The bus came and Cheyenne got on but couldn’t face going back to the apartment. Instead she went to find Essex. There was no one better to complain to about work—the idea of it, the reality of it, the lack of it—because on all our tombstones it will say: RIP independent contractor. Most likely they’ll write it on a billboard over a mass grave as deep as a valley. Essex would at least find that funny.
Cheyenne hadn’t been to his place but knew of it: Neighborsbane, a legendary, run-down Victorian mansion that rented rooms to all the outcasts who found their way to the Pacific Northwest. Seattle’s Ellis Island. Everyone knew someone who had lived there. The owner, Lester Minus, was equally famous. He occupied the top floor and rumor had it that climbing the stairs to his apartment you could feel the exact point where the floorboards stopped creaking and the walls were no longer white but the color of aged bone, and the floors became old-growth fir. All of it, famously—the period fixtures, the rehung windows, the leaded glass—was testament to Old World deal-making. Short on rent? Replumb my bathroom. No deposit? I’m sure there’s something we can do.
Taking a turn onto the block, Cheyenne saw it in all its broken splendor. At the door, she was let in by a petite trans man with a Bible Belt accent. She wandered into an unfinished kitchen where people were listening to Norse synthpop and boiling beets. She asked them where Essex’s room was. They shrugged and pointed at the ceiling.
* * *
—
Upstairs, Jared, Essex’s oldest friend, sat cross-legged on a mattress on the floor with Scorpions records fanned out in front of him. A few feet away was Essex, his back against the purple wall, his legs stretched out and crossed at the ankles. Balanced on his thigh was a paper plate with a rectangle of Spam in the center surrounded by an aura of grease. Essex had been carving the Spam into a deer with a key. He’d gotten the triangular shape of the head right and was working to free the animal’s spine from the gel and meat.
“I know you avoid me,” said Jared. “I’m not an idiot.”
“I don’t avoid real you. I avoid stupid you. It’s okay to avoid stupid you. What does your mom say?” asked Essex.
“She thinks it’s great I’m enlisting.”
“And she doesn’t mind you getting killed or having PTSD the rest of your life.”
“I can do both of those things here,” said Jared.
Jared’s hair was crimped on one side, a nod to metal, and shaved on the other, a nod to Southern California ’90s punk. His Iron Maiden shirt, a breastplate; his skull tattoo, a seal, a coat of arms—because how else would we know each other? In this vacuum, in these empty halls. At least Jared saw himself somewhere. Essex couldn’t find his place in any of it. He went back to sculpting the Spam deer, working on the haunch. Jared pulled a record out of its sleeve.
While Essex’s respect for Jared had dissipated over the years, his loyalty to him had not. They had been kids on the street together, bound in permanent jail solidarity, so when Jared called to tell him he was joining the marines, Essex made a point of hanging out. Now, having seen each other almost every day for the past week, each joke had become a blade that both cut away the years but also laid bare their current emotional distance.
Jared put the record down.
“You should enlist,” he said. “They’d love you. All big and strong. You’d be totally Call of Duty if you worked out at all.”
Essex instinctively shrunk, caving his shoulders, a habit. Raised by women, he was sensitive to his size, and what had started as awareness had evolved into a bit of a nervous twitch. His attempts to manage his presence in a room made him clumsy, which resulted in everyone being reminded of exactly how big he was, when, inevitably, he tripped into someone or knocked something over.
Jared looked at Essex with envy and a little bitterness. “They would take you in a second,” he said.
“I would never do anything that stupid without a good reason. Hanging out with you isn’t one,” said Essex.
Jared’s eyes strayed to the pink block that held his friend’s attention. Picking a pen up off the floor nearby, he reached over and sank it into the Spam deer’s back, where it stuck up like a spear. He laughed. Essex remained still for a heartbeat then held the deer with the pen in its back up to Jared’s face.
“Finish the job,” he said.
“Fuck you.”
“Finish the job.”
“Leave me alone.”
