Bobby knelt beside her as she pressed the plunger on her inhaler one more time, sucking deep on the spray. Dark patches rimmed her eyes, which were spent and glazed.
“You strong enough to walk to the kitchen, or you want me to bring the coffee in?”
She shook her head, like she couldn’t believe he’d ask such a thing, twitching from the pain in her diaphragm. Her breath came in quick shallow tremors and she rubbed her throat.
“I’ll just be a second.” He collected the half-cup of coffee from the kitchen sink and hurried back. In a mock accent, vaguely Transylvanian, he said, “Black like night, strong like bull.” Trying to joke, turn the mood around.
She’d inherited most of her features from her dad, her poor constitution and bone white skin from her mom. Tiny, with birdlike legs and arms, she spread oddly wide at the hips, square in the can, small-breasted, with an upturned nose and a sloping jaw that gave her a strangely vixenish underbite. Her lips were plump, curving wickedly at the edges, and she had the kind of wintry blue eyes that could stop you dead. Her pixie haircut accentuated how small she was to where, in her cotton briefs and tank top, barefoot, gasping for breath on the cold hard floor, she looked like a dying child. Except for the tattoos.
“Get me the aspirin.” She fluttered her hand toward the medicine cabinet. Bobby obliged—it would mean she’d taken every conceivable measure to stop the attack—and she popped three tablets with the coffee. Settling back against the wall, legs tucked up under her, she gathered a few even breaths then said, “It’s not fair. I eat like nothing that’s not green. I cut out the sugar. Cut out the salt, the wheat. Well, most of the wheat. No wine, no whiskey, just vodka.”
Bobby smiled. Yes, well, ahem, he thought. You still smoke.
“You do what they tell you,” she said, “you should catch some slack.”
She’d started smoking at age eight. Her three older brothers were out in the peat mounds that belonged to the greenhouse behind the schoolyard. Trink—Jennifer Trinka, third grade, Star of the Sea Elementary—snuck up, spotted them passing the Marlboro pack around.
“I’m telling,” she hissed, then fled.
They ran after her, forced her to the ground and made her smoke with them and said if she told on them, they’d tell on her. Did that every day for a month, till they didn’t need to hold her down anymore. Two years passed before she caught on to what a lame threat they’d made and by then she had a half-pack-a-day habit, ten years old. The asthma kicked in not long after when she hit puberty; she had a two-pack habit by then. She’d been flirting with suffocation ever since, working cocktail, chip girl, rooms hazed with smoke.
With the heel of her hand she wiped at one eye then the other. “Not fucking fair.”
“No, it’s not.” What could he say? She was his girl.
“I don’t want to die in this hellhole, Roper. Okay?”
“I’m working on it.”
An old pit boss of Bobby’s from his Reno days had settled in Minden, gotten in touch, said he had a housing deal. Come up with thirty grand, he said, he could work them into a condo meant for the casino staff, rig the financing through the union. Nothing magnificent, three rooms and a kitchen, but Bobby had no credit—name a gambler who did—he couldn’t be choosy. And it was high desert. Good for asthmatics.
Bobby’d been doing all right getting the money together till Trink’s string of therapeutic sidetracks and sudden disasters this past year—acupuncture, allergy tests, a pneumonia booster, then the thrush and the mold and the flu and four trips to Emergency where they amped her up on adrenaline so bad they had to monitor her for heart attack, after which she felt like the nurses had gone at her with hammers. And given her asthma, insurance? Forget about it. Every single payout for care or meds came out of pocket, full price. She couldn’t work anymore. With the elevator out, couldn’t even leave the apartment. Bobby was on his own, down to his last eighteen grand, kept in his player’s bank at the Eucalyptus Room. He’d lose that too if he didn’t do something.
It was why he’d jumped on Sal’s offer, decided to buy in to his new secret partnership. He needed a chance to score big.
Trink pursed her lips, chest shivering as she exhaled. “Just once in my life, Roper, I’d love not to have to think about my next breath, you know?”
Bobby had gone to college and he’d studied enough Psych to know what was going on. The imprint, so to speak. He was drawn to wounded birds: Women who were self-tortured victims of their own poor judgment. Like his mother.
