by Craig Nova
Mr. Green showed his bad teeth when he smiled. I thought the odor of the place was like that cellar in Cambridge. It was as though my father had been willing to let me see what he had done, sort of, since some of the papers were missing, and then he had waited to give me a glimpse after he was safely out of the way. Even as I flipped the pages, turned over the canceled checks made out to himself on the account that was for me, I knew that he had been struggling to come up with a legally defendable position that allowed him to do this, to take the money that was mine and still be on the right side of the law. About midway through the green-tinted paper, the running ink, the speckled mold that was so much like the black dust you see on an apple in an abandoned orchard, he had written “Eureka!” I guess he was so happy to have found a legal way to cheat me that he wanted to make a note, or to share it with himself, since the only other person he could share it with was me, and he knew, at least, that I wasn’t going to be overjoyed at the discovery.
The box sat on the counter. Mr. Green gave it a little shove.
“That takes care of it,” he said.
“Not quite,” I said. “There’s the funeral.”
“Yes,” he said. “There’s always that. But it comes to an end, too.”
He held the front door for me and then stepped into the hazy air behind me, a man who was tinted gray. I carried the festive bag. And when I was in the car, stabbing the key into the ignition, he waited, stooped, small and oddly defiant, too, as though he knew a secret that no one else had the guts to face. The cigar stink of the ashes hung in the car.
Perhaps I could put them in the trunk, but that seemed wrong. Somehow, we were going to make this trip together: me at the wheel, my father in the front seat. We used to go for a drive that way when I was first practicing law and then when I was an assistant prosecutor. He always wanted to celebrate at what he called the “farm.”
So, after the “Eureka!” I knew I was getting close. The next page of the ledger also had a note clipped to it, too, and there, along with a moldy Xerox of the original trust, he had come back to the kill. The underlined section of the trust said that the trustee’s fiduciary duty was to maintain the monthly stipend. Well, sure, that’s right, I thought, but as I turned the pages, as the papers became more wrinkled where they had been wet, the shape of the strategy emerged. It had a sort of beauty, when you got down to it. He didn’t have to produce more than the original monthly stipend, no matter what percentage of the original trust this was. Pop had been specific, I guess, because he didn’t want any doubts about the amount, never dreaming that the market could go up two thousand percent.
Well, at least I didn’t have to ask him about it, or to sit with him, at that card table, where we looked each other in the eyes and realized that the money was only part of the secrets that were hidden, not only by my grandmother, but him, too—that is his seduction or madness of the erotic over a young woman, years ago. What had been behind that? The years in a prison camp? The moment when he had looked down that hole in the barrel of the guard’s pistol in Poland? Had it all snapped right then, in that smoldering, sultry look of a woman who just appeared and seemed, if my grandmother is to be trusted, to exist in a haze that so perfectly engulfed him?
Here, I think, is the time to add another one of those things from the dark. When my mother was dying and when my father sat next to her, she said to him, “Chip. Promise me one thing. You won’t chase any cheap blonds, all right?”
Of course, he gave his promise, and within a month after her death that is exactly what he was doing, to the extent of finding one and even marrying her, although she died of cirrhosis within two years. Then my father lived alone. I feared I would end up the same.
[ CHAPTER EIGHT ]
I SHOULD SAY that my own trouble started eighteen months before my father died.
The first part was the Citron Modèle case. My father knew some of the trouble, but only a little on the surface. The trouble was deeper, far deeper than what my father knew.
Citron Modèle wasn’t the man’s real name, which was Jason Slivotviz. He was about six feet tall in his cowboy boots, and his hair was bleached “rock singer blond,” as he put it. He wore a pair of black jeans, a sheer shirt, and a gold necklace. At least he dressed this way when he worked at the Citron Modèle Beauty and Nail Salon, which was in a failed auto parts store in Braintree. Perms, trims, bikini wax, full sphinx, nails, and piercings. Three chairs, a cabinet for lotions, dyes, conditioners, creams, mousse, and wigs on plastic heads. The place smelled like a cotton candy machine in a hot chemical factory. Discount prices. Coupons. A little card he’d punch if you were a member of the Citron Modèle Fashion Club. Ten trims or perms gave you a free one. A pile of In Style magazines, next to some back issues of People mixed in with Extreme Sports and Cosmetic Surgery Monthly. Citron Modèle was making money, although to get his salon started he had borrowed from some men who weren’t regular bankers.
