Late in the Standoff Read online

  The radio station occupied the eighth floor of a glass highrise just west of the 610 Loop. This surprised Danny. He’d listened to the crap they called “programming.” Cut-rate salsa, slicked-up in fancy recording studios in L. A. or New York. None of the real stuff, the rollicking Afro-Latin rhythms—Fela, Isadora Lopez—or the mournful Indian ballads of Urubamba, which Anna Lia had taught him to appreciate.

  He’d figured KKLT for a nickel-and-dime outfit, playing whatever earwax the studios’ A & R men told them to push. He wasn’t prepared for … well, serious money.

  Clichés are so damned annoying, he thought. They pop up everywhere, just to mock us. Crespi at the funeral home. Tall, thin, bald—The Undertaker in every old movie Danny had ever seen. And with big, chilly hands, naturally.

  Now this: a flat glass facade, bright polish, ultramodern glamour. The station had anchored itself in a brand-new, high-concept business park, whose every Plexiglas surface screamed “Hip!” The owners had probably polled dozens of focus groups (eighteen- to thirty-five-year-olds, cash cows—Danny knew this from his weekends at the record store), picked a market niche they could fill, then hired the standard DJs: busty, blue suede bimbos, Ray-Ban goofs.

  Sure enough, the biggest goof of all was on the air now. Danny leaned across his steering wheel to turn the volume up. “Roberto Capriati here, the Love Stallion, filling in for my buddy Tiger today. We just heard the heart of Cuba, Francisco Repilado, a.k.a. Compay Segundo. If you don’t know his work, friends, you need to—good for the soul. For decades now, Compay has been the voice of the guajiros, the peasants in Cuba’s tobacco fields. We’ll be right back, amigos, with more son from Havana.”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Danny muttered. The Love Stallion. Shit. Voice like breaking glass …

  “Sit back, relax, friends. Coming at you now, ‘De camino a la vereda’ by the great Ibrahim Ferrer …”

  Danny’s head swam. He ate a couple more Excedrin. He felt better now than he had at Crespi’s; less dizzy, more alert. Maybe last night was finally letting go. He had a vague memory of a man in the restaurant … something to do with Libbie. But mainly, he remembered Marie’s mouth on his forehead as she kissed him good night. She’d insisted on driving him back to her place, laying him out on her couch. She’d called Libbie and Carla at his apartment and told them he’d meet them at the funeral home in the morning.

  He remembered sliding the gun beneath the couch, so Marie wouldn’t see it, before she helped him slip off his shirt and crawl beneath a big cotton blanket. Then she pressed her lips to his brow. He told her she was beautiful. “Hush,” she said. He tried to touch her hair, and she batted his fingers away. What else had he done? Where was Ricky? Had he seen anything? Danny would have to call Marie and apologize.

  He felt the Seecamp now, flush against his belly, stuck inside his pants. What the hell had pulled him into that rotten pawn shop? The encounter with Smitts, the anger, his sorrow.

  All day yesterday, he’d acted like someone else. Someone he didn’t know.

  And now? Ten minutes ago, when he’d walked inside the highrise, thinking surely he must have jotted down the wrong address, he blinked hard and wondered what in heaven’s name he was doing. What did he have to say to Capriati? In the lobby, a woman at a sleek metal desk between two elevators asked if she could direct him. “KKLT?” he said.

  “Eighth floor.”

  “Right or left?”

  “The whole floor, sir.”

  He’d glimpsed a security guard sitting on a stool by a giant potted plant. An elderly man in a blue uniform, half-asleep, snorting into the banked snow of his mustache.

  So Danny had walked back out to the parking lot, disoriented, a little nauseous. Sitting in the car now, with all the windows up, he felt his wits returning. The heat was stifling, but it made him aware of his skin, his boundaries, his limits—countered the churning he’d felt in his gut since the moment he’d heard about Anna Lia, the sensation of being blown into the world, every cell tossed into the grit and whimsy of the planet.

  The radio tapped him in the head:

  No hables de tu marido, mujer—mujer de malos sentimientos.

  Todos se te ha vuelto un cuento

  Porque no ha llegado la hora fatal.

