Earth Angel (28 page)

“She ghostwrote biographies?”

“Yes. One on Mary, Queen of Scots for some drip from Berkeley. One on Davy Crockett for some woman at Bryn Mawr—”

“
Davy Crockett: The Man Who Would Be King of the Frontier?
”

“Yup, that’s the one.”

“I read that. It was very good.”

He smiled. “For a dentist, you get around.” He let go of
my hand, leaned back against the sofa. He rubbed his eyes with the heels of his palms. “Anyway, after we split up again Lisa
convinced herself that she had a weight problem. That she’d never date again unless she dropped ten pounds. She started on
diet pills and soon was popping all kinds of stuff. She killed herself about a month ago.”

“I’m sorry.”

He nodded. “Me, too. I miss her. Thing is, since Lisa left here, the only other woman I’ve slept with in this house has been
Annie, who helped me through some rough times. I’d do anything for her and anything not to hurt her feelings. That’s why I
felt so bad last night when she said, ‘Davy, me boy, it’s not nice to mercy-fuck an old friend. It’s insulting.’ ”

“Jesus.” I cringed.

“Naturally, I claimed ignorance. But she just laughed. ‘I’m not looking for anything more than friendship here,’ she said.
‘So if you like her, run on over to her place and fuck her. I don’t mind.’ ”

I made a face. “She doesn’t mince words.”

“Thing is, I actually drove over to your motel last night.”

“What? When?”

“Late. Annie picked out my clothes. I looked very spiffy, I’ll have you know. She can be quite the matchmaker.” He sighed
heavily. “Anyway, I got there, stood outside your door. You were playing the guitar. A Paul Simon medley. You have a nice
voice.”

“You heard me sing? Now you must die.”

“I listened outside your door for about half an hour—”

“That’s kinda creepy, don’t you think?”

He nodded. “I didn’t have the courage to knock. I mean, we haven’t known each other that long and here I was standing outside
your door in the middle of the night. I didn’t think I was capable of acting that way. I think I scared myself.”

I looked at him plucking at a strand of shag in the carpet,
twirling it to a point. “You’re not just trying to throw a monkey wrench into my life, are you? To see what I’ll do, how
I’ll react? My life is sort of monkey-wrenched out.”

“Let’s just assess our situation, like adults,” he said. “Do you think about me when we’re not together?”

I thought of him, yes, but how much was because of him and how much was simply because he was the focus of my mission? I’d
thought of the others, too. Tina Grover, Gordon Moore. I was in a spot here. I didn’t want to say anything that might push
him away, but I didn’t want to encourage what would be an impossible long-term relationship. After all, I had other families
to visit, other survivors whose lives I had to change. Santa couldn’t stay at the first house he visited and move in.

“It’s not a trick question, Grace,” he said with a little annoyance. “Do you think of me when we’re not together?”

“Yes, David, I think of you.”

“A lot?”

I nodded. “A lot.”

“Me, too. Then it’s official, you’re wearing my letter sweater.”

I crawled across the carpet and kissed him. “And you can wear my underwear.”

We kissed again. I closed my eyes and listened. Ever since I was a child I would periodically close my eyes and pretend I
was blind, trying to distinguish sounds. Sometimes I’d sit still for over an hour. I remember being impressed by all those
movies in which a blind person knows things that sighted people don’t, just by the rhythm of a person’s footsteps, the smell
of perfume, the location of a callus on the hand. In
Star Wars
, Luke had to train without seeing; in martial arts films, guys are always being blindfolded and then attacked by a dozen
men. It was like having a sixth sense, like being psychic. That’s what I needed to successfully complete my mission, extra
senses.

I listened. Our kissing lips made wet smacking noises
like popping gum. His breathing was rapid. Over head, occasional footsteps in Josh’s room. Outside the house, a car drove
by. Then another.

If I halve the fare, I’ll be there
.

I opened my eyes and pushed David away. “David,” I said, “I think I know what the kidnapper’s note means.”

“Yes, Mom,” I said. “I know what time it is. But this is important.”

“A phone call in the middle of the night is always bad news. Especially at our ages. We thought someone was killed. You trying
to give me another stroke?”

“Yes, Mom, I am. Expect more of these calls.”

