Welcome Thieves

by Beaudoin, Sean

  “What kind of misunderstanding?”

  “Does it matter?”

  Probably not. Jake needs the job not the drama, been clean almost eleven months.

  “It’s cool. Let’s roll.”

  Tiffany Marzano rams it into gear. Time is money. They get paid by the load. The Truck of the Dead grinds up hills, down hills, spews resignation and exhaust into every last corner of San Francisco.

  It’s 1992, the middle of a health crisis.

  A citywide emergency.

  Or maybe the CIA gave everyone AIDS on purpose.

  Either way, it’s also Friday, and Jake needs to cash his check at the deli on Valencia. If he doesn’t get there before five, Luz, the owner, runs out of cash. She’s a tiny Salvadoran with a flowered smock and faded blue angels on her neck. She’ll smile at Jake, but not at Tiffany Marzano.

  “Tiff is alright,” Jake whispers. “Give her a chance.”

  Luz rolls her eyes, tosses in two mios for every dios, recounts the money.

  WAREHOUSE FUCKING is rampant.

  There’s a group of men, a couple women, like a club. A press gang. Going at it in utility closets and dimly lit storage rooms. Behind vast piles of donations, pyramids of broken microwaves and mismatched shoes, curls of ejaculate across dusty cement that might as well be raw plutonium.

  Jake does not fuck.

  It’s been over a year.

  Just the thought of being touched, by anyone or anything, fills him with an elastic dread. Even a shower seems too intimate. He tends to scrub over the sink with a wet cloth, keep his shirt on, eyes shut.

  Sex and death are the same thing, all the neon stickers say so.

  Being high is also death, but at least comes in euphoric increments.

  Since Jake has nothing to show for his twenties but a handful of nods, some insipid lyrics, and endocarditis, he figures it’s probably best not to judge. Even though the Warehouse Fuckers circled him at first, made insinuations, played with his hair.

  Jake told Luna, the dispatcher, who said, “Try being less hot.”

  Jake told St. Cloud, the manager, who said, “Gotta learn to deal, girlfriend.”

  Jake told Tiffany Marzano, who threw a Warehouse Fucker off the loading dock and then stomped on another’s lunch.

  Flat banana, flat banana, flat hummus wrap.

  The orbiting stopped.

  PROCEEDS FROM THE sale of donations go to charities with a variety of acronyms and intentions. Some deliver vegan meals, run triple-­blind trials, or give away rubbers wrapped like gold doubloons. Another trains Dobermans for the sickly to pet bedside.

  At least that’s what the pamphlet says.

  Jake takes a picture of the mole above Tiffany Marzano’s lip as Luna’s voice cuts through the radio.

  “Home base. Over. Jake? You there?”

  Luna is also Jake’s roommate.

  “I know you’re listening. Grab the handset already.”

  Jake rarely grabs the handset.

  “You’re late. The client has complained twice. St. Cloud is righteously pissed. Kindly move ass. Over.”

  “We need a direction,” Tiffany Marzano says.

  Jake’s map is marked with red stars, like crime scenes. Longitude and latitude might as well be Mandarin and Cantonese. Before he was hired, St. Cloud quizzed him with an atlas. Jake guessed six times, got five right. He also had to fill out a questionnaire. Are you familiar with local topography? Do you have an opinion on sexual orientation? Also, what’s it like being a vampire? Jake realizes he may have hallucinated the last one. He’s been tested sixteen times, clean sixteen times, still positive the virus is secretly eating into his brain, occluding his thoughts. Who’s to say that he isn’t already dead, discovered cold and blue on a hardwood floor, just another tedious overdose waiting to rise at dusk?

  Tiffany Marzano snaps her fingers. “Right or left?”

  The truth is they’re lost. Cars behind them lay on the horn. Jake shuts his eyes, prays to whatever god will have him and a few who won’t.

  A stack of boxes suddenly appears.

  “Over there. The driveway.”

  Tiffany Marzano double-­clutches, backs in. A client stands in front of his garage, next to an array of Dead Boyfriend items, stuff he can’t wait to get rid of, never wants to let go.

  “Our condolences,” Jake says, and begins to triage. Junk first, wedged into the crush zone by the stove. Valuables last, up front and wrapped with packing foam. There’s a brand new Nikon in a leather case. A bag of socks. A sconce and an ottoman. A vintage bowling shirt that has KEVIN sewn over the breast pocket.

