Someplace to Be Flying (23 page)

“You’ve got to talk to her,” Anita said.

“Me?”

Anita smiled. “Kids like you, Moth, damned if I know why. Maybe it’s because you never grew up.”

“Yeah, I’m a regular Peter Pan. Look at me fly.”

“Just talk to her,” Anita said.

She was gone before he could argue.

Moth sighed. Ranger trailed after her, but Judith settled down in the dirt by his feet, tongue lolling.

“You ever get the feeling you’re not really in charge anymore?” he asked the dog.

All she did was give him a steady look in response.

Well, what were you expecting? he asked himself. That she was going to talk? The world hadn’t gotten that weird yet.

He took a drag from his cigarette, lit another from its butt before he ground it under his heel. Judith lifted her head sharply when he tapped a knuckle on the window of the Volvo.

“Hey there, sleeping beauty,” he said when Katy turned around to look at him.

Those eyes, Moth thought. You’d swear she had a summer sky stashed away behind them.

“You mind some company?” he asked.

She shook her head, so he cracked open the front door and stretched out along the front seat, back resting against the passenger door. The ashtray was gone, so he flicked ashes out the window behind him.

“Nice place you’ve got here,” he said.

“I didn’t think you’d mind.”

“Help yourself. I told you before—you want something, all you’ve got to do is ask. We look out for each other.”

“I won’t be here long.”

Moth pretended indifference. He leaned his head back and blew smoke out the window behind him.

“Going on a trip?” he asked.

She shrugged. “Just going away. Back to wherever it is I came from. I can’t stay here anymore.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t belong.”

“Everybody gets to feel like that, one time or another. It’s a hard thing to have to live with, but it’s fixable.”

She made no reply. Moth gave her the space to talk or not. There was no hurry. That was the thing people forgot in their rush to fix this and set that right, as though problems—especially problems of the heart or spirit—were like cars, you just needed to find the right part to replace. Didn’t work that way.

He finished his cigarette and dropped the butt on the ground outside his window where it would burn out in the dirt.

“I always thought Jack was just being nice,” she said after awhile, “but now I know he was telling the truth.”

“About what?”

“Me not being able to die.”

Moth wanted to take this slow, talk it out, no histrionics, but she didn’t give him a chance.

“I’ve figured out why I can’t die,” she told him in a flat, empty voice. “It’s because I’m already dead. Or maybe I was never really alive.”

“Bullshit.”

She gave him a wistful look that made his old jaded heart want to weep.

“I wish it was,” she said, then she turned away again, face against the seat, back to him, hands tucked into her armpits, knees pulled up tight.

Moth started to argue, then thought better of it. He went back to his trailer and chased down a blanket, brought it back and laid it over her. She didn’t move, didn’t give any indication she knew he’d gone, or come back. When he returned to his trailer again, Anita was sitting on a lawn chair, waiting for him.

“How’d it go?” she asked.

Moth stared away into the darkness beyond the junkyard. Judith picked up on his mood and moved in close against his leg, whined. That was the problem with a dog—you couldn’t explain a problem to her. You just had to be there for her. Moth went down on one knee and laid a hand on her shoulder, felt it tremble. He looked over to Anita.

“It didn’t go at all,” he said.

“What can we do?”

“Damned if I know. Maybe Hank’ll come up with something.”

Moth showed up at Hank’s stretch of concrete in the Tombs when Hank was in the middle of his push-ups. The day had begun overcast, a
heavy
cloud cover settling in so low it seemed to sit on your shoulders, but it didn’t smell like rain. There was a sense of something else in the air, something Moth couldn’t quite put his finger on. An expectation that ran deeper than weather, he decided.

He sat down, cross-legged, waiting for Hank to finish. Fishing out a cigarette from his battered pack, he lit up, blowing the smoke away from Hank. Across the pavement he could see the big mongrel dog that followed Hank around in the Tombs chowing down on whatever it was Hank had brought him today.

“That is one seriously ugly dog, kid,” he said.

Hank only grunted in response.

“It’d probably feed on small children if you weren’t providing for it.”

“Or. Old men. Who. Talk. Too much.”

