Criminals (20 page)

“Oh, no way. No, thanks. No.” She folded her arms.

His hand closed over her wrist. He got hold of her elbow with the other hand and pulled her by the folded arm, until she felt the rabbit press her shoulder with a forepaw to keep its balance. “Let go.”

With his other hand he unlatched the door of the hutch. He eased the rabbit down his arm and in, and started, holding Bridget by the wrist, toward the van. “Wait a minute here, Aiken,” she said. “Hey.” If she had to slap him she would. What would a man like this do, if you slapped his face?

But he let go of her arm, or he didn't so much let go of it as hand it back to her. He put it against her chest, upright between her breasts, and reached for her other hand and crossed it over so that she was holding the arm like a bottle. Shaking his head, he wrenched the handle and opened both doors into the back of the van.

For some reason, instead of walking away Bridget said, “All right, I will. I'll sit. I'll look at the view, only there's no view.” She hoisted
herself up and sat with her legs dangling, while he grasped his lower back with his hands and bent to one side. “Back trouble?” she said. “You can sit.”

“Yeah? I can sit?”

“It's your van.”

“It's my van. I maybe stole it, though.”

“Thou shalt not steal,” she said.

“Thou shall not covet thy neighbor's house,” he said over his shoulder, walking away. “Thou shall not covet thy neighbor's wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass.”

“Where are you going? And it's ‘shalt.' ‘
Shalt
not.' I bet you're not even a Catholic.”

“What makes you say that?” He came back.

“Catholics don't quote. I bet you're some kind of evangelical.”

“Not me.”

“Lots of the people who work in the soup kitchen aren't Catholic.”

“Not me.”

“Say the Hail Mary.”

“Come again?”

“Say it.”

“I'm gonna say it for your entertainment?”

“Say the Act of Contrition.”

“You say it.”

“Hey. I bet you don't have anything you're ashamed of.”

“If I do it's none of your business. Yeah, I'm ashamed. I'm ashamed of a lot of things. Yeah, though, see, but if I am it's my business.”

She swung her legs childishly. She couldn't help it. “Say it.”

He stepped closer, frowning. “You got a problem.”

“OK,” she said. He had grabbed the doorframe so that she had to lean back. “OK.”

“Don't do that,” he warned her.

“What?”

“Don't make no sign of the cross.”

“I'm not, I'm just getting—out of your way. See?” She drew her legs up into the van and laughed. “Are you a werewolf?”

“No. No, ma'am, and you're not a priest. But I'm pretty sure you think you could be.”

“I do, as a matter of fact, think that I should be allowed to be if I wanted to be, which I don't.”

“Right,” he said. “We won't see that day. See anything in there? Hey, you don't need a warrant. I'll show you around.”

“I was just looking. Did you see
Silence of the Lambs
?”

“Nope,” he said. “I don't go to that kind of show.”

“‘
Show
,'” she said. “Where did you grow up?”

“No matter where I say, you're gonna say something,” he said, shaking the van as he sat down. But he pushed himself back and got all the way in, onto on a roll of carpet. He stretched out his legs. “Aren't you? You're gonna say something. New York City, that's where I grew up.”

“Really?”

“Where did you think?”

“Nevada? Florida?”

“That some kind of insult? I was born in Indiana.”

“Gary, Indiana?”

“Terre Haute. So figure out the rest.”

“Guys from Indiana, aren't they supposed to be basketball players?”

“The tall ones.”

“Do you think of yourself as short?”

“Do you think of yourself as bitchy? Where's that boyfriend you're supposed to have?”

“I don't know.”

“Up some mountain with a lot of fancy gear, that's what I hear.”

“That's what he does.”

“What do you want him to do?” He said it quietly.

Oh, no you don't
, she thought.

But he had her by the arms again, he was using them to bring her into the van with him. He held her weight against his chest and then went down on one arm, stretching out on the carpeted floor in an easy motion that had nothing she could argue with in it, though it brought her down beside him. Lying down could just as easily have been her idea. She let her head hang back but her body came forward.

*

“How come it stays warm in here?”

“It's warm outside.” He didn't say the obvious, that they had raised the temperature in the dark van. The doors were still open, with the limbed pines standing on either side. She could see the brown glow of the porch light.

