Free Form Jazz. Lee Lamothe
cultures, telling how she’d got an A-plus in high school for paralleling 1960s America with 1930s Berlin.
He found the sideroad and sped the Camaro absolutely straight for several miles, into the heart of the badlands, passing only scattered farms, a few shacks, and remote houses with yellow geometric windows lit in the distance. A cloud of Riders on noisy bikes flashed past him. In his rear-view he could see on their backs the smudged oval colours of the club. He slowed until they’d vanished, then turned onto a rough track, mindful of the washboards and dips, worrying for the undercarriage of the car.
In the middle of a speed revelation about the temperature at the core of the Earth, she turned to him. “Harv? Harv?”
“Nearly there, Ag. Relax.”
“You know, I was beautiful, once. I was perfect. It wasn’t my fault, how I was. Tell Connie, okay? It wasn’t my fault.”
“Just a little further.” He didn’t look at her. “Few minutes.”
He felt sad that she knew. Unless someone had fucked you up wickedly, this wasn’t the way to do it. If they were wicked rats you had to make them go hard. But if it was just housekeeping, you were jocular and a pal, lolling them off to sleep until you dropped them as though you flicked off a light switch. There was enough old pain in life without making new stuff.
Her knees were knocking audibly, a mile a minute. Her fingers twisted into one tight fist between the tops of her thighs. “Is it gonna hurt, Harv? Can you do it, fast, without hurting me?”
“Don’t get paranoid, Ag. It’s just the stuff making you think crazy.”
He flashed his headlights three times, then once, eased off the rough track and stopped. A rangy woman in an oilskin with a shotgun under her arm appeared in front of the Camaro, squinting through the windshield. The woman was in her sixties, her dead hair balding back from the front. She flashed a half-a-smile of broken, gapped teeth. She had angry sores around her mouth. Behind her was the lab, a sagging pickup truck with a weathered, peeling camper mounted in the back, the windows cranked open.
From the corner of his eye he saw Agatha Burns’s hands unlock from each other. Ghostly, one of her palms moved in the air between them. He glanced. Her knees had stopped jittering. She was looking directly at him. He felt his curtain of hair being gently moved back from his face, then the freezing of the palm of her flesh against his face, against his scars, stroking.
“I’m sorry, Harv. What he made me do, here —” her fingers traced the mass of ridges and angry boiled skin, “— that night at the hotel was the worst thing I ever did. To anybody. I’m sorry.” She inhaled with a sob, then calmed down and composed herself. “I don’t want to die without you knowing I’m ashamed.”
Chapter 6
She recognized him from that morning at the elevator, standing with the red-faced mug. He sat hunched at the elbow of the bar of an Irish pub on the furthest possible edge of Stonetown, with a half of stout in front of him. As he’d told her on the phone, he wore a striped rugby shirt. The place was packed with groups and couples but he’d saved her a stool by draping a scuffed leather jacket over it. A widescreen showed a satellite soccer game no one was watching. The sound was off and the players seemed to be dancing to the fiddle music blaring from speakers.
People stared at her bleached head and chocolate skin as she moved through the crowd with her hands jammed in the pockets of a blue warm-up jacket with drawstrings and a hood. Under it she wore a dark blue sweatshirt with faded writing on it, shapeless blue jeans, and battered, dirty sneakers.
Ray Tate stood when she reached him and greeted her with a hug. His hands roamed the back of her waistband, up the middle of her back, and he held her close against him.
“Hey, long time,” he said, smiling as though they were old friends. “You made it.” His hands lingered at her hips and fluttered at her shoulders. “You’re losing weight. You look great. You been working out or what?”
He took his jacket from the stool and she sat. The bartender came down the boards. Ray Tate looked at Djuna Brown and raised an eyebrow. She said gin and tonic. He nodded to the bartender. “And another half for me, Jimmy.”
She saw he was younger than he looked with the grey hair on his collar and hanging off his face. Mid-forties, maybe. He looked glad to see her. In spite of having the head of a bum, his body was thin and solid and his eyes were clear. Except for skipping off her face to check out who came in after her, he seemed to sparkle. She was wary. She didn’t like cops. She wished she’d called Gay-Glo and had someone come to monitor the meeting.
Jimmy put down the drinks and Ray Tate made a motion with his hand as though signing something. After the bartender went away he leaned in close and put his face by her ear as though romancing her. “Look, we’re going to sit here and have one. We’re gonna see who comes through the door for the next while, then we’ll go up on the patio for another round, smoke some smokes, and talk, okay? If you want, you can pat me down. That’s fair, because I’m going to have to pat you down again, for real. I want to talk to you. You can talk to me too, if you want. Or you can fuck off at any time. The drinks’re on me. Right now, we’re old pals on a date. Anything you want to talk about? Good movies? New bestsellers?”
In spite of his alley rat appearance, she could smell soap and shampoo off him. His breath was soft against her face, a mixture of toothpaste and stout. There were some fading blemishes on his neck that looked like the after-boil of insect pincers.
“What do you want?”
He shook his head. “Later. You reading the Harry Potter series? Good wizard action. Magic potions, flying stuff. My kid says she seen all the movies and the first one was the best. You think?” His eyes scanned the room behind her. “You got kids?”
She twisted her mouth at him and didn’t say anything.
“Hey, there’s test tubes and stuff. You don’t want to miss out. How’d you feel about stem cell research? Now, there’s an ethical issue. Science bumps up against morality. I’ve listened to Bush and the other guys, but myself, I haven’t sorted out all the —”
“Look, let’s just get this done, okay? I don’t know why you set this up. I don’t know who sent you, or why. I’m not comfortable. I don’t give a fuck about stem cells. I don’t give a fuck about Harry fucking Potter. I don’t like being felt up in a bar and, mostly, I don’t like racists.”
He wasn’t listening to her words. The sound of her voice was lilting, a bit of the Islands in there, perfect pronunciation. He could tell she was apprehensive but curious. “Okay,” he said, shrugging into his jacket, “let’s drain ’em and get ’er done. See where we’re at.”
* * *
They paused on the stairway to the rooftop patio and he gave her a more thorough pat-down. He ran his fingers around the base of her ruined bleached hair. There were loose valiums in her handcuff case and she wore her gun, a nifty little automatic, over her right hip. He offered to let her do him. She poked indifferently and he could tell she didn’t know what she was doing or didn’t care. The patio was vacant except for four smokers huddled at the far end against the cool night breezes. A waitress, hugging herself by a serving station, looked unhappy to see them arrive. Ray Tate ordered another G&T and half a dark.
Djuna Brown sat opposite him at the empty side of the patio. He saw her shiver and took his jacket off. Without consultation he draped it over her shoulders like it was the most natural thing in the world. She didn’t know what to say so she gave him a simmering look. The umbrellas shimmered in the breezes. Above them the ambient light of the city sky was silvery. Traffic noises rose from the bum side of Stonetown. The waitress brought their drinks and left and the four smokers clattered down the steps.
He held his hand out. “I’m Ray Tate.”
“The guy that’s gonna spike me, right?” She looked at his hand out over the table and finally took it. “Or shoot me.”
“I’m not