by Rich Leder
He didn’t believe her. Of course he didn’t believe her. No one could bring dead people back to life. It was impossible to bring dead people back to life. So why did she say it? Why in the world would she say she could bring dead people back to life when there was no way she could do something like that? Dead people were dead, and that was the end of it, the very fact of it: death is the end. She was conning him, and he needed time to figure out how and why. He needed time to find her angle.
“Nobody can bring dead people back to life,” he said.
She’d asked for lemonade, but he didn’t have any. He had Sprite, which had both lemons and limes on the can. She said that was fine, and he poured it over ice for her and then poured one for himself.
“I can, Mr. Miller,” she said. “I can breathe life into all living things that die.”
“No, you can’t,” he said.
“Yes, I can.”
“No, you can’t. And call me Danny.”
“My mother said I should use my talent to make money, and I don’t know how to go about that. She made me come see you, Danny. That’s why I’m here.”
“Your mother sent you to a talent agent so you could make money bringing dead people back to life?”
“Plants, pets, people, yes.”
“Why me? Did you see my ad?”
“No. I’m a checker at Ralphs on Woodman in Van Nuys. You come to my register sometimes. I overheard you talking to a woman behind you in line about representing her. She said she was a dancer, and you said she should come and audition for you, that you were a talent agent, and you gave her your card. Then you left with your bags, and she gave your card to me. I told my mother about you, showed her your card, and she made me come here. She’s in the car outside. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to waste your time.”
She got up to leave. Danny stopped her. “Wait; your mother’s in the car, for Chrissake. The least I can do is find out why she drove you here.”
He moved from behind the Tiki bar to one of the chairs opposite the sofa. He handed her the drink, and they sipped Sprite and sat across the bamboo coffee table from each other. On the table, along with the industry magazines, there was a potted plant, a fern—a gift from his mother that had died a miserable, desiccated death. He couldn’t even remember forgetting to water it, that’s how brown and dead it was. Jenny looked at the dead plant and made a sad little face that emitted a sad little sigh.
She’s a little mouse afraid of her shadow, Danny thought. At least with Paul the Pervert, there was something to him, something disgusting, granted, but something. There was nothing to Jenny Stone. She was sitting right across from him, and it was like she wasn’t here. She wasn’t here or there or anywhere.
Still, if her mother had been gung ho enough to drive Jenny to a talent agent, then she might be willing to fund her daughter’s career for ninety days. And if Jenny’s mother was willing to fund Jenny’s ninety-day career, then he would sign the little mouse anyway, despite her not even being here.
“Can you sing?” Danny said.
“Tone deaf.”
“Dance?”
“Bad rhythm.”
“Play an instrument? If you can do show tunes, I can get you work at retirement homes.”
“Not musical.”
“Juggle?”
“Terrible juggler.”
“Card tricks?”
“No card tricks.”
“Can you draw? We’ll call you Jenny the Caricaturist and set you up at flea markets and craft fairs.”
“I can’t draw.”
“There must be something you do.”
“I breathe life into death.”
She leaned forward and cupped the dead fern in her hands, put her face close to the plant, and gently blew on it. Then her lips turned ever so slightly up at the corners, and she released the fern, which fell back into its utterly dead posture.
Aaaand we’re done here, Danny said to himself. If she was conning him, he couldn’t see it. Rather, he now thought she wasn’t conning him, and that was a problem too. He could deal with an invisible, no-talent, plain Jane for ninety days if there were a few bucks in it for him. He did it all the time. He’d just signed Paul the Pervert for five twenties, for shit’s sake. He could deal with bizarre. But what he couldn’t do was deal with crazy. The clown was sick and fried (literally) and repugnant, but he wasn’t crazy like Jenny, who might start talking to his hula lamp any minute.
He stood and said, “I don’t know what to do with you, Jenny Stone, so let me think about it and get back to you if I come up with anything.”
She straightened her skirt, stood across the coffee table from Danny, and said, “I told my mother this was a bad idea.”
“It’s a tough business,” he said, gesturing her toward the door.