Sometimes Citron wore his hair in a ponytail, held there with a rubber band, so as to look like a sort of hippie transgendered cheerleader.
Citron was falling behind in his loan payments, at least as nearly as we could tell from the books he kept, the numbers and words written in a hand that he must have copied from a nineteenth-century manual of calligraphy for young women. Scrolls and swirls: two cases Condo Conditioner @ $56.95 per case, plus tax. And then an entry that said, “Need new girl for other chair. I skim her fifty percent and the rest is pure profit.”
He put an ad in Cosmetics Journal and hired a woman who was in her twenties. She was thin with very pale skin, and she had short blond hair, no tattoos, no identifying marks of any kind (which caused us trouble later). In the salon she called herself Sally Sunshine, but her real name was Martha Franklin. She had grown up in Lodi, New Jersey, where she had been a cheerleader in a secondhand uniform with losing football teams, and yet she had been a good student but without money to go to college. She fled Lodi as soon as she could, on a Peter Pan bus to Boston, where she went to the Braintree School of Cosmetology. A certificate in a frame she bought at Target. During the trial, I went down to Lodi. The main road ran by the wetlands, where ducks floated in the back channels on the reflections of smokestacks from the oil refineries. Giants Stadium sat like a crater made by a meteorite.
Citron had a house in Braintree, which was a sort of second-or even third-tier suburb at the end of the Boston subway line. The house had one story with some dead grass in the front yard and a tree that produced some apples every year that fell onto the hard earth and which the kids in the neighborhood used in their Wham-O slingshots to hit cars that went down the street. Of course, the people who got hit, some of them with broken windows, called the cops, and the cops went to Citron’s house.
The pit bull Citron bought to take care of the problem was called Blackie, and the dog weighed about ninety pounds, and every now and then the scent of a woman’s perfume, the gait of a teenager who sulked in the street, the sound of a car that wouldn’t start set him off. For instance, a woman with the wrong perfume came along and Blackie, after a silent but fast brooding, made a run for her. He hit the end of his chain and was lifted into the air like a pig being thrown into a vat. Citron didn’t care about the women so much, but he took this as a demonstration of what Blackie could do if those kids showed up with their Wham-Os. Of course, when Citron wasn’t around the kids did show up, and they peppered Blackie with the other stunted fruit they found in the neighborhood. It just made Blackie even meaner than before.
Still, when Blackie took a flying, rear-end-first leap at someone, Citron brought out a ball of raw hamburger and fed it to the dog and said, “Good dog. Yeah. Good dog.” Blackie bit Citron in the eyebrow once when he was doing this, but this only made Citron fonder of the dog, since the scar in his brow made him look, as he told Sally Sunshine, “more cool.”
Citron owned the house next door to his, and it was a smaller, more dreary version of his own: the dirt was a little harder in the s
ummer, the mud deeper in the spring, and a couple of the windows were cracked and fixed with Scotch tape, not to mention the hardwood floor had come loose and been fixed with toothpaste.
Citron let Sally have the house at a somewhat reduced rate. This way, he got her to work for less, and he didn’t do that badly on the rent. When she complained about the plumbing or the floor, he’d say, “Bitch, bitch, bitch. Why, that’s all I ever hear. How about the taxes I pay? How about the furnace repairman? Jesus.” Then he knocked on Sally’s head and said, “Is anyone home?”
Sally said, “If you touch me, I’ll kill you.”
So, Sally began to work for Citron. She put in long hours, trimmed and cut and remade hairstyles, and she did the other things that Citron pushed her way, like the wax jobs, which Sally did with a sound like tape being torn from a cardboard box, although every now and then Citron, just to keep the upper hand, would say that Sally had done a lousy “full sphinx,” and that he had had to “clean it up.”
