Edna Carruthers ran the chowder truck. Her husband had started it five years ago, sinking their entire savings into it and mortgaging their small home in Gardena. Then the bastard had died while getting a blow job from a prossie in Koreatown, leaving her chained to the chowder, even though she’d never wanted anything to do with clams or chowder or sourdough-fucking-bread bowls. Now she was the owner, manager, cook and server, and she had no other life than to serve the tourists over at Ports of Call during the day, and at night the longshoremen and denizens who called the docks home. I’d often see her snoring gently, her head on her arm as she waited for the odd customer to creep out of the shadows. She’d at least tried to celebrate the season with a scraggly old length of lights around the serving window. Red, green, blue winks like they were laughing at us.
And then there was me.
I’d been going to Harbor College, working toward a degree in law enforcement, for so many years now it seemed ridiculous to still call myself a college student. I lived on the couch of a one-bedroom five-hundred-square-foot apartment in Lomita. I paid half the rent, which came to six hundred a month. My bills and college loans came to another six hundred. In a good month, I might clear fourteen hundred dollars running the hot dog cart, leaving me with two hundred dollars mad money, which normally went to bus fare so I could get back and forth to work. When I had more, I’d take a class if I could find the books cheap enough. If it wasn’t for the hot dogs on the cart, I’d have nothing to eat. But then again a good hot dog consisted of all the food groups, especially if you understood that ketchup was a fruit. In between sales—and there was a lot of in-between time—I read mysteries. I’d gotten hooked on Sherlock Holmes when I was a kid; now I entertained myself by making deductions about my customers, telling myself I was practicing skills for the future.
An hour later my Christmas Elf was back.
I checked my watch. We were fifty-five minutes into Christmas morning.
Edna snored.
Frank rattled his fingers in a meth-fueled rat-a-tat-tat on the metal serving ledge of his truck. He was going to be in the shit if the Angels found out he was using their product.
We were five minutes away from the longshoremens’ union-mandated break.
“Gimme one with everything,” came a voice I’d been aching to hear.
And there she was. All the times I’d seen her, all the times I’d watched her, she’d never come to me, instead getting pastries from Frank or chowder from Edna instead.
“Everything? Even peppers?” I managed to say.
She had fairy features. Small nose. Small chin. Slightly slanted eyes, revealing something Asian in her genetics. My gaze was drawn to the space between her brown eyes, wider than that of most women, forcing my own eyes to dash back and forth to take in the whole of her elfin beauty. I couldn’t tell anything else about her, not from just looking. I wasn’t very good at being Holmes.
“Oh, ’specially peppers,” she said, drawing out the words.
I tried to look cool while I made her hot dog. I’d always been nervous around beautiful women. This one seemed to be more beautiful than most, if not completely intriguing.
“I see you watching me. Watching me talk to the customers. Thinking about me, like you’re Sherlock Holmes or something.”
I felt my heart skip as I spooned onions over the ketchup and mustard. I suddenly wondered if she kissed her johns. With the onions, one would think she didn’t. I felt her watching me, knowing she wanted a response. “I didn’t mean to stare,” I managed to say.
“Of course you did, Mister Hot Dog Man,” the last coming out as if it were part of a song. Mister Hot Dog Man.
I relished the words and forced myself to gaze at her.
“I know how I look,” she said as straight as any businesswoman. “I work at it.”
I smiled weakly. The last time I’d had a date, it was a divorcée in my building. She was ten years older, burdened by her three kids, and just wanted a good fuck. Two glasses of chardonnay and a piece of pizza and she had me doing her like a dog in the middle of my living room floor amid a battle array of Power Rangers and a talking teddy bear that she kept bumping, which made it sing. Even thinking of it made me feel dirty in front of this prostitute.
I added a swirl of mayo on top of the finished product, then wrapped it in paper and handed it to her.
She held out a ten.
I shook my head. “I got this.”
