Nothing but a Smile (33 page)

Wink had a game he played with the baby. He'd pull back her blouse and place his lips to her belly and blow a wet raspberry so loud it made her nervous the baby would be born deaf. It vibrated and buzzed like one of those reducing machines with the belt you strapped around your middle and it shook you to pieces. (Reenie had purchased one with her money from one of her first photo shoots, but Sal refused to even try it, and anyway, Reenie never looked any different no matter what she did.)

Even if she got him to knock it off with the raspberries, he'd feel around to see if he'd provoked any response. If he felt a few kicks or rolling maneuvers, he'd try it again or move on to the next assault—the photo lights. He was convinced the baby could see light and dark at this stage, and so he'd try to wake it up by
turning on all the lights in the studio. Usually this did produce a few flutters, but then it would stop. She'd tell him that the damn lights were so hot, he was probably warming up the poor thing and making it drowsy. “It's not a rotisserie chicken,” she'd say.

Wink usually seemed to feel remorse at this point and would pat her bulge gently, give it a kiss, and whisper, “Sorry, baby. You go to sleep now. Your daddy got a little carried away.” But sometimes he was too wound up, and any suggestion that the baby had dozed off only spurred Wink on to try one more time, and he'd turn on the radio and blast brassy big band music and keep feeling around, trying to make it fidget, until she'd have to tell him to take some pictures, just to get him to stop groping her stomach like a melon and turn down the music.

She didn't mind posing for him like this, though she thought she would. She thought she'd feel huge and bloated and anything but sexy, but the truth was, she sometimes felt very sexy. And since these photos were for no one but them, who cared if she was no longer pinup material?

To loll around nude in her state was so much more languid and lazy and swell. She imagined it was probably how those large Italian gals must have felt, a few centuries back, that they'd seen many times right up Adams at the Art Institute on free-admission-Monday nights. She liked to think, if he had his right hand back in shipshape order, these were the kind of pictures Wink would be making, only with oil paints and with big gaudy frames for wealthy patrons who would applaud him for just entering a room—not the kind of pictures you created under a fake name and delivered in manila envelopes and reproduced on cheap pulp and wrapped in brown paper. It was a little hard to explain the difference, but there seemed to be one.

He heard the voices before the pounding—a low murmur of slurred words and half-suppressed laughter: drunks out at the front of the shop, trying the handle.

It was almost eleven on a Saturday night. And the worst possible time: he was shooting Sal in the altogether, baby belly and all. “For no-body but you-oo,” she'd cooed, loving it, lolling like a wave against the tumble of half a bolt of dark velvet he'd unrolled across one of the low risers.

It wasn't the first study he'd shot of her like this, but it only got better each time. And she was noticeably bigger in each session, a state he found surprisingly beautiful. He loved experimenting with lighting the curves and roundness she now offered, and as much as he kidded around with her in these private sessions, once even coaxing her onto Chesty's aunt Sarah's ridiculous bear rug, it was still sometimes all he could do not to get choked up.

But now there was this pounding and monkeyshines. “Cover up,” he said and stepped out into the hall, moving to the front of the shop and turning on more lights. He supposed they might be legitimately confused about the shop being open this late—had seen light from the little studio area in the back cascading out into the dark hall—but mostly they were certainly drunk and even more certainly foolish.

“Closed!”
he called, waving his arms to go away.
“Eleven p.m.! …”
adding, under his breath, “ … jackasses …”

There were several grinning faces shoved down close in the
glass of the front door, but one in particular stuck out front and center: puffy, like something underwater, a distorted halibut over at the Shedd Aquarium.

But slightly more familiar than any anonymous halibut. He recognized him from the sports page—or at least the brand-new scar, just over the bushy left eyebrow. It was Jo-Jo “Kid” Fortunato, the Cicero Sicilian, local middleweight contender who'd won a big fight the night before. And he looked pie-eyed, out celebrating, no doubt.

Keeney had asked him, just yesterday, if he wanted to get a couple tickets, and he'd declined, telling him boxing wasn't really his cup of tea. The truth was, he could hardly stand to leave Sal alone these days, even though the baby was still months off.

