Further Out Than You Thought (19 page)

It occurred to her, as she set the photos back in the box, that she'd show these to her daughter, someday. And her daughter would see them as impossibly old. The thought struck in her a chord at once wistful and shrill. Who would this girl be? What sort of baby, toddler, first grader? Someday she'd be a teenager. This thought, in particular, was terrifying to Gwen, given the recklessness with which she'd lived her own teenage years—the sneaking out her window at night, the pot smoking, the drinking, the raging desert parties. And then there had been the anorexia, the bulimia. It sucked to be a teenager. She'd need her mother. Even if she didn't think she did, she'd need her. And Gwen would be there. She wouldn't check out early. She'd see her through. And this girl someday would be a woman, maybe even a mother.

Dizzy, she sat on the bed.

World without end, Amen. Wasn't that the prayer? Glory to the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit? Well, she wasn't so sure about those three, but she knew the answer to the prayer was inside her. She was the world without end, here, on the edge of this bed, unsure of her next move, alone, in a city still smoking, waiting to explode all over again.

She lifted one of the old dusty wicker suitcases onto the bed and flipped the latches. Its hinges creaked in protest, but the suitcase opened all right, and seemed as if it would hold. She tucked her things inside, pulled on the jeans and slipped into her heels. She'd head back up to Valiant's, get him off the booze and get some water and maybe some food in him before morning. She fastened the suitcase shut and heard screeching—high-pitched, like an owl's screech.

And then there were two—two screams echoing in the courtyard.

THROUGH THE WINDOW screen she saw Valiant on the ground, his head wrapped in a black bandanna, his aqua robe splayed and his body dull, skeletal under the yellow light. Barry stood above him, holding the sign high, ready to strike him. They weren't ten feet away, separated from her by just the screen.

“Barry, stop!” she yelled. Barry didn't move.

“Barry, goddamn it, it's me. What the fuck?” she heard Valiant say. She opened the French window wide, pressed the side of the screen until the metal bent and threw the screen into the courtyard, stepping with care around it, between a lanky rosebush and a hydrangea.

Valiant held his hand to his jaw. “Crazy motherfucker.” Blood ran down his hand and he brought it into the light to see.

Gwen stood back, frozen, like a dream when you can't move. Can't scramble up the wall, can't run fast enough. Can't call out for help. Barry still held the sign aloft. He was frozen, too, staring at Valiant. Transfixed.

“For God's sake, Barry.” She said it under her breath, but he dropped the sign.

“Count?” he said, bending over him.

“Who the fuck did you think?” The Count was slurring his words and his motions were slow and broad. “Fuck,” he said, touching his hand to his chin again, looking at the blood.

“Barry.” Gwen approached so that he could see her. “Give me a hand?”

They each took an arm and pulled Valiant to his feet. She folded his robe closed and cinched the sash. His feet were bare. She searched the courtyard and found his black velvet slippers—one on the edge of the fountain and one under the rosebush—and helped him into them. His blood was still wet on his hand and she was careful not to touch it, not to let it touch her. His arms around their necks, steadying himself with their shoulders, he took a few sloppy steps down the sidewalk, toward Jin's. Gwen spun him around, back toward the Cornell. “You need to go home,” she said.

“What are you,” Valiant said, “my mother?” He laughed as though he'd said something funny and swung back around. “Not
my
mother. Not mine, but someone's.” He giggled. And then he was serious, angry. “I'm going,” he said, lifting his arms off them and lurching forward. “I'm not a fucking invalid. I'm going for cigarettes.”

Barry picked up his sign and resumed his route. “I'm gonna keep on, then. Keep on keeping on.” He was walking away from them, rounding the corner. “You never know. You just don't know.”

“I'm going for cigarettes,” Valiant said again, stumbling toward the street.

“No one's open,” she said. Holding his elbow, she steadied him. Blood from a gash on his chin dripped down his neck. “Come on. We got to clean you up,” she said, walking him toward the door.

“Oh, this?” He smeared the blood across his face with the palm of his hand. He looked tribal, like a warrior off to battle, ready to trade his life for the good of his people, or like a modern survivalist, just come from the wilderness, where he'd killed deer and elk with arrows and lived off raw meat.

