Ruth Galm - Into the Valley

In the car, she presented the money to Daughtry. “Sweet Jesus. They practically handed you the reserves. Is this how easy it’s been for you? We should do another, baby! While we’re on a goddamn roll.”

But by then the cool expansive feeling had already faded.

He drove them an hour north and when she did the next bank, an old stone building with ionic columns and octagonal-shaped lamps, it was the same easy success and the same fleeting cool expansive feeling. A siren rose faintly in her head. Like a careening from a distance, the pitch higher and higher but never arriving.

“C’mon, let’s do another,” Daughtry said. “Hell, I’m Irish, we know a thing or two about luck.” He drove an hour southwest this time, babbling about Mexico on the way. “. . and in the little fishing villages, you can live right on the cliffs. Right on the Pacific Ocean. Just like those Seventeen-Mile Drive bastards, except ours. . They have a beautiful kind of tuna down there, baby, a gorgeous fish, tastes like steak and they swim around by the boatloads. And all the water warm as a bath, no fog, no cold. . And then, baby, after we finish the season, we’ll travel. We’ll see the whole goddamned beautiful continent, the ruins and the jungles, and never think of this rat race again.” B. heard him only intermittently through the siren. It blared behind her eyes now, rising to a shriek. It was white in her mind. She clutched the seat. She tried to focus on Daughtry’s house at the sea but she could only glance at a pink adobe with birds of paradise and then watch it vanish.

At the last bank, she could not walk steadily. The shrill of the siren bleaching everything to a white blur. Before she got as far as the start of the line, she buckled. She got up before anyone got near her and turned around. In the car, she told Daughtry the same thing she told herself: she was too hungry and too tired and it would go better in the morning.

Daughtry took her to a steakhouse they’d passed on the way in. It was an old Victorian, with tall shutters and a porch edged in scallops, stained floral wallpaper behind the leather booths and chairs. Daughtry ordered her a T-bone with a side of spinach and a martini. “You need iron. And you need a drink.”

He smiled a wide dopey smile and grasped her hand. “I like taking care of you,” he said. Then he lowered his voice. “I want to take care of you every night, baby. Every night I want to make you feel good.” Inside the siren B. could only nod at his short yellow teeth.

He watched her eat. The grainy meat stuck in her throat, it made her gag. She finished her martini and asked for another. By the third round Daughtry stopped watching so closely and the alcohol at least blunted the surface of the siren, letting the churn continue deeper down. She waited until Daughtry got up for the men’s room and slid the rest of her steak into her napkin. In the small opening created by the martinis, she tried to grasp at the pink adobe house as a way to breathe. She tried to think reasonably about a house again, to think about it in a way she had not yet: she could go there with Daughtry. It might not be so bad, she told herself. To learn to make fish soups, to embroider festive blouses and arrange tropical flowers in vases. (She had no other vision of what she would do in the house.) Maybe she had been wrong about marriage. Perhaps this had been the answer all along — never the banks, never the checks. But as she told herself this, the siren drilled violently through the alcohol to the top of her skull. She seized the edge of the table, knocking over her martini. Gin dribbled onto the green dress. Somewhere inside the violent tilting, she knew it would not matter if it was Daughtry or the Boston almost-fiancé or the university man or the developer and Sherry. It would not matter who was in the pink adobe house with her, she did not want to live in it with any of them. She did not want to make fish soups. She did not want to be taken care of or to fix her hair. She wanted only to get away, to start over, to undo something that seemed to bind her. She wanted only to find a calm quiet place to breathe. The landscape of her daydreams, the blue-white featureless expanse.

Daughtry came back from the bathroom and slid beside her, nibbled her neck. His aftershave and sweat and meaty breath only vaguely penetrating the careening. Her fingertips were bloodless from gripping. She pressed herself against his chest and palmed his lapel pocket.

He snatched her hand. “What d’you need those for, huh? Don’t you have enough here?” He leaned her back and wiped at the green dress with a napkin. “What d’you need those for right now?”

She sat immobile as he wiped her. “Get me out of here,” she whispered. Daughtry downed the rest of his martini, unfurled the new bills on the table and led her out by the elbow.

He made a point of locking the checks in the trunk of the Mustang, and in the motel room he dragged the mattress from the bed and shoved it against the door. “You’re beat. We both need a good night’s sleep without getting up drunk and having an accident.” She lay down on the mattress and closed her eyes, as if this might have any effect on the siren. Daughtry held her to him. “The last thing I need — Christ, the very last thing — is kids. I see you worrying, and you don’t have to. Not with me.” He kissed her cheek.

He had never asked her how there could be no scar. No mark from the invented hysterectomy. He did not, she knew, really want to know.

“Shhh.” She put her finger to her lips. “Let’s just sleep.” From her lock in his arms, she watched the shaft of yellow porch light through the curtains. She kept her eyes on the shaft of light for as long as she could.

The next morning she had not slept. The siren had quieted but the spinning continued, the unnameable dread had grown with each hour. Daughtry had woken early while she’d pretended to be asleep to delay having to speak. He had gone out and brought back coffee and somehow acquired nail polish remover and a tortoiseshell plastic headband.

He insisted on another shower. Before she got in he wiped the ragged pink polish off nail by nail. “Better to have none than to look chipped. We can get you to one of those nail places later.” Then he found a file in her travel bag (she was surprised to remember she owned such a thing) and cleaned out and filed her nails one by one.

She stood silent as he worked the plastic tortoiseshell into her hair. “To add class,” he said. He stood back to admire her. She was aware beyond the spinning and fatigue that the itching and burning in her crotch had returned. The sex with Daughtry had brought it back, like a chronic affliction.

“I need cranberry juice.”

“Sure, baby,” Daughtry said, but he was adjusting the headband in the mirror and not listening.

At breakfast, he made her eat half a doughnut and a few bites of egg, all of which choked in her throat. The restaurant had no cranberry juice.

She tried to steady herself by focusing on the Formica table. But the gold flecks jittered around like a frantic cosmos. “So this time try for a little more,” Daughtry was saying. “You’re looking good. You’re looking like a living doll, you want to know the truth. They won’t peg you. And the sooner we’re done, the sooner we split.”

Daughtry went on lauding their prospects. She reached into the ostrich-skin purse and absently touched the knife.

Inside the bank, she noted the two security cameras first and looked into each as if to acknowledge them. Then she made a check out to herself for $10,000.

The attractive brunette with hair teased into a bouffant smiled widely at B. “I’ll just have to approve this with my manager,” she said in a cheery voice.