Button Man

by Paul Lyons

  QUIET PLEASE. STAND BACK. SECURITY. CLEAR FOR THE CAMERAS.

  At the word “cameras” there’s a collective sigh. Hawk finds himself mashed against a barricade, and he looks down a line of eager faces, crews cut to squarish skulls, women with Nancy hairdos. Tots perch on their parents’ shoulders waving flags.

  “We’re here from Saint Louis,” a woman tells Hawk, pressed up against him. Her husband nods.

  “What are they shooting?”

  “It’s Good Morning America live,” says her husband.

  Just at that moment a man exits the trailer.

  CAMERAS READY. READY TO ROLL. ROLLING.

  The barriers strain as the crowd surges forward to see a figure in a sharp white linen suit moving in the center of a ring of lights. The man gives a papal-like wave and smiles to well-wishers.

  “Oh, look,” someone gasps a foot from Hawk’s cabbage ear. “Look, there he is! IT’S BRYANT GUMBEL.”

  PART THREE

  22

  THE IMPORTANCE OF FIRE

  Carla makes a couple of moves on a spare piece of glass tubing to recheck the torches while the Z of Seymour’s NUBIAN CZAR cools on a wire screen. The flame swells orange and narrows into triangles of blue and white. Carla’s been reading a Time-Life book about the history of fire and now she’s informing Hawk about some of the ways that fire has gone out of modern lives.

  “People—I mean, those who can afford it—warm themselves by every imaginable form of artificial heat,” Carla says without turning her head. “Fire—actually flames—it’s an important thing that’s missing for many people.”

  “Ain’t that the truth,” Hawk says, slumped against the plastic, leopard-spotted sofa across from her work desk, a slow-swiveling fan periodically cooling his face from the dead, late August air. Carla’s gleaming three-worlds tattoo dances as she torches the glass and moves with it and he feels himself crashing from the Amtrak, him and Mikey passing back a jug of red wine and smoking Marlboros without talking much in the dark hours.

  When Hawk slipped into a doze he watched processions of buttons dance on upside-down peace-sign legs in the cupped palms of severed hands. Then he was floating over the city, dangling from an enormous bouquet of silver and green hearts, reporters snapping away as he landed in the middle of an elegant rooftop party. His picture on the cover of the Post and the Daily News gliding down. A dwarf in a tuxedo and white gloves appeared with a tray and said, “Some delicate crabmeat, my man?” Only when Hawk reached out for an hors d’oeuvre it turned into a packet of Sammy’s money. The dwarf burst into laughter and Hawk snapped awake.

  Wordlessly, Mikey handed him the jug wine and Hawk stared into the rushing dark, seeing the outlines of his own face. There was nothing for Hawk to do but pay Armand and Phil with Sammy’s money and hope he could somehow return the whole eight thousand to the safe before the old man noticed, assuming he was above ground and alert enough to notice anything.

  It takes seven or eight moves to complete each letter, several jumps and drops, and you have to do the whole letter over if you mess up one of the moves. The hardest thing, Carla says, are Chinese characters.

  “Depending on fire for heat and sustenance is part of some collective human memory, going back to the time we lived in caves.”

  “Like Raquel Welch or Fred Flintstone?”

  “Be serious a minute, okay? It’s only a couple of hundred years that fire’s gone out of our lives. Fire’s more than heat.”

  When Carla’s done attaching the A to the Z, with just an R to finish and attach, she joins him on the sofa for a sensemilla break, lifts her heavy work apron over her shoulders.

  “Not half bad,” Hawk says, handing her the jay.

  “For something that comes out of someone’s backyard. Carlos grows it on his rooftop from mail-order seeds from Holland. Twenty-five seeds to an envelope, each guaranteed to grow a plant.”

  Her goggles hang around her neck above her sweat-soaked tank top. Hawk’s visualized her like this so many ways on the road and now she’s in front of him. He’s thought about the things he could say, how he’d be careful with his words. Now he runs his finger around her sweaty nipple but stops when she shifts slightly away from him, glances in Zoey’s direction.

  The little girl is seated at a low desk, made of cinder blocks and boards, against Carlos’s letter-cutting machine. The lamp on the boards, over which she’s spread books and papers and crayons, lights up her red hair.

