Double Reverse

by Tim Green

  For ten minutes the men watched Trane lie inert before he began to stir. When he rose he walked casually toward the big car that was parked next to his own red Mercedes convertible. His bulging muscles quivered like a horse's flank under his taut dark skin, an impressive sight. Dried grass stuck to his body from where he had lain, and the canvas vest, his soggy T-shirt, and a plastic gallon jug of water weighed down either hand.

  When Trane could see the whites of their eyes, the three men got out of the Rolls and greeted him. Dobbins introduced Lunden as the head of Zeus Shoes. Trane knew the deal Dobbins was working on with the man called Lunden was supposed to be very big. Still he gave Lunden a bland look as he shook his hand. Lunden wiped Trane's sweat off of his hand on his pink golf shirt without apology. The dark fingerprints left a mark on the shirt that was reminiscent of smeared blood.

  "Nice to meet you," Lunden said.

  "Yeah, you too," was Trane's surly reply. He turned to Dobbins for an explanation. The agent knew Trane didn't like people watching his workouts. He'd warned him more than once that he wasn't a racehorse.

  "Little too hot out there for you," Dobbins commented slyly, his bald head already beginning to gleam with sweat. "Got yo' ass a little sick."

  "Some of us sweat for a livin', Conrad," Trane said.

  Dobbins emitted a little laugh and patted Trane playfully on the shoulder. "My man," he said, "you don wanna know how many times I hadda sweat for you. Ha ha ha."

  "I wanted to meet you in person," Lunden explained without being asked, "and I'm not big on lunch. I like to see people in their element. It gives you an idea what they're about. . . That was an impressive workout. Conrad tells me you do it every day."

  "I do what I have to." Trane sulked.

  "Glad to hear it," Lunden said, apparently unaffected by the player's boorishness.

  "How 'bout we go get us a goddamn drink," Conrad suggested pleasantly.

  "I'm gettin a shower," Trane grumbled.

  "How 'bout my place?" Dobbins said. "You get your shower. I get us some goddamn drinks. The sun goes down, an' we talk some motherfuckin' business, get us all rich."

  Trane shrugged his assent and pulled his T-shirt on over his grassy, sweaty torso. "I'll follow you," he said, sliding into the front seat of the Mercedes.

  Lunden nodded and they were off, winding their way down through the hills and then along Mulholland Drive to West Hollywood.

  "You know where it is," Dobbins said to Trane with a grin when they got there. "Me and Kurt'll be on the deck."

  When he first came to L. A., Trane had actually lived with Dobbins and some of his things were still in the guest bedroom. Fifteen minutes later he . Emerged from the house in an electric blue pair of silk pants with a black body top. Zee was making drinks at the bar, and Trane had him mix a vodka martini with two olives. He took that over to the table where they liked to play dominoes and sat down facing the view. Lunden observed him coolly and picked gently at the skin on the bridge of his nose. Dobbins had his 8mm rolling. He was narrating.

  "This is a moment in time, brothers an' sisters, when a great white man comes into our midst and reaches out his hand across years of oppression to offer a partnaship, a partnaship, my brethren! The white man sharing with the black, both of them getting goddamn rich . . ."

  "A bit melodramatic," Lunden pointed out. He reached down into his briefcase and brought three copies of a contract out onto the table.

  Trane tapped the ball in his tongue against the edge of his glass and let a bit of the drink spill into his mouth. Dehydrated as he was, the alcohol found his brain in a matter of seconds. He didn't show any interest in the contracts, not because he wasn't interested but because he didn't want either of them to think they had something he wanted. That's how he liked to play things.

  "Go ahead, Trane," Dobbins crowed. "Sign that deal an' make us all rich as Bill motherfuckin' Cosby."

  Trane looked off away from the table at the city and the setting sun beyond. The sky was fading from pink to red.

  "What is this shit?" he sneered before letting more of his drink slip away from the glass.

  "What is it? What the fuck is it?" Dobbins said, his blood apparently up. "It's just the biggest motherfuckin' sneaker deal ever! You an Zeus Shoes! Big as it gets! A megadeal from the mega- agent!" He took out his pen and laid it down aggressively on top of the contracts.

