Safe

by Ryan Gattis

  See, but Rose was a switchblade that could open you up to anything, anywhere. Mira is a billy club wrapped up in warm towels.

  Rose was air. Mira is all earth.

  Rose was punk. Mira is hip-hop.

  Rose was white like Frank, white like new plates. Mira’s cocoa—that’s what she calls it, like it’s her own race.

  And maybe it is. She’s black and something else, something lighter. Something she’ll never know. Her mom got raped in the early eighties and had her anyway. But Mira’s not sure how much of a decision that actually was. Her mom was a junkie, just like mine. And she and I both know too well that decisions don’t get made when you’re using, decisions make you.

  “Just tell me you got it.” Mira huffs as she puts her hands on her hips like this is my last chance. “Tell me it’s good.”

  It’s time to put up or shut up, but I still feel like I want to string her along a little more, make the surprise that much better at the end.

  Rose’s middle name was Grace. Mira’s middle name is Rose. When I heard that, it was just over. Any walls I had to keep this from being a thing between us were just exploded into a million pieces. It was too weird. Too true and too sad, at the same time. Like, I knew that right away. Because I’ll never stop looking for Rose in other people, least of all in Mira.

  “When you say ‘it,’ ” I say while pulling a face like I got no idea what she’s getting at, “do you mean, like, milk shakes or what?”

  Her response comes quick, but not quick enough.

  I roll my right shoulder and lean back as the slap’s coming in. I’m already smiling and she hates it, but she can’t stop the swing. She’s committed to the force. Already on her toes, already a little off-balance. Her hand ricochets off my shoulder bone and I catch her wrist in my left hand, not hard, but just to let her know I can. I squeeze before I let go, not in a gloating way, but more like Cálmate. Like, Don’t worry. I got this.

  It doesn’t help anything. In fact, it does the opposite.

  A complicated look swirls up in her eyes, a mix of surprise, anger, hurt, and being impressed at me. Even I know not to push it much further. You push that look too far and she’s taking her earrings off and swinging. We’ve never done that, she and I. Come close a few times, but never fought for real. And I know that stuff is always hiding in the corners of her brain, ready to pop off if it goes there.

  When I let her wrist go, I can see she’s made up her mind that asking questions or even swinging at me isn’t working and she needs to try something else if she wants to find out how it went. She gets close to me and does something I don’t expect.

  She hugs me. She says she’s glad I made it, that I’m safe. That dazes me, and as I’m wondering if it’s the only thing that could right now, I hug her back.

  She’s told me before that she’s with me because she knew I’d never hurt her, not physically, but that if something happened to her like that, something real bad, I’d kill whoever did it. I know her husband’s the same way. I know I’m just a type. A plug for a socket. And that’s okay. I don’t need to be more.

  Some women need that kind of protection, need to feel safe to function. I’m talking about women that’ve been through it. I can’t explain it to you if you don’t know what it’s like to get beat till you black out and wake up somewhere with a busted face so puffed up that you can’t see out your eyelids. That’s why I’m here. You can’t leave a woman like that alone with a hole in her life.

  Sooner or later, she fills it. She has to.

  I pull her arms off me and reach down to my socks. I rip the tape off the tops of them and pull the rolls of wet money off my ankles and out into the air in front of her. Before she can grab them, I toss them on the bed. It’s maybe forty grand. Her face tells me she’s happy, but there’s expectation in it. Like, If that’s in your socks, what else you got?

  When I pull the kit linings out and empty them, she has to cover her mouth. I pull the plastic bag full of cash out of the bottom of the suitcase, turn it over on the bed, and she grabs a pillow, covers her face, and screams with every bit of her lungs for seven seconds. I counted.

  When she takes the pillow off her face, it’s got a wobbly O of brown-red lipstick on it and she’s throwing it to the floor so she can use both her hands to grab me and bring her mouth close to mine, because she’s got a kiss coming up on her lips that she needs me to take.

