by Lynn Kostoff
“I’ve paid my debt to society.” Jimmy shifts into contrition and presses the gas on the sincerity.
“We’d like to believe you,” Big says.
“You can take it to the bank.” Jimmy rises from the chair and nods twice.
“Good,” Bigger says. “Then we’re sure you won’t mind accompanying Ms. Wing to the nurse’s station.”
“Huh?” Jimmy says. “Not necessary. This sweating, like I was telling you boys, I got a quirky metabolism.” He steps up to the desk and extends his hand. “Nothing a good cold shower won’t cure.”
“We were thinking more along the lines of a urine sample,” Big says. “A little lab work.”
Oh, shit, Jimmy thinks.
“Fine there. No problem,” Jimmy says, stepping back. “But what say, boys, we put that on the docket first thing tomorrow morning? See, I’ve already punched out, and I need to get cleaned up and going here. I’m running a little late for an appointment.”
“I think this afternoon would be better,” Big says.
“Won’t take more than a few minutes of your time.” Big closes Jimmy’s file.
Jimmy’s cataloging the probable results of a drug test. It’ll be the equivalent of a chemical spill that would make the EPA blush.
“I’d like to oblige you boys,” he begins slowly.
“Then do,” Big says.
They’re standing side by side, watching him.
If they weren’t so obviously enjoying this little session, Jimmy thinks, maybe he could hunker down and turn things around. He’s talked his way out of tighter places before. And he’s capable of doing it again. He knows that. But the thing is, they’re enjoying it so much, clamping him, and over a dipshit job barely a click over minimum wage.
Big clears his throat.
They’re waiting for him to beg. Jimmy can read it in both their faces. Beg them for the chance to keep dressing up in a black cowboy outfit and shoot it out six times a day for the amusement of the citizens. They’re waiting, looking forward to it. They want him to beg.
“Tell you what, boys,” Jimmy says, “why don’t you let me save us all a little time?”
Jimmy steps back in front of the desk. He plays the smile large.
The brothers glance at each other. Big clears his throat again.
Jimmy leans closer, then snags an Old West coffee mug and slides it to the edge of the desk. “Yes, sir,” he says, “let’s just cut right to the chase.” In two quick moves, he has the zipper of the black jeans down and his dick out.
“Whoa there,” Bigger says.
Big makes a stab at snatching back the mug, but Jimmy’s too fast for him. Or rather, all the sodas he’s guzzled this afternoon are. The faucet’s full on now, and Jimmy’s feeling good.
He’s also a little reckless with his aim.
Big and Bigger each make a grab for the phone, but finally retreat to the wall of photographs. Big is holding Jimmy’s personnel file to his chest like a shield.
Jimmy leans into the job, putting a sizzling head on the mug and then switching over to a nearby pencil holder.
Jimmy’s feeling good, yes he is, until he suddenly hears Ray Harp’s voice echoing in his head: It’s not like you’re going to get a monthly statement, Jimmy. I’m not MasterCard. It doesn’t work that way.
And Jimmy, trying to avoid snagging his dick on the zipper as he tucks himself back in, knows that this time he’s really up against it.
This time he’s pissed more than a paycheck away.
TWO
Evelyn Coates struggles to locate and then resurrect her flight-attendant’s smile each time the bell above the door rings and a customer enters. The smile is important. It’s important never to forget that. People want to feel important, and therefore it’s important to give people what they want. Giving people what they want creates satisfied customers, and satisfied customers are repeat customers, and repeat customers are important, the lifeblood of any business.
She’s trying. She really is. The smile, though, just gets harder to find and hold.
Evelyn glances up at the clock and adjusts the neckline of the pale green smock she wears over her skirt and blouse. On the counter, bracketing her, are two cardboard placards, one advertising senior citizen discounts, the other detailing the store’s policy on unclaimed apparel.
Over the last month, Evelyn’s been rotating among the branches of Frontier Cleaners, getting a feel for the clientele and employees at each store, learning the basic duties behind running and operating the chain, soaking up the business from the inside out, as her husband likes to say, a portion of her evenings devoted to reviewing the long- and short-term plans Richard envisions, one of which is Evelyn eventually becoming a full partner in the business.
