But as the years went on his girlfriends became rougher, tougher, sleazier, shadier, older, meaner, fatter and generally lower on the attractiveness scale until Tommy left them at home, snuck over and fucked them when he needed to, strung them along, used them for their cars or food stamps or drugs, and then casually strolled out of their lives when they had a fit of self-respect and started screaming at him.
Tommy was still the cool character he had been from maybe 1982 to maybe 1996, but he was trapped in an aging husk. Time had carved lines into his face, bled the gold from his hair and laid a layer of grizzle around his middle. He was still a presence; still a big, loud, powerful, vaguely gorilla-looking shape, but none of the dewy young girls who made him antsy would look his way any more. He knew this but if you spent any time around him you would never know he knew it.
I thought of Tommy the next day as I awoke alone in the apartment Jill and I shared. I had slept, or tried to sleep, on the couch in the little living room and I lay there staring at the ceiling as the dawn became morning outside. I was sore all over. I had leaned in front of the bathroom mirror, gasped at myself, but determined that I didn’t need stitches. My face was just well tenderized. And I had heard that a tooth knocked loose would set again if left in its hole, so I did just that. When I walked back from the bathroom I could feel where each foot or fist had dug into my torso and limbs, but nothing was so smashed that the pain wouldn’t fade. Or so I guessed. Owen and his “boyz,” it seemed, hadn’t had quite enough time to work.
I thought of a lot of things as I lay there, in the little living room Jill had decorated and spent so much time with me in. I thought of the past, of my childhood, of what I believed I was and how all of that had turned out to be a cheap facade. I thought that if I let this thing slither away into yesterday, and then last week, and then a month ago, without grabbing onto it, without taking hold of it and mastering it—or at least making my best attempt—I would be looking back on it with shame for the rest of my life.
And so the little footpath of my thoughts wound around and brought me to Tommy again. Some people have friends on the police force or local government. Some can pay high-powered attorneys to start the wheels of so-called justice turning to draw in and grind up their enemies. In my hour of need, when I was confronted with my own impotence, I could only think of Tommy.
He was as soft-hearted in his own way as he was malicious and self-serving. He was a street kid who my aunt hadn’t wanted or cared about, and who had raised himself in the city, fighting and cheating and winning from his earliest childhood. It left him a compulsive hustler and, like every one of this breed, it had cultivated in him rare talents. He was vastly intelligent, with surprising imagination and lighting wit, but the spinning gears were set too far apart, never meshing, never taking him anywhere. He had never had a steady job that I was aware of but he worked relentlessly, seven days a week, scavenging scraps of other people’s wealth, foraging like a wolf, swindling fortunes and waking each morning with nothing again.
And there was another side of him, a vicious Mr. Hyde that emerged when the fast talk and the smiles and lies had failed. Tommy was dangerous. A big man with quick, fluid strength who had spent half his life in cages with other desperate and angry human males. He had bragged to me when he was drunk that he had never lost a fight. “And that,” he said, “ain’t on the fuckin’ playground, Sammy. I’m talkin’ in the worst places in the world with the toughest motherfuckers in the world.”
None of it left him much of a human being, but it left him with a specialized set of skills. And this morning, as I washed up and burned on this sandbar, as I marshaled my energies and prepared to croak for help, he was the only person I could make out in the distance.
He answered his cell phone by saying, “This is Tom.”
“Tommy,” I said. I was sitting up on the couch. Morning light was pouring in the front window. I had the phone against my head and his cell number, scribbled on a scrap of paper months ago, sitting on my knee.
“Who’s this?”
“Tommy, it’s Sam, your cousin. Listen—”
“You sound like shit, kid.”
“Yeah. Hey, I need to talk to you about some stuff. Can you meet me somewhere?”
“Sure. Well, shit. Can you come get me? My car ain’t running.”
I had the immediate thought that his car was running just fine, but he was working some angle—maybe just trying to save gas, for fuck’s sake. “Yeah. You still out there by the beach?”
“Yeah, but, fuck . . .”
