Redhanded

by Michael Cadnum

  “Mom works as a dispatcher for Friendly Cab,” Carrie said, maybe to explain her absence. “We rent the bottom floor; upstairs are the Websters. They sleep all the time.” She was quiet for a moment, maybe feeling she didn’t owe us even that much information. Maybe having a brother in prison, and another one as big and sure of himself as Chad appeared to be, made her want to talk. She closed the album, put it on the shelf, and said, “Would you like some apple juice?”

  The dog was going completely crazy, somewhere under the house by the sound of it, and I felt the intrusion of our visit, Carrie going out of her way to be civil to the two of us.

  When Little Brother came back into the room and said, “That cat got under the house,” it was a welcome chance to leave the place, the walls gradually closing in.

  Carrie showed us through the kitchen, a room with a high white ceiling and duct tape holding a pipe in place beside the water heater. Raymond stayed to one side of the back porch, over by a mop head dried stiff and gray. I took my time going down the steps, the Doberman peeling back the skin of his muzzle in a chilling display of white teeth.

  I couldn’t bear to look at the dog, even though Carrie said, “Bullet, go lie down,” and the beast retreated a few paces back.

  Little Brother and Carrie stayed on the back porch, and Raymond was halfway down the steps. The Doberman was growling and slavering at me as I stood there trying to stare him down. Now and then he would dodge over to an opening under the house, a space big enough for a large man to crawl into. Between the space under the house and me, he couldn’t decide which drove him most crazy.

  “If you get the dog calmed down, I’ll rescue the cat,” I said. “I can’t do it with the dog about to eat my body.”

  I had the mental image of my rear end being torn to pieces, and I had the impression everyone else had the same thought. Plus, Chad would be home just in time to see paramedics putting my remains into a body bag.

  Carrie made it all the way down to the bottom step, and she gave a soft, all but inaudible whistle, and confused the dog-monster just a little. She hooked a single finger under his collar and gave me a guarded smile, not with her mouth so much as with her eyes. It was a little challenging, daring me to get down on my hands and knees and crawl under the house.

  “What color is this cat?” I asked, as though there might be a dozen animals under there.

  “It’s white and gray,” said Carrie. “With black points on its ears.”

  I crept on my knees to the gap in the white wire screen that shielded the dark under the house, and bent the wire lace slightly, peeling it back. White flecks of paint came off on my fingers.

  The gap was smaller than it looked, and under the house it was very quiet.

  The dirt in the darkness was soft and rose up into the air, like sifted flour. Spans of spiderwebs caught the dimming sunlight overhead, and when I tried to rise up, my head hit the underside of the house. Dust-laced webs trembled overhead, and I breathed a taste of cold soil, decaying lumber, mildew.

  I avoided a bent nail in the dirt, and a white porcelain knob. A broken half of a blue-and-pink tea saucer impeded me briefly, until I set it aside in the bad light. Nobody had to rescue a cat from a refuge like this.

  But pride kept me there, calling, “Kitty, kitty,” flat on my belly in the grime.

  Eyes glittered. Reproachful, round eyes, and when I called in my gentlest voice, the eyes gazed steadily right at me, unwavering.

  Raymond’s voice reached me as though from an unearthly distance, asking was I all right.

  I was far from daylight now, hoisting my body forward. Black widows loved dark, neglected places like this. The space was shrinking, the floorboards above pressing down on my back, my shirt catching on splinters in the wood.

  The floorboards overhead creaked.

  A heavy, deliberate tread crossed the room just above, and the steps continued, in no hurry, until I could not hear them. Raymond fell silent. The dog was quiet, too.

  The cat was a dim shape, hunching, retreating from my hand.

  I stretched my fingers, and the cat gave a low, disturbing sound, a throaty grumble.

  I did not flinch, my hand extended.

  I touched soft cat hair, stroked it with the very tips of my fingers.

  Back in daylight the air was warm, the sun heavy and scented with honeysuckle.

