Personal injuries

MAY
CHAPTER 25

"Do you remember?" she asked. "We talked. That night. After Kosic. Do you remember that? And you described lying in the dark. And feeling so uncertain. Do you remember?"

She heard the hollow glottal echo as he drank. "So are you saying-?"

"I'll tell you what I'm saying," she said. "But answer me first. Do you remember that?"

"Sure."

"Well, here's what I need to know. Was that a play?"

He made a low sound, perhaps a groan. "Nope," he said at last. "That was straight shit."

"So then, can you imagine reaching inside yourself and being uncertain about what's there? Not being sure you can really feel what you crave. Can you imagine that?"

In the dark, he took his time to ponder. After he'd removed the FoxBIte and told her what Walter had said about Carmody, they had driven around before heading back to the LeSueur. Contempt bristled off him-him of all people, enraged because he thought he'd been deceived. But his anger proved strangely hard to bear. She felt lost and mangled as it was, still trying to calculate the costs of this breach of cover to the Project and to herself, shocked that out of nowhere her former life had come, like some unwelcome relation, to reclaim her. If Feaver had dropped her on a corner, she could never have wandered home.

He'd finally asked her what was true. Was she or wasn't she? She refused at first to answer.

`We're not going there, Robbie. It's not appropriate. I have a job to do.'

`And you've fucked that up, too.' As the dust from that wrecking ball rose, she received a darting sideward look, softer than anything she'd seen since they left Walter. `Not fair,' he said after a moment and reverted to silence.

Somehow they reached a consensus not to remain at the LeSueur. Feaver circled the block, while she tossed the FoxBIte to McManis from the door to his office. Jim didn't say much. He wanted to know if Walter had looked sold when he'd turned back to the elevator. She thought so. So did Feaver. But, she'd realized, even if Walter had doubts, there were no odds for him in confronting her.

She asked if Sennett had gone crazy.

`Yes,' Jim answered. `He thinks the Movers should have picked this up on background.' Grave as the situation was, he smiled at the notion of that questionnaire: List every wild and crazy evening for the last ten years. He nodded kindly when she told him she just wanted to beat it. `This isn't on you,' he told her.

She knew that was true. It was nothing more than wicked coincidence. UCAs got made most often by cops or prosecutors who recognized them. But that was logic. If the Project cratered now, it would always follow her. Back to Iowa and whatever might come next. Don't embarrass the Bureau. The Ouantico watchword was burned like a brand onto the mind of every recruit. McManis and Sennett were talking anyway. Balancing risks. That was why he was just as happy to let her go. They didn't know yet what they were going to do with her.

Back in the Mercedes, Feaver had asked if she needed a drink, which God knows she did, and he volunteered to go into a package store to get her a bottle. Until they abandoned ship, the Mormon girl shouldn't be seen buying liquor. She was not really ready to be alone, and it seemed at least a form of recompense to finally let him into her apartment. She mixed the vodka with some frozen lemonade she had in her freezer and, after they had drunk much of it in silence, impulse had welled up in her, almost like the piston push of sickness. She wanted to explain. Why? she asked herself, hoping to find a clear rationale for restraint. Why?

Because. Because silence would be fatal to something fragile in her.

Because it seemed unbearable to have the precious truth, so hard to speak, taken for a lie.

The light had disappeared. She'd never closed the drapes. Refractions of the streetlights and a neon sign across the avenue limned the room. Her eyes were closed for the most part. Robbie sat on the floor against the flowered sofa the Movers had rented. In the cushions, when she lay on it at night watching TV, she could detect the trace remainders of stale cigar smoke and the gassy chemicals that had failed to remove it. Feaver had taken off his suit jacket and his boots. His toes wiggled in his fancy patterned hose as he drank, but he'd gone still now while he deliberated on his answer. Could he imagine?

Yes, he said, in time. He could imagine that, yes.

"Is that how it is for you?" he asked her.

