“No reason to be rude, mister.”
Rocky said, “Oh, please, y’all. Don’t worry about it. My uncle’s okay.”
They glanced at each other while I stared at them, and I felt that tiny vein in my forehead jumping double-time. Then they stopped trying to look me in the eye. The boys gave her a sort of courtesy nod, loped back to their game without turning around.
“Jeez, man,” she said. “What’s up with you?”
I sipped my JW. “We aren’t trying to meet people here. You understand me?”
“Well, you tearing them guys’ heads off wouldn’t exactly have been low-profile.”
I didn’t reply, but I marked how easily and quickly I’d located the rage that would have enabled me to maybe cripple those boys.
That was kind of my thing. Always had been.
It stayed close to the surface with me.
But it wasn’t righteous now, given the situation and this girl being who she was. The boys regarded us from the pool table, talking to themselves. I sipped my beer and stared at a poster of the Saints cheerleaders on the wall. The way Rocky looked at me had changed, gotten more wary, and the light from the jukebox streamed over her face and caught in her eyes. I looked at them.
“What?” she said.
“You got green eyes. I wondered.”
“Hell, man. You’re kind of odd.”
I lit a cigarette. “Why’d you wave them over?”
“Well, I was going to bum a cigarette from them. But I’ll just take one of yours.” She reached into my jacket pocket and pulled out a pack of Camels, took one and replaced the pack, and the whole series of gestures seemed very calculated and amateurish.
“You’re not telling the truth.”
Trying to vamp me. “How do you know?”
“Lot of people, when they lie, their eyes jump to the left a flicker.”
“Get out.”
“It’s true.”
“Mine didn’t do that.”
“You bet they did.”
She laughed and lit her cigarette. Her eyes shut when she inhaled and she let the smoke rise slow from her mouth. Her voice came back low, almost pouty. “You said I needed money, right? I mean, we’re agreed on that.”
A twangy, forlorn tune climbed through the other voices and the jukebox shined pink and white through the smoke. “That’s pretty low-down. No offense. You’re real young. Seems like you might want to aim a little higher in career-type goals.”
She stepped close and put her hand on my wrist. Dull, quickening heat traveled up my arm and across my shoulders. “I don’t like it, man. But all my money’s back in the city.”
“You could have sold it but you overdid it. You shouldn’t’ve put your hand on my wrist. It’s too much.” I hadn’t pulled my hand away, though, and then she stepped back, her bottom lip falling and trembling a little.
I finished my JW. “It’s no big deal. Just don’t try to play me, girl. Down that road is nothing good for you.”
She crossed her arms and gritted her teeth, started building herself a nice little fort of indignation, but I stopped her before she could speak. “Calm down. Just stop. Cut the baby-doll shit and the little halfway come-ons. Okay? And I won’t bullshit you.” I set down my bottle and her lips relaxed into a cute, confounded snarl. She tapped her foot. I said, “Look. I’m offering you something, and believe me when I tell you it is way more than most people get from me. I’m saying: be honest with me. You don’t try to play me and I’ll be straight with you. If I don’t trust you, you can’t come with me.”
She hit the cigarette once, defiantly. “So you thought about it? We can hide out together?”
“Maybe. Only for a little while. Just be square with me.”
“About what?”
“About who you are.”
“Okay. You first.” She stuck out her jaw and blew smoke, held the cigarette out from her face. “Who are you?”
I shrugged. “I’m what they call a bagman.” I finished my Bud in a long swallow and put out my cigarette. “Also, I found out this morning that I’m dying of cancer.”
“I think—wait. What did you say?”
“This morning.”
“You—really?”
I bobbed my head. “You’re the first person I told,” I chuckled.
“Oh God. I’m so sorry, man. I had an aunt. Wait. Really? Are you really being for real with me?”
“Look at my face.” She did. “My lungs are full of shit and I am going to die soon. I found out this morning.”
“Oh. Man. I had an aunt with the cancer. It ate her up. She looked like gristle.”
