Valley of Bones (18 page)

“No!” Too vehement. More calmly, she says, “I mean, no, I don’t think it would be good for her to…change therapists at this point.”

She has to look away from him, for even to her own ears it sounds like sanctimonious bullshit. The moment passes. He sits down.

“Fine. Good. And now that we got that settled, I have to say I thought you showed a lot of class in this whole deal.”

“Class?”

“Yeah. Guy knocks you down and there’s a gun battle outside your house, you don’t run around in circles screaming, you calmly call 911 and then you calmly hide the vital evidence, and even though you’re scared right now, you decided to do the right thing. And you got a nice smile. Thank you.”

She feels like an idiot, grinning as she now is, and he is grinning too, that thin cat grin with the little lights in his eyes. “And there’s more,” he says, “truly the coolest thing, is that you didn’t ask me even once what I was doing handcuffed to my bed.”

“Well, we psychologists are trained to discretion.”

“You didn’t want to embarrass me.”

“You don’t strike me as someone easily embarrassed.”

“Trained to perception too. Cool, discreet, perceptive: that’s a nice trifecta.”

She laughs, not a maidenish titter, but a real laugh of pleasure. It is pleasant being tossed compliments by this attractive man, and she understands that these compliments are not mere sexual flattery, but the honest assessment of a potential comrade with whom she may be about to go in harm’s way. He really wants her to know what he thinks of her. It is unutterably refreshing and unlike any experience she has had with a man before. Some beaming here, and then this moment passes too.

“So,” he says with a brisk clap, “I owe you a boat ride. We could get some food and beer, run over to Bear Cut and have a picnic, get some fishing in. You up for that?”

She is. She goes into the house and dons the blue bikini without examining herself in the full-length mirror, and puts shorts and a Hawaiian shirt over that, and plops a canvas beach hat on her head. In his Z car they head north, and in the region known as Souwesera, he cuts into a strip of stores near the tan bulk of a rent-a-locker storage operation and enters a tacky-looking Cuban joint to get their picnic. She sits in the warming car, looking at the store-fronts through her sunglasses, slowly translating the signs in Spanish, wishing she had paid more attention during her single year of the language. She feels ridiculously content, the only little cloud being that at some point in the afternoon she may have to take off her shirt and shorts and stand revealed in this insanely revealing bathing suit.

It is well that she has stopped giving a shit, although she wonders why this is so. Perhaps a brain tumor in the rostral portion of the frontal lobes. As it grows, she will lose more and more inhibitions until she is putting out not only for her colleagues, but also for everyone, jail guards, this fat guy sitting in front of the Cuban joint in the wife-beater undershirt and the black cigar, or patients, maybe even Rigoberto Munoz, tardive dyskinesia and all, and just as she thinks this, who should appear within her field of vision but Rigoberto himself. He has deteriorated since the last time she saw him. He has his own wife-beater undershirt on, with an open dotted seersucker
shirt over it, both filthy and torn. He is mumbling, grimacing, sticking his tongue
all
the way out and otherwise demonstrating that he is off the meds. He is attempting to correct this by self-medicating via a forty-ounce malt liquor clutched in a paper bag, and yes, he has spotted her, although she is now crouching low in her seat and pulling down on the brim of her beach hat.

He grins horribly and waggles his tongue. “Hey, Doc,” he calls and bellies up to the car, giving off a mighty stench: the beer train has crashed into the vomit factory.

“Hey, Doc, hey, I gotta job.”

“That’s wonderful, Rigoberto.”

“Yeah, hey, I gotta a job onna fish boat with, hey, you know my cousin Jorge? I gotta job with him cleaning fish up by, uh, that bridge, what you call it? The fish boat.”

In case she does not know how fish are cleaned, he demonstrates by taking a thick-handled, black-bladed knife out of a belt sheath and waving it in front of her nose.

“Them, hey, them people are back, Doc,” he says. “You know they talkin in my head again. They say to do bad things but I don’t listen to them no more, uh-uh. Like you said, um. Where you goin’ in the car, hey?” Waving the knife. She watches it, semihypnotized, feeling the smile straining at her lips.

