Twisted: The Collected Stories (43 page)

His eyes gleamed. “I took her home and we stood on the steps of her parents’ house—she was still living with them. We talked for a while more then she said she had to get to bed. You catch that? Like she could’ve said, ‘I have to be going.’ Or just ‘Good night.’ But she worked the word
bed
into it. I know, you’re in love, you look for messages like that. Only in this case, it wasn’t Manko’s imagination working overtime, no sir.”

Outside, a light rain had started falling and the wind had come up. I rose and shut the window.

“The next day I kept getting distracted at work. I’d think about her face, her voice. No woman’s ever affected me like that. On break I called her and asked her out for the next weekend. She said sure and said she was glad to hear from me. That set up my day. Hell, it set up my
week.
After work I went to the library and looked some things up. I found out about
her last name. Morgan—if you spell it a little different—it means ‘morning’ in German. And I dug up some articles about the family. Like, they’re rich. Filthy. The house in Hillborne wasn’t their only place. There was one in Aspen, too, and one in Vermont. Oh, and an apartment in New York.”

“A pied-à-terre.”

His brief laugh again. The smile faded. “And then there was her father. Thomas Morgan.” He peered into his coffee cup like a fortune-teller looking at tea leaves. “He’s one of those guys a hundred years ago you’d call him a tycoon.”

“What would you call him now?”

Manko laughed grimly, as if I’d made a clever but cruel joke. He lifted his cup toward me—a toast, it seemed—then continued. “He inherited this company that makes gaskets and nozzles and stuff. He’s about fifty-five and is he
tough.
A big guy, but not fat. A droopy black mustache, and his eyes look you over like he couldn’t care less about you but at the same time he’s sizing you up, like every fault, every dirty thought you ever had, he knows it.

“We caught sight of each other when I dropped Allison off, and I knew, I just somehow
knew
that we were going to go head to head some day. I didn’t really think about it then but deep inside, the thought was there.”

“What about her mother?”

“Allison’s mom? She’s a socialite. She flits around, Allison told me. Man, what a great word.
Flit.
I can picture the old broad going to bridge games and tea parties. Allison’s their only child.” His face suddenly grew dark. “That, I figured out later, explains a lot.”

“What?” I asked.

“Why her father got on my case in a big way. I’ll get to that. Don’t rush the Manko Man, Frankie.”

I smiled in deference.

“Our second date went even better than the first. We saw some movie, I forget what, then I drove her home. . . .” His voice trailed off. Then he said, “I asked her out for a few days after that but she couldn’t make it. Ditto the next day and the next too. I was pissed at first. Then I got paranoid. Was she trying to, you know, dump me?

“But then she explained it. She was working two shifts whenever she could. I thought, This’s pretty funny. I mean, her father’s loaded. But, see, there was a
reason.
She’s just like me. Independent. She dropped out of college to work in the hospital. She was saving her own money to travel. She didn’t want to owe the old man anything.
That’s
why she loved listening to me talk, telling her ’bout leaving Kansas when I was seventeen and thumbing around the country and overseas, getting into scrapes. Allison had it in her to do the same thing. Man, that was great. I love having a woman with a mind of her own.”

“Do you, now?” I asked, but Manko was immune to irony.

“In the back of my mind I was thinking about all the places I’d like to go with her. I’d send her clippings from travel magazines.
National Geographic
s. On our first date she’d told me that she loved poetry so I wrote her poems about traveling. It’s funny. I never wrote anything before in my life—a few letters maybe, some shit in school—but those poems,
man, they just poured out of me. A hundred of ’em.

“Well, next thing I knew, bang, we were in love. See, that’s the thing about . . . 
transcendent
love. It happens right away or it doesn’t happen at all. Two weeks, and we were totally in love. I was ready to propose. . . . Ah, I see that look on your face, Frankie boy. Didn’t know the Manko man had it in him? What can I say? He’s the marryin’ kind after all.

“I went to the credit union and borrowed five hundred bucks and bought this diamond ring. Then I asked her out to dinner on Friday. I was going to give the ring to the waitress and tell her to put it on a plate and bring it to the table when we asked for dessert. Cute, huh?

