Valley of Bones

Ten

Lorna wise lies in bed and considers her symptoms. It is Saturday, so she can lie in bed doing this for longer than she usually does. A scratchiness in the back of the throat. A twitching in her calf muscle. A sort of deadened area just above her left elbow. She blinks one eye, then the other. Perhaps a slight blurring of vision in the left, or maybe that’s a bit of sleepy dust. Although, it’s worrisome that it’s the left one. The left calf muscle too, bad, speaks to central nervous system malfunction: an ischemia, a smallish brain tumor, the subtle onset of MS. As she lies, she palps her breasts, although she knows she should be upright, and although she will do it again when she showers. Probing for the tumor she knows is lurking, surely her fingers, so competent after all these years, can catch the nodule at the earliest possible stage and she can have the surgeon pluck it out. Although she knows that’s not true, although she is by now a fairly decent amateur oncologist, although she knows there are cancers so treacherous that by the time they show a palpable tumor they have spread througout the body. Not the kind her mother had, however, her mother was carrying a tumor the size of a tangerine around before she went to the doctor. Why, Mom, why didn’t you go to the doctor? Because I thought it was nothing. Because I hate doctors.

Lorna drops her breasts and sits up on the edge of the bed, experiencing a wave of dizziness and perhaps a slight nausea, the infallible sign of a brain wracked with metastases or else mere sickness and disgust at herself. Unlike Mom, Lorna happens to love doctors, occasionally in a sexual way, as with Rat Howie, and for this reason has decided that her personal physician should always be a woman, and so it is. She suppresses an urge to call Dr. Greenspan. But she saw her only thirty-four days ago and does not wish to acquire a rep as a crock. For some reason, she thinks as she starts her Saturday routine, the first minutes of the day are always the worst, the times when she feels most fragile and afraid.

She breakfasts on grapefruit and health pills and coffee on the little patio in the back, surrounded by flowers and twittering birds. She receives both theMiami Herald and theNew York Times every morning and reads both all the way through, except for the sports sections. TheHerald is an excellent paper, but she does not feel civilized without theTimes; theTimes and theNew Yorker, banners her dad flew, declaring that although he now lived in the New Jersey burbs, he had not surrendered to barbarism. And she likes the crossword puzzle, which she now does in twenty minutes, not as good as her dad but not disgraceful either.

After that, she sits in a sling chair, sipping the cooling coffee and recounting all the various tasks she has put off until the weekend and now must do or feel like a slacker. The phone rings, and she reaches for the cordless she has brought out with her and it is Sheryl Waits. Who asks if she is ready. Ready for what? It now turns out that Lorna’s mind has erased the appointment she made with her friend to go shopping for a dress to wear to Sheryl’s party, an actual party dress, which I don’t believe you own one of, sugar, because you are not entering my domicile looking like bark. Uh-uh!

That evening Lorna shows up at Sheryl’s party more than fashionably late in a scarlet spaghetti strap dress with a Saran Wrap cling and a built-in bra that offers her breasts up like twin servings of flan. The place is jumping, cars lining both sides of the street, people standing on the sidewalk and on the front lawn, holding drinks, lights strung among the branches of the pines and around the trunks of the palms on the property, light pouring from every window of the good-size split-level house, and thumping music.

She finds Sheryl in the kitchen taking a tray of fried chicken wings out of the oven. Sheryl screams how good she looks and requires everyone in range of her voice to see how good. Lorna says, “I hate you. This is the least fabric I’ve worn on my body outside a pool since I was four.”

“You’re such a fool, child! You look fantastic. Don’t she look fantastic, Elvita?”

Elvita agrees she looks fantastic. Lorna mugs for them, a pulp temptress. Hilarity.

In general, Lorna is bored by parties, by the way people act when they are drinking, nor does she like dancing with or being pawed by strangers. At loud parties, she usually finds a quiet corner, sits down with a glass of white wine, and observes the various species at their social rituals, an ornithologist in a rain forest. But because it is Sheryl’s party she feels obliged to be social. She circulates, sipping a wine and soda. Most of the people here are connected to the police, somewhat over half of them black, the rest a mix of Anglos and Cubans. As she expected, the men are standing about in clumps, clutching drinks in big plastic cups and talking sports or shop. The women are in clumps too, talking shop, shopping, vacations, clothes, kids, of which there are large numbers running underfoot and shouting in the yard. Some people are dancing under colored lights on the patio, to the Weather Girls, “It’s Raining Men.”

