“I could never beat you,” Leo said, starting to turn away. And you know what could happen if I beat you, he didn’t add.
Wanda sat down at the dealer’s chair on a blackjack table. “Lo-Ball,” she said.
“Honey,” Leo said, “Why don’t you get something to eat at the buffet? Daddy’s going to play a couple hands with the nice lady.”
When they needed to score and all their old marks were played out, Roshawn and Aida went shoulder-fishing at the County Clerk’s. Aida was too tweaked to keep the numbers straight and stop picking at her face, today, so Roshawn fished alone. Aida was better with people, better at stealing, better at all of it, until she got like this.
An old man caught Roshawn looking on with her lips still moving as she read his social off his form request. She ducked out before he could alert the security guard, streaked across the lot and into the dent-resistant side of a brand-new Volvo wagon with kids and groceries in the back and a mom in a soccer coach outfit, and a fancy white leather purse, more expensive than all the things anyone had ever bought for her in her life, put together.
It was the purse that Roshawn studied as she jumped back from the coasting Swedish shuttle, not the screaming kids or the oblivious mom. It was the purse, which was sitting on the roof. She jogged after the car as it sped up and, to her delight, turned down the side street where she’d left Aida in her shitbox Fiero. She saw the driver’s head turn and notice Roshawn in her mirror, dropped back so she wouldn’t stop. Go on, bitch, don’t worry about me, go back to La Mesa.
She broke into a run, rounded the corner and skidded to a stop as twenties blew by her on the dank afternoon breeze.
Aida danced down the middle of the street, snatching bills out of the air and laughing. “D’you believe this? You say praying don’t work, then what’s this shit?” Swinging from one skinny claw, the purse.
Aida smoked cigarettes like she was sucking venom out of a snakebite as she counted bills, “Three C’s and change,” but she counted again. “Let’s go see Hector.”
Roshawn’s nerves danced, sparks of autonomic joy sending the Fiero bouncing across the lanes on the eastbound 8. “The cards be trash by the time we get Hector out of bed,” Roshawn said. “Use your head, that shit makes you so stupid. We max ‘em out with a quickness and blow town. That was the plan if we got a fat one…”
“This bitch on the vapors. She lose her head, if it ain’t tied on. We fry her now, she lock up the castle and call out the feds. She too hot now, but she on the vapors, like I said. She cancel these, get new ones in the mail. We don’t need her cards. We’ve got her. We ghost her, and ride her to the next level.”
Roshawn and Aida had burned more people than they could hope to count, but in short, sharp shocks. Card dips, picked pockets, mail shakedowns, small schemes Roshawn learned from Aida. They sold numbers and papers to the Trashman, who prowled the rich condo dumpsters. But Aida wanted to slow-burn this bitch herself, something they’d talked about, but never got the nerve to do.
“We could bleed her so long, we be livin’ her life before she saw we took it.”
Roshawn came from poor Tennessee Navy trash, stranded in San Diego by a dishonorable discharge, and grew up in the ghetto. She had to learn to pass for black, though she was abysmally white, with the close hazel eyes, ash-blond hair and awful dentition of the Scotch-Irish mountainfolk who paid for passage to America as indentured servants before slaves were imported from Africa. Mimicry was survival for as long as she could remember, but Aida showed her how to make a living at it.
As to where Aida came from, Roshawn had learned little that stayed the same from one telling to the next, and she was smart enough to see how Aida’s lessons gave the lie to it all. Know what your mark knows, let them see you’re part of their world, and nothing more.
When they first met, Aida’s own stories of hardship as a military brat, of abuse at the hands of men, rang true, and bonded Roshawn to her. Overjoyed to find she didn’t have to choose the lesser of masculine evils, thrilled to find someone who understood her, she didn’t notice for a long time how much Aida had changed her.
In her more lucid moments, Roshawn guessed that the essential Aida must be whatever she was slowly changing Roshawn into, but she remained passive, fascinated. Becoming anything was better than what she’d been. She learned how to play men and women, straight, solid types who could draw cash on a credit card without getting the stink-eye from the manager. In between, she learned how to be hard and blank, to partake of the empty rituals of addiction without hope of pleasure, to endure the ugliest underside of life without pain or fear. It was a better life than she could have made, on her own.