She frowned. “Don’t do that.”
“No, really. Merry Christmas.”
“I said don’t do that, Sherlock.”
“Don’t do what?”
“This isn’t a date. It’s business.”
“But it’s Christmas.”
She thrust out a hip. “Do I look like a kid waiting for Santa Claus?”
“But what if I want to give it to you?”
“Never give away what you can’t afford to give.”
“How do you know I can’t afford to give it away?”
She laughed throatily, a bite of hot dog rolling in her mouth. “You out here slinging sausage tells me you can barely afford to breathe, sugar. The only people worse off than you is Frank, who’s about to get shanked for using product, and Edna, who’s thinking about walking away from everything and living on the street just so she can get a day off.”
I thought about what she said as I watched her eating the hot dog. Finally, I asked, “And you? Can you afford to give it away?”
She lowered her head and smiled, a speck of ketchup caught in the corner of her mouth. “Sherlock, this girl doesn’t give nothing away.”
As we laughed together, the horn blew, signaling the longshoremen’s break.
She finished her hot dog and wiped her mouth. “Time for both of us to get to work, right?” She pointed her chin to the dozens of men heading our way. “I know several are going to want a Christmas special.”
I nodded, realizing too late that I’d forgotten to ask her her name. I was soon swamped as the hungry men descended on the three food venues and the lone whore.
By one-thirty we were alone again. A pickup pulled up, and out she hopped. She glanced once in my direction, but remained standing where she was. I wanted to go see her, but I wasn’t supposed to leave the cart. Looking around, there was no one except Frank, Edna, her, and me.
Fuck it. What could happen to the cart?
I cinched up my bravery and strode over to her, adjusting my cap, smoothing my apron.
“Hey,” I said.
She turned to me. She’d been crying.
Anger blossomed inside me. “What’d he do to you?”
“It’s not that. I’m okay.”
“But you’re hurt.”
She shook her head and wiped a tear away. “I’m not. It’s okay.” She turned to me. “I’m fine.”
“Then why are you crying?” I glared at where the pickup had disappeared. “Did he do something to you?”
She sighed and bit her lip. “I know what’s best for me.”
I felt the need to be a hero. I persisted. “How can you know—”
“I know. I just do. Get it?” She turned away. “Just go!”
I rejoined my cart. I noticed that Edna had watched the whole episode and rolled her eyes. What was I getting myself into? I turned away from her and stared up into the lighted cranes. I knew that they were merely machines, but they’d always seemed a little eerie to me, as if they were monsters, waiting to be called to life.
“Hey,” came her soft voice from behind me.
I turned. She was no longer crying. She stared up at me, worry in her eyes. She was so beautiful.
“Sorry,” she said.
I shrugged. “That’s all right. I can be pushy.”
She smiled weakly. “All men are pushy. It’s in your DNA.” She put her hand on the cart, giving her manicured nails something to tap against. “Listen, I know things. If I tell you to leave, then you need to get far away from here, okay?”
W
hat did she mean? “How can you know?”
Now it was her turn to shrug. “I just do. It’s like I was born knowing.”
“Knowing what?”
She sighed. “Everything. Nothing. It doesn’t matter. It’s silly.”
I let the silence surround us for a moment, but it became too heavy too quickly. “It’s not silly,” I said. “I think you are something awesome,” then died inside as each word fell lamer and lamer.
“No. Don’t say that. I’m just a regular girl.”
Still, I persisted. “There’s nothing regular about you.”
“You just don’t know. I’m simple. Basic. I’m—I’m a girl in the key of C.”
Just then an old but beautiful Chevy lowrider rumbled slowly by. Carlos Santana blasted from big trunk speakers. Two heavily-tattooed cholos slouched in the front seat of the car, which was the metallic green color of a June bug. Hats cocked, eyes lasered in on Frank’s food truck, they were oblivious to us. I watched the man in the passenger seat, distinctly aware that I couldn’t see his hands. I followed his gaze to the coffee truck. The light was on but Frank wasn’t there. The bangers didn’t stop, but kept going.
