“Seven or eight’s all.”
“You weren’t in none of ‘em. That girl LuAnn was in ‘em.”
Florence nodded. “Been months I mighta starved too without what she got paid for doing ‘em.”
“I ain’t looking for nothing between us past what’s happened.”
“I didn’t climb onto you and fuck you after I stripped you of whoever’s clothes you wore back here last night, Samson, which means nothing’s happened. I didn’t even look at your pecker, though I itched to.”
“You don’t want to be with me in no kinda way.”
“Why don’t I?”
“I ain’t somebody you’d end up liking.”
“You’re honest, though. I like that.”
“You believe anything comes out a me, you’re a damn fool.”
“Then I won’t believe you’re somebody I won’t end up liking.”
“I don’t even like me.”
Florence smiled sweetly at him. “But you like me, Samson. You wouldn’t have come back if you didn’t. Let me rub your back.”
Rankin shook his head.
“Let me rub whatever of you hurts most.”
Rankin turned off the TV. He suddenly felt more imprisoned than he ever had when he’d been inside, as if everything he could see that would be worth having was locked away from him, as if anything he wanted in the free world (like this girl, Florence) would vanish if he reached for it. He said, “This rich friend of mine in the joint would describe to me all these fancy dishes he loved to eat— things made with lobster, shrimp, veal, grilled swordfish thick as your wrist, only tender and flaky, all these cheese sauces.” Rankin’s insides suddenly were quivering, as if in the aftermath of a belly punch; he couldn’t believe how close to unhinged he felt, as if a tightly wound spool encasing him were unraveling. “One thing to me, I’d tell him, tastes pretty much like another, but he’d say, ‘when you get out you go to the best restaurant you can find, you eat the most expensive thing on the menu, you order the waiter around like you’re a king, you tell yourself why shouldn’t you taste what other people taste, you call me afterwards, you tell me all about it.’”
“You’re rich friend write you a check to do all that?”
Rankin stared hard at her. “Don’t mention him no more.”
“Okay.”
“I got money.”
Florence, lowering her eyes, made a nervous laugh. “Are you inviting me to a place like that, Samson? Is that what this is?”
“First I’ll buy some new clothes. For us both.”
Florence gazed back up at him. “And before we leave I’ll give you a good bare-naked rub. Take away some your pain, so you’ll enjoy yourself on our date.”
“I don’t want you to rub me. I don’t want you to get naked. I don’t want either of us to get naked.”
Florence said softly, “It might go better between us in that area than you’re afraid it will, if you’ll let me relax you some.”
“Don’t you worry about that area. I got no problems in that area.”
“I’m not worried about that area, Samson, or any other area. I want us to connect in a big way, is all. I want you to chill. To loose that look from your face that says the devil, in his den, has got a hold of you by one foot and is tugging on it.”
“And I’ll buy a car.”
“A car?”
“After I buy the clothes. And we’ll take it to a restaurant where live music is playing and where the help all wear tuxedoes.”
* * *
Before the bathroom mirror, he peeled a Band-Aid from his nose; he poured peroxide into a small gash on each of his nostrils; he touched with his right forefinger a circular bruise between his eyebrows.
He put a fresh bandage over the gashes.
He remembered a guy he’d seen on a TV news show who’d woken up on a roadside unable to recall a thing about his life, from which point he’d started a new life. He thought if doctors could do with an operation what had happened to that guy, there’d be no end of people’s demand for it.
He brushed his teeth with one of two toothbrushes in a rack over the sink; he shaved with a hand razor he found in the medicine cabinet.
He told himself he’d woken up on this road. Everything before now was down another road. On this road, no sleet, no hail was falling; the sun was shining (he could see it through the slats of the bathroom window) as if yesterday’s storm hadn’t happened; he was free to go where he wanted, or to go nowhere at all; he was richer than he’d ever been; of everyone she could have been with, this girl, Florence, was with him.
