Afterburn

by Colin Harrison

  The attendant pocketed the money. "Nah, you? You kidding!" He threw back his head and burst into rotten-toothed laughter. "Yeah, I expect you did go through some kind of trouble, I expect you did. You think I don't know who you is? I seen everybody, man, I seen them all! Everybody comes down here sooner or later, every kind of people, the good people and the bad people, the rich people and the poor, yeah." His breath was coming in wheezes. "Telling me about some kind of trouble? I know that, man, I know just who you is, my brother, you is trouble coming and trouble going!" His laughing became a raspy cough. "Can't get no air down here!" he croaked. "Can't breathe, my brother." He hurried toward the elevator, his hack echoing through the cavernous space.

  THE NEXT THING Rick needed was a quiet pay phone, not on the street. He walked west on Canal through Chinatown, then north toward the art galleries, enjoying the morning sun, glad to be free of the truck. The city had a lot of money in it now. The galleries and shops and restaurants were busy, full of Europeans and girls in tight dresses who thought they were doing something new. He noticed that people were getting out of his way on the sidewalk, including the black guys. He'd forgotten about that. At the corner, a cop on foot patrol watched Rick pass by and lifted his brow as they made eye contact. Take it somewhere else, pal, take it out of my beat. I've got to change my look, Rick thought, I'm not fitting in here. I look like a Hell's Angel or pro wrestler or somebody. He found a restaurant with a pay phone in the back, got a coffee cup full of quarters, and called information in Sarasota, Florida, for Christina's mother, a woman he'd met exactly twice, the last time the day that Christina was arrested.

  "Mrs. Welles?"

  "Who's that?"

  "Rick Bocca, Mrs. Welles."

  "You looking for Tina?"

  "Yes."

  "She's not here, Rick. She's in prison."

  So, he thought, the mother doesn't know. "Well, I was wondering how she's been doing. She won't answer my letters, you see."

  "Last time we spoke was the winter. I've been traveling quite a bit. Just got back last night, and I'm leaving again soon."

  "How's Mr. Welles?"

  "He's lying down—"

  "Tired?"

  "—and he's smiling."

  "Smiling?"

  "He's lying down in the cemetery about eight miles from here, and he's smiling because he doesn't have me hollering at him."

  "I'm sorry," Rick said. "He was a pistol, I always thought."

  "Yes, he was, sugar, that's why I kept forgiving him."

  "He go out easy, Mrs. Welles?"

  She inhaled. "No, afraid he didn't. He missed Tina so much, you know, he used to have me come bring all her old high-school report cards and then he'd read them in his hospital bed. He missed her terribly, see. She got his mind, you know. My brain was no good, but Mr. Welles was quite something. I ever tell you why I married him?"

  He was listening to a lonely middle-aged woman. The decent thing was to humor her. "He was so good-looking?"

  He heard her take a drag on a cigarette. "No, it wasn't that. It was the Mustang."

  "I heard this once."

  "Mr. Welles bet a fellow that he could take apart a Mustang convertible and put it back together in two days. Not the seat cushions and not the inside of the radio, but all the engine pieces and the brakes and the body and the door and everything."

  "They got a lot of bedsheets, is the way Christina told me. And it had to be able to drive."

  "Yes, they taped a couple of old pink sheets down on the floor of the garage so they wouldn't lose any parts. He was allowed to have one friend put parts in little piles."

  "He won the bet."

  "He won more than that—he got me, too. I thought, Now, there's a man who can do things. We dragged that car around with us for the next thirty years."

  "I'm sorry he's not around."

  "I am, too, but I'm not letting it slow me down."

  "So you don't know how Christina is doing."

  "Haven't heard from her. Wish I did."

  "Okay, then."

  "I always liked you, sugar, just wished everything had turned out for Tina better. She got mixed up with the wrong people. That's all I ever knew about it."

  "She never told you what happened?"

  "No. Just said she made a mistake. But I knew she got mixed up with the wrong people. That's always the story."

  He said goodbye. Christina's father had died while she was in prison and she'd never said goodbye to him. Carry that, you fucker, you have to carry that one, too, it belongs to you. He looked at his coffee cup of change, then pulled out Detective Peck's card. One ring, and he heard the man's voice.

  "It's Rick Bocca."

  "Yeah?"

  "I'm having trouble finding her. She was already gone from the prison."

  "They let her out downtown."

  "You didn't tell me."

  "I had bad information."

