The Price of the Ticket

by Jim Nisbet

  It was into just this warren that Pauley drove, when he lumbered Max’s Chevy into a heaven-sent parking place across the street from the address on Martin Seam’s truck registration. All commuting had ceased long since. Except for a handful of transmission parts rolling around in the corrugated bed of the Chevy, the neighborhood was quiet. Jasmine climbing the otherwise ivied brick walls exhaled its stored scent into the evening coolness. A gray ridge of fog hovered invisibly above the entire town, like a lid over a septic tank, one is tempted to quip. But the fact is that this peninsular land and its little city are beautiful, well-kept, and deceptively tranquil. It’s not the land, or the architecture, or even the frigid cars and the people who live in them–not permitted to set feeler to curb in this part of town–that make the city tremble under cover of night. Perhaps it is the grid of finitude closing in, that funnels the city’s brighter aspects into the vanishing point of the millennium, like so many panicky mullet spiraling toward the diminishing noose of the drift-net?

  Pauley spotted the block security immediately. This was a guy with a moustache bigger than his station in life seated behind the wheel of an ostentatiously unostentatious late-model navy-blue Buick sedan with little chrome hubcaps and a beige interior, parked on a hydrant at the end of the block. To give him credit, though very little, the security simultaneously made Pauley, a first impression based entirely on the leprous carapace of the ‘63 Chevy, which looked like a topological map of Death Valley. And the truth was, of course, had the guy had any way to run a check on Pauley his darkest suspicions would have been confirmed–a known felon in a known henhouse–and he might have seen a little blue star, same color as the Buick, representing a potential pinch, glued next to his name in his supervisor’s big book, a couple of lines below a little yellow lemon, representing the nearly empty fifth of Newfie Screech found beneath the driver’s seat of this very same unostentatious Buick, directly after this very same Moustache’s night shift, just about this time last year. That’s correct, a couple of lines would have been entered between the lemon and the star down at the office and, whaddaya know, a couple of lines and a whole year’s gone by, that makes twelve, he takes it without flinching, he just sags a little lower behind the wheel year after year, like a sack of rotting onions, as the tics accrue in his face.

  That attrition was Moustache’s problem though, which he would by god alleviate just as soon as his speaker cable patent came through, representing the biggest leap in audio fidelity since Edison went deaf, and he could quit this stinking job, now there goes a story of hope.

  Pauley’s problem, as he passed through the garden fence at the side of the immaculately restored four-story Queen Anne, wasn’t the little goose-necked maplight plugged into the Buick’s cigarette lighter, really indispensable in Moustache’s line of work, that clicked on in the shadows next to the hydrant at the end of the block, so Moustache could make a little note on his clipboard, and maybe if Moustache felt like stretching his legs after a while he’d walk up and get the license number off the Chevy, such a piece of junk you don’t see coming to visit every day in this neighborhood, even the gardeners are doing better than that, and besides, their trucks are full of rakes and lawn-mowers and have sideboards to contain the clippings, with bright green hoses and orange cords for the weed-whip coiled on the stanchions, for easy identification, maybe someone in the neighborhood has taken up dealing.…

  Pauley’s problem was that, thinking he had an insight into this kid Martin Seam’s personality, which struck him as no deeper than beer on a level pool table, he’d rashly brought along about a gram of the cocaine Celeste had discovered in her day’s journey beneath the all-seeing sun, as a token to Seam of his, Pauley’s, desire for a simple, peaceable, easy, equitable, amenable, nolo contendere resolution to the problem of the six hundred dollars.

  So Moustache, who certainly had no way of knowing what he was looking at, was in fact looking at a convicted felon breaking the law, so Moustache had a bit of a point; and, while things weren’t or hadn’t yet gone, and while maybe he certainly didn’t have any reason to think they were ever going to go, off the rails, on his shift, things were perhaps getting off on a bit of the goofy foot.

