by L.H. Thomson
“You see those people, kid?” Buddy said. “That’s a look of awe you’re seeing there, people who can sense a man’s importance, his power.” He really meant it, too. It might have been based in self-delusion, but Buddy never lacked confidence.
Cobi turned his head towards the opposite wall, conscious of the stares. At the top of the escalators, they took the swinging glass doors outside. It was warm for the first week of February, right around zero degrees, and the crowd of fight fans milled around in front of the center to chat, smoke cigarettes, and wait for rides and taxis. Gordon took out his phone and called Buddy’s limo driver to bring the car around from the hillside parking lot below the conference center and to meet them out front.
Buddy took out a cigar from the inside breast pocket of his coat, then snipped the end off with a small knife. He lit it with an elegant gold lighter, puffing away on the huge Cuban until a cloud of blue smoke enveloped them.
Then Buddy’s hackles went up; he was suddenly curious, trying to peer through the group of people crossing the street just up the block, towards the busier part of Jasper Avenue. “You see? Get the fuck out… Gordon, is that … It is! Tommy Orton! That little motherfu…Cobi!”
“Mr. Gaines?”
“See that guy in the denim jacket? You see him? Go grab that little fucker for me and get me the two Gs he owes me. But watch him, he’s fast and slippery, the little bastard.”
Ah….Shit. It’s the same kid, for sure, Cobi thought. Maybe Jerry the Guard was onto something. “Mr. Gaines, I’m not a collection agent. I’m not…”
“You’re not getting fucking paid this week if you don’t, that’s what you’re not. Now get after him!”
Damn. Child support called.
Cobi strode up the block towards the crossing, cutting in and out of the pedestrian traffic, heavier than normal for a Friday night. The street was bathed in light from the frequent lamp posts and the office towers that rose above each storefront, the glow reflecting off windows and wet concrete.
Tommy had no idea he was being followed; running would have just alerted him. Cobi picked up his pace to beat the flashing traffic control before the red hand turned solid. He turned quickly on the curb to cross the street. He skirted past a woman in a grey dress and handbag… just as she stepped in front of his path. He bumped her slightly and had to help her avoid falling.
“Hey! Watch it!” she complained loudly.
Tommy had already reached the other side, but the noise caught his attention and he turned. Cobi locked eyes with him for a moment. When Tommy saw the expression on the older man’s face, he scanned the street and saw Buddy. Then he looked back at Cobi again, realizing what was happening. His eyes widened, and he turned to flee.
Both men started to run, Tommy sprinting up Ninety-ninth Street, ignoring the ice on the sidewalk, flying past the back wall of a hotel, then avoiding a cab as it tried to pull out from the street to his left, past the boxy concrete of the public library, towards busy Churchill Square and the giant glass pyramid of City Hall, a block away.
The ex-ball player was faster, adrenaline kicking in; Cobi tracked the denim jacket down relentlessly, catching up before the next corner, the streetlights shining through the dark of night as he threw himself full force into the tackle.
Both men hit the sidewalk hard. Cobi rolled quickly to his feet, ignoring the pain in his arthritic left shoulder and slipping slightly, then regaining his balance. A few people on either side of the street were paying attention, and Cobi pulled Tommy to his feet before guiding him to the adjacent bus shelter. “Sit down.”
Tommy looked terrified. Seeing Cobi with Buddy changed things. “Please, I swear I’m still good for the money. Tell Buddy I’m…”
“Shhh!” Cobi hissed. “Shut up for a second! Damn! He says you owe him two grand; you think getting us arrested for disturbing the peace is going to make him go away somehow?”
He was still breathing hard, but Tommy nodded agreement. “Look, Mr. Tate, I told him I’d get him the money…”
“He doesn’t seem so confident. And two grand is a lot of cash for a guy who just told me he isn’t a weed dealer.”
“Uh huh, yeah. Look, you got to do me another favor, Mr. Tate. Please. I promise I’m a good guy. I just had trouble making ends meet, is all, and Buddy Gaines said he could help me out.” He looked frightened. “Please, Mr. Tate, I don’t deserve this. My girl Chantelle, she’s real good. She don’t deserve this.”