  Danny’s Spanish was rusty—he used it sparingly, with hospital administrators in Del Rio, Nuevo Laredo, other border towns—but he caught the drift: “Don’t speak about your husband, woman of bad sentiments. Everything, to you, is a fairy tale because your time of reckoning is yet to come.”

  The swift rhythms reminded him of Gustavo’s voice: “Bomb? What bomb?” he’d said on Crespi’s phone, over an ocean-roar of static and stale technological air. “Who is this? Anna Lia?”

  Adoring Daughter. Rebellious Young Woman. Wife, Adulterer … Killer?

  “Here’s Inti-Illimani, folks, hold tight …”

  “Damn straight,” said Danny. Solid now, secure within his skin, he opened his car door.

  In the lobby, the old guard was showing a pair of Girl Scouts a brochure of some kind, perhaps a map of the building. Danny tucked the gun inside his belt, smoothed his shirttail over his jeans. What was he was fixing to do? Look around, he thought. Blue glass panes, each as tall as a man, filtering the afternoon sun; black marble floor; golden door handles. A smell of pine, vaguely chemical, in the air. This is what she left you for.

  Apparently, visitors were supposed to sign in with the woman at the desk, but she was busy with a group of gray-suited men, so Danny scooted into an open elevator—silver doors, like the gates of an Asian palace. “Eight, please,” he said to a woman in a black turtleneck and orange knee-length skirt. Her fingernails were purple. Tattooed to her cheek, below her left eye, a tiny red strawberry.

  After what seemed like only seconds, the doors opened onto a maroon-carpeted room. Plush white chairs surrounded a ficus plant in a bright red pot. KKLT in golden letters curled across the wall, which was made of dark, gleaming wood like the coffin Danny had picked for Anna Lia.

  At a bright steel desk, a young, short-haired woman, looking pale and anorexic, stared at her phone’s blinking lights. She appeared to be mesmerized. Morosely helpless.

  “Excuse me,” Danny said. “Roberto Capriati? I know he’s on the air right now, but can you tell me … is there any way I can speak to him? Does he have a break coming soon? It’s urgent.”

  “Appointment?” the young woman said. The word demanded all the pluck she could muster.

  “No. An emergency. Please.”

  “Name?”

  “Danny Clark.”

  She punched a button on the phone and spoke into the receiver. Then she nodded toward a hallway. “There’s a waiting area on the left. He’ll be with you shortly.”

  “Thank you.”

  He left her apparently on the verge of collapse.

  Down the hall, Danny found a row of plastic chairs facing a fat glass pane. Behind the partition, Roberto sat behind a console of loud yellow lights with a headset clamped to his ears. He smiled weakly at Danny. A sparse mustache, thin as fishing line, drifted across his lip.

  The clothes, Danny thought. Silk shirt, lime green, and a sea-colored tie flaring wide across his chest. Anna Lia was always a sucker for snazzy outfits. Couldn’t be the face—all saggy and dark.

  “We’re going to take you to Belize now, and the Garifuna, the Black Caribs of the Central American coast,” Roberto said into a padded mike the size of an avocado. “In 1635, friends, Spanish slave ships bound for Barbados sank near the island of Bequia. Hundreds of African slaves escaped and eventually intermarried with aborigines who’d emigrated from South America three hundred years earlier.”

  While Roberto prattled on, Danny stared at posters on the walls advertising running shoes, acne medication, hair gel—products that kept the station afloat. He remembered a man in Hobby Airport one night, waiting for his luggage while Danny signed for a record shipment. The man worked for a large supermarket chain. “We do polling a
ll the time,” he’d told Danny, making small talk. “Testing the public’s tolerance. A few years ago, you didn’t hear about feminine napkins on TV, am I right? It just wasn’t tasteful. Now, no one thinks about it. I mean, you got whole families slicing into their Swanson frozen chickens in front of the old tube—little Billy and Sally and Courtney—while some blowsy blonde tells them how fresh she feels. You know what’s next? Diapers for adults. I kid you not. Our latest marketing research indicates that people are ready to consider, in mixed company, the problem of bladder leakage.”

  Sure enough, the following spring, Depends appeared on grocers’ shelves.

  Why not coffins? Danny thought. Right next to the pharmacy. For all your death and dying needs …

  “Today, only about seventy thousand Garifuna are left, in the coastal cities of Honduras and Belize,” Roberto said.

