Safe

by Ryan Gattis

  “No.” I turn to her and say, “We need more. For more people. More houses.”

  Her eyes get wide at that. Her nose crinkles up. She doesn’t get it. I can see her thinking risk is one thing, but this is just crazy.

  Before she can respond back with anything, I walk to one of the hotel chairs that faces the windows and sit in it. We’ve never talked about this before. Never needed to. But Mira’s smart. She knows there’s something I’m not telling her, and she knows the relationship part is over between us too.

  From the other side of the room, Mira says to me, “So this is the last time? Or just the last time till the last time?”

  That’s how she calls me out. Tired, almost. Not quite sad but getting there. She might mean the money. She might mean us, together. Could be both. But she knows real good how all this money changes things. Makes everything more dangerous. Makes it real likely she’ll never see me again. That’s for sure.

  I hear her digging in her makeup bag by where the bathroom mirror is. There’s a half wall between us, but it feels like there’s more. Distance. Barriers. Whatever. And it’s not clean or perfect, but I’m happy with how I did it.

  It was my call, not involving her in any kind of heist, being real firm with her about how she couldn’t be there when I did it. That was me protecting her. And she knows I’d always been planning on seeing this out. I just never told her the whole why. Never told her about the memory smells, about the cancer. Never told her that doing this is for the time I got left. And I want to tell her. I owe her that. But I can’t yet. Not here. Not in some fucking casino hotel with a busted window overlooking the 91 Freeway.

  What I got to say is depressing enough as it is. It doesn’t need any more help. And I’ve held it so long on my own because I’m not about to give Mira the chance to pity me or think about anything like having a future with me instead of her husband and her kid like she should. She needs to forget me.

  “It’s going to be whatever it’s going to be” is all I can say. “Can’t make promises.”

  That’s true too. No guarantees I get any other safes. Even if I do, no guarantees I can get it to her to distribute. From here, it’s all chance. And, really, it’s the only one path worth taking.

  See, I can’t tell her I fought so hard to do something different with my life and this cancer coming back to take a bite out of me again means I don’t get to have it anymore, because I can’t look at her face when I say it. I can’t say to her that I’m already out living on this bridge between this life and what comes after it, and I know, I’ve always known, that I have to go as fast as I can because there’s no going back for me. Shit. Even if I wanted it, I got nowhere to go back to. Everything behind me is already burnt. There’s no Reverse now. Only Drive.

  I hear her drop whatever she was working with back into her little makeup bag, where it clacks against some other thing, and she steps out from behind the wall, so I turn my chair back her way. She’s looking at me, and nodding, but it’s heavy. The good feeling of counting all that money is gone and it’s not coming back.

  This is probably good, though. It’s how it has to go. The fantasy happy ending of us running off into some sunset with bags of money is dying on the carpet between us, in this quiet when she’s stopped nodding but her eyes are looking like she’s waiting for me to say something.

  I don’t, though.

  She says, “You know, you’re a hard man to know.”

  “I’d trust you to know that.”

  That gets me another of her real good tsks and a look that can’t make up its mind whether she wants to kiss me or punch me.

  I don’t even get up when she goes. I want to, but I know better. I watch her leave wheeling the empty bag she brought with her. The one that’s full now. That was always the deal because I can’t be having the money on me. The hurt sets in when the door shuts behind her. I’m smelling her body spray too much now, the kind she leaves in every room she ever walked in. Lemons, everywhere.

  I turn my chair to the window, imagining how she’ll be walking down the hall, how she’ll be pushing the button for the elevator, and then in the elevator, how she’ll wait, how she’ll exit and cross through the lobby, and out the doors through to the parking lot, and to her car, locking the gym bag in the trunk, getting in the front seat and turning it on, and putting it in reverse, driving out, going back to her little boy, and that’s exactly how it should be. From the window, I’m looking for her driving out, hoping I can catch a sight of her car, if not her driving it, but there’s too many other vehicles down there going in every direction.

