Fool's Puzzle (4 page)

At six-thirty, my best friend, Elvia, called.

“You’re still coming, aren’t you?” she asked.

“Wouldn’t miss it,” I said. “Is the birdman there yet?”

“No smart remarks tonight, Benni. He’s very serious about his work.”

Elvia managed Blind Harry’s Bookstore and Coffee House for the absentee owner, a shadowy Scottish man who owned three casinos in Reno. He bought it five years ago as a tax write-off and expected to keep it as such. He underestimated Elvia. The first year, she finagled funds out of him to make the store’s inventory the largest in the county. The second year, she converted the basement storage area to a coffeehouse with round oak tables that seated six, and walls lined with used books that were borrowed and replenished on a regular basis by customers. Serving the best espresso and cheesecake in town, it became the favorite hangout for college kids as well as a growing literary crowd moving in from L.A. and San Francisco.

“I’ll be good,” I said. “Is there going to be any food at this thing? All I’ve had to eat today was a jelly doughnut and I’m starving.”

“Don’t worry,” she said. “I’ll see that you’re fed. Do you look presentable?”

I inspected my mottled Reeboks and brushed at the dried mud. “Reasonably so.”

“What are you wearing?” she asked. Since she’d taken charge of the bookstore, her personal shopping habits had caused Anne Klein stock to rise twenty points.

“Who are you, my mother? Don’t worry. I look exactly like someone who slogs through marshes looking at birds.”

“Condors are not waterfowl,” she said. “Didn’t you read the cards I gave you?”

I decided silence was the safest response.

“Benni!” she wailed. “You promised.”

“I’ll be fine, Elvia. I’ll memorize them on the way over. Have I ever let you down before?”

She groaned and hung up.

 

When I walked through the main hall, Eric was, as I’d expected, nowhere to be found. There was evidence that he’d worked, but not enough to convict him. My stomach fluttered in panic, a feeling I attempted to reason away. Not counting Thanksgiving, we still had a day and a half until the pre-showing and auction on Friday night. Plenty of time.

“Honey,” Jack used to say when he’d walk in the door, dusty and tired after a long day, and I’d hit him with a list of chores, “I’d be happy to do whatever you need doing, but I can only do one thing at a time.”

In the last nine months, his words came back to me whenever I thought I wouldn’t make it through another day, another new problem. One thing at a time. And the one thing I needed to do at that particular moment was go see a man about some birds.

IT TOOK ME twenty minutes to get a space in the crowded municipal parking lot on Lopez Street. San Celina’s downtown merchants had started their tussle for holiday dollars the week before with implausible window displays of a Willie Nelson Santa bulldogging Rudolph, lavender Christmas trees with power tool ornaments, and pop art ski wear designed for bodies that could never possibly have experienced the joy of a McDonald’s sundae with double fudge.

In the last hour, the rain had stopped, but the infamous, jacket-piercing San Celina wind stung my cheeks as I stepped down from the truck. I shoved my hands deep into the pockets of my sheepskin coat. As I walked toward Blind Harry’s, uneasy feelings about the approaching holiday surrounded me like a mulish tule fog.

I’d traveled this route with Jack hundreds of times. The malted milk scent of baking waffle cones, the monkey chatter of skittish teenagers, the wrought-iron street lamps, draped with fake evergreen and twinkly lights, were like a favorite old movie. Only the distance felt different. The three long blocks to the bookstore seemed to stretch the length of my life.

“Where have you been?” Elvia asked. She stood tapping her foot at the top of the scuffed wooden stairs leading to the coffeehouse. “Professor Murphy’s talk starts in ten minutes.” She searched my face with black, vigilant eyes. “Oh,
amiga,
are you all right?”

“Nice hairdo.” I pretended not to hear her question as we walked down the stairs. There’s just no way to explain despair without sounding melodramatic. “Isn’t that a French twist? Looks very ... French.”

She touched her glossy hair self-consciously and tried not to appear flattered. Elvia’s great disappointment in life, to the irritation of her six brothers and bewilderment of her native Mexican parents, was to have been born an American rather than a European.

