No Regrets, Coyote

by John Dufresne

  “The guy in the bushes? Not formally.”

  Phoebe brought me a Christmas present, a six-week-old satiny black kitten with golden eyes named Django. He weighed less than two pounds and looked like a bat. She said they told her at the Humane Society that he was the most playful kitten they’d ever seen. The sign over his cage read LOTS OF FUN!!! She handed me a bag of cat food, the Humane Society paperwork, and an appointment card for his checkup and booster shot at Eden Animal Hospital. We let Django out of his pet carrier, and he dashed off to explore the house. I poured Phoebe and me snifters of cognac. Phoebe took a little rubber squid out of her purse and tossed it to Django, who wrestled it into submission.

  Phoebe and I sat on the couch. She told me about her holiday with Kai. They’d gone scuba diving in the Bahamas. Kai stepped on a sea urchin and got boinked on the head by a falling coconut. Django chased his tail, jumped straight up in the air. I told Phoebe about the Halliday killings. Django crawled headfirst into my shoe and fell asleep. Phoebe checked her watch and said she had to go. She said, “Take good care of my little guy.”

  I said, “Do you know a cop named Shanks?”

  “He’s an asshole. A friend of Gary’s, naturally. Stay away from him.”

  When I got into bed, Django sat on the floor crying. I scooped him up and laid him on my chest. He sneezed. His nose was runny. He kneaded my T-shirt. As I drifted off to sleep, he climbed onto my head and chewed my hair. I listened to his congested breathing. I was happy to have a cat again. I dreamed I was in a bright, empty room that had no visible entry or exit. I heard gypsy music. I turned around and saw a snarling Wayne Vanderhyde with bloodied hands advancing toward me, and then I heard a scream, and I woke up.

  4

  I called the vet’s and scheduled an appointment for Django. I told them how he’d come home from the shelter with a terrible cold. His nose is bubbling with mucus, and he has sneezing fits. He’s all congested. The receptionist told me it’s not unusual for them to pick up a virus at the Humane Society. Is he active? He’s a dervish, I said. Is he eating well? Like a champ. I wiped Django’s nose and his runny eyes with a damp washcloth. I fed him wet food that I’d warmed in the microwave. He danced around the dish, deliriously happy to be eating. I showed him the litter box. He seemed shamelessly disinterested. I got out a drawerful of Satchel’s old toys and scattered them around the living room. I opened the front door and asked Red how he took his coffee. I poured a coffee-to-go for me and a coffee with cream and two sugars for Red. I told Django goodbye and turned on the radio to keep him company.

  Red thanked me for the coffee and asked me if I was feeling all right.

  I said I was. “Why?”

  “I heard you scream last night.”

  “That was me?”

  “Woke me out of a dead sleep.”

  “I had a bad dream.”

  “You have a heavy conscience?”

  “Always.”

  Red sat on his rolled-up sleeping bag and tied the laces of his green sneakers. I asked him about his plans for the day. He told me first off he was going to the library to check his e-mail.

  “It’s Red123@homeless.net if you need me.”

  “You’re right here.”

  “True.”

  I said, “You have a good day.”

  He said, “If you tell me where the garden shears are, I’ll trim the bougainvillea for you.”

  “That’s not necessary.”

  “It could use it.”

  I said, “Red, why don’t you squat in one of those foreclosed houses around town.”

  “That’s against the law.”

  “So is this!”

  “What?”

  “Trespassing.”

  “Most of the desirable foreclosures are already taken.”

  I shook my head.

  “I’ll see you tonight,” he said.

  “Don’t wait up for me.”

  He winked. “Gotcha.”

  On the way to the office I drove down DeSoto Street and stopped at the house for sale on the nine hundred block. I wrote down the Realtor’s name and phone number. I knew that the SHORT SALE sticker was probably an indication that this stucco ranch was in foreclosure. The house lacked what they call curb appeal. The lawn needed tending, the shrubs pruning, and the hard water stains on the stucco could use a coat of paint. The house looked otherwise undisturbed and serene. I drove around the block and down the alley to take a look at the back. I peeked over the wood fence. The back windows were shuttered with aluminum hurricane panels. There was a shabby little swimming pool half filled with scummy water and a weight bench rusting in the sun. The screen door was torn like maybe it had been sliced with a knife.

