* * *
But things had changed and Levi knew it. Now when we arrived at work in the morning, there was no mistaking the glimmer in Shepard’s eyes. He’d hang around the house to have coffee with me before taking off. On occasion, when everyone was out of the house, we’d fool around.
“The dude fucking likes you,” Levi said a week later, his eyes flashing. We were in his truck, at a stop light.
“What are you talking about?”
“He’s been asking me all about you. He’s in love with you.”
“He can’t be,” I said, secretly wishing it were so.
“Hey, it could be good for us,” he scowled.
“What do you mean?”
“Shit, what could be better for us than if he wanted to marry you?”
“Excuse me?”
“It wouldn’t have to change things between us. No one’s as great for you as I am. You’d never go for someone that old. And if you did, I’d kill you.” He laughed, then added, “You’d just have to live with him for a time. It would help us pull off our plan.”
“You’re talking too crazy for me,” I said, as we crossed over Newport Boulevard and Piece of Heaven turned back into Costa Misery, with its pawnshops, its dive bars. But that night, after Levi went back out to do who knows what—he wouldn’t say—I stood on the balcony and smoked a hand-rolled. As the lit murky water below pulled my focus, the sounds of the compound drew close—TV, a neighbor singing off-key, kids screaming—and my own version of an old Animals song spun an endless loop in my brain: I gotta get outa this place, if it’s the last thing I ever do.
* * *
The next day, after Shepard’s sister picked up his kids for an overnight, he said, “Let me take you to the fair. You’ve been to the Orange County Fair, right?”
“Um, no,” I answered. I’d left Bumfuck where “hooptedoodle” was a favorite expression, and I had no desire to return.
“Then you got to let me take you.”
“Fairs are a Republican thing.”
“Pshaw!” he said, tucking in his turquoise polo shirt with a tiny alligator over the left breast.
“Shouldn’t you take your kids?”
“They’ve been, and I’ll take them again before it ends. Tonight it will be just you and me. How about it?”
I said yes. I said yes to everything—to Levi and his schemes, now to Shepard.
I went to freshen up.
Levi called from another job while I was in the bathroom; Shepard had run out of work for him. I told him I had to work late. I’d been spending more and more time at Shepard’s and less and less time at our sorry excuse for a home. It was getting to Levi. I knew because when he talked about Shepard, he no longer used his name.
“The motherfucker tell you anything interesting?” or “What’s up with the motherfucker?” I found a bindle with white powder in Levi’s things. His skin was becoming all mottled and he was losing weight. He denied using crank, said he had gotten it for a friend, but he was short-tempered and negative. Now I just wanted to escape with Shepard, go someplace where Levi couldn’t find me.
Shepard and I walked hand in hand to his dusty blue Jag and moments later were gliding down Broadway to Newport and up to Del Mar, his hand on my knee, my hand on his thigh, to where the dark sky was lit up all red from the lights on the rides and the midway. The Ferris wheel spun lazily around, its colorful, happy life temporary—like mine, I feared. This happiness wouldn’t last—it couldn’t; it hadn’t been a part of the plan for me to fall for an Orange County Republican. Levi would never let me have Shepard. I wanted to confess and tell him what Levi was planning, but I didn’t know how I could put it where he wouldn’t just fire me and tell me to be on my way.
We parked and walked toward the lights, toward the Tilt-a-Whirl and the rollercoaster with purple neon cutting the black sky, teenagers on all sides of us running amok, clutching cheap stuffed animals and stalks of cotton candy. Shepard bought us caramel apples, fried Twinkies, and roasted corn on the cob. We got wristbands and drank draft beer.
It was going on eleven and the fairgoers were pouring through the gates, probably to get a jump on the freeways. Shepard and I moved against the flow, heading toward the livestock area, past Hercules, the giant horse, llama stalls, and a corral where the pig races took place. He said he’d been coming here since he was a kid. Fair diehards moseyed about. My phone rang—Levi’s ringtone—but I ignored it, and I feared it. Levi said he could always find me. Something about the GPS positioning on my phone and how he’d rigged it. Cell phones didn’t make you freer—they made your whereabouts known, and I didn’t like it one bit, this hold Levi had on me.
