by Don Bruns
“Empire?”
“I’m not thinking one truck here. Think Ryder. Think U-Haul, Penske. Think big, Skip. People are more mobile than ever, and they have more stuff than ever. Stuff, buddy. Stuff. They need trucks to haul that stuff.” He stood up, stretched his six-foot, lanky frame, pulled his baggy green shorts up around his bare waist, and walked barefoot down to the girls’ patio. I could see him showing them how to get maximum heat without stinking up the meat with charcoal lighter. Four years of culinary college had paid off. He could pick up girls by dispensing barbecue advice. The phone chirped. I checked the number. Emily.
“Em. How goes it?”
“Whatcha doin’ for dinner? Want to grab a pizza?”
I looked down toward the girls’ patio. James was laughing, drinking one of their green labels, and they seemed to be amused at something he’d said. “Sure. I think my roommate has plans.”
“Oh, so I’m runner up?”
“No. Just an observation. Sure, let’s get a pizza. I want to run a business idea by you.”
“Me?”
Her, indeed. Emily’s dad owns a construction business in Carol City. Carol City Construction. He’s built some of the most palatial homes in the Miami area, and runs a very successful company. When Em graduated from the University of Miami with a computer engineering degree, she was offered about a zillion jobs, with salaries approaching $150,000. But she went to work for Dad and figured out how to make the main guy in her life another gazillion dollars. If anyone knew good business, she did.“You.”
“What about Jaystone?”
“I’m not quitting. Jaystone Security is still paying the bills.”
“Barely. You know you could always work construction, Skip. Dad could put you on at about a dozen sites right now.” Dad didn’t realize I couldn’t drive a nail even if I had a sledgehammer. And furthermore, he didn’t like me a whole lot. It wasn’t necessarily that I was dating his daughter or that I had a crummy job. It was more about not dating his daughter seriously. And I’m not sure he knew that was by her choosing. Em liked different guys. She liked to flirt, to party, to have her little affairs. She’d been that way since she went away to some hot-shit private school as a junior in high school and we’d broken up. But she still liked to get together with me and just get comfortable. And sometimes it was very, very comfortable.
“James has an idea—”
“Oh, Jesus.” I could picture her shaking that pretty little head, her short hair bouncing around that kissable face. “He’s always got ideas. You’re not buying into something with him are you?”
“Em, let’s go get a pizza. We can talk when my minutes aren’t on the line, okay?” Cell phone minutes, just like money, meant nothing to her. It’s the problem with rich people. They don’t think about how tough it can be on the others, trying to keep up. Every now and then I’ve got to bring her up short.
“I’ll be by in half an hour.”
“Dutch treat, Em. There haven’t been a lot of sales this month.”
“Then I hope to hell this business venture pans out, Skip. If it doesn’t, you might just starve to death.”
Did I mention that besides being rich, she has this sarcastic streak a mile long? Still, when she’s comfortable, she’s very comfortable.
Half an hour later to the minute she picked me up in the T-Bird convertible, the tan top already down and the red paint job waxed to a blinding shine. If I have to rely on a woman for my ride, I’m glad it’s a classy ride.
CHAPTER THREE
PAULIE’S HAS THIS GREAT CRUST that’s crisp and thin and has enough flavor to make you wish they’d just forget about the toppings. Seriously. Sometimes we just get a twelve-inch without anything and eat the crust.
Em ordered a fourteen-inch mushroom and Italian sausage with a pitcher of beer to wash it down, and we sat out on the faded wooden deck under a cheap umbrella, the sun cooking everything that wasn’t covered.
“So what is this big venture?”
“Promise me you won’t laugh?”
“No.”
“No, you won’t laugh?”
“No, I won’t promise you. Skip, that’s one reason I keep seeing you. You make me laugh.”
She laughed.
I read one time that if you can get a girl to laugh, you can get her into bed. I’m always afraid that they’ll laugh while we’re in bed.
“I’ll tell you anyway. James wants to go into the hauling business.”
“The what?”
“Hauling business.”
She was silent for a moment while she rolled that idea around in her head. “Well, he’s had to haul his ass out of a lot jams and he’s always been pretty successful.”
“He bought this box truck, and—”
“A box truck?”
“A box truck.”
“Like a U-Haul?”
“Yeah. Sort of. It’s this fourteen-foot aluminum box on the back of a cab. And you can haul just about anything.”
A smile played on her face.
“You’re gonna laugh.”
“No. Actually, it’s not a bad idea. For a sideline. And you could use the extra income.”
“That’s what I’m thinking. But James is thinking more than a sideline. He wants to have an entire fleet. He says people have too much stuff and they always want to move it.”
“Or store it.”
“Huh?”
“Skip, there’s this lady, Jackie Fuentes, and she’s got a ton of stuff she needs to store. You could haul it for her.”
There it was. We hadn’t handed out the first business card, and we already had a customer. This was going to be easier than I thought.
She sipped her beer and crossed those awesome tanned legs of hers. Her shorts rode up another couple of inches. I started to wonder if we were going to get comfortable tonight.
