The Witch Tree, page 18
Eli held up his hands, “What? You think I’d keep it in the apartment so they could just… break down the fucking door?”
“So – Ruben had it?”
No, he thought, Ruben’d only threatened to have the goods on Miller after he’d gotten caught. And Miller, failing to get out of Ruben what he’d wanted, had gone after Eli.
“Ruben stashed it somewhere? Is that it?”
“Yes.”
“‘Yes’ what?”
“It was supposed to be bundled up – and exactly somewhere where no one else could get to it.”
“So, go get it then.”
“But I can’t.” Eli lifted his head, his mouth trembling, and his eyes big, worse than pathetic.
Buck held his forehead in his palm, calming himself. Oh. My. God. Okay. So, this much was true. Ruben had screwed him – Eli, he was just too trusting – or was it something else?
“We had an agreement.”
“Christ, Eli–” Buck said. “With Ruben?”
“–if something went wrong, and he had to run with what we’d skimmed from Miller’s operation, or I did, we were supposed to leave the location.” Eli grunted, “Son of a bitch.
“Well, Ruben ran, all right. Ends up dead, and all he left me was some… joke. Spray paints in fluorescent orange Tani ma mitig on the wall of his unit at Little Earth, one big FUCK YOU, ELI, I GOT MINE. Even had the clerk there take me up for his things to be sure I’d see it.
“You could say, I saw the writing on the wall, brother.”
Something was coming to him, out of all the lies and misdirection, as if out of a fog. “So, how were you sure it was for you?”
“Because it was addressed to me,” Eli said, and glared. “It said, ‘Eli, tani ma mitig.’ See?”
Eli pressed his hands on either side of his head. As if he might squeeze the meaning of it out of himself.
“‘What- woods’?” Eli turned to Buck, stricken. “I mean, if it wasn’t some… fucking joke, what was it?!”
Outside, up the street, traffic had slowed. A burst of rain hit the windshield, scatter shot.
Well. There it was, he thought. And no one, but no one, had ever said Ruben wasn’t clever. He’d just hidden the location in a pun. Tani ma mitig–”What Woods?” Any traditional, as Eli’d made himself out to be around Ruben, would have understood, given the context.
Not what, but which woods.
Eli just hadn’t seen the woods for The Tree, he thought, grimly amused at the irony of it.
Because Ruben had, after all, done right by Eli; though he couldn’t tell him that, even as distraught as he was.
“Go,” Buck said.
“Is that all you have to say?” Eli asked. “‘Go’?”
“What’d you think?” he replied, “I’d hold your hand while you cried over getting ripped off?”
40
Sally
She was at her desk, working, when Sun, passing, rapped on the back of her seat like a summons. Startled, Sally lifted her head. What, she thought, could Sun possibly want now?
Sun went up the aisle, then strode to the proscenium, and there paced like a cock-of-the-walk.
It had been weeks since their near impasse with the ruined dentures, and daily Sun had found ways to alarm her. All of which she’d fielded, a veritable champion. She’d been more careful, more painstaking in all the work she’d done, only it had just seemed to make Sun that more determined to unnerve her. And, too, each expression of praise she received from Luz now infuriated Sun.
Which praise, she saw, Luz was about to dispense, Luz standing alongside Sun and beaming at her.
“Sorry!” Sun called out. “You come!”
Sally lifted her head. They all did. Curious to see what new difficulty The Dragon Lady might foist on them.
“Me?” Sally said.
“Come front,” Sun said, and the others bent to their desks in studied shows of industry.
Sally stood, brushed the pink gum residue from her thighs and slipped off her mask, then made her way to the proscenium, where she mounted the stairs, steeling herself to face Sun.
“How are you?” Luz asked.
Sally looked from Luz to Sun, her thoughts again turning to the possibility of her being fired.
“I’m good, thank you,” Sally replied. “And you?”
“Our delivery driver’s going back to college,” Luz said. “Kitty tells me you’d be perfect for the job. What do you think?”
Sally blinked. The thought of being DPA’s delivery driver horrified her, that’s what she thought. She could just make it to DPA as it was, granted she knew the route, but driving all over the Cities?