  19

  Mira and me take almost three hours to count it twice, to pile it, and repile it on the bed to make sure we got the count right. We cover the king comforter with stacks ten grand high—a hundred hundred-dollar bills each.

  When we’re done counting, we’re staring at each other and then staring at the stacks but still not saying anything. Like we’re scared to speak because it might break a magical spell. Like any words will make it all go away.

  For real, it feels like I’m hallucinating, like this couldn’t possibly be sitting in front of me, because, shit, I’ve only ever seen this in movies. Ten thousand dollars in cash, though, even in twenties, wouldn’t fill up a regular briefcase.

  A hundred hundreds standing up tall looks like thin books sitting there. That’s what ten grand looks like. And what’s crazy is, there’s eighty-eight of them. Eighty-nine with the one that isn’t all the way full because I had to peel a few bills off it to crumple up and throw back in the safe. Still, that’s eighty-nine stacks in rows of ten. Eight hundred eighty-seven thousand.

  That’s $887,000 point 00, like how Frank showed me to write it when I got all sheepish in front of him once because nobody ever taught me how to write a check.

  All we needed was $284,353. That’s $70,353 to John to finish his house payments that Mira wanted, and $214,000 for Frank’s outstanding debt.

  “Wow,” Mira says.

  “Yeah,” I say, slinging her word back at her, but the Spanish version, “guau.”

  Because there aren’t words for this. Not really.

  All this money.

  Shit.

  All this dirty money.

  That’s what’s making me nervous right now, so nervous that I know I can’t ever tell Mira, because this kind of stash isn’t how these Nayarit black tar dealers do business. Their whole model is to keep it small-time on purpose.

  They deliver product only when it’s needed and about to be distributed so that drivers driving around with heroin balloons in their mouths never carry enough to be seriously charged for drugs. It’s genius. Because if these fools get caught, they just get deported back to Mexico and replaced in the next day or two because there’s always an endless supply of rancho boys wanting to come up here and live the American dream, all quiet with their heads down, till that time when they can go back home and be big-time at the local feria del elote. Wearing 501s. Spending up big money on mariachis and enough smoky-tasting mezcal to drown anybody that ever doubted they could make it up north.

  And these black tar runners never, and I mean never, have money like this lying around, dude. Not that I’ve ever heard of. They’re straight flower to arm, always riding the edge of demand and nothing more.

  And that’s what makes me sick to my stomach. Like, I don’t even know if this cash is real. Could be counterfeit, I’m thinking. But it looks real. It feels real. And it smells …

  Well, I can’t smell nothing but grilled cheese again. And rotting strawberries now too. Like bad cheesecake, kind of. An oily, cheddary, berry cheesecake stuck inside my nose.

  Mira doesn’t know what we walked into with this money, but I do.

  I know I don’t have weeks anymore. I got days.

  Four, maybe three. At most.

  I’m not worried about Collins finding out anymore. If he does, fine. I sit in a lockup and die in a prison hospital. What I’m worried about is the people whose money this really is. About how quick they’ll be looking for the dude in the Jeep because you know they already talked to people in the neighborhood and they know I took a plastic bag out that I didn’
t take in.

  Shit like that doesn’t get missed.

  The only good thing about all this is that I know my outbound ticket’s already punched. Doesn’t matter if it’s a bullet or a knife when I can’t smell and I know my cancer’s back and making itself at home again. One or the other is the same to me. Either way, I’m going out on my back, but at least this way I’ll have done something half-decent with my life. Something to make Rose proud. Something to save her dad from drowning.

  20

  See, Frank doesn’t know I know he’s been putting everything on credit cards lately because there’s some wage garnishing going on. And he doesn’t know I know about the adjustable-rate mortgage he took out five years ago. About how it went into foreclosure. How it’s the bank’s if they don’t get about $150,000. Frank would kill me if he knew I read the mail he left in the upper left drawer of his desk.

