Onyx (57 page)

“This brightens my day.”

Keeley looked sharply at her.

“You want us to quit,” she said. “That can mean only one thing. The Brothers are finally getting someplace.”

“Every day's sunshine in Los Angeles. Nothing but blue skies all day long. You'll be happier. And healthier.”

“Is that a threat?” Her voice was breathy. “You really ought to do better. You sound like the stinker in a B movie.”

Smith's emery board rasped.

“Be a good girl,” Keeley said. “Stop trying to prove how brave you are, cut out the wisecracks. Have you got this straight? You're telling Justin that you're ready to pack up and go home.”

“Oh no I'm not.”

His pupils shrank, a momentary chaos of pure fury that reminded Elisse that two AAW members had died after Security's anonymous beatings, yet his voice retained that bantering drawl as he replied, “You're sharp. Can't you see this Brotherhood business is a laugh? You really don't figure the boss is about to deal with a local, do you? Why, he'd just as soon negotiate with a hunk of steel.”

His brief metamorphosis into a raging creature had sealed Elisse's terror. She was shivering in the heat; however, she forced herself to speak levelly. “People aren't hunks of steel. They think, they feel.”

“I'm paid a fortune to keep out unions, and the other auto companies spend the same amounts. Don't be a fool, Elisse. There's no point for you to live in a dump like this, or to work your tail off, no point at all. The auto companies aren't going to give any union a toehold. And Onyx! You tell me. When has the boss let anyone lay down the law to him? He didn't listen to the President or Congress, so why would he kowtow to a bunch of nobodies?”

“Because he'll have to. Or close down.”

“Don't make me laugh. More than half of Detroit's out of work. Every man in every plant could quit tomorrow, and the day after, they'd be lined up waiting to fill the jobs. What do you figure this double work week's about?”

“If there were a closed shop—”

“There won't be, so stop spinning your wheels.” He leaned his spatulate chin toward her. “Tonight you talk to Justin.”

“Never,” she said.

“What good did college do you?” he asked mildly, rising to his feet. “Guys.”

Smith ceased filing his nails and Potter stood in one swift, articulated movement. Both stepped into the small, stuffy room. Teeth glinted from between lips drawn back into horrifying grimaces that masqueraded as smiles.

The dingy, mustard-colored wallpaper, the cartons, the shabby, comfortable upholstery shipped from California receded from Elisse's vision. Unable to move, she panted, a small, paralyzed little creature run to earth. Her stomach froze in a spongy way, as if crushed ice packed her viscera.

Nobody spoke.

The fat one, Smith, tugged at his seersucker jacket as he took one long stride toward where she shuddered by the window. Suddenly her hypnotized state turned to frenzy. Unconsciously her fingers curved, her thumbs tensed; she prepared to gouge at his eyes. Before she could lift her arms, he imprisoned her wrists. His speed and agility as well as the strength of those soft-looking freckled hands should have astonished her, but there was no room for surprise in her incandescent panic. To escape his grasp she kicked and twisted. The celadon-green china lamp teetered, toppling quietly onto the couch, not breaking. Smith jerked his arms behind her back, about-facing her so that her heaving rib cage arched toward the other two.

Nobody spoke.

Dickson Keeley stepped over a carton to the radio, turning it on full blast so that the crazed scuffle of her saddle shoes and her barking gasps were covered by an actor's trained voice.
You can't get away with this
.

Smith forced her into the hall, skidding her balky soles across the floorboards. A wire of rationality was strung through her panic, and she bit her lower lip, refusing to cry out lest she awaken her children.

In the narrow hall a foot chopped hard against the back of her calves. Her shoes shot out from under her. She would have fallen had not Smith been holding her. He let her down onto the gritty linoleum.

Dickson Keeley struck a match to light a cigar.

For the rest of her life whenever she thought about this interlude while Dickson Keeley smoked his Havana, it was with the absolute conviction that she had been flung into a surrealistic world running parallel to the real one; a hellish world whose chemistry was composed of elements inimical to sanity.