“I ain’t going to beat on you,” Cobi said. “Shit man, straighten up and quit crying for a second!” The kid was practically sniveling, and Cobi suppressed an urge to cuff him, like the old man would’ve done back in the day, the wrong thing for the right reason.
Tommy nodded his head vigorously.
“Well look, man, my old man was a cop back in Detroit. So I know all about how people get themselves into the shit. I got a fair number of friends who went that route, so I know it probably started as no big thing. But you’ve got to get Mr. Gaines that green, ‘cause you made an arrangement. And if you can’t do it pretty soon, you best figure a way out of town, because he’s going to want someone to beat up on you. Maybe even me. And I don’t want that any more than you do, you feel me?”
Tommy’s head nodded vigorously, an electric jolt. “I’ll pay him by Monday, I swear man.”
“Okay then. You know the deal. You don’t pay, I’ll find you.”
The younger man nodded again and scrambled to his feet, then down the sidewalk, backing away at first to thank his would-be tormenter as he crossed to the other side. “Thank you, man, for reals. I swear I’m good for it. I swear.”
A car almost hit him in the near lane and honked angrily as Tommy made his way over, the courthouse looming behind him.
“Look both ways! Cobi yelled. Then he added more quietly, “Can’t repay the man if you’re roadkill.”
Tommy was far out of earshot within moments, past the courthouse and heading towards Chinatown. A few seconds later he moved out of sight. Cobi sat for a few seconds more, hands in his jacket pockets to keep them warm. He was glad he’d managed to handle the kid gently, though. No one that young deserved that kind of trouble.
He wondered how Buddy was going to take the news.
10
The limo reached Cobi before he could get all the way back to Jasper Avenue, pulling over to the curb so he could climb inside.
He slammed the door. Buddy waited for him to say something but got impatient.
“So you get my money, or what?”
“Or what, I guess.”
He looked peeved. “So what the fuck happened?”
“He didn’t have any.”
“So you’re supposed to lay a beating on him.”
“Why?”
“Why? What the fuck you mean, ‘why?’ Because, that’s why! Because if a man can’t pay his obligation, you have to send a message! And because I fucking say so, that’s why!”
Man, fuck you, Cobi thought. “I ain’t a thug, Mr. Gaines. You didn’t hire me for that. He’s just some terrified kid; he’s no threat to you. And he promised he’d come up with it, next week latest.”
The loan shark squinted. “Tommy Orton? A ‘terrified kid’? Are you fucking kidding me with this shit? He’s been slinging weed since you were somebody. He’s just another fucking foster kid working the street.”
“You should have seen how scared he was. Boy’s terrified of you, for true.”
Buddy reflected on that for a moment. “Okay, Mr. Bleeding Heart, since you ain’t worked for me long, you get a break. He’d better pay, though. Or I’m going to get Gordon to claw it back out of yours. You got me?”
“Yes, Mr. Gaines.” Cobi thought of his son; thinking of Michael always helped him keep his cool. Michael gave him confidence and purpose.
Buddy grumbled, “Okay, we’ll let it go this time, because I like you, kid. You remember that game back in … what was that, like, nine, ten years ago now? You were a sophomore…”
“The LSU game. Yeah.” Everyone remembered the LSU game. Cobi had set a single season conference passing record with seven touchdowns. That was when the hype had started.
“Whatever the fuck happened, kid? I mean, I know it’s tough making it down there...”
What had happened? The truth was, Cobi still didn’t know, years later. The bowl loss had been the beginning of the end, really, his confidence stripped, everything becoming harder overnight. The magic just… gone. It took him years before he’d realized that the love had gone first. That was always the way it worked when you’re no longer in it for the game, just the fame. Was that it? Had he just frittered away his talent?
“It just didn’t work out for me, is all.” He’d said it a thousand times since then. Why did people always have to ask? Why’d they have to make such a point of it? He’d become a “Where are they now?” article, a trivia question. He wasn’t sure which was worse anymore: being looked down upon, or being down on himself. He was dead to football and football was dead to him; but there was nothing to move forward to, nothing to strive to achieve. Just… surviving. For Michael and for himself.