  “I saw some of your convention on TV,” Carla tells Hawk. “Like you were saying. Everyone had on buttons. You never notice.”

  “What a fiasco.”

  “That Quayle’s a piece of work.”

  “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” Hawk says in a spooky voice. “They’ve probably already got him making fund-raising speeches all across the north of Idaho.”

  Carla picks up a blowtorch, tests the flame a few times, sets it down.

  “You guys make out?”

  Hawk would just as soon not talk about the show, since it puts him in a negative light, but the weight of his dilemmas and the weed loosens his tongue.

  “Get this: first me, Mario, and Mikey get arrested and spend half the night in tent city. Then the whole gang gets busted.”

  “Busted?”

  “Nine A.M. and the FBI breaks into the condo, thinking they’re stinging some drug organization. German shepherds barking and a swarm of crewcuts waving guns and flashing badges. All us wearing nothing but underwear, dogs sniffing up our legs.”

  Carla snorts and shakes her head.

  “The DEA man knocks a basket of plastic fruit off the mantelpiece. ‘What a fiasco,’ he says. You could tell they were disappointed they couldn’t shoot anybody. Jugheads squatting by boxes of buttons. ‘Shit,’ one guy says, ‘some tip. Impound this garbage.’ Guy finds a bag of Jesse Jackson buttons.”

  “Jesse Jackson buttons at a Republican convention?” Carla says, wipes away sweat, walks to check the cooling letters.

  “You cross his face out with a marker in front of the delegates. They go apeshit over that stuff,” Hawk says. “The FBI man says, ‘Who you guys for anyway?’ They tie the stock in evidence bags and old man Norman starts in about his rights and they cuff him and he does a night in jail.”

  “For possession of Jesse Jackson buttons?”

  “They found some bogus press passes he was selling. In the USA Today ‘Convention Watch’ there was a paragraph on Pass-O-Gate. They were investigating it like an assassination attempt.”

  “Okay, I get it, jeez,” Carla says, and whistles at Zoey, who hardly looks up.

  “She really digs those books you got her,” Carla says.

  “I like buying her stuff,” Hawk says.

  Carla doesn’t answer, but wanders to the open window, Hawk following. She puts one foot on the sill and massages her knee. The warm night air only a little cooler than inside. Across the street there’s a giant flashing Citgo sign. Carla says she finds old neon units and tosses them out the window as a sacrifice to the Great Neon God.

  A clear night to clear his debts with Armand and Phil.

  Hawk looks down the street at the slate gray Hudson.

  “You think anymore about what I said?” he asks. “You know, about fixing up Sammy’s loft together?”

  The area around Carla’s eyes is broad white circles from the goggles against her grime-blackened face, like some raccoon.

  “I look at you,” she says, “and don’t know if we’re in the same tribe.”

  “Is it my hair? You know, it doesn’t have to be Romeo and Juliet.”

  “No shit,” she says, and looks at him from an angle, braid hanging straight down.

  “It ain’t like I’m about to try a set of Ginsus on anyone,” Hawk says.

  “No,” Carla says. “I suppose not.”

  “I’m just asking if you’re open. I mean, open to trying.”

  “The way you live,” Carla says. “I don’t know. We’ll talk about it another
time.”

  “What time is it, anyway?”

  “Six, maybe.”

  Carla stretches and turns to check the letters on the wire grid and puts the work apron back over her shoulders.

  “Any chance that sign will be ready tonight?”

  “I’ve got about a half hour on the R. Everything oughta be cool when I send the neon through.”

  “I’d pay to see Seymour’s face when you hook it up. We could run it by together.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Look, I gotta few things to handle,” Hawk says. “Why don’t you and Zoey come by the loft later. I’ve got plenty of Jack. We can talk.”

  “It’ll be a few hours before I finish and then I gotta clean up a bit.”

  “Cab’s on me,” Hawk continues, laying a twenty on the arm of the couch. When she doesn’t move he lays another twenty on top of the other. “You could pick up a pizza.”

