* * *
As Billy Moore drove away from Wrobleski’s compound, it started to rain: big thick globs of water stippling the Cadillac’s windshield. He waited as long as he could before turning on the wipers and watched the world become marbled. He drove with the window half-open so he could feel the spray on the side of his face, and at last he snapped the wipers into life, blurring, smoothing, eventually clearing his field of vision.
Beside him on the passenger seat was an envelope of money Wrobleski had given him for his work. He decided it was time to open it. He pulled over, stopped the car in front of a shuttered halal supermarket, and unsealed the envelope. There was too much money inside. Billy could find a good use for all the cash that came his way — there was some upgrading to be done on the parking lot, and Carla was always begging for a new cell phone — but this was far more than you’d expect to be paid just for acting as driver to some homeless woman. Wrobleski was being generous, and that was flattering and worrying in equal proportions. Billy tried not to think about what was happening to Genevieve inside Wrobleski’s compound, but he couldn’t quite manage that.
* * *
Carla was awake and waiting for him when he got back. She was in her trailer, at her desk, an image of a lion on the screen of her laptop.
“Have a good night out?” she asked.
“I was working,” said Billy.
“This parking business takes up a lot of time, doesn’t it?”
“It sure does. What have you been doing?”
Carla said, “I’ve been thinking about lions.”
Billy looked at the screen and said, “So I see.”
“Yeah,” said Carla. “And about The Wizard of Oz. They talk about the Cowardly Lion like that’s something out of the ordinary, but it’s not, is it? All lions are cowardly. I mean, when they attack a herd of antelope, they always pick off the stragglers, the weak ones at the back, don’t they? It’s not like they go and fight the biggest, toughest antelope they can find, just to show how brave they are.”
“Are there any big, tough antelopes?” said Billy.
“Some of them have got to be bigger and tougher than others.”
“I suppose so. Is that all you’ve been doing? Thinking about lions?”
“Sure.”
“How’s your skin?”
“The same.”
“Let’s have a look.”
“No.”
“Come on, roll your sleeve up.”
“I don’t want to.”
“What are you trying to hide?”
She wouldn’t admit that she was trying to hide anything, so she pushed up her sleeve to reveal her right arm. At first all Billy could see was a red, inflamed rash.
“You’ve been playing with it.”
“It helps pass the time.”
“You weren’t happy with the skull and crossbones?”
She shrugged. “Change is good,” she said.
When Billy looked more closely, he saw there was a pattern in among the disorder. By constantly pressing and drawing on her skin she’d made a word appear, a livid, blotched, temporary tattoo that read DAD.
“That’s a very weird thing to do,” Billy Moore said. “Kind of sweet and touching, but also very weird.”
Without being asked, Carla pushed up the other sleeve and revealed on her left arm the word MOM.
“Even more touching,” he said, though he was touched in a very different way by this.
“Don’t worry,” Carla said. “They’ll fade eventually.”
7. NIGHT UNDER GLASS
Rain stippled the roof of Wrobleski’s domed conservatory, and inside it, a few scattered candles burned among the cacti, their flames reflected in the glass between the spines and paddles, reinforcing the wet darkness beyond. Shadows flicked over the relief map of Iwo Jima. Laurel was there, lolling, angled across the sofa, awake but drunk or stoned or exhausted, her head just a few inches away from the blue-black point of an agave leaf, her attention a million miles away. Wrobleski and the improbably named Genevieve sat in rattan chairs facing each other. He had poured two glasses of wine, and Genevieve was holding hers tightly in both hands, as if it might fly away.
“How are you?” Wrobleski asked, sounding, or at least trying to sound, concerned.
Genevieve blinked a couple of times, looked not quite at him, and said, unconvincingly, “I’m good.”
“Great,” he said. “I’m glad you could come.”
If she found this an odd way of putting it — and how could she not? — she gave no indication. Perhaps she was no longer capable of being surprised.
“You’re a train wreck, aren’t you?” Wrobleski said.
She shrugged: it made no difference.
“I didn’t ask for this date,” she said.
“No, you didn’t,” Wrobleski agreed. “What’s that thing you’ve got wrapped around you, anyway?”
“It’s a curtain,” she said, and that was all the explanation she thought necessary, or was prepared to give.
“And you’re naked under there?”
“We’re all naked under our clothes,” she said.
“Very profound,” Wrobleski said quietly. “Let me see.”
She hesitated only long enough to take a gulp from her drink, set it on the floor, and then she stood up slowly, regally, so that the velvet curtain — if that’s what it really was — remained behind her on the chair. She stood naked, about to place her dirty fingertips on the edge of the case containing the relief map, for support, but Wrobleski raised his hand to indicate she wasn’t allowed to do that. She took a step back and looked sideways at her own bare, milky, phantom reflection in the glass of the conservatory, and then she faced Wrobleski with an unconcerned calmness.
“I need you to turn around,” he said.
“Of course you do,” she said.
She did what he asked, as if she were being examined by a doctor, or posed by the instructor of a life drawing class. Wrobleski got up from his chair and moved very close to her. Yes, there was an odor rising from the body, onion and tired sweat, but Wrobleski didn’t care about that. He was staring very closely at the tattoos on the woman’s back.
“When did you have this done?” he asked.
“I didn’t have it done. It was done to me.”
“Who by?”
“I don’t know. I never saw his face. Could have been anybody. Could have been you.”
Wrobleski declined to respond to that.
She continued, “I was tied down, on a metal table. I don’t know where I was, a basement, I think. I’m not sure. Doesn’t matter much where it happened, does it?”
“And you’ve been on the street since then?”
“I was already on the street,” she said.
“And do you know what the tattoo means?” he asked.
“What do you mean by ‘means’?”
“You really are a philosopher,” said Wrobleski. “I mean that the tattoo is a map, right?”
“You’re smart,” she said. “It took me a while to realize that’s what it was.”
“So don’t you ever wonder what it’s a map of?”
“I used to. Then I stopped wondering. Wherever it’s a map of, I don’t want to go there.”
“Maybe it’s somewhere you’ve already been,” Wrobleski said, and he continued to stare, squinting in the flickering light, the explorer in the cave, confounded by the writing on the wall. He moved even closer and stretched out a hand as though to touch the woman, but his fingertips stopped an inch or so away from the surface of the skin, as if touching it might burn him, or worse.
“You ever think of getting it removed?” he asked.
“Never quite had the budget for that.”