  That ARM’s from 2003. He’s never said, but I think his idea was to buy a building and get renters in and get out from under the loan by the time Laura, the only daughter he has left, was ready for college. That way, he’d never have her worrying about student loans. So Frank goes in for a twelve-unit apartment building near downtown Long Beach and waives inspections to get it from two other bidders. Usually, Frank’s careful, but he got greedy there. He must’ve heard Laura drop Stanford into the conversation too many times and thought he had to grab it. So escrow comes and goes quick, and then it’s in his hands when he’s finally doing diligence. That’s when he finds the underground plumbing’s rusted out.

  He’s pissed, but it’s his problem now, so he bites the bullet and refinances the other building he owns, the one I live in, to pay for the repairs. That’s how he went from one loan to two. After that, it was downhill on a ride he’ll never talk to me about. So that’s what the $214,000 is for. To make Frank free and clear on two separate loans he’s underwater on. To help him breathe. And I couldn’t do that, at least do it and not get caught, without Mira.

  We’re both sitting on the floor and looking up at the bed with all the stacks on it, partners in some serious crime now. When I first asked if she wanted in, she laughed. She thought I was joking. When she figured out I wasn’t, she made it real clear I couldn’t get her involved without agreeing to something she wanted. She said anything beyond the number Frank needed had to go to people in danger of losing their houses. People she sees every day at her bank. People trying to do right. People that never broke laws. People that got jobs, maybe not good jobs, but jobs. That was the deal. The first name on her list was John. She knew that would get me. It did. The rest of the list had eight families: four we knew from NA, the others from her bank work.

  I said I’d do it. But I told her I didn’t know how long it’d take once we got going, I told her I wanted to do a trust too, and I sure as hell didn’t think I’d pull that much money out on the first go. That was just luck. Or fate. Call it whatever.

  Sure was a gift, though.

  I swipe at my nose but the oily cheesecake smell is staying stuck there. It hits me how taking $887,000 is nothing compared to the crazy corporate shit going on every single day.

  I try to pull one of those numbers up from memory, one I’ve heard Mira say from before, but it’s not coming and I’m starting to wonder how much tumors can affect memory too and I get a little paranoid, so I keep my voice calm and say, “How much were you saying those Enron motherfuckers stole?”

  “One point one billion.” This shit fascinates Mira. Always has. “Killed twenty thousand jobs at the drop of a hat too. They basically dropped a bomb on Houston. Just, boom. Fallout for years.”

  Mira has always told me that’s what’s happening right now, more fallout, with all this shit on the news about how Lehman Brothers is about to blow up like Bear Stearns did. That this whole thing is going to be worse than Enron even. It’s not going to be one company going down. If they go, they’ll drag down other shady companies. Ten. Maybe twenty.

  Rose used to say that nobody’s safe in this world. Not ever. And when you think you are, that’s when you’re not. One big truth of life is that all the money you ever get in it is a rental. Everything’s risky.

  For months Mira has been talking about how she’s going to fix everything up for anybody we help. Apparently, there’s a way to do anonymous checks that will apply directly to existing bad mortgages. The ones with interest rates that get higher and higher till there’s no way you can pay it.

  She’s a bank manager now, but she used to be a teller and moved up to home loans. She’d compile notes on applicants and send them to superiors. Then she had to sit by when people got rates by skin color. Ghetto loans, they’re called. Each one that went out peeled off a chunk of her soul, she said.

  She saw it and kept her mouth shut, learned the system. When she got promoted again after finishing her nights’ accounting course, she did some investigating work, basically learned how people used her bank to launder money. She met criminals. Even interviewed them sometimes about what went where and how so she could document it and pass it on to prosecutors.

  So now, Mira’s got this guy she knows who owns convenience stores all over the Southland. He’ll kick down with money orders in any amounts she wants under $1,000 so long as she brings him the cash to back them. He’ll even spread them out. Different dates. Different amounts. Issued from different locations. It’s a ton of work, but it’s enough to pay off houses without anyone knowing who’s doing it.