  Or bombs. Let’s get some tracking data, see who’s shopping around.

  “The song you’re about to hear was recorded by the Library of Congress as part of its Endangered Music Project. Relax now, sit back, and listen to the rain forest …”

  Through the station’s speakers came crickets, water crackling on leaves, distant thunder, a faint chanting, female and male, old and young, chilling Danny with its doleful simplicity, its dark and solemn repetitions.

  Roberto pulled off his headphones and slipped through a glass door into the hallway. He held out his hand. Danny shook it mildly. “Hello, Danny. Sit, sit. I only have a few minutes, but … how are you? I tell you, man, things have been nuts around here since the news broke. Day and night, calls to the station, reporters wanting inside dope about her habits, her interests … ahhh. I just try to stay busy, that’s all. Listen, I’m sorry, Danny. I’m sorry about everything that happened, man. It was never personal, you know? You know that, don’t you?”

  Fucking fast talk. “Tell me what you did,” Danny said. His stomach rumbled.

  “What I did?”

  “To Anna Lia. So she wanted you dead. That’s what they’re saying, right? It’s all about you. What the hell did you do to her?”

  “Wait, wait, wait—”

  “I want to know, goddammit.”

  “Danny—”

  “Tell me!” He stood, toppling his plastic chair.

  Roberto paled. “Have you come here to shoot me, Danny? Is that why you’re here?”

  Danny’s shirt had hitched up over his belt, revealing the pistol.

  The sorrowful chanting increased. “I want to know why this happened.” His throat burned. The sizzle inched upwards, into his nose. He straightened his clothes.

  “You know what I did.” Roberto sat primly, as if on a job interview. He placed his hands on his knees. “I did nothing.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You know how she was, Danny. Lovely but impossible, right? Right? Constant attention, that’s what she needed. You couldn’t give it to her. I couldn’t give it to her—”

  “That’s not—”

  “When I asked for a little rest from time to time, to be alone for a while, just to think … no, no, no, she wouldn’t hear of it, she took it like a slap in the face. You know how it was.”

  “No.” Clapping and chanting. Heavy rain. The cree of a faraway bird.

  “She exhausted me, Danny, just as I know she exhausted you. You’re a fucking hero, man, sticking with her the way you did. Jesus, I couldn’t do it. She was funny, she was thrilling, she was exciting to be with … but finally, my balls were dragging the ground. I couldn’t do it anymore. Buy me breakfast, in the middle of the night. Take me dancing, when she knew I had to work. Come on, take a few days off, drive me out of town. You want to know something? I lost ten pounds, dating her. Ran me ragged. Finally, I had to say, ‘Enough.’ She went ballistic, I kicked her out of my place, didn’t see her after that. That’s all, man. The whole lousy story.”

  Clapping, drumming, shaking beads.

  “I knew she was high-strung, nervous … but crazy? Making bombs?” Roberto shook his head.

  Danny rubbed his face. “She didn’t make the bomb.”

  “No?”

  “No.”

  “Smitts?”

  Danny flinched.

  “Yeah, I knew about him,” Roberto said. “Another poor fucker she ran through the wringer. Like I said. You’re a hero.”

  “I’m tired,” Danny croaked.

  “Of course you are.” Roberto watched him closely. “I am sorry, Danny. And I understand why you’re pissed at me. She was your wife. I dishonored you, and I apologize. But I swear I didn’t push her—I mean, Jesus, if she honestly meant to …” He shrugged. “Well. I liked her. I really did. I always treated her with respect, even when I told her I couldn’t see her anymore.”

  Danny stumbled and knocked against the chairs. Anna Lia, in the predawn dark of her place; in the blackness, now, of a big wooden box … “I feel sick,” he said.

  Roberto stood. “There’s a bathroom just around the corner.”

  Danny grabbed his belly, felt the gun.

  “I’ve got to get back now,” Roberto said. “Are you going to be all right?”

  Danny nodded. The motion made him dizzy. He saw Roberto reach for a phone. Security? The son of a bitch.

  Staggering, bent, groping past a poster for Kissing Fresh breath mints, he found the elevators.

  Hugh needed a haircut. Something—the sideburns, the back?—made his face rounder than she remembered. Was he slouching? He seemed shorter than before.

  Had it only been two days?