A man comes up to her, introduces himself as Rod, identifies himself as a friend of Leon’s. He is muscular, hairy, a cop, has only small talk to offer; he stares at her tray of breasts. Another man, taller, Ben, with the kind of big Adam’s apple she rather dislikes comes and joins them. He also stares at her breasts. She feels like she should be on a rotating platform, like a new model at an auto show. And another, Martin, younger and better looking, and what does he stare at? Not her flawless skin. They are all Miami PD and they engage in a joking rivalry, saying amusing bad things about one another to her, all of them eyeing her body. She can almost hear the saliva gurgle, the blood surging through their genitalia. This is it, then, sexual triumph: she finds she can’t take it seriously, it’s like thinking that a construction worker’s whistle signals the start of a meaningful relationship. Yet she feels obliged to play, to bat back the slightly salacious repartee, tosimper, for God’s sake! And to sweat. A good thing about this outfit is that it doesn’t come close to her armpits. A drink in a large plastic cup is placed in her hand and she drinks: sweet and very cold. Leon must be making his famous frozen daiquiris.

Somewhat of a blur after this. She dances with several men, feels several sets of genitals against her unprotected belly, several sets of hands on her ass. The dancing is to funk and disco, music she does not care much for. Then, suddenly, the music changes, a Latin beat, but unlike any Latin music she has heard before. It is layered, multivoiced, with rhythms that are incredibly complex yet still engaging of the groin area. Now she is dancing with a man who is leading her in steps she doesn’t know but seems to be able to do fairly well, or perhaps that is a result of the rum. He has steady hazel eyes set in a face that’s the caramel color of a Coach bag she owns. He is just her height in heels.

“What’s this music?” she asks.

“It’s a machine for the suppression of time,” he says.

“Pardon?”

“Levi-Strauss.”

“Levi-Strauss?”

“Yeah. Plays third base for the White Sox. How about those Marlins?”

“You’re Jimmy Paz,” she says.

“And how do you deduce that, Dr. Wise?” A grin now, small white teeth shining, like a cat.

“Sheryl said you were brainy. I don’t think many men at this party would respond to a question with a quotation from Levi-Strauss.”

“Only those on the structural anthropology softball team.”

“Of which you are a member.”

“I am. Leftbricoleur. We play ball, we down a case of cold ones, and sit around the locker room discussingTristes Tropiques.”

“Seriously, what is this music?”

“It’stimba. A Cuban record, a band called Klimax.”

“What are they singing about?”

“Yo no quiero que mi novia sea religiosa. I don’t want my girlfriend to be religious. Speaking of which, how’s our girl?”

“Oh, no, not shop! And here I thought you were dancing with me because you liked my dress,” Lorna says, not really believing that she has let this slip from between her lips.

He flings her out and leads her through an elaborate break and then snaps her back close. He smells of tobacco, not a smell she is used to on the health-conscious men she tends to hang with. Not unpleasant, though. Spicy. He throws her out again to the beat and now he gives her a long appreciative look that she feels running over her skin like heat. He says, “No, it was mainly the dress. Mainly the nondress zones, to be honest. Creamy. It makes me wish I had a long spoon.”

“I think we could use another drink,” she says.

Somewhat later they are sitting side by side on a somewhat ratty Bahama couch in the Waitses’ Florida room with that drink, Lorna’s a second foolhardy daiq and Paz with some dark brown liquid on ice. Lorna sees Sheryl zoom by with a tray of nibbles. Sheryl spots the two of them and rolls her eyes while licking her lips dramatically. Lorna sticks out her tongue.

Paz catches this action but declines to comment on it. Instead he says, “So. What do we have?”

It takes a second for Lorna to recall what he is talking about. Then she hears herself talking, the words slow and only a little slurred. She listens to the person speak, as from a great distance. “Two interviews and one notebook full of writing. From the interviews, nothing much. She’s a hard case, very smart, doesn’t want to give anything away. There’s a…I don’t know how to put it, a split in her, somewhere deep. Her usual persona is mild, saintly, lots of religious references. But occasionally, if she feels pressed…”

“Out comes the spider woman,” says Paz.

“You’ve seen it too?Her, I should say.” Lorna feels a rush of grateful relief. She has not discussed this aspect of her client with Mickey Lopez.

“Oh, yeah. I saw something when I interviewed her after the arrest. A look in her eyes. That’s when I knew we weren’t dealing with the Little Flower.”

“Excuse me, the little…”

“A saint, Teresa of Lisieux. I guess you’re not Catholic.”

“No. But I’m sure it’s not simple malingering. I’ve seen a lot of that and it’s fairly easy to tease out. We have tests that…anyway, not to get technical, but she’s for real, there really is something bent in there. That confession you got her to write tends to confirm that. She had a horrendous childhood.”

