Sweet Nothing

by RICHARD LANGE

  A kid ducks into our doorway to get out of the sun. He’s yelling into his phone in Spanish and doesn’t see me standing on the other side of the glass, close enough I can count the pimples on his chin.

  “¿Por qué?” he says. That’s “Why?” or sometimes “Because.” “¿Por qué? ¿Por qué?”

  When he feels my eyes on him, he flinches, startled. I chuckle as he moves out to the curb. He glances over his shoulder a couple times like I’m something he’s still not sure of.

  “Is it too cold in here?” the old man shouts.

  He’s short already, but hunched over like he is these days, he’s practically a midget. Got about ten hairs left on his head, all white, ears as big as a goddamn monkey’s, and those kind of thick glasses that make your eyes look like they belong to someone else.

  “You want me to dial it down?” I say.

  “What about you? Are you cold?” he says.

  “Don’t worry about me,” I say.

  Irving Mandelbaum. I call him Mr. M or boss. He’s taken to using a cane lately, if he’s going any distance, and I had to call 911 a while back when I found him facedown on the office floor. It was just a fainting spell, but I still worry.

  “Five degrees, then,” he says. “If you don’t mind.”

  I adjust the thermostat and return to my chair. When I’m sure Mr. M is in the office, I rock back and get myself balanced. My world record is three minutes and twenty-seven seconds.

  I’VE BEEN LIVING in the hotel awhile now. Before that it was someplace worse, over on Fifth. Someplace where you had crackheads and hypes puking in the hallways and OD’ing in the bathrooms we shared. Someplace where you had women knocking on your door at all hours, asking could they suck your dick for five dollars. It was barely better than being on the street, which is where I ended up after my release from Lancaster. Hell, it was barely better than Lancaster.

  A Mexican died in the room next to mine while I was living there. I was the one who found him, and how I figured it out was the smell. I was doing janitorial work in those days, getting home at dawn and sleeping all morning, or trying to, anyway. At first the odor was just a tickle in my nostrils, but then I started to taste something in the air that made me gag if I breathed too deeply. I didn’t think anything of it because it was the middle of summer and there was no air-conditioning and half the time the showers were broken. To put it plainly, everybody stunk in that place. I went out and bought a couple of rose-scented deodorizers and set them next to my bed.

  A couple of days later I was walking to my room when something strange on the floor in front of 316 caught my eye. I bent down for a closer look and one second later almost fell over trying to get up again. What it was was three fat maggots, all swole up like overcooked rice. I got back down on my hands and knees and pressed my cheek to the floor to see under the door, and more maggots wriggled on the carpet inside the room, dancing around the dead man they’d sprung from.

  Nobody would tell me how the guy died, but they said it was so hot in the room during the time he lay in there that he exploded. It took a special crew in white coveralls and rebreathers almost a week to clean up the mess, and even then the smell never quite went away. It was one of the happiest days of my life when I moved from there.

  J BONE’S COUSIN, the player from the lobby, is laughing at me. I’m not trying to be funny, but the man is high, so everything makes him laugh. His name is Leon.

  It’s 6:30 in the evening outside. In here, with tinfoil covering the windows, it might as well be midnight. I suspect time isn’t the main thing on the minds of Leon and Bone and the two girls passing a blunt on the bed. They’ve been at it for hours already and seem to be planning on keeping the party going way past what’s wise.

  The door to Bone’s room was wide open when I walked by after work, still wearing my uniform. I heard music playing, saw people sitting around.

  “Who that, McGruff the Crime Dog?” Leon called out.

  Some places it’s okay to keep going when you hear something like that. Not here. Here, if you give a man an inch on you, he’ll most definitely take a mile. So I went back.

  “What was that?” I said, serious but smiling, not weighting it one way or the other.

  “Naw, man, naw,” Leon said. “I’s just fucking with you. Come on in and have a beer.”

