First You Try Everything

by Jane McCafferty

  The Juicy Fruit girl walked outside and Evvie followed her, not looking at Ranjeev.

  “Hey!” she called. “Can I talk to you?”

  The girl just looked at her, her chin tucking.

  “I’m making a movie. Wanna be in it?”

  Still the girl said nothing. She smiled a little.

  “It’s about Apu. From the store.” Evvie nodded in his direction. The girl took a step forward, and Evvie started filming.

  “So what do you think of the man who works in the store back there? The man they call Apu?”

  The girl ignored the question and started dancing. She was really good. No, she was exceptional, an obvious student of Michael Jackson.

  “Come here often?” Evvie tried, filming the great dance.

  “Do I, do I, do I come here often?” the girl sang, fist a microphone. Evvie zeroed in on her face. She was beautiful.

  “Mrs. Lipton call Apu Mister Sweetie Pie Jesus Face,” the girl said, down on her haunches.

  “Who’s Mrs. Lipton?”

  “She givin’ all dis money out. She be here tonight.”

  “Do you think Apu’s like Jesus?”

  “I don’t know,” she sang, walking backward, smiling, then turning, then galloping on down the street.

  Evvie was suddenly exhausted. The exhaustion flirted with the edge of nihilism, that small but sinister part of being alive. Hadn’t she always identified with Dorothy and her three friends lying down in the field of poppies when their destination loomed so close?

  A large woman with red lips and dough-white skin exited the store whistling Stevie Wonder’s “You are the Sunshine of My Life.” (There it was again—Evvie had heard this old song three times in one week and each time was reminded of her father, who’d never bought records but had bought this one, and played it late one night, sitting alone, drinking in the dark, and Evvie had come halfway down the steps and watched him, not wanting to disturb him, not wanting to leave him alone. She’d been frozen there, watching him listen to the song, light from the street falling in through the window by his chair, leaving him half lit, so she could see how he closed his eyes, and how tired and baffled by his life he seemed. She’d felt a desperate and inexplicable love for him then, and only when the song ended did she manage to turn and head back up the stairs.)

  The woman made her way over to the gas pump in tiny high heels. She had crammed her feet into the heels, and God only knew how she was walking; Evvie admired the effort. “Excuse me, miss?” The enormous woman turned around to face Evvie. Her bright green eyes looked directly into Evvie’s.

  “Can I ask you a question?” Evvie said.

  “If I can pump gas when I answer.”

  “Oh, certainly.”

  Evvie offered to pump the woman’s gas, and the woman was charmed and amused by this, and leaned back against her car to apply some lipstick. “So what’s the question?” the woman asked. “What can I help you with?”

  Evvie watched the numbers race by as she filled the tank. “That man in there, the one behind the glass, do you know him?”

  “Nope.”

  “Never had any contact?”

  “No, I pay here at the pump.”

  “Will you do me a favor?”

  “What is it, honey?” the woman said, already losing patience.

  “Walk in there and buy something from that man, then come back out and tell me what you think of him. I’m making a movie. And you might be in it, if that appeals to you.”

  The woman barked out a skyward laugh. “A movie,” she said, narrowing her eyes and turning to Evvie. “How would you ever do a thing like that?”

  “I make movies. It’s what I do.” Evvie straightened her posture and cleared her throat. “I was the writer, director, and producer of The Urgent Child’s Pig.”

  The woman squinted and said it didn’t sound familiar.

  “So will you go on in there? Just go in and buy a candy bar or something. My treat.”

  “Don’t be silly,” said the woman, and she walked toward the store. Evvie waited, leaning on the shiny green car, her eye on a pale moon that floated toward one of the city’s many boarded-up churches across the road.

  She would not exploit anyone. People would not be obscured by irony run amok. The audience would not have their superiority confirmed. Somehow they would feel like everyone was in it together.

  Now the woman was back, arms hanging by her sides. “Alrighty, he’s a mensch,” she said. “Now, what’s up with your movie?”

  “What do you mean, ‘he’s a mensch’?”

  “Just what I said. A good guy. A sweetheart. A genuine person.”

  “A mensch.”

  “That’s what I said! Don’t you know any Jews? It’s a Jewish word.”

  “I realize that. I just wanted to know what it means to you.”

  “Same as it means to the Jews!”

  “So do you think you’d come back here just to see him?”

  “I’d come back here just to pump my gas and see him.” She winked. “But you better calm down.”

  “You’ll probably be in my movie.”

  “OK, honey,” the woman said, smiling. She left the station with a great, possibly illegal, gusto, flooring it until she was clean out of sight.

  Thunder rocked the world. The rain fell hard and fast. The sky was broken open by great shards of light. Evvie rushed into the store and up to the counter.

  “I’m sorry. No more movie,” Ranjeev told her. His eyes were sorry, but their expression was fixed. She stood there, stunned. “Why?” she said, but he had turned his back to her to work on straightening the cartons of cigarettes under the clock.

