Wild Horses (5 page)

Then the final insult: the sound of the shot glass clattering onto the floor.

“Shit!” he screamed.

“Nice going, Gunther,” said Kevin. “You nailed the Bailey’s Irish this time. That’s a first.”

“That was mine!” came a voice from across the room. Some guy crawling from beneath a table with a forty-watt grin. “I had the Bailey’s. I’ll take that in twenties, if you please.”

Gunther went chasing after the obstinate glass as it bounced across the floor. He trapped it against the wall and kicked at it until it cracked apart, and he was still trying to stomp it into a fine powder when Madeline slipped both hands around his arm and drew him away, told him to stop, that he looked like a psychotic groom at a Jewish wedding.

He put the gun away, took a few deep breaths of smoky air to calm his nerves, and only then did it register what was going on at the bar: Kevin paying off someone else.

“What am I seeing here, brief me on this,” said Gunther. “You got a betting pool going on whatever I might hit instead?”

“I thought you knew.” Kevin shrugged. “You want to play Quick Draw McGraw, fine, but I’m the one incurring the expenses. Forget the Bailey’s — you been pricing spackle and paint lately?”

Gunther sighed, let Madeline guide him out the door and onto the parking lot, a dusty slab of baked asphalt with a low-rent strip club and an X-rated-video outlet for neighbors. Daylight was on the wane now and shadows were long; neon pulsed, and the heat of late summer wrapped around them like a suffocating cocoon.

“I think I’m drunk, Maddy.” Then everything made sense. “Know what the problem is? Fucking Kevin, I let him pour me those drinks and trick me into spending too much time yakking before I take that shot.”

“Sure,” she said.

“Next time I ought to just go ahead, let him get me good and hammered, and then I ‘accidentally’ shoot him instead. Let’s see how smart he thinks he is then.”

“Sure, Gunther.”

“Worst day of my life.”

“Yours too?” Madeline gave him a chummy slap on the shoulder. “But that’s the beauty of Vegas, Gunther. Your luck can turn around any minute in the day.”

She had a point. It was exactly why he had come here in the first place. That, and those miserable winters back east.

Madeline looked at him with a feral grin, her rouged cheeks stretching taut and her eyes aglow with mayhem and maybe thoughts of the redress of wounds old and new. Her whisper in his ear was seduction itself:

“Gunther…? Say
truculence
again.”

CHAPTER 3

Allison Willoughby had the universe figured out by the time she was twenty-five, the last six years serving only to reinforce her understanding.

Physicists had for decades been seeking an equation to unify the laws of space and time, the clockwork of planets and atoms, and she felt pity for them. All their numbers, just so much chalk dust. If only they’d come to her in the first place, she would have been happy to fill them in on how it really was.

There was a playwright somewhere, making everything up as he went along. Perversely cruel at times, at others possessed of an equally perverse sense of humor. Scientists and atheists alike would scoff, but she knew that he was real; knew that he labored overtime on her script because some nights she could hear him up there somewhere, chuckling.

But perhaps he, in his zeal to keep the surprises coming, had done her a favor for once. She’d not had the courage to leave Boyd on her own? The playwright had shown her the worst sides of him, then written him out of her life. Free again, to go anywhere and do whatever she wished.

Allison’s decision to leave Vegas was made as soon as she’d turned Madeline DeCarlo away from her door. An odd choice even for Boyd, whose penis had proved to be as indiscriminate as a garden hose. Then there was Madeline’s allusion to some seven-hundred-thousand-dollar windfall that he had failed to mention.

Which sounded ominous. She supposed she’d known, deep down, that Boyd would one day pull some too-clever stunt that would come boomeranging back at him. She wasn’t about to stay put and see what he’d done and what its fallout would be.

Allison packed that night, the silent living room split down the middle. One side held all the belongings she thought she would need while traveling, the other was strewn with those that could be safely boxed away until they might reemerge into the light of some better place, some other life.

That everything could fit in one room was itself a shock, but after an honest appraisal of the way she’d been living, Allison understood where it all had gone. Clothes, once they no longer seemed to fit whoever she felt she’d become, were left in closets she would never open again, or were given to charity. Most books, once read, had been left on shelves that she’d never thought of as her own in the first place. Across Mississippi and Texas, Montana and California, Arizona and Washington and now Nevada, she had scattered bits of herself, shed skins left behind with friends and lovers whom she’d outgrown, or grown to fear, or even to loathe.

Appliances? Few, and small. Furniture? None. She had always preferred her homes prefurnished. Buy a sofa, drop an anchor.

Looking at the meager piles, Allison realized that she had always kept it easy to leave, and quickly. A seventeen-year-old runaway still hiding deep within, laying out her escape routes.

The next morning Allison was at her bank minutes after the doors were unlocked. Leaning against the fake-marble counter, she asked the teller to close out her checking account; cash would be fine. She gave the pert and fresh-faced teller an unused check, for the account number, then signed the forms slid before her. The two of them went over the recent stubs in her checkbook, and their amounts, to leave a reserve for anything outstanding.

Allison frowned when they got to the end and saw a blank stub preceding the check she’d just torn free. That couldn’t be right. She kept impeccable records. Nevertheless, check number 331 was missing in action. She supposed it could’ve stuck to the back of 330 — they did that sometimes.

“Here you go, Ms. Willoughby,” said the teller, then began counting it out. “Thirty-three dollars and fifty-eight cents.”

“No,” Allison said. “Oh, no. No no no no no. I don’t know what your computer’s telling you, but even after deducting for the outstanding checks, I’ve still got over fifteen hundred dollars in my account.”

