Business

by J. P. Meyboom

  She poured us each a generous shot in small crystal glasses.

  “To the Dutch in Old Amsterdam and the folks in Siam,” said Akinwole. “To love.”

  We raised and drained our glasses.

  “I’m glad you could stay,” Shirley Rose said and poured again. “I’m not sure I’d have made it through the rest of this day alone.”

  “We’re sorry we came with bad news,” I said. “He was one of a kind. He’ll be missed.”

  “And I am so sorry your boy will now be without his father,” Akinwole said. “A boy needs a father. I wish there was something we could do.”

  “Theo will be fine,” she said. “His father passed away when he was young. He’ll find a way through this.”

  Akinwole glanced at me for help to soothe the tears that brimmed up once more. Shirley Rose smiled through her tears.

  “Oh no, I see,” she said. “It’s not like that. Theo’s father died years ago. He was a cop. Killed in a gang shootout. Theo never knew him. Albert was a family friend to him. Uncle Albert.”

  “We assumed,” I said. Mixed kid. Single mom. Crazy Hornsmith.

  “Yes, you would,” she said.

  The kid not being Hornsmith’s changed everything. I could’ve kept the money. Instead, I’d connected the dots incorrectly. Seen the wrong picture. Drawn the wrong conclusion. And then I realized I was an idiot for thinking, even for a moment, that I should’ve done it differently. I wanted to apologize without being sure to whom or for what.

  “You had some hard breaks, sister,” Akinwole said, his voice soft, almost inaudible. “Third time lucky. I wish for you.” He raised his glass. “Love. For all of us.”

  Lovers, mournful together. We drank. Circled. Reminisced. Now no longer alone. Released. We toasted Hornsmith with sambuca one last time. By the time I lay down on the couch, Akinwole was snoring in the armchair next to me. In my leaden eyes, the room spun overhead. I saw Shirley Rose spread a blanket over Akinwole and peck him on the cheek while he slept. That could’ve been part of my dream.

  NINETEEN

  The Crossing

  DETROIT TO LOS ANGELES is a three-day drive if you put your back into it and your car is sound. The twins’ threats were enough motivation to get it finished. To get away from these people. Get them out of my life. Get to the ocean. Start something new, something to call my own.

  After an oil change in Lansing, Michigan, we committed the Firebird to charge at speed across Iowa and Nebraska into Colorado, Utah, and beyond. What the pioneers had done in months, or sometimes years, we were attempting to undertake in a matter of gas stops, along an almost-straight line of four-lane freeways southwest across the Great Plains, through fields of wheat and corn over the western mountains to the Pacific Ocean and the City of Angels. Endless miles past tractor-trailers, road gangs, and Denny’s restaurants. Anonymous service stations and nameless towns came up over the hood and vanished in the rear-view mirrors. It was a tedious business and why most people fly to California.

  The morning we left Detroit, Akinwole lay prostrate on the flattened passenger seat. With every bump in the road, he moaned. One arm hooked over his eyes. The other held his stomach. His big lips kissed the air with each groan. Sambuca wasn’t his drink.

  The day warmed up enough to take the top down. The open air helped. By noon, Akinwole was upright with a bottle of Gatorade. Cheap gas station sunglasses shielded his eyes.

  “We should have stopped in Chicago,” were his first words of the day. “The Windy City. Home of the blues.”

  “We’re on a schedule,” I said.

  He gulped some Gatorade and said, “This country has so much to offer. I must see some of it. What about Kansas City and the crazy little women?”

  “Can’t,” I said. “It’s not on the route.”

  “Well, it could be.” He unfolded the map. “If we travelled farther south. Stayed away from places where nothing has ever happened. Like Des Moines and Lincoln, Nebraska. Have you never wanted to go to Kansas City? See what all the fuss is about?”

  “There’s no fuss, Akinwole,” I said.

  “You are wrong,” he said, “Walt Disney opened his first studio there. Charlie Parker was born there. Ernest Hemingway lived there.”

  “Ernest Hemingway lived everywhere.”

