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Creek and Louis had dropped her at the corner of Dell and Li
'Sorry about the Witch,' Louis said. The Witch would be calling her. A
That's okay,' A
'Guy jumped off a building,' A
'Nasty.' He smiled, though, as he shook his head, and said, 'I'll watch for it,' and padded back inside.
A
She did, five minutes after A
'Screw us on this, we'll never use your stuff again.' The Witch opened as she usually did, with a direct threat.
'We can live with that,' A
'Courtesy my large white Lithuanian butt,' the Witch snapped. A
'You take a bigger hit than we do,' A
'You're not thatgood.'
'Yeah, we are: we're the best crew on the street. And your career life at Three is what? Four or five years? And you've been there three? You'll be gone in a year or two, and we'll sell to your replacement. And we'll make our point: You don't steal from us. Even if it's swimming cats.'
'I apologized for that,' the Witch shrilled.
'What?' A
'So I'm sorry now,' the Witch shouted back. 'Name the price.'
'Network price,' A
'Fuck that,' the Witch said. 'Network for the package, okay, but the cats we did, we did with our own crew.'
'C'mon, c'mon,' A
'So'm I. Five hundred for the cats.'
'I'm serious, we don't need you. Network plus a thousand for the cats.'
'Deal,' the Witch said. 'I want to see the fuckin' pictures in ten fuckin' minutes.' She slammed down the receiver.
A
'How much you get?'
'Four thousandI got a thousand for the cats.'
Louis said, 'Examonte, dude,' and repeated the price to Creek, whose laughter filled the background. A
Creek shouted at the phone, 'We might as well quit, we'll never do this again.'
'How're the radios, Louis?' A
'Good. Nothing happening.'
'Call me.'
A
Waiting for bed, A
She didn't sit downher head wasn't quite right yet. She put the music on the piano, said hello to a couple of plants, enjoyed the quiet. Went into the utility room and got a plastic watering can and filled it.
Barefoot, humming to herselfsomething stupid from Les Mis‚rablesthat she couldn't get out of her mindA
Back inside, she refilled the can and walked through the house, checking with two fingers the soil in a hundred more plants: some of them were named after movie stars or singers, like Paul, Robert, Faye, Susan, Julia, Jack. Most were small, from a desert somewhere.
On a broken-down Salvation Army table, the first piece of furniture she'd bought in California, she kept a piece of Wisconsin: a clump of birdsfoot violets, dug from the banks of the Whitewater River, and a flat of lilies-of-the-valley. Just now, the lilies-of-the-valley were blooming, their tiny white bell flowers producing a delicate perfume that reminded her of the smell of dooryard lilacs in the Midwestern spring.
Behind the California tan, A
The farm was part of her toughness: She had a farm kid's lack of fear when it came to physical confrontation. She'd even been in a couple of fights, in her twenties, in the good old days of music school and late-night prowls down Sunset. As she climbed into her thirties, the adrenaline charge diminished, though her reputation hadn't: The big guys still waved to her from the muscle pen on the beach, and told people, 'You don't fuck with A
The toughness extended to the psychological. Farm kids knew how the world worked, right from the start. She'd taken the fuzzy-coated big-eyed lambs to the locker, and brought them back in little white packages.
That's the way it was.
A
'A
'All done?'
'Yeah, but I was talking to a guy at Seventeen about the animal rescue tape. I don't know what they did, but it sounds a little weird.'
'Like how, weird?' A
'Like they're making some kind of cartoon out of it.'
'What?' She was a
'He said they'll be ru
A
She went back to the piano and worked on the Liszt until five o'clock in the morning, then pointed the remote at the TV and punched in seventeen. A carefully-coiffed blonde, dressed like it was midafternoon on Rodeo, looked out and said, 'If you have any small children watching this show, the film we are about to show you.'
And there was the jumper, up on the wall like a fly.
A