I Don't Like Where This Is Going

by John Dufresne

  We turned to see seven or eight handsome young Asian men in flashy rockabilly suits, aviator shades, Colonel Sanders ties, and cowboy boots. They all sported imposing ornamental pompadours, and they seemed to be swaggering across the room in slow motion. I asked Chad who they were. “Are they a band?”

  He said, “No offense, amigo, but did you just fall off the turnip wagon? Call themselves Saigon Boyz.”

  Bay asked Chad if he knew a guy named K-Dirt.

  “Heard the name.”

  “Bleak?”

  Chad pointed his chin at the flock of Asians. “They’ll know.”

  The Asians took seats at an empty poker table that seemed to have been reserved for them. I recognized one of the gentlemen as the failed pickpocket who’d unleashed his bee on my finger. When I pointed him out to Bay, the guy in the heliotrope suit and the lemon-yellow shirt, Bay told me to let it go. The beekeeper met my gaze, but did not seem to place me.

  I settled our tab. I called Elwood and left a voice-mail message with the names of Layla’s alleged killers. Bay said I shouldn’t bother the cops with this right now, but I called Spooner anyway, expecting to ask him to return my call when he got the time, but he answered. He let me tell Blythe’s story. He said, “You’re taking the word of a drug-addicted hooker?”

  “An eyewitness.”

  “And a dead one at that?”

  I asked Spooner what he knew about Refuge House.

  He said, “The homeless shelter?”

  “Yes. On Bridger.”

  “That’s all I know.”

  “Ever had any complaints about it?”

  He had not.

  We stopped at the men’s room, and as we stood at the urinals, I read Bay the crude latrinalia, and he explained that it was not licentiousness, but puritanism that made Las Vegas, with all its farcical extravagance and vulgarity, possible, maybe even necessary. If all these naughty tourists weren’t god-fearing religious zealots, they’d have seen to it that debauchery was legalized back in Centerville, and they wouldn’t need a plane ticket to Oz. They’d be kicking it with the neighbors back at the homestead.

  I was blow-drying my hands when our charming beekeeper burst into the loo, waving a pistol and demanding his money, his wallet, and an apology, the latter of which I thought was a nice touch coming from a douchebag. I was slightly terrified as I always am when I see a gun, but I knew not to look like I was frightened or amused. When you grow up with a drug-addicted twin brother and spend too much of your time dragging him out of crack houses, you get unwisely inured to the casual display of handguns and to the blundering jerkoffs who use them.

  Bay told him to put the gun away if he wanted to be taken seriously. “You’re not going to shoot anyone in a casino, Junior.”

  He smiled, slipped the gun into the back of his belt, drew an automatic knife from his jacket pocket, and fired the four-inch blade out the front of the grip.

  Bay said, “Now, that makes more sense.”

  He said, “You owe me four hundred dollars.”

  Bay said, “Three-sixty, but I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Why the bee?” I said.

  “You were being warned.”

  “I see,” I said. “A pun.”

  He said, “What the fuck are you talking about?”

  Bay said, “The essence of a warning is the identification of the offending conduct.”

  Mr. Heliotrope brought the knife blade to Bay’s throat and did not hear Open Mike enter. The beekeeper held out his hand. Bay held up a wallet, and Mr. H. lowered the knife. Our assailant’s very own leather bifold replacement wallet. Mike crept up behind Junior, reached his hand between Junior’s legs, grabbed Junior’s pecans, and crushed them until our gasping, trembling, wailing erstwhile mugger dropped the knife and dropped himself to the tile floor. Mike told him to shut the fuck up, and when he wouldn’t or couldn’t, Mike stepped on Junior’s throat and lifted himself up on his tiptoes. Bay used a pick to open a locked custodian’s storage closet, and Mike dragged Junior inside by the nuts. We shut and locked the door. When he finally caught his breath, Junior, now a man of diminished voice, managed to yell, rather hoarsely, that we were dead men.

  Bay counted the money in “Danny Choi’s” wallet and dropped the wallet and the black diamond watch and the iPhone and the sterling silver money clip and the pocket tin of condoms into the trash. “Medianoches at the Florida Café?”

