Boot Tracks

  “And tomorrow’s another day?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’ll tell him, Charlie—put his mind at ease.”

  Florence came out of the stairway door dangling Rankin’s sailor’s bag over one shoulder. Against Rankin’s instructions to her to not let on in the Sinclair she knew him, she strode through the lobby to him. She handed him his room key. “I didn’t need it”—she glared at the deskman—”account a girl was up there going through my man’s clothes.”

  The butt he’d just placed back between his lips again falling from them Corale said, “Goddamn maid. I’ll have her ass for it.”

  “I saw her good enough in the second ‘fore she lit out like a burglar”—Florence made a one-handed whisking motion at the street—”to know she weren’t in a maid’s get-up.” She looked at Rankin. “You’re not keeping company with another blonde’s young as me?”

  Rankin shook his head to her in the same instant that he put an identity to Ornay Corale’s card partner. He dropped the key onto the partition in front of Corale. He told Florence, “Go out the car. I’ll be along directly.”

  For a few seconds Florence appeared undecided on her next move. Then she left, toting Rankin’s belongings.

  Rankin watched her disappear through the circular glass exit. He turned back to Ornay Corale.

  Fumbling in his shirt pocket for a fresh smoke the deskman backed steadily toward the adjoining room. Rankin vaulted over the partition, wrapped his left arm around Corale’s neck, opened the door to the rear room, dragged Corale into the room, and shut the door. The pretty boy who, with the blonde girl, had tried to rob Rankin at the bus station lockers yesterday leapt up from the table. Before the guy could get out whatever he was reaching for in the rear of his pants-waist, Rankin had the blade of his gravity knife pressed to Ornay Corale’s throat. “I got a breathing condition, Charlie”—Corale wheezed—”a nervous thing . . . !”

  “Did you reckon I’d left a forwarding address in my room, Ornay? Or was you having the girl toss it chancing I’d been stupid enough to stash the cash in it?”

  “She was only hunting anything might give us a line to you, Charlie, on account—you know—Mr. Pettigrew, he didn’t know if you’d split with his money without ya’d earned it, but that was a misunderstanding, right, Charlie?—tomorrow’s another day?—that’s what I’m going to tell him.”

  “That had to be your play at the bus station, Ornay. Buddha wouldn’t set me up to steal from me his own money. If he’d had wind of it you two and the girl wouldn’t be breathing.”

  “I’m not following you, Charlie. What bus station?”

  Rankin had the sensation his life was a movie being played backward, highlighting parts of it he’d already lived in a whole different light. He remembered, a day and a half ago, on his way to locker #102, being ready—eager—to kill someone (he didn’t care who), convinced a killer is what he was meant to be. He had a terrible feeling the bad person he was now had scraped and crawled his way out of the skin of a person far worse than him. His fingers around the knife shook. “Charlie, please—for fuck sake let me get at my inhaler.”

  Rankin angled his head at the pretty boy. “Looks as if I’m in the spot I’d been in if you’d done better robbing me.”

  The guy said, “This is the first time I’ve laid eyes on you, Mister.”

  Rankin said, “Everybody lies,” blinking, unsure now if this was or wasn’t the grab-and-run guy.

  The guy shrugged. “Still I ain’t who you think I am. You’ve mistaken me for somebody else.”

  “You’ve mistaken us both, all three of us, the fucking maid too”—Corale gasped—”for other people, Charlie.”

  “Don’t call me that no more.”

  “Don’t call you Charlie?”

  “Tell him—tell Buddha—not to no more neither.”

  “Okay.”

  “And tell him he don’t know me from any other caged animal he hypnotized and sweet-talked into fucking him up the ass.” He pushed Corale into the arms of the other guy. Then he put away his knife and left, on his way out taking from his wallet another C-note and slipping it into a pocket of the tattered raincoat being worn by the old bag snoring on the lobby couch.

  * * *

  A fear that just outside the area he’d spent the last two days in the earth ended without warning in a depthless black void kept him from getting as far gone as fast as he could from where he was at.

