The Rescue

14

By evening Bettina has checked into a motel in Dana Point, the Queen Palms. It’s on Coast Highway and there’s a dog-friendly dirt and pee-burned grass “play area” with three shaggy queen palms growing close together. Not only that but room 212 has a microwave and mini-fridge, in-room coffee, and free internet.

She pays extra for a king bed so there’s plenty of room for Felix and Thunder. Thunder being her trap gun, a Winchester Model 12 with a high-profile comb and a cheek rest and a good recoil pad for the days she’d shoot a hundred, two hundred rounds in tournaments. Heavy as a tank but smooth of swing, and the pump action effortless. Her best friend for years. Her dad, a terrific shotgunner, shortened the stock and gave the gun to Bettina for her twelfth birthday. It was an old gun, one of the pre-1964s. When she outgrew it, she helped Dad put the cut-off piece of butt back on, helped him glue and sand and refinish the whole stock. Blued the steel too. Better than its former glory. Thunder shoots like a dream and kicks like a mule.

In room 212 now, Bettina checks the breach then shoulders the weapon, wondering how many hundreds of thousands of times this makes. She feels the weight and balance, the perfect fit to her face. Even feels a little of that spark inside, the danger and excitement. She tracks an invisible clay pigeon flying through the room. Clicks her tongue to simulate the trigger pull, and swings through the target to lengthen the shot string — trap 101.

She figures she’ll be sleeping with Thunder beside her, no plug in the gun, six shells in the magazine, barrel pointed to the foot of the bed, slide open, ready to be racked and fired. Safety on, too, in case of an active dream or a sudden move by Felix. He hasn’t chosen to sleep with her yet, but he could change his mind while she’s in dreamland.

She feels somewhat overequipped for this DEA “rumor,” but the “better safe than sorry” cliché offers her a mostly believable rationale.

“They better not try to get you,” she says to him. He’s lying just inside the doorway of the bedroom, watching her as always.

She wonders again if she should let him go back to being Joe. He’s responding to Felix by now, and Bettina likes the name, because it tells a story.

“So, Felix or Joe?”

He sits up and stares at her. He almost never backs off a stare-out, unless he gets distracted, which for Felix is not difficult. Any small living intruder in his world — an earwig on the kitchen floor, a fly on a window, a fence lizard on Bettina’s Laguna deck — is enough to snap his reverie and send him tearing off after it. The terrier in him, Bettina knows, bred for hunting and barnyard ratting, bred to kill pretty much anything smaller than himself.

But nothing distracts him now.

“Felix or Joe?”

His brown eyes are intent and intelligent looking, but she has no idea what he’s thinking.

“How can you have thoughts if you don’t have words, little dog? I know you have thoughts, but what form do they take? Do you hear them? Maybe you see them. Or smell them.”

He lies down like a sphinx, paws out and head up, not breaking eye contact with Bettina. Still staring back, Bettina extends her left arm, makes a fist and says “Joe.” Then holds her right arm out in a fist and says “Felix.”

The dog considers each fist, then lets out a faint whimper as he lies back down. Lays his head on his paws and looks at her with what Bettina thinks is profound frustration. He wants words, she thinks.

Give him words.

“You are Felix,” she says. “The best dog ever in the world.”

He cocks that head and taps his tail unconvincingly.

Settled.

After dark she drives to the market for provisions. Parks up close to the entrance and leaves Felix crated in the locked Jeep, a window cracked. She’s nervy about this, checks the Wrangler through the supermarket windows twice, but she’s back to it in less than eight minutes. Realizes she’ll need a service-dog license so he can go everywhere. Hell, she thinks, maybe Arnie can get me a DEA K-9 vest, scare the hell out of everybody.

Felix is asleep when she gets there.

She heats up two high-quality frozen dinners, cuts a pear and some goat cheese for sides, pours two fingers of bourbon in an old-fashioned rocks glass from home. Adds an ice cube and a slice of lemon rind.

Checks her messages and social buzz. Views and responses to “Felix: The Rescue of a Mexican Street Dog” — both print and video — continue to multiply. Even her scantily illustrated article about the boy who saved Felix, “Hero Without a Face,” has gotten major traction. There’s a voice mail on her work line from a literary agent and another two from Hollywood agents, all wanting to talk. She feels her heartbeat speed up but she’s not surprised at all. People love stories that matter.

The dog lies under the little table, at her feet, working on a cow’s hoof.

She puts Billy Ray Crumley on speaker and tries to eat the turkey and stuffing dinners without making noise.

“That was kind of ugly today,” says Billy Ray Crumley. “I would have warned you what was coming about Felix, but I didn’t know what Arnie had up his sleeve.”

“Arnie did the right thing. I have to be careful.”

She glances at the long tapering lump under the bedspread.

