Personal injuries (29 page)

"I've seen him around. I thought I had."

"Yeah, well." She followed Robbie's eyes as he looked out the window again toward the unfaced brick at the rear of the low building. A little tendril of something green twisted around the rusted rainpipe. "He says about five, six years ago-this is what he tells Walter-he was sent to Quantico for a couple weeks of advanced firearms instruction. Out there he gets to know his instructor, female FBI agent, DeDe Something. Real well he got to know her one night. Biblical `know.' And he could swear, so he tells Walter, that this chick he plowed into, meaning you-that's her. DeDe. Dyed her hair. Lost the glasses. A little less country-looking, but, Christ, that's hard to forget. The only reason he's asking Walter is because Missus Carmody is attending the hearing every day and he'd rather not have any howdy-dos."

Evon had her eyes closed by now.

"So I did the big ho-ho," Robbie said. "FBI? Ridiculous. Let's go ask her. Walter, thank God, is too much of a prude to actually stick his nose in the car and inquire of a lady about who she might have been bopping, and of course, his act is what-me-worry-about-the-FBI, but he was still curious enough to come up and watch."

"Fuck," she said, when she could talk. She had never used that word in front of him, she realized. Her Mormon routine.

"So, DeDe, baby, you better tell me what we're going to do now."

"Goddamn." Her mind was like a ship stuck in ice. The engine revved but the prow couldn't break through. If Walter had taken the money, she hadn't been made. But there was no way to be sure. Her whole torso was rattling. And as always, she felt her heart being carved on by shame. It was worse, somehow, that it had been broadcast to the surveillance van. Everybody knew. By now, Sennett was spinning like a weather vane in a tornado. They were all going to be nuts.

"So do I understand?" she asked. "He was just being cautious? Carmody? He wasn't really sure? I mean, we were drunk, Robbie. Knee-walking drunk." She drummed her forgers. "He's not sure. That's why he asked Walter."

"Probably. But Wally's still a little spooked. It looked like he was cooled out by the time he left. But the question is out there."

She talked mostly to herself I couldn't place him. I really couldn't place him. I walked right past him." It had to have been around 1986, because they were still building Hogan's Alley, a little town where crimes were staged for training purposes. It was the first time she'd been invited back to Quantico to teach firearms. Ancient history. Another life. A tiny inappropriate burp of laughter jumped up to her throat. Naturally, she remembered him as so much betterlooking.

"Yeah," he said. "A one-nighter. Just a stray dick at closing time. I've been there." When she caught Robbie's look, she understood the rest. The emotions tumbled through his dark face. He was gripping the walnut wheel with both hands and the deep eyes flicked up at her the same way they had the first day when she told him they'd already caught a bad guy.

"Robbie," she said, then stopped.

He gunned the car, backing into the alley.

"Great cover," he told her.

MAY

CHAPTER 25

"DO YOU REMEMBER?" SHE ASKED. "WE talked. That night. After Kosic. Do you remember that? And you described lying in the dark. And feeling so uncertain. Do you remember?" She heard the hollow glottal echo as he drank. "So are you saying-?"

"I'll tell you what I'm saying," she said. "But answer me first. Do you remember that?"

"Sure."

"Well, here's what I need to know. Was that a play?"

He made a low sound, perhaps a groan. "Nope," he said at last. "That was straight shit."

"So then, can you imagine reaching inside yourself and being uncertain about what's there? Not being sure you can really feel what you crave. Can you imagine that?" In the dark, he took his time to ponder. After he'd removed the FoxBIte and told her what Walter had said about Carmody, they had driven around before heading back to the LeSueur. Contempt bristled off him-him of all people, enraged because he thought he'd been deceived. But his anger proved strangely hard to bear. She felt lost and mangled as it was, still trying to calculate the costs of this breach of cover to the Project and to herself, shocked that out of nowhere her former life had come, like some unwelcome relation, to reclaim her. If Feaver had dropped her on a corner, she could never have wandered home.

He'd finally asked her what was true. Was she or wasn't she? She refused at first to answer.

`We're not going there, Robbie. It's not appropriate. I have a job to do.'

Ànd you've fucked that up, too.' As the dust from that wrecking ball rose, she received a darting sideward look, softer than anything she'd seen since they left Walter. `Not fair,' he said after a moment and reverted to silence.

