“I keep thinking I will.”
“What’s that they say the road to hell is paved with?”
“I don’t know.”
She looked frankly at him. “Better for me I didn’t either.” She dropped her smoke on the floor. “Mine’s the next stop.”
“Is that Willimette?”
“Alto. Willimette’s five miles up in a whole different neighborhood.” She squashed the cigarette under her boot. “You got business in Willimette?”
“Later I do.”
“How much later?”
“A ways later.”
“How you gonna fill the time till then?”
“Maybe get something to eat. They got any places to in Alto?”
“There’s a pretty fair pizza joint right below my place.”
“Yeah?”
“Take out’s all they got though.”
“I ain’t gonna eat a pizza standing out in this shit.”
“I wouldn’t want you to either, Samson.”
“I ain’t used to being called that.”
“I’ll call it to you if you’ll let me.”
“Go ahead if you like the sound of it.”
* * *
In the Pizza Palace a spray-painted mural showed red ants chasing or following toward safety a lone black ant through a collapsing tunnel; Rankin had the sensation the scene was screaming something the whole world but him could hear.
“A friend of mine, Wheezy—he ain’t around no more”— Florence tilted her head at the art work—”done it for a month a free lunches.”
On the arms tossing their pie crust Rankin recognized Aryan Brotherhood prison tattoos. Needle-tracks marred the cashier’s forearms; into the bag containing their pie he threw two peppermint breath mints.
Rankin climbed with their order behind Florence up the building’s external stairs.
Damp, prettified flakes that vanished upon landing had resumed falling in place of the rain. Glazed over streetlights persevered in the gloom like dozens of sick eyes.
Bright yellow and purple paint sloppily adorned her small quarters. No doors were present but to the hallway and bathroom. Veils of beads obscured the other entrances. A male smell mingling with incense tainted the air. Over the back of a kitchen table chair hung a man’s shirt. Florence, getting out plates and wine, said, “My ex—he’s been gone a few weeks— left some things.”
Rankin thought, with more skillful hands he might have been an artist; at times he intuited, as he suspected artists must do, shadings and colors in the world’s concreteness. Other times he didn’t have a clue. From the silverware drawer Florence took a plastic bag of hash and papers. She rolled a joint, then got it going. Rankin waved away her offer to share it with him. “I got to keep a clear head.”
“Whatever in the world for, Samson?”
“I’ll need it in Willimette.”
“Your mysterious business.”
Improvising now, having abandoned what little plan he’d had, Rankin felt more confident than he had since coming to the city. “Your ex still got a key?”
“If he does he ain’t used it so’s I’d know.”
“No roommates gon’ pop in?”
Florence cocked her head at him in the way she had at the ant mural. “Was your coming here my idea, Samson, or yours?”
“I ain’t clear on it either.”
Florence got up, went into the living room, put on some music. “Celine Dion,” she said.
“Funny name.”
“You got somebody, Samson?”
“Somebody how?”
“Like how I ain’t got nobody, ‘cept an ex.”
“I had a dog.”
Florence did a little slow dance with herself. “It’s an ex-dog?”
“Guy I left it with while I was in prison said it got run down by a lumber truck.”
“How long was you in for?”
Rankin held up all the fingers but his thumb on his right hand.
Florence, agile as a cat, moved in gradual circles. “You do blow?”
“I just told you ‘bout that.”
“You need a clear head.”
Rankin nodded.
“Was it a big dog?”
“Medium big. It looked a lot border collie, some shepherd.”
“Did you treat it good, Samson?”
“Till I left it with who I told ya ‘bout I did.”
“You think it didn’t die how he said?”
“I think I put a good dog in the hands of a son of a bitch.”
She moved fluidly back into the kitchen. “Mind if I do some?”
“What?”
“Blow.”
Rankin shook his head again. Florence returned to the silverware drawer. Grasping his gymbag, Rankin stood up. “I scare ya off already, Samson?”
“I can’t answer ‘em quick as you ask ‘em.”
“How I act I want to make a good impression on a guy I can’t get a fix on I start asking him questions.”
