“You gotsta try this.” She presses the brim of her martini glass between his lips. “Taste like shit, don’t it?”
He stands, sets a twenty on the bar.
“Oh come on. Don’t leave me with James. He’ll call the sheriff on me. He’s done it before. I’ll be nice. I swear.” She raises her fist, extends her pinkie. “Don’t make me beg.”
Andre takes his first drunken step, doubts he can take another.
“I got a present for you.” She digs inside her bag, slams an orange prescription bottle atop the bar. “I nabbed these from the rich bitch I work for.”
Andre returns to his stool, not because he likes her, nor because he cares about her pills, but because the floor has again begun to shake, and because, in truth, he has nowhere else to go.
* * *
In the alley, between two empty dumpsters, Andre and the woman with cornrows have sloppy, drunken, and unprotected sex. Afterward, she asks for twenty dollars, which confuses him. They hadn’t discussed money before, and now he wonders whether he just engaged the services of a pro. He’s amazed how a cheap moment can so easily be made cheaper. He pays her, and she scribbles her name and number on his sweaty hands.
“Call me later?” She kisses him.
“Yeah. Sure.”
“Promise?”
“I promise.” Of course, he won’t.
In the Jeep, the clock reads 12:05 A.M., and the GPS claims he’s forty-five miles from Carthage, an hour-long drive straight down State Route 44. He revs the engine, rolls out of the lot, and before long he’s flying down the highway, windows down, stereo blaring, AC on full blast. He presumes that he’s too drunk to drive, and, indeed, he is, but this small two-lane road is empty, not another vehicle in sight; no one else, he reasons, could possibly get hurt.
To his surprise, highway driving is easy, relaxing, just keep your foot on the gas and eyes on the road. Maybe, from the beginning, he should have been driving drunk. He pushes the Jeep harder, faster, seventy, eighty, eighty-five miles per hour. He knows he should slow down, that he’s driving too fast, that, with each passing mile, he’s inviting death-defying risk, but, in this moment, surpassing ninety miles per hour, Andre feels invincible.
The view turns dark as carbon, and he considers driving as far as he can. Maybe he could reach the Florida Panhandle by sunrise and, once there, start a new life. He and Cassie talked about moving to Florida, maybe opening a nightclub. He would manage the bar and staff; she could book the entertainment. She joked that Bogie in Casablanca could be his inspiration, with Andre wearing a white dinner jacket and black bow tie, playing chess against himself, and never drinking with the customers. He hated the idea—what did he know about running a club?—but he never told her so. Now he’ll have to find new dreams to pretend to love.
He pulls onto the exit that leads to home. In his rearview mirror, a police cruiser approaches, lights flashing. His instincts say to flee, to floor the pedal and start a high-speed chase through the barren streets of Carthage, a thought so childish, so ridiculous, it immediately evaporates from his imagination. But right now, he’s the very model of probable cause. He figures he’s committed at least half a dozen crimes, predicts the cop will frame him for a half dozen more. He pulls into a vacant lot—what other choice does he have?—prays that he hasn’t exhausted all his luck. He hasn’t. The cruiser picks up speed, passing him along the one-way road, and disappears into the dark.
Two minutes later, Andre parks on his front lawn. Brendan, standing on the porch, wears the same linen suit, in the same despondent pose he struck this morning, and Andre suspects the kid never went back inside. The kid, pale and gaunt, looks like a parent who spent all night sick with worry, and Andre wonders with whom he has talked. Andre closes his eyes, allows a moment to pass, and when he comes to, Brendan’s standing over him, the driver’s-side door open, pulling Andre from inside the car. The kid helps Andre take a bold, ambitious first step, but Andre’s too heavy, too unsteady, too clumsy, and collapses, smashes face-first into a puddle of tar-black mud. Andre rises quickly, spits the muck from his mouth, imagines his face and chest now black like a bit player’s in a minstrel show.
The kid helps Andre inside the house, where Andre says, “Hold up, B—hold up. I got a question. Seriously. B—it’s important. Come on, man, it’s important!”
“Yeah, Dre. What is it?”
“I hate my life.”
“That’s not a question, Dre.”