  22

  I’m still looking out that same window an hour later and seeing what there is to see of Compton putting on its dusk. Not that it’s much. The dry bed of Compton Creek with a tree in the middle. Above that dark greenness, the backside of Gateway Towne Center has fresh paint and empty loading bays. I slide my eyes from that to the parallel asphalts of Artesia and the 91 Freeway cutting through the city like an open artery and an open vein that blood cells with headlights and brake lights roll through in different directions. Past them, in the far south distance is the port of Long Beach, where cranes have their necks up, looking blurred and purple and ready to do work.

  I check my regular cell to make sure I still have no calls on it and then I use my prepaid to call the shop so Laura won’t recognize the number.

  She picks up on the third ring. “Stenberg Locksmithing.”

  I say, “What’s got more legs than cents?”

  She doesn’t want to talk to me, though. I know from the huff of breath she hits the phone mic with, but also because she says, “I don’t want to talk to you.”

  Some people say “wanna.” Most do. But Laura? She enunciates. She grabs her words and says them the right way and puts them in the right order because she’s proper.

  Laura Stenberg runs phones and schedules jobs. Hell of a name for a little Asian girl. She’s sixteen and been hearing that pretty much every year of her adopted life. Frank and Marcy adopted her from the Philippines after they lost Rose. Five years later, Marcy was gone. Not leukemia. Lung cancer. Also genetic. Same thing happened to her aunt. I’d been four years at the shop when it happened.

  I’d never met Marcy myself. She’d been sick for so long and Frank kept to himself outside of work. But going to that funeral and seeing what Rose would’ve looked like as an adult in that casket was about the hardest thing I ever saw. I was in pieces. Just busted up. It gave me everything I never got when Rose passed. Gave me a chance to say goodbye. Not all the way. But a little.

  I repeat myself so Laura knows I’m not doing anything till she guesses. “What has got more legs than cents?”

  I know she’s mishearing it sense, and I want her to. I also know she can’t resist. We’ve done this since she was ten.

  “Are you really attempting this right now?”

  I am. “What has got—”

  “Okay! Fine!” I feel her looking out the front window, scanning the lot and the street, maybe to see if I’m there, maybe to see if this is all some elaborate joke I’m pulling on Frank and that real soon I’ll come clean and everything will be okay. “A spider that makes friends with a lizard?”

  I give it a few seconds and then I say, “No,” and I pause there to sharpen up my delivery. “A yak that forgot her change purse.”

  Silence is what she hits me with. Not a smirk or a snort. Nothing.

  “Stupid,” she finally says.

  “You’re right, it was stupid of her to leave it on his dresser before she went to the savanna bar.”

  She doesn’t appreciate how I twisted that. “That’s not what I—”

  You got to keep teenagers unbalanced. Can’t let them think they’re running things. “Anything come in for me? Any calls?”

  “No.” Her voice goes a little tight. “Not a thing.”

  “Liar. Frank’s taking them, isn’t he?”

  “Why are we even talking? Didn’t you quit?” />
  “I’ll quit when I’m dead.” It started as a joke in my mouth, but now it’s out, I know it’s true. And knowing it’s true hollows me out a little.

  “Real funny,” she says back. “Dad said you were giving notice, or, he wasn’t exactly sure what, but he said you were leaving.”

  “I am leaving.”

  “But you haven’t left?”

  “Right.”

  “So, when are you leaving?”

  “I’m leaving when I leave. Till then, if a call comes in, put it my way.”

  “Dad’s not going to like that.”

  “He’ll love it. It’ll mean he’s not having to do it, but he’s still getting forty percent of the billable.”

  “I think he just wants to know what your deal is. What I mean is …” She halts there, and Laura’s not usually like that, a pauser. She’s as straight-ahead as a person can get. “I want to know too.”

  “It’s got nothing to do with you.”

  “Oh, I know that.”

  “Do you?”

  Her silence tells me she doesn’t. Not all the way.

