The Hummingbird's Cage (5 page)

Now others at the bar were beginning to laugh, too. Jim's face was turning white; I could feel him vibrate with rage.

With an effort he spat out between clenched teeth: “And how does Sam here like worn-out pussy?”

Sam shifted forward menacingly, but Bernadette raised a finger that stopped him in his tracks. She was appraising Jim now with the dead calm of a stone Madonna. When she smiled, it was beatific.

“Once he gets past the worn-out part,” she purred, “he likes it just fine.”

The bar burst into roars of laughter. Still smiling, Bernadette leaned back against Sam, who clasped her in a bear hug and spun her on her heels back to their bottle of tequila.

When Jim became aware of me at last, he wrenched my arm so hard I thought his fingers would tear muscle. Before he pulled me toward the exit, I threw a last glance at Bernadette, who caught it as she turned toward us from the bar.

The look on my face wiped the laughter from hers.

Around
two thirty in the afternoon came the growling racket of a motorcycle muffler in the drive. Then a knock on the front door. I didn't answer. I didn't intend to, but the knock came again. Then again. And, finally, a voice:

“I know you're in there.”

With a jolt, I recognized the voice: it was Bernadette's.

She was the last person I expected on my doorstep, and a small part of me was intrigued. The rest of me, though, was shot through with panic. And curiosity alone couldn't tamp that down, nor stir me from my blanket on the couch. I held myself as still as I could. I didn't dare breathe.

Knock knock knock knock
.

“I can keep this up all afternoon,” she called out, but it sounded more like determination than threat, so I called back, my voice croaking from disuse: “Jim's not here.”

“I'm not here to see that bastard,” she said quietly. “I'm here to see you.”

My first instinct was to batten down the hatches. To look around for something heavy to defend myself. To make up some story to shoo her off my porch and back on her bike, heading west toward Wheeler. But both would have taken more strength than I had in me.

It took a while to push myself off the couch and shuffle to the door, clutching at my bathrobe. I slipped the chain from the lock and pulled the door wide. I let her look at me.

She didn't speak for a long while. Then she muttered, “Holy shit.”

I couldn't look her in the eye. I waited for her to have her fill, to assess me one more time, then leave me alone. Instead she said:

“Let's have some tea, Joanna.”

She stepped inside and gently took my elbow as I shuffled painfully back to the couch. She eased me back onto the blanket. She pulled off her leather jacket and pushed up her shirtsleeves, heading to the kitchen. She put the kettle on to boil and rummaged in the cabinets for cups and tea bags and sugar. She fixed a tray with china cups in their matching saucers, napkins, some saltine crackers, a box of tissues and a bottle of ibuprofen. She was efficient, with an eye for detail. She sat opposite me in the overstuffed chair, and we sipped Earl Grey in a weirdly companionable silence. Then she smiled.

“You ever have a tea party with a biker chick before?”

I laughed despite myself, but I felt out of practice, and it came out more of a hiccup, which hurt my sore ribs. I hiccupped again, and then again. It became a sob. My hand flew to my mouth, where the bottom lip was split and stinging.
Tears sprang to my puffy eyes, one still swelled nearly closed, spilling down my bruised cheeks. Swiftly, Bernadette was beside me on the couch, handing me tissues, letting me cry it out, in no particular hurry.

When I was done, she didn't ask what had happened. Instead, she said, “Let me show you something.”

She cocked her head and pushed her long black hair to the side, holding it back so I could see the spot she was pointing to just above her left ear. I could clearly make out a gnarled white scar running five inches along her scalp.

“Bottle of Jose Cuervo,” she said. “Five staples to close. Concussion.”

“Did you go to the police?”

“Now, now, Jo. You're smarter than that. Even back then, he
was
the police. And he had a police buddy who said he'd swear I was whoring on Bernalillo Road, resisted arrest, assaulted an officer, got what I had coming.”

I gasped. “Frank.”

“I see you've met. Anyway, a split scalp—I got off easy, all things considered. I left town and never looked back.”

“You were afraid he'd kill you.”

She snorted. “Honey, I was afraid I'd kill
him
. I grew up on the rez. I've butchered enough game and livestock to know where the knife goes. So I guess you could say he got off easy, too. He just doesn't know it.”