  8

  “WAS I SLEEPING, while the others suffered?” Didi asked Gogo, while they waited for Godot, suspecting, perhaps, that his own untimely slumber was, in fact, treasonous. To be ignorant of the suffering of others is to be complicit in that suffering, isn’t it, whether the ignorance is willful and convenient or oblivious and genuine?

  I spoke with Patience before bed. She told me she was up at three because she was worried about Charlotte, who had not been returning phone calls or answering her text messages or e-mails. Patience said that Charlotte lost her job at the fish camp when she raised a stink about serving tomatoes and lectured her boss, Fatty Goodenough, about the immorality of buying produce from the local growers who forced their fieldworkers to labor under dangerous conditions. There’s blood on these tomatoes, she told Fatty, and he told her to put mayonnaise on them and get back to her station.

  Then Charlotte got involved with the farmworkers’ union, picketing Publix supermarkets and Hattie’s Burgers restaurants in southwest Florida. She spoke to the press about the horrific living conditions of the workers. She spoke with authorities. The only people listening to her, however, were the growers and their boot-licking subcontractors, and those folks weren’t happy at all. Patience worried that something dreadful might have happened to Charlotte, and she was driving over to Immokalee in the morning to knock on Charlotte’s door.

  I ended the call and lay on the bed with Django asleep and dreaming on the other pillow, his tiny black paws twitching. I closed my book on parasomnia and tried to imagine Layla’s final hours, thinking now, if I could trust Blythe’s putative confession, that Layla had not taken her own life. She got word from Julie about Blythe’s whereabouts and planned a rescue mission over a weekend. She took a cab from the airport to the Luxor, checked in, and without unpacking her luggage—filled with clothes for Blythe—hurried to the Strip, where Blythe presumably conducted her business.

  Blythe would not have been happy to feel the familiar hand on her chafed elbow and to hear her unduly protective sister say, It’s time to go home, sweetie. Layla would have been distressed by her baby sister’s thinning, lusterless hair, her gray, almost translucent teeth and receding gums, by the cold sores on her lips and the tracks on her arms, and would have had to fortify herself against tears and commence her persuasion. Layla would have said, You have the chance, sweetie, maybe your last chance, to save yourself, to start over, to take control of your own life, to fall in love, to start a family. And Blythe, being high, might even have believed this fantasy of a luminous future because everything is possible and imaginable when you’re feeling euphoric. And so they hurried to the hotel, dressed for their flight, checked out, got a taxi to McCarran. Layla would have noticed Blythe growing quiet, unresponsive, and dangerously reflective on the short drive. When Blythe brightened a moment and pointed out that she had no identification, Layla would have produced Blythe’s duplicate Tennessee driver’s license from her purse.

  And then the meltdown and the hysteria on the Jetway, the scolding of the flight attendants, the arrival of security, the humiliating escort back to the terminal, and the consultation with TSA agents. Official conclusion: panic attack due to pteromerhanophobia.

  Layla would have held her trembling sister on the cab ride back to the Luxor as she devised an alternate plan for getting the petulant one back to Memphis. She’d drive Blythe back, even if it meant tying her down in the trunk of the rental car. She would not fail to save her little sister from this vile and merciless life of perdition. She would fulfill her promise to Sa
int Jude, the patron saint of lost causes.

  They checked back into the Luxor and settled into their new room on the top floor. Layla called the rental car company, reserved a mid-sized sedan, and arranged for a pickup in an hour. Blythe went to the bathroom, turned on the shower and the vent, called her associates, K-Dirt and Bleak, explained that she was being kidnapped, and told them to hurry and to bring along something for the pain.

  When Blythe answered the knock on the door and introduced her friends to Layla, Layla asked them to leave. They laughed. She asked them again, a bit more forcefully. Blythe smoked heroin on the sofa. When Layla picked up the phone to call security, K-Dirt took the phone from her and stomped it with his foot. One thing led to another, and I didn’t want to think about it anymore. Blythe might have said something like, Don’t hurt her too bad, before she nodded out.

  In the morning I made coffee, filled Django’s stainless steel bowl with coconut milk, and called my journalist pal Donny L. in Melancholy to see what he could tell me about the farmworkers in Immokalee. He told me he was sitting on the beach among tanned and stout French Canadians, reading Upton Sinclair, and drinking Moscow Mules out of a thermos.

