by Jeff Johnson
“Maybe you should go to the coast or something. Get out of town for a few more days.” I could feel her eyes on my face as I studied my glass. “There was that little cabin you told me about, with the fireplace. The one you used to go to with that lesbian.”
I shook my head. “I can’t let anyone chase me out of Old Town.”
“Of course not,” she said sourly. “No one ever gets chased out of Old Town. It has never happened that advanced criminals from out of town came and made someone lie low for a few days.” She swirled the ice in her own tumbler, thinking. “So. The cops.”
“You can see how the police could complicate things.”
“Yeah.” She drained half of her beer. “You tell them a sanitized version of what you just told us and they might pick up on that. Not like they would believe you anyways, no matter what you say. This is a train wreck, Darby.”
A fresh round arrived. Delia paid for them again, tipping big to keep us to ourselves. Cherry left us alone.
“Well, as if all this wasn’t enough, it looks like we have a problem with Dmitri,” she continued. “I was waiting for a good time to tell you the whole story.”
“Shit,” I said, slumping.
“He came in yesterday looking for you. Dude looked like he hadn’t slept in a week. Smelled bad as fuck, too, like he’d been drinking bum piss white wine for breakfast and maybe had a dead foot tucked in his coat. I gave him the runaround, smiling and giggling like a toy bimbo machine, wiggled my boy butt, et cetera. You did pay the rent, didn’t you?”
“Yeah, it’s not that. Gomez is worried, too. So is Flaco.”
“If we had to move …” She let that one dangle. Moving a street shop like the Lucky was a death sentence. It was bad for any tattoo shop. It basically meant you had to start all over again. An old place like the Lucky did well because it had been in the same place for more than thirty years. Even if people didn’t know the name of the place, they knew it was a tattoo shop. The best advertising an alternative business could have was a big fat “X” on everyone’s internal map. Even a move across the street would be disastrous. The phone book, the Internet, a year of ads in every paper, all were powerless to redraw our place on that map.
“Fuck,” I said. “This week just keeps getting better and better. It’s like we … it’s like we got cursed by Gypsies or something.”
“Just don’t follow your instincts and we’ll be fine,” she said.
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?” I tried to look angry, but I could tell it projected as guilty evasion instead. I could feel it on my face. Delia considered for a moment before she replied, so something big was on the way.
“I’m going to use music to explain this. It’s the difference between, say, Clapton and Hendrix. You listen and you wait for the moment you hear something masterful in Clapton, how close he can get to the edge of soulful fury without losing control. It’s that moment when we measure the guy. Lacking in the end and probably only popular because he was white. Hendrix was of course black, and he had weird hair on top of it. But when you listened, there it was, a controlled raging beauty, precision deep soul fury navigation at its finest. He was like an astronaut flying with no computer and a blindfold through the fire part of reentry. Functional, genius-level insanity. It wasn’t instinct. It was something else entirely, something so rare there isn’t even a word for it.”
She motioned to Cherry for another round and held up her glass to me.
“You’re like that in a crisis, Darby. And sometimes it also happens spontaneously between drink number three and drink number nine.”
So we clinked glasses and drank. And then we drank some more.
Dark, fat clouds were squatting on the toilet rim of the horizon as I drove home. The rest of the sky was one featureless mass of pot metal gray. The streetlights were flickering on and it was just starting to rain with promise when I pulled up in front of my house. I reached into the pocket of my bomber jacket and cupped the cold steel ball there as I got out and locked the car door. As the rain pounded on me, I looked the place over until I caught sight of Buttons sitting on the porch watching me. He was a shy cat for such a big boy, fond only of myself and Delia and the old Chinese lady who lived next door. He wouldn’t be sitting there if a prowler had been around.
I went up the steps and let him in. His overlord and primary critic Chops greeted him with a beep and a few growls and then they went into wrestling mode, a random dance punctuated by grappling lunges and fits of licking. I couldn’t help but smile as I watched. You can’t trust people who don’t like cats. Anyone who failed to notice how they brightened a place was empty.