The prospect made my heart leap. If only she'd stayed in Wheeler, if only she hadn't left, had put her hunting knife to good use . . . “I wish you
had
killed him.”

She shrugged. “That's the bruises talking.”

Her indifference stung—clearly she had no idea.

Finally I asked, “Did you meet him here, or in Utah?”

“Utah? Did he tell you he was from Utah? Honey, he's from Tucumcari. The way I hear it, they ran the whole family out of town. He's never been very clear about parents, siblings, that sort of thing. I think he's pure self-invention by now.” She shrugged. “Nothing wrong with that, necessarily. We're all entitled to second chances, right? But I always did wonder what he did with his first one. We were only together a few months, but that was enough. I've always been a sucker for a handsome devil—only, between us girls, I prefer them more handsome than devil. Jim was a helluva wild man then. Not so much family oriented. Did he tell you about the time he shot up a motel room?”

“Why on earth?”

“Why on earth not? That's just the way he was. Half the men in uniform back then should have been behind bars at one time or another.” She gave me a sidelong glance. “I hear Jim finally made it inside a jail cell a few months ago. I only regret I wasn't here to take a picture. I would have framed it.”

“A picture?” I spat the words out.

Her laughter stopped short. “Sorry. I shouldn't take pleasure in that bastard's misery, when I know damn well he takes plenty of company with him. Honey, the stories I could tell you . . .”

Her voice trailed off bitterly; her dark eyes grew darker.

I didn't know what she expected when she came knocking on my door—checking up on a batterer's wife, an hour of tea and sympathy. Penitence for poking a rattlesnake that was sleeping in someone else's lap. And I wasn't sure what I could expect of her.

But, for the first time ever, there was someone sitting right in front of me who knew Jim—the real Jim, not the affable
doppelgänger he presented to everyone else. She knew him—if not to all his dark depths, then at least to his capacity for them. She had loved him, too. Once. And he'd made her bleed. Even her.

“The stories—” I stuttered. “The stories I could tell . . .”

And the next thing I knew, I was telling her—the dark things, the forbidden things, the things I'd never told anyone, could never tell anyone, especially when they pressed and prodded and tried to wring it out of me for my own good. The bruises, the bones, the burns, the scars—these are just the tangibles they can check off on any medical report. How do you quantify the words that cut as deep? The bottomless, wretched fear of more of the same?

The dam cracked; the truth gushed out. I told her about my tea tin, the groceries, the gas. The fishbowl isolation. The suffocating prison of this tin-roofed house.

The steady erosion of my own sanity. The no way out. The gut-churning horror of being forced to live every day with a monster.

I took a deep breath and braced and told her about Tinkerbell. About the grave he made me dig, the limp body, the spear-headed shovel.

About Laurel, and how hard it is to pretend to your clever child that everything's all right, that Daddy loves her, that Daddy's a good man, that Daddy would never, ever turn on her one day.

Bernadette was staring at me, expressionless. I searched her face for traces of disgust, for judgment, for compassion, for absolution. I couldn't stop myself.

I took another shuddering breath and told her what I hadn't even allowed myself to think too much about, for fear of
making it real. Making it true. About the night Jim returned home from his jail stint, just after New Year's. The welcoming meal I'd prepared—pot roast, potatoes, coconut cake. Laurel had dressed pretty for her daddy in a crimson velvet dress with bows. We'd sat down as a family, and Jim seemed happy to be home, kissing Laurel good night, even tucking her in. When she was finally asleep, as I was washing the dinner dishes, Jim called for me from outside. He was in the backyard near the woodshed. He was wearing gloves, and I thought he was restacking the cordwood, but it wasn't that. As I got close, I could see his face in the lantern light, and it was twisted with the old familiar rage. My stomach heaved. He grabbed my hair and pulled me inside, yanking out hunks till I gasped. He dragged me across the shed, pulled me upright, and with his other hand grabbed an object hanging on the wall. He held it close to my face so I could make it out. It was a machete.

People disappear all the time, he'd said. He's a cop; he should know. No one would miss you, he said. Hell, no one would even notice. And if they did, he'd just tell them I'd left him and gone back to my family in another state. No one would check. No one would care.

This is my future, he told me. This is my end, if I ever, ever, ever humiliate him like that again.

