Charles Willeford - Sideswipe

by Unknown

  But the first thing he would have to do was to buy a car. A man without a car would be helpless down there, and he didn't know anything about the bus routes, or how to use the new Metrorail, either. In a city that widely spread out, a car was an absolute necessity.

  He rode the bus into West Palm Beach and made arrangements at his new bank to buy a brown Honda Civic, a repossessed 1981 model with 42,000 miles on the odometer and a new roof rack. He felt guilty about buying Japanese, but being six years old the Civic was only $1,800, not counting taxes.

  He paid with a check and filled in the insurance transfer from his Escort at the bank, applying its coverage to the Honda. This transfer meant that Maya no longer had any insurance on their Escort, but that was her problem now, not Stanley's. He also got another five hundred dollars in traveler's checks and another forty in cash at the bank before driving home in his new--practically new--car.

  He found the mortgage book in his wife's desk and wrote out two monthly mortgage checks in advance. He didn't know how long he would stay in Miami, but at least he had this worry off his mind. He called the telephone company and, after being transferred three times to people who didn't seem to understand what he wanted, managed to get his telephone placed on a hold, or standby, basis. This way, if someone called, the caller could hear it ring, but the phone would not actually ring at his home, nor would he be able to make any calls from his home until it was taken off standby. The fee for this was nine dollars a month. Stanley argued with the supervisor he had finally been transferred to, telling her that it was outrageous to charge him this much money for an inoperable phone, but the company wouldn't budge. Stanley then sent a check for the current phone charges--and for ten dollars more--to the address the woman gave him, which was different from his regular billing address.

  The business with the phone company was such an ordeal, Stanley decided to do nothing about paying any of his other utility bills in advance. If they cut off his water and electricity while he was gone, he would pay up and get them reconnected when he returned.

  He then drove into Riviera Beach, mailed the mortgage payments, and signed a "hold mail" card at the post office for an indefinite period, writing on the card, "Will pick up at P0 when I return from vacation."

  If Maya had still been with him--instead of running away--these were all little chores that he could have delegated to her. And he knew his life would be complicated in a lot of other respects by her desertion. But it was worth it. He wouldn't have been able to take Maya to Miami with him anyway, even if she had been willing to go. Being without a wife gave a man a whole different way of looking at the world, and it looked even better now that he had a car to drive again. If it came to a toss-up, a car or a wife, most men, or at least the ones Stanley had known in Detroit, would certainly give up their wives.

  After packing some white shirts and some wash pants in a cardboard box, and putting on a new blue-and-white seersucker suit he had bought when he first came to Florida, but had never worn, Stanley wondered what to do about the storm shutters. If he closed them, and turned off the electricity, everything would be mildewed when he returned. He decided not to pull them down, but to crack all of the windows a little for circulation after he turned off the air conditioning. He drove over to Sneider's station to have the tank filled and asked Mr. Sneider to pull down the storm shutters from the outside if there happened to be a hurricane while he was gone.

  "If you'll do that for me, Mr. Sneider, I'll give you a dollar for your trouble when I get back."

  "No problem, Mr. Sinkiewicz. It's the least I can do for a neighbor. You takin' I-95 into Miami?"

  "I thought I would."

  "They've been having some highway robberies down there, you know. They throw a mattress or a set of box springs on the off-ramps, and then when you stop another guy throws a concrete block through your window and robs you. It's been in the papers. So what you should do is carry a tire iron on the other bucket seat in front, so you can chop off the man's fingers when he reaches in for your wallet and wristwatch."

  Stanley checked the trunk, but there was no tire iron. Sneider got one from the shop and handed it to him. "I'll lend you this one, Dad. You can return it when you get back. But if I were you, I'd stay in the center lane on I-95 and keep your doors locked. When I drive down to Miami in my tow truck for parts sometimes, I carry a shotgun loaded with birdshot. I don't want to kill nobody, but a load of birdshot in the face will discourage most of these robbers."