  He cruised four times through the same several blocks, wondering if everything he thought he was seeing—people, buildings, vehicles—existed only (like maybe the murders he’d recalled Little Charlie committing) in his mind. He stopped the Tranny finally in a neighborhood much like the one they’d come from, trusting nothing, not even that he’d not already driven off the end of the earth, into a hell indistinguishable from the life he’d hoped death would save him from. Unaware of thinking or forming the words, he said, “When I was a kid I heard if you stared straight at the sun long enough you’d go blind, so I tried it, but it hurt so much I quit doing it while I was still seeing.”

  “What in the world’d you want to go blind for?”

  “All I remember—I didn’t like what I was looking at.”

  “So why didn’t you look at something besides it?”

  “It was everything I could see.”

  Florence said, “Once I seen two kids in the street stone to death a pretty Persian cat that must have got away from its owner and that night I woke up crying for the ones who’d killed it because between them and it, they was by far the worse off.”

  “What the fuck are you telling me about a dead cat and two asshole kids for?”

  “I thought we was sharing our earliest memories.”

  Rankin turned off the ignition. He opened his window, hearing, with the impression they were being orchestrated to tell him something (he couldn’t decipher what), honking horns, disembodied shouts, whirring tires, a jackhammer he imagined as being applied to his brain, shredding his already disconnected thoughts into images, memories, wisps of near and long ago nightmares.

  “You didn’t want to get a rub, you didn’t want to have a picnic, you didn’t want to go to the zoo, you didn’t want to bowl, you didn’t want to watch a movie”—Florence’s voice reached him as a distinct sound in that din—”it’s looking more and more like you don’t want to go out to dinner.”

  Rankin faced her.

  She nodded across the intersection past him, at Randy’s Watering Hole. “Maybe we could have a few drinks and play pool while you’re working up to doing what you’re going to have to do to get your appetite back and you into His good graces.”

  Rankin took the key from the ignition; he put it in his pocket. Opening his door, he said, “If the place has even got a table.”

  * * *

  The chunky, Mexican bartender (he had Z carved into his right cheek and hair thick as kelp) believed he’d worked with Rankin. “Four years ago on a non-union crew putting a bridge over Roos Gap up in San Lee County?”

  Rankin shook his head.

  “Jesus, yes.” The bartender put down in front of Rankin his Bud and Wild Turkey order. “You drove a red El Camino with a black racing stripe and weren’t five feet from me when that Indian kid from Canada—we called him Chief and he couldn’t been but nineteen— hit the rocks from three hundred feet up after losing it on a beam wet with dew.”

  Rankin wordlessly downed the Turkey, put the glass on the bar, gazed into the mirror at the reflection of Florence, adding a quarter to the rail of the pool table in the far corner, jawing with one of the shooters, a stringbean without muscles, in a muscle shirt, his razored scalp halved lengthwise by old stitch marks.

  “You got a good-looking, nice as can be wife—or had one— and two kids?”

  “Never been married. Never been on a bridge job.” Less than a dozen shadowy figures in the semi-darkness drinking, moving about, “Stairway to Heaven” on the juke, pool balls clacking, laughter, a stale, bo
ozy smell, floating smoke clouds dense as thunder heads, Rankin trying to imagine having a bridge job (any kind of job), a nice as could be wife (any sort of wife), two kids, a home, his anger building, without him conscious of why, at this gabby Mex who’d made him see so starkly the life he was in by causing him to picture himself, if only fleetingly, in the far better sounding life of the guy he’d been mistaken for. The bartender rapped his knuckles twice on the bar.

  “The shot and chaser are on the house, my man.”

  Rankin picked up his beer. He took a deep breath, exhaled it slow (weird, he thought, he remembered a worthless little thing like this breathing technique taught to him by a jail shrink to supposedly keep a lid on his rage when it started to boil and other things, whole parts of his life, he remembered, if at all, only sketchily or in dreams).

  “Seeing that kid with all them unlived years dropping like a shot bird through the air”—the bartender made a grave frown—”man, it ruined me. I couldn’t go up ten feet after that without I’d start to shake.”