“Coward,” said Essex and took the pen out.
Using the shaft of the pen, he cut the Spam deer in half. It bothered him, though it shouldn’t have. It wasn’t a real deer. But that’s the problem with imagination. There was a knock and Cheyenne came in.
Essex jumped up. Brushing his hair back, he kicked some dirty clothes into a pile, but she didn’t notice.
“I was just at a stupid temp agency for hours then had to wait in the rain forever for a bus and I’m going to kill Livy for being such a cunt about the money but I can’t until I have another place.” She took off her jacket and dropped it by the dresser. “The whole thing sucks.”
“How much does she say you need?” asked Essex.
“Five hundred dollars for my share. The abbot we talked to in Montana thinks her real name might be JoAnn Colson, but he’s not sure. He gave us the address of a place in Boston called the Fire Blossom Temple.”
“Is she there?” asked Jared.
“Some lady named JoAnn Colson is, but that’s all I know.”
“Can’t you borrow Kirsten’s car?” asked Essex.
“She wants no part,” said Cheyenne.
“You could still ask.”
“No I couldn’t.”
“Five hundred dollars is a lot,” said Jared.
“It’s the minimum. Car rental. Gas and oil. Food. Lost wages.” Cheyenne’s eyes started to burn. “The most, the most I can make temping in a week is three hundred and twenty. And that’s without disruptions, which never happens—Oh, I’m sorry, I thought you knew QuickBooks. Oh, I’m sorry, you’re actually supposed to be at our satellite location. It’s just past fucking Pluto. Should I mark you for a half day?”
Jared laughed. “I’d talk to this JoAnn woman before driving all the way across the country.”
Cheyenne’s eyes snapped to Jared. “Well it isn’t your deal so it doesn’t matter what you’d do. Besides, we’re counting on the pathetic nature of our presence to work the magic.”
“Can you sell anything?” asked Essex.
She smiled. “My ass. Down on the corner. That’s the fucked thing. I’m a haggard thirty-three not twenty-two. It’s not like I can just go make bank in some strip joint.”
“Not haggard,” said Essex, and smiled.
“You could sell plasma,” said Jared.
Cheyenne laughed. “There’s no way I’m going to spend all day waiting in line, then hooked up to a pump, so some leech-farming blood baron can give me twenty-five dollars and a cookie. Only assholes make that deal.”
“What about selling some of your records or books?” asked Essex.
“I sold almost all of them today and got nothing. It’ll cover food and bus passes until I get my first check, but that’s it. And,” she began to gesticulate, “that check won’t come for three weeks. And it will only be for a couple of days because of where the stupid pay period falls. And it will have a onetime administrative fee deducted from it. And the fee for not doing direct deposit. And the fee to cash the check.” Stopping abruptly, she let her hands drop. Her throat was dry. She swallowed but the tightness stayed.
“If you had the money, could Livy get the time off?” asked Essex.
“They said she could have next week off or wait to see if next month works.” Cheyenne crossed to where Jared was and sat beside him on the mattress. “I don’t want to talk about it anymore.” She looked at Essex. “Are you going to driv
e a cab tonight?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t make any money last night and the night before I didn’t cover my lease. Livy says I’m the worst cabdriver ever.”
“She’s probably right,” said Cheyenne. “I can’t imagine you doing it.”
“Why doesn’t Livy drive anymore?” asked Jared. “As a chick she’d make double in tips.”
“She doesn’t like drunks. She always used to make money, though,” said Essex.
“So how come you can’t?” Jared asked.
Essex shrugged. “People are always talking to you. I feel bad cutting them off and the time adds up.”
“Livy would cut off your dying words if she saw a fare behind you,” said Cheyenne.
“She’s got the long view,” said Essex.
Cheyenne turned to Jared. “Essex said you’re enlisting. That’s stupid. Why?”
“It’s not like I have anything else going on,” said Jared. “I don’t think it’ll make a man out of me, if that’s what you mean.”