  The client looks like he’s about to cry. Jake would give the client a hug, except then the client might notice Jake’s complete lack of body heat or pulse. Also, all the way home Tiffany Marzano would make Jake recite Tiffany Marzano’s List of All the Things Caring Will Get You.

  “Where do I sign?” the client asks.

  “No papers,” Tiffany Marzano says, although there are. Practically a novella’s worth. But names trigger reminiscences. Reminiscences become Kleenex. Kleenex is the difference between completing three or six hauls.

  Tiffany Marzano is an instrument of change, not a grief counselor.

  Almost no one asks for the papers twice.

  ACROSS THE KITCHEN walls are photographs by Jake, tacked into plaster, chronological. One a day for a year, all of Tiffany Marzano. Always in profile, always behind the wheel. Framed by stoplights and street corners, buildings and people, the time-­lapse orange that is San Francisco trivial in the face of her stare.

  “Welcome home, sweetie,” Luna says, sprawled on the couch, blond and pale and 80 percent ass. It’s a popular look. A series of sleepover dates wait in towels outside the bathroom on Saturday mornings. There aren’t many repeaters. Luna likes to dangle them at arm’s length, feel their scales, toss them back. She prefers an ongoing scientific sample. Once there was a guy named Jordan for almost a month and then she had to delete the data and start over again.

  “So did you ask her?”

  Every day at noon Tiffany Marzano takes the truck. For exactly one hour. Doesn’t say where or why. For weeks Luna has been bothering Jake about it. She plays in a band called Mr. Teriyaki. Their landlord’s name is also Mr. Teriyaki. He owns a company that makes rubber vaginas. The different models all have names. Perky Pam. Moan Jett. Deep Erin. They come in a velvet pouch. In exchange for rent, every four months Luna drives a load to St. Louis. This time she wants to pocket the U-­Haul cash, use the Truck of the Dead instead.

  “I’m not asking anyone anything.”

  Luna frowns. “I think Tiff’s got a stash out in the avenues. I bet she’s hoarding dining room sets and vintage toasters.”

  “No way.”

  Everyone knows Tiffany Marzano doesn’t steal, which makes them nervous. The fear of investigation lingers over the warehouse like scorched hair, visions of men from corporate busting through the doors with tracking numbers and donation printouts, dock guys who turned so many stereos into so much powder taken away in cuffs.

  “Yeah, but if we tell St. Cloud, he’ll suspend her and then I’ll be back in a week and no one will even notice the truck was gone.”

  “What if she gets fired?”

  “Nah,” Luna says.

  Jake picks up the remote, which is broken. He finds an Eveready in a drawer filled with dimes and birthday candles. The 49ers blink from the screen. There’s an interception. One of the linebackers punches the goalpost like a boxer. The crowd cheers, slaps five. Jake longs to be so high that the entire stadium laughs as he floats past, hovers six feet above their cowlicks and bald spots and dry umbrellas.

  It’s not the discipline, he thinks.

  Being sober? It’s the colossal boredom.

  THE PHONE SITS on a table in the hallway. Jake’s mother’s ring is distinctive, all the way from Tampa, still hasn’t figured the time change. Jake gets out of bed, still dark, dream erection, picks up the receiver.
/>   “Hello?”

  “Your father is out in the yard again. He won’t come in.”

  Jake’s father has dementia, thinks he’s storming Normandy with Red Buttons. Which is good, because if he remembered who he used to be, his sodden bastard of a résumé, he’d shit himself more than he already does.

  “Leave him alone, Mom. You know the drill.”

  “Also, the counter is full of envelopes. From school. They all say IMPORTANT. In red.”

  Jake owes $23,500 in student loans. He is the recipient of a degree in photography from a criminally uninteresting midwestern college. His advisor was a woman who thumbed from Vermont to sixties Alabama and took iconic pictures of marches and water hoses, of police dogs and burning courthouses. A tough act to follow. There was pretty much nothing for Jake to shoot on campus except his friends doing drugs, the shadows cast by another leafless tree, that girl with out­rageous pubic hair.

  Besides, now everything’s digital. It’s like he spent four years learning how to use a cotton gin.

  “What you should do, Mom, is throw that mail away.”

  “All of it?”

  “All of it.”