It’s not like she stepped into the dry-cleaning business expecting it to be glamorous or exciting. It simply made a kind of sense, after she quit the airlines, not so much a step as a half step, the type of decision, she now realizes, that has come to inform the life Richard and she have made together.
A comfortable life. A good life. A sensible life. One spent balancing the practical and the passionate.
Evelyn glances at the clock again. Three customers come in. Evelyn waits on them, tagging clothes, handing out claim checks, verifying names, addresses, phone numbers, and making note of any special instructions. She’s conscious of the manager, Maria Sandover, hovering near the revolving racks of the day’s pickups, watching her.
There’s another lull in customer traffic. Evelyn looks up at the clock. 1:27. The hands have moved, but the time hasn’t seemed to change. She’s supposed to stay until five today and then meet Richard for dinner.
Maria Sandover steps up next to the register. Evelyn figures she’s somewhere in her early forties, but everything in her bearing makes her seem older: the dark hair shadowed by premature gray, no makeup to speak of, a pair of heavy unflattering glasses, a dark blue checked dress falling to midcalf, sensible shoes.
“You forgot to mention the ten percent discount on Mondays,” Maria says. “With each transaction, you should remind the customer of the standard and special discounts for the week. It’s also important to wish each customer a good day. You neglected to do that twice today.”
For some reason, Evelyn thinks of the fan of fold-out photographs, school shots of five boys, that Maria had brought out to show Evelyn on more than one occasion as if she were demonstrating features on a car. The Sandover brood ranged from five to eighteen. Evelyn thought she made the appropriate murmurs of approval, but now she’s not so sure. She’s been doing that a lot lately, becoming impatient or distracted and making small missteps in manners and social niceties that she only becomes aware of much later, after the fact.
Earlier last week when she’d once again been late getting to the store, Evelyn had overheard Maria Sandover talking with some of the other employees in the break room. They’d been discussing Richard and her.
The consensus on Richard held no surprises. As a boss, he was demanding and exacting, but he was also scrupulously fair and even-handed in employee relations and had earned their respect and loyalty. He appreciated a job done well and was not afraid to roll up his sleeves and help out when things got tight. He made it a point to be on a first-name basis with everyone who worked for him and knew where they lived, the names of spouses and children or their boyfriends and girlfriends. He remembered birthdays and anniversaries. He paid above minimum wage and set up a generous benefits package. He was a good man, a hardworking man, who expected the best from himself and others around him.
What Evelyn had overheard about herself was a different story. She’s vain. Full of herself. Alternately aloof or condescending. Tempermental. She doesn’t pull her weight around the store. She flirts with customers. She ignores customers. She wears too much makeup. Her dresses are too tight. She laughs too much or too little. She’s pampered. Afraid to get her hands dirty. She’s headstrong. A pretty package with nothing inside.
; At first, Evelyn had been shocked and hurt and dismayed by what she’d heard. There had to have been some mistake. She’d tried to be pleasant. She’d tried to get along. Somehow she’d failed horribly at both.
Eventually, though, something odd happened. She came to like those gossipy reactions, even take an odd sort of pride in them.
Suddenly she was a Bad Girl.
She again glances up at the clock. 1:45. Evelyn walks back to the break room. It’s empty. There’s a pot of coffee brewing, and the portable television in the corner is still on, tuned to an afternoon talk show. It’s a segment on Big Wish kids, five of them, three boys and two girls, all twelve and under, with terminal illnesses.
One of the boys says, “Sometimes when I wake up in the morning, it feels like there’s a fire in my bones.” He’s named Timmy and he’s eight years old, and he goes on to say he wants to visit the Grand Canyon and the Petrified Forest.
There’s a long sibilant hiss as the coffee finishes brewing. Evelyn closes her eyes for a moment and then crosses the room and turns off the television.
She walks back down the hall to the employee restroom. She locks herself in the first stall, lets out her breath, then sits down. She stretches her arms, pressing her hands on the walls to either side of her, then drops them back into her lap.
She watches the second hand circle the face of her watch.
