Deadman (7 page)

6

Helen

S
he'd be just as happy if he never came back. Not true, really. It was a way of punishing him, in her mind, for going away. Of course, he had to come back, he would come back, she wanted him to come back. She couldn't live without him, but . . . she had begun to enjoy the time when he wasn't around.

Oh god, what a miserable thing. She asked herself why women let themselves be trapped into these situations. But then she refused to feel trapped. This was a situation of her own making.

She had gone to Joe for help, she couldn't deny it. And then he had invited her to come with him. The trouble was that having done what she had wanted to do, and having gone with Joe voluntarily, she had begun not to like it here. Who in the hell wanted to lie around Montana for the rest of their lives? She had things to do. She was a young woman.

Joe had things to do. He went off and did them. He didn't tell her about them, not really, just little jokes. He called it his Gogol Scam and then, because she'd misunderstood and said “Go-go?” he'd laughed and taken that up. For a time she had been convinced it had something to do with girls, that he had another woman somewhere
whom he went to see. What was the big secret? No secret, he insisted, it was just too complicated to get into. He'd tell her all about it one of these days, if it worked out.

Helen hated that kind of talk. She was stuck here, waiting. That was the way it always was. She wanted to call her mother. No, says Joe. She wanted to send her mother a note. No. Don't contact your friends, he had warned. When you took out Carmine, you said good-bye to friends, to family. Sorry, but that's the way it is. Those guys get a lead on you, we're dead. They never quit. So, here we are. This is where we live now. Don't you like it?

She liked it plenty, for a while. They went fishing, they floated on rafts, they hiked. They bought matching Harleys and roared up to White Sulphur Springs, careening down empty highways through the mountains and over Missouri River bridges and dodging antelope, lights out, driving by moonlight. But soon enough, they roared home. It wasn't as if they had nowhere else to go. On a whim, they flew to Vancouver Island, to take high tea at The Empress Hotel in Victoria, then dinner in Seattle and the sweet ride on Amtrak's “Coast Starlite” to San Francisco to shop for a few days. They drove down to Flaming Gorge to make love on a mountainside, ignoring the cars winding up the road. But always back to the cabin.

She liked it here, basically. The house was terrific. She'd bought some nice things like dishes and a good sound system, hundreds of CDs, some great clothes. It was a lot of fun. They spent money sometimes like there was no end to it, and of course, there was no end to it, practically speaking. Boxes and boxes of money.

On a normal day they would get up late, loaf around over breakfast—which they made themselves, since Joe refused to have servants of any kind. This was a point of contention. Helen argued that since they couldn't very well go out for breakfast, they ought to have someone in to cook and do the housecleaning. Joe laughed long and hard at this. “You can't make your own breakfast? Hell, I'll make
it.” And he did. And he cleaned house, too, though it was not an arduous task, after all.

After breakfast was shooting. Usually it was just Joe, but Helen frequently went with him. She didn't really enjoy shooting, not as much as Joe did, but she knew that he liked her to come along. They would walk up through the trees and back into the canyon. Some days they shot pistols as they walked—snap shots, Joe called it (he alternated right-hand days and left-hand days, quick drawing)—but usually they took the AK-47s, or the Uzi, and always a few handguns. After shooting, one of them ran down to town for the paper and to check the mail. Later they might fish, or go to Butte for dinner, or even to Bozeman or Livingston. There were some good restaurants over that way.

The one thing she loved without reservation was the hot springs, just over the ridge from the house. The hot springs almost made Montana a good deal. It was a sacred place, she'd decided. Lately she had come to resent Joe's presence in the hot springs, and Joe had seemed to recognize that. He liked her to do things on her own. He didn't mind if she traipsed off, naked as a jaybird, walking the four or five hundred yards over the ridge to the hot springs by herself.

He was almost unobjectionable. He acceded to everything. But so what? The gritty little basic thing was that she had grown up in Detroit, in the city. She liked people. Joe didn't give a damn if he never saw another human being in his life. It wasn't true, of course; he was very outgoing and gregarious at times. But at other times he seemed totally indifferent to, or even hostile toward, people. Helen found this unbearable. She needed people, particularly other women. She couldn't live without friends. If he knew that she had been to Holy Trinity, the Serbian church in Butte, he would flip.