She rolled over, propped her bare ankles on something and crossed them. On his knees he pulled a blanket down from the logs of carpet and spread it over her. What on earth was she doing here, under an army blanket in the back of a van? She said sleepily, “You got my mother that thing, didn't you, that heart.”

“Somebody gave it to me. I gave it to her.”

“Somebody. A girl.”

“Yeah, a girl. You're one of them know-it-alls.”

“A girl thought you needed it.”

“Guess she did.”

“Knowing about your life. The story of your life. The
stories
. You're quite a storyteller. You had my folks pretty amused tonight.”

“I get into trouble in bars. I get going. I like a story.”

“I've heard you get into trouble.”

“You heard that.”

“Heard you get into fights.”

“Well, yes I do,” he said. “Or I use to. Half the time I liked the guy thrown the punch.”

“I see,” she said, in a classroom voice. Maybe she always had this voice.

“People get acrost me.”

“You didn't mean it when you said you like my parents, did you?”

“What now?” he sighed at the ceiling.

“I know what you meant. You meant you love them.”

“I guess you could say that.”

“And you think I don't. Love them.”

“You better hope I don't think that, if I make a pass at you.”

“This was a pass?”

“I'm not going after some girl that don't give a damn.”

“Are you going after me?”

“I got you.”

“Oh, you think so?” She put her finger on the crease in his cheek to feel the smile.

“Definitely.” With one of those slow shifts of his that she already recognized he got himself lying with his head on her thighs. He was outside the blanket and she could make out the white of his legs in the dark, and the dark sockets of his eyes. He turned over, sighed, and moved both hands up her legs until he had her hips in his hands the way you would hold somebody's, a child's, shoulders, if you had to gently lecture her. He rubbed his jawbone heavily against the blanket. “You're a beautiful girl,” his muffled voice said wearily, as if it were a lesson he had had to teach too many times.

“Funny, you said.”

“Don't fight about it,” he said. He was holding onto her. Both of them slowly adrift. It might be she was drifting and he was towing, though without effort.

“So . . . my mother told you a lie. And you gave her a Healing Heart to comfort her.”

“I reckon I wouldn't use ‘
lie
,'” he said after a while, “if it was my mother.”

“Where is she?
Your
mother?” The baby blanket under his pillow.

“Couldn't tell you. I left home when I was eight.”

“Eight.”

“Eight.”

“Why? Why would you have to leave Terre Haute, Indiana?”

“You don't wanta know.”

“No, I'd like to know. I would. I'd like to hear you describe it,” she said humbly.

He shrugged himself under the blanket with her.

Describe it
. An assignment. But one he declined with silence.

Describe a time you were praised.
This was for her night-school students, the Vietnamese and Samoans.
Describe a view from a window in paradise.
The Muslims liked that.
Envision the world with a key improvement.

And her students would write, striving—against their work-study schedules, their mono, their hangovers—striving to please her, it had to be that, by means of an imaginary world with a key improvement: three sexes, or plants generating the power, or no composition courses.

In the world I envision there would be only this one power, no other.
Love, it was, though she frightened herself with the word.

When she woke there was no sound, not even the dripping on metal to which she had gone to sleep. She sat up in the dark and tried to see her watch. She would have to be quiet getting back into the house. But not yet. She put her fingers to the back of her head, where the hair was matted. No one could see her, her prettiness at this hour gone puffy. It was arrived at, anyway, not to be found in the middle of the night.

It was not that that made her catch her breath as if she had been sobbing. It was not betraying Nat. When had Nat ever wanted her exacting loyalty? It was not that a few hours ago she had been gasping under this stranger as if she were being murdered, and taking pleasure in being murdered. It was an absence. A sound of roaring, or rushing, not close to her but half-heard and ever-present, the sound of her life, had stopped, rolled back from bare beach, herself.

Her ears were stopped up as if she were yawning, and the leg doubled under her had gone to sleep, while Aiken lay at ease, on his back, breathing peacefully. The black eyelashes fanned out along his cheekbones. That's what it was, she thought, looking at the hollows of his face. That's what happened to me. That's pretty simple. That's a first. I just gave in to it. Is that what it was?