“I don’t want to talk about it or anything. And I don’t want you reminding me about it. You won’t know me long enough to give a shit.” I lit another cigarette and her eyes widened on it.
“Hey. Should you be—?”
I blew a smoke ring. “Why stop now?”
“Wow. Cheers to you, man.”
A drunk with burn scars on his neck nodded lecherously between the two of us as he stumbled into the bathroom door. Rocky said, “You haven’t . . . you have a girl or family or anybody? I mean, that you should tell ?”
“No. What’d I just say about reminding me about it?”
“Sorry. Damn.” She laughed softly to herself. Her face bloomed when she smiled, and her eyes creased and twinkled.
“What?” I said.
“This has really been one hell of a day for you, huh, man?”
“The hellest.”
I thought about Sienkiewicz’s house, the men in the foyer, Angelo’s skull—but mostly about how fast I’d moved, how my thoughts and actions had flowed like quicksilver. As if certain death had burned away anything unnecessary, made me faster, more pure, the way it did for cowboys and swordsmen in movies I favored.
So even then in the bar with her I felt myself changing, becoming something different. She rattled the ice melting in her glass. “What do you want to do?” she asked.
I twisted my bottle on the rail, watched the perspiration slide. “How about we get drunk?”
“For sure.”
I went back to the bar and returned with drinks, and she was alone, but the boys at the pool table still kept an eye on her.
We toasted. She said, “But then what? Next?”
I shrugged. “Tomorrow we go on.” Nothing felt as risky as it was. As though I were protected, on a streak. I felt so sensory and aware I could almost detect each individual atom of smoke rolling over my skin like crushed gravel.
She sipped her drink and the ends of her lips curled, stamped two dimples on her cheeks, and in her smile flashed the danger of momentum, of riding hard with no plan.
But I didn’t need a plan, only movement. Like the purest assassin, I was already dead.
People especially watched us when we left the bar, because nobody liked the idea of what it looked like we’d be doing next—a man like me and a girl like that. I was squinting through the windshield and Rocky’s head kept nodding to her shoulders. I drove under the interstate where I knew a few hotels existed but they were all somehow too bright, and so I took us southeast to the black part of town, paid for a motel room looking out on an abandoned lot and boarded-up strip mall. A place called the Starliter. I paid cash, and the old woman behind the desk was nearly bald, dipping snuff, and she didn’t ask for ID. She reminded me of Matilda, the woman who’d cooked at the group home, meals of blood pudding, powdered eggs.
The room had a single king-size bed and the A/C rattled the windowpanes. Rocky went to the bathroom while I pulled off my boots and stuffed my pistol down one, tucked them with the lockbox under the bed. I took off my jacket and belt and fell back on the room’s only chair, my feet planted flat and my eyes closed to the ceiling, letting the spinning world resolve.
The bathroom door creaked and I opened my eyes a hair. She walked out in her panties and a halter top, her short hair wet and slicked back. The bulb in the bathroom gave her the lighting of one of t
hose classier-type centerfolds. She left her other clothes folded under her purse in a corner, and I kept my eyes slitted so it looked like I was dozing. She stood next to me and I could smell her, a musky, florid patch of atmosphere.
Her hand on my shoulder. “Roy?”
I opened my eyes. Her panties were light blue, the kind with string on their sides, and her hip bones jutted sharply out of them. I was staring level with the small cupped mound at the center of her legs. Her fingers moved real light on my shoulder. “You want to come to bed?”
“I’m fine here.”
“It’s okay. You can.”
I sat up and blinked back cobwebs. Her downward face, foxlike, showed me moist, parted lips.
“Something else,” I said. “What we talked about in the bar. About being straight. Don’t be walking around in your panties in front of me or anything. I don’t want you doing that.”
“Why not?” she said, while her other hand slipped along her thigh and rubbed her flat stomach. “After what happened today? You don’t like me?”
