Angela Sloan

by James Whorton

  A Chinese man in sleek black slacks and a V-neck pullover came to speak to Ray. His bald, shiny sternum showed in the V. Ray addressed him as Mr. Wang. He had cauliflower cheeks.

  We rose and followed Mr. Wang through the kitchen and out the back. Down the alley a steel door was propped open by means of a rubber mat folded on top of itself. Mr. Wang waved us in, kicking the mat and closing the door. We were inside Lucky Bus Tour.

  We passed a mop and a coat rack. Wang rapped on a door, and the answer came as a kind of bark. Again Wang motioned us in, only this time he didn’t follow.

  14

  There was a camera on a tripod and a small steel desk with another Chinese male behind it. A tassel beard of forty black hairs grew off his chin. He came close in order to scrutinize Ray’s face. He held a desk lamp on one side of Ray’s head, then the other, studying the swollen eye.

  “Her, too?”

  “Yes,” Ray said.

  “How old is she? Twelve?”

  “She’s eighteen.”

  “She might be fifteen. No more than that, I think.”

  His English was better than Wang’s. He gave me the lamp treatment, then nodded at my knapsack. “Have you got some makeup in there, miss?”

  “No.”

  He opened a desk drawer and brought out a greasy tackle box, which he laid in my hands. He sent me to a small, grim lavatory.

  There was my face in the cloudy mirror. Fatigue makes an adult look older, but it makes a child look younger and more childish. The skin under my eyes had a gray shine to it, and the knit forehead didn’t help.

  I put a lot of beige powder all over my face and ears, used a pencil around my eyes, and smeared some lipstick onto my mouth. I tried a few things with my hair, but it is the kind of hair that lies fairly slick no matter what is done to it. There was a comb in the tackle box, but I was unwilling to handle it. I pulled some hair forward to cover the sides of my face.

  When Ray saw me he said, “Oh, that’s not good.” I thought I had better go wash my face off, but the Chinese man said we’d try a picture first. He put me on a stool in front of some blue paper taped to the wall and snapped a Polaroid. Then he took another with the hair pulled even farther forward so that all but a three-inch strip down the middle of my face was covered with my hair. In the picture, I did not look older so much as embalmed. Well, but that was a strategy. The thing in the picture was ageless.

  On the desk he spread out a dozen driver’s licenses from various states. The idea was to choose the ones that would need to be altered the least.

  The faces had a sad foolishness about them. I suppose it is hard not to look foolish in your driver’s license picture once it has been stolen from you. All of the licenses were current. They included a set of three that belonged to a husband, wife, and daughter, judging by their names and by the way the young woman resembled both of the older people, who did not, however, resemble each other, except that all three of them were black.

  Ray had his mind made up on licenses from a southern state. “Don’t you have a couple from Tennessee?” he said.

  “No. I could get a couple.”

  “Okay, get a couple.”

  The man said it would take him one week.

  Wang had waited in the alley. As he led us back through the kitchen, the mean-looking girl was receiving a good, loud scolding in Chinese from a gray-haired woman with an iron pot in her hand. The girl faced a few degrees to one side, as though to let the high-pitched coughing fit of language be deflected.

  “My mother took the girl on for charity,” Wang said. “She is dull. Speaks no English, very little Chinese.”

  “What does she speak?” Ray asked.

  “A little Cantonese, that is all. We have a lot of trouble with that simpleminded girl.”

  I twisted to get one more look at her and saw an interesting thing. The hard eyes that had at first seemed calculating and full of foreign malice now struck me as merely stolid and flat. There was something to learn in this. I had seen a face I couldn’t read and attributed cunning to it. It never occurred to me that her face might be unreadable because she had been dropped on her head as a baby.

  Wang left us at our table. When the girl came out again, a little pinker for being shouted at, Ray ordered more beer and a large meal of Chinese food, taking care to include the number of each menu item and see that the girl wrote it down. It was a relief to know she was simpleminded. That made it easier to put up with her slow pace and sullen manner. Ray left her an oversized tip, as was his habit whatever the service.

