Button Man

by Paul Lyons

  Sitting in the Chinese restaurant that first time with Zoey she caught him staring at the white circles on her forearms that she got when the neon she worked with spattered.

  “No, I ain’t playing games with cigarettes,” she said. “Shit, the first year I singed my eyebrows off and lost my fingerprints. So I shaved the eyebrows completely and penciled them in.”

  Hawk watched her work the glass the night he left for Atlanta, fascinated at how the signs of the world got made. Beneath the IN GLOWING TERMS sign she had made for Carlos’s business, she lowered her goggles, twisted the stopcock. Hawk smelled the thick odor of propane. “The closer you get to the bottom of the canister the more odor they put in,” she said. “So you know when you’re running out.”

  She lit the cross torch, held it to the tubing, and twisted her body with the bending glass. The glass wouldn’t stay pliable outside the flame, and she checked the angle of the bend against the plan on her drafting table. Then she moved the glass rod into the flame, dancing it in and out, redistributing the glass. Orange flame wrapped and sparked around the glass and she bent the rod. Then she bobbed it out so it cooled and dipped, and bent it more. She blew the air hose, cheeks puffing, because, she said, if you just heated the glass it could collapse on itself, melt into a ball. Then she set the letter on the wire screen over the pattern. A passable R, foot leading into a looping l. She finished the letters, welded them together, sprayed them with glass cleaner, and wiped away the grime, and then she blacked out parts she didn’t want visible.

  Zoey was asleep against Carlos’s letter-cutting machine, which cut letters out of most known substances, her blanket over her, arms around Hopabout. Hawk watched the dramas in her face as she dreamed, eyebrows scrunching. Sometimes her breathing increased and she made sounds, cried in her sleep, and when she woke she stammered in Carla’s arms, trying to explain what she’d seen.

  Hawk crumples his pizza plate, wipes his hands on his jeans, and jump shoots the plate at a trash basket, misses, and keeps shooting it, hopping on one foot, until he swishes it. Suffering from an underdose of cold beer, he’d like to duck into an oasis for a pint. Only he knows he needs to remember the objective.

  Thirty-one years on the planet and he feels—what?

  Tired.

  9

  KEEP HOPE ALIVE

  Hawk moves past horse-and-buggy men smoking spliff and scowling salesladies in neon doorways and veterans in wheelchairs shaking cups and business people in creased shirts and daily haircuts. Skyscrapers rocket up. There are lacy moon-tinged clouds between the buildings. A sign saying Equitable blinks over the city. Vendors he traded with that morning roll by, all out of product with that one-fisherman-recognizes-another-from-a-long-way-off look, yelling, “yo red buttons, reach me some skin,” “hey button man, catch you ma-nya-na,” and suddenly feet scuffle around him, voices zero in and someone says, “Why don’t we ask street vendors for their impressions of the convention?”

  “Buy a button or no comment,” Hawk says.

  “Hey, now. Excuse me. Can’t you give the viewers back home a few words on how it feels to be here in Atlanta in the middle of the American political process?”

  “The American what?” Hawk says.

  And then the streets buzz and he turns and sees camera beams lock onto a dapper man who’s coming toward him.

  “Jennings … that sexy newsguy from ABC,” a voice coos.

  Yeah, Peter Jennings, Hawk thinks. I sting his ass for fifty maybe they make me Vendor of the Week.

  “How are you tonight?” Jennings asks, motioning Hawk to display his wares under a yellow street lamp.

  “I’m fairly well off, sir,” Hawk says, looking at the creased cash in his hand and angling his board.

  “How much are the pins?” Jennings asks.

  “The small ones are a deuce. The oversize three-color start at three dollars.”

  “Now that’s inflation,” Jennings says, “I’d like two of these.”

  And he points to the quadrilateral button with a color photo of Jesse and Dukakis, each giving the uplifted V sign with his free hand while clasping hands and gazing into each other’s eyes.

  “You have a good evening,” Jennings says, smiling confidentially as he forks over six bucks. The breeze doesn’t ruffle his hair.

  “Seems like a good man,” says a guy with the words Hello, I’m Patrick scripted on his work shirt. “Not like all them scum politicians. Someone you could vote for and trust.”