So I ended up arranging to meet him by the Amoco station out on Highway 1. Like everything with him, there was a story that didn’t add up explaining why he couldn’t drive and why I couldn’t pick him up at wherever his current home was. Something about a new place that was hard to find, a bitchy old lady, a dangerous dog. I spaced out while he delivered his spiel. I didn’t give a fuck.
When he got into my car, for the first time in my life, the guy seemed speechless. He looked at my face in the harsh ten a.m. light and said, “What the fuck . . .” and that was it for several seconds. He reached out and took my chin in thick, grease-stained fingers, turned my head and pursed his lips, furrowed his brow like a mother contemplating her sick child.
“You fall into the tiger cage at the zoo?”
“Something like that. I need to get some stuff,” I said. “A gun, I think.”
This was supposed to raise the question of why the fuck I, his relatively clean-cut cousin, would need a gun. This was supposed to awaken his sense of family honor and make him vow to never rest until I had been avenged. But he wasn’t biting. His large, blue, once-attractive eyes stared right through me a moment and then he said, “You got money?”
“A little in the bank, not much but—”
“Never mind.” He waved his hand. “We can get some.”
Tommy practically ignored me. I was merely a sounding board for his bullshit. He was off and running on his hustle. He only discussed his plan to “get funds”—which was simply to make me steal a chainsaw.
He knew the guy who possessed the chainsaw—“owned” might be too strong a word here—and some deal had gone bad that Tommy wanted to set straight, maybe; I still don’t know with any certainty. But they knew his car in this neighborhood, and he might have been spotted doing this himself, so he had rifled the mental files, done some kind of calculation and decided me needing something presented him with an opportunity to even up with this guy.
Tommy got out of the passenger’s seat and we switched places. He was dressed in clothes that had lost their bloom, a crusty leather jacket with a blue sweatshirt hood hanging over the collar, loose-fit jeans that were still new and wanted to be nice but had become grease-spotted while Tommy tinkered with stolen bikes or made quick adjustments to idling engines. His hair was longish, but not long, washing out from dark blond to gray. Tommy was once extraordinarily handsome and his face, when I bothered to consider it, made me give the amused grunt you give when you see an aging starlet. The striking, bright-eyed kid from those early publicity photos is still there, but distorted, transformed by the wicked workings of time, and the starlet just looks that much more pathetic as she tries to drape herself in the glamour of the old days. That was Tommy, except he was a little too scary to be pathetic.
As he walked around the hood of the Fairlane he slipped on wraparound sunglasses—right in style, circa 1990—and pulled the sweatshirt hood up so he looked like the Unibomber. We climbed in on opposite sides and I watched as he settled his large gorilla frame into the driver’s seat.
He pursed his lips, orienting himself to the gear lever on the steering column. “Good old three-on-the-tree,” he said. “This got the four-twenty-seven?”
“Yeah.”
“You want to get rid of this thing, lemme know. I know a guy loves these fucking cars.”
“Maybe after today,” I said, “When it’s known by the police.”
He threw me a mirror
-lensed glance and said, “Don’t go gettin’ nervous on me now, honey, when you got me all hard and ready.”
“Jesus,” I said. “Stop.”
He turned the key, listened to the motor and revved it up to a snarling scream a couple of times. “Don’t worry. I’ll snuggle you afterward, Sammy-boy!” He braced both arms against the steering wheel as he popped the clutch. The tires screeched as the V-8 yanked us forward and flung us out of the Amoco lot. Tommy said, “That’s what I’m talkin’ about!” as we fishtailed, kicking up gravel at the edge of the road and then grabbing the pavement and rocketing onto the freeway. My stomach lurched, the engine yowled higher and higher until I thought it was going to shatter, and he finally punched the clutch and shifted into second when we were doing forty.
We rolled into the poor side of Blackmer ten minutes later. It was a nice day for robbing houses. The blue sky was only marked with a couple of fading chemtrails, the sun was flexing and a friendly breeze sprinkled the dandelion seeds across the ragged lawns.
I did just as he said, and just as he said, there was nobody home. Maybe Tommy had killed the guy last week and he was rotting inside the place. Who knew? We backed into the driveway of a gray-white house with a front yard of dirt and a layer of grime on the windows. It was located behind another house. Someone’s rental unit. The operation took five minutes. I got out and let myself in the side gate, limped to the backyard, and went to the old rust-rotted hardware store tin shed Tommy had described. It wasn’t locked, and when the door opened daylight fell on the big orange Husqvarna chainsaw Tommy had described.