She let him go and he wobbled, but fixed his gaze on her. “My blood freak you out? My contaminated blood?”

“Stop it.”

He laughed. “You're just pregnant. I guess. Pregnant.” He was talking at full volume, his words bouncing off the brick walls. “Hear that, Leo, you fucking lazy-ass wop! Your girlfriend is—” Gwen would have put her hand over his mouth if he hadn't been bleeding, but as it happened all she could do was watch him say the word, and hear it echoing. “Pregnant-nant-ant.”

“Come on,” she said. “Let's go see Jin.”

He grinned and she held his arm and together they entered the empty neighborhood, crossing Sixth Street against the red light. There was a slight breeze and the residue of smoke. Her shoes pinched her toes and she stopped midstreet and took them off and held them as she walked beside Valiant, who shuffled in his slippers, as if down a hospital corridor.

“Hey,” she said. “That was a secret, you know. I'd told you in confidence. Because I thought you could keep it to yourself.”

“What are you talking about,” he said. “I'm dying, and you're accusing me?”

“Just don't tell him.”

“About your being knocked up? On the nest? With child?”

“About that.”

“You gonna tell him?”

“That's the plan.”

“When?” He stopped to let a lamppost hold him up.

“In Mexico,” she said. “Remember?”

“Mexico,” he said, and she watched the word sink in, watched his body relax into it. “We need rope, yes?”

“I have it.”

“Because we're tying him up.”

“We are.”

“Because he's crazy.”

“Well,” she said, taking his arm and coaxing him off the post and down the sidewalk. “If truth be told, we're all a little crazy. The point is, don't say anything.”

“About your delicate—”

“Right.”

“Cross my heart, hope to die, Gwendolyn.”

They'd reached Third Street and stood silent a moment, taking in the quiet. The city was only sleeping, but it felt to Gwen as if it had stopped breathing and died in its sleep. Everything looked smaller. Where were the come-along beater cars and their lonely radios bleating love songs into the night? Where were the solitary people out for a predawn stroll? Even the Leave Earth man must have found a box to call home until morning. There wasn't any fried vanilla on the air, no just-made old-fashioneds. In fact, Jin's was dark.

Valiant lumbered to the window and pressed his nose against it, peering in.

“Anyone there?” Gwen said, sticking to the curb.

“Gotta be.” Valiant knocked on the window. One, two, three, four—his signature knock, as though Jin would know it was him and would unlock the door. Only how would Jin know his knock? Valiant wasn't thinking—he was desperate, and drunk. He knocked again.

Nothing.

Valiant began to sing, an impromptu jingle.

He danced a little as he sang, hopping from one foot to the other and turning around. They waited for a light to come on, for Jin to stumble in from the back room, a sleepy smile on his face, shaking his head at Valiant's antics, but Jin's Joint stayed dark.

Valiant knocked again, this time harder on the window. One, two, three, four. Five, six, seven, eight. Double trouble.

“Come on,” she said. “He's not here. Let's go.”

“Oh, he's here. Hey, Jin,” Valiant shouted. “You goddamn Chink.” Then, “No,” he said, in a low voice to himself. “That's wrong.” Then he smiled and hollered, cupping his hands to his mouth and pressing them to the store window, “Nip! Gook! Open up!”

“What the hell are you doing?”

“What? It's just a joke,” he said. Gwen tugged at his arm and he shook her off and pounded with both fists on the window. “Jin! Cig-a-rettes!”

“I'm going home,” she said. Walking to the curb, she heard the latch click behind her, the door squeak open.

“Thank God,” Valiant said. “Jin!”

She saw the silhouette of a man in a T-shirt and jeans, his back to her, his legs spread. “Motherfucking nigger.” Even with his heavy Korean accent his words were clear.
Motherfucking nigger.
Did he mean Valiant?

The Count had his hands in the air. “Hey, man,” he said. A smile showed his white teeth and made his face look like a cartoon.

Gwen came closer. She realized she was walking soundlessly, on her toes.

