The Girl With the Deep Blue Eyes

Ten

He asked her what she’d like from the bar. She looked at his Pabst longneck, shook her head. “Not beer,” she said. “And this is no place to get fancy. You wouldn’t want to ask them to make you a mixed drink.”

“ ‘Shucks, ma’am, we’s just plain country folks here.’ ”

“I wonder what the wine’s like.”

“Red or white?”

“That’d be the two choices. Oh, white, I guess.”

He went to the bar and came back with four ounces of white wine in a small water tumbler. She raised the glass and he touched it with his beer bottle.

“Well, it could be worse,” she said, after a small sip. “Although it doesn’t taste much like wine.”

She offered him the glass. He noted the trace of her lipstick on the rim, and allowed himself to drink from the same spot.

“I see what you mean,” he said. “Maybe it’s not.”

“What else could it be?”

“Sour grape juice, watered down some and spiked with grain alcohol.”

“People do that? Why would anyone—”

“Same reason they’d make any kind of bootleg,” he said. “It’s cheaper.”

“You’d think jug wine would be cheap enough.” She took another experimental sip, then said, “Oh, and consider yourself kissed.”

“Huh?”

“We both drank from the same spot on the same glass. ‘Consider yourself kissed’ is what you say when that happens. You never heard that before?”

“No.”

“I guess we know different things. You know how to make bad wine and I know what passed for sophisticated wit at Foxcroft.”

“Is that where you went to school?”

“Not exactly. Jacob Tendler High, on Goodrich two blocks off Hennepin.”

“Hennepin.”

“That ring a bell?”

“It’s a main drag somewhere, isn’t it? Minnesota?

“Minneapolis. What did you do, read it somewhere?”

“Read it or heard it on the news, and evidently it got stuck in my mind. That’s where you’re from? Minneapolis?”

“A few different places, and Minneapolis was one of them. My mother kept hooking up with men who felt a need to relocate. Then they’d do it again, only this time they wouldn’t tell her, and she’d have to go and hook up with somebody else, some other shifty-eyed loser with an urge for going. I got the same urge myself one day, hopped on a bus and left the driving to Greyhound.”

“And the Foxcroft lingo?”

“Lingo,” she said. “I like that. At Foxcroft we’d say patois. Or maybe we wouldn’t, maybe I’m misusing the word. ‘Consider yourself kissed.’ I read it in a book, and it stuck in my mind the way Hennepin did in yours. Don’t ask me which book because I read so many of them, all about these preppy girls. Oh, isn’t that Emmy Lou? What’s the matter?”

“I thought there wouldn’t be anybody here that you know.”

“Well, I know her, but she wouldn’t know me from Eve. On the jukebox, Emmy Lou Harris.”

“Oh.”

She lifted her glass, set it down untasted. “I’ve never been here before,” she said, “and I don’t know any of these people except the ones on the jukebox, and I can’t say I want to. I picked this place because I remembered seeing it from the road and thinking how perfectly lowdown it looked, but aside from that I don’t know anything more about it than I do about Foxcroft or Miss Porter’s. I don’t even know your name.”

“It’s Doak.”

“And mine’s Lisa, but you know that. You know a whole lot more about me than I know about you.”

“I guess I do. But there’s a lot I don’t know.”

“All I know about you is you like your rib eye cooked black and blue. That was a new one on Cindy, and she was impressed.”

“Cindy? Oh, the blonde.”

“I guess you must have been in the mood for a steak, but that’s not why you came, is it? You wanted a look at me.”

“I did.”

“Oh, there’s another old friend of mine. His name’s Waylon.”

He nodded. “Somebody played the song earlier, right after I got here.”

“I like that the jukebox is all oldies. I don’t think they planned it that way. I think they just can’t be bothered to buy any new records. Can I ask you something?”

“Sure.”

“Who the hell are you? Some kind of a cop, but what kind? And why would you wait for me to take the bait and then let me off the hook?”

He was considering his response when she added, “Or maybe I’m not off the hook yet.”

“I don’t really know much about fishing,” he said. “The house I bought has a dock you could hitch a boat to, except that I don’t own a boat and don’t want one. But you can just fish right off the dock, and I bought a rod and reel, your basic beginner’s outfit, and I gave it a try, and it didn’t take me long to figure out it wasn’t likely to turn into a lifelong passion.”

“You never went fishing before?”

“Years ago, with a friend who kept a boat at City Island. Four of us out on the water for three hours, drinking beer and eating pizza, and nobody caught a thing.”

“I don’t know where that is.”

“City Island? It’s up in the Bronx.”

“New York.”

“That’s right.”

“That’s what I thought in the car, from the accent. But it was stronger then.”

“Part of the act.”

“Oh.”

“The sheriff says my accent’s slipping, that I’m starting to sound Southern. I don’t know if he’s right.”

“Florida, this part of it, is all different accents. You’ve got people in Belle Vista who moved here from all over the country, and you’ve got others who’re still living on roads that were named for their great-grandfathers.”

“That’d be me, if my grandpa’s name was Osprey.”

“That’s where you live? Osprey Drive? I know where that is.”

“So do I, but then I’d have to or I’d never find my way home. Is your accent Minnesota? There was that movie, Fargo, but you don’t sound like that.”

“We moved too much for me to have an accent. Or if I do, it’s just a blend. Standard American, I think they call it. Doak.”

“What?”

“I don’t know. I was just saying your name. We’ve got to talk and we can’t, can we?”

“I thought that’s what we were doing.”

“No, there’s a conversation we need to have and we’re just dancing around it. When I first noticed this place, Kimberley’s Kove, and the tattooed dude behind the bar can’t be Kimberley, can he?”

“Probably not.”

“Maybe Kimberley got sent home because she failed her spelling exam. K-O-V-E is just so fucking K-Y-O-O-T, you know?”

“When you first noticed the place...”

“Right. I also noticed, maybe half a mile south of here, a place called Tourist Court. Oddly enough, they spelled Court with a C.”

“On the left,” he remembered.

“A twelve-unit strip motel, plus four cabins. It’s about what you’d expect for twenty dollars a night, but the linen’s clean.”

“You’ve been there?”

“Half an hour ago,” she said. “That’s why I was late. I took one of the cabins, and I checked it just to make sure there wasn’t a porcupine sitting on the bed. There could have been, but there wasn’t.”

A lot of things went through his mind. He picked one of them and said, “You didn’t use a credit card.”

“Of course not.”

“Good.”

His hand was on the table, next to the unfinished bottle of beer, and her hand settled on top of his.

“Afterwards,” she said, “we’ll be able to talk.”