Fifty Mice Page 24

  “I can get us out of here,” he blurts out, more agitated than he intends to be. “But it has to be right now.”

  Ginger seems unmoved. Her eyes follow his worried gaze, over her shoulder, to the dark smudges that are Public and Doe, motionless behind the audience. “What did you tell them?”

  “Yes or no, Ginger.” Jay has a timetable in his head, an ever-narrowing window of opportunity, and he stays stubborn. “It’s pretty basic, you know? This door or that one.”

  Ginger asks it again. “What did you tell them?”

  And Jay says, “I made up a life.”

  Ginger stares hard, as if trying to look into him, and the sudden ache of doubt that Jay feels in his heart is not an illusion. Her eyes are black, her mouth set hard.

  “I made up a life, what do you say to that?” he tells her, then, not sure he wants to hear her answer.

  But a small voice behind Ginger says, simply, “Yes.”

  Helen. The rope for the clouds wrapped around her hand, her posture and expression intent, no nonsense.

  Ginger’s slow turn. Her astonishment. Her disbelief.

  Now Ginger’s the one who can’t speak.

  Dropping to her knees, to Helen’s level, eye to eye, Ginger’s staggered look swerving to Jay, and back to Helen, who tells her gravely:

  “Mommy, say yes.”

  Ginger reaches out and touches the corners of her daughter’s lips with fingers made unsteady by all those emotions Jay has promised would rule. It’s as if she can’t begin to process everything she’s thinking and feeling. Blinking back tears. Fracking a crooked smile.

  • • •

  Center stage, spotlit, a solitary child in a fat rat costume stands, alone, dwarfed by the cavernous casino darkness, blasted by a spotlight, singing her refrain when Helen’s forsaken cardboard clouds drop and strike the floor end-up with a firecracker pop, and quiver for a moment indecisively. The audience gasps. The clouds gently tip and bow and flatten, and the little girl sings, high, softly, eyes closed, unsuspecting that her sky has fallen.

  Auf wiedersehen . . .

  When Doe and Public come bursting into the jumbled backstage area they will find, amid scattered props and children and stage parents and teachers vexing in baffled confusion, that the rope Helen was holding dangles in the darkness like a punctuation mark, limp, untended. “Auf wiedersehen . . .”

  • • •

  Nimble in the darkness, Helen scrambles out along the jetty rocks, but Ginger has the wrong shoes, mommy-watching-musical shoes, and she’d take them off, but wherever they’re going, she says, she may need them, so she and Jay stumble after Helen like three-legged race contestants to where the skiff rolls on gentle waves that lap Casino Point.

  Helen tumbles in, excited, she can’t stop talking: “It’s just like Milo, except we have this boat instead of a car. Across the Sea of Knowledge to the Lands Beyond! Mommy, you’re Tock,” Helen explains, as Jay steadies the boat and Ginger clambers aboard, “and you”—Helen points at Jay, who has no idea what she’s talking about—“Humbug, because you can’t be King Azaz or the Magima—Magimathi—Mathemagician—and not Officer Shrift or Alec Bings, either . . .”

  Jay shoulders the boat away from the rocks and then jackknifes himself up over the gunwale, getting his pants soaked again, barking his shins, the black, frigid water sloughing into the skiff as it lists wildly under his weight. Ginger, still dumbfounded, can’t take her eyes off her chattering Helen, but her hand finds Jay’s shoulder and stays, as if steadying herself on him against the turbulence of her upended world.

  Or is she protecting him from it?

  The sea heaves black and the lights of Long Beach wink insolently in eddies of thick air coursing above the sea, and light blinks from an opening casino side door and two figures emerge as the skiff clears the point and leaves their sight line, but there is still a drift of the music and the full cast singing its curtain call—

  . . . hello again, guten tag, hello, hello . . .

  • • •

  Jay’s design asks Public to presume that his fugitives are headed for the mainland. After gauging how long it will take to get helicopters up and over from San Pedro for the search and pursuit, Jay wants him to calculate that it might be smarter to wait for the skiff to cross the channel and pick it up after the insistent current pushes them south to the serpentine, less populated beaches of the Big Orange.

