Dancing with the Dead

37

“Jesus!” Mel said at the airport, “what happened to you?”

Mary didn’t think the results of last night were that obvious, with her oversize dark glasses on. Mel must have noticed the bruise on the bridge of her nose, a small, blood-plum stain underlined by a moon-shaped cut where Jake’s thumbnail had gouged her when he’d swung and only grazed his target. No way to hide that one.

A dozen dancers and instructors were lounging around the waiting area of Gate 43, carry-ons and garment bags bunched like obedience-trained pets at their feet, waiting to board the flight to Columbus.

Mel moved around in front of Mary and turned her body slightly, toward the wide windows overlooking the runway, so none of her fellow passengers could see her face. He gently removed her glasses and stared at her. Then his handsome young face got ugly. “Oh, fuck, Mary! How you gonna compete with bruises like that?”

She’d never seen him this upset. “They should be better by tomorrow, and I can cover them with makeup. There’s nothing on them now, Mel, honest!” Which was true, because she was afraid to risk infection by putting on makeup too soon.

“So what happened to you?”

“Accident.”

“Like those other times?”

“What’s that mean?”

He shook his head sadly. “Mary, Mary… With your face marked up like that, it’ll be impossible. Nobody’ll be looking at us from the neck down when we dance. At either of us.”

“I can cover the bruises so they won’t be noticeable. You’ll see tomorrow, Mel!”

He did a quick complete turn, snapping his body around in an outburst of frustration. “We might as well go home,” he said.

“Who mize well do what?” Ray Huggins asked. He’d walked up behind them from where he’d been leaning, smoking a cigarette near an ashtray. He was wearing pleated gray slacks, fancy two-tone brown leather loafers, and a butter-colored leather jacket. He was grinning.

But when he saw Mary’s face he was suddenly shocked and serious, like a man who’d walked in on a burglar. “Yeow! What happened, Mary?”

“An accident.”

“Perfect goddamn timing, isn’t it?” Mel said.

Mary understood his bitterness. He wanted to compete, and finally he had a student who gave him a chance at a win in the most prestigious competition of all, and look what she’d done. Look what Mary had done.

“My fault,” Mary said. After all the time and work they’d put in. She felt so sorry for him, for herself. Her eyes burned and she didn’t want to cry. It hurt badly when she cried; she couldn’t wipe her eyes without igniting the pain in the bruises.

“Take it easy, Mel,” Huggins said. He laid both hands gently on Mary’s shoulders; she heard his leather jacket creak. “What do you think, Mary?”

“I think I can make myself look presentable tomorrow morning. The bruises’ll fade. I want to dance. You know how much I want to.”

He gave her shoulders a quick squeeze, then dropped his hands to his sides and shrugged. “Good enough for me.”

“But, Ray-”

“Can it, Mel. The lady says she can compete. Mary, you don’t hurt anywhere else, do you? I mean, any part of your body that’d keep you from moving okay?”

She was glad she’d decided not to mention the pain in her side, the breath-catching stitch of agony when she inhaled too deeply. Cracked rib? If so, it would have to wait. The world beyond the competition would have to be put on hold, like an annoying caller at work. “Everything else is fine.”

“What the hell kinda accident were you in?” Huggins asked.

“The kind that happens with fists,” Mel told him.

Anger flared in Mary. “How would you know?”

Mel touched her arm. “Mary, everybody knows. This isn’t the first time you turned up battered and bruised. It’s that guy you live with, Helen said. I thought you and him parted company.”

“We did, but he had a duplicate key made and let himself into my apartment. And Helen oughta mind her own business.”

“You should consider filing charges,” Huggins said. “A bastard who’d do something like that to somebody like you belongs in jail.”

“He’s outa my life,” Mary said. “Out for good.”

“I don’t blame you,” Huggins said. He glanced at Mel. “Mel, you take extra special care of this lady.”

“You know I will, boss.”

Mary put her dark glasses back on and picked up her garment bag that held her dance dresses. She’d checked her old red suitcase containing the rest of her clothes at the TWA luggage service outside the terminal doors.

“Here, lemme take that,” Mel said, and pried her fingers from around the handle of the garment bag. He slung it over his shoulder, using his forefinger as a hook. He was so slender the bag curled around him like a cocoon.

“You still mad?” she asked.

