When Sims had stood in the kitchen drinking milk and eating a sandwich three days running, and watching Cleo alone and crying, he decided he should call over to the Krukows’ and ask if there was something he could do. Maybe she was worried about the house. Or maybe something had happened to the Krukows and she was in shock about it and hadn’t come out of the house for days. He didn’t know what she did all day. It would be an act of kindness. Marge would go herself if she weren’t in the hospital.
At ten-thirty on the fourth night, just as he saw Cleo’s head go down on her folded arms on the kitchen table, he called the Krukows’ number from the kitchen phone. He saw Cleo wagging her head in unhappiness, then saw her look at the phone ringing on the wall, then look at the kitchen window and out into the night, as if whoever was calling was watching her, which of course was the case, though Sims had turned off his own light and stood far back in the room where he couldn’t be seen. Somehow he knew Cleo was going to look his way the moment the phone rang.
“Hi, it’s Vic Sims from next door,” Sims said from the darkness. “Are you okay over there?”
“It’s what?” Cleo said harshly. Again she turned and furrowed her brow at the window above the sink. She frowned into the night, then her eyes seemed to widen as if she could see something specific.
“It’s Vic Sims,” Sims said cheerfully. “Marge and I were just concerned that you were all right over there. Stan and Betty asked us to check on you and see if you needed anything. I was up late over here anyway” This was a lie, but Sims knew it could’ve been the truth. Stan and Betty were not good friends of theirs and had never asked them to do anything for Cleo at all.
“Where are you?” Cleo said.
“I’m at home. In my living room,” Sims lied, staring at Cleo, who, he could see, had on shorts and a long T-shirt. She sniffed into the receiver.
“Are you watching me?” Cleo said, looking at the window, then up at the ceiling. She sniffed again, then Sims thought he heard her sob softly and swallow. He couldn’t tell from looking through the two windows and the dark. She was turned toward the wall phone now.
“Am I watching you?” Sims laughed, “No, I’m not watching you. I’m watching the news. If you’re fine, then that’s all I’m calling to find out. Just checking. What are you crying about, anyway?”
“Nothing. Oh, Jesus,” Cleo said. Then she was overcome by tears and sobbing. “I’m sorry,” she said after what seemed to Sims like a long time. “I’m just at my wit’s end over here. I have to hang up now. Good-bye.”
Sims watched her hang up the phone, then turn and lean against the wall and cry again. She wagged her head just as she had when she was seated at the table. Finally, Sims saw her slide down and out of sight to the floor. It was a dramatic thing to see.
Sims stood in the dark against the kitchen wall of his own house. She could hurt herself, he thought. She could be in some real trouble and have no one to help her, whereas if someone would just talk to her she might work out whatever it was and be fine. Sims thought about calling back, but suspected she wouldn’t answer now. He decided he would go over, knock on the door and offer help. He took a bottle of brandy out of the cabinet, walked across the dark grassy yard and up the back steps, and knocked.
Cleo came to the back door with tears still fresh on her cheeks. Her red hair was frizzy and damp, and she was barefooted. She looked grief-stricken, Sims thought. She also looked vulnerable and beautiful. Coming over and having a drink with redheaded Cleo seemed like a good idea for both of them.
“Who are you?” Cleo said suspiciously through the screen. She glanced down at Sims’s brandy bottle and hardened her mouth.
“Vic,” Sims said. “From next door. Remember me? I thought you might like a drink. It sounded like you were crying. I can leave the bottle here.” He hoped leaving the bottle wouldn’t be necessary, but he didn’t want to seem to hope that. He hoped she’d ask him to come in.
“Come on in, I guess,” Cleo said and turned around and walked away, leaving Sims on the doorstep, watching her through the screen as she disappeared back into the kitchen.
Cleo, whose last name was Middleton, told Sims her entire story. How she and Betty, who was five years older, had grown up on a farm in Iowa; that Betty had gone off to college and married Stan and Stan had enjoyed a nice, unexamined life of advancement and few financial worries working as an executive for a chain of hardware stores. She herself, Cleo, had gone to a cosmetology school and had somehow ended up in California hanging out with a motorcycle gang who robbed and beat people up for fun and sold drugs and generally rained terror on anybody they wanted to. She didn’t say how this involvement had started. She showed Sims a tattoo of a Satan’s head she had on her ass. She pulled up her shorts and turned her back to him from across the table, and smiled when she did it. This tattoo was involuntary, she told him, and later she showed him some cigarette burns on the soles of her feet. Cleo said she’d had two children in her life — she was twenty-nine, she said, but Sims didn’t believe her. She looked much older in the dim kitchen light. Forty, Sims guessed, though possibly younger. One child had died soon after birth. But the other, a little boy named Archie, was still living with his father down in Rio Vista, but Cleo couldn’t see him because his father, who was a biker, had threatened to cut her head off if he ever so much as saw her again. “The courts are helpless against that kind of attitude,” Cleo said and looked stern. She told Sims about waking up one night and finding herself being dragged out of her bed by a bunch of her husband’s biker friends — Satan’s Diplomats. They put her in the back of a car and drove off to the mountains. She could hear them talking about Satan, she said, and his evil empire, and she heard one man, a biker named Loser, say they were going to sacrifice her to Satan and then laugh about it. She said she’d screamed and yelled but no one paid attention. Eventually, she said, the car ran out of gas, and all the bikers had gotten out and abandoned it with her left in it. The next morning a policeman came along and that was how she got out. She said she hadn’t gone back home after that, but that her husband, whose name was Savage, sent her a letter care of Betty telling her all he would do to her if he ever laid eyes on her.
Cleo shivered when she told this story, then she took out a cigarette and smoked it, holding it between her teeth. There was a sense about Cleo, Sims thought, that all she said might not be true. Yet she’d obviously had a kind of life that made inventing such a story an attractive possibility, and that was enough.
Cleo told Sims she knew his wife was in the hospital, and she encouraged him to talk about that. Sims had no idea how she’d found out about Marge, but he didn’t really want to talk about it. Marge’s illness was his terrible worry, he thought, and he didn’t know what to say. Marge was sick and might die. And he hated the whole thought of it. He loved Marge, and if she died his life would be over. No ifs or ands. It would just be over. He’d already decided he’d go out in the woods and hang himself so no one but animals would ever find him. That didn’t make good conversation in the middle of the night, though. Nothing he or Cleo could say would help any of that. He was happy to sit across from Cleo, who was very pretty, and get peacefully drunk and forget about illness and hospitals and people’s puny insurance claims he wasn’t processing.