They picked up three eight-balls of crank from Hector, but Aida swept into the bedroom, stripping off her clothes, and crashed on the waterbed. Roshawn sank in beside her, as close as she dared, wary of Aida’s feverish glow. The arid heat redoubled and cooked the sweat out of her naked body. Roshawn longed to touch her, but feared waking her up. This wasn’t normal, this kind of sleep, and she feared breaking it.
She lowered her head to the hollow between Aida’s tiny breasts and lapped at the rivulets of sweat, tasting the smoke and ammonia and ether of crystal meth, and something else she had always figured was the true essence of Aida, because she could not guess what else it might be. For a minute, she thought she knew the real Aida, and was happy.
Roshawn didn’t know how long Aida had been sleeping with the driver’s license under her pillow. She changed the sheets whenever they stole new ones, because neither of them liked to do laundry.
It was no kind of betrayal that Roshawn could explain, but it derailed her cleaning binge and got her taking things apart, and that was how she found the books.
“What’s all this shit?” she barked, when Aida breezed in from shopping.
Aida, confused, got defensive about the flock of gossamer shopping bags that seemed to float around her like balloons. Before Aida could stroke her, Roshawn charged her with the fattest of the books, something called the Tibetan Book Of The Dead. “What’re you reading for? Why are you keeping shit from me?”
Aida took the book and pocketed the license. “Haven’t you ever thought about your soul?”
Roshawn went slack. She hadn’t even looked inside them. Books were for learning how to do things, and if the books were a secret, then what was she learning?
“These souls we got now, they pretty beat-up, Ro.”
Roshawn looked into Aida’s eyes, lost in the way the golden mandalas in her irises seemed to burn and turn when she operated. “We could stop…”
“We’d still be us, wouldn’t we? Still damned, just starving, too.”
Why did she feel like the one who was hiding something? “We could change…”
Aida smirked, mute shorthand for helpless recognition of how dumb Roshawn was. “Ain’t you heard of predestination? God knows everything, from the beginning to how it’s all gonna turn out. So no matter what you do, if your name’s not in the book, you never get saved. God made you, so He knows you can’t change.”
Roshawn tried the smirk, but only felt dumber. “Where’d you get all this shit?”
“Daddy was a righteous Calvinist. After a good Sunday-go-to-meetin’ beatin’, he used to tell me about the Elect—that’s the saved ones. Since God knew how Daddy’d turn out in the end, he could do what he did to me, and still go to judgment with a clean conscience. This is their world, Ro. We just live here.”
Roshawn snorted a line to keep from laughing. “So you’re one of the Elect?”
“Hell no. Nothing in the Lord’s big book about Daddy knocking up a whore in the Philippines who could track him down in the States. Daddy used to say I had no soul, anyhow. They do give you a lift, though, knowing you judged and damned, whatever you do. Everything’s free, you know?”
“No judgment you need to fear but mine, girl.” Roshawn tried to look as brave as the words sounded.
Aida’s long acrylic nails tickle
d the tender scalp of Roshawn’s cornrow braids. “So I belong to you, now?”
Later, when Aida showed her the new ID with her picture and the mark’s name, she was too stoned in love to care. Aida had only to look at her that way, that said she knew who and what Roshawn really was, and could bear to keep looking, though she would never, ever tell what she saw.
A week later, the cards came. A Titanium Visa, Platinum American Express and, just for laughs, a Discover. They moved into a decent one-bedroom condo and bought new furniture: solid modern black lacquered oak, not like the flimsy particle-board Ikea shit that fell apart every time they had a fight.
And fight they did, as soon as the furniture was delivered. Roshawn was edgy, tweaking for two days, and Aida, she suddenly realized, hadn’t touched any in a week, hadn’t even lit a cigarette. They had it out until Roshawn’s anger, under Aida’s careful husbandry, mutated into lust.
“Why’d you have to tear my clothes?” Aida asked, after.
