The Woman Lit by Fireflies Read online

  Patty was sitting on the patio with a script in her lap chatting with the president of her studio on the phone. She had been watching the new gardener who wore a neck brace and seemed incompetent in that he merely repeated the same flower beds the other gardener had worked on the day before. He also looked like a mestizo rather than a campesino and was admirably muscled. When Billy returned from the hearing with the bad news Patty mentioned the gardener in the neck brace which disturbed Billy further. Sam had told him about the rope-and-scooter incident in the alley, but the two of them decided not to mention it to Gwen and Patty.

  The no-longer-very-wild four were having a snack and getting ready to go visit Zip when Billy’s father, William Creighton Sr., arrived with an aide-de-camp. To say this further exacerbated a depressed atmosphere is the most dainty of euphemisms. Patty, Gwen and Sam quickly passed him on the way out to the car. Rather than simply ignore them, Creighton Sr. pretended he didn’t see them. He waved away the aide and looked around the room before fixing his eyes on his son.

  “You’re traveling nicely these days. I tried to get Rebecca to come along but she said for her to do so would be a cheap shot. There’s no point in my insisting that you come back with me, is there?”

  “No, sir. It’s not looking very good and I have to hang in there.”

  “As you know, I could no longer deal with Mexican irrationality. Right now I’m interested in minimizing any damage to the firm you might be doing in politicizing on the home front. I have answered questions by saying you’re trying to save a college friend’s neck which has passed muster so far.”

  “I don’t think I’m doing any irreparable damage. It’s no longer the old-boy network unless you’re a defense contractor.” Billy had the temerity to glance at his watch. His father reddened then sighed.

  “Of course I’m angry but that’s beside the point. What can I do to get you out of this goddamned mess as quickly as possible?”

  “I’m not in a goddamned mess. Zip is. Like the morning paper said, make a few phone calls. I’m sure you’ve got the call-through numbers. I’ll leave here when I get him out.”

  “You won’t settle for anything less?”

  “No, sir. And it’s not the rest of them, Dad. It’s me. I’m running the show. It’s my idea.”

  Creighton Sr. obviously wanted to shake his son’s hand as a modest gesture, but the thought disturbed him. “Goodbye for now, Billy,” he said, wheeling and walking out the front door. For some reason he waved and smiled at Gwen, Patty and Sam who were standing against the car waiting for Billy.

  “How can you be our age and still let your friend’s father intimidate you?” asked Patty of no one in particular.

  It was to be the most confusing afternoon and evening of any in their lives except, perhaps, when they were arrested at the draft board in 1968. On the way to the federal building Sam had to take over the driving because Billy had suffered an apparent short circuit, sweating and shaking and mumbling. It was very disturbing to the rest of them, making them realize how much they had been depending on his almost flippant stability.

  Their confusion redoubled when they saw that the normally busy street in front of the federal building was empty and had been cordoned off. They were readily waved through which reminded them how visible they were. The same Federale captain was near the door, barking at his men, some sort of storm trooper who gave the arriving four a look of withering contempt. Inside the front door Sam questioned a security man who had been friendly on their first visit. The man said there was to be a demonstration for “Señor Ted Frazer,” also the people were very angry because Rudolfo had been murdered. Sam knew that Rudolfo was their gardener and one of the two men he had met with at the Blue Parrot, but when Gwen questioned him on what the security man said, Sam only shrugged.

  They were escorted into the same visiting room and Zip could not have been more captious and irritating, alternately embracing and upbraiding them. He had heard, via the jail grapevine, that there was to be a demonstration in his honor which gave him a manic and inappropriate sense of his own power. This contrasted with his weeping over Rudolfo whom he had known for a decade and was very important in the “movement.” Rudolfo had been in the Oriente province with Castro, and had escaped the jungles of Bolivia when his friend Che Guevara was murdered. This information made the four a little concerned about who they were dealing with, as if their collective reality had become exponentially distorted.