He’d been an only child, she a single mom, and they’d moved around a lot. Bobby’d only known his father through photographs. He’d been handsome with an effortless grace about him, generous with a smile and never seeming ill at ease in front of the camera. At least, until Bobby’s mother got pregnant. The snapshots ended then, along with the marriage. By the time Bobby was old enough to understand what a father was, his was nothing more than a rumor told to him when his mother drank.
She called him a sociopath or, if she was feeling clever, a born salesman. He’d liked his games—horses, cards—liked his liquor and his girls and he’d disappear for days, weeks sometimes, then come back smelling of drink and gamy sweat and another woman’s bed. When he left, he said he’d never wanted a family and how cruel could she be, bringing a kid into the world when she knew that.
It took twenty years for his mother to finally drag her heart out of its box to meet somebody new. Ralph Stoudemire: he brokered professional liability coverage and taught ballroom dancing. The dancing, it was like Bobby’s mom had been reborn.
“Come visit us, Bobby, couldn’t you? Your mother’s happy for once—do you understand?”
Bobby met them for drinks at the Embarcadero Hyatt in San Francisco. Bobby’s mom, the chain-smoking English teacher, wore lipstick and eyeliner and rouge, first time in years, and a cocktail dress, high heels. Ralph wore a blue blazer and brown slacks, reeking of cologne and breath mints. It was like a prom date, the light in their eyes when they sat together, the giggles, the furtive little pinches. Then the hotel orchestra struck up “Begin the Beguine.” Ralph shot to his feet, pulling her with him, and they were gone. The dark dance floor shimmered from a recent waxing and their reflections flickered beneath them as they swirled and stopped and circled, defying gravity for a little while. Not long enough. Six months later, after Ralph emptied all her accounts and disappeared, Bobby’s mom climbed out of the bottle just long enough to say, “That’s it. I’m done. Men leave, they take everything and they don’t come back. I’m only so brave.”
And there you had it, Bobby thought. He’d both mimicked and defied the example of the men in his mother’s life. Admiring their swagger, their cutthroat charm, their worldliness, but bettering them by being smarter, stronger, loyal. He hadn’t left Trink, he’d stayed. He’d taken nothing from her. On the contrary, he’d given all he had.
Bobby knew he owed some of that to Sal. They shared an odd simpatico, all the more strange because of the vast difference between them. Bobby’d been little more than a smart ass with a talent for cards when he’d shown up at the Eucalyptus Room. Sal made a gambler, a man, out of him—not so much because of anything he’d said or done, just by example. And that, Bobby suspected, made Sal the kind of man he’d been secretly hunting for all his life—not a father figure, but not one of his mother’s mistakes, either.
Bobby understood perfectly well that the buy-in for Sal’s offer was fifty, but he figured if he could just scratch up an extra two, show up with twenty even, Sal might negotiate. And in three months, the way Sal had pitched the deal, Bobby could turn the twenty into thirty, cash out, send his old pit boss the down and get Trink where she needed to be, up in the thin cool air, the sunbleached heat, the high desert. But he still needed another two grand. That was where Eddie Mott came in.
Bobby had to cab it to the Richmond District where Eddie lived because his own car had died, and he couldn’t throw good money after bad right now. Eddie’s wife,
a Korean named Claudia, opened the door, all five feet of her. She wore a washed-out housedress, hair in rollers, gazing up at Bobby through smudged glasses. There was no explaining gamblers and their wives, Bobby realized, but he’d always thought Eddie had stooped particularly low.
Claudia spoke in short, shrill bursts of sound, like a swim coach with his whistle. “Eddie not here! Mother’s house!” She gave Bobby the address then slammed the door.
The place was clear across town in Echo Park. It cost Bobby forty-three bucks with tip to get there by cab, and he figured it’d be wise to hit up Eddie for that as well. He was down to fifty-six dollars pocket money.
The taxi let him out in front of a stucco duplex. Mud-colored stains fingered down from the rain gutters and mold speckled the window ledges. Every house on the narrow street looked as bad if not worse. A brisk wind blew trash down the sidewalks.
Bobby tried the door, discovered it open. “Eddie?”
