Wild Horses (25 page)

“I’ll just leave the key on the table,” he said.

Her revolver was nowhere to be seen this morning, although he suspected she kept it close at hand, maybe in that giant purse. Walking along the frontage road, breathing new morn air and diesel exhaust, he wondered if she’d owned it awhile or had bought it in Coyote Ridge. The latter might, at least, explain why after a week she hadn’t even managed to scrape up enough for bus fare.

Allison looked refreshed when they returned to the road, exuding that fine clean smell of a woman with the worst of the world washed away. She wore her bruises less self-consciously than yesterday, seemed unconcerned with hiding them; holding her head higher, and to hell with what anyone thought. Her hair blew free about her face and shoulders, and he indulged himself, imagining what it must feel like between stroking fingers.

Try it once, though, and he’d likely lose a hand.

“Where to today?” she asked.

“We’ll head on into Las Cruces, be there in a couple hours. Then we turn south a little, into Texas, go to El Paso. We should be heading east across Texas for most of the afternoon, come back north into New Mexico to hit Carlsbad.”

Allison nodded, then fixed him with bright, enigmatic eyes. A bruised Mona Lisa, with her smile of secrets and privilege.

“What?” he said.

“Guess what
I
found around dawn this morning.”

“I don’t know, you tell me.”

But as soon as she went digging through his belongings on the floor, he knew what it had to be. A blush began at the soles of his feet as she rested the small flat box on her lap.

“I saw this box, and I’m sorry, but I just couldn’t help myself. I was wondering, Now what could he make from leather that would be small enough to fit in there? Because of the size of the box, well, I was thinking it could only be for one part of the body, so whatever it was, I just had to see it…”

She opened it and began to pull out the tiny books. Flipping through them, Allison read the titles aloud: “
Bobby Meets the Dinosaurs
.
The Jolly Barnyard
.
Little Bear Goes to the Moon
.
Mr. Putter and Tabby Pour the Tea
.
The Ever-Living Tree
. So, are these what you curl up with when you’re on the road?”

“What, I give the impression of having a first-grade reading level?”

“I’m just kidding. These belong to your kids, right?”

Tom shrugged uneasily behind the wheel.

“Either they do or they don’t, that’s simple enough.”

“I don’t have any kids.” It came out more snappy than he had intended. “But someday, if I do … then these books, well … they’ll belong to them then. Is that simple enough for you?”

She was looking more closely at him, but it went deeper than that this time. Past the scar that creased the corner of one eye, past the weathered skin and the black hair that was showing gray even in his mid-thirties. She saw these things as though they were somehow new.

“You buy these,” she said softly, “and you hang on to them? You just … hang on to them?”

He wished she would go ahead and laugh, get it over with. Couldn’t she see from his face that he picked them up all across the country? That he really did read them when it felt as if the next day was taking too long to arrive? That it was starting to hurt, for there was no one he was reading them to, and he was beginning to fear there never would be?

With unexpected reverence, she aligned the books in her hands and returned them to their box. “I think that must be,” she said in a hush, “the single sweetest act of faith I’ve ever heard of.”

“Maybe the most futile, too,” he admitted. “I’d probably make a lousy father anyway.”

“Think so? You don’t
know
about lousy fathers.”

“Don’t I? Any law says you get to have a monopoly?”

Allison lowered her eyes. “No. No law.” Then she turned the spotlight back on him like an accusation. “What’s your problem, then? You don’t have enough faith in yourself to try and get past the shitty example he set for you?”

“Maybe I could answer that better if he’d stuck around long enough to set one in the first place.”

He sometimes wondered if somewhere out there his father was still alive, wondering what had become of his son. But this was a trail thirty-two years cold, no more and no less real than a small boy’s dream of being swung from a giant’s arms.

That’s all he was now, that elder St. John — dream vapor, a featureless phantom who lurked on the edge of memory, in most ways more powerful in his vagueness than if he’d remained in the flesh all these years. Phantoms never stooped, never withered.

And Tom did
not
want to talk about this. Surely his name on the van’s registration granted him right of refusal.

They rode in silence awhile, during which Tom refused to look her way — except from the corner of his eye, and that didn’t count. Allison merely stared out the window, head on hand and elbow on upraised knee. Losing herself out in that passing desert, austere and mottled as with the ochers of a spilled paint pot, and in her seeming reverie, haunted, perhaps, by old ghosts.

That was the trouble with ghosts: One place was always as good as another whenever they were of a mind to follow.

“I wish my father hadn’t stuck around,” was all she said, and no more until Las Cruces.

CHAPTER 15

If good things came to those who waited, they were overdue for a bounty. Even Gunther seemed bored, and she’d not thought this possible. Had always thought of Gunther as the type who could shut down his nominal higher brain functions and outstare a lizard until it crawled away in defeat.

High noon on Monday, as they simmered behind the wheel of a Cadillac going nowhere. The town of Brady simmered along with them. Somewhere here in mid-Texas they’d exchanged the dry heat of the southwest for something heavier, wetter.

“Give me that fan,” she said. “Your turn’s up.”

“Five more minutes,” Gunther pleaded. “Come on, we got to keep me cooled down. I get too hot and infection might set in.”

“The heat’s not going to infect your eye. You’re just being selfish. Now give me that fan.”

With a huff, he offered it. A silly-looking thing, all white plastic, not even the size of a coffee mug, but it put out a solid breeze. An adapter cord plugged it into the Cadillac’s cigarette lighter. With the clothespin-like swivel on the bottom, Madeline clamped it to the steering wheel and turned it on herself.

“I’ve been thinking about you and this new Drano shtick of yours,” she said. “I think you’ve got a really sick eye fetish. I’m just wondering where that comes from.”

