Angels of Destruction (25 page)

28

P
aul was talking, but Margaret could not hear a word he said. The voice in her head overtook his speech, reducing it to white noise, and a part of her took perverse delight in watching his lips part and move, the animation of his features, and the grand sweep of his hands as he rambled. He never could still those doctor's hands as he spoke, how bound to his thoughts were the unconscious gestures, so that he was a mime, a clown making a dumb show, and all Margaret saw was the silent movie.

She counted the days, wistful at each one's passing. After the local newspaper ran a story about the teens’ disappearance, she had expected more from the press. But time passed and there was nothing to report. The newspapers moved on to the next big thing. The police stopped coming round, the man from the FBI had not called since November. Erica did not come home for Thanksgiving. She did not come home for Christmas. For New Year's. Not on the second, the third, the twelfth day. She did not come home in January. She will not make it back in February. No valentines. Not tomorrow. Not next week or the one after. Not in time for spring and the tulips in the garden. Not in time to see the cherry tree blossom and bloom. She will miss Easter, Mother's Day, Father's Day, the whole Bicentennial. She will not be home for the fireworks, the barbecue, the swimming pool. She will not call on the telephone. No telegrams. There will be no letters, no more postcards. She will not see you in September. This whole year will pass without seeing her again. You will not know where she is. She will not be right back, see you soon. She will forget your birthday, his, hers. Nothing you do will bring her back. Jackson cannot find her. Linnet will not. Paul could not. Everyone shuns you, even the Delarosas don't come round with flowers anymore. Erica has hidden herself underground, in the stars, beneath the sea, up above the sky. You may look a thousand years, take a thousand steps, but you will not find her. She is back in the womb, beneath six feet of dust. She is with the angels in heaven. She is in hell.

Paul did not seem to mind that she was not listening, if he could tell. Someone something at the clinic, he said, and somehow some way I sometimes can say a real word. “Anyhow, I hope she's happy now,” he said. “Now that's she expecting. I hope the baby does the trick.”

“Expecting? I'm sorry, dear, I drifted off.”

“Eve Fallon.” He sawed off a hunk of steak and pierced it with his fork. “She thinks a baby might help tame that tomcat husband of hers, and I hope she's right, because the baby is coming, ready or not.”

Ready or not, here I come, Margaret would holler from the other room. That girl loved hide-and-seek, didn't she? Remember how she would slither under the sheets and pretend she could not be seen till you tickled the bump in the middle of the bed?

Margaret watched him work his jaws, and the effort for pleasure obviously tired him, for he looked like a man living in slow motion. Picking at her salad, she asked about the lady and her baby, but his answer was little more than static. This will kill him. Not losing the girl—he has made his peace and believes that she will find her way back in time. But losing me, she knew, as he helplessly looked on. Snap out of it, go back to him. And it's been what, half a year since she left?

“Four months.”

Setting down his empty fork on the edge of his plate, he scrutinized her face, knowing at once what she meant but mystified as to how and why she voiced her thoughts. “Do you think about her all the time?”

“Not her, so much as her absence. Not think, but feel the hole. The empty chair between us. No sound of a door opening when we two are alone in the house. No sudden good morning. No creak of the floorboards when she settles in for the night. Things that no longer happen.”

“I miss her too.”

She saw Paul now as an old man, his feelings slipping away with his faculties. The circles around his eyes looked like the entrances to a pair of caves. Hair white and thin as a cirrus cloud. Those lines across his brow looked carved by a mason, and she knew that constant tremor in his hands would drive her crazy. Why did he leave me alone, she thought, alone to bear my suffering while withholding his own? Where did he go? Why did he leave too?

The phone rang as she washed the dishes, and she madly dried the suds from her hands to reach the receiver before the caller gave up.

“Mrs. Quinn? This is Special Agent Linnet, sorry to be calling you so late. Is your husband home too? I'm over here at the Rinnick house and since it's so close, I'd like to talk with you in person tonight, if it's not too late. There's been a development in the case.”

29

I
n Amarillo, she dyed her hair yellow. She had always longed to be someone else.