  You had bad intentions, Rick thought.

  "You looking the right places?" said Peck.

  "The old places, you know."

  The question was what the level of the game was.

  "You try her mother?" asked the detective.

  The question could be a coincidence. But they could be monitoring her phone, too. Grabbing the numbers called in and out. "Yeah. Nothing."

  "Maybe she was lying."

  "Maybe." Why would Peck think this? "But I doubt it."

  "Why?"

  "It didn't sound like that." He waited a moment. Peck had to keep him involved. "So she's out there and I have no idea—"

  "Her mother's been getting some other calls," interrupted the detective.

  "Where from?"

  "They came from the Jim-Jack Bar, down at Broadway and Bleecker."

  Same part of town where he was now. "How do you know?"

  "We just know. We have advantages."

  Such as the knowledge that Rick was calling from a restaurant on Thompson Street. The police used all kinds of computers now, could match phone numbers with locations instantly. He hung up. So they were watching for her. All he had wanted was to talk to her again. You make a mistake, you want maybe to redeem yourself. He'd thought that she was in Tony Verducci's game, but now he saw that he was in Peck's game. Paul always said that if you play the game, the game plays you. He needed to call Mrs. Welles back. But if he called from where he was, they'd know he'd called her after talking to Peck. Maybe Paul could figure this out for him; he'd call him, too. He walked north, then east on Bleecker until he came to the Jim-Jack. A greasy-spoon place on Broadway with big windows, cheap food, Mexican busboys. The Mexicans were everywhere in the city; it was getting to be like Los Angeles. The pay phone hung on the wall next to the bar. If Christina had called her mother from here, then his call might be mistaken for one of hers, assuming the police were not actually bugging the line. That was pretty smart. But it had only been ten minutes since he'd talked to Peck—too soon, they'd figure it out.

  He noticed a barbershop on the other side of Bleecker and stepped inside. Look civilized, you have to start dealing with people. The hair-wash girl beckoned him toward her chair.

  "Been a long time, I guess," she said.

  "Yeah." He sat down.

  "Lean back." He did, feeling the hot water, and her hands. Her hip pressed his shoulder. He couldn't remember the last time a woman had washed his hair.

  "Hey, guy," the girl said, smiling down at him, her face upside down.

  He glanced up. She had green eyes, and a sweet tattoo on her neck.

  "You a sea monster?"

  He didn't understand. "No. Why?"

  She bent close to his ear. "You got seaweed in your hair, mister, so I thought you was a big sea monster."

  He closed his eyes. You had to avoid this kind of conversation. That's not why he was here. Being out of the city had changed him. In the old days he'd be getting the girl's number.

  He stood up and got in the barber chair.

  "What'll it be?"

&nb
sp; "Short."

  "Above the ears?" The barber clipped his white towel around Rick's neck.

  "Yes."

  "Trim the beard?"

  "Trim everything."

  "If I cut the hair short, I have to take the beard way back, make it short, too."

  "Do anything, make everything short. Civilized."

  "Yeah, civilize him," the hair-wash girl called.

  The barber clipped his hair, shaved his neck to the shoulders, trimmed the beard to half an inch, even shaved his ears. Hair fell all over the floor around his barber chair. In the mirror, Rick could see his face again, wrinkles around his eyes from squinting on the boat.

  From there he went to a one-hour eyeglasses place. The clerk put Rick's broken glasses into some kind of machine that told you the prescription. "You can't see worth a damn with these things, you know that?"

  He chose some cheap Clark Kent glasses, not the designer kind. Maybe Christina would like them. He sat waiting, reading a magazine. The glasses came and he put them on.

  "That probably makes a big difference."

  It did. He could see everything—pigeons on the building cornices, shoes in the window across the street. But it was time to call Mrs. Welles back. He slipped into the Jim-Jack and pulled out his coffee cup of quarters, ready to make a mother worry.

  "Mrs. Welles, it's Rick Bocca again."

  "What is it? Tina?"

  "What I didn't tell you is that she's out of prison now. They let her out, Mrs. Welles. I don't know where she is. But the police up here might be interested in your phone. They're probably not tapping it, because that takes a court order. Probably they're using what's called a dial number recorder, which records all the phone numbers of people who call you, and then the police check who the number belongs to."

  "Oh."

  "You know anybody in New York City, Mrs. Welles?"

  "I don't think so. Nobody who calls."

  "Right. I think Christina's been trying to call you, Mrs. Welles."

