“Nobody’s giving two shits for you up there”—Rankin aimed his chin at the ceiling—”or you wouldn’t be making porno movies.”
“Up there”—Florence rolled her head in a circle—”in here. Out in the streets. He’s everywhere, and He’s all right with what I do, Samson, ‘cause I ain’t hurt nobody and I live just fine with myself unlike someone I know can’t hardly stand it in their own skin.”
Rankin grabbed her arm nearest him. “You bring up my dreams again you’ll find out exactly who’s been dreaming ‘em.”
“I didn’t bring ‘em up. You brought ‘em up.”
“See how little He helps you you open your mouth about ‘em to anybody.”
“Who besides God would want to hear ‘em?”
Rankin dropped her arm. “I asked your Friend for a few things—when I was younger, I did.” He stood up. “Not a damn thing come of it, and here I am.”
He took off for the church’s rear exit, aware of a rapid clattering from beyond it, Florence calling calmly after him, “He don’t always answer you in my experience, Samson, when or in the way you think He will.”
“He never answered me at all,” Rankin hollered.
He opened the door.
Cantering across the paved parking lot toward the hardwood stand behind it was the horse, under the blonde woman, they’d passed miles ago out on the highway.
Rankin fell to his knees, trembling.
He watched from the doorway horse and rider enter a dirt path into the woods, from trees all around them hundreds of black birds rising up, squawking. At where she’d come up behind him, Florence touched softly the top of his head. She said, “Didn’t they make good time.”
* * *
“Months after I heard he was dead I kept seeing my daddy places—in a movie line, climbing on a bus, rollerblading past my school—until finally I caught up with him leaving a Big K-Mart, loaded down with bags, and told him ‘you fucked up the worst not getting to know me, who would of changed your mind about splattering your brains.’” She opened her window, flicked out her dead cigarette.
“By then I knew the guy wasn’t my daddy and that in my heart I’d known it all along, so I helped him pick up his purchases I’d spooked him into dropping and explained what the deal had been and he was real nice about it and even wrote down his phone number and told me if I wanted to talk on it more to call him anytime, but I never did want to talk on it more or to call him and I didn’t either again mistake my daddy for being above ground.”
“I ought to get shed of you,” said Rankin.
“Just you’s stopping you from it.”
“It don’t make sense I ain’t.”
Florence rolled up her window. “No more than it does I didn’t send you packing the second I seen the shape a you this morning.”
“You should have for sure. I don’t know why you didn’t.”
That horse riding woman last night suddenly staring right at Little Charlie under his disguise, telling him “it’s got a full tank of gas,” accusing him with her eyes (Little Charlie’s Mother’s eyes) of being worse than every son of a hitch she’d never protected him from.
“What I think, Samson, we both know, without wholly knowing we know, that we connected big time, and that don’t happen often— two people connecting over things in ‘em only He can see.”
Little Charlie enraged by what was in those eyes, Little Charlie deciding to fix it so those eyes would never find him again.
Rankin took an exit for downtown, telling himself Charlie Rankin hadn’t killed or hurt no one, he hadn’t had but a bad dream.
“It might be love.”
He shot a glance at Florence.
She nodded to him. “What we got, might be. We’ll see.”
Rankin scowled at her.
Florence laughed. “You want to go bowling?”
“Why would I?”
Florence pulled a fresh smoke from her purse. “To relax that’s why. To help you get straight in your mind what to do to get rid of the pain in your belly, and then you can go do it, so you’ll want to eat again and won’t be afraid to die for fear of burning in hell.”
“I believe you might be loony. I don’t know why I didn’t see it before.”
Florence lit up again. “You don’t mean half what you say, Samson. You’re turned inside out is all.”
“I don’t want to go bowling. You can count on that.”
“Have you ever?”
“No.”
“What fun things have you done, Samson—or let me put it this way—what’s the funnest thing you’ve done?”
“I don’t know—maybe driving fast as hell on a narrow, twisty road.”
“That’s it? Christ. What a cheap thrill.”
