Anything You Say Can and Will Be Used Against You (23 page)

I chain-smoked cigarettes and watched the thick line of trees whiz by—dark, jagged blurs against the midnight blue of the sky—the tires humming and thump-clicking over patches in the highway. I watched the green and white signs approach and disappear: Denham Springs, Satsuma, Hammond, Covington, Abita Springs. I barely registered my favorite sign: Baptist Pumpkin Center.

We'd just pulled onto I-59 when Gwen cleared her throat. “I fucked up.” The dashboard lights partly illuminated her face.

“Yeah. Well.”

We were quiet for a minute, then I said, “I shouldn't have hit you.”

“I would've.” She snorted, her “fuckin' mama” snort. “Sarah Jeffries losing control. Really a fuckin' watershed moment, huh?”

Doris Whitehead pulled out into the left lane, and I followed her, passing a slow-moving Datsun with a missing license plate.

“I could've sworn he had a gun,” she said.

“I know.”

“Did you see it?”

I shook my head. “No.”

“Shit.”

A car passed us. Then another. “I'm sorry you have to pull this alone,” she said.

I shrugged.

We'd decided I'd pull the first watch with Doris and Vince. Tracy, Marge, and Beth had day shift; they'd head up to the camp as soon as they got off shift. Gwen and I were off Wednesdays and Thursdays, but Gwen had her husband, Joe, to deal with.

“Joe going to think it's weird you driving my car home?” I asked.

“Probably won't even notice.”

“Tell him I had too much to drink, that you dropped me off at my apartment.”

“It's my fuckup; I should be doing this.”

I tried to imagine her and Doris Whitehead baby-sitting Vince. And then we'd have two dead bodies to worry about. “It's okay.”

Gwen thumped her head against the windowpane. “You're the only one without complications.”

She was right. That was my life in a nutshell. Not complicated. I went to work, I came home. But there was Ricky. I tried to remember. We'd had dinner together, was it only six hours ago? He'd fixed pasta with oysters and andouille sausage while I put together a salad, cutting avocados in long strips. We'd walked Peacock over to Baton Rouge High and let her chase squirrels, came back holding hands, watching the clouds blend into dusk, put Peacock on the back porch and made love, long and unhurried, on the living room floor. He'd left at 10:30, kissed me on the nose, said, “Have fun,
cher
. Talk with you tomorrow.”

“Ricky's not at the apartment,” I said.

Gwen sighed. “I'll tell Joe I'm going to see my sister in Metairie and get back up here in the morning as soon as I can.”

“Okay,” I said.

She shifted in her seat. “Don't decide anything until I get there.”

Irritation pushed up vicious and alive, hard under my skin. Decide? Decide what? I wanted to yell. But I didn't say anything except, “Okay.”

 

We pulled into a tiny, dark marina way off the main road just after 1:30. On the Louisiana side, I noted with grim relief. It wasn't really a marina, more like a dock with some boats tied up and a broken-down shack near the water's edge. The mosquitoes were thick and hungry. Gwen helped us load Vince, a shotgun, and two sacks of groceries and clothes into a small boat. He struggled only a little bit until Doris Whitehead slapped him hard across the face and Gwen muttered something into his ear. I looked away.

Gwen put her hands on my shoulders, pulled me into a rough hug as we stood by my car. “Thank you,” she whispered into my ear. I stepped away first.

“Give me your gun.” I held out my hand.

She hesitated, then pulled it out, emptied the bullets into her palm, and handed me the gun.

“And the bullets.”

“That was a good gun.” She dropped them into my hand. “I wouldn't have shot if I hadn't thought he'd had a gun.”

“I know.”

“I'll be back by noon, one at the latest.”

I touched her once on the shoulder, then turned to Doris Whitehead, who'd been sitting in the boat quietly, waiting on us, and said, “We're all set.”

Doris Whitehead turned on the engine, and we pulled away from the dock. I sat crossways in my seat, between Doris and Vince, and watched Gwen's figure, barely distinguishable from the trees, until a bend in the river hid her from view.

