Wild Horses (6 page)

“How about…” Allison said, faltering. “Is there any chance you could wire me the rest?”

She’d not wanted to ask so bluntly, but they had skirted the issue long enough. She supposed she’d been hoping the offer would be the first thing out of Connie’s mouth. Something was wrong; the long silence confirmed it before Constance broke the news.

“I would if I had it to send you. You know I would.” Allison could hear a small voice, and Constance took a moment to mollify the little boy saddled on her hip. “Sorry. Got a thirsty kid here. Randy saw the neighbor’s dog drink out of the toilet last week and now it’s his life’s ambition. But, Allie? A couple months back, Jefferson lost his job, and he’s not found another one yet. We’ve got us a little bit coming in on unemployment, but Jeff’s about to gulp down the last of his pride and apply for food stamps to tide us over. We’ll find a way to put you up. We just can’t pay your way here.”

Allison apologized, wouldn’t have asked if she’d had any idea.

“Oh, you hush. These things happen. Jeff, you know Jeff, God bless him, his idea of an advanced degree is on a thermometer, so something like this was bound to hit us sooner or later.”

But of course it had hit now. Someday she was going to have to tell Constance about the playwright.

“Listen, Allie, maybe…” Constance stopped, Allison knowing what she was about to suggest. “I mean, seeing as how you
are
in a bind and all, have you considered your father?”

“That’s out of the question. Absolutely not.” Hearing that voice again after all these years, forcing herself to beg for his help — how he would relish that. Had probably been waiting fourteen years to hear it. She remembered him as a man with coarse hands and the scheming patience of a coiled snake. There was no reason to believe he would have changed, or even could.

“Just a suggestion, and a lousy one,” said Constance. “But Allie? Maybe someday you could see him again, and if you don’t want to see him at that house you could do it on neutral ground. I wasn’t planning on telling you this, but I think maybe you should know it after all: My daddy told me that yours had bowel cancer last year. Says they got it all, but you know how cancer is.”

Constance’s father and Allison’s late mother had been brother and sister. Uncle Conroy’s infrequent checkups on the old man had been, ever since Allison had left, her sole source of news about him. Bowel cancer — so the old man had a weakness after all.

“What I mean to say is,” Constance went on, “if he should up and die one of these days, and you get to thinking you wish you’d seen him once more … well, you know what I’m saying?”

“He’ll never die. He won’t, Connie. Men like him, the devil just keeps on giving them more and more years. Why should they go on to hell when they do the devil so much prouder right here with the rest of us?”

“It really hurts me to hear you still talking this way.”

Hurt. Hurt by talk alone. There was worse.

After they rang off, Allison went down to the manager’s apartment to check with Doug Powell about a damage deposit refund. He met her in the same clothes he’d worn the other day when she’d borrowed his car; different comic book.

The smaller of two bedrooms served as an office, beneath the grubby residue of Doug’s life. He had the housekeeping skills of a sloth but the file cabinet was in order. He looked over the lease.

“No can do,” he said. His round face was soft and helpless as a baby’s. Even his hair was infant-fuzzy, the drab color of cold dishwater. “It’s a year’s lease and you’ve only been here eight months. The rules are very specific about this. My hands are tied.”

“Doug, if you’d haul yourself up the stairs and take a look, you’d see that apartment is in better shape now than when we moved in. We painted it. We wallpapered the kitchen. We paid to have the carpets cleaned.” All this we-talk left a strange taste in her mouth. There was no
we
anymore. “Isn’t that worth something?”

“This isn’t my decision!” he squealed. “I don’t decide these things! They don’t let me! I don’t even write the checks when they’re authorized. They’re mailed straight from the property owners’ offices.”

Silent, she glared. Behind round glasses, Doug’s baby blues began to widen. Nervous around aggressive women, oh, was he ever.

“And … and besides … the lease isn’t in your name, it’s in Boyd’s.” He cast a hopeful look past her toward the door. “Where
is
Boyd, anyway? Is he coming down? I like Boyd.”

“There is no more Boyd. Boyd’s over the hills and far away, and you know what I say? If he makes it as far as the ocean, I hope his brakes go out.”

Doug swabbed his forehead, and Allison pressed forward with sweat and steam, swaying wheat hair and seething menace.

“I know how we can work this out,” she told him.

“Stay back. You stay right there.”

“Change the lease to read eight months.”

Doug looked horrified. “Alter the base terms of the lease? I can’t do that!”

“You see that little bottle of Liquid Paper over there on the desk? Open it up and get to work. It’ll take you maybe a minute.”

He argued, he shuffled his feet and tugged absently at his t-shirt. Doug Powell reminded her of a recalcitrant child, any of dozens she’d dealt with at day care centers, except she couldn’t threaten to phone his mother to come get him early.

Allison stormed out of the office and began a search of the rest of his apartment. Comics were everywhere, in cardboard crates and scattered across tabletops. She rummaged through stacks and tossed aside strays; they spilled to the floor as Doug begged her to stop. She settled on one most likely to be ransomed — the gray cover drawn to look like a tombstone, big “S” insignia chiseled into the rock, and the epitaph HERE LIES EARTH’S GREATEST HERO. Doug froze as she held it poised for ripping.

“If you can’t write the check yourself, okay, you can’t write the check. But I want that damage deposit back, or I’ll use this
Superman
here for confetti to celebrate my way out of town.”

“That’s the Superman Death issue.” Doug held his hands out before him. “Do you have any idea how much those are going for now, with some dealers?”

“You’d better hope it’s a lot less than my two-hundred-and-fifty-dollar deposit, or you might not see it again.”

Doug tottered over to a chair and sat. Men were such children sometimes. The trick to manipulating them was to simply figure out which toys were their favorites, then get your hands on them.