She had only to wait. She knew the life would run back in. Her voice would begin in a minute, in her own mind, she could not escape it. But she could sit here until then.

What if it started in and she stayed anyway, watching him?

“We snuck in and watched you,” her father would say when she was little. “Your cur-rls were spread out and you were sleeping the sleep of a clear conscience.” “And the baby, too. Little angels, you were,” her mother would say, as if the shock of this family formed out of
nowhere, out of nothing but two orphans, could never weary her. As if two ordinary children were beauties, and if they were, as if beauty were goodness. She could see why her parents had forgotten her and her cruel brother and imagined themselves the mother and father of a girl who had died and Aiken.

americans love dogs

O
n Brianne's first day as their au pair, the French couple tested the dog. They were going to observe its reaction to her presence near the baby,
l'enfant
,
le bébé
, whom the dog, said the father, lived to protect. Their dog was a sober animal, he said, not playful like those Brianne would be used to in the US. “
Asseyez-vous
,” he instructed Brianne. He opened a door and the dog, an untrimmed standard poodle, gray and tall, stood calmly sniffing for a moment before it entered the room and crossed the rug. A male, Brianne saw. The dog came to her and laid its muzzle on her knee. “Poof!” said the little girl, Nathalie. She was not yet four but she already knew English and was said to like the idea of having her own language and of speaking it at all times with Brianne. The father Luc gave a clap. “
Les Americains aiment les chiens
!”

On that afternoon Brianne barely took in his glowing eye and early silver at the hairline. Everything she said was directed at the mother, Clemence, who nevertheless let her husband do most of the talking.

Clemence was tired and losing weight but had not yet had all of her tests. With his small taut briefcase Luc arrived home every day on a gust of fresh air. He told Brianne her name came from a cheese. Or from the masculine Brian, which came from
brecan
, meaning “break.”
At any rate, a mimicry of French, one of the silly names so American. Brianne fell in love in the first week, recognizing this kind of talk for the warmth it concealed, like a béarnaise with pepper flakes. “Spicy!” he said with relish. “For me, it is better to have not very much cayenne,” Clemence mentioned in private. In addition to speaking English to the children Brianne was to do some of the cooking as well as clean a little. At home her friends had said, “They're French and they want you to cook?”

At home Brianne had been a nanny, until she exiled herself from American loves. For four years now she had been putting off college and getting into difficulties, most of them arising at the edges of her workday, with the fathers. Her mother had given up and just wanted her to be married.

Clemence came home in the middle of the afternoon from her appointment with the specialist. She sat down on the ottoman in front of the red armchair—the furniture was colorful and small—where Brianne watched TV while the children were having their nap. The French were serious about the nap. Every day Brianne had two hours of freedom while the two children slept, one in his crib and the other in her little French-sized bed. On this day Brianne was watching TV with her Mauriac novel open on her lap. She was not reading and had formed no plan for improving her French or reapplying to college. The dog was at her feet.

“
Ma chère
, will you bring
un petit Dubonnet
,” said Clemence. When Brianne came back with the little glass of ruby liquid Clemence said, “
Mais toi-même aussi.
” Brianne didn't like Dubonnet but she poured herself a glass, drank it in the kitchen, and poured another. Clemence was still on the ottoman, with her head in her hands. Among the curls her fingers still had the tiny glass in their grip. “I know that he makes some advances to you and I think you love him,” she said, sitting up straight again. “But do you love my children?”

Always say you love the children. But Brianne was sincere in this, whatever her effect on men—and it was not her fault that they had a similar effect on her, though only certain ones, very nearly a type, to be exact, and to give herself credit, for her the type was not the
matter of looks and fresh youth that it was for them, but some sense of a person at once a father well established in life and a pent-up little boy. The truth was she liked the boy side better, preferring children to adults. She would have at least two of her own. But she would take care never to slight the beautiful pair sleeping down the hall, who were half hers already, as was the dog, who stirred against her feet and opened his intelligent eyes when he scented the tears of his owner. He did not get up and go to the ottoman, where Clemence had wiped the tears, swallowed her Dubonnet, and fluffed her curls. Luc was at the door. With his head still high the dog shut his eyes as if asleep, as Brianne cried, too, and absently picked up and laid down his silken ears.