Her face was a few inches from Dickson Keeley's black shoes, and the smell of wax polish overpowered the dusty smell of the floor to which Smith was pinning her shoulders. Potter bent over to rip down her cotton step-ins. She lay exposed to the waist, thrashing like a landed fish, fearing to shut her eyes lest she somehow be trapped in this monstrous world, forcing herself to squint up at the red tip of Keeley's cigar. From the corner of her eye she saw Potter unbutton his pants. Dickson Keeley aimed a casual kick between her knees, and Potter punched apart her vibrating thighs.

Once Justin had told her that the Germans affixed their bayonets not with normal knives but with sharp, corkscrew-shaped ones. This travesty of the act of love was like that, inflicting hideously jagged wounds into what until now had been a spiritually dedicated private joy shared by Justin and her.

She stared up at that moving red star while her small, delicate body was rattled and ground into the worn linoleum of the narrow, dimly lit hall.

V

The Green Hornet
, tuned loud, woke Ben, and he went to the top of the narrow stairs.

If the men had been hitting his mother, he would have charged down, an instinctive reaction of his belligerent bravery, but one was calmly smoking a cigar, watching while the fat guy held down her shoulders and the other sprawled between her legs, his pants around his knees, his bare, viciously bouncing butt like two stuck-together bubble gums. Ben accepted that this particular harm they were inflicting on her was that adult mystery he could not be part of, even as her protector. He stood in the dark, shivering. The fat guy who held her shoulders took the other's place.

Long before he finished, she ceased struggling.

The man with the cigar bent over where she lay, her skirt rucked up. There was a lull in the radio, and Ben heard him say, “Los Angeles is the town for you, Elisse.” Noise sizzled as he pressed his cigar between her limp, spraddled legs. The music blared.

The men left, for the program changed. Neither Ben nor Elisse moved. He stood what seemed hours before she rolled over and pushed herself up on all fours. Darkness pooled on the floor where she had lain.

Ben tiptoed back to bed and lay with his arms tense across his chest.

The radio went off. He would never listen to
The Green Hornet;
never, never again. He feigned sleep when she came to lead him to the toilet so he wouldn't wet the bed. Her hands trembled wildly. He could not pee.

VI

She lay pressed to the mattress, her breath coming in mechanical gasps as though an iron lung were inhaling and exhaling for her. She was not crying. At first she could not think, could not feel anything beyond the burn. Gradually, though, an undefined determination began to radiate from the bleeding, outraged center of her. A queer, woozy determination that grew stronger.

Dickson Keeley's punitive brutality had failed in its purpose of dispatching Elisse, whimpering and sobbing, back to the safety of Los Angeles. Even granted the slow, benumbed way her mind was functioning, she knew she would not go back until her purpose was accomplished.

With the plodding repetitiveness of a child learning by rote, she thought,
I have to put a stop to this sort of thing. I must put an end. Yes. I'll force the Bridgers to put a stop to this kind of thing
. Her sense of humor hors de combat, she found nothing ludicrous or mad in one small woman's declaring war on her loathed, never met, other-side-of-the-blanket in-laws and their mammoth instrument of mass production—a single one of their factories, Woodland, employed more people than lived in the entire state of Nevada. Her mind refused emotionally freighted words like terrorize and rape, her precarious stability would shatter if she thought clearly about what had transpired against a background of loud radio melodrama.
This sort of thing must stop
, she thought. In her daze she found fortification in the eleven hundred and thirty-seven members of the AAW. With a union, this sort of thing will end.

Several hours evaporated.

Justin's secondhand Seven halted outside. She inched onto her side, stifling whimpers of agony in the pillow. When he came up, she did not speak or open her eyes. In bed he kissed her averted shoulder. Once they had promised to share desire, passion, mortal love, but since then she had visited that other world, and now his kisses were moist, slightly repellent nuzzling on bare flesh. “Elisse?” he whispered. She did not reply. He must have assumed she slept heavily, for he curled around her back, and soon his breathing lengthened into a deep, regular pattern. It was then, at last, that tears squeezed in odd shapes between her tight-shut eyelids.