“Makes a bigger one sometimes saying nothing.”
“You ain’t got to answer ‘em truthful or at all you don’t want to.”
“I don’t want to, I don’t.”
She dropped a baggie containing so little coke Rankin could barely see it onto the table in front of her. “We could set on the couch watch a movie and not talk at all you want.”
“When?”
“Soon’s we can agree on one. You want to watch a porno movie?”
“You got one that’s any good?”
“I got one starring me, how’s that?”
Rankin nodded and started for where he’d been headed in the first place. “Soon’s I use the John.”
* * *
He locked the door, put down his gymbag, then circled the small, rectangular room, pressing his hands against its vinyl walls. Only a spot over the medicine cabinet buckled as if it concealed a hollow spot; short of ripping off the siding, though, he couldn’t figure how to get at the cavity.
He climbed onto the toilet seat. He pushed on the particle board sheets comprising the ceiling. The attic rafters prevented the sheets from elevating.
He eyed the room’s lower level.
Out of the baseboard nearest him a duct blew hot air; a larger, rusted vent in the floor right of the shower stall looked to be left from a retired heating system. He got off the toilet and squatted over the dead vent, finding it hinged, rather than firmly secured, to the floor joists; he grabbed and yanked on the grill; it creaked up a few inches, exposing a dark hole. Rankin slipped his hand, then his arm to his shoulder, into the hole. His fingers in the darkness straight down touched nothing. He moved them to the right, catching his palm on a sharp object—a nail probably—extending from a stud; he felt atop and under the stud; around six inches wide, it was toenailed to a rafter. He pulled his hand from the hole.
“You’re missing the credits!” Florence’s voice sounded above the music past the door.
Rankin stood and twisted on the sink tap. He hollered, “I’m coming fast’s I can.”
He removed the sack of money from his gymbag. He folded the top half of the three-quarters full sack over onto the bottom half, then wrapped around it, and knotted, two long pieces of dental floss from a roll of it he’d found in the medicine cabinet. Careful to not rip or drop it, he pushed the sack into the duct, placed it on the joist, and wedged it beneath the connecting rafter. He shut the grill, pissed, flushed the toilet, turned off the spigot. He went back out to the living room, where Florence, sitting stiffly on the couch before a TV screen on which a girl in a Catholic school outfit stood in a small room across from a man in a priest’s habit and a woman dressed as a nun, said, “I’m of two minds on this.”
Rankin put his gymbag on the floor next to the couch.
“Reason I am, Samson, is I’ve known people—and I don’t know or not if you’re another one of ‘em—to mix an artist up with their art.”
Rankin sat down on the opposite end of the couch from her.
; “They get all sorts a ideas regarding the one from the other.”
“What sorts a ones do they get?”
Florence pointed at the screen, on which the nun, per the priest’s instructions, unbuttoned the school girl’s blouse. “Concluding for example that’s Florence.”
Rankin peered closely at the school girl. “She ain’t?”
Florence shook her head.
“Who is she?”
“A girl named LuAnn.”
Rankin blinked at the screen. “You coulda fooled me.”
“Florence, me”—she tapped her chest—”is the actress. LuAnn’s somebody else, get it?”
“It ain’t you in the uniform?”
“It is and it ain’t.”
Popcorn started to pop on the kitchen stove. Rankin crossed his legs. LuAnn stood obediently as the nun removed LuAnn’s dress, revealing creamy smooth thighs, then her panties, exposing a tiny V of pubic hair. “I had a cat I loved to death for six years that died.”
Rankin glanced at Florence. “Huh?”
“Like how you had a dog.”
Rankin stroked the side of his chin. Florence looked some embarrassed—or addled; Rankin wasn’t sure which. She said, “Florence is sort of shy really. She likes to hold hands, talk even if it’s babble, do a little blow to cut the ice.”
The nun slipped one of her hands between LuAnn’s legs.
“LuAnn—wide-eyed little LuAnn—comes off at first as all sweet and innocent, but what men, what anybody who tries to love her, finds out later is, well—I’ll just say she ain’t Florence.”
