The Man Offside

by A. W. Gray

  The ride hadn’t sobered me up much. I groped for the door handle, pulled on it, and the rusty back door creaked open. I put one foot on the curb, made it halfway to my feet, and flopped back down inside the cab.

  H.E. got out and came around to me, looking suddenly concerned. “Poor rummy, you really had a rough time of it. Come on, let ole H.E. help you.” He hoisted me to my feet, put his arm around my waist, and steered me up the sidewalk, one halting step at a time. The guy was strong as an ox; he probably would have been an even match for me even if I had been sober. As it was, he was handling me as though I was Raggedy Andy.

  And I had to admit, I was glad for the help. I’d never been much of a boozer, even in the old days, and the past seventy-two hours was really taking its toll. I had just enough of my senses intact to realize that I’d wasted precious time if I was going to do the things I had planned, but was far too drunk to do anything about it. I had to get some sleep. Had to sober up, clean up. Had to...

  H.E.’s hand was digging into my side pocket, where I kept my bankroll. He was steering me along, keeping up the sympathetic chatter, but the bastard was picking my pocket.

  I planted my feet, tried to stop. He took a firmer hold and pushed me along. We were scant feet from the porch now, and I was conscious of his aftershave—a musky scent, maybe Old Spice—and the faraway noise of running machinery. I grabbed H.E.’s wrist and tried to pull his hand from my pocket. He strengthened his grip and lifted me bodily onto the porch.

  I yelled. It was probably more of a croak, but as far as I was concerned, I was bellowing at the top of my lungs. H.E. clamped his hand over my mouth. I bit him. He grunted, then punched me in the ribs. The pain razored through me, slightly clearing the whiskey fog.

  The screen door swung open, and the noise of machinery increased in volume, a clanking, throbbing sound that I’d heard before but couldn’t quite place. Good Plates Tyson came onto the porch. His bushy eyebrows were knitted in anger, and his thin red hair waved in the breeze like bug tendrils. In the crook of his arm he carried a sawed-off, double-barreled shotgun.

  “The fuck is going on out here?” Plates said. “You come any closer, I’ll blow your ass off.”

  H.E. let me go and stepped to one side. His hands were balled into fists and he was breathing hard.

  I felt a sloppy-drunk relief. Right then the shotgun was pretty as a bouquet of roses. I managed to say, “Plates.”

  Plates leveled the shotgun at H.E. To me, he said, “Jesus Christ, all I need, the hottest fucker in America. You look terrible. You been hiding in a sewer?” Then, to H.E., “What’s your story, bud?”

  H.E. managed a frozen smile. “Just makin’ a livin’, drivin’ this here gent around in my cab.”

  The three of us stood there for a second, then Plates said, “Yeah? Well, looks like you got him where he was going. Now disappear, I’ll take care of this guy. I know him. Jesus, he smells like a dead fish.”

  “Lucky?” Plates said. “Hell, lucky ain’t the word for it. You got a golden screw in your belly button. I got old A.B. Dick cranked up, spitting out the twenties, suddenly there’s two guys in front of my house and they’re ducking it. Yeah, you’re lucky. You and the cabbie both ought to be pushing up daisies right now. Let you try and throw a shoulder block into a load of buckshot.” He was holding up a twenty-dollar bill, gripping the corner with a pair of tweezers. Plates had positioned the twenty by a lamp so that the light shone through the paper, and he was squinting carefully at the bill. Satisfied, he suspended the twenty from a clothespin, where it dangled from a line alongside a row of identical bills running the length of the room. There must have been two thousand of them, hanging about four feet off the floor. “Solid perfect,” Plates said. “Shit, if Alex Hamilton’s old lady was looking at them pictures, her drawers would get wet.”

  My eyes were having trouble getting accustomed to the shadowy contrasts in the room. I’d slept for twelve solid hours, showered, shaved, wolfed down three eggs over easy and six or seven crisp slices of bacon, and taken a three-mile walk in clean air and morning sunshine. I felt human once more, though my head still throbbed. I was sitting in an easy chair with one leg draped over an arm. “You’re still making twenties,” I said. “Seems like it’d take all day to pass enough of ‘em to keep you in pocket money.”

