My eyelids ache from the strain of being forced open so suddenly. Sour and sweaty and mortified, I fling myself toward Shelly’s purse and upend it, but those goddamn Polaroids are not part of the mess that spills onto the carpet. Drawer by drawer, the dresser gives up nothing, and the nightstand is a bust. I’m sliding my hand between the mattress and box spring when Shelly opens the door.
“Tell me where they are,” I say.
“They’re mine. I found them.”
“Stole them, you mean. I’m getting rid of them.”
“Yeah, right.”
“Come on, Shell, this isn’t our style, selling what isn’t yours. We’re not that desperate, are we? We’re not hurting that bad.”
This stops her for a second, cools the fire in her eyes, and I think, Damn, I’ve done it! But then she says, “I hid them better than you know how to look, so just leave my shit alone,” and slams the door so hard the pictures she’s hung on the walls jump and rattle, all those ballerinas and kittens and vases of flowers. I sense she’s bluffing, so I go through her purse once more, unzipping every pocket. Way down at the bottom I come across a rubber, a silly glow-in-the-dark number that makes me wonder what kind of clowns she’s fucking. I’m afraid I’ll kill her if my hands don’t get busy doing something else, so I gather all the clothes tossed around during my search, pile them on the bed, and take my time folding them, doing my best to put everything back exactly where it belongs.
THE PIZZA PLACE in the minimall closes early. The sun hasn’t even set, but the owner’s already drawn the steel grate across the windows, which gives us a really pleasant perspective on the parking lot. Shelly puts her foot down when he starts to mop the floor, saying, “Do you mind? We’re eating here.” Her tone always riles me these days.
“Give the guy a break.”
“He should learn how to treat his customers,” she says.
“He just wants to get out of here at a decent hour.”
“You’re such a dick.”
The kid climbs from under the table and grabs another slice, then worms his way back out of sight. Shelly picks at her pizza, eating the pepperoni, and after that the cheese, bit by bit, until only the crust is left, freshly skinned and gory with sauce. It pains me to see food wasted, but I bite my tongue when she pushes the crust aside and starts on another piece. I’m trying not to make her mad, because I want her to spend the rest of her night off with us, instead of going to the party I overheard her talking to her friend about on the phone. I plan to buy her a lottery ticket after dinner and let her rent Whatever DVD she wants.
A fire truck passes outside, and we turn at the same time to watch. When it’s gone, I catch her eye, and she shoots me a cute little pout. I’m thrilled to discover something we share that she hasn’t forgotten, even if it is only the chills sirens give us.
While I’m paying the owner, his wife is cleaning out the display case. She removes a pizza with a couple of slices missing and carries it toward the kitchen but stumbles on the way. The pizza slides off the pan and lands on the floor. Her husband barks at her in a language I don’t understand, and she snaps right back at him. Whatever he says next makes her glance at me and shrug. He follows me to the door and locks it behind me.
Shelly has seen the pizza fall, too. She pulls me down to her mouth and whispers, “You know what they’re up to, don’t you? As soon as we’re gone, they’re gonna scoop that thing off the floor so they can serve it tomorrow.”
“Oh, please,” I say.
“Bet you a million.”
I look inside at the two of them standing behind the counter, watching us.
“You’re wrong.”
“Like you know. Like you’ve spent any time working in restaurants.”
“They’re good people.”
Shelly snorts and shakes her head. “I swear to God.” She’s already walking away, dragging the kid after her. What exactly was it, I wonder, that destroyed her faith in me and everything else? This city hasn’t kept its promises, but its lies were no worse than those we left behind. I wave to the owner of the pizza place and his wife. They wave back. An ambulance screams down Venice in the same direction as the fire truck, and I shiver alone this time and picture myself dying that way.
THEY CAME IN through the front door, I suspect. One strong yank on a crowbar is all it took to bend the bolt of the flimsy lock and splinter the jamb. The apartment looks like someone has picked it up and shaken it, everything upside down and across the room from where it was when we left. Shelly waits outside with the kid while I make a quick circuit. I throw open closets and fling aside the shower curtain, but whoever it was is gone.
