Nameless Dame, page 10
“What are you doing?” Coolican asked. “Aren’t you even going to say hello to the mister and missus?”
“I’ve gotta get something from the car.”
Coolican followed after me. “You want to tell me what went on with you and the wife?”
“Later.”
Back in the cabin, Blossom and Sabbatini were sitting by the fireplace, but neither baby Milosz nor Quince were to be seen.
Sabbatini stood, regarding Coolican and me, before poking at the fire. “What have you guys been doing out there, having a little powwow?”
“Watch it, Bobby,” Coolican said, grinning. “It’s a slippery slope from talking powwows to out-and-out racism.”
“That arrow put a spark of life into you, Coolie,” Sabbatini said.
I dropped the bundled air mattresses on a chair.
“What did you do to Quince, Augie?” Blossom snapped. “She’s more unhappy than I’ve seen her since we were in prison.”
“You haven’t seen her since you were in prison,” Sabbatini offered.
“What did you do?” Blossom persisted.
“Why don’t you ask your wife?”
“I did.”
“She’s not talking, huh?”
“I’m talking,” Quince said, walking in from one of the back rooms. She had Milosz bundled in her arms. “I’ll talk all you want. I’m not afraid to spill the beans. I’ll tell you what it really was: I started to fall for the guy and it freaked him out.”
“That’s not quite it,” I said. “What freaked me out, if you want to stick with that vernacular—”
“Oh, please, show us how you can go slumming with the vernacular, Augie.” Quince secured Milosz with her left arm as she placed her right hand defiantly on her waist.
“What bothered me,” I started, but then realized that everybody was staring at me. I took a breath and mentioned the smallest infraction. “I was bothered by your wife’s shoplifting, and the fact that she left it for me to clean up after her.”
“Tattletale,” said Quince.
Coolican roared with laughter. “But it’s a really nice scarf, Augie.” “You know what the French say,” Sabbatini teased.
“Fuck the French,” said Blossom.
“Qui vole un oeuf vole un boeuf.”
“And what does that mean?” Quince asked
“He who steals an egg will steal an ox,” Coolican said, grinning.
“There are no oxen around here,” Blossom said.
“There’s just Augie,” Quince said, sticking out her tongue at me again.
I shrugged and said to no one in particular, “I’m going to check into a motel in Guerneville.”
Sabbatini shook his head. “Aw, man, we were looking forward to a slumber party.”
Blossom said, “If you’re going, why don’t you take her with you, Augie?”
“I’m not going with him,” Quince hollered. “He humiliated me.”
I fired back: “There’s a classic bit of projection.”
“And now he comes with the psychobabble,” the phony wife said.
Still grinning, Coolican said, “This is getting good.”
Sabbatini, down on his knees trying to revive the fire, said, “All we need is a poem.”
“Maybe you’re right, Bobby,” Blossom said. She smiled benevolently at Quince and then at me. “You’re having your first quarrel.”
“And last,” Quince said, bouncing Milosz on her hip.
“How about a little Yeats?” Sabbatini asked.
“Pourquoi pas? ” Blossom said, shrugging cutely.
I figured that she was trying some reverse psychology on Sabbatini—trying to get him to lay off the poesy—but it didn’t work.
Once the fireplace was roaring away again, he stood up and cleared his voice like a public speaker expecting the attention of everybody in the room. “Coolie’s recital last night got me thinking again about that old bird. Here are six lines that might be apt, from ‘A Man Young and Old.’”
THE MERMAID
BY WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
A mermaid found a swimming lad,
Picked him for her own,
Pressed her body to his body,
Laughed; and plunging down
Forgot in cruel happiness
That even lovers drown.
Blossom shook her head and spoke to her husband as if he were a fourth grader. “Thank you, Bobby, that was very helpful.”
“You people are crazy,” Quince said.
Coolican’s grin grew wider. “Now she’s catching on.”
“I’m off,” I said.
Milosz gurgled in Quince’s lap.
“I guess the boy doesn’t mind you leaving,” Sabbatini joked.
