Shepard directed me to the metal bleachers around the cattle arena. He picked me up, set me on one so our faces were level, and kissed me. “You make me so happy,” he said.
This tall bulky man had grown on me. He pulled a little robin’s egg — blue box from his pocket and flipped it open. A diamond solitaire.
He took the ring from the box and slid it on my finger. “You will, won’t you?” he said. “Marry me?”
Levi was leaning over the railing of the balcony, smoking with one of his lowlife loser buddies, when I arrived home at midnight. I’d taken off the ring and sequestered it at the bottom of my tampon holder.
The light from the water bounced off Levi and his buddy whose name I forgot. I gave them a half-hearted wave. Levi nodded and smiled his lizard-cold smile.
“Where’ve you been?” he asked, flicking his cigarette butt down into the pool as his buddy took off.
“Had to stay with the kids until Shepard got home.” I took a cigarette from Levi’s pack on the cement floor.
“Fuck you did,” he said.
I gave him a long look. It was always better to say less than more.
“Where’s the ring?” he said.
“What ring?”
“Mimi, this’ll only work if you’re straight with me about the motherfucker.”
I went to go into the apartment, but he grabbed my arm. “I’m gonna tell him all about you, Mimi. You weren’t supposed to fall in love with the asshole. You love me, remember?”
I wrenched my arm away and hurried inside. I poured a glass of water, trying to think.
Levi hurried in behind me. “Don’t fucking walk away from me, Mimi.”
“I’ll do what I want.”
“Fuck you will.” He pulled me to him, pressed his mouth against mine, hiked his hand up my top. “C’mon, baby, what happened to us?”
I pulled free. “Leave me alone, you asshole.”
“I own you,” he said. “I came all the way out here to find you and claim you and now you’re mine.”
“Whatever drug you’re doing, it’s making you crazy.”
“Crazy for you,” he said, grabbing me with one hand and undoing his belt buckle with the other.
I’d never given into a man forcing me and I wasn’t about to now. I tried pushing him away, but his grip on my arm only grew tighter.
“You always liked it with me before,” he said. “Mr. O.C. motherfucker better’n me now, Mimi?” His face looked strained, a Halloween mask. “He won’t want you when I tell him who you really are, when I tell him everything you planned. He’ll take his ring back and then where will you be?”
“What I planned?”
He jammed his hand down my pants and hurt me and that’s when something snapped. My prized marble roller sat on the counter behind me, where it always was. I felt for it with my free hand and almost had it, but it slipped away. My hand landed on Levi’s hammer. I brought it around and cracked it against his skull as hard as I could. His sea-foam green eyes went wide, as if he were seeing me for the first time. Then he crumpled to the linoleum. A trickle of blood issued from his ear.
“Levi!” I gasped. “Shit!”
The way his eyes gazed into the living room without blinking gave him a peaceful look I had never seen.
I tried to think. Should I pack up my things, including my pastry roller, and split? I considered cleaning my fingerprints off everything in the apartment, but I wouldn’t be able to get rid of every little hair, every little cell of mine that had flaked off. I knew about DNA. I could be easily tied to Levi, even without a car or California driver’s license. Even without my name on the month-to-month lease or on bills; I still received my mail at Leonora’s. To the mostly Latino transient residents, I must’ve looked like any other gringa. But I talked to Levi on my cell phone all the time. I could even be tied to him through Shepard. They would visit Levi’s former employer and find me there, loving my new life.
No, I couldn’t simply leave.
I pulled down the shades and locked the door. I wiped my fingerprints off the hammer after placing it near Levi. I turned on the shower as hot as I could stand, peeled off my clothes, and stepped in. This would calm me and help me think.
As the scalding water poured down my face, it came to me, what I would say and do: I came home, Levi was here with a drug-dealing buddy, I took a shower and heard something. When I got out of the shower, I found my boyfriend on the floor.
I turned off the water, wrapped myself in a towel, and jumped into my role. I hurried out to the kitchen, as if I’d heard something bad and found Levi hurt on the kitchen floor. I bent down to see what was wrong. Water puddled about me and mixed with Levi’s blood. I ran screaming from the apartment onto the balcony. As I started down the steps, the towel slipped from my body, and I let it. I was a crazy naked lady. Residents — men in underwear and T-shirts and women in nightgowns — started emerging from their hovels.
“Call the police!” I made a good hysteric. Someone had done my poor boyfriend in.
Women called in Spanish to each other. More than once I heard the word “loco.” A short dark woman with gold front teeth wrapped me in a Mexican blanket, patted my wet hair, and cooed to me in Spanish. The sirens grew closer. A crowd had gathered around us and upstairs at the doorway to the apartment.
There would be an investigation, but after a while I would be cleared. No one ever saw us fight. There was no insurance settlement coming. Why would I kill my boyfriend? The authorities would search instead for the lowlife who did him — or not. Probably not. Who cared about one more druggie dude going bye-bye? My first chance I would call Shepard, tell him details about what happened that he would have heard about on the news. I would tell him how Levi made me say I was his sister, had threatened my life even, had never wanted me to fall for him. I would remind Shepard that I loved him, every inch of him. Shepard believed in me, would never think I could do something like this.
I knew how to be patient. Shepard and Piece of Heaven, California, would eventually be mine, and before long, the ring would be back on my finger.
The Toll
by Dan Duling
Laguna Beach
Robbie froze as he felt a cold, metallic object press into the back of his neck. He realized what it was. The barrel of a handgun. This night was not turning out the way he’d hoped.
It had been the longest six months of Robbie’s life. Hiding out in a rented room in a crappy apartment building in the unincorporated part of East Orange County just off the 241 toll road, waiting for the heat to die down back in Laguna Beach, the town he’d grown up in, the town he could no longer afford to live in, the town he wanted to get back to as soon as possible. All he wanted was another chance.
When the call had come from Michele late that August afternoon, he was stoked. She wouldn’t elaborate on the phone, but she had a job for him. That was all he needed to know.
It was a little after 3 o’clock the next afternoon when he hopped in his two-tone — rust and primer — road-weary Corolla and headed toward Laguna. He didn’t like the sound the battered Toyota was making — bearing or ball joint? — as he pulled up alongside the 241 toll plaza and heaved a handful of coins at the bin. Car repairs were going to have to wait.
“Fuckin toll roads,” he muttered as a BMW with a FasTrak transponder raced by him. He grimaced. That’s what this place is all about now. They make you pay to get where you’re going and pay to come back. It’s all about the cash. He’d been around long enough to know the difference between the old money that seeded this area and the new, stupid money that was spoiling it for everybody.