John Lutz - Dancing with the Dead

“You still mad?” she asked.

“Naw. Check with me tomorrow morning first thing, though. Jesus, we gotta do something about those bruises. You bring some chemical suntan for your legs and shoulders?”

“Sure, just like you said.”

“The judges love bare skin in Latin competition, preferably tan. Maybe you can apply some extra to your face, blend it with the bruises. That might work.”

They were standing in front of Helen and her instructor Nick, who were slumped in two of the waiting area’s side-by-side brown vinyl chairs. Helen’s folded garment bag lay in the chair next to her. She was wearing a bulky gray sweater and slacks with a flower design on them, and looked more like a pudgy middle-aged housewife than a dancer.

“Ready for the big one, Mary Mary?” she asked, then did a double-take and frowned. “You get hurt or something?”

“ ’Fraid so.”

“Well, dumb question. It’s obvious you got hurt.”

Jet engines roared outside the windows as a red and white TWA airliner lifted off the runway, trailing dark wisps of uncombusted fuel that lingered like scratches on the pure blue sky. Comprehension, then anger, washed through Helen’s eyes. “He came back, huh?”

Mel gave Mary a protective hug that made her side throb with pain. “She had an accident, okay? ’Nuff said.”

Mary didn’t want to do any more explaining. “I better get my boarding pass,” she mumbled, and hurried to where a uniformed attendant standing behind a counter was examining tickets and resolutely pecking at a computer with a long forefinger. The other dancers and the instructors were talking about her, she was sure, but she told herself she didn’t care. Damned if she’d care! She was going to Ohio to compete. That was a certainty. Whatever needed doing to make it happen, she’d do it.

She asked the attendant to assign her a seat near the rear of the plane, on the side of the aisle where there were only pairs of seats.

“No problem,” said the attendant, a haggard, graying man. He studiously avoided staring at Mary’s face. Or was that Mary’s imagination?

No one spoke to her during boarding.

She sat alone in a window seat on the flight to Columbus. Mel sat near the front of the plane, walking back once to check on her when he got up to use the lavatory. In the seat in front of her was a boy about two years old who had a bad cold and sniffled and cried steadily until he fell asleep over Indiana.

Riding the hotel limo, which was actually a Dodge van, in from the airport, she stared straight ahead and said nothing.

Everyone was uncharacteristically quiet. Finally they were here, mere city blocks away from music and dance floor and spectators and judges. And the blunt white nose of the Hyatt Regency van was forging through traffic along those blocks, ticking them off like time.

What Mary and the rest of the dancers had been thinking about and sweating about all these months was suddenly becoming very real.

Was actually about to happen.

Miserable and apprehensive, Mary swallowed hard. Her throat was parched and she realized her fists were clenched. The knot in her stomach drew tighter and made her want to double over on the firm vinyl seat.

This, she thought, must be what astronauts feel in the last stages of countdown, when liftoff and critical risk become a virtual certainty.

The van lurched to the outside lane, then bumped and veered into the driveway of the hotel. Its brakes squealed, causing the cluster of businessmen standing outside the hotel entrance to turn for a moment and stare.

“Anybody got the jitters?” Huggins asked, laughter flitting an inch beneath the surface of his voice.

“Naw, I always got bats in my stomach,” Nick said.

“Belfry, too,” Mel told him. Everybody laughed harder than they should have.

Helen pointed a glitter-enameled fingernail out the side window. “Our home for the next three days,” she said.

Mary thought, Only hours to Blast-off.

He sat deep and unnoticed in a warm leather sofa and watched them enter the hotel. They’d been arriving in groups and checking in all day. There was a look about women who danced, something in their posture and precise movement that flaunted and excited.

The heat and rage expanded in him as he watched them line up at the desk to register, talking and smiling, so at ease and unknowing. They even stood motionless like dancers, weight on one leg, hip thrust out, tempting, tantalizing. Where their flesh didn’t show, they glittered, or their strong bodies stretched fabric as tight as his skin was stretched by his desire. He thought about the knife and had to lower the magazine he’d been pretending to read, so it covered his lap.

Even the older women who danced kept their attitude of allure despite the fact that they’d become pathetic parodies of their younger selves. Once a whore…

But he barely glanced at the old ones hanging on the arms of instructors the ages of their sons. And it was only with the greatest effort that he didn’t stare at the young ones.

He formed a perfect image of the knife in his mind and waited confidently for the voice.

A perfect image.

The elevator zoomed to the tenth floor with a speed that made her stomach lurch.

To save on expenses, Mary was sharing a room with Helen. The bellhop, a pimply youth with a remarkably crooked nose, led them to 1011, a luxurious but oddly shaped corner room with an angular row of windows looking over downtown Columbus. Mary stood near the bed and stared at her unfamiliar surroundings on both sides of the glass. The reality of what was truly happening was still something of a shock.

The bellhop laboriously carried in their suitcases and garment bags from his luggage cart parked in the hall, then he showed Mary and Helen the room, demonstrating that the TV worked and doors did indeed open onto closet and bathroom.

As he handed Helen the perforated plastic cards that were used for room keys at the Hyatt Regency, the young bellhop wished them both luck in the dance competition.

“How’d you guess that’s what we’re here for?” Helen asked.

He grinned. “Easy. You both got the look of dancers. Real graceful-like.”

Helen tipped him five dollars.

“Anything else you need, ladies, let me know. Name’s Howard.”

“Thanks, Howard, we’ll do that” Helen said, and stood waiting while he bustled out and closed the door behind him.

“Howard knows the way to a dancer’s heart,” Mary said.

“Or wherever he wants to go.” Helen sat on the nearest bed and bounced up and down a few times to test the mattress. For a moment she looked like a twelve-year-old lost in play. Maybe that was really why they were here, Mary thought, to lose themselves in the maypole motion of childhood.

An adult again, Helen rested her hands on the edge of the bed and stared up at Mary, frowning as if she shared Mary’s pain. “Your friend Jake did that to you, right?”

“You know he did,” Mary said. “Everybody else seems to know, too, so there’s no sense talking about it.”

“Talking can help sometimes. Relieves the pressure.”

“Sometimes not.”

“I thought you threw the guy out again.”

Mary walked to the windows and looked out at the sun-streaked haze of pollution that lay over Columbus. Unhealthy, she told herself, but undeniably beautiful. Too much in the world was that way.

“Don’t let him come back this time, Mary. Be smart and don’t let him back in.”

Mary turned to face her. “He’s out for good, Helen. I know it this time. He knows it, too. I guess that’s maybe why he did this to me, because he knew it was finally over.” She raised her arms and did a slow rumba box. “Let’s concentrate on the competition, huh?”