Button Man

by Paul Lyons

  Now Harold takes a flask from his jacket pocket and pours some rum into a plastic cup and adds Coke from a liter bottle.

  “Want a taste, Hawk?” he asks.

  Another guy in the room sees and Harold gestures him over and pours one for Hawk and one for Flo and a snort for the guy, who nods, a tear streaking his face, and wanders into the hallway.

  “It makes you think about things, allowing yourself to enjoy,” Harold says. “Like that song, ‘It could be later than you think.’”

  And Flo sings,

  Enjoy yourself, it’s later than you think

  Enjoy yourself, while you’re still in the pink

  The years go by as quickly as you think

  Enjoy yourself enjoy yourself

  It’s later than you think.

  “You guys sound like those Seven Day Adventists,” Hawk says.

  “Life’s what happens while you’re making plans,” Flo says. “This rum will put holes in your head.”

  “You gotta let the light in somehow,” Harold says.

  Sitting there reminds Hawk of a time he shared whiskey and Cokes with Harold in Sammy’s apartment. Harold looks like a man who invented a rocket that didn’t fly to the moon. He’s got a haggard look, teeth starting to brown. But the twinkle in his eye suggests that if he has only one brain cell left it’s the cell for brilliance. Since being let go from his accounting job soon after being let go by his wife, he’s let go of his previous life.

  “This was my wedding ring when I was married,” he told Hawk that night, pointing to a band with file cabinet keys hooked into a larger key chain. They’d just finished signing a couple of U.S. Open visors “Chris Evert” and “Rod Laver” to sell outside of Forest Hills. They copied the signatures out of an old tennis program and put the visors in Ziplocs with descriptive labels. Hawk sold two Lavers along with a couple of Jimmy Connors photographs Jep signed.

  “One morning, after I brushed my teeth with Micatin,” said Harold. “I decided not to let my life go down the drain.”

  “You brushed your teeth with athlete’s foot creme?”

  At thirty, Harold had been punctual, fastidious, fit from his five-mile runs in a plastic suit, knocking down 40K. Now, a shabby forty-two, working for Sammy, he could relax. Harold scouted good deals on condos, saw that they got cleaned after a show, picked up button orders from Norman, all of this giving Sammy the space to create. In winter Sammy gave him the keys to the Miami Beach condo, and Harold lazed on the deck, smoking cigars and sipping whiskey, ordering Cuban takeout, watching the sun’s slow arc.

  “You okay?” Harold asks Hawk. “You look restless and anxious these days.”

  They were still waiting for a doctor or nurse to get them.

  “I thought I looked like that all the time,” Hawk says.

  “I used to run around drunk and miserable,” Harold says. “Man, I miss those days. But kid, whatever’s on your mind, you need to let yourself feel clearly. You gotta stop auditing yourself. We can be worse on ourselves than the IRS.”

  “Me and the IRS have an arrangement. We leave each other alone.”

  Harold looks around for a nurse, then slips more rum into Hawk’s drink.

  “Salud, compadre,” Hawk says.

  “Thanks, kid. Listen. You don’t struggle for happiness. You choose not to be unhappy. I realized I didn’t have to run five miles in a sweatsuit every morning. It’s enough to walk without discomfort. I stopped dreaming of a great job and promotion. I’m happy to pay my bills. It’s about appreciating little things. You gotta think of the misfortunes that you don’t have. You could get a brain tumor anytime, or piles, or shingles, or prostate cancer.”

  Hawk nods, and Harold wipes his thick glasses.

  “Sometimes I weep when I see a bloodied boxer after a fight thanking his Lord and personal Savior and then hugging his wife. You’re in your living room and you’re crying about some gymnast on the other side of the planet. You feel so much emotion that you have to go outside and walk around the block a few times, get a slice of pizza and a beer. You gotta live your life, kid. You ever see a U-Haul behind a hearse? Do you follow what I’m saying?”

  “I think so.”

  “You do?”

  A pager tells them that the doctor will talk to them now.

