Hey, Joe

by Ben Neihart

  This is some shit, Seth; you're quite the operator.

  It suddenly occurred to him that he'd never faced an armed opponent.

  "Don't you know how to shut a door?" Rae asked, approaching with a clip clap drag of her shoes on the wood floor. "Do you have someone with you?"

  "I don't plan on staying," he said, and then blurted, "Hey, you missed me. Does that mean something? C'mon, Rae, look at me for a second."

  She righted her chin and met his eyes. Hers glittered. "What could it mean?"

  "You don't want to kill me. You want my help."

  "How can you help me?" she asked, and with two final steps she was standing right before him, one foot on his gun; the mouth of her gun snuggled against his stomach. "You can help me more than you already have, darlin'? I wish you'd tell me how."

  Seth focused his eyes on her nose and parted his lips, darting his tongue out for a quick, nervous lick. "I know that I owe you big-time," he said in a rush. "I can help you get to Brazil. I'll drive you."

  She turned her head to the side. ''How?'' she asked wispily. "How could I have trusted you? I don't trust anybody and I went and trusted a piece like you?"

  It was hard to keep looking at her face, to not give it away: in his peripheral vision he saw the boy's mother making her stealthy way across the floor to the front door. The woman glided, hand outstretched for the knob. Her fingers touched the metal. Seth thought he could see the tendons and veins in her wrist jump as she started to twist it, but then Rae snorted and twisted her neck as if to relax a crick. "Stop right there. Sherry, or you'll have this man's murder on your conscience."

  "Go! Run!" Seth shouted to the paused woman, and his eyes met Rae's and he didn't think he'd ever seen her so surprised. The corner of her mouth was hitched up as if to grin. "I'm not all shit," he told her.

  1:10 a.m.

  There must have been a dozen exits from the Sanctuary of Lady Rampart, but Welk seemed to be leading Joe to the least convenient of them. They had climbed two narrow flights of stairs, walked across a dripping wet fire escape attached to the rear exterior of the building, come back inside upon a crumbling brick vestibule whose floor was covered with a frayed green shag carpet, gone down a yellow hall of metal doors, and then a blank red hall, at the end of which Welk now shoved open a massive, buckled wood door marked with a glowing electric EXIT sign.

  "Well this is what I kind of wanted you to see," Welk said matter-of-factly, stepping onto a balcony with Joe close behind him. He jerked his thumb away from him at waist level to indicate the view.

  It was one of those sudden, disorienting moments. Joe felt as though a landscape had descended from the sky and crashed down around him as he stood dumbly in place. He brushed past Welk, only faintly registering the touch of their forearms together, and went to the railing. "Oh, man," he said. "How's this?"

  They were on the building's highest perch, up above all the adjacent rooftops, looking toward the Mississippi out over the Quarter. You could see brick courtyard walls speckled with broken shards of glass, dense little gardens, lazy swimmers in whitish blue swimming pools, alleyways spot-lighted and dark, all of it from an angle that reminded Joe of being hunched over an old board game, deciding in which direction to move his piece. His eye fixed on a blazing courtyard where a lone cypress tree was strung with blue and purple lights that fluttered with the movement of the branches. In the top sliver of his vision he saw without actually focusing on them the still white beams bedecking ships docked on the banks of the river, and the electrified span of the bridge to Algiers. The sadness that had been flickering around the edges of his heart as he made his way through the building was now gone, replaced just like that with this mellow elation. He patted his thigh as if with a tambourine.

  "You must come out here all the time," he said, leaning his head out as far as his neck would let it. A curly little warm breeze buttered the underside of his chin.

  "Yeah, I do. I knew you'd like it."

  "Who wouldn't?"

  "Well, you'd be surprised."

  Joe stepped back from the railing and bumped into the hard front of Welk, whose arm slithered around his neck with the elbow crook hitched just beneath Joe's chin. The big round muscles in the upper arm plumped up against the side of Joe's cheek and he sunk into a blissful reverie, romanticizing and burnishing their recent sex, which in fact had been kind of a contentious act alternating between Joe's laughter and Welk's grave raunchiness. Joe figured he had a lot to learn about the demeanor you put on when you were fucking.

  Now Welk kissed him on the temple and loosened his grip, so his arm hung necklacy loose around Joe's neck. "You need to go home," he said, nibbling on Joe's T-shirt collar. "Little fish."

  "Yeah." Joe sighed.

