The Weight

by Andrew Vachss

The Thunderbird was in its slot.

  It was late. I figured I’d try the next morning.

  I was taking off my clothes when she walked in. Wearing a bathrobe, with a towel around her hair.

  “I thought I heard something.”

  “The garage door. When it opens, you hear that?”

  “I … guess I do. I was never inside by myself at night when it did before. So maybe that was it.”

  “I’m glad you’re up. ’Cause I want to ask you something. And it’s real important.”

  She sat down on the bed. I zipped my pants back up and made sure I stayed as far away from her as I could.

  “Albie’s books?”

  “Yes?”

  “Remember you telling me about them?”

  “Yes, I remember,” she said, like her voice was a wall between us, and she had to use all her strength to keep holding it up.

  “What you said was, you knew where they were but you never even looked at them, right?”

  “Yes.”

  She was like a big talking doll. A doll that could only say one word. I knew she’d just say it again and again if I kept asking those same kind of questions. I was stuck. So I just shut up.

  A little time went past. She never moved. Then she said, “I told you, it was a matter of trust. Didn’t I do that?”

  “Yeah,” I said. But even as it came out of my mouth, I realized I was going to end up sounding just like her. Two parrots, who only knew one word between them. I had to take some kind of shot. “Did you know Albie left a will?” I asked her.

  “No.” Just like that. Maybe she didn’t even want to think about it. Maybe Albie had family somewhere. Maybe she didn’t know that; maybe she was afraid to find out. Everything out of this broad’s mouth was a “maybe.”

  “Well, he did,” I told her.

  “Where did he leave—? Wait. I get it. Solly, he’s got it, right?”

  “Yes. I called him earlier tonight. I wanted to make double-sure before I said anything to you.”

  “So you’re saying … you want to trade?”

  That’s when I knew she was lying about Albie’s books. His “ledger,” like she told me. Telling me she never opened them. She’d opened them, all right. And she couldn’t find one thing in there that would pay her a dime.

  I just looked at her, waiting.

  “How do I know you’re not just saying this?”

  “If I can prove that, prove I’m not making it up about a will, you’ll show me Albie’s books?”

  “If you can prove it? There’s only one way you could do that, Wilson.”

  That’s when I got my idea. I thought about it for a minute. She didn’t move. Then I said, “I need to go out again. I need to make a call.”

  “Just stay right where you are,” she said. Then she got off the bed and walked out.

  By the time she came back, she had changed into one of those silly outfits you see in gyms all the time. Fit her like blue paint, with white stripes down the sides of the legs. And she had a cell phone in her hand.

  “Yes, it’s clean,” she said, handing it to me. She stood there with her hands behind her back, telling me she wasn’t leaving.

  Okay.

  I dialed Solly again. When I heard the click, I said, “What if I had to prove that there really was this certain paper? Is there any way I could do that without actually holding it in my hand?”

  “She’s standing right there, huh?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Good!” he said. Which surprised the hell out of me. “Ask her, does she know what a partners desk is?”

  “Do you know what a partners desk is?” I said.

  She just nodded.

  “Yes,” I said to Solly.

  “Then tell her to go sit on it. Tell her you’ll be there in five minutes.”

  I told Rena. I couldn’t read the look on her face, but she turned around and walked out.

  Then Solly told me what I had to do.

  I walked through the house, cursing myself for always being such a fucking dope. And just when I thought I had played it so smart, too.

  See, I knew Rena was sitting on a partners desk. And what I was supposed to do with that desk. Only, I didn’t know where the damn thing was.

  I knew where it wasn’t, because I hadn’t seen anything like what Solly described. But I didn’t want to walk through the whole house. It was dark. Maybe she was thinking Solly knew she could hear what he was saying, so he’d used some code. Like “tell her to go sit on it” was really telling me to kill her.

  It wasn’t just that I didn’t want to scare her; I was scared of what she’d do if she thought I was coming after her.

  “Rena?” I called out. Not loud, but strong enough to carry.

  Nothing.

  I turned on the TV in the living room. Maybe the sound would tell her where I was.

  But then I shut it right off. For once, I wasn’t going to mess something up. If I’m Rena, maybe I think the TV is just a trick. So I could trap her instead of trying to hunt her down.

  So I went to the gym.

  I was doing lat pulls, front and back. Ten front, ten back. Over and over, until I lost count. I don’t even know what I set the weight for. I wasn’t tired. And nothing was coming to me.

  Except Rena. She came into the gym and stood in front of me. She had on that same blue outfit, but now she was holding a pistol. She handled it like she knew what it was for.

  “What happened?” she said.

  I let the bar go back up. Slow, the way you’re supposed to.

  “I’m stupid,” I said.

  “Meaning …?”

  “I tell you, go sit on the desk. Only, I don’t know where that damn desk is, okay?”

  She made a pretty sound in her throat. It made every part of her wiggle a little. Except the hand holding that pistol.

  “Go that way,” she said, pointing with her other hand.

  I walked. She was behind me. When she said to turn, I turned. Finally, we were in a little room. The desk was just old dark wood with a couple of drawers, little glass knobs. The only weird thing was that it was facing the wall.