“Suppose I change the lease. Do I get the book back then?”

“I’ll mail it to you the day the check clears.”

He grabbed a pen, sighing, surrendering with everything but a white flag. “I’ll need a forwarding address.”

*

She borrowed Doug’s car again — at this point he would accede to anything to get her out of his hair. With her belongings out of the apartment, Allison went first to the police and filed theft charges against Boyd, then pawned her bicycle to inflate her bankroll by another fifty-five dollars. Cash outflow was immediate and painful, two boxes of belongings stamped for a fourth-class crawl to Constance’s door.

In early afternoon she stopped by the day care center to give her resignation in person. To make her goodbyes to coworkers, the months of days and laughs starting to weigh on her heart; she had fit in here. But telling the children was worse. She knelt on the floor to give slow, squeezing hugs to those with whom she’d especially bonded…they having seen something in her that they wanted to love or be loved by, she having seen something in them that she felt a need to protect. They looked at her now, not understanding, smooth faces marred by hurt.

I’m teaching you an awful lesson,
she wanted to explain, but they wouldn’t understand this, either.
People leave you, or turn their backs on you, and even though that’s what life is and you have to learn that…I’m sorry I’m the one you’re learning it from today.

She returned to the apartment building in midafternoon, life once again winnowed down to its mobile essence, everything in one large battered suitcase and a shoulder-slung duffel. She knocked on Doug’s door, had to knock again before bringing movement from the other side. At a dimming of light in the peephole, she held his car keys in view, jingling them. He unlocked the door.

Such a difference a few hours made. Doug was holding a damp, bloodstained washcloth to his nose. Looking at her with two puffy eyes, rimmed underneath with purple crescents.

“I thought you told me Boyd was gone,” he said.

That name. That terrible name. “He was here? Boyd did that?”

“You missed him by about half an hour. I don’t know what it is he’s so pissed off about, but he sure is, and he’s looking for you.” Doug’s voice had the stuffy sound of a bad cold. “All I told him was that you’d moved out, you were gone already. I didn’t say you’d be back later with the car. I didn’t tell him anything else, honest I didn’t.”

She could not fathom this. Boyd — thief, forger, two-timer — had abandoned her, then had the nerve to come back angry? Drawing blood? Just more proof that Boyd’s brain had been dropping screws all over the desert.

“File an assault complaint,” she told Doug. “Call the police and swear out another warrant against him. That’ll make two in one day, maybe they’ll look a little harder for him.”

Doug said he would, sure, get right on that — but there was no heart to it. She knew he had no intention of following through, that the last thing he would want now was to provide chuckles for a couple of cops who could find the lighter side of a beheading.

Allison touched his cheek with gentle fingertips. What shame he had to be feeling, buried in that sad and doughy physique. No Man of Steel was Doug Powell.

“I’m sorry. I really am sorry he did that to you.”

Doug sniffed, dabbing at his swollen nose. “I thought I liked Boyd. Well, I don’t like him much anymore.”

“You and me both. We’re a growth industry.” She leaned in on tiptoe to kiss Doug’s other cheek. “I’ll print up the membership cards, you write the club charter.”

This brought a lopsided grin and half a laugh. Allison handed him his car keys, and he wished her all the best of luck, whatever she was planning on doing next. She turned to go, then dug into the duffel bag.

“This is yours,” she said, and gave him the purloined comic. “Just … do what you can.”

And the way he held it to his chest, as if it were the most precious thing he’d ever owned, sent her off wondering what would become of him. If he would ever truly live, or remain content to do it vicariously through the exploits of tall heroes in bright underwear.

She walked several blocks, where she could catch a bus that would carry her south, to the fringe of the city, where highways beckoned and dreams could rekindle, and where she might once more cast her fate to the winds, and in with the kindness of strangers.

CHAPTER 4

Some days it just didn’t pay to use your head.

Yesterday morning Boyd Dobbins had left Vegas feeling like the king of the world. He was Midas, his touch was golden. He was seven hundred thousand dollars wealthier and invincible. Transfuse his blood into the infirm and the old and they’d be up dancing. A man with his prospects needn’t sweat the small stuff, either. Sore shoulder? He laughed it off; would have the stiffness worked out in a few more days. Dented roof and cracked windshield? As long as Allison had reimbursed him for the damage, with no insurance claim to risk jacking up his premiums, certainly he was adult enough to bear her no grudges.

He didn’t even mind the scorching drive from Vegas to Los Angeles — I-15, south of Death Valley, all ugly brown desert, steep hills, and withered scrub too stubborn to die. These sterile miles Boyd enlivened with rocking stereo wattage, the soulful wail of his voice, and steering wheel drum solos.

Los Angeles lay before him, spread open wide, as inviting and ripe as a mango. With a new name and new fortune, swimming pools and movie stars, a man could shed his past here and find his true destiny, in this twisted Shangri-La.

And then he got there, and in less than a day that glorious Midas touch had to go all hinky on him.

Truly, this was a malign universe.

*

His first stop was Pasadena and his brother Derek, who no one ever believed could be his brother. Stand them side-by-side and skeptics shook their heads. Brothers three, the Dobbins boys, and each had stepped away from the genetic roulette wheel with the lion’s share of something.

Youngest brother Malcolm had gotten the voice, was working FM radio in Boston. Boyd, in the middle, saw no reason for false modesty, knowing that he’d come away with the looks. Dark-haired, dark-eyed, with long lashes and an easy crooked grin that made him appear more shy than he’d ever truly been, he was an irresistible choirboy that women wanted to take home and corrupt.

Good looks, velvet voice … he and Malcolm had been far, far luckier than elder brother Derek.

Derek had gotten the bones.