Slipstream

by Leslie Larson

  “It’s Damon,” a deep voice said. “You there, man?”

  Logan got up and opened the door. “What’s up?” he said, stepping aside to let Damon in.

  Damon’s upper arms were like hams; the back of his head was a series of hard rolls that widened until they met his shoulders. Logan wondered how he managed the creases when he shaved his head. Damon kept barbells in his room. Logan heard them clanking late at night.

  “Sorry to bug you, man. Hey, you got any aspirin I can borrow?”

  “Yeah, yeah. Come on in. Hey, you get that gig at the convo home?”

  “Yep. I’ll be working three nights a week to start. Midnight to eight. We’ll see how it goes.”

  “Way to go.” Logan found the aspirin in his shaving kit. “Your teeth still acting up on you?”

  Damon nodded. He was a good-looking guy, but his teeth were so encrusted with plaque it was hard to look at him. His breath wasn’t so great, either.

  “Why don’t you see a dentist, man?” Logan said. “You gotta take care of that.”

  “No way, man. There’s no way in hell.” Damon shook a little pile of aspirin into his hand and started chomping them like Life Savers. “One place you are never going to see me is the dentist.”

  “Why not? Those aspirin are going to do a number on your stomach.”

  “Already have. Sometimes it feels like I just had me a battery-acid milkshake.” Damon smiled. The gold cross he wore sparkled against his white T-shirt.

  “Well, lay off ’em, for Christsake.”

  “I try, but days like today it feels like somebody’s playing drums on my molars. Sometimes I need a break. Hey, at least I won’t have a heart attack. My blood’s so thin you can see through it.”

  “There’s gotta be a clinic. Someplace you can go where they’ll work on you for nothing. Or at least cheap.”

  “It ain’t the money. That’s not it. I’m scared shitless, man. When I was inside, they worked on me for free. It’s torture, bro,” Damon said in his rapid-fire way. “They sent me to a dental school. Cuffed me to the chair, man. You see that movie Marathon Man? It was like that. Root canal. Stuck something in my mouth so I couldn’t close it. Damn student had never done one before. Chinese son of a bitch, had to keep running to get the teacher because he didn’t know what he was doing. You understand what I’m saying? I was screaming like a stuck pig, man. Out of my fucking head.” He cradled his jaw in his hand tenderly, as if the ache were still there, before he went on. “No fucking way I’m ever going to a dentist again. Nope. My teeth can rot and fall out of my head for all I care. Hey, these your kids?” Damon picked up the first snapshot and inspected it close to the window.

  “Yeah, they’re all mine. That’s Jewell, my oldest. She’s at UCLA now. Smart kid. I’m counting on her to support me in my old age.”

  “How old is she here?”

  “I don’t know. Three or four.” Logan took the picture and looked at it like he’d never seen it before. Jewell was about to jump from a sawed-off tree stump, her hands in the air. She had been a fierce kid, stubborn as hell and determined to do everything herself. “I gotta see her one of these days,” he added. “It’s been a while.”

  “How long?”

  Logan frowned and looked out the window. His coffee had gone cold. Traffic would be bad on the way to the airport. “Jeez, I guess I haven’t seen her since she was in high school.” He remembered her as she’d been that last time: sullen, answering him with the least possible number of words from behind a curtain of waist-length hair. He’d been sent up not long after that, and she’d written him a few times, impersonal letters made up mostly of song lyrics and poetry written by people he’d never heard of.

  “I’m going to hook up with her pretty soon, though. She’s on my list. Hey, why don’t you keep these,” Logan said, pushing the bottle of aspirin toward Damon. “If I need any, I’ll let you know.”

  “All right. I owe you one,” Damon said, taking the pills and heading for the door. “Hang in there, buddy.”

  “Okay. Later.”