  "I had some hang-ups on my answering machine."

  "If Christina calls, you have to tell her this. They can figure out where she is very quickly if they have the number. Like in a minute, okay? I'm sorry to worry you, but you've got to tell her this."

  "I'm always worried, sugar, that's how I stay thin." She pushed out the ropy cough of a smoker. "You see Tina, tell her I'm leaving on a trip today, will be back in a few weeks."

  "No problem," he said before hanging up.

  Now he had to think like Christina. The two of them had rented a place over on Thompson Street, then in the East Village. Without much money, she'd need to be in a part of the city she understood. She'd spend a few days finding things for herself, her apartment or room. Drift around, window-shopping. She'd walk down to Chinatown to buy things. This was a woman he'd lived with for three years; he knew how she walked and dressed and how she liked to have sex and what books she considered important and what music she preferred and what places in the city made her feel good. She'd pick up The Village Voice. She'd buy fruit and juice and bread and vegetables and cigarettes. She'd paint her toenails and hang her feet out the window to let them dry. She'd think about getting her hair cut short. She'd buy a broom. She'd read the sports page. She'd go to bars by herself and look for trouble. He knew her. It had taken some time, too. She was one of those women who showed you nothing on the street, gave away nada. You saw her go by, maybe you didn't even notice. You threw her a line, she didn't even bother making sure you knew you were being ignored. She just moved in her own bubble of thought; she was here but elsewhere entirely. That didn't sound sexy unless you knew her, and once you knew her sexually, then you had a problem. He'd had a problem a long time and thought that he could get rid of it by not thinking about her, not thinking about the sex. It didn't help anything to remember it. She could wear him out easily, back when he was in shape. He'd routinely fucked her for ninety minutes straight, like running ten miles, the sweat pouring off his face and chest, rivering down his arms, soaking the bed. He'd been thirty-one, thirty-two, and known that in the future he'd never again have such stamina. Take it now, while you still have it. And she could take it, she could take anything he did, any position, any degree of force. If you remembered that, it kept getting more mysterious. Most particularly he did not wish to remember the night they drank half a bottle of Averna, a thick brownish Italian liqueur with a lot of mysterious herbs in it, and ended up in the SoHo Grand Hotel, Rick just flipping a credit card onto the counter, telling the clerk to give them any room he had, a single, a suite, he didn't care, and the hell with the cost. Once inside the room they turned on some salsa station and fucked, off and on, every which way, for a few hours, with Rick not coming, just stringing himself along in happy torture, the skin of his cock getting raw, pulling out of her before the pleasure became too intense, then pushing back in. She told him she wanted him to come and he refused. It's sort of a war, then, isn't it? she whispered. They kept going. Then, while he was working on her from behind, her butt up, her arms spread across the bed, she'd stopped moaning and gone limp. Passed out? Her hips sagged and so he held them up with both hands. The idea that he had fucked her into unconsciousness was so exciting that he just blasted himself away into her. And when he was done, and pulled out, and looked at Christina limp on the bed, he saw the smile flash into her face. You sneaky girl, you faker. I fooled you, she'd said with mischievous pride, and then she flipped over and took him against her tongue and absolutely chewed him into having a slow and excruciatingly sore orgasm, and at that point he was cold-cocked. A dead man. He'd already gone at her with his mouth five or six times as well. But she was still writhing around on top of him, and so he'd slipped two, then three, fingers into her and vibrated his hand, first in and out and then in circles and progressively harder for ten minutes, waiting for her to tell him it was too much, listening to her breath riding up and down, over and beyond, not stopping even as she sunk her teeth into his ear, keeping his other hand pressed on her ass, one finger inside back there, too, not stopping for the screaming, not stopping for anything until his right arm went dead. Enough—he'd thought that would be enough. It was enough for him. But she'd pulled his left hand down between her legs and he used that one, too, like a piston. She must have come another four or five times, screaming hoarsely, not at all into the pillow, wetness everywhere, and that was when the hotel security man and two bellhops threw open the door, thinking a girl was being murdered. In the dark, they pulled Rick off her and beat the shit out of him, kicked him in the head. The men finally threw on the lights, chests heaving, and asked Christina if she was all right. She hopped up naked from the covers, her body slim and young, nipples pert, and performed a sweet little pirouette on the hotel carpeting, arms outstretched. "Not a scratch, guys," she said, "as you can see."

  He didn't want to remember.