Moth took the hint. He smoked his cigarette and waited until Hank reached his hundred-count before he spoke again.

“Anita found Katy sleeping in that old Volvo at the back of the yard,” he told Hank. “Looking like an old cat that’s crawled off to die, is the way she put it.”

Hank sat up and reached for his shirt, wiping his face on it.

“You talked to Katy,” he said, not making a question of it.

Moth nodded. “Sounds like she’s pretty much packing it in all right.”

Hank got that look in his eye, the one he always got when the situation seemed hopeless but he was determined to do something about it all the same.

“We have to help her,” he said.

“You got the time?” Moth asked.

He regretted the words as soon as he spoke them. Hank was grown up now. He knew what he was doing, how much time he had, if it was stretched too thin or not.

“You don’t think I should’ve taken on this job with Marty, do you?” Hank said.

Moth shrugged. “The way I heard it, she popped her old man. Pretty? much cut-and-dried.”

“Maybe.”

They hadn’t had much of a chance to talk about it over dinner last night, so Hank took the time now to fill him in on the previous day, detailing his interview with Sandy Dunlop, how he’d gone chasing through the tattoo parlors and body-piercing joints—“I would’ve loved to have seen Bruno’s face when you asked him that,” Moth couldn’t resist saying. He finished up with the talk he’d had with Eddie this morning.

“So do you think she did it?” Moth asked.

Hank shook his head. “No. But don’t ask me why. I wouldn’t trust her with anything that wasn’t nailed down tight, but I didn’t see a killing instinct.”

“People do a lot of things you don’t expect. She bought the gun. And she had cause.”

“It’s Couteau that bothers me.”

“You sure we’re talking about the same guy you saw get dropped?”

“I wouldn’t forget that face.” Hank sighed, looked away over the empty lot, the abandoned buildings beyond it. “There’s some kind of connection here, but I just can’t put my finger on it.”

“Where, exactly, are you going with this?” Moth asked.

“I can’t see that far yet. I’ve got to dig a little deeper first.”

“Maybe this photographer—”

“Lily.”

“Maybe she’s working on something the Couteaus don’t like.”

Hank nodded. “Could be. I’ll ask her.”

” ‘Course you could just drop the whole business,” Moth said. “Eddie wouldn’t give advice he didn’t mean. If he says they’re out of our league, I’d believe him.”

“I’ve made promises,” Hank said.

“To who? The lap dancer? To Lily?”

Hank shook his head. “To myself. I’m not going to let Sandy Dunlop take the fall for something she didn’t do and if the Couteaus are gunning after Lily, she’s got no one standing between her and them except for me.”

Moth sighed. He took the time to light up another cigarette, blew out a stream of smoke the same cool gray of the cloud cover. There was too much going on here—too much that strayed from odd all the way over into seriously weird. He could feel a storm coming and all he wanted to do was get them all under cover. His family. Let the world deal with its own problems. But maybe it was too late. Maybe the storm was already catching up to them.

It sure looked that way, when you counted up the score. If he believed Jack, and he half did. If Katy was really what she said she was, and he was starting to lean toward accepting that as well. If he believed his own gut feelings, and they’d never let him down before.

But were they in the eye of the storm, or still watching its approach? Maybe they had time to retreat, get under cover and pull the boundaries of their small patch of the world in behind them. He knew what Hank would say, but he had to
try
anyway.

“You’re set on this,” he said.

Hank nodded. No hesitation.

“Who’s the skinny guy in that book, used to tilt at windmills?” Moth asked.

“Don Quixote.”

“Take a lesson from what happened to him to see how the world treats idealists.”

“I can’t let it go,” Hank said. “Guess you taught me too well.”

Moth ground his cigarette out on the pavement. “Only you weren’t listening. I told you to keep it in the family.”

“I can’t do that.”

“That’s your problem in a nutshell,” Moth told him.

But he didn’t really mean it. Truth was, he admired Hank’s generosity of spirit. He only had to think about how Hank had been there for Terry and Paris, took them off the street when no one else gave a damn. And it wasn’t just them. Hank had a habit of stepping into what wasn’t his business and doing the right thing. A lot of people owed their life, or a second shot at making something of themselves, to Hank. That kind of selfless charity wasn’t something Moth had ever been much good at mustering in himself, except when it came to family. When he was being honest with himself, he saw it for the failing it was.