“One time when I was a kid, I ran away from my mother and her boyfriend and spent three days in some woods by myself, eating berries and trying to finger fish out of a stream and carving all sorts of things from branches. There weren’t another person around and at night I’d lay there, looking up at the moon through the trees, trying to guess at the sounds in the dark.”
“Was you just ready to piss from fear? I’d a been.”
“Not a bit.” A strange sensation welled up in Rankin, one he’d not experienced in so long he scarcely remembered he ever had experienced it; he pushed at his eyes, hoping Florence wouldn’t notice him at it. “I can’t recollect a time, before or since, I been less afraid than I was then, knowing not a human being was in earshot of me. I might be there still but for a fisherman coming onto me and calling the state, as I weren’t but ten and looked younger.”
Rankin stopped the car at a red light. A sweeper truck went by so close to them the Tranny shook; a three-legged dog darted into traffic, then backed out again; a horn honking rhythmically formed in Rankin’s mind a picture of a man bad hurt, yelling, “Help me! Help me!”
Florence, leaning across the seat, kissed Rankin’s cheek, her scent suggesting a smoldering fire in a field of spring flowers.
“You might be dead wrong,” said Rankin, “on what you think you see in me.”
Florence reclined against her door, smoking, studying on him.
Rankin wondered if he’d ever had the ability to isolate a single, clear thought. He said, “If only I’d met you yesterday and gotten out of jail today.”
Florence blew smoke slowly up at the ceiling.
Rankin had an urge to scream at her to quit acting so relaxed, to understand she, like he, could be obliterated in the next instant. Instead he told her, “I believe I’m too late to get on board with God. I’m pretty sure He wouldn’t clear my slate if I asked Him to.”
“Or you’re pretty sure that He might and that you won’t let Him.”
“I ain’t even sure all what’s on it.”
“Best thing, in the telling of it, would be to err to the bad side— to include on it even your dreams.”
“I ain’t, either, gonna go back to jail.”
“Do I look to you like a cop?”
“Just don’t tell me no more what I got to do.”
“It’s you driving. I’m just sitting here.”
“I don’t want to go into no more churches.”
“You’re the one got a bellyache on the way to taking me out to dinner.”
“I think I’m going to give away what of the money I got left. Just hand it out to people in the street.”
Florence shrugged. “It’s in you, Samson, to make love to me a whole lot nicer and gentler than what you did with LuAnn on the hood of this car in broad daylight for just anyone walking by to see. That’s what I’m waiting on.”
“There is damn straight something off in you.”
Florence nodded through the windshield. “Green light.”
Rankin put the car in gear. He turned it to the right, toward the Sinclair.
* * *
Holding in his hand during a driving ice storm a nickel-plated .38 revolver equipped with a silencer, thinking that this is what the
world had prepared him for, that of all the niches that might-have heen his, here was the one he would finally fit into.
“Shit, Samson!”
He looked up to see he’d run the Tranny onto the sidewalk, knocking over a trash bin.
“And you without a license,” said Florence.
Breathing heavily, he backed up and parked the car at the curb. A puffer in high-water bellbottoms and a skull cap sissy-walked out of the Sinclair’s revolving front door right of them. Goose-stepping pigeons scattered on the sidewalk. A near-hairless mutt, pinching a loaf as it ran, cut down an alley away from a red-haired black kid chasing it. Rankin turned to Florence, who’d touched his arm a second, or several seconds, earlier. “I gotta go see a guy in here I don’t trust above the bottoms of his feet.”
“What do you got to see him for?”
“To check out of a room he rented me.”
“You ain’t got to see him then. You got to get your stuff from the room he rented you and clear out.”
“And I need to see how he acts seeing me.”
Florence placed a finger on the bruise between his eyes. “Did he get you into the business that caused you this?”
Rankin shook his head. “He knows something about it though.”
“Was he there?”
“Where?”
“Wherever it happened?”
“He couldn’t a been. No.”