Somehow they reached a consensus not to remain at the LeSueur. Feaver circled the block, while she tossed the FoxBIte to McManis from the door to his office. Jim didn't say much. He wanted to know if Walter had looked sold when he'd turned back to the elevator. She thought so. So did Feaver. But, she'd realized, even if Walter had doubts, there were no odds for him in confronting her.

She asked if Sennett had gone crazy.

`Yes,' Jim answered. `He thinks the Movers should have picked this up on background.' Grave as the situation was, he smiled at the notion of that questionnaire: List every wild and crazy evening for the last ten years. He nodded kindly when she told him she just wanted to beat it. `This isn't on you,' he told her.

She knew that was true. It was nothing more than wicked coincidence. UCAs got made most often by cops or prosecutors who recognized them. But that was logic. If the Project cratered now, it would always follow her. Back to Iowa and whatever might come next. Don't embarrass the Bureau. The Ouantico watchword was burned like a brand onto the mind of every recruit. McManis and Sennett were talking anyway. Balancing risks. That was why he was just as happy to let her go. They didn't know yet what they were going to do with her.

Back in the Mercedes, Feaver had asked if she needed a drink, which God knows she did, and he volunteered to go into a package store to get her a bottle. Until they abandoned ship, the Mormon girl shouldn't be seen buying liquor. She was not really ready to be alone, and it seemed at least a form of recompense to finally let him into her apartment. She mixed the vodka with some frozen lemonade she had in her freezer and, after they had drunk much of it in silence, impulse had welled up in her, almost like the piston push of sickness. She wanted to explain. Why? she asked herself, hoping to find a clear rationale for restraint. Why?

Because. Because silence would be fatal to something fragile in her.

Because it seemed unbearable to have the precious truth, so hard to speak, taken for a lie. The light had disappeared. She'd never closed the drapes. Refractions of the streetlights and a neon sign across the avenue limned the room. Her eyes were closed for the most part. Robbie sat on the floor against the flowered sofa the Movers had rented. In the cushions, when she lay on it at night watching TV, she could detect the trace remainders of stale cigar smoke and the gassy chemicals that had failed to remove it. Feaver had taken off his suit jacket and his boots. His toes wiggled in his fancy patterned hose as he drank, but he'd gone still now while he deliberated on his answer. Could he imagine?

Yes, he said, in time. He could imagine that, yes.

"Is that how it is for you?" he asked her.

"How it was," she said, "for years. Years. I thought I was just not interested or didn't care. I wasn't sure. Maybe I was putting all of it into sports." Athletes were their bodies. After a game, there was a supersensory awareness: the bruises, pulls, the aches within. Her skin felt as if something keen had been drilled through every follicle into the deeper layers of the derma. For most of her teammates, that electricity must have flowed into sexual expression. But for her, the game was the excitement. Her inchoate sensations of herself seemed almost superstitiously forbidden. Not merely because of the church-taught sense of plague or peril. But because it would deplete her somehow, put at risk the radioactive core of passion that sent her storming down the field.

In high school, she was the great jock, too much for many boys to want to take on. And it was a Mormon town anyway; more than half the kids weren't allowed to date until they were sixteen. She wanted to go out, naturally, once all that swung into motion. She wanted to belong. She was seventeen years old. She went to the senior prom and had sex that night, as if it were part of the same ceremony, which for many in Kaskia it was. She lay out in the grass on the lee side of the local ski mountain and let Russell Hugel wrestle off her undergarments and plunge into her. It didn't last a minute. He helped her up. He carefully plucked every leaf and grass strand from her dress, then walked her back down the hill in silence. The poor boy was probably embarrassed, probably thought he'd made a hash of it. A rooster in the barnyard, flapping his useless wings, went at it longer than Russell had. Such was sex. She reviewed it in her mind periodically. The interlude passed like the dance itself. Long-anticipated and brief and disappointing. She put away the dress. And concluded, as she went off to college, it was all too much of a mess. Gay-the thought that there was anyone on earth like that-was still kind of a legend, as far as she was concerned, one of those terrible things that people tell you about the world that you suspect is exaggerated or not even true. She sounded like a hick, she knew. But she'd grown up on a ranch. Rams with ewes. Bulls with cows. She'd heard about Sodom in church. But God had destroyed
them
.