  "The Jeep's out back."

  "Cool. Okay."

  Welk let go and walked over to the shadowy corner of the balcony. He twice kicked something metal, and suddenly, with a whoosh, a chain of ladder unrolled; within seconds, the bottom steps hit the ground with a muffled clang. Joe followed quickly and climbed easily down the four swaying rungs. The air became heavier and wetter during the descent, and by the time he jumped to the hard patio floor, he was sweating again; his T-shirt stuck to the small of his back.

  "One night we need to sit out here and talk," Welk said, leaning his shins against a low wooden box the size of a coffin, in which a few stunted banana trees grew, their scorched leaves brushing the floor like monkey knuckles.

  "Do you think we will?" Joe asked, mildly hopeful. "Like, are we going to ever see each other again?''

  "Don't say that."

  "You don't have to make me feel good. I mean, I feel good. You don't have to cover me with goo, though. I don't think it's like you're in love with me."

  "No," Welk said nonchalantly, or fake-nonchalantly to piss Joe off, creaking open a metal door onto the thick of Burgundy Street and holding it open for him. "I'm not in love with you."

  "Phew!" Joe staggered onto the sidewalk. This was another thing he needed to learn: questions you don't ask after you have sex; there were probably ten million of them.

  Cars were crammed on both sides of the street, and up a block there was a clump of high-spirited chicks sporting around outside a bar. A dark green Jaguar cruised slowly past them, four precise notes of a Def Leppard song booming from its open windows: "Rock of ages..." Joe remembered the mysterious druidical figures from the MTV video, which they still showed every now and then for a laugh.

  Welk made two halfhearted air guitar strums and pointed to the Jeep, just across the street. The passenger side was jammed against a street lamp, so Joe had to climb in on the driver's side. As he clambered across the poochy, slick red fabric, Welk pinched the back of his knee, and Joe looked over his shoulder, laughing with relief that it wasn't going to be a punitively serious kind of ride home.

  After snapping open the plastic sheeting that covered the window openings, Welk settled in his seat. He held the steering wheel loosely, pumping the gas and rocking the Jeep back and forth until they had cleared the tight space. They putt-putted to the end of the block and turned a wide slow left on wide slow Esplanade, until they were underneath the tight canopies of thick-leaved tree limbs that spread over the street.

  The Jeep stopped beneath a highway overpass for a red light. The signal shook frantically, as if at the end of a fishing line. In the diffuse beam of the Jeep's headlights, you could see the reds of people's eyes. They were sitting on the median grass beneath the highway, in abandoned cars, in shopping carts. Some of them smoked, some walked in circles, some sang. There was no route from the Quarter to the interstate that didn't take you through a blighted hellhole of abandoned people. Joe fixed his eye on the tan dog who scampered obliviously in and out of the headlight; he could have been a Country Day newbie's dog, trained to catch Fris-bees. Sinking into his seat, Joe muttered, "Just go through the light, man. Downer."

  Welk gave him a long appraising look, and then smiled and rushed the intersection
, peeled tire rubber as he made a sharp right and spiraled them up the on-ramp. They rose up above the rooftops, the treetops, the post tops strung with electric wires, up into a sky of pit-stop, checked-flag fast-food banners and plump, delirious motel signs and, in the distance, the red-and-white security twinklers that outlined the derricks and catwalks and towers of old industrial complexes. Air gushed through the Jeep. Radios and thumping horns, the general rush of traffic, filled Joe's ears, and he wished that they could spiral up another on-ramp, and another, and another, until they were on the loudest, highest, fastest interstate, just thoughtlessly driving.

  * * *

  Halfway home, traffic slowed to pass the scene of an accident. Fierce white spotlights mounted on emergency vans bleached the skinny tree trunks on the far side of a ravine off to the right of the road. A truck had fallen headfirst into the gulley, and a tube of gray smoke rose from its cab. Facing the highway, on the near side of the ravine, was a second truck; its cab was on fire, its glass melting inward.

  "My dad's dead," Joe said.

  "I know," Welk said almost tonelessly. "Black Chris told me."

  "He did?"

  "He sort of took me off to the side, at the party."

  "What did he say?"

  "To treat you with respect, or whatever." Welk guffawed theatrically. "He's an all right guy. Sort of. But I had to kind of ask him what was his relation to you."