“Bring out the girlies!” they chanted, pounding on the door, laughing hard. “Bring out the girlies!”

With a crash, the glass shattered, and the boxer came toppling through. A half a second of silence followed, everyone stunned, his cohorts behind him staring in at their fallen leader, hunched over, halfway through the frame of the door. Then there was yelping and glass bottles skittering on the sidewalk and a shriek from behind Wink, which had to be Sal, trying to get covered up and probably still in the dark as to what the Jesus H. was going on out front.

The prizefighter was cut up and bleeding when he righted himself, bellowing, “Weekend Sally! Come out, come out!” and his entourage, a gal or two among them, laughed now, maybe relieved he hadn't been guillotined by the falling glass.

“Go!”
Wink said and the group fell back, some of them latching onto the boxer by the coat, pulling him back out onto the sidewalk and away.

Wink stood there, listening to the retreating shrieks and more bottles rolling on the sidewalk, trailing off into the distance.

It sounded like they'd fled, so she stuck her head out in the hall. “Sweetie?” she said, and then when she saw the damage, the glass glinting across the floor out front, “Oh my God!” She started toward him, but he held out his hand like a traffic cop.

“Don't! You've got bare feet.”

He was right. She backed away, telling him he should maybe call someone—the cops?

“We don't need a cop,” he said, “we need a new window.” Moving to the phone behind the counter, he said he'd try Keeney, see if he could help him with the mess.

Suddenly, he was back, lurching through the front door—a huge, grinning man with cuts on his face, and he was pointing at her. “Knew it!” She turned for the stairs, seeing Wink step out from behind the counter to intercept the intruder, but the man just shoved him back with one hand and kept going, Wink sounding hurt, like he'd fallen hard back there or had the wind knocked out of him. She lurched toward the stairs but lost her footing, stumbling with a heavy weight suddenly on her. “Whoopsy!” He laughed, rolling off her, the two of them fumbling, trying to get to their feet. He'd miscalculated the first step, whether from being drunk or from his injury with the door, and probably meant to grab her rather than fall on her. She heard a woman shrieking that sounded an awful lot like her, and she flailed, all hands and nails, pushing him away, kicking, scratching, and he tottered back a little, weaving slightly on the bottom step with part of the robe in his fist, still grinning like he'd caught
a prize, but his eyes were swollen and half open, and his words were slurred. “Mr. Price
said
you was here!”

He tore the robe, pulling it open, hanging on to both pockets. She screamed, squirming, trying to snatch it back and close it.

But he just stood over her, staring and squinting at her naked body, looking confused, looking like he was trying to refocus. Finally, he muttered, “Holy
crap,
lady! You're
huge!”

Behind him, Wink appeared, swinging the sash weight he used to strengthen his lame hand and bringing it down on the guy's skull.

The big jerk slumped forward, and she didn't have time to scramble out of his way, so he fell on her again. She screamed and kicked, but Wink had him off her in no time, yanking him back by the collar, rolling him off. He was either out cold or at least too groggy to fight, as Wink heaved, dragging him away from her, the guy's huge head thumping down the stairs. She watched him trail away behind her husband, out the back door, into the alley.

Wink was out there for just a moment or two—she couldn't hear anything else—and then he was back inside, moving fast, throwing the bolt on the back door, and rushing to her side.

“Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ …,” he kept repeating as he knelt on the bottom step, trying to examine her.

“No, no. I'm okay.” It didn't feel like she could stop shaking her head as she gathered the torn robe back around her, feeling the last thing on earth she wanted right now was to have her body scrutinized further, though she did find she was rubbing an elbow and a hip and the small of her back, spots she'd banged up stumbling against the stairs.

“Yeah, but—what about the—”

She knew what he was thinking, but she doubted the baby had gotten squashed. “I banged up my
side,
yeah, but … He fell
on me a little, but off to the side, not on the baby. More on my pride.”

“Jesus Christ,” he said again, the veins on his neck throbbing. She'd never seen him look like that—her gentle artist, her sly smart mouth. He looked like he wanted to kill—or as if he possibly already had.

