But I detect no relief at my reappearance. Only defeat. I’ve beaten her and she knows it. Although she might have been aghast at the performance, she was transfixed by it as well. And during the time it held her prisoner, I could have brought down our own curtain by slipping out and disappearing into the night.
She is beaten, yes, but not broken. Bent almost to the breaking point, but she hasn’t snapped. All she needs is a little shove, the right sort of nudge to make her break off her surveillance and desert me. Then my victory shall be complete.
But how?
As I’m leaving I ask the young tattooed and pierced-to within-an-inch-of-his-life fellow at the door if there is any other performance art in the neighborhood tonight.
“Yeah. Just around the corner there, you know, like, usually around ten or so, Harry Adamski’ll be like doing his stool art.”
“You mean like furniture?”
“No, uh, like—”
“Never mind. I get it.” Oh, perfect. “And where exactly is this going to take place . . .?”
SOLE CUSTODY
“Yergundye am’row.”
The sound, a small, high voice, jars me from sleep. I roll over and lift my head. A pale wash of light from the streetlamp outside reveals a short, slim form standing close to my bed.
My son.
“Jason?” I shake the cobwebs from my brain and glance at the glowing numbers on the clock. “What’re you doing up at this hour? Is something wrong?”
“You’re going to die tomorrow.”
Now I’m awake. Believe me—fully awake.
“What?” I lever up to sitting and swing my legs from under the sheet. I grab his thin, knobby, seven-year-old shoulders. “What did you say?”
“You’re going to die tomorrow.”
Those words, spoken by my boy, my darling little boy, twist my gut. I fumble for the bedside lamp, find the switch, turn it on.
Jason stands stiff and straight; with his buzz-cut dark hair he looks like a soldier at attention; his brown eyes are wide and staring through me. I shake him. Gently.
“Jason! Jason, wake up! You’re having a dream!”
Jason doesn’t blink, doesn’t say a word. He simply turns and begins walking away.
“Jason?”
I say it softly this time because I realize he’s sleepwalking and I heard somewhere once that you shouldn’t wake a sleepwalker.
I follow. I’m scared for him, don’t want him falling down the cellar stairs. But he heads straight to his room. I’m close behind, turning on the light so neither of us will trip. I watch him slip under the covers. I stand over him as he closes his eyes . . . a few heartbeats later I can tell by his soft, even breathing that he’s back into normal sleep.
I stare down at my son.
You’re going to die tomorrow.
Christ, what a terrible thing for anyone to hear, but when it comes from your own little boy . . .
Then again, maybe not from Jason. Maybe from his grandmother.
Yeah. That would explain it.
Ralda hates me. Always has, always will. She never said so when Maria was alive. She didn’t have to. If actions speak louder than words, then Ralda’s body is the PA system at Dodger Stadium.
It all comes down to this: Ralda—her real name is Esmeralda but no one calls her that—has never forgiven me for stealing her daughter. If falling in love and getting married is stealing, then here—put on the cuffs and lock me up. I’m guilty.
Of course, eloping only made matters worse, but we didn’t see that we had much choice. No way we could have had a traditional wedding with both families in the same room. Maria was rom, a gypsy, and that translated to the uptight Brits who comprised most of my kin as thieves, whores, and ne’er-do wells. To Maria’s side I was gadje, a non-gypsy, and a rom marrying a gadje was unthinkable.
So we hopped a flight to Vegas and got married. When we returned and Maria told her mother, well, it was something to see. Ralda put on a day-long display of screaming and cursing, tearing her own clothes and throwing Maria’s out the front door. After that came the silent treatment, which was okay with me but damn near broke Maria’s heart. Over the years she had to endure a passel of silent treatments. Ralda has an advance degree in creative silence and a triathelete’s stamina.
She couldn’t spew all her anger at her only child—despite Ralda’s many faults, she truly loved Maria—and she couldn’t rail at her own husband who’d been dead (gratefully, I’ll bet) half a dozen years, so I became the target, the numero uno focus of her rage. Fine. Like I cared. It made for some uncomfortable meals at holidays, but I handled it.