  15

  Outside in the sun Ray patted himself for a matchbook. A cabdriver welcomed us to “Baldimore” and drove us out Harford Road to a used car dealer.

  Ray liked a sky-blue Plymouth Scamp with a white vinyl top, but the salesman balked when Ray mentioned a test drive. “Maybe you’ve been drinking,” the salesman said.

  “I didn’t mean that I would drive the car,” Ray said. “My daughter will drive it.”

  “I can’t allow that,” the salesman said.

  “Why? She’s perfectly sober.”

  “What is she, twelve?”

  “Why don’t we let the salesman drive?” I suggested.

  “I’m busy,” the salesman said.

  Ray brought a thick stack of hundred-dollar bills from his wind-breaker pocket. The paper was so crisp and springy, it would hardly stay folded.

  This caused the salesman to change his tune. Ray got in front on the passenger side, and I got in back by myself.

  “I’m Armando Snacki,” the salesman said.

  “Show us what the car is capable of, Mr. Snacki,” Ray said.

  Armando Snacki accelerated evenly and took us through a few smooth turns. Ray closed his eyes and fell asleep. We were pulling a slow U-turn when the tires squealed and Ray woke up. He twisted and looked at me.

  “We are test-driving a Plymouth Scamp,” I reminded him.

  He touched his mouth, checking for a cigarette.

  Back at the lot, Ray told Armando Snacki that we would take the Plymouth, but only with a new set of tires thrown in. “Those you have on there are noisy.” Snacki capitulated. “I can’t sell it to anyone else, now that it smells like egg rolls.”

  I had carried a paper sack of egg rolls from the Golden Monkey. He was right, there was a smell.

  I drank a 7-Up while the tires got put on. Ray gave Snacki some hundreds. Then the car was brought around front, and Ray got in on the passenger side again.

  I reminded him I’d never driven a car.

  “It isn’t hard,” he said. “I will explain it right now.”

  16

  “All I need to give you are a few simple principles,” Ray said.

  “Number one concerns your feet. The right foot is for going and stopping. Does this car have a clutch?”

  We established that it didn’t.

  “In this car, let your left foot rest. On rare occasions, you will use your left knee to hold the steering wheel, for example if you are eating food.

  “Principle two: avoid left turns, and avoid reverse. Principle three: adjust your mirrors.”

  Ray got out and stood in several positions around the car while I moved the mirrors so I could see him. Armando Snacki stood at the plate glass of his office.

  Ray got back in the car. “Don’t ever let the fuel level drop below half a tank. Top it off at the end of the day. Every week, check the oil. To check the brake lights by yourself, back up to a wall. Carry spare bulbs in the glove compartment, and carry a screwdriver. Don’t give some bored police officer a reason to pull you over. The first thing he’ll want is your license, and then there goes our cover. Above all, we must not go to Tennessee. It would be the worst place in the world for us, once we get our fake Tennessee driver’s licenses.”

  “We have no reason to ever go to Tennessee.”

  “Correct. Let’s drive.”

  I got the Scamp started and put it in gear. When I lifted my foot from the brake,
the car moved, and I stomped the brake again.

  Armando Snacki came out of his building.

  “Keep moving,” Ray said. “We’re done with Armando Snacki.”

  I raised my foot off the brake, and we idled through a wide turn across the lot. I did have to use the reverse gear once, when I came to a light pole. I aimed us out the exit. Then we were off. I was driving a car.

  I had to corkscrew down on the seat in order to reach the pedals. I used my left leg to keep from sliding into the floor.

  Ray flagged a liquor store. “Stop there, if you would.”

  It was on our left, across three lanes of traffic. Remembering principle two, I got us into the liquor store parking lot by a series of seven right turns.

  “Leave it running,” Ray said.

  My hands and armpits were sweating. Wouldn’t some country lane be a better place for my first driving lesson? But I decided to trust Ray on it, and when he came back, I drove again. He set two fifths in the floor and opened a pint to hold in his lap. “You are doing just fine with your driving,” he said.