On the long straight drive through Oklahoma and into the Texas panhandle, Wiley talked about the need to be more careful, to disguise their identities in case the police picked up their trail after the shooting at Garrison's Creek. There could be no more messages home, no more accidents, no more meandering along back roads. A new car would be necessary and more cash and ammunition. “We have to erase ourselves and write a new story. We have to be able to disappear and change, like chalk on a blackboard, one quick swipe and you are gone. Hope the wind obliterates our tracks, and every trace of who we once were is blown away.”

No trees provided shadow on the gray flatlands. The sun beat down on the window glass and the car felt hot even though it was cold outside. Erica fought to keep her comfort balanced by cracking her window and letting in some fresh air. Every few miles she pressed a hand against her belly. She wondered if the man they shot was someone's father. He had a gun, she told herself, a gun, and he shot first, and I thought the man was shooting Wiley. I didn't know what I was doing. Yes, just disappear.

“You should cut your hair short too, like mine, and maybe bleach it. Get some shades, maybe granny glasses, and change the way you dress. A whole new look, whatcha think about that?”

She gathered her brown hair in a ponytail and hid it from his sight.

“We will be strangers to all we have met on the road. Nobody will remember we were there. And we will forget our old friends and family back home. The Angels will know us, and we will be known only as Angels.”

“Don't you think I'll be cute as a blonde?” She patted his leg. “Like having a whole new girl to screw.”

Taking her remark as light-hearted, he laughed and beat a rim shot on the steering wheel. “Tell you what: we'll rob a wig store and take seven heads of hair. You can be a different girl every night of the week.”

Amarillo, silhouetted by the falling sun, grew on the horizon as they approached, the squat office buildings resting like building blocks on the prairie. Erica thought of the Wild West of her youthful daydreams—cowboys in chaps and ten-gallon hats, the country sere and tan, the long-horn herds lowing on the dusty trail to the stockyards or railroads—but instead, the Texas landscape seemed bereft till they reached an airport dotted with Piper Cubs and an antique biplane. If she jumped from the car, she could roll down the embankment and sprint across the dust, make it to the runway, and some movie-star pilot—maybe Dustin Hoffman or who was the boy that played Billy Pilgrim in that Vonnegut film?—would rescue her and they would fly away, make it home or down to Mexico, where there could be a happier ending. Wiley pulled the Torino into the parking lot of the Wagon Wheel Inn and checked in for the night. When he jumped into bed with her, she showed him her back, complaining that the nausea had returned.

She went into the bathroom at dawn and chopped six inches of her hair, leaving the ragged ends to skirt the base of her skull. Using a peroxide kit Wiley had shoplifted, she bleached the remains, mourning in the shower. Dizzy from the sulfur smell, she sat in the bathtub and let the stream beat the top of her head, and closing her eyes, she waited until her scalp no longer burned from the chemicals. As she dried herself with the thin white towels, Erica could hear him through the closed door. Wiley was practicing again, posing in front of the mirror, first cocking the pistol and then snapping together the shotgun. The bloodied grocer moaned from behind the drawn shower curtain as she trimmed her wet bangs and the sides to frame her face, and he would not keep quiet, so she wrapped her hair in a towel and stepped into the bedroom. Trained on the entrance, the shotgun greeted her. For a brief second, she thought that Wiley intended to shoot her and wished that he would.

“Let's see,” he said, motioning with the gun at her head.

Unwinding the towel like a turban, she murmured softly to herself the lines to a song her mother used to sing about a yellow bird way up in a lemon tree. Brilliantly golden, bordering on white, her hair stuck out in crazy angles like straw from under a scarecrow's hat. She fluffed it further with the scruff of the towel and stood there beneath her burnished halo.

“You did it. Your own mother wouldn't recognize you. You are a whole new you.”

In the lobby of their motel, the morning clerk stood behind the counter staring at the vacant space, the landscape already beginning to bake, deep in conversation with himself. He did not acknowledge Wiley or Erica when they entered other than to flinch at the sound of the door closing. Despite the hum of the air conditioner, he perspired heavily, the sweat visible in twin arcs below his madras-shirt sleeves. Drops dotted his forehead and clung like dew along his receding hairline. As the two neared the counter, the man stiffened and began to speak in the practiced cadence of a radio announcer. “We're open Monday through Friday. Monday-Tuesday-Wednesday-Thursday-Friday. Nine to six. Drop on by and say hello. That's Haverty's Hardware on South Cheyenne.”