Sally looked at him at these times and said, “It was a good, slick job. Are you saying I don’t give good wax? I give great wax.”
“I’m talking about the crevices,” he said.
“I get all the crevices. Some you don’t even know about,” she said.
“I know all about crevices,” he said. “Front and back. You’ve got to think about the back.”
“I think about it,” said Sally.
Still, Sally was good with her scissors, and her layer cuts were known as far away as Boston. Women came in and waited for her, more than for Citron, and they liked her advice about romantic problems. And if a woman considered getting a tattoo, Sally said, “Listen, kiddo, life forces you to make so many irrevocable decisions, you want to keep them down to a minimum.”
Citron cashed out on Saturday nights.
At the end of the first month, Sally stayed then, even when Citron had told her to leave. She did the arithmetic, which she knew anyway, since she had been keeping track of just how much money she was bringing in.
“I think I’d like a bigger cut,” said Sally.
“Not yet,” said Citron. “You’re still on trial.”
“Me?” said Sally. “I’m more than doubling what you’re making. They come to see me, not you. That’s a fact.”
“What about the house?” said Citron. “I give you a break there, don’t I?”
“I want a bigger cut,” said Sally. “Twenty percent more. No, make that twenty-five percent more.”
“Oh,” said Citron. “A regular teamster I’ve got here.”
“I could start a place of my own,” said Sally.
Citron put a rubber band around the cash with a deposit slip.
“Don’t even think about it,” said Citron. “I’ve got friends. You know that? No-teeth, tattooed ex-cons. You want to talk to them?”
“I’m thinking about it right now,” said Sally.
Sally’s diary said she got a mutt from the pound. I am guessing that the dog was her only luxury, since as nearly as anyone could tell, she lived alone, saved her money, although she used some for cocaine and painkillers, which she took with a shot of brandy. At least that’s the impression her diary left. She liked to go to the movies, and I am sure she had a desire to go to Hollywood, but she was smart enough to know what she would get if she tried. Her friends, mostly women who worked at other hair salons or who folded clothes at department stores, said that she loved her dog, that she even bought steak for the creature. She sat in the kitchen, after a couple of Vicodin and a slug of brandy, and watched him eat with tears in her eyes.
The mutt got out every now and then and went next door. It strained, trembling with the effort, crapping just beyond Blackie’s reach.
One afternoon, a Monday when the Citron Modèle Beauty and Nail Salon was closed, the mutt got out the back door.
Old women lived in this neighborhood, transplanted, I guess, from Sicily or Portugal, and they dressed in black and wore shawls when they came out of their houses, emerging from the shadows of their sad interiors to do their shopping, which they brought home in small carts with wheels, the squeaking of which haunted the neighborhood. They came out and stood together, in a group, having no need to talk, since they all knew what they were waiting for, just as their mothers had in those shadows of small towns in Sicily: trouble of the usual kind, violence, retribution, which all added up to a kind of restrained relief.
Sally’s dog came up to the property line and, on this morning, it went into Blackie’s realm. Blackie picked up his ears, his eyes a little rheumy. Sally’s dog turned and strained, its rear end toward Blackie. Blackie caught Sally’s dog in his jaws and shook his head from side to side, then opened his mouth to get a better killing grip, but Sally’s dog ran back for the property line, one leg dragging a little. Blackie hit the end of his chain. Sally’s dog whined at the back door.
Citron’s door opened with an angry smash and then he crossed that urine-scented, hard-packed earth.
Sally slept nude, but she woke and went to the kitchen window. Blackie was on his back, feet in the air as he gasped, and her dog bled from its back. Citron put his hands on his hips and lifted his head so that his chin pointed at Sally’s house, daring her to come out. Sally went through the door and picked up her dog. She carried it up to the property line and offered it to Citron, as though the dog were evidence of Citron’s cruelty, his exploitation of her, his cheating her out of the profits, the skimming of the money from her tips, the surcharge on the lotions and creams, the dyes and bleaches. The false accusations about the wax jobs.