  She stood there, waiting, but he didn’t turn around. “OK,” she said, “good-bye now,” but turning away to head out the door felt like falling into a bottomless well.

  Evvie

  “Hello? This is Evvie Muldoone. I met you on a bus a few months back.”

  “Hello,” Rocky sang, emphasis on the hell. That gravel voice she’d loved on the bus.

  “Yes, this is Evvie Muldoone. I’m calling about your business. The one where you—”

  “I got only one business, honey.”

  “OK.”

  “If you do it right, you only need one.”

  Evvie laughed a little. “Well, I’ve been thinking maybe I’d—”

  “Maybe you were sick of all the heartache? Maybe it was time to come to a pro and put an end to this tribulation? Time to start living again and be creative? Get things straight before Christmas rolls around?” A warm lullaby voice, a starry-night voice that could rock you right into another world. She tried bracing herself against it.

  “Something like that.” She pinched herself. On her lunch break, she had entered an office building, taken an elevator nineteen stories into the sky, and walked down a long, severely empty hall that ended in a glass wall. She stood with her forehead on the glass and watched thick white clouds breaking apart. Why she had chosen this building, this floor, this window to make the call, this day, this hour, she couldn’t say.

  Rocky sneezed several times. “I suffer fall allergies. Hurricanes stirred things up. Hold on please, miss.”

  Now he was back. “So, I don’t do business over the phone. I can meet you later today, anywhere in the city of Pittsburgh, and we can begin with eyes wide open.”

  Evvie remembered his eyes. Dark blue. In her mind they wer
e spinning like pinwheels at a fair, and heart racing, she almost hung up.

  “I guess it wouldn’t hurt to meet for a quick coffee and get some more information.”

  “Where will you be?”

  “I’m working. In a shop downtown. I’m out on the corner now near—”

  “Anywhere near the PPG?” Pittsburgh Plate Glass, the building was a magical castle, like a genius child’s creation, all black, watery glass bordered in silver, rising high into the sky it reflected. Evvie and Ben used to run through the courtyard fountains in the summer, taking Ben’s little cousins sometimes, and for years they’d gone ice-skating there in the winter. Evvie loved to skate but often had ended up falling. Ben had been the leisurely kind of skater who’d put his hands behind his back, a disconcerting and hilarious (if only to Evvie) imitation of a man from another century.

  “I’m two blocks from there.”

  “I can meet you by the fountain in front of the PPG. I find that’s a very conducive atmosphere. Very inspiring. Then we go to Bruno’s car.”

  “Bruno’s car?”

  “That’s our mobile office. We have various offices. We work all over the country, miss. In fact, had you called us next week, we’d have been gone. Our goal is we make it easy on the customer, and we have a good time too—we play some nice music, the car smells good, and it’s the most privacy you can get in this world. That’s important, don’t you think? To have a good time in this life? And a little privacy?”

  His speech had the slightest twang, like a well-educated cowboy. She was smiling. She liked him more than she should have.

  The PPG wasn’t just one building, but six, sitting upon six city blocks. It was topped off with hundreds of luminous spires. If you stood in front of one of the buildings, it mirrored another, the reflection watery and dreamlike. Bruno and Rocky stood in front of the black mirror glass looking straight ahead, possibly watching a reflected cloud swim its way across another of the buildings. Evvie stopped walking so she could look at them from a distance. She liked that they were looking up, calm enough to be interested in beauty they must have seen hundreds of times before. She saw that Bruno wore a red tie under his coat and stood with his hands in the pockets of his trousers. He could almost pass for a businessman, but something was off. Maybe it was just the shoes—brown–and-white patent-leather saddle shoes, scuffed up. Rocky, however, was dressed in work boots, jeans, a faded brown corduroy coat, pretty much exactly what she liked to see on a man. It was as if he knew that. As if he were trying to speak to her with those clothes. She waved, approaching them, and Rocky nodded his head.

  Bruno was taller than Rocky by a few inches, and quite a bit heavier, but even from a distance it was clear that Rocky was the leader. Rocky tapped his foot, looked at his watch, bristled with energy, a disconcertingly bright smile flashing on his face. It wasn’t an easy smile but one charged with effort, and maybe a little insanity, or maybe she was just seeing it that way today: a projection. And something about him was so exceedingly charming—it wasn’t just that he was handsome—that her knees felt a little weak. She herself was probably smiling an equally disconcerting smile as she moved toward them, the glass building behind her somehow cheering her on. She had loved it through the years, and now it seemed to be returning some of that love. She moved slowly, dreamily, and wasn’t sure why; she had always been a fast walker. Was her body trying to hold her back? Or was she somehow extending these moments, making them last, because Bruno and Rocky made such a nice picture? Bruno, at least from this distance, looked not just like Father Joe from childhood, but also a little like her own father. He had an amused expression on his face as he listened to something Rocky was saying.

  It was as if she’d already had the meeting and now was approaching them to do it all over again. Her whole body relaxed as they all shook hands. At times like this, it was easy to believe in reincarnation, that linear time did not exist at all.

