The real reason to come down from the apartment was because sometimes Grace Lei would step out and take her break, smoke a cigarette and stare out at the traffic. Jimmy liked to watch her, try to catch her eye, try to make her laugh.
“So what’s the difference between sesame chicken and General Tso’s?” he asked her, wishing she’d turn and look at him.
“The seeds.” Grace Lei watched the street. She was tall, and he stood straighter. Her hair hung down to her shoulders. He pictured running his finger along the ends of her hair and wondered if it would be soft, or maybe stiff, like bristles. Nothing would surprise him. He wanted to take the nail polish out and pass it to her, and watched her hands move as she smoked, trying to see if there was color at the tips of her fingers.
“The seeds, huh. That’s it? They should call it General Tso Plus Seeds.”
Jimmy watched through the glass as a Latino kid came out of the back of the restaurant and dropped a plastic bag on the table nearest the door.
Grace turned to Jimmy. “Where do you live? You’re always here.”
“Upstairs.”
A car pulled up, an old Chevy he’d seen before. A kid got out, an Asian kid with a red ball cap on backward and baggy jeans. Gold chains on his wrists and around his neck. He said something to Grace, but she just looked at the street, or at the firemen washing the trucks, or at nothing at all. The kid went into the Imperial and came back out again holding his order up to his face and miming hunger for his friends in the car.
She said to Jimmy, “Yeah, what’s it like up there?”
He turned to Grace, who he thought had never really looked at him before. He kept his body angled away and stole glances at her, as if she was something he was going to put in his pocket. He kicked at a yogurt cup crushed at the curb, its spilled contents a lurid, clotted pink.
“It’s okay. You can see the river, which you can’t really from down here. Sometimes you can.” He was aware that he was high, that he smelled like weed, and took a step farther away along the curb. He didn’t know how she’d feel about that, him being high. She might be cool, but the black-and-white work uniform and the way she held herself made her look somebody who was strict. You never knew about girls.
The kid with the bag got in the car and the guy behind the wheel stomped on the accelerator, almost clipping a van making the turn from Midvale. The Chevy was an old convertible with green metallic paint that glittered, a comet disappearing down Ridge toward Manayunk in a ribbon of green. Jimmy smiled, suddenly conscious of the neighborhood coiled on the hills above them, getting that way you could get under a head full of dope. Everything seemed connected; dark forces were at work moving cars and people around like pieces on a game board.
He turned back to Grace, but she was walking back inside, throwing away a cigarette. Her fingernails looked the same pale color as her fingers, some color that wasn’t yellow and wasn’t brown. There was a thin red stain on the white shirt at her hip. She wore tight black jeans and he let himself picture her stepping into them, her long legs that pale cream shade that he didn’t know what to call. He was suddenly too lonely to head back upstairs and walked around the corner to Buckets for a drink.
He stood at a window at Buckets, trying to see inside, to see who was behind the bar. A few weeks before he had swiped some change from off the counter and thought the girl bartender might have seen him do it, so now he only went in when she wasn’t there. While he was standing there, squinting through the dark glass, he saw Evan walking up toward the front door and stop. Evan waited for a short girl with hair dyed white-blond except for hard black roots and dark eye makeup. She was standing between two parked cars, rooting in her purse. He nodded at Jimmy, who smiled, his tongue out, and raised a hand.
“Hey, man. You getting a drink?”
“Oh, hey.” Evan looked at the bar, then doubtfully at Jimmy. “Ah, yeah. Well, no. Just getting something to eat.” The girl came over and hooked her arm around his. “Well, see you.”
“Man, you ever see Jesús and them?”
“Nah.” The blond girl moved a step toward the door, pulling Evan. “I got a job. At the Rite Aid.”
“Stacking boxes and shit?”
“Ah, I’m the manager. At night. You know.” Evan looked apologetic. “Anyway, Jesús went in the army.”
“No shit. Remember that time we took that grader and ran it in the creek? That was fucking retarded.”