  Adrian must have turned his TV off, because when Logan locked the door behind Damon, his room was quiet. There was only the distant sound of rush hour: people hurrying to get home to houses they owned, to cooked meals and cheerful kids. Logan felt a weight come down on his chest, enough to make him sit down on the foot of the bed. The banged-up furniture and stained walls, all the people down the hall who had one story or another. Damon’s aching teeth, the kids he hadn’t seen, his job wiping grown men’s asses. Even his damn pickup was falling apart. His life had pretty much been one fuckup after another, so why should it be any different now? He thought of his mother, who’d been dead now for almost six years. She’d never made any secret of the fact that Logan was her favorite, the baby. In her eyes he could do no wrong.

  He needed money. He took off his shirt and lay back on the faded bedspread that smelled of someone else’s hair oil and let the sun, which fell in a square on the bed, warm him. There was no way he could get a fresh start or change anything in his life without some cash. Where? he thought. How was he going to get it? His crotch heated up and he felt the slow pull of an erection. He unfastened his pants and masturbated halfheartedly, as the faint beat of disco started up again down the hall. A door slammed and locked, the elevator clanked. The woman he imagined now was one he’d constructed carefully over the years, an amalgam culled from advertisements and movies, from women he’d seen in the street or over coffee counters, from wives and girlfriends, women he’d known intimately and hardly at all. She was a formless creature he knew very well, a shape-shifter who changed over the years to suit his tastes, accompanying him through most of his life.

  “You have the most beautiful dick,” she said now, borrowing her words from Logan’s first wife, Jewell’s mother. “It isn’t huge, but it has perfect form. I’d know it anywhere.”

  No matter how many times he came, it still felt great. “Remember the best orgasm you ever had? Don’t you wish someone had been there to share it with you?” the woman of his dreams said now, laughing just like an actress who sold coffee on one of the TV spots he’d seen in prison. She borrowed the punchline from a woman Logan had never slept with but wished he had, the sister of a guy he shared an apartment with about four years before. “She’s a dyke,” the roommate had said. “Forget about it.”

  The jism on his stomach warmed in the sun. He thought again about Salvetti from earlier today and wondered if he ever got off. Was it even possible? Did his wife ever sit on his face? Masturbate for him? Suck his cock? Whatever, Logan thought, scooping the mess up with his hand. It was getting late, he needed to go. Half-babies, one of his girlfriends had called it. Spunk, cosmic goo, ragout of DNA. He washed in the sink, dried his hands on a towel he’d kept in storage while he did his time.

  He felt a little better. A little empty, maybe, but lighter, not so bad about himself. He was young and good looking. Optimistic. People liked him. He’d been outside for two months and he hadn’t fucked up. Not yet. Something good might happen, he told himself.

  You never knew.

  The Lincoln Town Car drove like a cruise ship after Logan’s Toyota. He kept hitting the windshield wipers instead of the blinker. He wore the long-sleeved white shirt and the Bogart jacket, a pair of brown cords pleated in the front. And the Italian shoes, of course. The guy had given him forty bucks when he picked up the car, which had a full tank. The sign they’d given him lay on the passenger’s seat. STONE. And the three guys he was picking up would tip him, at least they should. So he was looking at a good fifty or sixty bucks, plus free gas if he finished early and wanted to run a few errands.

  They were tearing up the roads around LAX. Huge pits of raw red dirt, mountains of gravel, orange cones all over the place. The place looked like a bomb had hit it. Logan inched forward in stop-and-go traffic. He thought again how he’d like to get away from all the mobs, move up to the Sierra and live the country life. He knew a few people up th
ere. Only trouble was they were cooking meth and shipping it down south, and he had to stay away from that kind of thing. He could open a restaurant or run a ranch, except he had no experience. Live in a trailer, it didn’t matter. Or maybe get a job working on the roads. At the stoplight, the woman in the next car looked at him and smiled. Logan smiled back, nodded. There were lots of possibilities in the world.

  The flight Logan was to meet was delayed twenty minutes, so he had a little time to kill. The men’s room was blocked off with yellow sawhorses that said WET FLOOR. Big fans were blowing on the soggy carpet outside. Beyond that was a bar; Logan wondered if it was Tommy’s. Most of the barstools were taken, but he found one near the pretzel machine. The older woman tending bar looked like she could strangle you with one hand and mix a drink with the other. His napkin was on the counter before he’d settled on the stool.

