The Deadly Kiss-Off

by Paul Di Filippo

  “Next time I’m saving both our fucking lives, I’ll try to drive like your uncle Ralph, who, as I recall, never goes over a brisk thirty-five miles an hour on his way to the track.”

  I stayed quiet, having no rejoinder for this accurate representation of Uncle Ralph’s driving habits as he ferried his lady love, the formidable Suzy Lam, back and forth to their daily handicapping pleasures, abetted by the bankroll of twenty grand I had given them for their help with our earlier scam.

  Stan pushed back his heavy chair and stood. He threw down a fifty as a tip. Then, on the way out, he ordered a growler to go.

  * * *

  On those six runs, besides more baby formula, we hauled loads of fake clothing, fake toys, fake sneakers, and fake cigarettes. Not that any of those goods were fake enough to be unusable—they merely did not bear the actual imprimatur of the companies they allegedly represented. I began to believe that I had seen all the kinds of counterfeit goods there were.

  But I was wrong. On the seventh run, the one mission I did not accompany Stan on, the cargo was of an altogether different type. And that proved to be the product that would launch us on our joint venture.

  Keeping Nellie happy about my new role as Stan’s migratory assistant involved a little creative storytelling. I had accomplished the first trip—luckily, the only dangerous one—while she was absent and unwitting in Cape Verde. But I could not count on her being out of the country every time I needed to ride with Stan. And so I had come up with a plausible reason for Stan and me to be gallivanting around the country.

  “Stan’s a car transporter for Hertz now, Nell.”

  “Fixe! I am so happy! He can make some good money now maybe? Get back on his feet?”

  “Oh, sure, maybe even fifty thousand a year.”

  Fifty thousand for about every ten days’ work, I might have said.

  “You wouldn’t mind if I rode with him now and then, would you?” I said. “I don’t have much really to occupy me day to day, and it would be kind of a break from my routines. They get a little stale. This man-of-leisure lifestyle is not what it’s cracked up to be. You wouldn’t know, because you’ve got your business to keep you occupied and happy. Not that my hanging with Stan would really steal much time away from whenever you and I want to be together.”

  Nellie, with her usual loving exuberance, hugged me and said, “No, of course not! So long as Hertz does not mind you riding with him while he does his job.”

  “Hertz is not going to care at all.”

  So the next three months went swimmingly. Stan and I did our thing together, with me socking away each mission’s fee in the bank to help fund Nellie’s work and our incidental expenses. And whenever I wasn’t on the road—which was most of every month—Nellie and I continued to lead our happy domestic life. That included occasions when Stan joined us and regaled Nellie with totally fictitious stories about driving for Hertz, some of which bordered on the implausibly outrageous. Yet she never twigged.

  But inevitably, a conflict arose. Now that my period of parole had expired, taking with it any travel prohibitions, Nellie had been urging me to accompany her to Cape Verde. She was starting to get disappointed at my general lack of enthusiasm for such a trip—ostensibly, this importing venture was as much mine as hers, although really it was her baby—and I knew I could not put her off any longer. Nor did I really want to let her down. So I arranged our international jaunt for October. She had been flying no-frills into Lisbon, then to Praia, the capital of Cape Verde, on the island of Santiago. But this time, I told her, we were going to do it up right.

  Her beautiful face lit up like the sunrise over her beloved homeland. “A week in Paris first! Oh, minha nossa! This is too much, Glen! Can we really afford it, even with all the money I’ve been using for the business?”

  “Yes, we can, thanks to some good investments on my part.”

  “Then I am going to start packing my sexiest outfits right now!”

  I went to tell Stan about the trip.

  “No problem, partner! Odds are, Gunther won’t need me while you’re gone. And if he does, I’ll just pocket your two thousand without one shred of guilt.”

  “So long as you think you’ll be safe without me.”

  “I can always drive with one hand and shoot with the other,” he said. “There is no good reason why the mirror on my side should go unpunished.”