  “Not important?”

  “Not important.”

  Luna cracks the door to her room, puts a finger to her lips. Some guy lies on the futon behind her, snoring.

  “Pierre?” Jake guesses. “Adam? Jonah? Billy?”

  Luna giggles, gives Jake the finger, shuts the door.

  “Who’s there? Who’re you talking to?”

  “Put some crackers and a glass of milk on the porch, Ma. After a while he’ll wander back in.”

  IT’S NOON. Luna stands next to Jake on the loading dock. Beneath them three homeless negotiate over something inscrutable, but probably vodka. Luna takes Jake’s hand as the Truck of the Dead pulls from the lot with a chirp.

  “C’mon, let’s get something to eat.”

  There’s a burrito place around the corner. The register boy has straight hair and glasses. His front tooth is set in a little frame of gold. Jake and the register boy grin at one another three lunches a week. Jake has been test-­driving his Spanish, as well as current events. For instance, pico de gallo means “tip of the rooster.” For instance, the 1988 Mexican general election was stolen away from Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas Solórzano by the PRI, a conservative party that has been in power for nearly a hundred years.

  “Well, now we have no choice,” Luna says, peels foil from a burrito the size of a toddler. “I told St. Cloud all about Tiff’s stash. He says we need proof. Or, you know, something proofish. So tomorrow at lunch we’re following the truck.”

  “Follow it how?”

  “I sort of have a car.”

  Luna has never had a car. There has never been any mention of a car. Jake has carried her amp dozens of blocks to Mr. Teriyaki shows, never the hint of a ride.

  “Since when?”

  “Yesterday. I traded a first-­edition Bukowski.”

  Luna does books, brings home a trash bag full every day, sells them to the secondhand place on Cesar Chavez. The owner is a former sleepover. Jake does cameras. He badly wanted not to steal, and for a while didn’t, but he could feel the Warehouse Fuckers resenting him, sort of like Serpico except with better facial hair. Mostly, though, not stealing was Tiffany Marzano’s thing and Jake didn’t want people to think he was copying Tiffany Marzano.

  “I’m not going.”

  “Sure you are.”

  “It’s isn’t right.”

  Luna retrieves a pinto bean from her collar, eats it.

  “Sure it is.”

  Jake raises his new Nikon. He wants to take a picture of the register boy but is out of film, so he aims at Luna instead. She sucks in her cheeks, continues to look exactly like Luna.

  The flash bangs and rolls back across the room, again and again.

  THE CAR IS a blue Accord. There are stickers with clever sayings on the dashboard, sticky black rectangles where less clever ones have been peeled away. Luna has been excited all morning, working on the story she’ll tell later: Tiffany Marzano robs banks, Tiffany Marzano fucks sailors, Tiffany Marzano is a hit man for a Shanghai triad.

  “Oh, wait,” she says. “My sunglasses.”

  While Luna’s inside, Jake lets the air out of the Accord’s front tire and then walks across the lot. The hold is mostly empty. There’s a rolled up carpet, a chest of drawers, and a tall wooden packing crate. The crate is half full of pants. Dead people’s pants. Jake gets in, covers himself just as Tiffany Marzano starts the engine.

  The Truck of the Dead crosses town, moves gracefully around Sevilles idling in the street, young men leaning in passenger-­side windows. Tiffany Marzano makes turns with the butt of one palm, rarely touches the brake, whistles “Viva Las Vegas” in and out of lanes. She is in utter control of all speeds, angles, vectors. She is the Sugar Ray Robinson of driving.

  The usual icons glide by, the orange bridge, the phallic tower, the island jail. Jake’s back begins to hurt. The denim smells wheaty with grime. Finally the truck stops and Tiffany Marzano gets out. They’re parked on the industrial side of the bay, near a performance arts school. The water is a shabby blue. Trawlers chug in circles. Windsurfers lean into the gusts.

  Jake watches Tiffany Marzano buy a hot dog from a cart, eat it in two bites, pick a bench. Students stream past her, around her, laugh and yell and slap one another’s backpacks. Some wear uniforms, some wear costumes. A Tybalt and a Mercutio spar with wooden swords.

  Jake climbs out, walks over.

  “You were in the truck, uh?”

  He nods, takes two pictures.

  “Thought I saw you in the rearview. Figured maybe I should open the back door, let that crate slide out into traffic.”