  Down along a narrow concrete path, past a neat row of garbage cans. A lovely back garden. Roses not easy to grow in San Francisco, what with the water shortage and all. A fig tree. Smell of anise. Passion flower. A gaggle of lilies-of-the-valley. Actual lawn-like grass surrounding a small octagonal redwood deck, in the center of which a cement vase quietly overflowed onto the head of the cement Danaid pensively shouldering it, and thence the water rippled into a cement basin at her feet. A purling little fountain. Pauley suddenly thought it had been a long time since he had seen, or consciously realized he was looking at, much less standing on, grass. He paused to muse. The fog brought along a tang of salt. Pauley considered that, although San Francisco is surrounded on three and a half sides by water, it had been maybe a year since he had set foot on a beach. He inhaled through his preoccupied nose. Lots of sweet smells. Fennel, roses, jasmine, freshly-cut grass, a hint of boxwood. Only the sounds of the fountain, with the fog soughing through a Monterey pine or some similar evergreen silhouette, tall beyond a fence at the back of the garden between this house and the one behind it, were audible.

  An irrigation system chose this moment to turn itself on. In the dark at his feet and around the perimeter of the garden little sconces hidden in the grass began to spit water. Intermittent bursts of air from six or eight sputtering nozzles sounded exactly like a man frantically projecting spit through a gap between his front teeth, which in turn sounds exactly like a porcelain light fixture with a short in the socket. Having no choice in the matter, Pauley logically realized the former and helplessly remembered the latter, and his cheek began to twitch accordingly. The bathroom tableau of his father’s death revealed itself to him with but one sound effect, the shorting socket, and one lighting effect, its dimming luminescent bulb.

  He stood still for it. Scourge-like and unfortunate are the ineradicable effects of early imprinting on the brain. The occasional ambush is enough to set a man’s teeth on edge, and sour his stomach.

  Soon the nozzles were done with their spitting, however, and issued their waters in uniform fans.

  The tic in Pauley’s cheek subsided.

  A set of nicely-painted wooden stairs climbed up the back of the nicely-painted house, one story, two, three. The top landing, less than a story below the peak of the gable, opened onto a small, nicely-painted deck. On the deck was an aluminum chaise lounge with nylon webbing. A mirror that folded like a book lay face up in the angle between the seat and the back rest; an image of Pauley’s shoulder flicked through it as he passed. A copy of a magazine unknown to Pauley, called Vanity Fair, lay face down on the deck beside the chair, its cover fluttering in the fog breeze. Next to it lay a brown bottle of Hawaiian tanning oil. Pauley caught a hint of the lotion’s gardenia-like scent as he tapped and waited at the sliding glass door set into the gable.

  A small light came on over the aluminum frame of the slider, and beyond the glass a brightly-patterned curtain swept to one side. Seam’s eyes were close together, black and opaque. He unlocked the glass door and slid it open.

  “Hiya, Seam,” Pauley said.

  Seam stood in the doorway momentarily. The pupils of his eyes gleamed dead center in their whites, like two tokens for a subway under a city on Mars.

  Seam stepped aside. Pauley entered. Seam slid the door closed, dropped the curtain, and turned out the deck light.

  Pauley knew he and Celeste had a small apartment, but Martin Seam’s place was smaller. It had been shoe-horned under the eaves of the original building, probably with little or no regard to building codes or human comfort. The sliding glass door opened directly into the kitchen, and beyond the kitchen a brief hall would open directly into an all-purpose room, and that would be the end of the tour. The kitchen smelled of burnt toast.

  “Hey,” Pauley li
ed, smiling as he ducked his head to avoid the south side of the roof, which angled sharply up over the back of the stove, from the right of the glass door, and into a ridge barely ten inches above his head. “Nice place you got here.” It always cheered him to rediscover that there were apartments smaller than his own.

  Seam actually blushed. He turned close to crimson. “Oh,” he said, “it’s such a mess. Please–please excuse–”

  “Not at all, not at all,” said Pauley. “I wish Celeste and me had a place as cozy as this. You should see our dump. We try, but.…” He spread his hands, palms up, and his right thumb hit the slope of the roof over the stove. He showed a lot of teeth, smiled a big smile. “But hey, them snakes take up a lot of room.” His mouth was smiling, but the tattooed tear disappeared into the lines that fanned back from the corner of his narrow, unsmiling eye. “What can you do, huh?”