He dug his money out of the heat vent; he put it in his gymbag. He went back out to the livingroom.
* * *
“What did you have in mind to drive?”
“One with guts. And a stick.”
Florence, nodding energetically, made as if she were working a shifter in the air space right of her. “The next best thing to fucking back in Oklahoma was closing my eyes and leaning back in the shotgun seat of some farm boy’s rip-roarer heading to red-line— Vroom! Vrooom! Vroooom!—’specially coked up or speeding. You want to, Samson, we could use some your money to score with.”
“I told you ‘bout that.”
“You like keeping your head clear. I remember now.”
“I’ll drink some vodka. Smoke a little weed. That other shit fries me.”
“I do better fried. My brain likes me better for heating it up.”
“The same friend who said for me to eat at a first class restaurant, told me about this thing—I can’t remember what it’s called. Them that believe in it think that after they die they’ll come ‘round again as something else—a rat, a lion, another person even. You hear of it?”
“I wrote a poem about it—’I Remember You from the Treetops.’”
“You figure it happens that way?”
“My poems is the only place I can’t lie in. Everything I feel and believe’s in ‘em. You want to read ‘I Remember You from the Treetops’?”
“No.”
“I guessed not. If you’re not ready to fuck me, you’re not ready to read my poems.” Florence lit a cigarette. “Do you believe in it?”
“I’d like to.”
“If you’d like to, you ought to.”
“I’m afraid it’s bullshit.”
“What if it is? It won’t hurt you to believe in it.”
“It would if I offed myself to get out of being what I am and into what I’m going to be and found myself in eternal hell.”
“That’s the saddest thing I ever heard.”
“This friend I told you about, he’s old and ugly and dried up”— through the smoke surrounding it, Florence’s face appeared to Rankin as the sun’s image through a cloud—”and whenever I fucked him in the ass he could make himself look as pretty as you.”
Florence, cocking her head slightly at him, blew smoke out a side of her mouth.
“He made Charlie Rankin see that he was born to be something, that he could as well be a special thing as to keep being the nothing he was.”
“And who’s he?”
“What?”
Florence’s lips pulling on her cigarette made a snapping noise. “The one your friend said was born to be something. Charlie Rankin.”
Rankin envisioned himself imprisoned in fog. He waved at the smoke before him. He remembered Buddha saying the person most dangerous to Charlie Rankin was Charlie Rankin because of the information Charlie Rankin had on the subject. “Just another con—a small timer who acted like he’d been born to be walked on till this friend I told you about— Buddha—give him the right picture of himself.”
Florence plucked a shred of tobacco from her lips. “I could fix us up for fifty dollars, Samson.”
“What?”
“I’d be back inside an hour.”
“Ask me again for toot money and the ride, the meal—from soup to fucking nuts—is off.”
Florence laughed uncertainly. “The subj
ect is closed then— Wow! It’s not like essential or whatever. It’d a been fun, that’s all.”
Rankin opened the door to the outside. Florence went up on her tiptoes. She kissed him tenderly on the cheek. “My man,” she said, Rankin surprised at how much he cared for the sound of the two words coming out of her, directed at him. They exited into a clear, temperate day (around sixty degrees) lacking any trace of yesterday’s precipitation. Florence took his arm. She guided him toward the boulevard mall. “What do you say, Samson, we dress you all in white, and me in black?”
Rankin queried her with his eyes, afraid he was missing in her exactly what he ought to see (what Buddha would call the hay beneath the chaff) while showing her everything in him he was trying to hide.
“All right, then”—with her free hand, Florence smoothed the air before them—”you in black and me in white.”
“Why?”
“It’ll be fun’s why. Jeez, Samson. Ain’t we looking to make some noise?”
* * *
He bought himself black jeans, a black denim shirt, a three hundred dollar black leather coat; he bought Florence white wool leggings, a knee-length white pullover sweater, a white beret. He tossed the clothes he’d changed from into a bathroom trash bin; Florence carried her old outfit under her arm in a shopping bag.
