Hailey's War

rescue her and now she’s rescued. Are you sure you want to keep babysitting her?”

I sipped a little of my Mountain Dew. “Yeah, I do,” I said. “Skouras isn’t going to say, ‘Win some, lose some,’ about this. She can’t handle this herself.” Then I said, “If you’re not in-”

“I’m not saying that,” Serena said quickly. “I’m sorry, prima, I’m just nervous. It’s just that we’re out in the middle of nowhere, the old man and his crew are gonna be looking for us all over, and Jesus, I left Trippy in charge back at home.” She frowned. “We probably weren’t even around the corner in the car before she rounded everyone up and started a war with Tenth Street. She hates their asses.”

I nodded in sympathy, but my thoughts were elsewhere. I looked over to where Nidia was, still slowly choosing from the salad bar.

In the shady confines of the old barn where we’d hidden the Bronco, Serena and I had done a short debriefing with Nidia. We’d sent Payaso away, outside, so she could speak freely, and then Serena had begun firing questions at her, in rapid Spanish: Are you okay? Did they hurt you? Touch you? Did they mess with your head?

Nidia had shaken her head, saying no, no. Serena hadn’t seemed to believe her. Are you sure? she’d demanded.

Serena, I’d cut in, stop tripping. They were under orders from Skouras. They wouldn’t have done things like that.

I’d been worried that she was going to get Nidia upset, as Payaso nearly had earlier, in the car, with his rant against the American law. I’d also been surprised at Serena’s depth of concern for the girl she’d dismissed as a “little vic” earlier. But some things were women’s concerns; they transcended petty differences.

When I’d gotten Serena to shut up, Nidia had told us the story. Most of it confirmed what we’d already guessed. The baby she was carrying was Adrian Skouras’s, and Tony Skouras knew about it and wanted the child. Nidia’s family, likewise, had known. They had thought that a tiny village in Mexico, if Nidia disappeared quickly and completely, would be a remote enough place to hide from him. I’d been right about all that.

I’d been wrong about how Tony Skouras had learned about his grandchild. Adrian had not revealed it to his father on his deathbed. Instead, when Nidia had missed her period, she’d asked the help of his home-care nurse with arranging a pregnancy test. The nurse had known even before Adrian had. After Adrian’s death, she apparently told the old man about the joyous life-in-the-midst-of-death fact of Nidia’s pregnancy.

Just days before his death, Adrian had warned Nidia that his father would want the child and would use any means necessary to get sole control of it. Nidia had kept her pregnancy a secret for that reason, never guessing that the nurse would use the information to her advantage.

“That fucking bitch,” Serena had said, as if personally affronted.

After Adrian’s death, Skouras Sr. and his lawyer came to the house with a rich financial offer for Nidia to give up the child, and Nidia had realized that if she didn’t take the carrot, she’d get the stick. She didn’t want money. She wanted her child to be safe from its grandfather. She’d pretended to feel ill and fled out the back door of Adrian’s house.

She’d stayed with her family only a few days. They had known Skouras would be looking for them. As I’d thought earlier, their very anonymity had protected them. If they’d been a middle-class suburban family, he could have found them in the phone book. But her family had wisely fled to another part of the state, while Nidia went to stay with an old friend of her mother’s in Oakland.

Nidia also told us that after she’d been taken from the tunnel, Skouras’s men had driven her to a rented house where a doctor had checked her out for signs of shock after the traumatic events of the day. Then they’d taken her to the airport and brought her back to California by private plane.

Nidia had been under guard in Gualala ever since, treated courteously, fed a healthy diet with plenty of prenatal vitamins, and checked out regularly by a doctor whom the big man-I assumed she meant Babyface-brought up to the house. I’d wondered if the doctor had been the passenger in the Mercedes today.

Payaso and Nidia came back to the table, and in a few minutes, a waiter came out with a pizza that Payaso, Serena, and I would share, and a chicken sandwich for Nidia.

Nidia was quiet, but then, she’d always been quiet. I believed her, though, that Skouras’s men hadn’t mistreated her. That lined up with what I’d told Serena: They wouldn’t have physically or sexually abused the mother-to-be of Mr. Skouras’s grandchild. I didn’t know what psychic scars Nidia was carrying, but she was functioning, and that was going to have to be enough. I’d learned to do a lot of things the hard way in the past few months, but I wasn’t going to learn to be a therapist.

“It’s a good thing we didn’t bring Deacon,” Payaso said, pulling a slice of pizza free of the pie. “My car would be way too crowded.”

“Yeah,” I said. “We’ve got a lot of driving ahead of us.”

“Back to L.A.?” Serena said.

“No,” I said. “We’re going east.”

thirty-nine

The McNair sisters, Julianne and Angeline, had been the most beautiful girls in their high-school class back in West Virginia. As with many pairs of sisters who turn heads, the key to their appeal was their contrasts. Angeline, the older of the two, had seraphic red-gold hair and pale blue eyes that her sons, Constantine, Cletus, and Virgil, all inherited. Julianne had glossy dark-brown hair, and her eyes were a deep iris blue. Angeline was engaged by her senior year of high school, to a funny shade-tree mechanic named Porter Mooney. Julianne drank and danced and remained uncommitted through graduation, when she left West Virginia with a girlfriend to see America.

Julianne was both pretty and smart. She was quick-witted to the point of cruelty, but people forgave her easily, because she illustrated why people call intelligence “brightness.” She drew the eye and held it. In photos, you can see that she knows exactly how to lean out for a man to light her cigarette, in a way that is fetching but not too accommodating. He still has to reach. She is the object.

She met a young Army private in a bar just off the base where he was stationed in Texas and married him six months later. Henry Cain was her emotional opposite-simple, hardworking, forthright. To this day, I still don’t know what their marriage was really like. Part of that is because he died when I was very young. But part of it’s probably deliberate obtuseness on my part. I had loved my father; I didn’t want to believe he was unhappy for twelve years. I did know that in conversation, Julianne had used her brains and verbal quickness to chase him around rhetorically like a jay harries a hawk. He’d never openly expressed anger with her. Sometimes, when she would excoriate him for small things, he would shake his head and say quietly, “Why do you have to be like that, Jewels?”

I suppose she did love him, because she loved men in general. After his death, there had been plenty more. Air Force men and guards at the prison, then a switch to artistic blue-state New Men in Santa Barbara and Ojai, where she lived after I went east for school. She’d followed the latest one to Truckee, nearly on the Nevada line. Pretty soon she’d tire of the quiet Sierra life and move to a city, where the lights were brighter and the dating pool bigger.

She had always worked-she couldn’t have afforded not to-but through it all, and between drags on a cigarette, she declared that the world was a man’s world, ambition a joke. Sincerity was anathema to her, a form of submission. Her dislike of authority and sincerity found its natural enemy in her husband’s employer, the Army. Drilling with rifles, starting and stopping and turning when you were told, snapping your hand to your forehead every time you approached someone who outranked you-she thought it was Boy Scouting on steroids. It was not coincidence that I told nearly a dozen people my plans to apply to the United States Military Academy before I finally told Julianne.

“I despair of you,” she’d told me. “You could do anything, and this is what you want? The Army?”

“It’s not just the Army,” I’d said, not once but many times. “It’s West Point.”

In her way, Julianne thought she was a feminist, just by virtue of being smart and having casual sex, of mocking supermodels and cheerleaders. For that reason, she could never admit that being beautiful was important