"How it was," she said, "for years. Years. I thought I was just not interested or didn't care. I wasn't sure. Maybe I was putting all of it into sports." Athletes were their bodies. After a game, there was a supersensory awareness: the bruises, pulls, the aches within. Her skin felt as if something keen had been drilled through every follicle into the deeper layers of the derma. For most of her teammates, that electricity must have flowed into sexual expression. But for her, the game was the excitement. Her inchoate sensations of herself seemed almost superstitiously forbidden. Not merely because of the church-taught sense of plague or peril. But because it would deplete her somehow, put at risk the radioactive core of passion that sent her storming down the field.

In high school, she was the great jock, too much for many boys to want to take on. And it was a Mormon town anyway; more than half the kids weren't allowed to date until they were sixteen. She wanted to go out, naturally, once all that swung into motion. She wanted to belong. She was seventeen years old. She went to the senior prom and had sex that night, as if it were part of the same ceremony, which for many in Kaskia it was. She lay out in the grass on the lee side of the local ski mountain and let Russell Hugel wrestle off her undergarments and plunge into her. It didn't last a minute. He helped her up. He carefully plucked every leaf and grass strand from her dress, then walked her back down the hill in silence. The poor boy was probably embarrassed, probably thought he'd made a hash of it. A rooster in the barnyard, flapping his useless wings, went at it longer than Russell had. Such was sex. She reviewed it in her mind periodically. The interlude passed like the dance itself. Long-anticipated and brief and disappointing. She put away the dress. And concluded, as she went off to college, it was all too much of a mess.

Gay-the thought that there was anyone on earth like that-was still kind of a legend, as far as she was concerned, one of those terrible things that people tell you about the world that you suspect is exaggerated or not even true. She sounded like a hick, she knew. But she'd grown up on a ranch. Rams with ewes. Bulls with cows. She'd heard about Sodom in church. But God had destroyed them.

"I made it through hockey camp the first summer with no clue. And some of those girls were so dykey, so out, one of them, Anne-Marie-the girls joked about not being alone with her. I still didn't get it."

She had a teammate at the time, she told him, a woman named Hilary Beacom, a good midfielder but not quite a star. Two years ahead of Evon, Hilary was from the Main Line near Philadelphia. Field hockey, weirdly, had a highclass heritage. There were all these women out there, running, whaling at balls, smashing each other in the legs and even, now and then, the head. Blood flowed often. It wasn't what Evon thought of as a finishing-school game. But that's where many of the girls came from. Private schools. Rich schools. Hilary Beacom had emerged from that world. Blond hair thick as velvet, pulled back in a tartan headband. Clothing by Laura Ashley. And the contented charm of someone who truly owned the world.

She looked after Evon, sat beside her on the bus, told her secrets about the coaches. Away from the field, they rode horseback together. One night in May of Evon's sophomore year, they got drunk. Drinking was forbidden in or out of season. They'd all signed pledges. But Hilary was graduating soon and they drank wildly, rolling through half a dozen frat parties before they made their way to Hilary's room. They were just silly. They were imitating people on childhood TV shows ("Oh, Mr. Grant!") and then Star Trek stuff, all the different species who were human except for a single trait that had been amplified, or mutated, or replaced. Spock, without emotion.

`I see your aura,' said Hilary across the room, pretending to be a character from the Canis galaxy, who supposedly had the ability of dogs to see the halo of emotional discharge around a human being. `I see your awe-rah,' she said and waved her hands swami-like as she approached. Evon had collapsed on Hilary's bed with her head against a bolster. They were both laughing.

`And what do you see?'

Hilary came closer, spreading her opened palms over Evon's head, as if massaging some presence in the air.

`I see,' said Hilary, whose eyes seemed to clear briefly, `I see you're drunk.'

They crumbled against each other. Hilary finally righted herself and began the same routine.

`I see you are uncertain,' she said. Her eyes lit upon Evon. `I see you are afraid.'

`Okay,' said Evon, laughing, though she realized then that the time for laughter had passed. Hilary moved her hands again, first around Evon's head, and then allowed them to drift along her entire torso, separated from contact by some barely visible micrometer.