“Cryin’ fuckin’ shame, kid, cryin’ fuckin’ shame. Here…” Buddy pulled out his clip. “Here’s your pay for the week.” He pulled off a thousand dollars in hundreds. “Don’t spend it too quick.”
“Sure, Mr. Gaines.”
“It’s Buddy, I keep telling you. You got anything else on tonight? You want to hang out with us at the club?” Buddy was part-owner of a strip club on the north side.
“I’m good, Buddy. I have to go see my ex.”
“Huh. Yeah, well I know all about that. Good luck to you, you poor bastard. John, pull over here, okay?”
The limo pulled over to the curb. “Goodnight, kid,” Buddy said. “Don’t do nothing I wouldn’t.”
Cobi got out. The door clunked shut behind him. He was at least twenty blocks from his car. Before he could say anything, the limo pulled back into the street and sped away. It had begun to snow again, broad, wet flakes drifting gently down, the night-bound street a grey impression of itself.
He pulled the collar up on his coat and started walking.
The front doorbell rang just after midnight, probably her ex. Still, Sarah woke and sat upright, glad she’d double-bolted the lock, just in case.
She flicked on the stairway light and came downstairs quickly in her white bath robe. She checked the peephole before opening the door.
“What the hell, Cee? Michael’s been asleep for three hours and you ring the bell…?” She pulled the door partly closed, blocking the view in with her body.
“Mom…?” Michael had woken and stood at the top of the stairs, rubbing his eyes, a tiny, tired figure in Spider-Man pajamas.
“Go back to sleep honey. I’ll be up soon.”
“Who is it?”
“It’s no one, sweetie. Back to bed, mister, now!”
He turned groggily towards the hallway, then stumbled his way back to his room.
Sarah opened the door fully again. Cobi looked unimpressed.
“What was that? It’s ‘no one’? You couldn’t have said ‘It’s just your daddy,’ or something?” He’d always worried she undermined him when he wasn’t around.
“I was dealing with it. That’s what I have to do full-time, remember? I’m the one who has to deal with everything. It’s way past his bedtime, and you shouldn’t be throwing his sleep patterns off by waking up half the neighborhood. If I told him you were here, he’d have run downstairs.”
It still stung, but he knew she was right. He hung his head slightly. “I know… I apologize, okay? Look, I knew it was getting tight to the end of the month, so I wanted to drop by as soon as I got paid.” He handed her the roll of money.
Sarah’s eyes widened for a moment, then her brow wrinkled. “Is this the whole thousand? How’d you make that up so quickly?”
“I told you, pay’s okay with the new job.”
Her frown remained. “What did you land that pays that much that quickly? The bank was a safe environment, with a good future…”
Cobi hated the bank, the stifling, buttoned-down atmosphere, some kid right out of school telling him what to do all day. “I was making forty-two thousand, top end. We can’t both live on that in this city. Besides, you shouldn’t worry. This ain’t exactly gangster business.”
“Cee…”
“I took a job with Chris’ friend, Buddy Gaines.”
“Oh! Cee…”
“Buddy’s just…”
“Buddy Gaines is a loan shark. You know that, I know that, everyone who knows Buddy knows that. Including Chris. Including the police – another place you could’ve gone for work instead of this…” Sarah had been involved with some of the same types when she was younger and a cheerleader, hanging out after hours with players when she wasn’t supposed to, going to the clubs. Times had changed, a lot.
And sometimes she could be so frustrating. “Man, I told you what it was like, Sarah. My family never knew if my father was coming home at night. You want that for Michael?”
The last thing that Cobi wanted was to echo his father’s mixed-up priorities. The last thing he needed was to try to live up to him.
“Better that than using your God-given athletic talent to protect some greasy criminal. This is a big city, Cee, but it’s not that big. You hang out with bad guys, you end up a bad guy. And then it’ll start feeling real small. Besides, what am I supposed to tell Michael as he gets older? ‘Your father is muscle for a loan shark’?”