The TV lies faceup against the overturned couch, too heavy for them maybe, but then I notice the DVD player in the corner, and the boom box. It hits Shelly at the same time it hits me. She rushes into the bedroom and comes out crying a few seconds later.
“They found them,” she sobs. “They took them back.”
My anger at her for not getting rid of the Polaroids when I told her to is a weak spark against the happiness swelling inside me. I was so right about those pictures being nothing but trouble, I don’t even have to say it. I wrap my arms around Shelly, and she really cuts loose. Not even by pressing her face into my shoulder can she muffle the wails that climb out of her. I hold her tight to let her know that I forgive her. I kiss the top of her head.
“I was fucking out of here,” she gasps.
“It’s okay.”
“Those fuckers.”
A neighbor pushes open the useless door and gapes at the mess.
“You call the cops?” he asks.
“We’ll handle it,” I say. “Thanks.”
Everything that was in the refrigerator is slopped together on the kitchen floor with everything that was in the cupboards. The kid slides around in the mess, laughing and smearing his face with flour and ketchup. I laugh, too, because now that it’s all been wrecked, we’re free to build something new out of the pieces, and I’m the man with the plan; Shelly will surely have to grant me that.
She’s stopped crying but looks like she could start again any second. I think back to Texas, to me and a cousin parked outside a liquor store a couple towns down the highway from ours, egging each other on, pistols cocked, and how the only thing that saved us was a cop car rolling into the next space at the instant we’d decided to make our move. I remember how we tore out of there and drove straight to a reservoir and sank our guns in the muddy water. I remember bawling because I couldn’t believe how stupid I’d been, and I remember praying that I never got that stupid again. I have an idea Shelly’s feeling a lot like that now.
I right the couch and sit her down, and when I put the TV back on its stand and plug it in, it works fine. I tell her to relax, I’ll whip the place into shape in no time. The kid pitches in as best he can, and we heave and ho and sweep and straighten, singing silly songs and sharing cans of root beer. He looks so much like his momma when he’s happy. Every so often I lean over the back of the couch and touch Shelly somewhere. She actually manages a smile, and not once does she push my hands away.
THE LIVING ROOM is dark when I wake up, except for the hissing glare of the empty TV screen that silhouettes the kid asleep on the floor in front of it. Shelly is gone from where she was, on the couch beside me, and I rise and walk to the bedroom, already knowing that she won’t be there either. The room is still sweet with the smell of her perfume, and I’m able to follow the scent all the way down the hall and into the courtyard before the night gobbles it up. From there laughter and a revving engine lead me to the parking lot, where I watch the Escalade that dropped her off that time bounce over the speed bumps in the driveway as it carries her away from me.
Back in the apartment, I sit at the kitchen table and smoke a couple of cigarettes. The people in the next unit are arguing about money, and the guy upstairs flushes the toilet and turns on the shower. It’s something I’m usually able to ignore, the dreary murmur of these ot
her lives at the edges of my own, but not tonight. The kid screams himself awake when I pick him up. I quiet him and wrap him in a blanket. There’s no way to lock the ruined front door, so I just pull it shut and leave it.
I’S EASIER TO think out on the bright, straight streets, behind the wheel of the truck. With half of me busy watching for stop signs and keeping to the speed limit, the ringing in my ears fades, and I try to put this latest disappointment into perspective. I let my hopefulness get the better of me again, which is just the kind of lamebrain leap I’m always making. The women at the coffee shop know where Shelly is, and I could get it out of them by saying the kid is sick. I could drive right up to so-and-so’s fancy house and barge right into his party and tell Little Miss Starfucker exactly what I think of her sneakiness, but what good would that do? She’d laugh in my face and call me an asshole. We wouldn’t talk for a few days, until I apologized for embarrassing her in front of her friends, and then we’d be right back where we started. I’ve been running in circles like that for years now, with her just one step ahead of me, and not once did I consider the possibility that I might never catch up. I was always sure she’d wear out before I did.
