The Girl With the Deep Blue Eyes

Eleven

He was sprawled out on his back, feeling like a puppet with its strings cut. His eyes were closed, and he had the sense that he could just float away, like a leaf on a stream.

She lay her hand on him, brushed her fingertips across the hair on his chest. She said, “We worked up a sweat, didn’t we? I could put the air on.”

“I’m comfortable.”

“Well, I’m dripping, but that’s your doing. You don’t suppose we just got me pregnant, do you?”

“I never even thought.”

“Now wouldn’t that win the prize for ironic,” she said, “after what George and I went through.”

“He wanted a child?”

“Desperately, and if you ever met his kids, you’d have to wonder why. Two girls and a boy, and the older girl’s the same age as I am.”

“I know.”

“The girls are bitches who hated me before they even met me, and Alden wouldn’t know which to do first, fuck me or kill me. Both, if possible, and I don’t think he’d much care about the order. You know about his kids?”

“Just that there are three of them, and the one girl’s your age.”

“You know a whole lot about me, don’t you?” She moved her hand lower, curled her fingers around his penis. “It’s so soft and small and harmless now,” she said. “Just to lull a girl into feeling safe. Who are you, Doak?”

“A New York cop who figured his pension would go further in the Sunshine State.”

“And it didn’t go as far as you hoped, so you got sworn in as a deputy sheriff?”

He shook his head. “Got a private investigator’s license, got to know the sheriff, and when he needed somebody with no local ties to play a part and wear a wire, I got the job.”

“And that was when, a couple of days ago?”

“There was a job before that,” he said, and started to tell her about the auto dealer. She remembered him, how he’d tried to get his partner killed and wound up going away for it, but hadn’t known about the way the evidence was gathered to lock down the case.

“And that was you? Same as this morning, he got in the car with you and you got him to talk?”

“But he got to make up his own lines,” he said. “They weren’t all written down for him on a legal pad.”

“Then you turned in the recording and collected your fee and he went off to prison. Was it a substantial fee?”

“Not especially.”

“How about for me? Will they pay you even though I didn’t say anything useful?”

“They’d pay for my time. I told them not to bother, that I was happy to do a favor for Gallatin County.”

“And if it was all the same to them, you’d just as soon get paid in pussy. Oh, come on. Don’t tell me you weren’t expecting this.”

“I suppose I was.”

“I’d have to be grateful, wouldn’t I? I was this close to getting locked up.”

“You could have had a change of heart,” he pointed out. “The lines I printed out for you? You could have come up with them on your own, and meant them.”

“But that’s not what would have happened.”

“How can you know that for sure? We’ll never know, because I didn’t give you the chance to change your mind.”

“And a good thing, Doak, because that wasn’t gonna happen. What was it you said, when you pretended to try to talk me back into it? ‘I bet you’ve got the thousand dollars in your purse.’ Well, you’re damn right I did, and that wasn’t all I had. There was another envelope, a thicker one, with twenty thousand in it, because I knew you’d want half the money before you did the work, and I wanted to move right on to the next step.”

“Who told you the price was going to be forty thousand?”

“Nobody. I was just guessing, and what I guessed was fifty, but twenty-five was more than I could come up with, it was a stretch to get my hands on twenty. And you know, a bird in the hand. Oh, that’s an idea.”

Her fingers found him again. “Now I’ve got your bird in my hand. Now you touch me. Put your finger in. Yes, that’s nice. Let’s not do anything, let’s just go on conversating while we touch each other like this.”

“Conversating?”

“Haven’t you heard people say that? I love it, it’s such a nice clunky word. Suppose the price was fifty thousand and you wanted half in advance, and all I could come up with was twenty. You’d have taken it, wouldn’t you?”

“Wouldn’t I have to be a hit man to answer that?”

“Yeah, it’s a little too hypothetical, isn’t it? What kind of name is Doak?”

“The only one anybody ever calls me.”

“Somebody must call you Mr. Miller. That’s the last name you said for the tape, and it would have to be your real name if you were preparing something for use as evidence in a murder trial. Except it wouldn’t be murder unless you did it. What would I have been charged with?”

“Criminal solicitation to murder.”

“I was arrested once for soliciting. Which was pure bullshit, because I was the one girl from Minnesota who got off the bus in Port Authority and didn’t get turned out by a pimp.”

“You came to New York?”

“I didn’t stay long. The city scared the crap out of me. And the prices! Three, four days and I was back at Port Authority getting on another bus.”

“But not back to Minnesota.”

