The Bones (42 page)

"Perfect, give me more of that," she says, unconcerned with Faron, who is walking out of the office without saying good-bye.

Manny Escobar, who is seated on the couch, watches Faron disappear. Removing a red, Western-style kerchief from his jacket
pocket, he wipes his perspiring brow and says, "That guy doesn't like me."

"What cop would like you, Manny? You put criminals on the street." Manny nods; can't argue with that. "You hot, Manny? What's
with the do-rag?"

"I sweat when I lose money. You gonna cover it, Otis? You guaranteed me he wouldn't skip."

"You're in a high-risk field, my brother. Got to take the bitter with the sweet."

"I got a kid in college, you cocksucker!"

"There's a lady present," Otis reminds the hostile bondsman.

Jane, who is changing roils of film, looks up, saying, "I've heard a lot worse. Otis, you want to change clothes while I reload?"

"Yeah, I brought two different sports coats." Then, to Manny: "You ain't the only one holding the bag. I was gonna try this
case and get my name in every damn newspaper in the country."

"Don't worry, Otis," Manny says, wiping his forehead again. "I know a skip tracer, new to the business, guy I balled out one
time. He's gonna find Frank and drag him back by his balls." Manny distractedly chews the inside of his cheek as he thinks
about the depredations that will surely be visited upon the elusive comedian when he is once again behind bars. Then he dabs
his sweaty forehead with his increasingly rank handkerchief and looks at Otis. "This skip tracer? He's very motivated."

Stacy and Dustin are the only two passengers in the Hylers' Learjet, which Daryl generously offered as soon as Stacy called
her with the news. They're headed for Mexico, and as Dustin watches a Monster Truck video with a look of slight discomfort,
Stacy ignores the turbulence they're flying through and assiduously works the phones. She has already lined up one of the
top criminal lawyers in Los Angeles and is now putting teams together in Mexico and Oklahoma. Stacy agonized over what to
wear since this is not a circumstance in which tastemakers generally weigh in, and she has settled on a tasteful Dolce & Gabbana
pantsuit worn with a cream silk shirt, simple gold earrings, and black pumps she purchased at the Barneys spring sale. Her
hair is freshly washed and her makeup subtle and refined since she knows she could wind up on television before the day is
over and it is important that the wife of any potential defendant display a pleasant and sympathetic mien. Stacy is clearly
in her element. Like many intelligent, nonworking wives of successful men, she has felt an unacknowledged absence of intellectual
challenge in her life, an absence that book clubs do not address, and now, despite the potential dangers that lie ahead, she
is enjoying the task at hand. Lloyd's foolishness has clearly come to a screeching halt, and she is going to help him ease
back toward the small pleasures of day-to-day life upon which he has so cavalierly turned his back. Stacy is convinced that
with some clever lawyering, he will be back to his old high-earning ways within a year or two and they will be able to pretend
this entire unfortunate business has never occurred.

The plane suddenly dips and judders in an oncoming wind. Stacy has just dialed Lloyd, in an attempt to ascertain a more precise
location so she will be able to tell the pilot exactly where in northern Mexico they are going. She is waiting for his phone
to ring.

"Mommy?" Dustin asks plaintively, and before she can answer, he has vomited today's lunch all over her suit.

Lloyd's driving, and Frank, still reeling from the tirade and enervated from the recent events, has decided to lie down in
the back. The silence in the car has been oppressive. When Lloyd's phone rings, he answers it with palpable relief.

"Lloyd, your son just threw up on me!" From Stacy's tone, you would have no idea the current situation is anything out of
the ordinary. In fact, it's the exact tone she would use were she admonishing him for working on a weekend when there were
errands to do. Then he hears her say, "Honey, talk to Daddy. Mommy needs to get cleaned up."

Then: "Daddy?"

"Hey, pal," Lloyd says, the simple three-word communication producing in him an awe you would associate with hearing a voice
transmission from another galaxy, a fundamental stirring of the emotions that is impossible to counterfeit. Stacy may be difficult,
but Dustin? Frankly, he's difficult, too, but by virtue of his age
he
has potential. "Howya doing?"

"I feel sick."

"Yeah, me, too."

"We're coming to see you, but now Mommy's mad." In the plane Stacy has been furiously wiping herself off with bar towels.