“She lives near the causeway off Indian Creek Village. Dad built her house about five years ago. God, Skip, it’s this huge mansion.”
Em’s dad lives in a 10,000-square-foot home in a gated community called Silver Bay, so when Em’s impressed with the size of a house, it must be awesome. And Daddy’s little princess lives in a condo that looks out over Biscayne Bay and South Beach from twenty stories up, so she’s not doing so bad herself.
“Her husband is involved in financing. I think he’s like a venture capitalist. He arranges high-interest loans to fund new businesses. And apparently he arranges extramarital affairs, because Jackie caught him with a little blond and threw him out of the house.”
In my relatively short life, I have always found it hard to fathom people who live that kind of life. And even with Emily, my own little rich bitch, I have to bite everything off in very small chunks. Christ, the apartment James and I live in isn’t 600 square feet, and our combined income is about $30,000 a year. Ten thousand square foot homes on fancy islands and high-finance engineers just don’t register.
“Eugene?”
She caught my mind wandering. Whenever she was serious she’d call me by my given name. I wish my mother had given it to someone else. And Skip? When I was younger, people would ask my name and when I said Eugene they’d invariably say “What?” I got to a point where I’d just say, “Skip it.” Over the years the name Skip took hold and I am so thankful for that. Of course, people I’ve known for years sometimes revert to Eugene. Sometimes when they’re serious and sometimes when they just want to piss me off.
“Yeah. Go on.”
“As I was saying, Jackie Fuentes threw her husband out.”
“And?”
“And she’s throwing all of his stuff out.”
“Stuff. That’s what James was talking about. People needing to move stuff.”
“She’s been going through his closets, the storage rooms, and she’s got a huge pile of stuff that she wants to move out. You could call and offer your services.”
Em gave me a big smile. I love that mouth. “Em, how do you know all this?”
“
She confides in me. I see her at the club, and—”
The club. Em’s friends belong to the club, and how can someone like me identify with the “club”?
“She told me.”
The waitress brought the pizza, the steam still rising from the hot, melted cheese. I took a whiff. I believe that God created pizza for the regular people. Em can be regular when she wants to. It’s cheap, it’s filling, and there isn’t a bad pizza out there. There are great pizzas. There are pizzas that aren’t as great as the great, but there are no bad pizzas. That’s what I believe.
“She said that Rick—”
“Rick?”
“Ricardo, her husband. She said Rick had moved the little blond into a condo and she wanted his stuff out. And then she told me something that I probably shouldn’t say to you. Hell, I shouldn’t say it to anyone.”
I loved this about Em. She fought with herself. Usually she was conflicted about her financial and social status. She wanted to be a pizza person, but she was this little rich bitch who could afford filet mignon. She had a lot of battles over that. But this time, it was something totally different. And again, I should have heard it and walked away. Away from her, away from the truck idea, and away from James. But no, I actually encouraged my cute little Emily. Partly because it was fun to torment her a little, and partially because I really was trying to understand how the other half lives.
“Come on, Em. Tell me. Please?”
She picked up a corner piece of pizza and took a tentative bite. Not too hot.
“I shouldn’t.”
“Em, you’re asking me to do a job for this lady. Tell me.”
“All right, but you can’t go to James with this.”
“Maybe. After all, he is my partner.”
“Eugene!”
“No James.”
“She thinks that Rick might be working for some subversive group.”
“Subversive?”
“I think she’s paranoid.”
“Subversive?”
“Things that he’s said. Spanish-speaking guys who call at all hours of the night.”
“So what’s he doing for these foreign guys?”
“I told you. He raises money for risky business ventures and charges a hefty percentage.”
I scraped the cheese off a square piece with my teeth, chewed and swallowed it, then took a bite of crust. I’ve asked some of the people at Paulie’s what was in the crust, and they act like it’s a secret. Actually, most of them are Puerto Rican and they don’t speak much English. They might have told me the ingredients, but I wouldn’t have understood.
“So he’s raising money for a Spanish business.”
“It’s probably just that. But she says they call or show up at all hours of the night. I think she just got freaked out. She thinks they are”—she paused dramatically—“terrorists—part of a subversive plot.”
I bit off another piece of pizza and this time savored the sauce.
“Anyway,” she asked, “should I call her?”
“Yeah. I think so. I mean, what’s to think about. The terrorist thing sounds like a lady who’s paranoid.”
“She thought about going to the FBI or CIA, Skip. She was that scared.”
“She was really going to turn her husband into the CIA? Maybe this isn’t such a good idea.”
“I shouldn’t have said anything.”
Terrorists? God, it seems that everything that happens any more is terrorist related. “Well, hell, we could use the money, we’ve got the truck, we can load it. Where does she want it hauled?”
“Probably a storage unit. Maybe to the condo where the Mr. is keeping the mistress.”
“How much do we charge?”
Em shook her head and drained her glass of beer. “Skip, Skip. You’re a business major. Did you learn anything at all at Sam and Dave?”
“To be honest?”
“Call a couple of companies and ask what they would charge.”