  “Stand still,” she said.

  I saw her walk around from behind me. She went right up against the wall, then she turned around and faced me. She sat down so her elbows and wrists made a triangle, with the pistol centered on my chest.

  “You get it now?”

  “A partners desk. So one partner sits facing the other one, right?”

  “Yes. This is Albie’s den. For his special, private stuff. Not his work stuff, understand?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’ve been in here plenty of times,” she said.

  I remembered hearing a girl say something like that, a long time ago, when I was still in school. The other girls were really stabbing her. With words, I mean. Not like playing the dozens—really vicious stuff. Like, her mother must be a real whore,’ cause the girl didn’t even know who her own father was. “I do too,” the girl kept saying, like she was a little kid.

  That’s how Rena sounded now.

  Back then, I’d waited around after school until the worst one came out. I didn’t know her name, but I could see she was with her special friends.

  When they saw me coming, they didn’t know what to do. A guy like me, I wasn’t supposed to be around people like them. I stepped close to the leader girl. Before she could say anything, I slapped her, hard enough to make her fall down and start crying.

  “Tell your boyfriend I did that,” I said. “He’s not gonna do nothing. You know why? Because he don’t give a fuck about you. He’s only with you because everyone knows you give the best blowjobs in school.”

  I never did find out what happened at school. I never went back, and they never came looking for me. But I was on the same corner every night, and people knew it. Her boyfriend, that pussy could have found me anytime he wanted.

  Only he never showed. So I never found out what happened in scho
ol. I wanted to call the girl they’d been torturing, but I guess I was afraid that I’d only made things worse.

  I wasn’t going to do that this time. So all I said to Rena was “Sure, you have. But I know something about that desk you don’t.… At least, I think I do.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “The desk. The proof you need is in the desk. Only, Albie had it fixed so’s it takes three people to get at it.”

  “There’s only two of us.”

  “I know. But I can do what two of the people are supposed to. You do the other part.”

  “Like two partners?”

  “I … I guess so. Maybe that’s right. All I know is, that desk has to be lifted up. Way up. All four legs have to be off the ground. High off the ground. That’s the two-man job.

  “Then the third one stands underneath. There’s like this water stain. On the underside, I mean. You have to look real close to even see it. Then you have to tap right on it. Not hard, just, like, with your knuckle.”

  She got out from behind the desk. “Give me that phone,” she said.

  I handed it over. She tossed it onto this old couch. It was some dark leather, and it didn’t look comfortable. But it had a bunch of rugs and stuff on it, so the phone didn’t make a sound when it landed. Neither did the pistol.

  “Let’s do it, Sugar.”

  I crawled under the desk. It would have been an easy lift, only I couldn’t get my head free to take the weight on my shoulders. I crawled back out.

  “What?” she said.

  “It’s probably not all that heavy, but I can’t lift it like you do a squat. And I don’t think I can hand-press it from my knees.”

  Rena went over to the desk. She looked at it a long time. Then she said, “It has to go up, but it doesn’t have to go up level. Just lift one end, okay? When you get that up, slide your left shoulder underneath. Put your left palm up, like you were getting ready to press. Then just slide your palm more to the left. Slow, just a little at a time. When you get it far enough over, you push with the one hand and I’ll haul up on it, too. Then you’ll be able to get your right hand inside.”

  She showed me with her hands what she was telling me to do. I could see it.

  “Okay? Now, when you get both palms under it, just push. Like it was a … I don’t know what you call it, but I saw you do it. In the gym, I mean.”

  She was right, too. Once I got one end up, the rest was easy. I got my palms under it, bent my knees, drove it up, just like doing a squat-thrust. One with serious weight to it—the damn desk felt like it was made of lead.

  Only one rep! I kept saying to myself. I can hold this up all night. For a minute, I thought I might have to. I couldn’t look around, but I could feel Rena wasn’t in the room anymore.

  But then I felt her against me. Smelled her. Her, not her perfume. I couldn’t see what she was doing, but I could see a flashlight, so I knew where she’d run off to.

  I heard a couple of little taps against the wood, and something dropped on my head. It didn’t knock me out or anything, but the surprise almost made me drop the desk.

  “I’ve got it,” I heard her say. “Let it down easy, okay? I’ll help.”

  In the living room, I watched her unwrap something in white tissue paper. She did it like she was disconnecting an alarm. Inside all that paper, there was a little bag. It looked real old, like it was once red but faded to a brownish color now.

  Like the thumbprint in Solly’s book, I thought to myself. I knew that little bag had to be Jewish. There was a gold star embroidered on the front with Jewish writing inside it. Underneath, there was like a whirly thing, also in gold, and two green-leaf things coming out of each side. The bottom was all gold fringe.

  “It’s his tallit,” she said, real soft.

  “His what?”

  “His prayer shawl. That’s what’s inside that bag. You get one of these when you’re bar-mitzvahed. On your thirteenth birthday. For Jews, that makes you a man. In the temple, you wear it over your shoulders.”

  “How come you know all this?”

  “Albie told me, what do you think?”

  “You went with him? To the—?”