I may not be the brightest bulb in the chandelier, but I was a good provider. I got through high school and made it halfway through year one at a community college before deciding I had a brighter future in the workforce than in the classroom. I was right. By the time Maria and I tied the knot I was bringing home decent money from my own little heavy equipment transport and specialty moving business. We began building a life together, and when Maria learned she was pregnant, I didn’t think life could get no better.
Ralda softened somewhat after Jason was born. Even though he was half gadje, she adored her grandson and lavished him with attention. It was almost scary the way she fixated on him when we came to visit. Like Maria and I weren’t there.
Life was good. My business was growing, Maria and I were talking about another baby, and then some rich eighteen-year-old fuck tooling around in his daddy’s Mercedes sport coupe plowed into the driver’s side of our minivan at ninety miles an hour. Maria and Jason were inside. J—that was what we’d started calling him—was strapped into his baby seat in the rear passenger side and, thank God, not even scratched. Maria didn’t last twenty-four hours.
At the funeral Ralda jabbed a bony finger at my heart and screamed, “You! You should have been driving!”
I couldn’t argue. I wished that too. Still wish it.
My brain and my life put themselves on hold for a while. I did a lot of couch time, remote in hand, switching channels like a robot, not watching nothing. I felt like I was coming apart. I kept thinking, What’s the use?
But I held it together for J’s sake, and we’re doing all right now. Not great. I mean, how good can a kid’s life be without his mother? How good can his dad’s life be without the love of his life? But we’re hanging in there.
The only problem has been Ralda. She’d like a recurring speed bump. Lately she’s been filling Jason’s head with her gypsy garbage—about how, even though he’s not a pure-blood rom, he’s still special, still has certain “gifts.” I’ve been doing my best to act like a counterweight, to drag him back to the real world, and I thought I’d been doing a decent job.
Obviously I’ve been fooling myself.
Jason awakens the next morning with his usual cheeriness. I quiz him gently as I pour his orange juice and nuke his frozen waffles—he likes them drowning in syrup and melted butter—but he don’t remember nothing about what he said or did last night.
So, after dropping him off at school, I pay a visit to Ralda’s little bungalow in Lomita.
As she opens the front door I get in her face, jabbing a finger right at her nose. “You’ve gone too far this time, lady!”
I’ve been thinking about last night all the way down here and by now I’m pissed. I mean really pissed.
She gives me her usual why-do-I-have-to-share-the-planet-with-this-gadje look. She’s wearing a pink housedress and fuzzy white slippers, her graying black hair is pulled back tight from her face. God, she’s ugly. She looks like that puppet Madame that used to be on Hollywood Squares. How Maria ever sprang from her has always been beyond me. Way, way, way beyond.
“What are you talking about?” She has this thin accent that ever so slightly rolls the r.
“What’d you do, hypnotize him?”
She squints at me. “You’re drinking again, aren’t you.”
I had a little problem after Maria’s deat
h, but I’m well over that now. And I’m sure as hell not going to let her change this from being about her to being about me.
“Not a drop. But what about you? What’ve you been pouring into my boy? I know you’ve been filling his head with all your Gypsy bullshit, which is bad enough, but after what you made him do last night, your ass is cooked.”
“What?” She spreads her hands, palms up, like the whole world is turning against her and she don’t know why. “What did my little Jason do that was so terrible?”
“You know. You know damn well. And he’s not your little Jason. He’s mine. And that custody deal you worked out with the judge? That’s gonna be history when I tell him the games you’ve been playing with a little boy’s head!”
“Vincent, what are you talking about? What did he do?”
Her using my first name hangs me up for a second or two. She never uses my name. I’ve always been “him” or “that man.” Like she couldn’t get my name to pass her lips. But it passes today.