“Naw. Check with me tomorrow morning first thing, though. Jesus, we gotta do something about those bruises. You bring some chemical suntan for your legs and shoulders?”

“Sure, just like you said.”

“The judges love bare skin in Latin competition, preferably tan. Maybe you can apply some extra to your face, blend it with the bruises. That might work.”

They were standing in front of Helen and her instructor Nick, who were slumped in two of the waiting area’s side-by-side brown vinyl chairs. Helen’s folded garment bag lay in the chair next to her. She was wearing a bulky gray sweater and slacks with a flower design on them, and looked more like a pudgy middle-aged housewife than a dancer.

“Ready for the big one, Mary Mary?” she asked, then did a double-take and frowned. “You get hurt or something?”

“ ’Fraid so.”

“Well, dumb question. It’s obvious you got hurt.”

Jet engines roared outside the windows as a red and white TWA airliner lifted off the runway, trailing dark wisps of uncombusted fuel that lingered like scratches on the pure blue sky. Comprehension, then anger, washed through Helen’s eyes. “He came back, huh?”

Mel gave Mary a protective hug that made her side throb with pain. “She had an accident, okay? ’Nuff said.”

Mary didn’t want to do any more explaining. “I better get my boarding pass,” she mumbled, and hurried to where a uniformed attendant standing behind a counter was examining tickets and resolutely pecking at a computer with a long forefinger. The other dancers and the instructors were talking about her, she was sure, but she told herself she didn’t care. Damned if she’d care! She was going to Ohio to compete. That was a certainty. Whatever needed doing to make it happen, she’d do it.

She asked the attendant to assign her a seat near the rear of the plane, on the side of the aisle where there were only pairs of seats.

“No problem,” said the attendant, a haggard, graying man. He studiously avoided staring at Mary’s face. Or was that Mary’s imagination?

No one spoke to her during boarding.

She sat alone in a window seat on the flight to Columbus. Mel sat near the front of the plane, walking back once to check on her when he got up to use the lavatory. In the seat in front of her was a boy about two years old who had a bad cold and sniffled and cried steadily until he fell asleep over Indiana.

Riding the hotel limo, which was actually a Dodge van, in from the airport, she stared straight ahead and said nothing.

Everyone was uncharacteristically quiet. Finally they were here, mere city blocks away from music and dance floor and spectators and judges. And the blunt white nose of the Hyatt Regency van was forging through traffic along those blocks, ticking them off like time.

What Mary and the rest of the dancers had been thinking about and sweating about all these months was suddenly becoming very real.

Was actually about to happen.

Miserable and apprehensive, Mary swallowed hard. Her throat was parched and she realized her fists were clenched. The knot in her stomach drew tighter and made her want to double over on the firm vinyl seat.

This, she thought, must be what astronauts feel in the last stages of countdown, when liftoff and critical risk become a virtual certainty.

The van lurched to the outside lane, then bumped and veered into the driveway of the hotel. Its brakes squealed, causing the cluster of businessmen standing outside the hotel entrance to turn for a moment and stare.

“Anybody got the jitters?” Huggins asked, laughter flitting an inch beneath the surface of his voice.

“Naw, I always got bats in my stomach,” Nick said.

“Belfry, too,” Mel told him. Everybody laughed harder than they should have.

Helen pointed a glitter-enameled fingernail out the side window. “Our home for the next three days,” she said.

Mary thought, Only hours to Blast-off.

He sat deep and unnoticed in a warm leather sofa and watched them enter the hotel. They’d been arriving in groups and checking in all day. There was a look about women who danced, something in their posture and precise movement that flaunted and excited.

The heat and rage expanded in him as he watched them line up at the desk to register, talking and smiling, so at ease and unknowing. They even stood motionless like dancers, weight on one leg, hip thrust out, tempting, tantalizing. Where their flesh didn’t show, they glittered, or their strong bodies stretched fabric as tight as his skin was stretched by his desire. He thought about the knife and had to lower the magazine he’d been pretending to read, so it covered his lap.

Even the older women who danced kept their attitude of allure despite the fact that they’d become pathetic parodies of their younger selves. Once a whore…

But he barely glanced at the old ones hanging on the arms of instructors the ages of their sons. And it was only with the greatest effort that he didn’t stare at the young ones.

He formed a perfect image of the knife in his mind and waited confidently for the voice.

A perfect image.