  I hadn’t been to Paris since my libertine-lawyer days. But of course, the eternal city hadn’t changed. Except that being in love and having Nellie along made Paris even more fun. Her bubbling, contagious, unforced enjoyment of every pleasure made me feel as if I were some minor wish-granting jinni—although I had never read in One Thousand and One Nights where the jinni got repaid for his efforts with champagne-fueled, chandelier-rattling sex.

  Then we flew to the islands, and the shoe was on the other foot. Nellie took over as guide, hostess, and civic booster. We went to markets, restaurants, clubs, and historic sites in the Cidade Velha until I felt pleasantly exhausted by the end of each day. An endless train of relatives showered us with endless drinks and endless delicious meals. We stayed at the Hotel Pestana Trópico, whose saltwater pool was invigorating for weary tourist bones. The October temperatures were still in the low eighties, allowing us to swim and cavort along the beaches—arguably the least beautiful sands in the island chain, but still a welcome change from home.

  And in between all the fun stuff, we tended to the demands of the pudding factory.

  The slightly shabby but well-tended facility on the southern outskirts of the city was run by a fellow named Onésimo Dambara. He proved to be a moderately handsome middle-aged guy, whose dark complexion carried evidence of some really severe adolescent acne or other affliction. He dressed impeccably in linen trousers and floral shirts and had the habit of smoothing his lush lothario’s mustache and grinning whenever he addressed Nellie. I began to get a little jealous, especially when they exchanged rapid-fire Criolu that I, of course, could not comprehend. But I tamped down the emotion, realizing that I would never sleep if I contemplated Nellie fooling around all those times when I wasn’t with her.

  Dambara complained of having trouble with his supply chain of ingredients for the doce de café, and so we ended up visiting various plantations and dairies until we straightened things out. And then, before we were half ready to leave, it was the day of our flight back home.

  Nellie cried as she boarded the plane, and I got a little wistful, too. I had visions of an unlived alternate life—of how this would have been my pleasant permanent home if our earlier scam had succeeded in making us self-exiled millionaires.

  Our fair city at the end of October seemed cold and gray compared to Cape Verde. But it did feel good to be back.

  I called Stan, and we arranged to meet for a beer.

  “Glen, you are looking at a guy with seventy thousand bucks, more or less, in the bank, and a plan to make even more.”

  “Yeah? Tell me about it.”

  “I will do so eventually. But you have to help me with something first.”

  “What’s that?”

  “We are going to go get my woman back.”

  12

  “Did you see the steamy look that babe gave us?” Stan said. “I swear, she woulda jumped right into the back seat and peeled her pants off if we’da asked her to.”

  “Stan, that woman was doing all she could do to keep from falling down laughing. We are driving a mobile recruitment poster for Jimmy Carter’s Peace Corps, not some babe magnet.”

  “Women love quirky.”

  “This car is not quirky, Stan. It is as far beyond quirky as … as Pluto is beyond us. It is a monument to the unlamented era when pop culture’s bad taste assumed the stature of sacred writ.”

  “You can toss your word salad about Mickey’s dog with all the extra dressing you want, son. There is no
way I’m going to see this vehicle as anything less than a rolling love wagon.”

  “Delusional,” I said. “And besides, my lust-goggled friend, that thoroughly respectable woman had to be forty-five if she was of legal drinking age.”

  “I know you like ’em young and dewy, Glen, but someday you will come to appreciate the charms of older females. And those heels she was rocking said, ‘I’m easy!’ plain as day.”

  I threw my arms skyward in exasperation, whacking them on the hard roof of our joke of a car.

  We had just pulled out onto Hedgesville Road after a satisfying meal at Bernice’s Philly Steak and Subs, a neat, efficient hole-in-the-wall diner sharing part of a tawny-brick building. The woman who was the focus of our debate had been climbing into her car in the parking lot and had stopped midway to gawp in horrified wonder at our wheels.

