Her eyes narrowed. “A ‘firefight’?” she echoed. “I don’t know what you’re up to, Hailey, but maybe you should get some kind of therapy. I don’t think it’s healthy for you to be getting involved with criminals and playing soldier to assuage your feelings over West Point not working out. I-”
Part two: I crossed my arms, pulled my sweatshirt over my head, and stood in front of her in just my bra. As Julianne stared, confused by my behavior, I touched the corrugated, dark-pink scars from where I’d been shot. “Do you know what these are?” I asked.
She knew, I thought, but just couldn’t process the information.
“I got shot,” I told her. “Twice.”
“Jesus Christ,” she said.
I pulled the shirt back on. “I know this is hard to take, but I was never ‘playing’ soldier, not back east and not now,” I said. “When I do something, I’m serious about it. Nidia is my responsibility because I’ve made her my responsibility. And it’s also my responsibility to protect you. Take the money and go to your sister’s.”
She was still staring at me. I wondered if my father had ever talked to her that way.
Then she took the money from my hand. “Is it too much to ask,” she said, “for you to ask your friends to go into town for an hour until I’m packed and out?”
forty
Julienne’s trailer was pretty nice: double-wide, two bedrooms, a little porch in back. There wasn’t much food in the refrigerator; my mother apparently shopped day by day. Naturally, there was a whole carton of cigarettes in the cupboard above the refrigerator. I could imagine Payaso’s happiness at seeing them, but they’d probably be going with her.
I’d sent Serena and the rest into town, as Julianne had asked, and since they left, I’d been avoiding her. Now I went into her bedroom. Nothing I was going to say was likely to help, but I couldn’t help myself; I needed to smooth things over.
The bedroom decor was clearly picked out by Julianne’s ex, still the nominative owner of the whole place, because it was dominated by masculine hues: hunter-green and rust red, with inexpensive pine furniture.
Julianne was in the little bathroom. I watched through the open door as she threw things into a makeup kit: eyelash curler, tweezers, nail clippers, lipstick. She glanced at me in the mirror.
I sat down on the bed. “I’m sorry about this.”
“No, you’re not. If you’re going to be a bitch, Hailey, don’t be a half-assed bitch. It undermines the whole point.” She fished a deep-red lipstick back out of her makeup kit and rolled it gently onto her lower lip, then her upper.
She came to stand in the bathroom doorway, studying me. “There’s something you don’t know, Hailey. When you were fourteen and I’d gotten back on my feet after your father’s death, I wanted to move to Santa Barbara or Ojai right away, someplace nearer the ocean, with more culture and more people.” She paused. “But you told me you wanted to go to West Point, and I stayed because of that. A metro area would have had a larger student body, more standout athletes and kids with 4.0’s. You would have been a smaller fish in a bigger pond. I never told you, never made a big deal of it, but I stayed in Lompoc for four years so you’d have your best shot at getting in.”
I looked away, repressing an irritated comment, which would have been this: If she’d tried to stir up any interest in my potential Army career, she’d have known that such a sacrifice wasn’t necessary-as the child of a dead serviceman, I’d already had a significant edge on the other candidates. Sons and daughters of personnel who died while in active duty are given special consideration.
But there was no point in embarrassing her. I played along.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t realize.”
“Lot of good it did, in the end,” she said.
Ah, there it was, the sharpened-dagger point to that little story.
She walked out of the bathroom and placed the makeup tote into her packed suitcase, zipped it up, and looked at me. “Why do you even think Porter and Angeline are going to open their house to me on such short notice?” she asked.
“Because they’re Mooneys,” I said.
She gave me a sharp look, but this time there was more than pique in it. If there was one legitimate grievance Julianne had with me, it was that in my younger years, I’d made no secret of how much I’d envied CJ and his siblings their settled home life, a jealousy that had clearly implied that Angeline had been a better mother than her sister.
“Oh, of course,” Julianne said. “You’ve never forgiven me for making you move out of the paradise of your aunt and uncle’s house. If you’d had your way, you’d have been there until the day you left for West Point.” She paused then, chambering her next thought like a shooter chambers a round. “Probably in bed with your cousin Cletus, too.”
It was unfortunate that Julianne had such contempt for the Army. She would have excelled at planning missions: She always knew where the weak point lay.
“That’s a sick thing to say,” I told her tiredly.
forty-one
The next few weeks were uneventful. That was almost a problem in itself. Serena and Payaso did not take well to mountain life, finding the blackness and the silence at night unnerving, and the days boring. Julianne’s little home would have been spacious for two, but not for four. There always seemed to be someone in the single bathroom. The TV got only a small selection of channels, and there was no sound system to speak of, just a clock radio that would also play a CD.
Relief came in the form of Bravo and Deacon, who drove up from L.A. to put in some bodyguarding time. A grateful Serena and Payaso jumped in the GTO and headed south for a fix of tacos mariscos and city light, as well as to check in with their respective lieutenants, Trippy and Iceman.
They came back in five days like a supply dogsled from Nome, laden with DVDs, magazines, a deck of playing cards, a box of Krispy Kreme doughnuts, groceries from a Mexican tienda, and several ounces of marijuana. I had to put my foot down about that.
“We’re guarding Nidia, and everyone who’s here needs to be clearheaded, which means no drinking and no drugs,” I reminded them. “I know it seems like Skouras’s men have no idea where she is, and they’re never coming for her, but that’s what the two guys in Gualala thought, right before Payaso and I walked through their front door and took Nidia away from them.”
That didn’t have the desired effect. “Motherfucking Trece style!” exulted Trippy, who’d come with them, throwing Trece’s sign. Deacon and Bravo threw it back, all of them focusing on the last part of what I’d said and ignoring the first.
It turned out that nearly everyone wanted to come up and do guard duty. While I’d have liked to believe it was esprit de corps, there was an ulterior motive, and not one I’d ever have thought of.
“Snow,” Serena told me. “Most of them have never seen it. They all want to be here when the first fall comes.”
Soon there was a regular rotation. Not only did Payaso’s homeboys come up to be security, but the sucias came, too, providing company both for their guys and for Nidia. Despite the glaring surface differences between the sucias and Nidia, Serena’s girls were natural and easy with her, playing cards and chatting, brushing and braiding her red hair. The guys, meanwhile, followed Payaso’s example, showing Nidia an excess of courtesy, cleaning up their language when she was around, holding doors for her.
Of all of us, I was the only one to stay with Nidia day in, day out. I dealt with mountain life by reaching back and tapping a little of my old West Point discipline, deciding to get my body back into its pre-coma shape. I got up early and ran for miles on the fire roads, coming back to do push-ups and Russian twists on Julianne’s little porch. In the evenings, I played more kinds of poker with Serena and the guys than I’d known existed. One afternoon, Serena and I took our guns out into the hills and shot at soda cans, sharpening our skills. Nidia and I went into town to get cold-weather clothing. Everyone else had a chance to get things from home, but I’d come to Truckee with only the clothes on my back, as had Nidia. Skouras’s guys had bought her a few things in Gualala, but in her haste to get out of there, naturally, she hadn’t thought to grab anything before leaving.