Shoedog

by George Pelecanos

  “Grimes is blackmailing you.”

  Randolph lowered his voice. “I come from a little tobacco farm, Constantine, outside of Wilson, North Carolina. If you could see the place I’m talkin’ about, compare it to what I’ve got now, my life now, at that shoe store…”

  “I understand,” Constantine said. He butted his cigarette, smiled at Randolph. “That skinny kid, at the store—”

  “Antoine.”

  “Yeah. He called you ‘Shoedog.’ You gonna tell me now what that’s all about?”

  “You might not understand, man. It’s about having some kind of direction in your life.”

  “Try me.”

  Randolph leaned over the table. “You ever see a dog, man, when he’s walkin’ across a bridge? Well, that dog, he doesn’t look left and he doesn’t look right. He keeps his head down, lookin’ at his paws makin’ a straight line, all the way. And the only thing he’s thinking about, the whole time, is gettin’ to the other side of that bridge.”

  “So?”

  “So this. You saw me today, on that floor. While those other boys were thinkin’ how to get the jump on me, or thinkin’ about the pussy, all I was concentrating on was doin’ my job. From twelve to two, that’s what the fuck I do. I put my head down, just like a dog, and I cross that bridge. And every single day, I’m the only one in that joint who gets to the other side.” Randolph sat back, pointed at Constantine. “I’m a shoedog, man. Might be time for you to be some kinda shoedog too.”

  Constantine finished the rest of his vodka, put the glass down on the table. “Maybe so, Randolph,” he said. “But I never found that one thing—”

  “Not yet.”

  “No. Not yet.”

  A few minutes later, the party moved back into the room. They grouped themselves around the table, stood over Randolph and Constantine.

  “Let’s go,” Polk said energetically, his arm around Charlotte. “We’ll get a nightcap over at Market Inn.”

  “Great piano bar,” Phyllis said, smiling at Randolph. “You boys up for it?”

  “I could listen to some standards,” Randolph said.

  “Come on, Connie,” Polk said.

  Constantine shook his head. “I don’t think so. I’m comfortable here. I’m gonna hang out, have another drink.”

  Weiner had a seat and said, “I’m with Constantine.”

  Randolph stood up, moved smoothly to Phyllis, slipped his arm around her back, his hand resting on her waist. “Suit yourself, Constantine. I’ll pick you up in the morning, at your place. Eight A.M. We goin’ shopping, remember?”

  “I’ll see you then,” Constantine said, nodding at Phyllis, then looking back to Randolph. “Have a good night, man.”

  Randolph raised his brow. “Bet.”

  “We took care of the tab,” Polk said. “See you fellas later.”

  Constantine took his cigarettes off the table and tossed the pack to Polk.

  The two couples walked toward the door. Charlotte broke away, came back, leaned over the table, and put her mouth close to Constantine’s ear. “Polk’s got plans for you,” she said. “He’s really impressed. For the record, so am I.” She kissed him on his cheek.

  “Thanks, Charlotte,” Constantine said. “Take care of him.”

  “Honey?” she said, standing straight and capping the movement with a broad wink. “I always do.”

  She turned and moved quickly to the door. As she walked out, Constantine could hear their laughter over the blues shouter coming through the bar’s speakers. The door closed, and the laughter died.

  Weiner looked over at Constantine. “Hope you don’t mind me staying with you. I would of been a fifth wheel in that group.”

  “I don’t mind,” Constantine said.

  Weiner looked around the room, touched his beret. “You want another drink?”

  “Yeah,” Constantine said. “One more.”

  Chapter

  13

  CONSTANTINE and Weiner killed another round, then got up to leave. Constantine paid the tab and pinned a damp ten under his rocks glass for the busboy. The busboy chin-nodded Constantine as he walked with Weiner from the room.

  On the landing, Constantine stepped aside as the big cop walked toward the head. The cop gave him a jittery, unfocused look on the pass. Constantine did not look him in the eye.

