“Oh, good, finally!” he says.
“What is that supposed to mean?”
“It means it’s okay to come apart a little when something like that goes down. They have therapy programs for incidents, people who’re involved in violence. Christ, you of all people should know that. I’ve been watching you, after it went down and now today, and I’m thinking where does she keep it and how is it going to come out? And here it is. You looked like you were about to keel over just then.”
“I was,” she says, but she knows it’s not just post-traumatic stress working here. There is deep stuff stirring, stuff that Mickey Lopez never got to in over two years of therapy, she thinks, and then quickly excuses Mickey, it’s all her fault really, but now some combination of Emmylou Dideroff, and violence, and this strange man on her patio, attractive and repellent at the same time (That body! That gun!), is working on the toxic sludge, raising clouds of fear, of excitement. She does not choose to explain this to the cop. She takes a number of deep breaths, attaining control. The tears dry.
“Uh-huh, and about continuing with Emmylou, you still want to pull out?”
“No!” Too vehement. More calmly, she says, “I mean, no, I don’t think it would be good for her to…change therapists at this point.”
She has to look away from him, for even to her own ears it sounds like sanctimonious bullshit. The moment passes. He sits down.
“Fine. Good. And now that we got that settled, I have to say I thought you showed a lot of class in this whole deal.”
“Class?”
“Yeah. Guy knocks you down and there’s a gun battle outside your house, you don’t run around in circles screaming, you calmly call 911 and then you calmly hide the vital evidence, and even though you’re scared right now, you decided to do the right thing. And you got a nice smile. Thank you.”
She feels like an idiot, grinning as she now is, and he is grinning too, that thin cat grin with the little lights in his eyes. “And there’s more,” he says, “truly the coolest thing, is that you didn’t ask me even once what I was doing handcuffed to my bed.”
“Well, we psychologists are trained to discretion.”
“You didn’t want to embarrass me.”
“You don’t strike me as someone easily embarrassed.”
“Trained to perception too. Cool, discreet, perceptive: that’s a nice trifecta.”
She laughs, not a maidenish titter, but a real laugh of pleasure. It is pleasant being tossed compliments by this attractive man, and she understands that these compliments are not mere sexual flattery, but the honest assessment of a potential comrade with whom she may be about to go in harm’s way. He really wants her to know what he thinks of her. It is unutterably refreshing and unlike any experience she has had with a man before. Some beaming here, and then this moment passes too.
“So,” he says with a brisk clap, “I owe you a boat ride. We could get some food and beer, run over to Bear Cut and have a picnic, get some fishing in. You up for that?”
She is. She goes into the house and dons the blue bikini without examining herself in the full-length mirror, and puts shorts and a Hawaiian shirt over that, and plops a canvas beach hat on her head. In his Z car they head north, and in the region known as Souwesera, he cuts into a strip of stores near the tan bulk of a rent-a-locker storage operation and enters a tacky-looking Cuban joint to get their picnic. She sits in the warming car, looking at the store-fronts through her sunglasses, slowly translating the signs in Spanish, wishing she had paid more attention during her single year of the language. She feels ridiculously content, the only little cloud being that at some point in the afternoon she may have to take off her shirt and shorts and stand revealed in this insanely revealing bathing suit.
It is well that she has stopped giving a shit, although she wonders why this is so. Perhaps a brain tumor in the rostral portion of the frontal lobes. As it grows, she will lose more and more inhibitions until she is putting out not only for her colleagues, but also for everyone, jail guards, this fat guy sitting in front of the Cuban joint in the wife-beater undershirt and the black cigar, or patients, maybe even Rigoberto Munoz, tardive dyskinesia and all, and just as she thinks this, who should appear within her field of vision but Rigoberto himself. He has deteriorated since the last time she saw him. He has his own wife-beater undershirt on, with an open dotted seersucker shirt over it, both filthy and torn. He is mumbling, grimacing, sticking his tongueall the way out and otherwise demonstrating that he is off the meds. He is attempting to correct this by self-medicating via a forty-ounce malt liquor clutched in a paper bag, and yes, he has spotted her, although she is now crouching low in her seat and pulling down on the brim of her beach hat.
He grins horribly and waggles his tongue. “Hey, Doc,” he calls and bellies up to the car, giving off a mighty stench: the beer train has crashed into the vomit factory.
“Hey, Doc, hey, I gotta job.”
“That’s wonderful, Rigoberto.”
“Yeah, hey, I gotta a job onna fish boat with, hey, you know my cousin Jorge? I gotta job with him cleaning fish up by, uh, that bridge, what you call it? The fish boat.”
In case she does not know how fish are cleaned, he demonstrates by taking a thick-handled, black-bladed knife out of a belt sheath and waving it in front of her nose.
“Them, hey, them people are back, Doc,” he says. “You know they talkin in my head again. They say to do bad things but I don’t listen to them no more, uh-uh. Like you said, um. Where you goin’ in the car, hey?” Waving the knife. She watches it, semihypnotized, feeling the smile straining at her lips.
Then Paz is there, with an arm around Munoz’s shoulders, gripping hard.”Oye, Rigoberto, mi hermano, zque tal?” he says, walking the man away from the car. There is a brief conversation in rapid Spanish, and the lunatic shambles off. Paz has taken the beer away, which he flings neatly into a trash barrel.
He returns to the car, places a paper bag and a plastic bag of ice onto the backseat.
“You know Rigoberto?” she asks.
“Oh, yeah, me and him go way back. He was one of my first collars when I was in uniform. He didn’t scare you, did he?”
“No, me and Rigoberto go way back too. But you get credit for another rescue.”
“I don’t know about rescue. He’s pretty harmless if you don’t set him off.”
“Yes, harmless for a violent paranoid schizophrenic with a big knife. But the amazing thing is I was just thisinstant thinking about him and here he is.”
“Plate o’ shrimp,” says Paz, tooling out of the lot and onto Twelfth Avenue.
“Pardon?”
“Plate o’ shrimp.Repo Man? The movie?”
“You lost me.”
Paz puts on a drawling accent. “Say you’re thinkin’ about a plate of shrimp, and all of a sudden somebody says ‘Plate o’ shrimp’ or ‘Plate of shrimp,’ just like that, out of the blue. No explanation. No point in lookin’ for one either.” In his ordinary voice he adds, “A little later in the movie you see this sign in a restaurant: ‘Plate of Shrimp $2.99.’ It’s a classic.”
“It sounds like it. I’ll have to rent the video.”
“I got it at home, we can watch it later.”
“You’re a full-service operation, Paz.”
“We don’t cash checks,” says Paz.
Paz’s boat is a twenty-three-foot locally built plywood cabin cruiser with a planing hull and a 150-horsepower Mercury outboard. It is painted fading pink on the topsides and chipped dirty white below, and is called the MATA II according to metallic stick-on letters applied to the stern. Lorna is completely charmed by it, having spent more time than she really wanted to on large, spotless doctors’ yachts where you had to wear special shoes so as not to mar the teak deck and got yelled at when you pulled on the wrong goddamned rope. Nothing seems to be required of her on this vessel, so she arranges herself on a padded locker at the stern and sits like the Queen of Sheba with a cold Miller as Paz arranges their departure and heads down the Miami River, under the bridges, past the little boatyards and moored boats, the downtown towers and the highway full of cars full of people who have somewhere to go, but they are free for the day, and when they leave the river’s mouth and clear Claughton Island, he opens it