  17

  We took a two-room apartment at the Fletcher Hotel on St. Paul and Madison. The front room contained one olive-colored sofa, one folding chair, and a card table with a hot plate on it. The black grime on the hot plate was hard like a casing. There was a bedroom and a minuscule bathroom. On the floor beside the toilet, someone had left behind a Donald Duck orange juice lid.

  Ray settled in on the sofa with his two bottles of bourbon and three packs of Raleighs. The pint was gone. “I need a favor,” he said.

  “What is it?”

  He held out one of the bottles. “Hide this somewhere.”

  “This place is kind of small for hiding things,” I said.

  He closed his eyes.

  I hid the bottle in my knapsack. Then I rinsed out the sink and brushed my teeth with a lot of toothpaste. I got in the bed.

  I had brought the shortwave radio, and I managed to pull in a few minutes of the Voice of America. Americans are not meant to hear it, since the government is not supposed to propagandize its own citizens, but sometimes you can hear it anyway, depending on the sunspots. The program I heard was a course in English. A woman and man were demonstrating how to have a conversation about the contents of the newspaper. For example,

  MAN: Did you see today’s headlines?

  WOMAN: Yes, I saw today’s headlines.

  MAN: Tomorrow is Election Day. Have you chosen your candidate?

  WOMAN: I will vote for the candidate from the Blue Party.

  MAN: Beef is on sale at the Robinson Market.

  WOMAN: The Robinson Market has good beef.

  It was a modest sort of propaganda. Pro-voting, pro-beef. The voices were furred over with soft static. Sometimes a long whistle echoed up from the bottom of a well.

  Later I woke to footsteps. The bedroom door was open, though I thought I remembered closing it.

  An egg of light moved low against the baseboard and onto the pocked gray linoleum. It shot up to the ceiling and stopped there, jumping in place just slightly.

  “Ray?”

  He stepped in. I couldn’t see him well behind the flashlight he carried, but I knew his sigh.

  He moved the light down the wall to the foot of the bed. The batteries were getting low. He ran the light over the bedspread until it glowed in my face.

  “The bottle is in my knapsack,” I said.

  He didn’t respond to that. With a flick he made the egg of light snap across the ceiling.

  “Like that,” he said.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “That is how they moved,” he said.

  He did it again, snapping it from one end of the ceiling to the other. The egg halted weightlessly against one wall then the other. Ray seemed to study it in a purposeful way.

  Then he turned the light onto himself. He was holding the blade of his sodbuster pocketknife alongside his throat. “Don’t let me do it,” he said.

  I jumped out of bed and grabbed his arm. I managed to pry a couple fingers open and shook the knife to the floor. “Wake up,” I said.

  He shook his head at me.

  “You’re asleep!” I said. “Wake up!” I steered him to the sofa and sat him down. “You were walking in your sleep, Ray!”

  I sat with him and he closed his eyes. He was quiet. Then he got up and ran into the bathroom. An awful croaking noise came out. He was throwing up.

  “You need to drink some water,” I said through the door.

  “Go to bed,” he slurred back at me.

  We didn’t have even a paper cup to put some water in. I told him to cup his hands at the faucet and drink some water.

  I heard splashing, so maybe he did what I said.

  He came out and lay back on the sofa. “Dear God,” he said. “I’m falling apart.”

  There was honking on St. Paul, and a gray metallic light came in at the window. The street was lit all night, and the blind was broken and wouldn’t stay closed.

  “You shouldn’t have to be a part of this,” Ray said.

  “It’s all right. We’re in close quarters for a while.”

  “It’s not all right. I have let you down badly, Jumbo.”

  “You haven’t let me down in the least,” I said.

  I touched his forehead. It was hot and dry. There were about a hundred things I wanted to tell him—mostly things I had guessed that I wasn’t supposed to have guessed, or things I remembered that I don’t think he knew I remembered. I wanted him to know that I was sturdy, and that he needn’t protect me from the truth.

