Ring Game

by Pete Hautman

  After that whole thing with Joe Crow, Axel had simply given up. He had asked Joe to discreetly check out Hyatt Hilton. Or something like that. Whatever he’d said to Crow, he had clearly intended it to be low key. He hadn’t asked Crow to threaten Hyatt with a shotgun. He hadn’t planned for Sophie to get wind of the investigation. The whole thing had blown up in his face, and now everybody was mad at him, including his best friend, Sam, who thought his kid walked on water.

  Well, hell. All he could do now was hunker down and let matters take their own course. Maybe Hyatt Hilton wasn’t such a bad guy. Maybe he should consider letting the kid in on the concession business, introduce him to the space rental guy at the fair. Maybe help him set up a concession to sell that fancy French water of his.

  Axel ground his teeth together and buried those thoughts, feeding them to the snake along with the rest of the garbage that had been infecting his mind. All he wanted was for it to be done and over with so he could get back to running his business. He had ordered a custom Conita grill for the back of the Taco Shop. He’d lined up his new suppliers, ordered the new signage, and convinced space rental to approve the menu addition. One more week and the whole wedding thing would be out of the way. He felt like a convict with seven days left on a ten-year bid, unable to sleep for worrying over all the things that might happen before he walked out those gates.

  It had taken Vince Mudge years to figure out what to tell people who asked him what he did. For a while, back in the seventies, he had called himself a garbage man. He had liked the uncomplicatedness of it, and the way people blinked and tried not to recoil. During the boom years of the eighties, however, Vince became self-conscious about his profession. The guys he had grown up with had all turned into suits—doctors, lawyers, accountants, stockbrokers—real jobs. Vince was just a garbage man. He tried calling himself a sanitation engineer, but most people were smart enough to figure that one out, so he had taken to simply telling people he worked for Browning-Ferris Industries and leaving it at that.

  Within the last year, after twenty-two years of tipping dumpsters, Vince had finally settled into a Zen-like acceptance of his lot in life. With acceptance came new levels of skill, and with skill came pride. He began to think of himself as a recycling specialist and would tell anyone within earshot exactly what he did five days a week, seven and a half hours per day.

  Vince’s most popular stories were those involving curious things that he had found in dumpsters. He had once found a computer, brand new, still in its box, which he had later sold for twelve hundred dollars. Empty purses and wallets were common. By his own calculation, Vince had emptied more than sixty thousand dumpsters. Sometimes, he thought he had seen it all.

  He had found cats, dogs, raccoons, and possums, both dead and alive. He had found human body parts, including a hand and a complete set of male genitalia. He had found sleeping winos and bag ladies, and he had once found a bride and groom in the act of consummating their marriage.

  But he had never before found a referee.

  Crow heard his alarm clock go off: screee, screee, screee. It sounded like a dump truck backing up. He flailed at the snooze button, but could not find it. Suddenly his bed was grabbed by a giant, convulsing lobster. Crow grabbed his pillow. The foot of the bed began to rise, accompanied by a grinding, scraping, howling sound.

  Crow opened his eyes. For one full second, he remained completely disoriented. He was half-buried in plastic bags, and the sky was moving. Then the smell penetrated his awakening consciousness. He experienced a small but crucial epiphany: stink, garbage, dumpster, dumping! He fought his way free of the bags, caught the rusty metal lip of the dumpster, pulled himself over the edge, and tumbled to the ground. The impact of his shoulder hitting concrete nearly caused him to pass out. He rolled out from the shadow of the rising dumpster, got to his feet, staggered a few yards, and collapsed. The grinding, whining noise ceased. Crow heard a voice.

  “You okay?”

  Crow pushed up with his arms, felt hands under his shoulders, lifting. He stood up and turned to face the dumpster and the man who had been operating the lift arms.

  “Jeez, mister, what were you doing in there?” The dumpster operator was a solid, compact, middle-aged man with a concerned demeanor. His brown baseball cap read: “BFI.”

  Crow shook his head, but stopped immediately when he felt his brain banging off the walls of his skull. “I don’t know,” he said.

