Break the Skin (18 page)

The officer slipped into my bedroom, and I whispered to Donnie, “If you ask me, they don’t want to arrest Slam. They’d rather get on his trail and let him lead them to Pablo.”

That’s the way it would work, I decided, if the string played itself out too long. Either Slam would be back for Pablo, and he’d finish what he started when he beat him, or else the police would let the hunter take
them to the prey. Maybe it would be better if I just turned Pablo in. He’d do time, no doubt about that, but at least he wouldn’t end up dead.

I thought about doing it. I really did. I thought about telling that officer exactly where Pablo was.

Then Donnie said,
“Hay mas tiempo que vida,”
and I went dumb. It was something
mi abuelita
used to say whenever I got in a hurry.
“Bebe,”
she’d say, “slow down. There’s more time than life.”

Hearing Donnie say that gave me the shivers. “I didn’t know you could speak Spanish.”

He shrugged his shoulders. “It’s just something I heard once.”

The officer came back into the kitchen then, and my heart leapt because I saw that he had my wallet—he’d found it in my purse and taken it just like that—and he had the Illinois driver’s license, the one I’d cut Lester Stipp’s name and address from, so now all it showed was his picture and his vital information.

“You’ve got no right.” I got to my feet so fast the kitchen chair fell sideways to the floor. I grabbed for that driver’s license, but the police officer jerked back his hand and held it over his head so I couldn’t reach it. “You went into my purse,” I said. “You’ve got no legal right to do that.”

“Now, Miss Baby, you said I could take a look around.” His voice was all singsong like he was talking to a little girl. He tossed my wallet onto the table. “Awful interesting what you can find if you just look hard enough. Now, why would you have this Illinois driver’s license in your purse, and who cut the name and address out of it and why?”

Donnie took his wallet out of his hip pocket and opened it. He pulled out the cash and the four-leaf clover laminated in plastic. Then he put them back and folded up the wallet and laid it on the table. He said to me, “Baby?” I knew that, like the police officer, he was waiting for me to explain.

“I had to make a Xerox copy.” I talked fast, letting the lie unravel before I could think too much about it. “A copy to carry to the bank so we could open an account. We must have forgot I still had it in my purse.”

The officer slapped the license against his palm. “Someone’s taken a pair of scissors to this. It’s illegal to deface a driver’s license, you know.”

“Yes,” I said, as if I was just noting a fact that didn’t mean much at all. “I know that.”

The officer waited for me to say more, and when I didn’t—when I couldn’t find any believable explanation at all—he said to Donnie, “Exactly who are you, Mister?”

Donnie didn’t flinch. “I’m Donnie,” he said. “Donnie True.” Then he went on, only now in a voice that stunned me—hard-edged and straight to the point as it was. “I chopped up that plate. I had my reasons. They don’t have anything to do with what you’re looking for here.”

The officer came over to where Donnie was sitting. He put his hands on the table and leaned in close. “I’m going to take this license, and I’m going to find out who you really are. Once I know that, I’m going to figure out what it is you’re ashamed of.”

“I didn’t say I was ashamed of anything.”

“A man cuts out his name and where he comes from?” The officer drew himself up, pushing out his chest. “Mister, that’s a man who’s trying to hide.”

Donnie kept his voice even. “You can’t take that license. Baby’s right. You’ve got no legal call.”

The officer laughed. He tossed the license onto the table. “Keep it,” he said. “I’ve got everything I need.”

Then he was out the door, leaving us to wonder what he meant, leaving Donnie to say to me, “All right, Baby. How come you did it?”

I tried to explain the whole thing. How I found him on the street, and he looked so lost I just claimed him. “Remember?” I said, and he snapped at me. “Of course I remember.” I kept talking, telling him about finding his wallet and taking out his driver’s license and cutting out his name and address, not wanting him to see them and remember who he was and where he came from, not wanting him to go back home and leave me alone.

Donnie took it all in. Then he said, “So who am I, really?”

“You’re Lester Stipp.”

“From Illinois?”

“Mt. Gilead. Do you know that place?”

He thought for a good long while. When he looked up, I could see the pain in his eyes. “Yes, I know it.”

“And you want to go back there?”

He shook his head. “I wouldn’t say that. No. Not really … I don’t know.”

