And Inky says, “Perfect.” She says, “You just pitched Cold Mountain.”
This is their little urban campout.
This hiding out in the open. This hiding in plain sight.
No one's easier to ignore than the homeless. You could be Jane Fonda or Robert Redford, but if you're pushing a shopping cart down the avenue at high noon, wearing three layers of soiled clothing and muttering cusswords under your breath—nobody's going to notice you.
They could do this for the rest of their lives. Scout and Inky, they plan to get on a list for a low-income apartment. They want to sit in waiting rooms and get free dental care from attractive young medical students. They'll apply for free methadone, then work their way up to heroin. Adult vocational training. Fry hamburgers. Learn to drive and do laundry, then work their way up into the lower-middle class.
At night, when Packer and Evelyn hold each other, under some bridge or on cardboard laid across a steaming, warm manhole cover, his hands inside her clothing, bringing her to climax as strangers walk past, the two have never been so in love.
But Inky's right. It can't last forever. The end comes so fast, no one's sure what happened until it's in the newspaper the next day.
They're asleep in the doorway of some warehouse, feeling more at home than they ever have in Banff or Hong Kong. By now their blankets smell like each other. Their clothes—their bodies—feel like a house. Just Packer's arms around his wife could be a duplex on Park Avenue. A villa in Crete.
It's that night a black town car hits the curb, brakes squealing and one tire bumping up onto the sidewalk. The headlights, two circles of bright high-beams, shine right on Mr. and Mrs. Keyes, waking them up. The back door falls open and screams spill out from the back seat. Headfirst, her hands and arms flying, a girl falls out onto the sidewalk. Her long dark hair hiding her face, she's naked and scrambling on hands and knees away from the car.
Packer and Evelyn, buried in their house of old rags and damp blankets, the naked girl is scrambling toward them.
Behind her, a man's black shoe steps out of the car's open door. A dark pant leg follows. A man wearing black leather gloves climbs out of the car's back seat while the girl gets to her feet, screaming. Screaming, Please. Screaming for help. So close you can see one, two, three gold hoops pierced through one of her ears. Her other ear is gone.
What looks like a long braid of dark hair is really blood running down the side of her neck. Where the ear was, you see just a jagged ridge of flesh.
The girl gets to the Keyeses, just their eyes showing from under the blankets.
As the man grabs her by the hair, the girl grabs at their rags. As the man lifts her, kicking and weeping, into the car, the girl tugs the blankets, showing them here, still half asleep, blinking in the car's bright headlights.
The man has to see them. Anyone driving the car must see.
The girl screams, “Please.” She screams, “The license plate . . . ,” and she's pulled back inside. The car door slams shut and the tires squeal, leaving just the girl's blood and skidmarks of black rubber. In the gutter with the fast-food paper cups, dropped or knocked out in the struggle, a torn, pale ear sparkles with two gold hoop earrings still looped through it.
It's over breakfast, a room-service omelet of greasy mushrooms, English muffins, lukewarm coffee, and cold bacon in their suite at the Sheraton, it's there they see the newspaper. In local news, a Brazilian oil heiress was kidnapped. The picture of her is the naked girl with long dark hair from the night before, but smiling and holding a trophy with a little gold tennis player on top.
According to the newspaper, the police haven't a single witness.
Of course, the Keyeses could send a note, but they really didn't see anyone's face. They didn't see the license plate. All they saw was the girl. The blood. Packer and Evelyn, they can't offer any real help. Going to the police, all they could do is humiliate themselves. Already, you could imagine the headlines:
“Society Couple Goes Slumming for Kicks”
Or: “Billionaires Playing Poor”
God forbid if they told about Inky and Scout, Skinny and Shoe and Bones.
Packer and Evelyn putting themselves up for public ridicule was not going to save this poor girl. Their suffering wouldn't lessen a moment of hers.
In the newspaper the next week, the kidnapped heiress was found dead.
Still, Inky wasn't worried. Poor, dirty people have nothing to worry about on the street. The girl who got killed was young. She looked clean and pretty and rich. “Having nothing to lose,” Inky said, “is the new wealth.”
And Packer said, “Lather, rinse, and repeat.”
No, Inky wasn't about to give up her happiness and go back to being rich and famous. And more and more, those nights, Packer went with her. To protect her, he said.
One of those nights, Evelyn's at the Charity Dinner Dance Against Colon Cancer when her cell phone rings. It's Inky, and in the background a man is shouting. Packer's voice. In the phone, Inky is breathing hard, saying, “Muffy, please. Muffy, please, we're lost and someone is chasing us.” She says, “We've tried the police, but . . .” And the call cuts off.
As if she's run into a tunnel. Under an overpass.
The headline in the next day's newspaper says:
“Publisher and Textile CEO Found Stabbed to Death”
Now, almost every morning, there's a new headline to avoid:
“Bag Lady Found Butchered”
Or: “Killer Continues to Stalk the Homeless”
Somewhere, every night, that black town car is looking for Mrs. Keyes, the only witness to a crime. Someone is killing anyone on the street who might be her. Anyone dressed in rags and asleep under a pile of blankets.
It's after that Evelyn goes cold turkey. She cancels the
