Little Girl Gone (19 page)

“I clean ’em up, and they don’t even say thank you. For what I do, a man like me, I’m just a pair of hands.” He shoved his chair back and went to the sink, turned the water on hard, and lathered his hands and scrubbed under his nails.

His disgust surprised Madora. He always said he liked his clients and how much they appreciated him. Why else would they give him gifts? Cash bonuses, jewelry. One old gentleman had presented him with his wife’s diamond engagement ring, and Willis sold it on eBay for five hundred dollars, which was the amount needed to fix the Tahoe’s transmission.

His feelings were not much different from the way she felt about Linda, but she kept this thought to herself. Caution dug its claws in under her shoulder blades, and a snake of pain uncoiled across her lower back and down her hip. She opened the refrigerator and stared into the cold vault. Now she knew that she was breakable, and with this realization, the planet might as well have stopped and reversed its spin; the transformation of her world was that drastic. He had never hurt her before, but now that he had done it once, she had no doubt he would do it again if provoked.

He left an hour later without saying good-bye. Wearing pajama bottoms and a tank top, barefoot, she went outside. She thought about feeding Linda but decided not to. Later she would be even hungrier, and that would make her more compliant. Maybe.

She tied Foo to an upright supporting the carport, then
lifted the cage that held the coyote. Inside he snapped and growled and leaped against the chicken wire. She had constructed it from bits of wood and old nails she’d gathered around the property, the litter of previous owners’ long-abandoned building projects. The coyote had grown heavy and she was not sure that the cage would stay together without the shelf beneath it. Holding it against her chest and supporting the bottom with her forearms, she crossed the road and went into the scrub. The rough ground hurt her feet, but she welcomed the distraction.

She walked several hundred feet beyond the road and behind a tumble of boulders many feet high and wide. Her right foot was bleeding when she stopped and put down the cage. She sat on a low rock and painfully brought her leg across her thigh so she could examine the sole of her foot, where a thorn had embedded in the soft-skinned arch. Pinching the protruding end between her thumb and forefinger, she drew it out slowly. A bubble of blood filled the tiny wound. She stared at it and then at the wilderness around her.

There were vultures in the sky that morning, drawn to something dead or nearly so. She watched them circle far off toward the county road. She had raised the coyote on a diet of scraps and dog food, and though he was small, he had grown strong. He had no experience in the wild, though, and she feared he had never developed the instincts to forage and protect himself. If a pack found him it might sense his vulnerability, kill him, and leave his
bones for the vultures to pick over. As Willis always told her, it was the way of nature to prey on the weak. Nevertheless, Linda was right: it was better to be free.

She opened the door of the cage and stepped back and to the side. After a moment she saw the tip of the coyote’s black nose and then his muzzle as he sniffed the opening, suspicious and prepared for something he would not like. When nothing jumped at him, he stretched his head and neck forward. A part of him quivered outside, free, while his shoulders and body were still caged. He retreated back to the farthest corner as if he had to think about the option newly opened to him. She imagined him summoning his courage. All at once, he darted out and stood in the open space between the cage and the wild, his whole body quivering. With excitement, Madora thought. And fear. And possibility. He lifted his nose and sniffed the air, and then, in an instant, vanished into the rough. A gusty wind whipped up the sand and gravel and erased his footprints.

Madora stayed as she was, watching the space where he had disappeared under a twisting manzanita with branches the color of blood. She let herself down onto the ground and leaned against the warm boulder. She hurt so much now. It was a struggle to believe that she would ever feel right again. The sun beat down and her eyelids drooped. Not fully conscious, she flicked away the ants that had discovered her ankles. Robin Howard came into her mind and then Django and the strangeness of that moment when, with Willis, they had stood in the parking lot, talking
together like ordinary people. Django’s aunt would never guess that Willis was a man who kept a girl prisoner in an old Great Dane trailer. Or that Madora was someone who would help him. She barely believed it herself, and for a few minutes she pondered the question of how she had become the girl she was, the path she had followed from the porch where Willis found her to this place of sand and rock.