In Andre’s room, Brendan, with a damp towel, wipes Andre’s face, chest, hands, and feet, removes Andre’s ripped and muddy pants. The kid speaks words that Andre is too drunk to understand, with a face soft and kind, free of judgment. Andre curls beneath his sheets, too ashamed to express his gratitude, to explain that he’s not a lush, that today was simply bad. Instead, as the world again goes dark, Andre says, “I’m sorry, B. I shouldn’t’ve been rude to you this morning.”
“Don’t worry about that now, Dre.”
“No. No. Seriously, B. I was an asshole, and, for fuck’s sake, you’re my only friend.”
Chapter Ten
In a dark room, Andre wakes hungover, belly down, hands sweaty, stomach a school of silverfish. He taps a bedside lamp, and a soft glow stings his eyes. He sits up, finds beside his bed an ice bucket with a fresh plastic lining and on his nightstand a glass of water in which shaved lemon peels float. Tinfoil on the window blocks the sunlight, and across the room, in the corner, a comforter with the colors of the Irish flag sits bundled atop an upholstered chair.
Slowly, carefully, he rises, peeling himself from sticky sheets, dons pants before bumbling into the parlor. He’s dizzy, doesn’t remember a damn thing about last night, doesn’t remember how he got home, can’t explain why he feels like he got his ass beat. Headache. Fever. His face feels numb, his torso tender. He squints against the sunlight, barely makes out Brendan cooking brunch. The unmistakable aroma, pork and onions in a greasy skillet, makes his nausea worse.
Brendan hands Andre a glass of cold cranberry juice that he gulps down in three quick swallows. He’s no longer thirsty, but he still feels sick. “I’m going back to bed.”
“Check your e-mail.” The kid refills the glass. “The Boshears want to meet.”
“Write back.” Andre heads toward his room. “Tell ’em we’ll meet next week.”
“E-mail wasn’t from Victoria,” Brendan says. “E-mail was from Nana.”
Andre imagines the interstate game of telephone: Tyler calls the Boshears, the Boshears call PISA, PISA calls Mrs. Fitz, and now Mrs. Fitz has called him. He should’ve seen this coming. Now he’ll have to call his boss and explain his side of this story, a version of events that, in the light of day, doesn’t feel all too compelling. Yes, ma’am. I fired our straw man because he took the initiative and snagged a successful feature in the local paper. No, ma’am. I don’t have a backup plan. Maybe he’ll embellish—Ma’am, I swear to God, that redneck called me a nigger. He’s told bigger lies to get out of smaller troubles.
Andre takes a seat at the table, finds, spread before him, today’s newspaper. He sips the juice, squints at the news type in search of reactions to Tyler’s unauthorized interview. But no response appears within the smudged, ad-heavy pages. No editorial. Nor follow-up feature. Nor letter to the editor. No one cares. He skims the comics, the sports section, the crime beat that lists criminal sentences. One man, age forty-two, received six months, stayed and suspended, for fondling his fourteen-year-old niece; four teens, exact ages and names withheld, received community service after pleading no contest to taking indecent liberties with a blacked-out classmate with initials KS.
“Pick your cure.” Brendan presents a plate in each hand. On the left plate, tomato slices, scrambled eggs, oyster crackers, and a white spine of lettuce. On the right, sausage, bacon, eggs, canned beans, potatoes and onions, ham and tomatoes. Hangover or not, who eats like this?
“About last night . . .” Andre takes the leaner plate. “I needed to�
��”
“You don’t owe me any explanation.” Brendan grinds pepper on the tomatoes. “But if you need to talk. Well, you know.”
* * *
The past twenty minutes, the two have been stuck in the Jeep, watching a freight train run, at a glacial pace, through this trailer park. Andre imagines all the personal property that the neighborhood boys must have flattened on these rails—pennies and bottle caps, soda cans and butter knives, house keys and little sisters’ favorite dolls—and he imagines the lonely little girl who sits by her bedroom window, wondering on which train she’ll one day hop, her only real chance to escape this small town and to make something of herself, a huge risk, she knows, but a risk, even at this young age, that she realizes she must one day take. East or west, doesn’t matter in which direction the train runs. Just as long as she can hop aboard and never look back.
