“We will not eat here, Frank,” she says.
The old man regards me with beautiful gray eyes and he smiles, then pivots and places his cane for the turn.
He’s still nodding as he drops to the floor.
The old woman just stares at him.
The pretty cashier gives me the heavy double bags with one hand and the other goes to her mouth. The kid with the French fry basket says, “Whoa,” and the manager suddenly jumps up and looks over the counter. Two customers rush in from the dining room. The front door opens and three teenaged boys shuffle in then stop, bumping into each other.
I aim Cañonita at the teenagers while I walk across the room and stand over Mr. Geezer. I kneel down and find his carotid pulse with my left hand, my right still holding Cañonita firm on the boys. There isn’t much pulse and his mouth is hanging open some so I figure he’s not breathing right.
“Get down here and CPR this guy,” I say to the wife.
“I don’t know how.”
“Boys, you know how to do CPR, right?”
They mumble and shy away.
“Fuck, what’s wrong with you people? Pretty face, you know CPR?”
“I forgot, I used to know, but…”
“Shut up! Red! Get over here, sister. Your lucky day. And make it quick.”
The manager bursts into the lobby through a windowed kitchen door.
“Do you know CPR?”
“I do not.”
“Watch me. I’m going to show you once. I’m going to explain what I’m doing. Then you’re going to take over. If you make a move on me while I’m breathing for this guy-like if you try to get this mask off or the gun? I’ll come off him and shoot you. Got it?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Watch and learn, Red.”
I put Cañonita in my left hand, hook my right thumb deep over the old man’s tongue and lift his head back to open the trachea. I explain this to Red, who is nodding quickly. Then I get Cañonita in a funny grip so I can use my left hand to pinch Mr. Geezer’s nose shut. With my mouth I cover my thumb and his mouth and give him a nice, slow, even exhale. I taste my breath going into a small cavern that smells mildly of meat. I feel my breath come to the end of the cavern, like blowing up a balloon. I look up sideways to see Red nodding even faster. I count to four and breathe for him again. Red practically elbows me away so she can get in and try it. So I swing around and straddle the guy and join my hands over his firm but oddly thin and light chest. It feels like he’s made of aluminum, like an office blind or a soda can. Down-up. Down-up. Down-up.
“Count seconds, Red. Every other second you press in. One, two, three, four-all the way to twenty. Got it? It’ll keep his heart going or maybe even start it back up.”
“Push on every other count.”
“Then ventilate him, like I just did. Some of the new protocols say to skip this part, but I wouldn’t. Look at this guy. It’s four breaths, twenty pushes. Four breaths, twenty pushes. The damned experts change the ratio every year or so just to confuse people like us. But this can work. Good luck.”
“Yes,” she says, then grabs Mr. Geezer’s nose and swoops down to get him in a mouth lock.
I jump up, swing Cañonita in a semicircle and make sure the parking lot isn’t crawling with innocent bystand ers or cops.
And if it were, what choice would I have but to run out through them? I feel as if I’ve been breathing for that old guy for hours, like the whole world has had time to get here and get their cameras ready and their guns drawn and wait for me to walk into the shitstorm. I feel like I’m never going to make it to those swinging doors. I step in that direction. The teenagers part.
I’m too rattled to even hand out my business cards.
But miracle is in the air tonight. The GTO beckons from the other side of the hedge like a burning bush.
Four hundred horses.
And the lot is empty of pedestrians, just a minivan looking for a place to park.
I’m almost to the door when Mr. Geezer coughs and sputters. Red looks at me with pugnacious wonder. Mrs. Geezer throws tears as she silently kneels over her husband with her hands folded under her chin like for a prayer.
Too bad nobody has a camera to show me saving the old man’s life on TV-fame to go with my infamy.
I walk out, palm the gun and shorten my stride. I take a deep breath. Mask off. Head high, back straight, eyes alert.
I know I look right.
I’m a just a hungry consumer with a hard-earned bag of burgers and fries. Maybe even a family to feed. Nobody can stop me.
I can’t even stop myself.
I have just enough time to secure my tools in the adjoining room, shower and change before Hood arrives. Short dress. Of course I brush my teeth.
When he comes through the door I swarm him.
A thick bunch of roses and a bagged bottle of something drop to the floor and I pull him through them toward the bed. I hear the crunch of the stems on carpet and the rattle of the paper bag. Hey, I can drink wine or smell a flower anytime but right now I got Charlie Hood where I want him and no conventional weapon can keep me off him.
It doesn’t last long but after it I’m starved so I take him to dinner in the GTO.
“Nice car.”
“I have nice friends,” I say. “I choose them on the basis of the cars they can lend me.”
“This have the three-fifty horse?”
“It’s the six-liter, Charles-a full four hundred. Sick torque, and I love that it looks like something my grandmother would drive. No wonder they quit making it.”
“Where’s the Corvette?”
“In for service.”
He’s looking at me with an expression I’ve never seen on him before. Like he’s discovered something and locked it up for safekeeping. Up until now I made Hood nervous or least uncertain but now I wonder if my mother might have got him thinking about my unorthodox girlhood and or that I shot Bradley’s father or that I’ve had more boyfriends than Hood has had dates.
Or maybe he changed his mind about me and the diamonds.
Or… Allison?
I pick a Persian restaurant on Sunset with private rooms where we can sit on beautiful pillows and eat spicy food and I can touch him. Hood seems gently befuddled by his surroundings and I wonder if it has to do with his time in Iraq. Or, again, if it has to do with me.
“You’re quiet,” I say. “Remind you of the war?”
“Just the way the people look.”
“I want you to tell me about it someday.”
“I will.”
“Tonight?”
“Not tonight,” says Hood. “Have a glass of wine.”
“I told you I don’t drink, Deputy.”
“Maybe you should.”
“Like having a cigarette before they shoot you?”
He looks at me then with genuine amusement. I like a guy who can enjoy your joke without having to make a better one. I like a guy whose ears turn red once in a while. Most of all I like a guy who’s got the kind of Man Thing that you can’t fight or ruin or dissolve or avoid-this big blocky clunky Man Thing right in the middle of him. The Man Thing is a nuisance, I’ll admit, and early on I learned every trick in the book for eliminating it. Mom taught me some of them. Grandma some. Girls just learn most of them on their own. The deal is, some men will let you take the Man Thing and dispose of it. They actually think that’s what women want. I’ve got no time for men like that anymore. Because the Man Thing is half of what makes the time shared by a man and a woman interesting. It’s like this dirt track we had out in the Bakersfield desert when I was a kid. It was a little oval and we’d race our bikes around it as fast as we could. It was flat and smooth and level and you could haul ass. But there was one hairy thing about it-a big sharp rock lodged right in the middle of the far turn. It stuck up, pointing back, like a big dull fishhook looking to stab you. We had some bad wipeouts trying to miss that rock. We didn’t always miss. There were stitches and broken bones. Terry Lilley knocked out his front teeth on it. I picked them out of the dirt but they couldn’t fasten them back on. So one day we got together like intelligent human beings and dug the thing out and rolled it off the course. We filled the hole and packed the dirt down hard and rode around that track for a few hours. We made some good time. Very fast. Very smooth. And very boring. So we dug the hole and rolled the rock back into place and buried it just like it was. That’s what the Man Thing does-it makes the race dangerous and difficult and worth running.