“To get at you,” Roshawn answered, but the lie had no legs. These clothes made her mad—frothy pastel floral prints, soccer-mom country club togs. Aida dressed like the mark, shopped in the same stores, cutting the game too close. She didn’t care if Roshawn didn’t like it, wanted her not to. Roshawn could steal, she could lie, and on a good day she could pass for a Wal-Martian credit-slave, but Aida could put on quality with or without the clothes. If Roshawn could get her hands on the thing that could enable Aida to leave her behind, she would gleefully rip it to shreds and eat it.
“D’you want to go out?”
“No,” Roshawn moaned.
“Well, I do.” Aida squirmed out from under her, skinned into fresh clothes and was gone.
Roshawn made herself look at the books. It wasn’t even that they were hidden. Books, written words in any configuration, made her feel stupid and mean.
They were about souls, but not like Aida talked about. A couple of them were religious stuff, about good works and sin and prayer and salvation, but these were outnumbered and outweighed by the others—science books, the kind Roshawn hated most. A head-shrinker book said the soul was an illusion, but a very real one, while another book by a brain-mechanic said that the soul was an energy field made by the brain and DNA, and a third was full of poetry about the soul and its hiding places in the heart, the eyes and the brain.
She thought Aida was going to clubs, or maybe to Hector’s, because she hadn’t dented her share of the crank. Whatever she was doing—and in their time, she had caught Aida doing everything—Roshawn could forgive, but what she saw when she followed her one night, she couldn’t even comprehend.
Aida left her Fiero at the curb and walked down another block to a Volvo station wagon with Avis plate frames. Roshawn huddled behind a bush until the silver wagon’s frosty high-beams died away, then ran back to the apartment for the spare keys to the Fiero.
She wasn’t hard to catch. She drove so slow she might have been on the links, looking for a lost golf ball. Roshawn dropped back. The Volvo only went another few blocks to the outlet mall, where Aida parked in the front of the enormous, empty lot and just sat there. For an hour.
Roshawn shivered and scratched, sure Aida had spotted her, wondering why she didn’t just come over and call her on it. Because she can’t, came an unaccustomed rational judgment. Because she’s not Aida, right now—
When the Volvo finally pulled out, Roshawn had almost fallen asleep. Her feet prickled with oxygen-starvation, the crank stealing all the blood from her extremities, but she made the little shitbox car go into gear and slipped in behind the crawling wagon.
She followed it to the park next, where it stopped beside the soccer field for another hour. Roshawn resisted charging the car and finding out what the fuck was going on, but she felt the old numbness washing over it all, every bad or inexplicable thing in her life getting cemented over so it seemed normal.
She loved Aida. She’d never told her, and never would, but Aida knew it, used it, wrung it dry. She’d never been this close to anyone, though, and wasn’t about to fuck it up like everything else. When the Volvo started up again and pulled out into the street, Roshawn forced herself to turn around and go back to the apartment. Whenever she got home, they would figure out what was what.
Lying in wait in the dark, Roshawn snapped into action when the arc-sodium lamplight from outside spilled in the open door. She’d tossed the condo, found more books, more things she never knew Aida had bought. She took the book in her hand—on making mummies, of all fucking crazy things, not the heaviest, but slim and wide, lots of pictures—and pulled a muscle in her shoulder throwing it at the silhouette in the doorway.
The book met flesh with a pulpy crack and a scream that raised goosebumps of joy on Roshawn’s skin before she realized she didn’t recognize her victim’s voice.
“What the fuck?” Aida shouted and flicked on the lights. She stood behind the woman Roshawn had hit—the mark. She wore sea-foam green silk pajamas and a matching wrap that looked like very expensive smoke. Her hands were tied behind her back with nylon rope, and duct tape covered her mouth. Her eyes were red and streaming, and her nose was crushed to the right and just starting to bleed.
“What’s going on, Aida? What the fuck, girl—”
“Time to take it to the next level, Ro.” Aida led the crying woman to the dining room and sat her on one of the new chrome and black leather barstools. “She can’t help us any more, like she is.”
“What do you want with her?”
