The Days of Anna Madrigal (12 page)

Chapter 13

ABYSSINIA

T
he beauty of Lasko's escape plan was that most of it could be discussed openly, even at Eagle Drugs, where Mr. Yee mistook the gleam in Lasko's eye for fierce company loyalty. When Lasko crowed to Andy about the twelve cars on the Rexall Train or the hordes expected in Winnemucca or the efficiency with which this blue-and-white python would slither through all forty-eight states, there was no reason for suspicion. For Mr. Yee, and the rest of the town, the Rexall Train was just a one-day extravaganza, a vision that would evaporate as soon as it left the station.

And so it would for Andy, since Lasko had not requested company on his exodus to Frisco. Andy's job was to board the train an hour before departure and tour the exhibits with Lasko, leaving with the crowd once Lasko had found a good hiding place. He might not even need a hiding place. He'd be wearing a white shirt, he said, with the Rexall emblem stitched on the pocket. He could easily be mistaken for someone official, someone who belonged there. And if anyone asked where he was (Mr. Yee, for instance), Andy was to say that Lasko had gone home sick.

Going home sick from the Rexall Train struck Andy as funny, since each of the cars, according to Lasko, was named for a different Rexall product line intended to improve health or well-being. There was Firstaid (gauze and bandages), Bisma-Rex (antacid powder), Cara Nome (cosmetics), and Kantleek (hot water bottles and enema bags). The last two cars were Joan Manning (chocolates), where the staff would be sleeping, and Puretest (Epsom salts and talcum powder), the private observation car of Mr. Louis Liggett Himself, the grand poobah of United Drugs.

Andy had a cartoonish image of Mr. Louis Liggett Himself throwing Lasko off the train by the scruff of his neck. He saw angry steam coming out of the old man's ears and Lasko flailing like they do in the movies. Then he saw a bloody, gravelly death. He shared this vision with Lasko one afternoon as they walked home from school.

“You don't get it,” said Lasko. “I ain't no Okie, and this ain't no boxcar. This is the Rexall Train, and I'm a Rexallite. They don't wanna make a stink while they're sellin' these many fine products. It's a palace in there. They've got a four-piece orchestra. They've got an exhibit that shows how maraschino cherries are made.”

Andy was kind of curious about the cherries, having experienced them in Reno at the same time he experienced air-conditioning, but they weren't relevant to this discussion. “Lasko, look, the other Rexallites will know each other. They'll know that you don't belong there as soon as the train starts moving.”

“No, they won't,” said Lasko, sounding testier than Andy had ever heard him. “Half the people on the train will be Pullman employees. I could be one of them. I could easily be that. Everybody will think I'm with somebody else.”

Not if you're wearing a Rexall shirt, thought Andy.

Lasko walked for a while in sulky silence, kicking the rubble along the roadside. “I'm pretty convincing, you know. I can talk people into things.”

Andy did know that. He thought of Lasko's hand on his shoulder that day at the drugstore. He thought of the complimentary squirt of cherry syrup and the fancy supper at the Martin Hotel and, later that night, the Mediterranean heat of Lasko's leg against his own. Lasko's offer of friendship had been mildly suspect from the beginning, but Andy, after consideration, had decided that he didn't care. For better or worse, Lasko was adventure in a red sash and baggy pants—Richard Halliburton on a shoestring. This train caper might be goofy as all get-out, but it was harmless enough, and Andy's role as henchman was so peripheral as to seem unnecessary.

So why had Lasko enlisted his aid? Did he just want a witness to his grand scheme, someone to tell people where he had gone and how he had pulled it off? Was it easier to entrust this secret to the bookworm whose mother ran the brothel than to one of his buddies on the baseball team? Or was there something else on Lasko's mind, a secret longing he could never bring himself to name? No matter, thought Andy. Even if Lasko
had
asked him to run away with him on the train, hide with him god-knows-where until they reached San Francisco, even if he had lured Andy with talk of a magic heathen city, of a giant waterwheel in a giant swimming pool, Andy would have had to say no. He could never do that to Margaret or Mama.

