by Seth Harwood
She wasn’t away for long, just his time in the shower, but she was away. Part of him hates that he’s even thinking it, but Jack’s never had good experiences with trust and women. He thinks of Victoria, remembers Ralph lying on the bottom of his tub.
Once he’s in the car, he heads for her apartment.
Maxine’s home, buzzes him up as soon as she hears his voice through the speaker. When he comes up the stairs, he sees her door open and she leans into the hallway, her hair wet, wearing a thin kimono that only comes down to the middle of her thighs. “Hey,” he says to her.
“I didn’t think you’d be back so fast.”
Jack gets to the top of the stairs, and she kisses him once, long and wet, her skin still warm from the shower and her mouth hot. She smells like apples.
Inside her apartment, he can smell the steam of the shower and the sweet scent of her shampoo. Her hair hangs wet to her shoulders, stringy instead of full, and Jack remembers the soft feel of it on his face last night. She sits down, her robe showing off more of her legs.
Jack puts his hands in his pockets, then takes them out.
“What’s the matter?”
He rubs his hands together, not sure where to start. “Tell me everything you know about Tony. Start with how you got work in his club.”
“Well, Jack.” She crosses her legs and sits up very straight, as if it’s an interview. “I met Tony when I applied for a job as a bartender. I’ve wanted to tend bar for a while, went to some dumbass bartending school, and when I got out, there were no jobs. I saw one opening at a bar in the Oakland airport and then I tried Tony’s because a friend of mine used to dance there and she said he’d put me on. Then he did. Does that answer satisfy your curiosity?”
“What’s Tony like?”
She shrugs, relaxes her posture. “Tony’s mostly okay. He can be an asshole, but mostly he takes care of his girls. Sure, he tries to put his hands on us once in a while, but he’s not that bad. At least he wasn’t with me.” She nods at Jack’s fresh bandage, points to his torso. “Wish I could say the same about you.”
Jack walks over to her bookcase, starts reading the spines. She has some good books—Hemingway, Flannery O’Connor, Raymond Carver, Jayne Anne Phillips—things Jack’s started to read in his downtime.
“I just want to know that you don’t give a fuck about this guy, that you wouldn’t tell him what’s going on if he called.”
“You know, Jack?” She raises a finger, points at the front door. “I almost want to ask you to leave right now. What are you really asking me here?”
“Someone called someone and let them know where our meet was last night. I know the club owner called the police, but those shooters didn’t just happen by.”
She stands up. “And you think it’s me? You’re going to fucking stand here in the room where I cleaned your cuts and say this shit?” Her chin crinkles as she says this, but she doesn’t cry. “What is wrong with you, Jack Palms?” She comes over to him, stands close, and slaps him across the face.
Jack turns away, feeling the sting of her slap. Luckily she hit his good side. He tastes blood, then touches his lip and looks at his finger: red. “I just have to know,” he says.
“If you don’t already, then there’s nothing I can do.” She moves toward the bedroom, then looks back once, tells him to fuck himself, and goes inside, slamming the door.
Jack waits a few breaths, tapping his finger against her shelves. He knows she’s not coming back out. He finds a pad on her kitchen table and writes a note. Sorry I had to ask. I shouldn’t have, but I did. You’re right, I’m an ass. Call me.
Then he leaves.
Jack’s not sure about his next move, so he heads to the Hotel Regis, figuring he owes the Czechs a visit. He’s prepared for anything when the elevator door opens, so when the bodyguard has his gun raised at Jack’s head, he’s not surprised. Jack looks right at him, raises his hand to point at the guy’s face. “Now, what did I tell you about that?”
A moment passes where Jack’s eyes and the guard’s eyes meet. Then the guard blinks and lowers his weapon. Jack looks around the suite. “Can somebody tell me this guy’s name?”
From one of the couches, David salutes Jack with a thick glass of scotch and then turns his attention back to the TV. He’s wearing a white hotel robe, has his white-socked feet up on the glass coffee table. “That is Niki,” he says.
“Okay, guys,” Jack calls out to the room. “It’s me. I’m still not the one fucking you, but we got to start working together on this thing.”