“He said just what you wanted him to say.” I turn and start stomping back to my pickup. “I never thought much of you, Ralda, but I never dreamed you’d use your own grandson to try to work a number on my head!”
“What did he say? Tell me what he said!”
Oh, she’s good, she’s really, really good. I didn’t know her better, I’d think she really and truly didn’t know.
But I ain’t gonna play her game. I give her an I’m-outta-here wave and hop in behind the wheel. I don’t have to crank up the truck because I never turned her off. As I put her in gear I hear Ralda’s voice calling to me.
“Whatever he said, Vincent, listen to him! He has the gift! Do you hear me? The gift!”
And I’m thinking, He ain’t got no gift, lady. He’s got a curse: you.
I’m not a crazy hothead. Really, I’m not. It’s just that this has been simmering for years and now I’m at the boiling point.
When Maria died, J was four and in preschool. Just the morning session. She hadn’t wanted to let him go, even for those few hours, but figured it would help with his socialization. Yeah, she used that word. She was always reading books on raising kids.
After Maria’s death, when I was lower-lip deep in my funk, J was the only thing that kept me from going under. I kept him in the morning session just so he could keep something of his old daily rhythm. But after I pulled my act together and got back to work, I had to add on the afternoon.
That worked out most of the time. But not all.
I had no trouble getting him there in the morning, but afternoons tended to be a problem. We live in a nice little two-bedroom ranch—the kind the real estate folk like to call “cozy”—in an okay neighborhood in Gardena. But sometimes me and my crew have jobs in places like Sylmar or Costa Mesa, which may not be all that far in miles, but in time . . . let me tell you, take anything bad you’ve heard about L.A. traffic and multiply it by ten for the reality. I just couldn’t guarantee that I’d make it back in time every day. So I arranged for aftercare, which is new speak for after-school daycare.
That was when Ralda played her hand.
Old bitch took me to court. Can you believe it? To family court! Petitioned the judge for some strange kind of joint custody where she could take care of Jason after school until I got home from the job. Let me tell you, she made a real heartstring yanker of a case for herself: Lived alone, J was her only grandchild, all that was left of her beloved daughter. Wasn’t it better that he spend his after-school hours with a loving grandparent than in the company of strangers?
Sounded good to the judge—who I think was a grandmother herself—and Ralda was awarded after-school custody. I had to hire a lawyer to try and get it undone but he was useless. Money down the sewer.
I wound up feeling more like a divorcé than a widower. I mean, my mother-in-law had joint custody of my kid.
Ralda loves J, I know that, and to be honest, for a while there it looked to be working out. J seemed happy with the arrangement and I have to admit I felt better knowing he was staying with someone who’d die rather than let anything happen to him.
But then J started coming home with Gypsy words and expressions and talking about having “gifts”—you know, second sight, clairvoyance, talking to animals, crazy stuff like that. I went right to Ralda and told her—no, wait, I asked her, real polite-like, to stop putting ideas like that into his head. People would think he was crazy.
Know what she said? She told me that into every third generation of her family is born a child with a “gift,” that J is that one, that there are many gifts and she is only trying to find out which one he has.
I asked her to stop. (See? I was still asking.) She said she couldn’t, that it would be a terrible sin to let his gift go undetected, undeveloped, that he’s been neglected too long already.
Neglected? I blew my stack at that and told her if she didn’t cease and desist—yeah, I said that; heard it on Law & Order or someplace—if she didn’t stop filling my little boy’s head with her garbage, I’d have her joint custody thing tossed out on its ear.
She gave me this hard look and said that I’d never have sole custody again. Then she slammed the door in my face.
Things were kind of at a stalemate for a while. J stopped using Gypsy talk around me, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t getting an earful from his grandmother and being told not to use or mention it at home.
But last night changes everything. I don’t care if the judge is a grandmother ten times over, no one can get away with teaching a child to say something like that to his own father.
