Nothing but Gossip (3 page)

“No, I’m a federal police officer.” That got him to back up a little farther. “Are you really from Siberia?” I asked.

“Da.” He nodded and indicated the rest of his contingent. “We let Rutherford Oil come in and do some business. Big project. Bigger than North Slope. We build pipeline to Manily, very beautiful. I am chief petroleum engineer for Magadan, my province. You come visit.”

“Well,” I said—Richard had taken my arm and was pulling me away—“good luck. Enjoy your visit. Mind your manners. The police are watching.”

“Da.” He laughed. “That I understand.”

“Aren’t they a scream?” Alma asked as she steered us across the room. “I never thought Siberia could be so much fun. And the vodka is to die for. Have you met Johnny and Shanna Bourbon?”

Johnny Bourbon is Roundup’s one and only world-famous televangelist. His ministry, Johnny Bourbon’s Christian Cowboys, had miraculously managed to survive his thirty-six months in the federal clink for selling each timeshare condo in his Christian retreat/theme park—Christ’s Corral—a remarkable twelve times.

I could tell that most of the guests found the Bourbons as exotic as Martians. They circled the get-down, ex-con, high-roller, high-country preacher and his show-business wife as if they were the fat man and bearded lady at the circus, but never actually got close enough to talk.

It’s like the time I met the comedienne, Joan Rivers, and we were laughing about the horse races at the state fair in Montana—the Midland Empire State Fair—and the fact that the track at the fairgrounds was so short, the horses had to go around it eight times to make a mile and a quarter. And she said, “I was booked there very early in my career, and I think I was the first Jew ever to visit Montana. People kept sending their children up to touch me for luck.”

That’s what the Bourbons brought, maybe a little touch of the forbidden.

I’d never met Johnny Bourbon, but now I could see that he had it. His eyes were as fiery blue and intense as cattle prods, and I felt their power instantly when we shook hands and he turned those eyes on, burning them into mine. But mine are Bennett eyes, the color of Bisbee turquoise, and immune to unsought charms. I also saw in him the wariness that no former prisoner ever can hide around law-enforcement officers. That flicker of animal fear and longing and begging that comes from the horror of incarceration, the personal knowledge that a stranger can exercise absolute, impersonal
control over your life. Even the deepest faith cannot erase that memory.

“I’ve heard your name for years and years from Alma,” Johnny said, holding my hand in a powerful grip.

“Really?” I asked, trying to imagine why Alma would ever have any reason to mention me to anyone.

“I know you’re her oldest friend.”

“Really?”

“God bless you.” He was medium-tall, in good, trim shape, had a black moustache and short beard, and was decked out in a snow-white Western-cut suit, white shirt, white string bow tie, and white cowboy hat with a silver coinband. His boots were shiny gray eel-skin. “I’m awful pleased to meet you. And you,” he turned to Richard. “You both look like you know what you’re doing, getting hitched. It’s a great state of being, marriage. Shanna and I”—he slung his arm around his wife’s wasp waist and drew her close in a brusque sort of yank—“have been married for twenty-five years. Haven’t we, darlin’?”

“Sure enough have, sugar darlin’.” Shanna’s enthusiasm sounded to me as if it had a “you idiot” hanging at the end of it. Her rodeo-queen hair—as black as midnight—exploded like a Clairol commercial from beneath a white beaver Stetson, and her sleeveless baby-blue doeskin dress draped her curvy body like soft butter. Long strips of fringe fell from beaded emblems across her back, and bracelets of downy eagle feathers circled her wrists. She had on false eyelashes, television makeup with the flawless sheen and smoothness of fondant icing, and her teeth were so shiny they looked as if they’d been capped with mirrors. I remembered that she played the guitar and sang her own Christian compositions on the daily television show she and Johnny
broadcast all over the world from their own studio. Shanna and her husband looked a little more like brother and sister than I thought was quite right or healthy.

“Shanna’s going to sing for us a little later,” explained Alma, who hadn’t taken her hand off Johnny Bourbon’s forearm. An edge had crept into her voice.

“Great. I’ll look forward to it.”

“Come on,” Alma suddenly ordered me. “There’s something I want to show you.”

“God bless you,” Johnny said again as Alma seized my arm in a painful clench and pulled me away.

“That miserable motherfucking son of a bitch,” she muttered.

Wow. I turned to see if Richard had heard, but he’d vanished in the direction of the bar and my brothers.