  Constantine dropped quarters into the cigarette machine that stood on the landing, took his Marlboros from the long slot that ran along the bottom of the machine. He grabbed a blue book of D.C. Vending matches off the top of the machine and stuffed them into his jeans, pushing on the front door. He caught the toe of his shoe on the sidewalk as he walked out, stumbled, and stopped clumsily next to Weiner, who was standing on the edge of the street.

  “You all right?” Weiner said.

  “Yeah,” Constantine said, realizing then that he was irreparably drunk. “Where we goin’?”

  “Across town for a quick stop,” Weiner said, motioning for a cab that was approaching from two blocks away.

  “I don’t need any more to drink.”

  “Neither do I,” Weiner said, as the cab stopped at the curb. “Come on.”

  A soft-spoken young Arab drove them into Northwest. Constantine stared out the window, tried to focus on the buildings. At a stoplight, he saw a shadow of a man walk into the blackness of a storefront, his head down, his hands buried in the pockets of his jacket. Constantine looked at his watch, tried to focus on it in the darkness of the backseat. He could see only that the hour hand tilted to the right of midnight.

  At Weiner’s direction, the cab stopped on a corner of 9th Street. Weiner paid the man—Constantine did not know how the man had arrived at a figure, as there was no meter in the cab—and the two of them got out.

  Constantine could see some club action on F Street, the lettered block that ran to 9th. A group of kids stood halfway down the block, most of them smoking, leaning against the gated front of a shoe store. They wore flannel shirts, all of them; it looked to Constantine as if the boots they wore on their feet were the same style as those he had worn in the marines. One of them yelled something at him, and the rest of them laughed. Constantine wished he were with them—he wanted to laugh too. Weiner tugged on Constantine’s shirt, and Constantine followed Weiner down the block.

  They crossed to the east side of 9th, walked a half block down, to a group of businesses lit by yellow blinking globes. Constantine recognized these businesses as porno shops. Somewhere in this area Constantine and his friends had come one night as teenagers to check out the strip clubs, the tail end of an already dead downtown burlesque scene. His first experience had been at the Gold Rush, then at the Silver Slipper, where he had eagerly sat at the table nearest the stage as an aging transvestite lisped the introduction—“Welcome to the fabulous … fabulous … Silver Slipper”—and where he had been promptly thrown out after refusing to buy the minimum amount of watered-down drinks. Later that evening he had paid for some head in a place called Benny’s Rebel Room, twenty-five dollars for a sensationless squirt. He supposed that these places, like most of the places he had known as a youth, were gone.

  Weiner entered a door under a white sign that read FUN PALACE. Constantine followed. Inside, the fluorescent light and cigarette smoke burned his eyes. Two dour Salvadorans stood behind the counter, casually examining their new customers. Constantine walked behind Weiner past the product aisles, through a corridor lined on both sides with books and magazines, to an area where men stood silently, waiting to enter curtained booths alternately marked RED SYSTEM and BLUE SYSTEM.

  Weiner took a spot behind a man wearing a red, black, and green knit cap on his head, and folded his hands below his waist. Constantine stood at the back of another two-man line, next to Weiner.

  “What’s the system?” Constantine said to Weiner.

  “I don’t know,” Weiner said. “You got quarters?”

  “Yeah,” Constantine said, reaching into his pocket. “I think I got some quarte
rs.”

  Weiner’s number came up first. Constantine watched him throw back the curtain on a blue-system booth and slip inside. A little while later a dead-eyed man walked out of a red-system booth, and Constantine took his place.

  In the booth, Constantine dropped two quarters into the slot next to a television set in the wall. Dried, tear-like lines of jism ran down the screen of the television.

  The quarters dropped and a picture came on the set: group action on a waterbed set to wah-wah pedaled, cheesy background music, three women and a man, the usual cluster-fuck. One of the women, a terribly skinny coke whore, moved aggressively, her mouth self-consciously frozen in an O. Watching the acne on her back, Constantine felt a brief wave of nausea. He could smell the alcohol coming through his own pores, and the stench of cigarette smoke on his clothes and in his hair. The film loop ended as quickly as it had begun, and Constantine walked unsteadily from the booth.