Then Paz is there, with an arm around Munoz’s shoulders, gripping hard.
“Oye, Rigoberto, mi hermano, ¿qué tal?”
he says, walking the man away from the car. There is a brief conversation in rapid Spanish, and the lunatic shambles off. Paz has taken the beer away, which he flings neatly into a trash barrel.

He returns to the car, places a paper bag and a plastic bag of ice onto the backseat.

“You know Rigoberto?” she asks.

“Oh, yeah, me and him go way back. He was one of my first collars when I was in uniform. He didn’t scare you, did he?”

“No, me and Rigoberto go way back too. But you get credit for another rescue.”

“I don’t know about rescue. He’s pretty harmless if you don’t set him off.”

“Yes, harmless for a violent paranoid schizophrenic with a big knife. But the amazing thing is I was just this
instant
thinking about him and here he is.”

“Plate o’ shrimp,” says Paz, tooling out of the lot and onto Twelfth Avenue.

“Pardon?”

“Plate o’ shrimp.
Repo Man?
The movie?”

“You lost me.”

Paz puts on a drawling accent. “Say you’re thinkin’ about a plate of shrimp, and all of a sudden somebody says ‘Plate o’ shrimp’ or ‘Plate of shrimp,’ just like that, out of the blue. No explanation. No point in lookin’ for one either.” In his ordinary voice he adds, “A little later in the movie you see this sign in a restaurant: ‘Plate of Shrimp $2.99.’ It’s a classic.”

“It sounds like it. I’ll have to rent the video.”

“I got it at home, we can watch it later.”

“You’re a full-service operation, Paz.”

“We don’t cash checks,” says Paz.

PAZ’S BOAT IS
a twenty-three-foot locally built plywood cabin cruiser with a planing hull and a 150-horsepower Mercury outboard. It is painted fading pink on the topsides and chipped dirty white below, and is called the
MA TA II
according to metallic stick-on letters applied to the stern. Lorna is completely charmed by it, having spent more time than she really wanted to on large, spotless doctors’ yachts where you had to wear special shoes so as not to mar the teak deck and got yelled at when you pulled on the wrong goddamned rope. Nothing seems to be required of her on this vessel, so she arranges herself on a padded locker at the stern and sits like the Queen of Sheba with a cold Miller as Paz arranges their departure and heads down the Miami River, under the bridges, past the
little boatyards and moored boats, the downtown towers and the highway full of cars full of people who have somewhere to go, but they are free for the day, and when they leave the river’s mouth and clear Claughton Island, he opens it up. The boat sits up on its plane like a well-trained dog, and they are off on the sparkling blue bay, headed south, and a weight she didn’t know she was carrying lifts off her.

They fly under the causeway, and he veers left and cuts the motor to a burble and steers into the shallows. They coast, and when they are in two feet of water he heaves the motor back and tosses out an anchor. They float off a little beach backed by a line of mangroves and Australian pines waving and casting moving shadows on the sands. As it is a weekday, there are only a few blankets laid, Cuban matrons sitting and the tan children dashing about, their shrill calls like those of seabirds.

They wade ashore with their beach burdens. They spread their blanket, Paz’s blanket, none too clean unfortunately, but while she can detect no absolutely shameful stains, she cannot help wondering how many on this very blanket. He removes his garments and proves to be wearing a minuscule black French bathing suit. She forces her greedy eyes away from that zone and focuses instead on his chest. There’s that crucifix and that walnut-size brown lump on its thong. Before this, she has never consciously socialized with a man who wore a crucifix, although she has seen boys in high school who did. They usually spent a lot of time in shop. To distract herself from this memory, she asks, “What’s that around your neck?”

He touches the crucifix. “This? It’s a symbol of Christianity. You see, many centuries ago, God came down from heaven, and by the power of the Holy Spirit…”

Laughing at her. “I mean that other thing.”

“Oh, that! That’s an
enkangue
. A charm in Santería. You know what Santería is, right?”

“Vaguely. What does it charm?”

“It wards off zombies, among other things.”

“Have you been much troubled by zombies?” she asks archly.

“Not that much, recently,” he says, “but when I got it they were pretty thick on the ground.”

He does not seem to be joking, but he has to be; maybe there is something Cuban that she isn’t getting. Looking around, she says, “I can’t see any. It must be working.”