“We'd like to check out,” Wiley said.

The radio man ran his fingers through his wispy hair and stared through the window, as if he could see something invisible to the others. “Tuesday-Wednesday-Thursday-Friday-Monday. Closed on weekends. Wednesday-Thursday-Friday-Monday-Tuesday. Nine to six, so we can be with our families and you can be with yours. Drop on by and say hello. That's Haverty's Hardware on South Cheyenne. Tell ‘em Hank sent you.”

Wiley leaned across the counter. “Are you going to take the key, friend?”

The question caused a synapse to fire the broadcaster back to normalcy. He fiddled with the receipts and poked at the bell as if it were explosive. The nervous man made them nervous. At the axis of jaw and ear, his skin looked beshot with blackheads, as if he, too, had been sprayed by bird pellets long ago, and his lips trembled slightly, struggling to contain a torrent of words. She wondered what station he was receiving now. Out of some innate civility, she and Wiley waited, said nothing, gave him the chance to start.

“Where are you heading?” he blurted out. “The maps, the maps.”

“Las Vegas,” Erica said.

“Viva Las Vegas. That's Spanish. Runaways?”

“Our honeymoon,” Erica lied.

“And that's the way it is,” the man said.

“We'd like to get us some breakfast,” Wiley said. “Anyplace good around here? Maybe some pancakes.”

“I saw Jesus once, the face of Jesus on a pancake.”

“Must have been hard to eat,” Wiley joked.

“You aren't the same one come in last night.” He pointed to Erica. “What happened to her?”

She did not realize that he was referring to her hair until Wiley turned to stare at her head. All she could offer was a shrug of her shoulders.

“I run away,” the radio man said. “Run away from the place they kept me, and you have to run away where they'll never find you. If they come looking. Your mom and dad. And the police. The maps.”

“We're not running away,” Wiley insisted. “We're on our honeymoon. We're married.” He handed over the keys. The man searched the papers and receipts scattered now across the counter, finally handing them a napkin with a greasy bacon stain.

Wiley played along. “If there's no other charges, we'll be on our way.”

“Stay off the main roads. Don't go where they expect you. The straight path is not always the fastest way. Look both ways before you cross the street. Do you have a gun?”

“Listen.” Wiley spoke sharply. “We paid last night when we came in. Cash.” He walked to the door, expecting her to follow.

As if he had switched stations, the radio man began talking like the newscaster, picking up some distant signal bouncing back in time from outer space. “Now we must be ready for a new danger: the atom bomb. Radiation is something we live with every day. If we know the facts and act intelligently, we'll be able to weather any storm that blows our way.”

Fascinated by the man, Erica inched closer. He grabbed her by the wrist.

“The key to survival is adequate shelter.” The man paused, looked at an imaginary explosion on the horizon. “The fallout shelter is the best defense.”

“Let me go,” Erica said. He was reminding her of her father and squeezing her arm so hard she wanted to cry out but was afraid.

“Stay off the highways,” he whispered to her. “Watch the news and read the papers. They are looking for you. The little girl said.”

“Who? What little girl?”

“You know.”

“Please let me go.” She circled her wrist with her other hand and tugged free.

“Don't talk to strangers,” he shouted as she pushed open the flimsy screendoor.

On the western side of town, they stopped for breakfast at the Yellow Rose Cantina, a neon flower visible in the gray November light. Just like Mr. Delarosa's shop, she thought. The neighbors would not recognize me, and was the radio man right, a stranger to my own mother? Before they left the car, Wiley counted their remaining cash, scooped the coins from the holder next to the ashtray, and then reached across her lap for the pistol in the glove compartment. She put her hand over his wrist and said, “Not here. Not now.” He withdrew his arm, and they went inside, trying to be inconspicuous, and seated themselves at an empty booth. Every surface—from the Naugahyde seats to the plastic menus—bore a slick of grease as fine as furniture wax, and while they waited for their server, Erica traced the AOD logo and wings with her fingertip on the table and slid a sugar canister to cover her handiwork.

