Troubled Waters (25 page)

But had Rap been as careful? That was the hidden piece on this chessboard, the queened pawn waiting to pounce. How much had Rap let Dylan know?

A jolt of pure fury shot through Dana.
If that bastard involved Dylan, I'll
—

She caught herself, pulled back into the hard shell she'd created. Divide and conquer. Oldest trick in the cop book. She had no reason to believe Rap would put Dylan in danger any more than she would. This cop was messing with her head, that was all.

“There's a girl named…” Koeppler pretended to root through papers on his desk, waiting for Dana to fill in the name. She sat silent, making him finish. “… Ysabel Navarro,” he went on, bringing out the name like a chessmaster moving his bishop in for the kill. Triumph underneath the flat beige tone of voice.

“Belita,” Dana amended. “She's called Belita.” She sighed; this little man who looked more like an insurance agent than a law enforcement officer had more pieces on the board than she.

Dylan and Belita. Why shouldn't her son spend some of his summer working at the migrant day care center at Amigos Unidos? Why shouldn't he play ball with migrant kids in the field behind Our Lady of Guadalupe? Why shouldn't he learn early that the privileges his white skin and middle-class upbringing gave him were gifts that had to be paid for?

Because Belita was up to her ears in the sanctuary movement, that's why. Because with his mother, father, and nominal boss involved, how could anyone believe Dylan didn't know what was going on?

Walt Koeppler didn't believe it. “Look,” he said, his flat voice going flatter as he stared at her with his colorless eyes. “We can do this the easy way or the hard way. The hard way is you get on your high horse, call your father in and grab the headlines, make a big stink. If that happens, I got no choice; I have to involve your boy.” He let the words sink in.

“Or you and I can work a deal. You tell me when and where you're going to move Joaquín Baltasar and I'll not only keep your son out of this, I'll see to it you don't go to jail for obstruction. That boy'll need one parent at home, and it might as well be you.”

Dana surveyed the imaginary chessboard in front of her. On her side: a few pawns, a trapped rook maybe. Not much room to maneuver. Arrayed against her: formidable pieces ready to move in from every direction.

A good chess player knew when to quit. She tipped her king over, conceding defeat.

“Tomorrow afternoon,” she said, her voice a hoarse whisper. “From the van Wormer place.”

Hard folding chairs. Protestant chairs, Jan thought as she arranged them into a haphazard circle. Wednesday noon meetings didn't get many comers. She wouldn't need more than fifteen. No, make it twenty. Nobody should come into an AA meeting and have to unfold their own chair.

If she'd had to do that, if she'd had to tiptoe past the other drunks, trying not to disturb the speaker, conscious of all eyes on her, aware of the whisky still on her breath, if she'd had to lift a chair from the rack and open it without a noise, hands shaking, knees knocking—

Hell, she'd have run out the door and never come back and would probably be lying dead drunk on a bunk in the county jail right this very minute.

You couldn't have too many chairs.

Or too much coffee. Ninety degrees in the shade and she had a pot of coffee perking in the back of the room, a box of donuts next to it, going soft and mushy in the humid heat.

Jan went to the closet and pulled out the scrolls. They were faded, but their gold-edged mottoes still spoke truth, still called the warriors of sobriety to arms with slogans like “One Day at a Time” and “Easy Does It.” She carefully positioned them at either side of the room, next to the Twelve Steps and the Twelve Traditions.

Behind the scrolls was a blackboard with words in Spanish and English, the legacy of the ESL class taught by Belita Navarro. The meeting room at Our Lady of Guadalupe had many uses, had seen everything from Spanish bingo games to FLAC meetings to strategy sessions for the sanctuary movement.

Which was why it was bugged. Behind the plywood panel in the closet from which Jan took the banners sat a voice-activated recording device.

Most of the words the little machine recorded were useless. But every now and then one of the cassettes yielded pure gold.

As Jan waited for the designated speaker, her fingers drummed nervously on the battered table that held the literature. It was her job to set up for the meeting and call it to order; if the speaker didn't show, she'd have to choose someone else to give the qualification or do it herself.