  "Better not be any of that ice-cream shoe bullshit," Trane muttered as he picked up the contract to give it his own perusal, which consisted of reading six or seven random words per page and maybe locking in on a number or two. "How much?" he asked, turning to Dobbins with a smile. "I see a lot a shit, but I don't see how much."

  "Maybe mo' than anything you're makin' playin' motherfuckin' football," Dobbins responded.

  "Maybe?"

  "Your compensation is in stock options," Lunden explained.

  "We build a line of shoes around you. If it works, Zeus Shoes stock will go up as much as three thousand percent. With the options I'm giving you, you could make twenty to thirty million, maybe more."

  "Maybe? We got a lot a maybes in this fuckin deal," Trane said slowly. "What if this thing ain't nothin' but funk! Then that's what we'll be getting', motherfuckin' funk."

  Lunden stared passively and waited.

  "Hey, my man," Dobbins said glibly, "I told you all about it. We get nothin' if it don't work, but it will work! An' without this deal we ain't gettin' shit anyhow."

  "What about those motherfuckin' shoes?" Trane shot out. "I ain't backin' no motherfuckin' ice-cream shoes!"

  Lunden's mouth was hanging open now in a half frown, and Conrad Dobbins began to worry that the man was losing patience. He glared at Trane. He'd talked with him about the deal just yesterday. Nothing was wrong with it then.

  "The shoes we've designed," Lunden said patiently, "are a line just for you. They capture your image--a bad image, frankly." He reached back into his briefcase and extracted five glossy prints. He handed them across the table.

  Trane examined them crossly.

  "We tested these," Lunden said, gauging the player's face. "In malls. What we do is put pictures of all the different shoes we're considering up on a two-way mirror. Then we watch the kids. It's simple numbers. We record the number of engagements and the amount of time they spend looking. It works. It's the same way NFL teams now find out what new logos they're going to use."

  "Now this is some shit," Trane said, shaking his head and unable to keep from smiling at the array of black, gold, and white shoes, each adorned with the dark insignia of a screaming skull with demonic bloody teeth. "This shit's killer."

  "What'd you say?" Lunden said, leaning forward.

  "Shit's killer, the motherfuckin shoes, man!" Lunden smiled broadly now. "Bad is good," he said. "Naw," Trane said, looking up with his evil grin, "it's bad." "Yeah, we can use that," Lunden said with the appreciative smirk of a huckster. "Killer shoes. How good is that?" He looked at the agent, who was smiling too.

  "Real good," said Dobbins. "Real bad."

  Chapter 18

  Trane knew all about being bad. He'd been bad from the get go. And not unlike Clark Cromwell, his fate had been sealed on a single day at an early age. It began with a call from the school. Trane had lit a roll of toilet paper on fire in the boys' bathroom. His mom hit him a few times with the toaster cord, but the blows lacked real passion. She went right back to making a toasted bacon sandwich with mayonnaise for her boyfriend, who was kicking back on their couch drinking a quart of beer.

  Trane wasn't upset. He figured the suspension from school would give him an opportunity to make some money. There was a dealer named Scoot who'd pay him ten dollars to make a couple of deliveries. Trane knew how important money was. Money was everything. When he got bigger, Trane was going to make millions, but not dealing like Scoot. He was going to be a pro football player. He knew he could. He was the fastest kid in the hood. He was faster than the grown-ups. The last time he got chased by the cops
, he had time to turn around and give them the finger.

  The only football he played was in the street, but the real thing was coming. Next year he'd be in middle school and they had a team. There were some kids around whose moms put them into the youth league. Trane begged for that, but his mom said she wasn't having it. She said his father had played football and all it did was make him meaner than he already was. She told Trane he didn't need to get any meaner. But once he was in the seventh grade, she couldn't stop him. He didn't need her permission, and he didn't need any money to sign up.

  There were other ways Trane made money besides running for Scoot. There was a strip club just across the highway in the middle of an abandoned industrial zone. Expensive cars came from the north side of the city. With a screwdriver and some nerve, you could jimmy the Mercedes symbol off the trunk of a car and get yourself five bucks for your trouble. The strip place had a security guard that roamed the parking lot. That's why it took some nerve. But with Trane's speed, it was easy money.