  “I never seen it,” said Rankin. “I wasn’t there.”

  The bartender shrugged as if it didn’t matter to him if or not Rankin had seen it, if or not he’d been there, if or not he was who the Mex had said he was. “I quit so not to be fired and pretty soon I started to get pissed off at my wife and kids for looking at me as if I was half the size I used to be—though I realized later I’d shrunk only in my eyes—plus I couldn’t find other work to fit me and the shit jobs, like this one, I took just to be employed didn’t bring home near what steelwork had and my wife hung in awhile, till she saw and I saw things had changed for good, then she took off with my four babies out west and I’ve seen ‘em exactly twice since.”

  Rankin stood and turned his back to the bar, abruptly realizing that since he’d woken up that morning he’d had no imagined picture of himself; even when he’d caught his reflection in a window or mirror he’d looked right through or beyond himself as if he were passing Charlie Rankin in a crowd; also that he couldn’t recall the sound of his voice from before he started talking to Florence earlier that day.

  He heard at his back the bartender tell him, “I can still hear him screaming as he fell, seemed like for five minutes or more it went on. I hardly knew the kid and I ain’t been able to shake it, man.”

  Rankin walked away from the Mex, into the men’s toilet. He shut the door; moaning, he grabbed his stomach, in which he felt a sporadic pulsing, as if from tiny, rock-hard fists internally pummeling him. His mind’s eye showed him Little Charlie, against Chester Rhimes’s wallops, holding his breath until he blacked out laughing inside at the son of a bitch for never having succeeded in forcing a sound from him, then (minutes, hours, days, years later?) opening his eyes to find his mother atop him, breathing heatedly in her efforts to love him.

  No. Not his mother.

  And Little Charlie wasn’t lying under her; he was sitting atop her, as she uttered gasping, croaking sounds through a crushed larynx and stared wild eyed up into four dark, gaping holes in his otherwise blank face.

  Rankin reached up and touched a finger to his eyes, his nose, his mouth.

  He remembered in that moment buying, with his new boots and gloves, a black ski mask, the clerk he’d bought it from remarking, “You must be expecting the real deal.”

  Buddha declaring that a diamond, no matter how deeply buried in the earth, is a diamond, that one’s dreams, even if they are nightmares, are the purest part of one’s self.

  He stumbled to the sink; he splashed water onto his face, picturing abstractly, as if he were imagining the faces of people with whom he’d been trapped in a dark room, the loneliness of prison, the desolation of anonymity, the desperation to be seen by another set of human eyes, to be touched by caring hands, to be felt by a warm body.

  He remembered pulling the mask onto his head like a watch cap, reminding himself to yank it down later over his features.

  He pulled a towel from the wall rack, dried his face; he dropped the towel in the trash, remembering as he did so tossing into a gas station dumpster the night before a duffel bag holding the bloody mask, gloves, the clothes he’d worn from prison, and a .38 revolver, and he remembered exacdy where that dumpster was.

  He reentered the room to find Florence gone.

  * * *

  Against his mental picture of her, the bar’s occupants struck him as fleshly offspring of the same ghost; he perceived them as one person in different bodies, using different voices, a single son of a bitch eyeing from every angle Charlie Rankin approaching the pool table. A cue stick was thrust out at him.

  The spindly guy holding it inquired of him, “Five bucks a game rich enough for an assassin like you?”

  Rankin perceived himself in that moment as someone a smart person would go miles to avoid; he imagined a part of him, at odds with the rest of him, wriggling to escape his own grip. He pointed to his chest. “You think you know me?”

  The guy sighted along the length of the cue at him. “Ain’t you the money shooter?”

  “Ain’t I what?”

  “Delilah had it you was the one of the two of you to watch out for.”

  Rankin pictured countless closed doors encircling him, each one opening onto a human face that recognized him in a form no other face recognized him in, that remembered him from a place no other face remembered him from, the faces together witnesses to every moment Charlie Rankin had lived or dreamed he’d lived. He said, “I don’t know no Delilah.”