They walked up the boulevard’s grass median to a used car dealership and bought, for six grand, from a lumpy-faced Indian guy with chili breath and what looked like finger pokes for eyes, nose, and a mouth, a four-speed, fire-red Trans Am, showing seventy thousand miles burned.
“You got a license, Samson?”
“No. You?”
“Uh uh. I’ve never even drove a car.”
“You can drive this one later.” Rankin angled the Tranny out onto the boulevard. “Where there ain’t as much traffic.”
“There’s a zoo out this way we could go to.”
Rankin strove to reach cruising speed. “What for?”
“To look at the animals.”
“To stare and gawk at ‘em, you mean.”
“I don’t think they mind it.”
“You can’t tell looking at ‘em in cages nothing about ‘em.” In the drabness of prison, he’d forgotten how bright the world could be; reflecting off buildings, vehicles, windows, water, eyeglasses, road signs, the unmasked sun had him flinching and head-bobbing as if at ricocheting bullets. “A deer, say, being the fiercest thing in its paddock, will start strutting around like a lion—it might even believe it is a lion—and a lion, kept fat and happy behind bars, will get to acting like a faggot little house cat.”
“Let’s go for a picnic then.”
“We ain’t going to go for a picnic. We’re going out to a fullblown dinner.”
“I know we are. It’s early for dinner, though.”
“We’ve got the scratch they’ll serve us anytime. We just show it to them, next you know we’re sitting down holding menus. That’s how it works at those places.”
“Then we should head into the city. All the five star restaurants are in the city.”
Wood chips flew out the back of a tractor trailer ahead of them; Rankin had the sensation the blowing particles were trapped in the vitreous body of his eyes, that they were flakes from a large, disintegrating object in his head. He swiped at his eyes, as if to remove the impediments. He said, “I ought to be starved, last I ate.”
“You ain’t?”
“Goddamn it, I got a right to be”—he jerked the car onto an exit ramp to a one-lane highway—”all the shit I ate the last four years.”
“So we’ll cruise for a while—take the scenic way in—let our appetites build.”
Rankin headed west onto the highway, into open country. He felt that he was, at once, taking in this world he’d recently reentered at half the speed it was meant to be taken in at and with twice the normal power of his senses; but with no feel for scale. He waved at the day past the windshield. “From one to ten, what do you give it?”
“Terms of weather?”
“Terms of whatever.”
“Eight, eight-and-a-half. ‘Cause you’re with me, maybe nine. And I ain’t never seen a ten.” Florence fished a joint from her purse. “What do you make it?”
Rankin, finding in his memory no day to put this one against and no feeling approximating his current one, shrugged.
Florence pushed in the dash lighter. “This one case worker I had was always telling me, ‘you’ll feel better when the sun’s shining again.’ She told me it when I got moved to a group home from the only foster family ever treated me’s good as their dog, and she told me it right after she’d told me my daddy had blown out his brains a day after he’d visited me for the first time ever and had promised me he would again real soon.” Florence fired up the joint. She drew in some smoke, held it, exhaled it at the roof. “Studies have proved her right too. About the sun.”
She passed Rankin the joint. “I seen it on ‘Oprah,’ some scientist or whatnot saying more suicides, more crimes, more out and out low down and mean things that aren’t crimes, happen on stormy or gray days than on sunny ones, that people, overall, feel and act better in the sun.”
Rankin hit on the joint, remembering an old lifer name of Bone telling him that everything Bone had done in his youth to get locked up, he’d done when it looked as if the sun would never shine again, that if Bone had seen more sun growing up he might never have served time at all.
Emptying his lungs through the crack at the top of his window, Rankin spotted an AM-PM mini-mart ahead to the right. He put on the Tranny’s right blinker. He told Florence, “It ain’t doing nothing for me but about blinding me.”