On Alma’s neck, ears, and arms, masses of gold jewelry flashed in the setting sun like signs at a truck stop as she marched me double-time through a narrow, twenty-foot-high archway into a vast solarium. There were eight or ten seating areas of natural bamboo armchairs with yellow and green palm-leaf-patterned cushions and glass coffee tables, each with an arrangement of wide, floral scented candles of different heights and what looked like black teak African fertility artifacts. But the artifacts weren’t what made the room memorable. It was the fact that actual zebra-, tiger-, and leopard-skin rugs covered the gray terrazzo beneath the tables and chairs, and hundreds of stuffed heads of rare, beautiful African game stared out blindly from the walls. It made me sick at my stomach.

We stopped at a black-lacquered sideboard where a number of pictures were displayed in black-lacquered frames.

“We used to go to Africa every year on safari,” a
calmer Alma explained. She tapped her fingernail on a photograph of herself leaning against the neck of a dead elephant; a long Weatherby elephant rifle rose from between her legs in case anyone missed just what a macho-girl she really was. “Got a Grand Slam in cats.”

She raised a cigarette to her glossy pink lips, making her heavy gold bracelets clank into a solid stack on her strong, tanned forearm, and inhaled deeply. Her face was thickly made up and evenly taut, what looked to be the result of a recent face-lift that had turned the jowly pouches on either side of her mouth into smooth, slightly swollen balls about the size of chestnuts. And although her lips were plumped by collagen, tiny lines around them deepened into cracks as she dragged on her cigarette. She had wide, square hands and feet, stubby fingers and toes, and all her nails gleamed with the same bright pink as her lipstick and caftan. “But now they won’t let you shoot anything, so we just go to Scotland and Nebraska and Texas bird-hunting. Last year I bagged two hundred quail in one afternoon.”

“What do you do with that many birds?” I asked.

Alma shrugged. “They give them to the Mexicans or something. I don’t know. We give away lots of stuff.”

I bit my tongue and followed her through more vaulted, cold, dead rooms. I’d been in friendlier morgues. Alma’s high-heeled sandals slapped against her callused feet like hands methodically slapping a face. One slap. Two slap. One slap. Two slap. One slap. Two slap. The sound was so cheap, it made me want to scream.

Alma’s mother’s lovely Danish country antiques—not the knife-edged Danish Modern junk everyone fell in love with in the late fifties, but graceful, pale pine pieces with clean, simple lines—were everywhere. But they’d been trampled, killed with the gray by Alma, or
her decorator, and seemed to struggle for air. Even the animals in the large painting that had hung in her parents’ living room, of Denmark’s wild ponies racing along the banks of a swollen river beneath an endless threatening sky—a work so easy to confuse with our own wild mustangs dashing through the Wind River—looked as if they’d turned into one more herd trying to escape the Gilhooly slaughterhouse.

God. The whole place was gruesome and depressing, overwhelmingly dreary. And in spite of all its height and open space, it made me want to hunch over, as though I were walking through a dark tunnel.

“This is Wade’s room.” Alma punctuated the words matter-of-factly with exhaled smoke, as though she were saying, “And this is where we keep the dog.”

We walked along a gray-leather sectional sofa that snaked through a grown-up boy’s ultimate playroom, where one wall danced with images on twelve television monitors. Another wall held framed photographs of models wearing little more than lip gloss and posing with high-speed Harley-Davidson and BMW motorcycles between their legs. What I would consider to be a serious gun collection, ranging from antique dueling pistols to plastic Glock handguns, was mounted above the bar. Below, a glass-fronted refrigerator displayed countless brands of beer, canned margaritas, and piña coladas.

“Where
is
Wade?” I asked.

Alma, who’d been flicking ashes onto the floor the whole time, now ground out her cigarette in an ashtray set in the inlaid edge of what looked like a brand-new pool table. A few live sparks jumped onto the smooth green felt and burned tiny holes, but she didn’t seem to notice or, more probably, didn’t care. Alma was just a complete pig.

She looked me in the eyes for the first time, and the toughness and cynicism I saw there said it all. “He was so upset. He got an emergency call from one of the dealerships and had to run up to Billings. He’s going to try to get back, at least in time for dessert.”

We both knew she was lying. He wasn’t upset, and he wouldn’t be back.

“Too bad,” I said.

