Every Man a Menace

by Patrick Hoffman

  It occurred to Raymond when he was back in his room that Shadrack could have gotten any old Filipina lady to say his mother’s address. Sure, it had sounded like Gloria, but how could he know it was really her voice? Any jailhouse lawyer would tell you evidence like that wouldn’t hold up in court.

  The more he thought about it, the crazier Shadrack seemed. There was no conspiracy to rip him off. Raymond hadn’t seen any sign of anything like that. The man had gotten some woman to say Raymond’s mother’s address. That was all. He would just sit back. Let things work themselves out.

  His thoughts were interrupted by knocking on the door. It was Gloria this time. When she came in, the smell of perfume filled his room. There was no sign of her driver in the hall.

  “You saw him?” she asked.

  “I did.”

  “And he what?” She held her chin up, so she was looking down her nose at Raymond. She looked like some kind of pissed-off teacher.

  “He told me that you broke my mother’s windows.”

  Raymond watched her face undergo a series of transformations. She smiled slightly, and then the smile disappeared, her eyes filling with anger. She looked hateful. Raymond couldn’t tell if she was guilty or not.

  “This man,” she said, “has gone too far.” She held her hand in the air like she was brandishing a poisoned dart.

  “He’s crazy,” Raymond said.

  She looked him dead in the eyes, like they were finally understanding each other. “A crazy man,” she agreed.

  “He thinks y’all want to rip him off.”

  “No,” she said, shaking her head. “Why would we do that?” Her face still looked angry. “I have a prediction,” she said, then paused for a few seconds as though planning her words. “Tomorrow he will say, ‘Only Raymond. I only deal with Raymond, now.’ This man is going to wash everything down the drain.”

  Something about this felt scripted. A lonely feeling settled over Raymond. He wanted to be done with these people, their world. He wanted sleep. His shoulders hurt. His head hurt. He was hungry, thirsty, dehydrated.

  “One thing I don’t understand,” said Raymond. “How’s he get to say anything, if he’s the one doing the buying?”

  “Because of your boss,” she said. “Your boss says I can’t cut him out. So, for now, he stays,” she said. “It’s that simple.”

  She left after that. Raymond, for the first time since he’d gotten to San Francisco, started to consider what it would mean to replace Shadrack.

  He bought a pint of whiskey and wandered downtown. The only people out were bums. He walked under the tall buildings. At one point, he felt someone following him, but when he turned around he saw a beautiful woman about thirty feet away. She reminded him of a girl he’d seen before, but he couldn’t remember where. He thought about talking to her, but she went into a Walgreens and disappeared. The wind had picked up. He kept walking.

  He thought about getting a hooker, or some pills, but he was feeling too unsettled to do either. Something bad was coming. There was nothing nice in San Francisco.

  It was one in the morning when he finally lay back down on his bed. It barely surprised him when at three o’clock, the young black man with the blank face came by and knocked on his door. Said he had the wrong door again. When he came back at five, Raymond tried to fight him, but he ran.

  Raymond’s heart was beating hard after that. He tried to cry into his pillow. He tried to force sobs, but nothing came, so he just moaned and moaned and let the bad thoughts ride through his mind.

  At a quarter to seven, his phone buzzed. The sun had just come up; his room was covered in dust. Shadrack had texted him: Godz blezzed uz with wizdom and sin. Raymond didn’t know what the hell the man was talking about.

  A couple of hours later, the knocking returned. He figured it was the black guy again, and anger spread through his whole body. He wanted to get the jump on him this time. He got out of bed as quietly as he could and snuck over to the door. Then he reached for the handle, grabbed it, and pulled the door open.

  Shadrack was standing on the other side. He had his doctor’s bag with him.

  “Jesus, what’s wrong with you?” he asked.

  Raymond shook his head. “I thought you were that black guy.”

  “What black guy?”

  “Never mind. What do you want?”

  “What do I want? What kind of greeting is that? I brought you coffee.” He held out a cup of coffee, and Raymond took it.

  Shadrack scanned the room as he stepped through the doorway. “You living like a damn homeless man,” he said.

  “Your place ain’t no fucking mansion.”

  “Come on, get dressed.”