  The lamplight reflected from Plates’s scalp through his thin hair. His hair was like red spun glass. “That’s the idea,” he said. “Fuck the fifties and hunnerds, everybody’s on the lookout for them. Same thing the U.S. attorney wanted to know when I got busted the last time, how come I made all them tens and twenties. Know what I told him? ‘Shit,’ I told him, ‘they make great tips.’ Man, was he pissed. They’re still spending tens out there that old Plates made fifteen years ago.” He sat down on a wooden kitchen stool. He wore blue jogging shorts and he crossed his skinny white legs. “What you wanting to do, Ricky? Go to Belize, maybe one of them islands down there? Shit, you ought to. It’s a miracle nobody’s recognized you, much ink as you’re getting.”

  I licked my lips and scratched the bridge of my nose. “I can’t leave the country. I got something to do.”

  He caught something in my expression and suddenly was serious. “You got a big hard-on for somebody, ain’t you? You’re damn sure not using your head, staying within a million miles of cops.”

  “Well, maybe I’m not,” I said. “I don’t have much time to waste. Sooner or later they’ll be picking me up. Listen, Plates. When you go shopping . . . that’s still what you call it, isn’t it, when you’re passing that funny money?” He nodded. I went on. “When you go out, how do you disguise yourself? You’re not exactly a forgettable guy.”

  He shrugged his birdlike shoulders and spread his palms. “Makeup. Shit, don’t you remember the minstrel show up at El Reno? Yeah, okay, the singing wasn’t so hot, but them blackfaces was straight from vaudeville. I’m a pro at it—shoulda done it for a living and won me a coupla Oscars. Never show ‘em the same guy twice, is what I always say. Shit, there’s guys took three, four bills from me at different times and never knocked me off.”

  I ran my fingers through my silver-gray hair. “Think you could do a job on me? There’d be something in it for you.”

  He waved as though he was batting mosquitoes. “Shit, Ricky, I wouldn’t want no real money. I wouldn’t know which was which.” He bent closer, his gaze roaming my face. “Tell you what, though. Yeah. Yeah, I guess I could fix you so’s your momma wouldn’t know you. I can even make you up to be a broad, if that was your bag. Shit, make your dick longer if you wanted me to.” He grinned. “But that’d cost you, I did that.”

  The mustache wasn’t bad. It was thick and brushy and dark blond, a shade lighter than brown. And it looked plenty real. The part of the false mustache glued to my upper lip was a flesh-colored panty-hose material so that the individual hairs seemed to sprout from my own skin. Yeah, the mustache was pretty good. The rest of the disguise was so perfect that it was incredible.

  I’d naturally assumed that a beard was part of the standard disguise. But Plates had said no, that’s what everyone would expect, for a man in hiding to wear a beard. So instead he had used a plastic filler—it was a thick, gooey paste going on, but had dried into a smooth surface that looked and felt like my own skin, fatty tissue and all—to reshape my chin. Where my chin had been square it was now round, almost cherubic. Cotton stuffing had flared my nostrils and puffed out my cheeks so that my entire face now had a round, scholarly look. Soft contact lenses—these had been a problem at first, but after fifteen minutes of wearing I couldn’t feel them in my eyes—had turned my eyes from blue to dark brown.

  What Plates had done to my hair was the crowning touch. It was the same dark blond as the mustache, hanging straight down on the sides to touch the tops of my ears. And now I was bald on top. Plates had taken the better part of two hours working on my hair, his jaw working nonstop, and what he’d done was an absolute miracle. He hadn’t used a razor at
all; he’d done the entire job with scissors, painstakingly clipping the hair in sections so that I appeared to have tiny tufts sprouting here and there. The natural bald look, complete with sparse tendrils to wave in the breeze. I bent and examined the top of my head in the mirror for about the twentieth time. Couldn’t have been better.

  As I turned my back to the mirror and examined my rearview side, Plates said, “Remember to shorten your stride in them shoes. You’re two inches taller. The shorter steps’ll feel funny to you, but to everybody else they’ll look natural.”

  “Jesus,” I said, “those fat pouches hanging out over the rear of my belt, well, they’re just the ticket. What do you call that stuff?”

  “Aw, it’s only a silicone. Is pretty good, though, huh? I’ve tried two or three different kinds, I get that stuff from a guy in Atlanta. One thing sure, nobody’s gonna spot you. Hell, if you tell ‘em who you are, they’re gonna think you’re bullshitting them. The stuffing in your mouth and nose even changes your voice. You probably don’t notice it, but you should hear yourself talk. Like I said, Ricky, your own momma.”

