Trauma (16 page)

She frowned, and stood up, and padded across the pale blue nylon-carpeted floor. “Duke?” she called, opening the bathroom door. No Duke—and for the first time ever in the history of the Winter marriage, the toilet seat was down.

She went through to the living room. Sometimes Duke got so drunk that he fell asleep on the couch in front of the television. But the television was switched off, there was nobody lying on the couch, and the cushions were all straightened. This was very weird.

“
Duke?
” she said, but this time she spoke so softly that he wouldn't have been able to hear her.

He wasn't in the kitchen. She even opened the larder.
He wasn't in the yard, either—and thank God, his body wasn't floating in the pool. She saw herself frowning in the gilt-framed mirror in the hallway as she went back to see if he had dropped off in Ray's room—although why he should do that, she couldn't think. He always called it The Funkatorium. She could almost hear him now. “Kids today, you know why they fart so much? It's the food. All those goddamned vegetables. How can they call that health food when it practically asphyxiates you?”

She knocked on Ray's door and said, “Ray? Is your father in with you?”

There was no answer, so she knocked again and looked around the door. There was no Duke lying on the carpet, but then, there was no Ray lying in the bed, either. The bed was tidy, and the drapes weren't even drawn.

Bonnie was becoming seriously worried now. She remembered going to bed last night. She remembered taking a long shower and putting on her nightgown and climbing into bed. She remembered wondering how long it would take for Duke to come to bed, because when he did he almost always woke her up, cursing and burping and falling over his feet. But that was all. She couldn't remember kissing Ray good night, the way she usually did.

She went to the front door. It was locked and bolted from the inside and the chain was on. The patio door at the back was safety-bolted, too. None of the windows were open, and they all had locks. So Duke and Ray must have left the house before she went to bed, and she must have locked all the doors after them. Yet she couldn't remember doing
it, and she couldn't think why Duke and Ray would have gone. Duke had hardly any money, so it was doubtful that they would have gone to a hotel; and Duke had hardly any friends, either. Maybe they had spent the night with one of Ray's buddies.

But why? She could remember arguing with Duke because he had lied to her about finding a job. She remembered Ray saying something about cheap Mexican labor ruining their lives, and Mexican drug traffickers killing one of his friends. But that had been early in the afternoon. She simply couldn't remember what had happened next.

Oh, yes. She had called Esmeralda at three o'clock, and showered, and changed, and gone down to Sixteenth Street to see her. And talked to Juan Maderas. And then come home again. But had Duke and Ray been at home when she got back? They couldn't have gone far, because she had borrowed Duke's car—which was still parked next to her truck in the driveway outside.

She felt as if she had been to a very drunken party the night before and simply couldn't piece things together.

She went into the kitchen again and poured herself a glass of orange juice. When she had finished it, she drank some more straight out of the carton. There was no sign of a serious fight. Nothing broken, so far as she could see. In fact, the house was immaculate. Even the carpets had been vacuum cleaned and the pile raked up with a carpet rake.

She went back to Ray's room and found his Bart Simpson phone book. Most of the pages were crowded with scribbles and cartoons and exclamation
points, but she managed to find the number of his closest friend, Kendal.

“Mrs. Rakusen? It's Bonnie Winter. I'm sorry if I've disturbed you, but I was wondering if you'd seen anything of Ray. No? He didn't ask to stay with you last night or anything? I see. Well, could you ask Kendal? Okay. Well, if you do hear from him, can you ask him to call his mother? He didn't come home last night, and I'm a little worried about him. Well, yes, after that last business. Thanks.”

She called two more friends she could think of, and a girl he used to go out with called Cherry-Jo. None of them had seen him or heard from Ray.

She sat in the living room biting her lip and wondering what to do. She took another look all around the house, even bending down and looking under the beds.

At last she called Ruth.

“Ruth … something weird has happened.”

“Don't tell me that you and Duke have actually—you know—”

“I'm not kidding, Ruth. Duke and Ray have both disappeared.”