  “That interests me.”

  Akinwole sighed.

  “If we stray,” I said, “those crazy twins will let a killer off his leash to hunt us down. Hunt me down. Do you have any idea who?”

  Akinwole removed the sunglasses, rubbed his brow, and made like he wanted to say something. I didn’t care to hear it. He had no idea who these people were.

  “It’ll be someone like that psycho I saw in Kirkland Lake,” I said. “A knife-wielding, coke-snorting, hot-rod-driving, tattoo-covered, stone-cold killer.”

  “So what?” Akinwole said. “We can leave the car in a parking garage. They will send their man to retrieve it. Who cares? We hop a Greyhound. Get lost in America. By the time they find the car we could be anywhere.”

  “You’re a bad influence,” I said. “You’re going to get us killed.”

  “I crave an adventure,” Akinwole said. “Life has been tedious for a long time.”

  Akinwole sulked. Akinwole wanted to live the Dream. Get his piece of the pie. Not that there was much left, by the look of it. The heartland of America was cored. A straight, empty passage lined with soulless industrial parks and utilitarian, boxy buildings that peddled plastic lawn furniture and gallon jugs of Coca-Cola to people whose idea of extravagance was to run their pickup truck through a car wash. People united under God by honky-tonk, baseball, cornflakes, guns, and cars. People who willingly give up their sons and daughters to be killed in places they can’t pronounce for reasons they don’t understand.

  “I have something to tell you,” Akinwole said after a while, his hand outside the window in the rushing air. “I have no wives or children waiting for me in Kinshasa or anywhere else. I made them up. I have no one to live for. After I graduated from the London School of Economics, I ran away from my adopted family in search of my African soul. I am alone.”

  I stared down the road in the grips of a trance. The straightness of the highway made it hard to stay awake. At eighty miles an hour, I was well velocitized, immune to the landscape streaking past. It took a moment to digest what he was saying.

  I said, “And what did you find?”

  “Malaria.”

  “Malaria? Mosquitoes and swamps?”

  “Yes.”

  “Isn’t gin and tonic good against that?”

  “No. It turns out nothing is.”

  “So, no wives? No kids? No happy, poor life under the African sun left behind to find work across the sea? No self-sacrifice? No sending money home?”

  “No,” he said. “The immigration woman who processed me misunderstood my situation. I had some photos of my cousin’s kids in my wallet. She concluded they were mine. She was supportive of my coming here to find work for my family. I didn’t contradict her so as to avoid being denied. I let it be.”

  “What about your parents? The adoption part’s true, right?”

  “Yes. My birth parents are still in Nairobi. My father was a minor government clerk with no connections. My mother used to wait on the porch of their shack for him to come home after work. Sometimes he came home late. Sometimes not at all. They might still be like that. I have no idea. We never communicate.”

  “And your English family?”

  “Thinks I died.”

  “From malaria.”

  He nodded. His confession was unexpected. At the same time, his story didn’t surprise me. He’d never seemed like a family guy. For one thing, someone with that many kids would’ve talked about them more. Kept some photos around. This reframed image of Akinwole suited him better: another lost soul without a plan.

  “So, what will you do when we get to Los Angeles?” I said.

  “I am unsure,” he said. “Like car lig
hts at night, I can see twenty feet out. More is a lot to ask.”

  The afternoon wore on. We drove due west directly into the sun. Akinwole wore his sunglasses, while I squinted to keep sight of the road. In the glare, I didn’t notice the pothole, so we hit it hard. Afterward, the car handled differently. The steering wheel vibrated in a new way. The Firebird pulled to the right. Akinwole leaned over the side for a look.

  “We have a flat tire,” he said when he was safely back in the car. “I hope we have a spare. We are far from anywhere now.”

  Indeed, when I brought the Firebird to the side of the highway, there wasn’t a building in any direction. There were no cars on the road. There were no trees in the fields. There were no contours in the landscape. There was only an ocean of flat, endless, shadowy land with a sunny riot of orange and red dripping behind the horizon.