She started that way and said, “I told my mother no one should make money breathing life into death.”
“Probably not,” he said. “Maybe Jesus, but that’s about it.”
It was a joke, but she didn’t laugh. He wasn’t surprised. Sense of humor was just another thing she couldn’t do, another talent she didn’t have. He walked her across the reception room and opened the door. The San Fernando heat blasted through the doorway. The dying animal fan groaned with agony. Maybe it will die completely and she can breathe on it and bring it back to life, he thought.
“Thank you for your time,” she said, and she managed an embarrassed smile and followed Paul the Pervert into the broiling chaos that was LA.
He watched her go and leaned through the doorway. “Ralphs on Woodman?”
“Yes,” she said, and like a little mouse wearing a Catholic school skirt and black glasses and sensible shoes, she scurried away.
Danny went back into the office, stopped in front of the bamboo mirror, and his cell phone rang. He watched his reflection answer the call and thought he looked like a big-time talent agent. He would be a big-time talent agent if he could meet some talent other than the pervert clown and the breather of life and the fire-breathing fat guy and the paraplegic magician and the redheaded kid who eats nails and the—“Miller Talent.”
“Dan, it’s Mike.”
He could feel the arctic wind in his brother’s voice and was happy to blow it back at him. “Not a good time, Mike. Business is booming. Try me in three years.”
“Don’t tempt me.”
“Make it five years.”
“It’s not a personal call.”
“No shit?”
“I know it’s hard but try not to be a douchebag for the next two minutes.”
“What do you want?”
“Mom had a heart attack. She’s in Northridge Hospital, on Roscoe between Reseda and Lindley. She’s very weak. You should come here as soon as you can.”
“I know where the hospital is. What does ‘soon as you can’ mean?”
“It means now…if you can break away from your booming business.”
He’d hated his brother’s sarcasm even before he knew what sarcasm meant. Maybe he was five when he realized he hated it. He still hated it. “Kiss my ass.”
“Room 304.”
They clicked off the call without saying goodbye to each other, and Danny took a step closer to the mirror. For the first time all day, all week, he had nothing to say to himself. It was bad news that his mother was in the hospital. But it was also bad news that he had to see his brother.
For a moment, it was a toss up as to which news was worse, but then he admitted his mother’s heart attack was truly bad news and seeing his brother was just bad news. He even felt something, a moment of genuine emotion—sadness, maybe, a bit of regret and remorse—then pulled himself away from his reflection, hurried into his office, walked to his pineapple desk, retrieved his keys and his sunglasses, and exited again in a hurry, missing completely the fact that the fern, the dehydrated-dry-and-shriveled-brown dead fern, was now vibrant and green and alive.
OMAR HOLDS THE DOG
Side by side, Harvey Mi
neral and Omar Creech leaned against the liquid platinum Lexus LS 600h L of Dr. Donald Greenburg. The luxury sedan was parked in the long, narrow lot belonging to Valley Beverage on Ventura Boulevard near the corner of Kester. The lot was on the south side of the Boulevard and was surrounded by buildings. The sun was high in the cloudless sky and wicked hot. It was one hundred five degrees in the shade, which meant it had to be one twenty in this narrow box of concrete and cars. Heat waves wafted off the hoods of the automobiles like steam. The macadam was broiling.
“I’m unhappy, Omar,” Harvey said. “Dr. Greenburg is making me wait in the sun, and my skin is on fire.”
Parked in the spot next to the Lexus was Harvey’s black Range Rover with tinted windows and a license plate that read: Mineral. Omar opened the Range Rover rear door, removed an extendable umbrella from a storage pocket, shut the door, opened the umbrella, and held it over Harvey to block the sun.
“If I had a dozen like you, I could rule Los Angeles,” Harvey said.
“Here he comes,” Omar said.