  “He’s Canadian,” Hawk says, thinking, Good for fucking what? Newsfuckingcasters. Years ago, street grimed and exhausted from spieling and dealing, lights of Broadway coloring faces, and up sails Walter Cronkite in yacht wear. This shaggy-faced, “most trusted man in America,” who nightly gives reality to a hundred million viewers with his eyebrows. He studies the Watergate buttons all over Hawk’s jacket and hat and board without expression. Then he looks Hawk straight in the face, like Hawk’s some slimy, marine life, eyebrows working, and says: “Kid, you’re not going to make it.”

  Hawk grits his teeth, hustles toward the convention center, where Jesse will be chanting to the Republic about partnership and the People, red-white-blue balloons releasing, huge state markers capped by star-spangled donkeys bobbing, Jesse’s body swaying and dialoguing about how the white man (say it) brought the black man (that’s right) and the yellow man (YES, YES!) to work the land that he had stolen (Stole is right) from the red man (ain’t that something). Chanting about how the only reason you have to look down on anyone is because you’re about to pick them up. The place will be hopping, canary-yellow limousines emptying out the nation’s richest African Americans in minks and glinting diamonds and matching Mercedes.

  Hawk squats to arrange buttons with Jesse’s signature and face and the words PRESIDENT or RUN JESSE RUN. NO place for anyone else on the board. He pins row after row of Jesse’s face, round like it was born to be on a balloon rising over a sea of votes. High overhead stars have come out, a thousand points of light.

  Last time they sold Jesse buttons was at the Jobs, Peace, and Freedom March. Washington, DC, 1983. Twenty-year anniversary of the original march. Tribes fresh from the hills in freedom-rider overalls, leather vests, and bell-bottoms streamed through the groove of the street. Mario wore a red, green, and black knit cap and power-fisted the customers. The rest of the gang wore thrift-shop ties and carried plastic CONTRIBUTION cartons in the candlelit night outside of the packed cathedral while inside Jesse rapped on in gospel rhythms about economic violence and justice like a drunk making too much sense about what rising inflation meant to the ordinary person, to the laboring man, to the farmer who wanted to grow his corn, to the factory worker who wanted to send his children to college, to the veteran who risked his life for his country, to the working mother who wanted to go to night school to learn a trade, to the elderly and the handicapped, to the people outside of the realm of the census.

  Just before eleven, Jesse’s “Keep Hope Alive” speech begins, and ovation after ovation swells from the hall. Later, in the condo, Hawk will watch the speech with the gang while they’re counting out. Dukakis’s foreparents came to America on immigrant ships, Jackson says. My foreparents came to America on slave ships. But whatever the original ships, we’re in the same boat tonight. And finally, Wherever you are tonight, you can make it. Hold your head high, stick your chest out. You can make it. It gets dark sometimes, but the morning comes. Don’t you surrender.

  In the morning on Peachtree, Hawk will see vendors hawking tapes of Jesse’s speech at ten bucks a pop.

  At 8:00 A.M., a few hours later than all week, Harold goes to the kitchen and puts on a pot of gourmet Mocha Java from Zabar’s.

  “Hate to wake the old man,” Harold says to Hawk, Jep, and Mikey, who are eating a breakfast of Pop-Tarts and Diet Coke.

  Sammy lies face up, pillow on his chest like an umpire’s shield. Harold reaches for his shoulder, but hesitates, watching the old man breathe. There’s a faint wheeze an
d humpf, a gentle scowl on his face like those who sleep the sleep of the just.

  “Hey Sammy, smell the fresh coffee.”

  “What day is it?” Sammy asks.

  “Friday, Sammy.”

  “Already,” Sammy says.

  Which is just what Hawk’s thinking. If only this peachy show could go on and on. Another week of it and he could kiss Armand good-bye. Blue skies all week, legit licenses. It’s the last day and there’s hardly any stock for the fire sale, but first thing up and Sammy’s acting like he’s worried about breaking even. The old fox just has to give off that he’s hard money, and you never exactly know how he’s making out, what the overhead is for all his dealings, what his apartments cost. He gets this look—forehead a washboard, a pained smile—like he’s lost everything in a stock-market crash and can be led anywhere through the broken world.

  Jep pulls his smudged God Bless America T-shirt over his gut.

  “Professor,” Sammy says. “Change your shirt. Five days. How you look matters. You’re not shaking a cup. You’re a salesman!”