Paz listens as she summarizes the contents of the first notebook, professionally sympathetic, not particularly shocked; he has heard and seen worse. Studying the woman as she speaks, he sees something unsaid flickering behind her bland professional delivery, and he knows that she has seen the same kind of inexplicable transformation he’d seen himself. It wasn’t just a look in Emmylou Dideroff’s eyes, but what it actually was he cannot say, doesn’t want to think about, and for damned sure is not about to bring up just now.

He says, “A double murder-suicide should be easy to check. So she sets up her mom to whack her stepfather and the little brother goes down too. Quite the sweetheart. But even though she has no problem spilling that, she totally denies tossing our guy off that balcony. How do you figure that?”

“She’s not legally responsible for what her mother did. It’s no crime leaving out a key and depriving someone of tranks. But clonking someone on the head and throwing them to their death is a different story. I think.”

“So, you think we’re being gamed?”

“No, she’s not a psychopath. In fact she feels responsible for everything.”

She sees the confusion on Paz’s face, feels it in her own mind too. This is actually stupid, trying to discuss a case with a cop with her being half in the tank.

Lorna is finishing her second daiquiri now, and as she does, a young boy is standing in front of her with a tray of tall cups full of the same brew. He is dressed in a too-large maroon monkey jacket and has a clip-on bow tie loosely clutching the collar of his white shirt.

“Take another one,” he says.

“Does your mother know you’re dispensing liquor, young man?” says Lorna.

“She said Ihad to, that’s how low she is. You want a daiquiri, Detective Paz?”

“I don’t think so, John. I believe I would be contributing to the delinquency of a minor.”

“Wimp,” says the boy. “Wethepo-lice here,” and turns to Lorna.

“C’mon take one, Lola, it’s a party!” he says, taking the empty and placing a full cup on the wooden arm of the couch. He gives Lorna a frank once-over. “Lookin’ fine, Lola. Dress is da bomb!” He slides away into the crowded room.

“Lola?” says Paz.

“My family name around here. One of the kids called me that when she was a baby and it stuck.”

“It suits you. In that outfit.”

“You think it’s da bomb, too, hm?” She takes a sip of the new drink. She knows that if she finishes it, she will be really drunk, fraternity house drunk, as she has been careful not to be for some time. She decides to go ahead. Better to be completely incapable of speech than try to make sense of Emmylou Dideroff on half a brain. Also, she is sitting with a man who knows who Levi-Strauss is. She drinks her drink so quickly that its chill makes her jaw ache, aware of Paz watching her, that little grin playing around his broad lips. She leans toward him, a little closer actually than she had planned, her breast squashing up against his arm. “How about another little dance, Detective?” she says.

She groans and pulls the sheet up against the morning sunlight. There is a dull pain behind her eyes, and her entire pharynx feels dry enough to crackle. It is painted thick with the particularly foul rotten-molasses taste you get when you drink a lot of rum. Her mind is perfectly empty, even for a moment or two void of her own identity. Memory returns in a slow trickle: who she is, where she is (her own bedroom), her current condition. She is hungover and naked. No, not quite, she is wearing the red lace thong from last night. There memory stalls. She recalls the third daiquiri and Paz and whirling with him around the patio and his insolent, examining grin, and then a blank. It is inconceivable that she could have driven home, so someone must have driven her. She can’t recall. Did she have sex? She might have taken on the Dolphins’ defensive line for all she knows. Sheryl calls, but Lorna has no dirt to give her, and they arrange for the return of Lorna’s car amid a degree of girlish giggling that only increases the pounding in Lorna’s skull.

An hour later, the car has been dropped off, she has showered (after confirming that the only pubic hairs clinging to her skin are those she grew herself) and eaten Advil and drunk half a pot of black coffee. She is lying in the lounge chair in her office, trying and failing to get interested in a recent novel. She is restless, wired, the sheaths of her nerves scraped raw by toxic ethanol metabolites, but at the same time exhausted, lacking even the energy to stroll through a fictive garden. She spies the school notebook on her desk, puts the novel aside, fetches it back to the lounger. Emmylou’s confessions now sprout a shrubbery of Post-its. She thumbs through to one in particular, examines the page. Emmylou’s writing is large and bold.

This has happened to you too, hasn’t it?

Underlined, directed at the reader, at Paz obviously, some relationship established there already. Why? A Catholic thing? Exterior voices a common enough phenomenon, she knows, particularly in childhood, here we had an extreme case, the impulses of the id projected out and turned into an imagined figure, this shiny man. Why shiny? Some early visual hallucinations too, fading with age. Fascinating. There is a whole line of therapy that she can generate from this. Lorna goes to get a pen and her own notebook.

