Nightmare Ballad Read online

  “But how did you…it just happened today,” Luke repeated Maribel’s statement.

  The man’s voice got louder, “We’re certainly glad you’re all right Mr. Rhodes and let us know if you need any medical attention. There are post-traumatic stress groups that meet at the community center every Wednesday. Do you want me to send an email with the information?”

  “We don’t understand,” Maribel insisted. “Something very bizarre happened at the pool today. Why are you being so…tolerant of this?”

  “Oh, yes, well, it isn’t so bizarre,” answered Reese. “You see, there were frogmen in the pool, and in circumstances like this, that’s what they do. Right? Not much we can change about that. Yeah?”

  It did make sense to Dara, actually, and as she searched Luke and Maribel’s faces, she discovered that it also made sense to them. That’s what frogmen do. Even the reporters on the TV had moved on to basketball scores. This event wasn’t a big deal at all. What else could you expect from frogmen?

  “Is there anything else I can help you with?” The detective’s voice sounded bland.

  Dara felt bad about Petunia. Losing both parents at once…. She unfortunately knew how that was. “What will happen to Petunia now?”

  “Like the other children, she’s with family, from what I understand. Otherwise, I’m not part of that proceeding.”

  Luke nodded. Some life flooded back into his face.

  “Thank you, Detective Reese,” said Maribel.

  “Call me if you have any further questions.”

  “We will. Thanks again.”

  Ten minutes of silence passed. It was uncomfortable silence. Dara thought of the song in her head. She wanted desperately to put it together, so she could recall the tune.

  “Did we all just space out at the same time?” Maribel blurted out suddenly.

  They all shared a laugh.

  Another cell phone rang.

  Luke’s.

  He’d left it on the mantle over the fire place. Dara began to get up, but Maribel touched her arm and nimbly pushed off the couch. She hurried to the phone and answered it. “Hi, Blake, yes, he’s here. Oh yes, he’s okay. He can talk. Here.”

  Luke nodded thanks and accepted the phone. “Hey, man. How are things?”

  He leaned forward and pushed some ice off the top of his toes. “Yeah, I’ll be there tomorrow. No, it’s no problem…what? Well what is the status? Come on Blake, you can’t put that out there and then expect me not to ask.”

  Slowly, Luke leaned his face into the fist that held the cell phone. “So the Los Angeles project is gone then, too?”

  Dara and Maribel exchanged anxious looks. Luke’s main project was water remediation with Los Angeles County. Some of the funds had been “mismanaged” at the top of the corporation, but it seemed like Luke had received all the blame for it. He had reassured them it would all work itself out, but the plowed-over expression on his face now told another tale.

  “Well thanks for calling. Yeah, thanks, it was pretty unreal. Never seen frogmen before.” He chuckled uneasily. “All right, buddy. Good bye.”

  He pushed the end button and tossed the phone on the coffee table so hard it skated off the glass and went over the other side.

  “Bad?” asked Dara.

  Luke sniffed and looked down at his buried feet for a moment. “I’d say that of the two of us, you are the more likely to be working for GeoGreen next month. I might have trouble finding engineering work anywhere locally after this.”

  “No way.” Maribel shook her head. “We won’t let them tarnish you like that. It isn’t fair. You work so hard for them.”

  “They don’t care about that,” Luke said. “The people at the top know a sacrificial lamb when they see one, and they want to keep their jobs. It’s an easy call as far as they’re concerned.”

  “It won’t be an easy call,” Maribel promised. Dara forced a smile.

  Luke patted their legs. “Let’s be calm for now. I’m going to take a bath and relax a bit.”

  “Your feet up for that?”

  He pulled them out of the ice. The skin was bright red from the cold. “I forgot about that,” he admitted. “Probably not a great idea. Do we have any poison?”

  “You two drank all the Tequila on the Fourth of July,” Maribel said pointedly.

  “Want me to go buy something?” Dara asked.

  “No, no. You have to study for your interview. I’ll give Johnny a call. I have to not think about this stuff for a while, and it’s easy to forget just about anything when he’s around.”

  “Just don’t bring him over here.” Dara folded her arms. The last person she wanted to see right now was Johnny Cruz.