Couples lingered in the shadows. Shadows scared me. I worried Levi might be hiding in them. Lately everything got on his nerves and he suspected everyone. He’d screamed at the next-door neighbor to quit his fool singing. He’d even pierced the pink inner tube in the pool because he no longer liked seeing it floating there.
Shepard directed me to the metal bleachers around the cattle arena. He picked me up, set me on one so our faces were level, and kissed me. “You make me so happy,” he said.
This tall bulky man had grown on me. He pulled a little robin’s egg–blue box from his pocket and flipped it open. A diamond solitaire.
He took the ring from the box and slid it on my finger. “You will, won’t you?” he said. “Marry me?”
* * *
Levi was leaning over the railing of the balcony, smoking with one of his lowlife loser buddies, when I arrived home at midnight. I’d taken off the ring and sequestered it at the bottom of my tampon holder.
The light from the water bounced off Levi and his buddy whose name I forgot. I gave them a half-hearted wave. Levi nodded and smiled his lizard-cold smile.
“Where’ve you been?” he asked, flicking his cigarette butt down into the pool as his buddy took off.
“Had to stay with the kids until Shepard got home.” I took a cigarette from Levi’s pack on the cement floor.
“Fuck you did,” he said.
I gave him a long look. It was always better to say less than more.
“Where’s the ring?” he said.
“What ring?”
“Mimi, this’ll only work if you’re straight with me about the motherfucker.”
I went to go into the apartment, but he grabbed my arm. “I’m gonna tell him all about you, Mimi. You weren’t supposed to fall in love with the asshole. You love me, remember?”
I wrenched my arm away and hurried inside. I poured a glass of water, trying to think.
Levi hurried in behind me. “Don’t fucking walk away from me, Mimi.”
“I’ll do what I want.”
“Fuck you will.” He pulled me to him, pressed his mouth against mine, hiked his hand up my top. “C’mon, baby, what happened to us?”
I pulled free. “Leave me alone, you asshole.”
“I own you,” he said. “I came all the way out here to find you and claim you and now you’re mine.”
“Whatever drug you’re doing, it’s making you crazy.”
“Crazy for you,” he said, grabbing me with one hand and undoing his belt buckle with the other.
I’d never given in to a man forcing me and I wasn’t about to now. I tried pushing him away, but his grip on my arm only grew tighter.
“You always liked it with me before,” he said. “Mr. OC motherfucker better’n me now, Mimi?” His face looked strained, a Halloween mask. “He won’t want you when I tell him who you really are, when I tell him everything you planned. He’ll take his ring back and then where will you be?”
“What I planned?”
He jammed his hand down my pants and hurt me and that’s when something snapped. My prized marble roller sat on the counter behind me, where it always was. I felt for it with my free hand and almost had it, but it slipped away. My hand landed on Levi’s hammer. I brought it around and cracked it against his skull as hard as I could. His sea-foam
green eyes went wide, as if he were seeing me for the first time. Then he crumpled to the linoleum. A trickle of blood issued from his ear.
“Levi!” I gasped. “Shit!”
The way his eyes gazed into the living room without blinking gave him a peaceful look I had never seen.
I tried to think. Should I pack up my things, including my pastry roller, and split? I considered cleaning my fingerprints off everything in the apartment, but I wouldn’t be able to get rid of every little hair, every little cell of mine that had flaked off. I knew about DNA. I could be easily tied to Levi, even without a car or California driver’s license. Even without my name on the month-to-month lease or on bills; I still received my mail at Leonora’s. To the mostly Latino transient residents, I must’ve looked like any other gringa. But I talked to Levi on my cell phone all the time. I could even be tied to him through Shepard. They would visit Levi’s former employer and find me there, loving my new life.
No, I couldn’t simply leave.
I pulled down the shades and locked the door. I wiped my fingerprints off the hammer after placing it near Levi. I turned on the shower as hot as I could stand, peeled off my clothes, and stepped in. This would calm me and help me think.
As the scalding water poured down my face, it came to me, what I would say and do: I came home, Levi was here with a drug-dealing buddy, I took a shower and heard something. When I got out of the shower, I found my boyfriend on the floor.
