James Siegel - Detour

The bird-watcher turned to look at him with an expression of mild disapproval. Asking questions wasn’t his job today. Before the bird-watcher could interrupt, plead time constraints, or simply stand up, the administrator spilled some details.

“I wasn’t here when the girl was admitted. Different administration. Naturally, I looked at her file when you contacted me. According to her adoptive father, she witnessed the torture and murder of her mother. Was apparently made to witness it. It went on for several days. Some kind of drug lord’s idea of retribution—it’s quite a country down there, isn’t it? I imagine we’re talking about a true sociopath with strong sadistic impulses. As you might assume, being forced to watch something like that would have an unhealthy effect on a three-year-old. She evidently became too much for her father to handle.”

Yes, Miles had given it all of one day, Paul thought.

“Well”—the bird-watcher looked at his watch—“we have to get this show on the road.”

“Of course,” Theodore said, a man glad to be of service to his country. “They’re bringing her down.”

Paul had one more question.

“Does she know her adoptive father passed away?”

“Yes. According to Dr. Sanji—have you met our Dr. Sanji?”

Paul nodded.

“She said Ruth weathered the storm quite nicely. He was pretty much a father in name only. On the other hand, he was all she had.”

No, Paul thought. She had a grandfather who’d cried for her. A grandmother who’d entered a pact with the devil in order to save her.

“What’s she been told?” the bird-watcher asked. “About where she’s going?”

“Per your instructions, she was told she’s going somewhere for treatment. Not permanently, just for a little while.”

The bird-watcher nodded. “Good.”

IT SEEMED LIKE HER EYES WERE OPENED WIDER TODAY.

Maybe she was taking it all in. The surrounding world. Burned-out buildings and potholed highways, looming bridges with pigeon-covered underpasses, roving bands of restless kids trolling the mostly mean streets. Paul wondered how many times she’d been taken outside the hospital—if they still conducted retard patrols across the street where they fed the llamas and threw peanuts to the elephants.

They’d made it out of the Bronx and were this moment coming off the ramp of the Throgs Neck Bridge. When Paul was a kid, he’d wondered what a frog’s neck looked like.

Ruth remained mostly silent. Every so often she’d utter something that might’ve come from the pages of Little Women or a 1930s comedy.

“Ezooks,” she exclaimed when they passed a particularly huge man lolling against a stripped car, “get a load of that gorilla.”

Her first sight of the Throgs Neck Bridge elicited a chorus of gosh es and gee whillikers es.

Occasionally, the bird-watcher peered in his rearview mirror in an effort to see whether she was really saying what it sounded like she was.

Even with the looming rain, Long Island Sound was dotted with sails today.

“Quite a flotilla,” Ruth said.

The bird-watcher pulled a cigarette from his pocket.

“Think she’ll mind?” he asked Paul.

“Why don’t you ask her?”

“Darling,” the bird-watcher said, “would it trouble you greatly if I partook of some nicotine?”

Ruth stared at him.

“A smoke? A cancer stick?” he said.

“Cancer is the second leading killer in the United States,” Ruth answered, sounding like an actuary in good standing.

“You don’t say,” the bird-watcher replied. “Well, I’ll certainly keep that in mind.”

The bird-watcher lit up, sucked in a generous amount of cancer-causing nicotine, then blew it out, where it drifted to the backseat, causing Ruth to sputter and cough.

“Whoops,” he said, “maybe I ought to crack open a window in deference to our friend.”

“I don’t particularly like cigarette smoke myself,” Paul said.

“Yeah,” the bird-watcher said, “me either.”

He opened the driver’s side window, letting in pure humidity and the sound of a mufflerless beer truck to their left. It sounded like an entire pack of Hell’s Angels.

“Lovely,” the bird-watcher said.

“No, it’s not,” Ruth volunteered, obviously unfamiliar with sarcasm. “It’s raucous and revolting.”

“You’re right,” the bird-watcher said. “My bad.” He turned on the CD player. “This ought to help.”

Latin music.

It sounded vaguely familiar.

Paul closed his eyes. Was that what was playing in Pablo’s car on the way to Santa Regina? His heart had been beating so fast it hurt. About to meet the daughter it had taken eighteen hours and five years to find. He was already forgetting her face, he realized with a pang. How long had he really had with her—a blip in time—and yet they’d forged a connection strong enough to still tug at his emotions, to pull them clear across time and space.

He was a father, he guessed. That’s all.

They were headed east on the Long Island Expressway. Which was decidedly better than heading west on the LIE, since that side of the highway was staying true to its moniker as the world’s longest parking lot.

They were close, he thought. About to close the circle again.

He wasn’t absolutely sure when it hit him.

But hit was the right word.

A realization that came with the force of a punch to the solar plexus. It staggered him.

The music.

It wasn’t the music playing on Pablo’s radio.

He’d heard this music somewhere else.

Suddenly, he was back on his stomach in a field full of cattails and screams. Trying not to listen as a human being was tortured to death just fifty yards from him. Hearing every excruciating whimper as they cut off his body parts one by one.

You could almost hear the sound of knife hitting bone. Even with that music blaring. Even with that pounding rhythm and screeching horns.

Even then.

Celia Cruz. Queen of Samba.

Mi mami, one of the men yelled. A fucking scream.

That’s what the bird-watcher was playing on his car radio. Only it wasn’t a car radio. It was a Jeep radio. A green Jeep.

Two green Jeeps had come flying out of the cattails that day.

Paul’s eyes were wide-open. They must have matched Ruth’s.

He looked at the bird-watcher sitting beside him. A bulge on the left side of his shirt. Assume shoulder holster complete with loaded gun.

The bird-watcher was still contentedly puffing away, considerate enough to exhale through the crack in the window. He was humming along to the late Queen of Samba, keeping one eye on the road.

At some point that eye wandered. He noticed Paul noticing him.

Or maybe it just took him a few minutes to suddenly realize he’d screwed up.

“Shit. That was kind of Homer Simpson of me.”

Paul felt familiar tentacles of fear wrap themselves around his newborn hope. And strangle it.

“Oh well,” he said. “You were going to know eventually. Although I was kind of hoping it wouldn’t be while doing eighty on the LIE. It kind of forces me to multitask. Not that I’m not up to the challenge.” He stubbed his cigarette out with his right hand.

Freeing it for other things.

“Okay. Let’s get the lay of the land here. I have a gub. ”

Paul was frozen to the seat.

“Come on, you saw the Woody Allen movie— Take the Money and Run ? The bank heist—the note he passes to the teller? I have a gub. Work with me, Paul. I’m trying to protect our friend back there from needless anxiety. We can talk pig latin if you’d like. No? Okay, what the heck. We’ll talk turkey.”