The man turned. The pistol pointed at her stomach shook in his hands. She held her breath. Her face, her ears were hot, the palms of her hands tingled and pulsed. This was like her dream. The gun at her stomach—did it mean her dream had been a premonition? She wished she could fly. She dropped her shoes. And then she laughed, that ridiculous trill of a laugh that meant things were beyond her comprehension, beyond her control. It was a laugh that should have been a scream.

“Oh God, God, please,” she heard Valiant say.

She stopped laughing as abruptly as she'd started. The scene had gone slow-motion, so she knew it was real—a real gun, a real man with his finger on the trigger. This moment was her life. She looked from the O of the gun's barrel into the man's face. She recognized him. It was Jin's brother. The man's eyes darted from her to Valiant and he aimed the gun back at him.

“Kim?” she said. “It's Gwen. Remember? I met you this morning. We're your brother's friends.”

He looked at her again, his unseeing eyes flat and frightened, and then shifted his focus to Valiant—Valiant with the smeared dried blood across his hollow cheek. The blood didn't help things. Still, in his aqua satin robe and his black slippers, he was hardly capable of concealing a gun, let alone of beating anyone up. Yet Kim walked toward him, his gun on him, his hand trembling. Valiant backed up until he was against a brick wall.
“Mae de Deus,”
he muttered, and closed his eyes.

Inside the store a light came on. In a crumpled, unbuttoned shirt and jeans, Jin crept out from the back room. She'd never seen him so scared, so tense and humorless. His arms were at his sides, in one hand he held a pistol. She smiled and waved both hands in a frenzied gesture above her head.

Jin didn't smile. Had he seen her? No. The window was a mirror. He saw just himself.

Valiant was saying a prayer in Portuguese. She recognized the prayer, the insistent rhythm of it. Her grandmother used to say it in Spanish, over and over, her fingers rubbing the beads of her rosary.
Dios te salve, Maria, llena eres de gracia.

She knocked on the window. Jin ducked behind the counter, peered out from the side and from his crouched position pointed the gun. Like he'd seen in all those American Westerns, Gwen thought.
True Grit. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

Kim had his gun on her, too. She put her hands up. She'd be just another riot death. One that could have been avoided had they played by the rules and obeyed the curfew. Cigarettes. They'd gone out for cigarettes. What had they been thinking?

Jin crept forward and opened the door. “Miss Griffin?” he said, and lowered his gun. He shouted at his brother in Korean, and Kim's hand fell to his side. Still holding the pistol, it dangled there like a dead fish.

“Count?” Jin said.

Valiant slid down the wall to the cement and broke into sobs. “Sorry,” he said, choking and swallowing. “I needed . . .” he wheezed, “cigarettes.”

Jin spat an order at his brother. Looking down at his tennis shoes, Kim walked inside.

“I am sorry one, Count,” Jin said and offered him a hand. Valiant took it and stood. “Miss Griffin,” he said, “I—”

“It's not your fault, Jin,” she said. She picked up her shoes off the curb and went to Valiant's side and steadied him.

His head hanging low, Kim brought out a pack of Camels and a six-pack of Budweiser and handed them to Valiant. Jin barked another command at his brother, and Kim with his dog eyes wet and red looked up at Gwen and Valiant. “Sorry,” he said, and plodded inside.

The Count took a twenty from his pocket and offered it to Jin.

Jin shook his head. “Is a gift,” he said.

THEY WERE HALFWAY to the Cornell before the Count opened the pack of cigarettes. He pulled the plastic tab with his teeth and spit it into the gutter. He hadn't said a word, and his whole body quivered as if with cold. He stopped, striking a tenuous stance, as he flicked and reflicked the lighter. Nothing. Gwen gave it a try. Her hand shook, and she used her other hand to hold it steady. A flame sprang from the plastic casing—fire where there had been only air. He sucked at the cigarette, inhaled long and exhaled slow. He cracked a can of beer and drank a good bit of it down.

Slogging on down the street, he leaned on her all the walk home, but she didn't feel the weight. The sky was lightening, so reluctantly at first that she thought she was imagining it. One by one, the trees emerged from the shadows. Their leaves began to glow, and then the windows in the apartment buildings. The world was taking form, catching the predawn light. And she had a lightness to her, too. A rush of anticipation. Twice in a single day she'd been reborn. She was alive when she might not have been. The possible was perceptible.