Fifty Mice Read online

  “Oh boy,” she says, distant, with that vacant remove that sometimes attends catastrophe. She’s on fire.

  Helen is rigid with terror.

  The tablecloth blurs off the breakfast table as Jay yanks it loose and envelops the flaming Ginger in its folds, and the whole smoldering package in his arms. Later, he’ll wonder how he even knew what to do with a grease fire; later, when he thinks of it, if he dreams about it, Ginger will melt and he’ll be helpless to stop it from happening.

  Thick black smoke is everywhere. Jay falls back, twisting Ginger down to the floor on top of himself, cushioning her descent, and holds her there, smothering the flames with his embrace. She’s coughing and shaking, stunned eyes, framed by the creases of the heavy, smoldering cloth, fixed on Jay, in shock.

  And then Helen is on top of both of them, tears spilling, leaking the noise of her wordless weeping, trying to wedge her way under Jay’s arms to get next to her mother.

  “It’s over,” Jay says. “It’s okay, it’s over, we’re good.” He kicks out at the smoldering frying pan where the grease has burned down and flips it upside down, killing the last of the fire.

  For a long time they lie in a lump on the blackened linoleum.

  • • •

  Honey ribbons onto the reddened, largely superficial burns on Ginger’s blistered arms. Jay kneels beside her, on the bed, in the darkened bedroom, one hand already slick with honey, the other delivering it to Ginger’s right hand and forearm from his fingertips, the honey scooped from a big open jar.

  “Lemme know if this hurts. It’s not supposed to hurt.”

  Ginger just watches him, shivering. She smells of smoke and perfume. The faint white salt of dried tears trails down from her smeared, raccooned mascara. There are two rolls of toilet paper and a Scotch tape dispenser between Jay’s crossed legs.

  “This was my mother’s big miracle home remedy,” Jay says about the honey. “I remember she was always burning her hands on these shitty aluminum pots we had when I was little and that my father claimed over and over would give us all Alzheimer’s, all the while smoking two packs a day.”

  “Is that what killed him?”

  Jay looks at her strangely. “How do you know he’s dead?”

  Ginger blinks. “Your file.”

  Jay asks her how it says his father died.

  “It doesn’t.”

  “And my mother?”

  “It doesn’t say anything in there about your mom.”

  Jay wonders why. Ginger wants to change the subject, to the honey: “It’s cold.”

  “Yeah,” Jay says. “Weird, huh? That’s it, working, apparently. Bee magic.”

  Helen, exhausted, has crashed on the other side of the bed in a tumble of stuffed animals and her thumb, to which the little girl sometimes regresses, Ginger has explained, when things get especially stressful.

  “I can’t really cook at all,” Ginger admits ruefully.

  “It’s that the honey seals the air out,” Jay says. “Or maybe there’s something in it, biochemically, or maybe just that it’s naturally sterile, I don’t know—but now we have to wrap it with tissue or”—he points an elbow to a waiting roll—“toilet paper and leave it on overnight. By morning, the honey’ll be gone and the burns will be pretty much—”

  “Doctor?” Ginger interrupts.

  “—gone.”

  “I’m dripping.”

  Sure enough, honey is starting to sheet off Ginger’s arm. Slow-motion waterfall. Both his hands are presently engaged and therefore useless, so Jay’s at a loss. “Okay. Okay . . . I um . . . sorry about this but—” He bows toward her, lowering his head to her arm, and licks the overflow off the nape of her wrist, gently.

  “Oh. Oh, wait—now you’ve got”—Ginger gestures to a smear of honey on his forehead—“something, here.” She tries to squeegee it off with her one untreated pinky finger, but, failing that, just pulls him back toward her and licks the honey off his head.

  There follows a very uncomfortably wired moment; an intimacy has enfolded them and neither one of them knows what to do with it.

  “Thanks. For putting me out,” she says finally.

  “The fire? Yeah, well.” He makes a vague gesture with one hand. “But what was the alternative? House burns down, and all my stuff is in here.”

  The joke is lame and slow-dawning, but Ginger shows him the possibility of a smile. Jay eases away from her, uncrosses his legs, slides off the bed and goes into the bathroom, flips the faucet on, water splashing, washing the honey off his fingers.