* * *
He removed from a sunglasses display in the apparently unoccupied store a pair of mirrored Foster Grants. He gazed into their lenses. Instead of seeing his face, he saw the face of a guy he remembered, at that moment, Little Charlie choking dead in a golf course house the night before.
He placed the glasses on the counter before the register; a cigarette burned in an ashtray over a floor rack of Alto-Willimette Daily Gazettes.
He scanned the front of the top paper in the pile.
No headline about a break-in and murder in the area.
He picked up, then opened the paper.
No mention of a local killing on page two or three.
Nothing about what he was seeing in his mind on page four or five. Or on six, seven, eight, nine. Then he was into the sports. After the sports, were only classifieds. He folded the paper. He dropped it back onto the others.
Behind the register a door marked “Employees Toilet” opened; a bleached blonde with bad teeth, pimply skin, and a six-inch stump for a right arm came out of the room trailing a bad stink. Eyeing Rankin’s glasses she pulled from a shelf near her knees and snapped open a switchblade. A radio left of her played a horror movie promo, in which a guy was screaming. Rankin half-recalled another movie character screaming that way; then he realized the person he was remembering hadn’t been in a movie—he’d been shot to shit and hollering at his own front door.
“I’ll get it off in a minute here,” said the clerk.
She was aiming, in her only hand, the knife blade at the plastic price-ring encircling Rankin’s glasses. The glasses, with nothing holding them to the counter, kept sliding away from her. The clerk, her useless stump flapping from her side like a busted wing, persisted in poking at them. Rankin reached out and grabbed the glasses; he snatched the knife from the clerk.
He cut off the tag, slipped on the glasses, returned the knife to the clerk, saying, “Nobody’d blame you for robbing the place.”
Giving no indication she’d heard him, the woman deliberately folded the knife on her thigh; she replaced it on the shelf; Rankin pictured her as a shell missing its nut, having in it only foul, dead air. He said, “Add to my tab two sixes of Genny Cream. I’ll grab ‘em on my way out.”
The woman rung him up. She told him how much he owed; Rankin picked up she
had, with the rest of it, a mother of a lisp. If she didn’t mind the world fucking her, he thought, why should he? The thought struck him on the way out that any goings on in that golf course house last night likely would have been discovered too late to make the morning papers.
* * *
“What got you the four years?”
“Taking forty-two bucks and some candy bars from a hospital vending machine I jacked open.”
“Sounds like a long stretch for not much.”
“I had priors. Plus supposedly I popped pretty good the security guard who caught me at it.”
“Supposedly?”
“I don’t remember doing it, just being mad at some lip he give me. The state claimed I did and the guard come to court with his jaw wired shut.”
Shifting into fourth on the rural highway, Rankin punched the Tranny’s accelerator; in the corner of his left eye, a moving patch of fur dove into a thicket.
“Were you wasted?”
“I doubt it.”
“You doubt it?”
“I ain’t that way often.” He switched on the dash radio. He fiddled with the tuner until he found a Willimette station playing hard rock. He looked at his watch. Two minutes to the hour.
“You ever rode in an airplane, Samson?”
“No.”
“It’s my favorite thing to do.”
“How many times you done it?”
“I ain’t never done it. I’ve watched enough of ‘em take off and land though to know that when I do do it it’ll be the nuts. A few times a year I’ll go out to the airport and sit in the terminal, facing the runways, with a nice buzz on. We could do that till you’re hungry. You want to?”
Rankin shook his head.
“What’s your favorite thing to do?”
“I ain’t never thought on it.”
“You ought to.”
“Why?”
“So you’ll know what it is in case you ever do it. And it’s a better thing to think about than a lot of things.”
Rankin turned up the radio at the start of the hourly news.
“You done a thing like what they said you did and weren’t wasted, Samson?”
“I don’t think I was.”
Florence leaned over and kissed his cheek. “I find that hard to believe, a gentle soul like you.”
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