Now that I had Nicky, I couldn't afford that risk any more, either.
Jesus.
I drove over to Gevier's house to pay my bill.
* * *
I didn't expect him to be there, and he wasn't. Eddie answered the door. She didn't say anything, she didn't even look at me, she just stared out past me at the minivan. Sometimes I have this effect on people, and I've never understood it. I don't growl, I don't flex my muscles at you, I even try to smile sometimes. Maybe it's just a size thing, you know, maybe some people are afraid of me for the same reason I'm afraid of Louis's horse.
I'm not really afraid of the horse, okay, I just don't like it. Anyway, Eddie hadn't been afraid before, either of the times I had met her. Her father and Louis had both been around the first time, but I couldn't see that making too much of a difference, and I thought we'd done great when Nicky and I met up with her out in Louis's pasture. When a person is scared of you, though, you can sense it, you can see it in the way he looks at you, the way he moves, the way he sits, everything he does. I'll tell you something I would never be able to admit if you and I were standing someplace having a conversation: it hurts every time it happens. It's like being slapped in the face. You think you can get used to it, right, you think you have a thick skin and they can't really touch you, but then you see that look again, and you think, Come on, man. I ain't a bad guy. And even if I am, you don't know it yet. But you're on the outside again, and there's nothing you can do to make him let you in.
She did, though, she stood back from the door, held it open, waited for me to come inside. "He's not here," she said.
"He's still at work, right? I just came by to pay up." I held out the bill, and she took it from me with a shaking hand. This kid is afraid, I thought, really afraid. Something must have happened, something that shook her up. I wondered what she thought I was.
"I couldn't stand it if he had to go back to jail," she said. "They'd send me away somewhere, we'd be locked away from each other, and I can't stand the thought of it." She started undoing the buttons on her shirt. Her cheeks were flaming red, and she still wouldn't look at me.
"Eddie, stop." She had all the buttons open and she shrugged her shirt back off her shoulders. She had no bra on underneath it, and, I suppose, no need for one. I turned away, put my hand on the doorknob. "I gotta go."
"Why can't you just leave him alone?" I heard panic then, and her voice rose in pitch, loud, uncomfortably close to hysteria. "I'll do whatever you want me to, if you'll just go away afterward, and leave my father alone."
I didn't turn around. "Eddie, put your shirt back on."
"He didn't do anything! He's just a mechanic now, don't you understand that? He fixes cars for a living!"
I kept my back to her. "Eddie, I ain't made out of stone. If you put your shirt back on, I'll stay and talk to you." I listened to the sound of her breath, angry little huffs in and out.
"All right," she finally said. I turned around to see her standing, rigid, her face still red. Her shirt was on, though. She had buttoned it all the way up to her chin. At least she was making eye contact.
I walked past her. "Sit down," I told her. "Over there." She took a chair, and I sat down across the room from her. "Eddie, I don't know what the hell you're talking about. Your father fixed my van, and I came by to pay the bill. That's all I know."
She glared at me. "You can stop pretending. Thomas Hopkins told me who you really are."
"Did he now?" My stomach did a kind of a roll, but it stopped, because I didn't think Hopkins knew who I was, for one thing, and it didn't fit with Eddie's worries about her father, for another. "What did he tell you?"
She looked at me, anger and defiance plain on her face. "He said the DEA sent you up here to break up the Oxy trade. He told me you didn't even care if you got the right guy, that you knew my father used to be a chemist, and you were going to hang it on him."
It was almost funny. "Fucking Hopkins." The guy was poisoning the waters, I guess. "And you believed him?"
"You wouldn't tell me the truth, anyway."
Maybe not. "Look, Eddie, I am the furthest thing in the world from any kind of cop, okay? But I just came by to pay my bill. When I'm done here, I have to go out of town for a couple days to take care of some business, and when I'm done with that, I'm going to come back up here, pick up Nicky, and be on my way. I got nothing to do with the DEA, and I couldn't care less about the Oxy trade."
Her face seemed to crumple. "Hopkins said you thought my father was the chemist who figured out how to counterfeit OxyContin. He said there's a lab in India someplace where they're making it now, and that they're bringing it in through Canada."
I shrugged. "Well, that may be true, but I always figured, you want to put a needle in your arm, it's your business. Nothing to do with me."
She leaned forward in her chair, covered her face with both hands, and began to cry silently. It was relief, I guess. After a couple of minutes she stopped, but she didn't uncover her face. "You must think I'm a fool," she said, her voice muffled.
"No."
"I'll be right back." She stood hastily and stomped out of the room. I could hear water running, and then she lost it again, I could hear her going on, "hoo-hoo-hoo," crying like a little kid. She came back about ten minutes later. She had washed her face, tied her hair back, tucked her shirt in. Probably had on a pair of cast-iron underpants.
"I'm sorry," she said, standing next to her chair, flustered. "I thought
" She gestured with a fluttering hand over toward the door, where she'd been standing when she'd taken off her shirt. "I was afraid of you, you know
."
"Sit down," I told her. "Let's move on from there, okay? Let's just, like, go forward. Can we do that?"
She glanced at me, and she blushed again and looked away. "Okay," she said, sitting down. "Yeah, sure."
"You must love him a lot."
"All I have is my father." Her eyes clouded over. "Why would Hopkins say that stuff about you?"
I told her the whole story of Hopkins and me, the traffic stop, the convenience store where he'd been smacking his girlfriend around, the complaint Bookman made me sign, the fight at the VFW, Bookman suspending Hopkins for the fight at the VFW, all of it. "Next he'll be sneaking over at night to let the air out of my tires," I said. "I caused him some trouble, or he thinks I did, and he wants to return the favor. Nothing he would say or do at this point would surprise me."