The phone now rings. Twice and the machine picks it up. A voice, distorted by the cheap speaker: “Lorna…Jimmy Paz here, hope you’re okay. Look, I need you to give me a call?”

“Hello?” She has flown across the room and snatched up the receiver.

“Oh, good,” says Paz. “You survived. I’m not going to ask you how you feel.”

“That’s very considerate of you. I assume you got me home last night. I’m sorry, I don’t usually act like that.”

“Like how? Get drunk at a party and have fun?”

“Did I have fun? I can’t remember.”

“You were laughing a lot. That’s usually an indication.”

“Well, it was nice of you to take the trouble.” A little pause here, both of them in the embarrassment of forced intimacy, waiting for the other to make the first move, which eventually Paz does, saying, “I hope you don’t mind about me getting that dress off you. It looked uncomfortable to sleep in. I didn’t realize about the top. The no-bra aspect.”

“That’s okay.”

“I kept my eyes closed the entire time, I want you to know.”

“That was very considerate of you. Was it hard?” Guffaw, shared. “No, I mean was it difficult getting it off….”

“Not at all. It was like skinning a mackerel.”

Lorna thinks this is the sexiest thing anyone has ever said to her. She tries to think of a rejoinder, but all she can do is breathe stupidly into the mouthpiece, like a telephone tormentor.

“Look, um, another reason I called is I need a favor.”

“Sure, what is it?” she asks.

“Could you, like, come over to my place?”

“You mean now?”

“Yeah, if it’s no trouble. I’m in sort of a jam and you were the only one I could think of to call.”

“What kind of jam?”

“Um, it’s hard to explain over the phone. It’ll just take you a minute.”

Lorna agrees right away. He gives her the address and tells her where a key to the back door is stashed, under the near-left foot of the picnic table. He thanks her warmly before he hangs up. She dresses in haste, the crisp look today, khaki shorts and a white short-sleeved shirt, like a camp counselor. She drives to Little Havana, SW Nineteenth off Calle Ocho, lets herself in, feeling a little odd but not uncomfortably so. Anticipatory, even.

“Jimmy?”

“In here. The bedroom.”

She follows the voice. Jimmy Paz is lying in a brass bed, covered from the waist down by a light quilt and showing from the waist up an impressive expanse of buffed musculature coated in smooth dark golden skin. Gold chain and crucifix too, and another small dark object on a thong. That was strange and a little exciting in a scary way. Lorna can almost feel her pupils expand.

“Thanks for coming,” he says. “I did something really dumb.” He wiggles his foot, and she sees that it is fastened with handcuffs to one of the bed’s pipes. “I had the key right here on the table, and to be extra sure I didn’t lose it I had it inside my watchband, right? So, of course, I wake up in the middle of the night and the first thing I do is check the time, and the key kind of hooks on the band and skitters off across the floor. Over there.” He points. “Can you locate it?”

She can and hands it to him. He unlocks the cuffs.

“Thank you.” He gives her the grin. “Free at last, free at last, great God almighty…”

“And so on,” she says. “Well, it looks like my work here is done.”

“Time for play, then. You doing anything today?”

“I’m free more or less except for some errands. What were you thinking of? It can’t involve alcoholic beverages.”

“Of course. Yet numerous teetotal experiences are available here in Miami, it being the sun and fun capital of the world. Do you like the water?”

“To drink?”

“To float upon. To dip into. The sea. Boating.”

“You mean sailboats?”

“No, I mean a Cuban workboat with fish scales all over it. We could run down to the reef, throw a line over, get lucky maybe, catch some redfish.”

“You know all the good places, I bet.”

“Some of them. You up for that?”

“Sure, if I can go by my place and get some stuff.”

“I’ll come with you,” he says, “or I would if I could figure out a way to get dressed with you in here.”

“I’ll close my eyes,” she says. And she does, nearly, while he slides naked and truly terrific-looking from under his quilt and pulls on a pair of faded cutoff jeans and a black T-shirt that says GUANTANAMERA COMIDAS CRIOLLAS on it, and a baggy plaid cotton shirt with the sleeves ripped off over that. Then he clips on his pistol and slides a shield wallet into his rear pocket.

He catches her stare. “Regulations,” he says. “Does it bother you?”

“I don’t think so. But I never spent any time with a man who had a gun.”

“You did last night, with about fifty of them.”

“I mean consciously. It must be weird.”

“You get used to it,” he says shortly and leads her out.

