And more of the same, until the woman was frantic and thoroughly bamboozled. She was a confirmed watcher of the kind of daytime television in which children were indeed turned into monsters by the shock of witnessing something nasty.
Smoothly, he closed with “So, if it’s okay by you, ma’am, I’d like to arrange to have her looked at by a doctor, somebody who could talk to her and figure out what the damage was and how to fix it. No charge to you, of course; the Miami PD will take care of the whole thing.”
It was okay by her. Later, driving back to the department, Paz felt only somewhat ashamed of himself. He knew that there was no way that the PD would pay for any kind of counseling for a kid like Tanzi, even if she knew who got Hoffa. At a light, therefore, he used his cellular phone to dial a familiar number, the office of Lisa Reilly, Ph.D., child psychologist. The last remaining girlfriend.
THIRTEEN
My transmission does a little hesitation and a lurch before it pops into third gear. It’s leaking fluid, too, and is the main thing that dissuades me from packing Luz and my scant trunkful of possessions in the Buick and heading out the next day toward some city picked at random. If Lou Nearing actually spotted me walking down the halls of Jackson pushing a records cart, and if he wants to come after me, say hello, talk about old times, it shouldn’t take him long to find me, and then what? No, more probably he’ll recall that I committed suicide. It was in all the papers. I wonder if Lou is still friendly with him. Maybe they call each other a couple of times a year. Hey, man, funny thing happened, I thought I saw Jane the other day in the hospital. And my husband would remind Lou that I was dead, but at the same time he would be thinking, triumphally, happily (if “happy” is still a word that applies), she’s alive. Because there wasn’t any body, which should have made him a little suspicious in the first place. On the other hand, if I were going to kill myself, for reasons he alone knew, he would have to figure I’d do it in a way that left no body for him to find?and use, in the various ways he must have learned. Immolation by fire. Drowning at sea. I chose a boat explosion and drowning, being a nautical person.
Or maybe Lou’s in with him. Maybe he’s the disciple. Maybe he killed that woman. I can’t think this way, or I’ll go mad. Madder.
Unpleasant times at the office today. Mrs. Waley tells me to push the records cart around again and I refuse to leave the Medical Records Office. Mrs. Waley is vexed. I say that it is the job of the messengers to carry records, and she points to the section of my job description where it says other duties as assigned, and I say that is only true of duties having to do with clerkship. She says in what she imagines is an intimidating voice, are you refusing a direct order, as if we were in the marines, and I put on an air of mulish obstinacy and repeat that I am not going out of the office anymore. As I do so, because I am so frightened of running into Lou Nearing again, I let Crazy Jane peek out from behind my eyes for a few seconds and I see the expression on her face change. She remembers that I am a bat and envisions a scene, maybe even violence, and she backs off, muttering about a written reprimand in my personnel jacket. I will have to bear it.
Later, Lulu and Cleo grab me in the file warrens, mad to know what the fuss was about. I tell them a version of the truth, that I don’t want to wander the halls because there’s a man I’m avoiding, someone who’s annoying me. They stare at me in amazement, and a look passes between them. A man? Dolores?
Later in the car thinking, Yes, drive to some anonymous city. Dayton. Boise. Indianapolis. Get a place to live and a meaningless job moving paper or electrons from one box to another, raise Luz, each day scratch another line on the wall, like the bearded prisoners in cartoons.
There are long shallow steps leading to the day-care center, and on one of these sits Luz in close conversation with a little blonde. She flickers a hand at me as I approach but doesn’t move. Their perfect cheeks are close together, dark as bread crust, pale as milk. I have a moment of faintness. A little unstuck in time for a moment there: I was thinking of my husband’s brown hand moving over my body, how happy I felt there at the beginning. Oh, it was love, true, but it was also a certain self-satisfaction, the world convulsed with the hallucination of race, and little Jane had beat it, gone beyond. I dig my nails into the palms of my hands and summon up a ghastly smile. But they are not watching me.
The blonde is Amanda, the new best friend, the subject of continuous commentary recently, a Talmud in pink sneakers. Luz has been to Amanda’s house, on Trapp Avenue in the good white Grove, the earthly paradise, and desperately does she want Amanda to come to her house. I had not anticipated this, I confess. I thought she would be as I am now, a solitary, the two of us for ourselves and no one else. But no, she is now a regular little kid, the insanity of her first four years has been put out with the trash, and now she wants Barbies and My Little Pony and pals.