The teller peered again at the computer screen, pecking away at the keyboard. Perfect little fingers with their perfect little nails, not so much as a single crinkle on her perfect little face. What was she, three months out of high school? Something was terribly wrong here; this candystriper was not qualified to sit on the other side of the counter, in charge of Allison’s life.

“Well, you did, until yesterday. Then that big check you wrote came through, and that about cleaned out the account.”

“What big check?”

“Check number three-thirty-one. For fourteen hundred and forty-two dollars, even. Both dated and cashed yesterday.”

Allison gripped the counter, the floor trying to throw her off balance. “I didn’t write any checks at all yesterday.”

The teller’s eyes flicked back to her computer. Her perfect little mouth constricted into a circle of surprise. “Uh-oh.”

At which point bank officers became involved, drawing her away from the lobby and behind closed doors. Taking her by the arm, gently. The loved ones of accident victims would be treated this way, ushered into some cold chamber to view the carnage while thinking,
This isn’t happening, there must be some mistake.

They didn’t let her handle the processed check, offering her instead a pair of photocopies, front and back. They feared she was going to lose control, rip the original into confetti? She would prefer to reserve that treatment for the one who’d forged it.

“Oh, that son of a bitch,” she whispered.

“And you deny having written any checks to a Boyd Dobbins yesterday?”

“You’re damn right I deny it. The only thing I would’ve written for Boyd Dobbins yesterday was a death certificate.”

She pieced together what she could, imagining Boyd yesterday morning after his night on the couch — his shoulder a giant festering sore, she hoped — pilfering her purse as she slept off her Southern Comfort in the bedroom. Imagining him at the table where they’d shared so many breakfasts, glancing at the bedroom door, hoping she wouldn’t walk in on him and his practiced pen.

As a forgery it was impressive — another talent she’d had no idea he possessed. Both his name and her signature appeared at a glance to have been penned by her own hand, although under the scrutiny of a trained eye discrepancies would surely be apparent.

But motive? With a seven-hundred-thousand-dollar windfall, Boyd obviously hadn’t needed emergency cash. Which meant he had done this to her out of pure mean-spirited vindictiveness. He’d even left a message, so there would be no mistaking it.

In the check’s lower left corner, where it said MEMO, he had written all she needed to know:

Damage to car.

*

Fifty minutes later she was home again, thirty-three dollars plus change extra in the pocketbook, which wasn’t going to get her very far at all.

Allison clung to the phone, an iced tea sweating in her free hand as she listened to the ringing.
Answer.
How easy it was to get religion down in the trenches.
Please, make her answer. Make her answer and I’ll never ask for anything again, until the next catastrophe. That ought to square us until day after tomorrow.

For a moment, all of heaven and earth seemed to smile.

“Constance?” she said. “It’s me.”

“Allie!” Her cousin’s voice still embraced the drawl that Allison had worked hard to leave behind on Mississippi soil. “Hey, Allie Cat, how’s life treating you?”

“Like a winepress treats grapes.”

Allison covered the highlights and pictured Constance moving through the house in Yazoo City, cordless phone clamped between ear and shoulder, left arm slung around a toddler that rode her hip and clutched at her breast with tiny hands.

“I’d been thinking that maybe I’d be able to find a cheap car today,” Allison said, “with a few good miles left in it, and have enough left over to get me down the road a little. But now? Boyd didn’t even leave me enough behind for a bus ticket.”

“Why, you poor thing.” The sixth time Constance had said this. Enough. “Allie? A bus ticket to
where
, exactly?”

The question stopped her cold. In the chaos, she’d not even been thinking of a destination. Las Vegas was such a blight that direction scarcely seemed to matter.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I just want to
go
. I want to get out of this apartment because it smells like Boyd, and out of this city because it eats souls.”

“And that bank of yours? They’re not planning on making good on that check when you didn’t even write the thing?”

Allison felt her blood pressure surge. “Not their policy, they tell me. Don’t you love it? They give my money to that human plankton, they nearly bankrupt me, and it’s not their policy. It’s a criminal matter now. For all they care, I could’ve put Boyd up to it myself, so we could try to double my money.”

“They didn’t accuse you of that, did they?”

“Not in so many words.” Remembering the looks she’d gotten, though: emotionless sympathy with a gilding of suspicion. Perhaps she had spoken wrong, moved wrong, looked and smelled and breathed wrong. Never quite good enough for them. Perhaps she’d shown them flaws, that if they would scrape a few years away they could find devious white trash beneath. Scrape away a few more and they would find some tainted girl who used to lie awake in her room, awaiting and hating the tread of the visitors who came in the dark to lie with her, upon her, until their weight grew too heavy to bear, and she would push herself far away, into green meadows beneath brighter suns than morning could ever bring.

Riding horses — now that was a fine dream. Gallant horses with stout backs and wild, flowing manes, they had never grown tired of carrying her through those nights.

She almost found herself in tears, and forced them back. She would not let Constance hear that from her.

“Okay, Allie, let’s break this mess down. How much money do you have left?”

“About fifty-six dollars.”

“And suppose you wanted to get yourself a one-way bus ticket to Yazoo City if you knew you had a clean bed to sleep in once you got here. Do you know how much that’d set you back?”

“It’d be in the hundred-and-sixty-dollar range, around there. I priced them a couple of months ago when Boyd and I had a fight.”

Constance began suggesting options, things she might not have considered. Was anything due from the day care center? No; she’d just been paid, and had been calling in sick ever since. Did she have a credit card? No; first you need an actual credit rating. Anything she could pawn? Maybe her bicycle, but it wouldn’t bring much. How about a damage deposit from the apartment? Worth a try, but no guarantee.