“Very funny.” She cleared her throat, which sounded like steam from a cappuccino-maker. “Where are you, Season? You were supposed
to come here and visit. Then you tell me you’re going to Europe. We haven’t heard from you in weeks, now we get this crazy
call about Frankie Laine. Are you on drugs? Where are you?”

“Mom, this is important. Play the song for me.”

“Isaac, you talk to her,” my mother said to my father.

“Sweetheart,” my father said to me sleepily. “I have to get up in two hours to bake.”

“I know, Dad. I’m sorry. Just bear with me. I need to hear that song on the record, that one from the movie,
3:10 to Yuma
. You know the one?”

“The movie? With Glenn Ford and Van Heflin?”

“Right. We have that old record where Frankie Laine sings all those theme songs from the Westerns. You know,
High Noon, The Hanging Tree
…”

“
The Hanging Tree
had Gary Cooper.” He yawned loudly. “And George C. Scott.”

“Yes.”

“How’s that song go again, ‘The Hanging Tree’?”

“Dad—”

“‘I went to town…’” he mumble-sang. Pause. “How’s it go again, pumpkin?”

I looked over at David, turned my back to him and lowered my voice. I sang softly to my father, “ ‘I came to town, to search
for gold.’ ”

“Right, right. Yes, that’s a good one.”

“Dad, I need to hear ‘3:10 to Yuma.’ Can you play it over the phone for me?”

“Hmmm.”

Silence. I feared he’d drifted off to sleep. “Dad?”

“He’s getting it,” my mother said. “You know he has to bake in two hours? He’s got thirty dozen bagels on order and half a
dozen cheesecakes. Where are you, Season?”

“See, I told you. They’re different.” I pressed the stop button on David’s tape recorder. Frankie Laine stopped singing “3:10
to Yuma.” The sound was a little fuzzy because it was recorded over the phone, and because my father sang along in a few places,
but the words were clear. I pressed the play button on the VCR. The opening credits to “3:10 to Yuma” rolled as Frankie Laine
sang an entirely different version of the song while a stagecoach in the distance rattled over parched, cracked earth. We’d
just returned from the video store with the tape half an hour ago.

“Wonder why they changed it for the album?” David said.

“It doesn’t matter. What’s important is that line on the album: ‘If I have the fare, I’ll be there.’ “ Like the kidnapper’s
note.”

“But his note says ‘halve the fare.’ Is he just being illiterate, a typo?”

I sat on his living room sofa and stretched my feet across to the cushions, kicking my shoes off. “I don’t know. We should
just call the police and leave them an anonymous message, let them figure it out.”

“Why anonymous?” he said. “You should take some of the credit for figuring this out.”

“Figuring what out? I remembered a line from a song. My dad is a Western-movie buff. Wanted to be a Jewish gunslinger, ended
up baking bagels. For a while he wanted Mom and me to call him
hombre
, after the Paul Newman movie. Anyway, he took me to a lot of movies.”

David came over to the sofa, lifted my legs and slid under them, resting my feet on his lap. “So, what do you want to do with
this information? Nothing?”

I thought about it. I didn’t want to risk getting involved with the police, have them reveal who I really was to David. “I’ll
call them on the way home, for whatever good it will do.”

“Obviously the kidnapper thinks it’s important. Maybe you know more, you just don’t know that you know.”

I swung my feet from his lap. “David, my life is complicated enough without getting involved in an alphabet mystery.”

“A what?”

“That’s what they call a mystery in which the criminal deliberately leaves clues, daring the cops to find him. Didn’t you
see
January Man
or
Silence of the Lambs?
”

He shook his head. “I missed them.”

“Anyway, the problem with those kinds of mysteries is that there are a million variables involved that writers conveniently
ignore. Like with this clue. Once we guess the movie, then what? The three-ten to Yuma is a train in the movie. Are we supposed
to go to the train station? He says ‘halve’ instead of ‘have.’ Does that mean we should find out how much it costs to go to
Yuma and then cut it in half, or does he mean how much it cost back in the Old West? And from where? And once we have this
magic number, what does that mean? A time, a place, a locker number? See, it’s bullshit. Only works in the movies.”