  "WHAT I'M LOOKING FOR is just a splash. There's all this liquid moving around and I want to get splashed. In the face, once. It's not too much to ask. You think these assholes "—the man swept his hand around toward the rest of the bar, the late-night crowd in good clothes, then turned back to Rick—"don't think the same thing? I get that splash, that big splash, I pack it up and pack it out, baby. I take me a little road trip, do some fishing in Alaska, check out the Mexican chicks in Mexico."

  "What if you don't get it?" Rick asked.

  "Oh, I will."

  "How do you know?"

  "Some things you just know, man. I got a lot of little prospects going. That's what I call them, my prospects. One gets in there, crosses the line first, then I get splashed. When that happens, I shut down, move out. No more risk."

  Rick nodded but let the conversation die. He'd told himself not to go into a bar, and he'd refined that into not going into one of the five or six bars owned by Tony Verducci, and then he'd refined that into not saying anything to anybody about Tony Verducci. If he did that, he'd be okay. The day had been long; he'd walked in circles around the East Villa
ge, up and down St. Mark's, around Tompkins Square Park, and up to Tenth Street and then west, looking into every bar and restaurant, the Korean groceries, one after the other, the coffee shops, the secondhand clothing shops, just in and once around, to see if she might be there. He'd covered perhaps a hundred businesses, until about 4:00 p.m., when he came to a health club on Lafayette and stopped in, and once he was there and saw the free weights and the machines and the mirrors, the old sickness hit him, hit him quite beautifully, and he dropped a couple of hundred dollars for a three-month membership right there and bought a T-shirt and a pair of trunks and a towel and a lock right out of the display case and went down to the lockers and changed. The place was full of gay men who were buff, some of them with rings in their nipples and stomachs and dicks. He examined the facilities and found the boxing ring, where white women were kickboxing with black instructors wearing pads. Both getting into it, working the symbolism. Race relations, there it was. Upstairs in the weight room, you had a few guys very pumped up, one or two black guys who looked like they'd done some time. They didn't recognize him; they had no idea he'd made the final round of the New York State Bodybuilding Championship three straight years, won once. He'd told himself to go easy. He'd lost a lot of strength, of course, but didn't mind that. He was back to his basic ability. It would feel good to be sore the next day and the next and the next, and within a week he'd see the first changes in his biceps and shoulders. The chest and stomach would take longer; they always did. He wouldn't get bulky, he told himself, just a little form, a little size. Something to do while he searched for Christina, make himself look better for when he found her. He'd buy some protein drink and start to mix that in with his meals. With the haircut and new glasses, he was back in action. Rick Bocca, here and now. Botta bing, botta boom.

  Now, at the bar, an hour slipped by, as did dozens of great-looking people with their hair and eyes and lipstick and cigarettes and leather jackets and good shoes, and he'd fallen into conversation with the bartender, drinking three, then four, then five doses, and then, suddenly, he realized he might have mentioned he used to work for Tony Verducci. He had promised himself he wouldn't talk to anyone, because once you started to talk, about this or that, whatever flew into your head also flew out of your mouth, and then, if you kept drinking, some more stuff came gushing out, and you thought you were a genius or insightful or tragic, and then you really started to babble, but he had been lonely as hell, started talking to the poker-faced guy named Matthew behind the bar instead of keeping his mouth shut. And maybe he really had said something about Tony Verducci, maybe he—yes, he just happened to say the name Tony Verducci, as in, We were running some jobs for this guy who probably worked for Tony Verducci, and when he said this, Matthew the bartender just nodded casually, but his eyes went cold and he set up another glass and said it was on the house, which made perhaps six Mount Gay rums, beautiful bottle, map of Barbados on the label, "World's Finest Rum—Since 1703," looked like piss, actually, bit of a celebration due not only because Ronnie didn't blow off his nuts with the shotgun but also because in the gym he'd pressed two-forty on the free weights, which he never expected, must be the fucking boat, all that work with the nets, and he knew—he knew he knew—he must get out of that place as soon as he could. Now. He should leave now. You say Tony Verducci and they look at you funny. Leave now and they won't kill you. Ha-ha. The bartender got a look in his eyes and then gave him a free drink and disappeared. Probably to make a call. Ha-ha. Rick had even leaned over the bar to see that there was already a phone under the bar, but the bartender wasn't going to use it, no sir. We got some fucker in here, says he knows Tony Verducci. Ha-ha. Go now. Get back to the truck. You blew it.