She paced back and forth in front of the window. Wearing those little shorts again. Nancy had found a few old board games in the office, and Nonie and Dehra asked if they could have Tiffany for a few hours.
“What?” I said.
“I mean, what do I do?” she said.
“You dress nice and you go in and ask for an application. You bring a pen and fill it out.”
“But, I mean. What do I fill out? I ain’t had a job before, Roy.”
I had to think on this.
I took a yellow pad from the nightstand drawer and tapped the pencil on my teeth. I wrote down the names of two places. One was a bar in Morgan City, and the other was a barbeque joint in New Orleans. Both of them had burned to the ground over the last few years. I’d watched, matter of fact.
I handed it off to her. “That’s where you worked. Make a timeline for yourself. You just tell them the places are closed now. And you stayed at each till they closed, ’cause that’s the type of worker you are—a sticker. You’re loyal.”
She sat on the bed and she shook her head as if arguing it.
“I don’t know, though, Roy—I just don’t know what to do. I don’t know how to do this.”
“Well, you’re going to have to teach yourself.”
Her eyes had teared up and took a ninety-yard stare. I thought about everything I didn’t know about her, and what parts of her had led her to Sienkiewicz’s house. At the least it was real poor judgment, but it could be something worse.
“All you do is act like a charmer when they talk to you. You know how to do that.”
Her eyes flickered over to me and they looked wild, rapt with simmering hysteria. I thought of how quick her laugh could become desperate.
“You got to think of it this way. The dumbest sons of bitches on earth can get jobs. You just got to get out there and do it.”
She nodded and wiped her eyes, stared at the curtains.
We heard sirens whisk by the window, and the bed squeaked as I got up.
“You could stay in here awhile,” she said. “Them ladies are going to watch Tiffany.”
I paused at the door and she stretched her legs, sat back on her elbows, and the bed squeaked again. I gave her a look of warning about whatever she was doing with her legs.
Then she started talking. “I never saw my dad. My mom told me a couple different stories about him. In one he was in prison, and in the other he was dead. My mom met Gary at the club she’s working. I used to sit in the backseat sometimes. When she’d be out with somebody. Drove around in backseats. Every time I want to say Gary was evil, I always think about him being lazy. This big, fat, lazy fucker. Got fatter every year. Started breathing hard if he had to look for the remote. I think types of laziness is evil.”
I moved back from the door, let myself sit down, and offered her another Camel. She waited till she’d taken the first hit and scraped her tongue along her teeth.
“My mom went away about four years ago. I mean, Gary talked like she ran off. Maybe she did. She might of went out one night and not come back. I think something happened to her.”
We ashed at the same time and the tip of her cigarette was shuddering.
“What he did once. He decided he was gonna raise rabbits. He’s living on something from the state. He did something at the plants once but hurt his leg, so he’s living off that mostly. My mom thought it was a stupid idea. She worked at a club in Beaumont. There were nights I know where she didn’t come home. So maybe she did run off. Maybe she was thinking about those rabbits.”
She crossed her legs and I turned my eyes to the curtains.
“He spent some money. Made me get out there and help him build these fences with chicken wire, mow down all the area behind the house with a push mower he had to borrow. All that sun. We spent a few weeks building like a chicken coop for them all, and what he said was that you got a few of these big special kind of rabbit, and you put them in there, maybe just two, and in a couple months you had a whole bunch of rabbits. You just fed them and watered them. Sold them in town. Meat and fur, ’cause these kinds of rabbits had good fur. Me and mom were both shocked when that was pretty much what happened. I was eleven then, I guess. We didn’t have no dogs or cats and I liked having all those bunnies around. They were huge. If you held them under their arms and let them hang with their toes touching the ground, they’d come up to your shoulders. White and black and spotted rabbits. He’d keep making up numbers and writing them on paper at the kitchen table, trying to think up how much his first litter would be worth, spending it already. But this was all before August, when the heat gets so bad, and the grass drying out and the yard turning to dirt. There were too many of them to feed, so he took half out. He had Mom and me go with him into Lake Charles to sell this batch, a bunch of wire cages in his truck. He doesn’t get as much as he figures. Not nearly. The stores that sell fur coats tell him it doesn’t work like that. They all go to the butcher, cheap. So he’s upset and Mom’s upset that he didn’t get near as much as he thought. I remember feeling so bad for those things when we were at the meat place and the skinned animals hung everywhere. Him and Mom are so pissed and he says, ‘Fuck it. Let’s go get a drink.’ And they go to do that, and I stay in the room. That’s what I was thinking about just now, next door in there. I was thinking about sitting alone in that room. Because I was there a couple days. I just stayed in there watching TV and I’d eat cereal at the breakfast counter in the mornings. I hate waiting for things. They come back two days later and they look like hell, pissed off, their clothes are wrecked. Stink. So now whatever money he did get was gone and she needed to get back to work, and we all went back to Orange.