“I’m just telling you. Stop.”
She stepped back toward the bed. “Okay.” As she climbed into bed her ass jutted high, narrow and round and cleft as a peach, the kind just about every white man I know fantasizes to, including me, and the triangles of silk let the sides of her butt peek out, and there was nothing on her that wrinkled or jiggled. I don’t know what was wrong with me. Getting drunk, I’d been thinking about Carmen, and about Loraine, wondering if she’d gotten a divorce, and Rocky was prettier than either of them, and like most men the idea of sex with a young woman implied a measure of immortality to me. But I just wasn’t into the idea. She settled in the sheets while the air conditioner jangled and shook, the cold air going down into my chest.
She spoke quietly, without turning from the wall. “You can sleep up here if you want. You should sleep in bed. I won’t do nothing.”
She’d bundled the covers over herself. I rose and lowered myself on the bed, and the mattress creaked and sank. I lay flat on my back with my hands folded on my stomach. Her curled body inched just a bit closer to me, clenched and facing away.
I shut my eyes to the racket of the A/C and gradually felt her breathing settle into a deep, slow rhythm. In the dark I started thinking about that man whose apartment I’d visited earlier in the day, the one with betting slips and empty bottles and the picture of the woman and child. He wouldn’t have to worry about seeing me now.
I wondered what he would do with his borrowed time.
I wondered if he would run.
In the morning Rocky snored gently beside me, the covers kicked off her four-alarm legs, the worn panties thin and clinging to her ass, one string fraying. I woke thinking about Mary-Anne. My mother had strawberry blond hair and a pretty, strong-boned face, a dramatic face, and when she didn’t wear makeup she’d have dark raccoon rings, her only real flaw, but one that made her face deeper, and her eyes rummaged over things, searching out trinkets. She stepped out on John Cady a bit. It was obvious, and I later came to think he must not have minded.
Sometimes she’d stay home and listen to Hank Williams records with her hand on her chin at the kitchen table. Drinking rum punch until her eyes took on a blowsy, dazed character. Then she might want me to dance with her. I was always tall, and she could put her head on my shoulder and the clattering fan would blow the smells of her sweat and soap warmly over me, and the skin of her arms would stick to my neck a little.
Those nights she might tell me a story. Her stories were about the time before me, when she worked in Beaumont for a man named Harper Robicheaux, who ran a nightclub. She liked to talk about him. He was a shot caller who’d been good to her, and she had stories of singing for people at the nightclub, wearing long spangled dresses and smoking with an ebony cigarette holder. Talking about it, she might start to sing, and she did have a rich, trembling voice that was almost too low and smoky for a woman. She’d sing things by Patsy Cline or Jean Shepherd, but when she’d stop singing the way she grinned was a sad sort of act that almost frightened me.
She never got right after John Cady fell off that cooling tower, and she started hanging out with people I didn’t know.
Her body washed up on Rabbit Island, this empty patch of forest in the middle of Prien Lake, where the I-10 cantilevered over the waters.
When I woke these memories of Mary-Anne were close to the surface of me. Wet and dreary daylight sifted gray through the window of our room at the Starliter. I didn’t feel at all like I had the night before. All that sureness and alignment with fortune seemed gone.
There was a broken promise in the room’s cold walls. Old hopes bayed like ghost dogs inside me, just the old frustrations, old resentments, and I was pissed to find them at my heels this morning, tracking me across the years.
I got up to have a smoke and left Rocky curled on the bed. A snapped pine craned over the parking lot and marked the beginning of a weedy field that fell down into a shallow ravine full of broken bottles and burst garbage bags. The sun hadn’t quite crested the horizon and a pearling light filled the sky, hauled shadows from the motel’s flaking white paint, revealed a water stain that ran across the whole U-shaped building. Cracks mapped the pavement to its edges where the asphalt fractured into small chunks.
I deemed the weather offensive, the way the air lay on me like a giant tongue, clammy, warm and gritty as embers. I thought about Stan and Carmen, and I wondered if she’d known about what he tried to do to me.