  We had taken Stan’s new car on our mission to rescue Sandralene. We certainly could not have driven the eighteen-wheeler on this road, even if Gunther had been willing to loan it to us. And Nellie needed my Lexus to get around town on her own errands—especially since she had a trip planned upstate to Centerdale, where her parents lived. Not only did she relish a visit with them—she had still lived happily at home with her tight-knit clan before I spirited her away into a life of sin and entrepreneurship—but also, the sizable Cape Verdean population in that burg made up the initial market for her imports, and she had to conclude arrangements with various merchants. Not that she was planning to stay local for long. She had big dreams about the appeal of her line to nonethnic consumers and hoped she could someday take her brand national. I found myself always cautioning her not to move too fast or get too big before she had a solid foundation.

  So Nellie, who knew and approved of this mission to rescue Sandralene, was now somewhere behind the wheel of my sweet luxury ride while Stan and I tooled down this neat, moderately busy two-lane street of modest homes and the occasional strip mall, in what could be charitably classified as a campy antique.

  With some fifteen thousand dollars of his bankroll, Stan had bought a Jeep. But not just any Jeep. It was a CJ5 limited model made in 1973—and, I had to admit, in mint condition. The archetypal nonaerodynamic body, like a cracker box on wheels, was mostly a lurid white. I had never imagined that white could be lurid, but this somehow was. The roof and the upper back portion of the car that wasn’t big smoky windows gleamed an electric royal blue that would have been judged too overpowering for the uniforms of the Toronto Blue Jays. So far, so tacky. But the kicker was the detailing. Groovy undulant red and blue stripes traced the contours of the Jeep, with occasional cartoony white stars jittering against their patriotic backdrop.

  And, of course, not only was the beast a rolling punch line, but its 1973 amenities consisted mainly of ashtrays for every occupant. Of its lack of safety features, I prefer not to speak.

  And this was the chariot with which Stan intended to woo Sandralene back into his arms.

  I had to admit, Stan was never one to let practical considerations sway him from embracing his authentic vision of a life well lived.

  I looked at him and had a sudden insight.

  “Are you talking like a horndog because you’re nervous about seeing Sandralene again and what she’ll say?”

  Stan only frowned and kept us rolling down the road.

  The drive from home had taken not quite five hours at moderate speed. After our many Detroit jaunts, the journey south seemed like just rolling out of bed to trot down to the corner store. I realized now that Stan deliberately went slow to give himself time to ponder tactics and strategy. I had refrained from offering any advice on how to win Sandralene back. Indeed, I wasn’t even convinced that any such campaign was necessary. I found it hard to believe that a few months apart while she tended to her sick mother would have served to alienate the two soul mates—even if complicated by the interested presence of one Caleb Stinchcombe.

  I had tried to get Stan to share details of his new get-rich scheme, but all he said was, “When this whole Romeo crap is over, that’ll be plenty of time.”

  Our first stop in West Virginia had been our lodgings: the Thomas Shepherd Inn in Shepherdstown, a large two-story brick Federal-style structure dating to 1868 and painted a café-au-lait shade. Those were the closest accommodations we could find to Hedgesville proper, about twenty minutes distant.

  Our hosts, a husband-and-wife team who resembled Santa and Mrs. Claus from the Rudolph TV special, had greeted us with effusive warmth, plumping pillows and rearranging chairs before leaving us in our room.

  “They think we’re gay, right?” Stan asked.

  “Hey, if it gets us extra French toast at breakfast, I’m willing to play along.”

  Leaving our bags unpacked in the room, we had set out for Hedgesville and lunch.

  And now, after just a mile or three of additional driving, passing a fire station and a school and a Shell station as well as some neatly tended mobile homes, we were arriving in the center of Hedgesville, such as it was.

  “There’s the house,” I said. Its small, narrow porch was separated from the road only by the width of a sidewalk and a grassy strip. “Number two-oh-one.”

  Stan turned into a moderate-size paved lot next to the picket-fence-bordered yard of 201. He cut the motor and we stepped out.

  On this late-October day, the temperature hovered in the midsixties, and the sun seemed still to be fondly dreaming of the summer just past. I knew that the snaky Potomac, the border with Maryland, was just a short distance away, and I fancied that I could smell its riverine essence.