They take his car, a Datsun Z of a certain age, in sun-faded orange. At the curb in front of her house she tells him that she’ll just be a minute. As she opens her front door she stops for a second as it strikes her that her hangover is quite gone, and more interestingly, that she has not had a hypochondriacal, neurotic, or self-conscious thought since the minute Paz called her. She feels terrific, in fact, better than she has in ages. She is arranging her beach bag in her mind as she turns the key and enters her front room. She needs a tube of industrial-strength sunblock and a towel, and yes, she intends to wear an electric blue bikini she purchased on Antigua and has never summoned up the nerve to wear locally.

She barely sees the man before he clubs her aside with his fist and races out the front door. Paz is leaning against the driver’s side of his car, staring contentedly after Lorna, and so he has a perfect view of what has just happened. The man trips slightly on a little rag rug Lorna keeps inside her front door, and when he is halfway down the path, just building up speed again, Paz is already leaning over the top of his car with his Glock out, yelling, “Freeze, freeze, police! Get down!”

The man slows, startled, staring. Paz sees that he is a thin Latino man dressed in satiny black warm-up pants and a black tank top withHeat written on it in red cursive letters and big white Air Jordans, with his head wrapped in a shiny black cloth. Maybe twenty-something, Paz figures, and he’s got a dark flat object in his hand that Paz can’t quite identify, because he is focused on the man’s face, and all of a sudden he can see what the man’s going to do and ice enters his belly. He fills his lungs with air to shout again.

The man’s right hand snakes behind him and comes out with a dark angular shape that could be anything, a toy, a knife, a Walkman, but Paz doesn’t wait to see what it is. He fires twice, and the man sits down at the head of Lorna’s walk in that cut-string-marionette way of shot people, with dark leaking punctures above and below thea inHeat. Paz rushes to the man, sees he isn’t breathing, plants his mouth over the blood-filled mouth, feels the sparse hairs that rim it. He pushes down on the sternum, blood squirts up between his fingers.

“I called 911,” says a voice behind him. Lorna, smart lady. He keeps working, although it is clearly hopeless. His prayer now is that it was a real gun in the guy’s hand, although he can’t see one when he lifts up his head to breathe. What he can see is a small school notebook standing on the sidewalk, its spine perkily upward like a tiny house. It’s exactly like the ones he bought for Emmylou Dideroff.

Remarkably, we have a vivid description of that scene from the viewpoint of the uhlan captain, Manfred Ems von Frisch, recorded in his memoir,To Paris with the Thirteenth Uhlans (1889):

Suddenly there appeared before us a pretty girl of about fourteen, tousled from sleep, and dressed in silk slippers and a French cavalry cloak. She presented a remarkably calm mien, as if finding lancers in her yard before breakfast were a common occurrence. I saluted her and said, in French, “Little miss, have you by any chance seen the French army?” To this she answered, in good German, “I am surprised that you dare to ask me such a question, sir, for you make me choose between polluting myself with a lie and betraying my country. No gentleman would place a lady in such a position.” I was somewhat taken aback by this sally, and irritated at being made to look the fool in front of my troop. Therefore, I said to her, “The exigencies of war, mademoiselle, preclude such nice distinctions.” She replied, “I must differ with you there, sir. War or peace, there is no excuse for rudeness. Your king would not approve, nor would your mother, I believe.”

A better exhibition of Marie-Ange’s spirit and fearlessness could not be found! Ems von Frisch further reports that she offered him and his men refreshment and fodder for their animals, but gave no information whatever. After the Prussians left, Marie-Ange dressed hurriedly and ordered the coach to be prepared. She intended to travel with speed to Metz, as she knew that her father would be frantic for her safety when he heard that the enemy had crossed the Moselle.

The road east from Gravelotte was jammed with advancing French troops and local people fleeing the battle, whose guns could already be heard to the east and north. The coach was forced off the road by an artillery train, and while they waited, Marie-Ange heard the sound of a woman crying. She got out to see what was the matter and found a farm cart in which were lying a man and two children, covered in blood. The woman stilled her tears long enough to explain that they were from Villers-au-Pois and that their farmhouse had been taken over as a strong point by French soldiers. While the family hid in an outbuilding, a Prussian shell had scored a direct hit upon it, with the present sad results. Immediately, the girl abandoned her original plan, loaded the wounded peasants into her coach, and drove back to Bois Fleury.

— FROM FAITHFUL UNTO DEATH: THE STORY OF THE NURSING SISTERS OF THE BLOOD OF CHRIST, BY SR. BENEDICTA COOLEY, SBC, ROSARIAN PRESS, BOSTON, 1947.