  “It’s a thing I have to handle.” I already hate myself for saying that much. “It’s not about you, and it’s not about Frank. I promise.”

  I’m thinking that’s enough, that my tone was good and firm and she’ll have to accept it, but she doesn’t.

  “Is it cancer again?”

  I’m wincing where I’m sitting.

  “If you don’t answer, it just means yes.”

  I saw Frank thinking it before. Of course he told her it was maybe why I was doing what I was doing.

  “It isn’t,” I say, and I know it’s not convincing but I don’t care. “Tell Frank I said hello, and that I owe him one, no, two steaks. Keep sending me calls, Laura. I’m not even playing about that.”

  And in my head right then, I’m thinking, Nah, fuck two. I’ll get him a whole box of Omahas. I wait a second and she doesn’t say anything. But then she exhales, and whatever reason Laura has for deciding not to fight me on this, I’m grateful for it, because all she says is “Okay. I’ll run it by Dad, but you know I have to do what he says.”

  “Always. Adios, Spider.”

  Bringing the joke back is how our calls get ended. It’s how we show each other we were listening. How we care.

  Since she doesn’t want to say bye, Laura says, “I hope I’ll be seeing you, Yak.”

  I say, “I hope so too,” before hanging up, and just because it’s true doesn’t mean it’s going to happen.

  It took Frank a month to ask me about how hard I was crying at his wife’s funeral, and I was forced to give him some good bullshit about how my mom died when I was little, and that I was made to go to the funeral and seeing Mrs. Stenberg like that brought a bunch of memories back, which was just true enough to convince him. It did bring memories back. Of Rose and me. And my mom is dead, but I never went to her funeral. She didn’t have one that I know of.

  So, now Frank’s just got me and Laura.

  Well, not me.

  In the beginning when we were planning, Mira and I fought hard about Laura. I wanted to give her money and Mira said I couldn’t. I said yes or I wasn’t doing it. Mira just sat there all calm and said no. No way. If I do that and get caught somehow, people come in and find the money I stole. Forensic accountants, they’re called. And if any of it got connected to my former employer, well then, he’d be going to jail too. That, I finally understood.

  So that’s how the trust came to be. Mira will put in 10 percent of whatever I can get above that original amount we needed. As of today, that’s about $60,000 to the Rose Grace Stenberg Memorial Trust for young women who got cancer but got better from it. It’s not much, just whatever the interest is off the lump-sum investment that will be spitting out annually in 2018, but the awards will help them go to college, buy books or whatever. It’s not too particular, but if the students want to study music or arts, they get special preference. It’s what Rose always wanted to do, so I’m making good on that.

  The executor on it is a lawyer named Henry Willis-Jackson that Mira knows. When I’m gone, he’ll send a letter to Frank informing him that some long-lost Stenberg relative from Sweden or something set it up on his deathbed. It’ll be the last good thing I can ever give him and he’ll never even know it was me. I’m imagining Frank’s face when that letter shows up. How he won’t understand it at first and then maybe it’ll creep up on him. Maybe.

  And I already know yesterday’s gone and tomorrow never comes.

  There’s only this.

  II

  ¡SIN VERGÜENZA!

  Ricky Mendoza, Junior, a.k.a. Ghost

  Monday, September 15, 2008

  Late Afternoon

  23

  All day till now felt like I was floating. No calls from Laura, from Frank, from anybody. No jobs. No text from Mira even. So I slept till I couldn’t sleep anymore, checked out of the Crystal Casino, and then just rolled out. By the time I got to Wilshire, Bad Religion was screaming at me about wanting something more. Like, mooooooore.

  I still had an hour before I could check into my next hotel, so I went by LACMA to Los Angelenos, this Chicano art exhibit my tattooer told me I had to go see. The Chaz pillars were cool in there, his Chinese dragon too. What really snuck up on me though was something in another show, Phantom Sightings. There were these two coffins, one white, one black, done up by these dudes Ochoa and Rios. They were all angular, like an adjustable bed stuck sitting up. Speaker-box fabric was used, the little plaque said. It was a nice way of maybe going out, I thought, sitting up, not lying down, Rose’s mix around me forever.