  “Hey kid,” Harold says. “I almost forgot. I need a favor for Sammy. His plants and stuff, they need watering. I gotta get to New Orleans, check a few things. You could take in the mail or anything in front of Sammy’s door so they don’t swipe it all. Check the answering machine. You could drop the key with Flo and Norm before you leave for New Orleans. Flo said she’d stop in a few times while we’re down South. Norman is going to come down by plane and run the show. You got time for that?”

  18

  THE EYES OF P. T. BARNUM

  Sammy’s mail is in two stacks on the card table, one containing the receipts of bills that Harold has paid, the other unopened letters and catalogs. There’s a half-finished bottle of Sam Adams on top of the TV, probably Harold’s, and crusts from a turkey club sandwich. Hawk examines it, about to take a bite, but sees ants dancing on the tomato.

  It’s strangely silent in this apartment he’s worked in so many nights. So quiet and orderly where they usually sit and pin, fast-food containers strewn about, odor of a dozen vendor’s socks after a day in the streets. Everywhere he looks there are buttons like eyes on the corked walls. A couple of nineteenth-century political pins are framed like rare specimens and above that the framed poster of P. T. Barnum, whose eyes seem to shadow him around the room. With the hush, the place feels like being in a museum after hours.

  On the refrigerator there’s a postcard of Dale Carnegie stirring a pitcher with a ladle and the words, “When life deals you lemons, make lemonade” and another of Calvin Coolidge that says, “The business of America is business.” Hawk opens the fridge quietly, scared to disturb the silence of the place and hesitates in the coolness before taking a beer. It’s a humid night. He twists off the cap. There are five beers left, and a six-pack of Fresca. If he drinks all the beers he can replace them or not.

  Most guys in the hospital are probably not counting the beer in their fridge.

  After watering the plants, Hawk sits on the couch and picks up the remote. He watches an infomercial about selling real estate. A man with an enormous glinting Rolex harangues a studio audience about wanting to bathe in a bathtub full of bills.

  “If I take a woman out I want her to see my cellular phone,” he yells. “I want her to see my BMW. I want to be filthy stinking rich! What about you? What do you want?”

  Then there’s a former criminal turned best-selling author and then a guy from Deal A Meal who with courage, the help of his friends, and powdered shakes lost six hundred pounds. Once, this man’s average lunch had been twenty-two bologna sandwiches. Now he’s a group leader for Ultra Slim-Fast Hikes. Hawk flips past a pundit talking about how extremist liberals like Dukakis threaten to take the Democratic Party back to 1972 and the dark days of George McGovern and then stops on a PBS special about Republican vice presidential hopefuls.

  Hawk listens with grim interest while he runs a Scott towel over the wood of the furniture, sponges down the kitchen counter, realizes he’s cleaning Sammy’s clean house to draw out the sense that that’s the reason he’s still there. Up to something useful and honorable. Who is he kidding? He should just leave and find an “A” place alcohol, or action, or ass—put what he’s thinking out of his mind.

  Only if that’s what he was going to do, he’d have done it.

  The old man would never forgive him even for looking.

  If you played the angles creatively with someone else’s money he wouldn’t care, but loyalty was the first and last commandment in his little black book.

  Jim Lehrer raises the question of whether Senator Dole would accept a vice presidential nomination, and pundits on a split screen jibe at each other while they debate both sides of the case.

  The
Sucrets box is where Hawk heard Sammy say it would be, alongside a few special pins from Atlanta they traded for in the streets and a few airline Seagram’s bottles.

  Hawk sets his beer on the TV, bottle beaded with perspiration.

  P. T. Barnum gazes soberly at him from the wall and then Hawk sees the lips move and say something and then nod like he’s approving a loan. Hawk blinks and Barnum’s lips move again, creepy, and Hawk takes the poster off its hook, sets it on the floor, turns its face against the wall. On the cork display board he sees the Watergate buttons they sold when he was fifteen, like yesterday.

  They sold a barrel of them.

  The safe is a simple lock-and-key job.

  What was he expecting, the vault at Chase Manhattan?

  Would it really hurt just to have a look? He doesn’t exactly have to grease his face black like a cat burglar, stethoscope in a doctor’s bag, flashlight on his hat, dynamite in his pants, his watch synchronized with some getaway man.