  All I wanted was to get home and watch Jeopardy!, but I couldn’t say no now, now that Leon had backed down. I had to have at least one drink. One of the girls handed me a Natural Light, and Leon joked that I better not let anybody see me with it while I was in uniform.

  “That’s cops, man, not guards,” I said, and that’s what got him laughing.

  “You know what, though,” he says. “Most cops be getting high as motherfuckers.”

  Everybody nods and murmurs, “That’s right, that’s right.”

  “I mean, who got the best dope?” he continues. “Cops’ girlfriends, right?”

  He’s wearing the same suit he had on the other day, the shirt unbuttoned and the jacket hanging on the back of his chair. He’s got the gift of always looking more relaxed than any man has a right to, and that relaxes other people. And then he strikes.

  “So what you guarding?” he asks me.

  “A little jewelry store on Hill,” I say.

  “You got a gun?” he says.

  “Don’t need one,” I say. “It’s pretty quiet.”

  I don’t tell him I’m not allowed to carry because of my record. We aren’t friends yet. Some of these youngsters, first thing out of their mouths is their crimes and their times. They’ve got no shame at all.

  “What you gonna do if some motherfucker comes in waving a gat, wanting to take the place down?” Leon says.

  I sip my beer and shrug. “Ain’t my store,” I say. “I’ll be ducking and covering.”

  “Listen at him,” Leon hoots. “Ducking and covering. My man be ducking and covering.”

  The smoke hanging in the air is starting to get to me. The music pulses in my fingertips, and my grin turns goofy. I’m looking right at the girls now, not even trying to be sly about it. The little one’s titty is about to fall out of her blouse.

  Leon’s voice comes to me from a long way off. “I like you, man,” he says. “You all right.”

  Satan’s a sweet talker. I shake the fog from my head and down the rest of my beer. If you’re a weak man, you better at least be smart enough to know when to walk away. I thank them for the drink, then hurry to my room. With the TV up loud, I can’t hear the music, and pretty soon it gets back to being just like any other night.

  EXCEPT THAT I dream about those girls. Dreams like I haven’t dreamed in years. Wild dreams. Teenage dreams. And when I wake up humping nothing but the sheets, the disappointment almost does me in.

  The darkness is a dead weight on my chest, and the hot air is like trying to breathe tar. My mind spins itself stupid, names ringing out, faces flying past. The little girl who’d lift her dress for us when we were eight or nine and show us what she got. My junior high and high-school finger bangs and fumble fucks. Monique Carter and Shawnita Weber and that one that didn’t wear panties because she didn’t like how they looked under her skirt. Sharon, the mother of one of my kids, and Queenie, the mother of the other. All the whores I was with when I was stationed in Germany and all the whores I’ve been with since.

  The right woman can work miracles. I’ve seen beasts tamed and crooked made straight. But in order for that to happen, you have to be the right man, and I’ve never been anybody’s idea of right.

  WE CLOSE FROM one to two for lunch, and I walk over and eat a cheeseburger at the same joint every afternoon. Then I go back to the store, the old man buzzes me in, and I flip the sign on the door to Open. Today the showroom smells like Windex when I return. Mr. M’s been cleaning. I sit in my chair and close my eyes. It was a slow morning—one Mexican couple, a bucktoothed kid and a pregnant girl, looking at wedding rings—and it’s going to be a slow afternoon. The days fly b
y, but the hours drag on forever.

  Around three thirty someone hits the Press for Entry button outside. The chime goes off loud as hell, goosing me to my feet. I peer through the window and see a couple of girls. I don’t recognize them until the old man has already buzzed them in. It’s the two from the other night, from the party in J Bone’s room. They walk right past me, and if they know who I am, they don’t show it.

  Mr. M asks can he help them. “Let me look at this,” they say, “let me look at that,” and while the old man is busy inside the case, their eyes roam the store. I realize then they aren’t interested in any watches or gold chains. They’re scoping out the place, searching for cameras and trying to peek into the back room.

