Heathern Read Free Page A

the regular fork," he explained.
    "AO," said Jake, examining the tines of both. Something
returned to caress my leg. Slipping off his shoe so as not to
ruin my hose, Thatcher ran his foot along my calves,
appearing to his audience so expertly vacant that he might
have been running for office.
    "Anyone here might try and do the do," said Susie,
rescuing her olives, drying her hand by rubbing her short
hair, hoping perhaps to bleach the gray into platinum tones.
"Pop out of the crowd and bingo. You know that." Gus
frowned; in this season he wore his memories so poorly.
"What are you trying to prove?"

    "Not trying to prove nothing, darlin'. Just enjoying
myself while I can," he said, his foot writhing over my
knees. I froze, showing nothing to anyone. I dreamed of
assassinating him when he prodded my thighs with his
toes. "It's the edge that makes life worthwhile. Dancing
through the minefields of life. Like flying over the border at
night with all the lights off. Like dropping in on the
competition when they're not expecting company. Just
cause somebody lives straight doesn't mean they don't need
a rush now and then."
    "You're such a fool-"
    "Too damn paranoid, darlin', that's your problem," he
said, laughing. "My boys don't miss when they aim."
Clamping his lips onto her cheek as if to feed, he simultaneously thrust his foot between my legs until he could push it
no further; he wriggled his toes as if squeezing mud
between them. Choking, I dropped my glass; Jake caught it,
not spilling a drop. "What's the matter, hon?" Thatcher
asked, his eyes postcoital as he drew back his foot.
    "Went down the wrong way," I said, pressing my legs
together, feeling to have given birth to something unwanted. "I'm all right."
    Susie stared at me, anxious to convict, keen to execute, no
more sympathetic than any judge; my innocence was no
less real than any defendant's. "Paranoid," she repeated.
"You're the one with the lock on every lid. Always claiming
you'll spoon it out next Christmas-"
    "I've helped you grasp the intangibles of the situation,"
he said.
    "Imagine what I could do with whatever's in your files."
He nodded, saying nothing. "You're so good keeping
secrets when you want to. This thing you're sending her off
on tomorrow. What is it you want her to look for? What's
she going to find? You act like you think you're really onto
something."

    "Maybe." A feigned guilelessness came naturally to him.
"Let's not talk business after work, darlin'-"
    "No better time to talk it," she said. "What's this creep
got that you want?"
    He looked toward the ceiling as he spoke, seeming to
visualize something he didn't yet own. "Somebody drops
by your house on their way someplace else," he said, "and
they go to the bathroom while they're there, and stop up the
pipes shittin' gold, you're not going to call a plumber."
    She had no response to his homily. Susie had known him
from before the beginning, when he and his brother owned
nothing but a plane and a field in the Colombian highlands.
He admitted to me once that her business acumen brought
them to where they were, but only because he had, as he
put it, such blind fool timing. I can't imagine she'd ever
gotten used to him.
    "If there's something you're not telling me, I wish you
would," I said, doubting that I would be heard, much less
answered. "What've you got me walking into?"
    His smile resembled an old incision, a caesarean scar. "If
I knew for sure I'd tell you, but I don't. Just take a look and
let me know." He raised his glass. "A toast."
    "To what?" Susie asked, lifting hers; a waiter refilled it.
    "Everything," he said, a whisper to his mother.
    Jake held my jacket for me when we rose to leave; I smiled
at him, and he grinned in return, his face full of blessings.
Gus led us, Jake tailed us; the crowd parted for our
movement as if for a clump of bellringing lepers. Everyone
in the place must have worked for Dryco, directly or