  Raymond pulled his clothes on, went to the bathroom down the hallway, brushed his teeth, and rinsed his face. Tired as he was, he didn’t even stop to wonder where they were going. When he came back to the room, Shadrack was sitting on the bed. He seemed to be in the middle of some kind of deep rumination. His face glum, his shoulders hunched. He looked lost. The man was dreading something, Raymond thought.

  “You got your ID on you?” Shadrack asked, looking up.

  They walked to the car, the sun shining down on both of them. Shadrack said he’d had to park on South Van Ness because he didn’t have any change for the meter. No change, but a bag filled with jewels. He had an errand they had to do, he said. Before Raymond could ask, he cut him off, said he’d tell him when they got there.

  They drove south on 101, Shadrack leaning toward the wheel, Raymond slumping in his seat, trying to catch some sleep. As they got closer to South San Francisco Raymond realized that Gloria had never taken him to collect his ID. He felt sweat on his forehead.

  “I’m sick of playing,” he said. “Tell me where we’re going.”

  Shadrack pointed at the airport. “Right there,” he said.

  “You better stop fucking with me,” Raymond said. “You ain’t letting me sleep. You and Gloria both, you keep messing with me. I’m tired of it, man. You get it?”

  “Well, we’re reaching the end of this little journey,” said Shadrack. “Soon enough you’ll be able to sleep all you want.” He looked at Raymond and winked.

  “I’m not flying.”

  “I’m not asking you to fly. Now shut your damn mouth.”

  Raymond looked at the doctor’s bag near his feet and swore that if he had the chance he would take a handful of Shadrack’s precious jewels. He would take the whole damn bag. It was time to push this motherfucker out, he thought.

  They moved to exit the freeway, joining a stream of taxis floating toward the airport. Raymond resigned himself to whatever was coming. He sat back and looked at the sky, watching the planes cut through it.

  Shadrack stopped in front of the United Airlines terminal. It looked like a prison for rich people. After making sure they were unobserved, he pulled an envelope from his breast pocket and handed it to Raymond. It was stuffed full of traveler’s checks.

  “Need you to buy me a ticket,” he said.

  “Shit, man, you can do this shit online now,” Raymond said. “Do it on your damn phone. You don’t need me to do this.”

  Shadrack’s eyes searched Raymond’s face. A female voice announced something about passenger pickup on the intercom. A cop walking by bent his head and looked at them.

  “I need you to buy me a ticket,” Shadrack said again, when the cop had passed. “Go in there, go to the desk, and buy a ticket to Mexico City. Make it for three days from now, Friday. You hear me?”

  Raymond shook his head. “And I’m supposed to pay with these?” he said.

  “With those. Make it in your name.”

  “My name? I’m not flying anywhere, man! I’m on parole, I can’t go—”

  Shadrack raised a finger to silence him. “I didn’t say you flying. Just buy it in your name. It’ll hold a seat for me. You can’t get violated for conspiring to leave a damn state. You only get violated if you leave the state. Go on. We’ll cancel you
rs and change it to mine on the day of, but I’m on the no-fly watch, all right? I put it in my name today, the FBI’ll be here waiting. So we’ll come in together, switch the tickets right before the flight. Nobody gonna know, and I’ll be gone. It’s how I do it every time, dummy.”

  Raymond squinted at him. It didn’t make sense. But the image of Shadrack on a plane, soaring far away, certainly intrigued him.

  “Just do it,” Shadrack said. “Stop asking so many damned questions.”

  “Friday?”

  Shadrack nodded.

  “First class?”

  He thought about it for a moment. “If there’s enough money in them checks right there, yeah, first class. Go on, I’m gonna circle around. I’ll be back.”

  Raymond went to the desk and bought a one-way ticket to Mexico City. It was the first time he’d ever bought a ticket at the airport. The traveler’s checks made the woman helping him smile mechanically. She muttered to herself while she counted. Tired-looking people shuffled by pulling bags. Raymond’s own weariness had faded. He was wide awake.

  Outside, he waited for Shadrack. The man’s face, as he pulled up, looked so serious it almost seemed funny.

  “You did it?” he asked, when Raymond was back in the car.

