To say the trailer park governs itself would be true, but the real truth is that the place is run like a kingdom, the Arab’s kingdom, and he is a benevolent ruler. If you follow the rules and pay your rent, you’re a subject in good standing. If you follow the rules and can’t pay your rent, you’re afforded leeway because you’re trying. If you don’t follow the rules and you can’t pay your rent, he’ll cuss you out in two languages, but he’ll let you stay because you might be trying. And he’ll probably slip you a twenty when you leave, because Allah forbid you go hungry. Really, as long as you don’t smoke crack or steal anything, the Arab has your back.
A lot of the folks in the trailer park don’t work; the Arab keeps about half the residents on a casual payroll, with salaries and titles that vary depending on how bad you’ve managed to fuck up lately. Take Beau, for instance—because he’s the biggest guy in the park and is always being called on to break up fights or scare off crack dealers, he’s designated Trailer Park Police. The week he tried to move a trailer without permission and destroyed the Arab’s old Ford pickup, he got demoted to Raccoon Wrangler. Bill Baldy is the Arab’s assistant, and as far as I can tell that job involves drinking beer and doing crosswords in the office—which is actually just a trailer with OFFICE written on the door. Bobby Harvey’s been here the longest, so he’s Senior Manager, but it’s more like Señor Manager, since that job is mostly steering drunk Mexican dudes into their trailers on Fridays. And Judy is the Arab’s secretary even though she doesn’t read or write. Her job qualification is her diabetes; unsupervised, she’ll sneak to the 7-Eleven and eat herself into a coma on Bama Pies. The Arab made her his secretary so he could get her into the office and keep an eye on her.
Ever since I lost the diner job, the Arab had been letting me clean trailers whenever somebody skipped out and left one full of junk. My title was Home Improvement Expert. He paid me a hundred bucks a trailer. He had at least one every rent day. But not lately. When things get tough all over, the trailer park business booms. Folks were beating down the door to get into Rudd’s. To make a little more room, because Allah forbid somebody gets left in the cold, the Arab offered to pay me double to clean out the big trailer on the property’s back edge. Nobody had lived in it for decades. I was grateful for the chance to make double pay; at least I’d have something to try and buy time with on Saturday—but that was between me and Ivan. The Arab just thought he was giving me grocery money.
“Sure, I’ll clean it,” I said, taking the keys from him and sticking them in my jeans. “How long has it been vacant, anyway?”
“Ain’t nobody ever lived in that goddamn thing,” he told me. “Not as long as I been runnin’ this shithole, anyway. Most of what’s in there probably came out of the house, when they tore it down.” The house was where the Arab’s aunt had lived, a rooming house on Jeff Davis, which used to be part of the biggest travel highway on the East Coast. When Interstate 95 came through in 1958 and the tourists dried up, the rooming house was left to fall to pieces until the city finally made the Arab tear it down. He put up the trailer park in its place. It’s that whole Islamic revenge thing.
The Arab said I could keep whatever I found in the trailer, but after I got through the first room it was pretty obvious that there were only a bunch of dusty old ledger books and guest registers. I pitched box after box of ledgers and files out the front door for Beau to load into the dumpster. Then I pitched one that clanked instead of thudded. I figured it was office supplies—pencil sharpeners and staplers, you know, more useless crap. I wasn’t expecting a passport from Beirut, Syria, for Saleem Hassan, born 1890. Tucked under that a stack of letters, written in Arabic, mostly postmarked in the 1930s and 1940s. And sepia-toned pictures of the man from the passport standing with a woman I recognized as the Arab’s aunt, whose picture hung in the office. In the bottom of the box was a thick layer of Arabic newspapers, and between every couple of sections there were records, old 78 RPM ones, with Arabic writing on the labels. And, in the very bottom of the box, the source of the clank—wrapped in a handkerchief, four brass cymbals the size of Oreos.