  “Okay so lemme just . . . lemme just . . .”

  He dries his hands, hurries back, and stands beside the bed, unfurling toilet paper to make long, narrow, padded bandages the way his mother would, careful and compact, her hands a blur, her eyebrows angled, serious, riot of hair pulled back and knotted to keep it from getting into the sticky stuff.

  She was his original rock.

  “Is this an important part of the treatment?”

  “You better believe it. All of a piece. Kleenex is the preferred medium, due to its superior absorbency, but any two-ply will do.”

  “Mm.” Ginger watches him with an expression he can’t unpack, but it’s not blank, not indifferent.

  Jay positions the completed bandage pads on Ginger’s honey-sealed burns, and he holds them in place with more toilet paper unrolled liberally up and down her arm and over her hand, forming a kind of soft cast that winds in and out of her fingers and over her palm and back up her arm, where he fastens it with Scotch tape. The pink tips of her fingers are stark against the white. Honey bleeds up through the tissue but doesn’t surface. The room smells of bacon and sweetness.

  “Your mom’s still alive?” Ginger asks.

  Now it’s Jay who changes subjects. “Can I ask you something? What the hell do you do all day? I mean, while Helen’s at school and I’m cleaning returned discs of the Matrix trilogy or some other incredibly important video-shop chore?”

  “Me?” She meets his gaze. “You’ve followed me, you would know.”

  Jay’s face gets red, but he doesn’t back down. “Okay, sure. Once. But—”

  She cuts him off: “I float.”

  Snap: strip club aquarium, Ginger in the mermaid suit, silvery sequins glued to her hips, breasts weightless in their sea-green halter, hair fanned in lazy tendrils, stares emptily out at Jay, eyes searching his, hands flat against the glass.

  Jay frowns, squints. “You what?”

  —No.

  “Float. I do all the household crap my mother did and which I swore I would never do. I surf the web, ‘Page Six’ and TMZ. I listen to music. I read trashy mystery books at the library, sometimes.” She hesitates. “And I think about my old life. I float over it. Wondering what went wrong. And if I give a shit.”

  “Your old life.”

  “Yeah.”

  “With your boyfriend and everything.”

  Sad, Ginger looks down at her papered arms and hands and says, “Husband,” like she’s underlining it. “He was my husband, Jay, we were married.” She shifts her weight and leans away from Jay and scoots back against the wall. Creating some distance.

  Stacy could never get close enough to him, it was like she wanted to crawl inside of him, but it was all about body, not soul. Even this far away he can feel Ginger’s heartache as she whispers, “We were cops. Did Public tell you that? So it’s not as if . . .” She stops again.

  Jay wonders: As if what?

  “And we’re not,” she continues, voice thin, “I mean, it’s not . . .” She lets the thought drift off. Does she blink back tears? Jay can’t tell, still wondering: As if what?

  “Somebody out there gonna miss you, Jay?” she’s asking, changing subjects, and doesn’t wait for an answer. “I think about that part, too, don’t you? With this disappearing st
uff. Witness protection. One minute we’re in Kansas and the next, poof, Wizard of Oz. Tap tap. Gone. And all the people we knew . . .” She’s wistful, but she’s fishing, too: “. . . A steady girlfriend or something?”

  “That detail wasn’t in my file?”

  Ginger shrugs. Jay just swims around it. “What’s your real name?”

  “I like the name Ginger, actually. They let me decide on it.” She rotates her arms and studies his bandaging. Avoiding his eyes.

  “You won’t tell me?”

  “I won’t. I can’t. I’m sorry.”

  “Well, I’m really Jay.”

  “Okay. Is that important?”

  “Yeah.”

  She doesn’t say anything, then.

  “What about Helen?”

  “You think that there’s another name she’s not telling us?”

  “So Helen is real, too.”

  Ginger, stubborn, returns to her talking point: “No girlfriend?”

  Jay’s sure that she knows, so why is she asking? “Fiancée,” he says, flat.

  “Oh. When’s the big date?”