`I feel yearning,' Hilary said.

Evon didn't answer. Hilary's face, thick with makeup to hide the blemishes on one cheek, was inches from hers. The shades on the room were drawn.

'Do you know what's happening here?' Hilary asked her.

Yes, she knew. She knew. Somehow. They watched each other, measuring the uncertainty. And then Hilary brought her face to hers. Evon lingered there, in the sweet, powerful smells of Hilary's face. Beyond the phony scents, her flesh had the vague sweetness of milk. Evon's eyes were still open when their lips met. Dry from sport and the anxiousness of the moment, they felt like the fragile crust formed on an orange section left in the air, and, like the orange, some thrilling sweetness lay below. Hilary slowly brought her full weight down upon her.

Feaver spoke: So, she knew.

"No. It was something that happened. I didn't know what it meant." She never failed to admit there was pleasure in it. But afterwards, she told herself she had not known what else to do. It was, oddly, not much different than being on that hillside with Russell. She remained aloof from Hilary, whose patrician grace-more than that, her kindness-prevented her from ever speaking a word. A month later Hilary graduated. The event receded with time, its contours lost in the murk of memory. There were lots of things about her, Evon reasoned, that weren't the same as most people she knew. She came from a tiny little town nobody'd ever heard of. She'd been selected for the national team in an Olympic sport. And she once slept with a girl. That was how she was.

But did that mean she wasn't going to get the happiness everybody else wanted? That she wasn't entitled to it? If you'd asked her, then, after Hilary, she'd still have predicted she was going to get married, have kids, the house, the husband, a good guy, quiet and sincere, the way she thought of her father and her little brothers. When that happened, Hilary wouldn't matter. None of it would. She was thirty-four years old now. Thirty-four, and the vision of that waiting serenity still swam through her as a comfort from time to time, and when she realized it was never going to occur, she was still, at thirty-four, crushed.

A little more than three years ago she had been detailed to San Francisco on an investigation of suspected bribery of Agriculture Department inspectors at the seaport. Another agent had taken her to this strip club for a laugh. One of the girls there was a source of his, she bounced around with a lot of would-be wiseguys and had some good information. But Evon wasn't laughing. He thought it was because she was uptight and they left after a drink. But what seized. up everything in her was the way one woman looked at her while she was dancing. She had her naked breasts in her hands, massaging them, drawing them together, the nipples slender, very red, and visibly erect, and she turned a yearning, willing, knowing look on Evon. It was a come-on, she realized, part of their routine, the girls played to everybody in the crowd, knowing nobody was there by accident, everybody came looking for a little thrill. And Evon got hers. She went home and did not sleep all night. When she poured a vodka for herself, her hand shook so that she could barely get the liquid in the glass. She sat in an easy chair in the little monthly studio where the Bureau'd put her and tried to calm down. And after an hour or so of drinking she finally said it to herself. So that's how I am.

"And I went back. I didn't have the remotest idea what I'd say if anybody I knew showed up there. `I expected to find you'? I guess that was what I'd worked out in my head. I went back like it was business, an investigation. I sat in the front row. I watched this woman-Teresa Galindo, it turned out, was her name-I watched Teresa, I smiled at her, she looked at me again that way, and now I just sort of gave in, succumbed. I felt my body rise to her-" Even now, the memory was stunning. Stunning.

"Anyway, they circulated, the girls, you know, they wanted you to buy drinks. And this girl, Teresa, she wasn't a special beauty. The girls in the clubs, most of them, the main attribute they brought to the job was that they were willing to take off their clothes and dance in front of people. Teresa was all kind of pockmarked. When she went walking around in this skinny bikini and this little bathing shift, you could see she was made up all the way down her chest. But I was so turned on. Because I didn't have to work for what I wanted, because Teresa just saw it and knew what was there. When she came back with the drinks, she dropped a napkin in my lap and whispered, `I do privates.'

