“How much money?”
“We pay them fifty dollar one night.”
I said, “Wow.”
“We getting better,” he said. “Before, we pay one hundred.”
“At that rate,” I said, “you’ll be playing for free in no time. Is Eaglet around?”
“Oh,” he said, sounding excited. “You have something for her? Somebody she can shoot? She so—so boring.”
“Bored, dammit,” I heard Eaglet say, “not boring. Who is that?”
“Is Mister Junior.”
“Well, do I get to talk to him anytime soon, or are you waiting for Imelda Marcos to die? And can you not play the marimba while I talk?”
“I play quiet,” Ting Ting said. He was the first person in her adult life who acted like she was a harmless hausfrau from a 1955 sitcom, and she loved it. Everyone else was terrified of her.
“Jesus,” she said to me. “It’s like being held captive by a ray of sunshine.”
“He is sweet, isn’t he? If I played on the other team, I’d be on him like hot fudge.”
“For all the good it would do you,” Eaglet said. “Every fragrant bit of him belongs to me.” Behind her, I heard an interval being struck on the marimba.
“So?” I said, “Other than that, how are you?”
“Like he said, bored. You know how it is. Kill somebody, sit around for a long time, kill somebody, sit around for a long time. It’s like being a pitcher.”
“No uniform, though.”
“Wouldn’t the cops love that? Hey, we got number 17. Are you planning to get to the point any time soon?”
“I need protection for a few hours. Me and a teenage girl.”
“I don’t entirely like you,” Eaglet said, “but I admire the fact that you didn’t tell me only about the girl and pretend that you were bulletproof. Even put yourself first. When?”
“I can be there in maybe thirty minutes. Might take a couple of hours, total.”
“A thousand,” she said.
I said, “Yikes.”
“Okay,” she said. “Since you’re an old whatever—acquaintance, I guess—five hundred, plus an extra five if I have to shoot anyone.”
“Do I have to pay for the bullet, too?”
“I’ll throw it in for old times’ sake.”
“Thanks. And you can go soon?”
“You already said thirty minutes. I’ll be sitting on the curb. Anything to get away from this fucking marimba.”
The first thing Anime said when she saw the big black SUV was, “Where’s your terrible car?”
“In the parking lot of a terrible restaurant,” I said. “We’re using Uber. For security.”
“I didn’t know they had SUVs.”
“It’s Uber Whopper or something. There are some people who know what my car looks like, and I don’t want to make things any easier for them than they already seem to be.”
Anime was wearing a baseball cap that said “Lemon Meringue pi” on the front with her ponytail drawn through the loop at the back, a plaid shirt that looked like it had made its way down from Oregon on its own power, and a pair of skinny jeans that accentuated the fact that she probably didn’t weigh eighty-five pounds. As always, she was makeup-free, but she’d once told me that Lilli wore so much it averaged out. Under one arm she had a box designed to hold a pair of men’s sneakers for somebody with big feet.
We were most of the way to the car when something shifted behind one of the darkened windows, and Anime stopped and said, “Who’s in there?”
“That’s our protection for the day,” I said. “She’s a hitter. Her name is Eaglet.”
“God, her parents must have hated her.”
“They changed their last name to Sunshine.”
“Literally?” The word hitter must have dropped because Anime’s eyebrows did a high jump. “And she shoots people?”
“Not indiscriminately.”
“I’m sitting in front.”
“No, really, she’s fine. She just shoots the people you point her at.”
“Don’t be silly,” she said. “I don’t care about that. I get sick in the backseat.”
“Fine,” I said. “We’ve probably been standing here talking about her long enough for it to be rude, so let’s go.”
Eaglet and Anime exchanged purely social smiles as they sized each other up. When I got into the backseat, Eaglet said to me, in the tone of one who doesn’t believe teenagers understand English, “You didn’t mention kids.”
“Why would I?” I said.
“You said a teenager.”
Without turning around, Anime said, “It’s not his fault you’re a bad judge of age.”
Eaglet said, “You barely look—”
Anime said, “I’m in my teens. I live in that storage unit. Do you know a lot of pre-teens who live in a storage unit?”
Eaglet’s eyes widened. “Do you really?”
“Off and on. Things are a little rough at home.”
“You poor thing.” I’d never heard that tone from Eaglet. The driver glanced at Anime, pulled through the storage facility’s gate, and turned right.
“My mom is trying to figure out how to break up with her hair stylist,” Anime deadpanned. “It’s dominated family conversations for a week. There’s not much room for personal growth.”
“Not easy to do,” Eaglet said, accepting that she’d been outmaneuvered. “My stylist knows everything.”
As the driver pulled through the storage facility’s gate and turned right, I said, “I hope to shit not.”
“Within reason,” Eaglet said. “It’s like the confessional. As I understand it, I mean. You know you’re supposed to talk about everything, but there’s always that little bit everybody holds back. How they really hate their little brother or something.”
“Anyway, Junior needs me,” Anime said. “Probably as much as he needs you. He’s technologically illiterate.”
I said, “Hey.”
“So, your job, I mean, what you do,” Anime said. “What are the requirements?”