  But that’s not where they’ll be. Even if Public decides to send up the air support, and some fast boats with high beams, he won’t catch them. Because out on the open sea, beyond the reach of even the Descanso Beach surf lights now, Jay’s skiff changes course, jets northwest at full throttle, hugging the jigsaw Catalina coastline, planing sawtooth rollers that crash against the blunt stone shores and rebound back, whisking the water foamy where flying fish fling themselves, argent apparitions, toward the moon and stars, much to Helen’s delight.

  The casino ballroom, quaint, golden, behind them, ringed with lights—a trophy somebody forgot—is slowly eclipsed by Lion Head Point and they are alone in the watery darkness, headed for Two Harbors.

  “You’re bait,” Ginger says gravely, tenderly, and out of nowhere, as if she just figured out the last clue of a crossword. It jars and chills inexplicably. What?

  “Fish don’t eat people.” Helen giggles and rolls her eyes, head cradled in her mother’s lap.

  But Ginger is looking only at Jay, fully eclipsed by the dark: he feels her gaze more than sees it. “What?”

  “Bait. You know that, right?”

  “No. I was bait before L.A. But this is . . .” He stares at her, lost again. “What are you talking about?”

  “It’s okay,” she says after a moment, over the outboard’s dull whine. A blade of moonlight traces one edge of her face, exposes one intent eye gleaming, black beneath the fence of her rowdy bangs, lips slightly parted: settled, serene: no one has ever looked at Jay the way Ginger is looking at him now.

  “What?”

  It’s less a question than a confusion.

  Ginger declines and shakes her head ever so slightly, turning so that he can’t read her expression anymore, her fingers tangled in Helen’s hair, and Jay, rudderless, riding the waves, wondering for the first time what new hell he’s found.

  | 30 |

  FOAMING ROLLERS reel the empty husk of the Boston whaler, abandoned just shy of Perdition Cave, throwing it against the rocks and back again, and again, and again, while up on the steep incline of black sage and beard grass, in the shadow of West Summit, Jay and Ginger and Helen are moving as fast as they can.

  They’re due east of Two Harbors, the narrow strip of land separating the two shores of Catalina, perhaps two hundred yards wide. The bright cold blade of pale white from the Ship Rock lighthouse flickers across the fugitives and continues clockwise past them, and the night wind shoves the grass flat. Helen stumbles, but Jay catches her, and lifts her into his arms.

  Scattered dim luster of houses and campgrounds limned around the two bays wink behind high scrawny manzanita and clumped stands of trees listing in the windy darkness as Jay leads them over the high ground, skirting the narrow isthmus and the orphaned weekender fishing trawlers and sailboats moored in the shallow water on the Pacific side, one of which the waitress Penny’s husband cares for while its owners, according to Cody, “are chillin’ in, like, Cyprus,” which is how Jay knows it won’t be quickly missed, and—yes, it’s that simple—Jay is planning to borrow the boat and head out into the open Pacific where Public and Doe will never think to look for them.

  He’s learned from YouTube how to hot-wire an onboard engine. Or at least he hopes he has: there were several slightly conflicting demonstrations. With any luck, they can sail farther north, to Oxnard, Ventura, or Santa Maria, where the Feds shouldn’t think to intercept them. And from there? Jay will improvise.

  Gi
nger hasn’t said anything since they landed. Sensing a change in her, a hardening, a vigilant rigidness, Jay can only hope it isn’t buyer’s remorse: a snowballing apprehension about what he’s asked her to commit to—but there’s no time for them to sort this out. Approaching the crest of the bluff, the wind seems to tremble and gain resonance, and suddenly a helicopter thunders up on island thermals and soars over them, searchlight sweeping the terrain, surreal.

  “Down!” Jay barks. “Get down!”

  Collapsing as one, the lump of Jay and Ginger and Helen waits, afraid to breathe, traced briefly by the edge of its twitching, probing light, and then left adrift in darkness as the chopper hurries north. They rise, run, summit, and—thunk, foom!—are caught short and stunned by a blind-dazzling of teal sparks when a Roman candle explodes above their heads to scattered cheers from below.

  Thunk. Foom!

  Another burst blooms crimson. Helen shudders and covers her head, Ginger shouts sharply down at a gathering of shadows, and a voice replies, “SORRY! We didn’t know anyone would be up there . . .” And then asks, “. . . are you LOST?”

