Her eyes sparkled again at the memory; it didn’t take much imagination to follow her mind down its track, to sex in Sandra’s bed while the wife was standing in front of the By-Smart cash register. She’d helped construct a murder weapon, but what she remembered was the sexual excitement. Maybe she’d feel something else when she recovered: she faced two more major surgeries before she could go home.
She saw some of what I was thinking in my face. “You are a bit of a prude, aren’t you, Vic? You take a lot of chances yourself-don’t tell me you don’t know that adrenaline kick from skating close to the edge.”
I fingered my own head bandage reflexively. “Adrenaline thrills? Maybe that’s my shortcoming: I take risks so I can get the job done-I don’t take jobs so I can run risks.”
She turned her head aside, impatient with me, or abashed-I’d never understand how she thought.
“What about those extra meetings with Buffalo Bill?” I asked. “He confess to all his dirty business practices?”
“Not in so many words. But a few admiring comments and he talked more than he realized. I’d say a streak of paranoia runs through the man, not enough to derail him, but the fact that he sees the world as his enemy means he’s always on the attack, which I guess has fueled his success. We had a lot of ‘hnnh, hnnhing’ over the necessity to do things like pile garbage in the parking lots of smaller shops to get customers to agree that they’d be smart to ‘By-Smart.’”
“So you’ve got yourself quite a nice story,” I said politely.
She grinned weakly. “Even though I don’t remember the climax, it didn’t come out too badly. Except for poor Bron. He was so greedy he couldn’t imagine there’d be a big fat stick of dynamite inside that carrot they were dangling in front of him.”
“Greedy isn’t the word I’d use,” I objected. “He was desperate for a way to help his daughter, so he was going to shut a blind eye to the risk he might be running.”
“Maybe, maybe.” Her color was fading; she lowered the hospital bed and shut her eyes. “Sorry, I’m weak as a cat, I keep dropping off.”
“You’ll recover fast when you’re out,” I said. “You’ll be back in Fallujah or Kigali, or whatever the next war zone is, in no time.”
“Hnnh,” she murmured. “Hnnh, hnnh.”
Back in my car, I could hardly summon the energy to drive. Prude, she’d called me. Was that really me? Next to Marcena, I felt like some large slow object, maybe a rhinoceros, trying to do a pirouette around a greyhound. I had an impulse to go home and spend the day in bed, watching football and feeling seriously sorry for myself and my beat-up body, but when I got home the old man was packed up and ready to go to Max’s. He had a large casserole filled with his wife’s recipe for sweet-potato pudding. He had brushed the dogs until their coats shone, and tied orange bows around their necks-Max had said the dogs could come as long as they behaved and as long as I repaired any damage Mitch did to his garden.
In the evening, when we’d eaten the way one always does on these holidays, and I was in the garden with the dogs, Morrell limped out to join me. He didn’t need his cane for short periods now, a hopeful sign.
With the crowd inside, and me watching the football game while Morrell talked politics with Marcena’s father, we hadn’t really spent any time together today. The sky was already dark, but the garden was protected by a high wall that kept the fiercest of the lake winds at bay. We sat under the trellis where a few late-blooming roses produced a feeble sweetness. I tossed sticks for the dogs to keep Mitch from digging.
“I’ve been jealous of Marcena.” I was astonished to hear myself say that.
“Darling, not to be indelicate, but a Siberian tiger in the living room is less obvious than you are.”
“She takes so many risks, she’s done so much!”
Morrell was astounded. “ Victoria, if you took any more risks, you’d have been dead before I ever met you. What do you want? Skydiving without a parachute? Climb Mount Everest without oxygen?”
“Insouciance,” I said. “I do things because people need me, or I think they do-Billy, Mary Ann, the Dorrados. Marcena does things out of a spirit of adventure. It’s the spirit, that’s what’s different between us.”
He held me more tightly. “Yes, I can see that-she must look as though she’s free, and you feel too tightly bound. I don’t know what to say about that, but-I like knowing I can count on you.”
“But I’m tired of people counting on me.” I told him the image I’d had, the rhino and the greyhound.
He gave a loud shout of laughter but took my hand. “Vic, you’re beautiful in motion, or even when you’re lying still-not that that happens very often. I love your energy, and the grace you have when you run. For Christ’s sake, stop being jealous of Marcena. I can’t imagine you casually helping Bron Czernin rig a lethal device in his back kitchen and then not telling the cops because you didn’t want to ruin your big story. And it’s not because you’re so damn conscientious, it’s because you use your brain, okay?”
“Okay,” I said, not really convinced, but ready to drop the subject.
“Speaking of jealousy, why does Sandra Czernin have it in for you?” Morrell asked.
I felt my face turning crimson in the dark garden. “When we were in high school, I helped play a very nasty practical joke on her. My cousin Boom-Boom invited her to the senior prom. My mom had just died, my dad was kind of clinging to me, didn’t want me dating, and Boom-Boom had said I could go with him. But when I found out he was taking Sandra and I’d be like a fifth wheel, I really lost it. We’d already had some disagreements, she and I, so the prom felt like a total betrayal to me. She slept around, all us girls knew that, but I wouldn’t acknowledge that Boom-Boom did, too. She used to be pretty, in a soft, Persian cat kind of way, and I suppose, well, never mind that. Anyway, I was furious, and-and my basketball team and I, we stole her underpants out of her locker when she was in the pool-we used to have a swim program at Bertha Palmer. The night before the prom, we broke into the gym and shinnied up the ropes and hung her pants from the ceiling, with a big red S drawn on them, next to Boom-Boom’s letter jacket. When Boom-Boom found out it was me, he didn’t speak to me for six months.”
Morrell was roaring with laughter.
“It’s not funny!” I shouted.
“Oh, it is, Warshawski, it is. You are such a pit dog. Maybe you don’t have a spirit of insouciance, but whatever your spirit is-it keeps a lot of people on their toes.”
I figured he meant it as a compliment, so I tried to take it as one. We sat in the garden until I was shivering in the chill air. After a while, we went back to his place with the dogs-a Loop-bound guest volunteered to drive Mr. Contreras home. We huddled in bed much of the weekend, two sore and fragile bodies, bringing each other such comfort as this mortal life affords.
On Monday, I had a call from Mildred, the Bysen family factotum, to say they had cut a check for Sandra Czernin and were messengering it down to her. “You might like to know that Rose Dorrado started work this morning as a supervisor in our Ninety-fifth Street store. And Mr. Bysen feels he’d like to make a special gesture to Bertha Palmer High, since that’s where he went to school. He’s going to build a new gym this summer, and, next winter, he’ll install coaches for both the girls’ and the boys’ basketball teams. We’ll be holding a press conference on this down at the school this afternoon. We’re creating a whole new program for teens called the ‘Bysen Promise Program.’ It will help teens keep a Christian focus through athletics.”