Suitcase City

by Watson, Sterling

  Teach knelt, rigid, his breathing measured. The boy flung his white arms in a violent shrug, grunting as he put on his clothes. Then he lifted a blanket from the sand and followed the girl.

  Lord, Teach thought, it takes a powerful, skinny need to make love in the mangroves at night. Such is youth.

  He followed the lovers’ footprints up a winding path to a spot where he could watch the midnight gathering of outlaw teenagers.

  There were about twenty of them, and about half as many cars. The cars were mostly new, and many were upmarket rides. He counted two BMWs, a Benz, and a big Range Rover. In groups, the kids drank beer and talked. Couples embraced leaning against cars, or in backseats. Radios and tape decks played what was to Teach’s ears a hellish mixture of noise and garble. The words were a philosophy of loneliness, breaking things, and want you, baby, baby, baby.

  Though a three-hundred-millimeter telephoto lens, Teach found Tyrone Battles surrounded by friends, white and black, most of them half his size. Teach would have to get closer. He would have to sprint from the mangroves to the nearest vacant car. It would take luck to cross thirty yards of open sand without being seen. He was about to try it when the white Bronco arrived.

  The night warriors turned to watch the Bronco roll to a stop near the group where Tyrone Battles held sway. The football player separated from his fans and sauntered over, leaning into the window. Teach aimed the Minolta and fired. He did not know what he could get at this distance, in this light, but something told him he’d need coverage, a complete picture.

  He ran to the closest empty car and crouched behind it. The Bronco pulled away, heading back up the causeway toward Tampa. Teach dodged to another car and then to another only twenty-five yards from where Tyrone Battles stood surrounded by young people. The kids wore slashed jeans and Doc Martens and T-shirts emblazoned with logos of bands. Beers or wine coolers hung from their fingers. They were all well on their way to falling-down drunk.

  As Teach watched through the lens, Tyrone Battles produced an object from his pocket and moved it to his lips. He raised his other hand and Teach saw the sudden flame of a lighter sucked into the bowl of a glass crack pipe, saw Tyrone’s cheeks swell, his face go rigid as he held the hot smoke in for all of its power. Then he lowered the pipe and blew a long gray stream into the night air, following it with a sigh and a shout. “Man, what a brainfuck!” He surveyed the group. “Who’s next, man? Step right up here.”

  Two of the kids staggered away from the group. One knelt to vomit not far from Teach. A girl—by her voice, Teach thought she might be the one whose tryst he had spoiled in the mangroves—said, “Not me, dude. That shit’ll kill you.”

  Tyrone laughed. “Chickenshit white bitch. It ain’t killing me.”

  A skinny, bare-chested white boy with long, matted dreadlocks stepped forward, scratching his upper arm. “Lemme try a hit, man.”

  Tyrone shoved his hand into his pocket, lurching from the power of the drug, and pulled out another rock. He unwrapped it, tinfoil glinting. He held the pipe to the boy’s lips and lit the rock. The butane flame danced as the boy dragged on the pipe. Teach clicked the Minolta’s shutter. Tyrone turned away from the boy and looked with deadened eyes at the spot where Teach crouched, then wandered off toward the mangroves. “Pay me later, man,” he said. “Right now, I got to enjoy my ride.”

  Teach kept firing the shutter until the tall football star was gone, staggering among the branches. Then he moved away from the Tyrone circle and shot the other groups, shot all the cars, shot their license tags.

  Ten minutes later, sweating and filthy, Teach retraced his steps up the muddy shoreline to his car.

  EIGHTEEN

  Teach stood in the vestibule of Thurman Battles’s office for the second time in as many days. When he told the pretty woman with the long red fingernails he wanted to see Mr. Battles, her mask of cool professionalism slipped. What was the crazy white man doing back here? Hadn’t the first visit hurt him enough?

  She told Teach that Mr. Battles had a full morning calendar. She doubted that she could work him in, but she would speak with his secretary. He could have a seat.

  Teach kept standing. “I have to see Mr. Battles right away.” The woman gave him a look of suspicion (would he slip the paperweight from her desk into his pocket while she was gone?) and walked through the door to deliver his message. Teach moved to the wall of Battles’s framed accomplishments and opened the manila envelope.