  I faced the mirror, lifted and dropped my shoulders. The fat pouches on my back and sides gave the illusion that my shoulders were rounded. Enter one soft, pudgy bald guy.

  “I don’t think she’d know me, either, Plates,” I said. “Trouble is, it’s not my mother I’m trying to fool. It’s some other folks.”

  Plates had finally made some money off me, I was pretty sure of that. The navy blue suit, white shirt, and thin polka-dot tie I was wearing couldn’t have cost a third of the five hundred bucks I’d paid him. Plates was like that. He’d never have let me give him anything, but selling me a fifty-dollar suit for five hundred, now that was something else again. Part of the game. When I’d tried to pay him for the use of his pad and the makeup job as he dropped me off at Tampa Airport, he refused. Now he’d be laughing all the way home about what a sucker I was for giving him five hundred for the suit. Spending time in prison with a man lets you get to know him pretty well.

  Now as I stood at a pay phone in my third airport in as many days, Muhammed Double-X said over the line, “Yeah, I got your message. The fuck you want with me? From what I’m seeing on the TV, I’d be better off not getting your message. Come on, Bannion, you popped the broad? Brendy’s old lady? Whadja do that for?”

  The message he was referring to was one I’d left with Elmo, the bartender at the Green Parrot, giving Elmo the phone number of the pay station where I now stood. Muhammed had returned my call ten minutes later.

  “I didn’t kill her,” I said, feeling an empty space in the pit of my stomach. “Nobody else, either. I need your help.”

  “Sho you didn’t. Nobody kills nobody. Help you? Shit, I got trouble enough, honky cop trouble. They busting my guys one after another.”

  “I’ve got things to do, Muhammed. You’ll be better off for helping me, if you’ll think about it.”

  “So convince me. And don’t give me no shit about leading me to no Skeezix. That fat honky snitch ain’t no more.”

  That stunned me; how the hell had Muhammed known Skeezix was dead? Never mind, I knew. The FBI shooting its mouth off again. The word would be out all over town. They’d also be putting out the word that I was under investigation for still another murder, Skeezix’s. Mentally I chalked off the main bargaining approach that I’d planned to use with Muhammed.

  “How about money?” I said. A porter rolled a baggage cart by; farther away a Sean Penn type, sunglasses and all, strolled through the airport with a white cotton sports coat slung over his shoulder and a big-breasted blonde on his arm. I shifted the receiver from one ear to the other.

  “What money?” Muhammed said. “Fuck.”

  “Some money I’m holding. I’ll pay you to help me.” I crossed my fingers and hoped that the money was still there in Sweaty’s office. If it wasn’t, there’d be hell to pay.

  “It’ll take some serious bread for me to chance fucking with you,” Muhammed said.

  “I’m talking serious money,” I said.

  There was a moment of silence and I listened to the long-distance static and watched a Delta flight attendant pull her luggage along on little metal rollers. Her hips swayed nicely under her straight green skirt.

  Finally Muhammed said, “Okay, you got me curious. Honeybear going to meet your plane. And Bannion. You better not be shitting me about the bread. Just stand around the gate after you land, Bear, he be watching you. The cops don’t pick you up, he do. And any funny shit you ain’t gonna be around too long.”

  DFW Airport on Friday afternoon was a madhouse, mobs of businessmen coming home from a week on the road, harried-looking mothers with kids squealing and clapping and jumping up and down, anxious to see Daddy. My face had sweated quite a bit during the three-hour flight, and I had a mental picture of my false chin melting and my mustache floating off my upper lip. I shouldered my way into the men’s room and checked my makeup in the mirror. It was still intact, and I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised. Good Plates Tyson probably sweated quite a bit while he was passing the phony money, and his makeup job would have a built-in perspiration factor. I blended back into the throng in the terminal corridor and looked around for Honeybear. He wasn’t hard to spot. They didn’t make crowds big enough for Honeybear to hide in.

  He was wearing mirror shades, probably one of Muhammed’s discarded pair, and tight Levis that his bulging thighs were threatening to rip into shreds. His sleeveless mesh shirt was yellow and his hands were jammed into his pockets. As I approached, he yawned.