“Is that why you keep lying to save me? To save us? Do you remember more than you let on?”

“More than I wish I did,” he said, and then Emma came through the door.

She was out of breath, and she was waving her hands in the air. “Miss Baby, Pablo needs you. He says you got to go to Deep Ellum. He says you got to go right now.”

I WAS SUPPOSED
to go to Club Dada, and there I was to meet up with one of Pablo’s
hombres
, a man named Amos. He’d have on a panama hat, Pablo told me, a gold cross dangling from his left ear. He’d find me in Club Dada, after the band came on. “Amos,” Pablo said. “Remember that.” He’d come up and say, “You must be from out of town.” That was the sign that I was to follow him. “You go,” Pablo said. “You do whatever he tells you to do. He’ll take you to where the money is. He’s my only chance.”

Amos had the money that would save Pablo from Slam Dent, but I knew it wouldn’t come free. “What’s it going to cost?” I asked.

“One thing at a time,” Pablo said. “You let me worry about that. Now go.”

So we did, Donnie and I. He was still Donnie to me. I couldn’t think of him as Lester because when I did that, I had to face the possibility that I’d end up losing him. We drove down 35E, through the metroplex
sprawl—Lewisville and Carrollton and Farmers Branch—toward the lights of Dallas, toward the Bank of America Tower outlined in bright green argon lighting, and the white diamond argyle pattern along the length of Renaissance Tower, and the dandelion ball flashing on top of Reunion Tower.

I was afraid to ask him what he remembered about Illinois and who and what he’d left there, but finally I couldn’t stand the silence anymore, and I said, “Why’d you leave where you’re from? Why’d you buy a one-way bus ticket to Texas?”

It took him a long time to answer. He kept fiddling with the glove compartment, unlatching the door and then closing it again, over and over, two, three, four times. Then he said, “I was in the war over in Iraq. I saw some things there, did some things, things that are hard to think about now.…”

I interrupted him. I could tell he was having a hard time, and as much as I wanted to know the truth, I wanted to save him from whatever misery telling it would bring him. “You don’t have to tell me.…”

This time he was the one who wouldn’t let
me
go on. “No, I want to. I owe that to you. It was after the war that I started having spells. Sometimes I’d just pick up and go. Sometimes I’d know right away what I’d done, and sometimes, like this time, it’d take a while. The doctors told me those spells were amnesia. Fugues, they called them. Dissociative fugues.”

“I’m trying to understand,” I said.

“Things get hard for me.” He shrugged his shoulders. “I guess I just run and I don’t even know that’s what I’m doing.”

I knew then he’d run from something hard back in Illinois, something he wasn’t ready to tell me.

“Are you going back?” I asked.

“Right now I’m with you.” He reached over and took my hand. He raised it to his lips and kissed it. “Right now that’s all I’m thinking.”

For the time being, I let that be enough. We crossed over the LBJ
Freeway and took the Woodall Rogers to the Pearl Street exit, and then we were in Deep Ellum. Music thumped from the clubs. The night was on the warm side, even for December in North Texas, and the club doors were open. I could see the bar lights inside and the strobes from the stages. I kept my focus on this man, Amos, we were to meet, and the money he would give us to save Pablo. I didn’t know what sort of deal Pablo had struck. I just wanted that money.

We walked past The Bone, and I thought of the story I’d told Donnie about how one night we left there and a man hit him with his fist, and that was the start of his amnesia. Something told me we were beyond the power of stories now. There wasn’t anything else I could say to keep Donnie from remembering Mt. Gilead in Illinois and whatever was there he wished he didn’t recall.

The clubs and bars and restaurants were in squat buildings that used to be warehouses. Now they were painted bright colors—splashes of pink and blue and green and red. Some of them had murals on the exterior walls. My favorite was “Oddities of Our World” on the side of the Prophet Bar. It was a series of drawings—they looked like pencil drawings, all grays and whites—featuring freaks like Fat Ted, Anaconda, and Zen Man. Some nights before Donnie came, I dreamed that I was on that wall: Lonesome Girl.

He stopped in front of a sign that said
HELP US HELP YOU TO BE SAFE AND SOUND IN DEEP ELLUM
.

“I hope you know what you’re doing,” he said.