“Sure,” David said. “But this guy is basing his thinking
on the movies, so there’s a good chance it’s not going to be that complex. You’ve already solved the hard part, you’ve matched
a misleading quote to the right movie. How many people would have known that? He had to think he was pretty safe. Maybe he
didn’t sweat as hard over the rest of the clue.”

I pulled my feet from his lap and curled them under my butt. “Why are you getting so worked up over this, David?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know. It’s a puzzle. I like puzzles.” He reached over and touched my knee. “Also, I like you. I like
seeing how your mind works.”

“I’m not a tribe, David. I’m not a culture. I have no rites, no rituals. There’s nothing to study.”

“You sang to your father,” he said with a smile. “You sang to your father and that made me feel… “ He laughed… good. Loving.
I wanted you to stay here with me, and figuring out what that stupid line meant was a good excuse. I know we’re not going
to solve anything. Christ, I don’t even care.”

I closed my eyes, listened. I was blind. What did I hear? David breathing. No cars. No footsteps. It was late. I opened my
eyes. “This is what I know: the movie was made in nineteen fifty-seven. It stars Glenn Ford and Van Heflin. The screenplay
was written by Halsted Welles, based on an Elmore Leonard short story. Directed by Delmer Daves. It’s about a farmer, Van
Heflin, who volunteers to take an outlaw, Glenn Ford, to catch the train, even though he knows Ford’s gang will be after him.
At first he does it for the money, so he can buy water rights and save his farm from the drought. But later, when Ford tries
to bribe him, he does it because it’s right, to make a better world for his wife and sons. Very moralistic tale.”

“I wish I’d seen it. Sounds like something the Moki would have enjoyed.”

“Let me ask you something. All those stories you told
the Moki. Did you tell them they were common stories or did you take credit for making them up yourself?”

“Let’s see how well you know me. What do you think I did?”

“I think you pretended you made them up.”

“I guess you do know me after all,” he said.

I looked at him.

“You’re disappointed in me?” he asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Well, you have to understand something about the Moki. They don’t think of stories as being authored. They think of them
as being compulsory, something that just tumbles out of a person. They don’t distinguish between fact and fiction. Once a
story is told, it becomes fact. No one owns fact.”

“That must get complicated, especially when someone lies.”

“They don’t consider anything a lie. It’s just another version of the facts. If a person chooses to see certain events in
a distorted way, then that person is ill. If I’d told them I was retelling stories from others, they wouldn’t have understood.”

“Why didn’t you just tell me that up front? Why let me think the worst of you?”

“Why think the worst of me?”

I stood up and slipped my feet into my shoes. “I’m going home. We may be moving into an area where we’ll say something we
don’t want to. I don’t want to start something.”

“Maybe we should. It’s better than just surface chatter.”

I didn’t respond. I didn’t have the courage to go beneath the surface chatter. Floating was what I wanted, it was what I was
good at.

David followed me to the door. “Okay, forget us for a moment. Let’s go back to a neutral topic: the kidnapper. Here’s what
I think. I think ‘halve’ means to divide three-ten
in half. That gives us one fifty-five, which I think is an address. He can’t be so obtuse that there’s no way for us to figure
it out. Eventually he’s going to want to tell the world what these clues mean, and he’ll want them to be accessible enough
that the police will look like morons.”

“Is this a ploy to keep me here, David?”

“Damn right.”

I shrugged. “Do you have a street map of Santa Barbara?”

Three hours later we were still sprawled out on the living room floor. We were drinking cold coffee and eating English muffins.
We’d watched the entire movie, looking for clues. We’d played the theme song—both versions—dozens of times. We’d written endless
variations on complimentary note pads imprinted with a neighborhood real estate agent’s face.

“What’re you guys doing?” Rachel asked from the stairs. She was wearing a long T-shirt that came to her thighs and thick white
socks. She looked sleepy. And innocently sexy. And I realized now why David was so concerned with figuring out the note.

“We’re playing a game,” he said. “Go back to sleep.”

“What’s that song you keep playing?”

“Nothing. Something by Frankie Laine.”

“Who’s he?”

“A guy. An old singer, like Tony Bennett. You know Tony Bennett?”

She nodded, turned, and climbed the stairs.

I looked at David. It was in his eyes, the fear for her, the desire to protect her. He looked away, embarrassed.