She tries to imagine the need for a Big Wish and what hers would be.
THREE
The sun’s burning away what’s left of the morning, and the needle on the gas gauge is kissing empty when Jimmy pulls into the lot at Pete Samoa’s Pawn Emporium. There’s one other car parked out front.
Most of the surrounding buildings are one story and flat-roofed, fading and dirty and rundown, like paint was a relative they’d lost track of. A donut joint, a used tire shop, a twenty-four-hour Laundromat, a check-cashing service, and a package store are sandwiched between a string of empty storefronts covered in gang graffiti, obscenities, and oddly sequenced numbers resembling zip codes.
Just beyond a lethargic traffic light is a sun-baked playground empty of children but crawling with stray cats. At a glance, Jimmy figures there must be thirty or forty of them milling about, all of them scrawny and mange-ridden and yowling. At the edge of the grounds is an old man in a baseball cap, who’s methodically throwing pieces of gravel and chips of concrete at the cats and singing.
Jimmy burns down a Marlboro waiting for the owner of the other car to come out of the emporium and leave. He then flips back a canvas tarp in the truck bed and carries in a twenty-one-inch color television, a VCR, three CD players, a PC, and two plastic garbage bags filled with hubcaps.
Pete Samoa’s perched on a metal stool behind the long glass-faced counter fronting the register, his posture reminding Jimmy of a buzzard with its wings folded.
Nothing about Pete Samoa ever seemed to change. A little more gray at the temples now, but the same steel-rimmed bifocals punched back on his nose; the dark, sun-cured skin; the asymmetrical pencil-thin goatee resembling dried lines of chocolate syrup. The wardrobe’s a ditto, too. Blue pocket-T, plaid baggy Bermudas, black mesh shoes. A tiny gold crucifix lying in the hollow of his throat.
Pete climbs down from the stool and walks around the counter. He pulls a stub of a number two pencil from behind his ear and a small notebook from his pocket and begins itemizing what Jimmy’s set on the floor.
Jimmy looks around the emporium. Nothing’s changed there either. Row upon row of narrow and cluttered metal shelves filled with dusty hard-luck bargains. Half the fluorescent lights lining the ceiling burnt-out or buzzing. The stuff here, the straight pawn, covers the rent and utilities on the shop. What Jimmy brought in will end up in one of Pete’s three warehouses over in Avondale and will be fenced out within forty-eight hours.
Pete walks back around the counter, writes down a figure, rips the page from his notebook, and slides it across to Jimmy.
Jimmy glances at it, then looks down at his shoes. He then pulls a white handkerchief from his back pocket and offers it to Pete.
“I was thinking maybe you needed that for your glasses,” he says. “You know, maybe you had a speck on the lens there that you confused with a decimal point.”
Pete crosses his arms on his chest. “Glasses are fine, Jimmy.”
“Maybe it’s the light then,” Jimmy says, sliding the paper back across the counter. “You being too fucking cheap to replace the bulbs, the place like a cave here, you got some numbers reversed.”
“Best I can do,” Pete says, nodding at the slip of paper.
Next to the cash register is a plastic cup full of pens, the name of the shop and phone number on one side, the other holding a photo of an overly made-up middle-aged woman with an upswept mass of hair the color of butter. She’s wearing a black one-piece bathing suit that’s about two sizes too small. Jimmy lifts a pen and tilts it and watches the bathing suit drain away.
Pete shakes the cup and winks. “That’s Doris. The new Missus.”
Pete had been passing pens out at the Ocotillo the other night, and Jimmy supposes if you look at it from one perspective, shave away a few extenuating circumstances, you could see Pete Samoa as the prime mover in the series of events leading to Jimmy losing his job at the Old Wild West and Pete therefore owing him one.
“A little deeper in the pockets,” Jimmy says, dropping the pen back into the cup. “Come on.”
“What, come on? I’m looking at amateur hour here. What you do, hit one of the student ghettos over at Tempe?” Pete punches back his bifocals. “This is an embarrassment, Jimmy. At least bring me something I can work with.”
