The Summer Garden (58 page)

Erin, her friend and the night receptionist, answered, and the first words out of her mouth were, “Tania! Why was your phone off the hook? I’ve been calling and calling you!”

“Why? What’s the matter?” Tatiana asked quietly.

“Steve Balkman was brought in here again with some other guy. Balkman is still unconscious, but the other one was a wild animal. They had to subdue him with tranquilizers. He was drunk and bleeding. He kept yelling, threatening unbelievable things, and before they shot him up full of drugs, he kept saying your husband’s name, cursing! Do you know anything about that?”

“I do. Is Sergeant Miller there?”

“He went out on his break. Who
is
that man? And how do you know him? We’ve been trying to call you for three hours!”

“Let me talk to Sergeant Miller. That man needs to be detained.”

“Tania! He can’t be, he left already.”

“He what?”

“Yes, that’s what I’m trying to tell you! At one thirty he stormed out of here without a doctor, without a discharge, without anything. Just pulled out his IV, put on his clothes and left.”

Tatiana’s voice was a whisper when she said, “Erin, tell Miller to send a car to my house.”

“What’s going—”

Tatiana hung up. But now her heart was thudding so hard that she couldn’t hear the quiet, the outside, the inside. Was it a car she had heard? Or was it a fever? A delusion?

She was standing at the kitchen counter. The shades weren’t drawn in the living room. They never drew the shades. There was no one around. Was there wind? She couldn’t tell, but the black-and-blue shadows kept moving in long strides through the windows. She couldn’t hear anything outside. She was paralyzed with deafening fear on the inside. She needed to walk across the living room into the bedroom and wake Alexander, but she couldn’t move. It would mean walking across the house, past two unshaded windows, past two doors.

She was still in the kitchen when the shadow in her window rose in the darkness into the shape of a man moving slowly up the steps of her front deck. She always left that window open so she could see Alexander walking up the steps to his home. This wasn’t the wind!

She moved, she took three steps away from the counter, past the front door, and before she could take another, the door crashed open, and before she had a chance to scream, Dudley, his mouth full of black holes, his eyes filled with black rage, was in front of her. He grabbed her around the mouth and throat so she couldn’t make a sound and twisted her head back so hard she thought her neck would break. There was a pistol in his hand. And she had so solicitously closed the bedroom door to let Alexander sleep!

But the front door, the door! It was such a loud crash. Maybe he would hear.

He heard.

The bedroom door slowly opened, and Alexander appeared and stood naked in the doorway. Dudley showed him Tatiana. “Here I am, motherfucker,” Dudley said, lisping through the missing incisors. “And here she is. We’re going to finish this in your house.” He was holding Tatiana around the throat. The cocked pistol was pointed at Alexander. “You pigging Red, don’t move. You think you can break my fucking face and get away with it? You don’t know soldiers for shit. I’ve brought it right back home to you.” Dudley’s hand around Tatiana’s throat fanned out over her breast. She exhaled piercingly, her eyes wildly pleading to Alexander, who stood like a tomb, not blinking, not breathing, looking only at Dudley. “Stevie told me she never had another cock but yours,” Dudley said. “Oh, we said, how
sweet
that must’ve been for you—with tiny little her. Well, guess what? I’m going to find out if she’s still like candy”—he smacked his lips—“find out right in front of you, and then you can have my sloppy seconds. Now step away from the door”—Dudley steadied his cocked weapon—“but slowly.”

Alexander did as he was told. He slowly stepped away from the door, and without anything else moving on him and without another instant of time ticking by, he raised his left arm that had been hidden behind the door jamb, pointed the Colt M1911 pistol straight at Tatiana’s face and fired in the dark.

The reverberating thudding impact of the .45 caliber round travelling a distance of 20 feet at a speed of 830 feet per second and breaking apart a skull was so loud and shocking that it felt as if Alexander had shot her. Dudley’s head exploded six inches away from Tatiana’s face. With Dudley still clutching her, they were both thrown back; he hit the wall behind him and slumped forward to the floor in a heap on top of her. She was blinded, she couldn’t see, she didn’t even know if she was screaming, or crying, or dying. His arm remained around her throat.