“QED,” he says and smiles at her.

They eat their sandwiches and drink cold Miller twelves. Paz takes out his cell and makes a call but gets no answer. Lorna doesn’t ask whom he’s calling, but hopes it is not another woman. She realizes she knows nothing about this man, that he might, in fact, be the kind who would be capable of lining up a date while on a date. If this is a date. She becomes by degrees a little depressed, and this makes her desire food. Ordinarily she doesn’t care much for Cuban fare, finding it fatty and crudely spiced, but when she bites into this sandwich she experiences deliciousness. The roll is absolutely fresh, the two meats succulent and tasting of the grill, fresh pepper, and anise, the cheese is real unprocessed Swiss, the pickles add just the right astringency, without that awful sweat-making rush.

She makes a spontaneous mmm of pleasure.

“Good sandwich?”

“Incredible!” she says around a wad of it.

He tells her about the sandwich, how it is the best Cuban sandwich in continental North America and why, how his mother found Manny Fernandez in his little shop years ago, how she encouraged his instincts toward perfection, how this sandwich became the featured item on the lunch truck she had before the restaurants, how her reputation spread, how Cubano construction and landscaping workers would drive miles to where she was parked and bring dozens of sandwiches back to the job site, how they prospered enough to buy their first little place.

She liked the way he told it, funny but without the mockery or resentment that many hard-knocks immigrants threw in. Then he said, “What about you? What’s your perfect Cuban sandwich?”

Lorna prides herself on being a good listener, a useful trait, considering
the sort of men she has chosen to be around most of her life. One of the reasons she picked clinical psych was that people told you about their lives and did not wish very much to know about yours. So there is not a ready spate, her Cuban sandwich does not spring instantly to mind. He gets her résumé therefore, together with the usual set-piece anecdotes about college and grad school and internship, but nothing deeper, and a number of the fibs she uses to ward off any efforts to dig. But she expresses her desire to find out what makes people tick, why they were so different, one from the other, and to learn if skilled interpretation of standard instruments can ferret out their secret pain. He listens. To her surprise, he asks informed questions, she warms to her subject. She began this outing with a number of expectations about what would transpire, but a lively discussion about the operational differences between nonparametric and parametric statistics was not one of them. She draws in the sand with a stick, the normal curve, the equations and tables that analyze variance….

There is at last a silence. “Getting hot,” he says. “Let’s have a swim.” He walks to the water, wades in, and dives below the surface with barely a splash. She pulls off her top and shorts. She has prepared herself with two beers, but this is always a sticky moment for her. She walks toward his head, now floating above the shimmering surface, slick and glistening like a seal’s. He watches her with an appreciative smile as she enters the water; she feels his gaze settle on her, and she hurries her steps to submerge her body. The water is tepid and has an oily feel, as if megagallons of bath oils have been added to Biscayne Bay.

They bob together, in chin-high water, touching briefly, then floating away like flotsam. She thinks it must be the beer, this voluptuous languor she now feels, she has not been out on the water since the breakup with Howie Kasdan, who now passes across her mind. If Howie were here, and he never would have come to so plebian a beach as Bear Cut, he would be swimming laps, making her swim laps too, coaching her, deprecating her style.

On the beach someone turns a radio up, music and a woman’s
voice singing in Spanish. Paz turns to her and says, in a conversational tone, “She sang beyond the genius of the sea, the water never formed to mind or voice, like a body wholly body, fluttering its empty sleeves; and yet its mimic motion made constant cry…”

For a moment Lorna thinks he is translating the lyrics of the radio’s song, but after a moment she doubts that the sentiment is one ordinarily expressed on Cuban AM’s Top 40.

“…caused constantly a cry, that was not ours although we understood, inhuman, of the veritable ocean.” A grin after this and a gesture to the Bay, its sky, its littoral.

“What’s that?” she asked after an astonished pause.

“ ‘The Idea of Order at Key West,’ first stanza,” he replied, “by Wallace Stevens. A friend of mine always used to recite the whole thing whenever we were out on the tropic seas.”

An unexpected little stab of jealousy here. “So you weren’t an English major.”

“Nope.”

“Not psych?”