  Billy made a vain attempt to bring Zip back to earth by telling him it might be three years before their appeal was successful. It didn’t work. Instead, Zip’s craziness was drawing Billy ineluctably into itself, so that Billy’s movements around the room were birdlike rather than decisive as he tried to follow what Zip was saying. Patty, Gwen and Sam were powerless and stiff in their chairs. Zip said that you were allowed to make love in Mexican jails but he didn’t feel up to it today, then he made a series of inane puns on the idea of being “purged” by his own country. He almost calmed the room and himself down by making a little speech on how he had failed to become great. Gwen had heard the speech before and went to Zip to console him which caused Zip to shoot off on another bughouse tangent. It was Billy’s howl, finally, that cleared the air.

  “I have to ask your forgiveness. I have to confess something . . . so listen.” It was curious because everyone knew what he wanted to confess and didn’t want to hear it, but Billy didn’t know they knew.

  Zip embraced Billy who was mouthing words that couldn’t be heard. “Nonsense,” Zip said. “I don’t want to hear it and besides I know everything. You came down here and we’re brothers again, aren’t we? That’s what’s important.”

  Rather than Gwen or Patty, Sam began crying at this point. Then Gwen and Patty tried to comfort Sam, but were interrupted by the guard who said the prisoner had to be put away because of the demonstration. Zip was quickly led off and the rest of them were guided out to the office area which was noisy from the streets below. The guard told them they would have to stay until the demonstration was over. The atmosphere was more than a little festive with clerks and guards hanging out the windows waving to those below. Sam took a pair of binoculars from a desk top and scanned the crowd, focusing on the captain of the Federales, Virgil Atkins and the American in the neck brace who were standing together in the doorway of a store. Sam called Billy over but Billy was nearly comatose and was being tended and consoled by Gwen. Patty stood alone in the corner, frozen with anxiety.

  The bailiff from the judge’s office rushed in and gestured at Billy to come along, then in a stream of Spanish tried to explain himself. Sam came up and told Billy he had to go meet with the judge. Gwen and Sam tried to accompany Billy but were pushed back rudely by the bailiff.

  It was the kind of meeting in the judge’s chambers that none of those attending felt comfortable with for even a second. The judge sat at the head of a conference table, looking out over the waiter, Jorge the fruit-and-vegetable tycoon, the lawyer, Billy and a fresh spook who ineptly tried to “get the ball rolling.” The new spook’s name was Michael Straithwaite, and he spoke with a Virginian accent, explaining he was replacing Virgil Atkins who was being reassigned. He went on to say that the current situation was being misrepresented by the press and knee-jerk liberals . . .

  Curiously enough, no one else at the table paid any attention to Straithwaite. Billy was still confused and the lawyer whispered that he had been ready to take a plane but something had happened in Mexico City. Then a truly nasty quarrel started between the waiter and Jorge, who had a hundred trucks tied up by pickets at the bypass. Jorge said if a single tomato rotted he would tear the heart out of the waiter. The judge tried to quiet them with a string of inanities about the gravity of the situation.

  “Fuck your situation, Ernesto,” Jorge yelled at the judge. “You have always had this problem that you want to go to bed with the Americans and still wake up a Mexican. What are the fucking Americans paying you?”

  Str
aithwaite leapt to his feet to say he resented the insinuation, having comprehended the Spanish. Billy, who was coming alive, accurately deduced that Straithwaite was a spook of a much higher order than Virgil Atkins. The judge gaveled the table senseless and announced that Mr. Theodore Frazer was a piece of Yankee vermin who was to be banished forever from Mexico, on pain of the immediate resumption of the fifty-year sentence. There would also be a fine and court costs of fifty thousand dollars, at which point everyone glanced at Billy. Billy numbly gave the thumbs-up sign. The lawyer asked when the prisoner could be taken across the border and the judge said after a day or two of paperwork. Straithwaite rushed off, presumably to a phone, after he said that he was happy that a difficult situation had been resolved. When the lawyer led Billy off down the hall Billy was stunned enough not to notice that Jorge and the waiter were chatting amiably.

