The Street Sweeper

by Elliot Perlman

  Lamont watched Danny’s eyes as he pulled the bad guy Shogun Warrior out of his bag. Danny Ehrlich saw the Shogun Warrior and his eyes widened till they were as round as golf balls. Then solemnly, Lamont handed it over to Danny Ehrlich, who stood there for a moment perfectly still, just trying to get a sense of its weight. Danny gently ran the thumb and index finger of his left hand over the length of the Shogun Warrior. He inhaled deeply, exhaled slowly, and said quietly, ‘Wow, I don’t believe it!’

  Still holding the Shogun Warrior, Danny Ehrlich turned suddenly and, without warning, ran down the hall to his mother in the kitchen yelling, ‘Look, Mom! Look what Lamont gave me. Isn’t it incredible?!’

  Lamont swallowed hard. He hadn’t expected Danny Ehrlich to think he’d given it to him and he didn’t know what to do. He walked slowly down the hall towards Danny and his mother. He’d never been in the kitchen before. He’d never met Danny’s mother before either. Danny Ehrlich had seemed to like his mother a lot. He stood in the doorway of the kitchen.

  ‘Thank you so much, Lamont, for that incredible monster,’ Danny’s mother said kindly.

  ‘It’s a Shogun Warrior, Mom,’ Danny corrected her with a momentary impatience. ‘Look at the arms!’

  Lamont couldn’t go home without it. That just couldn’t happen. His grandmother would miss it. He was sure she would. He’d asked herpermission to take it to Danny Ehrlich’s place and she’d permitted it only if he’d promised to be careful with it. He had been careful. He’d kept it safe at school all day, kept it hidden all day. All he had done at the very end of the day when he was alone inside the Ehrlichs’ home was to show it to his new friend, Danny Ehrlich, and to allow Danny to hold it. That was all he’d done. And now he was in all sorts of trouble. Michelle might want to see it again one day too. She had told her father precisely what it was he should buy Lamont and even where to go to get it. This was one of the best things Lamont had. Maybe it was the very best thing he had. His uncle had got it in Chinatown for him for his birthday. There was no telling what it cost. There would be no telling what would happen if he didn’t bring it back home with him. Should he say something to Danny Ehrlich? He couldn’t. This was a calamity for which his anxiety had been rehearsing and for which it would rehearse long after the event was over. It was the flavour of his adult life to come.

  Danny Ehrlich wasn’t in the room when Lamont put the Shogun Warrior action figure back in his school bag. He was going to smuggle it back to his grandmother’s apartment. No one saw him do it and Lamont wondered whether he’d get away with it. Perhaps Danny Ehrlich would forget about the Shogun Warrior action figure. No, this was not possible. Could it happen that Danny Ehrlich might think that he himself had lost it? After all, he had quite a lot of stuff. But this was unlikely, Lamont concluded. In fact, it was more than unlikely, it was impossible.

  Lamont had felt sick from the moment he’d heard Danny Ehrlich telling Danny’s mother that Lamont had given him the the Shogun Warrior. He felt even sicker when he secreted the action figure back into his bag. To the pain of his still possible imminent loss of the Shogun Warrior, to the expectation of his grandmother’s anger at him for giving Michelle’s gift away, and to his incredulity that something so inherently innocent had turned into such a nightmare was now added not only his gut-wrenching guilt for stealing the toy back but something even more powerful, more immediate, something that screamed like Danny Ehrlich’s father had in the story about him and the kid from ‘the Valley’, screamed till there were globules of sweat on his palms. It was terror. Lamont was afraid he would be caught with the Shogun Warrior action figure in his bag even though it was his. As it happened, he wasn’t caught. He made it back home with the toy in his bag undetected.

  Lamont said nothing about the incident to his grandmother. The next day Danny Ehrlich said nothing about it either. Perhaps he hadn’t yet noticed it was gone, Lamont speculated to himself. But this was clearly wrong. Of course Danny Ehrlich had noticed. Lamont was never again invited back to the Ehrlich house. In fact, Danny Ehrlich hardly ever spoke to Lamont again after that day. On the few occasions he did speak to him it was in a strangely polite way, not at all like a boy of his age would normally speak but in the tone of a teacher or a parent or a social worker. It was as though Danny Ehrlich had been coached by an adult on how he should speak to Lamont Williams should the need to speak to him again ever arise.