The nine o'clock crowd had come and gone, leaving a few retirees in baseball caps swapping gossip in a corner booth. A solitary young woman in the corner tortured the pulp in her orange juice. She looked like the woman from Elmwood Cemetery back in Memphis, and her stare unnerved Erica until she turned away.

“You kids ready to order?” The waitress arrived dressed in mint green polyester with a glass coffeepot. Erica covered her mug with her fingertips, then turned it upside down. Though she dared not look, Erica could feel the woman's stare, knew that she was scrutinizing the crazy haircut, but orders were given and taken without pause. When she departed, the aroma of oranges lingered in the air, and from behind, her blonde hair looked like a haystack upon her neck.

“Wiley, I have something to tell you.”

“Is it about that dude back in Oklahoma? Honestly, Erica, you gotta let it go. Into each war, some blood must flow. Besides, I might have—”

The grocer appeared behind Wiley's shoulder, his bloody face a mash of anger, a butcher's cleaver in his hand, and he lifted the blade above his head like an executioner.

“No!” she screamed. Faces pivoted in their direction. She offered the half circle a small smile, and the other patrons and the waitstaff looked away, the hum and clink of conversation and cutlery resumed. “Not that,” she said. “Sorry, it was upsetting, and I don't want to upset you, not this morning, not when I have something this important I want to talk about.”

“Is it about the money? We'll get more; we can last a day or two. Enough for gas. Why don't we shoot straight through to Vegas? It's only eight or nine hundred miles, and we can sleep under the stars. Then we'll get ourselves another car, something with better mileage.”

“Not that. You remember that woman I met?”

“We met lots of people on the road, babe, and it could have gotten much, much heavier than it did. Remember that policeman when we were lost in Virginia, and those two dudes in Nashville?”

Angels had been warning us all along, she thought, telling us to turn back, go home, this was not working. Now it's too late. A man is dead, and we shot him down like an animal. She looked at the boy across the table, a hardness fixed to his features, twitching fingers tapping a staccato beat on the rim of his orange juice glass, hopped up on caffeine and Lord knows what. The baby's father.

“Wiley, I think I'm pregnant.”

The waitress arrived with a plate of French toast for her, huevos rancheros and strips of greasy bacon for him. He did not seem to notice as she set the plate before him, did not glance up once at the bouffanted blonde, no acknowledgment when she topped off his coffee, asked if there would be anything else. Stare fixed on Erica, he was seething, holding his words inside through brute force. Up to Erica to offer a word of thanks, a gesture to send away the lingering woman.

“You think you're what?”

“Expecting a baby. Back in Shawnee, the maid found me out cold on the bathroom floor.”

From the corner booth, the woman who had been watching stood suddenly as if to leave, but when Erica smiled at her, she sat back down and stirred her drink.

“You never saw her once, did you?” Erica said. “You never saw anything.”

The people from the road appeared one by one. Through the din of the room, a voice croaked out: “When you see the flash, remember: duck and cover—” Two tables over, radio man nattered on to Carl over a stack of pancakes. Red and blue lights bounced against the walls, and the Virginia trooper entered the diner, began chatting with the gunshot grocer seated at the counter, who swiveled around on his stool to point out the murderers in the booth. Pushing through the swinging doors from the kitchen, their waitress morphed into Josie, laboring under a tray laden with night deposit bags filled with money, setting them down in front of Mrs. Gavin. Through the ceiling between two broad timber beams emerged the child, undulating softly to the floor and landing on her bare feet. Translucent, as she moved toward them, Una carried the light inside and gained brilliance with each step. The penumbra in the round glasses, who had been watching all along, loomed over all. Erica could no longer bear to witness. She cast her eyes away from these visions, stared at her cooling breakfast, the scoop of butter sliding to the plate, and looked again to Wiley, who was watching her, poised to explode.

“This woman Josie picked me up off the floor and gave me clothes and crackers and ginger ale. She told me she had seen it before, had kids of her own. The morning sickness, she knew right away.” His blank, unblinking eyes revealed no evidence of listening, much less thinking of all she was saying. “Your eggs are getting cold. Eat.”