The Lies that Bind (12 page)

On the way, I thought about what was for dinner. It was the Kid's night to play the accordion at El Lobo, so he wouldn't be showing up with a bag of tacos under his arm. My mind took a walk through the shelves of my refrigerator and encountered four half-full bottles of Pace picante sauce, with blue fuzz forming on top of the red salsa, and an open bag of Ortega tortillas, crisp and curling at the edges. I moved on to the refrigerator door, where I discovered a bottle of raspberry-vinegar salad dressing, a jar of mayonnaise, another of mustard. Was that Grey Poupon or Gulden's? I couldn't be sure. Next I entered the vegetable bin and exited quickly—a couple of limp carrots, a calcified lime, a slimy jícama. When I opened the freezer and found only ice, I decided to stop at Brown's and pick up a couple of Lean Cuisines. Brown's is my favorite supermarket; the checkout clerks are downright surly, and a surly clerk is hard to find in Albuquerque, the city of aggressive politeness. I paid for my Lean Cuisines. The
checkout
guy took my money, gave me my change and never once looked at my face. He didn't ask about my personal life, wish me a nice day or get someone with whiskey breath to help me put my bags in the car. I felt right at home.

When I got to La Vista I remembered that the Kid wouldn't be showing up with tacos for La Bailarina, and I didn't have anything to give her. I didn't feel like going out again. The van's curtains were closed, the sun screen was in place, and she seemed to be asleep anyway. The invitation to Baxter, Johnson's party was still in my purse. I pulled it out and slid it under her windshield wiper. When I turned around I saw Truman, the night watchman, standing beside the Dumpster with his hand out, just to let me know he hadn't been ignoring La Bailarina's presence in the parking lot for nothing.

“Evening,” he said

“Evening,” I replied. He was waiting for me to fill his palm with liquor or silver. I slipped him a twenty.

“Why, thank you, ma'am,” he said.

“It's nothing,” I replied.

As I crossed the lot to my apartment, I noticed a parked truck, a shiny black one, with the lights on.
Passion
was scrolled in purple neon across the back end, and purple lights lit the pavement underneath the truck like the landing gear of a UFO. It was somebody's idea of macho cool, but the engine wasn't running and nobody was sitting in the cab. The owner had probably come home before dark and forgotten his lights were on. I thought about knocking on doors to find him, but I went inside and unbagged my groceries instead.

There are people who cook and people who heat. Those of us who heat know how fast water boils in the high New Mexico air. I cooked the Lean Cuisines in their plastic pouches, and when they were done to perfection I scooped them out and ate them. Before I got into bed I made my offering to the sleep god—a shot of tequila—but José Cuervo was having an off night and it wasn't enough. I kicked the sheets and squeezed the pillow until I was good and bored, and then I grabbed the remote and zapped the TV on. When it comes to flipping channels, I have one of the fastest trigger fingers in the West. It was the hour when the secure, the steady, the regular and the married are fast asleep, when the guy in dark glasses plugs God, the fat boy dances in the street, when the couples on
Love Connection
do their dance of approach and avoidance, the Juice Man sells juice, when what looks like a real program is a hardsell pitch, when Suzanne Somers squeezes her Thighmaster and powers a lot of bad jokes, and Vicki LaMotta sells rejuvenating face cream, the time of night when men get older but women don't. In thirty years on TV, Johnny Carson went from smug to mature, from dark hair to white, from rich to richer to richer still. Through the wonders of modern science, Vicki LaMotta might look the same when she's a hundred and ten. But the function of life is to move toward a resolution. It's programmed in the cells to be young,
older,
old. Not to live out the cycle is to get stuck. The one thing worse than a clock that ticks too loud is a clock that doesn't tick at all. When I finally fell asleep, I dreamed about the woman who'd stayed thirty-five for thirty years. When I woke up, the TV screen was blank, the numbers on the digital clock flashed 2:25. I looked out the window. The truck was still there, but its purple passion had burned out. I got up, went to the bathroom and took one of Martha Conover's Halcions. Like the manufacturer says, it acted quick. If I had any more dreams—good or bad—I didn't remember. Mother's little helper didn't leave me drowsy the next day, and if it caused any bizarre behavior or loss of inhibitions, I didn't notice. I
was
late for work, but it doesn't take drugs to do that.