Dr. Donald Greenburg was a thin man in all regards. His nose, his lips, his face, his arms and legs and ass and hair were all thin, as if he hadn’t been given a full share of these things at birth. He drank Tanqueray and tonic at lunch on stressful days, and they all were stressful days now. And then, of course, there was the cocaine. He held a brown bag in one hand and the leash of his little poodle in the other. The dog was like a furry pillow or perhaps a purse, white and white and white and white.
As Greenburg crossed the lot to his Lexus, Harvey could see the dentist was rattled by the scene awaiting him, and he knew it wasn’t so much that a giant with a long black ponytail and pockmarked skin was holding an umbrella over a well-dressed dwarf; it was that the giant was Omar and the dwarf was Harvey.
Greenburg spoke first. “Harvey, I know—”
“I’d prefer to have this discussion in the air-conditioned comfort of your car,” Harvey said, cutting him short. “You drive, I navigate, Omar holds the dog.”
“I’d like to do that, but I have to get back to the office. I have patients,” Greenburg said.
“And I have no patience,” Harvey said, perversely pleased by his wordplay. “Get in the car, Doctor, or Omar will put you in the car.”
“What’s your dog’s name?” Omar said, retracting the umbrella and taking a size-seventeen footstep toward Greenburg that made the doctor shrink back.
“Chachi, after the character on Happy Days,” Greenburg said. “He’s a spunky little guy. He’s my wife’s dog, but we’re best buddies.”
Omar bent down and lifted the tiny poodle with one massive hand. “Come on, Chachi,” he said. “We’re going for a drive.”
They situated themselves in the car the way Harvey had described it—Greenburg behind the wheel, Harvey riding shotgun, Omar seated behind Harvey with Chachi on his lap—and immediately Greenburg started complaining.
He whined about how hard his life was; he whimpered about how slow his dental practice had become; he groaned about how the government was killing his cash flow; he bellyached about how the Valley was draining his life force dry; he grumbled and griped about how he was in over his head and just needed a little time to find his footing and straighten it all out.
Greenburg complained, the engine ran, and the air conditioning cooled the car. It was a beautiful sedan, more modern art than automobile, with a soft, semi-aniline leather and rich wood interior, streamlined modern technology within easy reach, and audio-visual capabilities usually reserved for Hollywood screening rooms.
Harvey admired the car while he looked at his fingernails, wishing he were in the middle of a manicure with that eighteen-year-old Japanese geisha, while really wishing he was tying her with leather straps to his bedposts and hurting her in his special way.
But he caught himself in the middle of that thought, heard Greenburg’s sniveling voice bewailing the state of the union, and slapped the dentist across the face as hard as he could. Whack.
“Ow, Jesus, shit, Harvey, what the hell are you—” Greenburg said.
“Today, your wife borrowed an additional five thousand dollars, so do you owe me ninety thousand dollars, yes or no?” Harvey said.
Greenburg’s cheek turned bright red, and he said, “I was going to call you but—”
Whack. Harvey hit him again, bouncing the dentist’s skull off the headrest.
“Ow, fuck, that hurts, Harvey,” Greenburg said.
“Do you owe me ninety thousand dollars, yes or no?” Harvey said.
“Stop hitting me, and I’ll—”
Whack. “Do you owe me ninety thousand dollars, yes or no?”
Greenburg leaned toward Harvey as if he might physically stop the dwarf from cracking him in the face again but saw Omar in the back seat, holding the dog but drilling the dentist with his bottomless-pit eyes, and he froze. Omar never said a word, just kept petting the poodle.
Harvey lifted his hand to strike again, and Greenburg flinched. “Yes, I owe you ninety thousand dollars.”
“Omar,” Harvey said. “Progress.”
“Progress, Chachi,” Omar said. The poodle couldn’t have been happier. He was melting in Omar’s lap, the sweetest little spunky poodle anyone had ever seen.
“Drive the car, Doctor,” Harvey said. “Take the 101 to Calabasas.”
Greenburg pulled out of the Valley Beverage parking lot, went east on Ventura, north on Van Nuys, and took the entrance ramp onto the 101 North. As always, there were thousands of cars traveling through the Valley, but today, instead of crawling along in bumper-to-bumper traffic, they were flying down the freeway at eighty miles per hour.