  Michelle never asked to see the Shogun Warrior action figure again nor did she ask to see anything else Lamont had been given for his birthday. Michelle wore perfume now and her feminine charm, the charm that had so engaged Michael’s imagination on the banks of the Hutchinson River, was even more evident. Then there was her poise and her intellectual hunger for things just out of Lamont’s reach, out of his then universe of awareness. It wasn’t merely that he didn’t understand these things – he didn’t even know what they were, just that they were. She had a slightly different way of speaking. He felt that it was a better way of speaking. She didn’t talk much any more about Jason and the Argonauts and any of the Ray Harryhausen stuff or about the Xanth books. She talked more and more like a girl who would any second now be a woman with a beauty she could no more hide than others could ignore. If she already had boyfriends she somehow managed to keep this area of her life away from Lamont. It wasn’t as difficult as it might have been since they were seeing less and less of each other anyway. If their grandmother knew anything about any of Michelle’s boyfriends she certainly never said. Michelle was the one, always the one, their grandmother didn’t have to worry about. Maybe Michelle was studying too hard to have time for boyfriends. If she had boyfriends, maybe they knew all those things Lamont imagined Michelle wanted to know.

  Sometimes seeing Michael was better than nothing. Often it wasn’t. Sometimes Michael had to bring his kid brother along, the one who would years later visit Lamont in Woodbourne. Michael liked to talk about girls. Who he wanted, what he’d done, who he’d touched and where, what he was going to do – he talked about it all. A lot of it, most of it, was lies. He would talk like this even in front of his kid brother, which made Lamont uncomfortable. Lamont thought about girls too but he didn’t much like talking about many of the things he thought about and he didn’t see much point lying to Michael or anyone else about his achievements in this or any other area. His self would know he was lying and he would feel ashamed.

  As his high school days sped to an end Lamont began seriously to consider what he should do after he left. He knew a few guys from the neighbourhood who had joined the Army. He didn’t know them well but he liked the idea of being ‘all that he could be’, liked the sound of it. He was still thinking about this when school ended and he picked up some construction work, unskilled and off the books. He had done that off and on during school vacations for quite a few years. It had enabled him to help his grandmother with money. And it had felt good having a little money. It was a feeling that made him go back to construction work after he left school.

  It was some years later that he happened to meet a young Hispanic man from Inwood on a construction site. They got talking and the man explained how he earned his living with the only thing the man had been left by his father when he’d died, his pick-up truck. It was old and needed a respect that bordered on pampering but it was taking care of him now just as the man’s father had promised it would. The man explained how the pick-up truck played only cassettes but that there was even something comforting about that when looked at in the right way. He had found some mixed tapes his dad used to listen to. He didn’t know who had made them for his father but he would drive around the city hauling things and making deliveries with his dad’s songs turned up loud. When Lamont asked the Hispanic man how this man’s father’s truck was taking care of him, the man explained that there was more delivery work than he could handle.

  ‘No reason it should stop long as I keep my dad’s truck in good shape and stay competitive. A guy can make a packet on the IKEA run alone, E
lizabeth, New Jersey, to Manhattan or wherever. People need help with that shit.’

  Lamont listened to the man’s description of what he did each day and liked what he heard. Later, over a beer, he asked him if he wanted another driver to take some of the extra work. The man said he needed to think about it. He could see that the two of them got on well. Nevertheless, as he explained politely, he felt he needed to be careful who he entrusted with his father’s truck. Lamont said that he understood this and that he respected it.

  ‘I hear every little purr my dad’s truck makes. You know?’

  ‘Sure, I understand. I bet you’re a good driver too.’

  ‘I’d like to think I am … most of the time.’

  ‘Prob’ly not enough for you to know the driver; you’d prob’ly want to know the guy who taught him to drive.’ The Hispanic man laughed.

  ‘I mean it,’ Lamont said.

  ‘What do you mean?’ the man asked.

  ‘Well, you seem to know yourself. Teach me how to drive.’

  ‘You don’t drive?’

  ‘I will if you teach me.’

