Dancing with the Dead (8 page)

“What’d he say exactly?”

“Said you was bound to tell me about him dancing with a woman at Casa Loma Friday night, so he mize well tell me first.”

“Well,” Mary said, “he was only dancing with her.” Wasn’t that all Danielle Verlane was doing the night of her death? Wasn’t that how Mary had defended her against Jake’s accusations yesterday? Now she was defending Fred, but not meaning it.

“Fred’s sure as hell no dancer,” Angie said. “The knees he’s got, he’s lucky he can walk across a room without falling on his ass.”

Mary had to smile. “Yeah, the truth is he didn’t look all that smooth.”

Angie pulled a wadded Kleenex out of her pocket and wiped her nose as if trying to tear it from her face. Maybe she’d hurt herself, because she dabbed delicately at her eyes. “Fred said not to make anything outa that Casa Loma thing. Said the woman you saw him with was just somebody he knows from his part-time job, and they’re friends is all. You believe that shit?”

“I dunno. So what’d you tell him?”

“Didn’t tell him anything—I hung up.”

“When was all this?”

“ ’Bout an hour ago. Phone’s rung several times since then.”

“It’s possible Fred was telling the truth,” Mary said.

“We had a date Friday night. He called and broke it. Said something about an emergency on the job. Bastard threw in a lotta details to make me believe him. I know that game. You do, too.”

“What’s that mean, Angie?”

“You and Jake.” Her nose was dripping again, mucus catching the light like the broken glass in the carpet. “I know about men like Jake, Mary. You and him back together?”

“No.”

“Good. The sick bastards don’t change. Your father—”

“Angie!”

“Okay. Duke had his good points; I get dru—Sometimes I forget that, but you shouldn’t. I don’t wanna say anything I’m sorry for. But Jake, I mean, I see Duke in Jake. Maybe that was to be expected, that you’d go for a guy reminded you of Duke.”

“Jesus, Angie, Jake’s nothing like Duke was!”

“ ’Cept in a dangerous way.”

Mary remembered the marred doorjamb, the message of the dead bird. Jake wasn’t the only one who was dangerous; in fact, having him back in her apartment would provide a certain degree of protection. But this wasn’t the time to tell Angie that.

“If Fred called an hour ago,” Mary said, wanting off this subject, “you can’t have been at the gin very long.”

“Sometimes it don’t take long.”

“What about this morning?”

Angie breathed in deeply and stood very still, her arms extended straight out to the sides at shoulder height. “I’m okay this fine morning. Really, I am. I only had a couple of hits off the bottle, then the phone rang and I knew it was Fred calling back, so I lost my temper just listening to the goddamn phone, and that’s when I made that mess over there on the wall.” She grinned. “Felt great, even if it was a waste of good booze.”

“There’s no such thing as good booze for you.”

“Oh, you’re right, Mary. I know you’re right.” She dropped her arms suddenly so her hands slapped against her thighs, as if abruptly giving up on a momentary notion of flying.

“You think you’re okay to go get some breakfast?” Mary asked. “You need food in you, and I think we need to get outa here.”

“I can make it,” Angie assured her. “Least I’ll be fine by the time we reach Uncle Bill’s. You better drive, though.”

“I’d intended on it. Button your dress straight, all right?”

“Ain’t that the style?”

“Like feather boas,” Mary said, and waited patiently while Angie fumbled with the buttons.

She watched Angie take the stairs to the street door. She seemed to be moving okay, had her balance, even though she had a death grip on the banister.

In the car, Mary gave her a cinnamon Life Saver from the roll she kept in the glove compartment to freshen her breath before dance lessons. “You gonna forgive Fred?” she asked.

“To forgive’s divine,” Angie said, chomping on her Life Saver so hard Mary feared she might break a tooth. “It’s in the Bible.”

“I don’t remember the nuns at Saint Elizabeth’s telling me that.”

“You done really well in school, Mary, right through college. I mean, truly applied yourself.”

“Is Fred gonna be the recipient of divine forgiveness?”

Angie stared out the window at the sparse Sunday morning traffic. “Fred’s all I got, such as he is.”

“Could be worse, I guess,” Mary said.

“We tell ourselves that, don’t we?”

“Yeah, we do.”

“You’re a good daughter.”

“I know, I know.”

“Gimme another one of them mints, will you? Women like us, we gotta stick together.”