  He bumped into a man who was pushing by to get in the booth. Neither he nor the man acknowledged the contact. Constantine moved to the product wall, saw some blunt rubber instruments called “butt plugs,” scanned the wall further, saw some sealed replicas of penises redundantly labeled COCKS, and further still, COCKS, WITH BALLS! Finally he studied a group of suspended rubber penises that had been arranged by size, culminating in a three-foot member capped on both ends by fist-sized heads. Constantine wondered passively, what could anyone do with that? A case of one’s eyes, he decided, exceeding one’s stomach. He plucked a latex vagina off the wall and held it absently in his hand.

  “Constantine,” Weiner said, behind his back, “come over here.”

  Constantine replaced the vagina on a metal hanger and moved over to the magazine section, where Weiner held a cellophane-wrapped publication in his hand.

  Weiner handed Constantine the magazine. “See anything funny about this?”

  Constantine looked at the title of the mag: A Man and a Woman. His first thought was that the magazine was oddly named, as only one person stood posing on the cover. But his eyes traveled down, past the wig and lipstick and the perky brown breasts, down to the crotch, where he suddenly understood. This was a man—and a woman.

  “Who do you suppose,” Constantine said, “gets off on this?”

  “Other he-shes, I guess,” Weiner said, with a shrug. “How was your flick?”

  “A daisy chain,” Constantine said, “on a bed.”

  Weiner said, “Same as mine. I thought for a minute, you know, that the red system had different movies from the blue.”

  “Can we go now?”

  Weiner touched his beret. “Sure, let’s go.”

  Weiner stopped at the front counter before leaving the shop. He called one of the clerks over with a curl of his finger. The clerk got off his stool and walked tiredly to the counter.

  “Quandes el difference,” Weiner asked, “donde el systemo rojo y el systemo azur?”

  The clerk looked back at his coworker, shook his head slowly, leaned over the counter, and stared at Weiner. It was a while before Weiner realized that the man was not going to speak.

  “Thank you,” Weiner said to the clerks. “You gentlemen have a nice evening.”

  CONSTANTINE drifted in and out of consciousness as the cab drove north on Georgia Avenue, the damp air from the open window blowing pleasantly against his face. He awoke several times to Weiner’s voice, to the sudden stop and forward lurch of the cab, and on each occasion he tried to remember where he was, what things he had done that night. The concentration became too difficult, and after a brief, hazy glance out the window, Constantine let his eyes close once again and fell into the easy arms of sleep.

  Weiner woke Constantine in front of the motel near the District line. “Come on,” Weiner said, “I’ll walk with you inside.”

  Constantine rubbed his face, felt the idle of the cab. The driver’s head was tilted in shadowy profile, listening to the backseat conversation.

  “I’m not ready to go inside,” Constantine said.

  “Okay. Well, I’ve paid for the cab.”

  “Thanks, buddy. Thanks for the night.”

  “Take care, kid,” Weiner said, patting Constantine’s arm. “I’ll see you Friday morning.”

  Constantine watched Weiner exit the cab, march across the street to his GM sedan. He sat in silence until Weiner pulled away from the curb.

  Finally the driver looked in the rearview, caught Constantine’s eye. “Where would you like to go?” he said, with the careful enunciation common to Middle Easterners.

  Constantine looked out the window. “Take Thirteenth Street to Missouri. Catch Military and head west.”

  The cabby nodded, swung the car out on Georgia, cut a U, and gave the Chrysler gas.

  CONSTANTINE had the driver stop the cab at 27th and Military, across from an entrance to Rock Creek Park. He gave the man ten dollars, told him not to wait. The driver took off down the empty street. Constantine stood under a streetlight, strained his eyes to focus on his wristwatch. He could see that it was sometime after three.

  Constantine crossed to the west side of 27th, started down the sidewalk. He buttoned his shirt to the collar against the chill as he walked past St. John’s, his Catholic military academy high school.