  "My dad would not have wanted to know what I did tonight." He gave a small airy whistle and held his hand out in the air as if he expected to catch something. Overhead, jets approached, each with its distinct, massive wiggle, lowering its wheels for landing. Three of them in the sky, approaching at separate angles of descent, wings blinking and scarved with clouds.

  ' 'Well, probably most parents don't want to hear that shit—do they?"

  "If I were, you know, a girl, I think my mom and I would talk about guys and stuff, but just the idea of like talking with her as me makes me want to puke. Like, if I were to tell her about the way it felt when you ..."

  "Well," Welk said, turning on Joe with a fat smile, "that's what I'm here for. Tell me how it felt."

  "No, that's not the same. It's not, and you know it." As traffic picked up speed, he scooted down in his seat and settled in the orange night lull. Welk reached across and took his sweaty hand.

  1:40 a.m.

  Sherry had twice been mugged over lunch break as she made her way to the parking-garage ATM across the street from the hospital. Both assaults had taken less than a minute; their very briefness had frightened her most: the snarling face, the flash of gun in the sunlight, the shove, the pitiless threats—and then she was alone again, crying, her sleeve ripped, heel busted, her scared little voice repeating in her head, I could have been dead, I could have been dead.

  Tonight was different. It was dragging on too long, and she felt in her heart a dull assurance that she'd prevail; she kept telling herself, I'm not going to die, I'm not going to die. She stood barefoot on top of a plain black $400 DKNY skirt she'd bought at Rubinstein Brothers on Canal Street over lunch one day this week. Her big toe was black from repeated stubbings and falls in her earlier fight with the woman who'd swarmed into her life out of nowhere, out of the fucking quiet night. Her arms and back ached from sitting at the kitchen table, listening to the banshee lather at the mouth about her grand delusional "legacy" to New Orleans; she'd interrupted herself at a few dull spots to draw lewd but, Sherry wondered, possibly true innuendos about Joe, whom she claimed to have seen in a clutch at the NOAC with the man standing with them now in the lamplighted living room.

  The three of them stood near the center of the room in a sort of triangle just to the side of the big, gauzily curtained bay window, through which you could see the black night just sitting there, patient. Babbling still, with private murmurs that Sherry didn't even try to hear, Rae Schipke held a gun in each hand, both pointed at Seth, as if she hadn't even enough contempt or fear of Sherry to draw a bead on her. The only mark on Schipke from their brawl around the house was the crusted-over little hole on the palm of her hand, the key-chain nick the sight of which even now gave Sherry a little whiff of consolation.

  Suddenly, as if she'd read her mind, Schipke turned on Sherry with a lunge and slipped one of the guns into Sherry's hand; Schipke placed her own hand on top of Sherry's then, and guided her finger to the trigger. She wheeled their joined gun hand upwards, aiming at Seth's face. The man kept blinking, trying not to flinch.

  "Shoot him," Schipke said with just the subtlest little mean hint of frivolity in her voice.

  Sherry began to open her hand, but Schipke squeezed it shut and jerked the gun an inch closer to Seth.

  "I'm not going to shoot him," Sherry said. "You're not going to pull me into that." She didn't know if she had bundled up her passions and stuffed them deep in her bruised toes or what, but if this was pure terror, it was oddly sedating; if she closed her eyes, she was sure that she could fall asleep.

  "Women are the ones," Schipke said, shrugging, bobbing their gun hand, "who won't curry favor with me. Women always give me the shits." She swung her second gun and shoved its mouth at Sherry's neck. "Now, Seth, tell this woman I'm serious."

  "Rae," he said, squinting his eyes shut and flinching with every third or fourth word, "you're a fucking joke. You need to just walk out the door, get in your tired-ass mini van, and drive the hell off into the horizon."

  "You don't add up to much," she whispered.

  "I know," he said. "I don't mean much. What does that say about you, baby? That you dragged your business all the way over here to what—ambush me? Me?"

  "Shut up."

  "I'd almost be willing to die if I knew you'd shoot yourself, too. I'd have a hero's death if it meant you were erased."

  "God damn you," Schipke said after a moment, and in the two seconds that it took her to pull the second gun away from Sherry's neck and thrust it back in Seth's face. Sherry made her move. She twisted the first gun from their shared grip, swung it up in a loose arc, and brought it down hard on the side of the woman's face. She pushed the round blowhole against the side of the woman's face and said with as much judo as she could muster the very words she remembered her first mugger saying to her. He'd been a young guy, barely a teenager, and he hadn't seemed scared at all.