  Inside the safe are five Garcia Vega cigar boxes, neatly stacked. Hawk places them on Sammy’s desk and sits in the padded chair from which Sammy studies his ledgers, pays dividends and makes motivational speeches, ceiling predictions, and strategizes about producing numbers with his foot soldiers. The first four boxes are filled with money in packets of twenties, fifties, and hundreds, sealed by taped paper strips. The packets are different sizes—some fat, some thin—maybe each holding two grand like the ones Harold counts out after every show. Yeah, of course. Probably recorded somewhere. The fifth box has a few packets of cash—all hundreds—and five sealed envelopes, all Fontainebleau Hotel stationery from Miami Beach, two with keys inside. Hawk could open these envelopes and replace them, since there’s a stack of fresh envelopes from the Fontainebleau. Harold would never know the difference, but they could be letters to his kids, or the gang. The thought entered his head that maybe Sammy had even put a little something aside for Hawk and the boys.

  Hawk replaces the Fontainebleau envelopes and starts taking the packets of money out and stacking them neatly on Sammy’s desk. He’d read someplace that a hundred grand in spanking new C-notes from the mint makes a stack about a foot high. These bills aren’t fresh from any mint and they’re mostly twenties; he makes ten stacks, not including the C-notes, and guesses the total’s in the neighborhood of a hundred thousand. A pretty respectable neighborhood, as De Niro says to Charles Grodin at the end of Midnight Run.

  Hawk looks at the stacks in front of him, his forehead frying like when you tilt in a casino and play ATM. Stick a fish fork in yourself, you’re done. He puts his hands over his face, then peeks at the mountain of money from between his fingers. Not that he hasn’t from time to time seen the likes. He’s seen Harold and Norman and Sammy count out close to this amount before the divvying up, roughing the edges of each bill like they’re making sure not to give away anything extra. At the club, after the big stud game, you see mobsters with stacks of hundreds so thick they can’t hold them and have to carry the money out in bags. But Hawk’s never been alone with this much.

  The money makes his head go around. It takes his breath away, makes him dizzy, like looking over the cliff of involvement. How many hours a day did the average American think about money?

  Hawk looks at the cash closely. It’s dirty, grimy. He sniffs it and it smells dirty, too. Crisp money, sharp-edged bank bills, have a smell of their own, all ink and mint and watermarks, before human smells mix in. You can slice your fingers on their edges. After they’ve been handled you can only smell that pure money smell faintly, mixed in with the grimes and oils of a thousand hands and the stinks of work. The smaller the money, the grimier it smells, the softer and dirtier the paper from all the hands in which it’s been clutched and creased. Singles traded back and forth, crinkled into pockets, not wallet money. Some of the bills Hawk handled on a trip to Mexico were worn practically through and soft as toilet paper. You don’t see many ragged C-notes in circulation. Just some with weird cryptic messages Magic Markered or stamped onto them, or phone numbers. Or cocaine blood from executive noses. A lot of these bills in the sealed packets Hawk’s probably touched. Him and the guys had busted ass on the street for it, gotten busted for it. Hours of their lives were sealed within the wrappers.

  If he planned to pay Sammy back every cent, would it still be outright robbery to borrow a few grand? Skim temporarily from the old skimmer just enough to cool his debts to Armand and Phil the Pot? Could a no-interest, unapproved loan, with a flexible repayment plan, on money that wasn’t earning interest, be thought of as only a mild case of partial theft? Wouldn’t anyone in the position life had brought him to, try to remove the immediate threat to his toes? His foot throbs when he thinks about toes.

  After so many years together, would the old man, laid up in the hospital and maybe booked on a one-way trip to Graceland, hate him so much? Yes, of course he would. There was no room to delude himself on that point. Sammy could never accept Hawk in his safe. Punto. It would go against everything Sammy had taught Hawk in their years together.

  On the other hand (or foot), Hawk needed the money and this could save him a toe or two, which you thought about when it was your toe at stake. Hawk believed in Sammy’s code, more or less. He wouldn’t touch a cent more than he needed to pay his debts. He could make copies of the keys to the safe and Sammy’s apartment and put whatever he made in New Orleans back in the safe.