“A steady hand and a profound indifference,” Eaglet said. To me, she said, “Big mouth. Don’t you have to tell this nice man where to go? Or is he driving at random?”
“He knows,” I said. “I worked it all out before you got in the car.”
“Big secret,” said the driver. He was a jovial Jamaican and I could tell he’d been dying to get into the conversation.
“Into town?” Eaglet said as we signaled for a freeway on-ramp.
“Good guess. In fact, when we get off the freeway I’m going to need you to cover your eyes for nine or ten minutes.”
“People who have my job do not cover our eyes,” Eaglet said. “Professional code. It’s a deal-breaker.”
Anime said, “I’ll get car sick.”
“It’s okay,” the driver said. “I can see.”
“Oh, come on,” I said to Eaglet. “You know I wouldn’t do anything—I mean, Jesus, how long have you known me?”
“I’ve known Corney Swinster a hell of a lot longer than I’ve known you,” Eaglet said, “and he took a whack at me last month.”
I said, “Corney? But I heard he got—” A perfumed hand was clamped over my mouth.
“Finish the thought silently,” Eaglet said, removing her hand, “and yes, he did.”
“Poor Corney,” I said when I could talk again.
“That’s not a very friendly sentiment,” she said. “Considering.”
“Well, I wasn’t suggesting I wished the outcome of your meeting had been different. It’s just that he was one of the guys who played poker with Herbie, back when I was just getting going. He was a terrible player, so everybody liked him.”
“Aces and eights,” Eaglet said. “Wasn’t that what Wild Bill w
as holding?”
“It’s amazing,” I said. “You can go a decade without thinking about Wild Bill Hickock and suddenly he’s everywhere.”
Anime sniffled.
“The little girl, she crying,” said the driver.
“It’s okay, sweetie,” Eaglet said. “She’ll find a new stylist in no time.”
“It’s not that,” Anime said. “It’s Lilli.”
“Who’s Lilli?” Eaglet and the driver asked in unison.
“My—my friend.” She craned around to look at me. Her face was gleaming, so she’d been crying silently for a little while. “I lied when I said we were boycotting, protesting, whatever I said. About food. Lilli, she, she stopped eating things, first it was sugar and then it was gluten and then it was soy or nuts or meat or rice or fish or salt or—”
“I know where this is going,” Eaglet said, and the driver nodded and said, “Yes, yes, yes,” and Anime said, “And I said something really stupid, like, It doesn’t matter what you don’t eat, you’ll never be transparent, and she went all quiet for a couple of weeks and then I noticed she was wearing different clothes, a shirt I hadn’t seen before, and I asked her something innocuous, like where she got it, and she leaned over to me like there were a hundred people listening, and she whispered, ‘I’m too fat.’”
“Yes, yes,” said the driver. “My wife’s sister’s child, too.”
“And I was trying to talk to her and it turned out it was something I said, something about her butt, and now she’s lost, she says, twelve pounds, but it looks like more to me, and you know, Junior, you know she wasn’t very big to start with, even when—”
The driver said, “Stop, child,” as he merged right, and Eaglet said, “You didn’t do it. Listen to me—”
“And now she won’t go to school and she’s throwing up all the time and her breath smells terrible and I’m scared that—”
“You listen to the lady,” the driver said. “I can tell the lady knows.”
“I went through this,” Eaglet said. To my profound surprise she leaned forward and put a hand on Anime’s shoulder. “How old are you, honey? I mean, really?”
“Fourteen. Honest.”
“And your, your—”
“My girlfriend.” Anime swiped at her cheeks with the back of her hand. “She’s fourteen, too, we’re both—”
“And her parents?”
“They’re old.”
“No, I mean, what are they—”
“Doing about it? Nothing, they haven’t even said anything,” Anime said, and her voice scaled up a little, “but her mother is skinnier than that horrible old woman who wanted to be the Queen of England—”
“The Duchess of Windsor,” I said.
“My mother saw her,” the driver said conversationally. “When she was living in Bermuda. Not fat.”
“That’s her,” Anime said. “And Lilli’s mother, she talks about how she can wear child sizes. The way she says it, it’s like she cured cancer or something.”
“It’s not your fault,” Eaglet said. Her hand was still on Anime’s shoulder. She was sitting behind the driver, so it was a diagonal stretch. She hit me with her left knee to move me over. “It’s her mother, it’s what we see on TV all the time, it’s pressure on girls, it’s a lot of things. For me, it was—I mean, I did it too. I weighed seventy-five pounds, and I’m taller than you are.”
Anime turned and looked at her. “What did you do? To get better?”
“Oh, well,” Eaglet said, shaking her head. “I’m not exactly typical.”
“But you must have—”
“My parents were Christian Scientists,” Eaglet said with some resignation, “until they found what my father called the vegetarian route to God. Which was peyote, mostly, with some mescaline thrown in for variety. So when I’m eight or nine our whole middle-class life—school, the house in the suburbs, and regular names and so forth—turns into a crowded Quonset hut in San Bernardino with me starving myself in the corner while my parents, who are now the Sunshines, loop out over a book of paintings by Hieronymus Bosch as they peak on the day’s dose. And then they added weed to the mix and my mother began baking day and night, anything that was sweet, and they knocked all of that back with bottled spring water because their systems were so pure, right?”