"I made it through hockey camp the first summer with no clue. And some of those girls were so dykey, so out, one of them, Anne-Marie-the girls joked about not being alone with her. I
still
didn't get it."

She had a teammate at the time, she told him, a woman named Hilary Beacom, a good midfielder but not quite a star. Two years ahead of Evon, Hilary was from the Main Line near Philadelphia. Field hockey, weirdly, had a highclass heritage. There were all these women out there, running, whaling at balls, smashing each other in the legs and even, now and then, the head. Blood flowed often. It wasn't what Evon thought of as a finishing-school game. But that's where many of the girls came from. Private schools. Rich schools. Hilary Beacom had emerged from that world. Blond hair thick as velvet, pulled back in a tartan headband. Clothing by Laura Ashley. And the contented charm of someone who truly owned the world.

She looked after Evon, sat beside her on the bus, told her secrets about the coaches. Away from the field, they rode horseback together. One night in May of Evon's sophomore year, they got drunk. Drinking was forbidden in or out of season. They'd all signed pledges. But Hilary was graduating soon and they drank wildly, rolling through half a dozen frat parties before they made their way to Hilary's room. They were just silly. They were imitating people on childhood TV

shows ("Oh, Mr. Grant!") and then
Star Trek
stuff, all the different species who were human except for a single trait that had been amplified, or mutated, or replaced. Spock, without emotion. Ì see your aura,' said Hilary across the room, pretending to be a character from the Canis galaxy, who supposedly had the ability of dogs to see the halo of emotional discharge around a human being. Ì see your awe-rah,' she said and waved her hands swami-like as she approached. Evon had collapsed on Hilary's bed with her head against a bolster. They were both laughing. Ànd what do you see?'

Hilary came closer, spreading her opened palms over Evon's head, as if massaging some presence in the air.

Ì see,' said Hilary, whose eyes seemed to clear briefly, Ì see you're drunk.'

They crumbled against each other. Hilary finally righted herself and began the same routine. Ì see you are uncertain,' she said. Her eyes lit upon Evon. Ì see you are afraid.'

Òkay,' said Evon, laughing, though she realized then that the time for laughter had passed. Hilary moved her hands again, first around Evon's head, and then allowed them to drift along her entire torso, separated from contact by some barely visible micrometer.

Ì feel yearning,' Hilary said.

Evon didn't answer. Hilary's face, thick with makeup to hide the blemishes on one cheek, was inches from hers. The shades on the room were drawn.

'Do you know what's happening here?' Hilary asked her.

Yes, she knew. She knew. Somehow. They watched each other, measuring the uncertainty. And then Hilary brought her face to hers. Evon lingered there, in the sweet, powerful smells of Hilary's face. Beyond the phony scents, her flesh had the vague sweetness of milk. Evon's eyes were still open when their lips met. Dry from sport and the anxiousness of the moment, they felt like the fragile crust formed on an orange section left in the air, and, like the orange, some thrilling sweetness lay below. Hilary slowly brought her full weight down upon her. Feaver spoke: So, she knew.

"No. It was something that happened. I didn't know what it meant." She never failed to admit there was pleasure in it. But afterwards, she told herself she had not known what else to do. It was, oddly, not much different than being on that hillside with Russell. She remained aloof from Hilary, whose patrician grace-more than that, her kindness-prevented her from ever speaking a word. A month later Hilary graduated. The event receded with time, its contours lost in the murk of memory. There were lots of things about her, Evon reasoned, that weren't the same as most people she knew. She came from a tiny little town nobody'd ever heard of. She'd been selected for the national team in an Olympic sport. And she once slept with a girl. That was how she was. But did that mean she wasn't going to get the happiness everybody else wanted? That she wasn't entitled to it? If you'd asked her, then, after Hilary, she'd still have predicted she was going to get married, have kids, the house, the husband, a good guy, quiet and sincere, the way she thought of her father and her little brothers. When that happened, Hilary wouldn't matter. None of it would. She was thirty-four years old now. Thirty-four, and the vision of that waiting serenity still swam through her as a comfort from time to time, and when she realized it was never going to occur, she was still, at thirty-four, crushed.