  “I know, I know.” Luke got up, slightly wincing.

  Maribel clapped her hands, as she always did when a plan was made. “You have your boy time, then. Dara and I are making spinach bake.”

  “Bleh.” Luke opened the bathroom door in the hall.

  “Sound good?” Maribel asked Dara.

  She smiled faintly and nodded. She did love the spinach casserole under normal circumstances, but her stomach still churned from the events of today, not to mention the butterflies for tomorrow. Maribel pinched her skin below her ribcage. “You know you want some.”

  “Don’t,” Dara cautioned. For some reason she couldn’t get Maribel or Luke to buy into the fact that she hated to be tickled.

  “So sensitive!” Maribel tittered and headed for the kitchen.

  “Hey, you okay with all the stuff I told you about Stobecker?” Luke stood in the darkness of the bathroom, his hands bracing him in the doorframe.

  “Hope so,” said Dara. “He hates you, so I might be tainted.”

  “He doesn’t hate me. He’s just very Christ-y. But there are two very nice atheists on the panel. They probably aren’t going to go to bat for me with this Los Angeles deal, but that’s neither here nor there.”

  Dara didn’t want to address this new development. Luke couldn’t lose his job. They didn’t have the right to take it from him. “Are these other folks as conservative as Stobecker?”

  Luke paused. “I don’t know their politics, Dee.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “Just try not to mention Maribel.”

  “You said the rumor’s already going around.”

  “Yes, so don’t add gasoline to the fire. Just concentrate on your business. They should concentrate on theirs.”

  “I don’t have to go, if it bugs you.”

  “If you want a job there, then I want you to have a job there.”

  She sighed. “Go take a leak.”

  “Your wish is my command.” Luke shut the door. She could hear the toilet lid flip up.

  Dara hummed part of the song from her dream last night. She had the interlude right, but couldn’t quite get the next part worked out.

  The bathroom door swung open. Luke stood there, pants unzipped, backlit by the bathroom’s florescence. “What was that? What were you humming?”

  Dara almost blurted out where she’d thought the song came from, but she didn’t want him to think her foolish. “Nothing…just something on my mind. I don’t know where it’s from.”

  “Huh,” he said.

  Maribel shut the refrigerator firmly. “Sounds like something from one of my dreams.”

  Dara turned to Luke, wondering if he’d say the same. But he said nothing.

  He shut the bathroom door, looking disturbed.

  Chapter 4

  Johnny just couldn’t feel sorry for Mouse.

  It was a tough break, what happened to him and his wife at the pool, but the man had been a lazy-sack-of-shit vampire who sucked the city of every drop he could. Dead or not, you couldn’t mince issues here. Workers like Mouse made it harder for everybody to get their jobs done. He showed up late, took long lunches, napped behind abandoned tanks, yapped all day long with the secretaries down at City Hall, on and on; he was a dingleberry of the first caliber.

&nb
sp; But he was the city’s favorite dingleberry, it seemed. Mouse and Johnny had the same grade of mechanic certification, but the city handed him the Lead Mechanic title last year, which carried a significant raise, not to mention an ego blowjob for someone who didn’t deserve one. Never to go silently into that fucked-up night, Johnny bitched high and low about Mouse’s piss-poor performance maintaining the plant, his abuse of sick time and floating holidays; and—to show he wasn’t just a jealous jerk—Johnny pointed to data to support this. Nobody wanted to listen, though. Minds were made up. Eyes and ears and assholes were shut tightly.

  Johnny then made a few not-so-veiled threats about quitting and leaving everybody in the lurch (they needed him so bad it was pathetic— with him gone just two days, all of Redwood Boulevard would be under three feet of sewage), but even with the threat of overflowing sewers, still nobody considered his candidacy. Somehow, the superintendent of Water and Wastewater was more impressed with all the overtime Mouse put in. This supposed overtime really amounted to Mouse abusing union rules. The man checked a sewage lift station on his way home from work every day, a ten-minute job, and since this was considered off-the-clock, he logged the time as a call-out and granted himself the union-sanctioned three hours overtime. To Johnny Cruz, this amounted to stealing, but to those schmucks standing before him in the operations room, it amounted to a dedicated employee.

