Denial lf-4 Page 6

  “No, not for sure.”

  “Then I think maybe we’ll keep Carlos inside till he’s caught, this driver,” she said.

  “It can’t hurt. How are the tacos?” I asked.

  “How are the tacos?” she repeated, shaking her head and smiling. “What do you expect me to say? The tacos are terrible? The tacos are good, the best.”

  “Two tacos,” I said, “and a Diet Coke.”

  “He’s a good man, Arnoldo,” she said. “A very good man and a good father.”

  My turn to nod. She walked away and I waited and looked out the window. The clouds were white cotton. The sun was behind one of them heading for the Gulf of Mexico.

  I had finished the first taco when Arnoldo Robles sat down across from me still wearing his apron, a bottle of water in his hand. Corazon Robles was right. The taco was good and big.

  “I’ve got maybe five minutes,” he said.

  “You look tired.”

  He shrugged.

  “You know this song? The one playing?” he asked.

  “‘La Paloma,’” I said.

  “Yes, ‘The Dove.’ People think it is a Mexican song, but it is not,” he said, looking at the tablecloth. “It is Spanish and the other famous song in Spanish, ‘Granada,’ about a city in Spain, is a Mexican song. Ironico. You understand?”

  “Ironic,” I said. “Almost the same word. You look tired.”

  “Bad dreams,” he said. “My wife told you?”

  “Yes.”

  “I dream about that boy, that car,” he said.

  “I have nightmares too. My nightmares are about my wife. She was killed by a hit-and-run driver.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “When?”

  “Four years, one month and six days ago.”

  I took a bite of the second taco.

  “Good taco,” I said.

  “You talked to the police?” asked Robles.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “I don’t have anything more to tell you than I told them,” he said after a long drink of water. “I was walking home. I see this kid in the street. There’s a car behind him. Kid runs down the street, right in the middle, you know? Kid turns, holds up his hand, but the guy in the car just…”

  “Ran him down,” I said.

  “Ran him…?”

  “Hit him on purpose.”

  “Looked that way to me,” said Arnoldo.

  “What was the boy doing in the street?”

  “I don’t know. I could see him like I see you now. He turns, headlights on his face, and the guy in the car steps on the gas, screeches the tires. I can hear it.”

  “What did the kid’s face look like?”

  I kept my eyes on him and worked my taco.

  “Look like? I don’t know. Afraid and then another look. Don’t know what it was and he puts up his hand maybe like he wants the guy to stop, but the guy in the car steps on the gas and I’m just standing there.”

  “You couldn’t see the driver?”

  Robles shook his head.

  “In my dream, he’s a big guy, big shoulders, but I didn’t get a good look at him. In his car he was just…”

  He held out his hands.

  “… like a shape. Like the one in the backseat.”

  I put down my taco.

  “In your dream there’s someone in the backseat of the car?”

  “In my dream? Yeah, but in the real car too. Someone not so big. Maybe a girl. Maybe a kid.”

  “You tell this to the police?”

  “Yeah, sure, cop named Ralston.”

  “Ransom,” I corrected.

  “Ransom, whatever. I told him. He said maybe I was seeing things. I said maybe but I didn’t think so. He said maybe the kid who got hit had run onto the street. I said no way. He said maybe the screeching I heard was the driver trying to stop before hitting the kid. I said for sure, no. I could see.”

  “Anything else you remember?”

  “Blood, maybe brains on the street. Boy was dead when I got to him. Car was driving fast down the street. Boy’s body all twisted. When I was a kid, I wanted to be a doctor. No more. You really working for the boy’s mother?”

  I nodded.

  “Find the guy,” he said. “Find out what it was all about. Let me know. I need to sleep. My wife and I need to know our son is safe on the streets, at least safe from that crazy guy.”

  He got up. So did I. We shook hands. His was damp with cool moisture from the water bottle. He went back to the kitchen and I dropped six dollars on the table and left.