“I was thinking about that. Sitting in that room. Like sitting in the backseat of a car.” She picked at a fingernail and fiddled with her cigarette.
“But, Gary’s rabbits—when we got back first thing we see is the backyard is full of birds. A bunch of birds in there, a couple big vultures that made me start crying just to look at. He hollered at them and got them off and I saw one of the vultures tug a strip of meat off as it flapped away. All the rabbits were splayed out in the backyard. They were all stretched out on the ground, more than a dozen, just lying there. They were all chewed up. Come to find out they’d overheated, didn’t have water, just like suffocated. I remember my mom swatting him with her purse. She was crying, she was so mad. I’d been crying since we drove up and saw the big birds, but then I think I was screaming. We were both screaming at him and crying, and he just looked pathetic, all fat and hungover and teary. Anyway, that’s what he was like. I think that was the last time he tried to make any money. Besides selling shitty weed he grew behind the house.”
She flipped some bangs off her forehead, and she looked up. The downturn of her lips was coarse, a little clumsy, and the heavy way her lids sat on her eyes spoke to very specific things.
I stood and went to the door. Parts of me wished that I wanted her, and whatever held me back was hard to put into words. I didn’t want to think about it.
“Get some sleep,” I said.
Back in my room I realized that if her mother had left four years ago, it would have been before Tiffany was born. I didn’t want to think about that, either.
I shot up in bed, breath trapped. Police lights flashed outside the curtains, red and blue strobing the room. The lights were silent but I was deafened by the pulse booming through my ears.
I rolled off the bed and dug out the lockbox and grabbed my .380, chambered a round. I squatted next to the metal door, both hands on the gun, and focused on quelling my breathing, getting a deep, slow rhythm going. You line the front sight with the back sight by making two parallel bars of light frame the front. Exhale and squeeze the trigger, like making a fist. Don’t pull.
I waited for the knock. Far voices came from outside, low, official, and I crawled to the window, peeked through the edges.
Two police cruisers parked in front of room 2. Another sat on the street,
blocking the driveway, all of them creating a paranoid carnival with their lights.
There was an ambulance, too.
Nancy stood outside in a long robe, her arms folded. Lance put a hand on her shoulder, and they watched from the purple shadows around his room. Down the way, the door to room 2 was open. This was where the commotion centered.
By and by two deputies escorted the father out. His eye was blackened and he was shirtless, his hands cuffed in back, big gut spilling over his jeans. He looked dismayed, humble and frightened.
Directly after him two paramedics wheeled a gurney out the room, a thing on it covered by a sheet. One of her arms hung out from under the sheet, and her hand was like a tiny claw on the end of that massive hock. The skin flashed blue and red in the night.
I spotted the kids watching things from the backseat of a cruiser, where the mesh gate between seats crosshatched their faces in shadow. I closed the curtain and stepped away from the window.
I couldn’t sleep and flipped stations on the television for the better part of an hour, but I couldn’t follow anything on the screen. The cop lights were gone. I stepped out to check if Nancy or Lance was still around, to see if I could find out what had happened in number 2.