  So why was Johnny so surprised? It shouldn’t have come as a shock that with Mouse now gone, these dunces would not only pass the Lead mechanic job to someone else, but to a guy with less experience and a lower certification.

  “Grover Franklin? I trained that fucking guy. He doesn’t even have five years under his belt!”

  From the break room, Grover shuffled in, a tanner, slightly more muscular version of Jim Carrey in an orange city shirt and black Dickies. He was a hard worker and a good kid, but Johnny hadn’t decided yet if it wasn’t all just kissing asses.

  Grover took off his sweaty LA Angel’s cap; his hair was an oily dark mess. “Hey, I don’t want to interrupt here, but maybe Johnny is right,” he said with a shrug.

  “Well done, candy-ass, but they aren’t going to change their minds and you know it. You’ve made yourself look good without losing anything.”

  “Come on, Johnny,” he mumbled, face flushing.

  “Meanwhile, I’ve been faithful to this city my entire adult life, and now it’s turning its back on me. Mouse was a fucking idiot, and now you’re replacing him with a rube!”

  The superintendent, Fabian Rove, a short, bald, dodgy-looking guy in a button-up baby-blue shirt and maroon tie, just about took a step back. He was courageous, though, in his Superman colors, and locked eyes with Johnny. “Let’s calm down here, Alberto. I know you lost a friend today. I appreciate that.”

  “My name’s Johnny.”

  “Okay, Johnny.”

  Johnny whipped around to the silent man in the corner of the dim trailer. “You’re not really endorsing this, are you Jack?”

  The plant manager, Jack Portiere, head and shoulder above all three other men, idly brushed his calloused thumb against the canary cage hanging in the office, making an irritating noise that reminded Johnny of a song he’d once heard. The plant’s mascot, Shit Bird, a brown-and-black finch, cycled around, making a racket but also adding to the song. Johnny tried to recall it for a moment and then refocused his thoughts.

  “Grover isn’t ready,” Johnny said. “He’s just hardly a grade two.”

  “I aced it, though. I’ll be able to go for the three in no time,” Grover pointed out.

  “He pulls a lot of overtime,” Jack said, in the weary monotone of a man about to retire. “Puts in the extra hours. We need that dedication.”

  Johnny smacked his own face, hard. “Oh my damn god. Have you even asked what the overtime is about? Does common sense mean nothing to you people?”

  “I don’t want to take sides,” Jack replied, shrugging his thin shoulders. He didn’t even look at Johnny and instead studied Shit Bird again.

  “There won’t be any new hires. You’ll have to use what you have,” said Rove. He folded his arms, sweat ovals running from his underarms down his sky-blue shirt, maroon tie soaked in his own brine.

  “Okay. It’ll get done,” said Jack. “We’ll make it work. Johnny can show Grover the new lift stations on Cedar and how to maintain surcharges on Redwood.”

  Johnny’s mouth dropped. He was furious at himself for being so shocked. Jack Portiere had less of a spine than Mouse Stedding had a work ethic. He was actually the other extreme—the guy required his head buried in an engine or pump at all times, and human conflict, moments like these, he avoided at all costs. Johnny never could understand how such a jellyfish had become manager of an entire sewer-treatment plant for a large city.

  “You’re both fucked in the head if you think I’m training Grover for a job that should be mine.”

  “Hey!” Rove pointed a thick little finger at him. “You’re getting a lot of chances to vent here. Remember what I said before. There’s no need to be uncivil. We can get through this without being rude.”

  “I’m not being rude. You’re just not important enough for civility.”

  Rove stepped right in front of him. The guy had to look up at Johnny, who nearly busted up laughing at the intense pale face and beady hazel eyes. “I think you should leave now,” said Rove.

  It was a trial of temptation not to slam his forehead into Rove’s stupid face. “Tell you what, get your ass away from me before I choke you off.”

  “How about I terminate you instead?”

  “You gonna let him do that to me, Jack? After I showed up on every flippin’ rainy day this city’s ever had?”

  Jack gave him a glance as though to say hey, come on, don’t drag me into this.