“Arnie likes the tough-guy Federale act,” says Billy. “When he’d catch me in baseball, he’d pop that ball back hard if he didn’t like my call or my pitch. Him throwing runners out was a thing of beauty, though.”

“Brothers,” says Bettina, thinking of her own. What a tangle of testosterone they were. “Talk about competitive.”

A beat, then: “Thanks for helping me today, Billy.”

“Anytime, anyplace.”

“You’ve got a big heart.”

“Just trying to be a friend.”

“You miss your life in Texas? Your friends and job, and the way everybody knew you were a major leaguer?”

“Hmm.”

Bettina hears a muffled gulp, figures he’s drinking a beer. And having a chew, which he tries to hide from her. But you have to spit it out somewhere. Smells like mint.

“Sure, yeah. The friends mainly.”

“Are you still friends with your ex?”

“No, ma’am. It got ugly in the divorce, and things got said that weren’t true. In a small city like Wichita Falls, everything’s everybody else’s business.”

“Laguna too.”

“Laguna’s about as different from Wichita as you can get. It’s great here. A great place to start over. I was damn lucky to have an uncle on the PD or I’d probably never have got an interview. Everybody wants to be in a cute town on the California coast. I ride a bike around and help tourists for sixty grand a year and bennies. That’s not bad.”

Another pause. Bettina sips the bourbon.

“Where’d you put the shotgun, Bettina?”

“Under the bedspread. Thanks again, Billy. For everything.”

“I am more than happy to be there for you,” he says. “I’m pissed at Arnie for scaring you, then cutting you loose.”

“That means a lot to me, Billy. I’ll call you if I need you.”

“Anytime and I’ll be there.”

“Later gator. Felix says good night.”

Bettina pours another bourbon, adds ice, wipes a fresh lemon peel around the glass and puts the lemon in the tiny fridge. Straightens the kitchen, checks the door, leaves the lights on and gets into bed with Papi. That Rita Indiana is one crazy-good writer.

Tonight, though, Bettina can’t lose herself in Indiana’s funny-desperate phantasmagoria. The bourbon makes her think of Keith, and the occasional too much of it they drank together. Keith would have liked Papi, she thinks. It has his loopy humor, his wide-eyed hunger for the unexpected, his love of words and language.

Here’s to you, Keefo.

Propped up in bed, here on the second floor of the U-shaped Queen Palms Motel, she can see the far parking stalls and the face of the building. Felix lies across the wide-open doorway, angled into the bedroom to keep his patient brown eyes on her.

She thinks of Billy Ray Crumley and how he reminds her of someone she knows but doesn’t want to know. But she won’t say who. She could say who, but she won’t. Some people are better off unnamed. What a terrible time to remember all of that, Bettina thinks, but sometimes a second bourbon breaks things loose inside. Once her memory starts in, it’s as unstoppable as a freight train going down a grade.

It was her freshman year at UCI, and she was living on Balboa Island with roommates and she went to a party over on North Bayfront. Some drinking going on and she did her part to represent the Hamilton High School Bobcats, did some tequila shots, got maybe a little more than just happy but still way under control. Way. Went upstairs to use the bathroom. Some boys in the bedroom drinking and talking conspiringly, scratchy phone music, so she had to wait. Made bitchy small talk with them. One said she had a pretty face and asked what her major was. And out of the bathroom came J from Hamilton High, a familiar face to Bettina but only an acquaintance — a jock quarterback with aw-shucks manners and an easy smile — and he was weaving drunk, wiping his mouth on the back of one hand, gripping a champagne bottle by the neck in the other. A cliché drunk. Grinning when he recognized her and swayed to a standstill. Blubbered a greeting, stuttering through the Bs: “B-b-bettina B-blazak the b-beautiful...”

“You’re drunk, J,” she said, a ripple of worry when the music went louder and the lights went out. She turned for the stairs. Motion from the bed, men climbing off, then J pushing her onto it, one strong hand over her mouth, cramming her head back into the pillow, the other hand yanking her belt open. Then the zipper of her jeans got pulled down hard. “Go for it, J,” slurred someone from the corner and the door closed so even the light from outside was gone. Bettina bit J’s palm and clubbed him on both ears with her fists, and kneed him in the meat of his thigh, and then again. But J forced her back flat, and clamped her wrists to the bed. He was heavily on top of her and thrusting away even though her pants were still on and so were his as far as she knew. Then he was panting and telling her he loved her and trying to kiss her but she head-butted his nose, blood spraying into her face. Then the lights come on and J froze for a second and six-foot Bettina was strong enough to reverse the wrist-locks and use her weight to twist the big man away and off her. J sat on the foot of the bed looking bewildered, and Bettina kicked him hard in the face. J collapsed to the mattress. The guy who had turned on the light, a capable looking dude in an Anteaters Lacrosse hoodie, asked Bettina if she was all right. She nodded, not knowing, zipping up her jeans, looking down at J and wanting to hurt him badly again, right then. Just crush the bastard. Instead, she wiped her face with a pillow, looked the lacrosse guy in the eye and nodded. Then carefully went down the stairs, a trembling hand on the banister.