  A campfire flares in the wind and spits sparks at the hillock’s base, feathering with hellish light the youth church group and counselors gathered around it wreathed in an inky smoke. Thunk—the Roman candle—foom!—pitches another missile out, slitting the night sky, to explode golden, farther away, re-aimed.

  The distant helicopter brooms the hills on the other side of Two Harbors.

  Jay takes Helen’s hand and starts moving again.

  “WE HAVE PLENTY OF POPCORN . . . and cocoa.” The woman’s voice, contrite, followed by glittering entrails of a bottle rocket, the sharp bang of its report, and in the instant of its bright eruption the face of Sam Dunn stares up at Jay from among the church group, smiling, bookended by tweens with stars-and-stripes face paint staring skyward.

  Jay falters, spooked. Looking back—

  Ginger, disquieted, “What is it?”

  —But now there’s nothing but darkness where Jay saw Dunn. He wants it to be a phantasm: free-falling paranoia working his nerves.

  “I don’t know,” he says.

  Bait, he thinks. Fuck.

  Toward the lowlands near the water, setting their legs stiff against the slope, slip-sliding down, they put the thrown spasms of fireworks behind them: the underbrush gets thicker: the soughing of sea on shore louder. Crashing through neck-high weeds, Jay scissors his arms out in front of himself to clear a path in his wake for Ginger and Helen, feeling their breathing and stumbling behind him, until without warning his feet lose contact with solid ground, it simply drops away, and Jay goes windmilling straight down into the fetid waist-deep water of a tidal swamp.

  “Careful!” he shouts, too late, because Helen and Ginger tumble after him. He gropes for Helen first, but she comes up on her own, spitting, eyes stinging, blinking, wide, too surprised to cry. The brackish smell of salt and decay embraces them. Jay’s lost all sense of direction, the weeds are too high, or the water too deep.

  “Helen!?” Ginger sounds to be somewhere to his left.

  “Over here,” Jay calls out. “She’s okay, she’s okay, I’ve got her—”

  “—Mommy?”

  Shielded from the wind, an eerie quiet: the insistent lap of standing water disturbed, the hush of their breathing: a dire augur of ruin.

  “So what’s the plan?” Ginger’s voice is fragile with fatigue and impatience. “I mean, this isn’t exactly . . .” The rest is erased by the wind. A string of firecrackers pops, far away. “I mean, what the hell are we—”

  “He doesn’t have one.” Dunn. Icy, grim, inevitable. “A plan.” Jay draws Helen closer to him, and a blinding beam of light ignites the swamp; the grass goes translucent in its path. “He’s a rat, running,” Dunn says. “Isn’t that right, Jay?” The light, Dunn’s flashlight, darts off to pin Ginger, mired in a sinkhole fifty feet distant from Jay and Helen, and soaking wet.

  “Mouse,” Jay says.

  “Plunging onward,” Dunn adds.

  Jay’s eyes finally find him, on a far bank of the swamp, thirty yards away. Gun in one hand, and the flashlight in the other. Standing between Jay and their escape. The light swings back.

  “What’d you tell the Feds?”

  “Nothing they didn’t know,” Ginger says coldly.

  “Ha.” Dunn laughs. “They.” He looks sidelong into the shadows where Ginger is. “You.” Then, to Jay, asking again what he told Magonis: “The truth?”

  Jay says, “Whose truth?” while stepping protectively in front of Helen.

  “Yeah, yeah.” Dunn kills his light, and Jay, momentarily night blind from its absence, has to use the splashing sounds he hears to calculate the pilot’s movement, closing the distance between them, left to right. “I guess you’ve gone into business for yourself,” Dunn says.

  “Okay, sure. What about you?”

  The search helicopter, skimming the slope of Howland Peak on the other side of the harbor, disappears behind a ridge, headed for the West End Light. If Jay can just keep Dunn talking—sure, then what? His mind screams: What am I doing here? What have I done?

  “Grudge of the Moon Lady. 1980,” Dunn’s voice declaims. “Chin Bong Chin gets caught and held captive in a swamp by the Evil White Cat Spirit: Amy Yip in satin hot pants and a halter top—who wants to”—more staggering sloshing sounds—“shit,” then silence, then, as if he never stopped talking, “—who wants to know Bong Chin’s secret.”