Passing through the doorway, he entered a museum of motherly kitsch glazed with dust. The place stank of mildew, the windows all closed tight, plus a heavy stench of gas. But there was a foul human smell, too.
Bobby found Eddie in the kitchen, perched like a toad on a tiny wood foot stool, staring at a sun-faded flower-print bed sheet covering a lumpy shape. The odors were worse in here. The oven door stood open. Duct tape sealed the windows and still hung tattered along the edges of the doorway.
“Eddie, hey,” Bobby whispered, thinking: Good God.
Eddie glanced just once at Bobby, nodded, then returned his gaze to the washed out bedsheet.
“I had to move her. They’re gonna get pissed, the cops I mean, but fuck them. I had to.”
Eddie was possibly the most placid person Bobby knew, but he sensed something dark, something hostile, dragging at his voice like an undertow. Bobby slipped up behind, squeezed Eddie’s shoulder. “Christ, Eddie, this is, I don’t know, terrible.”
Eddie nodded solemnly. He was a hulking, soft, plain man, with a wardrobe from Sears—gray, beige, white, more gray—and a face memorable solely due to his horn-rimmed glasses. His life consisted of repairing computers in his garage and playing cards.
“She called out of the blue, left a message. ‘I’m going away. Don’t worry if I don’t answer the phone.’ That was it. Her voice, I don’t know, I just had a feeling.”
Bobby tried to picture it, a mother calling like that. He felt scared suddenly about his own mom and made a mental note to phone her. It had been a while.
“People don’t die the way you think, Bobby. Smell that?” Eddie’s nostrils flared and he winced, pushing his glasses up the bridge of his nose. “Not the gas, the other thing. I cleaned up most of it but, you know, the muscles relax. Not right, cops find her like that.”
“Respect, Eddie, it’s important.” Bobby felt desperate for air. “Hey, listen. This probably isn’t the best time, but I—”
“Her head in the fucking oven, Bobby. It’s a message. I don’t feel despair here, Bobby, I feel anger.”
Yeah, but whose, Bobby wondered. “Don’t take this on yourself, Edster. Old folks, they get depressed.”
“Sixty-two, Bobby. Just sixty-two. That’s young.”
“Too young, Eddie. You’re right, what can I say? Listen—”
“Gotta admit, can’t say I cared for her all that much, you know? Used my old man up like a bag of peas. Me, I was just the errand boy. But you know, today of all days, she’s my mother, and what ain’t right, ain’t right.”
Bobby was kneading Eddie’s shoulders now, working them like a weight room trainer. “Eddie, Eddie, I understand. Totally. The human condition, it’s supremely wack. Now, like I said, this ain’t the best time I realize—”
A loud knock sounded at the front door. Bobby spotted two cops venturing in through the living room.
“Anybody? Hello?”
Like that, Eddie shot to his feet. “Look who decided to show the fuck up!” He hitched up his belt and lurched into the living room. “That all my mother means to you guys? Just another yeah-yeah-yeah?”
“Sir,” the lead cop said, raising his hand. “Back up.”
No, Bobby thought. This can’t happen. Out of the corner of his eye he spotted Eddie’s key ring on the kitchen counter as the voices in the living room started to boil. Eddie’s headed for lockup, Bobby thought, what good’s his car to him. He snatched the keys, shoved them in his pocket, as the same cop shouted, “I meant what I said. Back the fuck up, fat man, or we do the dance.”
The next few hours dragged by like a Swedish movie. The cops wouldn’t let Bobby go till they could write out a report and Eddie just kept cycling through paranoid fits of guilty rage and sad-sack crying jags, at one point mewling in misery on one cop’s shoulder, same cop he took a swing at not thirty seconds later. That was when they put the cuffs on and called for backup. When Bobby tried to suggest that everybody just, you know, chill, he got told to shut up and sit tight or he’d be joining his friend in stir.
Bobby slinked off to the kitchen table where he sat and chewed his thumbnail, watching the hands on the clock while more and more cops showed up. Even the Neptune Society got there before Bobby could finally steal one of the cops into a corner and talk him into jotting down enough so he could leave.