  Raymond handed him the ticket. Shadrack took it out of the envelope, examined it, then folded it up and stuck it in his pocket. Raymond felt a brief wave of fear. He didn’t like putting his name on paper, didn’t like the idea of Shadrack holding this over him somehow, but arguing seemed impossible; instead, he sat there and felt doomed. Shadrack looked around for a moment, then pulled out into traffic.

  “I knew this dude once,” he said, when they were back on the freeway. “Back when I was still just a kid selling weed in Eureka. He was one of those dudes with a wide face. You never wanna fight one of them; they’re liable to head-butt you. He used to scare everyone. There wasn’t a single tweaker on the street wouldn’t cross over when they seen him coming. Matter of fact, they called this wide-faced dude—”

  “You saying wide or white?” Raymond asked.

  “Wide—wide,” said Shadrack, waving his hand in front of his face. “They called him Pan Face, or some shit. I’ll tell you a story, though, he got cut in the arm with a knife by a girl one time, and they took him to the hospital and he got one of them staphs, one of them MRSAs. He ended up dying from that shit. The point is, the girl that cut him, did it just ‘cause she was crazy. She didn’t have no reason to do it. See? You had the scariest boy in town, shit, scariest boy in the area, get cut by a girl, and dies from a fever.” He shook his head. “My question for you is: When you were in prison, you ever thought Arthur was the scariest boy on the yard?”

  Raymond didn’t like the question. He felt his stomach knot up. “Yeah, he’s a scary old boy,” he said.

  “Yep, and Gloria’s a scary old girl.”

  “So what are you saying?” Raymond asked. “Gloria’s going to stab Arthur in the arm? He gonna die of a fever?”

  “She gonna stab somebody. She always do,” said Shadrack, shaking his head side to side like a man unhappily speaking the truth.

  You are in the hands of a crazy man, thought Raymond. “We gonna finish this deal tonight?” he asked.

  Shadrack turned and looked at him. “Sure as a song is sung by a singer,” he said. “This deal will be done. Don’t you worry, Mr. Deal Broker. Look at that van,” he said, pointing at a white van that had veered in front of them, out of its lane. They drove in silence for a moment. Then, after taking a deep breath, Shadrack said, “I wish I could just do the deal with you, though. No Gloria, none of them Filipinos.”

  Raymond glanced over at Shadrack and watched his head bump up and down with the road. He thought about that stolen boat. He thought about his mother, hidden away at Uncle Gene’s. When Raymond was twelve years old, she had tried to get him into the Best Buddies program. She thought he’d needed a positive male influence. Raymond was a sullen boy, and he’d told her he didn’t want to do it. Maybe his life would have turned out different. He might be working in a bank now, or be a paramedic, or some bullshit. You never know: he might have ended up with a child molester for a mentor.

  Shadrack dropped him back at the Prita. Said he’d call him later, told him to shower and shave—get cleaned up.

  “Since you been out,” he asked, “you go and get yourself a good meal? Steak, or some shit?”

  Raymond said he hadn’t.

  Shadrack looked him up and down. “My advice is make sure you get yourself pretty and fed,” he said. “It’s gonna be a long night.”

  On his way upstairs, Raymond walked past a prostitute: a black girl wearing jeans with her hair pulled back. She nodded, and when he passed she called out, “Five-oh.” She thought he was a cop. Normally he would have felt insulted, but he was too preoccupied to care.

  He half expected to see Gloria waiting for him, but there was nobody. The hallway was dark and empty. It smelled dirty, like old cigarette smoke. A handwritten sign had been taped to the door directly across from his own: DON’T BOTHER ME.

  Raymond lay down and tried to clear his head. His socks, damp and itchy, felt dirty on his feet. The muscles of his shoulders wrapped in painfully on themselves. Gloria would be calling any minute now. He closed his eyes and the image of a snake, black and yellow, its tongue hissing out of its mouth, jumped into his mind. When he drifted off he had a short dream about Shadrack burning his hands and holding them up, and yelling. The man’s teeth had turned shiny black. The dream was interrupted by his phone vibrating in his pocket.

  It was Gloria. “Hold on,” she said harshly when Raymond answered. “Are you there?”