“Then how could he know more about it than you do, Samson”—Florence applied gende pressure to where she was touching him; Rankin, closing his eyes, remembered a guy looking up from a chair near a lighted fireplace, through a glass window, at Rankin peering in at him from out in the hail and a feeling that Charlie Rankin had fucked up again just by being alive—”who was there?”
A God-awful braying in the dark: staring into blackness in which shapes weren’t who or what they seemed to be; Chester Rhimes attacking him with a piece of firewood; Little Charlie scared as hell.
“Do you dance, Samson?”
He opened his eyes to find Florence with her hands now in her lap, cradling a little .22 automatic. “You know”—she moved her feet in a slow gambol on the floorboards—”like this.”
“I never have.”
“It’s sad how many fun things you ain’t done. I could teach you how to, so that if it ever comes up that you have to you can.
“I can’t see how it ever will come up.”
“Nobody knows the future, Samson. Take me into your room and let me teach you. I could help you pack too. And maybe we could lay on the bed and watch a movie before you check out.”
“I ain’t the guy you keep mistaking me for. I’m either the worst son of bitch living or I’m loonier than you.”
Florence, acting not to have heard him, pulled out the .22’s clip, counted the six bullets in it, shoved it back into the gun. “And I’d like to see your personal belongings, what things you treasure most, so that if I decide to I’ll know the sort of gift to buy you.”
“I don’t carry with me but a change of clothes.”
“That’ll make it easy to decide then.”
“It’s a wonder to me you’ve lived this long reckless way you go about it.”
“I’d sooner not live at all than to live how you do, Samson, not trusting a soul, not even the one inside you.” She raised and aimed the pistol at the spot on Rankin’s forehead her finger had recently been pressing on; Rankin, coolly anticipating the bullet shredding his brain and a trap door opening beneath him, didn’t even flinch. “I carry this against totally bad to the bone people. Do you believe I ain’t encountered none yet?”
“I believe you won’t know you have till it’s too late.”
“The evil in people looks into me and goes gentle as a lap dog. I don’t know what causes it—something passing from Him through me maybe and speaking only to it through my eyes.”
Rankin shrugged. “Good thing for you to tote that pistol case you’re wrong.”
Florence lowered the .22. “I wanted you to see it was loaded”— she tossed him the gun—”before I gave it to you.”
Rankin shook his head, then chinpointed to the Sinclair. “I got a knife to deal with this guy it comes to it.”
“Well I ain’t got a knife and, in my present company”— Florence stared hard at him—”I still don’t need it.”
Rankin took her purse from her lap, stuck the gun in it, lay the purse back on her legs. He handed her his room key. “You go up ahead a me and pack my stuff, bring it down the lobby. I’ll learn from you to dance another time.”
* * *
A vomit-mopped-up-with-Mr. Clean smell; a workman, neck-deep in the busted elevator’s shaft, whistling “Where Have You Gone Bill Bailey”; footsteps resounding on the enclosed metal stairs; two cops, coming out of the lunchroom, arguing over whether a local zoo lion should be put to death for mauling an escaped mental patient who’d vaulted into its compound; a bag lady, her hand out on a sunken couch she looked to have spent her life being pounded into, begging for charity in a hoarse whisper that unearthed in Rankin a picture of that strangled woman at the golf course house in a pisssoaked nightgown making a sound like a donkey’s bray up at Little Charlie.
“Where’s the little Spanish guy runs it?” Rankin asked the woman, nodding past her at the unoccupied cubicle housing the hotel’s register.
The old bag gazed at him as if he were flecks of dust in the air.
Rankin took from his wallet and put into the crone’s outstretched palm a hundred dollar bill; without looking at it she slipped the cash into a gymbag with a busted zipper between her feet.
Little Charlie sleeping naked in his mother’s bed beneath a headboard supporting a glass jar of paper money (mostly twenties and fifties) dropped into it by a succession of strange mens grubby fingers.
“Buy you some shoes with it,” Rankin told the woman, noting her tattered bedroom slippers.
The woman closed her eyes.