“Eddie, Eddie, you be strong!” Bobby waved goodbye through the crowd of uniforms. Backing into the living room, he collided with the crematorium’s gurney. It scared a little yelp out of him and he spun around, apologizing to the bored tech who just sat there on the couch, paging through an ancient copy of The Potrero Bingo Beacon.
Out on the street, Bobby spotted Eddie’s car, blocking a driveway. It was one of the new VW Bugs—white, of course, dullest color they had, and automatic, not a stick Check it out, he thought: One of the cops had written Eddie a ticket. That was cold. Bobby snatched the ticket from under the windshield wiper, tossed it into the gutter then got behind the wheel and drove off as fast as he could. He’d tell Eddie later that he’d only borrowed the Bug because Eddie himself insisted—so Bobby could come around the county lockup later, bail him out, drive him home. Eddie’d be too drunk from his own mood swings to remember for sure what he had and hadn’t said the past few hours.
Bobby gassed the Bug’s throaty little turbo through Vistacion Valley and up the rim of hills connecting Candlestick with the San Bruno range, dropping down again at Oyster Point and following the Bayshore Freeway south. The Eucalyptus Room sat along the briny mud flats lining the Dumbarton Bridge approach. He pulled into the parking lot just before the ten o’clock closing. Okay, he thought, no two grand. But it wasn’t like Eddie refused. That’s what he’d tell Sal. Just a temporary setback. You know, bad luck.
Bobby’d moved back to the Bay Area two years earlier, after leaving Chico State without a degree and working the tables in Reno for a while. His mother had moved to Albuquerque for a total lifestyle makeover so San Francisco seemed like a whole new city. No dreary echoes, no morbid shadows.
He quickly found his way to the peninsula south of town and marveled at how much money rolled through the card rooms. There among the suburbs with their car lots and strip malls and office parks you had players with more attitude than card sense and a careless abandon when it came to their own incomes.
Bobby ended up favoring the Eucalyptus Room, Sal Lazzarini’s place, down in East Palo Alto. It had a reputation for hard play at the sixty/one-twenty tables and was rumored to draw a rough crowd. But all that was fine with Bobby. He’d learned to play poker with sawed-off roughnecks—long-haulers, skip tracers, meth-head carpenters and boozy, chain-smoking barbers—the kind of creatures who inhabited the slummy neighborhoods his mother could afford to live in. Those guys would have fit in like furniture at the Eucalyptus Room. Besides, there was this chip girl there. Her name was Jennifer Trinka.
She wore her hair longer then, halfway down her back in long permed curls. It set off the soft smooth whiteness of her skin and the hard cold blue of her eyes. Boyish
in the chest, she emphasized her legs instead, wearing kinky heels and shameless skirts. Guys at the tables couldn’t love her enough. Bobby knew he couldn’t just make his play from the floor, like every other mope. He needed status.
He hung around, doing the rail bird bit, making idle chat with the help and hoping to team up with someone, play partners at a high spread table. It was the only way to make real money in a room like that. You had fools getting hosed at Texas Hold ’Em and Low Ball, forty hands per hour. Meanwhile, across the room, Asians threw insane amounts of money away at Pai Gow and Pan Nine, thrilling Sal since the house had a stake in every ante and winning pot.
As Bobby settled in over time, he seemed to get along okay with folks—he had a talent for that, getting along—but couldn’t quite get that second leg over, especially with Sal. Then one night, Trink sidled up, smiling like she knew something he didn’t.
“Mr. Lazzarini would like a word.”
Bobby followed her back to the office, memorizing the tiny waist, the rippling black hair, the pendulum action of her strangely boxy tush, marveling at the strong stockinged legs with her tattoos peeking through the mesh. At the office door she turned like a game show hostess and gestured him inside.
“You joining us?” He tried not to sound too hopeful.
She didn’t answer, but he noticed that her smile lingered as she walked away.
It was the first time Bobby’d been in the office, first time alone with Sal for that matter. They’d traded nods and smiles on the floor, but never spoken beyond small talk. But Bobby already knew he liked Sal, respected him. He seemed unbothered by doubt, as though thought was just a kind of action—you sized up a man asking for credit, you tallied odds—and beyond that reflection was pointless, counterproductive, even dangerous.
Killing Yourself to Survive: Stories Page 8