I made my way toward the door.
“Wait,” Quince said, and handed Milosz off to his mother.
A triumphant Coolican bellowed, “Looks like I get the rollaway.”
Broken Glass
I turned back to glare at Coolican, but suddenly his grin disappeared and he held up his hands in a gesture to quiet us. The deputy’s pocked face became strangely angelic. His mouth opened in wonder as he listened to something I couldn’t yet hear. I heard frogs from the stream just west of the property and the shallow breathing of a generator, which I assumed came from one of the off-the-grid pot farms nearby. Then the wheels of a car getting closer, the hearty purr of a large motor. The car came to a stop. Then it backed up as if it were turning around. Coolican gestured for all of us to get down. Sabbatini helped Blossom and Milosz to a place under the oak dining table, and I led Quince to a spot by them.
“Get down,” Coolican hissed at Sabbatini and me, both still in a crouch. The large Indian, with his gun drawn, had flattened himself against the wall adjacent to the door.
Sabbatini motioned me to get down with baby Milosz and the women, which I did without bothering to consider the implications, as he dashed in a crouch to the cover of a cabinet across the room.
“Bobby,” Blossom called. It was the first time I’d ever seen anything approaching terror in her eyes.
Quince caught my eye and whispered, “I’m sorry, Augie. Really.”
Sabbatini pulled his revolver from a drawer of the living room cabinet and clicked off the safety.
I’d never carried a gun, which I’d always considered a curious badge of courage, given my line of work. Now I felt a bit emasculated, crouching under the table with the women and child. I guess the alternative was to make a fool of myself.
The vehicle stopped, but the engine was still purring. I listened for a door opening. Footsteps. I wondered why Coolican sensed that this was more than a benign visitor. Maybe, I mused, that’s what comes with being attacked. The frogs and distant generator receded into a mesh of white noise. I could hear Coolican breathing. I watched him concentrating with his ears. He winked at me, which I found even more surprising than his patience.
Bobby Sabbatini appeared to be losing his. He stood to the side of the cabin’s front window and inched closer to it.
Coolican called, “Get back, Bobby.”
“Bobby,” Blossom cried out, “be careful.”
As soon as Sabbatini pulled back a corner of the curtain, I heard the shimmying approach of the vehicle and then a quick stop. Coolican motioned for us to stay down. I heard the squeaky hinge of a door, followed by an eerie swoosh, and, faster than seemed possible, the gaudy shock of shattering glass.
Pandemonium ensued. Blossom issued a squealing scream. Milosz wailed in perfect sympathy with his mother. The vehicle door slammed. Sabbatini’s shoes crunched over broken glass. He and Coolican hurled themselves out the cabin door as the vehicle blasted off down the road.
Only Quince was quiet. She took my hand and placed it over her heart, which I could feel ticking like a little bomb about to go off. I held her close for a moment. Then I crawled out from under the table.
A gold-tipped arrow sat amid the piles of glass. A tight scroll of paper, fastened by rubber bands to the arrow, had begun to unfurl. Without touching it, I peeked at what I could see of a message, handwritten in fat Cyrillic characters.
Sabbatini rushed back into the cabin. “Everybody okay in here?” Without waiting for an answer, he hustled to the phone on the wall. It was an old turquoise rotary job. “Custard,” he said breathlessly into the phone, “it’s Poesy. Somebody just took a shot at us up here. Thought you could maybe catch his license as he barrels down the hill.”
Once he hung up, Sabbatini helped Blossom and the still whimpering Milosz out from under the table. I extended a hand to Quince. She stood awkwardly and surveyed the damage. Then she whispered, “I’m a little embarrassed. I peed myself.”
Somehow, I found her admission endearing.
As Quince hurried off to the bathroom, I went outside, hoping to find Coolican. He was a little bit down the road, crouched with a flashlight from his cruiser, studying the tire tracks.
“Can you identify them?”
Coolican glanced up at me. “My guess is a Jeep Cherokee.”