  “You look sorta beat up, mister. Some softball team didn’t like the way you called ’em?”

  “Where am I?” Crow asked.

  “Behind the old Fitzgerald school. You want I should call an ambulance?”

  “No, that’s okay.” It was coming back to him. Crow felt his pockets for his keys. “I think my car’s still out front.” He remembered pretty much all of it now, right up to the moment the guy called Chip had hit him the third or fourth time. “What time is it?”

  “About five.”

  “In the morning?”

  “That’s right.”

  He had spent the entire night in the dumpster. He thought about asking the garbageman what day it was, but then thought of a better question.

  “How old do you think I am?”

  The garbageman squinted at him. “I dunno. Forty? Forty-five?”

  Crow winced. “Thanks a lot.”

  “You sure you’re okay?”

  “For a middle-aged guy who just spent the night in a dumpster? Yeah, I’m feeling great.” He walked away, feeling far older than anyone would have guessed.

  28

  One meets his destiny often in the road he takes to avoid it.

  —French Proverb

  “WHAT ABOUT NAMES, HY?” Carmen said.

  Hyatt looked up from the paper. “What?”

  Carmen cracked an egg into the batter and stirred. “Do you want blueberries? I bought some blueberries.”

  Hyatt said, “Sure. I like blueberries.” He was worried about Carmen. She’d been spacier than usual lately. And she was actually cooking, making pancakes from scratch. He couldn’t remember her ever making anything more challenging than macaroni-and-cheese from a box, and here she was, first thing in the morning, making blueberry pancakes. Getting all domestic on him. “What are you talking about, ‘names’?”

  “For the baby. What should we name it?”

  Hyatt scratched his nose with a long forefinger. “What baby is that?”

  “My baby.”

  “Carmen, doll, you aren’t having a baby.”

  “I mean, what if I was? What would we name it?”

  Hyatt folded the newspaper. He said, thinking to humor her, “How about ‘Rasputin’?”

  Carmen made a face and shook her head. A small chunk of pillow foam fell from her hair, which was still mussed from sleeping, and landed on her cotton nightgown. She looked, Hyatt thought, like a young mother-to-be, letting herself go now that she’d captured her hubby’s seed.

  “I was thinking, if it’s a girl, we could name her Courtney. Or if it’s a boy we could name him Sterling.”

  The scene was giving Hyatt flashbacks to a life he’d never led. Sitting in a kitchen with his pancake-cooking fiancée, reading the funnies, talking about baby names. He decided it would be safest to say nothing further. Carmen dumped a pint of blueberries into the batter. “Are you excited about the wedding?” she asked, stirring with a dreamy smile.

  This was a time to stay focused on business, and here she was drifting off into la-la land, Hyatt thought. He had seen it before, the salesman believing his own pitch, the actor caught in a role, the politician making promises he actually intended to keep. Maybe he should just let her be there—wherever the hell she was.

  “Sure,” he said. “I’m excited.”

  “You’re going to love my dress.”

  “I’m sure. How’s your mom doing?”

  “She’s totally into it.” She poured a ladle full of batter into the frying pan. “Damn!”

  “What’
s wrong?”

  “I forgot to turn the pan on.” She poured the batter from the pan to the bowl, rinsed the pan, put it back on the stove, this time firing up the burner. “I never really learned to cook.”

  “Carm, when the money starts rolling in, you’ll never have to crack another egg. We’ll hire a cook.”

  “We can get a nanny, too.”

  “Don’t space out on me, Carm.”

  “Don’t you worry about me.” A minute later she tried pouring another pancake, and this time was rewarded by a sizzle and the sweet smell of hot blueberries.

  “I’m not worried,” Hyatt lied.

  “Good.” Carmen lifted a corner of the pancake with a spatula. “Suppose we have twins,” she said. “What would we name the twins?”

  Hyatt sighed. “Beavis and Butt-head?”

  “No, I mean if they were girls.”