“Let’s not waste this opportunity.” The kid is passionate. “We don’t need a second straw man. We can run a transparent campaign. Respect the voters. Respect their intellect. We’ll tell folks that we represent PISA, that a mine could spur local investment, some short-term jobs. Studies show—”
“Jesus, B,” Andre groans. The kid knows he’s sick. Why is he picking this fight now? “This county has a fifty percent high school dropout rate. You think anyone gives a shit about academic studies?”
“Dre, you’re missing the point. We make our case on the merits.”
“That’s a great campaign. Vote yes for millions of gallons of cyanide in your drinking water. It may kill your kids, but, heck, it might also kill your mother-in-law. On Election Day, you decide.”
“That’s better than all the secrecy.”
“First, it’s not secrecy. It’s privacy. And people have the right to participate in our democracy without—”
“PISA is not a person. Bribery is not participation. By definition, secrecy is . . .”
A wave of nausea hits Andre, and he buries his face deep in his lap. He feels light-headed, dizzy; he might faint. For the first time, he suspects that last night he consumed something trickier than off-brand booze. The kid says, “Need me to pull over?”
“The height of Jim Crow. Segregated water fountains. Lynchings. The whole white-hood-wearing, cross-burning shebang.” Andre sips his water. “Black business owners would fund white candidates who supported civil rights. And these black entrepreneurs gave their support anonymously, because if local whites learned—”
“You’re seriously comparing billion-dollar international conglomerates with blacks during Jim Crow? Dude! In grade school, did you not watch Eyes on the Prize every February like everyone else?”
“Here’s your problem,” Andre says. “Anonymity or secrecy—call it whatever you want, but it’s long been part of American politics. And not only black folks in Jim Crow. You think dark money didn’t further the political fortunes of gays, of women, of your people?”
“Irish?”
“Stoners.”
“We prefer cannabis connoisseurs.”
“The entire marijuana legalization movement is full of anonymous money,” Andre says. “Dark money isn’t just about big corporations. Anonymous money benefits anyone who wants to share a message but who fears the message might harm the messenger.”
“Dude, spin it however you want,” Brendan says. “But blacks, gays, cannabis connoisseurs, each of those groups has reason to keep their identities secret. People in those communities express their political views, and those people lose their jobs, lose their freedom, lose their lives. What the hell is PISA afraid of losing?”
“We’re sticking with our current plan.”
“And what exactly is our current plan? We still need a registered voter to submit the signatures, and you fired our straw man.”
“Here’s my plan. We sit in silence for the rest of this ride.” Andre turns on the radio. “‘Cannabis connoisseurs’? Really?”
“Yeah, I know. But what did you expect from a bunch of stoners?”
* * *
On the eastern shore of Lake Santee, two dozen men pray. The men form an imperfect ring, in the center of which a purple-robed man preaches. The wind, strong and wild, whips the preacher’s words away, casts them down shore toward a cottage-style boathouse, where a sign delimits public from private. PUBLIC BEACH ENDS HERE. NO TRESPASSING. WE HAVE GUNS.
Andre and Brendan stand on a cliff’s edge that overlooks the entire scene. Victoria, on the private beach, waves. She points up the hill, toward the mouth of a sandy path, draws her forefinger through the air as though tracing the trail. The wind lifts the hem of her dress, and, blushing, she retreats inside the boathouse.
“Before we head in,” Andre says. Seventeen years have passed since his release and making this disclosure hasn’t gotten any easier. The past few weeks, the kid’s been good enough to avoid any awkward discussion about Andre’s criminal past. But now Duke Boshears probably knows, and Andre can’t predict what the fool will say. “Here’s the deal. You might know. I have a criminal record. Two years in, three years out. I was young, sixteen, homeless. I was runnin’ with older boys, and I found myself in this criminal situation, and someone got hurt. Not making excuses. I was wrong. I regret it.”