  Akinwole knew his way around a jack and a tire iron. By the time I found a flashlight in the glove compartment, he’d popped the trunk, tossed the spare tire by the side of the road, jacked up the front of the car, and was busy with the lug nuts. I pointed the flashlight at the wheel.

  “You’re a one-man pit crew.”

  “Sometimes in the Congo,” he said, “we changed tires two or three times a week. The roads were more like bush paths, with treacherous craters as deep as a man.”

  He pulled the flat tire off, and in one fluid motion, heaved the spare into its place.

  “What were you doing there? Besides looking for your African soul and getting malaria?”

  He twirled the tire iron in his hands like a baton.

  “I went for diamonds. It was supposed to be simple. You dive them out of a river, you stick them in a sack, and you take them home.”

  Akinwole laughed to himself while he tightened the nuts.

  He said, “I underestimated how hard everything could be.”

  “How long did you last?”

  “Three years,” he said. “I lasted three years. One year in the bush, on and off. And two years a prisoner.”

  “A prisoner?”

  “Yes. When I got malaria, I started back to Kinshasa. It was a week’s journey by river barge. I stayed with a Portuguese pineapple mogul the night I came out of the bush, looking for a ride downriver. He supplied pineapples to all of Portugal. He had his own label.”

  Akinwole shook the new tire. Satisfied, he worked the jack to lower the Firebird onto the asphalt.

  “When the Pineapple King learned I had studied economics in London, he wanted me to stay. He needed an accountant. There were kids with AK-47s guarding the place. They were under orders to keep me. At night they locked my bedroom door from the outside.”

  He finished with the jack. The car was ready to roll.

  “So, what happened?” I said, light still in hand.

  “At first, I was bedridden. Later, once the malaria burned off, I started to co-operate because I feared for my life, and for two years I did the plantation’s bookkeeping.”

  “And then you tunnelled out?”

  “There were two Belgian nuns who came for lunch every Sunday after church. Eventually, we started exchanging notes through some of the staff, who felt sorry for me. When the nuns learned of my situation, they improvised a plan for my escape.”

  By now, the jack was folded back into its assigned spot. He flipped the flat tire in and had almost closed the trunk when something caught his eye. Akinwole stuck his head in.

  “Pass me your torch,” he said, his arm out behind him.

  I handed him the flashlight.

  “What do you see?”

  “There is a little metal box welded into the frame of the back seat,” he said. “I believe it is the tracking device.”

  He put the flat tire back on the roadside. Then, brandishing the tire iron in one hand and the flashlight in the other, he crawled into the trunk. After a couple of metallic smacks, he emerged with a small metal casing about the size of a pack of cigarettes.

  “Got it.”

  “That’s a terrible idea,” I said. “They’re going to mobilize.”

  “You worry too much, Paul,” Akinwole said. He drew back his arm and hurled the box deep into the night. “Now they have to rely on us to tell them where we are, if we so choose. Now we are free. Better.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “Sure. Soon, they will telephone and ask, why does it look like we are not moving? And you tell them you have no idea. Say you made a wrong turn and you are in Kansas City.”

  “No,” I said. “We go to Los Angeles and get rid of this car.”

  Akinwole returned the flat tire to the trunk a second time. He paid no attention to my protestations.

  “We cannot drive across America without doing something off the plan,” he said. “Where is your sense of adventure?”

  He slammed the trunk and wiped his hands on his trousers. Akinwole the escape artist. Akinwole the anarchist. The man was on a tear. He had me in a zugzwang. That’s what Hornsmith would’ve called it.

  “Come on,” he said, “pick somewhere.”

  “Okay,” I said, “how about Las Vegas? It’s on our route. We can stop in Las Vegas. We do the casinos. We take in a show. We see the sights. Have a fancy dinner.” I had to give him something, or I feared he’d get worse.

  “Las Vegas is an excellent alternative to Kansas City,” Akinwole said. “Even though I do not gamble, because I have no luck.”