Bernadette was still staring at me, her eyes still blank. I waited for her to say something. To say anything. To tell me what a pathetic wreck I was. What a terrible mother. To hop on her motorcycle and leave a trail of diesel fumes all the way to the Javelina so she could sit with Sam and tell him all about the nutcase outside town.

Instead, she said, “Show me.”

She helped me up again, and slowly I led her through the
kitchen, through the back door, through the yard. When I got to the shed, I hesitated. I hadn't been inside since that night. Bernadette paused, too, for a second, then moved past to unlatch the rough plank door. She opened it and stepped in. I forced myself to follow. It was musty and close and smelled of motor oil. “This is bad,” she muttered, glancing around. “Bad energy.” The afternoon sun cut through the dusty window like a blade; the light was weak, but it was enough for her to scan the walls, taking in the rakes, the spades, all the garden hand tools. Then her gaze rested on one item in particular. It was a machete, hanging just where Jim had left it.

She shook her head, backing away.

She didn't speak again until we returned to the house. Then she paced the living room, her steel-toed boots clicking up and down the wood floor. I waited expectantly, not knowing for what.

“Where's your daughter?” she asked.

I told her Laurel was staying with a school friend for a few days. Bernadette nodded.

“Now, think hard. Give me a name and a number. Someone you can trust. Someone who will take you and your daughter at a moment's notice.”

I shook my head, desperate. “No one. There's no one. They're all Jim's friends here. My family's gone. It's been ten years—”

“It doesn't have to be someone you know well, or even recently,” Bernadette said. “You'd be surprised how many people are willing to help, if they're only asked. But make it someone as far away from here as possible.”

A name sprang to mind.

“I used to know someone in Boston.”

Bernadette seemed pleased. “Very good. Write it down.”

There was a notepad and pen on the end table beside the telephone. She grabbed it and handed it to me.

“In two days, when Jim has left for his shift,” she continued, “I'm coming back here and giving you cash and two plane tickets out of Albuquerque for Boston. Do you know where the Albuquerque airport is? Never mind—I'll give you a map anyway. You'll leave as soon as I get here, gas up your car and drive hell-bent for leather. Take nothing with you. Nothing—do you understand? By the time Jim gets home, you'll be in coach, eating peanuts somewhere over Chicago.”

Suddenly the enormity of what she was plotting overwhelmed me. The insurrection was too massive, too fast. The blood was draining to my feet. I began to shake, murmuring protests.

“I can't. Wait. Please. Two days is too soon. I can barely walk. Laurel has to finish school. Laurel has to finish school. Please, she has to.”

Bernadette stared at me again, but not unkindly. I was ashamed at my weakness. Oma used to tell me stories of how she and her husband and their young daughter—my mother—had fled East Germany and the communist occupation. Left their lovely home one night without warning or preparation, their dinner half eaten on the table, racing on foot toward the western border with nothing but the clothes on their backs, the barking of search dogs in the distance. I was just a child at the time, and shivered at the story, but Oma would hug me and kiss my cheek.
Mut,
she'd say.
Courage
. And here I was, frantic over pulling my seven-year-old from school early.

But of course my panic was more than that—when you're released suddenly from a dungeon, sunlight is a painful thing.
Prisoners need time to adjust. Bernadette must have understood.

She nodded. “When's the school year over?”

I did the calculation as fast as my feverish brain could manage. “Fourteen days. June fourth.”

“Does Jim work that day?”

Another calculation. “Yes.”

“Good. June fourth. Until then, pretend everything is okay. Nothing has changed—understand?”

“I can do that.”

“No doubt. We're staying at the Palomino Motel, just up the road.” She took the notepad and pen from my hand and began writing. “This is the number. Put it somewhere Jim won't find it. But don't call, understand me? Don't call unless it's life or death.”

She stopped herself and chuckled. “I mean,
imminent
.”

It struck me that, whatever I was risking, this virtual stranger was willing to risk just as much. And for no good reason that I could see. I was confused, light-headed, struggling for words, trying to stammer out gratitude.

“I don't know how to repay you . . . I don't know why you're doing this.”

“Don't you?” She cocked her head and smiled down at me as if I were a child who'd just said something precocious.

“Because you asked.”