  The snapshots had not prepared me for Chad.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  He was tall, but not giant, only six one or so, built like a heavyweight, with broad shoulders. He was in solid shape, no tummy fat at his belt. He hair was yellow, like fake coloring, bright blond. It was his eyes that stopped me right where I was. Blue-gray, with a steady gaze, he looked at me like he could see into my mind.

  I looked right back. It’s the first thing you learn as a boxer, the prefight stare. But fighters are half bluff, trying to fake each other out. Chad was actually using his eyes to observe me, measuring, about to pass judgment. Something about his gaze, and the possibly pleasant, possibly menacing openness of his expression made me want to win his favor.

  Raymond kept off to one side, his arms folded.

  Chad extended his hand, and I shook it. Dad once told me you want to shake hands not too hard, not too soft. Chad’s handshake was all grip. I squeezed right back, and his eyes crinkled. He released my hand, and we both grinned, as though some point had been made.

  “You hurt yourself,” he said.

  I studied my hand. The cat gouges began as shallow rips, and then welled with blood where the claws had found meat. The blood was already drying, dark pearls. It was nothing that would keep me from fighting, although Loquesto would tell me I should take care of my fists.

  “Cat,” I said.

  “Not that old sick black-and-gray cat that couldn’t hurt a baby?” asked Chad, in a softly teasing tone.

  “Bullet chased it,” said Little Brother, watching all this with interest.

  “That old wasted cat that has cancer?” Chad asked, just a little more playful sting in his voice.

  “Chad, you are a disgrace,” said Carrie, with no attempt to lighten her words. “I’m going inside to get some medicine,” she said.

  “That’s the world’s feeblest, oldest feline,” said Chad, with a little lift of his chin.

  Raymond stayed quiet. I didn’t know if I should rise to the insult, or laugh.

  “Besides, didn’t the police come around here last week saying look out for a cat with rabies?” said Chad. He stretched out the word, so it sounded like a strange name for a grotesque disease: ray-bees.

  This was where Raymond had picked up his recent diction, a jailhouse, faintly Texan lilt. Raymond was full of convict lore lately, things he’d learned from Chad. Raymond maintained that men who have done time don’t walk like the rest of us but adopt a habitual, loose-limbed, self-protective stroll, a pace not intended to cover ground.

  For some reason another smile forced itself across my face. Chad was funny, in a flat, edgy way. This was a surprise. Little Brother swallowed a sigh, none of this as entertaining as he’d hoped. He picked up a little twig and broke it, swinging the broken twig bit around in the air, hanging by a thread of bark.

  “Steven wanted to talk to you about boxing,” said Raymond.

  Chad would be a tough opponent, taller and heavier than I was. Maybe a lot heavier. Chad gave the impression of powerful, jaded adulthood. Raymond had said he had just celebrated his nineteenth birthday, eating well-done sirloin and every single cherry tomato at the Sizzler’s all-you-can-eat salad bar.

  The metal trowel stuck into a patch of geraniums, the brass nozzle of a garden hose—I tried to size up the space we were in, what I could hurt Chad with if he stopped teasing and got suddenly cold eyed. Because that could happen, and Chad let me see it in his expression. You wanted Chad on your side in a fight.

  Raymond said, “We were talking about Loquesto.”

  Chad closed his eyes and slowly opened them, as though the boxi
ng coach’s name was beneath mention.

  I lifted my shoulders, high, all the way up to my ears, and let them fall, the quickest way to loosen your arms when you don’t have time to warm up.

  Carrie made no sound as she made her way down the back steps holding a small white tube in her fingers. She hesitated, and waited until Chad motioned, go right ahead.

  I didn’t want to acknowledge the claw marks just now, and yet something about Carrie made me accept the white tube. I squeezed some white ooze over my scratches, and rubbed it in.

  “She’s my only sister,” said Chad.

  As he said this he shifted his head from side to side, maybe demonstrating how he’d avoid a punch if anyone tried to hit him. “I try to make sure no puppy dog comes sniffing around the wrong bush,” he said.

