Maya's Notebook: A Novel (34 page)

It was useless to try to stand up; I was shaken by convulsive spasms, with no control over my extremities. “Fuck, fuck, fuck, you have to get out of here, fuck, Laura, fuck,” the boy was repeating like a litany. Freddy went to the kitchen again and came back with a pipe, a blowtorch, and a handful of crack. He lit it and put it in my mouth. I inhaled deeply, and that gave me back a bit of strength. “How are we going to get out of here, Freddy?” I murmured; my teeth were chattering. “Walking is the only way. Stand up, Laura,” he answered.

And we walked out the simplest way, through the front door. Freddy had the remote control to open the gate, and we slipped down the stairs in the darkness, glued to the wall, him holding me up by the waist, me leaning on his shoulders. He was so small! But his brave heart more than made up for his fragility. Maybe some of the phantoms of the lower floors saw us and told Joe Martin and Chino that Freddy had rescued me, I’ll never know. If nobody told them, they probably guessed—who else would risk his life to help me?

We walked a few blocks in the shadow of the houses, getting away from the building. Freddy tried to stop several
taxis, but when they saw us they kept going or sped up; we must have been a dreadful sight. He took me to a bus stop and we got on the first one that came, without noticing where it was going or paying any attention to the expressions of repugnance on the faces of the passengers or the driver’s glances in the rearview mirror. I was disheveled, smelled of piss, had smears of blood on my arms and shoes. They could have ordered us off the bus or called the police, but we had a little luck there and they didn’t.

We got out at the last stop, where Freddy took me to a public washroom and I cleaned myself up as best I could, which wasn’t much, because my clothes and hair were disgusting, and then we got on another bus, and then another, and we went around and around Las Vegas for hours to shake them off. At last Freddy took me to a black neighborhood where I’d never been. The badly lit streets were empty at this time of night, lined with humble working-class houses, porches with wicker chairs, yards full of junk and old cars. After the terrible beating that boy had taken for going into a neighborhood he didn’t belong in, it took a lot of courage to take me there, but he didn’t seem worried, as if he’d walked down these streets many times.

We arrived at a house, no different from all the rest, and Freddy rang the bell several times, insistently. Finally we heard a thundering voice: “Who’s got the nerve to bother us so late!” The porch light came on, the door opened a few inches, and an eye inspected us. “Praise the Lord, is that you, Freddy?”

It was Olympia Pettiford in a plush pink bathrobe, the nurse who had taken care of Freddy in the hospital when he got beaten up, the gentle giant, Madonna of the defenseless,
the splendid woman who ran her own church of the Widows for Jesus. Olympia opened her door wide and hugged me in her African goddess’s embrace, “Poor girl, poor little girl.” She carried me to the sofa of her living room and laid me down there with the delicacy of a mother with a newborn baby.

In Olympia Pettiford’s house I
was completely trapped in the horror of withdrawal, worse than any physical pain, they say, but less than the moral agony of feeling I was despicable or the terrible pain of losing a loved one, like my Popo. I don’t want to even think of what it would be like to lose Daniel . . . Olympia’s husband, Jeremiah Pettiford, a real angel, and the Widows for Jesus, a group of bossy, generous, older black women, with sorrows of their own, took turns supporting me through the worst days. When my teeth were chattering so much that my voice could barely be heard begging for a drink, just one drink of something strong, anything just to survive, when the tremors and stomach cramps were tormenting me and the octopus of anguish wrapped its thousands of tentacles around my temples and squeezed, when I was sweating and struggling and fighting and trying to escape, those marvelous widows held me down, rocked me, consoled me, prayed and sang for me, and didn’t leave me alone for a single second.

“I’ve ruined my life, I can’t go on, I want to die,” I
sobbed at one moment, when I could articulate something more than insults, pleading, and swear words. Olympia grabbed me by the shoulders and forced me to look her in the eye, to focus, to pay attention, to listen to her: “Who told you it was going to be easy, girl? Endure it. Nobody dies of this. I forbid you to talk of dying, that’s a sin. Put yourself in the hands of Jesus and you’ll live decently for the seventy years you still have ahead of you.”