“No. How I got arrested, this cop in Houston hit on me and I wasn’t interested. I was a barista in a place that wished it was Starbucks, and this creepy guy hit on me, which happened all the time, and I blew him off. And he showed me a badge.”

“And arrested you?”

“Gave me a choice. ‘You can suck my cock and I’ll let you go, or I’ll slap the cuffs on you and swear you offered to suck me off, and you’ll say you didn’t, and who do you think they’ll believe?’ Me, I thought, because everybody must know you’re a lying sack of shit, and I held out my hands for the cuffs.”

“And he laughed and let you go.”

“No, I told you I got arrested. He put the cuffs on and told me I was under arrest and led me out of there, and when we got around the corner he laughed, like it was a big joke, and of course I didn’t think he was serious, did I? And after he copped a feel he unlocked the handcuffs and told me I was free to go, and when I walked into the shop everybody stared at me.”

“Jesus.”

“I could have toughed it out, but for minimum wage? I decided the hell with the Coffee Clutch, and the hell with Houston, for that matter. Criminal solicitation to murder. That sounds serious.”

“It’s a step or two beyond littering.”

“They’d have put me in jail, wouldn’t they?”

“They’d have sent you to prison.”

“But they won’t, thanks to Mr. Miller. Doak Miller?”

“Right.”

“You said some initials, and I don’t believe either one of them was a D. One was a J, and I’m not sure of the other.”

“J. W. Miller.”

“Which one of them stands for Doak?”

“The W.”

“You spell funny.”

“My given name,” he said, “is Jay Walker Miller.”

“What’s the J stand for? Mookie?”

“No, Jay’s my first name, J-A-Y.”

“Three letters, but it sounds the same as the one letter. That must be a pain in the ass, having to spell it out all the time.”

“You got that right.”

“I’ve known girls named Bea and Dee and Kaye, but those were nicknames for Beatrice and Dolores and Katherine, not actual official names. I still don’t get how the W got to stand for Doak.”

“It’s not a very interesting story.”

“Tell me anyway,” she said, and gave him a gentle squeeze. “And how would it be if you put two fingers in? And you could move them around a little bit while you tell me.”

“So you don’t get bored.”

“Oh, I won’t get bored. I’m a long ways away from bored. Don’t move your fingers too much, you don’t have to stir me up, just... yeah, like that. That’s kind of nice, moving them like that.”

So he started talking, telling her how his name was Jay Walker Miller because that was how it worked in his family. His mother’s maiden name was Marjorie Walker, so he got Walker for a middle name, and his father’s name was Jay Prescott Miller, because his father’s mother’s maiden name, which is to say his grandmother’s name, was Juliana Prescott.

So he was a Jay, like his father, but not a Junior, because they had different middle names. And it was actually a tradition that went back a total of four or five generations, but it stopped with him. He’d married a woman named Doreen Geoghegan, and he was damned if he was going to saddle a kid with a middle name no one was sure how to pronounce. The fucking Geoghegans couldn’t even agree on it, one branch of the family calling themselves GAY-gan, the others opting for Guh-HEE-gan. And nobody ever called him Jay, and a name that sounded like an initial was a pain in the ass anyway, so the hell with it. His son was Gary Andrew Miller, and he’d spared the little prick a lifetime of aggravation, and for what? The kid wouldn’t speak to him.

“Why?”

“We’ll get to that,” he said. “Everybody called my father Jay, so they had to call me something different, and they settled on Walker. And then somebody, I think it was one of my uncles, remembered a football player named Doak Walker. He was a Texas kid who played for SMU, a three-time All-American. ESPN put him fourth on the list of all-time great college football players. Then he went on to play half a dozen seasons for the Detroit Lions, and after he was through they retired his number.”

“What was the number?”

“Thirty-seven. Why?”

“To see if you knew it. I’m sorry, keep talking. And keep, um—”

“Doing this?”

“Yeah.”

“I know a whole lot about Doak Walker, and I’m tempted to tell you every last word of it because I don’t ever want to take my fingers out of you. Are you okay with that?”

“Uh-huh.”

“I grew up thinking Doak was his nickname, same as it was mine, but one day I looked it up and found out his actual name was Ewell Doak Walker, Junior. So it was his real middle name, and it was his father’s real middle name, and where it came from originally I have no idea. But I could make something up, just to keep on talking.”

“Or you could forget him and tell me more about you.”

“Or I could stop talking,” he said, “and eat your pussy.”

“Oh,” she said.

“Yes, you could do that.”

He slid his hands under her buttocks and put his mouth on her and the world went away.