  On the tube Jim Lehrer, looking like he sleeps as little as Hawk does, is discussing a dark horse named J. Danforth Quayle of Indiana. The general consensus on the Hill is that he’s not the sharpest tool in the shed, a bow-tied pundit says, but his Kennedy-like looks might swing middle-age, married white women moderates.

  Hawk lies back on the couch, head on a pillow. Robbery. If you’re a flat-out honest-to-goodness thief you’re serious about it. Here the old man rates to never miss a dime. Sammy would have no reason to suspect anyone of skimming his safe. What point would he have of recounting the money? Or was he one of those types who can’t sleep well if he hasn’t fondled each and every one of his reassuring bills in his living room?

  Anyway you looked at it, there’d be time for Hawk to slip back into Sammy’s Museum of Unnatural Button History and replace the money. Was there no more to it than putting some in his pocket? Here was a tired cosmic moment. A pile of filthy money and you could take what you needed and the odds were that no one would be the wiser. People say if they did a certain thing they’d never find a way to forgive themselves, but most of them manage just fine. All over the world people swim up rivers of shit for this kind of opportunity, the sound of a cash register their call to prayer. Hawk smiles and feels like weeping. If he does he can dry his tears with the softer notes.

  “Money’s not the number one reason for doing things,” the Rubber Rabbi always says. “But it’s way ahead of the number two reason.”

  It’s a hot, humid night.

  Hawk will have a drink and a think.

  He can sip beer all night and consult the Yellow Pages for a Gray Area Expert in the morning. He has days before New Orleans to inspect the situation. What does he have to do in the dull of pauses behind his sausage cart but turn things over in his mind and study his Columbia Encyclopedia for facts or read the papers and brush mustard over sausages. If you’re a vendor you read the Post and the Daily News so you’ll have opinions or wisecracks about the day’s murders, movie stars on drugs, covert invasions, schoolboard members grafting from the city. Professional types love to kibbitz unfolding events with an informed vendor while they thaw from their offices. They might order a second sausage or make you their regular lunch guy. Knowing your current disasters or celebrity scandals is basic street vending sense.

  Sammy would be the first to say so.

  19

  BOUGHT CITY

  Most of the buildings in the French Quarter have For Rent signs, like it’d be easier just to sell the whole neighborhood.

  Harold got the run-down two-story condo w
ith an empty pear-shaped pool and lounge chairs, three blocks off Bourbon Street, for twelve hundred for the week. There’s sixteen of them along, word about the peachy show in Atlanta having circulated, so no one will get more than nicked by the lodging. Some of the gang Hawk hasn’t seen since the Statue of Liberty Festival, when they worked twenty-hour days for five days, danced on the tables draped with glow-in-the-dark clip-on earrings and necklaces and Lady Liberty headgear, and took turns guarding the booths. They wrapped the stock in canvas tarps against rain and napped under folding tables.

  The mood in the condo’s high, remembering those nights.

  Only Harold’s getting bad vibes. At the licensing bureau the woman asked why he wanted licenses and when he told her they had a few convention-related items she shook her head and told him to go home. When Harold looked at her with incomprehension she said she’d sell him a license but it wouldn’t be good for any place he wanted to sell. Harold asked her to show him where the boys could sell on a map and she said he didn’t need a map. He could start at the center of town and walk straight north out of town and when he got to a place where all the people’s skin was as black as her black ass he could sell whatever he wanted.

  On the tube there’s a clip of Dukakis outside a factory juggling reporters and then inside droning on about equal opportunity for every American, and then, sleeves rolled up, trying to bond with factory workers. If they are threatened by unemployment, he understands their hardship: his parents were immigrants with nothing but sweaty shirts on their backs. If they have family or friends with a substance-abuse problem, he relates: his cousin had a drinking problem. If they suffer from depression, he had a brother with head difficulties. Then he moves through the crowd, signing union hats, asking workers for their support.

  Hawk identifies with Dukakis’s shortness, but how can you trust a guy whose hair looks like it was shined and waxed one strand at a time? His favorite from the primaries, Gary Hartpants, monkey-boated his way off the ticket.