Alexander was pulling her from under him, untangling her, lifting her. That’s when she heard herself screaming. She started flailing at him, hitting him, trying to get away from him. He said nothing, did nothing but held her to him; he held her to his chest while she thrashed and screamed in terror. His heart was just inches away through his breastplate. It was beating steady, it was pounding on, and he was saying,
shh
, and his heart was saying shh, and staying sanguine. But she couldn’t calm down. She thought she had been hit. Her skin was cold, her own heartbeat at two hundred. Alexander sat her down, held her firmly around the shoulders, pressed her to him, and put his hand over her mouth. “Shh,” he said. “Calm down.” His hand remained over her as she breathed in out carbon dioxide. “Shh. Shh,” he kept saying. He took his hand away, opened her mouth and exhaled into it. “Feel my calm breath? Now slow down, it’s all right. Slow down.”

Her eyes gazed at him in horror. “You
shot
me?” she mouthed.

He rocked his head, rocked his body, rocked her. “No. You’re fine. Shh.”

“I’m covered in—is that my blood? Is that my skull?”

He held her as she continued to shake. They were still on the couch when the lights of the police cars flashed outside. The silk camisole she was wearing was blood slick and sheer, and he was still naked. The police officers walked in through the open door. Alexander left Tatiana on the couch and went to put on jeans and a T-shirt, bringing her a terry cloth robe. She remembered about the blood on her. She struggled to her feet to go get cleaned up, but the police said no, Alexander said no.

She knew two of the police officers. One of them was Miller. More police came. A reporter from the
Phoenix Sun
came. He was shooed away, but not before he took pictures.

The police began to ask her questions and took Alexander from her, to ask him questions in the bedroom. When he stood up to walk away, she started to cry.

He sat back down. She clutched him. “Don’t—don’t go—please.”

“Just in the bedroom, Tatiasha, just in our bedroom.”

Sitting, covered in blood, she talked to the police, her head down, while in the bedroom, away from her, Alexander, his head up, standing, talked to the police.

Why were you up, they asked her. Why did you call the hospital? Why were you in the kitchen? Why didn’t you run to the bedroom? Did you hear him come up the steps? Why did he come? Is it true he and your husband had a fight? We got a report of an assault, of two assaults. That man wanted to press charges against your husband. What happened? The man was badly hurt. The other man is badly hurt. Sergeant Miller intervened. The other man is Steve Balkman, he said. All the policemen nodded. Not again, someone said. Were they drunk, was your husband drunk? What was the fight over? Were there two separate fights or was it the same fight? Alexander shattered a man’s face, broke another man’s teeth, why? Was it true that there already was bad blood? His father, Bill Balkman, a long-time member of this community, said he didn’t know what had happened. It was a complete surprise. He said it was just a fight between boys. Boys will be boys, he said. He told them all to take it easy. His son was going to be fine. It would all be just fine. Yet a man was lying in her house dead.

Where did your husband shoot from? He didn’t know Dudley had a pistol, how did he know to take a gun to the bedroom door? Why did he use deadly force? Was there a way to get the man to release you without lethal violence? Was it breaking and entering? Attempted assault, attempted rape, attempted murder? Was it excessive force on the part of your husband to hit another man at a party simply for making a rude comment about you? And was Dudley overreacting to Alexander’s overreacting? And what did Steve Balkman do
this
time?

Two more reporters came from the
Phoenix Sun
, standing in the living room with their spiral notebooks and their whooshing camera flashes, writing it all down, recording it for the morning papers. Did he touch you? Did he hit you? Did he cut you? Is any of this your blood?

Was Tatiana hurt? No one could say for sure, not even Tatiana. Only Alexander said, no, she’s not hurt, she’s in shock. They were worried about her. They called for a doctor. Sergeant Miller said he wanted her to go to the hospital. She refused. Alexander thought she should go. She refused. She was fine, she said. She was a nurse, she knew about these things.

Hours went by. Alexander remained in the bedroom with the police. She would catch glimpses of him, pacing, smoking, sitting on the bed. Then they closed the door, and she cried again. Dudley’s body remained limp on the floor behind the bloodied couch where she sat.