I'd never been on a river this dark and remote at night. I could see the outlines of small buildings occasionally along the shore, but there didn't seem to be anyone around or in them. The moon kept playing hide-and-seek between the clouds, and I heard splashing, fish
I supposed, or perhaps alligators, once the flapping of some great bird off to the side; otherwise, it was quiet. About five minutes out, I slid Gwen's gun out of my back pocket and held it over the edge of the boat, the water warm to the touch. I let the tug of the water pull it out of my hand.

I looked at the back of Vince's head, his hands clenched tight in the cuffs. He squirmed some, but mostly he seemed to be waiting, his body one tense line, the breath coming through his nose in a soft, rapid wheeze.

Doris Whitehead moved the boat through increasingly smaller channels with confidence, and I was impressed at her adeptness doing this in the dark. Gwen and the others would never find their way out here. Doris Whitehead would have to go back to the marina midday and wait.

After about twenty minutes we pulled up to a dock that ran parallel to the shore for a considerable distance with a short, six-or seven-foot protrusion out into the water from the middle of it. Doris Whitehead cut the engine and tied us off to a narrow metal pole on the shorter dock, beside four rungs that led to the top. She gestured for me to get out first. I bent down and untied Vince's legs, then quickly went up the rungs. Doris Whitehead pulled Vince to his feet. “Nothing funny, boy, there's gators and moccasins all around. And I feed 'em regular like when I'm out here, so they'll be ready to chomp hearin' the engine,” she said.

He looked at the rungs and then up at me, the bandanna in his mouth stretching his cheek muscles into wide commas. I motioned to him, reached down, and grabbed him by the shoulders as Doris Whitehead kept a hand on his back, and we guided him up onto the dock.

When Doris Whitehead joined us, he balked, tried to say something. I hesitated, then reached to untie the bandanna. “Don't,” Doris Whitehead said, but I ignored her, told him if he yelled no one would hear him and the bandanna wouldn't come off again, and then pulled the cloth out of his mouth. He coughed several times, licked his lips, shifted his jaw back and forth. “Fuckin' bitches,” he growled, and I reached up with the bandanna, but he pulled his head away, said, “Gotta piss.”

Doris Whitehead and I looked at each other.

“I'm not undoing these handcuffs,” I said.

“And I'm not gonna hold his thing,” she said. “Let him do it in his pants.”

“No.” I reached forward and unbuckled his pants, his eyes boring into mine, a slight smirk on his face. “I'm going to take you to the edge there, hold on to you, and you can do your business.” The smirk disappeared. I pulled his pants down around his ankles, then his underpants, dark green briefs. His penis was small and a bluish dusty rose, his balls shrunk up and shriveled in a mass of dark hair. A fetid odor drifted up off him. I turned him around, walked him to the edge, put one hand on the link between the handcuffs and the other on his shoulder. “You try anything, and I push you in,” I said. He squatted a little, his legs trembling, and we stood there until he'd finished.

He'd dribbled some on himself, and I stared at the dark patch between his legs, his penis dangling loose and damp against his skin. When I looked up at him, he must have seen something in my face because whatever he'd started to say he bit back, and his jaw tightened, his eyes shifted away from mine. I jerked his pants up, turning my head away as I did, buckled his belt, and grabbed him by the arm. “Let's go,” I said to Doris Whitehead, and pushed Vince in front of me as we followed her up the dock and onto a dirt path that led several yards back into the dark woods.

 

Her cabin was larger than I'd expected, cleaner too. A good-sized bedroom led off the main room that functioned as living room, kitchen, and dining room. Three big armchairs and an old navy blue couch were crammed up against two walls, a table, refrigerator, and stove against the third. There were no pictures, no knickknacks. Doris Whitehead lit a kerosene lamp and then led us into the bedroom, where I had her hold the shotgun on Vince as I uncuffed him. He rubbed his wrists slowly, stretched his shoulders forward, his eyes following me carefully as I gestured for him to get on the bed. “What the fuck you bitches think you're gonna do with me?” he said, but there was more fear in his voice now than anger, and I gestured again. He hesitated. I shoved him slightly, enough so he stumbled back and sat
down heavily, the bedsprings squeaking. I cuffed his right wrist and attached it to the bed frame, then used the other set of cuffs on his left hand. Tied his feet back up again, replaced the bandanna, and propped the pillow up under his head so he could breathe more easily.