  "I could stop at Moseley's Hardware and buy a shotgun--"

  "The tire iron'll be enough. I use my shotgun for dove hunting, too, but for you, I wouldn't go to that extra expense just for a trip down 1-95."

  "How's little Pammi, Mr. Sneider?"

  "I sent her up to Camp Sparta for the rest of the summer. She called last night to tell us she won fourth place in the archery contest. They know how to straighten little girls out in Camp Sparta. You get a little girl, or a little boy, interested in sports, it gets their mind off their private parts."

  "I never had the advantage of going to a summer camp when I was a kid."

  "Me neither. But there was a time there in the service, for about five years, when I didn't own a damned thing that couldn't be left out in the rain. Kids have it good nowadays, but they're too dumb to know it."

  Hoping he hadn't neglected anything important, Stanley drove to I-95 and headed south for Miami, seventy miles away, and without a single stoplight on the interstate.

  The painting on the upright easel in the garage had a meaning so private that the artist himself, James Frietas-Smith, didn't know what it was.

  James always worked slowly, on one large canvas at a time, and without a preconceived notion of what the final product would look like. He piled on paint and then more paint until every inch of the canvas was covered with multiblobs of color three-quarters of an inch thick.

  James stepped back about ten feet and studied the painting for a few minutes. The composition definitely held the eye within the rectangle, and the magenta blobs on the right balanced the three wide smears of lampblack on the left. But the overall picture needed a touch of luminosity. James squeezed a large tube of zinc white. The thick paint oozed out like dilute toothpaste onto his palette knife. Moving in close to the canvas and spreading his short, slightly bowed legs, James applied the globule of white to the center of the canvas. He brought his pursed lips close to the blob and blew steadily, flattening it into the shape of an amoeba with the jet of air he forced through his lips.

  That was all it needed, he thought, as he stepped back and looked at the picture again. Finished. A wave of depression engulfed him as he wiped his fingers on a turpentinesoaked rag. It was always this way when he completed a picture. Always. Painting them was a joyful suspension of life, but it was a downer to finish them. Who would buy a picture like this one, anyway? The canvas was sixty inches wide and forty inches high, and a frame would make it larger still. James always made his own stretchers, tacking down the canvas and sizing the surface with white lead himself. The money he invested, including the tubes of paint, was a large sum for a man in his financial position. And if he were to consider the time consumed in actually painting and finishing a work (the cost of framing was out of the question), he would have to charge a great deal of money for each finished picture. But so far, he couldn't sell any of them; he couldn't even give them away.

  The primary colors he was fond of would overpower most living rooms, and the hotels he had tried were not interested. A few weeks ago, before his trip to New Orleans, James had stacked four of his paintings on top of his little Morris Minor, tied them down with rope, and driven to a half-dozen small hotels in Miami Beach. The two managers who consented to look merely shook their heads; the rest of them wouldn't even come out to the parking lot. He didn't intend to let them humiliate him again. He would just have to wait until he was somehow discovered, and his work recognized by someone.

  The picture was finished now, but what cou
ld he do with it? Maybe the best thing to do would be to scrape off the paint and begin another. But he didn't feel like starting another painting. Not now. Not when he was frightened half to death--and part of his fear, he noticed, had somehow managed to work its way into the new painting. He didn't recall using so much magenta in anything else he had done.

  The temperature in the four-car garage was in the high eighties, but James's hands weie cold and clammy. He wiped his palms on his blue-denim cutoffs and sighed. If this thing with Troy Louden didn't work out, he would be in the hands of the Allambys for certain. James shivered and left the garage studio for the bright sunlight of the jungly back yard. James didn't know the precise origin of the expression "in the hands of the Allambys," although he presumed it had been a slave-owning family of unusual cruelty during the early years of Barbados. But Bajans, when they still used the archaic expression, knew for certain that when a person was "in the hands of the Allambys," hope was gone, the worst that could happen to a man had already happened, and from that day forward the man was lost... doomed.