  It would have been wonderful if the whole thing had ended right there, but it didn’t. It almost never does except in the sporting contests. Maybe that’s why they’re so popular.

  By the time the four of them arrived home in mid-afternoon they felt peeled like the many peeled throats of Cerberus, and not quite in the mood to celebrate. They mostly sat around in their separate silences trying to believe they had won. Sam made an enormous pitcher of margaritas but the ice had melted before more than a few inches were gone. There were a lot of calls from journalists until Billy unplugged the phone, then replugged it to give Rebecca and his dad the good news. Gwen called Sun, and Patty and Sam sort of wished they had someone to call. They ordered a dinner to be delivered but it stayed in paper bags on the table. They filtered in and out of the showers and tried to get interested in television. They listened to A Prairie Home Companion on the radio but it seemed too remote and innocent. Patricia found a station that was featuring a tribute to Miles Davis, and that music seemed to fit the mood.

  The only serious discussion of the evening was brought about by Sam’s attempts to get the rest of them to leave for home the first thing in the morning. He felt and said that he was best suited to be Zip’s escort back to America and wherever he wanted to go. Perhaps he would take Zip to the mountains to cool him off and build up his health. Sam’s real reason was his view of life as a grave and terrifying approximation. In short, he expected something could go wrong and knew that it could better be handled by someone working solo.

  But no one agreed. “Man is nostalgia and a search for communion,” or so said Octavio Paz of Labyrinth fame. There was a natural impulse after all they had been through to want to stay around for the good part.

  Meanwhile, at a hotel in Nogales, Sonora, that looked shabby on the outside but offered pleasant accommodations, a meeting was taking place. Virgil Atkins is having a drink or two while Michael Straithwaite, in a Haspel drip-dry suit, is admiring his own cordovans and drinking bottled water. Straithwaite tries to console Atkins using the metaphor of a game, “Win some, lose some,” which works with most men in a state of extreme disappointment. But not Atkins who recites all the ways and places he’s tried to nail Zip over the years, only to lose him again, plus all the government money it took to arrange the fifty-year sentence.

  “Washington says to let it go and move on.” Straithwaite is bored by Atkins’s whining and is on the verge of telling him he blew it.

  “I didn’t hear you say that. As far as I’m concerned Frazer’s still on the list.”

  There’s a noise at the door and Atkins lets in the American in the neck brace and the captain of the Federales. Straithwaite stands and nods at Atkins. “Virge, I didn’t see these guys. Good luck.”

  When Straithwaite left he felt a certain tightness in his ass that made him want to propel himself across the border to America. If the room was bugged, he had covered his tracks.

  The linen closet Straithwaite passed in the hall held a diminutive Mexican bellhop with a listening device and a tape recorder. The conversation between Atkins, the captain and the American was disturbing indeed. The bellhop waited until they were safely off to dinner, then left in search of his leader, the waiter, who in turn made his way to the judge’s house and replayed the tape.

  The visit of the judge and waiter to the villa confirmed Sam’s grim intuition but pushed Gwen, Patty and Billy toward the lip of hysteria. It wasn’t the fact that Atkins and the American had said they knew where the Cessna was stored but that the American argued for letting them get airborne before blowing the plane to pieces with three AK-47s, destroying the evidence. The captain agreed and Atkins said nothing. The captain also stated that he was sure it would be at least two days before Zip was released because the judge was going to Tucson to play golf with a cousin the following day.

  In the discussion that ensued the judge pointed out it would be impossible to get the authorities to arrest an American spy and a captain of the Federales. The waiter nodded and said he had somewhat anticipated the problem. Could the prisoner be released to Sam at five A.M. the following morning? The judge agreed and left the house. Billy asked the waiter if the judge could be trusted. The waiter said yes, because the judge hated the captain who had intercepted a narcotics bribe due the judge. Also the judge’s career would be finished if Zip was murdered. The waiter’s plan was extremely simple, in fact, using the well-traveled and successful route he had established for the sanctuary refugees from Central America.