So all this crapola is on my mind as I drive to today’s job in downtown. Yeah, there really is a downtown L.A. That’s where the city’s skyscrapers cluster in the basin. That’s where you find the convention center and city hall, that big tapering building everyone knows from Dragnet. The whole rotten situation’s on my mind when I park in a municipal lot, and I’m still steaming about it as I step off the curb to cross Figueroa.
I hear a voice behind me yell, “Oh, shit!” and I hear a horn blaring, and I look up to see this Ford F-150 pickup running the red light and making a beeline for me. I see the guy behind the wheel and he’s got one hand holding a cell phone against his ear and the other wrapped around a Starbucks cup, leaving his left pinky for steering; he’s looking down and I know, I just know he’s spilled some coffee in his lap. He ain’t got a clue as to what’s happening and I realize I’m a goner and somewhere in my head J’s voice is saying, You’re going to die tomorrow.
All this takes place during a single heartbeat and just as I start into a much-too-late dive back toward the curb this eighteen-wheeler tools into the intersection from the left, cruising with the green, and knocks the shit out of the pickup, knocks it into next week, leaving me in the middle of the lane shaking and sweating and sick and hoping I haven’t peed my pants.
I stagger to the other side and lower myself to the curb. I sit bent forward, holding my floating head in my shaking hands. Nobody notices me, which is fine. I’m not keen on having people watching as I hurl breakfast. Everybody’s gravitating toward the wreckage in the intersection. Everybody except this bent old black guy with a cane and a Fred Sanford beard.
“You gotta be the luckiest-assed man on God’s earth,” he says as he stops a couple of feet from me.
I look up at him but say nothing. I’m not lucky. I’m unlucky. I’ve got a witch for a mother-in-law. Oh, not a witch who casts spells and cooks up magic spells. No, she’s a witch who plays with your head. Because that’s what Gypsies do, and they’re good at it.
I see how this works now. She hypnotizes or does whatever she does to Jason to make him say whatever she wants him to say. You’re going to die tomorrow is a brilliant choice, especially when it comes from your son. It puts you on edge, throws you off your rhythm, distracts you. Distracts you to the point where you’re on autopilot. You see the little green walking man sign light up and you step off a curb without checking to see i
f anything’s coming your way.
“Here,” says the old guy. He’s holding out a pint bottle swathed in a paper bag. “Take a pull. You could use it.”
I wave him off and struggle to my feet. “Thanks, but I’m wobbly enough already.”
“Lucky guy,” he says as I walk away. “One lucky fucking guy.”
I’m better by the time I get to the job, but I’m still not right. Taking charge though, dividing up the crew into details and telling them to get their asses in gear takes my mind off what almost happened.
The job is in one of downtown’s older buildings. Real old. One of those narrow three-story dinosaurs that hung on through the ferro-concrete building boom. Me and my guys have been hired to move a big old Kelvinator-sized safe out of the third-floor office. Ordinarily not a problem, but in this case the building’s been renovated umpteen times since the safe was moved in, and one of those renovations was a major overhaul of the staircase. Mainly narrowing it to increase the square footage of rentable space around it. The result: the safe can’t go down the way it came up. The solution: knock out a window and enough wall around it to get the safe through, then winch it down to the sidewalk.
Yeah, I know, sounds like a mess, but trust me, the window and its wall are a much easier fix than a ripped-up stairwell.
By noon we’ve broken through the wall, the winch is in place, and the safe chained up and ready to go for a ride. I head downstairs to guide it from there and to make sure the landing pad stays clear of the curious. I’ve got about a mile of yellow caution tape wound around the area but over the years I’ve learned never to underestimate the stupidity of the average L.A. pedestrian. Even though my safety record’s just about perfect, my liability premium is still through the roof. One bad accident, just one, will put it on the space shuttle.
Nobody gets to play the old Looney Toons flattened-under-a-safe scene on my watch.
As I hit the sidewalk I see the old black dude from over on Figueroa standing at the front of the gaggle pressing against the tape.
A Soft Barren Aftershock Page 130