  Like many Barbadians whose families had been on the island for a dozen generations or more, James wasn't completely Caucasian, even though in Barbados he was considered a white man. His hair was reddish brown and curly. His eyes were blue. His nose, although high at the bridge, was wide at the base, and his large round nostrils flared slightly when he got excited. His even teeth were white and strong, and his lips were pronounced and thick. His jutting hips and the carelessly swinging arms that gave an island rhythm to his loosely disjointed walk also hinted at his ancestry and upbringing. But only once since he'd come to the United States--in New Orleans--had James been recognized as a man who was half black.

  Every time James recalled the incident in New Orleans, a wave of shame, fear, and revulsion hit him, like a man with a case of the dog bitters. He had gone into one of those intimate, candle-lit, side-street, open-air restaurants to sample some of the city's famous French-Creole cooking. The patio setting was attractive, with flowers growing in ceramic pots along the intricate wrought-iron fence. There were colored lights trained on the fountain in the center of the courtyard. The waiter had seated James at a glasstopped wrought-iron table, with a pink plastic table setting and pink linen napkin. He handed James a menu printed in French and left him alone for five minutes.

  When James had looked up again from the menu, he was confronted by two white-jacketed men who were studying his face by the flickering light of the double-candled hurricane lamp on his table. The headwaiter nodded briefly to his table waiter and then said softly and firmly, "We'll serve you this time, sir, but don't come back again. Many of our patrons prefer not to dine with black men."

  No one overheard the headwaiter, but for a moment James had been petrified with fear. Without protesting, without even ordering, he had slunk out of the restaurant. He hadn't eaten anything that evening. He had walked for hours, thinking about the things he should have said to the waiters. He could have shown them his Barbados passport; he could have forced a showdown of some kind--but he hadn't. Two days later James had left New Orleans on the Greyhound bus and come back to Miami, even though his vacation money would have stretched for another week.

  He had a good setup here in Miami, and he was sorry now that he had gone to New Orleans in the first place. If he had only stayed put, when his aunt had sent him the birthday check, he wouldn't be involved now with Troy Louden and that horribly mutilated woman! James could hardly look at her face without feeling sick to his stomach, and he couldn't meet her eyes at all. Her face was so badly disfigured, he knew that the horror he felt in his heart would show in his eyes.

  And now another man was coming in on the deal--Pop Sinkiewicz, Troy Louden's old cellmate. Another professional criminal and ex-con. Troy had told James that Sinkiewicz had done a little time with him for trying to crack a small safe, and that James should be nice to the old man because he would be financing their operation. How many more would be in on it before Troy was through? He had never dreamed that Troy would come to Miami in the first place. James had been rather vague about the job at the time he had suggested it to Troy in New Orleans, but he hadn't been able to concentrate fully on his painting since he received the postcard from Troy saying he was on his way to Miami.

  The postcard alone had been an omen. A symbol, and an ugly one, too. As a nonobjective painter, James thought often about symbols, even though he avoided them in his work, and just the sight of that four-color postcard had shaken him before he read it. Naturally, James hadn't told Troy about the incident in the courtyard cafe; he would never tell anyone about that, ever. Yet the card from Troy had featured a typical New Orleans wrought-iron gate, and filling the background behind the gate (not in front, which would have made a big difference, symbolically, but -behind-) there was a bed of roses--yellow, pink, and dark red. What had made Troy take that particular card at random out of a drugstore rack? There were literally thousands of postcards he could have chosen. Did the gate represent prison bars? Or did it mean the color bar? The symbols meant something awful; he knew that much.

  Suppose, just suppose, everything went wrong? The robbery would fail--or -could- fail--despite Troy's assurances to the contrary. Then where would he be? In prison, that's where, and if he went to prison, would the authorities list him as a black man or a white man? But that wasn't as important as -going- to prison...

  Oh, man, he wouldn't be able to stand being in prison either way.

  On the other hand, Troy knew what he was doing. This sort of thing was old stuff to Troy, and if everything worked out smoothly, as Troy claimed it would, James would be off to New York with four or five thousand dollars--maybe more--in his pocket. And if there was a place that deserved to be robbed in Florida, it was the Green Lakes Supermarket.