  I started across the parking lot toward my car, reaching into my pocket for the car key. I didn’t see it coming. I heard the screech of tires close by and started to look up. I sensed it almost on me. Maybe I held up my hand the way Kyle McClory had done about a week ago. I didn’t freeze. I dived over the edge of the fender, my knee hitting something, maybe the headlight, as the car passed by and made a sharp turn at the end of the aisle onto Lime. I didn’t see it turn. I heard it. I was sprawled on my back, knee throbbing, left shoulder numb, Cubs cap still on my head.

  I got up as fast as I could, rubbed my hands against my jeans, picked up the car keys where I had dropped them as I limped toward my parked car.

  “Oh my God. Are you all right?” a woman said, rushing across the parking lot. She was small, huge busted with big round glasses, carrying a baby.

  “Fine,” I said.

  “It looked like that maniac was trying to kill you,” she said, rubbing the baby’s back to comfort him or her, though the baby didn’t seem the least bit upset.

  “I’m fine,” I said.

  “Maybe I should call the police,” she said. “Driving like that through a parking lot. He could have hit my baby or me. I’m calling the police. You wait here.”

  “Did you see his license number?”

  “No,” she said.

  “Make and color of the car?”

  “I… no. But a man was driving it. I think he had a beard or something. I could tell the police that.”

  The baby decided to cry.

  “You could,” I said, going to my car.

  “You’re sure you’re all right?” she asked.

  “Yes,” I said, thinking that I was all right until the next time.

  I got in and closed the door.

  My hands were shaking. I closed my eyes. I had not been there when my wife had died. The police had pieced together a likely narrative in their report, but it left a universe of imagined scenarios. I had tried to come up with one I could cling to but it kept changing. Sometimes Catherine is struck by a huge Caddy driven by a distracted old man. Catherine doesn’t see it coming. She was alive one second, dead the next. Or, sometimes Catherine is frozen in the path of a pickup driven by a drunken, grinning ex-con. Someone she had put in prison.

  Now I was juggling three hit-and-run scenarios, Catherine’s, Kyle McClory’s, mine.

  My hands stopped trembling. They hadn’t been trembling with fear. They had been trembling because the person who had tried to kill me had opened the curtain, letting in memory.

  Since my wife had died, among the things I had lost were fear and a willingness to experience joy.

  The woman and the crying baby were back on the sidewalk standing in front of Ace Hardware. I drove slowly. There was a predator on the streets and my knee and shoulder hurt.

  I caught what there was of a rush hour as I headed down Fruitville toward Tamiami Trail. The Gulf Coast was in season, which meant lots of tourists, lots of snowbirds. Jaguars, red convertibles with their tops down, a Lexus or two, pickups, SUVs, almost all being driven badly.

  Traffic rules in Sarasota: (1) If the light recently turned red, step on the gas and go. (2) If you come to a stop sign, do not stop. Just slow down a little and look both ways. (3) At a four-way stop, it doesn’t matter who gets there first. What matters is how big a vehicle you have and how mad at the world you are that day. (4) If there is just enough room for you to fit, you can speed up
and cut off another driver. (5) Checking the rearview mirror before changing lanes is optional and checking side mirrors is to be avoided. (6) The law is wrong. It is the pedestrians who should yield to the cars.

  Driving badly is an infectious disease on Florida’s Sun Coast. I think it started with native Floridians in pickups and baseball caps who zipped in and out of traffic in a hurry to win the race that had no winner. A variation, in mutated form, had been imported from the North with little old retired men and women who kept their eyes straight ahead, drove a dangerous ten miles under the speed limit, never looked at their side or rearview mirrors even when they changed lanes as they sat with necks craned so they could see over the dashboard. Finally the disease had been passed on to people angry at the pickups, angry with the ancient drivers. This group drove a few miles over the speed limit and had an uncontrollable urge to curse at everyone who hogged or shared the road.

  Someone inside one of those cars on the streets of Sarasota with me that day was even more dangerous than all the rest of the drivers on the road. He was the one who had tried to kill me.

  6

  I pulled into the driveway of Flo Zink’s house on a street off Siesta Drive before you get to the bridge to Siesta Key.