"I'm not mad, I'm not mad," she says, taking the phone from Dustin. "Okay, where are you?"

"We're headed for a town called Monterrey. Keep your phone on and I'll call you when I know exactly where we are."

"Lloyd?"

"What?"

"It's going to be all right," she says, picking an errant piece of regurgitated chicken off her lap with a cloth napkin and
placing it in the silver trash receptacle. Then, quietly, so the pilot doesn't hear: "Just don't shoot anyone else."

***

Las Casitas Motel is on the main drag outside Monterrey, between a taqueria and an auto body shop. It's a tired-looking two-story
building built in the shape of a horseshoe with a pale blue swimming pool surrounded by a Cyclone fence. Frank and Lloyd have
each rented a room.

In the late afternoon Lloyd lies on the bed. Taking a shower, conscious it could be his last private ablution in a while,
he was no less resolute about his desire to head north. Now he is watching
Judge Judy
(in Spanish) and imagines himself on her docket. He runs through his defense in his head:
accident, Paxil, tequila, accident, no criminal record, remorse, Paxil, accident, accident, accident, Paxil,
and feels reasonably confident that he will not be sent away for life. Looking over, he notices the phone is bolted to the
night table, confined, shackled. Ditto the television and VCR. He wants to see his son, spend more time with him; do father/son
things. Jail looms. Stacy looms. He needs to address the subtle daily rumble he discerns beneath his life, the one that has
taken him on this quixotic journey that is culminating in a motel outside Monterrey, Mexico. He'll have time. There will be
time.

If they don't kill me.

Am I being naive to think this could turn out well? I did shoot someone after all, a cop. Are they going to take us down?
Are they going to look for an excuse to shoot us? Frank said it didn't matter I didn't kill the guy. Should we have kept driving
until we got to his house? The beaches? The blunts? It's a holiday paradise for him but I don't even smoke dope anymore. Did
I remember to ask Stacy to see if she could find any Paxil in the medicine cabinet before she left? I don't think I did. Why
did she bring Dustin? Things could get hairy. I could die in custody, killed while trying to escape, which is what the cops
say after they bang your head into a wall a hundred times. I want to see Dustin
. . .

Just after five in the afternoon, Lloyd opens the door to his room and beholds an apparition, his wife and son. Stacy has
changed into tight jeans and a white tank top, Dustin's stomach having foiled her sartorial planning. "You couldn't have found
a nicer place?" Stacy asks as he ushers them in, quickly closing the door behind them. When she sees his face, she says, "I'm
joking, okay? I'm glad you're alive."

"That's two of us," he says, looking her over. Stacy's arm muscles are supple and defined, her whole body torqued and ready
for combat with whatever's on the way. Lloyd can't help noticing she looks terrific.

"I'm hungry," Dustin says. He's in a new outfit as well.

"Hi, pal," Lloyd says, picking up his son and hugging him, placing his face in the crook of the boy's neck and inhaling the
boy smell, sweet and once again sticky, even after having been cleaned up at the Monterrey airport. Having considered the
possibility he might never see his son again, Lloyd watches him for an extra moment as the boy explores the room. He feels
a slight tightening in his throat.

"We'll get you some food in a little while, sweetie. Mommy needs to talk to Daddy."

"Can I watch the SpongeBob video?"

"We left it on the plane." Sensing the strain of the day could shortly lead to a meltdown, Stacy adds, "But we'll buy you
two new ones as soon as we get home."

"Three." A talented negotiator already.

"Fine." She turns to Lloyd. "So, where's your friend?"

Lloyd has summoned Frank to his room and deposited Dustin in front of the television in Frank's so the adults can reconnoiter.
Stacy has had to keep herself from recoiling at the sight of Frank, whom she blames for her current troubles, Lloyd in her
mind a cult member in need of deprogramming, Frank the sinister guru now reclining on one of the beds. Lloyd is seated in
a chair and Stacy stands facing them. It's her meeting. "I talked to the most prominent criminal attorney in Los Angeles this
morning, he's a friend of Daryl's," she says, looking at her husband knowingly, proud of her access. "He can't try the case
since it's out of state, but he's willing to co-counsel pending a meeting. He'll fly to Oklahoma and arrange the surrender
so the cops don't come looking for you. All I need is the go-ahead and he's on a plane," Stacy concludes, looking around as
if expecting to be congratulated. But Lloyd is the only one who's impressed.

