Andrew Vachss - Safe House

“I don’t know. I just—”

“You do know,” she said. “People know why they do things, if they would just think about them.”

“Okay, I guess I never thought about—”

“Do it,” she said. Then gave me a sweet smile. “Please.”

I sat down in the easy chair and closed my eyes. Crystal Beth came around behind me, put her hands over my eyes. Little hands. Soft. Smelled like purple lilacs and dark tobacco. Her nose nuzzled gently against the back of my head. I let myself go into it.

“When I was a kid, I had a dog,” I said, thinking and talking to her at the same time. “A fox terrier. A walking death warrant for rats. She was my great pal. I loved her. When I went to one of those foster homes, they took her away from me. I never saw her again.”

“Why wouldn’t they let you take your dog?” she asked, more anger than sadness in her voice.

“I’m sure they had their reasons. Reasons that looked good on paper. But I knew what it really was. They wanted to hurt me. They all did.”

“But . . .”

“I was right,” I told her, cutting that off before the feelings came back too strong. “I always swore I would have a dog someday. My own dog. In the juvie joint, the fucking ‘reform school,’ other guys dreamed of cars. Mostly cars. Where I came from, nobody thought about having a house, so it was cars we dreamed about. Fantasies, I guess they were.”

“You didn’t fantasize about girls?” she asked, her voice more flirtatious than teasing.

“I meant fantasies you could talk about,” I told her. “Out loud. Girls, the play was you already had them, see?” And mothers too, I thought to myself, remembering how kids in the joint would fight to the death if you called their mother a name . . . even if that mother was a drunken whore who never showed up on visiting day.

“And you could talk about them? About girls?”

“Lie about them mostly,” I told her, keeping my voice light. Thinking of the boys in there who were already talking about girls they hadn’t met . . . and what they were going to do to them when they did. “But me, my fantasy, my dream was to have a dog.”

“Did you ever get one?”

“I got the best dog in the world,” I said. “Her name is Pansy. She’s a Neapolitan mastiff. One of the original war dogs. They came over the Alps with Hannibal. Marco Polo took one to China.”

“Are they smart?”

“Smart? I don’t know. In some ways, I guess. But that’s not her big thing. Pansy would die for me. She’s not some pet, ” I said scornfully, “like a tropical fish. Or one of those damn cats.”

“What do you have against cats?” she asked. “Lorraine has one, and it’s—”

“Cats are the lap-dancers of the animal world,” I told her. “Soon as you stop shelling out, they move on, find another lap. They’re furry little sociopaths. Pretty and slick—in love with themselves. When’s the last time you saw a seeing-eye cat?”

Crystal Beth took her hands away from my eyes and walked around the chair. She knelt in front of me, hunched forward, almond eyes widening, not listening so much as opening herself, as if to make her body understand me too.

“But when I come back to . . . where I live,” I went on, “Pansy’s always glad to see me. It doesn’t matter what I look like. It doesn’t matter whether I’m a success or a failure. Or even whether I have food for her. She’s so . . . loyal. Loyal and true.”

“And she’s a bitch?”

“And she’s a bitch. Maybe that’s it. I’m not sure. We get the words all wrong. A man steps out on a woman, he gets called a dog. But if the woman’s ugly, she gets called a dog.”

“I know. And if the girl’s pretty, she gets called something like ‘kitten,’ yes?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“Burke?”

“What?”

“It shifted again. Your aura.”

I didn’t need her to tell me that. I could feel the blue in the room. A mist rising from my . . . I don’t know what. “Kitten.” When I was a young man, I called a lot of girls that. They always liked it. I did it so I wouldn’t blow my cover, call one of them by the wrong name. I had a lot of girls then.

“Had.” Looking back, I know I never understood what that meant. But I remember the last one. Ruth. The more she loved me, the more I knew I had to go away. Before Ruth, it was all game. I knew what they wanted. They knew what I wanted. Fire-dancing, seeing which one of us would tumble in first . . . and get burned. It was never me. You can’t lose what you don’t ante up.

The only thing I knew for sure about myself back then was that I was no good. Ruth wasn’t like any of the other girls I’d been with. She didn’t want me stealing to buy her jewels, didn’t shake her ass in the street and then come running to me because some clown noticed it, demanding I defend her “honor” . . . be a man. I thought I knew what that meant too, back then—cause pain, and never show any.

Ruth wanted to be married. Have children. A house. She wanted me to have a job. Be a citizen. Her eyes were the color of nightclub smoke.

She came from the same place I did, but she wasn’t going to stay there. And she’d wait for me to join her, however long it took.

I knew how long it was going to take. And I felt so bad about it I had to go.

But I couldn’t make her see it. When I told her we were done, she said maybe someday I’d understand that she had true love for me and I’d want her back. And she’d come, she said. All I had to do was leave a notice in the paper. People did that then—before the personals columns got degenerate the way they are now—left messages for someone they actually knew.

“Just say ‘kitten,’ ” she told me. “And I’ll know it’s you.”

“But I wouldn’t know it was you,” I said. And told her how I used that name. How it was nothing special.

I told myself I was just being honest, squaring up with her like she deserved. But I saw something die in her eyes right then.

Every once in a while, I would feel that again. First time I heard Barbara Lynn singing “You’ll Lose a Good Thing,” I felt that way. Sorry. For me. A lot of things happened since then. I never broke up with a woman for her own good again.

No, they went away from me. Or died.

When I thought about that, only Hate kept me from drowning.

Crystal Beth stood up. Held out her hand. Then she pulled me in.

The Plymouth swam over the Manhattan Bridge, dwarfed by the Brooklyn-bound trucks. It rolled past the car-repair shops and topless bars on Flatbush, me safe inside, listening to the truth girl-growling out of my cassette player, Magic Judy warning her sisters everywhere—if you’re dumb enough to brag about your man to your girlfriends, they’ll double-cross you every time.

Ten in the morning on a weekday, the Plymouth was invisible in the moderate traffic. I crossed Atlantic, hooked the first sharp left and motored a couple of blocks past the abandoned Daily News printing plant—they do all the work in Jersey now—looking for a place to park.

I found one close enough. Got out and walked back to the bridge over the railroad yards. Wolfe was standing there, waiting. At the curb across from her a dark-green Lexus GS sedan stood idling—I could see smoke from the exhausts. Pepper waved at me merrily from the driver’s seat, a small, pretty dark-haired girl with an electric smile. I could make out a much larger shape in the back seat. Not the rottweiler, a human shape.

I lit a smoke, cupping my hands against a nonexistent wind so I could glance over my left shoulder. Sure enough: a young woman with long winter-blond hair in a bright-orange jogging outfit strolled by past the entrance to the bridge behind me, walking like she was cooling down from a long run. I knew who that was. Chiara, one of Wolfe’s crew. I remembered her from our last meeting; her and that honey-colored pit bull she had on a short leash. They both stopped walking and watched me, making no secret of it.