Al comes out of a bedroom, holding a handgun of his own, a semiautomatic Beretta. He’s wearing jeans now and a too-tight yellow polo shirt, tucked in. “No. Fuck this, Jack.” He frowns and raises the gun, pointing it in the air. “We want coke. Not the shooting. If we need shooting, we need to be the ones.” He waves the gun over his head. “We kill. We shoot.”
Jack can hear Vlade call from somewhere in the suite. “People die here.” He comes out to the main room. “We come here to have fun, buy the coke. In America we plan big drive: San Francisco, L.A., Vegas, Phoenix, New Orleans. Who knows?” He raises his shoulders toward his face, holds his hands out. “Maybe we go all the way to New York. We don’t know.”
“New York is different,” Al says. He waves his gun around the room as he talks. “New York we cannot shoot. In San Francisco, we can shoot.” He comes closer, stops when he sees Jack’s face. “Jack Palms,” he says. “What happened to your face?”
“This?” Jack touches his cheek. “This is nothing.”
“No,” Al says. “What happened? Did that occur last night?”
Jack shakes his head. “It was dark. You didn’t see it. This happened yesterday, day before. It was Ralph’s friends at The Coast.”
“The Coast!” Al yells. “We will demolish that place to the ground. I go in there and burn that place gone. I kill Tony Vitelli! We stop everything else right now.” He’s pointing his gun around the suite.
Jack looks at the others: Niki and Vlade appear unconcerned, like they’re used to Al going off like this. Maybe they’re mad enough to go after Tony or whomever else they can take out their anger about Michal on; maybe they’re just humoring Al. David looks drunk, like he’s not going anywhere.
“Guys,” Jack says. “Relax. We should make this deal.”
“What can we do?” Vlade asks. “We have no coke. Our friend Michal is gone. Perhaps we let Al have for now what he wants.” He tilts his head at Niki, who nods.
“Okay. Okay.” Jack opens his hand toward the couch. “All right if I sit down?”
Vlade comes over to sit on one of the couches himself. He waves to Niki that he can come sit down too. “Niki did good job last night,” Vlade says. “So did your Maxine. Without her, we get arrested, I think. She show us way out. We like her.” David and Niki both nod.
Al comes all the way out into the center of the room, stands behind the couches. “Thank you, Jack,” he says. “You help me out of there. For this I owe you pay back The Coast.” He’s got his lower lip buttoned up over his upper one, looks like nothing could be worse than how he feels. “Can I make you drink?”
“Sure,” Jack says. “Club soda.”
Vlade laughs. “This has not made you to drink yet?” Al walks to the bar as David drains off the rest of his scotch and holds his glass up, clinking the ice against its side. “Yes, David,” Al says. “I hear you.”
In a half hour, Jack’s got the Czechs telling stories about where they’re from and how they made their money. They explain that they have an importing business in Ukraine that brings in fish for the fancy sushi restaurants that’ve started popping up in the former Soviet Bloc. It’s doing well enough that they can take a few months off and come to tour America. But not so well that they aren’t thinking about staying on if they can score enough blow to start dealing a little. First they want to rent motorcycles and drive across the plains and around the whole United States, stopping at the major citie
s. Their bikes won’t be ready for another few days, and getting the coke they want for the trip is causing problems—problems they’d like to see end.
Jack wonders whether he should tell them it’s not a good idea to be driving across the country with guns and a big supply of coke, but he figures that’s their problem, not his.
The coke they started with came from Ralph—he gave them a key when they arrived—then he was supposed to connect them directly to his supplier, a guy named Junius. The one Maxine mentioned. Then, Ralph being Ralph, he decided he thought he could get a better deal from Castroneves.
They never got to meet Ralph’s original connection.
“What the hell kind of name is Junius?” Jack asks.
They all frown, then shrug. “We do not know,” David answers. “We just know Junius. That is name.”
This is when Jack remembers Ralph’s message from his machine that morning, telling him to contact Joe Buddha. It’s not a lead to Junius, but it’s someone else Jack needs to follow up with.