I nodded toward the cabin. “Looks like your friend sent you a little written message along with the arrow.”
“What did it say?”
“I left it for you, Coolie. My Russian is a little rusty.”
“It’s in Russian?”
“I believe so. Tell me something—what tipped you off that evil was approaching? The most I heard was an engine in the distance.”
“That’s my ISD—my Injun Sense of Danger.”
“You got an idea who’s behind the entertainment?”
Coolican shook his head. “I’ve got nothing.”
“You going to let the sheriff’s department know about this?”
“I am the sheriff’s department. Soon as the powers that be find out about this, they’ll want me to leave the area for my own protection.”
“Maybe you should.”
Coolican looked at me a little sadly and shook his head.
Marked Man
By the time we got inside, Blossom had hung a heavy wool blanket over the window and was beginning to sweep up the broken glass.
She leaned on the broom for a moment and greeted us. “Welcome to Appalachia.”
Sabbatini had a pair of work gloves on and was sitting at the kitchen table, having flattened out the scrolled message.
I looked around the room for Quince with a longing that surprised me. And as if my longing beckoned her, she strolled into the main room, dressed now in a pair of tight turquoise pedal pushers. I had to concentrate to keep my eyes off her. She walked toward Blossom and said, “I think Milosz will sleep now.” It was nice to think of Quince performing one of her wifely duties for the house, even if she was a phony wife.
We all jumped a bit when the phone in the kitchen rang. Sabbatini ran off to answer it. I stood with my arms around both Quince and Blossom.
“That was Custard calling back about the vehicle. Damn thing went by too fast for him to catch the license. He said it looked like a Ford F-150 pickup. Know who it might be?”
Coolican shook his head. He muttered, “No way that was an F-150. Didn’t sound like it and the tracks don’t match it.”
Sabbatini went back to the dining room table and the letter that had been so rudely delivered. I walked up beside him. Coolican came over and shined his flashlight on the page. There were three lines printed in large, wobbly letters.
Sabbatini looked up at the deputy. “The light’s nice, Jesse, but it doesn’t change it into English.”
“It’s Russian alright,” Coolican said.
“Think it’s Yevgeny sending you a little message?” Sabbatini asked.
“That’s too obvious.”
“Somebody trying to set up the wild mushroom man?” I asked.
Coolican shrugged. He was still bent over the lines of Russian. He began to sound out the words in a credible Russian accent.
Sabbatini shook his head. “Don’t tell me you studied Russian at Stanford.”
“Cal,” Coolican corrected. “I had four years of it.”
“Don’t bullshit us.”
The Indian was quiet for a moment. “It’s Yevtushenko.”
“The bartender?” Sabbatini asked.
“No, the poet. I think they’re lines from ‘Babi Yar.’ But I’ll tell you this, the letters were written by someone who’s never written Russian before.”
“Can you translate them?” I asked.
“Roughly. ‘Blood spills in rivers on the ground’ . . . maybe ‘on the floors.’” He paused. “I don’t know this word. ‘The bosses of taverns holler freely. And stink . . . stink like vodka and onions, half and half.’”
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?” Sabbatini asked.
“Somebody’s trying to frame Yevgeny,” I offered.
“Or target me,” Sabbatini said. “A slightly looser translation would have the boss of a poetry karaoke bar reciting freely. Could be a little intimidation from the Christian fanatics. Rivers of blood spilling on the floor.”
“Why in Russian?” I asked.
“Just to fuck with our heads,” Coolican responded.
Sabbatini nodded. “I think someone ought to have a little conversation with the minister down at River of Blood.”
Coolican turned off his flashlight and stood to his full height. “And I guess it’s time for me to have another conversation with Vlady. See if he can shed some light on all this.”
“Who’s Vlady?” I asked.
“Vlady Babiansky,” Coolican said. “That’s the bartender’s real name.”
The Indian turned toward Blossom. “Hey, I’m really sorry to bring this on you people. I think it’s best if I leave.”