“You didn’t have to come with me.” I was testing him, looking for some sign that he’d stay and not go to Illinois. “I’m used to doing things by myself.”

“It’s not like that.” We stood on the sidewalk in front of Club Dada, the grotesque faces that lined its facade looking down on us. Faces with noses elongated, lips stretched, eyes bulging, mouths twisted. “It’s not what you’re thinking. The reason I don’t want to go back.” He took my hand. “It’s you, Baby. How could I leave you?”

He squeezed my hand, and I felt my heart go, just like it had that first night when I found him. “You and me?” I said.

“You and me, Baby.”

Then a crowd of frat boys from SMU went brushing by us with their honeys, their blond sorority babes, and Donnie and I let ourselves get swept along into the club.

The band was already playing. Four rockers who called themselves Watershed. Three guitars and drums. A little on the grungy side: sneakers and jeans and T-shirts. The bass player wore one of those tight-fitting watch caps, and he had a voice that lifted high above the music and rang like a bell, clear and lasting, and went right to my heart when he sang about love gone wrong. “Here we are, in the same dive bar,” he sang, and I swore he looked right at me, and I thought,
Exactly
.

Donnie held my arm like he was afraid I’d slip off into the crowd and disappear. I loved the feel of his hand, the way he clung to me. I told myself everything was going to be all right. He wouldn’t go back to Illinois. He’d stay with me, and our life together would be the one I’d always dreamed of. We’d get the money we needed to get Pablo out of trouble with Slam Dent, and we’d let everything else run its course.

I kept looking around the club for a man in a panama hat, a man with a gold cross hanging from his ear, but all I saw were the college kids, shaking in front of one another on the dance floor, hopped up on booze and hormones and whatever drugs they took to make them believe they were invincible and this was the most wonderful night that could ever be.

Watershed played a song aimed right at those kids, a song about wearing all the latest clothes and seeing all the coolest shows, and they went wild, dancing hard to the driving beat, lifting their arms over their heads and clapping their hands. They sang along: “My steel toes start kickin’. My new tattoo just ain’t stickin’. You’ve got to break the skin. Take the needle just stick it in.”

Tattoo ink lives in scar tissue. That’s what keeps it permanent. The needles pierce the top layer of skin, and then the layer beneath it. As
deep as that. Over the years that follow, the ink migrates even deeper, which affects the clarity and integrity of the tattoo, but it’s still there. It’s not going anywhere. I put my arms around Donnie’s waist, stood behind him, hugging him like that, wishing that what we had would last forever. Even if it got roughed up or smeared or faded, it’d still be ours. We’d feel it inside. Nothing would ever be able to wash it off, cut it out, burn it away.

“This band,” Donnie said, but the music was so loud I couldn’t hear the rest. Something about Cheap Trick, that old band from the seventies and eighties. Something about a winter night. Something I didn’t think I wanted to hear because I suspected it was something from his old life, something calling to him.

“Keep your eye out for that man,” I said, and he quit talking.

I squeezed him more tightly, and that’s when I felt a stir of air behind me, and I heard a man’s deep voice say, “
Chica
, you must be from out of town.”

I turned around and there he was, Amos, the man we’d come to find. He turned and started making his way toward the door. I took a deep breath. I grabbed Donnie’s hand, and I did what Pablo had told me to do. I followed.

On the street, Donnie and I walked a few feet behind Amos. He was a tall man with long legs, and he moved quickly down the sidewalk, not even glancing back to make sure we were following. He was tall and slender, his arms swinging, the gold cross earring jouncing from his ear beneath the brim of his panama hat. We were almost to The Bone. He turned down an alley, and I followed.

Then I realized Donnie wasn’t with me. I turned around and saw him still standing on the sidewalk.

“Come on,” I said. “Hurry.”

He wouldn’t move, so I went back and grabbed his hand.

“This is how it happened, isn’t it?” he said. “That man who hit me.
He was in this alley. I wouldn’t give him any money, and that’s when he hit me.”

I had to say it. “You know that didn’t really happen, don’t you? You know I made it up.”

“It feels real to me. Everything you’ve told me. It feels like mine.”

He was afraid to follow Amos down that alley. That’s the thing that was true. Donnie was afraid, and because he was afraid, I was, too.