  The swamp grass blazes again, revealing Vaughn, waist deep in the swamp water ten yards off Jay’s right shoulder; Vaughn is sharply, almost comically, uplit by Dunn’s flashlight, Nosferatu-ish, duct tape stretched across his mouth, arms bound behind him at the elbows and his eyes wide and scared.

  “At first, of course, he stonewalls her.”

  Jay’s pulse hammers in his throat. A reverb of church-group laughter strays through the swamp, disembodied. Another string of firecrackers goes off to a chorus of mock shrieks, and bottle rockets streak skyward to explode, their flash momentarily revealing Dunn again, arm outstretched, gun in his hand pointed at Vaughn’s heart.

  “So the Cat Spirit kills the best friend,” Dunn says. “To get everyone’s attention.”

  Jay shouts, “NO—”

  The muzzle flash sears a ragged scar in the darkness between Dunn and Vaughn, and Vaughn jerks backward, coughs, and the night swallows them both.

  Jay lunges across the water, leaving (he hopes) Helen to Ginger—lunges to where he (correctly) guesses Vaughn will fall, spun wildly by the bullet that just hit him. And sure enough, Vaughn sags into Jay’s arms, a look of astonishment, nothing to say. “Oh, shit,” Jay whispers, lost. “Oh, shit, Vaughnie. Oh, shit.” It’s Halloween night, it’s his sister’s doleful cry, it’s the voices in the kitchen, his father’s weight hitting the floor, the mermaid all over again, flowing, reeling, the mermaid, in onrushing water, roiling and flowing into his arms like this, like Vaughn, flesh and blood—

  —into the liquid void.

  Dunn’s light rakes the swamp, its beam making reeds blush and blackwater ripplets shimmer, but it can’t locate Jay or Vaughn, because Jay has moved them both.

  “Hey, now,” Dunn says.

  He wags the beam back around and catches just a glimpse of Helen and Ginger crashing away through the thicket of the far bank. “Hey, now.” He raises his gun under the flashlight’s reveal, one on top of the other, intending to shoot them.

  But Jay won’t abide it, defying his terror, the water around him erupting and sheeting off as Jay rises out of it and crashes into Dunn, clawing the flashlight into the mire, where it sinks, throwing its sickly light through the turbid shallows.

  A quickened disarray of arms and fists; bodies slur and Jay is already almost out of ideas. Momentarily back on his heels, Dunn throws up defensive elbows and forearms
, letting Jay’s inexpert blows roll off his shoulders while lashing out with his left and trying to re-grip and bring to bear the gun clutched awkwardly in his right.

  Behind them, Vaughn surfaces, ungainly, upended, an ugly black-red shine slick across his side, face thrown skyward, sucking the humid air, unable to find his feet and probably drowning if he doesn’t. Jay blinks the acid burn of salt mud from his eyes and hears a thrumming sound swelling transcendent like rage itself. He thinks it’s in his head. He wants Vaughn to live, he wants Ginger and Helen to have run back to the church camp for help. He vomits swamp water and clutches desperately as Dunn spins and bucks, trying to shake him, and gain the advantage his training should make inevitable.

  A warm gust of air hits them and blows Jay loose: the search helicopter, dull rotor thrum visceral, seizes overhead, turning in circles, stabbing the swamp with the bright narrow shaft of its searchlight. Vague in the faint nimbus cast backward, leaning from the open cockpit doorway, there is the suggestion of Jane Doe looking down at them like Vaughn does at test subjects: alert, emotionless, evaluating—

  Bait, Jay remembers. Ginger said I was. But—

  —salt grasses, cattails and reeds humbled sideways by angry turbulence, the down current upends Vaughn, from the shallow berm of solid ground where he’s found momentary purchase, and he disappears again under foaming water crusted with mosquito fern—

  —Jay helpless as Dunn braces himself, priming the chamber of his gun, glancing away distracted only for that instant when the helicopter’s landing skid judders through his peripheral vision (Doe is flying that low), flinching his head and turning his shoulders, and when he looks back for Jay? The soggy length of driftwood in Jay’s hands crushes Dunn across the ribs, spitting bark and water, continuing up under Dunn’s chin and leveling him.

  The handgun disappears.

  Jay wheels around to where he thinks Vaughn went under and plunges his arms in the water, desperate to find his friend.