  I stood before him, fished out a bent Pall Mall, and held it between my lips. “Got a light?” I said.

  He didn’t even notice me; he was too busy checking out the men in the crowd as they filed by. One man, hatless and coatless, wearing a white shirt and tie, hustled along toward the baggage claim, got a load of Honeybear lurking in his path, and made a six-foot detour.

  I grabbed Honeybear’s bicep and pulled him toward me—not hard, just enough to get his attention. His arm was a quarter-inch thickness of skin stretched taut over muscle and sinew. I said, “Hey, man, you listening to me or what? Got a light?”

  His jaw was slack in amazement, and I don’t suppose that many people had ever walked up and grabbed him in public. He used his middle finger to snug his glasses up on his face. “Naw, I got no light, I don’t smoke. Say, cantcha see I’m waiting for somebody? How ‘bout fucking off?” He turned his back and watched the crowd file by.

  I couldn’t believe it; he’d looked straight at me and really given me the once-over. Honeybear was no scholar, but recognizing people was a way of life with him. Part of the survival routine. A woman in a red pantsuit brushed me slightly as she walked by. I stepped up and clamped my hand onto Honeybear’s wrist. “Hey,” I said, “who you waiting for?” I was pretty sure he wouldn’t lower the boom on me right here in the airport, but not sure enough to keep my stomach muscles from tightening on their own.

  “Say, buddy,” Honeybear said, “you got a screw loose or something? I toldja I don’t smoke.”

  “Yeah, but I do.” I pointed the tip of the cigarette, still holding it in my mouth, in his direction. “Come on, gimme a light,” I said.

  Now Honeybear was completely buffaloed. He put one hand on his hip and looked me over from head to toe while he rubbed the strip of hair between the shaved sides of his head. In the elevated shoes I was a couple of inches taller than he was, and I felt as though I was standing in front of a short refrigerator.

  He said, “Man, that smoking bad for your lungs. How ‘bout if I poke one of them cigarettes up your ass where it won’t do so much damage, huh?”

  The tight leer of anticipation on his face changed my mind about whether he’d jump me here in the airport. I said quickly, “Honeybear, old buddy. Don’t you know me?”

  He moved his chin to one side. “Naw. Know who?”

  “Me. Your old pal. The guy who sent you and Snakey and Muhammed on
a nice little boat ride up at Connie Swarm’s place.”

  “Bannion? Now you fucking magic, huh. Took over somebody else’s body like one of them Martians on TV.”

  “It’s only a disguise,” I said.

  He reached carefully over and rubbed the top of my head. “Fer real? I guess it is you. Nobody else ignorant enough to go around poking cigarettes in nobody’s face. Well, come on, I’m taking you with me. But I ain’t so dumb I ain’t going to beat the shit out of you, I find out you taken somebody’s body over.”

  16

  I didn’t think Honeybear looked particularly happy. On the other hand, he didn’t look particularly unhappy, either. He just looked like Honeybear, eyes hidden behind mirrored shades, big body slouched down behind the wheel of Muhammed Double-X’s Caddy limo, a toothpick dangling from the corner of his mouth. His window was down and his ear rested on the ledge. I was pretty sure he wasn’t asleep, but he looked as though he might be. The rest of the limo’s one-way black windows were closed, the silver antenna protruding from the trunk lid. The hood vibrated slightly as the Caddy idled. Beyond the idling limo was the jam-packed parking lot around Texas Bank Plaza, the cars’ roofs shimmering in the afternoon sun. Farther away, the building’s mammoth bulk blotted out the skyline. A low green hedge ran along the sidewalk between the Caddy and the phone booth in which I stood.

  Fred Cassel’s voice came to me over the line, slightly higher-pitched than normal. “I don’t know what you think I’m going to do for you. I don’t even know why you’re calling here.”

  “No, I don’t guess you do,” I said. “I’d be the last person you’d expect to call. You might expect me to kill you someday, but not to call.” I was trying to keep my voice calm, but a tremor crept into my tone. Just hearing Cassel’s voice tightened my grip on the receiver.

  After a few seconds’ pause, Cassel said, “Well, for your information I’m protected from you. The best thing you can do for yourself, Mr. Bannion, is to keep the hell away from me. They’ll slap on the cuffs if you come within a mile of me, I’m not fooling you.”