  Mira takes it from there, putting those checks in envelopes and having some trusted conspirators she grew up with put on hoods and sunglasses and drop the envelopes in the night-deposit boxes of her bank’s various branches, some of which she’ll see as a manager and report up the chain about their receipt. She already knows the policy, though.

  There’s nothing illegal about paying someone else’s mortgage. The checks can get cashed and go straight against amounts outstanding. All the bank needs is names and addresses, not even account numbers, and a note of instruction about what the money is for. Turns out banks never say no to free money.

  Benefactor notes, Mira calls them, Good Samaritanism in an envelope.

  21

  Mira learned about benefactor notes through a colleague who told a story about a rich old married dude paying off an apartment for this young piece he had on the side in Redondo. See, he didn’t give the money directly to her. He gave it to a middleman who slid checks to a banking corporation instead and then she got to live free of the debt they were holding on her.

  Because the maximum amounts for money orders are low enough, they don’t trip tax triggers, and the U.S. government apparently doesn’t have a problem with them. Or, it’s not that they wouldn’t have a problem, it’s just that it’s a low enough threshold that it’s not worth their time to go after it. Kind of like how the Xalisco Boys figured out that less heroin on delivery drivers was better, I guess. Pretty much always they carried below the “intent to distribute” amount they could be prosecuted for, even though distributing is exactly what they’re always doing.

  I know my nose is clearing up when I can smell Mira’s lemon body spray close. Faint at first, but growing.

  I notice how she’s not talking anymore. She’s just staring at me, bringing her hand up to touch my face, but then saying “Shit!” when she looks at her watch and sees the time. “The damn babysitter leaves in a half hour!”

  She moves to the other side of the room to put her face back on.

  I don’t move or go with her. I flip a few piles of money over. I hold them before I start saying bye to them and putting them in the gym bag Mira brought. Back when I was using, I had a million hustles. But I never had a hustle as smart as Mira’s, as untraceable. I’ve ripped and run, stabbed and stolen, and burned people like you wouldn’t believe. Me on drugs was nobody you’d ever want to meet.

  And I know people who did way less than me sitting in San Quentin right now. I was the luckiest fool you’ve ever seen. Coming through my drugs years
without one arrest is, like I said before, a miracle.

  They wake me up at night still, the things I did. They get all mixed up in my dreams. Harlem Harold getting robbed of his stash. Me swinging a baseball bat at his head, making sure he never takes revenge for it. Me finding out what brain looked like when pieces leaked out. Liver meat without the color. A mash of skull bone looking like chunks of big eggshells in the one-bulb light of his garage. The blood sticks with me. I can sometimes still smell the wet metal of it.

  See, you don’t get forgiveness for the things I’ve done. I can’t come back from them and be a normal member of the human race anymore. And all’s I can do now is try. Try to help some people, but even more than that, try not to hurt even one more person for as long as I got left.

  First, do no harm. Like John always says in group.

  See, I always had it backwards. I did all the harm first, when I was young and stupid, and now I’m trying to make up for a slice of it. As much as I can. For Frank. For Rose. For anybody else too. I guess for me, it’s like: Last, do no harm. And if I can do that on my way out of this life, then I really did something.

  I used to tell Rose that in boxing you keep getting up till you can’t anymore. That the only honor there is in punching people for a living is you just keep getting up till you can’t. And that’s it. It’s a good run then, and when it’s done, you hang your gloves up and hope it was all worth something to somebody other than you, that your sacrifices made people’s lives better because it sure as hell shortened yours.

  From the other side of the room, Mira says, “This is enough, right? More than enough money. For Frank. For John. For helping people.”

  I zip the gym bag up and walk it over to the door, where I drop it on the carpet. That’s our goodbye, me and this money. It’s going to a better place now. Better hands. And that makes it worth it. The risk. The running. The bad way it’s all going to end.