Since the Arab said I could have anything I found, I took it all home with me that night. I brewed myself up a pot of coffee and put on one of the records. I never thought I’d see the day that I’d need the 78 setting on the old Emerson, but then I’ve done a lot of things I never thought I’d do. While the stereo went through its ancient ritual of dropping the record onto the turntable and situating the needle in the groove, I unfolded the letters. Not that I could read any of them. I wanted to take them to the Arab, but then again I didn’t—I figured he was related to Saleem Hassan, and who would want their family reading their letters, especially ones so personal they were saved in a box? The passport revealed that Hassan had traveled a lot—mostly back and forth from Lebanon to New York. His last stamp was for entry to New York in October 1960. His picture was grim—gray hair and a droopy, permanent frown that pulled his whole face toward the lapels of his black suit. I squinted and tried to see my Arab in his face, to no avail. There was nothing there but something that felt like loneliness, radiating off the page.
The records were the opposite of the picture. Between the crackles and pops there was a celebration, shrieking and ululating and drumming and the rhythmic clanking of finger cymbals, tek-tek-tek-a-tek! I unrolled the handkerchief and took out the cymbals. They didn’t have any handles or straps, just two slits in the center, like buttonholes. I held one in each hand and tried to hit them together, but they made a muddy sound, not a bright chime like on the record. I rolled them back up in the handkerchief and set them on the table.
That night, when I went to sleep, Saleem Hassan came to me in my dreams. Droopy frown and all. It was just his face, black-and-white like in the passport photo, surrounded by a gray haze, cheesy, like in the movies. The Arabic record was playing in the background.
Rubber bands, he said. He nodded and pointed his finger at me through the haze. Get you some rubber bands.
The next day I got up early. When you might only have a few days left on the planet, you want to make them last, even if they are spent scrubbing down old trailers on Jeff Davis Highway. You just have to appreciate life for what it is.
When I stopped by the office to report for duty, the Arab asked how it was going. “You find anything good yet?” He was eating his usual, meat and eggs with sliced onions on the side. Judy was tending to her secretarial duties, watching Jerry Springer and painting her nails. No one else was up, seeing as it was the crack of 9.
“Just papers, mostly.” I opened his desk drawer, pulled out a handful of rubber bands, and slipped them onto my wrist like bracelets.
“What do you need out my desk? You need money?”
“No, I’m good.” It was pointless to even answer because when the Arab asks if you need money it isn’t really a question, it’s a statement of intent. “You said it was your aunt’s stuff in there?”
He shrugged and bit a big wedge of onion. “Mumkin. I don’t know whose it is. Just get it out of here.” Then he reached in his pocket and pulled out a roll of bills. Peeling off a twenty, he threw it on the desk and pointed at it like it was a cockroach. “And take that and get you some goddamn food. You’re gonna blow away.” Which is what he says to everybody when he gives them money, even Beau, who weighs three hundred pounds easy. Then he added the footnote that comes when you don’t reach for the money fast enough, “Take it and kul khara! Eat shit!” I took the twenty. Saying no was not an option. I tucked it into my pocket and headed back to tackle the old trailer.
Day two of cleaning didn’t bring any more mystery boxes. Old sheets and towels mostly, some dishes, all of them covered with fifty years of dust and grime. The first thing I wanted to do when I got home was take a shower. I stripped off my filthy jeans and T-shirt right inside my trailer door and was slipping the Arab’s rubber bands off my wrist when I saw the cymbals on the table. I remembered my dream from the night before. Get you some rubber b
ands.
I took one of the cymbals and looped a rubber band through the slits in the middle, making a slipknot underneath. I did the same with a second cymbal and stuck my finger and thumb through the bands. Tek-tek-tek-tek-tek! They rang clear and true, just like on the record. I rigged the second pair and put them on and then, just because why the fuck not, I carried my butt-naked dusty self over to the record player and started up the music again. I danced like a whirling dervish in my eight-foot-wide living room, clanking my cymbals and shaking my hips, moving ways I’d never thought about moving with muscles I didn’t know I had, until Bobby Harvey threw a bottle at my trailer and yelled at me to shut up the noise. Looking at the clock, I realized I’d been dancing for hours. I fell into bed, filthy as you please, and closed my eyes—only to see Saleem Hassan’s grumpy face. But where the frown had reached almost past his chin the night before, this time it stopped just before it got there. He was nodding, like he approved.
Tanoura, he said through the haze. At the top of the kitchen cupboard. Tanoura! He lifted a cigarette to his lips and drew on it, then blew out more gray haze. Then he was gone. The music kept playing.
