“OK,” Evvie said, and turned from the smiling photos on the back ledge. “Give me an alias.”
Bruno laughed a little.
“How ’bout Starshine?”
Bruno laughed again.
Rocky turned to him. “Do you have something better?”
“No, no, not at all.”
“She looks like a Starshine,” Rocky said. “Look at those beautiful eyes.”
“I like Starshine,” Evvie said, and Rocky turned around to give her a nod of approval. Who did he look like? Someone from long ago. Maybe from a dream. Maybe a movie. She couldn’t figure it out. It didn’t matter.
“She’s got little stars right in the middle of her pupils,” Rocky said. For a split second she recoiled from his charm and wanted out of the car.
She turned back to the photos. One couple was photographed in bathing suits on the beach. Both were a bit paunchy and pale in sunglasses, with big smiles and drinks held up to the sunshine. They looked unpretentious and sturdy, and she liked them instinctively and felt she’d met people like them before, in Jersey. She wondered if Rocky and Bruno changed these photos according to who the customer was. She pushed the button and the woman said, “Rocky, Bruno, I think of you every day! I wish you as much joy as you brought me!”
“Push it again,” Rocky said.
Evvie pushed the button again, and the woman said, “So God bless and keep ya!”
“I appreciate that,” Rocky said. “So does Bruno. Are you a believer?”
Evvie thought about this. “I’m not a hard-core atheist.”
“That counts,” Rocky said, nodding. “That counts.”
“Are you a believer?” she asked Rocky.
He reached into his shirt and pulled out a gold cross.
“And you, Bruno?”
“Without my higher power, I wouldn’t be here.”
Evvie was strangely happy to hear this.
She turned around and pushed another button on the framed picture of a young couple who sat on the steps in front of their nicely painted blue house. Though their heads were inclined toward each other and their hands were entwined, Evvie wasn’t all that interested in them. They were too young, too protected by the ignorance of youth, but she pushed the button anyway. No sound came out. “Must be broken,” Bruno said. “Those two are from North Carolina.”
“OK. Let’s get down to business,” Rocky said. “What are your questions?”
What were her questions? For a moment her mind was utterly blank. She looked back at the black glass building before which a woman in a red coat paused on the sidewalk. The woman wore white mittens. Evvie looked at her and asked, “When you kidnap people, you never, ever have a loaded gun. Am I correct?”
“Might as well be a plastic water pistol,” Bruno says. “We don’t play with fire, Starshine.”
“We hate guns,” Rocky added. “We hope you’re not an NRA supporter ignoring the plight of the ghetto kids?”
“Of course not,” Evvie said. “I wish the NRA would go fuck themselves.”
Bruno and Rocky laughed at this, turning toward each other with eyes held wide.
“So how did you get into this business?”
“I was waiting for you to ask,” Rocky said. “And I understand that you might want nothing to do with this when I tell you the how of it in a nutshell.”
“OK.”
“Cards on the table. I’m a felon. Served time. Twice.” He nodded his head to emphasize the truth of it.
“For?”
“Drugs! You could’ve guessed that now, couldn’t you? You’re a smart young woman, I can see you putting two and two together, I can see you looking at my eyes and knowing I’m just the kind of person who would want to go exploring mentally. Just the kind of person who might hear that drugs open a window to reality. Which of course they do. And when you see reality, you can hardly bear the colors or the truth. But seeing reality happens to be quite illegal in this land of ours, and a robocop threw me in the brig. Problem is, you get out of the brig, you go for a job, and the man says, I don’t think so. I think you flushed your life down the shitter, son! Excuse my language.”
“And you, Bruno?”
“I was Rocky’s cellie.”
“We weren’t doing anything together.”
“We were brothers, talking through the nights.”
“That’s right.”
“And you did drugs, Bruno?”
“I’m afraid I drank. One too many times, in all the wrong places with all the wrong faces.”
“Don’t withhold,” Rocky said, turning to Bruno, his chin lowered down. “Don’t withhold a damn thing. We learned you can’t do that. Just tell it like it is.”
“Well, I got in a fight. In a bar. And I was ramified, and broke some glasses, and one man had to get stitches, and next thing I know, I was getting me a steady diet of brake fluid.”
“Brake fluid?” Evvie said.
“Brake fluid. Drugs they pump into you when you spend those special months in the brig.”
“Brake fluid,” Evvie said.
“I never needed any, but they shot me up anyhow,” said Rocky. “Like a vaccine just in case. If anything, I needed a good counselor, seein’ as I grew up homeless.”
“You did?”
“From third grade on, it was mostly an old brown Chevy I called home sweet home,” Rocky said. “Parents were addicts. But I educated myself.” She saw he was rolling himself a cigarette.
“Rocky’s got a high IQ.”