"'Private what?' I nearly asked. `Dancing' is what she'd have said. But I didn't think she was really talking about dancing. I saw a phone number and just crumpled the napkin up in my hand. And I called. That night, so I didn't lose courage. And she came to my apartment the next morning. 11 a.m. Broad daylight, before both of us went to work. It was so weird. Not because of what we were doing-and it went past dancing in about two minutes not because it was a woman's hands on me, not because of the incredible little toys she'd brought with her-there was one she called the Magic Wand with these three little revolving balls at the end?-but because in the middle I thought, This is a dream, God, I have dreamed this, I have dreamed it a thousand times.

"I paid her. And she always took the money. She said she only did this with women and not very often, but I had no idea whether that was true. She liked me. She figured out really fast that I was law enforcement, but she never guessed it was the Bureau. She thought I was a county sheriff's deputy. She made up this whole tale about me. I worked in the jail. I hated the men in there. Just the way she and most of the other girls hated the men in the club. That's why they seemed to do it. For the chance to look down on men, who want it so badly, so openly, and who're not going to get it. She had her reasons, too. She'd been messed with for years by her grandfather, a big patron who everybody was afraid of. She'd been to college; that was a surprise. She had a degree in accounting. But she made more money doing this.

"So I knew. Out loud to myself, I knew. And people who're straight, I listen to them talk, and sometimes they seem to think that knowing is the only hard part. As if straight people have an easy time hooking up with someone else and aren't miserable about the fact they can't. I tried hanging out with this woman, Teresa. Sometimes, before or after, we'd go for a drink. But she'd made up her story about me, and I'd made up my story about her. Mine was that she was soft and kind and really just wanted somebody to turn to, and that wasn't so. Her crowd was tough. They liked pain. She took me to the sex clubs. They call them clubs, but it's just somebody's loft where you pay at the door. And I didn't care for what I saw. A woman with an Idaho potato? I wanted a life. That was a freak show. At least to me it was. So," she said wearily.

"I mean, sometimes I think about it and I'm just appalled. A stripper. A strip-per, for gosh sake. It's like my life was something dreamed up by a wino in a bus station. A stripper."

That was a play, Feaver said. She stiffened, but she'd misunderstood.

"It's a rehearsal," he said. "You're not bringing a stripper home to Mom."

She laughed at the idea. She wasn't bringing anybody home to Mom. She'd never have the fortitude. But she knew what he meant.

"So where the hell does Carmody come in here?" he asked. "After this?"

"Before. That was a pretty predictable period. I mean, I knew I wasn't getting the same thing from it as other people. From the Act. I thought I was frightened. Well, I was frightened. So I thought if I could get drunk enoughAnd I was away from home. That wasn't the only time. Hardly. The mechanics, they were okay, actually. This isn't about mechanics. It's about passion. Being the kind of woman who feels passion for other women. And who wants a woman to feel passion for her."

He asked who she was feeling passion for now, who she'd left back home, and somehow she laughed again at the idea. Des Moines wasn't exactly San Francisco, and she had to be sensible, there was a lot the Bureau wasn't ready for yet. Iowa City was another story, but it was a distance, and there was an uncomfortable aspect to what she encountered there, reminiscent of what she'd seen in San Francisco. A lot of those women were on a mission and sort of demanded you be queer their way. It was fine all right to walk around in leather panties with your nipples covered in duct tape, but God forbid a girl liked Lee Greenwood or Travis Tritt. Or George Bush. Over all, though, she was still uptight. She realized that. Even now, there must have been some little part of her that was waiting for it all to go away.

About eighteen months ago something started to happen with a woman from church named Tina Criant. She was married to a trooper Evon had worked with, and Tina and she had a lot of things in common, the same funny mix of hobbies, needlepoint and pistol-shooting. They did those things together. Tina liked to give her books. They laughed. She was just a warm, special person, and Evon could see something beginning, probably the kind of thing Hilary Beacom saw in her. She never said a word, neither of them did. In retrospect, she knew she'd let it get away somehow. If she'd been bold, she might have been an example or supplied the courage for both of them. But perhaps it was just as well. Tina and Tom, her husband, had two little boys, five and seven. For about two months, Evon watched Tina work it out with herself. And decide. She quit the needlepoint circle. She stopped coming to the range. It had hurt a good deal. Evon hadn't realized until then how hard she had been hoping.