THE KID IS hysterical again. He struggles to open the door of the truck, and I almost kill us both, veering into oncoming traffic as I try to stop him. I pull into the minimall to calm him down, but he’s tired and cranky and won’t let me touch him. The lights are still on in the doughnut shop, and I tell him that if he’ll be a big boy, he can have Whatever he wants. He allows me to take his hand and lead him inside.
I don’t say anything when he orders more than he can possibly eat, I just have the clerk add on a coffee and pay for it all. We sit across from each other at a little plastic table. When I ask for a bite of one of his maple bars, he shoves it back into the bag and hugs the bag to his chest. Sad music is playing on the radio, and the beginning of a thick fog smears the lights shining down on the empty parking lot. I’m reminded that there’s an ocean nearby, that we’ve come about as far as there is to go in this direction.
THE SUN IS rising when the kid awakens. He sits up next to me on the seat of the truck and sleepily watches the breakers fold into the shore as we zip along beside them, headed north. A guy once told me Oregon was a nice place to raise children. Said the trees there were older than anything we know. It sounded like something to see. Our clothes are in back, a few other things. We don’t need much. Shelly can have the rest.
She should be getting home right about now, drunk probably, a fresh hickey on her neck. The note I left was pretty basic. When it was time to put everything on paper, there wasn’t much to say. Still, I imagine her crying as she reads it. Or maybe she’ll be angry and tear it into little pieces. Not that it matters.
“I’ve got to pee-pee,” the kid says.
I pull off the freeway and swing back under it to a parking lot on the beach.
“Want to wear my sunglasses?” I ask, and the kid smiles at me with his momma’s smile as I set them on his face. We get out, and I unbutton his pants so he can do his business. There are seagulls here, surfers, a few fishermen. I walk to the crumbling edge of the asphalt, pick up a handful of sand, and fling it at the waves. The breeze blows right through me.
Love Lifted Me
ASHOTGUN BLAST AT DAWN SEPARATES NIGHT AND DAY. I come awake awash in adrenaline before the echo has faded and roll off the bed to sprawl on the nappy motel shag, where I hope I’ll be safe if war has broken out between the crackheads in the next room and the pimp downstairs. The carpet reeks of cigarette smoke and spilled perfume. I press my face into it and wait for another explosion, but there’s only this dog somewhere, putting together long and short barks into combinations reminiscent of Morse code. I imagine that I’m able to decipher the gruff pronouncements: He who feeds me is a liar and a thief. His hand upon me is a curse. God sees all and does nothing.
The parking lot is quiet when I finally muster the guts to crawl to the window and peek between the drapes. The other rooms are shut up tight, and a perfect mirror image of the neon vacancy sign shivers in the placid, black water of the swimming pool. So I guess I dreamed the gunshot, or maybe it’s Simone again, my dead wife, trying to drive me crazy.
Linda is still sound asleep, too, but that doesn’t prove anything. A stone speed freak, her standard routine is seventy-two hours up and twenty-four down, and when she crashes, she crashes hard. Right now she looks as serene as an angel or a sweet, dead baby. A blanket hides most of the damage: the tracks; the scabs that keep her nervous fingers busy; the bruised skin stretched thin over her ribs and spine, elbows and knees. She’s sixteen years old and has been raped three times, and I’m like an uncle to her, like a big brother, she says, because I let her stay in my room when it’s cold outside. No, I’m not fucking her. I’d like to, but then Simone would kill me for sure.
I rejoin her on the bed, careful to keep to my side, and watch the walls go from blue to pink to white, until the river of grief twisting through me unexpectedly swells and jumps its banks. At the first rush of tears, I get up and shut myself in the bathroom, and it’s as rough as it’s been in a while, but by the time the liquor stores open, I’m showered and shaved and empty enough to bob like a cork on the surface of another day.