“You’d use your own car – Kitty tells me you have a reliable one – and we’d pay miles and you’d get a raise, plus a bonus at the end of the month.”
Sun nodded solemnly. Here a gift to Sally, one Sally knew, instinctively, she could not refuse. Oh – My – God – she thought. So, this was the way Sun would get rid of her.
“You’d get to know the routes first,” Luz offered. “I mean, before you went out on your own.”
As though to be kind, Sun set her palm on her shoulder. “You be happy, Sorry!” she said, something coy in her voice. “This be for you good work. For you show ‘serf-motivation.’”
“Yes, thank you, Sun,” Sally said. “Thank you so much for thinking of me, I’m – touched.”
Standing between them, she thought she might be sick. She got that near-telescoping feeling she so feared when her panic attacks came on, that vertiginous falling away. Even the light seemed not to shine from the river-facing windows, but to cut sharply to the floor, where she stood, spinning.
“If you want,” Luz said, “later, Kitty says we could have you pick up our supplies, too.
“Well,” Luz added, “we thought, since you’ve been making sense of the supply cabinet, and doing such a great job of it, you’d be perfect for running our inventory. What do you think?”
Her mind racing, Sally pasted a smile on her face. Of course she’d done well with the cabinets! The mess in them had very nearly driven her crazy. She craved order, symmetry, sense. Feared anything unusual, because it made it hard to fight off her panic attacks.
But traffic?
“I herp you,” Sun chimed in. “Show way in town, yes?”
Oh – my – God, Sally thought. She’d be alone in the car with Sun, which was even worse. The degree to which she was not all together would become far, far too apparent.
How anything-but-perfect she was.
Sun turned to Luz, and Luz to Sally, “It’d be a wonderful step up here,” Luz said, “so?”
“Thank you, thank you so much,” Sally heard herself say, as if from a great distance.
Oh – My – God–
Luz swelled with pleasure. “Wonderful,” she said. “We’ll start you on it today then!”
“Great!” Sally said.
Back at her desk, she fumbled with the dentures she’d been working on, a panic attack swelling in her chest.
Around her nineteen heads bent at desks, whirring tools, sharp, bitter-sweet chemical smells. She’d get out of it, somehow. She’d quit. But, no, she couldn’t. She wouldn’t let Sun get to her so easily. She could… what? Get sick? Make herself sick? Only she’d promised not to anymore. She laughed, an awful, hysterical laugh. She would not cry, she told herself, Do – Not – Cry, even as her vision shrank to a tiny circle.
The dentures in her hands seemed to grin up at her. Ha ha ha ha ha. Oh, Christ, oh Jesus, God help me.
When it got really bad, that… dark… thing rose up in her, saying dirty, horrible things she refused to hear. Showing her things she refused to see, and the world receded from her, as it did now.
Okay. This was bad, she thought. Which made it all the worse, her breath coming short, her heart racing. It wasn’t even about the job now. No, not now, it was about dying, her fear of it, any second her heart would stop, it was pounding so fiercely in her chest and – God Almighty, that black-winged thing had crawled up into her head, was saying, “I’ve got something to show you, Little Missy,” and she started to fall, as if through space, end over end.
It was at that moment she felt a hand on her forearm, Sun, in the aisle, bent over her.
“We go now?” she said.
“I can’t,” Sally whispered.
“Stand,” Sun said, a kind of steel in her voice, and Sally set her mask on her desk and picked up her purse.
“Walk,” Sun commanded and, clutching Sally’s arm, she steered her toward the exit door. Outside, on the bank over the river, Sun said, “You hyperventirate, make dizzy. You make rike this–”
Sun released her arm. She held her arms out at her sides and breathed deeply. “Now, you do.”
Time passed, and her vision opened up again. That caught-behind-thick-glass feeling receded, and the darkness went with it.
She noticed birds singing. Sparrows, a gaggle of them, in a hedge; it sounded like music to her.
“In serf now?” Sun asked.
Sally almost laughed. ‘Serf’? Oh, ‘Self’! she thought, then, still worse than unsettled, she said, “Yes.” But… if she got so panicked, even here, what if something truly… difficult happened? In traffic? What if… she crashed the car, with Sun in it? Or did something… humiliating, since she couldn’t understand Sun half the time? Peed herself, or….