Sometimes now, she told him, in her worst moments, she would see one of those women who turn up in completely male settings-on road crews, or the lone white person among a Hispanic gardening gang-one of those bulky types with short hair and a dried-up face devoid of makeup and a bunched-up sweatshirt to hide what, for some reason, was always a humongous set of tits. She'd look at those women and think, Is that who I am? Is that who I'm going to be? Some self-declared misfit with her pistol collection and three sports channels on cable?

"Cut it out." He spoke unexpectedly, softly.

"Huh?"

"Don't do that to yourself. I mean, you can say I don't know you, but I know that's not you. Christ," he said, "you don't have it that easy."

It probably wasn't funny. But she laughed for a long time, and he laughed with her. Tonight, right now, she was ready to laugh. Because he was right. Both ways. The good news and the bad. She wasn't a type. She was herself. Square peg, all right. Cranky. Awkward. Confused, of course. But not completely ill suited to the world, not so dominated by these questions that they took over everything else. She had her secrets. Everybody did. Stuff swirled around inside her, undetermined, like the dust in the cosmos that wasn't yet a comet or a planet or a star. But who wasn't like that? Everybody. Everybody's sex life was strange. Right?

"So what else do you need to know, Robbie?" she asked after a time, in a drier tone. Across the room she heard the ice cubes rattle in his glass. Next door, a neighbor who'd played the Bodyguard sound track often enough since January to wear out the plastic was at it again.

"How'd you come up with `Evon'?"

It was the name of her first cousin, a girl about her age, an Americanized spelling meant to be pronounced the same way as Yvonne. But people got confused. The teachers. Other kids. They came to call her cousin `Even' and she got tired of correcting it. At times, it was a source of torment, kids being like they are. `Even worse.' `Even dumber.' `Even uglier.' `Even fatter.' But this girl, her cousin, she had some stuff. She wouldn't dent. `Even better,' she would answer, and meant it. She was a doctor now in Boise, divorced, two kids, pretty happy on her own. They'd seen each other only once in the last ten years, but it had been a warm occasion. `Even better.' She always wanted to be able to say that the way her cousin had.

A motorcycle gunned by in the avenue. She asked him if there was anything else.

"Once and for all," he finally said, "are you wired or not?"

She had to laugh. She'd laughed quite a bit by now.

"You think I'd have said all this to you with a tape recorder running?"

He'd considered that, though. He said he'd always figured they let her, as an agent, turn it on and off. She faced him in the dark. They'd been careful up to now not to look at one another.

"Just tell me no," he said. "I'll believe you. Just tell me no."

"I've told you no before. You want to look?"

"Huh?"

"Look." She stood up. She lifted her arms. "Go ahead and look. Go on. Frisk me. You won't believe anything else."

He was startled, but he eventually padded, shoeless and with a strangely light tread, to where she waited.

I don't have to do this."

"Yes you do. Only don't mess around," she said. "Do it the way I would. Check the purse."

He stood there for some time, embarrassed or simply unskilled in laying hands on a woman without the usual involvements. Finally, he gripped her shoulders. But he went no further. Instead he pulled her toward him slowly, until her head was directly beneath his chin, and then he bent and kissed her squarely on the crown, much as he'd done in the courthouse with Leo, his elderly cousin.

After that, he collected his coat and wiggled one of his feet awhile getting it back into his boot. A blade of light edged the door.

"You're okay," he said.

"Don't sound so surprised."

"I'll see you tomorrow."

"If they don't close us down tonight."