  “I don’t need his approval, just his statement for the record,” Rove fired back. “I’m not afraid of you, if you hadn’t noticed.”

  Johnny balled his fists and exhaled through his teeth. The lenses of his eyeglasses had fogged a little. He wasn’t stopping to wipe them. It was on now.

  “You still have a chance to stop this fit of yours and go home.” Rove took a step back, not so macho after all. “I will take into account what happened today to Ralph. Just go home and reflect a little. You a family man, Alberto?”

  It was all over. What the hell right did he have in asking that? In just a moment’s time fate had changed everything. Johnny lunged forward, caught Rove by his sickeningly wet shirt and threw him into Jack’s desk. Rove went backwards, ass-over-elbows, and struck the stem of the canary cage. The cage went sideways and wacked Jack Portiere hard in the face. He was jumping out of the way as it happened, and the blow sent him staggering into another desk overflowing in paperwork. The cage door popped open. A black-brown bullet zipped out and headed toward the engine room, tweeting merrily.

  Johnny stormed down that same hall, not even looking back at the calamity he’d caused, trying not to feel anything more about the shouts and challenges coming his way, because with all his strength he could easily cripple any of these men. He came to the exit for the pump room and kicked the door open. As he went outside, the finch flew past like an apparition loosed on the world.

  Freedom, Shit Bird. It’s called freedom. We’re both flying out tonight.

  Johnny got on his Hog and pulled a cigarillo from a pocket in his cargo shorts. The tip was a bit scrunched, but it would do. He lit it. Puffing away, he started his bike and blew down the side road along the plant’s sludge beds. As he got to the end and stopped at the street to wait for some cars, everything surged inside him.

  “Son of a fucking fuck!” he yelled. His cigarillo fell out of his mouth. “Fuck,” he added in a whisper.

  If they canned him over this…they’d be sorry. That’s all he knew at this point.

  The drive back home normally took about fifteen minutes, but with all that was running through his mind, it didn’t feel like more than five. He listen
ed to Cannibal Corpse the entire way; the death metal band hadn’t even seemed to get warmed up when he pulled into his driveway. Johnny decided he’d put them on in the garage and do some fab work tonight.

  His garage door hadn’t even opened all the way when a car pulled up behind him. The sun was setting, but he recognized the Chevy Volt and his friend behind the wheel. Luke slid out of the car with a black plastic bag from the liquor store. Bottles clanked inside.

  “Holy shit,” Johnny muttered. “You’re a sight for sore eyes. I must be turning gay.”

  “Thanks?”

  “It’s just that I didn’t think I’d see you again for a while.”

  “Happy?”

  “What’d you bring me?”

  “Corona.”

  “Good man. The shop fridge has room.”

  Luke nodded and headed up the grease-streaked driveway. “You just get home?”

  “They called a meeting about Mouse. He had one of those positions that had to be filled right away with an interim.”

  “How’d that go?”

  Johnny sighed. “I don’t know, man. I think I’m gonna quit that job.”

  Luke tilted his head. “And do what?”

  “Who the fuck knows? Maybe I’ll be an engineer. I can spend Sundays barbequing my feet in front of strange houses.”

  “Be nice.”

  “Yeah, okay, weirdo. I don’t know what the hell I can do. There’s not enough money to start my own metalwork shop. But I don’t mind taking a government check for nothing, rather than actual work.”

  Luke bent down before the little fridge, opened it, put the six pack inside, less two bottles. He used the opener on the wall, careful to collect the caps and set them on the drying machine. Johnny took the beer he was offered and drank half of it in one tug. “Thanks for coming over man…I mean it.”

  Luke brought up his bottle. “My pleasure. Neither of my wives wants you in our home, so it’s always my pleasure.”

  Johnny smiled. He couldn’t help it. In that moment, he was so damned grateful. He might not have a wife and son anymore, but this he still had. Friendship. Tonight would have been about drinking alone, beating off to porn, maybe a little welding if he got ambitious, but honestly probably not. Instead, his best friend was here. He was lucky to have Luke. And Johnny would do anything for him. Hell, he’d do anything for Dara and Maribel, too, just because he believed Luke really loved them as much as he said.