So I talked to some people, and I landed a job working the stick at Liar’s, a dive under the Blue Line. I’d hung around there often enough anyway. It was the kind of bar where workingmen go to find someone to kick them ten percent for leaving the back door to a warehouse open. I’m not talking criminals. I’m talking honest guys with more bills and children than a nine-to-five coupled with a six-to-midnight could cover.
The criminals were the guys they talked to, guys like I used to be before I trusted the wrong person, before a job that should have set us up for six months instead sent me up for five years.
Tending is no way to get rich, especially at a dump like Liar’s, but my life is pretty simple. I have a studio in Little Puerto Rico and a phone number I make damn sure stays listed. At work, I keep a Louisville Slugger behind the bar, but rarely pull it out. I know these men, even the ones I’ve never met. After a year or two, I struck up a few friendships, guys that hang around after I flip off the neons. We talk and drink and smoke the place blue, and if Lester White is feeling magnanimous, do a couple of bumps. It isn’t quite a family, but it’s what I have, and it’s okay.
Sometimes, I even get to feeling good. Last week Lester was talking on his cell, chewing out the guy who runs a house he deals crank out of. He’s nice enough, Lester, until he isn’t. Then he’s, well, not nice at all. I’ve heard stories about him and pit bulls, and I don’t ever want to know if they’re true.
When Lester hung up, I asked if everything was okay.
“Fucking kids,” he said. “I don’t know how many times I’ve told him to get a fucking security cage put on the back door. Kid thinks because they’ve got one on the front, they’re safe, but these days…” He shook his head.
He didn’t finish, and I didn’t ask him to. I just topped off his Glenlivet. The rest of the guys I only spot Beam. Lester nodded at me, smiled, said, “Frank, when are you going to quit this bartending shit and come work for me? Kids these days, they aren’t worth a goddamn.”
Like I said, sometimes I get to feeling good. Silly, maybe, but there it is. I have a job and friends and a daughter who calls every couple of months, even if only to say she hates me. And as long as she keeps calling, there’s hope.
Hope is a dangerous thing.
He comes in around three, when the bar is all but empty. A thin kid in his twenties, sporting that cocaine skeeze: long, limp hair, a complicated goatee, a mean twitchiness to the eyes. A pack of Parliaments in his left pocket. A plastic-gripped pistol barely hidden by a half-buttoned work shirt. I know his type. I’ve been his type.
The locket dangles from his closed fist, rocking like a hypnotist’s crystal. “You know this, old man?”
Do I know it?
Till the day I die.
A lot of the stuff I gave Lucy over the years was pinched, and she was generally understanding. From the beginning, my wife knew how I made our money. But I spotted the locket in a display window one day I happened to be flush. When she saw that it came in a box, with a ribbon and everything, she hit me with that smile of hers, the one that lit me up inside. I know just what to put in it, she’d said. I’d asked, What? as I hung it on her. Us, she’d said, and shivered when I kissed the back of her neck.
That was a long time ago. I haven’t seen the locket since the last time she visited me at Dixon. “That’s my wife’s.”
“Not anymore.” His lips curl into a shape nothing like a smile. “You know who was wearing it last?”
And all of a sudden I know where this is going. “Yes.”
“Say it.”
I force the syllables. “Jessica.”
“Who?”
“My daughter.”
“So, then, Frank.” He curls his lips again. “I guess you better do exactly what I say. Right?”
I don’t have many pictures. Three, to be precise.
We used to have tons, albums full. I once joked Lucy that she must’ve been born with a Nikon attached to her head, all the pictures she took. And once Jessica came along, forget it. Our daughter was the most documented kid on the North Side.
But you can’t take that shit inside. They’ll let you, but you don’t want to. It kills you slowly to have proof of the way time passes, all those frozen instants that used to be yours. So you keep a couple of shots, two or three, and you stare at them until they don’t mean anything anymore, and at the same time, they mean everything.
After I got out, I tried to find out what happened to the rest of our pictures. But after Lucy died, shit fell apart. What little we had that was worth anything was sold for bills, and the rest probably ended up in a dump. I like to think that maybe a collector got the photos, one of those guys who sell random snaps in boxes down at the Maxwell Street Market. I check it some Sundays, flipping through other people’s lives, but I never find mine.
Three.
One of Lucy, dressed as a sort of slutty angel for Halloween a million years ago. It’s faded and blurry, but she looks the way I remember when I close my eyes.
One of the room in Cook County Hospital, Luce red-eyed but smiling, Jessica bundled like a burrito in her arms.