Somehow Olympia Pettiford managed to get me some antibiotics, which cured the urinary tract infection, and Valium to help me with the symptoms of withdrawal. I imagine she brought them from the hospital with a clean conscience; she counted on Jesus Christ’s forgiveness in advance. The cystitis had gone into my kidneys, she explained, but the injections she gave me got it under control in a few days, and she gave me a bottle of pills to take for the next two weeks. I don’t remember how long I was agonizing through withdrawal; it must have been two or three days, but it felt like a month.

I gradually began to emerge from the pit and peered at the surface. I could swallow a spoonful or two of soup or oatmeal with milk, rest and sleep a bit; the clock mocked me, and one hour stretched out into a week. The Widows bathed me, trimmed my nails, and deloused me, cured my inflamed injuries from needles and from the cords that had cut through my wrists and ankles, gave me massages with baby oil to loosen the scabs, got me clean clothes, and watched over me to keep me from jumping out a window and going to look for drugs. When I could finally stand up and walk on my own, they took me to their church, a shed painted sky blue, where members of the tiny congregation
gathered. There were no young people. All of them were African Americans, most of them women, and I knew that the few men who were there were not necessarily widowers. Jeremiah and Olympia Pettiford, dressed up in violet satin robes with yellow trim, conducted a service to give thanks to Jesus in my name. Those voices! They sang with their whole bodies, swaying like palm trees, their arms raised to the heavens, joyful, so joyful that their singing cleansed me from within.

Olympia and Jeremiah didn’t want
to know anything about me, not even my name. Freddy having brought me to their door was reason enough for them to take me in. They guessed that I was fleeing from something, and they preferred not to know what, in case someone asked them compromising questions. They prayed for Freddy daily, asked Jesus to look after him, to help him through detox and to accept help and love, “but sometimes Jesus is slow to answer, because he receives too many requests,” they explained. I couldn’t get Freddy out of my head either, worrying that he’d fall into the clutches of Joe Martin and Chino, but Olympia had confidence in his cunning and his amazing capacity for survival.

One week later, when the symptoms of the infection had cleared up and I could stay more or less quiet without Valium, I asked Olympia to call my grandma in California, because I couldn’t bring myself to do it. It was seven in the morning when Olympia dialed the number I gave her, and
my Nini answered immediately, as if she’d been sitting by the telephone for six months, waiting. “Your granddaughter is ready to go home. Come and pick her up.”

Eleven hours later, a red van pulled up in front of the Pettifords’ house. My Nini leaned on the horn with the urgency of love, and I fell into her arms before the satisfied gaze of the householders, several Widows, and Mike O’Kelly, who was getting his wheelchair out of the rented vehicle. “You little shit! If you only knew what you put us through! How hard could it have been just to call to tell us you were alive!” was my Nini’s greeting, shouted in Spanish, as happens when she’s agitated, and then: “You look awful, Maya, but your aura’s green, the color of healing, so that’s a good sign.” My grandma was much smaller than I remembered. She’d shrunk in a few months, and the purple circles under her eyes, which used to be so sensual, now made her look old. “I told your dad. He’s flying back from Dubai and will be waiting for you at home tomorrow,” she told me, clinging to my hand and staring at me with owl eyes to keep me from disappearing again, but she abstained from overwhelming me with questions. Soon the Widows called us to the table: fried chicken, french fries, breaded and fried vegetables, fritters, a feast of cholesterol to celebrate my family reunion.

After dinner, the Widows for
Jesus said good night and left while we gathered in the little living room, where the wheelchair could barely fit. Olympia gave my Nini and
Mike a summary of my state of health and advised them to get me into a rehabilitation program as soon as we got back to California, something Mike, who knows a lot about these matters, had already decided for himself, and then she discreetly left the room. I brought them up to date briefly on what my life had been like since May, skipping the night with Roy Fedgewick in the motel and the prostitution, which would have destroyed my Nini. As I told them about Brandon Leeman, or rather, Hank Trevor, the counterfeit money, the murderers who kidnapped me, and all the rest, my grandma writhed in her chair, repeating between clenched teeth, “You little shit,” but Snow White’s blue eyes shone like the headlights of an airplane. He was delighted finally to find himself in the middle of a real police investigation.

“Counterfeiting money is a very serious crime, with longer sentences than for premeditated murder,” he cheerfully informed us.