T
HEY SAT IN A WINDOW
booth, gazing out at the traffic swishing past on Kingshighway, while they ate Uncle Bill’s pancakes and sipped coffee. The restaurant was crowded as always on Sunday mornings; many of the customers were dressed up, on their way to or from church. Waitresses scurried between the tables, balancing trays of hotcakes, eggs, and steaming coffee, refilling cups and smiling and dealing out checks signed with a scrawled “Thank you” above their names. In the air was the faint smell of hot cooking grease and frying bacon. The murmur of conversation flowed over the clinking of flatware and china.

Angie had ordered wheat cakes and saturated them with butter and syrup. She didn’t say much while she ate, but Mary could see she was feeling better, and the three cups of strong black coffee she’d downed had to have gone a long way toward sobering her completely.

After her last bite of pancake, Angie fumbled in her purse for a cigarette, then leaned back and fired it up with a disposable lighter. An elderly couple at a nearby table glared as a finger of smoke found them, but Angie paid no attention. This was the smoking section, and Mary knew her mother would defend with nail and fang her constitutional right to foul the air. Her life was pulled this way and that by forces she didn’t understand, but what territory she was sure of, she would fight for with tenacity beyond reason. Mary was glad the people at the nearby table were almost finished eating. She’d seen militant nonsmokers and Angie clash before, and didn’t want to see it again. She wondered as she often did how a woman so fierce in public could have been such a punching bag for Duke.

As if reading her mind, Angie exhaled a glob of smoke thick as cream and said, “It’s a pattern that’s sometimes impossible to break, a relationship like yours and Jake’s.”

Well, she hadn’t been reading her mind quite accurately. “I was thinking about you and Duke,” Mary said. She could defend her territory in public, too.

Angie’s mouth smiled beneath weary eyes, her teeth stained by years of nicotine. “Okay, just so there’s some way I can get you to understand. Duke, Jake, they’re all alike; put ’em in a bag and shake it and it don’t matter which drops out. That’s the point. It’s like they’re born with the need and the cruelty, and early on they learn what buttons to press and strings to pull so they can control people. Some men are like that. They move knowing how it’ll make
us
move. It’s like a dance we do and we got no choice in. You oughta understand that.”

Mary stared out the window. “That’s not my idea of dancing.”

“Okay, so it was a bad whatchamacallit—an analergy.”

“Analogy,” Mary corrected. “An allergy’s something that makes you sneeze.”

“So I see why you was a whiz in school.” Angie flicked ashes onto her plate. “I phoned your apartment yesterday morning. Jake answered.”

“He didn’t spend the night,” Mary said, irritated that she felt she owed her mother an explanation. Maybe the reference to school had put her in that frame of mind; lonely hours of study, trying to make everything perfect. Buttons. Strings. Duke. Her professors at the University of Missouri. The past was gone, no longer existed, yet it seemed to illuminate and shadow her life like time-delayed light from a dead star.

“Some things have been happening to me,” Mary said, trying to get Angie’s mind off Jake. She told her about the knife marks on her apartment door, but not about the Casa Loma incident with the dead bird. She didn’t want Angie to worry
too
much.

Angie waggled her cigarette and said, “Jake.”

“Jake isn’t into that kinda thing, Angie, believe me!”

“Maybe he’s got reasons you don’t know about.”

“Not likely. I understand Jake.”

“Nobody understands anybody.”

The couple who’d been bothered by the smoke stood up to leave. The man laid a dollar bill on the table for a tip and shook his head at Angie before walking away, as if to say it would be hopeless to try reasoning with her. A woman and a young man with a dark beard were shown to the table and sat down. They wore jeans and matching turquoise sweatshirts. The man was carrying a fat Sunday paper. Mary found herself peering at it to see if there was anything about the Danielle Verlane murder case, then decided she shouldn’t be so interested. It was something that had happened in New Orleans, not here in St. Louis. It was coincidental and irrelevant that the victim had been a ballroom dancer like Mary, and, like Mary, Mel’s student.

But suddenly it occurred to her why she might be intrigued by the story. She and Danielle Verlane were somewhat the same type. Not only did they both dance, but both had the same general facial shape, approximate hair color, and there was something in common about their individual features, especially the eyes. That was how Mary saw it, anyway, insofar as anyone actually
knew
what they really looked like to other people. But it did seem Danielle Verlane was a slightly younger version of Mary. It gave Mary an eerie feeling, as if someone had tapped her on the shoulder, and when she turned around, no one was there.