  “Yeah, Professor. You’re kinda ripe,” Mario says. “If you put on Odor-Eaters you’d disappear.”

  “I got a fresh T-shirt,” Harold says. “I bought a box of ’em in Chinatown last week for a buck a piece.”

  “Charge him a deuce,” says Hawk.

  Harold drops the gang on Peachtree, where they lay their scuffed boards on the sidewalk. A moderate pre-lunch-hour pickup has begun, business women passing in expensive, ugly dresses. There’s no use saving their voices and the gang blasts, “FIRE SALE, FIRE SALE, buck a button. Dollar, dollar, dollar. Get down on your hands and knees with your money ready.”

  At about the same time the homeless, having been housed in tents during the convention, start making their way back into downtown Atlanta, many shoeless and scabbed.

  “The last limo leaves and the city buses ’em back onto the streets,” Sammy says, and frowns like he’s at a convention of schmucks. Hawk can just hear him thinking, “Look at schmuck-du-jour over there without a shirt. He’s got all his limbs and can’t put a roof over his head and eats out of the garbage can like an animal. You don’t have to be blind to buy Bic pens three for ten cents and get a quarter a pop. Or tube sox. People always need ’em. You go to a wholesale outlet and you get a couple of boxes and take ’em out on the street.”

  For Sammy, being broke is a failure of imagination. It’s a character flaw.

  The homeless move morosely, scoping trash cans. A bum finds a shoe with flex and grins. Another finds a paper plate and licks it, a can and he drains it. He scoops pizza crusts into his bearded mouth. As the bums pass they see the cash and suits scrambling over the button-covered boards, and they stop in bunches to watch.

  “Hey crackers,” a guy says to Hawk. “I’s homeless but harmless. Helpless ’til you help. Lemme sell some of them buttons.”

  Hawk gives the guy two bucks and says, “Send me your résumé.”

  “Go ten minutes at a half,” Sammy yells, and mounts an overturned crate and yells: “FIRE SALE! CLOSEOUT PRICES, FINAL TEN MINUTES, LAST TEN MINUTES ALL BUTTONS TWO FOR A DOLLAR.”

  Harold pulls up the loaded van and watches the gang in the closeout dance. Suits jostling, gang grabbing their money fast as it’s forked. When it’s over Harold hands out cold beers and leftover food from the condo. Jep sees a chair left for trash and sits in it.

  The procession of the homeless continues. Hawk, Jep, and Mikey hand out about twenty singles each. Mario pours out popcorn, Cracker Jack, and blueberries.

  “Professor, that chair will eat you alive,” Hawk says.

  “Blueberries, God bless you,” says an old woman with a tilted wig, hands cupped. A cough rips out of her and continues for half a minute. Her shredded stocking reveals a shin-length festering sore.

  “May God make his face to shine upon you and give you peace, Amen,” she repeats, wiping spit off her face. And with that benediction the button gang, leaving the box of food behind for the people, boards the van.

  10

  JUST OLLIE

  Some bozos on TV are telling the viewers how to make your first million selling real estate from your own home. Hawk inflates a couple of the heart-shaped Earth Day balloons and lets one out the window, then another; unkinking from the long ride. Right, if they were making millions these humanitarians would tell anyone how.

  Hawk had called ahead when they gassed up and drank slushies outside D.C., hoping to arrange an evening with Carla and Zoey, maybe catch a matinee of Who Framed Roger Rabbit? No one answers now, and there’s no message on his machine, so he leaves a fresh message and fixes canned ravioli, panfried with one orange habañere. Then catches the last segment of a Discovery Channel special on our Cro-Magnon ancestors starting fire with sticks. Carla’s always got a paperback in her jeans about spiritual awareness and primitive times because she says she needs to be in touch with stuff that’s more real and primal. Hawk thinks you don’t have to go looking for primitivity: it rings at your door.