  “Are you okay?”

  “I’m okay.”

  “You want to talk about it?”

  “Why?”

  I had been trained to think that if you could only articulate your thoughts and feelings, you could discover the truth or a truth about yourself, and the truth, as gospellary wisdom has it, would set you free. But I was being persuaded to believe that some of us can’t face the truth. The truth we’ve buried would crush us. We need the lie so that we can go on, and the point of therapy is to go on, isn’t it?

  So my developing theory was that sometimes therapy works because it allows us to be less truthful with ourselves, and we would like our circumvention to be “blessed” by the therapist. And in this way we become someone we can live with, someone flawed but not, thank god, repellent.

  Donny told me there were three hundred thousand farmworkers in Florida and every one of them lived in poverty. The average annual salary of a farmworker was $7,500. “We subsidize farmers and growers to the tune of twenty-five billion dollars. That’s double what we spend on welfare for the needy, for the farmworkers. Socialism for the rich and capitalism for the poor.”

  To take home $50 a day, Donny said, a worker in Immokalee has to pick four thousand pounds of tomatoes, 125 buckets, each weighing over thirty pounds, has to haul that bucket hundreds of yards across a field at times. The workers live in barracks housing, most of them, owned by the growers, and their rent is deducted from their paychecks. They live in perpetual debt. They work bent over in the hot sun, exposed to toxic pesticides for ten to twelve hours a day, and they get no benefits, no holidays, and no health insurance. All of that so that we can eat flavorless tomatoes that are gassed with ethylene so they turn red, and are then given cute names like UglyRipe or Tasti-Lee.

  MIKE CAME HOME with his right hand wrapped in a bloody Brunswick bowling towel. He told me he’d cut his knuckles when he punched an annoying little Ted Nugent–impersonating cocksucker who was trying to sell him a paintball gun and wouldn’t take Get the fuck out of my face, needledick, for an answer.

  “I’ve still got a piece of his tooth in my knuckle.”

  Mike rinsed his hand at the sink, and I filled a plastic bag of ice from the freezer. Django swatted a fallen cube across the floor and sped off after it. I gave Mike the bag. “So you punched him, and then what?”

  “I picked him up and punched him again. And he cried.” Mike said good night, headed to his room, slipped on the ice that Django had abandoned, and said, “That cat’s going to kill someone.”

  Elwood stopped by the house on his way to the TV station. He told me he had found out the identities, but not the whereabouts, of K-Dirt and Bleak. He’d brought along two bowls of jook, a kind of rice porridge, that he’d picked up at Seoul Brothers. I sniffed and decided that maybe jook was an acquired taste and saved my bowl for Bay.

  Elwood said, “Kaiden Castle and Ben Alexavier. A pair of Jack Mormons from Twin Falls, Idaho. They were on their mission here in Vegas and were preaching the good word to a clutch of hookers in what they suddenly realized was a brothel and not the home of a large and very blessed Catholic family. The girls did some laying on of hands and speaking in tongues, as it were, and there ensued the weeping, the moaning, and the gnashing of teeth, and then the boys dropped to their callused knees and praised God and the Angel Moroni for delivering them to their terrestrial kingdom.”

  “What do they do?”

  “Whatever they’re told, apparently. Except go to temple anymore.”

  “But you can’t find them?”

  “I’m expecting a call.”

  Elwood sprinkled sugar on his jook. He said he was posting a story on his blog later today about Layla’s horrific death and about the seemingly incompetent, perfunctory, and perhaps compromised investigation into her case. “The authorities won’t be able to ignore this.”

  He asked me what we had to drink.

  “Milk? Juice?”

  “I was thinking breakfast spirits.”

  “I’ve got this bacon-infused vodka in the freezer.”

  “Drop a raw egg in it.”

  He would report what we had learned from Blythe through Julie Wade and what he had learned from an anonymous source at the coroner’s office. Zohydro had been found in Layla’s system. Didn’t sound recreational to me.

  I said, “Did you speak with the police?”