One of the women in black said, “Guarda. Look. She shaves.”
“Get some clothes on,” said Citron. “I am a respectable citizen.”
“What?” said Sally. “A man who charges more than he should? Who won’t be fair?”
“What did you say?” said Citron.
“You heard me,” said Sally. “You and that ghastly dog.”
“Get some clothes on,” said Citron.
“What are you going to do about my dog?” she said.
“You heard me,” said Citron.
Sally went into the house, where she put on a pair of blue jeans and a tee shirt, took some money from the jar on the kitchen counter where she kept her tips, went outside into the smoky air, and waited for the cab she had called.
The vet stitched up the wound, put on a bandage, gave the dog a shot, and then Sally brought the dog home. She took the bill and walked across the yard. She stopped in front of Blackie, who looked up with that ominous silence, as he always had before making that lunge.
Sally knocked on Citron’s door. Citron answered and she said, “Here. This is yours.” He looked at the bill, crumpled it up, and stuck it into the top of Sally’s tee shirt.
“I told you if you touched me I’d kill you,” said Sally.
Then he went inside and closed the door.
Of course, it wasn’t just the dog, but the money, too. Each Saturday night, Sally said with a growing sense of certainty (now far beyond a threat) that she could open a place of her own. Citron knew that she’d take the new customers she brought in and probably half of his, too. Then he’d have to face those guys who came on a weekly basis to pick up the interest.
Sally continued to work at Citron’s and then came home to feed her dog. Sometimes when she looked out the window, where Blackie waited at the property line, or as close as he could get to it, his enormous pink tongue hanging out in the sultry heat of a fall afternoon.
Sally had a regular cab driver who drove her from Citron’s salon, and one night she asked the cab driver to come into her house. He put his hand down in front of Sally’s dog, as though to make friends, and when the dog got up and limped and showed its bandage with a bloodstain in the middle, the cab driver said, “What’s wrong with it?”
She just shrugged.
“Do you like dogs?” she said.
“They’re OK,” he said. “I’ve got a python. Its name is Dilly. Eats like
you wouldn’t believe. One gulp.”
The cab driver swallowed. It was a good imitation of a python, eyes bulging to get something down rather than choking. At least that’s the way we thought it happened after we talked to Sally’s friends, the other women who worked in salons in Boston, and after we read her diary. After we talked to the cab driver, too.
Sally asked the cab driver if he would give her some help, and the cab driver, a man of about fifty, overweight, covered with tattoos, said, “Sure, what’s your pleasure?”
“Can you read?” she said.
“As well as the next guy,” he said.
Sally wrote a script right there, and then she got out her tape recorder and sat the cab driver down, gave him a drink of brandy, and asked him to read it. He did so, in a halting, bumbling way, but she kept after him until he got it right. Then she gave him fifty dollars, thanked him, and put him out the door.
At night, she sat with her dog in her lap, the stiff bandage under her fingers, her mood increasing with the warmth of the painkiller perfectly enhanced by the brandy. She turned on the tape. Outside, on the other side of the yard in a purplish light from the street lamp, Blackie went back and forth, always a little less than the absolute limit of his chain, as though inviting Sally to come a little closer. The cab driver’s voice came into the room, seeming friendlier, more intense, more like the voice of Antonio Banderas than anyone else. He said, “Look, I know how much you are bringing in. I admit I am skimming you thirty to forty percent. Not counting the dyes and lotions. So, we’ve got to put this right. I owe you ten or fifteen thousand, but we’ll have to figure that out later. I can’t do much about that. But things can change from now on. We’ll split everything fifty-fifty, after expenses, and each year I’ll give you ten percent of the business. How about that? Shake on it?”
So, she sat, in that glow of warmth, imbued with that heat of perfect justice, or what seemed like perfect justice to her, and while suspended in this miasma, this cloud of sensation, which was just as warm as flesh under the covers, she made plans.