Later, Madora limped out to the trailer and opened the curbside door. Without entering, she leaned inside and slid Linda’s lunch tray across the floor, then closed and locked the door. In the house she lay on the sectional and dozed. The sound of rapping on the kitchen door awakened her. Barking, Foo leaped off the couch and ran into the kitchen.

“Go away,” she shouted over the noise.

“It’s me.”

“I said go away.” Foo had stopped barking. She heard the sound of his nails on the screen door. He would tear the screen, so happy was he to see Django. This would give Willis the perfect excuse to take him to the pound.

Once, in elementary school, she had visited the Yuma animal shelter on a field trip. The most common breed was pit bulls. The cages were full of them, two or three to an enclosure four feet by six or eight. They pressed their broad noses to the wire and looked up at Madora with doleful eyes, and their bodies wriggled with their eagerness to please.
Let me out, I’ll be good, I won’t bite. Let me out.
The children begged to pet and play with the dogs and would not listen to the shelter worker who tried to explain why
the dogs could not be released. Some tenderhearted children had begun to cry, Madora one of them. The teacher had to take them outside and put them back on the bus.

“Foo! Stop it!”

She heard Django open the door and walk into the kitchen. “What’s the matter with you?” he asked, standing at the foot of the sectional.

“Are you deaf or just stupid?”

“How come you’re lyin’ in the dark?”

“I have a headache and you’re making it worse.”

He leaned closer. “What happened?”

“Mind your own business.”

“You look like you were in a fight.”

“I fell out of bed.”

Django said nothing.

“Go home.”

“My aunt really liked your name.”

“I don’t care about your aunt.”

“She’s not so bad.” Django sat on the floor. “So, how’d you fall out of bed?”

“I thought you wanted to get away from her.”

“That doesn’t mean I don’t like her, okay? I’m not going to stay with her forever, but she’s a good person. Only, listen to this, when I was at my old house, I went into the garage and—” His voice cut off. In the shadowed living room Madora saw him draw up his knees and begin to pick at the shag carpet.

“Don’t do that,” she told him. “You’ll pull it apart.”

He started over. “Me and Aunt Robin were at my old house and I went in the garage and all the cars were still there except, you know, the one.”

Maybe this was a true story, not a Django fantasy. She could tell that it upset him to tell it.

“I was thinking how, if I knew how to drive, I could just get in one of them and take off for my brother’s and nobody’d be able to stop me. Do you know how to drive, Madora?”

“Everyone in California knows how to drive.”

“I don’t.”

“You’re a kid.”

“Dad was going to teach me.”

For several moments neither of them spoke.

“I let the coyote go.”

“Cool.”

His quick and positive response angered her. “He’s probably dead by now and it’s my fault.”

“You always think the bad stuff. But he’ll be okay. He knows how to hunt. It’s a survival instinct.”

She hated when he used words like that, assuming that she knew what he meant. He went on about coyotes and wolves and she pretended to listen but did not.

He stopped talking and they were quiet again.

“I’m sorry you’re hurt,” he said.

“I’m okay.”

“Did you go to the doctor?”

“Shut up, Django.” She couldn’t help crying. Foo put his face close to hers and licked her salty cheeks.

She said, “I’m going to see my mother.”

“When?”

“Soon.”

“Is Willis going with you?”

Madora was weary of carrying the truth alone. True, Django was only a boy, but such a boy might be able to help her. Immediately she realized it was too dangerous for him and for her.

He asked, “Where’s your mother live?”

“Sacramento.”

“Hey, that’s great. Sacramento and Los Gatos aren’t too far apart. You could live with your mother and I’d be at Huck’s and we could visit. You’d really like my brother, Madora. And he’s got this great house. It’s kinda hard to get in. Willis’d never find you, honest to God. There’s gates and codes and stuff, but once you’re inside you’d be safe. You could even stay there if you wanted to.”

He told her again about the many rooms in Huckleberry Jones’s house, the helipad and garage big enough for six cars. He told her about Junior, the bodyguard he knew best, and Cassandra, the pot-smoking, bikini-clad girlfriend who had probably been replaced by now. He said there were video screens and games and PlayStations everywhere.