Frank's response is "Fuck that, I'm staying down here."

Stacy looks at Frank and exhales through her nostrils. This is all such a trial for her. Ordinarily, she'd be in her marble-countered
kitchen now giving Dustin his dinner and waiting for Lloyd to come home from work. That she is in a cheap Mexican motel room
discussing the surrender of her husband and his accomplice is an absurdity not lost on the woman whose wedding china was purchased
at Bloomingdale's. This keeps her from becoming annoyed with Frank's reaction.

"The Bones can handle Mexico," Frank says, lapsing into the third person, a distancing device, to prepare himself for the
difficulties that lie ahead.

"Hey, the Bones can do whatever the hell the Bones wants to do, okay? I could give a shit what the Bones wants to do," is
Stacy's coolly delivered reply. Lloyd looks at his wife, shocked. He's never heard her talk to anyone other than him this
way, and he finds it curiously inspiring, implying, as it does, that someone is taking control of the situation. Indeed, Stacy
has left no doubt what's going on here. She is engaged in a surgical extraction, a virtual military rescue mission. If Frank
wants to get on the Chinook, fine, he's welcome to come along for the ride, but what truly matters is that Lloyd is pulled
out, dusted off, and somehow eventually deposited back in his Los Angeles life.

Dustin's frantic entrance interrupts the conversational flow, and in the torrent of words and tears the leitmotif is "The
bad video! The bad video!" A moment later the four of them are in Frank's room standing in front of the television on which
can be seen a boxy room shot through the lens of what appears to be a celling-mounted security camera. In the room a black
man, big guy, maybe thirty-five years old, is handcuffed to a chair. Clay Porter and Faron Pike stand next to him, Faron saying,
"Just tell us where our share is, Wayman."

Wayman answering, "I don't know," his voice higher than you'd expect, given a man of his size. Clay slugs him in the face,
causing his head to jerk back, his nose breaking.

"What is this horrible thing?" Stacy asks, hiding Dustin's eyes.

"Those are cops," Lloyd says. "The short one's the one that got shot."

On the television Faron's saying, "We're trying to be nice here, Wayman."

"I told you it got stole," Wayman says, blood running down his face and onto his shirt.

"Someone just helped themselves to ten pounds of our crystal meth?" Faron asks rhetorically.

"Wayman, that is bad business," Clay says, smashing him on the head with a blackjack.

Lloyd clicks off the VCR. "I've seen enough of that," he says as Frank and Stacy watch mutely, Dustin whimpering against his
mother's stomach. The room is dead silent until Frank says, "Where'd this come from?"

"I found it in a bag! I'm sorry!" Dustin walls.

"You did a good thing, pal. Don't apologize," Lloyd tells his son.

"It was good?" Dustin says, looking up at his father through wet eyes, his sobs abating. Lloyd smiles at him. "Can I have
a present?"

"I will definitely get you a present."

Stacy is now morbidly fascinated by the circumstances of the tape and wondering if this could somehow be exculpatory in Lloyd's
case. She has actually watched enough police shows on television to know what
exculpatory
means so she says, "Maybe this is exculpatory." As Lloyd watches his buffed and cut savior, his wife of over ten years and
the mother of his child, plan his deliverance, he vows to love her more, to reclaim his old life with enthusiasm, to remain
untroubled by whatever is roiling him, but in a dark comer of his furtive mind a splinter of consciousness recognizes this
will forever be a vain hope.

Frank and Lloyd are saying good-bye in the darkened motel parking lot as Stacy and Dustin watch from their rented SUV, Stacy's
environmentalism conveniently retired for the day.

"You still want to write that book?" Frank asks.

"I think so."

"If you sell it to the movies, make sure you let me know. Maybe I'll come out of hiding to play myself."

Lloyd looks at Frank and marvels at the promise of his gift, now largely wasted, his time onstage nearly over. Still, even
now he wishes the other man's talent were something he could grab on to, hold, place in his soul's hard drive like a diskette
whose contents he could access to render himself something he will never otherwise be. As for Frank, he just wants Lloyd's
money, not for the purchase of glittering baubles, the spangled treasures by which success is measured in America, but to
give to Mercy so as to assuage the remorse he's feeling about having decided once again to recast the part.