  Joking, not joking. Chad gave a nod and Carrie and Little Brother vanished up the back stairs. I could see why my boxing friends had described him as big. He owned the space he was in.

  “I have been trying to think of a couple ways I can help you two get your hands on some spending money,” he said. “Because I’m a kind person, and I take an interest in my friends.”

  He dug into his pants and brought out a roll of currency with a bright red rubber band around it.

  The rubber band made a high-pitched sound as he eased it gently off the roll. The money opened up in his hand, straightening partway, bent like a horseshoe.

  “Buy yourselves some clean clothes,” said Chad.

  I made no move to take the bills he was holding.

  “I owe it to you,” said Chad.

  A slight wind ruffled the money he was extending to me, the breeze fluttering the gray-green paper. I could see that under a couple of fifties and twenties, the cash was all singles.

  “For getting all dirty, helping my sister,” said Chad.

  Raymond turned away, strolling over to a Colonel Sanders carton squashed beside the garbage can. Raymond made a show of tucking the trash into the can as Chad put the roll of currency back into his pocket, unaware that I had seen how little money it really was.

  The insight made me feel strangely protective of Chad, as though I knew he was half bluff. Chad smoothed out the marks I had left in the dirt by the opening under the house, scraping soil over the specks of white paint. “Raymond, what do you know about Pontiacs?”

  “The cars?”

  “Pontiac cars, that’s right.”

  Raymond looked my way, his eyes uncertain. “My brothers and my dad have better luck with foreign cars.”

  “Like your beautiful special convertible Volvo,” said Chad.

  Raymond laughed.

  “A man just offered me a Pontiac outside Pic-n-Pac Liquor,” said Chad, in a tone that let us know he was having some fun with us. “I think I made a mistake. I paid him cash and drove it away.”

  We followed Chad through a side gate, out into the front yard, where an Arctic white Firebird rested under the pine tree, making quiet, inward sounds as the engine cooled.

  “It’s got a V-six engine, standard,” I said. “Two hundred horsepower at five thousand two hundred rpms. If you don’t move it, those birds are going to make droppings all over it.”

  “You have one of these?” asked Chad.

  “I tried to get my dad to consider a new car,” I said. One of my favorite classes at Hoover High was automotive engineering. Dad had said we could lease what we needed. What he thought he really required was this seventy-year-old grand piano that he had found advertised on a music store bulletin board.

  “It’s hard to drive this car,” said Chad.

  I peered through the passenger window. “It’s got five-speed manual transmission,” I said. “You probably drove down the street popping the clutch.”

  “Popping the clutch,” echoed Chad, relishing the phrase.

  “Let’s go for a ride,” said Raymond.

  “I’m not getting into this car,” I said. I had a clear mental image of police units, the three of us handcuffed and arrested for receiving stolen goods.

  At the same time I could see the pull Chad had on Raymond, and I felt it, too. This tall man with yellow crayon hair knew a world I had seen only on TV, a landscape of handguns and street cops. I wanted him to like me.

  “He’s not going to sit down in my car,” said Chad, in an explanatory tone walking over to Raymond and handing him a set of car keys.

  Raymond shot me a warning look.

  “Why not?” asked Chad. “Afraid it doesn’t have seat belts? Afraid the brakes don’t work?”

  Sometimes you talk, sometimes you don’t. I kept my mouth shut.

  Chad smiled.

  “Your friend is a smart man,” he told Raymond.

  I felt a flush of pleasure.

  Smart man.

  A shaggy brown dog, part sheltie, had been making his way stiffly along the sidewalk. The dog nosed the air, scenting the Doberman perhaps, and doubtfully eyeing Raymond and me.

  Chad held out his hand and called to it. The old dog gimped all the way to him and licked the air hopefully.

  Chad took a moment, talking to the dog in a quiet voice, caressing it gently.

  Then he turned to the two of us and said, “Let’s go.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Chad told Raymond to drive the Pontiac north on 1-80.

  The traffic was backed up close to the Bay Bridge, but Chad looked out at the lanes of slow traffic, nodding like someone who heard music in his head, sitting in the passenger side of the front seat.