  We took turns at the wheel through the night and into the next day. Dawn had the Rockies on the western horizon. We crawled through Denver with the morning rush hour and started the climb up to the Continental Divide. When he wasn’t driving, Akinwole would sometimes fall asleep. His mouth gaped open. Other times he would fidget with the push buttons on the radio, hunting for songs. Mostly he found Jesus, political commentary, and tax reform editorials. America had more opinions than songs these days. God was in. Government was out.

  “What about you?” Akinwole said once the radio had given out to the solitude of the mountains. “Did you never yearn to run away and catch malaria? Discover your soul?”

  “I did,” I said, “and I do. I’ve been leaving people and places most of my life. I lived with my grandparents in a small prairie town. My father was the local member of parliament, so he was never around. My mother was a hippie who spent her time trying to get in touch with her inner om. One day she left a note on the kitchen table and never came back. Later, when I left, no one noticed I was gone.”

  “Where did you go?”

  “I hitchhiked to the city, bought a bus ticket, and went to another city.”

  It was the life of someone else. Long ago. So unfamiliar to me now.

  “You drive a while. I’m tired,” I said.

  The twins barked for an update. Poor reception kept it short.

  “The tracker shows you sitting on the side of the road in Nebraska for half a day,” Ben or Barry said. “What the fuck’s so interesting in Nebraska?”

  “I don’t get it,” I said. “I’m moving along. Past Denver and into the mountains, heading toward Vegas.”

  Akinwole shook his head and waved his pink palms. No. No. Don’t tell them where we are.

  “I had a flat tire back there in Nebraska,” I said.

  “A flat tire? Those were brand new Pirellis.”

  “The right front blew out,” I said.

  “We don’t like it.”

  The phone cut out. They never called back.

  On the other side of the mountains, we were in a vast red desert haunted with monstrous rock hallucinations that soared over the road in the shape of old ladies, broken turrets, and strange insects. The afternoon wore on, and we drove the car harder and harder until somewhere inside Utah, near the junction for Moab, we were pulled over by a state trooper for speeding. Akinwole was at the wheel. The cop marvelled at the Firebird, then wrote up the ticket anyway.

  Hours later, Las Vegas popped up over the horizon. We screamed into the valley on the I-15. The car strained
in the desert heat. The temperature gauge had been on a slow upward creep for a while, until the car couldn’t bear it any longer. The Firebird shuddered to a full steamy stop outside a nondescript motel called the Golden Suites. We were somewhere in suburban Las Vegas. End of the road.

  Akinwole was keen to see the city right away. But that had to wait. The engine needed to cool. In the morning, we’d water the radiator and hope it recovered. For now, we pushed the Firebird off the road into the motel lot and locked it for the night.

  The place reeked like a drag strip. Oil, gas, and exhaust fumes choked the air from the freeway next to the motel. Through the windows into the rooms, we saw shirtless tattooed men on their beds watching TV, drinking cold cans of beer. A little girl came out of the laundromat with an armful of unfolded clothes. While we looked for our room, a gangbanger in a wifebeater with heavy gold bling around his neck watched us from a doorway.

  We were at the end of the corridor. The room stank of lemon disinfectant. The couch in the living room sagged. The kitchenette offered mismatched cutlery and chipped plates.

  Across the street, we picked up a case of beer at Lee’s Discount Liquor. Next to the cashier, photos taken from the store security camera of regular shoplifters and stickup artists were pinned on a corkboard. Underneath each snapshot, handwritten notes scrawled in marker by the management offered editorial comments on the offenders. “Does his girlfriend care he pees in public?” “Acts stoopid.” “Is this your neighbor?”

  Back in the room with the beers, we ordered off a delivery menu for “New York Style Chinese Cuisine.” We flipped on the baseball game. The Braves were showing the Mets how it’s done. It felt good to have something to watch that wasn’t the road. Outside, trucks and motorcycles roared by so loud it was like they were coming through the room. An angry woman argued with someone on her cellphone right outside our window.

  There was only one bed in the back room of the suite, so we tossed a quarter for it. Loser slept on the couch. Akinwole called heads and won. His luck wasn’t so bad after all.