“Sit there.” She pointed to a round table in front of an antique wooden pulpit where a short, rabbit-nosed man in an olive-green corduroy jacket muttered to himself while shuffling through a stack of papers. “Did you look at my questions?”

“Yes,” I said. I had indeed looked at the questions. Just hadn’t read them. I pulled the cards out of my pocket and waved them at her.

“Don’t be so obvious.” She pushed me down in one of the oakwood ladderback chairs she’d purchased when the city built the new public library last year.

“You’re so bossy.”

“Look through his book,” she whispered. She shoved a heavy coffee table book in front of me. The cover featured a picture of the ugliest bird I’d ever seen. “Take it up to be signed after his talk.”

“Do I get to keep it?” Though in my estimation, a jumbo-sized book on the California condor was not adequate compensation for my trouble, it would make a fine Christmas gift for Dove, one she could complain about for months.

“Yes, yes.” She fluttered the air around her with slender fingers and hurried to the back of the room to supervise the buffet of finger sandwiches, pastries and horrible French roast coffee she always served at her literary events.

I tucked the book under my arm and moved to a side table. If forced into asking fabricated questions, I preferred not sitting front-and-center while doing it.

To my surprise, the birdman’s talk proved interesting and amusing. With his soft-spoken, slightly batty sense of humor, he seduced the audience of mostly senior citizens attending for the free food into sympathetic support for the almost extinct California condor. As he explained in elaborate, somewhat graphic detail how condors mated, I felt a sharp thwack on the back of my head.

“Hey, cut it out,” I said. “Those nails of yours ought to be registered as lethal weapons.”

“How condors mate was not one of the questions I gave you.” Elvia set a steaming white mug in front of me. Her Chanel red lips curved upward, softening her reprimand.

“He seems to be enjoying himself.” I held my face over the
café au lait
and inhaled the aroma before taking a sip. She offered a plate of tiny sandwiches. I popped one of the crustless triangles in my mouth, then grimaced. “What is this?”

“Watercress and parsley,” she said. “The professor’s a vegetarian.”

“I must be starving.” I grabbed another. “They’re awful.”

“What’s awful?” said a voice behind us.

“Hey, Marla,” I said. “What are you doing here?”

“I’m double-parked. We need a key.” She pushed a long strand of dark hair behind her ear and adjusted her red baseball cap.

“I guess it was too much to expect Eric to be there working. Shoot, the spare keys are in my desk.”

“I’ve got Eric with me, but he doesn’t have his keys.”

“If I ever figure out why Constance keeps him on, I’ll give myself a raise.” I pulled my key ring out of my purse and twisted the museum keys off. “I’ll need them to open up in the morning, so I’ll come by later. That is, unless you want to be up there bright and early.”

“Sorry, I’m an artist. I don’t do mornings.”

“I should be so lucky. How long are you staying tonight?”

“Three, maybe four hours.” She pocketed the keys and started up the stairs.

“Wait, I’ll go with you. It’ll be wasted breath, but I need to talk to Rita and Eric.” I grabbed another green-filled triangle and stood up. “You know, these taste a lot like how alfalfa smells.”

“Benni,” Elvia protested. “The professor’s still talking.”

“Two minutes,” I said. “He won’t even know I’m gone.” I jerked my thumb at the professor, who, with an ecstatic expression and outstretched arms, imitated condor flight. A couple of bemused-looking elderly ladies at a front table leaned back slightly in their chairs as he swooped in their direction. “Believe me, Elvia, he’ll never notice.”

On the passenger side of Marla’s blue Volkswagen van, in front of an extra-wide visor mirror, my cousin Rita practiced her smoky-eyed, pouty look. In the back seat, eyes closed, Eric bobbed his head to the Walkman sprouting from his ears.

“Where have you been?” I propped my elbows on the window ledge. “It’s an open question,” I added in a loud voice. Without opening his eyes, Eric threw me a two-finger kiss.

“Around,” Rita said. She poked at her shoulder-length Dolly Parton hair with a bright pink fingernail.

Superficially, our looks affirm our familial connection, though I’m still not convinced of the Southern dictum declaring fifth cousins, or whatever we are, family. At slightly over five feet tall with curly, reddish-blond hair and hazel eyes, we sound the same on paper, the difference being I use one can of hairspray a year where she is personally responsible for at least a half-mile hole of ruined ozone layer.