The kid runs his tongue across his teeth, and Andre wonders what’s passing through his mind. Over the years, Andre’s learned to predict a person’s reaction based upon the listener’s political bent. Conservatives tend to shrug, to acknowledge that they too, at sixteen, raised hell, that, but for the grace of God, they too could’ve ended up imprisoned. Liberals never admit personal failure. Instead, lefties prefer to rant about the criminal justice system, to mount their soapbox and to show off their knowledge of racial disparities in policing, prosecution, and sentencing. The kid, Andre guesses, will do neither, and, indeed, Brendan leans forward, ear turned, as though awaiting more. Andre says, “You did know, didn’t you?”
“Dude. It’s the twenty-first century. Of course I knew,” he says. “I did an extensive background check on you when I learned you’d be my mentor.”
“When did I become your mentor?”
“And we should definitely talk about that, because, Dre, in the mentoring department, you could do better. But, yeah, so what? I Googled your name.”
“I’m not complaining,” Andre says. “Makes perfect sense.”
“And then I used those search results and cross-referenced the information with a private database of federal criminal offenders. Got your birth date. Mother’s name. No father’s name. Then I paid a two-ninety-nine sketchy fee. Learned you have a brother, Hector. He’s got medical issues, and he’s married to Vera, and boy, that’s a criminal record. They live in a bad neighborhood. Is that racist to say? That part of DC is like one hundred percent black, but it’s also like one hundred percent violent. Not a causation. But correlation, I’m sure, but still, dude. That neighborhood. Al-Qaida training camps have fewer annual casualties.”
“Yes. That’s racist. It’s true, but it’s also racist.”
“You were a part of a special pilot program. Your three years of parole, you were enrolled in college. A second-chance scholarship paid all your expenses. You finished in four years, with honors. That’s how you met Nana. She endowed your scholarship.”
“Please stop.”
“You’ve had one job since graduating college, and that’s with Nana. Do you really speak Arabic? Oh, and dude, we gotta work on that credit score. How’d you manage to get a loan to buy a condo? Was the bank manager a friend of Nana’s? Yeah, bet that was it.”
“Don’t you have better things to do than stalk people?”
“I respect your privacy. Privacy is important. But it’s public information and a prudent precaution. You could’ve been an axe murderer with shitty credit,” Brendan says. “Now I know I was half-right.”
The kid has a point. Online opposition research is essential to modern campaigns. Criminal records. Public debts. Sarcastic comments written on disreputable message boa
rds. But Andre rarely researches people in his personal life. Yes, he’s researched Cassie and his mother, neither yielding helpful results, but he’s never researched Brendan, or Mrs. Fitz, or Vera, or Hector, not because he respects their privacy, but because he cares so little about their private lives.
The kid says, “And, if I can be honest with you, when I read the criminal complaint, I was a little freaked out. I was like—”
“The criminal complaint is online?”
“For like ten bucks. As is the arresting officer’s affidavit. As is your booking photo. Were you sporting a ’fro with sideburns?”
“Like I said, I was sixteen and homeless.”
“Were you sixteen and homeless in a 1970s blaxploitation film?”
Andre drifts away, considers the news that the complaint now appears online, hates that he’s lost control over his own personal narrative. These past seventeen years, he’s taken great care to polish the retelling of his past, emphasizing his youth, embellishing his circumstances, omitting any reference to the fifteen thousand dollars or Dylan Miller. Now he must revise his own story, review the complaint and mold his account to those facts in the public sphere. He wonders whether that’s possible. The facts are bad. Dylan Miller could’ve been any of his clients’ sons. Andre says, “You still freaked out?”
“Dude, of course I am. It’s insane that you help billionaires buy elections.”
“I swear to God, B. I’m not talking about the job. I’m talking about the conviction.”
The kid hesitates, ponders. Seems not to have asked himself this question, says, “No. No? No!”
“The first no would’ve been good enough.”
The wind picks up, throwing itself in harsh and loud somersaults across the beach. Flecks of sand whip against flat rocks, and low, delicate waves crash against the shore. Andre raises his hands, shielding his face, wishes he had worn warmer clothes. He wonders whether the praying men, in white buttoned shirts and khaki pants, are bothered by the cold, wonders whether the benefits of prayer include a Lord that keeps them warm.
The Coyotes of Carthage Page 11