  Up in their bedroom Sam quickly checked the shotgun and pistol while Patty was still in the bathroom, not wanting to offend her. He loaded both, turned and found her standing at the door in the kind of nightgown that made him smile. She didn’t want to be obviously upset so she ignored the guns. What she wanted to know was if he was going to come see her when it was all over. He thought it was a better idea if she came to see him as he had been noticeably unsuccessful in terms of booze when he visited cities.

  “Is that an actual invitation?”

  “Of course. We’re just getting to know each other. Maybe we’re lucky we like each other. Most people don’t.” Now he was beginning to blush, a trait she had always found endearing.

  “Remember when I used to make you sing a song if you wanted to sleep with me?” She sat on his lap but the feeling was more melancholy than erotic.

  “I don’t remember any lyrics but I could make some up,” he said.

  °

  Billy paces in his room in his pajama bottoms, sweating and watching a ball game on ESPN. The set is small, black-and-white, and the sound is off. Billy has the feeling that the outside world is just like that. He looks up at the wall at a primitive eighteenth-century crucifix. He lights a cigarette and begins to genuflect but recovers his senses. He opens the door and looks out into the dark hallway and at a yellow slice of light coming from Gwen’s door. She enters the light and opens the door, wearing the kind of old robe that no one wears if they intend to sleep with someone else.

  “Do you want me to come over there?” she asks.

  “Yeah. Come on over. We’ll tell jokes.” His voice cracks down into a whisper.

  In his room she sits on the edge of the bed as he continues to sweat and pace. He turns off the TV and abruptly turns it back on. He can almost hear the noises in his head, and the anguish is palpable.

  “I don’t look very sexy, do I?” she asks.

  “You look wonderful . . .” Then he begins to speak in a maddening rush, continuing the confession he had tried to make to Zip and all of them that morning. He says Sarah overheard us and called my dad who convinced me we were wrong and we talked to the FBI in Denver. They said go through with it, and soon.

  But Gwen stops him. She says she had always known because Zip asked her to make love to a policeman to find out. Billy sits down beside her but can’t stop weeping at first, and when he does, their embrace becomes that of a disconsolate brother and sister.

  Just before daylight Sam trotted across the patio, scaled the wall and got into the back of a waiting flat rack truck full of muskmelons. The truck pulled away as he drew the tarp over him. The
truck made its way over the border to an alley behind the federal building where Zip stood with two security men and the very nervous judge. The security men boosted Zip up into the truck with Sam pulling at the other end. Zip’s breath hissed through his teeth from the pain of his back injury.

  The truck continued east, gaining elevation into the relatively peopleless area of large, arid fincas. Then it was on a narrow mountain road, among canyons and pines, the home of mountain lions and coyotes, driving into the rising sun. The truck pulled laboriously off onto a two-track for a hundred yards. The waiter emerges from a thicket leading two horses as Sam and the driver help Zip to the ground. Sam pulls his dop kit from his pack and gives Zip a pain pill. The waiter points off to the north and down the mountain to the San Raphael Valley in the distance. Sam embraces the waiter and he and Zip mount their horses and they are off on the slow decline through the forest.

  It was still barely light when Billy, Gwen and Patty loaded their Hertz car and were off through Nogales to Route 89 which ran north to Tucson, seventy miles distant. It was their very bad luck that the captain had drunk a great deal the night before with Atkins and the American, and was just emerging from a diner and a restorative bowl of menudo. Now he would read the paper and go back to bed. As he got into his car he looked up and saw Billy driving past with the two women. The captain followed, and patched through on the radio to Atkins’s room where the American answered. The American said it had to be a decoy and told the captain to meet him on a plateau a few miles behind the village of Patagonia.