“Let me get one thing straight,” he says, unable to leave it alone. “You guys want to take ten keys across the country with you on motorcycles?”
Vlade laughs, shakes his head. “Ten is too much. We will take just enough and leave the rest here in San Francisco. They have lockers here, no? We leave and then sell what we can for ourselves, to our own community here.”
“Yes,” David says. “Part we sell, part we keep.”
“Okay.” Jack raises his glass and the others follow. They’re all drinking scotch except for him and Niki. “We put this thing back together. Find out what’s happening with the guns, get in touch with Junius if that’s what needs to happen, and find out who did Ralph and Michal. We get you your coke.”
Jack looks at his watch: It’s a little after three in the afternoon.
“It is now Saturday. If you give me until this time tomorrow, we will get these things done.” Jack holds his glass over the coffee table and waits while the others exchange glances. Finally, they lean forward and touch glasses with his, Niki using his bare fist.
“You are on, Jack Palms,” Vlade says.
“But first we go to The Coast and burn down the mother-fucks who have attacked you. About last night, we do not know who did this. But this”—Al gestures toward Jack’s face—“this we know.”
Vlade picks up his gun off the table and sights down the barrel. Then he holds it back and looks at the gun’s side. “For you, Jack Palms, we have business with Tony Vitelli.”
Jack finds Joe Buddha listed in the phone book under his real name, John Wesley Taraval, with an address in Noe Valley.
Driving down Market, he tries Maxine at home to apologize and gets her machine. “Sorry about before, Max. I just found out you helped the Czechs get out last night. Thanks for that. I guess I owe you in more ways than one.”
He hopes he hasn’t pissed her off completely but thinks she’ll be okay once she settles down and has some time to unwind. If he has time, he decides, he’ll stop by her place again before meeting the Czechs at The Coast in a few hours.
But the first stop is Joe Buddha’s, where Jack can work on tracking down a few leads. He pulls up in front of a white row house on Church Street, at Chavez. As he gets out of the car and walks closer, Jack notices a little altar mounted high up beside the front door, a small shelf screwed right onto the side of the house. It holds a bowl of pears, a small collection of incense sticks, and a ribbon that looks like the prize from a horse-riding contest, but with Japanese characters on it.
Jack rings the bell and in a little while hears feet in the hall, then a small Asian woman opens the interior wooden door, regards him through a thin metal grate.
“Joe Buddha?” he says, and when that brings no response, “John Wesley Taraval?”
“Oh,” she says. “You are here to see John? Come right in.” She opens the metal-grated door and leads Jack inside a dark, carpeted hallway that smells like incense. At the end of the hall, Jack can make out a kitchen in the light of the room’s windows. Inside, at a small table, a small, wide man sits on a chair, eating in silhouette. Jack can tell it’s Joe Buddha even without seeing his face; nobody else has the body, the round paunch like Joe—the reason for the nickname Buddha. The woman leads Jack down the hall, and before she can announce him he bellows, “Old Joe Buddha!”
Buddha turns fast, surprised, and stands up. Jack comes into the kitchen and sees him in the full light: Before him stands his old friend, only smaller, older, more wrinkled, and with an even more pronounced middle. He’s always had one of those bellies that look like someone stretched the skin over a watermelon: tight-looking, but large.
“Holy shit,” Jack says. “You look even more like the old man now than ever.”
Buddha nods, spreads his arms. “As it has turned out to be.”
Jack fakes a punch at the paunch. “Don’t tell me you’ve finally gone Asian in your old age, turned religious on us.”
“This?” Buddha raises his short arms. “No,” he says, waving at it all with both hands. “This is all her. You just met my wife, Yuko.” He puts his arm around her and she smiles. They both laugh.
“Joe Buddha,” she says, rubbing his belly. “My little religious icon.”
Buddha runs his hand over his scalp and then around to the sides of his head, where he still has a bar of hair behind his ears and around the back. Otherwise, he’s shining bald. “Old Buddha,” he says. “Haven’t been called that in a while. You heard from Ralph, then?”