“We go, derively. Yes?” Sun said.
Derively?
“One business, only,” Sun said. She had a grim set to her mouth, as though she were marching Sally to some execution. “Then go to next. Rike that. So, then you say, ‘Yes’?”
Going to one place at a time. Just one. It was a way to think about it, a way to get through it.
And, she’d be goddamned if she were going to let Sun get to her, because she wanted this job. No, she needed it. Though, if she were really honest with herself, she did all that she did now for one reason, and one reason only: She was waiting for Buck to come for her.
He had to, didn’t he? After all, he’d promised.
They pulled out of the old Crosby Milling lot onto River Road, and from the first it was a punching match. Sun would bark out directions, and Sally, unable to understand them, would turn the car.
“No!” Sun barked out. “I say, ‘Guide light!’ Not go reft! What, you not hear? You deaf?”
Fuck you, Sally thought. But at least, after the last, horrible hour, she understood Sun’s directions enough to navigate. They had made five “derivelies,” and she hadn’t crashed the car. Though, now, just when she was feeling the exhaustion she always felt after one of her attacks, they were in the heart of the heart of it, downtown traffic, the cars bumper to bumper, and here one way streets and taxis jockeying for position and pedestrians everywhere – some jaywalking, like this one, with a briefcase, about to cut in front of the car.
“Go!” Sun shouted, pointing to their left. “GREEN RIGHT!”
“What?!”
The man with the briefcase was just off their right bumper. Was this what Sun wanted? To bump him out of the way?
“I say, ‘Right change!’” Sun shouted, “You GO!”
Sally didn’t, and the jaywalker, glaring, banged his briefcase on the hood, and Sun reared in her seat.
“Ho!” she said, throwing her hands up, “So solly!”
Sally threw the car in park, and a sea of traffic flowed around them, all angry faces and honking.
She turned to Sun. “You want to fire me,” she said, “FINE! BUT DON’T HURT SOMEONE TO DO IT.”
Sun had set her hands in her lap. “Not intention,” she said.
“And DON’T THINK I’M SUPPOSED TO UNDERSTAND YOU ALL THE TIME, BECAUSE YOUR… ENGLISH IS TERRIBLE. AND IT’S NOT BECAUSE YOU’RE… ASIAN.
“That’s bullshit, and you know it, so cut that nonsense out or we’re done here. GOT IT?”
Nodding, she added, “You’ve just been… somewhere else most of your life. I get that. So, I’ll cut you some slack, but you do the same for me, okay? I don’t drive much, and….”
Abashed, she glanced over at Sun.
“Go one brrr-ock east, take… Rrrr-pentu-rrr north,” Sun said, wrestling with her problem consonants.
A block east, then north on Larpenter.
“Thank you,” Sally said. At the wheel, leaning into the windshield and her teeth set, she put the car in drive, and pulled away from the light, and a block later turned. “Now what?”
“You go over Washington–” But Sun wouldn’t say it.
“‘Brrr-idge,’” Sally said, and glanced over at her. “Can you growl, like a dog? You know – ‘rrrrrr.’”
Sun glared.
“I’ll get out,” Sally threatened.
Sun growled. “Rrrrrrrr.”
“Bah-rrrrr-idge,” Sally said. “Say it.”
Sun sputtered beside her. “Brrr – like you’re cold,” Sally said, and Sun said, plainly, “Brrr-idge.”
“Good,” Sally said, and Sun beside her nodded, and under her breath she said, “And Ffffff-uck you, too.”
“Wonderful,” Sally said. “Isn’t this… grand? Aren’t we just – having – soooo much fun?!”
That evening, parked again on Dupont in her spot, Buck came to her like a dream come true.
“Dinner,” he said, and handed her a bag. Blue Heron Chinese, which, after her near-catastrophic day, was resurrection itself.
As was their ritual, Sally set the Styrofoam bowls on the dashboard, and on either side the sauces in their little hat-like containers, and in greasy, near-translucent boats, the wontons. With a mock-officious whipping motion, Sally lay out their napkins, on them the Blue Heron logo.
“Now we are Chiefs!” Buck said, as he always did, and they both laughed, then tucked into it. “So, Loo-cy,” he said, miming a once-famous comedian, “how was your day?”