As for Tinstar—well, it wasn't even a town, it was just appalling. A bar, a gas station that was also a post office, and a kind of convenience
store that wasn't conveniently open—the hours depended on how the trout were hitting. And there was more poverty than she had expected: so many of the people on welfare, on some kind of assistance, living in shabby trailers. It didn't have the abject misery of Detroit, but misery was there just the same.

And she couldn't go by her own name. At first she had found it amusing to ask Shawna in the Tinstar Saloon to call her “Buddy.” But lately she had found it disagreeable. She wanted Shawna to call her Helen. She wanted to be friends with Shawna, but Shawna was an awful hick, it turned out. She was also on aid, even though she was employed. Conversation with Shawna was like, “Did you watch Sally Jessy Raphael yesterday, she had a guy on there who admitted that he'd raped two hundred women, whyn't they cut his balls off?”

Well, what did she expect from a bartender? The women available to her weren't equals, they were hairdressers and ranch wives, waitresses and unwed teenaged mothers. The milieu did not include upscale career women, lawyers and go-getters. About as close as it got was Milly, a realtor in the Ruby Valley, who sometimes came into the Tinstar Saloon. But Milly was in love with some redneck rancher and had a couple of kids. There were also a lady sheriff, whom Helen necessarily avoided, and a kind of interesting but somewhat aloof (or at least cool) single woman who had some kind of job with the irrigation district. And the old gal who ran the Garland Ranch, the XOX, who had sold Joe the property—she was not to be believed, a raw-boned, wind-rubbed cowgirl who evidently preferred the conversation of red cattle.

Butte wasn't a hell of a lot better. A raggedy old falling down city, a kind of Flint-in-the-Rockies or maybe some time-warped decrepit burg from the Depression. She didn't find it nearly as interesting as Joe did. It looked trashy to Helen. She had been stunned to discover a Serbian Orthodox church there, of all places. Evidently, the Serbs had come to work the mines, and they made up one of the
largest Serbian communities in the West, but it was incongruous, and anyway, she'd never been much for church.

Bozeman was a college town, deadly boring. Livingston was campy, tanned oldsters wearing Gucci bandannas. Missoula was also a college town; it had a couple of rock joints and some cultural offerings, but it was too far away and annoyingly self'important. Helena, the state capital, was the most boring of all: a political town in a state where the legislature only met for ninety days every other year. This was not the year.

Montana was not a bad place, she conceded. Their little mountain, their house, their pine trees, the view down the valley. But after all, what was it? Take away her hot springs and it was just okay, but it wasn't anything, really. Joe liked it. Joe loved it. He kept talking about how great it was, the air, no people . . . a man could piss off his front porch without checking on the neighbors. Big deal. Fine for him. But what was there for a dynamic young woman to do? Pissing on the front lawn didn't get it.

After a while she couldn't stand it. The day she discovered Holy Trinity in Butte, she felt so blue that she couldn't resist sending a card to her mother, mailed it from Butte. Big deal. What was the use of being infinitely rich if you couldn't live like a rich person, or even send a stupid postcard, like a poor person? Her idea of being rich was that they should live in, say, San Francisco, in the Palace Hotel. They would buy a boat. They'd have a small crew, and they'd sail to Mexico when they wanted to, or perhaps to Panama or Peru. But Joe didn't like the idea. Instead he'd suggest a float trip on the Madison, or maybe on the Missouri. Big deal.

The other part, the part that she didn't discuss with Joe, was that she had begun to have dreams about Carmine. Not so much Carmine, as it turned out, but the bodyguard. She had shot the man, after all. The guy was looking at her, and she just swung up the shotgun and blasted him. Then crawling into the car and blasting Carmine, with
the little shit screaming and whining, “Don't kill me” . . . Well, she'd wanted to kill Carmine, but she'd never considered the bodyguard. She kept seeing his big dumb face, before she'd blown it away. He'd looked like a guy she knew. She thought she did know him. His name was Carlo, or something. She couldn't remember. And then in her dreams she kept trying to remember. She'd see his stupid face and he'd say, “Do you know me?” like some fool in an American Express ad. And then she'd raise her hand and his face would slide off his face, in a way, in a bloody slide, and she would have to think very hard about who he was. But she couldn't think of his name.

