“Man, how the hell you get into this line of work?” asked Checker, still laughing on the grass.
The agent shook his head and caught his breath, collapsing on the hill, noticing how brightly the lights shone from the garbage-processing plant across the river. “Jesus,” he said. “That’s a long story.”
Which he told.
Even Eaton Striker is afraid of Syria
4 / The House of the Fire Queen
People had always talked to Checker, they never knew why. Even for chronic truancy, his high-school teachers preferred asking Check to stay after school to turning him in. They’d get feverish toward the end of sixth period, rushing the lesson, anxiously shredding spare mimeos after the bell, afraid he wouldn’t come. But usually, in his own sweet time, Checker would appear at the door, humming, and glide to the desk, a small secret smile pointed at the floor; he’d glance up shyly, down again, back, down, then suddenly, when they least expected it, whoom, he’d carve straight into their pupils, coring their eyes like apples. It was terrifying. Have a seat, please. Sure. The pads of his fingers on the desk rippling. His leg jittering up and down so the floor trembled. In trouble, and perfectly happy. No matter how severely the teachers began, his eerie blue irises flashed like heat lightning, his smile, a joke, would trigger an aside, and before they knew it they were talking about their children, their wives or husbands or lovers, the problems of teaching bored people, then all about what boredom was exactly, whose fault it was, until pretty soon Checker’s feet would be up on the desk and his chair tilted back on two legs; the teachers, too, would be leaning back and playing with their pencils and jabbing excitedly with the eraser to make a point. Checker would finally remind them that it was six or seven and dark, so the two of them would stroll out and stand another half hour in the parking lot, an hour if it was spring; only out of a reluctant sense of duty and decorum would the teachers pull into their dumpy cars and away from this—this—student. Sometimes they gave him a ride home.
Checker was not precisely rebellious; he simply had his own agenda, and if that happened to coincide with the school’s, good enough; but if it diverged, he didn’t let it “rattle his cage,” as Check would say. He cooperated with authority but didn’t recognize it; he was no more or less conciliatory with a principal than with the boy at the next desk. He was pleasant and attentive when called in, unless another matter took precedence, like a science exhibit on refraction at the IBM Building, or a variety of orchid in the Botanical Garden peaking that afternoon, in which case he might pencil a neat and polite note declining the invitation to the principal’s office, ending with the genuine hope that they could reschedule sometime soon. Dazed, the principal would read it over three or four times: Looking forward to our talk. Until our next mutual convenience, Checker Secretti. With even more incredulity, the man would find himself courteously negotiating with Checker over the phone, trying to find an afternoon he was “free.” By the time Check showed up, the principal would feel grateful and offer the boy the big armchair and a cup of tea.
After all, appealing to his mother was hopeless. Lena Secretti was illiterate; Check had been signing her name to permission slips and even money orders to Con Ed since the age of six. His mother had borne children much the way she scrounged junk from trash piles—she carted them from the hospital and placed them in the apartment and sometimes, at moments, would remember having brought something interesting home once and look around for what had happened to it. After picking up the roll of bubble wrap, checking behind the broken adding machine, and moving the big box of paint-sample strips, nubby crayons, and plastic surgical gloves, she would dig up a dirty, hungry, but contented son playing Olympics with roaches. Now, Lena Secretti was not exactly insane, and no one ever died or got permanently misplaced in her care, but she was not the kind of woman you sent curt notes about truancy.
In his obliviousness of rules and even of law, Check had been accused of being “unrealistic,” but in fact his world was profoundly concrete. He understood tangibles, like, there is an agent who wants to ship your sax player back to Iraq, so you take your friend away from the man. Checker tried to explain.
“But we’ll get him eventually, and you could get prosecuted yourself, bucko,” said the agent the next day at Plato’s. The club was closed for The Derailleurs’ rehearsal on Sunday afternoons, which the man had interrupted with his enthusiastic investigation. “Aiding and abetting, harboring fugitives. We’re arresting Catholics for that shit lately, for Christ’s sake. Think we’d bat an eye at a black rock drummer?” But somehow the agent, Gary Kaypro, didn’t sound very threatening. Like all the high-school teachers before him, he was leaning back with Checker Secretti, waving his cigarette, trying desperately to entertain.