  When I arrived at the office, my client Cerise Beaudry was slumped on the floor in the hall, and she was beside herself. She could hardly speak for choking back tears. I helped her to her feet and unlocked the office door. I put my arm on her shoulders and led her inside to the sofa. “What’s going on, Cerise?” I held her hand. “Talk to me, hon.”

  She sat there clutching the box of Kleenex on her lap and trembling.

  “Take a slow, deep breath,” I said. “We’ve got all the time in the world, Cerise.”

  She blew her nose and squeezed the tissue in her fist. She wiped her eyes, looked at the ceiling, and shook her head. She patted down her gray hair. She smoothed out the legs of her blue slacks and looked at me.

  Cerise’s thirty-one-year-old gay son, Ellery, had broken up with his steady boyfriend at a Thanksgiving dinner. Too much drama, he’d told Cerise. “Well, then last week,” Cerise said, “Ellery got a call from the ex to come get all his shit out of the condo.” When Ellery got there, the jilted ex let him in, pulled a gun out of his pants, pointed it at Ellery, who was scared speechless and must have thought he was a dead man. The lover then smiled and shot himself in the heart. Ellery called 911 and then tried to keep the man alive. “But you can’t patch a shattered heart,” Cerise said. “So then Ellery’s covered in that asshole’s blood. He rode in the ambulance and talked to the friend all the way to Everglades General. ‘Stay with me,’ he said. ‘Hang in there.’ The cretin died,” Cerise said. Then the autopsy showed that the deceased was HIV-positive, so now Ellery was having his blood tested, but you couldn’t be sure for three months. Cerise told me that Ellery was so devastated at what happened he couldn’t sleep, and he was back on those goddamn prescriptions that took him so long in rehab to get off of, and he wouldn’t talk to her, and he quit his job at the nightclub.

  “I’m so sorry, Cerise.”

  She told me that the dead bastard’s mother was now under observation because, it turned out, she’d already been suspected of being complicit in her son’s seventeen previous suicide attempts and was being evaluated by doctors to see if she had that Munchausen-by-proxy thingy. “At the funeral, the crazy bitch threw herself on her son’s casket and vowed to join him soon, and I hope to God she does.”

  Cerise cried into her hands. She put her head between her knees. “I’m overwhelmed,” she said. “No matter what I do, life gets worse. My baby,” she said, “my poor baby.”

  I said, “What do you need today, Cerise?”

  Cerise, herself, is a suffering soul who told me at our first session years ago that her mother tried unsuccessfully to kill herself after she was raped by a priest. Cerise was nine at the time, and the priest had also fondled her. “She burned out her vagina.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “With a glowing piece of wood she pulled from the fireplace.”

  “Why did she do that?”

  “God told her to.”

  “But she lived?”

  “Yes.”

  “She was lucky.”

  “You think so?”

  Back then when Cerise first came to me, before the meds, she told me that the morning light through her bedroom window blinds cast shadows on her wall that instructed her how to conduct her day. She saw crosses everywhere she looked, including
, one morning, in the middle of my forehead. I asked her what that meant. She said that I’d been sent to earth to save her. I said, Sent from where? From the Void Room, she said. By whom? The Doorman.

  Cerise got by on her disability checks and by cleaning houses off the books. She cleaned my house one morning every other week in exchange for our sessions. She lived in a bedraggled single-wide at Trainer’s Mobile Home Park on Melancholy Beach Boulevard. Either the roof was leaking, the AC window unit was kaput, or FPL had shut off her power. She had no car. I’d given her a bicycle, but it got stolen. She was on Clozapine for her schizophrenia. She got treated, if that’s the right verb, at the psych clinic at Memorial, where they kept trying out new meds on her.

  At that first session I asked her what she thought of God’s asking her mother to mutilate herself. She told me when God talks, you don’t question; you don’t resist. She said, Yes, He spoke to her as well.

  I said, “He’s that powerful, then?”