It was Joe's fault. She knew that wasn't fair, but there wasn't anything she could do about it. It was Joe's fault. He knew she wanted to kill Carmine and so he made it possible. He had coached her. He had said, This is how it goes. You hold the gun like this. The kick is fierce, but brace yourself. Once you squeeze the trigger, don't stop. Keep shooting. Keep going. And he'd said, If you don't succeed, if it goes wrong, don't look for me. I'll be waiting if you do it all. If you don't do it, I'm gone. It's your show.

Well, it was her show, and she'd done it, and she'd been proud. She'd been beside herself. She'd loved Joe for making it possible, but now . . . well, it
was
his fault, wasn't it?

Had she ever meant to kill anyone? She had to wonder about that. Of course, she had harbored and nurtured the idea that as her father's son—well, only child—it was her duty to avenge him. She was clear on this. But what is vengeance, here in America? Is it really the same thing? Couldn't she have defended her father's honor in some less violent manner? Mightn't she have found some way, eventually, to humiliate Carmine? To show others that he was slime?

Killing is such a crude, brutal thing. She hated killing. Animals kill. Well, she had killed, but it was just Carmine, or should have been just Carmine. Anybody would kill Carmine. What slime. The proper way to kill Carmine would have been to step on him and then scrape your shoe off on the curb. She couldn't help feeling that, left to
herself, her violent feelings toward Carmine would eventually have dissipated. But then she had met Joe. He was used to killing. Killing meant nothing to a man like Joe, she felt. And in the sway of his casual attitude, and given her perfectly normal passion for the guy, she had fallen in with his idea that she should kill Carmine. A responsible man would have loved her and convinced her that she didn't need vengeance, that their love was enough. If Joe had really loved her, he would have gone to any lengths, even have left her, to prevent her from doing something so horrible. But, instead, he had helped her. He had in a way encouraged her to kill Carmine (and that other unfortunate man). So, really,
Joe
had killed Carmine. She was simply the method, the weapon, the tool. Was that the act of a man who loved? Did love say kill? She could hardly think so. No, Joe didn't really love her. He couldn't love her.

She couldn't get it out of her mind. Killed a man? No. She hadn't killed anybody. Of course, a guy like Carmine, anybody would kill that son of a bitch. The other guy, she couldn't think of his name, and now she couldn't think of his face. It wasn't like killing.

The simple fact was this: She had to get out of here. She loved Joe. He was the greatest man she'd ever met, but who needed a man, anyway?

Joe had gone to do his business. Another “go-go” trip. What crap. Why should she put up with this? She decided to go soak in the sacred pool.

As usual, she stripped completely naked and walked out the back door. It was a cool day in October, but the pool would be hot. She wanted to be chilled by the time she got there, walking through the pines, walking on the bed of needles on the path, barefoot.

She carried a large, fluffy towel. Her head was no longer shaven, as she had worn it when she was preparing to avenge her father. Joe had wanted her to keep it shaven—he liked the small silky patch that she'd retained, a kind of reverse tonsure—but she had let her thick black hair grow out, with its single silver stripe running from
her right brow. There was no hair on her body except for this black mane. Her breasts were tiny and the nipples were tight from the chill.

When she got to the sacred pool she breathed deeply, inhaling the odor of the pines, and then she stepped down on the flat rocks into the hottest part. She lay back and looked upward through hooded lids at the tops of the huge Douglas firs and ponderosas. The gossamer was out. Joe had told her about the gossamer. It drifted through the incredibly deep blue sky and caught on the tops and the branches of the firs in such profusion that she felt like a houri in an ancient Arab pool, a silken canopy waving gently over her. She lay back in the hot pool feeling energy seep out of her as she scissored her legs slowly, feeling the warm water seep into her.

She rested her head on a rock and let her body float out, staring upward. A jay flew across the pool. Then a raven drifted from the top of one great tree to the top of another. Neither called, but both looked down at her nakedness.