"What a dick," she said. "Listen, I'm sorry. It's just that I've been under so much stress lately. I'm trying to figure out what I should do, and I worry about what would happen to my father if I left, you know, and then this
. I couldn't stand it if he had to go back to jail."
"I understand, believe me."
She looked at me. "If Nicky were in my position, would you make him go away to school? Will you do it when he gets old enough?"
I hadn't thought about it. "I don't know. I guess I would want him to go. Not to get him away from me, not to get rid of him. But you know, I've made a lot of mistakes in my life, and I don't want Nicky to make the same ones. I want better things for him. I'm sure your father wants better things for you than what he can give you."
She thought that over. "Do you remember what you said, back when I told you I didn't fit in up here?"
"What'd I say?"
"I told you I wouldn't fit in down in New York City, either. You made a joke. You howled like a wolf, and then you told me you could get me around that in ten minutes."
"Oh, yeah." She sat there staring at me. "All right," I told her. "Easy enough. First of all, you don't have much of an accent, so you don't need to worry about that. Second, don't go by the name Edna. Nicky was right. Call yourself Eddie. All right? Eddie Gevier. Lose those flannel shirts, but just keep that one on for now, okay?" She grimaced at me. "Wear black jeans everywhere, and sneakers, those old-fashioned Chuck Taylors are good. Sunglasses, no jewelry. T-shirts, black leather jacket for winter. Okay? That'll get you through the first year. Next, stay out of places you don't belong. Don't smoke dope, don't drink more than two beers. Never tell anybody anything about yourself. Nobody's got your back, so you got to look out for your own self. If you go out, go with a bunch of other females. Keep your mouth shut and sit near the door. Never carry money in your wallet, keep it in your pants pocket. Never date a guy more broke than you. Never believe a guy when he talks shit to you."
"You think men are dogs?"
"I know it." I looked over at her. "Guys will do or say almost anything to get into your drawers."
"You didn't," she said. "You had the perfect chance and you didn't take it."
"You can't go by that, it was just a moment of weakness."
She stood up, and so did I. She watched me count bills out of my wallet. I handed them to her. "Thank you," she said, "for not, you know
"
I looked at her, remembering. God, I couldn't help it. "Don't mention it. You love him that much?"
Her face wrinkled, she took three steps across the space between us and wrapped her arms around me. It was a chaste hug, though, all arms and shoulders, not the full-body squirm you get when they really want you. "Come on," I said, patting her back. "Don't start up again."
"All right." She separated herself from me. "I really should do it, right? Go away to school, I mean."
"It's your call."
"I know it would be stupid not to. I just hate being alone again."
"I know what you mean. You can take it for a semester, though. So can your father. I gotta go, Eddie, I want to make it to Boston tonight. You gonna be okay?"
She nodded, put the money in her pocket. "See you."
* * *
I called Bookman's house from my cell phone. Bookman wasn't home, but his wife answered and I talked to her for a while. She told me how much she liked having Nicky, even if it was only for a few days, and how much Franklin enjoyed having him there. I could hear that mixture of joy and sadness in her voice, her happiness that Franklin had someone to play with, her sorrow at being reminded of her son's limitations. She put Nicky on the phone, and he bellowed in my ear about the yellow perch he'd caught, and how you couldn't eat yellow perch, either, how they tried to stick you with their fins when all you wanted to do was take them off the hook and let them go, and Franklin had caught a bass, a great big one, but they let him go, too. "You have to use worms, Poppy. You have to stick them right on the hook. Do you think it hurts them?"
"I don't think so, Nicky. I don't think worms can feel anything." He talked to me a while longer, but then he ran out of steam. I made him promise to be good, and I listened to him hang up the phone. I had to remind myself again why I needed to do this, leave Nicky with someone and drive away.
Information gave me Thomas Hopkins's telephone number and placed the call for me. His answering machine was on. I listened to Hop's voice say, "You know what to do," then I heard the beep. I thought about the bullshit story he'd told Eddie Gevier, but I couldn't think of any useful message to leave the son of a bitch, so I hung up. I needed to talk to him, though, because there were too many things going on for me to waste time thinking about Hop and his stupid schoolyard shit.
I started falling asleep behind the wheel just north of Portland. The second or third time it happened I got off at the next exit and bought a couple cups of coffee. I don't know why, but I couldn't bring myself to stop there for the night.
The coffee wore off before I reached Massachusetts. Maybe it was coincidental, or maybe it was just because I knew where the fucking place was, but whatever the reason, I wound up back at the same motel Nicky and I had stayed in that first night, on our way north. Different room, at least. I wondered how Nicky was, what he'd had for supper, if he was asleep, all of that. For a guy who always thought he had it together, I had to admit that my shit was spread out all over the place. My money was in New Jersey, my kid was in Maine, and my ass was in Massachusetts. I was beginning to feel like I was losing control. I wanted to call Nicky again but I didn't. What could I tell him that I hadn't already, just a couple of hours earlier? Nicky, I promise to do better than this
. He wouldn't understand, and anyhow, it was myself I needed to make that promise to.
I've never been much for praying. Like Huck Finn, I always got either the hooks or the string, so I gave up on it. I used to think I had a lot of this shit figured out, you know, why people do certain things, why it was all right for me to be what I was, and all that, but you add a couple more pieces to your equation and suddenly the answers start coming out all different. I could see houses up on the hill behind the motel, just ordinary places with trees around them, places where regular people lived. I tried to picture Nicky and me up there inside one of them, the minivan parked in the driveway, Nicky going to school, me cutting the grass
.