  She said, “I don’t know if He’s powerful, but knowing Him is a powerful experience.”

  “So why are you talking with me now and not with Him?”

  “He stopped talking to me when I started on the meds.”

  “Do you miss Him?”

  “Hell, no!” Cerise told me that Vladimir, her current live-in Russian boyfriend, didn’t appreciate my calling him a parasite and a layaway.

  “Layabout, Cerise. Parasite, layabout, and malingerer. And, well, you’re not really supposed to tell him what I say to you.”

  “He will hurt you, Mr. Wylie.”

  “I don’t think so. That would mean getting off the comfy chair.”

  “He can be a bad man.”

  “Does he hit you?”

  “Not hard.”

  “Cerise, Cerise,” I said. “We’ve talked about this pattern before. You let a man into your life, and the man takes advantage of your compassionate nature.”

  Cerise folded her hands and closed her eyes. “So be it.”

  I went home at lunch to check on Django. I’d built him a nest of flannel shirts on the couch, and there he was curled asleep with his arm around a plushy duck. Well, it’s not really an arm, is it? I sat beside him and patted him awake. He crawled up my shirt and sat on my shoulder. He sneezed on my neck. I called Carlos and asked if he could get me into a foreclosed house.

  “Why?”

  I told Carlos Wayne’s story.

  He said, “The guy is nuts.”

  “I want to see what he saw in that house, smell what he smelled, hear what he heard, maybe figure out what triggered his fantasy.”

  “Call the Realtor.”

  “I need to be there alone.”

  “If your client broke in, like you say, and if the owners let the maintenance slide, then my guess is you can still get in the way your basket case did.”

  “I might get busted.”

  “You might.”

  I told him we should talk about the Halliday case. I told him I had rehearsal today. He said he’d meet me at the bar after his shift tomorrow.

  Empathy is being able to imagine the link between you and the other. It’s being able to blur the boundary between the two of you. I look at how a person moves his body and face, and I copy it, and I wait to see what thoughts and sentiments arise in my mind. Emotions don’t lie, but you certainly can lie about them. You’re angry, but you say, I’m not angry, but then, perhaps, just for a moment, you draw your eyebrows down and together, flash those vertical wrinkles on your forehead, press your lips together, and you feel that anger. Change your expression and you change your nervous system. If you move your hands in a tender way, you’ll begin to experience tenderness. Learned that in acting class. Your natural-born liar understands that everyone is watching his transpicuous face, and he knows that an easy smile is the cleverest mask. You might ape his smile and think here is a contented man. Gestures, however, may belie the counterfeit smile. He brushes a nonexistent piece of lint from his slacks, drums his fingers, leans forward. Watch his feet. They turn toward what they like or desire and away from what they fear or suspect.

  I was at the Eden Playhouse working on feeling T-Bone’s exhilaration, his joy about life after death and the promise of eternal salvation. T-Bone’s the character I play in the second play in our evening of one-acts, The Sweeter the Meat. He’s a former alcoholic, junkie, outlaw biker, but now he’s found Jesus. He’s slain in the spirit and knows he is saved. Easy enough to slap on the brilliant smile, brighten the bountiful eyes. I stood on my toes like I couldn’t hold the good news inside, like I was bursting with beatific energy. I started hopping, pounding my fists in the air. Hiroshi, our director, asked me to take it down a notch or several. “It’s only life everlasting, Wylie; it’s not a weekend with Cate Blanchett.”

  I drove to the Silver Palace to meet Bay for a drink. He was going to work in forty-five minutes, so he was drinking coffee. When he plays poker, Bay dresses like his idea of a tourist so that he’ll stick out at a table full of surly hombres in shades and cowboy hats, so that he’ll look all plump and ripe for the picking. That night he wore a red polo shirt, olive-green Bermuda shorts, blue socks with his slip-on sandals, a ball cap that read ARKANSAS THE NATURAL STATE, and a plaid fanny pack. His guileless getup was not going to fool the regulars, but it might fool a novice into thinking he’s got a chance here to juice this orange. “Hope,” Bay likes to say, “is the poker player’s worst enemy.”