Rankin scratched his head. “I know what acting is. I’ve seen it before.”
LuAnn closed her eyes. She put a hand on each of her small, pointed breasts. Her hips pushed against the nun’s fingers.
“Florence always worries after men meet LuAnn, Florence will just—disappear to them.”
“Was you wanted to watch it.”
“You don’t want to watch it?”
Rankin swallowed hard. “I don’t mind watching it.”
“On one hand I’m proud of my performance, you know?”
“It looks to me like it’s going to be pretty good.”
LuAnn could be heard panting on the screen. “On the other hand LuAnn is so powerful that after seeing her bigger than life what man would want to get to know Florence, I mean”— Florence tapped her chest again—”the hand holder who had a cat she loved that died.”
Rankin said, “I ain’t never mixed a movie person up with a real one.”
“I think you’ve got layers, Samson, that’s what I think.” An erection sprouting through his open tunic, the priest approached LuAnn and the nun. “Layers and layers of yourself. Just like an actor.”
Rankin said, “That mean you want or you don’t want to watch it?”
Florence, answering indirectly, kicked off her boots. “If I put my feet in your lap will you rub ‘em warm? “
“What about the popcorn?”
“The popcorn?”
“It might burn.”
Florence stood up. “I’ll go get it.”
Rankin looked back at the screen. If LuAnn wasn’t Florence, he thought, maybe Samson wasn’t Rankin. He felt better believing it might be so, even while knowing it couldn’t be true.
Holding a bowl of popcorn and two full beer cans Florence returned to the living room. “How you liking it?”
“Okay, so far.”
“Are you getting aroused?”
“I’m working at it.”
“I could fast forward it you want.”
“This is okay.”
She put the popcorn and beers on the table before the couch. “Hope you like butter on your popcorn.”
“Yeah.”
“You got out of prison when?”
“Just yesterday.”
“Guess you’re feeling like a hooked fish thrown back into a pond.”
“I ain’t forgot how to swim in it.”
“What you should do, Samson, is see how much Timber-land’ll pay you for doing an ad for ‘em saying your first purchase as a free man was a pair their boots. What did you buy ‘em out of anyway?”
“The same four hundred bucks I had to my name and gave to the state for safe keeping when I got locked up.”
Florence nodded down at his gymbag. “I know you’re going big time, Samson. I seen it in your boots.”
Rankin, looking hard at her, picked up and drank from his beer. The nun’s ecstatic moaning, the priest’s commanding LuAnn to lick her harder, the cheap, shitty elevator-music soundtrack. He was relieved anyway that no matter what happened later that night his money was safe, nobody could take it off him.
Sitting down facing him on the couch, Florence put her feet in his lap. She smiled timidly. “You don’t mind?”
“Nah.”
Returning his eyes to the set, Rankin rubbed her feet. They were cold and small, in how fragile they felt reminding him of two little china dolls. The priest entered LuAnn’s bottom. “What was its name?”
Rankin gave his attention back to Florence.
“Your dog that died?”
“Mister Full Boat.”
She laughed a laugh as small and fragile as her feet. “Mr. Full Boat like in Mr. Full House?”
“’Cause what a guy in a stud game lost to my kings over sixes, he couldn’t pay me but with his dog. Mostly, though, I just called him Mister.”
“My cat was named Gold. ‘Ccount of her color.”
Rankin yawned.
Florence’s toes nudged him in the crotch. “You hot yet, Samson?”
“Getting there.”
“I ain’t in no hurry if you ain’t.”
Florence’s talking or the droning sound track or the food he’d eaten was suddenly making Rankin aware of the tiredness he’d accumulated from not having slept, past those couple of hours at the Sinclair, since his release. Florence’s voice bore on: how she’d grown up in foster homes in some hick town in Oklahoma, was only truly herself in the poems she wrote and would, if he wanted, let him read, had not taken in another cat for fear it would die and leave her alone like Gold had, had had three abortions and wished she hadn’t of, was determined on some days to do anything to get rich and on other days to give away what few belongings she owned and to work among the sick and unfortunate like Mother Teresa had. Once in a while Rankin would glance at LuAnn fucking, sucking or licking and start to get hot, then Florence would say something again and kill it for him. “You’re a man of few words,” she said.