“Garnet’s going nuts,” I said. “Would you give her a call so she’ll quit bugging Dove who will then quit bugging me?”

“She’s just here to deliver a message from Mama,” she said. “And I know what it is. Come home now.” She pumped a tube of mascara, and flashing the whites of her eyes, applied what had to be a fifth coat. “Thanks, but I’ll pass. I’m through with the South. I’m a Westerner now.”

“Well, do whatever you want. Just be careful.”

“I intend to.” She smiled chimpanzee-wide, and rubbed at a spot of pink lipstick on her teeth.

“Be careful?” I asked hopefully.

She laughed and snapped the visor up. “Right. Loosen up, Benni. You sound like my mother.”

“Your way of loosening up is a bit risky for me,” I said. The psychic mileage between age twenty-one and thirty-four beat the distance to Mars.

“You two done squabbling?” Marla said from the driver’s seat. “Some people have work to get done.”

“Lock the studio doors behind you,” I called after them. “And get those quilts hung.” Eric’s head bobbed up and down, though I suspected it had nothing to do with my request.

By the time I walked back downstairs, Professor Murphy had finished his flight and was signing books.

“And what is your name, young lady?” He poised a chubby hand over the flyleaf of my copy.

“Dove Ramsey,” I said. Now she wouldn’t even be able to recycle it. Garnet owed me; it probably would have been her next birthday present.

“Lovely bird, the dove.” He signed his name with a flourish. “Not a condor, but a lovely bird, nonetheless.”

I spent the next hour upstairs in the bookstore attempting some half-hearted Christmas shopping. I chose a book on championship poker strategy for Dove, to make up for the condor book. The updated
Veterinary Handbook for Cattlemen
took care of Daddy. But before making a bigger dent in my list, I became engrossed in an oral-history book chronicling the lives of Midwestern farm women during the Dust Bowl years of the 1930’s. Edith Bennett was saying how hard her husband took it seeing the farm blow away, how he took his pain out gettin‘ mad with her and how a woman always seems more able to rise above it, take more hurting and keep on going. Then she gave her recipe for Mock Apple Pie made with soda crackers. As I was mentally rolling out the crust along with her, the store’s lights blinked twice and the round schoolhouse clock in the children’s department chimed ten o’clock.

At the front of the store Elvia helped with the last-minute rush of customers. When I caught her eye, she raised her eyebrows in question.

“When you have time, put these on my account,” I said over the crowd. I shoved the books across the counter to her.

“Thanks for coming,
gringa,”
she said. “Even if you embarrassed all my senior citizens with your obscene questions.”

“Just trying to add a little excitement to the dry tomes of avian academia.”

She rolled her eyes and turned back to the cash register.

I hurried toward my truck, pulling up the collar of my jacket against the cold mist swirling around me. Annoyed at myself for not thinking to give the extra keys to Marla that morning, I tried not to think about the warm bed waiting for me at home.

The truck tires hissed over wet, luminous streets as I drove the two miles to the museum. Just before I turned into the parking lot, Marla’s van sped past me. Rita was driving. Alone. I honked once and waved. She either didn’t see me or ignored me. She must be going out to get food, I thought.

I’d discovered since working at the co-op that most craftspeople, once they finally started, didn’t like to take the time to stop for meals, so munched along as they worked. Marla was no exception. I mentally congratulated Marla for putting Rita to some use.

Parking lot gravel popped and cracked like rice cereal under my Reeboks as I walked toward the museum. The front door yawned at me.

“Well, that’s just great,” I said out loud. So much for security. Pulling the door closed behind me and locking it, I walked past the still-unfinished quilt exhibit, across the patio and into the main studio, my feelings cascading from anger to frustration to resignation because there was nothing you could do to force people into being anything but what they are.

The area around the potter’s wheel informed me Marla was still working. A pot posed half-formed on the wheel; clay, water, rags, two cans of Diet Coke and an empty bag of corn chips decorated a worktable nearby. Somewhere a radio played low—Johnny Cash was falling into a ring of fire. I hugged my jacket closer and envied him.