“Yeah. Well.” He nodded his head. “I gotta go.”
Jimmy fished in his pockets and held out a bottle of blue nail polish to the girl. There was a long pause, then the girl fluttered her fingers to show him the rose tips.
“Sorry, not my color.” She turned to the door, her arm still hooked to Evan’s like they were chained together.
Evan lifted his shoulders, as if he wanted to stay and bullshit but he had to go. “Hey,” he said, looking at the bottle in Jimmy’s hand. “We carry that stuff.”
Jimmy got up the next afternoon and went to see his aunt to get more money. He walked up Stanton along the back of St. Bridget’s, feeling the heat coming up through his sneakers. The kids were in school, and he thought it was funny you could tell without seeing any sign of them, like the building gave off a kind of hum when it was full of people. He had dated a girl, Cheryll, who said he had a shaman aura, some kind of power to tell about things, a sense other people didn’t have. She had a tattoo of a tree and an owl and a pyramid with an eye in it. When he got pinched and sent to the Youth Study Center, he had been trying to steal a huge wheel of wire from the cable TV place where her brother worked. Jimmy thought she was in love with him. She was always saying what a dick her brother was, but she still wouldn’t talk to Jimmy after that, would hang up on him when he called from the center, the kids lined up behind him and tapping him on the shoulder so he’d give up the phone. So maybe she was wrong about his aura.
His aunt wasn’t really his aunt, she was his great aunt or his mother’s aunt or something. She lived near the tracks that ran in the gulley in front of Cresson, in a house so narrow he could almost reach out and touch both walls in the front room. He’d go over there once every couple of weeks and listen to her talk and leave with a couple hundred bucks. It paid for his rent, and he sold enough of the stuff he stole to stay in weed and the orange Drake’s cupcakes he liked.
The house was full of little green animals. Ceramic donkeys and horses and birds in a million different styles, but all of them green. There were also pictures cut out of the newspaper and put in crooked frames, including one that his aunt said was Princess Grace at a wedding at St. Bridget’s. Once when he came over his aunt was sitting in the dark watching movies of some kind of procession of kids dressed up in matching outfits, the colors faded into a muddled blue. The girls all had on the same uniform dress and veils, and he said, “Is this Muslims?” before he realized it was little kids at St. Bridget’s getting first Holy Communion. His aunt didn’t seem to hear him, shaking her head and saying something like, “There’s your uncle Pete,” or, “Oh, look at Mary, how young she is,” but he didn’t know any of the faces.
She made him drink blue skim milk and gave him cookies from a tin. He thought if he could get her to give him some extra money sometime, he could invest in a quarter-pound of weed. He told her he wanted to go into business.
“Doing what? You should be in school.”
“I don’t know. Selling things.”
“You’re a dreamer. You get that from your father.” She walked him to the door, stopping to look at the framed clippings. “I used to tell people we were related, me and Grace. Because of the Kelly name. I just wanted it to be true.”
Jimmy looked at a picture of Princess Grace in a green dress, her hair swept back and her body arched, like a bow.
His aunt held out a small wad of cash. “But we’re not the princess kind of Kelly, are we? We’re just the other kind.”
The next afternoon he wrote, 9/06, silver bullet lighter, AM/ PM market, in
the composition book, and went downstairs, his pockets full. He had glass bottles of makeup, lipsticks in two shades. He came through the door in time to see the Latino kid handing the bag to the guy from the Chevy and saying something, his head close to the guy’s ear.
Something was going on. Jimmy watched the Chevy drive off and the kid in the doorway watching them go and then turning to look at Jimmy. The kid was big, with a shaved head and tattoos on his neck. His eyes were dark, with heavy lids that made him look sleepy, and when he looked into Jimmy’s face it was like there was a tunnel in the air between them so that Jimmy couldn’t turn away. But it meant something, the kid hitting him with an attitude.
Grace Lei came out then and said something to the kid so that he sneered at her, showing her the back of his hand. Jimmy couldn’t dope out the gesture, but he got that it was something disrespectful, and when the kid turned to go inside Grace gave his back the finger. There was shouting from inside and then she came all the way out and got a cigarette from a pack in her purse.