  Crow woke up in his own bed, again. After finding himself in that dumpster last Saturday, each morning had arrived with a note of fear and uncertainty. He wasn’t sure until he opened his eyes that his pillow was not a Hefty bag. He might find himself in another bed, or another dumpster, or tied to railroad tracks, or in free fall, or in the wrong body. Could be anywhere. But this morning, once again, he found himself in his own rumpled bed with a cat sleeping between his knees.

  He sat up and worked his tongue around in his mouth. The sensation was revolting. He stood up carefully and made his way to the bathroom, where he brushed his teeth and threw handfuls of cool water on his face.

  The cuts on his unshaven cheek and lower lip had nearly healed. Maybe he could shave today. The sclera of his left eye, with its broken blood vessel, was clearing up nicely, the red giving way to streaky yellow. Bending forward no longer produced shooting pains in his torso, and the ache in his right shoulder had taken on a distant quality.

  He fed Milo and made a cup of coffee for himself, then went to sit on his porch swing to watch the rush hour traffic hurtling along First Avenue toward downtown Minneapolis. He’d been watching the traffic a lot lately.

  Sometime during the past week, Crow had rounded a bend in his quest for self-improvement. Rather than adding new items to his compendium of poker wisdom, he had been reading and rereading his rules, searching for enlightenment, and had discovered that he had broken no fewer than five of his promises to himself, which had led directly to his dumpster adventure.

  If you don’t know the rules, don’t play.

  He had gone to the Anti-Aging Clinic blind, without knowing who or what to expect. He had learned nothing much other than that he had somehow entered middle age, that Hyatt Hilton had been excommunicated for lack of faith, and that Flowrean Peeche did not always reek.

  Don’t try to play someone else’s hand.

  Without a clue as to why Flowrean Peeche had been at the Anti-Aging Clinic, Crow had taken her side in an altercation. For all he knew, she had deserved to be knocked down by the toga man. Maybe she had stolen something, or committed some other transgression. Crow had acted impulsively, siding with the underdog.

  Never play uninvited.

  Axel had clearly asked him to leave the game, yet he had continued to play.

  Play to win, or don’t play.

  With nothing at stake, there was nothing to win.

  Do not play in wild card games.

  As near as he could tell, all the cards in this game were wild.

  Crow felt the weight of his own foolishness pressing in on his chest. He had let himself be drawn to the Amaranthine Church because, like the other Pilgrims at the Anti-Aging Clinic, he’d been trying to fill a hole in his life. Like a child misbehaving, he had sought out punishment as an alternative to boredom. Now he had sentenced himself to the ultimate boredom of being with his own middle-aged self for days on end.

  His body was healing. He was not so sure about his other parts.

  29

  When you have the nuts, squeeze.

  —Crow’s rules

  FORGET ABOUT IT, CROW. Walk away from those people.

  Debrowski heard the echo of her own wise words. Easy advice to give.

  She speared a cold frite with her fork, raised it to her lips, and bit off the tip. She had been working her way through the mound of deep-fried potato sticks for nearly an hour. The waiter had been stopping by every four or five minutes to pick up her unpaid check, examine it with a portentous frown, then slip it back beneath her coffee cup.

  Debrowski didn’t care. She had the perfect table, the weather was flawless, and she was well on her way to not giving a shit what anybody on this side of the Atlantic thought about anything whatsoever.

  Walk away from those people.

  The Les Hommes project was doomed. Even if they were able to complete the CD, René would make the process hell for her. She might never earn a franc and, if she did, it would be money hard won. When the mix sours, it is best to walk. The financial rewards were never worth it.

  But she had never walked away before.

  The waiter again approached her table, said something in French. Debrowski let the words roll off her, not bothering to translate, and lit a cigarette. If only she could maintain such insouciance, perhaps she could work with Les Hommes.

  Impossible. Unacceptable.

  The thought of two, or three, or four more weeks dealing with René was unbearable. But to simply board the RER for Orly, to fly back home defeated … that would be equally intolerable.