“That’s a goddamned thousand-dollar piece of equipment!” Tommy said as we drove away. The chainsaw was on the backseat. It looked brand new and it was huge, although it had been unexpectedly light as I carried it out. Tommy was agitated now, high, drugged by the success of the caper. “Motherfucker stole it from me,” he said as he drove. “Sneaky prick didn’t think I’d come take it back ’cause he called the cops when I beat his ass. That thing better still run.”
I just looked at him, still donning his Unibomber shades and hood. I was unable to discern what the reality of the situation might have been. Who knew who stole what from whom in the circles Tommy moved in?
“Where we going now?” I said.
We were wandering from the residence I had just robbed, cruising the neighborhoods of Blackmer, working our way out of the homely, poverty-ridden streets to where lawnmower wheels left geometrically perfect stripes in the front yards; where the sidewalks were uncluttered and uncracked and the cars clean and new. Tommy rolled down the window as he lit a cigarette, speaking out the side of his mouth, impersonating what was probably supposed to be a Texas tycoon. “I’m gonna show you how we do things in the big league, son! Market conditions are favorable to sell at a profit this morning!”
“What, you gonna pawn that thing?”
“Shhh! You hear that?” Tommy had his left ear cocked toward the window, he plucked the cigarette from his mouth and said, “That’s opportoonity knockin’, boy!”
I listened. I heard a small engine grinding away somewhere.
“Yep, that’s us,” he said in his own voice again, pushing the gas and listening for the source of the noise. “Watch this, Sam. Just watch this. Wetbacks always got cold hard fuckin’ cash!”
He listened as he drove, smoking rapidly in his excitement, and finally turned the car around a bend, and said, “Oh yeah. They’re the ones.”
Before us, against the curb in front of a house with fresh paint, professional landscape design and a deep green lawn, there was a well-outfitted gardening rig. I looked at the new metal trailer loaded with equipment and the big white Ford truck in front of it, and I began to get the idea.
Tommy pulled up behind the truck, set the brake and turned off the car. He flipped his sweatshirt hood down and smoothed his hair, then got out and walked up to the house. After a moment he got the attention of a skinny, dark Mexican who was running a weed-eater. I heard Tommy shout something about a “patrone” a few times and the guy shut his machine off and went to the back yard. Tommy fidgeted and glanced up and down the street for a few seconds, until a boss-type emerged.
The boss was maybe forty, Mexican but Americanized. Thick and frog-shaped with the black caterpillar on his upper lip and an intensely skeptical glint in his eye.
I watched them approach the car. I just sat in the front seat, seeing myself and Tommy through this workingman’s eyes and feeling like something he had noticed in the uncut grass, left behind by a dog.
“That thing’s brand-new!” Tommy said. I had a view of the two men’s middle-aged midsections out the car’s window and I saw Tommy’s hands shape his thoughts as he spoke. “You gotta cut a tree down, this mother’ll go through a fuckin’ giant redwood like warm fuckin’ butter!”
“I already got a chainsaw,” the Mexican said in flat American.
I heard Tommy scoff. “What do you got? A fourteen-inch for chomping up trimmings?”
“That’s right.”
“What’re you gonna do to a tree with that fuckin’ toy? Hurt its feelings?”
I laughed and shook my head.
“Shee-yit.” The Mexican was laughing too. “I just rent one when I need to, man.” A moment passed, then the Mexican leaned close to the window so his jowly face was an inch from the glass. “This thing even run?” he said, and I knew the hook was in.
“Like a fuckin’ top!” Tommy said. “I’m telling you, it’s brand new!” He opened the door beside me, folding my seat forward as if I wasn’t in it as he reached for the chainsaw.
I just went for the ride. Let the time pass. Endured Tommy’s bragging and addle-brained ranting and unbroken chain of off-the-cuff jokes that sometimes were so clever I wondered why the guy was such an imbecile. We wound up in a filthy house on a backroad, occupied by an obese papa, a fat, scraggly mama, and a gothic teenage daughter who looked at me either like she was interested or like she resented me for seeing how she lived.