  “Rely on me,” I said.

  He made an odd noise. A squeak. I couldn’t see his face well, and half a minute went by before I understood that he was crying. It startled me, because I’d never seen him cry before. I went all to pieces, then, and had to go to the other room. I was crying so hard I was wheezing. My bare foot hit Ray’s pocketknife. I closed it up and pushed it under the mattress. The flashlight was dead. I pinched myself on the legs.

  I ran back to Ray. “We’re all right!” I said. “Let’s get things in order. We need some paper cups! We’ll cover that window. Also, you need some pajamas. You’re sleeping in your clothes! No wonder you’re up at night. Did you drink from your hands like I told you to?” I went on fussing over him in this way while sniffling. “I’m going out right now to find some paper cups,” I said.

  “You won’t find them this time of night.”

  “Where’s that empty bottle? You can drink from that.”

  “I’ll be sick again,” he said.

  I rinsed out his handkerchief and folded it over his forehead. “I know you’ll feel better in the morning,” I said.

  “Maybe. You should go back to bed.”

  But I stayed. I sat on the edge of the sofa while he lay there taking shallow, quick breaths. I held his hand, which was not a thing I often did. I can’t think when I had done it before. His hand was big. I held it in both of mine.

  18

  Eventually he slept. Where does a person go, when he’s asleep? It’s a pointless question, but I felt he had left me and gone somewhere else. Yet I wasn’t quite alone, because there was traffic noise from outside, and the occasional raised voice or door slam reached my ears from somewhere else in the Fletcher Hotel. I stepped around the room just taking things in. It was night and the lights were off. The off-white walls were off-blue in patches of glare from the street. The room was weirdly large and barren with Ray on his back on the low green sofa, and the flimsy card table adrift in the middle of the floor.

  I went to the bedroom and lay down.

  When I woke up again it was daylight and Ray was still asleep. I was hungry, so I went out by myself to find food. I made a childish blunder at a place called Carrelli’s Market on St. Paul. I had a dollar and change in the pocket of my knapsack and had calculated the amount to be sufficient for two coffees and two large cinnamon rolls sealed in crisp plastic. When I got to th
e counter the girl gave me a total that was somewhat over that. I had left out the sales tax, and I had to put back one of the cinnamon rolls. It’s the sort of thing that takes you down a grade or two in your own mind. It bothered me even though they were great big cinnamon rolls. Too big, really. We could split the one.

  The emotional scene from the night before had knocked me off my balance. Ray and I really were not given to that kind of eruption. I put it behind me. On the street, white sunlight filtered through a pillowy haze. Sand had washed over the sidewalk from a construction site. Trucks were making deliveries, drowning out the birds.

  When I let myself into the room, Ray was sitting up.

  “Where have you been?” he said.

  “I brought breakfast,” I said.

  “What’s your name?” He meant my cover name—the new one.

  “Roberta Dewey.”

  “Who’s the old guy you’re staying with?”

  “Roy McJones.”

  “‘Roy McJones.’ Why are you with that old guy?”

  “I’m his private nurse.”

  “You attended nursing school where?”

  “I’m not a registered nurse. I look after Mr. McJones.”

  “What’s wrong with him that he needs a private nonregistered nurse looking after him day and night? Can’t he wipe his own nose?”

  “Would you like your nurse to go around describing your medical conditions?”

  “I see. All right. Anyway, you look awfully young to be someone’s nurse. You say you’re nineteen?”

  “Maybe it is a stretch to say I’m nineteen, Ray.”

  “Not at all.” He touched his hurt eye carefully. The swelling was mostly gone. “You do need to have some patter ready, though.”

  “My growth was stunted by a disease in childhood,” I improvised.

  “What disease in childhood?”

  “Compound complex anemia.”

  “We’ll work on it.”

  He rubbed his fingers together now, looking for a cigarette. They were in his jacket pocket, but we couldn’t find the jacket. It was a big mystery, since the room was a nearly empty box.