“Oh, what the heck, I can’t lie to you, Lilly. You’re my oldest friend and you know me better than anyone.” She removed a gold case from her pocket, lit a fresh cigarette, and, once she got a coughing fit behind her, continued. “The truth is that ever since I found Jesus, I’ve been able to forgive Wade for the life he leads. I know he strays, but he can’t help himself. I have trouble staying on the straight and narrow myself from time to time. Besides, I love him too much to let him go, and as the Lord says, ‘People who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.’ ”

I half-smiled at her, not trusting myself to speak for a moment or two. Where was all this best-and-oldest-friend stuff coming from? Johnny had said it, and now Alma. We hadn’t seen each other for twenty-five years and didn’t know each other at all, not even a little bit; only those fading memories of early acquaintance and our parents’ close friendship connected us. And how can anyone who falls in love with Jesus rationalize—with pride, I might add—killing two hundred birds in one afternoon just for fun? Once you’ve been a cop, it’s tough to rationalize killing anything for fun. A soul can take only so much carnage.

“That’s great,” I finally said.

“But here’s what I wanted to show you.” We cruised down a long, glass-walled gallery, changing wings of the house the way people change lanes on the highway,
past atrium gardens and fountains, past another gun collection, and into the master bedroom wing, where Wade and Alma’s bed sat in the center of the room on a raised platform like a big, round, white satin roller-derby rink. The walls were upholstered with gray flannel. If there were any windows, it was hard to tell where.

“Goodness,” I said, recalling the handful of times I’ve slept in round beds—usually in expensive suites in Las Vegas—and spent the whole night swimming in a circle, looking for my moorings. Plus, if they have satin sheets, it’s like sliding on black ice, and once you’ve fallen out of a round bed, it’s hard to know exactly where to get back in. Besides, usually the person you’ve woken up with in a round bed is not one you’d especially care to crawl back in with if it’s light outside. Round beds give me the heebie-jeebies.

“Dandy, isn’t it?”

On we sailed into her dressing room, where she clapped the lights on with a matador’s flourish, and there was a grown-up version of the room of her childhood—apple-green carpeting and pink walls with huge pink-tinted mirrors and fringed lampshades, and a bookcase of dolls, most of them dressed like Scarlett O’Hara. Off to one side, a platform bathtub sat in a glass cubicle in a walled garden that must have been designed from a description in a romance novel. Stuffed exotic birds perched overhead in the fake trees, their glass eyes angry.

“Can you stand it?” she exclaimed.

A
lma grunted herself down at her dressing table like a truck driver climbing onto a stool in a diner and powdered her face with a marabou puff between sips of her martini. Then she removed the top from a tube of lipstick with a muffled pop and applied it as though she were drawing thick circles on a wall with a crayon, slathered some peachy lip gloss over all, and that done, studied her face carefully. Finally, her eyes caught mine in the mirror.

“My life is a complete joke,” she said flatly.

“What do you mean?”

“This whole thing is a sham. This house. Everything. I only moved back to Roundup to be closer to Johnny, and ever since we got here, he’s avoided me.” She got up and walked over to a mirrored cabinet that opened to reveal a well-stocked bar and small refrigerator, inside of which sat a crystal martini decanter.

“Want one?” she offered, waving the pitcher my way.

The sound of New Orleans jazz played quietly from invisible speakers.

“No, thanks. I will take some of the Jameson’s, though,” I said, splashing whiskey into my glass and glancing at my watch, wondering how much longer Richard and I had to stay and knowing it would have to be a lot longer than an hour.

“Irish. Ick.” Alma grimaced. “Wade’s Irish, but he doesn’t have the class to drink Jameson’s. He drinks ale and stout and all that affected crap.” She flicked open a gold Cartier lighter with the Kenya Safari Club logo outlined in diamonds on its side, fired up another cigarette, resumed her perch on the leopard-skin dressing-table bench, and picked up the subject of Johnny.

“I’ve underwritten his whole stupid ministry for years, paid his stupid payroll while he was in prison, otherwise the whole stupid, fucking operation would have gone down the toilet. He and Shanna don’t care about each other any more than Wade and I do. As a matter of fact, I think Wade and she even had a thing going for a few years, although I can’t imagine why she’d bother, he’s such a quick-fire little pipsqueak, and now he’s been moping around with a case of flu for the last month. I don’t know why I’m telling you all this. We hardly know each other, but I know you can keep secrets and I needed to talk to someone. I hope you don’t mind.”