“No way, Coolie,” Sabbatini said. “We’re all in this together. Anyway, how do you know it was you they were shooting at? They could have been after me. It’s my house.”
“Nope,” Coolican said, “I think I’m the marked man.” He picked up the arrow. “I’m going to take this to go with the other one. Pretty soon I’ll have quite a collection.”
Sabbatini flashed anger. “Who the hell’s doing this?”
Blossom, still looking a little tense, turned to her husband. “It sure as hell’s not Robin Hood.”
I wondered whether Blossom wanted Coolican to leave. It would be only natural. Maternal instincts. But Blossom was such a defiant woman and so loyal that I guessed she stood right with Sabbatini.
Sabbatini said, “Nice knickers, Quince. You look like you’re ready to party.”
“May as well.”
“I can roll us a nice smoke of Fuck Face,” Sabbatini offered.
“You people are really a bunch of potheads, aren’t you?” Quince said.
Sabbatini pulled his stash out of a coffee tin. “Absolutely. This will settle us down.”
Coolican looked around at each of us. “I’m off.”
“You’re not going anywhere, Coolie,” Sabbatini said. “You can’t do anything tonight but worry, so you might as well relax.”
“Somebody ought to stay straight around here,” Blossom said.
“Yes,” Sabbatini agreed, “we need a sober witness.”
“That would be me,” I offered.
“It boggles the mind,” Blossom said. “Augie Boyer has gone straight.”
Charades
It was a slumber party at which very little slumbering occurred. At first we played charades. Sabbatini and Coolican were declared the winners after the deputy got Sabbatini to quickly guess Gaston Bachelard’s The Psychoanalysis of Fire in the book title category.
Gloating, Coolican said, “I was thinking about going with Bachelard’s other big title, The Poetics of Space, but I got to wondering how many abstractions a guy ripped on Fuck Face can communicate to somebody in a similar condition.”
“We’ll never know,” Sabbatini lamented.
Then we played cards for hours. Hearts, mostly. Quince created a bit of a scandal when she proposed playing strip poker.
“You’re not in prison anymore,” Blossom said.
“I know, but the weed makes me amorous.”
“Then take Augie into the spare bedroom. See where you can get to on the rollaway.”
Quince grinned. “No, Augie’s too good for me. He’s pure.”
“Yeah, as the driven snow,” Blossom added, with a guffaw.
Pretty soon all four of them, humming on Fuck Face, were laughing their asses off.
CHAPTER TWELVE
The Root Is One
I WAS THE only one to wake to the knocking at the door. I stumbled toward it, but before I could get there, Custard, the anti-Semitic pot rancher, walked in. It was hard for me to believe that after our little siege, we’d left the cabin door unlocked. Custer looked around at the chaos—empty glasses and wine bottles, books of poetry scattered everywhere, the remains of late-night nachos crusted to plates—and shook his head. Quince was snoring sweetly, wrapped in an army surplus blanket, but Coolican, on his back on a half-inflated air mattress, rumbled like distant thunder. He wore his hat over his face like an old cowboy. Why none of the three of us took advantage of the spare bedroom, I’ll never know. The sofa remained empty after Blossom mentioned the family of mice that kept house inside it. As far as I knew, Blossom and Sabbatini were in their bedroom.
“Hey,” Custard said, “if you guys were having an orgy, how come you didn’t invite me up?”
I assured Custard that nothing very exciting went on in the cabin after the window had been smashed by the night arrow.
“What were you guys doing, reciting poetry in the raw?”
“Pretty much.”
“Who’s that?” Custard asked, noticing Quince’s head poking out from the blanket.
I put a finger over my lips to shush him.
“Poesy’s one crazy shit,” Custard said, in a whisper now. He motioned toward the thundering Indian. “And how about Coolican, bet he was chanting some Indian poetry, huh.”
“Matter of fact,” the deputy said, lifting the hat from his face and surprising us both, “I’ve been working on W. B. Yeats.” Coolican sat up and looked directly at Custer. “He’s Irish, Mr. Cust. I believe that’s your tribe, isn’t it?”