  ‘You don’t drive?’ the man repeated, shaking his head in disbelief. Why was this man wasting his time?

  ‘I work construction. I live with my grandmother in the Bronx. And, no, I don’t drive. You teach me how to drive the way you think your dad would want someone to drive his van. You teach me to listen out for its purr and wheeze and you can take a cut off of me while I’m working and you’re resting.’

  ‘Listen, Lamont, you seem like a nice guy but … I don’t know.’

  Lamont wrote his name and phone number on the back of a Samuel Adams coaster and told Ramón, the Hispanic man, to think about his proposition. Almost two weeks passed and then Ramón called Lamont early one evening. His grandmother interrupted her preparation of pork chops and yams to answer the phone. It was some Spanish guy for Lamont.

  ‘What kind of music you like?’ Ramón asked.

  ‘Why do you ask me that?’

  ‘I need to know whether to leave my father’s mix tapes in the truck,’ Ramón answered. This was how Lamont started driving for a living. But first he had to learn to drive.

  When Lamont had suggested Ramón teach him to drive, he hadn’t really expected to be taken up on it. But once Ramón had agreed it seemed a time of possibility was dawning like perhaps no other he had known. It didn’t take him long to learn to drive. He liked driving and though it was Ramón’s truck, Lamont felt he was his own boss. They were friends. It had happened naturally, organically, as though it was meant to be, in a way no other good fortune had ever made itself known to him. To win Ramón’s trust, to learn to drive, to learn the vagaries of Ramón’s father’s truck – its throb and hum – to learn the streets of New York and even some in New Jersey that had been foreign to him and to have some extra cash in his pocket – it seemed like a new start. Over a period of weeks it felt to him as though his lungs had increased their capacity while his heart was able to beat more slowly, restrained for the first time by real calm as opposed to the calm he wore as armour, as protection. This new calm, the kind that can come from a sense of accomplishment, didn’t diminish his excitement. Never in his life had Lamont been more pleased to get up in the morning. The excitement abated after a while but the calm persisted for years. If he was ever going to meet someone like Chantal it would surely be during this time. And it was.

  In reality the biggest change in his luck was the way he was feeling when finally he spoke to her, rather than that a woman so attractive or so elegantly dressed should talk to him or even that she would appear at Cappy’s where he had whiled away so many childhood and adolescent hours reading and occasionally stealing comic books and magazines. But Lamont would never see it that way. He thought she was his luck, the agent of its change, and its realisation.

  She was only nineteen when they met. She was working at a cosmetics counter in an upmarket department store downtown. Only at this time would Lamont have approached a young woman who looked like Chantal. Only at this time would she have seriously considered the entreaties delivered in the quiet voice of a shy man who did not come on hard or strut like an inner-city peacock. At most other times in their lives – even had they been next to each other in a store, at a bus stop or at a movie theatre – they would not have even looked at each other. But the time was this time. He was buoyed by the promise of steady work and she was ready to try a man who had a job, no drug habit, no prison record, no children from another woman, and next to no money. So he asked her out.

  Although it was not the first time they had been out when he took her to eat steak and drink from glasses meant only for wine, rounded and swollen at the bottom like over-grown tulips, Lamont still had not got used to the fact that this woman kept saying ‘yes’ whenever he asked her to go out with him. With each ‘yes’ he had grown a little more confident but that didn’t stop him being nervous this time too. This nervousness, which showed no sign of subsiding, was almost a pleasant sensation so he didn’t entirely mind it. He just had to check himself to make sure he didn’t say or do anything inappropriate, anything he might regret when he replayed the evening over in his head at night in bed or else later in Ramón’s father’s truck. It was hard to resist the urge to touch her when she opened the door to her mother’s apartment. It was hard to resist touching her as they walked along Union Square.

  She knew the area better than Lamont because she worked near there. She knew people in the stores there – people on the day shift anyway – knew where to buy lunch. Best chicken salad sandwich ever was near the Flatiron Building. Famous. Real famous. Old Jew place of like a million years ago. On 5th. No, he didn’t think he knew it. What did he know? He knew that the cafeteria at the IKEA store in Elizabeth, New Jersey, opened a half-hour before the rest of the store. You could get eggs, potato and bacon for under a dollar. Bus your own tray so there’s no need to tip. That’s how they keep the prices so low. Probably. That might be part of it. Also, they buy in bulk, everything. Started in Sweden, Europe. The whole thing. Ever been there? Sweden? No, IKEA. No. Elizabeth? Where is it again? New Jersey. No.