Lasko stopped walking and looked directly at Andy. The slanting afternoon light made his embarrassment golden.

He's not used to begging
.
That face gets him everything.

“Are you in on this?” asked Lasko.

“I'm in. Just tell me what to do.”

“Swell.” Lasko thrust out his hand to be shaken.

Andy shook it. “Are you coming back?”

“What's it to you?” asked Lasko.

Andy shrugged and started walking again. “I think that's a natural question for one friend to ask another.”

“You don't say,” said Lasko.

It was one of those dumb things boys come up with when they don't know what to say, some meaningless tough-guy expression they've learned on the radio.

You don't say, wise guy.

But that was just the sound of it. If Andy had been looking at Lasko, if he had seen those dark eyes dance or the slightest curl of his lip, he might have known what to make of it. He might have even seen it as flirtatious, something overblown and sassy that landed, a little clumsily, halfway between Cary Grant and Mae West.

You don't say.

They walked in silence for a while.

“Are you enjoying the book?” Andy asked at last.

“What?”

“The
Book of Marvels
.”

“Oh . . . yeah . . . it's good.”

Andy scuffed a cloud of dust at him. “It's not a book report, Lasko. I'm not your teacher. I don't care if you've read it. I know you've got a lot on your mind.”

“Like what?” Lasko looked genuinely curious.

“Well . . . packing, for one.”

“Packing?”
He made a noise like spitting soda.

Andy found himself grinning. “Well, I guess, under the circumstances . . .”

“You don't pack for an escape.”

“No, I guess not.”

Lasko hooted and bounced around Andy like a prizefighter, his fists pumping slowly and steadily, teasing but never quite touching the parts of Andy's body they purported to be demolishing. “Pack for an escape!” He sounded pirate-crazy at that moment, scornful too, but it was hard not to smile in the midst of that whirlwind.

When he finally stopped, Andy said, “You must've made plans for the other end.”

“The other end of what?”

“The line, Lasko. Do you know anyone in San Francisco? Are you just gonna get off the train and take a streetcar to the swimming pool?”

“I might. I could.”

“You have to have a plan, Lasko.”

“No, I don't. Not after this. I don't have to have a plan in the world.”

They parted in town, not far from Lasko's house. At least, Lasko said it wasn't far from his house, leading Andy to think that he might be ashamed of the place. Either that or he was just ashamed of Andy, the madam's boy he'd brought to the restaurant kitchen without so much as a how-do-you-do from his Mexican father.

Lasko raised his hand in a parting salute, walking backward for a moment as he uttered for the third or fourth time a snappy new farewell that Andy liked to think had been invented just for him. “Abyssinia!”

“Abyssinia,” echoed Andy.

He watched Lasko as he headed down the street past Kossol's Korner. He would walk for while, strutting almost, then stop to spar with someone who wasn't there, some mighty invisible foe that had to be vanquished. Even from a distance his long, balletic shadow was comical and melancholy and completely magnificent.

I
t was coming on dusk when Andy got back to the Blue Moon. Several unfamiliar cars were parked out front, one of which almost certainly belonged to a customer, since Delphine was in her cabinette yelling “Peckerwood cocksucker!” at the top of her lungs. Mama would not be happy about that. She expected the girls to be ladylike. If there was yelling to be done, Mama would be the one to do it.

Andy stopped outside Delphine's cabinette to make sure she was all right. His answer came when the customer, a stumpy, baldheaded, beet-red man, stumbled out the screen door with his shoes and spats and most of his dusty blue serge suit piled in his arms. Upon seeing Andy, he shook his head in contempt, as if to say,
These women!
, presuming sympathy from a member of his own gender.

“Fucking Cajun cunt,” he muttered, then stumbled toward his car, arms still brimming with clothes, stopping only to pee on the cactus painted on Violet's cabinette. They despise women, thought Andy. Why do they even bother?

Margaret, slouched against the porch swing, caught the world-weary look on Andy's face as he headed into the house. “Elegant here tonight, ain't it?”

Andy rolled his eyes. “How do they get so plastered so early?”

Margaret followed him into the house so eagerly that he assumed she'd been waiting for him. “Delphine was raisin' more Cain than he was.”