Rocky narrowed his eyes on the front windshield. Evvie watched him closely. In profile too he was somehow intensely familiar. His profile was as familiar as the front of his face.
“Well, I do have that, but so do a lot of folks. What you’ll really notice most is I’m a creative entrepreneur. As is Bruno. I told Bruno a man can have all the smarts in the world and still be a failure if he doesn’t understand people. If he understands people, he can be a creative entrepreneur.”
A silence fell. She thought of Rocky the homeless kid. How in third grade, the other kids would’ve started whispering, He lives in a car. She saw his mother dragging him into a public restroom, holding him upside down at the sink to wash his hair, then standing him in the sink to wash his feet.
“In any case, what else do you need to know?”
“Well, a lot,” Evvie said.
“Ask away,” Bruno said. He had a thick, baby-pink bottom lip that didn’t fit the rest of his face.
“How much does something like this cost?” Evvie said.
Rocky laughed. “Something like this? There’s nothing like this, miss. There’s only this.”
“We saw a need, and we filled it. There’s no competition. We believe in helping people in creative ways is all.”
“And the cost?” Evvie said. She could feel they were stalling. They looked at each other. Were they trying to decide how rich she was? Did everyone get a different price?
“Don’t you have a set price?”
“Sure we do.”
“Then what is it?”
“Two grand.”
“Well, thanks anyway. That’s out of my league.” Actually, she’d been imagining this was the price. But now it seemed outrageous, as did her presence in the car. To even consider such a thing! She reached for the handle. She would walk through the cold and forget about these two. Forget about the whole thing.
“One grand up front.
The other you pay over time. One lady took three years,” Rocky said.
“We understand how it goes. We been around the block. I myself had to stand in line for food stamps years ago, and my ex-wife and I, for many a year, had to save up for days just to get a pizza. I was poor. Nurse’s aide down at the VA.”
“Your ex-wife? Did you ever try to reunite with her?”
“We didn’t have the business then. Even if we did, how could it work when I’m one of the workers? And she was much happier with her new fella.” Bruno laughed.
Rocky kept nodding his head, as if to hurry Bruno along. He had heard this story too many times. But Bruno still wanted to tell it. The new fella, apparently, had blossomed into a multi-million-dollar casino owner in Atlantic City, see. His ex-wife kept in touch for years just to tell him about all the luxurious vacations they went on, see, but he didn’t mind! He was the type who would rather have his peace of mind than be rich. Far as he could tell, rich people were some of the most miserable sonsabitches in the world.
“And you, Rocky, are you married?”
“Very happily.”
“For how long?”
Rocky looked in the rearview and held her gaze. His eyes were both dark and bright, with an earnest expression. “Forever. She fell in love with me when I was still locked up in the stony lonesome. Rode on a bus and brought me candy galore and a steady smile.” Rocky held up a picture of what looked like an older Hispanic woman in a baseball cap, wire-frame glasses, and silver earrings. Around the woman’s neck was a small gold cross. “Read that face. Go ahead.”
Evvie shrugged.
“Honest? Pretty as hell turned backward and forward?”
Evvie smiled.
“I sang ‘You’re the Best Thing That Ever Happened to Me’ the third time she visited.”
Evvie smiled again.
“Society’s fallin’ apart, but we don’t have to fall with it.”
“I guess not.”
“You guess not? You guess not?” Rocky was smiling at her in the rearview. “Come on, Starshine, you guess not? That’s not good enough. Is it?”
She returned his smile. “I guess it’s not. Apparently.”
He laughed. He sighed, and shook his head. “Take her picture, Bruno.”
Bruno snapped a quick picture on a tiny digital before she could stop him.
“Why did you do that? I’m not comfort—”
“Don’t you know you’re beautiful?”
Evvie said thank you.
“Me and Bruno are not part of the Me First crowd,” Rocky said, and the non sequitur made her lean back into herself. “We’re not down with the greed machine. We’re trying to make ourselves a living without dying.”
“And now we got the al-Qaeda terrorists on top of everything,” Bruno said, and Rocky shot him a look of confused contempt and asked what the fuck that had to do with anything.
Bruno started to answer, but Rocky stopped him, hand up in the air. “I know, you’re right, everything is everything.”
“Yeah,” Evvie said. This was a phrase from a line in the devastating Springsteen song “You’re Missing.”
“We thought 9/11 was it,” Rocky said. “Thought that was the beginning to the end of the show.”
“The chickens came home to roost,” Bruno said. He had taken off his coat and loosened his tie. He was looking at Rocky.
“That’s right,” Rocky said.
Did they mean what she thought they meant? She decided they did. At the very least, they were far from the sorts of people who would ride around in a truck singing that song about the U.S. of A. putting a boot in your ass.
“What’d you think that day?” Bruno said.
“I didn’t really think,” Evvie said.