  Since he didn't have to get up for school in the morning, Trane decided he'd go to the strip joint that night. He had a pair of sneakers on his mind. He'd seen Eric Dickerson in a pair of sneakers on an advertisement during cartoons. He planned to be like Eric one day, so the sneakers were important, but he was short by about twenty-five dollars.

  He let himself out of the bedroom window around midnight. His mother and her boyfriend were passed out in the living room. Empty cans of Colt 45 stood among the bottles of Miller High Life in a loose crowd on the coffee table. Trane could have marched right out the front door without a hitch, but he preferred the window.

  The air was hot and still. Trane paused in the narrow alleyway between his own brick building and the one next door to peer under the shade covering the neighbor's bathroom window. There was nothing to see but an empty toilet with the seat up. It was a quiet night until gunfire erupted a few blocks away. After a moment he could make out the distant mewling of whoever had been shot.

  "Get me a gun," he muttered to himself, squeezing between the broken slats of a fence and into the backyard of his homeboy Nemo. Nemo lived with his granny. She couldn't hear a car horn if she was sitting on its hood, so Trane simply pounded on the back door. Nemo's face appeared briefly in the window before the hardware inside began to rattle.

  "You ready?" Nemo asked, his eyes bright and shifting nervously in the night.

  "Are you ready?" Trane said to him placidly.

  Nemo nodded that he was, and the two of them set off for the highway. Trane was paying Nemo five bucks to keep a lookout and because trouble always felt better when someone else was with you.

  Towering lights girded with sultry halos stood watch over the cars. The gleam of chrome and buffed black paint spoke of quality. It was always a pretty safe bet that Saturday night would bring people with money to the strip club. It was a good club. That's what people said. Where Trane was from, you didn't need a club to see a woman naked. Girls, they'd get naked if all you did was ask, some of them. He'd seen plenty of women naked, too, just stumbling onto their front steps, drunk, with their boobs falling out all over the place. He'd even seen a good-looking woman naked one day in the back of Abbot's Garage. She was with a dog and everybody came to see. Scoot brought him. The whole thing was nasty, but like the men around him, he really liked that naked girl.

  "You keep watch, okay?" he whispered to Nemo.

  "Uh-huh," Nemo said, grinning at all the fine automobiles lined up in the middle of practically nowhere. The two of them were lying on their stomachs in a culvert between the lot and the street.

  Trane took a screwdriver out of the long pocket on the right- hand side of his shorts. He stood to mark the location of the security guard, then ducked between a Town Car and a Mercedes coupe. With an expert flick of his wrist that barely chipped the paint, the emblem popped right off. The guard was heading his way now. He could see him through the windows of the Town Car. Trane ducked back down and scrambled to the edge of the culvert where his friend waited. A valet dodged into sight suddenly as if from nowhere, giving them both a start.

  The man didn't see either of them though. He simply hopped into the Town Car and raced off for the entrance of the club.

  "Shit!" Nemo whispered. "He almost got us!"

  "Didn't almost get, my booty," Trane said disdainfully. "You just keep a watch."

  They moved along the culvert to the farthest corner of the lot before Trane hustled back up over the edge and darted in between a long black Mercedes limo and a Corvette. For one lazy moment he peered at himself in one of the darkened windows near the back of the limo. He tilted his head and it looked bigger than he remembered. The sound of car doors slamming near the club's entrance broke his reverie, and he quickly went after the emblem on the trunk. It popped off with a pretty little click. Then he heard a click that jolted his groin: the hammer of a pistol being snapped back into its firing position. He froze.

  "Little coon bastard," drawled the big man. He wore the most basic elements of a tuxedo: ruffled shirt, dark pants, patent leather shoes. Without their links the cuffs of his tentlike shirt hung forlornly from his elbows. His distended belly and the lack of suspenders had pushed down the pants to the point where he'd have to hitch them in order to take much more than a step. The top of his head was bald and shiny, and his nostrils flared like he was on something. Behind the steel-framed glasses his mean little eyes twitched like living raisins plugged deep into the dough of his face.

  "You think you can do whatever the fuck you want, don't you?" The man glowered, jabbing the gun barrel at him through the air.