  Jay suggests that his present situation has put a kink in any plans, but Ginger isn’t buying it.

  “So there was a date on the books.”

  “Well,” he admits, “no.”

  “Huh.” Ginger stares at him. “Commitment issues?”

  “Personal freedom issues,” he says.

  “Oh.” But: “So I guess . . . this is all . . . kinda ironic, then. Considering.”

  “Yeah.” Jay is suddenly uncomfortable. “Look—” He stands up. “I’m here—”

  “—by mistake. I remember.”

  “You don’t believe me, either.”

  “No,” Ginger admits. “And it’s just that I’m not. A mistake. I mean, my being here isn’t one. So.”

  They look at each other for a long time, then Jay nods and leaves Ginger frowning at an empty doorway.

  In the kitchen, he takes in the damage: not too bad: burned grease everywhere, the charred tablecloth, the sour funk of the burned bacon. He picks up the overturned frying pan from the floor and clatters it in the sink. He unrolls a few feet of paper towels, drops them, and mops grease with his foot until it’s thick and cloudy and pooling up, then he’s down on his knees, sopping it and throwing the sodden towels into the trash. The linoleum gets bright shiny, reflecting hard overhead light. He finds some 409 in the cupboard and, with another length of paper towel, manages to cut the grease and scrub the floor clean to its scuffed, worn, dull natural state.

  Standing at the faucet, lathering his hands, he looks absently up through the window at the lit window of the house next door. Tripod—the prodigiously endowed asshole, Marshal Miles—is gazing right back at Jay from Barry and Sandy’s kitchen. Shit-eating grin. Exaggerated thumbs-up gesture, his arm cast all squiggled with best wishes and crude cartoons.

  Jay frowns.

  Tripod puts his tongue against the inside of his cheek and makes a lewd hand gesture suggesting, what? Masturbation? Oral sex?

  Blow job. Or whatever. It doesn’t matter.

  Something in Jay snaps.

  He’s out of the kitchen, out the front door, into the darkness and braced by a cold wind off the bay before his next thought registers, if he’s thinking at all. He hurdles a short hedge, goes up the front steps of Barry and Sandy’s house onto the wooden porch and kicks the front door in, splintering the doorjamb just like in the movies and making a crazy racket.

  The floor plan of this bungalow is pretty much the mirror image of Jay and Ginger’s, but the tiny living room where Sandy is just standing up from the recliner where she was doing her nails and watching TV when her front door caved in is divided from the entry by a low wall decorated with a collection of ugly china figurines, so even if she wanted to intercept Jay, she couldn’t.

  “Where is he?”

  Sandy, fingers outspread, nails drying, cotton balls wedged between her toes, can’t seem to decide whether first to shout or to move, so Jay keeps going, murmuring under his breath, “You’re all assholes,” just as the man they’ve named Barry comes out of the kitchen, calling to his partner: “Sandy?” He sees Jay, and sputters, “Whoa. Jimbo. What the hell are you—”

  “He kicked the door in,” Sandy repeats unnecessarily.

  “Where’s Tripod? And where’s all the surveillance stuff you’re using to spy on us?” Jay asks, brushing past Barry and heading down the hallway. “In the bedroom?” Barry is hot behind him. “You have cameras in every room of my house? So you can watch me? Record me and Ginger and Helen?”

  “Hey.” Barry says, reaching for Jay’s shoulder. “Hey.”

  “Why didn’t you come over and help put out the fucking fire?!”

  From behind him, somewhere, Sandy: “What fire?”

  The bedroom: normal: single bed, cheap pressboard dresser, some clothing draped over a chair. No Marshal Miles. Jay shouts, “PUBLIC?!” although he’s pretty sure Public is not in the house.

  “What the fuck is wrong with you people? She could have been seriously burned. I thought you were on my side. I thought you needed me to volunteer whatever it is I know. I thought that was essential.”

  As Barry tries again to grab him, big hand on one shoulder, Jay shakes violently free, swings wildly, his fist deflecting off Barry’s hands as they reflexively go up to shield his face.

  “Easy, Jim. I have no idea what you’re—”

  “I want to talk to Public.”