  The swiveling fan shifts the bills on the couch arm and Carla looks at the twenties about to slide off and reaches out and puts them in her pocket. Then she puts her work apron back over her shoulders, and lowers her goggles, and looks at Hawk like a spacewoman and grins.

  “Hi Hawk,” says Zoey, rubbing her eyes and stretching her arms.

  “Hey monkey,” Hawk says. “You were working hard over there. I didn’t want to break your concentration.”

  “I’ve been thinking about my retirement plan,” Zoey says. “Do you have any ideas?”

  “Honey, I told you that you can’t plan for your retirement until you’ve had a job.”

  “Tell the driver to get off at Dyckman and just a few blocks up on the left,” Hawk says. “There’s Mama Mia’s on the corner. It’s gotta be the best pizza in the city.”

  “It wouldn’t bother me if you cleaned that kitchen of yours a little either.”

  “Can do. Zoey, you make sure your mother gets us pizza and sodas.”

  “Okay,” Zoey says.

  “I mean, you talk about fixing up that loft of yours but I ain’t even seen you so much as rinse your own sink,” Carla says.

  “Alright already.”

  “Christ, why don’t you start by getting some Drano and stuff. Unless you’re planning on throwing a party for the roaches.”

  “I said I’m all over it,” Hawk says.

  23

  THE YELLOW BRICK ROAD

  Back into the loft, gentle buzz from Carlos’s mail-order-seed-grown dope, bills and junk mail in hand, careful not to stub his foot, Hawk flicks on the dim red light over the sink. A roach walks slowly in his direction with disregard for human hostility toward its kind, as if it had been lonely in Hawk’s absence. No new messages on his answering machine. Only one message on Hawk’s Madonna marker board: DRANO!!

  Carla’s handwriting from before he left.

  Sure, he’ll clean the kitchen at least until it shines. His first act is to erase the marker board. Hawk writes down the number off his Amtrak ticket and sticks it in his pocket so he can lay a buck on it with Phil the Pot after he hands the man the four thousand he owes him and says, “We’re even.”

  Hawk sets down the bag of cleaning stuff he bought on the counter—including one large bottle of Drano—and opens a letter from Con Ed that threatens to cut off his electricity and a past-due rent bill, both addressed to Sammy. His grimy button-selling seersucker hangs over a kitchen chair where he left it next to the table. After the train ride from New Orleans he’d just washed his face, put down the plastic bag with his few things from the convention, and subwayed down to Carla’s.

  Now Hawk loads the jacket pockets with the four packets of Sammy’s cash. He’ll settle with Armand first. Then? Maybe he won’t pay Philly entirely, since there’s no pressure to do so. No, it would be good to have his accounts settled. It’s not like if Hawk returned half of Sammy’s money to the safe he’d be half as guilty.

  A ragged green film rings his sink. A moth flits in the reddish light over the rusty faucet. He can scrub the place good before Carla and Zoey come over, work the sink a bit with the Drano and his plunger. A surge of hope rises in Hawk at the thought of Carla bringing Mama Mia’s pepperoni pizza and then the two of them sipping Jack into the night. It’s a good thing too that Carla’s bringing pizza because he doesn’t have much to eat in the loft. There are only a few boxes of macaroni and cheese in the cupboard. Nothing in the fridge but some dried-out habañero chili peppers, half an economy-size bologna, drying Wonder Bread, and two jars of Hellmann’s mayonnaise. One is overgrown with molds and he trashes it. By refrigerator light he unscrews the other, sniffs, whoa. Then he senses something lurking in the dark, the air nerved and twitchy, and wipes his hands on the Con Ed cut-off notice.

  And listens, jar reddish in hand, scared to turn on the overhead or remain in the dark. He spreads mayonnaise and chops a chili pepper fine and sprinkles it on the bread. Just the hum of fixtures and the refrigerator, a slow drip somewhere. Finally he pulls the kitchen light string, slips out of his sneakers, peels off his crusty socks, and feels his feet sticky on the linoleum.

  Then he hears a blast of compressed air and turns.

  It’s Ginsu in a cutoff jean shirt and another guy, who’s massively freckled and has bushy red hair and a narcish look. Ginsu’s cheeks are full, limp balloon in hand.

  “Follow the yellow brick road,” he says in a tokey voice.