“But first we’ve got to deal with Katy’s problems,” Hank said.

Only when they headed over to where the Volvo sat rusting in the back of the junkyard, Katy was gone. Anita hadn’t seen her go, and she’d been keeping an eye on the car. They checked Jack’s bus, but she wasn’t there and neither was Jack. So then everybody got into looking for her. The whole crew. Benny, Terry, Paris, the dogs. But it was no good. And not even Moth’s sixth sense at finding things could help them track her down.

It was as though she had stepped right out of the world. And when you knew her history—if what she’d told Hank had been true—maybe that was just what had happened.

Tucson, AZ

Lily found herself with more free time over the weekend than she might have liked, but since the video production company was paying for the shoot, she couldn’t really complain. It was like being paid to take a holiday. In somebody’s oven, it was true, but a holiday all the same.

The shoot was in an airplane graveyard in the south part of the city. It reminded her of the junkyard near Jack’s bus in Newford, only on a much larger scale. Here rusting cars, stacked two or three high, had been replaced by row upon row of rusting aircraft—a drowsing elephants’ graveyard of helicopters, transport planes, and fighters, suddenly invaded by a film crew with their lights and gear, and of course their subjects: the latest Nashville chart-toppers. The director had the band members playing in the open bay doors of junked transports, line-dancing on their wings, gear all set up under the old propellers of others, marching with guitars over their shoulders down the rows of out-of-commission helicopters and fighters. Lily’s job was to keep a
pho
tographic journal of the proceedings.

It was fun at first, dealing with the desert and the towering saguaro cacti, the big sky and the wonderful light as it played upon the hulking metal shapes. The band were all photogenic—pretty boys in cowboy hats, tight jeans, and pointy-toed cowboy boots. The lead singer wore a Nudie suit, but he didn’t have either the grit of a Buck Owens or the good-natured party attitude of a Marty Stuart to pull it off. Shooting them got old fast. The film crew was much more interesting—probably because they all looked like individuals rather than interchangeable mannequins pulled off some Nashville assembly line.

The single for which they were filming the video was played over and over again, a slick, catchy song that sounded more pop than country to Lily’s ears, but then that was what it was all about these days. New Country. Young Country. It was all just Boomer pop with the addition of a steel guitar or fiddle, so far as she was concerned. When it came to country, her tastes ran more to that high lonesome sound that had come down to the cities from the Appalachians, or music that had its roots in the border music of Texas and Mexico.

But they weren’t paying her for her taste in music and she was enough of a professional to get the shots the director was looking for, candid and casual, but with the band still looking good. Some of them were going to be used in the video—short flashes juxtaposed against the action sequences; some for promo. Most would gather dust in the director’s file cabinets.

The most interesting subject on the shoot, the one her viewfinder kept returning to, was a tall young woman in a black tank top, raggedy blue jeans, and cowboy boots as pointy as the band’s, only hers were scuffed and well worn. Her blue-black hair was long and tangled, with two bands of white running back from her temples. She was deeply tanned, or naturally dark skinned, it was hard to tell which. Her eyes were so dark they were almost black, but with a faint hint of yellow in them, and she liked jewelry. She was wearing a half-dozen earrings, a charm necklace that had to have thirty or forty silver charms dangling from it, rings on the pinkies and ring fingers of both hands, a fistful of bracelets that jangled when she moved her arms.

After awhile, Lily got the idea that the woman wasn’t really involved in the shoot. It was more as though she’d simply wandered onto the set when no one was paying attention. And they still weren’t. Perhaps she was a local, Hispanic, or from the Tohono O’Odham Reservation west of the city. By the end of the first day, everybody was feeling wilted by the heat, except for her. She looked as casual and fresh as she’d been when Lily first noticed her.

Putting away her cameras and gear, Lily went over to where the woman stood, leaning up against the shiny bulk of some junked plane, thumbs hooked in the belt loops of her jeans.