  Hawk flips the channels: QVC gold-plated silverware; Barbara Bush looking like George Washington in drag; Jessica Hahn interviewed after negotiating to sell her account of being degraded by Jim Baker; a party official citing Spiro T. Agnew in calling the media “Nattering Nabobs of Negativism”; Fawn Hall refusing to pose for Playboy; Dukakis a few lengths ahead at the ⅝ pole, entering the auditorium to Neil Diamond’s “Coming to America.” Fields of placards sway, brass bands pump, balloons drift across the American seal, and large Styrofoam index fingers point toward the small man, stiff and trim on the podium, who drones on about how he’d said all along that character would elect the next president of the United States of America in 1988. And he smiles to the delegates, their sea of round faces chips in the presidential pot, his pillhead wife at his side waving to the people.

  Hawk heads for the Crime Scene, a bar you enter through streamers of yellow crime tape saying Crime Scene Do Not Cross. He doesn’t have to order here because John the bartender knows his pleasure and pours him a freebie every second round and Hawk tips him the cost of the drinks. Hawk scratches the bar when he’s ready, like taking a hit at blackjack, and John tells him with his eyes when he’s had enough. In every public space you’re somebody, nobody, or a guy at the edges who people nod to and shake hands with until they become sure of which one you are.

  From the bar Hawk phones Carla again. Maybe she can meet the gang at Cannoli’s to celebrate Atlanta and Jep’s birthday.

  “Hawk,” she answers sleepily. “You back in town?”

  “I missed you,” he says.

  Pause.

  “Hey, baby, you free tonight? Watcha wearing?”

  “Blankets. I worked all night and half the day and tomorrow this deal we’ve been waiting on came through. You know Carlos, ‘No cash, no sign, baby.’ And I’m fighting a cold.”

  “I hope you win. Drink chicken soup and call Señor Hawk in the morning.”

  Was it a cold or coldness in her voice? Had there been any gladness to hear from him? He can’t read her voice any more than he could read her expression when she said she’d think about the apartment. No wonder he keeps losing at Texas Hold ’Em.

  He’d wanted to tell her how he cleared more than five grand over the week. What’s the point of good fortune if he doesn’t have someone besides Armand, Phil the Pot, and Slavic dice-degenerates to share it with? Only then he might have to explain why he had to give it right back, and about his fix, his debts, which he’s held to his chest, doubting she’s ready to take the bad with whatever sweetness she sees in him.

  John brings another JD and chaser. Hawk sees a regular, looking better, almost cured, and thinks it’s a hopeful sign. Only when Hawk taps the man’s shoulder the guy whirls with a ferocious look. On the other side a white-haired woman with a baby carriage orders a pint. Hawk thinks the carriage is carrying her things but then a baby cries from inside. Good for Carla that the work’s coming through. Hawk feels strong, lik
e Bullwinkle. Down to a half of Doc’s pills the last two days, his foot aching less, no drink to speak of all week, and not a drop of gamble.

  The itch for action has faded enough to hold off and inspect. And what comes into view are late-lates when, throat sandpapery and forehead fevered, the unmerciful cold cards come charging, driving him cleaned out and busted and shocked and twitchy and nose wide open to the next room, where electric lights cackle over a few old gin players slanting against the wall with their mouths open. Phil the Pot taps the ash off his cigar, looks at him like Hawk’s a fighter who’s had enough and better save a few marbles for another day and says, “Go home. Enough is enough. You’ll thank me later.” And Phil stares from behind his thermos of Bloody Mary and Racing Form and little black book. Phil from Philadelphia, the tightest Hold ’Em player in the joint, running his own offtrack betting, sitting by the pay phone like he owned it, taking bets and paying out ten cents higher than the OTB, using the backs of OTB forms as personal stationery.

  “Phil, I can get ’em.”

  “You’re running cold, kid, and late at night it gets cooler.”

  Muchos gracias, Philly.

  Hawk hits his bruised knuckles against each other a few times, flakes a dry scab.

  He shouldn’t play tonight. If he starts, it’ll suddenly be late and he won’t sleep except a few minutes on the subway downtown and miss his stop and wake in Chinatown. He should get out early, hang some Disney and convention T-shirts and July Fourth balloons from the cart.

  Close to Cannoli’s, Hawk looks in the window of a leather goods store, catches sight of a sweet briefcase. He thinks of Jep always walking around with his student papers in a plastic bag. If he were a teacher and had papers to carry, maybe he’d like this kind of thing. Once inside he doesn’t want to buy cheap so he wanders into the two-hundred-dollar neighborhood, inhaling the smell of fresh leather while the saleswoman tails him.