“Well, Ricky,” she said, “I got another promotion!”
“That’s wonderful,” Buck said. “Only, remember, you’re headed for Seattle soon, right?”
The moon was out, and it rose in the trees.
“Tibik gesis,” Sally said, and when he nodded, she thought to tell him about her day, but then not.
They ate, taking their time, and a companionable silence in the car, here an oasis in the city. Only, when they’d finished, Sally got a sad, pensive look on her face, struggled with something.
“What?”
“Do you ever wonder if you’ll… come to anything?”
“Sally,” he said, “you have a whole… bright future ahead of you. A lifetime. If you can just–”
He reached for her hands, threaded his fingers through hers, and squeezed, then let go.
“You have to go forward,” he said. “No matter what, even if you have to go back, first, to do it.”
“But how could I go back?” she asked, saddened. “In the first place, they wouldn’t have me.”
“When you’re strong enough, you’ll go back. You’ll see. And maybe you wouldn’t want them?”
“But why?”
Outside, the street lights blinked on, and there was the clatter of an overturned garbage can, and a raccoon zigzagged furtively from behind the ruined tenement to their right.
“Because,” Buck said, “it’s what you’ve been running from, isn’t it?”
He nodded, then turned to let himself out of the car, got the door open and looked back at her.
“See you in a few, ninamuch,” dear one, he said.
41
Buck
He took a bus to St. Paul, then strode the wonky off-kilter sidewalks of Frogtown. It was chilly, and the streetlights came on. He paused at one shop after another, in the windows used bicycles, and castoff telescopes, and sewing machines, none of which he was looking for.
He tried the door to a shop, and the proprietor, a bearded giant, shook his head. Pointed to the sign in the window: Closed. Printed in the cement stoop, under layers of paint: No Dogs, Indians, or Jews, here the place Joe’d taken him when he’d needed a baseball glove.
He stood in the vestibule, rush hour traffic at his back, and the shopkeeper reached under the counter.
“ARE YOU BRAIN DEAD?! OR CAN’T YOU READ?!” he shouted, his muffled voice coming through the glass.
Buck shucked off his jacket, stood in the cold in his T-shirt. “Owwww!” came a voice from behind him. He glanced over his shoulder. Toughs, sporting mullets, cruising. “The liquor store’s down the block, Tonto!” one shouted. The light changed, and they shot off, a kid in the back window pulling a face. “Get a life, Ira Hayes!” he called out.
He pressed three bills to the glass door, hundreds, and the blond giant buzzed him inside.
“Shut the door,” he said, “and no funny stuff. You go for something in the jacket, I’ll shoot you dead.”
Buck kicked the door closed, and venetian blinds came down over the street-facing windows.
He set the bills on the counter. “.38 Special, all chromed-up would be best. And a pump action twelve gauge.
“Case of solids for the .38; deer slugs for the twelve.”
His gun within reach, the clerk busied himself, getting it all together. When he was done, he slid the works in a canvas bag down the length of the counter, toward the back door.
“Got enough firepower there to take down an elephant, Chief,” he said, “hope you know what you’re doin’.”
In the alley, he shouldered the duffle. On Tenth, he caught a cab, had the driver drop him on Lake Street.
At Sears, he bought two pair of locking pliers, a flathead screwdriver, and a hacksaw, then retrieved the duffle from the dumpster where he’d left it. He crossed into Tonto Town, the duffle slung over his shoulder and, skirting up one alley, then another, emerged across from The Evergreens. The windows in Eli and Jenny’s unit were dark and he let himself in.
He went into the kitchen, where he got a roll of aluminum foil, taped sheets of it over the bathroom window, then took the .38 and shotgun from the duffle. Nickel-plated, the .38 looked enormous. He closed the door and ran the tub – he couldn’t have Eli or Jenny coming home and wondering what he was doing.
Kneeling, he lay a towel on the floor, set both pliers on it, the screwdriver alongside, then shook the .38 cartridges from the box. Opened the jaws of the larger pliers, clamped them around the brass shell casing of the first, then locked the second pliers around the bullet. Bore down but couldn’t get the bullet out.