In the morning I went straight to the old trailer I hoisted myself up onto the red Formica countertop and opened the kitchen cupboards. In the first three, nothing. In the last one, there was a rolled-up Thalhimer’s bag stuck way back on a shelf. Inside the bag was a single piece of fabric, a black mesh diamond-patterned linen with strips of silver woven through. Unfolded, it ran the width of the trailer and the length of the kitchen. I stuffed it back into the bag and walked over to the office. The Arab was watching CNN and drinking red soda out of a plastic mug.
“Hey, who’s Tanoura?”
He snorted. “Did somebody call you Tanoura?”
“No, I just heard the name somewhere.” I wasn’t sure what he’d think if I told him about Saleem Hassan.
“It’s not a name. It means skirt.” Where’d you hear it?”
“I don’t remember. Somewhere. Maybe a song.”
I rushed through the afternoon cleaning session with the help of Iggy Pop and a lot of coffee. Then I took the Thalhimer’s bag back to my trailer and laid the fabric out flat on the floor, calling on all the Christiansburg Middle School Home Ec knowledge I could muster to convert that wrinkled old linen into a tanoura that would do Saleem Hassan proud. It wasn’t anything fancy, just an elastic waist and some high slits up the sides, down to my ankles and gathered up at the hips for some flounce. I had enough of a piece left over to crisscross into a skimpy halter—a trick I remembered from the trampy girls back home, although they’d used bandannas or Confederate flags. I checked out my getup in the mirror, fluffed my hair, and put on my finger cymbals. Then I played my record and danced, spinning and undulating and tek-tek-teking until the bottle hit the trailer and signaled me to stop. I took off my tanoura and cymbals and lay down on the bed, awaiting my next mission from Saleem Hassan. This time he was smiling. Just barely, but it was definitely a smile.
Inti jamila, ya habibi. He nodded, puffing on his cigarette. So pretty! And now you are ready to go back to the diner. Go tomorrow. Bukrah. At night.
What did the diner have to do with anything? I woke up wondering if maybe I wasn’t getting omens, just going crazy. Saleem made more sense when he was talking in Arabic. Still, he was right about the rubber bands and the fabric—I was willing to take my chances on the diner. With Saturday coming fast, I didn’t have many options.
The next day I cleared the last boxes out of the trailer and gave it a good scrub with bleach water. It passed the Arab’s inspection with flying colors, so I had two hundred dollars in my pocket, plus the twenty he’d given me. Stepping out on faith, what little I had of it, I packed my new outfit in a backpack, borrowed Bobby Harvey’s bicycle, and headed up Jeff Davis toward the Lee Bridge. Just before the bridge, as I waited for the light to change at Hull Street, Gimpy-Arm loped across the parking lot of Church’s Chicken and screamed my name. “You better make that money, bitch,” she called, flinging a Styrofoam cup of Coca-Cola that exploded next to my tire.
Fortunately, Jeff Davis crack whores are like vampires in that they can’t cross moving water. She didn’t follow me toward the bridge.
Once I was halfway across, I stopped to smoke a cigarette and get my nerves back. The view from the Lee Bridge that night made Richmond look sparkly, more like a city than it really is. It was beautiful against the dark sky. Looking down, the glistening water was beautiful too, until I started seeing visions of my lifeless body floating in it. I forced myself to raise my eyes to the skyline. The city had seemed so big to me when I first got here. Now it was way too small.
I finished my cigarette and headed to the diner
Only when I got there, there wasn’t any there there. To be specific, there wasn’t a River City Diner there. The neon clock was out front, and I could see the grill of the Cadillac sticking out of the wall inside, but the sign had been covered with a hand-painted banner that said, BUBBLING. In the window, rows of hookah pipes like the one the Arab kept in the office stood at attention, and the booths were full of smokers, mostly men—young, swarthy men—smoking hookahs and scooping at plates of food with flat bread. I understood now what I was supposed to do. Of course Saleem Hassan hadn’t steered me wrong. I felt bad for doubting him. I locked Bobby’s bike to a parking meter and walked inside.
At the grill, a dark-haired man scurried to fill baskets with kebabs, fries, and pitas. He muttered as he worked, snatching order tickets from the carousel as fast as the waiters could tack them up. “Have a seat anywhere,” he barked. He turned his back to me and began shaking a basket of fries over the deep fryer.