  I look out the window again, and there’s Leon standing on the curb with J Bone and Dallas. They’ve got their backs to me, but I know Leon’s suit and Bone’s restless shuffle. Leon throws a glance over his shoulder at the store, can’t resist. There’s no way he can see me through the reflections on the glass, but I duck just the same.

  I go back and stand next to my chair. I cross my arms over my chest and stare up at the clock on the wall. In prison, there’s a way of being, of making yourself invisible while still holding down your place. I feel like I’m on the yard again or in line for chow. You walk out that gate, but you’re never free. What your time has taught you is a chain that hobbles you for the rest of your days.

  The girls put on a show, something about being late to meet somebody. They’re easing their way out.

  “I could go $375 on this,” the old man says, holding up a bracelet.

  “We’re gonna keep looking,” they say.

  “$350.”

  “Not today.”

  The old man sighs as they head for the door, puts the bracelet back in the case. Every lost sale stings him like it’s his first. The girls walk past me, again without a glance or nod, anything that a cop studying a tape might spot. The heat rushes in when the door opens but is quickly gobbled up by the air-conditioning, and the store is even quieter than it was before the girls came in.

  I don’t look at Mr. M because I’m afraid he’ll see how worried I am. I sit in my chair like I normally do, stare at the floor like always. The girls are right now telling Leon what they saw, how easy it would be, and J Bone is saying, We should do it today, nigga, nobody but the old man and McGruff in there, and him with no gun.

  But Leon is smarter than that. That ain’t how we planned it, he says. We’re gonna take our time and do it right.

  Him sending those girls in to case the store doesn’t bode well for me. There’s no way he didn’t think I’d remember them, which means he didn’t care if I did. He either figures I won’t talk afterward or, more likely, that I won’t be able to.

  THERE ARE LOTS of Leons out there. The first one I ever met was named Malcolm, after Malcolm X. He was twelve, a year younger than me, but acted fifteen or sixteen. He was already into girls, into clothes, into making sure his hair was just right. I’d see him shooting craps with the older boys. I’d see him smoking Kools. The first time he spoke to me, I was like, What’s this slick motherfucker want with a broke-ass fool like me? I was living in a foster home then, wearing hand-me-down hand-me-downs, and the growling of my empty stomach kept me awake at night.

  Malcolm’s thing was shoplifting, and he taught me how. We started out taking candy from the Korean store, the two of us together, but after a while he had me in supermarkets, boosting laundry detergent, disposable razors, and baby formula while he waited outside. Then this junkie named Maria would return the stuff to another store, saying she’d lost the receipt. We’d hit a few different places a day and split the money three ways. I never questioned why Maria and I were doing Malcolm’s dirty work, I was just happy to have him as a friend. Old men called this kid sir, and the police let him be. It was like I’d lived in the dark before I met him.

  The problem was, every few years after that, a new Malcolm came along, and pretty soon I’d find myself in the middle of some shit I shouldn’t have been in the middle of, trying to impress him. “You know what’s wrong with you?” Queenie, the mother of my son, once said. She always claimed to have me figured out. “You think you can follow someone to get somewhere, but don’t nobody you know have any idea where the hell they’re going either.”

  She was right about that. In fact, the last flashy bastard who got past my good sense talked me right into prison, two years in Lancaster. I was a thirty-three-year-old man about to get fired from Popeyes Chicken for mouthing off to my twenty-year-old boss. “That’s ridiculous,” Kelvin said. “You’re better than that.” He had a friend who ran a chop shop, he said. Dude had a shopping list of cars he’d pay for.

  “Yeah, but I’m trying to stay out of trouble,” I said.

  “This ain’t trouble,” Kelvin said. “This is easy money.”

  I ended up going down for the second car I stole. The police lit me up before I’d driven half a block, and I never heard from Kelvin again, not a Tough luck, bro, nothing. It took that to teach me my lesson. I can joke about it now and say I was a slow learner, but it still hurts to think I was so stupid for so long.