  “You would never. Also, Luna told St. Cloud.”

  “Told him what?”

  “I dunno. What you’re up to.”

  “What am I up to?”

  “I guess this.”

  “Your girlfriend is a cunt.”

  “She’s not my girlfriend.”

  “Your roommate is a cunt.”

  “Yeah. I’m sort of moving out.”

  Tiffany Marzano smiles as a little girl runs over, white sweater and pigtails. Jake takes two pictures, brackets the aperture, takes one more. Tiffany Marzano leans over and removes the Nikon from his hand, snaps the lens clean from the body, lobs it at a pigeon that barely deigns to move. The little girl laughs. She has a mole near her lip, ringlets of black hair set against a white dress.

  “What’s your name?” Jake asks.

  “Summer.”

  Tiffany Marzano and Summer talk for a while, hug, tell secrets. Locker doors slam. Tennis balls pong in spurts. Finally, a bell rings and Summer jumps up, runs back toward the school.

  “So yeah, I took her down south for a couple weeks. Just to the beach. Matinees and fried clams. A little pink motel. Her father has custody, but I brought her back. Was always going to. Still, we roll up and asshole’s got a lawyer plus half the force waiting in the driveway.”

  Jake tries to imagine Husband Marzano. Wraparounds and a goatee? College wrestler with a flattop, still lifts twice a week? Or maybe a mouse with round glasses, washes up after dinner without being asked.

  “I thought you were queer.”

  “So now I got lunch visitation. Also, a record.”

  Another parent comes over and shakes Tiffany Marzano’s hand. There’s talk of a fundraiser, T-­shirts for the soccer team. They bump knuckles and the woman goes away.

  “This place must really cost,” Jake says.

  The bell rings one more time. The grounds are quiet. Vendors lower their umbrellas, begin to leave. Tiffany Marzano is wearing chef’s pants, the kind with a drawstring and little blue checks. There’s a tan ring of skin between the hem and her boot. A gold anklet with an emerald charm hangs in the gap.

  Jake has seen it before. At a client’s. Triaged it into the hold himself.

  Tiffany Mar
zano yawns, stretches, steals after all.

  “Every night I park the truck on a different street. People walk by, have their conversations, their arguments, no idea I’m there. It’s snug. I got candles. I got books and wine and a sleeping bag. The hold makes this ticking sound as it cools, sort of like music. And then when the sun comes up, it expands again.”

  “Sounds nice.”

  “Yeah, but they were gonna find out, take the keys away eventually.”

  “I could talk to St. Cloud.”

  “You could, huh?”

  “I think he likes me.”

  Tiffany Marzano turns. Her face is different from the front, prettier.

  “At first I thought you were dumb. Then stoned. Now? Who knows?”

  “I’m a vampire,” Jake says, adopting a thick Hungarian accent. “I may not have mentioned before.”

  “Nope, I’d have remembered that.”

  “Yes, I remember thees place back ven eet was just rocks and grass. Ven there were only horses and pale stable boys and ze hint of plague as it rose from mounds of burning garbage.”

  “Sounds nice.”

  “Yeah, but they were gonna find out, stake me in the heart eventually.”

  Tiffany Marzano laughs, holds out her wrist. “Well drink up, Vlad. We got three more hauls to do.”

  Jake takes her hand, warm and rough, presses it to his cheek.

  Flesh degrades but antique Turkish rugs persevere. Memories fade while busts of Maria Callas callously seek new homes.

  There will always be more donations, they will never stop.

  There will always be too many cars and not enough streets, traffic all the way to the pandemic.

  The sun will set, and then it will be night.

  The moon will rise again on the decadent carcass of San Francisco, and by then Jake will be very, very high.

  Comedy Hour

  I am the point guard, best player, and team captain.

  Which means we suck.

  At least until Makarov transfers to West Boylston.

  “We’ve got a new teammate,” Coach Grout says, with four days of gray stubble and a belly like he’s smuggling hams. “All the way from Ukraine or whatever. Let’s make him feel at home, okay Bolts?”

  There are a few smirks. A couple comments. The dude is tall but way skinny. With Coke-­bottle glasses and Russian sneakers that don’t even have a name. No swoosh, no nothing. Hair that would be mod if it were intentional, all feet and hands, looks like he’s about twelve.