The City Under the Skin

38. SHY

Wrobleski, Akim, and Carla Moore had been sitting together in the rooftop conservatory, in silence, for a good long time. The morning was becoming clear and pale, the sky slowly brightening through streaked glass. Carla was managing to keep it all together. Another kid might have cried or sulked or pleaded, but Carla looked beautifully, if studiedly, indifferent, and Wrobleski was impressed by that. Akim meanwhile looked like a man being quietly tortured, though he also managed to send barbed, peevish looks of disapproval in Wrobleski’s direction.

“All right, Akim, your stink eye has been duly noted. Why don’t you go away and prepare yourself for the impending arrival?”

Akim got up and slouched out of the conservatory door, his eyes now looking firmly ahead of him.

“There,” said Wrobleski to Carla, “alone at last. I hate people who talk too much, don’t you?”

Carla kept her silence.

“It’s okay, I understand if you’re shy.”

She looked for a moment as if she might attack him. “I’m not shy,” she said. “I’m pissed off.”

“Well, of course you are,” said Wrobleski smoothly. “You’re just a kid. You expect your dad to protect you. But sometimes he can’t.”

Carla already suspected this might be true, but hearing it stated by this weird stranger, a man to whom she’d been delivered in the middle of the night, having been dragged from her trailer, a man from whom she needed protection, made it all the harder to bear. She looked as though she might, after all, start crying.

“Laurel looked after you all right, didn’t she?”

Carla shrugged.

“I’m not good with kids,” said Wrobleski. “Especially not girls. ’Specially not cute little numbers like you.”

Carla had a feeling she was being complimented, but she wasn’t sure.

“Have I been kidnapped?” she asked.

“No,” said Wrobleski, feigning offense. “No way. If you’d been kidnapped, there’d be ransom notes and demands for money and I’d be slicing off your fingers and sending them through the mail. I’m not doing that, am I?”

“No,” Carla admitted. “Not yet.”

“Not ever. I just want your old man to see things my way.”

Carla wondered if that really made any sense.

“How long am I going to be here?” she said.

“Just until he arrives.”

“When’s that?”

“That all depends on him, honey. He may have more important things on his mind than you.”

“No, he doesn’t,” she said, and she very much hoped she was right about that.

She saw Wrobleski examining his own hand. Even at the very beginning, with everything else that was going on, she’d noticed the webbing on Wrobleski’s hand was scarred with a set of teeth marks, some scabs, yellow staining.

“What’s wrong with your hand?” she asked.

“Dog bite,” said Wrobleski.

“Not good with kids or animals.”

It was perfectly true, of course, but Wrobleski didn’t care to admit it. He saw Carla staring vaguely at the relief map of Iwo Jima.

“It’s not a model,” he said to her helpfully, “it’s actually a map in three dimensions, and the scale of the elevation, the height, that’s exaggerated to bring out the features.”

Carla sniffed.

“Come over here,” said Wrobleski. “Come and look, I can tell you’re interested. That father of yours said you wouldn’t be, but I knew he was wrong.”

Insulted, grudging, but not entirely unwilling, Carla got up and moved to the center of the conservatory, and stood a respectful distance from the case, looking down through the glass.

“Iwo Jima,” said Wrobleski. “World War Two. An island belonging to the Japanese. But the Americans took it away from them. They landed here and here and here.” As he spoke he used only his right hand to point at various places on the island: the left was hurting too much. “Here, this was an airfield. This was a dormant volcano. Here’s an amphitheater. The Americans raised the flag here, but raising the flag didn’t mean they’d won. The flag went up on day five: the battle went on for another thirty days.

“But here’s the thing. The Japanese knew they were going to be attacked, so they’d already built a lot of bunkers and tunnels all through the island. When the battle ended, there were three thousand Japanese soldiers still in the tunnels. They’d lost the battle, but they didn’t surrender. Some of them committed suicide, because that’s what they were supposed to do, code of honor and all that shit. But some didn’t. They decided to live. They stayed there in the tunnels underground, hiding, right till the end of the war. Here, the model even shows some of the tunnel openings.”