“I'll make us some coffee,” Doris Whitehead said. She took the lamp back into the main room, and put it on the kitchen counter along with the shotgun.

Vince diminished to a gray outline with darker shadows cast by the angles of his body. He seemed not quite human—a black mirage, except for his eyes and the hard red slash of the bandanna.

“I find it fascinating, really, that you've never mentioned her. Your wife,” I said softly. He blinked once, pulled his right hand hard against the cuffs. “Never asked us a damn thing about why we were at your house.” I kept my face still, expressionless. “Curious, isn't it?”

He muttered something into the bandanna, but I turned my back and left, keeping the bedroom door open, and moved an armchair so I had a direct view in. I could just see his outline on the bed.

“Black okay?” Doris Whitehead said, and I nodded.

While the water heated, she busied herself emptying the grocery sacks, putting food up into the cupboards and into the refrigerator, opening the shade partway over the kitchen sink. I watched Vince, and I watched her. She wore olive-colored cargo pants and a maroon T-shirt, the material stretched out tight across her breasts and the rolls of fat beneath. Her face looked like a Rottweiler's, massive with jagged eyebrows, but watchful and steady too, the folds of flesh under her chin jiggling slightly. Not a pretty woman, I thought, probably never was. Needed a better haircut, something more flattering, less harsh. Looked home done.

When she moved to pull back the drapes on the far wall, I said, “No.” She stiffened a minute, then said, “Of course,” and closed them.

She turned on the ceiling fan overhead and then a large floor fan that rattled at the far end of every turn. I got up and turned it off, looked back at Doris Whitehead, who watched me stone-faced, and said, “Too noisy. I need to be able to hear him.”

“It'll get hot in here by midday,” she said.

“Then it'll get hot,” I replied, and settled back into the chair and studied Vince's dusky outline again until bile rose up into my throat, abrupt and corrosive. I stood, said in a thick voice, “I'm stepping outside for a minute.”

I knelt on the dock at the edge opposite from the side Vince had used, waiting to throw up. Nothing came but acid coating my mouth. I spit and waited some more. I wanted to howl, just tear the sky open. But I kept taking deep breaths, and the nausea eventually passed. I looked at my hands, flexed my wrists. Water lapped softly against the wood, and I stuck a few fingers in; it was body temperature and smelled slightly metallic under the fish and wet clay odors. Then I remembered the alligators and jerked my fingers out.

The sky was huge. Away from the city, I could actually see the stars, a whole blanket of them playing peekaboo behind gauzy clouds. I lit a cigarette, studied the smoke wafting up through the air. There was no way on earth, I realized, I could kill Vince Durham or be a party to killing him. And there was no way on earth I could let him go. Those were two facts I could not reconcile.

After a while I returned to the house, stopped in the doorway of the bedroom, Vince's eyes watching me. I looked away first, came back to the chair, and picked up the mug of coffee Doris Whitehead had placed on the floor beside it. She'd settled in the chair on the far wall, the shotgun within grabbing distance. The light from the kerosene lamp made her face softer, less grim.

I blew on the coffee, took a sip. The taste of chicory was so strong I struggled to swallow the first mouthful without wincing. “Thank you,” I said, and meant it, the bitterness running through my body, clearing out the numbness I'd felt since Gwen fired her gun. I slipped my gun out of its holster and tucked it in my lap, shifted my hips more comfortably into the chair.

Doris Whitehead cleared her throat, rubbed a thumb against her chin as though she were playing with a stray hair. “It's different for you, isn't it?”

“Ma'am?” I looked at her over the edge of my cup.

“From them other women. Some of 'em believe and some of 'em don't so much, but you feel it more strongly, don't you?”

“I'm not following you.”

“What you told me after you found her, that you do it gently. That's not the way it is at all for you, is it?”

I stared at her openmouthed.

She smiled a little, settled back farther into her chair, put one foot up on a small stool. “I've been watching you, thinking about all you said the other day, how kind you were to Jeannette, to me, and I figure you're leaning up against some mighty big doors inside, trying to keep 'em closed.” She took a sip of her coffee. “But you ain't having much luck, are you?”

“Well, I think under the circumstances—” I started, my voice indignant.