  On the tenth of every month James received a check for $200 from his father, mailed from Bridgetown, but it wasn't enough, not nearly enough to live on and buy expensive art supplies, too. When the Green Lakes Supermarket had announced its grand opening in the newspaper, James had driven out there and applied for a part-time job as a bag boy. He had worked on Fridays until eleven, and all day Saturdays. The minimum wage, plus his tips, had added almost forty dollars a week to his income. But this extra money wasn't enough either, not when he had to buy art supplies and pay for the upkeep on his Morris Minor. To supplement his supermarket pittance, James had done a little pilfering every Saturday he worked at the market. He hadn't taken much, only little items he could stuff into his pockets--a can of sardines, a can of tuna, some candy bars, apples, toothpaste, and once a pound of hamburger, which had turned bad before he got home that night. Then on his way back inside the store after delivering a load of groceries to a customer's car in the parking lot, James would drop off his pilfered items behind the front seat of his Morris, which he always parked close to the store's entrance.

  At four P.M. Ofl the last Saturday he worked at the market, the day manager crooked a finger at him as he came back in from the lot, pushing a half-dozen carts he had collected. The day manager was in his early forties and wore a Fu Manchu moustache, a red tie, and a pink buttondown shirt.

  "You're fired, James."

  "Why?"

  "For stealing, that's why! Now get the fuck out of here, you goddamned thief, and don't stop at the cage for your check on the way out!"

  Two of the girls on the checkout line heard every word.

  "Yes, sir," James said, and hurried out of the store as the two checkout girls giggled.

  That was a week before his twenty-sixth birthday, and before he received the sizable and welcome check from his Aunt Rosalie. Now he had no money, and a lot on his mind.

  The Green Lakes Supermarket had suited Troy perfectly when James had driven him out there yesterday to show it to him. After spending fifteen minutes in the store, with James outside in the car, Troy had rejoined him with two apples he had bought. He handed one of the apples to James and bit into the other.

 
"Lush," Troy had said. Then, gesturing toward the entrance, "It's just like you said, James."

  From a professional's point of view, the layout of the store and the location of the market were ideal. Eventually there would be an entire Class B shopping center in the Green Lakes subdivision of Miami, with thirty different stores, but at present only the supermarket had opened, and the rest of the buildings were still under construction. The supermarket would anchor one end, and there would be a K-Mart at the other. The twenty-five-acre parking lot had been completed, but had not yet been striped for parking spaces. The new supermarket was about 250 yards away from State Highway 836, which led to the Miami International Airport cutoff. Troy couldn't have selected a better location, or a better time, for a successful robbery if he had been allowed to design one himself. The employees were new, and security was lax, and as James had said, the safe was supposed to be locked but in practice never was until the store was closed for the night.

  When they got back to James's garage apartment, after the quick surveillance of the supermarket, Troy had borrowed the Bajan's last five dollars, taken the Morris Minor, and driven away. James hadn't seen him again until he returned later that night with the woman--

  "Pardon me, son."

  James leaped two feet off the garage floor and whirled in midair before he landed again. "Man!" he said to Stanley Sinkiewicz, "you shouldn't sneak up on a man like that, man!"

  "I didn't mean to scare you none, son. I knocked at the door of the big house in front, but when no one answered I just came around here to the back."

  "That's all right, sir." James had recovered his breath. "I live back here over the garage. The Shapiros own the big house, and they let me live here free for taking care of the place while they're up in New England for the summer."

  "You're James Frietas-Smith, with a hyphen?"

  "Yes, sir."

  "You're the fella I'm looking for, then." Stanley stared curiously at James. Stanley had never seen a Bajan before, but the young man, except for the size of his splayed bare feet, looked about the same as any other well-tanned Floridian wearing cutoff shorts and a paint-stained T-shirt. "My name's Stanley Sinkiewicz. Senior," he added. "I'm a friend of Troy Louden's."