I flicked my cigarette and went back inside.
The shower hissed from behind the door, and the empty bed was a tangle. I sat on the edge of it, squeezed my fists to stop the morning shakes.
She stepped out the door, wrapped from chest to thighs in a white towel; her slicked-back hair isolated her face as though a spotlight trained on it. “Hey,” she said. “I’m putting clothes on now. I just gotta get them. I’m not trying nothing.” A sheepish tone in her voice irritated me.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“What?”
“You trying to say there’s something wrong with me ’cause I don’t want to fuck you?”
“No. No—”
“I’m leaving you here.”
“What?”
“Enough of this baby-doll, come-hither bullshit.”
“What’s the matter with you, man?”
I stood up and she backed toward the bathroom, clothes in hand. “Stop it, man. You look like, like you looked at them boys last night.”
“You’re going to have to call somebody. I’ll leave you a few bucks.”
Her face was scared, and with her hair back it looked innocent, unimpeachable. I stared at my boots, opened and closed my fingers. “Look,” she said, “I been thinking. A lot. About what you said last night. You’re going to need somebody, Roy. I seen how sick people get.”
“Shut up about that.”
“All right. Look. But what you said last night. And then we get here and I do something like that. I’m real sorry about that. I don’t know what it was. Just the drinking, I guess. The way you talked to me. But I appreciate it, Roy, the way you talked to me last night.”
I glanced at myself in the mirror. My nostrils white, the lines in my forehead deep and drained of color.
“I wanted to tell you I really do appreciate it. Everything. Everything you did. You could of done anything you wanted with me, but you helped. When I was trying to get something over on you—I don’t even know what. And you talked to me good. So I was thinking about that in there, Roy.”
As she talked that dim pride from the previous night stirred in me, the heroic feeling, and she sat on the bed and drew her clothes to her chest. “I was thinking about you, too,” she said. “What’s happening to you. I don’t mean to remind you. I don’t. But, listen. I know you don’t need me around, Roy. I know that. But I think, I mean the way things are, I think you might. Eventually. I think of maybe you having a friend to help you out, do thi
ngs when you need it.” She faced the wall and cinched the towel tighter. “I’m just saying, if it comes to that, and you need someone around. You want to play it straight, like you said—then I’d do it. I won’t lie to you. I can pay my own way. And if anybody’s looking for me, I have you to help me out. And if you get bad, or, you know, then you got me helping you out.”
I opened my hands and gripped my knees, felt my face slacken. We were an unlikely pair in that hotel mirror. “All right, Rocky. We’ll see how it goes. For a little while.” I let my neck hang down and took a deep breath. “And start calling me John. That’s my new name.” My new papers said John Robicheaux.
“You can count on me, John.” She rose and walked to the bathroom, stopped at the door. “And I can count on you.”
First thing after leaving the Starliter I bought a Times-Picayune and a box of doughnuts at a Kroger’s, and Rocky and I sat in the parking lot eating them with coffee while I looked through the paper.
I went through it front to back but there was no mention of any murders in Jefferson Heights, and when I thought more about it I realized the only sound had been the two blasts from my gun, and that might have been muffled enough by the old plaster walls to blend with the general city noise. Or maybe people had heard and no one cared. In either case, Stan would have cleaned the thing up.
“I never seen somebody put that much sugar in coffee. That was like half the cup,” Rocky said.
I put my coffee on the dash and reached under the seat to the manila folder stuffed with papers. The blood on the pages was dry and rust-colored, and I opened it on top of the newspaper. Manifests. Records of lost cargo containers. Records of payment. A long, signed testimony by Sienkiewicz. The name Ptitko in cursive. Ptitko all over the place.
“What is that?” Rocky asked, stuffing her cheeks with bear claw.
I closed the folder, slipped it back under the seat. “I don’t know yet.”
Galveston Page 4