“A big score, huh, Pete, like maybe a tractor-trailer load of government-protected saguaros? A sure thing, that one. I follow up on your tip and end up looking at twenty-four months in Perryville.”
Pete shrugs. “No one twisted your arm. I heard something. I passed it on. It was entirely up to you what you did with that knowledge.”
Jimmy bites his lower lip and looks around the store, then turns back to the counter and picks up the slip of paper, studies it, puts it back down, and then picks it up again.
“Okay. Fine. Right there. Okay,” Jimmy says.
The thing is, on one level, Jimmy knows Pete’s right. A couple trash bags of hubcaps and some low-tech toys are strictly bottom-end action, a definite embarrassment, but until he can get a few things realigned, Jimmy needs some walking-around money.
Pete doesn’t punch up the sale on the register. Instead he brings out a squat metal box with a combo lock. He turns his back to open it. Jimmy watches him count out the bills.
“What the hell you doing?” he asks when Pete finishes. “You think I’m rusty on my basic math skills? That maybe I forgot how to add?”
Pete holds up an index finger. He pulls a small handgun from the front right pocket of his Bermudas and lays it next to the cash. “I thought you might want to take the balance out in trade,” he says.
“Why would you think that?” It’s a shitty little .22, the bluing on the barrel gone, the grip cracked and mended with electrical tape.
Pete looks up at the ceiling. “Because, Jimmy, I hear things. I stand behind this counter, and sometimes I sell things and sometimes I buy things, but mostly what I do is hear things. Your name and Ray Harp’s, for example,” he says, “have come up more than once of late, friend.”
Jimmy looks out toward the parking lot.
“Ray’s been on edge for a while now,” Pete says. “Things are tense between him and some of the Mexican gangs running crank labs. They aren’t very happy with the way Ray’s cutting up the pie.”
“What’s that got to do with me?”
“I shouldn’t have to explain this to you, Jimmy,” Pete says, dropping his hand and tapping the cylinder on the .22. “What I’m saying here is Ray has become more focused in his business practices since you went up. Considerably more focused. He can’t afford not to be. The Mex gangs are watching
him, looking for any signs of weakness.”
You pick up a gun, Jimmy thinks, and it has a way of getting used. He nudges the .22 over to Pete’s side of the counter. “I appreciate the thought, but I think I’ll stick with the cash.”
“Even if Ray has Newt Deems and Aaron Limbe out looking for you?” Pete asks, counting out the rest of the bills.
Jimmy starts rubbing the top of his head. Newt’s straight muscle. Jimmy can understand him coming around. But Aaron Limbe is a different story. He’s a wrinkle no iron can touch.
“Limbe’s working for Ray now?” Jimmy asks.
Pete nods.
“Look, do me a favor, will you?” Jimmy pulls the cash across the counter and crams it in the front pocket of his jeans. “If Newt or Limbe, they come back in here asking about me, you tell them as far as you know, everything’s copacetic, okay? Can you do that?”
Pete slowly lets out his breath and nods. “That’s as far as it goes though,” he says.
“I appreciate that. I really do.” Jimmy starts rubbing the top of his head again. “I may have gotten off on the wrong foot with Ray, but I’m working on straightening things out.”
Pete’s smiling but won’t look him in the eye. “I’m glad to hear that, Jimmy.”
Jimmy digs out his truck keys and turns to leave.
He’s just about made the door when Pete calls out to him. “Hey, I almost forgot. Sorry to hear about your old man. A hell of a thing, that. They let you out for the funeral?”
“No.” Jimmy leaves it at that. The last thing he wants is to get into a discussion about his father.
He palms the doorknob and tells Pete he’ll see him around.
Outside, the sun’s so bright it’s like a slap.
FOUR
Jimmy’s brother, Richard, owns and runs a string of dry-cleaning stores and keeps a central office in downtown Phoenix in a dark, somber, turn-of-the-century, stone building. From where Jimmy’s sitting he can look out the window past lines of palms and eucalypti and see snatches of traffic on Washington and beyond that, part of Wesley Brolin Plaza and the bright copper dome of the old capitol building with the white angel of mercy statue perched on its top like half of a wedding cake decoration.