  Martin Seam was clearly on edge. “Hey,” he stammered, “nothing. Rents are, are impossible!” He laughed a little laugh. “Rent,” he added, with a strange chuckle. His voice trailed off without finishing the thought, and Seam stared at nothing for a moment.

  Pauley stood there, refusing to be included into Seams’s rent mantra, his smile fading rapidly. Coming on shy, polite and befuddled, after sticking Pauley for six hundred dollars!

  “Hey,” Seam said suddenly, “Come on in.”

  He moved aside to let Pauley pass. Between two closet doors in the brief hall connecting the kitchen and the second room a staircase, steep enough to call a ladder, descended one story as if into a well, at the bottom of which stood another door. The stair was steep enough to radically foreshorten the angle at which one viewed the lower door, to the extreme of making the door itself appear dwarfed by its own knob. A faint whiff of mildew lingered about the stairhead, along with the pungencies of freshly ironed clothes and burnt toast. The bathroom, or more likely access to a bathroom, must be down there, and–a laundry? A laundry seemed excessively civilized.

  A few feet later Pauley had seen the whole place, and the odor of fresh ironing was explained by a miniature ironing board, the smallest one he’d ever seen, squatting in the middle of the doorway to the second room. A person would have to kneel to use it, a surprisingly traditional approach to laundry, but on the other hand it was easy to step over, to get into the second room, which might partially explain its utility. A shiny chrome electric iron stood on a CD box on the floor just beyond, ticking as it cooled, beside a plastic spray bottle half full of water. On the floor beyond these was a lime-green, plastic mesh basket, half-full of laundered, mostly black clothes. Next to the basket stood a stack of neatly pressed slacks, shirts, and underwear, also almost entirely black, protected from the thin gray-brown pile of a wall-to-wall carpet by a pink Chronicle entertainment supplement. Pauley said, to himself, this guy irons his underwear.

  The laundry operation consumed almost entirely the viable space in the room, and pervaded it with the smells of steam and lemon-scented softener and scorched cotton. There remained a bed, built into a dormer beneath a pair of windows, a round white aluminum patio table with a hole in its center for a missing umbrella, three matching wire-frame lawn chairs, and a floor-to-ceiling “entertainment center,” against the wall opposite the door, with a full complement of state-of-the-art, all-black electronics. There were a wide-screen video monitor, two videotape machines, a compact-disc player, an audio cassette dubbing deck, turntable, tuner, amplifier, equalizer. On either side of this agglomeration stood two very strange speakers, hourglass-like things four feet high with two stranger-looking speakers on top of them like miniature radar dishes. Two pairs of headphones hung from hooks. Above, below and beside this gear were shelves and stacks of records, cassettes, videotapes and compact discs. Not a book in sight. Pauley had to stay in the middle of the room to stand upright, but as he studied the winking lights on the wall of stereo stuff he began to relax. The kid had thousands of dollars worth of electronics and media stuffed into this closet of an apartment. Seam might have lived in a big pad with a view for what the records and tapes alone must have cost him, and Pauley figured it for a lifestyle choice. Music in Seam’s ears would make big windows in his mind–something like that. Video as big as the wall would keep him from seeing the wall. Somewhere, too, would be a nook stuffed with even more designer clothes like the ones Seam was wearing or ironing now, which were completely different than but somehow identical to the ones he had been wearing when he’d sold Pauley the Toyota. The electronics and the clothes would be as expensive as they were black, and the whole deal was set up to match Martin Seam’s eyes or soul or something. At any rate six hundred bucks might not present much of a problem for the kid, and that was just about all Pauley thought he would ever need or want to know about Martin Seam. The only wall decoration in the entire place, other than the television, was a framed animation cell of an upright, grizzled rat with a sneering grin and a huge erection. A black rat at that. The rat in his frame hung above a narrow, full-length mirror, on the wall just beyond the patio table. Weird or, at least, lame. So maybe Seam just worked his little heart out in retail, and the Toyota deal merely represented yet another lapse in judgment and taste.