Rankin just gazed at her, his eyes blinking in their efforts to stay open.
“You want me to take off my clothes?”
Rankin shook his head.
She took out a cigarette, placed it between her lips, started to light it. “I could give you a blow job.”
Rankin reached over, pulled the cigarette from her mouth, and dropped it onto the coffee table. Looking funnily at him she blew out the match she’d intended to light the cigarette with.
“Don’t you find Florence attractive, Samson?”
“Sure.” He tried smiling at her, but he wasn’t sure if he managed to. He felt as if he was metamorphosing into somebody else over whose actions and expressions he had no control. He held his watch up before his face. “I’m leaving in an hour.”
Florence resumed yakking as if she hadn’t heard him, a blizzard of little girl’s words; she wanted eventually to fall in love with a well-mannered man, get married, have a family.
Rankin nodded over and over at her; he felt as if his head were on a string being manipulated by a hand extended from the ceiling. He glanced at LuAnn and saw that every one of her orifices and both her hands were full.
“If we could just connect, the two of us,” said Florence, “find that human connection.”
Rankin blinked at her.
“If we could just find it, Samson, me and you, I believe we’d really have something because I see us as having big potential together. Do you see
it that way, Samson? Our potential together?”
Rankin’s head bobbed up and down.
“Do you want to fuck me in the ass?”
“Maybe later.”
Finally, she started to wind down. Her voice got low, almost a whisper or Rankin had grown so weary listening to her his hearing had diminished. She looked as tired as he felt. The movie ended. Rankin imagined the click it made stopping after the final credits as the sound of her eyes snapping shut; or of his own closing.
Her snoring was the next sound he was conscious of. Her mouth was wide open. Her head lolling to one side. Her hands were tucked under her right cheek, her fragile, little feet still in his lap. She looked about twelve years old. Rankin lay a comforter over her. He stood up. A minute later, carrying in his gymbag, along with its other contents, a flashlight he found under the kitchen sink, he quietly left the apartment.
* * *
Wetly hissing tires, scattered shouts, planes shrieking while climbing from or dropping toward a nearby airport. The windless air at a fraction below freezing. Large, damp flakes trying gamely to stick. A thin, white smear patchily frosting the ground.
A walleyed midget with caked food in his beard and some kind of imitation dimestore medal on his chest asking for change. A closeto-hairless, three-legged dog licking its balls on a Seven-Eleven’s stoop. Sporadic lights dully shining behind imprisoned windows. Lewd whistles, catcalls through a titty bar’s cracked doorway. Kids peppering with slush balls a boarded up youth center, just ahead of where he veered onto a less-noisy, side street of brick and clapboard row houses bunched together like barnacles on a single rock, the road to both sides lined with parked vehicles.
Seeking, by avoiding hired transportation, to lessen the number of eyes able to link him to Willimette, as well as his overall visibility in the area, he got from his gymbag and slipped on his gloves. They so warmed his hands he only now realized they’d been chilled. He remembered the Buddha claiming but for stupidity jails would be begging for inmates. The Buddha’s definition of smart? Being a combination of a clam and a ghost (“Open up to no one and leave no trace of yourself, get it?”). From William Pettigrew, thought Rankin, inside for another ten years minimum.
He sidled up to a black Grand Am, tried its driver door. No dice. The fair number of pedestrians in the area and its harsh lighting dissuaded him from chancing a forced entry. He had a go at, in succession, a Marquis, a Cougar, a rusted Jetta, a tritoned Trans Am, a Celica, a dinosaur VW bug, a type of minivan, all of them locked. His lack of luck increasingly felt to him like a warning that he was angling in polluted waters; the appearance of a cop car convinced him of it. He gave it up, hiked to the end of the street and through a small park centered by a gazebo, into a neighborhood of mostly single family, moderately spaced homes. Driveways containing carports or garages adjoined maybe half of them. A few were internally dark. No one but him seemed to be about.
Boot Tracks Page 3