“You paid your dealer with the money I loaned you, your wife sent her plastic surgeon’s son to college with the money I loaned her, and your collective due date with me has expired,” Harvey said.
Greenburg concentrated on maintaining his speed. He was in the middle lane, and there were cars doing eighty all around him. “I need more time,” the dentist said. His cheek was angry, swelling around his right eye.
“There is no more time. Do you have my money?”
“Harvey—”
“Do you have my money?”
“No.”
“Throw the dog out the window, Omar.”
“What? No, no,” Greenburg said.
Omar opened the back window.
“No, Harvey, no, stop. Omar, stop, don’t…”
The hot Valley wind blasted into the Lexus, and Omar threw Chachi out the window into the zooming Ventura Freeway traffic.
To the other cars, the poodle was nothing but a white blur that required no braking or even horn honking; Chachi was a small white bump in the road. There was a moment of distant, echo-y yelping, but then, almost immediately, there was nothing but a steady relentless roar. Omar closed the window. The dog was no doubt dead, a bloody poodle mess, but that was behind them now, literally and figuratively.
“Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ,” Greenburg said. He was shocked, hyperventilating.
Harvey watched the dentist wheeze and gasp and imagined that Greenburg’s profound physical anguish was a result of the idea exploding in Greenburg’s brain that there were people on this Earth who would throw a living dog, his living dog, his best buddy, out the window of a speeding car into the path of other speeding cars.
“Chachi, oh my God, oh my fucking God. Chachi,” Greenburg said, panting.
“Breathe, Donald. Eyes on the road. Hands on the wheel,” Harvey said, thinking, Oh, Doctor, there are people on this Earth who will do far worse than that.
“You killed Chachi,” Greenburg said, squeezing the words out.
“Yes, Chachi is dead, but you are alive, and that is a fact to be strongly considered. You are alive, Doctor. As is your wife.”
“If you touch my wife…” Greenburg said in what he intended to be a brave and threatening tone that came off as scared shitless.
“I liked your dog,” Omar said casually from the ba
ck seat. “I could like your wife too.”
Greenburg was silent.
“What you’re going to do, Dr. Greenburg, is pawn the Lexus to me,” Harvey said.
“I’m not pawning my Lexus,” Greenburg said.
“I’ll sell it to you or to the first person who’ll pay ninety thousand,” Harvey said.
“It’s a hundred-twenty-thousand-dollar car,” Greenburg said.
“Depreciates the minute you drive it off the lot,” Omar said. “That’s why I lease.”
“I’m not giving you my Lexus,” Greenburg said.
“What floor is your practice on, Doctor?” Harvey said.
“Twenty-second,” Greenburg said.
“Omar, when we get to the Doctor’s building, accompany him to his office and throw him out the window,” Harvey said.
They made a U-turn at Parkway Calabasas and took Ventura Boulevard back to Valley Beverage. No one spoke. When they returned to the narrow parking lot, a spot two cars down from the Range Rover was open.
Greenburg parked the luxury sedan, Harvey presented the dentist with a written agreement that contracted the Lexus to Pacoima Pawn and Loan, Greenburg signed it, and all three men got out of the car.
Harvey climbed up and into the Range Rover, which was custom outfitted so that he could drive it like a normal-sized person, and Omar slid behind the wheel of the Lexus. The dwarf and the giant drove away to Pacoima, leaving the dentist without a ride in the Valley Beverage lot, holding his bottle of gin and thinking about his dog.
DYING HEARTBEAT
Hospitals made Mike Miller nauseous. Even at home, the sights and sounds and smells of illness made him queasy. When his daughters had sore throats and stomachaches and earaches and fevers, Marcy did the lion’s share of nursing them back to health because Mike got anxious around the accouterment of care—the medicines, the chicken soup, the saltines, the ginger ale, and the unbuttered toast. He couldn’t eat graham crackers because that’s what his girls ate when they were vomiting up everything else. The bottom line was he didn’t like being around sick people.