By the time I left La Vista, the parking lot was empty (the passion truck had gotten its batteries recharged, and La Bailarina had gone wherever it is she went in the daytime) but the streets were full. It was one of those days when everybody out there seems crazy or drugged. They were going somewhere and just as fast as the traffic would allow. We all travel the same highways, but we'd like to do it at our own speed. The boy behind me in a blue Honda wore a baseball hat turned backward. He was pissed that I had stopped at a yellow light and disobeyed the three-left-turns-on-yellow rule. I could tell because I could see him glaring at me in my rearview mirror. “Lighten up, dude,” I said, but he wasn't listening. The boy passed me as soon as he could and was replaced by a couple who stared straight ahead in stiff and icy silence as if they were balancing between them a hostility balloon inflated by years of bad marriage. Driving in city traffic requires full attention, but not many were giving it their best shot. My fast-acting Halcion had already passed through my system and wasn't interfering with my driving skills, I hoped, but I had to wonder what everybody else out there on the highway had done: who was hung over, who had smoked grass last night, snorted coke, swallowed Xanax; who was angry, who was depressed, who was getting divorced, who was getting senile; who hadn't had any breakfast, who had had too much coffee, who had taken antihistamines, who was sneezing her head off. Everybody was driving high-powered machines, but how many of us were up to the job?

My first stop was Los Cerros, the handicapped section, building number 53 to be exact. I wanted to know who had been giving Cindy wet feet and why she'd acted so guilty about it. There were no cars parked in front of the building. Everybody seemed to have gone to work, just as I'd hoped. The sprinklers were off, the sidewalk was dry. I parked and walked into the middle of the building, where the front doors and mailboxes are. The apartment I was interested in, right front, had a D on the door. I looked at the metal mailboxes, but there was no name on the box, only the number, 53D. I already knew that. A TV blared from behind the door of the apartment across the hall; someone else hadn't gone to work. I heard the sound of a metal walker scrape the floor. The door opened, and I recognized the theme song of a daytime soap. An old woman stood in the doorway, supporting herself on the metal walker and staring at me. I'd forgotten that the elderly don't go to work. Her face was lined and cracked like the floor of Death
Valley
in summer. White whiskers sprouted from her chin. Her curls had a bluish tint. Her back humped as she hunched over her walker. Her skin color went beyond unhealthy. It was the color of the ashes long after the life force has gone up in smoke. But her eyes were bright and shrewd, a couple of gemstones that had survived the fire.

“He's not home,” she said, an indication she'd been watching me through the peephole in her door.

“Who?” It was my subtle attempt to get the name of the occupant of 53D without revealing who I was or why I wanted to know.

It didn't work. “Him.” She nodded toward the door. “He went to the Last Chance Thrift Shop. Took his typewriter and some old clothes with him. He asked me if I had anything to give away, but I don't.”

“Actually, I'm looking for Paul Rodríguez.” It was a name that came to me from out of nowhere.

“You coulda got the wrong building,” she said without conviction.
“Maybe
you want fifty-five D.”

“Maybe I do.”

“You watch the soaps?” she asked. I might have been the first woman she'd talked to all day, maybe even all week, and now that she had me in her web she didn't want to let me go.

“No. I work,” I said. I consider watching the soaps about the most unproductive daytime activity a person can engage in, but I didn't say so. She wouldn't have listened anyway.

“Sallie and Jesse are getting a divorce. And Lucy is pregnant with Teddy's twins, but Teddy is in jail for killing Joe, who was sleeping with Lucy, but the twins are really Teddy's, even though he thinks they are Joe's.”

So this was what women who stayed home did when they got together during the day—talked about all the inexplicable things people do, like screw and kill each other, the same things I talked about at work. I looked at the place on my wrist where a watch ought to be. “Nice meeting you, but I have to get going. I need to track down Paul.”

“I'll be ninety years old next month,” the woman said, hunching lower over her walker and fixing her stony eyes on me. Once the very old get you in their orbit, they don't like to let you go. “Do you know what that feels like?”

I smelled the overcooked broccoli smell drifting out of her apartment, listened to the blaring soap, watched the hair quiver on her chin. “Well…” I said.

“It's no fun. I can tell you that. Here he comes now.”

“Who?”

“The man you're looking for.” Her gemstone eyes said I hadn't put anything over on
her
and had
been
a fool to try.