Edna and I locked gazes, as the music receded.
Where was Frank?
“Be careful,” said the girl, then she slipped into the night.
A ship’s horn blew.
Then silence.
One hundred and twenty minutes into Christmas, I fed two port police officers. Fifteen minutes after that, a foreman from a nearby loading crew came over and bitched and moaned about the quality of workers he had that night. He had nothing but management working to get overtime, and wanted real workers because this crew was way too slow. Longshoremen made between twenty and fifty bucks an hour. I’d give anything to get one of those jobs, and told him so. He mumbled something about the union and having to know someone, then paid up and went back to yell at his men. I didn’t have a chance to ask how one gets to know someone.
The Girl materialized once more twenty minutes later, looking more and more like a Christmas elf.
I wonder if she’d grant me a wish. Then I shook my head to dislodge the idea. She’d never go for me. I was just Mister Hot Dog Man. Still, I went over to her, hands in pockets, confidence balanced on the tip of a smile.
“Hey,” I said like a conversational genius.
“Hey,” she said back. She glanced worriedly at Frank’s truck, then back at me.
“My name’s not Sherlock. It’s Danny.” I stuck out my hand.
She took it like it was someone else’s used Kleenex and gave it a brief squeeze.
“What’s that mean, that you’re a girl in the key of C?”
She paused a moment, then pulled out a nail file from her tiny white handbag. She began working on her right hand as she asked, “Are you familiar with music?”
“I listen to it.”
“But you don’t play it.”
I remember when my mother wanted me to play the trombone. I’d thought it a totally stupid instrument at the time, but now I wished I’d had, if only to have something to talk about with the Girl. So instead of conversation, I let a “No” escape from my lips.
“Never evs?” she asked, grinning.
I couldn’t help but reciprocate her cuteness. “Never evs.”
“So, a key is a kind of guide on how to play the other notes. A song will sound different depending on the key it’s played in. C, or C major, is one of the simplest keys, ’cause it doesn’t have any sharps or flats. Get it?”
I nodded. “C is the most . . . common?”
She nodded. “It’s the first key beginning students learn.”
“So what does that have to do with you? It’s not like you’re a musical instrument. It’s not like you’re common at all.”
“Don’t be so sure.” She cracked a smile. “‘A Girl in the Key of C’ means I’m the normal. I’m the simple that people look for. When their lives get so hard . . . so sharp . . . so flat . . . they want nothing more than to find the center. The C of it.”
“C as in Christmas,” I said.
She looked at me oddly. “Why do you say that?”
I tried to come up with a reason, but I’d only said it because it had come to me. Now I cursed inwardly for even saying anything and disrupting her flow. “Cause it’s Christmas day?”
“Christmas isn’t the center. Christmas is the sharpest of sharps and the flattest of flats,” she said. “I’m anything but Christmas.”
You’re my Christmas every day, I said to no one ever, but wanted to now. What I actually did say, I tried to make serious, but it came out almost reverent. “You’re anything but normal.”
There was an awkward moment. Then, “If you say that, it means you’re so far away from normal that you can’t even recognize it.”
I thought about that as she strode away. So I was one of her sharps. I was one of her flats. It bothered me to hear her say it. What was normal? Was it normal for a thirty-year-old man to be living on a couch, still going to college with teenagers, living hand to mouth, his only method of transportation the city bus, and whose entire diet was hot dogs? It could be argued that it was normal for L.A. I knew plenty of people like me—but no, I didn’t really know anyone. To use her musical metaphors, if my life was an old vinyl record, I lived in the scratchy grooves at the end of the album. My music had played and I was caught between the music I’d already heard and the music that had yet to start.
So how could I get my life to the new music?