And there it was. Our first hauling job. Hauling away the remains of some philandering guy’s marriage. Hauling away the possessions of some rich bastard, Rick Fuentes, who might be an international terrorist. And I wondered if U-Haul and Ryder started out like that. I bet they didn’t.
CHAPTER FOUR
YOU CAN SEE THE MARLINS’ STADIUM from in front of our apartment. It’s this space-age looking building, and when the Marlins play at home you can literally smell the noxious exhaust fumes from the thousands of cars leaving the game. It’s South Florida at its finest. Acres and acres of concrete surrounded by palm trees. From our spacious five-by-ten cement slab out back, we look directly at the back of the next row of apartments. Seven apartments to the right, the border of our property is defined by a narrow stream with shallow, dirty, brown water flowing slowly by. On the patios are broken tricycles, cheap rusting barbecue sets, and tenants’ freshly washed underwear thrown over old picnic tables and plastic chairs to dry in the hot South Florida sun.
Our neighbors behind us have a playpen all set up on their slab, with a plastic duck and some foam building blocks, and the only people we’ve ever seen coming in and out of the place are a black couple in their late sixties. We’ve never seen a baby.
“I told you. Listen to me, pally. In three months, we’ll have a second truck and we’ll be hiring employees.” James was figuring longhand on a brown paper bag. “Jeez, Skip. If we charge a couple of hundred a load, and we could get three gigs a day—”
“That would be six hundred a day.”
“See? That business degree is paying off.” He sat straight up in the cheap lawn chair. “And six hundred a day is like $3,000 a week. And $3,000 a week is—” He scribbled with his pen.
“$12,000 a month and $144,000 a year. The problem is, James, that I don’t think we can do three loads a day five days a week.”
He paused, squinting into the bright Sunday afternoon sun. “Yeah, I guess it would be pushing it. So, we up our price.”
“You’ve got to stay competitive.” I sipped on a Coke and watched water flow through the muddy dirt ditch that ran by on the edge of our complex. A big sign was posted.
NO FISHING, SWIMMING, SOAKING, OR WASHING
Like there was the slightest desire.
James tossed back the last of his beer—the last of our beer. He hadn’t contributed to the communal beer fund and I was damned if I was going to buy another six-pack. He drank four out of the six anyway.
“When is she calling?” James asked.
“Any time. She was meeting Jackie at the club.”
“Oh.” His finest English accent. “The club. The veddy important club. The fucking rich asshole’s club.”
“That’s the one.”
“Tell me, Skip. If you could belong, would you? Huh?”
I let it slide by. When I was very young, my father used to say to me, “I wish I had enough money to buy a herd of elephants.” I’d always counter with “What would you do with a herd of elephants, Daddy?”
“Well, son,” he’d say, “I don’t want the elephants. I just want enough money to buy them.”
Would I join the club? Hell, I wish I had enough money to make that decision.
“Anyway, we’ve got a job. An honest to God job. It’s just a matter of time, Skip. Hey, you can do a business plan, right?”
“Yeah, Basic Business 101.”
“Well, we need a business plan.”
“You need to have some goals. Some idea of where you’re going. Right now you cook crab and I suck at selling security systems. Where do you see this new venture going?”
James looked out over our dark brown stream. He tugged a Marlins’ cap over his perpetually sun-burned forehead. “I see us being successful. I see us light years ahead of my old man. This isn’t a hair-brained scheme, Skip, it’s real. It’s finding a need and coming up with the solution.”
“It’s a part-time job that lets us pick up a few bucks.”
He squinted his eyes and looked at me. “I see us
making a million dollars in two years.”
“Jesus! You’re out of your fucking mind.”
“Two guys started Google at our age. What about them? And Ben Affleck and Matt Damon. By our age they had already written that movie Good Will Hunting that made them millionaires. Why can’t it happen to us?”
“Because you’re talking about hauling somebody else’s shit. That isn’t the same as Google or a hit movie.”
James slowly stood up. I almost told him that the client’s wife thought her husband might be an international terrorist. I almost broke my promise to Em, just to jab him a little bit. But hell, he would have loved the intrigue. James looked down at me from his perceived lofty position. “I’m going down to Gas and Grocery and picking up a six-pack. Hell, you don’t bother to get the beer around here and after listening to your negative attitude, I could use a drink.”
CHAPTER FIVE
THE THREE OF US MET AT CHILI’S. If you want a drink and a decent meal in Carol City, Chili’s is about it. And the sad part of that story is that Chili’s isn’t really in Carol City; it’s across the border in Miami Lakes. There’s no place in Carol City to get a decent meal and a drink.
“James.” Em nodded at him, an icy tone from her usually warm mouth.
“Em. Looking sexy as usual.” In her skintight jeans, she did.
She grimaced.
“Of course, it’s all for show. I happen to know you’re frigid as hell.” He smiled, shrugging his shoulders as if it was all a joke we should share.
“And you’re an asshole, James. Now that we’ve got the pleasantries out of the way shall we discuss your business?”
I jumped in. “How much did you tell her we charged?”
“I told her $1,500.”