  Plus, the kid looked too dubious to be any trouble. That had been the assumption last Sunday, too, of course, and as to why Seam had taken the trouble to sting Pauley in the first place, maybe dumb was the answer. But Pauley couldn’t be taking that personally; all he’d done was answer an ad. A little tension flowed out of the pinch in his back. The kid had picked on the wrong guy, that’s all. He wouldn’t fight, and Pauley wouldn’t either; the kid would see reason, fork over the six hundred, and that would be that. A full risk-free refund. Maybe they’d get high on coke together afterward; after driving that big Chevy across town Pauley’s sacrum, for one, needed another dose. Perhaps Pauley was near the end of a long day at last. Perhaps Seam would chalk up the refund to a good effort failed and a close call with the wrong party, and never even bother to get the Toyota out of the Highway Patrol’s towing yard. That’s if Pauley bothered to tell Seam the truck was by now in the Highway Patrol’s towing yard. If he did tell him, it would be after the six hundred changed hands again. If he did, maybe they would laugh about that, too, and maybe Pauley would learn a little about why people lived like Seam lived. They could move right from commerce to drugs to anthropology. A real uptown Friday night.

  No way for Pauley to know, of course, that except for some records and tapes everything in the room was stolen property. Piece by piece, year by year, through duplicity, trade, deception, and theft, Martin Seam had built himself up a loud stereo system and a suave wardrobe, and to Seam’s mind the trail had been arduous and long. Too arduous, too long. Seam hated waiting for anything. The single exception to this aversion was the annual queue for Gone with the Wind at the Castro, because it was more like a linear block party than marking time. Otherwise, waiting was torture. Waiting gave Seam time to think about how miserable he was, it gave him time to realize that, while he could steal a stereo anytime, and while he might eventually figure out how to cheat his way into a nice apartment, it was a certainty that he was never going to figure out what to do with himself when he had all this stuff.

  “Yeah, Seam,” Pauley said again, exhaling loudly. “A real nice place.”

  Pauley was reaching into his front shirt pocket for the Toyota papers when Seam asked him if he would care for something to drink.

  Pauley hesitated. A long moment went by. Then he said, “Sure, why not. Got a beer?”

  Seam went into the kitchen and returned with a bottle of dark Beck’s. Pauley had no way of knowing, of course, that even this bottle of beer was stolen. Seam rarely drank anything stronger than grasshoppers, but he had reflexively grabbed a six-pack as he was leaving a particularly boring party last Wednesday night. For Martin it was grasshoppers or nothing–okay, a little retsina now and again–a man has his standards, but this was expensive beer and therefore worth stealing and Seam wondered if the Pauley
-guy even had the taste to notice.

  Martin placed the opened Beck’s and an empty glass on the little table and invited Pauley to sit. Pauley sat into the white enameled wire grid slung between two folded aluminum tubes that passed for a chair, and poured out the dark beer as Martin went back to the kitchen for one of his own. When Martin came back he found Pauley leaning the chair onto its two back legs, contemplating the stereo stack. His bottle was nearly empty and his glass half-full and he was wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. The Toyota’s pink slip lay on the table next to the beer bottle.

  Martin poured himself half a glass.

  “Fill it up, Martin Seam,” Pauley said lazily, “and we’ll toast.”

  “Oh,” Martin smiled, patting his little round tummy with the palm of his hand, “I couldn’t. I put on weight so easily.” He laughed nervously and gestured toward the basket of clothes on the floor. “Half a size and I wouldn’t have a thing to wear!”

  Pauley laughed with him half-heartedly. “Yeah.” Then he raised his glass and said, “To a square deal instead of a square meal, then.” He showed a lot of teeth.

  Martin momentarily lost his smile.

  Pauley noticed. He was expecting it. He was figuring Seam as practicing his scams in the wrong league, and thought he might let him know he knew. It was consistent that Seam couldn’t keep a straight face any more than he could pick the right mark. Seam was looking like a guy cleaning a fish for the first time when he suddenly raised his glass and said, “To a square deal.”

  They touched glasses. Pauley swallowed half the contents of his while Seam barely touched his lips to his beer.

  Seam lowered his glass and smiled ruefully. “I’ll get a pen.”

  Pauley smiled back. Another one-minute stall. First the beer, now a pen. Next thing, Seam would offer to go out for a notary public. He sighed and shook his head. “Don’t bother.”