“So, Friday, I was working the
P.M.
shift, three to eleven, for the bonus, but I ducked out early, at five, and showed up at her house at six-twenty. There were cars all over the place. Allison came outside, looking all nervous. My stomach twisted. Something funny was going on. She told me her mother was having a party and there was a problem. Two maids had got sick or something. Allison had to stay and help her mother. I thought that was weird.
Both
of them getting sick at the same time? She said she’d see me in a day or two.”

I saw the exact moment that the thought came into his mind; his eyes went dead as rocks.

“But there was more to it than that,” Manko whispered. “A hell of a lot more.”

“Allison’s father, you mean?”

But he didn’t explain what he meant just then and returned to his story of the aborted proposal. He muttered, “That was one of the worst nights of
my life. Here, I’d ditched work, I was in hock because of the ring, and I couldn’t even get five minutes alone with her. Man, it was torture. I drove around all night. Woke up at dawn, in my car, down by the railroad tracks. And when I got home there was no message from her. Jesus, was I depressed.

“That morning I called her at the hospital. She was sorry about the party. I asked her out that night. She said she really shouldn’t, she was so tired—the party’d gone to two in the morning. But how ’bout tomorrow?”

A gleam returned to Manko’s eyes. I thought his expression reflected a pleasant memory about their date.

But I was wrong.

His voice was bitter. “Oh, what a lesson we learned. It’s a mistake to underestimate your enemy, Frankie. You listen to Manko. Never do it. That’s what they taught us in the Corps.
Semper Fi.
But Allison and me, we got blindsided.

“That next night I came over to pick her up. I was going to take her to this river bluff, like a lover’s lane, you know, to propose. I had my speech down cold. I’d rehearsed all night. I pulled up to the house but she just stood on the porch and waved for me to come up to her. Oh, she was beautiful as ever. I just wanted to hold her. Put my arms around her and hold her forever.

“But she was real distant. She stepped away from me and kept glancing into the house. Her face was pale and her hair was tied back in a ponytail. I didn’t like it that way. I’d told her I liked it when she wore it
down. So when I saw the ponytail it was like a signal of some kind. An SOS.

“ ‘What is it?’ I asked her. She started to cry and said she couldn’t see me anymore. ‘What?’ I whispered. God, I couldn’t believe it. You know what it felt like? On Parris Island, basic training, you know? They fire live rounds over your head on the obstacle course. One time I got hit by a ricochet. I had a flak vest on but the slug was a full metal jacket and it knocked me clean on my ass. That’s what it was like.

“I asked her why. She just said she thought it was best and wouldn’t go into any details. But then I started to catch on. She kept looking around and I realized that there was somebody just inside the door, listening. She was scared to death—
that’s
what it was. She begged me please not to call her or come by and I figured out she wasn’t talking to
me
so much as saying it for whoever was spying on us. I played along. I said okay, if that’s what she wanted, blah, blah, blah . . . Then I pulled her close and told her not to worry. I’d look out for her. I whispered it, like a secret message.

“I went home. I waited as long as I could then called, hoping that I’d get her alone. I had to talk to her. I had to hear her voice, like I needed air or water. But nobody picked up the phone. They had an answering machine but I didn’t leave a message. I didn’t get any sleep that weekend—not a single hour. I had a lot to think about. See, I knew what’d happened. I knew exactly.

“Monday morning I got to her hospital at six and waited just outside the entrance. I caught up with her just before she went inside. She was still scared,
looking around like somebody was following her, just like on the porch.

“I asked her point-blank, ‘It’s your father, isn’t it?’ She didn’t say anything for a minute then nodded and said that, yeah, he’d forbidden her to see me. Doesn’t that sound funny? Old fashioned? ‘Forbidden.’ ‘He wants you to marry some preppy, is that it? Somebody from his club?’ She said she didn’t know about that, only that he’d told her not to see me anymore. The son of a bitch!”

Manko sipped his coffee and pointed a blunt finger at me. “See, Frankie, love means zip to somebody like Thomas Morgan. Business, society, image, money—that’s what counts to bastards like that. Man, I was so goddamn desperate. . . . It was too much. I threw my arms around her and said, ‘Let’s get away. Now.’

“ ‘Please,’ she said, ‘you have to leave.’

“Then I saw what she’d been looking out for. Her father’d sent one of his security men to spy on her. He saw us and came running. If he touched her I was going to break his neck, I swear I would’ve. But Allison grabbed my arm and begged me to run. ‘He has a gun,’ she said.

