“I’d have coldcocked her,” Richie said.
“I finish with the guy and say to my brother, ‘What about her in there?’ In the bathroom, the door’s closed. He says, ‘I don’t think she saw me good.’ I say to him, ‘What are you telling me? You don’t think she saw you?’ He says, ‘No, she didn’t see me good.’ It was seven months later the police come to the Waverley Hotel—”
Richie said, “The Royal Canadian Mounties?”
“The Toronto Police, that’s enough. They come to the hotel where we stay there looking for the Degas brothers. This time they find only Gerard, take him in and that nurse points to him in the lineup. Yes, he was in the room when the man was killed. They find my brother Jackie and shoot him down, they say resisting arrest. That could be true. They find me, the nurse takes a look; no, she never saw me. They have to let me go. See, but I lost my two brothers—one dead, one in prison for life, because Gerard says she didn’t see him good. That one time ... Why did he say that? I don’t know, maybe he looked at her. Maybe he liked her face, I don’t know. I’m never gonna figure that out.”
Richie said, “Well, did you ask him?”
“Sure, I asked him. He don’t know either. Now he’s at Kingston trying to figure it out.”
They drove through the dusk in silence.
Until Richie said, “Well, I don’t see there’d be much difference anyway, whether it’s a man or a woman. . . . Is there?”
“Not if you don’t think about it,” Armand said.
7
LATE AFTERNOON, cool and clear outside, three days since the excitement at the real estate office, the phone rang. It was on the wall next to the window over the kitchen sink.
Carmen knew it was Lenore because she had her hands in meat loaf, working a raw egg, onions and bread crumbs into the ground beef and pork, and her mom only called when she was in the middle of something or in the bathroom. If Carmen called her mom, Lenore would answer, “Who is this?” in case it might be an obscene phone call. She had worked at one time in the telephone company’s Annoyance Call Bureau and knew all about dirty-mouth pervert callers. Just last month she had changed her number after twice answering the ring and the caller hung up without saying a word. She told Carmen, “That’s how they find out if you’re home, so they can come in and rape you.” Wayne said to Carmen, “Tell her don’t worry, once the guy got a look at her she’d be safe.”
Carmen turned to the sink, rinsed her hands and dried them on a dish towel, the phone still ringing. Sometimes she’d pick it up and say, “Hi, Mom.”
But not today. Carmen looked out the window as she lifted the receiver from the hook and didn’t say a word.
She saw something move in the woods. Not the far deep woods, where Wayne grew his row of corn along the edge and had placed the salt lick, but in the thicket beyond the chickenhouse, where a section of woods came down close to the backyard. She was pretty sure a man was standing in there, in the tangle of dense branches; not at the edge but back in the gloom, his form blending, most of him concealed. Lenore’s voice was saying, “Carmen?” Repeating it. “Carmen, what are you doing?”
Whoever it was just stood there, not moving.
Carmen said, “Hi, Mom.”
She didn’t say anything about it to Wayne, not right away. He came home—it was on her mind as she got dinner ready and Wayne opened beers for them and phoned Lionel. No answer. Two days now, no one home. Carmen said didn’t they have relatives in Ohio they went to visit? Wayne said, “In duck season?”
During the week Carmen would turn on the TV in the kitchen and they’d watch Jeopardy while they ate dinner, sitting at the counter. Wayne was good at state capitals, country music, some history, because it was all he read outside of hunting magazines, and wars. His favorite was the Civil War. Carmen was good at popular music and groups, movie stars who had won Academy Awards and biology. Carmen would get more right than Wayne. Jeopardy was on now. Some of the categories were Art, Bowling, Four-letter Words and Kings Named Ed. But they weren’t paying much attention to it. Carmen listened to Wayne saying he wondered if he should go over to Walpole, check up on Lionel.
Wayne saying he liked the One-Fifty Jefferson project, he knew most of the guys on the raising gang and the walking boss was an old buddy. One of the connectors got a bunch of flowers with a card signed by five women who’d been watching him from an office building. Wayne saying he was bolting up and doing some welding, but that was okay, it was the kind of story job he liked, put it straight up in the air three hundred feet and go on to the next one. Wayne saying the meat loaf was the best he’d ever tasted. Then going on to say he could never understand why Matthew didn’t like it. How could you not like meat loaf?
Carmen, waking up, said, “Oh, we got a letter today.”
Wayne gave her a funny look, because a rare letter from Matthew would be sitting right here on the counter. Carmen had to find it, over in a drawer where she filed letters and bills.
Wayne began to read the letter from their son. Carmen took a bite of meat loaf—it was okay but she’d made better—played with her peas and carrots, looked up at the window and saw the kitchen reflected on the glass, the portable TV screen a bright spot. One of the Jeopardy contestants had picked the Kings Named Ed category. Something about one of them being a saint and the contestant, a woman, said, “Who was Edward the Confessor?”
Just as Wayne said, “Everything’s initials with him now. The A-7Es, the AE-6Bs. He isn’t on a carrier, he’s on a CVN. Here, he says, ‘My new job is to make sure the nosegear towbar engages the catapult shuttle and then stand clear. You don’t want to get caught between the aircraft and the JBD.’ What’s the JBD?”
“The jet blast deflector,” Carmen said.
“Well, what’s FOD? He says, ‘We police the flight deck for anything lying around that might cause an aircraft to FOD-out.’ ”
“Foreign object damage,” Carmen said. “I guess something that might get sucked into the jet engine.”
It seemed to irritate Wayne.
“How do you know that?” “It was in the book he sent, Supercarriers in
Action.”
“I haven’t read it yet.”
The woman contestant on Jeopardy was running the Kings Named Ed category, answering one, “Where is the Tower of London?” in the form of a question, as you were supposed to. The woman was the smartest Jeopardy contestant Carmen had ever seen.
She said, “Mom called this afternoon.”
Wayne looked up from Matthew’s letter. “To brighten your day. Asked what you were fixing for dinner, you told her meat loaf and she said leave the Tabasco out, we’re ruining our stomachs.”
“She said to be sure to add milk.”
“I bet she asked about your dad, what’s new with him.”
“She hinted around.”
“Hoping to hear his liver had finally got him. Guy’s down in Tampa happier’n a pig in shit. She’s up here drinking her vodka and grapefruit juice, thinking of ways to be miserable. How’s her back?”
“The same. She bends over, it’s like somebody sticks a redhot poker in her.”
“I better not say anything,” Wayne said and returned to the letter. After a moment he said, “I like this part. Matthew says, ‘The steam pressure it takes to catapult a thirty-ton aircraft off the flight deck would send a pickup truck five miles out over the ocean.’ Now something like that I can picture. Then he talks about steam building up in the ‘below-deck accumulators.’ How’s a kid like Matthew know that? He’s nineteen years old.”