  WHEN THE HEAT breaks late in the day, people crawl out of their sweatboxes and drag themselves down to the street to get some fresh air and let the breeze cool their skin. They sit on the sidewalk with their backs to a wall or stand on busy corners and tell each other jokes while passing a bottle. The dope dealers work the crowd, signaling with winks and whistles, along with the Mexican woman who peddles T-shirts and tube socks out of a shopping cart and a kid trying to sell a phone that he swears up and down is legit.

  I usually enjoy walking through the bustle, a man who’s done a day of work and earned a night of rest. I like seeing the easy light of the setting sun on everybody’s faces and hearing all of them laugh. Brothers call out to me and shake my hand as I pass by, and there’s an old man who plays the trumpet like you’ve never heard anyone play the trumpet for pocket change.

  I barrel past it all today, not even pausing to drop a quarter in the old man’s case. My mind is knotted around one worry: what I’m gonna say to Leon. I haven’t settled on anything by the time I see him and his boys standing in front of the hotel, so it won’t be a pretty sermon, just the truth.

  The three of them are puffing on cigars, squinting against the smoke as I roll up.

  “Evening, fellas,” I say.

  “What up, Officer,” J Bone drawls.

  Dallas giggles at his foolishness, but Leon doesn’t crack a smile. The boy’s already got a stain on his suit, on the lapel of the coat. He blows a smoke ring and looks down his nose at me.

  “I saw them girls in the store today,” I say to him.

  “They was doing some shopping,” he says.

  “I saw you all too.”

  “We was waiting on them.”

  He’s been drinking. His eyes are red and yellow, and his breath stinks. I get right to my point.

  “Ain’t nothing in there worth losing your freedom for,” I say.

  “What you talking about?” Leon says.

  “Come on, man, I been around,” I say.

  “He been around,” Bone says, giggling again.

  “You’ve got an imagination, I’ll give you that,” Leon says.

  “I hope that’s all it is,” I say.

  Leon steps up so he’s right in my face. We’re not two inches apart, and the electricity coming off him makes the hair on my arms stand up.

  “Are you fucking crazy?” he says.

  “Maybe so,” I mumble, and turn to go. When I’m about to pull open the lobby door, he calls after me.

  “How much that old man pay you?”

  “He pays me what he pays me,” I say.

  “I was wondering, ’cause you act like you the owner.”

  “I’m just looking out for my own ass.”

  Leon smiles, trying to get back to being charming. With his kind, though, once you’ve seen them without their
masks, it’s never the same.

  “And you know the best way to do that, right?” he says.

  “Huh?” I say.

  “Duck and cover,” he says.

  He’s going to shoot me dead. I hear it in his voice. He’s already got his mind made up.

  YOUNGBLOOD SAYS HE knows someone who can get me a gun, a white boy named Paul, a gambler, a loser, one of them who’s always selling something. I tell Youngblood I’ll give him twenty to set it up. Youngblood calls the guy, and the guy says he has a little .25 auto he wants a hundred bucks for. That’s fine, I say. I have three hundred dollars hidden in my room. It’s supposed to be Mexico money, but there isn’t gonna be any Mexico if Leon puts a bullet in me.

  Paul wants to meet on Sixth and San Pedro at nine p.m. It’s a long walk over, and Youngblood talks the whole way there about his usual nothing. He has to stop three times. Once to piss and twice to ask some shaky-looking brothers where’s a dude named Breezy. I’m glad I have my money in my sock. I don’t like to dawdle after dark. They’ll cut you for a quarter down here, for half a can of beer.

  We’re a few minutes late to the corner, but this Paul acts like it was an hour. “What the fuck?” he keeps saying, “what the fuck?” looking up and down the street like he expects the police to pop out any second. He has a bandage over one eye and is wearing a T-shirt with cartoon racehorses on it, the kind they give away at the track.

  “Show me what you got,” I say, interrupting his complaining.

  “Show you what I got?” he says. “Show me what you got.”

  I reach into my sock and bring out the roll of five twenties. I hand it to him, and he thumbs quickly through the bills.