“More coffee, hon?”

The waitress was hovering above her with a bulbous glass pot. It reminded Mary of a detached eye with the brown orb of its iris rolling sightlessly at the bottom. She nodded, then moved her hand off the table and out of the way while the waitress topped off her cup. Angie waved the pot away with her cigarette hand, leaving a tracer of gray hanging over the breakfast debris like smoke over a bombed city.

“You always had a kinda pluck,” Angie said. “I’m counting on that to overcome the family weakness for the wrong men. Don’t take Jake back this time.” The waitress glided away and veered toward another table with the coffee pot. “Don’t do it. Can you promise?”

Mary thought, Promise, hell! “Didn’t you tell me on the drive over here you were gonna forgive Fred?”

“But Fred never hit me, not once.”

“There’s other kinds of abuse, Angie. Some of them worse.”

Angie sat back and smoked. Said nothing.

Mary didn’t feel like sitting and letting the awkwardness and pall of tobacco smoke build. She touched the puddle of maple syrup in her plate and licked her finger. “That’s tasty.”

Angie didn’t answer.

“You think there really is an Uncle Bill?”

“Sure,” Angie said. “We just ate his pancakes. You gotta believe.”

That night Mary awoke just before midnight, and there was Jake in the shadows of her bedroom, poised like a stork on one leg and calmly taking off his pants. Her first thought was that she was dreaming. But she lay flat on her back with her head raised, her eyes wide and staring. The room with its subtle noises and smells, the slow-motion turning and bending of the quiet figure now laying the folded pants on the chair, the soft night sounds of distant traffic, the summer breeze drifting in through the window with its gently swaying curtains—it was all real.

Jake was real.

Here in her bedroom.

She sat straight up as if yanked by a string. “Jake, goddamn you!”

He wheeled, startled. “Whew!” His shoulders drooped as his hulking form relaxed. She couldn’t see his face in the shadows. He made a half-joking grab at his heart, fingers splayed across his bare chest. “You scared holy shit outa me, Mary.”

“What’re you doing here, Jake?”

“Doing? Well, I forgot some stuff yesterday, and I figured I’d come get it, but the lights were all out and I knew you’d already gone to bed. Then I said to myself, what the hell, Jake, whyn’t you just let yourself in with your key and look around. But I couldn’t find what I left, so I thought, well, hell, no point waking Mary up, I’ll just sack out here and ask her in the morning if she knows where my stuff’s at.”

“A pair of socks?” Mary said with disbelief. “You came back for a dirty pair of socks?”

He laughed. “Them? Hell, no. It’s my wallet I can’t find. It’s gotta be here, though. Probably in this room. You wouldn’t want me to turn on the light so’s I can search for it, would you?”

“I’ll look for it in the morning, Jake. I’ll call you if it’s here, which I doubt. I wanna go back to sleep. Now go home.”

“Mary! . . .”

“Go home, Jake! Please!”

He walked over to the bed, wearing only his socks and jockey shorts. “Mary, lemme be totally honest. I miss you like crazy and I don’t wanna be alone tonight. You don’t wanna be all alone either. I know it.”

She tried to will him away, but he kept coming and sat on the edge of the bed. The springs groaned and the mattress gave, tilting her toward him. She didn’t want to slide in his direction, so she dug her fingertips into the softness of the bed.

Gently, he touched her hair, stroked it. “Ah, Christ, I’m lonely. I miss you so damned much. You miss me at all? The truth, now, Mary, okay?”

He sounded like a schoolboy playing a guessing game.

When she wouldn’t answer, he said, “Mary? Babe?” Then he stopped stroking and sat very still. He bowed his head as if in church.

Something shifted in her, some rigid structure beginning to crack. He’d know it somehow; he’d be able to sense the weakness in her. She resisted. “Jake, dammit. Go! Please! You got no right to do this! No damned right!”

“Yeah, I wouldn’t claim any kinda rights where you’re concerned. Wouldn’t force you into nothing you were dead-set against.” But he didn’t budge.

“Oh God, Jake, what is it you want?”

“Not sex.”

“I know that.” And somehow she did.

“I wanna lay down next to you is all. So I feel home. So the need and emptiness goes away and I can live through till morning. Don’t you ever feel that way? Like you’re all hollow inside except for something pulling you in on yourself, like one of those black holes in space that’ll suck anything into nothingness.”