  My leg hurt. My shoulder ached. I was thirsty.

  The SUV was in the driveway. Before I knocked, I could hear guitars and singing beyond the door. This meant that either Adele was out somewhere with the baby or the baby was not taking a nap. The sound system and the pumping of country-and-western music played several decibels too loud were turned off when Adele’s baby was sleeping.

  Flo, glass of amber liquid in her right hand, opened the door and smiled at me. Flo is a short, solid woman in her late sixties. She used to wear too much makeup. Now she wears a little. She used to dress in flashy Western shirts, jeans and cowboy boots. She still does.

  The music was loud behind her, but nowhere near as loud as when I had first met her. I must have looked at the drink in her hand. She did too.

  “Pure, zero-proof Diet Dr Pepper,” she said.

  I looked at the drink, saw the bubbles and nodded. I had pulled some strings, very thin strings, to get Flo’s driver’s license back. Adele was a few days away from turning sixteen. She would be able to drive on her own then, but until she could do it legally, she needed a licensed driver in the car. That was Flo.

  “Quiz, my sad Italian friend,” Flo said, stepping back to let me in. “What Cole Porter song did Roy Rogers make famous?”

  “‘Don’t Fence Me In,’” I said.

  The song was playing throughout the house. I didn’t recognize Rogers’s voice, but I recognized the song.

  “You are a clever son of a bitch,” she said. “What are you drinking?”

  “Diet Dr Pepper will be fine,” I said.

  “You know where the kitchen is.”

  She closed the front door behind me. I limped in and she said, “What’s wrong with your leg?”

  “Bumped into something.”

  “Let me take a look. Sit down and drop your pants,” she said, motioning toward one of the living room chairs.

  “I’m fine,” I said.

  “And I’m Nicole Kidman. Sit. Drop ‘em or roll’em up.”

  I sat and rolled up my pants leg. Flo looked down at it. Roy Rogers sang about gazing at the moon.

  She looked down at my leg.

  “Knee’s a little swollen,” she said. “Nothing too bad.”

  She patted me on the shoulder. I winced.

  “What’s wrong up there?”

  “Bumped into something else,” I said.

  “You are one injury-begging sad sack or a liar,” she said.

  “Adele home?” I said, rolling down my pants leg, getting up, about to head for the kitchen, just left of the front door off the living room.

  “Sit back down. I’ll get it,” said Flo, holding up her glass and heading toward the kitchen and calling back, “She’s home. I’ll get her after I bring your drink.”

  Behind us Roy Rogers sang about starry skies and wanting lots of land.

  I didn’t want lots of land. I wanted to get back to my small box of a room behind my office. And I could do without starry skies. I liked small enclosed spaces. I hated lying on my back outdoors at night. It made my head swirl. I had felt a little of this before Catherine died. Since she was gone, it had gotten more defined. I welcomed it.

  Flo didn’t have to get Adele. Adele came down the hallway to the living room, baby in her arms. Adele smiled at me. No, actually, it was a grin. Catherine, five months old, thin blonde hair, was thoughtfully chewing on her mother’s hair.

  “Mr. F,” Adele said. “Want to hold her?”

  “No thanks,” I said.

  Flo came back in the room, handed me a cold glass of Diet Dr Pepper, touched Adele’s face, kissed the baby’s forehead and scurried off down the hall.

  I didn’t want a baby’s life literally in my hands. I don’t trust fate and I know if there is a God or gods, devils or demons, they can play games a certified sociopath might admire.

  Flo came back with a colorful Indian blanket and rolled it out on the living room floor. Adele loosened the baby’s grip on her hair and placed Catherine on the blanket on her stomach, facing us. The baby lifted her head unsteadily, hands pushing against the rug, and looked at me. Our eyes met.

  “Lew,” said Flo. “Lew.”

  The thought had crept up on me. My wife, Catherine, and I might have had a baby like the one who was looking up at me if a hit-and-run driver on Lake Shore Drive in Chicago hadn’t killed her four years ago.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “You all right?” asked Adele, coming to my side. Roy Rogers had stopped and Johnny Cash was singing about killing a man in Reno as I rejoined the living.