  He kissed her cheek, then gave her a full embrace. “Libbie, Libbie. I’ve missed you so much.”

  “I’ve missed you too.” It was true, but saying it drained more strength than she could spare. The drive over here had left her limp.

  St. Anne’s looked like a toy cathedral, one of those plastic buildings in a snow globe. Incense sweetened the sanctuary. Worn leather hymnals, curling candle smoke. Behind the altar, a gold cross, big enough to crucify an NFL linebacker. It reflected purple light from the stained-glass windows.

  “If nothing else, history teaches us the importance of rituals,” Hugh had told her when they’d first discussed their wedding plans. “I think public declarations of love and faith really do ensure decent private behavior.” She’d laughed at his seriousness, but she’d also been touched by his desire to announce their union in front of their friends. Still, each time she entered the church, she wondered what she’d gotten herself into.

  A boyish priest with black hair emerged from a creaky side door. “Are you Mr. Campbell?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m Father Grady. Father Caskin sends his apologies—he was called away at the last minute to deliver extreme unction to an elderly parishioner. Quite sad.”

  “Oh. Well, then …”

  “Father Caskin just wanted to confirm with the two of you your previous annulments, your faith in Our Lord, your commitment to the church and to each other, to the holy vows you’re about to make. I can sit with you in his place, if you like. I’d be honored to share in your joy, to help you with anything you need at this point.”

  Libbie flushed with shame. She didn’t know why.

  “I can see the love in your eyes for each other. Always wonderful to witness.”

  “Thank you,” she said. Her voice was flat, and she thought she might cry.

  “Is everything all right?” the priest asked.

  Libbie nodded. Hugh studied her face. “Yes. We’ll … be in touch with Father Caskin, then,” he said. “Sorry to trouble you.”

  “No bother. If there’s anything—”

  “No no, we’ll come back at a more convenient time,” Hugh said, and hurried her out to the parking lot. “Honey, are you okay?”

  “I’d like to go home for a while.”

  “Sure. Of course. I’ll follow you.”

  She nodded.

  In her van, Libbie rolled the windows down. A calming breeze, the sweet scents of azalea, m
agnolia, thyme. Mid-June. The city in its splendor. She mustn’t forget, mustn’t lose track of the life around her or of her own good life, despite the haze in the air. To the north, the First City Tower. A large parallelogram stippled with gray solar glass. Solid. Serene.

  In her rearview, she saw Hugh hunched above his dash, punching his radio buttons. How many times, when she was with him, had he played with those buttons when she’d wished he’d rest his palm on her thigh? By the time she turned the corner toward her house her eyes were moist. Was anything sadder than the body’s awareness of its growing impatience with a lover? Isn’t that’s what was happening? Days ago, as they sat together in her kitchen planning their wedding, Hugh’s annoying habits didn’t matter. His love of instant coffee. The bland oatmeal he insisted on eating for breakfast. Charming, then. Quirky. Oh, that’s just my Hugh. But now everything had changed. Anna Lia had wrecked it all. Libbie knew it wasn’t fair to expect Hugh to feel what she felt, to commiserate fully with Danny. These were her friends, not his. He barely knew them. Still, it wouldn’t go away—the sense that he’d failed her. Or was she using all this to cover her inadequacies?

  She pulled into her driveway. Hugh stopped by the curb and wrenched his parking brake, a screech that raked her nerves. Three days’ worth of newspapers lay on her porch. Her roses looked parched.

  “Next week, when I rent the U-Haul, it may be easier for me to pull around back, in the alley, and unload things there,” Hugh said. Early on, they’d agreed to live in her place after the wedding. Hugh didn’t have as much space as she did. Eventually, they’d buy a new house, but they wanted to take their time and shop around.

  Next week. The words had the force of an ultimatum. Things. Space. You haul. Her ribs felt brittle. The thought of a large truck in her alley—the awful purring of its gears—of boxes, Styrofoam peanuts, crumpled old newspapers …

  “I hadn’t thought about it before,” Hugh said. He was standing on her lawn, scanning the street. “My guess is all these postwar neighborhoods south of downtown were thrown together pretty quickly, to attract the returning G.I.s. They’re probably not up to current codes. I wonder if there’s asbestos in these walls.” For an instant he looked uncertain, as if next week frightened him too. “We should probably have it checked.”