Frank returned on a bike ten minutes later. He stopped by my cart. His whole body trembled like it was in the middle of a methquake.
“Anyone come looking for me?” His normally combed hair was mussed. His gaze moved frantically from object to object.
“Two bangers in a lowrider,” I said.
“Shit. Shit.” He swiveled in his seat to look at the road behind him. “Did they say they’d be back?”
“Didn’t say nothing at all.” I watched his eyes dart back and forth. “And I didn’t bother to ask,” I added.
He put foot to pedal and without any further words, went to his truck. He disappeared inside for five minutes, then appeared at the counter, his elbows resting on it as he listened to KROQ playing softly on a portable radio as if everything was normal.
I suddenly remembered a science teacher I had in ninth grade—Mr. Southard. He had this gravitational experiment he liked to show us. He had an immense metal bowl with a clear plastic top. He’d put a marble into it and shake the bowl so that the marble would travel all the way up to the rim, then circle, and circle, until it eventually found the center.
“Everything wants to go to the center. It seeks it. It wants it.”
Then he’d remove the cover and do the experiment once again. At first, it had the same result, but then he’d shake the bowl harder and harder until the marble finally flew free.
“Sometimes it can escape the center,” he’d said. “But once it does, there’s no going back. That marble escaped gravity. It’s out there looking for a new center. Maybe it will find it, maybe not.”
Strange how that memory had sprung forth. I hadn’t thought of Mr. Southard in years. I’d always wondered what the hell he’d been talking about, but I suddenly understood. The center in science was the large object that everything else rotated around. In life it was normalcy. As I thought the word, I broke it down once more—and laughed: normal-c—The Girl in the Key of C. It was too perfect to be coincidence.
Once again, I realized that I didn’t even know her name.
One hundred and eighty minutes into Christmas saw another shift break. We were all busy. I noticed that when the longshoremen came across the walk, the Girl was nowhere in sight. She must have gotten good work. Edna, Frank, and I did brisk business for half an hour, then it was a ghost town once more.
The Girl appeared ten minutes after that and went straight to Frank’s truck. They appeared to argue for a few minutes, then she st
omped away. She stood in the middle of us, staring at the ground, her eyes furious, but concentrating. Then she slowly raised her head, her gaze first falling on Edna, then eventually falling on me with so much weight, I could hardly breathe.
She glanced once at Frank, then strode toward me, now with the ferocity of a dark rider from Lord of the Rings. “Listen,” she began, her words low but forceful. “You’re going to go to the police and report what you’re about to see. Ask to speak with the FBI. Ask them for protective custody. They’re going to change your life. They’re going to make it normal again. This is your chance. This is your redo.”
Was this is my flipped album? Was I going to escape the groove? But how? She was talking nonsense and I said as much to her.
“Remember when I was crying earlier and you thought someone hurt me?”
I nodded.
“The man I was with then . . . he’s going to die later on this morning in a car crash, heading to his ex-wife’s house to give his son Christmas presents. I tried to see a way out of it, but if it’s not him, then it’s a four-year-old girl, or a mother of three, or a young man who’s destined to create a new vaccine. I can see it all if I concentrate, and it’s . . . it’s just too much.”
I stared at her, aware that my mouth was open. I closed it. “I thought you said you were normal.”
“Are you listening to me? Did you hear me? Go to the FBI. Ask for protective custody.”
“FBI,” I repeated. “Protective custody. Got it.” Then I shook my head. “I don’t get it.”
She sighed in exasperation, then glanced over at Edna. “Watch her. She’s going to touch her ear when the next customer comes over, then she’s going to laugh and then she’s going to hand over a cup of chowder, but then watch as she lets it go, spilling it on the man.”
I watched, and everything the Girl said came true, every last thing down to the spill of steaming hot chowder.
“How did you—did she do it on purpose?”
“I never know the whys; I just know the whats . . . as in what’s going to happen.”
For the Sake of the Game Page 20