She didn't want to. In AA terms, that probably meant she needed to. One of the hardest things about the Program was that it made you do things you didn't want to do, even though you always felt better once you'd done them. So when eight people sat ready for the meeting to begin, and there was no sign of the speaker, Jan began to talk.

“My name's Jan, and I'm a cross-addicted alcoholic.” She paused for the ritual “Hi, Jan.”

She almost said aloud the words she always wanted to say after introducing herself at a meeting:
It's been twelve years since my last confession
.

“It's really hard for me to remember a time when alcohol wasn't the center of my life. It was always there, like air.” Jan took a breath of the humid, heavy air in the badly ventilated room. Sweat beaded her forehead; her hair and cotton dress stuck to her skin. She'd better make this short. Everyone in this room, including her, was thinking of one thing—cold, cold beer.

“When I was really little,” she continued, “I thought my Daddy had a friend named Johnnie Walker. I could picture him—a tall man with curly red hair and crinkly eyes who'd sit and color with me instead of breaking all my crayons. My mom bought me new ones later and told me not to blame Daddy because he was drunk and didn't know what he was doing.”

Sympathetic nods; a nervous laugh from a woman in white polyester shorts and hightop tennis shoes.

It was strange yet comforting that the most horrendous things you could say about your family always touched a chord in someone else. As though all those years of feeling alone when you were a kid weren't really true because out there all the time were other kids feeling the exact same pain. You'd had friends and you didn't even know it.

“You might think I'd grow up hating booze, but I think now I must have decided whisky was power. It gave Dad the power to do whatever he wanted. Nothing was ever his fault.”

An old man with a bright red nose—booze or too much sun or both—hung his head. Her voice grew stronger. Behind the cabinet door, the cassette whirled as it collected sound waves, trapping words like a lobster pot closing on an unlucky crustacean.

Jan twisted her lank hair in her fingers. “Then I discovered pot,” she said, and once again her words were greeted by knowing nods. “But drugs weren't like booze,” she explained. “They weren't for getting high, but for getting to that field of rye where the Catcher was waiting to stop me, gently and lovingly, from falling off the edge.”

She ran thin fingers through her long straight hair, hippie hair, iron-straight, no style, no color job. Just natural hair, the way God made it. She went through the rest of her story almost by rote, ending with her arrest.

“So the first thing I did when I got sober was get into trouble.” Her voice was barely audible. She stopped and let the words from the Big Book echo in her brain.
Our stories disclose in a general way what we used to be like, what happened, and what we are like now
.

What was she like now?

Scared
.

Was that a natural response to a life suddenly without the cushion of alcohol, or was it a very real response to what was going on in her life?

It didn't matter. All that mattered was that she tell the truth as she knew it.

“I feel scared.” Her voice was a tiny sound in the still, hot room. “I wake up every day and wonder if I'll get through it without a drink. I pray that I will, but I don't really know. It's been eighty-one days now, and I wonder if I'll ever know. I'm scared I'll pick up a glass of club soda and it will turn out to be vodka instead and I won't remember pouring it and I'll just drink it down anyway and pour another and then another until I pass out.”

She dropped her eyes, her hair falling across her face. “I wonder if I'll always be this scared.” The room sat silent, waiting to see whether she had more to say. She liked that about the rooms, liked the way people listened instead of always rushing in with words to fill the empty spaces.

Sometimes you needed empty spaces.

“I don't think it's just the booze,” she said at last. The cassette resumed its spinning. “I know these people. People who are doing illegal things.”

Her eyes remained fixed on the ancient, scarred table in front of her. She didn't dare raise her head. She didn't dare look into the eyes of the other drunks, knowing that whatever they thought of her would be reflected on their faces. Right now, she couldn't stand to meet other eyes, to deal with what other people thought. She needed to work this out for herself.