I turned the lights on and changed into dry clothes, then popped a beer and went to the front window. Curtains of rain swept the street. A couple of cars sloshed past, a Jeep and a Ford Taurus. I sat down on the edge of the couch, drawing a blank as big as the rainy night. I didn’t know what to do.
I didn’t like sneaking up on my place and standing in the rain any more than I liked leaving the Lucky early. Part of being a good boss was playing the part well. I’d bailed Nigel out of jail once and loaned him my car a dozen times. I’d listened to his strange problems late into the night and bought him drinks while I did. I’d helped him exact revenge a few times, even when he was being purely spiteful.
Big Mike had crashed on the very couch I was sitting on many times, owing to his unfortunate taste for suburban women, who actually had no patience for him. When Mike’s only family member, a cousin of his grandmother and the woman who had raised him since he was four years old, died suddenly of a stroke, I had spent many a night listening to the big man’s stories of his “Memaw,” as he called her, even though as an orphan myself I found his deep attachment to some stern old Croatian woman perfectly mystifying. Oddly enough, of all my long-time artists, only Delia had never leaned on me. But the fact of the matter was that I never really leaned on any of them, ever, no matter what. It would be a breach of trust, breaking into a piggy bank that was never supposed to be busted. Those people counted on me for their livelihoods, and their fates hinged on how well I held my shit together. And now I was leaning on them.
I sipped beer and thought about Roland Norton. Not the artist. The man. The man who had drawn a set of flash in Panama, 1955.
I’d bought the Lucky Supreme from Wally Langdon, my unstable non-mentor. He was the closest thing I had to family, which meant that he had given me a birthday present once or twice and I’d eaten dinner at his house on a handful of occasions, that kind of thing. We’d known each other for more than two decades. Wally would butcher anyone over pussy or a nickel, myself included, but he was sweet for such a terrible villain. When he’d finally retired at seventy-eight, the rain had gotten to him at long last and he and his obese wife had picked up and moved back to San Diego, where they’d grown up more than half a century before. Wally was eighty-two now and taught boxing part time at his local YMCA as a cover for his women and wine activities. After thirty years of working the night shift at the Lucky Supreme, he still kept late hours. It was a little after nine, so I decided to call him. His wife Maureen answered.
“Darby, you bad boy,” she scolded. “You haven’t called in months. We were wondering if you’d gotten married or you were finally convicted of something.”
I smiled. “How’s San Diego treating you?”
Maureen made an exasperated hiccup/burp/grunt. “Still sunny. I have to wear a hat whenever I go out, doctor’s orders. My skin, you know. You’re coming for Thanksgiving, aren’t you?”
“You know me and free food.” There was no way in hell.
“Oh goody. I have a couple of little jobs for you. The storm window in the living room is stuck and the downstairs toilet just keeps running after you flush it.”
“I’ll bring my tools.” Maureen always thought of me as her personal handyman, her inept gardener and unpaid janitor. Her jiffy toilet repair guy. I was part of her humanitarian exploitation of the lost and damned, which also inclu
ded three-legged dogs. A charity project to gloat about in the company of other, lesser old fat white ladies. I thought about her skin cancer. Her bad breathing. Her giant heart, bloated with cheese, straining with every beat, purple and taut.
“Let me get Wally.” She put the phone down and whistled. “Papa, it’s Darby!” Thirty seconds later I heard the phone clatter across the floor, followed by some muted curses and then rustling.
“Hey, boy! How the hell are ya?”
Wally’s resilience never ceased to amaze me, nor the incredible volume of his voice, or the way he dropped every phone before he spoke into it. I’d once seen Wally eat a slice of pizza that fell wet-side-down on the floor of the tattoo shop after a busy night of really rock-bottom hookers, all getting his sloppy tattoos courtesy of a frat kid gone mad. Eating that fallen slice was like licking a scalpel in the medieval infirmary of a particularly nasty Haitian prison. It had shocked me mute at the time, and then he’d fucked the worst one in the group. I was silent for two days as a result. More than once during the long years we’d worked together I’d looked over to see him picking his nose with bloody gloves on while tattooing a horrifically bumpy, scab-pocked junkie’s yellow neck. Either Wally had an immune system more advanced than a sewer rat’s, or germs weren’t all they were cracked up to be. I held the phone out and thumbed the volume down.