  “No! And Albie didn’t go, either.”

  “Well, Solly said this was something Albie left to you. In his will, I mean. Doesn’t that prove Solly has it?”

  She didn’t say anything. For a long time.

  She was still sitting there, with that little bag in her lap, when I got up and walked back to that suite.

  It took me a while. By the time I got there, a whole set of books was on my bed. Big, thick ones.

  Albie’s ledgers, I guess. Because that little blue book Solly wanted, it wasn’t there.

  It was still nighttime when she came back to where I was—3:51, with a blinking sun. There was enough light from the hall for me to see she only had her underwear on.

  She lay down next to me. Before I had a chance to even think about what was going on, she put her lips against my ear.

  “We have to get out of here, Sugar.”

  “Now?”

  “Right now. Pack up your stuff. Everything, understand?”

  “What about your—?”

  “The keys are in the Lincoln,” she said, stepping over what I wanted to ask her. “Put all your stuff in the trunk. Then come back to the living room. I’ll have stuff, too. A lot more than yours. If it doesn’t fit in the trunk, we’ll just throw it into the back seat.”

  “What hap—?”

  She put her finger over my mouth. Then she jumped up and ran out the door.

  It was easy for me to pack. The only problem was that new stuff Rena had bought for me. I didn’t have a suitcase for that, so I just threw it in the back seat, loose.

  In the living room, there was Rena. And about half a dozen different bags.

  “If I had a strap, I could—”

  “Just make a couple of trips, Sugar. I’ll be carrying some of them, too.”

  The garage was dark. She got behind the wheel of the Lincoln and hit the button for the door, then hit it again as soon as we rolled out.

  Only, Rena didn’t take the driveway. She turned and drove out behind the garage. It looked like a damn forest, but she drove through it like there was a road somewhere.

  A few minutes later, she stopped.

  “Unload it all,” she said. “Don’t worry about being neat—just get everything out of the car.”

  It only took us a couple of minutes. When Rena saw my loose stuff, she popped one of her suitcases open and stuffed it all inside.

  “Wait right here. Don’t move.”

  The Lincoln went back the way we came. When she came back to where she left me and all that stuff, she started snapping off sentences like she was firing jabs.

  “It’s about a half-mile from here to the road. You stay here. Right here. But lie down, like, okay? I don’t know how long it’s going to take, but I’ll be back for you.”

  She looked at me the way you look at a pawnbroker, trying to get him to believe you really are coming back to claim what you hocked. I didn’t know what the deal was, but I didn’t know what else to do except sit there and listen.

  “Keep this cell on,” she said, tossing a new one at me. “Then you’ll know it’s me coming.” She handed me a big plastic bag. “There’s your bars and drinks in there. Now wait.”

  She threw some of her stuff in a little carryall and disappeared.

  Waiting never bothered me, but I didn’t like being in those woods—I wasn’t used to places like that. When it finally got light, I could see why she picked that spot—it was almost like a cave of trees.

  The fucking bugs were making me crazy. I had to take my mind off everything. I had to do that or go nuts. I still didn’t know what was going on.

  So I opened one of Albie’s books—that tiny flashlight Solly gave me was enough for me to read by. After a while, I could figure some things out. Like the dates. They started in 1966, and they
went all the way to a couple of months ago, probably just before he died. Every page was laid out the same. I couldn’t understand much more than the dates, but I knew all those words and numbers had to stand for something. I just couldn’t make any sense of them.

  I took a few deep breaths, then I started over. Albie was in the same business as Solly, right? I used that. Looked at the capital letters in blocks, like initials. Some I found over and over again. Like, whoever JBR/H/C was, he had the same phone number for years. The first number, it was inside a box. Not crossed out, just this box around it. Then nothing for a long time. Then a different number. With no box around it. So that one, it was probably still good.

  I’d picked up on that because I was looking for a “J.” Like in “Jessop.” I kept trying. Found “AJ/WT/X.”

  Whoever that was, Albie kept his record the same as he had for the other one. Phone number started in 1978, all in those boxes. Nothing until 1985. Then a new one.

  Only this one was different from the others. The phone number was still the same, but the name, there was a circle around it, starting in 1990. And just the number “100.” In the very last book, “AJ/WT/X” had a line drawn through it. Not a line, more like an arrow. Pointing down.

  The cell went off. It didn’t ring, just kind of throbbed. I opened it up, but I didn’t say anything.

  “I’m coming in,” Rena said. Then she cut off.

  Maybe ten minutes after that, I heard her crashing through the woods. At least I thought it was her.

  It was. She had on jeans and boots. Work boots, not show-off things; lace-ups, with heavy soles.

  “Hurry! I’m parked on the shoulder. Some cop could come by.…”

  It took three trips. It wasn’t the weight, it was all those different little bags. She didn’t have any big suitcases, like for traveling.

  The car was a white Cadillac with a monster of a trunk. Everything fit.

  Rena stomped on the gas, and we got out of there. After a few turns, she kind of calmed down. I could tell, because she lit a cigarette.

  We drove for a while. She was on her third smoke when she finally said something.

  “All we’ve got to do now is not get a ticket.”