  “Yes, it’s me again,” she told them, sucking in some brisk air. She wore sneakers and her black coat and a blue-and-green scarf around her head that she felt lent her an air of exotic authority. Underneath the coat was a form-fitting rust-colored sweater and her best jeans, chosen very carefully, as if for a date. She had stuffed a credit card into the back pocket of her jeans, along with twenty bucks and a blank check. She had no idea what this would cost her up front—maybe it would be free to simply sit in the car and hear how things worked. She wasn’t necessarily going to hire them, was she? That would be a very impractical joke. But they were certainly interesting people, and why else had their card fallen out of her jacket yesterday into a patch of sunlight on the green-tiled floor in the bathroom? The day’s only patch of sunlight? It might as well have whispered, And now you will pick me up.

  They seemed unusually gentle, but still she was curious to know if they’d reveal themselves as madmen, or legit. Just ask some questions. Give them the benefit of the doubt.

  “Like that scarf,” Rocky told her. His blue eyes actually twinkled.

  Bruno asked her if she was hungry.

  “No, thanks.”

  The two of them seemed anything but dangerous. In fact they offered the atmosphere a surprisingly powerful current of goodwill.

  “She looks different,” Bruno said to Rocky, as if she weren’t standing right in front of them.

  “They all do,” Rocky said, then extended his hand. What did that mean?

  “As pretty as you are, you look a little malnourished, honey, and that’s because food doesn’t taste good anymore. Am I right?” Rocky said, and somehow winked without aggression or insinuation. His face was bright and warm in repose. Then he tilted his head to the side, his expression one of sincere concern.

  “I also walk a lot.”

  “So follow us to Bruno’s car. We’re walking quiet, we’re three people having a meeting, we’re not drawing attention to ourselves. Three fine individuals,” he sang in a high-pitched near whisper.

  “That’s right.” She felt a streak of exquisite happiness shoot through her.

  The three of them headed up a narrow sidewalk and around a corner. Bruno’s car, parking lights flashing, sat legally parked on the corner, across from an alley where an old man heaved a trash bag into a Dumpster. The car was a green sedan, a Buick Electra from the 1980s, or perhaps even older.

  “Nice car, gentlemen. But probably a real gas-guzzler,” she said, too loudly.

  “Correct. We don’t drive it much.”

  Bruno opened the back door for her and gestured with his arm. “Madame.” She stood and looked at Rocky.

  “We’re just going to sit here, right? And have a meeting? We’re not going anywhere?” Evvie looked at Bruno, who smiled at the ground.

  “We’re just going to sit here,” Bruno said, nodding. She saw him look at Rocky, and for a moment was scared.

  “Why’d you look at him like that?” she said.

  “Because all the ladies ask the same exact question. They all want to make sure they’re not going to be driving with us. Always the first thing they say. Some of the fellas say it too. But all of the ladies.”

  “Well, you can understand, can’t you? I mean, this isn’t all that normal.”

  “Of course we understand,” said Rocky. “We’re not well acquainted at this point. A smart lady such as yourself does her homework. Feels the waters. Take it as slow as you want, sweetheart.”

  “Thanks.” She actually liked him calling her s
weetheart. Why did that presumptuous condescension feel good?

  “And take my keys,” Rocky said, and tossed them over. She caught them. There were at least twenty of them on a Pittsburgh Steelers key chain that was just like Ben’s.

  “Can’t go anywhere without my keys,” Rocky said, and winked.

  “Thanks.” She held them in both hands.

  Rocky’s head dipped down, and he put one hand up in the air that said, No need to thank me.

  She slipped into the backseat. Lush olive green fleece had been stapled over the seats, and two pink-velvet pillows sat against either door. The interior had been made fanciful with dangling mobiles, like the space above a baby’s crib, and she looked up, dazzled. One of the mobiles was made of tiny plastic records—Evvie leaned forward to read their labels. Old stuff. The Four Tops. Elvis. John Lee Hooker. The Beatles. Lead Belly. Smokey Robinson. These put her somewhat at ease. Especially Smokey Robinson, whose records her neighbor Donnie had played in those years before he’d gone to Vietnam. She’d forgotten all about those songs. And John Lee Hooker, whose “I Cover the Waterfront” she and Ben adored. Another mobile was made of tiny stuffed animals—rabbits, turkeys, bears, and kittens. Still another mobile featured pictures of happy couples—no doubt an advertisement, Evvie thought; they were smiling because it felt so good to be back together.

  The two men were in the front seat now, both of them craning their bodies so they could look at her.

  “Well?” Rocky said. “Nice office?”

  “Very nice. Are those all people you reunited?”

  “Most of them. And if you turn all the way around, we got talking people too.”

  She turned around and saw three framed photos on the back ledge. “Push those buttons on the frames there, and you’ll have a little fun. But can we ask you what you want us to call you? You need an alias. We don’t want your real name, because then we might slip up and use it during the operation.”