“I know. I heard it.” Andy's eyes shot nervously to the corner of the parlor, where Mama's big desk was piled so high with ledgers and
Collier's
magazines that you could never tell for sure if she was there.

“It's okay,” said Margaret. “She's in town. And what she don't know won't hurt her.”

Andy agreed. At this point Mama needed only the slightest excuse to boot Delphine out of her cabinette. Delphine had lately been giving Mama lip, so Mama had been on the warpath. Margaret had never cared much for Delphine, she said, but she didn't want to see her working the arcade either, doing it on the cheap for Chinamen behind the bowling alley. So that meant keeping Mama in the dark about Delphine's tantrums with customers. Margaret liked keeping Mama in the dark.

“It's in her blood, you know. She can't help it.”

For a moment, Andy thought she was talking about Mama.

“They get this rage in 'em down in the swamps.”

“Oh . . . Delphine.” Andy smiled. He loved how Margaret summed things up so neatly, the way she kept things uncomplicated for herself. “That's a new slip,” he said, noticing it for the first time. It was powder blue rayon, lace-trimmed.

Margaret ducked her head as if she'd been complimented at a prom.

“Special customer?” asked Andy.

“Just some Stanford boys. They've been here before, but they've got a new chum with 'em.” Margaret plumped the white-blond tresses she had piled on her head for the evening. “Girl's gotta keep up her reputation.” The brave vamp tone didn't come naturally to her, so she abandoned it immediately. “They're nice boys, though. Polite as can be on the phone. Listen, lamb, can we chew the fat for a sec?”

“Sure,” said Andy, already puzzled.

“In your room, I mean?”

With Mama in town, it was hard to imagine what could possibly require privacy. What crisis would have to wait until the girls were out of earshot? The dress, thought Andy. The chiffon shame in his closet. At Margaret's insistence, he had never worn it outside his room—and only three times inside—but Mama could easily have found it. She'd been known to snoop around sometimes, and there was no way to lock his door from the outside. On two occasions Andy had come home from school to find the orange-blossomy sweetness of Mama's perfume, Je Reviens, inhabiting his room like an overripe tropical garden. It troubled him more than it should have. It didn't help, of course, that the name meant “I'm coming back.”

Andy led the way into his room. Margaret followed him closely, a picture of international intrigue as she latched the door behind her.

“What's going on?” he asked.

“Are you in trouble, lamb?”

“What?”

“You know you can ask me for money. You don't have to do this.” She sat on the edge of the bed and patted the spot next to her. Andy sat down reluctantly.

“Why would you think I need money?” he asked. He received an allowance from Mama every week when she doled out the cash to the girls. It was nothing to brag about, but it covered lunch money and sodas and movies and such. He knew plenty of kids at Humboldt High who didn't even get lunch, much less allowances.

Margaret was studying him with big cow eyes. “It's not like you, lamb. That's what I don't understand. Help me to understand, all right?”

“Margaret—”

“I went into town today to buy me some special emerald-green thread, and I passed the pawnshop on the way out of Hunsucker's.” She laid her hand on her chest and sighed, as if the awful truth had just been finally revealed in full.

“And?” he said.

“They had it for sale in the window, Andy.” A tear blazed its way through her caky makeup. “I know it's silly. It didn't belong to me in the first place, but it was a nice piece of luggage—real Italian leather—and I wanted you to have it.”

The valise, thought Andy. Lasko hocked it.

The emotions jostling within him—confusion, betrayal, shame, guilt—left very little room for the truth. “What do you mean?” he asked, completely poker-faced.

“You know, Andy. That beautiful valise.” She pulled a hankie from her slip and blotted her eyes with delicate precision. “I wanted it to be an heirloom from me.”

“Ohhhh.” Andy made it look like the light had finally dawned. “So that's what happened. I'm so sorry, Margaret. I really am.”

“What do you mean?”

“I took it to school last week. I wanted to show it off. I left it by my chair in the lunchroom when . . . you know, I went to stand in line. When I got back, it was gone. I asked everybody around my table, but nobody said they'd seen it.”