Jimmy stumbled a little getting across the sidewalk to offer her the lighter. She lit her cigarette and held the lighter out, but he waved her off.
“Keep it.”
She stuck it in her pocket without looking at it and turned back to the street.
He said, “That guy giving you a hard time?”
“Ah, never mind about him. That’s Luis. He thinks he’s a big deal because he’s friends with Tiger.” She pointed to the street.
“Tiger?”
“That Chinese boy who comes here every day.” She looked over her shoulder, lowered her voice. “He’s in a gang. They sell drugs. They’re idiots.”
Jimmy wanted to do something to the kid, but he couldn’t think of anything. He lifted his palms and looked at them, the fingers of his left hand smeared with ink from the pen. He noticed for the first time a stripe of maroon in Grace’s black hair. Was it new, or had he just never noticed?
“I like your hair.”
She shook her head and threw away her cigarette. “It’s just hair.”
“If you could go anywhere, where would you go?” He figured he had about a second before she went inside.
“Go? I can’t go anywhere.”
“I see you watching the cars. Do you wish you could get away somewhere?”
She looked at him again, and her eyes were tired. “I’m not going anywhere.”
The next two days he didn’t leave to steal anything. He sat around the apartment smoking weed and waiting on the end of the day so he could go downstairs and watch. At about six the first night he went down the stairs quietly with his notebook and crossed the street. He sat with his back to a tree in the tiny park next to the fire station across the street and watched the front of the restaurant. The tree was one of those with the leaves that he thought looked tropical, like a fern or something, and it was as if he was on an island, only the island was between Ridge Avenue and Kelly Drive and instead of circling sharks there were cars running up and down the river.
He had on three cheap watches he’d stolen, two of them with the same time. When the big kid, Luis, walked out of the back with the bag and put it on the table, he wrote down the time from each of the three watches and then waited. He could see Grace inside, but she was at the counter and didn’t come out. After six minutes by the top watch (a girl’s watch with a lavender band and fake gemstones around the face), the Chevy pulled up and the Asian kid with the cap and the chains got out and grabbed the bag. He said something to Grace that made her face go tight and then walked out again and the car pulled away.
Jimmy wrote down the time again and then got up and walked the long way around the block.
No money. That was how Jimmy knew there was something going on. Luis came out and dropped the plastic bag, and not on the counter where all the other bags went, but on a table near the door. It looked like any other bag, full of food, but it wasn’t. The Asian kid came in and took it, and didn’t pay anybody. Didn’t talk to anyone except Luis, and sometimes Grace, who wouldn’t talk back, but kept her eyes down.
The next afternoon Porter came over to buy more of the stuff Jimmy had piled up around the apartment. Jimmy liked Porter because he was older, a grown-up, and still out of control, and because he had red hair that stood up on his head. Most of the adults he ran across seemed like someone had let the air out of them or something, or like they were all nearsighted and not being able to see anything made them cautious and slow. Porter charged in and threw shit around the room, did lines of coke he never thought to offer anyone else, would spend fifteen minutes beating Jimmy’s price down only to hand him more money than he’d promised. Jimmy asked Porter’s opinion about the Imperial Garden.
“Oh, that’s a fucked life, kid. They bring a hundred people at a time sealed in containers, then they owe so much money they gotta work shit jobs for years to pay off.”
“Containers?” Jimmy picturing Grace Lei in a giant shrink-wrapped plastic package, like the headphones from Best Buy he could never get open and had to saw at with a steak knife.
Most of the stuff piled up in the apartment was worthless crap. Porter never got tired of pointing this out to Jimmy, but he also went through everything meticulously; holding up and identifying each baseball, coffee mug, book, candlestick, decorative plate, and teapot Jimmy had stacked up around the apartment, and then guessing what it was worth.
“What the fuck is this?” he’d say, holding up a collectible action figure from a comic book store. “A doll?”