A man in a wheelchair was rolling down the walk. He wore a white T-shirt and black leather gloves with no fingers, which protected his palms from the wheels. His legs were limp and useless, strapped into the chair, but he had a hefty upper body. He was a wheelchair athlete—the one, in fact, who had stared at me from the tennis court the previous week. His wheelchair was a streamlined, racing model, but the exercise hadn't exactly gotten him in shape. His skin had a marbled look, as if layers of fat had slipped between the muscle. His face was full, and his features seemed obscured by the flesh.

“How's it going, Dorothy?” He spoke to his neighbor but his eyes were on me.

“She's looking for you.” The woman nodded in my direction. I tried to find some excuse for standing in front of his door, but what? That I had cookies or magazines or God to sell?

He rolled up close and looked at me. His eyes were the color of Jack Daniel's. His grin was quick and sharp as a bite. “Hello, Nellie,” he said.

There aren't many people around who know my old high school nickname. Hardly any are Hispanic, and only one of them knows Cindy Reid. “Emiliano?” I asked. “You can't be Emiliano Velásquez.”

“Yeah,” he said. “I can and I am.”

The Emiliano I'd known had gotten fat and crippled. David had sunk back into the marble. The boy god had become an imperfect man, which had to be about the worst thing that could happen to a god. Before I could stop them, two words slipped out. “Oh, no,” I said.

“Don't worry, Nellie,” Emilio said. “Everybody does it.”

But I wasn't everybody. I had been a friend in another, better time. “I'm sorry,” I said.

“Shit happens, or as Dorothy likes to say, life sucks and then you don't die. Right, Dorothy?”

“Right,” Dorothy agreed.

“This is a lot worse than shit,” I said.

“Don't worry about it. I'm a survivor.”

“Well, I see you two have a lot to talk about,” Dorothy said. When nobody denied it, she turned around laboriously in her walker, went back into her apartment, shut the door and scraped across the floor.

The fact that I was standing and Emilio wasn't didn't make this any easier. “Vietnam?” I asked.

“Yeah. The last step I ever took was on top of a land mine.”

“Why didn't Cindy tell me?”

“She had her reasons. I'll tell you all about 'em, but first let's go inside.”

“Okay,” I said.

10

E
MILIANO'S APARTMENT WAS
smaller than the Reids' kitchen. It had about as much furniture as mine but a lot less mess. It was, in fact, as neat as a motel room ready for the next traveler. There were no unread magazines and newspapers on the coffee table, no overflowing ashtrays, and no clothes on the floor. Emilio picked up after himself.

“You keep a tight ship,” I said.

“That's what Cindy says.” He smiled. “I'm too poor to be a pig. I don't do so bad for a cripple or an otherly abled. That's what they're calling us now: otherly ableds.”

“Is that anything like calling a divorce lawyer a marriage counselor?”

“Something like that,” he said. “Hell, I'm a paraplegic. I live in a fucking wheelchair. I'll never use my legs again. No matter what you call it, it sucks, but I've had plenty of time to get used to it by now. How'd you know I live here, Nellie? It's not something Cindy or I have been advertising.”

“I didn't know. I just happened to see her car parked here yesterday on my way home from Martha's. I thought I'd stop and say hello. I saw her talking to you through the window, and—I'll admit it—I wanted to find out who you were. Cindy gave me the feeling the other day that she was hiding something; you were it.”

“Cindy thought that now that her mother can't drive anymore, it would be all right to leave her own car out front. We didn't think about you. You're pretty observant.”

“I try to be.”

“Can I get you a drink?”

“How 'bout a glass of water,” I said.

“You got it.”

The only decorations in Emilio's living room were two photographs in brass frames, standing on a table. While he went to get the glass of water, I picked up the pictures. In the first one Justine Virga was leaning against a wall, wearing a black beret and a black leotard with a scooped-out neckline. I'd seen her before, but this was the first time she really came into focus. The blackness of her hair and the leotard gave her pale skin the look of moonlight floating on dark water. She had a long, graceful neck, and she held her head high, making a deep shadow under her chin. A black curl that had fallen loose was a question mark on her forehead. She had the pouty lips and high cheekbones of a model but the eyes of a desperado. They had the sad, passionate recklessness of a gaucho, a tango dancer, a gypsy, and there were
dark
smudges under them that hadn't been caused by smeared makeup. Martha had said those eyes were open as she lay on the ground at Los Cerros. What was she looking at when she faced the final mystery? I wondered. Headlights?