“Gary,” said Check affectionately, “we have a gig next weekend. I can’t find another sax player in five days.”
“Play here, man, your buddy won’t be around for the encore.” Gary Kaypro said “man” a lot. He’d shed the pink bandanna from the night before, but still propped heavy leather boots on the table. He’d managed to emphasize early how very much guitar and saxophone he’d played in high school. The agent was vaguely middle-aged, for from the vantage point of nineteen anything between thirty and sixty is simply not young; after sixty you are old. Kaypro himself knew this, and though he kept trying to intrude the fact that he was only thirty-six, he guessed correctly that they didn’t care.
“Well, say we toe the line,” Check proposed. “How can I get my sax man legit? You must know immigration law—how does it work?”
Kaypro shrugged with casual expertise. “There’s the political-asylum gambit. Say they’re going to flay the kid with a potato peeler if he sets foot in Iraq.”
“They would,” said Check. “He’s a draft evader.”
“Still a bad bet,” said Kaypro. “None of that shit is flying lately, see. With the Cubans, the Haitians, and now the Salvadorans, we’re burned out on the but-they’ll-shoot-me routine. Pretty much the U.S. says, So what? Unless you’re Eastern European or Soviet. And you ever read the newspaper?”
“Only the little articles on the inside pages.”
“Well, the big articles are full of Middle Eastern maniacs blowing up Americans and shoving them out of planes. Imagine how overjoyed the INS gets when they apply for asylum. We figure most of them belong in one.”
“So what’s another angle?”
“He could disappear. Get out of New York, or at least never show up here, or at his room on Grand.”
“No good. What else?”
“He could marry an American.”
“No kidding.”
“Sure. Even gets you citizenship eventually. But—only if it’s for real.”
“What do you mean?”
“We’re on to that scam, see. We do interviews now, in intimate detail. Ask the couple the colors of their underwear? Any moles? Form of birth control? The works. Sometimes split them up, compare their stories. I’ve done it. A scream, really. Catch these guys, picked up a wife for three thousand dollars, can’t even remember her first name. Man, they’re on the plane by sundown, bingo.”
“But if Hijack got married this week, you couldn’t arrest him?”
“I could. He’s still illegal until he goes through channels.”
“But would you?”
“What are you trying to pull here, bucko?”
“I’m shooting straight, Kaypro. If he gets married, will you leave him alone and let him go ‘through channels’?”
“You have a lady in mind?”
“I might.”
“Depends,” said the agent, clicking his eyeteeth together. “You know the INS is famous for corruption, don’t you?” He smiled.
“We don’t have any money, Kaypro.”
“No, no. What I want I can’t buy. I—” He seemed flustered. “I’d like to play with you guys!”
“What?” said the band.
“Just a set once in a while. I used to get in m
y licks, see? And—you’re half decent, Secretti. Three-quarters, even.”
Checker laughed. “Deal’s on.”
“But the kid has to do the whole bit,” the agent added. “Someone turned him in; I have to report. And if the marriage is a fraud, they’ll skewer him and the girl both. Likewise, you don’t get wedding bells to chime before I find him, the ax is gonna fall. I’ll look the other way if he’s got a solid claim to living in this country, but as of now he’s moist, through and through. I’d like to beat out a few oldies with you kids, but I’m not a sleazebag—I do my job.” With that moment of officiousness, he left the club.
“Well, that’s the ticket,” Check announced.
“Ticket’s on the family plan,” said J.K. “What about La Señorita, Jack?”
“Well…” Check drawled, moving to his Leedys to tune the heads for their upcoming rehearsal. “That’s the one tiny hole in an otherwise flawless scheme, isn’t it? Rache, why don’t you run down and tell Hijack we’ll get him out of that steam bath before the week’s out.”