“It’s Wolverine. From the comic book. It’s worth like a hundred and fifty bucks.”
“To little kids. Or retards, maybe. I’ll give you ten. This?”
“It’s a fork. I think.”
“You got no eye, kid. Honest to Christ. A fork. Did you at least get the spoon?”
“Fuck you.”
“You need to start boosting jewelry.”
“That shit’s all locked up.”
“You need to put together a crew. When I was your age, I stole with five, six other guys. A girl with a cute ass. She bats her eyes, the clerk opens the case.”
“I don’t want to get put away again.”
“At your age? What’d you get, like three months? In kiddy jail. That’s nothing. That’s the cost of doing business.”
“It sucks. It’s boring. The big kids fuck with you and steal your shit. I couldn’t wait to get out of there.”
“How old are you? Jesus Christ, you’re in the prime of life. You should be boosting everything you can get your hands on. Steal every fucking thing and run like a jackrabbit.”
“Why don’t you?”
Porter’s eyes got big. “I’d go to real jail, kid, and that’s no fucking joke. Not like Henry Avenue.”
“You think I want to go? Back to jail?”
Porter looked around, his eyes going back and forth. “Kid, I got to tell you. Living like this? In this rathole? It’s not that different than prison.”
The night he stole the bag from the Imperial he didn’t smoke, but sipped at a bottle of peach brandy that had been in the apartment when he moved in. He stood in the window a long time, looking down at the cars and the river and working himself up to it. The brandy tasted weird, and he wondered if that was how peaches tasted. He ate a cupcake he’d gotten at Major Wing Lee’s, the little store on the corner. He leaned on the window frame and looked up and down Ridge. The road was busy, and it was getting a little dark, which he liked.
He pictured how it would go, flitting through the shadows, the bag sliding across the table to him like a magic trick. Him and Grace Lei together, dumping out the money onto his mattress, maybe five or ten thousand bucks, and him seeing her smile for the first time, maybe the first time since she came to America. He cupped his hands in front of himself, mentally calculating how much might fit in the bag.
Coming out onto the street he could hear a rising scream, the siren from one of the trucks starting up across the street, and he pressed him
self flat against the door like a bug caught in the light. He moved sideways, looking left and right, his back flat against the storefront of the hair place next to the restaurant. He had his watches on and looked at his wrist. Three minutes more, give or take. He stood at the edge of the window and looked in.
Grace was standing at the counter, her back to the street. He looked east up the street for the Chevy but there was a line of cars stretching away toward Philly and he couldn’t tell if it was coming. At the same moment that he saw the bright grillwork of the old Chevy, Luis came out of the back, swinging the bag. The Chevy approached, a few cars back from the light at Midvale. Jimmy’s eyes went back and forth, back and forth, while the car inched along and Luis took his fucking time getting to the front table.
Jimmy crabwalked along the front of the Gardens, his head on a swivel. Luis seemed to be looking out the front door, and Jimmy was ready to drop to his shaking knees if Luis swung his head around. The Chevy was there, three cars back from the intersection, and Luis was still standing at the door. Jimmy could see the Asian kid in the front seat, his cap bright red. Jimmy was breathing hard and mumbling under his breath, Come on, come on. There was a gap open in front of the Chevy and Luis still hadn’t dropped the goddamn bag.
The light changed, going yellow and then red, and the Chevy stopped hard. Luis opened his hand and dropped the bag, turning to the counter. Jimmy took two steps, three and stuck his head in the door. Luis was close, his back turned. There was a line of sweat baked through his massive white T-shirt and he smelled like starch and fried food. Jimmy put his hand out and touched the bag, his hand formed into a hard L shape that scooped it off the table. Luis said, “Hey,” and Jimmy looked up to see who he was talking to and it was Grace, who cocked her head as Jimmy stepped backward out the door, the bag up at his chest, and they looked at each other and she saw Jimmy plain with the bag, and her eyebrows went up but he was gone.
Philadelphia Noir Page 8