The only person outside was the red-haired boy, Killer Tray, standing beside his door smoking a cigarette and pulling on a bottle of Lone Star. He lifted the beer and wiggled it, cocked his head.
I wasn’t going to sleep, I could tell, and the prospect of a cold brew drew me across the lot.
He said, “She was like that awhile,” nodding down the way to number 2, where yellow police tape crossed over the door. He stepped inside for a second and came back with a fresh beer, handed it off to me.
“What’d he do?” I asked him. The beer was not quite cold enough but soothing just the same.
He shrugged. “It took awhile. One of the kids finally said something to Nancy.” He hit his cigarette with a laconic sort of attitude, a reserve he’d rehearsed but not yet mastered. “Cops took the kids. Took him, too. They told Nancy there were bruises around her midsection.”
What I remembered about the man then was how helpless he’d seemed, and how you could tell that helplessness had made him cruel.
“Those girls are your nieces?” The kid’s voice was high with an extravagant drawl, a practiced Texan.
“Yeah.”
“You just out for vacation, huh? I’s talking to your oldest one. She said you brought them out for the beach. Said her daddy died.”
I nodded. A warm breeze rustled the police tape across the door, palm leaves rattled.
“Sorry to hear it.” He flipped his butt across the lot and ran fingers through his hair. “I been on vacation, too. Laying low.”
I let that go, took a drink of the Lone Star.
“What were you sent up for, you don’t mind my asking?”
I flicked him a hard stare, rolled my eyes at the question.
“Yeah. No sweat, brah.” He scratched at his neck and the skin was grated, shaded to ash tones and given a grainy quality in the pale buzzing light. He hadn’t been to the beach much. The long red hair was feminine on his slight frame and his features were all about deprivation, angles of want. But maybe that beggary tugged some sympathy from me, because I remembered how hard I worked not to seem scared at his age.
“Reason I ask,” he said, “I’s wondering if you’re looking for work at all. Like if you want to earn. While you’re, you know, on vacation.”
I looked at him out the side of my vision, the kid wispy, gray. He cocked an eyebrow with a bit of moxie that showed me something. Mostly I just wanted another beer.
“What you got, Killer?”
In his aluminum-shuttered room, a garbage bag spilled some clothes and a drawstring laundry bag looked filled with sharp, heavy objects. Bungee cord laced the sack for strapping to his bike. Not much else in the room but two books and some sketchings on the table. Modern Electronic Alarms, read the cover of one. The other was white and titled 777 and other Kabbalistic Writings. Pages of yellow legal paper bore drawings, ink scribbles and diagrams, odd doodles.
“Man, I knew you was down. I could just tell. I got that eye for it.”
I’d taken another of his beers and lit a cigarette, watched as he shuffled together his papers and stacked them on the books. He had a kind of fastidious, finicky way with his hands, making the papers stack even on all sides, having to square off the angles of the books to the surface of the table. He almost seemed bashful about that, like he couldn’t help himself. His round, wire-frame glasses added to this schoolboy air, the kind of intellectual particular to a junk habit.
“All right. Here it is, man. Mr. Robicheaux. The thing. What do you think I do, man? I mean, how you think I make do?”
I just hit the cigarette and let smoke unroll over my face while I stared at him. “I can’t imagine.”
“All right. This right here, man. This is what I do. I am a thief, and a real, real fucking good one.”
I didn’t offer a response except to squint into the smoke drifting between us.
“Okay, okay. You’re saying, ‘So what?’ I know. You’re saying, ‘Good for you.’ Well, my trip is that I’m not going to spend any part of my life in a cage again. My thing is that I don’t make a run at something unless it’s bona fide, unless there’s no risk and large reward.” He pulled out some yellow legal sheets with drawings of room layouts, crude maps. A lot of good thieves were junkies. When they were on top of their habits, they could be effective professionals, but it never lasted. They’d stay functionally clean, pull a few jobs, and at some point get too successful, overdo the junk and get busted, start the cycle over when they got out. I noticed the webs between Tray’s fingers had a few little welts on them, like chigger bites. “I had this partner, man. Good guy. Solid. He was kind of like, well, he would have been what you’d call the muscle of the operation, more or less. He brought me up. Did transpo, bankrolled scores sometimes. A jobber. Real good guy.”