  She stood, dropped two twenty-franc notes on the table, and walked out onto the boulevard. Only one person could help with her decision, and that was René himself. She might as well get it done.

  René Missett lived above a small bakery on Casimir-Delavigne. He answered his door wearing nothing but a pair of cotton briefs.

  “Ah,” he said. “The American Cunt.” He stepped back, inviting her to enter with a smile and a sweep of the arm. Debrowski stepped into the small one-room apartment. She had never visited René at home before and was surprised to find a neat and orderly space. His meager collection of books was neatly shelved as were his CDs and record albums. His furniture consisted of three plastic chairs, a small folding table, and a neatly made bed. The room smelled of yeast and baking bread. René stood very close to her. His breath smelled like cheese.

  Debrowski said, “I thought we should talk.”

  “I agree!” said René. He gestured toward the bed. “Would you like to sit down?”

  Debrowski remained standing. René shrugged and dropped onto the edge of the bed. Debrowski let her eyes examine his body. Unclothed, it was much as she had expected. René Missett was an extremely attractive man. At twenty-six years old, a good age for a man to be, he showed no signs of fat. His muscles were taut, his skin free from blemishes. He would make a beautiful pop icon.

  With a twinge of regret, and of relief, Debrowski realized that she had made her decision.

  “I’m walking,” she said.

  René wrinkled his brow, not sure he understood.

  “I wanted to say it to you in person. I’m leaving the project.”

  René’s eyes widened. “Ah!”

  Debrowski started for the door.

  René stepped in front of her. “Wait.”

  Debrowski waited.

  “A good-bye kiss,” said René.

  Debrowski said, “Do not touch me.” She wanted him to touch her.

  René’s eyes dropped to her hands, checking to make sure she wasn’t wielding another Perrier bottle. Seeing nothing resembling a weapon, he reached out with his long arms and placed his hands on her cheeks.

  “Take your hands off me,” said Debrowski. Her voice, level and calm, detached itself from her body and filled the space between their faces. René’s hands pressed in on her face, forcing her mouth open. Debrowski stepped into his embrace, slipping one hand into the front of his briefs. Her hand slid past the base of his hardening penis, located a testicle. She squeezed, digging in with her nails, draining all of her strength into the fingers of
her right hand.

  René gasped and shoved her head back, hard. Debrowski felt a sharp burning sensation in her neck, but she hung on as René pounded her body with one fist while grabbing her wrist with the other. She held on for what seemed like minutes, though it could not have been more than a few seconds until René’s flailing fists found a spot on her arm that caused her hand to go slack, releasing him. Debrowski remained standing. René dropped to his knees, moaning, one hand cupping his groin. Debrowski took a step back, then walked around him and let herself out of the apartment.

  Everything hurt. How many times had he hit her? Spikes of pain traveled up her neck into the base of her skull. Her chest, shoulder, and arm throbbed, and every finger in her hand pulsed painfully. Had she hurt him enough? Had she made her point? She stepped out of the building into the evening light. A man stood outside the bakery cleaning the sidewalk with a hose. Debrowski looked at her hand. Her palm was slick with blood. Bits of flesh were embedded beneath her fingernails, and coils of dark pubic hair had caught between her fingers. She suppressed a wave of revulsion, walked over to the man with the hose, and plunged her hands into the stream of water. The man held the hose steady, saying nothing, and let her finish washing.

  “Merci,” said Debrowski.

  The baker shrugged. “You’re welcome,” he said.

  30

  Remember, people are not cards.

  —Crow’s rules

  JOE CROW SAT UP, disoriented, groping for the ringing phone. He found it, pressed the talk button, put it to his ear. “Hello?” He was home, in his own bed. He cleared his throat. “Hello?” he said again, more clearly this time.

  An extended moment of silence followed. Another sales call. He could see some guy in a cubicle searching his call list, trying to remember which number he’d dialed. Crow got tired of waiting and said, “No thank you.” He turned off the phone and set it on his bedstand. Where had he been? Asleep, someplace interesting. He closed his eyes, hoping to reenter the dream he’d been having.