“That’s what Officer Arana told me. I better phone him and confess everything. He gave me his number,” I suggested.

“Great idea! Only my idiot granddaughter could come up with such a brilliant plan!” exclaimed my Nini. “Would you like to spend twenty years in San Quentin and end up in the gas chamber, you silly girl? Go on then, run and tell the cop you’re an accomplice.”

“Calm down, Nidia. The first priority is to destroy the evidence, so they won’t be able to connect your granddaughter to the money. Then we’ll take her to California without leaving any trace of her time in Las Vegas, and then, once she’s recuperated, we’ll make her disappear—
what do you reckon?”

“How are we going to do that?” she asked him.

“Everyone here knows her as Laura Barron, except for the Widows for Jesus, right, Maya?”

“The Widows don’t know my real name either,” I said.

“Excellent. We’ll go back to California in the van we rented,” Mike decided.

“Good thinking, Mike,” interjected my Nini, whose eyes were starting to twinkle as well. “To fly, Maya would need a ticket in her name and some form of ID—that leaves a trail—but we can cross the country by car without anybody finding out. We can return the van in Berkeley.”

In this simple way the two members of the Club of Criminals organized my escape from Sin City. It was late; we were tired and needed to sleep before putting the plan into action. I stayed that night with Olympia, while Mike and my grandmother stayed in a hotel. The next morning we got together with the Pettifords for breakfast, which we stretched out for as long as possible, sad to say good-bye to my benefactors. My Nini, extremely grateful and in eternal debt to the Pettifords, offered them unconditional hospitality in Berkeley—“My house is your home”—but to be on the safe side they didn’t want to know my last name or our address. However, when Snow White told them he had saved boys like Freddy and could help the kid, Olympia accepted his card. “The Widows for Jesus will look for him until we find him and then we’ll bring him to you, even if we have to tie him up,” she promised. I said good-bye to that adorable couple with a huge hug and a promise that we’d see each
other again.

My grandma, Mike, and I
headed for Beatty in the red van, arguing on the way about how to open the locks. We couldn’t put a stick of dynamite in front of the door, as my Nini suggested; if we did manage to do that, the explosion would call attention to us, and besides, brute force is the last thing a good detective resorts to.

They made me repeat ten times the details of the two trips I’d made to the storage lockup with Brandon Leeman. “What exactly was the message you were supposed to give his brother over the phone?” my Nini asked me once again.

“The address of where the bags were.”

“That’s all?”

“No! Now I remember. Leeman kept insisting that I should tell his brother where his El Paso TX bags were.”

“Was he referring to the city of El Paso in Texas?”

“I suppose so, but I’m not sure. The other bag was just a regular travel bag, without any logo on it.”

The two amateur detectives deduced that the combination to the locks was in that brand name, and that was why Leeman had been so insistent on me getting the message exactly right. It took them three minutes to translate the letters into numbers, such a simple code that it was disappointing; they were expecting a challenge worthy of their abilities. All they had to do was look at a telephone: the eight letters corresponded to eight digits, four for each combination, 3572 and 7689.

We stopped to buy rubber gloves, a cloth, a broom, matches, and rubbing alcohol, then went to a hardware store for a plastic container and a shovel, and finally to a gas station to fill up the tank and the container. We went on to the lockup, which luckily I recognized, because there were several in the same place. I found the right door, and my Nini, wearing gloves, opened the locks on her second attempt; I’ve rarely seen her more pleased. Inside were the two bags, just as Brandon Leeman had left them. I told them that on the two previous visits I hadn’t touched anything. Leeman was the one who opened the locks, took the bags out of the car, and locked up again when we left, but my Nini thought that since I’d been on drugs, I couldn’t be sure of anything. Mike wiped all the surfaces where there might be fingerprints with alcohol, from the door on in.

Out of curiosity, we glanced inside the crates and found rifles, pistols, and ammunition. My Nini suggested we should leave there armed like guerrilla fighters, since we were already in the criminal world up to our eyeballs, and Snow White thought it was a splendid idea, but I wouldn’t allow it. My Popo never wanted to own any firearms. He said the devil loaded them, and if you had one, you ended up using it and later regretting it. My Nini believed that if her husband had owned a weapon, he would have killed her when she threw his opera scores in the garbage, a week after they got married.