  I’m still thinking about those things as I’m finishing off my corned beef Reuben from Canter’s in my room at the Ramada across from St. James Episcopal in Koreatown. That’s where group’s always held. This is the closest I’ve ever had to commute to be there. It doesn’t even take me five minutes to cross the street and duck upstairs. I’m early.

  But coming into the group room, I can already tell it’s going to be packed. I just feel it. Bad days mean more people. That’s how it is. Weekends can be rough and everybody comes in on Monday to put things back together. We don’t get the main worship area like the alcoholics do, but we’re heading that way, getting bigger every couple months. Even five years ago, there were maybe twelve or thirteen of us here, mostly old-schoolers from the seventies looking twenty years older than they are for real, or kids like me that got caught up with it in the late eighties/early nineties. There’s too much new blood in here these days, though. Teens doing their court-ordered NA. Little fools in their twenties that got caught up in pills. Oxy, mostly. More of them are whiter than you’d think. All the way white, even.

  We all come in through the parking lot off St. Andrews Place and go up the back stairs, turn right, and go down the hallway to this little room on the right that fits maybe forty or forty-five of us with a squeeze. We got to set out metal chairs with green cloth backs for everybody. I’m doing that, taking five at a time, setting them down on a spot and letting go of the bottom one and then moving to the next spot beside it, and then the next. I do six rows like that as people are filling in, talking about how the stock market pulled a samurai move and cut its own guts out today.

  Over five hundred points.

  Mira schooled me already on Lehman Brothers going under and Bank of America buying Merrill Lynch and AIG going in the toilet, but to me, it was just chickens coming home to roost for some greedy motherfuckers. Far as I’m concerned, they get what they deserve.

  But with the people at group, I can hear fear riding on their words as they’re getting coffee and sneaking cookies into napkins. The older ones, anyways. They don’t care about stocks. There are probably eight people in this whole spot with 401(k)s. They care about what happens only because it means there’s a tidal wave coming and what to do when it hits them. They care if they’ll get washed away with it. If they’ll even have houses when it’s done.
They care if they’ll be on the street. If their kids will be okay.

  And I feel that in my stomach. It’s a hot coal cooking down there. And I’m thinking, This is why I did what I did, and why I’m going to keep doing it. More. For people like this. I got no shame ripping off drug dealers anyways.

  Sin vergüenza, I’m thinking, and I haven’t even thought about that in forever.

  I remember being a dumbass little kid with no parents ever around in our tiny little apartment on the block and how the Piñeda family took care of me, lumping me in with the three brothers and feeding one more kid most nights. Mrs. Piñeda used to say, what was a little extra beans? They were good to me even though me and Beto and Javi and Squeaker were a bad little crew, always getting into mischief. Stealing shit. Scrapping with anybody that wanted some. I remember how their grandma with the glass eye always used to say how these Piñeda boys (and she meant me too) had no shame. Like it was a bad thing.

  After a while, we just took her scolding words and said them when we did bad shit, but turned them around like it was a good thing. Like, ¡Sin vergüenza! It became a call, sort of. A rally cry. Like, Yes, I am doing this and I don’t care if you see me, because I got no shame doing it!

  That’s how I feel right now. No shame for stealing. Never. Not if it helps people like John. He’s already sitting two rows in front of me, slumped a little on the left because ever since his car accident in the eighties, his back’s bad and his pelvis is so wrecked that he can’t even sit flat. All of him is on a slant now.

  It started with opiates for him. That’s true of more and more people here. It started with bad pain, and then it’s about trying to take that away so you can function, but then, as you’re doing that, tolerance goes up. First it was the legal way, with pills, getting bumped from Vicodin to OxyContin, and then it was other stuff. You don’t wake up one day and decide to do heroin. You fall down the ladder to it.

  Sitting in rooms like this, man, you learn everything you ever needed to know about human weakness.