I gathered my courage. "No, Martin, tell me really." He was hanging up the dishtowel on a rack mounted beside the sink. He got it exactly straight.
"I wondered when you were going to ask," he said finally.
"I wondered when you were going to tell."
He turned to face me and leaned against the counter. I leaned against the one at right angles to him. I crossed my arms across my chest. His sleeves were rolled up and his tie was loosened. He crossed his arms across his chest, too. I wondered what a body-language expert would make of this. "Are the Youngbloods my jailers? Are they here to keep an eye on me?" I thought I'd lead off with the most obvious question.
Martin swallowed. My heart was pounding as if I'd been running.
"I knew Shelby in Vietnam," he began. "He helped me get through it."
I nodded, just to show I was registering this information. "After the war... after our part of the war ... I'd met some intelligence people in Vietnam. I spoke some Spanish already, and so did Shelby. We had some Hispanic guys in our unit and we spoke Spanish with them, got a lot better. It was something to do."
Martin's knuckles were white as he gripped his crossed arms. "So, after we left Nam, we left the Army but we signed on with another company that was really the government."
"You were asked?"
"Yes." His eyes met mine for the first time, the pale brown eyes edged with black lashes and brows that were Martin's most immediately striking feature. "We were asked. And in our—working with us, was Jimmy Dell Dunn, a swamp boy from Florida who'd grown up next to some exiled Cubans. His Spanish was even better than ours." Martin half-smiled and shook his head at some fleeting memory of a time and place I couldn't even imagine.
"What we did was," he resumed, "sell guns. Really, we were giving them away. But it was supposed to seem like we were an independent company selling them. What can I say, Roe? I thought, at least at the beginning, that I was doing something good for my country. I never made any personal profit. But it's become harder and harder to know who the good guys are." He was looking out the window into the night. I wondered if the Youngbloods could look outside the side window of their apartment and down into our kitchen. I could not move to draw the curtain. And Martin had his own private view of darkness. Guns. Guns were better than drugs. Right? Of course with all Martin's trips to South America, I had been worried Martin's pirate side had led him into the dangerous and lucrative drug trade, though Martin had often expressed profound contempt for those who used drugs and those who sold them. Guns were better. "And we delivered them, in some very remote places, to right- wing groups. Some of these people were okay, some were crazy. They were all very tough. A few were just— bandits."
I pulled my glasses off and rubbed my eyes with my hand. I had a headache. I put them back on and pushed them up on my nose with a ringer. I stared past Martin's arm. I needed to get some Bon Ami and really scrub that sink. "And one day—it was about midmorning, we were up in the Chama Mountains ... we were making a delivery to one of the better guys. Out of nowhere, we were ambushed by another group who'd heard somehow about the delivery. I got the scar on my shoulder, Shelby got a worse wound in the leg. And Jimmy Dell got his head blown off."
I took in my breath quickly. I was married to man who had witnessed this barbarity, this horror, had been part of it. I began to shiver. I wanted this story over.
"Shelby and I got out of there, just barely. We had to leave Jimmy Dell, and he was our pilot. Shelby knew enough about the copter to get us out, though he was bleeding like a stuck pig. And then it took us a while to heal. We heard the group we were supposed to take the guns to were all dead before we got there. When we came back to the States, Shelby went to see Jimmy Dell's family in Florida. Jimmy Dell had been the oldest kid by far, and there were five more after him. The youngest one was Angel. She was too young then, Shelby thought, and Mr. Dunn surely thought so, too. So Shelby wandered for a while." And Martin had gone to stay on that isolated farm in Ohio with a man he hated, just to have a familiar place to recover. And while he was there, he hooked back up with Cindy. And they married. And he never told her this. Or not all of it. Ridiculously, I could not stop shivering.
"After a few years Shelby went back to Florida. Angel had gotten interested in martial arts in high school after something happened to her, and she got Shelby interested, too. They got married, and they began working as a team of bodyguards."
Gee, I wondered whom you would work for in southern Florida.
"But they didn't want to work for that kind." My face must have spoken for me. "So later, mostly they worked at the smaller movie studios up and down the East Coast, guarding people who were there temporarily. Some of the people were pretty famous." Martin attempted a smile. "And they did some stunts in karate movies, too. Their last job was for a woman who told Shelby she owed a lot of money to the wrong people.
"She didn't owe it, Roe." Martin looked directly at me. "She'd stolen it, and they found her. They let the Young-bloods live, but they gave them a beating they'd remember. Angel was in the hospital, still, when Shelby came up here to find me. In their line of work, you can't get insurance, and they were broke, and they needed to leave the area for a while. I'd been worried about you being out here by yourself when I was out of town, and the apartment being empty... you're shaking."
He came over to me in two steps, waited a moment to see if I would hit him if he touched me, then put his arms around me. I felt his heavy muscles encircle me, and I had the stray thought that the workouts I had attributed to a desire to stay fit and look good were actually aimed toward keeping him ready for self-defense. I lay my head against his thick chest and let some of the shaking be absorbed by him.
"So," he said to the top of my hair, almost in a whisper, "what's going to happen now?"
"I'm going to get some Bon Ami and scrub the sink." Martin held me away from him. He was angry. "I'll go in the family room and work until you feel like talking."
He left the kitchen through the hall door, his shoes making little noises on the hardwood as he crossed the hall.
I got the Bon Ami and a sponge with a rough scrubbing side, and set to work. I thought of a conversation I'd had with my mother. We'd been talking about love, and she'd said that women who stay with men who damage them have some deep need to be damaged; they can't possibly love the damager, that can't be the reason they stay. A woman with a strong sense of self-preservation will leave the bad relationship to save herself; the self-preservation will kill the love, so the individual will leave and be saved from further harm. My mother had cited herself: When my father had begun to be unfaithful, she had left, and she no longer loved him.
I loved Martin so much it made me catch my breath, sometimes. He had not told me the whole truth. I was going to stay. I had no idea what he was thinking, sitting there in our new room in our new house. I rinsed the Bon Ami out of the sink. It was gleaming. It had probably never been so clean in its entire existence.
I seemed unable to string a coherent chain of thought together. I was relieved beyond measure that it hadn't been drugs. I would have had to leave. Guns were bad. Could I live with guns? I could live with the guns. And why on earth had Martin fallen in love with me, anyway? It was like a mating between a Martian and a Venusian. I doubled over and put my head on my arms on the counter and began to cry.
Martin heard and came in. He hated it when I cried. He turned me around and held me, and this time I pressed against him, hard, as though I were trying to crawl inside his skin. After a few moments, this had the inevitable effect, even under the emotional circumstances. Martin moved restlessly, and I kept my arms wrapped around him and raised my face to his.