  When we passed a Highway Patrol unit that was stopped to help a stranded car, Chad watched the patrolman until he had to turn his head as we passed. Chad caught my eye and made a pistol with his fingers, and a series of soft, plosive reports in the direction of the highway cop.

  We took an off ramp and drove along San Pablo Avenue. It was a sunny afternoon, and when Chad saw young women waiting for the light to change, hurrying along the crosswalk, he called them “jailbait” and “split tails.”

  I am always embarrassed or irritated by guys who talk trash about women, and I wondered why Chad felt he had to make such comments.

  “You can’t even trust a bitch to make it across the street,” Chad said as a woman with a limp made us wait, slow to get out of the crosswalk as the light turned green.

  I could sense Raymond trying to flash me a glance in the rearview mirror, wanting to know what I was making of all this, half hopeful, half nervous. Raymond wanted me to say something, but I wasn’t ready.

  “My brother’s wife is talking about divorcing him,” said Chad. “Can’t wait for him to get out of prison, has to cut and run.”

  I said that I was sorry to hear that, glad I had kept my mouth shut until now.

  “She used to be okay,” Chad said, in a tone of regret. “She told me all about stream fishing, fishing lures, fly casting. She knew all about trout.”

  I was about to ask if he liked to fish, just to ease the conversation away from a painful subject.

  “Look at these storefronts,” Chad said abruptly. “Check cashing places, liquor stores, asking for trouble. Begging for it, some reason to make their insurance pay off. They have low-surveillance security, and rent-a-cops too slow to work for the post office.”

  Maybe Chad could hear my unasked question.

  “I can’t scout these sites all by myself,” he said. “And get my face recorded in the video. If word got back to my brother, he’d have me killed, just to teach me a lesson. We need someone fresh.”

  He looked back at me and winked. “Can’t you smell that money?”

  I gave a little half laugh, so both of them knew I thought Chad was just fooling around.

  We stopped at Nation’s Hamburgers on San Pablo, right across from a furniture store, big windows with leather sofas and pretty little coffee tables.

  Chad insisted on sitting in a booth. “One over there, with a view of the parking lot,” he told the woman at the counter.

  The three of us waited until a
booth was vacated by three very short, dark-haired men, one of them with a yellow Golden Gate Fields stable pass hanging from his belt.

  “Jockeys,” I said as we settled into the seats.

  “Watch your mouth,” said Chad. “How do you know those guys have jock itch?”

  I began to explain that they were probably jockeys from the racetrack across the freeway, but then I saw Chad’s grin. He picked up a slice of dill pickle left on the tabletop, and made a motion like he was going to skim it over to me.

  I couldn’t see this big-boned, good-humored guy using a gun on anyone.

  When a police unit rolled into the parking lot, right past the white Pontiac, Chad stopped swirling the ice water around in his glass. The cops were coasting very slowly, and Chad leaned forward to watch as the two cops conferred in the front seat of their city of Richmond squad car.

  Chad put both hands on the table, and I thought that he was ready to bolt out of the booth.

  Then one of the cops came in to place an order to go, and Chad sat back. He started in on a story, how his brother gave him his first basketball, and how convicts play one-on-one in the prison yard.

  Chad and Raymond dropped me off outside the Buccaneer Cafeteria, near the back entrance, where the offices are.

  “You work here?” asked Chad. He squinted around at the building, the row of Dumpsters, the parked cars, his expression full of mock pity and amazement, How can people live like this?

  They left me there, Chad giving me a wave out the window.

  Marlo, the woman at the pay window, beamed at me, crinkling her eyes behind her half-lens glasses, but she said I couldn’t have my final paycheck until “the end of the payment cycle,” nearly two weeks off.

  I wanted to make more of an argument, but I wasn’t really surprised. “Could you look in the computer and see—maybe they could make an exception.”

  “Oh, Steven, the only time there’s an exception is if you die. Mr. Gartner cuts a dead person’s check right away.”