  Constantine had no feeling for the school at all, not like the boozehounds he met in all the bars around the world, guys who talked incessantly about “those days” as if those were the only days that still carried significance in their bitter, empty lives. Constantine had not wanted to attend St. John’s—his father had insisted—so his years there had been spent working toward a kind of deliberate separateness from the school and its students. He supposed now that he had achieved what he set out to do.

  At a curve in the road, 27th became Utah. Just past that, Constantine turned left and walked down McKinley. The structure of the neighborhood, its impression of low-key wealth, had not altered. Elegant, porched colonials sat rowed on the block, complemented by sensitive Volvos and Ford Taurus wagons parked on the street in front of them. Only the trees had changed, their height and fullness exuding an old-world, botanical charm on the homes that stood beneath them.

  Constantine quickly crossed Nebraska Avenue, continued west on McKinley. He walked to 33rd, made a right. He had done nearly a mile on foot now, and though he knew that he was loaded, he felt oddly invigorated. The feeling accelerated as he brushed past hyacinths and shrubbery, taking the steps up to the playing field of his old elementary school, Lafayette.

  He went around the concrete walk that encircled the baseball field, passed a concrete pedestal water fountain that had been jammed on. Constantine slowed at the backstop, curled his fingers through the fence. He looked out at the fog moving slowly in the night, across the wet diamond. Behind him, the water of the fountain arced over and cleared the pedestal, drumming faintly in the mud.

  Constantine remembered the year—1973—and his team, a ragtag group of D.C. Rec boys. They took the city championship that summer, against Anacostia, under the lights at Turkey Thicket. Constantine played second base, went two for three that night, a cheap single and a line double to left. The double had knocked in a pair of runs. Closing his eyes, he could still see the faces of his teammates in the infield: a stoic Irish boy at first, a genial, rifle-armed Indian at short, a fireplug Irish Catholic at third base. The pitcher was a tall, lanky kid whose black eyeglasses, held together at the bridge by white surgical tape, slid down his thin nose at the completion of each pitch. The kid threw serious heat—the opposing teams reverently called him “The Greek from Rock Creek”—but Constantine could not remember his name. Standing there, he could not remember the names of any of them.

  Constantine pushed away from the backstop and walked toward the school, remodeled now since his youth. He saw the brick wall where he had played stickball as a child, walked past the basketball court where as a teenager he had smoked reefer and shot hoops daily, walked past the hill where he had drunk Tango and Boone’s Farm, where he
had made love to Katherine on summer nights. He could smell those nights—the bite of wet, freshly cut grass, the taste of nicotine and fortified wine on Katherine’s breath, the faint, briny tang of her young vagina—even now. These memories were clear, though he did not feel as if he owned them; he had the feeling that these were memories told to him by someone else.

  He walked over a grassy hill, slipped in the dew, slid a few feet to the bottom of the hill. Getting to his feet, he brushed wet grass and mud off his jeans as he crossed Broad Branch Road. Constantine walked straight down Oliver, made a left into the alley that ran to the street after the first house.

  He walked along a privacy fence, turned right at the back of the house. The privacy fence told him that the Bradfords had passed away—they would never have erected a fence, and they would never have left their beloved house for anything less than death. At the next house, Constantine stopped, stood in the alley under a light, rested his forearms on a chain-link fence.

  He looked into the yard. The shrubbery, the border around the walkway, the double-locked wood shed—all of it fastidiously and impersonally maintained. The pear tree was still standing, pruned back, flowering now with small white blossoms. At nine years of age, one August evening in 1966, Constantine had reached for a pear in that tree, reached absently and with anger as his parents had argued violently in the house, their voices carrying into the backyard. The pear had been filled with bees, and the bees stung his palm and forearm just as he put his hand around it, and he knew instantly from the horrible sound and then the unbelievable pain that he had made a terrible mistake. He had run screaming down the alley, frantically rolling in a puddle at the end of it. Afterward, Mrs. Bradford had held him and treated him, and he went home very late that night. By then his mother was so far into the bag mat she could not recognize the swelling in the hand and arm of her own son. His father, of course, had gone to bed.