“I’m not here to eat,” I said, then screwed up my courage and pulled a pair of cymbals out of my bag and slipped them on. “I’m here to dance. I mean, if I can, if you’ll let me.” I clanked the cymbals once for punctuation and he wheeled around.
He squinted at me through the grill fumes. “You bring a costume?” I nodded. “You bring music?” I shook my head. Saleem should have mentioned that. “Ma fi mushkila, it’s no problem, I have music. You change in the ladies’ room. But I no pay you! You dance free! If I like, next time I pay!”
Dance free? The doubt crept in again. What the hell was Saleem thinking? And, really, the bigger question was: what the hell was I doing, about to belly dance in a hookah bar because a dead Arab told me to? As Iggy said at the last Stooges show, I never thought it would come to this.
After I got changed and combed my hair out with my fingers, I put both pairs of cymbals on and closed my eyes, calling on Allah, Jesus, Saleem Hassan, and whoever looked out for crazy trailer park girls who needed money bad to help make this whatever it was supposed to be. Then I slipped out of the ladies’ room and stood in the dark corridor until one of the waiters came back and asked if I was ready.
“Muhammad wants to know your name so he can introduce you.”
“Kim,” I told him. He looked at me like I stank and walked away. A minute later he came back and said, “Muhammad says your name will be Jamila. It means beautiful.”
I nodded. Over the chatter and clatter and bubbling hookahs I heard Muhammad yell something in Arabic, and then he called my new name and the lights dimmed. The opening strains of an Arabic song I’d never heard poured forth from the vintage Wurlitzer. I danced down the aisle fast, giving everyone a quick taste, twirling in great cursive loops and clanging the cymbals together over my head like an ambulance siren, clearing my way through traffic. Then I made my way back up the aisle more slowly, stopping at each table for an undulation or a stomach flutter, teasing, flirting, and charming the men, flirting more with the few women there just to show there were no hard feelings. They ululated as I spun, and each time I presented a piece of myself to a table—a bobbing hip, a shrugging shoulder, or a beckoning arm, someone would tuck a bill into my costume. As I tek-a-teked to the music on the Wurlitzer, the men got up one by one, leaving their hookahs to dance wi
th me for a measure or two, showing off to their friends, snapping and clapping and blowing clouds of fruity smoke around me. Through the smoke I could see Muhammad in the kitchen, nodding along with the music and shaking the fryer basket to the rhythm of my cymbals.
When the instruments fell away and the song was nothing but drums, two waiters cleared the backgammon boards from the front table and hoisted me up without asking. I stood, covered in sweat, dollar bills lining the waist of my tanoura. I translated the beat of the drum into motion, hips snapping left left right, up up down, circle around and back. Whenever the drums paused, I answered with my cymbals, clanking in syncopation. The longer I danced, the more bills the men stacked on their tables, and as the drums built to a crescendo that I followed with my hips, the men leaped up to flick the piles of bills at me like dry leaves. They fluttered down around my feet for the waiters to scoop into a paper bag.
When the song ended, I wiped the sweat from my eyes, blew kisses, and bowed, then grabbed my paper bag and hustled back to the ladies’ room to see if I had enough to save my ass. The bag was stuffed full—I had to have enough, after all of this craziness with the dreams and the tanoura and the dancing and all, right? Isn’t that how stories like this end? I was confident, giddy. I pulled handfuls of ones, fives, tens, and twenties out of the bag and piled them on my lap. Sitting on the toilet and stacking bills on the sink, I counted three hundred and forty-two dollars. Three hundred and fifty-two, after someone slid a ten under the door. Which put me at five hundred and seventy-two dollars. Four hundred and twenty-eight short of what I needed.
Pulling my jeans on and folding the money into my pocket, I felt betrayed. By Saleem Hassan, by Saint Iggy, by my own stupid-ass choices and bad decisions. I was a cliché. I was going to be a dancing girl who gets murdered in a trailer park on a Saturday night over crack money. Fuck irony. All the way from Christiansburg to Richmond and this was what my life had become. I might as well have stayed a waitress and called everybody honey.
Richmond Noir Page 15
