“I didn’t steal no money. I don’t owe you no eight t’ousand dol’ars, either.”
“’Cause you was so stoned out you got no memory of it.” Then he begins to mimic her. “‘Tie me off, Herman. Give me just one balloon, Herman. I’ll do anyt’ing, Herman. I’ll be good to you, Herman. I’ll pay you tomorrow, Herman.’”
How does he speak with such authority and confidence? Did she actually say those things? Is that who she really is?
“I ain’t stole no money out of no office.”
“Tell that to the sheriff when Rodney files charges. Open this goddamn door, bitch. You fixing to go on the installment plan.”
She attacks his face with her nails and he hits her with his fist harder than she ever believed a human being could be hit.
During the next six weeks Lisa comes to believe the person she thought was Lisa perhaps never existed. The new Lisa also learns that Hell is a place without geographical boundaries, that it can travel with an individual wherever she goes. She wakes to its presence at sunrise, aching and dehydrated, the sky like the watery, cherry-stained dregs in the bottom of a Collins glass. Whether picking up a brick of Afghan skunk in a Lafayette bus locker for Herman or tying off with one of his whores, sometimes using the same needle, Lisa moves from day into night without taking notice of clocks or calendars or the macabre transformation in the face that looks back at her from the mirror.
She attends meetings sometimes but either nods out or lies about the last time she drank or used. If pressed for the truth about where she has been or what she has done, she cannot objectively answer. Dreams and hallucinations and moments of heart-pounding clarity somehow meld together and become indistinguishable from one another. The irony is the knocking sound has finally stopped.
Sometimes Tookie Goula cooks for her, holds her hands, puts her in the shower when she is too sick to care for herself. Tookie has started to smoke again and some days looks haggard and hungover. At twilight on a spring evening they are in Lisa’s bedroom and the live oaks along the bayou are dark green and pulsing with birds against a lavender sky. Lisa has not used or gotten drunk in the last twenty-four hours. But she thinks she smells alcohol on Tookie’s breath.
“It’s codeine. For my cough,” Tookie says.
“It’s a drug just the same,” Lisa says. “You go back on the spike, you gonna die, Tookie.”
Tookie lies down next to Lisa, then turns on her side and places one arm across Lisa’s chest. Lisa doesn’t resist but neither does she respond.
“You want to move in wit’ me?” Tookie asks. “I’ll hep you get away from Herman. Maybe we’ll go to Houston or up nort’ somewhere, maybe open a café.”
But Lisa is not listening. She rubs the balls of her fingers along one of the tattoos on Tookie’s forearm.
“A mosquito bit me,” Tookie says.
“No, you’re back on the spike.”
She kisses Tookie on the mouth and presses Tookie’s head against her breast, something she has never done before. “You break my heart.”
“You’re wrong. I ain’t used in t’ree years, me.”
“Stop lying, stop lying, stop lying,” Lisa says, holding Tookie tighter against her breast, as though her arms can squeeze the sickness out of both their bodies.
It begins to rain and Lisa can smell fish spawning in the bayou and the odor of gas and wet leaves on the wind. She hears the blades of a helicopter thropping across the sky and sees lightning flicker on the tin roofs of her neighbors’ homes. As she closes her eyes, she feels herself drifting upward from her bed, through the ceiling, into the coolness and freedom of the evening. The clouds form a huge dome above her, like that of a cathedral, and she can see the vastness of creation: the rain-drenched land, a distant storm that looks like spun glass, a sea gone wine-dark with the setting of the sun.
Gerald loved me. We was gonna be married by a priest soon as his divorce come through, she says to Tookie.
I know that, Tookie says.
Down there, that’s where it happened.
What happened?
My sister was trying to hand up my l’il boy t’rew the hole in the roof and they fell back in the water. I could hear them knocking in there, but I couldn’t get them out. My baby never got baptized.
These t’ings ain’t your fault, Lisa. Ain’t nobody’s fault. That’s what makes it hard. You ain’t learned that, you?
Directly below, Lisa can see the submerged outline of the house where she and her family used to live. The sun is low on the western horizon now, dead-looking, like a piece of tin that gives no warmth. Beneath the water’s surface Lisa can see tiny lights that remind her of broken Communion wafers inside a pewter chalice or perhaps the souls of infants that have found one another and have been cupped and given safe harbor by an enormous hand. For reasons she cannot explain, that image and Tookie’s presence bring her a moment of solace she had not anticipated.
Michael Connelly
Mulholland Dive
From Los Angeles Noir
Burning flares and flashing red and blue lights ripped the night apart. Clewiston counted four black-and-whites pulled halfway off the roadway and as close to the upper embankment as was possible. In front of them was a firetruck and in front of that was a forensics van. There was a P-one standing in the middle of Mulholland Drive ready to hold up traffic or wave it into the one lane that they had open. With a fatality involved, they should have closed down both lanes of the road, but that would have meant closing Mulholland from Laurel Canyon on one side all the way to Coldwater Canyon on the other. That was too long a stretch. There would be consequences for that. The huge inconvenience of it would have brought complaints from the rich hillside homeowners trying to get home after another night of the good life. And nobody stuck on midnight shift wanted more complaints to deal with.
Clewiston had worked Mulholland fatals several times. He was the expert. He was the one they called in from home. He knew that whether the identity of the victim in this case demanded it or not, he’d have gotten the call. It was Mulholland, and the Mulholland calls all went to him.
But this one was special anyway. The victim was a name and the case was going five-by-five. That meant everything about it had to be squared away and done right. He had been thoroughly briefed over the phone by the watch commander about that.
He pulled in behind the last patrol car, put his flashers on, and got out of his unmarked car. On the way back to the trunk, he grabbed his badge from beneath his shirt and hung it out front. He was in civvies, having been called in from off-duty, and it was prudent to make sure he announced he was a detective.
He used his key to open the trunk and began to gather the equipment he would need. The P-one left his post in the road and walked over.
“Where’s the sergeant?” Clewiston asked.
“Up there. I think they’re about to pull the car up. That’s a hundred thousand dollars he went over the side with. Who are you?”
“Detective Clewiston. The reconstructionist. Sergeant Fairbanks is expecting me.”
“Go on down and you’ll find him by the — Whoa, what is that?”
Clewiston saw him looking at the face peering up from the trunk. The crash test dummy was partially hidden by all the equipment cluttering the trunk, but the face was clear and staring blankly up at them. His legs had been detached and were resting beneath the torso. It was the only way to fit the whole thing in the trunk.
“We call him Arty,” Clewiston said. “He was made by a company called Accident Reconstruction Technologies.”
“Looks sort of real at first,” the patrol officer said. “Why’s he in fatigues?”