Cheyenne leaned into his space. “You know what women do when they’ve got nothing going on? They get pregnant. Having one decision you could make that made the rest get made for you.” She slapped his thigh. “Good luck with that, man.”
Jared pulled another record out of its sleeve and spun it on his finger until it toppled, rolling onto the floor and into the wall.
“Which branch?” she asked.
“Marines,” said Jared. “If they don’t take me, then the army.”
“It’s fucked that you need a college degree to go into the Peace Corps,” said Essex. “There should be some way to sign over your life without killing something. I wouldn’t mind digging ditches for the next twenty years if there was a good reason.”
“I’m sure someone wants you to dig a ditch. Go find them,” said Cheyenne.
“I’m just saying there should be global use for a person with low standards and a shovel,” Essex said.
Cheyenne rolled her eyes but giggled. She crawled off the mattress and stood. She felt better but didn’t know why. The night seemed different.
“You know, if Livy kicks you out they have a room coming up here,” said Essex, “one of the nicer ones. If I drive more I might be able to front the move-in costs for you.” He paused. “You can also stay in here if you want.”
Jared started to hum.
“God fuck no,” she said.
Jared laughed.
“But thanks.” She smiled at Essex.
Cheyenne picked her jacket up off the floor. Essex walked her out.
* * *
—
When Essex came back Jared was looking through liner notes. “My dad was in the military. I think that’s why he killed himself,” said Jared.
“I thought he got hit by a car,” said Essex.
“Might have.”
Essex laughed and gathered up the Scorpions records. “I always heard my dad was in the marines, but I’ve never seen proof.”
“Bet he was a Coastie,” said Jared.
“Bet your dad wasn’t there at all.”
Essex pulled open the top drawer of his dresser. “I should drive.” He plowed through a jumble of black shirts.
“You’ll just drive half the night and go home the second you make your lease.”
“There’s no reason I can’t force myself to stay out. If I have a good night, I can help Cheyenne.”
“Oh Cheyenne, you can always stay in here with me…”
“What?” said Essex.
“Your feelings aren’t exactly brotherly.”
Essex stopped going through shirts and turned. “So you’re a prepubescent boy on the street—”
“Like we were,” said Jared.
“Like we were,” said Essex. “And a hot, seventeen-year-old girl who is smarter than anyone you ever met picks you up and takes you home to live with her family. For. Ever.”
Jared clicked his tongue.
“Tell me,” said Essex, “tell me it wouldn’t make an impression.”
Jared shook his head. “You have a crush on your sister, man. It’s gross.”
“Oh,” said Essex, “it’s way more than a crush.”
7 Crown Victoria
ESSEX DIDN’T HAVE A STEADY LEASE. If he wanted to drive, he had to go down and ask for a cab, put his name on a list, hang out in the tunnel for hours, and wait for the dispatchers to call out a number for the cab he could take. There were rules, though. You couldn’t leave and come back even if you were at the bottom of the roster because it wasn’t a first come, first served kind of thing. The list was just so they didn’t forget you existed. They went down it according to their own logic: Let’s me see…Yeah, he’s good—give him 112…He’s got a sick kid—give him 38…Oh no fucking way, he wrecked last week…No…Caught stacking…No…Oh, definitely man, she’s cute—give her 26…Oh her? She’s totally cute—122…And—god brother, are you kidding me? HOT—88. Luck or lightning could strike. Sometimes you got a free lease because the dispatchers didn’t like the owner of your cab and comped it on a technicality. Sometimes you got charged a fee that didn’t exist or were made to wait hours on a cab that wasn’t coming because they were curious how you’d react. Once Essex spent a whole week driving around with a roasted chicken under his seat because the dispatch guys had a bet to see how long it would take for a precooked bird to rot to the point where you could smell it.