  In the little dark room he had built for himself at the back of the garage, he had developed the photos the same night he’d taken them. They had turned out well. The best one, and Teach’s best hope for a return to the life he had lived before meeting Tyrone Battles in a men’s room, showed the football player sucking flame into the bowl of the crack pipe.

  By lucky accident, the boy’s head was framed in a corona of light from a streetlamp a hundred yards away. The look on Tyrone’s face was priceless. His eyes were closed, his cheeks were hollowed as he sucked the smoke, and his head was thrown back in chemical beatification. His religion was rock cocaine, and its message turned a web of nerves into an incandescent lamp. It was, apparently, a rush more powerful than anything a boy could get toting a pigskin into the end zone.

  Teach put the photo back into the envelope with the others he had chosen—Tyrone holding the pipe to the lips of the skinny, bare-chested white boy, lighting it, holding the flame to the rock.

  The young woman returned with a disappointed expression on her face. The door opened behind her. Thurman Battles’s secretary stood in the doorway. She was a woman of bearing and dignity who, in a better world, Teach thought, would have been a lawyer herself. She said, “Mr. Teach,” and stepped aside, holding the door open for him.

  Teach walked into the hallway lined with charcoal sketches of racehorses. He was moving toward Battles’s office when the woman put a hand gently on his arm. “Mr. Battles asked me to tell you he can’t see you. He said to remind you of his advice.” She smiled sadly and looked a question at him.

  Teach said, “I remember his advice.” He was touched by this. She had taken him inside. She had chosen not to banish him in front of her younger colleague. Teach handed her the envelope. “Please give this to Mr. Battles . . . and tell him I’m waiting.”

  The woman took the envelope and examined his face with confused, careful eyes. Was she dealing with some kind of lunatic? Was this a letter bomb? Was it a bribe, some pathetic flailing by a man about to sink into a maelstrom of legal catastrophe? She said, finally, “All right, Mr. Teach. I’ll give it to him, but . . . as I told you, he’s very busy.”

  Teach waited until she turned and took a step before he said, “Should I wait here or return to the outer room?”

  The woman stopped, turned back, smiled. “Please wait here, Mr. Teach. I’m sure this won’t take long.”

  He had examined two of the charcoal studies, a mare grazing under a willow tree with her foal, and a stallion extending his head across a fence toward a woman standing beside an open roadster, when Battles’s secretary returned. “Please follow me,” was all she said. Her face gave nothing away. Teach guessed she knew only that something unusual was afoot. Good. The next few minutes had to be handled with the greatest care, and the fewer people who knew about it, the better.

  When Teach entered and quietly closed the door, Battles was seated, his head bowed over the photos spread across the desk. His elbows rested on the blotter and his slender hands were clasped in front of him. Teach took the chair in front of the desk. The curtains were closed; today there would be no vista of Tampa Bay. This was a dark room meeting. When Battles looked up, he made no attempt to hide his disgust. “So, Mr. Teach, you turn out to be a blackmailer.”

  Teach had anticipated this, had thought long and carefully about what to say. “No, Mr. Battles, I am not. I’m a man who wants you to know that your nephew, a boy you seem to care a great deal about, is in a lot of trouble. He’s a boy with enormous potential. You you
rself pointed that out to me. He’s throwing his life away on crack cocaine.” Teach stopped for a breath, aware that his words sounded memorized. They were. He wouldn’t apologize for that. Yesterday, he had sat here in silent, terrified humility while Thurman Battles had delivered his own speech.

  Teach went on: “I see myself as a man who is offering you an opportunity that I, as a father, would want for my daughter if she were in such a situation. I’m offering you a chance to intervene in this boy’s life before it’s too late. To handle this quietly before it breaks into the open. A chance to get him back on the path that people who know him, except of course the kids he does drugs with, believe he’s on. I think I’m offering you the boy’s life, his future, Mr. Battles. I think I’m making amends for what I did to the boy. I hurt him, I split open his cheek and gave him a scar he’ll have for the rest of his life, and I’m sorry for that. But now I’m giving the boy and you something much bigger than that, a chance to heal this wound of drugs. You and I both know it’s a wound that can kill.