When the planes crashed, she’d been on the bus not far from here, going to a job interview at a radio station where she’d hoped to spin records in the middle of the night to make a little extra cash. She could still remember the people she rode with. A child in a red jacket speaking loudly about a vampire to an enormous woman who kept saying, “Mmmm-hmmm, that’s right,” as if the child were a preacher and she in the pew. This vampire he eat babies!
Mmmm-hmmm. The woman had her eyes closed.
Ben had called her, watching people jump to their deaths. Get off the bus and wait on the corner of Murray and Flemington. I’m coming to get you.
She’d wanted everyone to get off the bus with her. Ben had come fast. They’d gone home, watched the television, and huddled together for two whole days.
Ben!
“God help the little guy,” Rocky said, facing her. She saw a rich melancholy come into his face; then his eyes widened in resistance. “In a country like this, God help the average working man.”
“That’s right.”
“We took a wrong turn,” Bruno said. “Someday the poor man will rise up.” He clapped twice. He looked at Rocky while he spoke. It was clear that Rocky had schooled him on such matters. Rocky, had he been given a few breaks in life, could’ve been some kind of history professor. It wasn’t hard to imagine him pacing back and forth in front of a classroom, his hand on his square chin.
Now, if she was really interested (and there was no pressure, they kept insisting, she could just slip out of the car at any moment, no need to explain or even say good-bye), but if she was interested, then, like they said, they would need a hundred dollars right away, then a thousand up front before the operation (they kept using this word operation and she wasn’t crazy about that), and the way the operation would work is Starshine would have to visit her husband somewhere, maybe his work, or his apartment, or even just on the street, but the timing was crucial. If she got the timing wrong, and they showed up and found she wasn’t there with him, they were sorry to say it, but they would have to keep the money and she’d get no second chances. This unfortunate policy was because of someone they called the dame from Denver. (Evvie laughed at that and said, “The dame from Denver?” Rocky laughed with her, and winked.)
They’d worked with the dame from Denver for two weeks. They’d show up, and she wouldn’t be there; she was a nice gal, a great gal, actually, a beauty-full lady in heels, said Bruno, but she wouldn’t be there, or he wouldn’t be there, and, well, after that grand waste of precious time, they got tougher with the rules.
“We had to. We’re actually softies. Do you know how many people out there like to take advantage of softies?”
So now they couldn’t mess around, they were in demand at various places in the country, they depended on people who respected them as professionals and so behaved like professionals themselves.
“Sure. I can see that.” Her voice was thin and off-key and her mind was frozen.
It started to rain a little. She turned and looked out the back window and saw the PPG. One summer night, just a few years ago, she and Ben had met a nine-year-old break-dancer, and talked with him for hours. The boy had regaled them with stories about his intergalactic travels. In the middle of his stories he would stop occasionally and salute the sky above the PPG, suddenly in contact with someone on another planet.
“Can I write you a check?” she said, eyes on the building.
“We prefer cash. First we work out the details. We give you a secure plan.”
“You have a say in it. We work on it together,” Bruno said. “All our customers are creative people. Risk takers. We value their input.”
“OK, OK,” Rocky said, reeling him in. “Don’t pile on the BS.”
“I don’t have the cash,” Evvie said.
“But you can get it?” Rocky said, calmly, hopefully.
“Tomorrow.”
“We’ll take the check,” Rocky said. “Just this once.”
Bruno shrugged. “He must like you,” Bruno said, looking at Rocky. “Rocky hardly ever takes a check.”
“I can judge a person’s character,” Rocky said. “You ought to know that by now.”
Evvie smiled at him. She could see that this was the truth. She could read his eyes as they read hers. She could see him seeing that she wouldn’t steal or cheat. She understood that the two of them had an understanding of sorts. These stirring connections were rare in the world. They always took her by surprise and filled her with relief and gratitude.
“So tell me again how it works. I’m not completely sure about this yet,” she said.
For one moment, she felt she was looking down from above, a giant who was contemplating taking her small self by the scruff of the neck and tossing her body out of the car and into the nearest river, where she could swim back to the shore of reason, because, she thought, this is insanely unreasonable, and I know it, but then why does it also somehow feel like exactly where I should be and what I should be doing, right now, right here, on this rainy afternoon. Ordained.
She took in a slow breath. The silence in the car was deep and filled with their patience. They’d been right—back when she first met them they’d said the whole thing was like going to the theater. Thee-ate-her. She was on the verge of having front-row tickets to a show she’d been dying to see forever, and it didn’t matter that she was one of the actors. She had nearly always been one of the actors, and simultaneously one of the watchful audience members.
“I need all your contact information on the check,” Rocky said. “I mean, if you plan on writing one.”
“I do think I will.”
“Give Starshine the book to lean on.”
First You Try Everything Page 18