“I think he … figured it out there right before you cracked him on the head.” It was reassuring, to a degree. Of course, she wasn't sure what would have happened if the big goon
hadn't
realized she was expecting. Maybe he just would have looked at her, leered at her, getting a thrill from checking her out in the flesh, and that would have been the end of it. Maybe he
wouldn't
have done much more than that even if she wasn't expecting. It
was
possible he hadn't had any intention of forcing himself on her or anything like that …

Maybe.

Keeney rushed right over with some scrap lumber and plywood and helped him board up the front door while Reenie comforted Sal and helped her pack some things.

When the girls were upstairs and out of hearing, Keeney asked what he'd done with the intruder, if he'd called the cops. Wink explained that no, he hadn't, and why he hadn't—who the intruder had been.

“Shit on a shingle!” Keeney said, low and worried. And when he told him he'd dragged the boxer into the alley, the ex-marine insisted that might not have been far enough. “You don't want him coming to and coming back in for a second wave. Shit, pal,
even that silly little Dugout Doug managed to make good on his ‘I shall return.' Let's you and me drag this monkey into my truck, drop him somewhere else to recover, far away. Some other distant alley.” Keeney hefted the sash weight he'd used. “You sure you didn't kill him?”

They went to check on him, Wink bringing along the sash weight just in case, but Kid Fortunato had taken a powder.

He'd left him right there, half propped up against the downspout, in a heap. He'd looked like a sack of old clothes left out for Goodwill.

Wink wasn't sure if he should feel glad about the fact that he probably
hadn't
killed him or panic that this meant he might return, as Keeney had said, like General MacArthur. His main impulse was to just get far away and figure this out later, and he doubted Sal would have any objections to this plan.

“We'll keep an eye on the place,” Keeney said. “You just get out of here.” He offered him Reenie's car, the old Buick, and even in that hurried moment, Wink couldn't help but think the sly dog was playing pretty generous with a gift she'd been given by an old boyfriend.

The first safe place he could think of was four or five hours away. If the idea of sudden travel had come up a few hours ago, he would have said no way, he was too tired to drive anywhere tonight. Now he felt as alert as a goddamn German shepherd.

Because they'd arrived well after midnight, her first real view of the place was bright and early the next morning. She woke to the sounds and smells of a panfried breakfast and the whole
house creaking with quiet activity. There was a radio on, far too low to make out—old-timey hymns, maybe?

The little bedroom window was dusty and warped with imperfections, but it was enough to see the flat farmland and the distant edging of trees and the overcast sky all around. Michigan, all right: midsummer, yet gray as bachelor's laundry.

She remembered now. Wink had slept on the floor. There wasn't room for the two of them to even spoon, in her condition, in his narrow boyhood bed. His uncle had announced that there weren't any double beds in the whole house, but he'd figure out something “more matrimonially suitable” for the future.

She could have used a bathrobe, but she was unclear what Wink had managed to stuff in the suitcase that still lay unpacked under what he had identified as a chick incubator, taking up one end of the small room, and she didn't relish bending over to get it, so she put on what she'd had on during the drive, including her raincoat, and took her chances on the narrow rickety staircase.

She could have used a husband, too—he was not waiting for her in the kitchen. His uncle Len, long and lanky as that actor Raymond Massey, if not Lincoln himself, seemed sheepish to see her, as if he needed his nephew to interpret.

“Didn't want to wake you too early,” he said. “So I held off on breakfast for a good while.” She glanced at the clock. It was seven-fifteen.

“The boy, he's up to the store. Fetching the Sundays. For the real estate ads. Feels, also, that you're needing
orange juice,
so …” He said this last as if Wink had run out for frankincense and myrrh.

She stood there, not sure what to do, trying to cover her belly with the raincoat. It barely closed these days.

As dim and dreary as the morning light was, compared with the endless blackness last night in that long, terrified ride, this
seemed bright and startling, washing in on the dingy linoleum and the chipped dinette. They'd rocketed through a lot of desolate night, driving all the way from Chicago to …
nothing,
a turn off the highway in about the middle of the state that he swore was St. Johns.