THE LISTLESS WINTER sun doesn’t do much to warm the chinky concrete of the pool deck, where I sit sipping beer and tomato juice, my feet dangling in the frigid water. The pool is the heart of this place. From here I can keep an eye on all of the doors and windows. I can see everything coming at me. I work on a letter I’ve been meaning to write. Dear Simone, please leave me alone. Relaxing my neck by degrees, I let my head fall back until I’m staring up at the sky, which is crawling with choppers and blimps and spectral silver jets. The wind steals half of every cigarette I light.
The bad guys sleep at this time of day, so the kids who live here are running wild, making the most of the few hours when it’s safe for them to be out of their rooms. While their mothers cluster around the Coke machine, as vigilant as nursing cats, they play hide-and-seek among the cars in the parking lot and pedal tricycles in sloppy circles. I ignore them as best I can. They make me nervous. I’m afraid that at any moment they’ll go off like a string of firecrackers and disintegrate into acrid smoke and drifts of shredded newspaper.
A couple of them, little boys, rattle the gate of the fence that surrounds the pool and beg in Spanish to be let in.
“Vamoose,” I say. “Adios.”
Undaunted, they snake their skinny arms through the bars and strain to reach the lock. I scoop some ice from my cup and fling it at them, and they fall back laughing as a police car eases into the lot, no lights or sirens. Before it has come to a stop, the boys’ mother is herding them back to the family’s room, and the other mothers, too, gather their children. Within seconds the parking lot is empty. The sudden silence makes my palms itch. Mrs. Cho, the owner of the motel, leads the cops up the stairs, and I lift my feet out of the pool and stomp some feeling into them in case things get ugly and I have to run for cover.
When the eviction party reaches the second floor, it’s round and round she goes, where she stops, nobody knows. Room 210: old guy, Mexican, Cuban, something. Wears a cowboy hat and plays the radio loud late at night to drown out the whores’ comings and goings. The kids and their mothers watch from behind half-closed doors as one of the officers knocks with his baton. His partner cups his eyes to peer in the window, but the glass has been covered over with tinfoil. Mrs. Cho dials her cell, and the phone in the room rings and rings and rings. After a bit of discussion, she unlocks the door with her passkey and moves off down the walkway so the cops can do their stuff.
“Police!” they shout in unison as the door swings open. Guns drawn, they roll into the room, one high, one low. Such caution is unnecessary, however — the guy has been dead for a while, judging by the stench that billows out and settles over the motel like another coat of stucco. Mrs. Cho backs away, covering her nose and mouth. She
bumps into the railing and slides along it toward the steps. Then the cops reappear on the walkway. One of them says something snide to the other and both laugh, but they’re not happy, and neither am I. I’ll be smelling death for days.
Are you happy now? I promise I’ll take the blame for what happened to you if you’ll just let me be.
MY SHADOW LIES beside me, a wan and shapeless stain in the gutter. I drag it into the liquor store, to the beer cooler, the register, and out again. The effort leaves me winded. Twisting the cap off my forty, I drop onto a bus bench, but I’m barely settled when a passing car’s backfire sends my heart wheeling with the pigeons from the telephone wire overhead.
Eightball rolls up on his bicycle with Linda perched on the handlebars. Eightball, because that’s how black he is. He doesn’t care for the name, but so what, the little dope fiend, the little thief. I don’t care for how he professes to love Linda one minute and pimps her the next. She’s welcome in my room, but he is not allowed.
“S’up,” he says. He feigns interest in a billboard across the street, a giant hot dog adorned with a bolt of yellow mustard. He can’t look me in the eye.
Linda slides off the handlebars and sits beside me on the bench, then immediately pops up again like something has stung her. She stands on one foot, using the other to scratch the back of her leg. She’s tweaking, every hair of her platinum crewcut in frenzied motion, her nostrils rimed with dried snot.
“Fuckin’ that dude killed himself,” she blurts through clenched teeth. “We saw’m carryin’m out. Smelled like fuckin’ I don’t know. Like shit. You see it? Hung himself in the closet. C’n I have a hit of your beer?”
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