He shrugged. They'd done their best, he said. Both of them. He left her in the dark, feeling he was right. THE NEXT MORNING, when Evon left her apartment, she was followed. She took a taxi out to Glen Ayre, where she'd left her car overnight, and even as she was getting in, she saw the headlights come on in a car positioned in a no-parking zone across the street. Daylight Saving had recommenced, and there was little light at this hour. She used her makeup mirror to watch behind her. The car fell back on the highway, yet it appeared now and then, and soon she noticed a second auto, sometimes floating a little ahead of the taxi in the right lane. At one point, that vehicle, a jacked-up Buick, rode alongside, its occupants black guys, older fellows with a thuggish look. The passenger had a beard and prison muscles and wore a dark do rag and shades, even though the sun was not over the horizon. He turned to Evon with a quick, knowing smartass smile that froze her heart.

Both cars stopped a quarter block away while she paid the taxi driver. She told Robbie as soon as she was in the Mercedes. He didn't seem to buy it, but she'd described the cars and he recognized them himself in his rearview within a few minutes of leaving the subdivision.

"Should I ditch them?" he asked.

"Let McManis decide. I'll call him." Her cell phone wasn't really secure, but there was no choice. There was no answer on the emergency number.

Robbie's car phone rang a minute later. McManis didn't even say good morning.

"They're ours," he said. "We've been covering you since last night. Just in case." Before he hung up, Jim told Evon he wanted to see her once she got in.

She came straight up from the garage. Jim greeted her from behind his desk and asked her to close the door. He drained the last from a Starbucks cup and took a long time to look her over. He was well groomed, but there were little gray swells from sleeplessness beneath his eyes.

He'd prepared a speech. The assumption from the start, he said, was that they were dealing with rough company. Undercover agents who'd been unmasked had had some heaping bad times, McManis said. Shot. Some UCAs had been tortured to find out what they knew. His tone remained unruffled, but he did not spare details graphic enough that for a moment it was almost as bad as if he'd laid those corpses on his desk. As McManis figured it, he said, she was entitled to get out now.

"I'm a big girl," she answered.

"You have to think about it. Don't just sing from the hymnal."

She had thought about it. Much of the night.

"It's starting to get exciting," she said.

"We might be able to do it without you." That was ridiculous. They both knew that. If she cut and ran now, she might as well wire Walter Western Union to tell him Carmody was right. She tried to be level and unflappable, like McManis, as she shook her head.

At ten, we met. Jim stood up in his white shirt and addressed the assemblage-Sennett, Robbie, me, and the remaining UCAs. D.C. had punted. The decision whether to go on had to be made on the ground, where the operatives themselves had the best vantage to judge how close they were to blown. Evon was willing to go forward, he said. But he urged everyone to take a second to reconsider. Around the table, no one moved. It wasn't clear to me whether Stan would have offered Robbie the same chance to opt out, but Feaver and I had talked already, and he was convinced that, for the moment, Evon was the only one in serious peril.

Stan received the community resolve with a taut buttonedup smile and took over. To reinforce the team, he had decided to share news previously sequestered in the realm of need-to-know. Everyone had realized that Amari and his surveillance squad had tailed the targets after the drops. Both Walter and Skolnick, it developed, had visited with Kosic within a few hours after Robbie passed them money. And the surveillance hadn't terminated there. Amari and his watchers had been dutifully following Rollo when he bought a newspaper, or blood sausage at the market, or visited a currency exchange. As he approached the register, an agent would sidle close enough to catch a look at the bills Kosic was using to pay. Then, as soon as he was gone, another agent would make a purchase with something larger. The idea was to get Rollo's bill back as change in the hope it would prove to be part of the prerecorded money Robbie had delivered. And it had worked. They'd hit the bull's-eye three times now, picking up two bills Robbie had passed to Skolnick, from one of which D.C. had even lifted Rollo's prints. This morning at Paddywacks, the notorious hang of county pols, where Rollo, as always, had paid for Brendan's breakfast, Amari had recovered a fifty that Robbie had given Walter yesterday at 5 p.m. Stan was prepared to ask the Chief Judge to approve a bug it Kosic's office the next time money changed hands.

"The game is changing," Stan said. "We're in the second half. After yesterday, we have to figure the clock is running. But, folks"-Stan's dark eyes were bright as a grackle's-"we're literally, literally, right outside Brendan Tuohey's door."