The Black Gold
That night, she stays late at the office, propped up behind her desk long after the others have gone home. It’s not that anyone would ever question her over her hours or that she feels any compulsion to clock in like a factory worker because she’s her own boss and her schedule is flexible — but she’s conscientious, that’s all, and when four-thirty rolls around she never even glances up. The breakfast meeting was work, certainly, but it took a chunk out of her day and there are things she wants to catch up on. Vital things. Purchase orders. E-mail. The latest figures from Island Healers, who need to be paid in monthly installments. And, not least, Alicia’s computer.
She didn’t say a word when Alicia did finally come in, fifteen minutes after she herself arrived, and Alicia, tentative, red-faced, her eyes dodging away from the issue — apostasy, and nothing less — murmured only that she was sorry she’d decided to take an early coffee break but that she was starving because she’d overslept and left home without breakfast and since nothing was happening in the office anyway, she thought no one would mind. Alma, mortified herself, had only stared at her as coldly as she could manage. Then it was lunch hour and Alicia stayed anchored to her desk. Conspicuously. Rising only to go to the machine for a Diet Pepsi and then, half an hour later, to the ladies’, answering the phone in her breathy nuanced voice, entering data, typing, her fingers in swift softly clicking motion as people came and went, telephones rang and the fluorescent lights hissed overhead.
Shadows lengthened, the afternoon fell back and finally dropped into the ocean. At five-thirty, quitting time, Alicia stood, fluttering briefly round her purse and backpack before murmuring, “See you in the morning,” and pulling the door shut behind her as she left. A full hour drifted by, Alma absorbed in her own work, before she went to Alicia’s computer, and it was another half hour before she shut it down. She was looking for irregularities, outside contacts, e-mails that might have tipped her secretary’s hand, but there was nothing whatever beyond the usual business correspondence. And yet Alicia had been with Wilson Gutierrez — had been intimately engaged with him, his arm around her, his tray of coffee and cakes set down before her as if he were used to courting her, serving her — and that was beyond the bounds on every level she could think of. But was it a firing offense? Was there anything in the Park Service’s contractual agreement with its employees that proscribed consorting with the enemy? On company time, no less? Or was that considered free speech or free association or whatever?
At any rate, when finally she does leave the office, it’s past six and all traces of light have faded from the sky. The yachts sit patiently at their berths, muted amber lights showing in one cabin or another, the water as still as the boardwalk that parallels it. There’s a faint echoing thump, a noise so soft it’s been sealed and wrapped twice over by the time it reaches her, and she looks up to see a working boat—uni divers — gliding past the ranks of ghostly masts, lights slowly pulsing, in search of its berth. It’s a moment stolen out of the day, a moment of tranquillity and surcease, but she doesn’t linger. She’s always been a brisk walker, always in a hurry, and she’s moving quickly, ducking around children, exiled smokers, strolling couples. Just as she’s passing the Docksider, she becomes aware of the music drifting down from upstairs, a cover band sloppily working its way through one of the tunes from her mother’s day — and that’s when she pulls up so suddenly the jogger coming up behind her has to swerve wide right to avoid her, very nearly colliding with a pair of oncoming women in the process. She sees the women’s faces flood with alarm and annoyance beneath their flap-brimmed whale-watchers’ hats, there’s a murmured apology, a scramble of limbs — the jogger’s legs glowing as if they were fluorescent — and then he’s gone and one of the women calls out something, but she’s not listening. She’s rooted to the spot.
Her mother. In the confusion of the day she’s forgotten all about her. Her mother’s baking a birthday cake. She expects to be taken out to dinner, as promised. At this very moment she’s no doubt sitting in the easy chair in the living room, with Ed, abusing vodka, the images of chaos on CNN drifting past like clouds in a flattened sky. Guiltily, Alma digs out her cell phone and dials her home number.
Her mother answers on the first ring.
“It’s me, Mom. I just wanted to say I had to work late and—”
“On your birthday?”
“Well, yeah. Some things came up.” She can hear the falseness in her voice, the amateur theatricality — and why does it always seem as if she’s hiding something when she’s speaking with her own mother? When, in fact, she’s not? Because many things have come up, one of them — Alicia’s duplicity — as disorienting and disturbing as anything she’s been through in a long while. Aside from the protestors, that is. And they tend to give it up when the sun sets. “But I’m leaving now — I’ll be home in half an hour, half an hour tops.”
“I’m cooking.”
“But I wanted to take you out, my treat—”
“I said to Ed, ‘Ed, she’s overworked, and I want to make it nice for her today of all days, no stress, know what I mean’—just like when you were a girl, and Ed agreed with me.” A pause. “If you really want to, we can go out to that restaurant tomorrow, but it’s our treat, definitely our treat.” And then she muffles the phone with one hand and calls out to Ed for confirmation. “Right, Ed?”
“But tomorrow’s the concert. Remember? Tim got me tickets?”
No response.
“You said you’d go with me because Tim’s out on the island?”
“Who was it again?”
“Micah Stroud? I told you, I think you’ll like him. He’s”—she’s about to say Just like what you were listening to this morning, but not as soft-brained and poppy, because he sings with fire, real fire, and commitment, but catches herself—“I don’t know. But you’ll like him. Trust me.”
“Okay, fine. But forget the restaurant. The lasagna’s already in the oven — meatless. Homemade. And both Ed and me are fine with a quiet night at home. Okay?”
She’s about to chirp “Okay” into the receiver because it’s been a long day and the idea of letting her mother baby her is beginning to enlarge for her, since what’s the point of having your mother installed in your guest bedroom if you can’t let yourself go? when she reaches the car and suddenly loses the ability to form a coherent sentence, to speak even. Because the car, parked in the shadows facing the artificial lagoon with its tethered boats and strolling tourists, has been defaced all over again. The fact of it, the discovery of it, after Alicia and Wilson Gutierrez and the muffled chants of the protestors that kept breaking through the pianissimo passages of the string quartets on the classical channel so that it became a kind of static in itself, is as much a shock as a sudden fender bender or the savage propulsive snarls of the dog at the window of the car beside hers. From the phone, clutched in the hand she’s dropped to her side, the thin complaint of her mother’s voice, lost to circumstance: “Alma, are you there? Alma?”
This time the color of the paint is red, or at least it shows red under the streaming yellowish illumination of the arc lights running along the promenade, and the message, though its import is the same, aims at a more general application. What it says, in the ballooning continuous letters of spray-can fluidity that loop up over the hood to obscure the view out of the windshield, is: Pig Killer. Only that. An epithet and accusation wrapped up in a single compound noun, which is, she has to admit, in her case at least, incontestable.