A thin, elegant woman gets out of a silver Audi and comes over to the girls and me. She has big sunglasses pushed up on her hair, which is beautifully cut and a few shades darker than her daughter’s. She is wearing a fawn suit, and a peach silk blouse. She is something with an airline. The mister is a big-time lawyer. Julia Pettigrew is her name. Amanda runs to her and asks if she can go home with Luz, and Luz does the same to me. Mrs. Pettigrew looks at me kindly, the sort of patronizing look Dolores Tuoey deserves, the look saying of course I don’t mind if my precious goes in your horrible dangerous junker and visits your half-caste kid in your white-trash household, and I am far too liberal, and proud of it, to ever by word or deed imply that there is any objection to the association between our children. And in response I sort of shuffle and begin to shake my head negatively, so that Mrs. Pettigrew rescues me, as I knew she would, by saying, “Girls! Why don’t we go to Cocowalk and get an ice cream!” Cries of delight, the bribe effective, and “I’ll bring her back in a couple of hours.”
A couple of hours, good, that will give me enough time to pack my little box and my ugly clothes, and write a note, please take care of my little girl, and by the time they get there I can be in Vero Beach. The transmission will get me to Jacksonville and then I can take a bus. I can travel faster alone, dumb in the first place to take the kid. The ogga, grasping at the controls.
Later I sit in the car in my driveway listening to it tick. We are both troubled by transmission problems; like my Buick, I can’t get into gear. This happened after I left Marcel, too. It is hard to leave the Chenka. Impossible to find them if they don’t want to be found, but leaving is no simple thing either, especially in the spring, when everything turns to bog. I went with Marcel and a party of Chenka on their semiannual shopping trip to Ust-Sugoy. Kmart has not come to Ust-Sugoy yet, but you can buy salt there and tools and cloth if you have wool to trade. Marcel put me on the weekly boat that runs up the Kolyma River to the roadhead at Seymchan. My eyes slid off his face, there was a repulsion there, where once there had been attraction. He volunteered to leave his work and come with me, but I flatly refused, I think I even got angry with him, accused him of treating me like a child, of wanting to continue his control. Being a good modern girl I had reinterpreted the cosmic evisceration I had just gone through as personal growth! I need my freedom?I actually said that to him. Freedom, the one pathetic virtue of the Americans, that and honesty. I was disappointed in him, I said, being honest. I didn’t cry when the greasy old boat pulled away, but, now that I recall it, he did, the slow embarrassing tears running down his face.
At Seymchan, while one waits for one’s bus, one stays at the exclusive Gulag Hilton, a two-story structure in cracked and rusty concrete, where the rooms are little boxes without TVs, mini-bars, or windows. You get an iron bedstead and a mattress stuffed with felt and vermin and a twenty-watt bulb that turns off all by itself at ten. You can get kvass at the bar, though, and pepper vodka, which I did in some quantity. From Seymchan, it is a two- hundred-mile bus ride through the lovely Commie death camp district to Magadan, stopping for the evening at romantic Myakit. There was a hotel in Myakit, too, but it had burned down while I was in the field, and so we all stayed the night in the bus terminal. My fellow passengers were all Siberians and so the temperature in the cement-block building?maybe ten degrees of frost?did not trouble them. There was a red-hot stove going, and a boiling samovar, and there was ample vodka traveling around in a jolly enough manner.
I fell in with a Yakut family named Turgaliy, a man, his wife, and three children, two girls and a little boy. They had some bread, sausage, and tea, which they kindly shared with me, and I passed on a Bic lighter for Mr. T., and for Mrs. T. an almost-full purse spray of L’Air du Temps (oh, yes, I actually brought it along for my romantic idyll among the Chenka), and push-button ball pens for the kids. They also had a bottle of unbranded local vodka, which stood by me during much of the evening. We drank from little silver cups. I learned some doleful, droning Yakut songs and passed out singing.
And awoke in my sleeping bag, into which the Turgaliys had stuffed me, at dawn, to find myself in the middle