Sometimes Essex would slip into the dispatcher’s office and listen to them tell stories. It was his favorite part of driving, watching the steady drivers pass through, the smooth-shaven Eritreans in pressed shirts and lemon cologne, the Caribbeans with thin gold chains and silver teeth, the middle-aged Persians with low voices and rich accents. Far from being a sacred sphere of enlightened multiculturalism, though, the dispatcher’s office was the epicenter of unchecked stereotyping.
“Don’t you people pray, like, five times a day? Where’s your rug?”
“Man, I don’t know. I must have left it at the S-Y-N-A-G-O-G-U-E.”
“Hey, amigo! Como estas?”
“I’m fucking Egyptian, you idiot.”
It was the kind of gloves-off diversity found the world over in places where people of different backgrounds actually lived together. The parade went on with nicotine-stained Vietnam vets with felonies, men who used hair spray, Lebanese, Macedonians, African Americans eating lactose-free chocolate bars, and the tattooed white kids who knew every cool bartender in town and where the shows were happening—all people who would rather risk a gun to their head than have a boss. People who’d work a twelve-hour shift for nothing but a slice of pizza over their lease and return night after night looking for that mythical six-hundred-mile cash fare, that fat halibut, which meant a week off from work because these were the most motivated to be unmotivated citizens of the planet. Gamblers each, and everyone had a game. You played wide, ran the hinterlands, and went long on the chance at a twenty-mile airport run; you stuck inside, hitting short rides, darting from club to club all night where the fares were smaller but tips were bigger; you took anything you got and let fate play out, but what you didn’t do was mix it up. You had to have a strategy, a philosophy, or you were nowhere. Essex was nowhere.
Most nights he drove he went home early. Once he covered his lease and gas all ambition bled right out of him. No matter how he tried, he couldn’t make himself care. Every night he had an excuse for why it was better to leave and swore he’d make up for it the next night by working his full twelve but never did. Over his twenty-seven years Essex had failed at most everything conferring social value. School counselors, fry-cook managers, concerned citizens strained to make real to him the costs of his behavior. He wore his ability to suffer consequences like a merit badge. But he really did want to help Cheyenne. Which wasn’t to say his feelings for her weren’t a problem.
They were. Just not one he expected to solve. Or as the Egyptian said to him one night, “No one drives for money.” Essex wanted to thank Cheyenne in a way that would matter to her. So he went down, signed up, and waited in the tunnel.
He tried to become more visible to the dispatchers, waiting patiently while they played video games, while they each ate an entire pizza. It only half worked. So Sanders says he should get a haircut and Gil turns bright pink and says, “Yeah? Yeah? Well you tell Sanders this,” and he pulls out a knife with a ten-inch blade then I kid you fucking not, grabs his own ponytail and starts sawing it off, throws it on Sanders’s desk and walks out. The next morning it’s lying there like a dead fox when Sanders comes in— Essex, are you still here?
On the weekend when there were more drivers than cabs, the lease drivers gathered in the break room for the lottery. Leaning against the walls in faded black Western shirts and baby-blue Cuban button-downs they talked shit under the florescent lights or sprawled on metal folding chairs with their eyes on the trashed gray carpet. Then one of the dispatchers would come in and make a speech about safety, share a few horror stories from the previous week, and end with “It’s raining, go make money.” He’d shake a coffee can of Scrabble tiles and everyone would line up to take a piece, one letter for each cab going out. Rarely were there Z numbers of cabs. In general, A through H would go out in the first hour. Then I through M might get a five-to-five short an hour or a six-to-six cab.
Any letters after that and you might not go out at all. That’s where the gamble came. Sometimes it was better to throw the tile back in and go play video poker instead, try another night. If you’d had a bad run, someone might hand you a B and say you owe them.
On the weekend the cashier’s office was closed. Which meant you didn’t have to pay up front for your lease. You could actually drive Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, then drop the lease for all three nights early Monday morning. It allowed for a longer game. You could have a lousy night, totally blow it, then cover the lease out of the next night’s take. If you drew a good Scrabble tile and got a cab.
The Great Offshore Grounds Page 5