I turned off the water, wrapped myself in a towel, and jumped into my role. I hurried out to the kitchen, as if I’d heard something bad and found Levi hurt on the kitchen floor. I bent down to see what was wrong. Water puddled about me and mixed with Levi’s blood. I ran screaming from the apartment onto the balcony. As I started down the steps, the towel slipped from my body, and I let it. I was a crazy naked lady. Residents—men in underwear and T-shirts and women in nightgowns—started emerging from their hovels.
“Call the police!” I made a good hysteric. Someone had done my poor boyfriend in.
Women called in Spanish to each other. More than once I heard the word “loco.” A short dark woman with gold front teeth wrapped me in a Mexican blanket, patted my wet hair, and cooed to me in Spanish. The sirens grew closer. A crowd had gathered around us and upstairs at the doorway to the apartment.
There would be an investigation, but after a while I would be cleared. No one ever saw us fight. There was no insurance settlement coming. Why would I kill my boyfriend? The authorities would search instead for the lowlife who did him—or not. Probably not. Who cared about one more druggie dude going bye-bye? My first chance I would call Shepard, tell him details about what happened that he would have heard about on the news. I would tell him how Levi made me say I was his sister, had threatened my life even, had never wanted me to fall for him. I would remind Shepard that I loved him, every inch of him. Shepard believed in me, would never think I could do something like this.
I knew how to be patient. Shepard and Piece of Heaven, California, would eventually be mine, and before long, the ring would be back on my finger.
MASTERMIND
BY REED FARREL COLEMAN
Selden, Long Island
(Originally published in Long Island Noir)
Jeff Ziegfeld was always the exception to the rule: the dumb Jew, the blue-collar Jew, the tough Jew. No matter the Zen of the ethnic group the wheel of fortune got you born into, dumb and poor was the universal formula for tough. And he had to be tough because it’s hard to be hard when your name is Jeffrey Ziegfeld. Didn’t exactly make the kids on the block shit their pants when someone said, “Watch out or Ziggy’ll kick your ass.” He was extra tough because his dad liked to smack him around for the fun of it, all the time saying, “Remember, dickhead, no matter how strong you get, I’ll always be able to kick your ass. I grew up the last white kid in Brownsville. And where’d you grow up? Lake Grove, a town with no lake and no grove. What a fucking joke. Kinda like you, huh, kid?”
J-Zig, as one of the other inmates at the jail in Riverhead had taken to calling him, could trace what had gone wrong with his life back to before he was born. Neither one of his parents had ever gotten out of high school or over moving out of Brooklyn. Long Island was a rootless, soulless place where everyone except the Shinnecock, the East End farmers, and the fishermen came from Northern Boulevard or the Grand Concourse or Pitkin Avenue. And even the natives were trading in their roots and souls for money. All the goddamned Indians wanted to do was run slot machine and bingo parlors. The working farms had been converted into condos, McMansions, and golf courses that no one like J-Zig could afford to play. Not that J-Zig knew a rescue club from a lob wedge. The fishermen? Well, they’d become the cause célèbre of Billy Joel, Long Island’s king of schlock’n’roll. Billy Joel, born and bred in Hicksville. Hicksville, indeed.
* * *
J-Zig’s head was somewhere else as he sat on the ratty Salvation Army couch in his dank basement apartment in Nesconset. Nesconset, a stone’s throw from his mom’s house in Lake Grove. It might just as well have been a million miles away for all he saw of his mom since she’d remarried. He had plenty of reasons to hate his real father, but he hated O’Keefe, his mom’s new husband, even more and that was really saying something. His stepfather, a retired city fireman with a belly like a beach ball and the manners of a hyena, was a drunk and more than a little anti-Semitic. J-Zig didn’t let that get to him. O’Keefe—if the moron had a first name, J-Zig didn’t know it—hated everybody, himself most of all. Jews were probably only fourth or fifth on his list. Besides, O’Keefe’s opinion of him was nothing more than the buzzing of mosquito wings. There was only one man J-Zig ever cared enough about to want to impress.