Behind him the foil on the windows held dull, pleated reflections of us, and I almost asked him why he kept it there.
“He’s gone now, but we were a good team. He’s over. Some ole boys dumped him in a swamp in Alabama.” I’d taken him for a half-ass grifter, but at the mention of his buddy gloom wafted over his eyes and I thought the kid was lonely, and that reminded me of my old self, too. He hadn’t quite learned how to carry it yet. He pretended to relinquish things he really hadn’t. He said, “Only now I got some things going. I got prospects.”
“What do you steal?” I said.
He twitched his face like the question was absurd. “Pharmaceuticals, man.”
“You take down doctors.”
He shrugged, held the expression to emphasize its obviousness. “Listen, man. The thing is, swear to God, I can turn raw product around in two, three days. Tops. I mean like thirty thousand dollars, man. I mean like there’s this guy runs a clinic on Broadway. I know a cleaning lady there, man.”
I didn’t say anything, and he took that as encouragement.
“In Corpus and Houston, I can move it. Three days. Thirty might be a low estimate, really. This guy—he’s like the doctor for every legit dude owns a vacation spot here. Their broads, them housewives. He’s the guy that gets them their drugs. Keeps a sampler dope pharmacy stocked on the premises. I’m talking now benzies, dexies, biphetamine. Amphetamine. Ecstasy. You know what that is? I got this place airtight, man. My maid, she fronts me the info on their alarm system. I got Polaroids. It’s nothing, man. Contact alarm. I do those in my sleep. Nothing to it.”
“What do you need me for?”
“Okay. All right.” He put out his smoke and lit another, shuffled some papers on the desk and showed me a crude schematic, a room plan. “I need somebody to front a van, and I need a fixer. Somebody to help me get in, open the door from the outside once I’m in. Help me move it. My thing is I hide in the place till they lock up and close. I come out, bypass the ala
rm—you just make a closed circuit. Moving the stuff—we got to do it fast. From the back door to the van. And really, what a guy like you would really help with is moving the stuff. I got all the clients, but, you know, the people interested in this stuff are more or less scum-of-the-earth. Not to be trusted. You know? Wilson was great for all that. A big dude, like you. Always strapped. Nobody would try ripping off Wilson. Everybody thinks they’ll rip me, though. So. You know. I think it’s just that this type of thing goes a lot smoother if there’s a big killermanjaro across the table when the deal goes down. A guy like you.”
“What makes you think you could trust me?”
“I knew you was a convict. But I seen you with your nieces, man. Way you are with them girls. You’re a definite white man. You want to make some bank for your people, I figure. You got that sense about you, but also kind of hard. You ain’t no junkie. I could tell that.”
I tapped my fingers on the table. A hot wind cooed outside.
“How’d you come to do this, Tray?”
He laughed to himself. Tiny teeth almost appeared to flutter.
“I’s in a group home in Houston. Ran off when I’s fifteen. Started boosting. Did all right for a while. Just crashed wherever. Had some other kids I knew. One day I meet Wilson. I’m seventeen. Figure I won’t see twenty. I’m in this Maison Blanche, right, boosting a couple watches. I look back on it and I was real obvious, but back then I’m thinking I’m smooth. Anyway, I’m loaded down with a couple hundred bucks’ worth, this big dude passes by me, just behind me, and he like jabs me in the back and says, ‘Nix, kid.’ He keeps walking. Freaks me out. So I unload the stuff, empty it out in the clothes racks, and when I’m walking out, sure enough, two security guys stop me, check me out. But I’m clean. I get out the store and the big guy’s out there. He had this cool El Dorado he’s standing by, smoking. He was watching me the whole time. Said the store security was, too. So that’s Wilson, right? And he’s like the professional. And I’m like the amateur. Rolled with him almost eight years. Good times. Taught me a lot.”
Galveston Page 10