“Tell him he has Super Check on his side. Mild-mannered rock drummer by day, wild-man immigration lawyer in a phone booth.”
Checker turned to the door, unable to decipher Eaton’s tone. Eaton kept a straight face. So many of Eaton’s compliments would have this quality—balanced perfectly between admiration and mockery. Never quite sardonic, never quite sincere. “Right,” said Check uncertainly. “Guys, I thought Strike should rehearse with you instead of me today, learn our tunes.”
“When I talked to you last, you were all in a tizzy,” said Eaton, languishing in a chair. “Now you’ve solved everything?”
“We just have to find him a wife.”
“The Sheik doesn’t have a sweetheart, does he?” asked Caldwell.
“Who needs a sweetheart,” said Eaton, “when your band leader has such a pretty smile?”
Checker looked at Eaton with anthropological curiosity.
“Surely, Secretti,” Eaton proceeded, “with those big broad shoulders and wide blue eyes and that impressive set of drums there, you must have quite a harem. Just point. Marry your friend? Sure. Anything for you, Checker. Whatever you say.”
“Now that,” said Check, racheting his keys, “is a laugh.”
“Check don’t have no harem,” said J.K. “He got a death squad.”
“Remember Janice?” said Checker, pointing to four faint white scars scraped parallel down his arm.
Checker remembered Janice. Sure. Last summer, right here. More than once that wiry little creature waited all night for some joker to finish his beer, methodically splintering the edge of The Derailleurs’ regular table with her nail file. The way she dug into that wood and twisted as it got so damn late and the son of a bitch ordered another one. But she liked it on the table, hard and half off the edge. She said she sat here during sets and kneaded the varnish, watching Checker drum. She said she liked knowing what they did there and no one understanding why she was smiling. So she’d chip away until the waitress packed out; Checker had a key.
It was the last time he remembered, best and worst. Before, he’d always figured her a hellion, a vicious little animal survivor, with long, stringy muscles and wary eyes. He didn’t worry about her. Janice was thin, but more flexible than fragile, like Rachel. That afternoon she’d been to the beach; sand still stuck to her skin. Stubble had risen on the sides of her pelvis, where she shaved for her bikini, leaving only a little black tuft in the middle, like a Mohawk. Checker needed a shave, too, so between them the grind of their bodies had a satisfying grit, a resistance. She never liked it too smooth, too perfectly, simply good. And she wouldn’t let him roll her onto her back. The positions she preferred were more contorted, and she’d wrestle to stay on top. There was nail in her caress, bite to her kiss.
Sand imbedded in his pores. She was bony, without cushions; their hipbones jarred. At last she bit too deep, and reflexively he pulled her off him by her ragged wet mop, surprised to find that with the strands pulled taut he could feel her heart beating in her hair. That was when he noticed the frantic pulsing everywhere, the way her arteries exploded on the sides of her neck, at her throat, her armpits, in the shaved cups of her hips—it was amazing, this girl stripped so thin she was like a Compton transparency of the circulatory system. He stared at her veins, their rapid beat and alarming syncopation.
“Musicians,” she’d whispered over him; he moaned a half step lower each inch her hand descended from his shoulder. She meant it was not all cacophonous grappling, that he understood distinctions, different notes: here not there, and no longer—sustain, cut; press, lift. She would extend her hand and then delay; she played like funk, behind the beat, the little stop, the little reluctance. Checker smiled and thought, Give this girl sticks, but she was more keyboard really, resting her hand light and relaxed like a good pianist—Checker could have balanced pennies on her wrists. Her chords down his side grew increasingly deft, his pecs, nipple, under the ribs, off, to the hip socket, off, less and less, only tickling over the hairs now, right by his balls, but refusing, because it was too obvious, to touch the genitals themselves, like lyricists who leave a line at a rhyme so inevitable that they don’t sing the word at all.