“I’m good, real good. Well, I mean okay. I guess. Actually, Wally, I have a small problem.”
“I went down to the beach today and saw the cutest little number! These kids wear bathing suits like band aids! I remember when—”
And off he went. It was always that way with Wally. I could have called and told him a tulip had grown out of my belly button and the mysterious phenomenon had somehow resulted in leukemia, and he would have instantly launched into a story about whatever he was thinking about at the time, usually pussy or war, sometimes tits, and occasionally ass. Having a two-way conversation with him was like talking to a two-year-old at a theme park. His attention span was only seconds long and stuck in random. The three things that could make him focus were money, a woman who was seemingly impossible to attain, and the appearance of the children he had outside of his marriage. Then his scheming was eerie and alien, still out of focus but effective, like the war council consensus of the minds of a million clever rats.
“Wally,” I interrupted. “Tell me about Roland Norton.”
“Roland Norton? Didn’t what’s-his-name steal all that stuff from you? The kid with the fake name, what was it?” I could picture him squinting and rubbing his wiry gray hair. “Did you ever get any money out of that?”
“JB. Jason Bling.”
“That’s the guy! Whatever happened to him?”
“Nothing good,” I replied shortly. “So, Roland Norton …”
“You know, I never met the guy. He worked with old Roy Bob down around Camp Pendleton. When I bought the Lucky from Roy, oh, in ’76 or so, I found that Norton flash in a box with some other stuff. I think Roy Bob thought it was too ugly to hang up. I remember when—” and he was off again, tunneling down through the lengthy colon of his lies and memories.
“So who would know anything about him?” I interrupted quickly, before he got completely carried away again.
“Who? Roy Bob? That old redneck—”
“No, no, Roland Norton.”
“Oh. Well, let’s see. I think Red Avery’s dad might have worked with him for a while. Right after the war. You could talk to him. Red’s pretty … old, I guess they call it.”
I had to make it fast. If I left any clues, I’d have the council of a million rat minds to deal with on top of everything else. “You don’t have a number for Red, do you?”
An hour and many rambling, seamy stories later I hung up and looked at the number for Red Avery. Seattle area code. It was after ten, but I called it anyway. I got a scratchy eighties-era answering machine, full of condenser microphone static. A very old woman announced that no one was available to take my call. I left a polite message and my number, saying that I was a friend of Wally’s and that he sent his best regards, though of course he hadn’t.
It was getting late and I was tired after the last few days. I took off my shoes and socks and walked in my bare feet over the cold wood floor to the front window. There were no new cars on the street. The rain was steady and the drops were small. I lit up a smoke and went outside, flanked by Chops and Buttons, who would guard me against malevolent night squirrels and errant raccoons.
Probing into Roland Norton, who was after all nothing more than a blurry memory in the minds of a few old-school con men, might amount to nothing. I was probably tracking a washed out scent down a dead-end alley, but that was pretty much all I’d been doing so far anyway.
In the morning, I worked out at sunrise and then walked around the corner to the G&G café for breakfast. I enjoyed the atmosphere of the little place and the food was better than good, plus it wasn’t far to walk in the rain. The G&G had old brick walls, an exposed beam ceiling, and a few older but fine waitresses I flirted with outrageously at every opportunity. I took a seat at the counter and ordered two eggs with a side of biscuits and gravy. I was just settling back with a cup of coffee and my sketchbook, soaking in the morning vibe of clinking plates and the smell of bacon, when my cell phone rang. I looked at the screen. Seattle area code.
“Is this Darby Holland?” came a quavering, ancient voice.
“Yes, sir,” I replied. “Thanks for getting back to me so soon.”
“Not much … to do.” Red Avery was a very sick man. His breath came in tiny, enervated sips between his almost inaudible words. I winced.
“Well, good to hear from you. Wally told me you used to know a man named Roland Norton. Do you remember him?”
I listened to the painful sound of Red Avery’s breathing. “I do. Roland worked with my father. And Roy Bob. San Diego.”
“Ah, good,” I said brightly. “What was he like?”