“It’s so much fun up there, it’s like a resort. You wouldn’t believe it.”

“I know.”

At just after seven, Willis jumped out of the Tahoe carrying his medical bag and a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken. He smiled when he came through the kitchen door. “Hey, little girl, brought you some dinner.” He put the red, white, and blue bucket on the table. “How you doing?” He tried to kiss her, but she winced and pulled out of his embrace.

“Still hurts, huh?” He said it as casually as if she had skinned her knee. “I’m sorry I had to do that, honey. But you’ll feel better in no time. Remind me to give you some painkillers later. They’ll help you sleep.”

He began talking about the new job caring for Robin Howard’s mother. “I meant to tell you about it last night, but then things got crazy, didn’t they? I’m charging her full price and then some, ’cause, boy, can she afford it. You should see her condo. Nice stuff, nothing cheap. From all over the world. She started talking about all the trips she’d taken. She’s been just about everywhere. Windows look out on the Sycuan golf course. She’s not rich, but she’s got some fine things.”

He was cheerfully boyish, humming to himself as he set the table and laid pieces of chicken and scoops of mashed potatoes and slaw on the plates. Madora understood that this was the best apology he could manage:
I’m sorry, honey,
and a chicken dinner. In spite of her resolve, her heart softened a little.

“How’s Linda? Did she eat?”

“I gave her food but I didn’t hang around.”

He wanted her to say more but it was part of his apology that he did not press her, not tonight.

“I want to change my clothes before we eat.”

She followed him through the dark, airless living room and into the bedroom, where he stripped off the blue scrubs he wore to work. The light cotton scrub pants hung below his navel, resting on his hip bones. His smooth and almost hairless body had softened in the years since the Marine Corps. There was something feminine about it now, and when Madora tried to remember what it was like to want him sexually, her mind went blank. She looked away.

“I want to visit my mother,” she said. “I can go on the bus.”

In her thoughts she told him,
This is how you can say you’re sorry and I will believe you.

“Madora, no one in their right mind wants to go to Yuma in the middle of the summer.”

He had forgotten that Rachel lived in Sacramento now. He had never cared much for the details of Madora’s life, so the lapse of memory did not surprise her. She started to correct him but he interrupted her.

“Where do you think I’ll get the money so you can have a vacation? And who’s gonna take care of Linda? With this new client, I’ve got enough to do without adding that. For what I’m charging, she’s gonna expect a lot of attention.”

“I miss my mother.”

“Since when?”

“I wouldn’t stay long.”

His lip curled derisively. “You think I don’t know you, Madora? I know you better than you know yourself. You go up there, I know you’ll stay. You won’t come back to me.”

Her cheeks felt warm. “I just want a couple of days.”

Let me go, and I will forgive you everything. Always.

She watched his expression change from suspicion to irritation and half-humorous disbelief to a dawning hurt. She recognized this look and tried not to respond, but she had been conditioned to it.

“She’s all the family I’ve got.”

“I thought I was your family.” Half dressed, he stepped toward her.

Madora’s toes curled into the floor.

He cupped her face in his hands, gently so as not to hurt her. “I know this has been a bad few days and I was rough on you and I’m sorry. You know I never wanted to hurt you, little girl.” He reached back and tugged the rubber band off his braid, combed his fingers through the thick, dark hair. “Now you want to leave me. Just when I need your support the most, you want to take off.”

She remembered being small, laying her cheek against a velvet pillow on her parents’ bed, the softness that made her want to fall asleep right there.

He said, “I’m going to do just what you said, baby. Take Linda up around Elko in Nevada, let her go. I’m just waiting for a few days off. If you’d given me a chance the other night, I would have explained.”

He shook his hair back, over his shoulders. Often in
the evening, he would sit on the bed and she would kneel behind him and brush his hair until it lay flat and glossy on his back. He wanted her to do that now.

“You’re right, she’s a little bitch-kitty and the sooner she’s gone, the better for us. And what happened last night? It wasn’t just you, Madora. It wasn’t all your fault. I’ve got to tell you, sweetheart, that med school interview at the college—it’s still got me reeling.”