Jack nods. “Before he passed.”
Buddha shakes his head. “Yeah. We saw that one on the news. Not good.” He shrugs. “But what can you do? He got popped.”
“He told me to come find you.”
“He would. It was only a matter of time.” Buddha tucks in his chair at the table, carries the bowl of cereal he was eating over to the sink. He turns to look at Jack. “How are you?” he asks, all serious concern.
Jack nods. “I’m all right. Getting by.”
Yuko leans against the counter and looks at Jack sideways, regarding him. Buddha shakes his head. “We were worried about you, Jack. Really worried.”
Jack sits down at the table. “Yeah, well. I’m okay now. How long have you been up here in S.F.?”
Buddha shrugs. “Two years.” He moves to the table and puts his hands on the back of a chair. “I’m sorry we didn’t get in touch with you. I wanted to. I was concerned about how you’d be doing.”
“So you saw what happened?”
“Who didn’t? I’m still so sorry about Victoria, about what happened to the second picture.” Buddha was like that: He liked to call movies “pictures.” He’d been involved with Jack’s sequel, Shake It Up, as one of the producers. When it came down to it, though, the others had all pulled out around the time of his arrest. “The thing is, Jack, we could all see that coming for miles.”
“And you tried to warn me,” Jack says. “I know.”
“Victoria, Jack. She was fire.”
Jack nods. “But it was me too. I wanted some of that. I got into the coke myself, I guess H was just a matter of time. What did I know?”
Buddha shakes his head. He pulls out the chair and sits across from Jack at the table. “You know, Jack, we knew. I could see it all happening. I’m just sorry I didn’t help.”
“I don’t know.” Jack shrugs. “Maybe it had to happen.”
Buddha nods. Then he shakes his head as if he’s considered it and decided that it did not have to happen. “No, Jack,” he says. “We could’ve helped you more, gotten you out of that mess, helped you clean up. I have to believe that now.”
Jack nods, feels the soft tablecloth under his fingers. He knows what he’s come back from, that he’s in the middle of something crazy now, something he’s only hoping he can control.
“Can I have some cereal, Joe?” Jack says, realizing he hasn’t eaten breakfast, that all he’s had is the coffee with Maxine and no food.
Buddha
laughs. “Yuko, will you bring my friend here a bowl of our finest?”
Yuko looks at Jack, then back at Buddha. “No,” she says. Without hesitation, she walks out of the room. Jack can hear her feet padding on the rug in the small, quiet house as she moves back down the front hall and then up a flight of stairs.
“Did I say something wrong?” Jack asks.
“No. I did. I guess I’ll be getting that for you.”
Buddha gets up and moves around the kitchen, placing items on the table in front of Jack: the box of cereal, milk, a spoon, and a bowl. Jack pours out the cereal for himself, adds the milk. He hasn’t had any cereal in a day or two and misses something about it, about the routine of eating from the round bowl, the cold milk.
“Routine is what makes us who we are,” Buddha says, as Jack starts eating. “It’s how we find our true self.” He nods. “Once you read this Zen business, it’s actually not that bad.” He rubs his own stomach. “I used to hate that nickname for a while, but now it seems I’ve grown into it.”
Jack tastes the cornflakes, still crunchy, and counts his chews. He won’t have another cigarette today, not for a while, and he’s been doing well by avoiding all of the drinks he’s been offered. He’s still on the wagon. And he’s turned down the blow—all of it. He’s been out of the hills and his routine for three days now, and he’s still getting by. But it’s nice, in the small bowl of cereal and milk, to go back to routine even just a little. “I had a hard time coming back from the drugs and shit,” Jack says.
Buddha nods. “No one ever said that part was easy.”
Jack looks up, regards the lines around Buddha’s mouth as he says, “You know I never hit Victoria, right? Any woman.”
Buddha puts his hand over Jack’s, then withdraws it. “I know,” he says. “I knew from the first time I heard it, never believed those stories. But you know how they are down there. Still small and you get some bad pub, no one will touch you. You’re big and the bad pub works for you. The whole system is fucked.