“ ‘I don’t care,’ I told her.” Manko lifted an eyebrow. “Not exactly true, Frankie boy, I gotta say. I was scared shitless. But Allison said she didn’t want me to get hurt. And if I left, the guy wouldn’t hurt her. That made sense but I wasn’t going just yet. I turned back and held her hard. ‘Do you love me? Tell me! I have to know. Say it!’

“And she did. She whispered, ‘I love you.’ I could hardly hear it but it was enough for me. I knew
everything would be fine. Whatever else, we had each other.

“I got back into the routine of life. Working, playing softball on the plant team. But all the time I kept writing her poetry, sending her articles and letters, you know. I’d put fake return addresses on the envelopes so her father wouldn’t guess it was me writing. I even hid letters in Publishers Clearing House envelopes addressed to her! How’s that for thinking?

“Once in a while I’d see her in person. I found her in a drugstore by herself and snuck up to her. I bought her a cup of coffee. She said how happy she was to see me but also was nervous as hell and I could see why. The goons were outside. We talked for about two minutes is all then one of ’em saw us and I had to vanish. I kicked my way out the back door. After that I began to notice these dark cars driving past my apartment or following me down the street. They said ‘MCP’ on the side. Morgan Chemical Products. They were keeping an eye on me.

“One day this guy came up to me in the hallway of my apartment and said Morgan’d pay me five thousand to leave town. I laughed at him. Then he said if I didn’t stay away from Allison there’d be trouble.

“Suddenly I just snapped. I grabbed him and pulled his gun out of his holster and threw it on the floor then I shoved him against the wall and said, ‘You go back and tell Morgan to leave us alone or
he’s
the one’s gonna be in trouble. You got me?’

“Then I kicked him down the stairs and threw his gun after him. I gotta say I was pretty shook up. I was seeing just how powerful this guy was.”

“Money is power,” I offered.

“Yeah, you’re right there. Money’s power. And Thomas Morgan was going to use all of his to keep us apart. You know why? ’Cause I was a threat. Fathers are jealous. Turn on any talk show. Oprah. Sally Jesse. Fathers
hate
their daughters’ boyfriends. It’s like an Oedipus thing. Especially—what I was saying before—with Allison being an only child. Here I was, a rebel, a drifter, making thirteen bucks an hour. It was like a slap in his face, Allison loving me so completely. She was rejecting him and everything he stood for.” Manko’s face shone with pride for Allison’s courage.

Then the smile vanished. “But Morgan was always one step ahead of us. One day I ditched work and snuck into the hospital. I waited for an hour but Allison never showed up. I asked where she was. They told me she wasn’t working there anymore. Nobody’d give me a straight answer but finally I found this young nurse who told me her father’d called and told ’em that Allison was taking a leave of absence. Period. No explanation. She didn’t even clean out her locker. Jesus. All her plans to travel, all her plans with me—gone, just like that. I called the house to get a message to her but he’d changed the number and had it, you know, unlisted. I mean, this guy was in-
credible.

“And he didn’t stop there. Next, he comes after me. I go in to work and the foreman tells me I’m fired. Too many unexcused absences. That was bullshit—I didn’t have more than most of the guys. But Morgan must’ve been a friend of the Kroegers. I was still new so the union wouldn’t go to bat for me. I was out. Just like that.

“Well, I couldn’t beat him at his game so I decided to play by my rules.” Manko grinned and scooted forward. Our knees touched and I felt all the energy that was in him pulse against my skin. “Oh, I wasn’t worried for me. But Allison, she’s so . . .” As he searched for a word his hands made a curious gesture, as if stretching thread between them, a miniature cat’s cradle.

I suggested, “Fragile.”

The snap of his fingers startled me. He sat up. “Ex-
actly.
Fragile. She didn’t have any defense against her father. I had to do something fast. I went to the police. I wanted ’em to go to the house and see if she was okay. But also it’d be a sign to her father that I wasn’t going to take any crap from him.” Manko whistled. “Mistake, Frankie. Bad mistake. Morgan was one step ahead of me. This sergeant, some big guy, pushed me into a corner and said if I didn’t stay away from Morgan’s daughter, the family’d get a restraining order. I’d end up in a cell. Then he looked me over and said something about did I know all sorts of accidents could happen to prisoners. It was a risky place, jail. Man, was I stupid. I should’ve known the cops’d be on Morgan’s payroll too.