his face in the place. That was a lie on her part, but I doubt there was ever a dinner party in this history of the world where a few lies weren’t told. So it went off all right, at least until I was driving him home. L.T. started to talk about how it would be a year Lulubelle had been gone in just another week or so, their fourth anniversary, which is flowers if you’re old-fashioned and electrical appliances if you’re newfangled. Then he said as how Lulubelle’s mother – at whose house Lulubelle had never shown up – was going to put up a marker with Lulubelle’s name on it at the local cemetery. “Mrs.
Simms says we have to consider her as one dead,” L.T. said, and then he began to bawl. I was so shocked I nearly ran off the goddam road.
He cried so hard that when I was done being shocked, I began to be afraid all that pent-up grief might kill him with a stroke or a burst blood vessel or something. He rocked back and forth in the seat and slammed his open hands down on the dashboard. It was like there was a twister loose inside him. Finally I pulled over to the side of the road and began patting his shoulder. I could feel the heat of his skin right through his shirt, so hot it was baking.
“Come on, L.T.,” I said. “That’s enough.”
“I just miss her,” he said in a voice so thick with tears I could barely understand what he was saying. “Just so goddam much. I come home and there’s no one but the cat, crying and crying, and pretty soon I’m crying, too, both of us crying while I fill up her dish with that goddam muck she eats.”
He turned his flushed, streaming face full on me. Looking back into it was almost more than I could take, but I did take it; felt I had to take it. Who had gotten him telling the story about Lucy and Frank and the note on the refrigerator that night, after all? It hadn’t been Mike Wallace, or Dan Rather, that was for sure. So I looked back at him. I didn’t quite dare hug him, in case that twister should somehow jump from him to me, but I kept patting his arm.
“I think she’s alive somewhere, that’s what I think,” he said. His voice was still thick and wavery, but there was a kind of pitiful weak defiance in it as well. He wasn’t telling me what he believed, but what he wished he could believe. I’m pretty sure of that.
“Well,” I said, “you can believe that. No law against it, is there?
And it isn’t as if they found her body, or anything.”
“I like to think of her out there in Nevada singing in some little casino hotel,” he said. “Not in Vegas or Reno, she couldn’t make it in one of the big towns, but in Winnemucca or Ely I’m pretty sure she could get by. Some place like that. She just saw a Singer Wanted sign and give up her idea of going home to her mother.
Hell, the two of them never got on worth a shit anyway, that’s what Lu used to say. And she could sing, you know. I don’t know if you ever heard her, but she could. I don’t guess she was great, but she was good. The first time I saw her, she was singing in the lounge of the Marriott Hotel. In Columbus, Ohio, that was. Or, another possibility…”
He hesitated, then went on in a lower voice.
“Prostitution is legal out there in Nevada, you know. Not in all the counties, but in most of them. She could be working one of them Green Lantern trailers or the Mustang Ranch. Lots of women have got a streak of whore in them. Lu had one. I don’t mean she stepped around on me, or slept around on me, so I can’t say how I know, but I do. She … yes, she could be in one of those places.”
He stopped, eyes distant, maybe imagining Lulubelle on a bed in the back room of a Nevada trailer whorehouse, Lulubelle wearing nothing but stockings, washing off some unknown cowboy’s stiff cock while from the other room came the sound of Steve Earle and the Dukes singing “Six Days on the Road” or a TV playing Hollywood Squares. Lulubelle whoring but not dead, the car by the side of the road – the little Subaru she had brought to the marriage –
meaning nothing. The way an animal’s look, so seemingly attentive, usually means nothing.
“I can believe that if I want,” he said, swiping his swollen eyes with insides of his wrists.
“Sure,” I said. “You bet, L.T.” Wondering what the grinning men who listened to his story while they ate their lunches would make of this L.T., this shaking man with his pale cheeks and red eyes and hot skin.
“Hell,” he said, I do believe that.” He hesitated, then said it again:
“I do believe that.”
When I got back, Roslyn was in bed with a book in her hand and the covers pulled up to her breasts. Holly had gone home while I was driving L.T. back to his house. Roslyn was in a bad mood, and I found out why soon enough. The woman behind the Mona Lisa smile had been quite taken with my friend. Smitten by him, maybe.
And my wife most definitely did not approve.
“How did he lose his license?” she asked, and before I could answer: “Drinking, wasn’t it?”
“Drinking, yes. OUM’ I sat down on my side of the bed and slipped off my shoes. “But that was nearly six months ago, and if he keeps his nose clean another two months, he gets it back. I think he will. He goes to AA, you know.”
My wife grunted, clearly not impressed. I took off my shirt, sniffed the armpits, hung it back in the closet. I’d only worn it an hour or two, just for dinner.
“You know,” my wife said, I think it’s a wonder the police didn’t look a little more closely at him after his wife disappeared.”
“They asked him some questions,” I said, “but only to get as much information as they could. There was never any question of him doing it, Ros. They were never suspicious of him.”
“Oh, you’re so sure.”
“As a matter of fact, I am. I know some stuff. Lulubelle called her mother from a hotel in eastern Colorado the day she left, and called her again from Salt Lake City the next day. She was fine then.
Those were both weekdays, and L.T. was at the plant. He was at the plant the day they found her car parked off that ranch road near Caliente as well. Unless he can magically transport himself from place to place in the blink of an eye, he didn’t kill her. Besides, he wouldn’t. He loved her.”
She grunted. It’s this hateful sound of skepticism she makes sometimes. After almost thirty years of marriage, that sound still makes me want to turn on her and yell at her to stop it, to shit or get off the pot, either say what she means or keep quiet. This time I thought about telling her how L.T. had cried; how it had been like there was a cyclone inside of him, tearing loose everything that wasn’t nailed down. I thought about it, but I didn’t. Women don’t trust tears from men. They may say different, but down deep they don’t trust tears from men.
“Maybe you ought to call the police yourself,” I said. “Offer them a little of your expert help. Point out the stuff they missed, just like Angela Lansbury on Murder, She Wrote”
I swung my legs into bed. She turned off the light. We lay there in darkness. When she spoke again, her tone was gentler.
“I don’t like him. That’s all. I don’t, and I never have.”
“Yeah,” I said. I guess that’s clear.”
“And I didn’t like the way he looked at Holly.”
Which meant, as I found out eventually, that she hadn’t liked the way Holly looked at him. When she wasn’t looking down at her plate, that is.
“I’d prefer you didn’t ask him back to dinner,” she said.
I kept quiet. It was late. I was tired. It had been a hard day, a harder evening, and I was tired. The last thing I wanted was to have an argument with my wife when I was tired and she was worried.
That’s the sort of argument where one of you ends up spending the night on the couch. And the only way to stop an argument like that is to be quiet. In a marriage, words are like rain. And the land of a marriage is filled with dry washes and arroyos that can become raging rivers in almost the wink of an eye. The therapists believe in talk, but most of them are either divorced or queer. It’s silence that is a marriage’s best friend.