  Adele was about my height, blonde, clear-skinned and definitely pretty. She had lost the touch of baby fat shortly after I first met her.

  “How’s school?” I asked.

  Catherine rolled over onto her back.

  “Straight A’s, arts editor of the paper,” Flo said.

  Catherine rolled onto her stomach, heading toward the edge of the rug. As she rolled again, Adele stepped over and put her back in the center of the rug. Flo picked up a red plastic baby toy that looked like a ball with handles and placed it in front of the baby.

  “How’s life treating you, Mr. F?” Adele said.

  I knew how life had treated Adele. Her father had sold her to a local pimp when she was thirteen. Her father had murdered her mother. Adele had gotten into an affair with the married son of a famous man when she was fifteen, who had taken her in. Result: Catherine was named for my wife. Catherine’s father was serving a life term for murder. And yet there was Adele smiling, finishing high school, and writing award-winning stories that were sure to get her an invitation to major universities.

  “Fine,” I said.

  “He’s been bumping into things,” said Flo.

  Johnny Cash was finished. The Sons of the Pioneers were now singing “Cool Water.”

  I drank some Diet Dr Pepper and watched Catherine suck on one of the handles of the circle.

  “You know a boy named Kyle McClory?” I asked as Adele sat cross-legged on the rug next to the baby.

  “Knew,” Adele said. “He got killed about a week ago. Hit-and-run.”

  “How well did you know him?” I asked.

  “Hardly,” she said. “He was a freshman. Two years apart in age. Two decades apart in life school. He was a kid. You trying to find the driver, right?”

  “Yes. I’m working for his mother.”

  “Wait, wait,” said Flo. “How’s knowing about the boy going to help you find some hit-and-run drunk?”

  “He thinks maybe Kyle was murdered, right, Mr. F.?” Adele was smiling, her hand gently rubbing the back of the baby, who was totally absorbed with the difficult choice between which handles of the toy she was going to put in her mouth.

  “It’s possible,�
� I said. “What about Yolanda Root? Kyle’s sister.”

  Adele looked up and said, “Half sister. She wants no part of Doc McClory or his name. He wants no part of her. Probably the only thing they ever agreed on. Her, I can tell you a whole lot about. What are you thinking, Mr. F? Someone ran down her kid brother to get back at Yolanda or something?”

  “I don’t know.”

  And I didn’t

  Flo had sat on the sofa, diet drink in hand, watching the baby.

  “Yolanda’s two years older than me,” Adele said. “She just graduated. No, I take that back. She wasn’t graduated. She was ushered out after an extra year to make up the courses she had flunked. Haven’t really been in touch with her much since they handed her the diploma and probably asked her not to come back for reunions.”

  Bob Nolan and the Sons of the Pioneers sang about someone who was a devil and not a man.

  “Yolanda was trouble?” I said.

  “Name it,” said Adele, gently rubbing her forehead against the top of the baby’s head. “Drugs, maybe even a little low-level dealing, men, boys, maybe even girls. She tried to come on to me back when I was with… you know. But she wasn’t good at it. She was just playing bad girl. You know? Diamond in her tongue, triple rings in one ear and makeup that said put up or shut up. This Goth is watching you. Tolstoy said you play a role long enough, you start becoming the character.”

  “That’s what happened to Yolanda?”

  Adele nodded.

  “Possibility,” I said. “You think maybe someone might try to get back at her by going after her brother? Or maybe she got Kyle into something?”

  “No,” she said. “She liked the kid, wanted to protect him, be big sister, which didn’t play well being who she was. Haven’t talked to Yola in, I don’t know, maybe a year.”

  “Andrew Goines?”

  “Who?”

  “Friend of Kyle,” I said.

  She shook her head. The name meant nothing to her.

  At the door, Flo handed me what looked like a candy bar.

  “PowerBar,” she said. “Super-high protein.”

  I put it in my pocket.

  “Thanks.”

  “You don’t need an excuse, Lewis,” she said.

  “Excuse?”