He seemed to take this seriously as he stared across and down the street at a business called Hawg Heaven. A brick building on a wide lot filled with rows of gleaming chrome, virgin tires, and streamlined frames. And nothing going on at midday. All the action was here on their side of the street, at the walk-up ice cream hut where they were parked.

“Never really crossed my mind before,” Gunther said, “but you could be right. When we were kids I used to take my sister’s dolls and gouge out their eyes. Or if they were too small — Barbie dolls, like that, tiny-eyed things — I’d black them out with an ink pen.”

“Why did you do that?”

“I don’t know. Hear her scream about it when she found them, I guess. She had this funny way of crying, like she was about to suffocate.”

“I mean why the eyes. That’s weird, Gunther, don’t you know how weird that is? Most big brothers would just steal the dolls or hide them or rip up the clothes. They wouldn’t go for the eyes.”

“I don’t know why I did anything. I just saw the eyes and I thought it’d be funny to put them out. All those blind dolls, it’d crack me up to look at them.” He scowled. “She was always watching me, my sister was. Always waiting to tell on me for something. It was like she’d leave those dolls of hers around on purpose, like they were her spies. Maybe I just wanted to send her a message.”

Madeline couldn’t help but laugh — picturing Gunther as a boy, mutilating dolls with his vindictive resolve. A junior wiseguy in training. “Did you leave them in toy cars after you did the hits? Or scattered around their little tea party tables?”

“Fuck you,” he said. “See if I ever tell you anything again.”

“And now look at you, Gunther, you and your bandage. There’s a bizarre kind of justice in that, you have to admit.” A chuckle threatened to overtake her. “There’s got to be a word for it, this eye business boomeranging back to haunt you. There’s just got to be a word for something that perfect.”

He looked annoyed and embarrassed by it all. “Yeah, well, if there is, I never ran across it, so let’s drop the whole thing.”

“Testy?” she cooed. “Are we getting testy now?” She poked at his ribs, at his flat, muscled stomach. Loved to watch him squirm, on the verge of taking a swing at her but never letting himself slip over that edge. Not with her. Another woman maybe. Never her.

This often seemed the glue that kept them together. Where else could he find such symbiosis? Madeline suspected that he was the rarest of the rare among his criminal kind, in that he gave no indication whatsoever of having cheated on her. Not because the opportunities weren’t there — in Vegas, opportunity practically crawled onto the nearest tabletop and spread its legs — but because the notion simply didn’t seem to occur to him. His needs were few, focused, uncomplicated. He was the only man she’d ever known who passed by other women and not only didn’t stare, but appeared to take almost no notice of them at all.

Why she spent so much time dreading the moment that he would, Madeline did not know.

She found a peculiar benefit in his being half blind these days. One eye bandaged was one eye that couldn’t betray her, show him the truth of her that the mirror had noticed but that Gunther, so far, had not. One eye bandaged improved the odds, gave her a little more time to sustain the illusion, whatever he saw when he looked at her.

Beyond Mexico, they hadn’t discussed plans for the money. She wasn’t sure she would tell Gunther the truth. Even before scouting Boyd for the skim, the intention had been there: Take part of the money and disappear for a few weeks, into the finest clinic for cosmetic surgery that she could find. What years had taken away, the knife could give back. Get everything done in one long ordeal of cutting, lifting, and tightening: breasts, eyes, neck, face, jawline, stomach — especially her stomach — and bring them all back up to the standards still defined by her legs.

She had even rehearsed her temporary departure, replaying it in her mind until every word was just right.

I’m going to be gone for a few weeks,
she would tell Gunther when the time came,
and I don’t want you asking me where. But I’ll call you every day, and when I come back, it’ll all make sense to you then, and you’ll be glad I went. We can’t really start over until I do this one thing.

Madeline looked over at the line for ice cream — high school girls on lunch break, wrinkles and sag the farthest things from their minds. Tiffany would look like them in a few more years.

It never felt as if she should have a daughter, not even an absentee living with her dad, but there Tiffany was, back in Lake Tahoe. Residue from another life. Growing up without Madeline, perhaps without need of her, maybe even better off for it. Quite possibly she would never see Tiffany again, and she had no trouble accepting this. Maybe her ex-husband had been right: If she’d ever had one maternal bone in her body, it had long since been broken.

All told, by going to Mexico, Gunther might be giving up more than she would.

“You’re handling this a lot better than I thought you would,” she told him.

“Handling what?”

“You know. That you can’t go back to Vegas, that you’re out. That they’ll probably kill you if they find you back there.”

“Aah. So what. It’s not like I hadn’t already gone as far there as I was ever gonna. Toby Costas, he had his way, I’d still be doing collections when I’m eighty, trying to drag some asshole behind my wheelchair. Half full of German blood, you know, I could never be a made man with those guys anyway.”

He’d told her before of how they demanded racial purity for their innermost circles. How you could work for them, but never be one of them. She had immediately known the feeling, working as pit boss where most others were not only men, but men who thought that women belonged onstage or serving drinks. All the education she would ever need on the subject of exclusion.

“The Guidos made that real clear to me early on. That’s the one thing that really frosted my balls back in Philadelphia. That ethnic thing. Halfway there wasn’t good enough, and there was nothing I could do to change it. I was never gonna be one of those guys, not really. The Guidos got a lock on things like that.”

“I thought Costas was a Greek name.”

“Hey, they’re all Guidos to me. So I say get on to Mexico, and the Guidos can go to hell. I don’t need all that made man shit. All those vows and their secret ceremonies, I might as well go join the fucking Masons.”