He wanted her to understand his view, how he felt. “You know, if we could work things out, give us another chance to get it right, I’d have an easier time…”
She shook her head, cutting him off. “That’s not going to happen. You know why, Cee. It didn’t work. For three years, I tried. But it shouldn’t take so much effort, so much fighting all the damn time. Being in love with each other shouldn’t feel like an obligation, or a contest, or whatever we were. It just shouldn’t. And I’m done with debating that.”
Sarah saw it, right then, as she said the words, his left eye twitching for just a moment, a brief look of pain on his face that showed the statement cut right to his core. It was what she’d wanted, to be cold enough that he’d feel cut loose, accept it was over; but she didn’t feel better for it, and he never seemed quite able to go.
“Okay,” he accepted, deflated for not the first time in recent memory, hurt but not wanting to show it. Not wanting her to wear it. “Okay I guess. Look, I’m going to go…”
She smiled and nodded, but added nothing, her hand high on the door frame, just waiting for him to turn around, so obvious in her anxiety.
Cobi looked at his car by the street curb, parked in the half-darkness. Then he turned again briefly, wondering if maybe there was something else that he could say, something that would bridge the space between them, rediscover a part of her that still felt the way he did.
But the door swung slowly to a close under the bright porch light, a glimpse of Sarah’s concern the last thing he saw before the latch clicked into place.
11
The apartment just off Whyte Avenue and Ninety-sixth Street wasn’t much, but it was cheap: seven-hundred-and-fifty dollars a month for five hundred ten square feet of relative privacy, in the basement of a three-deck walkup, with thick old concrete walls from when they were built to last.
Cobi parked the car in the lot behind his building, under someone’s living room window, in the second of four narrow, uncovered slots. He was glad the small parking area had been plowed for a change. He got out and slammed the door to his eight-year-old BMW, then checked around him habitually. The alley sometimes housed colorful characters, some more desperate than others depending upon the day and circumstance.
The complex’s walls were stained dirt grey, ideal for a three-story cube that paled next to the new condominiums next door. Snow covered the line of block heater plug-ins that fronted each pa
rking space, attached to a five-car-length guard rail.
Rather than enter through the back door, his feet crunched through the snow past the row of young pine trees down the left side of the building. He was careful not to shake the branches, so that he could check around his basement unit’s windows, looking for signs of sneak thieves. Finding nothing, he went around to the front of the building, with nearby Whyte Avenue busy with traffic, as always.
He used his key on the front door. Inside, a small atrium served as a landing between the basement and first floor; a half-flight of steps led in each direction. He took the stairs down. The hallway was humid and musty, the original lime green of the plaster walls badly faded. At Apartment No. 2, he opened the old wooden front door with its deadbolt key then shut it behind him. He threw both locks and tossed his keys onto the small telephone table next to the kitchen door.
The place dated to the fifties, four small rooms of beat-up hardwood floors, decades of wear on the plaster-and-rebar walls. The rooms boasted nine-foot ceilings and real crown moldings, from back in the day when the tenant of a one-bedroom cold-water flat was treated with dignity. The rooms were closed off from one another, connected by a small hallway running from the front door past the back of the living room, to the kitchen door, to the bathroom door, to the rear bedroom. In summer, being in the basement helped alleviate the sometimes stifling Edmonton heat, which could get into the thirties – or ninety Fahrenheit to Cobi, who was still having trouble with that part of metric.
The avenue had its upsides, too. It was popular, buoyed by summer festivals, old brick buildings, and a string of restaurants and boutiques. It was made for patios and people watching, and was undoubtedly the city’s busiest shopping street, a home of architectural nostalgia in a town where almost everything was new.
That was also why the walkups slowly disappeared: the land was so close to the trendy part of town that they could be worth much more as condo developments. Those buildings that remained were often neglected, with tenants certain it was their landlords’ intent to get them out as quickly as possible without breaking the law too badly. That made for poor conditions, which in turn meant cheap rent. That brought other problems, people living on the margins. The walkups were targets for sneak thieves; and twice, Cobi had awoken to see someone casing his transom windows, which sat at the ground level outside, shadows quickly scurrying away when he turned on a lamp and expelled the darkness.