  “You wanted me to be a symbol of white racism, and you wanted to punish that symbol. You wanted to use Tyrone as a symbol of—to use your phrase—the young black man crying out for justice. Well, neither of us is a symbol. I’m a man, and Tyrone is a boy, and we’ve both made mistakes. I thought he had a knife, and he didn’t. He’s a good football player and a good student and he’s using crack. I think you should put your love for a boy above your need for a symbol and get on with the business of saving his life. You’ve got the money to put him in treatment if that’s what he needs. Spend your money and your time on that rather than on ruining me.”

  Teach considered saying that this was his advice to Battles, remembering how ready the man had been to give advice to him, but he kept this inside. Let him draw the inference if he would.

  Battles started to speak but Teach allowed himself the same gesture Battles had used in this office the day before. He held up his hand and stopped the man’s words. “You’re about to ask me what I want in return. Well, I’ve already told you I’m making amends for what I did. That’s something I want. You can believe me or not about that, Mr. Battles. I suspect you’ll think my talking about making amends is a load of crap. You’re entitled to your opinion. But I want this on the record. I want to be a good man, just like you do, and I want to live in a good world, and I think what I’m doing here can make good things happen. It can make my daughter able to continue living without all the hell you planned to bring down on our heads. It can make Tyrone a better boy and maybe someday a better man. All you have to do for me is drop this lawsuit. And I think you can find a way to do it without hurting anyone.”

  While he spoke, Teach watched Battles’s eyes, the softening planes of his face, the sinking stillness of his body behind the desk. He watched for signs. Of rising anger, of a stubborn refusal to listen. He saw none of these, only a slow, gathering acknowledgment of the power of Teach’s position. “Please, Mr. Battles, let me know what you think. Am I a blackmailer?”

  Battles smiled, and Teach knew they were in a courtroom again. Battles had won too many cases, had prospered too well in the law, and had suffered, Teach guessed, too many setbacks in it too. With all of this behind him, how could he answer a simple question simply?

  Battles leaned back in his chair and laced his fingers behind his balding head. “Let’s say, Mr. Teach, that I see the strength of your position.” He waved a sinuous hand. “Oh, don’t think I contest the sincerity of your interpretation of things. And I told you I admire your gift of gab.”

  Teach wanted to say this wasn’t about performances, it was about lives. But he’d made his speech. It was Battles’s turn to talk.

  “But I believe the good life you and your daughter live is built on a foundation that would collapse were it not for the brick-and-mortar of racism. That makes your protestations of your own goodness seem a little silly to me, Mr. Teach. But we live in a practical world, and the practical fact is that you have my nephew by his short and curly hair. I wanted very much to show you up to the city of Tampa for the racist I still believe you are, but it appears that practical concerns eliminate that possibility.” Battles collected the pictures, stacked them, slipped them back into the envelope. He opened the desk drawer in front of him and put the envelope inside. “All right, Mr. Teach. I shall do as you suggest.”

  Teach contained his joy. He nodded and said, “At the risk of presumption, I suggest that you tell the newspapers you’ve investigated the matter further and you’re convinced I made . . . an honest mistake.”

  Teach saw the danger in suggesting strategy to the better general, but he knew something about damage control. He wanted to help write the history of this sorry event. After all, he was the villain of the pageant. From now on, no matter what Battles said to the papers, he’d be known as Teach, the guy who got into a racial scrape in a men’s room.

  Battles smiled. “And, of course, you’ll give me the negatives.”

  “Of course,” Teach said, thinking, And I’ll surrender my copies of them when pigs fly across the moon at midnight in perfect formation. He stood and extended his hand to Battles, certain that the man would not refuse to shake it. Battles’s grip was firm and brief.

  Teach turned and moved toward the door. Battles said to his back, “I underestimated you, Mr. Teach. You’ve taught me something.”

  With his hand on the doorknob, Teach turned back. “I had to protect my daughter. You should have known I’d do whatever I could.” There had been other times and places when Teach had done what he’d had to do. He’d thought he was doing just that in Malone’s Bar, and some part of him still thought so. He still believed it was better not to wait and see if Charlie Manson had come for the pinot noir and the canapés.