  He told the police what we knew about the killers. No corroboration, no comment. He asked them if they knew that Layla’s sister was a prostitute and drug addict. No comment. He asked if anyone in the police department understood the nature of their job. No comment. “When I got back to my car, I had seventeen citations on the windshield, a broken sideview mirror, and a note that threatened me with arrest should I persist in interfering with an ongoing police investigation.”

  “But they closed the case, I thought.”

  “Keeping it open just enough so no one gets in.”

  I GOT A TEXT from Patience. Charlotte would be arriving at noon in Vegas on a flight from New River. Could I fetch her? Evidently, Patience never made it to Immokalee, but Charlotte made it out. Bay joined me for coffee and jook. He decided the jook needed a little salt. And a little sriracha. I told him about Charlotte.

  He said, “I love a full house.”

  “Should we all meet for lunch?”

  Django hopped up on the table and sniffed at the jook. Bay said Django needed a time-out. Django sneezed and backed away from the bowl. Bay said, “Where should we meet?”

  “Mladinic’s. One-ish.”

  THE EAGER PASSENGERS arriving on Virgin flight #321 were so hell-bent on gambling that they stopped to play the slots in the terminal. A slender Filipina in a zebra-striped jersey and black pedal-pushers hit the jackpot on Firehouse Hounds and got so excited, she had to suck on her asthma inhaler.

  I saw Charlotte walking toward me up the ramp, holding a canvas shoulder bag with both hands. She looked a bit weary and a lot relieved. She wore a blue cotton short-sleeved shirt dress, red running shoes, and a red Fort Myers Miracle baseball cap. We hugged.

  “So good to see a friendly face,” she said.

  I said, “You’re staying with us, of course, but first lunch.”

  “Great. I’m starving.”

  I saw no pet carrier. “Where’s Henry?”

  MLADINIC’S TAVERNA IS ONE of the city’s most venerable eating and drinking establishments. It’s nestled in the surprisingly verdant John S. Park neighborhood, far enough away from the Strip and from downtown to escape the hyperstimulated hordes of tourists held in thrall by the scintillant neon. When Pete Mladinic, a Croatian immigrant, opened his bar in 1935, he could see as far as Red Rock Canyon to the west and all the way east to Frenchman Mountain. The vista has changed; the tavern has not. There’s a shaded patio out
back where Charlotte and I would be meeting Bay and Mike, and a cozy little bar inside—six stools and two tables—where I sat on my first visit here when I fell in love with the place.

  That day I sat at the only vacant barstool, a stool, I would soon learn, that was normally reserved for one Ren Steinke, but Ren was, on that day, over at Green Valley Gastroenterology Associates enduring a colonoscopy. I ordered a Croatian beer. The wiry cowboy to my right, the one who told me about his pal Ren, introduced himself as Ellis Derringer and tipped his Stetson. He said that for the past fourteen, fifteen years, he and Ren met here every weekday at noon to watch The Young and the Restless on the TV over the bar. He asked me if his cigarette was bothering me. I said it wasn’t. I’d been a smoker once myself. Then you know the hunger, he said. He told me he wished his life was like the lives of the characters on Y&R.

  He held up two fingers to the bartender, Tatjana. He said he would put up with all manner of betrayal, infidelity, and deceit if only his life could mean something. “Not one person on this show is happy. Me, I’m happy as a dung beetle in a shit storm, but I’m just sitting here on my bony ass going nowhere fast.” He pointed to the TV screen, where a gray-haired gent with several chins and ropy forearms was telling a skittish blonde that his wife knew about everything.

  “Take Adam and Chelsea,” Ellis said. “They’re doomed. But theirs is a magnificent train wreck of ruin. Something you could write home about.”

  Tatjana brought our beers. Ellis lit a Lucky Strike and said, “My old lady stole away in the middle of the night. Gone like she never happened.” He sipped his beer and said maybe he deserved the desertion: he was no day at the beach.

  He said, “Sometimes I think I’m happy because I have unfulfilled desires and that gives me hope. It’s not all belly-up for old Ellis, you know?”

  The credits rolled on the show, and Ellis said, “Sometimes I imagine I have amnesia. I’m not Ellis Derringer at all. I’m Clu McClure. I’m from Genoa Falls, and I’m related to the Abbotts and the Newmans, only I, sitting here talking to you, don’t know it.”