CHAPTER 27

The new streamliner with its silver-grooved promise of a swift glide into the future drew the crowd's attention. Few people on Track 14 turned to react to the loud scene Ben was making. Balking at the steps, he hurled himself at Elisse, burying his face in her white piqué jacket, clinging to her waist with a parasitic grasp. Bending, she kissed his curly brown hair, concealing the pain that his scrabbling clutch inflicted on her pelvis and her soul, saying: “Hey, Ben. It's called the Zephyr.”

“You come,” he said, muffled.

“You're the one who's taking the vacation with Grandma and Grandpa,” she said.

It was the middle of August, two weeks after Dickson Keeley's visit, and by hook, crook, and long distance wire, she had connived this “vacation.” The children's departure wrenched her as much as if her vital organs were being removed for safekeeping.

“I don't wanna go on a dumb train.”

“You let Grandpa buy your ticket.”

“So what? I wanted to see what the streamliner looks like,” he replied pugnaciously.

Mr. Kaplan put his hands on his grandson's shoulders. “How about the duets we're going to play?”

And Mrs. Kaplan fluttered closer. “The compartments on the Zephyr are lovely.”

“
Booooooard
!”

Elisse gripped Ben, torn between crushing him yet closer and thrusting him onto the protective safety of the throbbing train.

Justin, who was holding his daughter, set her tenderly on her tiny white boots. Tonia's face crunched as if in preparation for tears, but instead of crying she trotted to her grandmother, reaching up for the kid-gloved hand, a docile, pleading gesture that mangled Elisse.

“I have a good-bye present for you, Ben,” Justin said as he unclamped his son from Elisse. “Come take a look.” He dragged the child a few steps.

Elisse murmured to Mr. Kaplan, “I don't know what's gotten into him. He's never been a mama's boy.”

The Kaplans glanced at each other, but Elisse did not see. Kneeling by Tonia, resting her lips against the warm, silken cheek, she wondered how she could entrust her precious to that sweet, vague woman and the foolish-clever stout little man in Hollywood white flannels and navy blazer. “Love you, Antonia mine,” she whispered.

“Love Mommy,” Tonia replied with a strangling hug.

The other passengers already leaned from windows, waving.

“
Boooooard
!”

“Dad gave me an AAW badge,” Ben said in a combative, unassuaged tone and, not glancing at Elisse, sprinted onto the train. One more hasty round of embraces. “Look after them, Daddy.… Mother, remember don't let Tonia eat strawberries.… Byee.… Byeeeee.…”

Whistles shrilled and the Zephyr slid from the depot. Wiping her eyes with one hand, waving with the other, Elisse found herself remembering what her mother had told her, a German second cousin had sent his two little daughters to live with her uncle and aunt in London.
Hitler
, her mother had whispered with a tremulous sigh.
It's very bad in Germany
.

As they started along the emptying track, Justin took her bare elbow. Once his touch on her skin had brought tingles of erogenous pleasure, but now it only depressed her.
I'm a dry stick
, she thought, stepping away.

Sun blazed on a sullenly hot morning, and they opened the car windows. On Fort Street they passed the large brake-drum factory, Milfrond Dome, which stood on the site of the old Stuart Furniture Company. Here, Tom Bridger had driven his first gasoline-powered quadricycle, here Hugh Bridger had lost his angelic beauty, from this place had come Justin's inheritance.

“Harris is worried about you,” Justin said.

“Daddy?” It was Mrs. Kaplan who kept reiterating,
Dear, you're so pale, a little holiday home would do wonders for you
.

“He said you asked them to invite Ben and Tonia.”

“We had a bad connection. I can't remember who said what.”

“I don't understand you, Elisse. We've never taken a weekend without them. And now you insist on sending them two thousand miles?”

“I've given up my overprotective ways, all right? What's so terrible about grandchildren visiting their grandparents? You agreed it was a good idea. They'll be out of this muggy heat.”
What excuses will I find to keep them out there in autumn
?

“Harris wondered if you're pregnant.”

“Chummy little chats you two had.”

“Are you, Elisse?”

“In my tenth month,” she said. “Oh, honestly, Justin!”

“You haven't been yourself the last couple of weeks. And … well … you've never put me off before.”

She felt the blood in her face and was grateful for the protective brim of her out-of-date mannish hat. “A little problem down there,” she said.