  As Teach walked the gauntlet of charcoal horses, he found that he was full of joy and a little sad too. Maybe this thing was, after all, more about winning and losing than about right and wrong. He said goodbye to the kind woman who had thought enough of his feelings to invite him into a hallway before dismissing him. He nodded to the lovely lady with the very red fingernails. Then something, call it superstition, made him stop in the men’s room to drink again the water of his recent humiliation.

  His thirst abated, he turned to the toilet where he had vomited and then to the mirror. He whispered to his own glad face something he remembered from a college class, “History is the story told by the winners.”

  PART TWO

  NINETEEN

  In his white Bronco, Bloodworth Naylor followed the delivery truck out to Suitcase City, a neighborhood of cinder-block houses, duplexes, and cheap apartments baking in the sun. He was setting up three girls in a house with a rent-to-own account that would launder what they earned with their ankles behind their ears.

  The house in Suitcase City was near enough to the university for the girls to pick up college boys in the bars and clubs. It was close enough to Busch Gardens so they could troll for horny dads who left the wife and kiddies asleep in the motel room after a long day of adorable animals. Those deprived husbands out on the streets letting the real animal out of the cage. Blood Naylor loved the stories his girls told about the johns. Guys with their faces sunburned from waiting in line all day for Wet and Wild with little Susie and little Freddie and mama Mary Beth. Enough energy left to get the wild thing wet. Guys who said they wanted something special and were willing to pay for it. Guys who could always be convinced they’d gotten it.

  One of the new girls, Terri, a cute little blonde with six toes on both feet and skulls tattooed on her tits, was riding in the delivery truck, sitting up there like a pit bull terrier between Mook, the driver, and Soldier, the kid who helped Mook move the furniture. The truck was weaving a little and Blood figured maybe the new girl was giving Mook head for twenty bucks. He admired her enthusiasm, and, what the hell, he’d get his cut. He’d been in the life long enough to know the girls who would pay out, the ones who would burn out, and the ones who would get sick
of the life and get out.

  Terri was a star. She would burn high and hard and then drop like a dead cold rock. She was shooting methedrine into the veins under her tongue. One of the other girls had caught her licking blood from her lips in the ladies’ room at the Celebrity Club and asked her what happened. Some guy get rough with you? Nothing, she replied. Nothing happened. Smiling that gone-from-here smile. Blood Naylor would get what he could out of her and watch her closely. She was the kind who could get him into trouble.

  At the house, Blood supervised the unloading while the girls watched, Terri and Marie and Severiana, the Colombian. The girls pranced around trying out the chairs and mattresses and flirting with Mook and Soldier. They told Blood they liked the Barcalounger with the built-in tray table and the early-American dining room set and the two Louis XIV bedroom suites. All of it was recently removed from a house nearby where two of Blood’s girls had lived. Redheads, twin sisters from Des Moines, a cheerleader and a majorette who had come to try out for the Busch Gardens Ice Capades show and didn’t make the cut.

  When the unloading was finished, Blood tipped the two muscleheads twenty each and went into the kitchen for a beer. Severiana was in there on her hands and knees cleaning out the oven. She had on thick rubber gloves and an apron and was spraying that foul-smelling lye shit people used to clean ovens. Blood admired her ass for a while, watching her shove her head into the oven, breathing hard as she reached way back for that grime. Finally, he said, “Girl, cut that out. You keep breathing that stuff, you won’t be able to work. You want, I’ll send over a new oven. Have old Mook take that one to the landfill.”

  She wiggled out and met him with those serious butterscotch eyes. She looked like a good girl, a village girl, somebody’s sister. Guys liked that look, thought they were corrupting the woman, turning her away from the path of righteousness for their dick’s sake. One of a hundred easy turn-ons. Severiana had been a steady earner for two years, and she didn’t do drugs. One of the girls had told him Severiana was sending half her money home to a sister in Cartagena who took care of her kids. When the sister got enough cash together, she was going to bribe Severiana’s husband out of prison. Then Severiana was going to bring him to the Estados Unidos and set him up in the restaurant business. Blood had told her if the guy came to the States, she better make sure he wasn’t one of those hotblooded Latinos, one of those guys with a butterfly knife who thought his wife was sending home a thousand bucks a month on a maid’s wages. None of that shit.