  "I'll do you," Sherry said, "I will, believe me I will." Then she looked up at Seth, who was smiling. "Go on," she said, "take the fucking gun out of her hand."

  1:45 a.m.

  It took just one sharp left off busy, flashy Old Metairie Road to enter into the deadly hush of Joe's neighborhood. A lot of times, upon coming home, Joe fought against the serenity by jumping around in his seat or fucking with the radio, but tonight, as the Jeep rounded the comer and glided down the slight hill toward his house, he looked around him with a forbearing smile and a shrug. "Park over here, skookieman," he said, pointing to the curb in front of Al Theim's house.

  "Okay," Welk said, bringing the Jeep to a sputtering stop. "I like your house."

  "Well this isn't my house." Then, automatically, he added: "A dick of a guy I used to like lives here."

  "Should I kick his ass?"

  "Al Theim? No, I mean Al Theim's whoever he is; I kind of in my mind turned him into a dick."

  "Well, which house is yours?"

  "Next door. The one that's all lighted up for a party; my mom is waiting up, I'm sure." He looked over at the house again, through a break in the shrubs along the perimeter of Al's lawn, and noticed the minivan parked beside Mom's car in the driveway. A little pinwheel of gladness began to spin inside his chest, and in a matter of seconds its good breeze had spread all throughout him. It was about time, he thought, that she had people over, even if only Chloris Devitt or Dave Sidey from the hospital for wine and pizza or whatever.

  "So now we're here," Welk said.

  "Looks like it."

  "Hmmm." He put his fist against his chin to show Thinking, and Joe imitated the pose. They both gave
a desultory chuckle and the moment dissolved away. "Well, Joe," Welk began, "I guess ..."

  "Oh, come on, don't say anything like a blessing or shit. No."

  "Blessing? That's not what I wanted to—"

  Joe interrupted again. "Thank you, man; I had a great night." He reached across the front seat to take hold of the hem of Welk's T-shirt, and with one fast, laughing lunge he peeled the fabric from Welk's torso and slipped his head beneath it, pressed his lips to the ridged, fuzzy warm belly and kissed its little button; he nudged his cheek against the skin for a moment longer as Welk patted his back and whispered sweet syllables, and then he pulled himself off the older boy's lap, unlatched the door, and stepped sideways onto the road, looking down at his Pumas.

  Walking backwards across Al Theim's yard, each step sending the eggy smell of weed killer into the air, Joe watched the Jeep's taillights dwindle, emberlike, and disappear. The street just lay there, all empty, but Joe had to admit, as cold of him as it may have been, that he didn't feel any kind of bereftness, no loneliness at all. As he came to a stop in the disputed territory between the Theim lawn and his own—a weedy strip that neither family cared to mow—he began to cry a few elated tears and hiccup a sob. He turned on his heel and looked at his house and wiped the burning liquid slivers from his lower lids. This is our house, he said, with a little corny surprise, to himself and to the little part of his mother that he carried inside him. Its exterior was white brick and pinkish white aluminum siding that was fake-mottled to resemble stucco, and if snobby people had it in their icy asshole hearts to call it tacky then Joe guessed they'd just go ahead and do it. It was still the house that his mom and dad had always promised him when they sat down to dinner or breakfast or plopped in front of the TV at one of the many, dozens, trillions of apartments in which they'd lived in Florida, Alabama, Pennsylvania, New Mexico. The House We'll Have had taken on its own mythology: it would have elevators and fountains, an aviary, a gym, a home theater, a sewing room, a fire pole, and Mom and Daddy would actually be there, be home; their jobs and the family bills wouldn't demand such frantic attention. Funny, Joe thought, sniffling and wiping the back of his hand across his cheek, they didn't want him to grow up in an apartment. Why? Each one in which they'd lived had been fine with him; more than fine, even: regular, comfortable, smelling like home, with enough bedrooms and a kitchen and a bathroom or two. What about the one in a tower near the beach, the one with the saltwater swimming pool and an ice-cream shop in the lobby? That place had been swankier than a sixed-out Miami Beach hotel. It did tear him the fuck up when he let himself remember that his parents had been way down hard on themselves for living where they lived. Leave that alone, he thought to himself; they should just leave that alone; they shouldn't waste their time on that. The world was this sickening, amazing, rapid-fire place where you had to kind of dig your heels into the ground and just say, What the fuck, it's too late, and not dwell on the shit you couldn't fix up.