“I mean, the thing is, some of the stuff is illegal under the law but it's still the right thing to do. And some of the stuff is really illegal and bad. And it's all mixed up together and people's lives are at stake.” She pulled hard on the strand of hair in her finger. Her scalp stung.

“I know how that sounds,” she said. “I know it sounds like a soap opera or something, but it's really true. People's lives are at stake, so I have to help. I have to do this even if I get arrested again.”

She sighed. “When I was drinking, I knew who my friends were. They were the ones who helped me to keep drinking, who got me drugs when I was sick. I knew who the enemy was. The cops who busted people for selling me drugs, who stopped me for driving drunk. Now,” she went on, her hair swinging from side to side as she shook her head, “I don't know anymore. When you're sober, you're supposed to see things more clearly. But I don't.”

Tears started in her eyes. Her voice wavered. “And that's how I am today,” she finished. “Scared.”

Other people started talking, telling their stories of conflicts at work, angry children, temptations to drink with old buddies. Jan tried to listen, but her thoughts were jumbled.

One thought finally pushed out all the others.

There was one person in the world she could trust. One person who would know what to do and help her do it.

Ron.

She was beaming with a newfound peace by the time the meeting ended.

C
HAPTER
T
WENTY
-O
NE

It was like trying to get into the parking lot just before the Big Game. Cars were backed up to the highway, horns honking, some edging into the mainstream from feeder lanes. I started counting bumper stickers. There were about three Tannocks for every Spurrier. Of course, this was Toledo, always a Democratic stronghold.

When the car reached the lot itself, I was waved toward a space by a T-shirted volunteer wielding a fluorescent wand. The boy's shirt and baseball cap proclaimed, “Team Tannock: Go with a Winner.”

On the way from car to entrance, I was stopped by no fewer than six volunteers handing out flyers. Most were Wes's, but I also received brochures from neatly dressed men and women wearing straw hats with red, white, and blue bands that read, “Spurrier Knows What
You
Need.” Loud music emanated from the auditorium and minicams hefted onto the shoulders of local television techies filmed the incoming crowd.

It was reminiscent of the circus I'd been taken to when I was eight.

I walked up to one of the volunteers, a dark-skinned woman in her twenties whose Team Tannock T-shirt covered impressive breasts and was complemented by a bright red miniskirt. “I'm supposed to meet Paul Tarkanian,” I said, shouting over the music and crowd noise.

“If you're with the press,” she shouted back, “you'll have to talk to Ms.—”

“I'm not,” I said, stepping close enough so that I could lower my voice. “I'm a personal friend. Tarky invited me to watch the debate with him.”

“Oh, okay.” She walked, making maximum use of the short, swingy skirt, over to a man in a cream-colored suit. He stepped over, shook my hand, and walked me toward the front of the hall.

It was a huge room, with rows upon rows of comfortable-looking, royal-blue-covered seats. The front four rows were cordoned off, a hand-lettered sign proclaiming “Press Only.” On the stage, two identical tables and chairs flanked a podium with the Great Seal of Ohio embossed on the front. An American flag and an Ohio burgee stood on poles behind the twin tables, which were illuminated by pinlights against a royal blue drapery. It was austere, but it would probably look good on television.

The man in the ice-cream suit led me up a small flight of stairs onto the stage, then veered to the right, ducking behind the curtain. I followed, stepping over a snake basket of wires that reminded me of Jan hooked up to her IVs and machines. We passed a huge sound console with lights blinking and flashing. A young man with earphones fiddled with the controls and shook his head as if displeased by the results.

I threaded my way through a maze of cables, feeling a thrill of excitement at being backstage, of seeing the little men behind the Wizard of Oz. My guide opened another curtain and led me down steps and corridor to what I assumed was a green room.

“… shouldn't parents be able to choose the school best suited to their child's needs?” The voice was Tarky's. I thought it strange that he was asking Wes a question like this twenty minutes before the debate started, but then I realized what he was doing. In law, we call it moot-courting. Helping a colleague prepare for an argument by throwing all the tough questions at him so he could practice the best response.