  Hawk just stands there, mayo jar in hand.

  “So Mickey Mouse,” Nelson says. “What’s going down?”

  “Not much, Nelson.”

  “Well shoot, maybe me and Fitz here should start something.”

  “Nelson,” Hawk says, exhaling and lowering the jar. “You scared the shit out of me. What do you guys want coming up here?”

  “I told you I’d be back for you and I always keep my word,” Nelson says. “How much did I borrow from you last time?”

  “Forget about it,” Hawk says. “I never counted that pocket money. You guys want a sandwich? How about a drink?”

  Nelson peers into the open fridge, shakes his head.

  “Well fuck me hard. You got two half-drunk bottles of Jack Daniels and no beer for chasers?”

  Fitz is still eyeballing Hawk, his eyes sunken in his face like M&M’s pressed in freckled dough.

  “Go ahead, make your sandwich,” Nelson says. “You need a knife to cut it with?”

  “That’s okay,” Hawk says, opening an Amtrak utensils packet.

  Nelson frowns as Hawk spreads mayo with the plastic knife and then arranges a few slices of bologna and crunched habañeros on the bread, heart racing.

  “What the fuck kind of sandwich is that?”

  “Comfort food,” Hawk says, raising the sandwich and taking a bite.

  Nelson can’t stand still, wets a strand of his hair with a finger and pastes it behind his ear. Drugs? Or Tourette’s syndrome?

  “These Zoey’s?” Nelson asks.

  He pulls a drawing from behind a magnetic Ronald Reagan in a space helmet on the fridge. It’s a picture with several trees and four-legged creatures with speckles on them, done in watercolor. Another with a two-legged shape with a yellow safari hat labeled “Hawk,” with a caption bubble saying, “I am a Freakazoid and Zoey is my Dancing Star.” Hawk remembers her drawing them using his back as an easel.

  “My daughter made these,” Nelson says. “Not bad, eh?”

  “Yeah. A real artist.”

  Fitz shrugs. His fat, pawlike hands are blotched with freckles. To Hawk he looks like a huge child who’d have fat-kid bosoms under his shirt. Now the man picks up one of the spools of duct tape that are always lying around for doing the crease on folding boards or boxing up Sammy’s junk. Fitz twirls the tape around his index finger.

  “She’s got talent,” Nelson says. “I guess she gets it from her mother.”

  Nelson has a drawing in his hand and walks over to Hawk, swatting a drifting July Fourth balloon out of his way.

  “So my girl puts your name in her drawings?” and then sarcasticall
y, “Hawk.”

  “It don’t mean nothing. We were just having fun.”

  “What?” Nelson says, and in two steps he clamps Hawk in a headlock, ridges of his Rolex pressed on Hawk’s neck and the blood rushing to his face, the guy squeezing him like a lemon. Then Nelson grips the back of Hawk’s neck and hurls him headlong into the refrigerator. Echo of whiteness, blank, and his good cheek against the marker board as he lifts himself up. He feels his eye swelling, and a stream of blood on his face. The eye had just about healed and now it’s open again. He bleeds too easily, no doubt about it.

  Hawk sits there on one knee, shaking it off. The flag on Nelson’s veined forearm seems to pulse. He’s definitely not a man Hawk can mix it with.

  Fitz picks up a Statue of Liberty visor, the Lady rising in green plastic above a row of lights. He examines the thing and then attaches the battery cord. The colored lights start blinking over his pink face as he puts the visor on.

  “Finish your sandwich,” Nelson says.

  Hawk starts to bend to pick up the fallen bologna and peppers and then just straightens up and says, “What do you guys want? You gonna kick my ass, just do it.”

  “A weird, greasy, twitchy little fuck, ain’t he?” Nelson says.

  “What’s all this stuff?” Fitz says to Hawk. “You a thief? Fence?”

  Hawk shakes his head. The visor flickers watery colors over Fitz’s face.

  “Some kinda penny ante con man,” Nelson says. “Last time I saw this guy he had a pocketful of bogus IDs.”

  “I’m a salesman,” Hawk says. “A vendor. I sell sausages on the street. Other kinds of merchandise from the cart. You know, buttons, hats, T-shirts.”