  In the back bedroom there is another bed, another cheap dresser, a big taped-up David Hockney poster that passes for artwork, and Jay finds himself for an instant wondering resentfully why Barry and Sandy got two bedrooms while he’s in the one-banger sleeping on a shitty sofa.

  “Get a grip on yourself, man,” Barry says, as Jay pivots and tries to move back up the hallway, past him, but Barry blocks his way, and things quickly turn to an awkward, ugly kind of stand-up wrestling, something Jay is not very good at and would like to escalate into a full-out fight that he would be even worse at, but evidently Barry has instructions not to hurt him.

  “Christ on a cracker, man, will you—will you—just stop—c’mon.” Barry tries to corral Jay’s whirling arms and fists. “We’re not watching anything but your back, you moron. We’re here to PROTECT you—stop stop stop—stop fighting—us—”

  “Where’s Tripod?! Ask him about it. I just saw him in the window—”

  “Just. Take it—easy—”

  They spin. Jay slips Barry’s grip, steps backward, and, sensing movement behind him, pivots, swings, and hits Sandy, just arriving, right in the face.

  She sinks, hands crossed over her nose.

  Barry wraps his arms around Jay from behind, jams him down to the floor, and pins him there. “Calm the fuck down.”

  Between her hands, Sandy says something neither of them can understand. Back against the wall, knees to her chest, painted toes lifted, head tilted back. There’s blood running down her chin.

  “I just want to talk to Public,” Jay says, played out, as Barry lifts him and holds him against the wall with one big forearm up under his neck. “This is all—I saw that asshole Tripod—I just need to talk to Public.”

  Sandy rises and lets her hands fall away. Her nose is skewed and bleeding. Her chin set hard, mouth a straight, angry line. Head cocked back, she looks down at Jay from her angled eyes. And then hits him so hard the back of his head makes a crater in the plaster lathe.

  • • •

  In office 204 the next morning, everybody’s present and accounted for: Jay (crazy black eye and a surplus of regret), Magonis, Barry (weirdly cheerful), the young marshal called Sandy (ruined nails and her nose set, braced, and taped), Tripod (hair gelled and malicious smile unshakable), and John Q. Public (serene and dapper in his cream-of-wheat sport coa
t and teal club tie).

  “I saw him in the window,” Jay says.

  Tripod insists he wasn’t there.

  “He’s lying.”

  “And nobody saw any fire,” Barry adds.

  Magonis suggests they move past the petty argument, that Jay’s explosion was borne of more than just Tripod making lewd gestures in the window, which Tripod again, like a fourth-grader, forcefully denies. The shrink has left his walker somewhere, and seems to be fully ambulatory without it. Is the limp an affectation? Is everything and everyone on the island perpetually in flux?

  All Jay’s paranoia has come rushing back.

  “Okay. Then explain to me the point,” Jay asks Public, seething, “of three U.S. Marshals sitting in that house watching me like some kind of reality TV show.” Or test subject, he thinks. The mice, again.

  “Watching me, watching Ginger, watching Helen—” Always the goddamn mice.

  With a shrug, “Got to have eyes on you,” Public argues. “It’s part of the security protocol. More concerned about incoming than outgoing, though. Truly.”

  “Watching me in my house is protocol?”

  Public shrugs. “If we were, and I’m not saying we are, most people might say it makes them feel safer.”

  “Anyway, it’s not even your house, is it?” Tripod drawls, nettling.

  “Jimmy, there’s no cameras,” Barry announces, defensive. “We’re not peepers. Miles’s just jerking your chain.”

  Jay just looks at him.

  “Not your real house, not your real life,” Tripod sings. “Maybe he’s getting confused.”

  Jay has reached a point where his outrage has been trumped by his situational impotence. He looks to Public, the diplomat, who says that while there aren’t any cameras, they could loosen their surveillance a notch, if that’s really what Jay wants—

  “Yes,” Jay says.

  —and if Ginger agrees to it, Public continues. “There’s the little girl to consider,” Public says.

  A new thought dances into Jay’s head: maybe Helen is the protected witness, and Public’s lurid story about Ginger is just another layer of cover.