  She had a friend who was trying to become a model. Surely that was something Chantal herself might want to do, Lamont had volunteered. Good money. She was certainly pretty enough. No, really. He had a cousin who was also very pretty, went to college and married a professor. Didn’t see so much of her. Not lately. Not these days. Tight when they were kids though. They had a daughter. Not really his niece, a cousin’s daughter, Sonia. He was thinking he might get his own van; set up on his own. Wasn’t sure. Maybe. Chantal thought that was a great idea. They really should think of printing the wine list in English. She laughed, thank God. He meant it but he also meant her to laugh at it. Didn’t know which he meant more. Didn’t matter. She laughed. This meal was going to kill him but it was worth it. Maybe he could pick up a couple of days’ construction work in addition to the driving. Didn’t make any sense to fill up on the bread unless he was going to take home that part of the steak he couldn’t finish. He wouldn’t do that unless she did. And he couldn’t know that in advance. Wasn’t worth the risk. He just wouldn’t do it. His grandmother loved a good steak, though. Shouldn’t have said that. Shouldn’t have mentioned his grandmother.

  They walked through Union Square and he thought he might be in love with her. He’d never paid so much for food in his life. If only Michelle could see him now. He would look into making a down payment on a vehicle of his own. The bigger the vehicle the more it could haul but the more it would cost to run. He thought he might be in love with her. His grandmother would be pleased.

  Look at all those other people walking or driving past. For once he could just look at them and not have to drink them in. Maybe as he and Chantal walked by there were people drinking him in; him, the man with her. How did they look together? Michelle would like it. She’d like the look of it. Maybe they would get married one day, have a cousin for Michelle’s little gir
l, Sonia, to play with. He leaned in to hear Chantal as they talked and walked. He had to. She didn’t lean in to him. It was the same crowd, same noise for her too. She faced the same thing. But she was younger. Perhaps her hearing was better than his? He didn’t notice this imbalance too much. Not too much. But his self saw it. He tried to banish the observation, to deny he’d made it. A random smile of hers ultimately enabled him to convince himself that she just really hadn’t heard what he had said to her. Maybe everything will pay off, maybe everything will work out? It could, he thought to himself.

  Michelle would have seen the inequality in their body language, an inequality that might have suggested the young woman was just visiting Lamont’s life. Their grandmother might have seen it too. But there was something more eventful his grandmother wouldn’t have seen that Saturday night. Lamont was again staying with her while he looked for an apartment to replace the one he’d been living in, which was being torn down. His grandmother wouldn’t have seen it because Lamont’s bedroom door that night was closed in a way that let out less light than usual. And she wouldn’t have seen it on the Sunday morning because she had gone to church, something she had long since given up trying to get her grandson to do. She had tried to talk to him about God when he was a boy. It wasn’t that he wasn’t interested but just that he didn’t understand what she was talking about. She clearly liked it very much – God, Jesus and the Church. But he didn’t really get it so he hardly ever accompanied her, not even when he was a boy. He particularly did not join her that Sunday morning. Instead, he smuggled Chantal into his room the night before and joined her. That was the time their daughter was conceived. Not long after she was born Lamont got his own van.

  No one could ever take that night away from him, even if later it seemed they could take his daughter away from him. That was still to come. First there had to have been their night together at his grandmother’s house, and the dinner in the steakhouse, and their walk through Union Square and how the men had looked at Chantal. It was the way men looked at her at the Visit Center at Woodbourne Correctional Facility a few years later. He was sharing a cell with a man named Darrell and he made the mistake one night of confiding in Darrell about the way he felt when he saw the other men look at Chantal. It had been a couple of months since she had visited Lamont but Darrell too had seen her then and, perhaps in an attempt to mitigate Chantal’s absence or perhaps merely to amuse himself, Darrell painted a picture with words that seemed to hang in the dead night air of their cell.