  A tub of lard in denim overalls standing near the first guy said, “He’s fucking with you, Samson.”

  Rankin shifted his eyes to the tub of lard.

  The guy grinned, his yellow teeth, behind matted facial hair, bringing to Rankin’s mind a jackal’s fangs. “She didn’t tell us her name.”

  “Only your name, Samson,” said the spindly guy.

  Rankin took from the spindly guy the cue; he envisioned busting the cue over the guy’s head, the blow not altering the guy’s appearance, the cue being stopped only by a wall or the floor after passing through thin air. “Where is she?”

  “Delilah?”

  Rankin tightened his grip on the cue. “Florence. Her name’s Florence.”

  The tub of lard nodded down a hallway left of him; indenting his right nostril with an index finger, he inhaled exaggeratedly through his left one, as if taking something up into it.

  The first guy said, “You want to go ‘head break, Samson, or wait for her?”

  Rankin, not answering, carrying the stick still, strided past the table, into the hallway; darker even than the bar, it contained two closed doors, several feet apart, in its right wall; an emergency exit filled its far end. Next to the first door, marked STORAGE, Rankin stopped, then put an ear to its wood facing; indistinct noises reached him; he seized and twisted the door’s handle; he pushed it open.

  The stringbean with stitch marks on his head jumped back, colliding with the boxes, stacked along the far wall, against which he’d been pinning Florence, her sweater yanked up over her face, his hand tearing at her panties, his hard-on jabbing at her mid-section. “What the fuck, man?”

  Florence, panting heavily, yanked down her sweater; she spit on the floor, running a hand back through her hair.

  The guy struggled to rezip his pants.

  Rankin stepped into the room.

  Raising his hands before him, Stitch Marks made as if to back up through the boxes. “Lose the cue, okay, man?”

  Rankin shut the door.

  “This was up to your lady, man. I don’t go around soliciting people to give shit away to, believe it or not.”

  A bare ceiling bulb (the room’s only light) cast on the floor an expanded shadow of Florence, her head lowered, swiping at her mouth, pushing a fist into her eyes, her make-up smeared, her lower lip bleeding. Certain when he couldn’t find her in the bar she’d run out on him, Rankin was caught off guard by his feeling at discovering she hadn’t, a feeling telling him something g
ood maybe existed in him because someone good maybe hadn’t given up on him. He pushed the cue’s point into Stitch Marks’s chest.

  Stitch Marks gyrated against the pressure. “She gets me in here, man—not the other way around, all right?—then gives me fifteen bucks for thirty’s worth a beanies—what’s a guy supposed to think?”

  “I told you how much money I had”—Florence’s voice suggested to Rankin a little girl, ten or so, talking to a pet dog she couldn’t believe had bit her purposefully—”and for you to give me what it would pay for. I didn’t say nothing about you raping me!”

  Rankin lifted the stick to the top of the guy’s skull. “What was it opened you up?”

  The guy stared blankly at him.

  Transfixed by a vision of a head being zippered open and things being removed from it, Rankin ran the cue’s felt point along the keloid scars sectioning the guy’s pate.

  Stitch Marks wet his lips with his tongue. “Doctors,” he told Rankin.

  “Why did they?”

  “A part a my brain woulda killed me they hadn’t got it out.”

  “What all’d they take out with it?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Did they take out your nightmares? Your memories? All them fucked up thoughts won’t let a man live peaceful?”

  “After they took out whatever they took out, man, I woke up not remembering what was gone and mostly glad of it.”

  “They took all that out it shoulda made you nicer, smarter, a better fucking human being. It would of me.”

  The guy made a nervous laugh.

  Rankin jerked from off the guy’s head, then jabbed hard into his stomach, the cue’s point; the guy doubled up, groaning; Rankin whapped the stick against the back of the guy’s neck; the guy fell to his knees, a voice in Rankin’s head telling him it as well could be, it ought to be, Charlie Rankin getting clobbered. He raised up the stick again meaning to beat the guy senseless. Florence grabbed his arm.