In the several seconds Rankin stood above her hoping she’d reopen them and smile and/or look kindly at him, she didn’t. “That was a hundred bucks,” he said.
The woman started to snore.
Rankin approached the register.
* * *
In the cubicle’s rear wall a half-glass door exposed a small room containing a metal table at which Ornay Corale, eating a sandwich, played cards with a solid-built guy.
Rankin couldn’t put a finger on what in the second guy’s appearance increased his edginess over revisiting the Sinclair.
He pushed the help buzzer in the partition separating the cubicle from the lobby.
Corale, glancing up, waved to him from behind the glass in the way of a driver apologizing to another driver for cutting him off in traffic; then he lay down his cards, stood, strode to the door, yanked a shade down over the pane in its upper portion; he stepped out of the room, shutting the door behind him. “Told you, didn’t I, Charlie, that snow’d amount to a dry fart?”
Rankin responded to the little deskman only by ringing the buzzer again.
Corale hooted out a lungful of smoke. “I know you ain’t here ‘cause your bed needs changing, Charlie”—walking at the partition, he swiped from his shirt front ash dropped from a cigarette gone near to its filter in one corner of his lips— “account my maid tells me it ain’t been slept in.”
Rankin mutely pressed the buzzer a third time.
Corale, grinning uncomfortably, picked with a fingernail at his teeth nearest his cigarette. “I’ll put you down, Charlie, for another night?”
Rankin shook his head.
Corale came to an abrupt stop a good arm’s length yet from the partition. “You’re leaving us, Charlie?”
Rankin nodded.
“You sure?” Corale laughed too loud. “So soon, I mean?”
Rankin leaned in at the deskman, whiffing from him onions, rank smoke, a shit cologne. “Why would I stay longer?”
Corale scanned the lobby only the old bag and the elevator re
pairman currently occupied. “You’re asking me, Charlie?”
“I won’t a second time.”
“It’s your business, not mine, brought you here, Charlie. Why would I know about your business?”
“Knowing my business, deskman, is your business.”
Corale with two fingers fished the butt from between his lips. “I’m ‘bout the last one to hear anything, Charlie.”
Rankin took hold of and wadded up Corale’s shirt front with one hand.
“I’m just a pissant, Charlie, gets thrown a coupla bucks once in a while to make sure certain people—Charlie Rankin for one—have what they need—”
“Our boss who throws ‘em to ya got a problem with me checking out when I want to?”
Trying to put the cigarette back in his mouth, Corale banged it against his lip and dropped it. He hissed, “I don’t know what you’re doing here talking to me, Charlie! You got the room you was supposed to get. Something wrong?”
Rankin twisted the fabric in his right hand, whispering, “You tell me if there is, Ornay.”
Corale viewed nervously the lobby. “What do you think, Charlie—Mr. Pettigrew gets word a certain guy shows up for work this morning like he always has after you and Mr. Pettigrew had an arrangement?”
Rankin let go of Corale’s shirt.
“Mr. Pettigrew’s gonna want to know if I’ve seen you, Charlie.”
Rankin, backing away from the partition, touched, as if blindly groping a stranger’s body, two fingers to the Band-Aids on his nose, to the bruise between his eyes, to the scratches on his forearms.
“Do you want me to tell him anything?”
Rankin stared uncomprehendingly at the deskman.
“You know, like shit happened, and tomorrow’s another day?”
Chester Rhimes’s face turning purple above Little Charlie’s clenched fingers around his neck.
“The exact shit that happened won’t matter to him, he don’t even have to hear it”—Corale skittishly squatted, picked up his cigarette, fit the tiny nub back between his lips; he straightened up, eyeing Rankin as if Rankin were an animal mad with rabies—”only that you said for me to tell him that the certain guy won’t be at work tomorrow morning.”
Rankin remembered Little Charlie one night snapping his fingers and becoming Poof Man and waking up in daylight, covered in blood, recalling punches, knife blades, bullets passing harmlessly through him. “Shit happened,” he said, with the sensation that he was dreaming as he stood there of a time when he’d been awake.
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