“Hey, congratulations! How did you manage it?”

“They've gone, Ruth, and I don't know how and I don't know where.”

“Hey, you're serious, aren't you? What do you mean, they've disappeared?”

Bonnie told her everything about her argument with Duke, and all about the empty beds and the toilet seat down and the doors locked on the inside. “They must have gone, but I don't remember them
going. It's like a blank. It's like they never even existed.”

“Nah,” said Ruth, dismissively. “I think they're pulling some kind of stupid stunt. Duke's the kind of guy who hates it when a woman tells him what to do, especially when it comes to getting his butt off the couch and earning himself a living. They'll show up, believe me, as soon as their guts start growling.”

Bonnie was about to tell Ruth about her visit to Esmeralda's house yesterday evening, and Juan Maderas, and Itzpapalotl, but then she decided against it. She didn't want her to think that she was totally bananas.

“Ralph, you have to—
crackle
—that I didn't come on to Phil Cafagna.” The connection kept breaking up.

“Don't worry about it. It's forgotten.”

“But I don't want it to be forgotten. What happened between us was something—
crackle
.”

“I know. I'm not saying it wasn't. But Glamorex is falling apart, Bonnie, and I don't have the time to think about anything but saving it.”

“Ralph, Duke's left me.”

“What?”

“He's left me. I don't know where he's gone, but he's taken Ray, too.”

“I'm sorry, Bonnie. It doesn't make any difference if Duke's left you. It wouldn't make any difference if Vanessa dropped dead. There are times when
things work out and there are times when they don't. Call it fate. Call it what you like.”

“Ralph, I'm actually pleading with you. What you gave me—you showed me that a man could—
crackle
—for me. I've never felt that before. Never. And don't tell me you didn't like what I did for you.”

There was a pause so long that Bonnie felt her heartbeat twenty times. Then Ralph said, “I love you, Bonnie. I'm sorry if I hurt you. I'm hurting, too. But we both have to accept that it's just one of those might-have-beens, isn't it?”

“No, Ralph! Listen, Ralph—”

But then she stopped herself, because she knew that it was no use, and that she never got lucky like this. She didn't switch the phone off, but slowly lowered it and stood in the street right opposite the Glamorex building looking up at Ralph's office, where she could see him standing next to the window. After a while he hung up his phone. Then he stood with his arms tightly folded and his head bent, like somebody suffering from agonizing chest pain.

When she returned home, she called more of Ray's friends, but none of them had seen him. She even called up Duke's elderly mother, who lived in a nursing home in Anaheim. All Mrs. Winter did was mumble and cough and ask her repeatedly to remind her who she was. “Bonnie who? Duke? Who wants to know?”

She called her own mother, too, who made the nearest noise that Bonnie had ever heard to an audible shrug. “
Pwoff
, that's what men are like. They leave you when you least expect it. I never could tell what you saw in him anyhow.”

She searched the house for anything that could give her a clue to what might have happened. Behind the water heater she found a copy of
Hustler
, corrugated with damp. She found a lock-knife under Ray's
pajamas, and a twist of kitchen foil with a minuscule amount of marijuana in it. But nothing that explained how and why they might have disappeared.

Ruth called. “Any sign of the wandering boys yet?”

“Nothing. I can't work out what's happened to them.”

“They didn't say anything before they left?”

“I don't remember them leaving.”

“That was only yesterday. How can you not remember them leaving?”

“I just can't, that's all. We had an argument. Maybe they walked out then.”

“You know what you need? You need a break. Why don't you come on over to my place and we'll have a couple of drinks and polish our toenails.”

“Ruth, I'm really worried.”

While she was talking to Ruth, her eye suddenly caught a movement on the potted plant on the windowsill. A slow, humping movement, like a caterpillar.

“Hold on, Ruth. Just hold on a minute.”