  “Yeah, I’m here,” Raymond said, sitting up. He was covered in sweat. His room seemed even smaller; the walls suddenly looked like they’d been painted with dirt. A car horn blared outside.

  “He’ll only do the deal with you,” she said. Raymond shook his head. “Listen to me,” she said. “We called him, and he said the deal was off, unless it was you. He said, ‘I only do it with Raymond Gaspar.’”

  Raymond wondered why the hell Gloria would accept Shadrack’s damn orders. It didn’t make any sense. She told him she’d pick him up at seven that night.

  He ended the call and looked at his hands. “Surprise, surprise,” he said to himself. What would they say at DVI if he came back after a week outside? Well, you can take the prison out the man, but you can’t take the man out the prison. You’re supposed to buy a one-way ticket, not round-trip! Blah, blah, blah. He felt then that life was sitting in dirty rooms being scared all the time. Men would continue to knock on his door while he slept for years to come. Every last one of his mother’s windows would be broken. People all around him would have their teeth kicked in. The world was rotten to its core.

  At two minutes after 7:00 p.m., Gloria texted and said she was there. When Raymond stepped outside he could’ve sworn he saw the same young black guy that had been keeping him up at night walking away from Gloria’s van. He couldn’t tell, though; he didn’t see the man’s face. The van’s back door opened. Raymond walked to it and looked in.

  “Who’s that black dude?” he asked.

  “The black dude?” Gloria said, turning. “He’s asking for change. We told him we didn’t have nothing.” She shrugged.

  There were three men with her, this time. The driver was the same one he’d seen with Gloria before, the man with the mustache. Next to him, in the front seat, sat another Filipino man. Gloria—dressed like she was going to a business meeting: black pantsuit, pearls, heavy makeup—sat in the middle row. Another man, older than the rest, sat in the very back. Gloria didn’t introduce any of them.

  “Only Raymond,” she said, shaking her head, as he got in, apparently imitating Shadrack. “I’ll only do the deal with Raymond Gaspar.” She scooted over so he could sit next to her. “If it wasn’t for Arthur, I swear to God I would feed Shadrack to the fish.”

  “Where we going?” Raymond as
ked. The van pulled into traffic. Gloria’s perfume smelled like flowers. He closed his eyes and breathed it in, picturing a different place.

  “We don’t know,” Gloria said. “He said he’d pick you up at a restaurant in Emeryville.”

  “I still don’t understand how this motherfucker gets to set the terms.”

  “He pays a high price,” Gloria said. Raymond waited, but that was all she offered by way of explanation.

  “Let me ask you something,” he said. “How much we dealing with here? How much is it? How much you selling? How much he paying? You never told me any of that.”

  Gloria chewed her gum and looked at him like she was trying to understand some deeper meaning to the question. Raymond could recognize her habits now, the way she tilted her chin up and gazed down at him when he spoke. She liked to pause before she answered his questions.

  “We’re selling four hundred and forty pounds,” she finally said.

  Raymond felt like he’d been hit in the gut. It was a lot more than he’d expected. Ten times more. Arthur had said forty, fifty at the most. Raymond had to stop himself from reacting. Ten times more? Did Arthur know? “For how much?” he asked, trying to sound unimpressed.

  “He’ll give you five-point-six.”

  “Five million?”

  Arthur should be getting half a million on the deal. His own little cut should be almost three hundred thousand, instead of thirty. Raymond’s heart was threatening to beat out his chest.

  “Five-six, yes.”

  “I gotta count it?” he asked, still trying for indifference.

  “No, no, no. Just look at it. Examine it. Leaf through it. Make sure it’s real. He’s crazy, but he always pays.”

  “And then what?”

  “After he’s given you the money—you make sure it’s after—you’ll give him the address. The pack is in a storage locker in Vallejo.” Her accent made her pronounce it Ballejo. “Also, the key. That’s all.”

  She handed him a slip of paper and a silver key. The paper had a handwritten address on it: 556 Lemon Street #342. Vallejo.

  “After they pay you, they’ll give you a ride back to the restaurant. We’ll wait for you there. That’s it. That’s all. Deal done. Time for everyone to go home until we start all over again.”