  We realized we were in the parking lot for the Zion Church, a tidy red-brick building with a pointy steeple. Across Hedgesville Road, roughly opposite number 201, stood a larger white wooden church. Any such concentration of churches always seemed to me to imply a proportionate amount of sin that needed preventing or atoning for.

  I sized up the house where Sandralene must reside. Three stories high, planted off-center on a quarter-acre lot with plenty of vegetation both cultivated and wild, it sported beige vinyl siding except on its porch, whose bare wood could do with a paint job.

  The presence of two guardian churches around the Parmalee ancestral manse seemed to imbue Stan with a good feeling, as if nothing too terrible could happen within their godly sphere of influence. He adjusted his trousers and shirt for a less rumpled look.

  I noted a historical sign at the margin of the parking lot. I walked over to read it. It told of the founding of Hedgesville: “Site of a stockade fort built during the early Indian Wars …”

  Stan came up beside me and read the sign, too. I sensed his continued reluctance to face Sandralene, who, of course, knew nothing of our intentions.

  Finally, Stan turned to regard the house. “Okay, no more stalling.”

  “I’m not the one stalling,” I said.

  “Glen, when you’re right, you’re right. Let’s go.”

  13

  The narrow porch, which was empty of furniture and useless for sitting, really, was a mostly symbolic architectural shield against the nearby flow of traffic. Standing there, I got a deeper impression of the house. Genteel/shabby, as if it had once been better maintained but now suffered from lack of resources and a hollowing-out of its inhabitants, who probably still loved the place but with a sort of melancholy despair.

  The doorbell button had a swatch of duct tape across it. A hand-lettered sign, thumbtacked above the bell and faded by the weather, said to please knock loud. The door had a curtained window.

  Stan banged with his big fist on the wooden part of the door, and we waited for a response.

  “You ever been here before?” I asked.

  “Naw. Sandy and I met in the city, and I never knew squat about where she hailed from. She just didn’t like to talk about her past.”

  The curtain twitched aside just enough for an unfamil
iar eye and slice of wrinkled cheek to manifest itself before the gauzy fabric slipped back into place.

  Another ninety seconds passed, and then the door swung inward.

  Sandralene stood there with an old-fashioned straw broom upright in her hand. I had an instant flash of American Gothic—if the painting had been drawn by Bill Ward of Torchy comics fame.

  When I first met Sandralene, her physical magnificence had left me speechless, as if viewing Kilimanjaro for the first time. Proportioned along Amazonian lines, Sandralene inhabited her lush physique with the composure and unassuming self--possession of a jaguar. Her mass of dark wavy hair further accentuated her resemblance to some big, sleek prowling feline. And yet, a Zen-like placidity of expression—resting Buddha face, I called it—left the male beholder feeling as if he were trying to interpret the emotional state of a galaxy whose center contained an insatiable and all-devouring black hole. After knowing her for nearly two years, I was still just as much in awe of her as ever.

  Today, Sandy wore a pair of cowboy-cut Wranglers with ripped knees and an untucked men’s white oxford shirt. Her hair was gathered up in a red bandanna, and her shapely feet went bare. Even this modest attire, which did not cling to her curves, still seemed pushed to its limits to contain her plenitude.

  Stan opened his mouth to speak, but Sandralene beat him to it.

  “Stan Hasso, you can just get right to work! There’s too much here for just me to do!”

  She thrust the broom at Stan, and he reflexively took it.

  “Well, what are you standing there for, like two hydrants waiting for a dog to piss on ’em? Come inside.”

  The front door opened into a hall of sorts. A few steps in front of us, a staircase with well-used rubber treads headed up. A doorway on the left and one on the right opened onto the rooms at the front of the house while a third doorway, alongside the foot of the stairs, led to the back of the house. A worn braided rug and a teetering vintage side table served as the hall’s furnishings. The room on the left offered a view of a sprung sofa, while to the right I could see ladder-back chairs around a large pedestal dining table whose veneered surface had last gleamed about fifty years ago.