  Trane had seen and smelled enough drunken people to know this man was. His knees began to wobble like Jell-O. A war whoop by the culvert drew his attention. Another man, younger and with long hair, also in the remnants of a tuxedo, came dragging Nemo into the light by a handful of hair.

  "Got the little prick!" the younger man crowed. His face was much too thin for the big ugly features it had to carry, but when he opened his mouth his perfect teeth flashed brighter than the whites of Nemo's terrified eyes.

  "We got us a couple of little ghetto monkeys," said the big one, licking around the edges of his lips and making up his mind about something.

  "What are we gonna do with 'em, Josh?" the skinny one said with a nervous giggle.

  "I'm thinkin' they're gonna suck our dicks," Josh said with a mean smile.

  "Oh yeah." Skinny giggled. "They are!"

  Everything happened so fast that the entire sequence would play itself out again and again in the smallest moments of Trane's later life. Sometimes, during the time it took the flame of a match to ignite a joint, or in the brief period between tying a shoe and standing up straight, he would see it all over again with remarkable clarity: Skinny would whip Nemo down and around on his knees and at the same time undo his pants. Instead of cowering, Nemo would take a vicious bite out of the man's exposed member, dirtying his mouth with blood. Skinny would throw him to the pavement, screaming. And in an instant Josh would spin and put a bullet into Nemo's head at point-blank range.

  The noise of the shot would deafen Trane and before he could think about running the gun would be back on him.

  "Kill that little fucker!" Skinny would howl.

  Trane's hands would go up instinctively, mirroring the gun.

  The barrel would roar an orange flame into the night. The bullet would smash through the second digit of his ring finger before hitting him squarely in the face. The impact would knock him back flat, and he'd stare up with blank eyes at the white light above him without being able to move a single muscle.

  Outside himself he'd watch with calm fascination as the security guard, two valets, and a bouncer came racing up to see what had happened. He'd watch the two rich white men gesticulate wildly and pawn off their twisted version of what had happened. He'd watch the police screaming up the street under flashing blue lights.

  He would remember not expecting to live, and in a way
not caring. Then he would remember the phoenix of anger rising up inside him.

  Half an hour later, an emergency-room doctor slapped up his X rays and said he would live. The impact of the bullet, attenuated by the knuckle, had only enough force to penetrate the nasal cavity beneath his eye. The men who shot him and killed Nemo didn't spend a single day in jail, but Trane gained power from the experience. He vowed never again to allow himself to be in a position of weakness, especially with a dirty white man.

  Chapter 19

  After lunch at Clark's favorite place in Manhattan Beach he and Annie doubled back to the truck for towels, chairs, and a cooler. Side by side they walked down a concrete path into the breeze with sandals slapping until they reached the hot sand. The beach opened wide and long before them. You could walk all the way to Malibu. And even right in the middle of L. A. it was spacious enough so that the two of them could lie in the sun without anyone else on top of them. Part of that, too, was that it was the middle of the week.

  From behind her blue mirrored sunglasses Annie watched Clark unfold the chairs. Her arms were crossed, and she looked like she'd just eaten a bad piece of fish. She draped the chair with her towel and stripped off her shorts and T-shirt before mechanically slicking her skin with oil. Clark sat without speaking and nibbled the cuticle on his pinkie, wondering if any of Annie's recent behavior had anything to do with him. She seemed at times almost morose. Of course, in all fairness, she hadn't been entirely well. She had had some kind of lingering stomach bug over the last week or so, and that could explain why she seemed tired and grumpy more often than not.

  Clark secretly rapped his knuckle against the stony shell in his shorts pocket. He was nearly giddy with the notion that what he had might be just the thing to pull her out of it. He pulled off his shirt. His muscles, tanner than they'd ever been, rippled with angry striations. Ghostly stretch marks shot out from his armpits before fading away into his massive pectorals. He was in the best shape of his life, stronger and faster than ever before. It was do or die for Clark. He had to recapture the confidence of the team-- not so much the players, but the coaches and management. Right now they doubted him because of his recently injured neck, and he was determined to erase those doubts. If appearance had anything to do with it, he was well on his way. There were people now who saw him in a tank top at the mall and mistook him for a bodYouilder.