Carla scrutinized the island.

“I thought you said it was a map, not a model.”

“Very good, Carla, very good indeed.”

Carla inhaled damply. She didn’t want to be told she was good.

“Do they still have geography in school?” Wrobleski asked. “Or is it all earth science and environmental studies these days?”

“They still have geography,” said Carla.

“So if I asked you what was the highest mountain in Africa, you could give me an answer?”

“Yes,” said Carla, though she didn’t offer one.

“Or the longest river in Europe. Or the capital of Mongolia.”

“You can look all that stuff up online,” said Carla. “We do more creative stuff.”

“Do you?” said Wrobleski. “Creative stuff? You ever draw maps?”

“Sometimes,” said Carla, feeling it was a confession.

“Why don’t you draw one for me?”

“Why?”

“Something for my collection. You could draw me a map showing where you live, where you go to school, where you go on the weekend, things like that, so I’d know all about you.”

“I don’t want you to know all about me.”

“Ah, a girl after my own heart,” he said. “See. Aren’t we getting on better now?”

“No,” said Carla.

“Oh, I think we are, and tell me, Carla, what’s wrong with your arm?”

“Nothing.”

“Something must be wrong with it. You keep scratching.”

“Want to see?”

Carla didn’t give him the choice. She rolled up her sleeve to reveal her bare arm. While they talked, she’d been worrying at her skin with her fingernails. The message FUCK YOU now stood out on her forearm in a bold, ugly, embossed rash of letters. She showed it proudly to Wrobleski, and he was fascinated rather than insulted.

“All right,” said Wrobleski, “dermatographia! Very interesting. I’ve never seen it before.”

“But you’ve heard of it?”

“Don’t sound so surprised. I know stuff. I’m not an idiot. And I know that ‘fuck you’ will disappear after a while, won’t it?” said Wrobleski.

“Yeah, but I can make it come back any time I like.”

“You’re good,” he said. “Obviously it doesn’t run in the family.”

Wrobleski’s cell phone rang. It was Akim telling him that Billy Moore and his Cadillac were approaching the gate and that Charlie was about to let them in.

“I’ll be right down,” he said into the phone; then to Carla, “See, your father does care after all.”

And then he hesitated. He wasn’t quite sure what to do with the kid. Should he lock her in here while he went down to confront Billy, have Akim or Laurel guard her? No, that didn’t seem right. He should probably take her with him, to show that she was unharmed. He turned away from her, knowing he should have worked this out earlier. And then something hit him on the back of the head, something hard, loose, and dry: a fucking potted cactus, small enough for a child to hold in her hand, and in this case throw with great accuracy. He was outraged. If you couldn’t trust a twelve-year-old, who could you trust? As he turned back to glare at her, a second pot hit him, this time full in his left eye. He winced, blinked, rubbed away the dirt, drove a few cactus spikes into his cheek, and when he looked up, Carla was at the center of the conservatory, her hands on the top edge of the glass case with Iwo Jima inside.

She pushed against it with all her strength, and the supporting wooden legs slipped on the conservatory floor and the case keeled forward, and although Wrobleski moved to save it, the surprise, the pain in his hand, made him too slow, as the case carved a painfully precise course through the air, a simple 90-degree curve, and then hit the ground hard. The glass shattered, and the skillfully molded plaster surface split open to reveal the innards, a rough construction of chicken wire and clumsily glued balsa wood struts. Involuntarily, pathetically, Wrobleski snatched at the fallen relief map, even as slivers of glass bounced across the floor. He succeeded only in catching a single shard that sliced into his left hand, agonizingly close to the throbbing dog bite.

“You know I’ve killed people for less than that,” he said.

“Yeah?” said Carla. “But I’ll bet none of them were such cute little numbers, were they?”

The Cadillac’s horn sounded down in the courtyard. The man was impatient; well, he had reason to be. Wrobleski flung his arm around Carla’s middle, hard enough to knock the wind out of her, and to lift her off the ground like a bundle of laundry so he could take her with him.

“I blame the fucking parents,” he said as he strode out of the conservatory.