Tommy jabbed his chin at me and said, “This is my cousin, Sam. Don’t mind him, he fell down and hit his head a few dozen times,” then laughed at his own joke, coaxing laughter out of everyone else. I got the impression Tommy had spent a lot of time with these people and that he made them nervous.
Silence settled over the room again and Tommy laughed at nothing and said, “Don’t everyone talk at once,” which elicited another ripple of nervous laughter. Then he said, “Craig, we got some special business for you. Garage business.”
So we went through a kitchen of high stacks of dirty dishes, ancient appliances and peeling linoleum, and out a side door. Craig hit the switch and fluorescent lights stuttered to life and we filed into a garage with a tepid, dying smell to it, like a warm refrigerator. The place was piled with papers and rusty tools and a general, insane confusion of garbage from one end to the other. We followed the fat man as he picked a path through the junk, then watched as he keyed a padlock on the top door of an old metal locker of the kind that are racked up by the hundred in the hallways of high schools.
Inside were cardboard boxes, plastic bags and a couple of loose weapons. “There it is,” Tommy said. “How about some knucks?” He seemed a full foot taller than the fat man.
“How about these bad boys?” Craig was holding up something that didn’t resemble my idea of brass knuckles. They looked like a knife handle with a skull-head at the base and four loops of metal for fingers on the front. Without warning he tossed them to me and I jerked my hands up and caught them. I was immediately impressed by their weight. I put my fingers through the loops, closed my hand on the contoured handle, and there was a flutter in my stomach. If I’d hit Owen with these last night. . . .
“Those are a felony to even have,” Craig said, his black-bagged eyes weighing into me.
“Didn’t I tell you? This is my cousin, man.” All the humor was gone from Tommy’s voice. “He’s solid. He’s good. Don’t even sweat it.”
“I
ain’t sweatin’ it, I’m just saying. He might not know how shit works. I don’t need anything coming back on me.”
“Sam’s good. You want those, Sam?”
“Yeah.”
Tommy looked at Craig. “I got two bills. We need something else too. Something that shoots.”
“Shit.”
“Don’t ‘shit’ me, brother. I’m talking a pea-shooter. No fuckin’ Dirty Harry cannon. Come on, man. What do you think, I’ve joined the force?”
Craig looked from Tommy to me, his head beginning to nod. “Okay.” He looked at me. “You ever shoot a gun?”
“No.”
“Don’t let this thing go off accidentally when you’re figuring it out. And don’t forget, you get caught with this motherfucker, you found it. You hear me? It was in the bushes by the sidewalk or something. I don’t give a shit. You make up something and you stick to it no matter what. You mention me to the cops? I mean, your cousin here, him and me go way back, but . . .”
“I got it,” I said.
“Didn’t I tell you?” Tommy said, looking disgusted. “This is my cuz, man. Me and him are cut from the same cloth.”
Craig responded with a pregnant glare, but just said, “Hang on. I got just the thing for you.”
Tommy sang as he drove, jabbing his thumb at his chest: “He’s Mister Save-The-Fuckin’Day when he wants to be! He’s one heck of a guy and I’m talkin’ ’bout . . . Me!” He was proud of himself. I had asked and he had delivered as if he could magically produce money and weapons any day of the week. He had sold the chainsaw for nearly three hundred dollars, cleared a little cash for himself and armed me as well—all, he pointed out, before lunch time. It was a rush, a morning of pure hustling, and only now did Tommy say, “So what the fuck you gonna do now that we got you armed?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Nothing, maybe.” I was holding the little revolver between my knees, carefully pointing it at the floor of my car, imagining thrusting it into Owen’s face and saying, “What now, bitch?” I felt alternately dangerous and foolish. At moments I was outside myself, looking down, and it seemed I was a character in some alarmist film about lost kids turning to crime and dying in hails of bullets. The gun smelled like oil and I couldn’t tell for sure, but it looked quite old. I had heard of it—a thirty-eight-special—and recognized its snub-nosed shape from television and movies, but couldn’t say much more about it—except it felt nice, substantial and menacing, in my hand.
The Wrong Man Page 4