Only at the end did he shrink back, from the long, scrappy fingers with the tight-in, pointed nails, black—an urchin’s. The urgency went too far. She clutched his collarbone like a ledge; he could see her hanging. His hands slid from her sides, and she slipped down his thighs. Checker’s prick sucked out, bent down, and sprang free of her like a perch that wouldn’t bear her weight. Her knees hit the table. She fell only three inches between his legs, but far enough for Janice to see he wouldn’t hold her up. She had wanted him, but getting him didn’t solve anything. She would need to find later there was nothing to solve, but he refused to teach her that much. He was a man and enjoyed this. He loved her childlike clambering, her skinny athletic daring, the way she climbed and swung and gripped at his limbs like at the rungs of a jungle gym. But he was not her father or brother or rescuer, and her wide brown eyes saw that in horror and went wild, then flat. She rolled completely off him onto her back, her palms to the wood, breathing at the quick, inconceivable pace of a hamster, the tiny rib cage filling up and down, her nostrils quivering, her short black hair frayed and chopped-looking, stricken. She would look only at the ceiling. He stroked her forehead, but would not comfort her too much, because he wouldn’t take back what she’d discovered.
They all thought they needed saving. They all got a surprise. And sooner or later, the nails came scraping over his arms, eyes clawing at his face. They screamed. Janice was the worst, since of course some of them were calm, pretend-cold, but he could always see the fingers opening and closing at their sides, the muscles springing in their jaws, hear the air grating through their teeth. Checker would spread his hands. He thought he’d given them what they wanted. Instead, he’d come too close—he gave them more than the others and stopped. He let them touch what they could not own. So many Alices, longing for the tiny garden, who couldn’t reach the key. For the girls it must have been worse than nothing. All his memories of that table had an edge in them, like Halloween apples filled with razor blades.
Little wonder none of these lovelies sprang to mind as Rahim’s bride-to-be. The last favor Janice did him was slashing her initials in the head of his snare, and Checker had known her well enough to see that the gesture cost her some restraint.
“What about your vocalist here?” Eaton proposed.
“You mean Rache?” asked Caldwell, no one looking straight at her.
Rachel immediately began to unravel her sweater, from a moth hole, with such concentration it was like knitting in reverse.
“Rache do enough for the band, man, I don’t know you want to involve—”
“Checker,” Rachel interrupted J.K. softly, “would you want me to?” She looked up at the drummer. “Would you like me to marry Hijack?”
Rachel’s hair was lo
ose today, and washed; it wafted out from her head, and her face was lost inside it. Looking into her eyes was like staring into a dark ball of fur which, with the slightest puff of air from the stage, would tumble away. Checker found himself actually holding his breath. He said absolutely nothing.
That was enough. A moment later the ball of fur blew out the door, caught on the breeze of its own shudder.
“You should have said no right away, man,” said Caldwell.
“I know,” said Checker. “I was thinking of Hijack. Back soon as I can.” They all think they need saving. Checker pulled on his jacket and jogged out of the club.
“Are they…?” asked Eaton.
“No!” the band answered at once.
“It’s just, that wasn’t a great suggestion, Strike,” said Caldwell.
“Rachel—” Howard hesitated. “Rachel is a romantic.”
“How the hell did I offend her?”
“Rache and Check—” Caldwell began.
“Sweets!” said Howard.
“Everybody know, Howard,” said J.K.
“Everybody knows if you tell everybody,” said Howard.
“Okay, okay.”
They sat in silence.
“I’ve never figured out how she stands it,” Caldwell remarked.
“It’s very delicate,” said Howard, his delight in analysis getting the better of his loyalty. “Like photosynthesis. A perfectly balanced chemical process that by all rights shouldn’t work—”
“Where you get that?” asked J.K.
“The point is”—Howard glared—“if plants can turn air to branches, anything is possible.”
“Howard’s right, Big J.,” said Caldwell. “There’s something real incredible about those two. Like, it’s a miracle little Jackless hasn’t killed herself.”
Checker and the Derailleurs Page 5