  We were sitting at the Center Bar in the middle of all the noise and frenzy. Bay lit a cigarette with his thumb and then blew out the flame. “Playing against the house is a loser’s game. These slot jockeys think they’re here to make money, but they’re really here for the chance to make money. If they made money every time they came here, it’d be too much like work, and they’d quit.”

  “How’s Marlena?”

  “She wants me to take her to Disney World.”

  “Are you going to?”

  “How could I say no?” Bay crushed out his cigarette, pulled another out of the air. “By the way, I asked around about the late Mr. Halliday.”

  “And?”

  “Had a reputation for being tough. One time he bit the tip of a guy’s nose off during a particularly difficult negotiation.”

  “Holy shit!”

  “He paid for the guy’s plastic surgery.”

  “How do you know this but the cops don’t?”

  “Who says they don’t?”

  “So do you think Halliday was clean?”

  “Mr. Halliday ran a very lucrative cash business, Wylie. The gambling boats, I’m talking about. There aren’t many of those around, and they tend to attract the attention of our Italian friends, if you know what I mean.”

  I knew what he meant. I was present at the final night of Bay’s house game, the night these two sturdy, well-upholstered, pastafed gentlemen in thin black leather jackets walked in and told Bay to take a seat and told the rest of us to fold our cards and head down the street to the pub and buy ourselves thirty-minute cocktails. The gentlemen then told Bay they were interested in running the game. Bay said he wasn’t looking for partners. When they didn’t respond, when they didn’t even blink, he said that maybe he could use some help, actually, and offered to cut them in for 20 percent. And then 40 percent. One gentleman smiled. The other did not. The smiler said, You don’t understand. We are not here tonight to negotiate. Bay said, Now I understand, and then he handed over the keys to the place.

  That happened not long after two African-American guys in baggy basketball uniforms and masks busted through the door with a steel battering ram and tried to rob the players. Easy pickings, they figured, until three guys opened fire, two of whom were cops, so there was no investigation to speak of, and the bodies were carried out to the Everglades and buried in the muck. So I was told. I was not present that evening.

  A woman screamed. The red light above a video poker machine flashed, and electronic circus music played, the same dozen happy notes o
ver and over. People gathered around the winner and her lucky machine. She took a photo of the screen display with her smartphone. An attendant asked her for her driver’s license and Social Security number. The winner bought herself an 18 Carat Gold Margarita and wiped away her tears.

  I said, “You don’t think Halliday got himself mixed up with the wrong people?”

  Bay said, “Find out who catered the boats. Find out who picked up the trash.”

  I checked my watch.

  Bay said, “You going to stay and watch me play?”

  “I’m meeting Phoebe.”

  “I’ll see you on New Year’s Eve.”

  I met Phoebe at Kurosawa for the eleven o’clock seating. Kurosawa’s our favorite restaurant, a little Japanese omakase place tucked into a Russian neighborhood in Sunny Isles. There are seventeen seats, two workers—Kevin the chef, and Wendy the waitress—and no menus. You eat what Kevin bought off the boat at Haulover Marina hours earlier or had flown in overnight from Tokyo. We sat at the bar so we could watch Kevin at work. “No more bad food” is Phoebe’s motto. Life is short, she says, so meals should be long and ambrosial. We ordered our bento boxes and a bottle of soft, smooth organic sake. The night’s fare featured carrot-egg tofu, eel tempura, simmered whiting and okra jelly with shiso, and simmered lotus root. We toasted the new year. We kissed in that European way—on both cheeks.

  I said, “We have to stop meeting like this.”

  “Kai thinks you’re gay. You knew that, right?”

  “Why?”

  “You’re a bachelor.” Phoebe put air quotes around the noun. “You act. You collect Fiestaware. Your house is cluttered with vintage bric-a-brac. You live with a cat. You read novels. You talk about movies in public.”

  “I have all the symptoms.”

  My cell phone vibrated. My father calling. “Hi, Dad. You’re up late.”

  “Who is this?”

  “It’s Wylie.”

  “What do you want?”

  “You called me.”

  “Why?”