J-Zig had a terminal case of yearning exacerbated by persistent bouts of resentment. But he was a lazy son of a bitch and about as ambitious as a dining room chair. There’d be no pulling himself up by his bootstraps—whatever the fuck bootstraps were, anyhow—not for this likely lad. One way or the other he was a man destined to be a ward of the taxpaying public. He’d already tried on three of the state’s myriad options: jail, welfare, and the old reliable unemployment insurance. Truth was, he found none of them very much to his liking. The food and company at the jail sucked. Welfare was okay as far as it went, but since he and the wife and her bastard son by another man’s drunken indiscretion had split, he no longer qualified. He liked unemployment fine, but the bitch of it was you had to work for a while to qualify and J-Zig wasn’t keen on that aspect of the equation. So he sold fake Ecstasy outside clubs and stolen car parts to pay the bills.
When he wasn’t making do with the drugs or the hot car parts, he worked as muscle, doing collections for a loan shark and fence named Avi Ben-Levi. Ben-Levi was a crazy Israeli who put cash on the street and charged major vig to his desperate and pathetic clients. Avi might have been a madman, but J-Zig admired the shit out of him. He admired him not only because Avi was only a few years older than him and had everything J-Zig wanted—a big house in King’s Point, a gull-wing Mercedes, and the hottest pussy this side of the sun—but because of how Avi got it.
“Balls, Jeffrey, balls. That’s what counts in this world. I came to this country five years ago with three words of English and these,” Avi would say, grabbing his own crotch. “Look at me. I am a plain-looking bastard with a high school education. I even got kicked out of the IDF. Not easy getting kicked out of the Israeli army, but I did it. And here I am. Do you have the balls to make good, Jeffrey? Do you have them?”
That was a question J-Zig sometimes asked himself until it was the only thing in his head. Still, as much as J-Zig yearned for Avi’s approval, he hated being muscle. Well, except when it came to gamblers.
He had no respect for gamblers. They’d borrow the money and blow it that day and then, when J-Zig would come to collect, they’d squeal and beg like little girls. He liked to hear them scream when he snapped their bones like breadsticks. It was the business types he felt sorry for.
All sorts of people borrowed money from Avi, but as broke as he could be at times, J-Zig knew better than to dip into a loan shark’s well. Once they had you, they had you by the balls and then they squeezed and squeezed and squeezed until they milked you dry. Thing was, Ben-Levi didn’t do the milking himself. It was always left to the muscle like J-Zig. It had been a few months since he’d worked for Ben-Levi because the Israeli had wounded J-Zig’s pride. Isn’t it always the way: the people whose love you want hurt you the most? He’d come to the loan shark with an excellent idea about how to streamline Ben-Levi’s business.
“What, are you a mastermind all of a sudden? Listen, Jeffrey, never confuse muscle with balls, okay? You are good muscle, but show me your balls. Until you do, just do your job, get paid, and shut up.” He’d waved his hand in front of J-Zig’s face. “This ring and watch are worth more money than you will ever see in your life, so please, either go to Wharton or keep your genius ideas to yourself.”
Mastermind. The word had been stuck in J-Zig’s head ever since. He burned to prove the Israeli wrong, to repay Avi for mocking him. He wanted to shove Avi’s sarcasm so far up his ass that they’d be able to see it in Tel Aviv. It didn’t seem to matter what J-Zig did or how hard he tried to please, because his father du jour would always shit on him. He could never remember a time when his real dad had anything but disdain for him. His dad’s pet name for J-Zig was the Little Idiot, as in, Where the fuck is that little idiot? or What did the little idiot get on his report card this term? That’s how J-Zig still saw himself—a little idiot. Then there were all the other men who had passed through J-Zig’s front door on the way to his mother’s bed. Most of them ignored him. The ones who didn’t treated him like a case of the crabs. Hey, can’t you ditch the kid? I can’t fuck if I know the kid’s listening to you squeal through the wall. Compared to them, O’Keefe was a fucking prince among men. But it was Avi more than any of them he burned to prove wrong.
USA Noir Noir: Best of the Akashic Noir Series Page 20