Finally Alexander came out of the bedroom. She clutched at him desperately, she buried her face in him. He kept repeating,
shh, shh
. His arms were around her. Suddenly his presence terrified her. She began to cry again, push him away. The police, the medical emergency workers, the reporters, stood silently watching while Alexander, pressing her bloodied head to him, kept soothing her.
Tania
, he kept whispering,
shh, shh. Come on.
She might need a shot, he finally said, getting up to get her nurse’s bag. She is clammy. I’m fine, she said, but couldn’t stop shaking. She looked at Alexander standing smoking. He was calm. He wasn’t agitated, his hands were steady, his movements normal. He was in control of himself. She remembered him near Berlin on the hillside, strapped with machine guns, grenades, semi-automatic pistols, automatic weapons, alone in a trench, systematically mowing down the battalion of soldiers who were crawling, running, charging up the hill to kill him, to kill her.

A man came up the hill to hurt my wife, Alexander said to the police without emotion, a cigarette in his mouth. Look at the door. The front door lock is busted, one of the hinges broken. The police were going to check out the Montana prison escape story. They were going to talk to Bill Balkman about hiring a man suspected of escaping prison, suspected of murder. It was a federal offense to hire a man suspected of a felony.

How did Dudley know where Alexander lived? Who would have given Dudley Alexander’s address? And if it was Steve Balkman, wouldn’t he have had to give him the address
before
the party, since after the party, he wasn’t talking? Why would Steve do that—give Dudley Alexander’s address? That Steve Balkman, Miller said, shaking his head. Loved trouble, caused trouble, always been trouble. Well, that’s it, he said. This time we’re not keeping it out of the papers, no matter what his father does.

It was six in the morning. The light was barely steel blue over the mountains. Someone brought coffee, rolls. Alexander gave Tatiana a cup, tried to get her to eat.

A drunk, belligerent man was dead in the middle of the night after breaking and entering a mobile home in the McDowell Hills a mile up a dirt road from Pima Boulevard in the middle of nowhere. Those were the undisputed facts. Neither Tatiana nor Alexander shared with the police the three years of disputed facts. Or the lifetime of disputed facts.

Sun came up, more police came, took more pictures. At eight in the morning Alexander called Francesca and asked her to keep Anthony the rest of the day. Tatiana continued to sit on the couch. She leaned back at one point, fell back and thought she passed out. When she opened her eyes, she was in the crook of Alexander’s arm, and Dudley’s body was still behind her. The chalkline was on their black and white linoleum floor. In the light of merciless day, the blood was now drying and browning, chips of bone were over the living room carpet, in the hall in front of Anthony’s bedroom, on the counters, on the door, on the walls. Tatiana looked back only once. Dudley was still all over Tatiana. Nothing anybody could do about that until the police left.

The phone did not stop ringing.

The police asked Alexander if he knew Dudley’s next of kin. Who did they notify of his death? Alexander and Tatiana exchanged a disbelieving glance. Were they really being asked about Dudley’s next of kin?

A doctor finally arrived to examine her. She was fine, she said, shaking; she didn’t need a doctor. Alexander got her a blanket, covered her with it. Carefully the doctor removed the blanket and took off her robe. He asked if she’d been assaulted, if she’d been beaten, hurt, penetrated. She watched Alexander watching her from across the room in her stained see-through camisole. He walked over and pulled the terry robe back over her. The doctor pulled it off again, looked at her arms, her legs, her red throat where Dudley had grabbed her. Pulling her hair back, he noticed the suck marks on the back of her neck. He asked about them. She didn’t reply. Normally she would have blushed, but not this morning. “Are you hurt?” he asked.

“No.”

“What are those?”

She didn’t reply, just raised her eyes at him. The doctor was the one who became deeply flustered. “You’re covered with blood, with some bruises. It’s hard to tell where you’re actually hurt from this particular incident. I apologize.”

“I’m a nurse at Phoenix Memorial Hospital,” she said. “I know if I’m hurt.”

The doctor was David Bradley. She’d never met him. He was one of the attending physicians in ER, but he worked nights and she worked days. After seeing the marks on the back of her neck, he was unable to meet her eyes. She closed hers anyway.

Ten, eleven in the morning. Finally the coroner came and pronounced the body—dead! What would we do without coroners? Alexander quietly said to Tatiana.