She carefully laid down the receiver and walked across to the window. With the tip of the ballpoint pen she was holding in her hand, she carefully lifted up the leaves of the plant, one by one. And there, underneath the third leaf, was the black spotted larva of
Parnassius mnemonsyne
, the butterfly known as Clouded Apollo, or Itzpapalotl.

Bonnie stared at the caterpillar and didn't know what to do. On the table behind her, she could hear Ruth saying in a shrunken voice, “
Hello? Hello? Bonnie—are you there
?
What's wrong?
”

She let the leaf fall back and returned to the phone. “Ruth … I'm beginning to think that something dreadful might have happened.”

“Come on, Bonnie … you know Duke. He'll be back before you know it.”

“I think I have to talk to Dan Munoz. I really think that something dreadful might have happened.”

Dan came around an hour and a half later. He was wearing a cream blazer with gold buttons and a black silk shirt.

“Hi, Bonnie, how's it going?”

She let him into the living room. “You want a cup of coffee or something?”

“No, thanks. I was supposed to be over on La Brea about fifteen minutes ago. Some kid stabbed his best friend through the heart with the pointy end of a beach umbrella.”

“I wouldn't have bothered you, but I'm really worried.”

“Hey, that's okay. What are friends for?”

She handed him a small glass screw-top jar. “I found this crawling up that plant over there.”

Dan held it up and peered at it, his eye magnified by the glass. “Ugly little dude, ain't he?”

“It's the same kind of butterfly that I was telling you about … the Clouded Apollo.”

“Yes? And?”

“And Duke and Ray have both disappeared, and I think that something terrible must have happened.”

Dan looked around the living room. “Something terrible like—what?”

“Well, suppose that thing
is
some kind of a Mexican
demon goddess—supposing she looks like a butterfly by day, but when it gets dark she turns into this insect monster with knives on her wings?”

Dan opened his jaw wide and thoughtfully rubbed his chin. “Oka-a-ay … suppose she does?”

“She could have killed them … and then she could have taken them away.”

“If she killed them, where's the blood? She's got knives on her wings, right? And a knife for a tongue? There would have been catsup all over. But this place looks like a centerfold for
Ideal Homes
.”

“Maybe she just took them away.”

“No sign of a struggle? And you didn't even notice? Come on, Bonnie!”

“I don't know. I can't seem to remember. It's like there's a whole chunk of yesterday just missing.”

“You were overtired, probably. I get that, too, lapses of memory when I'm tired. I get lapses of memory when I'm
not
tired. The best thing to do is go back over everything you did yesterday, like, step by step in chronological order.”

“I've tried to. I still can't remember.”

“What did you do? You cleaned up George Keighley's house in the morning—what time did you finish up there?”

“Twelve, twelve-fifteen, something like that.”

“Then what? You dumped the mattresses at the Riverside waste facility?”

“Yes. Then I came home, and Ray was here but so was Duke. The thing is that Duke was supposed to be working. He said he'd found a job at the Century Plaza, but that was just a lie. We had an argument about it.”

“Did he walk out then?”

“No … I called Esmeralda at about three o'clock, and I remember looking out into the yard when I was making the call and they were both still lying on their loungers. I showered and changed, and about quarter after seven I went downtown to meet Esmeralda and her father and this guy called Juan Maderas, who knows all about Mexican mythology and stuff.”

“Then you came home?”

“That's right.”

“What time was that, when you came home?”

“I don't know. Not too late. Nine-thirty, maybe.”

“Were Duke and Ray still here when you came home?”

Bonnie frowned. She remembered parking the Buick. She remembered opening the front door. Then all she could remember was climbing into bed and saying, “Good night, Duke. Sleep tight. Mind the bugs don't bite.” If she had spoken to him, he
must
have been there.

“Duke was there,” she said, nodding slowly at first and then more vigorously. “Duke was definitely there. He must have drunk too much beer and gone to bed early.”

“How about Ray?”

She had knocked on Ray's bedroom door and called out, “Good night, Ray … don't go listening to those earphones all night.” So Ray must have been there, too.