“The hungry herb,” the driver said. “Makes everybody eat.”
“Except me,” Eaglet said, “and after a few months my mother realized I wasn’t eating any of the donuts she’d baked, and she said, ‘Don’t you like it, honey?’ or something, and I just lost it, I squeezed them into crumbs and threw them all over the place. She hadn’t even noticed I was starving myself to death.”
“So,” Anime said, “what? A doctor?”
“No, ’cause they’d been Christian Scientists, remember? No doctors. And then they turned to the sacrament of the cactus, which is natural, they kept saying, so no technology, no chemicals, no medicines, no anything. Listen, I’m not your basic case history. They handed me to this shaman, an old Mexican guy who made me sign a piece of paper saying I was a member of the Native American Church to make everything legal and then he took me up into a big rock formation about twenty miles away and gave me some peyote, first time I’d ever had any. And after I finished throwing up—”
“Lilli is cool with throwing up,” Anime said. “She does it a lot.”
“I’m not recommending this, honey I’m just telling you what I—” She patted Anime’s shoulder as though she were soothing herself, and Anime allowed it. “Anyway, we spent about ten hours up there talking about my life, and around five-thirty, when I thought I was getting a pretty good handle on my life and the sun was about to set, he made me stand up and he introduced me to my shadow, which was really long by then. He made me bow to it and see how it bowed back, and he said I had to remember my shadow when I was losing weight because when I got smaller I was making my shadow smaller and weaker, too, and I needed my shadow to be powerful. See, he said, just before you’re born there are two spirits that are both you, as close as the two sides of a window, but at the last moment, just before you slide into the world, a decision is made somewhere, and one of those spirits becomes you and the other one is your shadow, and you’re responsible for your shadow’s well-being. Because your shadow is like your visible spirit and it’s there to remind you that you’re part spirit, and that spirit can be blown out like a candle. Just poof because of something you do. He also said your shadow is there to keep you from darkness, ’cause when you’re someplace dark, your shadow disappears, right? And that’s how it reminds you that you’re always just one doorway away from real darkness, the bad kind. Your shadow is there to nag you not to go through the door into that kind of darkness because if you do, it will disappear forever. Both you and your spirit, both of you, lost forever.”
“Huh,” the driver said. “My sister’s child—”
“So,” Eaglet said, “it got my attention. I’m not saying it worked exactly, but it gave me someone else to think about, even if it was my shadow. I don’t think I believed anyone knew I was alive. My parents were lost in the dope, my life had been taken away from me. What I wanted didn’t count for anything. My eating was something I could control. So that thing with the old man was like a push, and over the long run I sort of found my way back.”
“You’re saying I could be her shadow, sort of?” Anime said.
“You’re together a lot?” Eaglet said.
“Only like all the time.”
“Well, I’ve read a lot about this for the obvious reason, and one thing that seems to work, unless there’s clinical depression in there somewhere, is actually feeding them. A lot of parents have coped with this by feeding their kids, by hand, if necessary, just showing how much they care.”
Anime’s nose wrinkled, and she said, “Really?”
“Look,” Eaglet said.
“There’s three things here. There’s what’s happening to your friend, there’s how you’re reacting to it, and there’s what you can do.”
“What I can—”
“You need to stop blaming yourself. You didn’t cause this, any more than my parents caused it in me. People are complicated, it’s almost never just one thing. So that’s first, stop feeling responsible. Next, assume some real responsibility. Hold her fucking hand, make her talk. Feed her. Try, at least, to feed her.”
“But if she won’t eat—”
“You’ll be doing something,” Eaglet said. “You’ll be loving her. You’ll be sitting right next to her, showing her how much you care. The best doctor, the best nurse in the world, they can’t love her the way you can. That old man who took me up to the rocks, for weeks he came by and looked at my shadow and then at me, and he’d say, ‘Make us happy, girl. You can make us happy because we care about you.’ You care about your girlfriend, right?”
“She’s the only person I ever loved,” Anime said.
“Then you know what? You’re the person who can help her. I’m not saying it’ll be easy, but eventually she’ll let you in. Maybe not at first, but this is one of the things love can fix.”
The driver said, “She’s right, child. You the only one can help her.”
“I don’t know,” Anime said, blinking fast.
“Well, excuse me,” Eaglet said, “but who the hell is going to do it if you don’t?”
Anime said, “Oh.”
“Tell you one other thing,” Eaglet said. “There’s something fighting with itself inside her, and she needs to eat, she needs energy for the fight, to work it out. You can’t solve it for her, but you can help her get to the point where she can solve it herself. For me, once I got back to my fighting weight, so to speak, I realized I had a lot of hostility inside myself, a lot of unresolved hostility.”
“What did you do about it?” Anime said.
“I resolved it,” Eaglet said flatly. She turned to look out the window. “I’m still resolving it. I resolve it a little more every time I do a job.”
12
Time to Talk
Nighttown Page 11