Aida flanked Roshawn into a corner of the room so she couldn’t see the woman, could see nothing but Aida’s hungry eyes. “It’s no good anymore, Ro. This life… it’s all make-believe, you know? We keep using her cards, in a couple months, they going to catch on, and we have to run, and start all over. And you and me both got bench warrants, fucking cops know us both from all fucking day, girl. I’m sick of this shitty deal, Ro. I want what she got.”
Aida backed up to the bound woman, beckoning Roshawn closer. She ran her fingers through mark’s sweat-plastered hair. Her tongue flicked out and lapped a bead of blood from the end of her broken nose, a tear from her rolling, popping eyes.
Roshawn wanted to vomit fire. “Too far, Aida, this is way fucking past too far…”
Aida jerked her back by her braids. Cranked as she was, Roshawn was fast, but Aida paralyzed her with a gaze, stopping Roshawn just short of crushing her windpipe. In the air before her eyes hung that promise, that knowledge, that Roshawn hungered for. That look told her she might just be more than a throwaway drug casualty, more than a shitty little thief, and Roshawn knew, by now, that the look was its own reward, a tool and no more, but still she couldn’t look away.
“We can use her body,” Aida whispered. “We burn this place up with her in it, and get gone, and they think she’s me. We go on, like born again, and all that shit you been trying to forget, you just shed it like old skin. Just roll it off you and start over, and we can be together, baby…”
Roshawn gave this a moment. “Bitch, you so stupid. You watch them detective shows, same as me. They always get dumbfucks who try to play that. They got DNA, no matter how burned up she is, they still won’t take her for me, and you? You a mutt, Aida. She a purebred.”
“I can fix it,” Aida said, beaming, so proud. “Been fixing it. DNA is just records. Just shit on computers. It’s fixed.”
“And don’t we need two bodies?”
“Yeah, we do.” Aida went behind the bar and chopped out some rocks on the beveled, mirrored top. “We’ll go back out and get yours, right after, I got it lined up…” Aida bent and snorted manfully of the fat rails at the bar. Roshawn came up behind her, and the rich bitch was watching, so she ran her hands over Aida, feeling electricity rushing through her, and she wanted to taste it, to go down on Aida right now and show the bitch who she belonged to. But Aida twisted away and slipped her the straw.
Roshawn knew this was not a time to ponder the situation. It was time to be a bu
llet from a gun, a kamikaze pilot, until it was all done. She sucked up a line and switched nostrils for the next, slaloming through the remaining six before sitting back to savor the burn.
Aida was tying the woman to the barstool with more rope, and getting books out and setting them on the bar, and opening a brand new toolbox full of shiny things. Aida moved so fast she blurred into a green shimmering comet, and Roshawn realized she must be wearing the same green pajamas as their hostage, the Volvo lady who’d forget her head if it wasn’t tied on—
She dreamed that she saw part of what happened next.
Aida sat down before the woman, but really, she just appeared, because she’d been a blur, and all the books before her, and so many tools for ingesting drugs she’d never imagined existed, for doing things to people that even she had never been subjected to.
Aida shouted in the woman’s face, but Roshawn couldn’t hear it. The woman screamed and sobbed back until Aida shrugged and rocked back on the barstool.
When Aida did the drugs and picked up the other tools, the woman in the chair suddenly came to life, her arms scissoring the rope, the tape slipping away, but she did not try to escape, nor did Aida restrain her. What she saw was not their physical bodies, which hung motionless behind them like shadows of candlelight.
Aida stormed the mark with her tools. She scooped out both eyes with a peculiar notched spoon, and swallowed them like oysters. She seemed to meditate on their digestion for a moment, then, finding something wanting, dug deeper.
The fluttering shadows of the rich bitch mirrored Aida’s movements so that they seemed to eat each other in a dead heat, the clatter and scrape of their feasting competing with the slurp and pop of stolen morsels fitting into place in their new bodies, only to be torn away and eaten again.
Roshawn tried to say or do something to stop it, but it just went on and on until they were identical, and then Aida ordered her to be a dog, and the woman echoed her command, and Roshawn was a dog, and rolled over and thanked Aida for letting her go to sleep.
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