She walked back to her apartment in the dark, arms crossed around herself, heart pounding, crying without sound. Throat sore and body hurting. Coppery smell of blood. Made it to her bathroom without being seen by the roomies, took a long shower, put on clean clothes and laid herself on the bed.

Wondered what to do.

Much later when the first light came to her windows, Bettina knew, all right: endure it. Avenge it if you can, someday, somehow. But for now, no police. No denials. No he said, she said. Nothing of tequila shots and tight jeans and were you flirting? No reports, no charges, no testimony, no public anything.

Let it become something buried down deep. Like a diseased corpse that she knew, even then, she would never forget.

Which brings her full circle to the Queen Palms Motel on this March night to wonder: What did that have to do with Billy?

She knows damned well what it has to do with Billy.

Nothing and everything.

The nothing part is easy to understand because Billy has nothing to do with what happened. The first time Billy walked into her cubicle at Coastal Eddy, however, she thought of J: a faint physical resemblance, the athletic stature, the easy face. She didn’t want Billy to remind her of J, but he did. That was the limit of Billy’s culpability — he walked into her cubicle.

The everything part is harder for her to deal with because it’s not a memory, not a piece of personal history, but her own reaction to it: J had stolen not only her once-easy trust of men but also her natural affection for them, her empathy, her spiritual attachment. J had spoiled half the world. Spoiled all the Billys and the Toms and the Tylers, the Nathans and the Marks and the Juans, the Albertos and Kendricks and Jamals. All of them.

Spoiled any chance of friendship with the lacrosse player, John Torres, who had offered to talk to the police about what he’d seen, and tried to keep in touch with Bettina after that night.

J had even spoiled Bettina’s brothers and father, forced them to be a part of a separate vile gender.

Felix comes to her bed and jumps aboard. A first! He licks her face and Bettina sets her left hand protectively over the trigger guard of the Winchester.

Later she turns off the lights. Propped up in bed with the gun on one side and her dog on the other, Bettina looks out at the parking lot and the other units, two stories of them, facing her from just a few hundred feet away. Everybody in everybody’s face. Some with lights on inside, most not. Faint lights over the doors, flecked by moths. A compact car arrives; a van departs. Doors open and close and voices drift through the damp March air. English. Spanish.

At the sound of the Spanish, she goes to the window and finds the source: two men at the door of a downstairs unit directly across from her. They look old and tired. One has trouble with the card key, in and out and again, and the door finally opens.

Shame on you, thinks Bettina: these guys are workers.

Back under the covers she can’t sleep. Can’t believe how good it feels to have a dog in bed again. Can’t believe that just yesterday life was more than good, but now she’s trying to protect a former DEA drug dog from the Sinaloa Cartel, which is possibly in Laguna right now, looking to dognap Felix, or worse. Or so says a pain-in-the butt DEA agent with “credible but unverified” evidence.

She checks her laptop with the free Wi-Fi, sees the pictures of Felix’s “relatives” still coming in. Some of them really do look like him.

She closes the computer, wondering if it might be time to open the box in her brain, give J his name back, let him be a real man instead of a living curse, time to deal with him face-to-face, once and for all and forever.

Bettina strokes the top of Felix’s perfectly round head, the “doggen noggin,” as her mother would say. Then she works his funny ears with her fingers, scratches under his front legs, feels his heart beating deep in his chest. She can’t quite believe how much she loves him. How easy it is to fall in love with a dog. You just do. They make you.

Her last thought before tumbling into sleep is about Felix: You can’t take him.

He’s mine.

Joe lies beside Bettina, his back flush to her. He feels the faint thump of her heart and the sounds inside her, draws in her river of smells. He thinks of his mother and the sweet milk and the other puppies all around him jostling each other for position and the way she would suddenly get up and go away, yanking that wonderful warm tube from his mouth and leaving him rolling and roiling with his brothers and sisters in the sudden emptiness of their crate. It’s one of his best memories, being buried in live, warm, friendly bodies that smell good.

He thinks of swimming in the pool with Teddy, and at the beach with Dan.

Remembers the mouse he killed working with Dan before they shot him.

Thinks of the boy holding him tight and running to where he was taken care of by Good Man and Woman.

He knows this Woman Bettina loves him. He sees it on her face and hears it in her words. These are clear and unmistakable signs. Faces are easy to understand; words, too, if you go by sound. When she looks at him in that certain way, Joe is starting to love her back.

He doesn’t know the word for love. Just that it’s all good feeling and happiness. For sleeping next to.