Red Avery wheezed and then bubbled a small cough.
“You work for Wally?”
“No sir. Wally retired a few years ago. I own the Lucky Supreme now. I had some of Roland Norton’s flash that went missing and I’m gathering information for the insurance.”
Red Avery might have been a very sick old man, but he wasn’t stupid. I listened to the labored patterns of his breath for over a minute before he replied.
“Insurance,” he said finally. There was a note of skepticism in his whistly voice.
“I’m trying to file a claim, but I’m getting the runaround,” I clarified. Every tattoo artist of Wally’s generation had gotten stiffed by the system. We still did. Also, every one of the old guys always wanted money for anything, especially information. Wally had tried to shake me down a dozen times with various scams only just last night. “I thought if I knew a little more about Norton I could … I don’t know.” I left it there. Either he’d bite or he wouldn’t.
“Roland Norton,” Red whispered. “I knew him when I was … getting started. Thief. Crook.” He took a moment to pant. It sounded like he was operating on one tiny black lung. “White drugs, whores. Beat a woman dead. Hated. Him.”
“I see,” I said, trying to politely fill in the next breathing episode.
“Went to Panama after the war. Tattooing service men. All we did.” Pause. “Service men.”
“Yes,” I said. “The flash says Panama, 1955.”
“About … right. Ever see … Basil Rathbone … movies?”
“Yes, sir.”
“He was like him, but scummy.” Pause. “Roy Bob … they went back.”
“What happened to him? To Roland Norton?”
Red Avery wheezed for a moment. “Died. Black market. Jail. Panama. Mosquitoes.” His breathing was terrible to hear. “That it?”
“Yes, sir,” I said.
“How’s Wally? We had … good times. Hear that? You … enjoy … your day, boy.” He took a few whistling breaths and coughed up something big a
nd thick as glue. “Don’t come twice. Now money. The insurance. You—”
I hung up and grimaced at my phone. The smiling hippie waitress brought my breakfast with a bottle of my favorite hot sauce and set everything on the counter in front of me. She was a long haired, trim blonde in her late thirties, with glacier-blue eyes and deep smile lines around her mouth. I had a sudden, almost overpowering urge to lick those lines and then lick the inside of her smile, to suckle her sun-freckled eyelids.
“Bad news?” she asked, glancing at my phone. I ran my eyes over her and smacked my lips. She blushed and I grinned and watched her wonderful face, a work of lifespan art that told of dancing in cold mountains and drinking beer around bonfires after swimming naked in canyon lakes the color of her eyes. I was a regular there and we knew each other well enough to do a little visual groping without it getting too serious. Either way, I gave her a long, long look, and Red Avery went away.
“More of the same. Maybe I’ll have some orange juice.”
When I pulled up to the Lucky just after noon it was cold enough to see my breath. Monique was standing under the awning of the Korean mini-mart next door again, chewing the shit out of someone on her cell phone again. She was still wearing flip-flops.
The human body can exist, for some short years, on nothing more than Burger King’s one dollar menu, desperation, whatever you can suck out of a glass pipe, and the bitter certainty that everyone dies, especially the people who fucked you over. At least that’s what I understood about Monique, the little black hooker we let use the bathroom at the Lucky the most frequently.
She snapped her phone closed and glared at me. Other than the flip-flops, she was wearing three-quarter length bright blue spandex pants, a frilly red bra, and a big gray warm-up jacket that was hanging open. She must have been freezing, but you couldn’t tell from looking at her.
“The fuck you want,” she snarled.
I shrugged.
“Bitch stole my good boot,” she fumed, stamping her sodden flip-flops on the wet sidewalk. I’d heard about it already, but it surprised me that she hadn’t gotten the other boot back yet. Her toes were long and skinny. Monique had been around for a few years by then. Every year she lost a little more of the dreamy bubble butt she’d hit the streets with when she arrived, and her hair got shorter and thinner. Patches of her mottled scalp were finally showing. She rooted around in her giant purse and yanked out a single pink plastic boot. “What the fuck I’m supposed to do with this?” She threw it into the gutter. A brand new Old Town relic.