  “What would you like?” she said.

  Logan ordered coffee.

  “Say, does a guy named Wylie work here?” he asked when she brought it. “Tom Wylie?”

  The woman looked him up and down. Ugly-ass shirts they made them wear. Pukey beige. Her hair was dyed shoe-polish black. GEORGETTE, it said on her name tag.

  “Why, he owe you money?” she finally asked.

  Logan laughed and glanced around at the others in the bar. Mostly guys by themselves, some staring down at their drinks or across the bar, others looking up at the news on the TV screen. Two women with deep tans and bleached hair were deep in conversation with each other. A couple of husband-and-wife teams.

  “No, I wish he did,” he said, flashing his smile. “He’s my brother. My big brother.”

  “That right?” The woman’s arms were knotty, hard. “Wylie works here, but he’s not on now. Got off at three.”

  “I’m meeting a plane,” Logan explained. “I had a little time and thought I’d drop in and see if he was here.”

  He looked around at the twirling pretzels and junky neon lights. This was it, then. The sad-ass place where Tommy put in his eight hours. All the people coming and going, the canned air and the loudspeaker telling someone to pick up a white courtesy telephone. So impersonal it made your heart ache. He felt a sudden sadness for his brother, remembering him as a kid. A serious boy, as Logan recalled, eager to please. The loner type, or was that just how it seemed to Logan, who was always running around in a pack, surrounded by friends? But Tommy could kick ass, he remembered that. Even though he wasn’t that big, he had a reputation at school. Once his temper flared up, that was it. You were dead meat if you messed with Tommy.

  “Coffee’s on the house,” Georgette said. “I’ll tell Wylie you were here. You want anything else?”

  One of the blondes was giving him the eye, or at least the once-over.

  “So what’s it like working with Tommy?” Logan said, loading his coffee with sugar.

  Georgette shrugged. She wore several gold rings studded with lots of small, colored stones. “Nice guy, your brother. Low-key. Knows the ropes. Pretty private, you know. I wouldn’t exactly call him a motormouth.”

  “Sounds like Tommy.”

  The coffee was thick and bitter, like it had been standing in the pot all day.

  “You live here in town?” Georgette asked while she picked up the older couple’s credit card and ran it through the machine.

  Now both the blondes were staring at him. Logan made eye contact just long enough to keep them guessing. They whispered conspiratorially to each other, still glancing in his direction.

  “Yeah, I got a place up in San Marino,” he said. It just slipped out, but it worked. Georgette tipped her head like a spaniel listening to a strange sound and looked at him with new admiration. The Bogart jacket was working its magic. To top things off, the blondes were headed in his direction.

  Georgette saw them coming. “Let me know if you need anything else,” she said before heading to the other side of the bar.

  The women crowded his stool, close enough for him to smell their perfume. Even though it was November, they both wore tank tops. Little bands of stomach showed. Gold chains and lots of makeup.

  “Excuse me,” one of them said. “Sorry to bother you.”

  “No problem at all,” Logan smiled, half turning on his stool.

  The older couple at his side turned to watch. So did a few of the guys across the bar.

  “My friend and I thought we recognized you,” the spokeswoman for the duo said. “We couldn’t figure out from where, though.” She paused, looked at her friend, then back at Logan. “You’re in the business, right?”

  Logan knew better than to ask what business. Up close he could see the trouble the women had taken with their faces: the lip-liner and plucked eyebrows, the way their foundation ended under their chins. Hair moussed and sprayed to look tousled.

  “Who wants to know?” he asked with a kidding smile.

  “Oh, this is Lisa,” the talkative one said. “My name is Janet.”

  “Logan,” he said, extending his hand. “Pleased to meet you.”

  Their hands were narrow. Cool and limp. They were a little tipsy. He could smell the booze on their breath, possibly tequila.

  The silent one snapped her fingers like she’d just remembered something. “That program about a magazine, right? You’re the guy who plays a photographer. And that commercial, too. Where the guy dreams he wakes up in this giant house right on the ocean.” She giggled. “He gets up and stands at the window in his underwear.”

