“Jane? Ms. Doe? Are you there?”
I let out the breath I am holding, and a wave of relief passes through my body, tingling down to my fingers. I lower the gun, and I say, “Come in, Detective Paz. The door’s open.”
He comes in. I turn on the kitchen light. A little double take when he sees the new me. When he notices the pistol he frowns.
“That’s quite a piece.”
“It is. It’s a Mauser 96, old and very rare. It works, though. You look like you’ve had a rough night.”
He has a smudge on his forehead, grease or smoke, and the knees of his tan slacks are grimy.
“You could say that. Can I sit down?” I motion to the other chair and he falls into it heavily. He gestures to my pistol. “Expecting somebody? Or considering another suicide?”
“Troubling times,” I say. “You never can tell who might come by on a night like this. Or what.” This sounds so portentously like the dialogue in a bad horror film that I feel hysteria rising in my throat, and I have to stifle a giggle.
“How do you know I’m not a what?”
“If you were a sending, you couldn’t have gotten in. I have bars up against magical forces. The pistol is for physical beings, like those zombies out in the yard.” He stares at me, his mouth slightly open, like a child’s. A good deal of the slick gloss and confidence he exhibited earlier today seems to have been scraped off Detective Paz by this night’s doings. I feel for him. I recall being scraped myself.
He says, “Shit! This is really happening, isn’t it?”
“I’m afraid so,” I say.
He hisses something in Spanish that I don’t quite catch, and strikes the heel of his hand hard against his temple. “Fuck! Sorry, I’ve had a bad day.”
“What have you been doing?”
“Lately? Well, we started the evening by arresting your husband. That didn’t work out too good. He didn’t stay arrested. He was in the back of my car, cuffed, and then he was smoke. Then all hell broke loose, which I thought was a figure of speech until a while ago. You wouldn’t have any idea about how he does all this shit?”
“Actually, I have a very good idea, but I already told you and you didn’t pay any attention. I don’t really feel like going through it again.” I tapped the cover of the journal. “It’s all in here, more or less. You could read it.”
“I might do that.” He looks around my bare kitchen. “You wouldn’t have a drink handy, would you?”
“A drink drink? No, I don’t. But I could run across to Polly’s and borrow a couple of beers.” I rise, pistol in hand. I should have offered, of course; we Does are trained in the elementary courtesies, but there has been a long time between guests chez Jane.
“What about …?” With a movement of his head he indicates the waiting things in the yard.
“Oh, they won’t bother me. If they do, I’ll shoot them.”
“The zombies? I thought they were dead already.”
“A popular misconception. In any case, I have magical bullets. Stay where you are. Don’t move. I mean really don’t move. You’ll be fine.”
I go down the stairs and cross the yard. The paarolawatset begin to move toward me, but slowly, shuffling like old bums.
I knock on Polly’s side door. The yellow porch light comes on, a curtain pulls aside, showing the terrified face of my landlady. At first she doesn’t recognize me; then, with a look of vast relief, she does. Several locks click and she pulls me inside.
“Dolores! Thank God! What’s going on? I was watching TV and then the cable went down. There’s supposed to be a riot going on. Christ! Is that a gun? Who are those guys in the yard? I called the cops, but 911 is jammed up …”
I put a calming hand on her shoulder. “There’s not going to be a riot around here. Just stay in the house and you’ll be okay. Are the kids in?”
“In L.A. with their father, thank God. They’re due back tomorrow. Dolores, what’s going on?”
I try to radiate confidence. Polly is actually pretty tough, and New Agey enough not to be knocked entirely out of whack by weird doings. “It’s a real long story, but first of all, I’m not Dolores anymore, I’m Jane. My husband isn’t dead, like I told you; he’s alive, and after me, and he’s a … sort of a terrorist, and those are his people out there, watching me.”
“You’re kidding, right? God, you cut and colored your hair! You look great. But seriously, you were hiding from him and he found you? Did you call the cops?”
“Yes. One of them is up in my place and I offered him a beer that I don’t have. I came over to borrow a couple.”
She bursts out laughing, and I join her, and arm in arm we go up to the kitchen and she passes me a six-pack of Miller tallboys from the fridge. She says, “I don’t know about you, but I’m gonna go up to bed and turn up the A/C all the way, and put Hildegard von Bingen on the headphones and pull the covers up over my head until this is over.”
I tell her this sounds like a good plan. I am halfway home when I feel a finger scratching at my neck, and then my neck hairs are pulled and twisted in that annoying way she used to do when we were kids, and my sister’s voice comes clearly over my left shoulder. Oh, Janey, you really messed up again, big-time. This is all your fault. Plain Jane. Plain Jane couldn’t stand I was pregnant, you were so jealous you could hardly look at me, you always hated me, Mom said so. That’s why you got him to kill me. You knew he was going to kill me, didn’t you? And my baby. Look at me, Jane! Look what you did to me!
I don’t turn around but keep walking. Slow going; I never realized that it’s about a quarter of a mile from Polly’s house to the garage. The path is closing in: rattan palms rattle and brush my arms, acacias, and locust bean, and all the dry spiky shrubs of the Sahel. My feet sink into the warm sand. A figure looms ahead, blocking my way. It’s my brother. He is naked. He has an erection, which he strokes. Janey, honey, let’s do it in the weeds. Janey, come on like we used to do in the boathouse, come on, Janey, his voice is sweet, low, insistent, come on, Janey, you know Mary and I used to do it all the time. Take off your clothes, Janey, let’s see if you got any tits yet. I raise my pistol and shoot him in the chest. Screaming and crashing in the brush, and laughter, not human, like a hyena. I stagger.
There’s hot breath in my ear, stinking breath, booze and decay. I don’t know what I’m going to do with you, says Mom, why do you have to be such a pain in the ass? Look at your sister, just look at her! And there she is, right in front of me now, white and lovely in her little scoop-neck blue linen maternity top and white shorts. She smiles her cover girl smile. She opens the top and her insides fall out of her ripped belly as she smiles on. There is shrill howling, like a dog hit by a car.
Something grabs my left arm, hard. I raise the gun, but it is batted away and I am hauled up off my feet, an arm around my waist. I feel stair treads under my zoris. Detective Paz is heaving me up the stairs and into my apartment.
I collapse inside the door, my head against the cool porcelain of the stove.
“I heard the shot,” he says. “I think you popped one of those … those guys. You were turning in a circle and screaming, about ten feet from the stairs.”
“Yeah. It’s not so good out there right now.” I crawl on hands and knees to the bathroom. I lay my cheek on the rim of the toilet and retch up a little yellow slime. I hear the snap of a pop-top and the gurgling sound of a man knocking down most of a twelve-ounce in one slug.
“Feeling better?” he asks when I totter back and collapse into a chair next to him.
“Much. If I were a bell, I’d be ringing. Thank you for coming out there after me.”
“You had the beer. What was going on?”
“Just paging through the family album. Look, I think we’re stuck here for a while. We’ll be okay here unless he decides to come in person.”
“In which case, you’ll waste him with that funny gun. Or I will.”
“No,” I snap, “if he comes here, I’ll probably shoot you, and maybe my daughter, too, or you us. Surely it has finally sunk in that he can control what we see? If I think he’s approaching in person, we unload the firearms and put them out of reach. We can’t fight him in m’fa; I have to stop him in m’doli. If I can.”