  Logan pursed his lips like he was trying to remember, while he calculated how much time he had before he had to meet the plane. He had the Lincoln, which might come in handy. What if he just forgot about Stone, told the service he never showed up, and drove the women around in the car?

  “No, I think it’s film,” the one named Janet said. “That movie with Sean Penn.”

  “You’re both on the right track,” Logan said, looking at his watch. “Trouble is, I have to meet someone whose plane is arriving in just a few minutes. How long are you ladies going to be here?”

  They looked at each other.

  “We have to leave in about a half hour,” Janet said anxiously.

  “You want to meet up later on? After I drop my friend off?”

  Both of them, Logan thought. That might be nice. With any luck, one of them had a place of her own, because he sure as hell couldn’t take them back to the Morningstar.

  “Oh, no. We’re leaving,” Janet said. Her face looked genuinely pained. “Back home, I mean. We’re flying out. Our plane leaves in a half hour. We’re going back to Phoenix.”

  “Ah,” Logan said slowly, nodding. That was it, then. Close, but no cigar. “Well, listen. It’s been great talking to you. I’ve got to get going.” He put a dollar on the bar for Georgette, stood, and picked up his sign, careful to keep the STONE side toward his leg. He brushed his lips lightly across each of their cheeks. Jeez, they smelled good.

  “See you in the movies,” he said, turning and waving as he headed off to the greeting area.

  The new security made it a pain in the ass to meet anyone getting off a plane. Logan stood at the back of a mob of people who watched the trickle of passengers coming through the barrier. You couldn’t tell what flight was disembarking. People came in spurts: one or two, nothing, a clot of five or six, an empty space, a short stream of ten or twelve. Logan watched their faces. He tried to guess if the flight had been smooth or bumpy, if the people were arriving in an unfamiliar city or coming home. Their eyes swept the crowd anxiously for a familiar face, broke into relief when they spotted whoever was meeting them. Others hurried past the waiting crowd with their eyes on the ground, knowing that no one would be there to put their arms around them, to kiss them and cry with joy. Weird animals, people. They held up babies, handed each other bouquets of flowers. Men in wrinkled business suits, families in sweat outfits, old ladies coming to visit their grandkids. It was still strange for Logan to see people who could get on a plane and fly wherever they wanted, wh
o could walk out into the night and hail a cab, head down to Mexico, rent a hotel room, go out for a steak dinner. Drop in on a friend or see a movie. It probably didn’t occur to any of them that at that very moment there were people who were locked up in cells, whose every movement was restricted.

  Even more amazing that he was here, on the outside. He shifted his feet, looked at his watch. He held his sign at waist level and leaned against the counter behind him. There were two other men with signs, both of them in uniforms. What he had missed most while he was inside were tacos. Carne asada in a soft corn tortilla with a heap of fresh, fiery salsa. A cold beer to wash it down. He had lain in his bunk and pictured it, the same scene over and over: a wide, white beach late in the afternoon. The sound of the surf and the smell of the ocean. Him in a lounge chair, facing the water. A waitress in a bikini who worked at a stand up near the boardwalk would bring him three tacos on a big plate and an icy long-neck. Man, oh man. He could almost taste it.

  Jesus, it was taking forever. What if the guy had already come through, if Logan had missed him? The crowd around him shifted impatiently. A Chicano guy with a buzzed head held the hand of a little girl with a balloon that said WELCOME HOME. She smiled up at Logan, a ring of chocolate around her mouth, and his memory fired suddenly on Jewell, how the hard white edges of her teeth had pushed through her gums when she was a baby. How he’d dipped his finger in whiskey and rubbed them, how she’d locked eyes with him while she chawed on his finger. The memory was so strong it engulfed him. That was the problem with getting clean—stuff started firing up. Everything came back to haunt you.

  The Chicano guy took out a phone and flipped it open. His cell phone! Logan kept forgetting he had one. Why not kill a little time, reach out and touch someone? But who? Prison was hell on your social life. He took a chance on the speed-dial. Plugging one ear over the noise in the terminal, he listened to the electronic tones.