One of Jess from Nag’s Head, the summer before I went in. Eleven years old, just beginning to fill out the bikini Lucy and I fought about her having. I’m dragging her into the surf, and she’s fighting me, legs scrabbling at the sand, face framed into the kind of mock fear you only have around someone you trust. You can almost hear her shrieking, almost hear her laughing.
I can, anyway.
I reach out, and he lets the locket slip from his fist, the thin chain coiling in my palm. The filigree is worn, the hinges dark with age. I stare at it, and then I look up at the kid and think about taking that pistol away from him. Cracking his fucking skull with it. Then I say, “I don’t have it.”
“You think I don’t know who you are? What you do?”
“I’m a bartender.”
“Bull-shit. I know all about you. The jobs you’ve pulled. Lucky I’m not asking for twenty.”
“Those jobs were a long time ago.” I gesture down the bar. “You think I had any kind of money, I’d be working here?”
He looks it over, taking in the two geezers staring at their beer, the Cubs sign in the dingy window, the bowls of pretzels the regulars know better than to eat. For a second, his confidence seems to slip. But then he shakes his head, fingers his shirt to make extra sure I get a view of the cheap Chinese pistol. “Ten grand,” he says. “By Friday. Or she fucking dies.”
My fingers go to fists. “Don’t,” I say.
“Don’t what?” His mask is back in place, all insolence and swagger.
“Don’t threaten my daughter.”
He curls his lips again. “Friday,” he says. Then he turns and struts out.
I open my hand to look at the locket. I know it’s warm from being in his pocket, but it’s hard not to pretend that it’s because she had it around her neck.
Ten years ago—Jesus, a decade—one of the neighborhood kids came to get me.
It was eleven in the morning, and I had been up all night doing a thing. When I heard the doorbell, I wanted more than anything to bury my head under my pillow. But Lucy was at work, so I staggered out of bed.
The kid was named Jimmy-something, a scraggly little brat that had lately been sniffing around Jessica. She was nine and he was maybe eleven, but things happen earlier these days. I didn’t open the screen door, just glowered down at him. “Yeah?”
And Jimmy-something, he said the scariest words a father can hear. “It’s Jess. She’s hurt.”
I didn’t even change out of my pajama bottoms.
Growing up in the city, it’s a blessing and a curse. Kids are wired to run around shrieking like carefree morons, and that’s exactly the way it should be. But between drug dealers and speeding buses and evil fuckers in raincoats, it’s tough to just let them go. So Lucy and I had set up boundaries; Jess could go to the school playground but not to the city park. She could walk on Augusta b
ut not on Division.
So of course this Jimmy idiot led me straight down Division to the city park.
The first thing I saw was a ring of ten or so kids clustered around someone on the ground, and my heart kicked up to a hundred beats a minute, sweat running down my sides like it never did on a job, ever—not even the time Leo-fucking-Banks shot the security guard because he thought he was reaching for a piece—and I tore ass across the street, shoved through the kids, and there’s my Jess on the ground, clutching at her ankle, which is bent way too far to one side, and her face is squinched up in pain, tears cutting tracks down her cheeks, and then she spots me.
Ever seen your baby girl look at you with relief and terror at the same time? It’ll rip your fucking heart out.
I dropped to my knees beside her. She looked at me and then at one of the other kids, and said, “I fell.” I glanced up at the kid she’d eyeballed. A boy, maybe twelve and already got that scraggly not-quite mustache, pale and shaking and looking like he was about to take off running. It was obvious there was more to the story, but I didn’t really give a damn. I just wanted to take care of her. So I scooped her up and walked out of the park.
Warm and trembling, scrawny little arm clinging to my neck, smelling of dirt and sunshine, she looked at me, and she said, “I’m sorry, Daddy,” and my heart broke all over again.
Everyone talks about how a kid changes you. How there’s this whole sense of wonder, like, I don’t know, like you woke up and could see colors that hadn’t been there yesterday. Everything is still the way it was, but it all looks different.
So you change too. Become a different person. Self-preservation goes out the window. All of a sudden you’d do anything, any- thing for this helpless little creature. That’s what everyone says, and they’re right.
Especially if it’s a girl.
I drive an ’86 LeBaron. My furniture comes from the Brown Elephant resale shop. Towards the middle of every second week, I have to downgrade from Marlboros to Basics.
Ten grand. May as well ask for a ticket to the moon.
After my shift, I go home to pace my shitbox apartment and smoke and think.
I think about going to the police. Telling them there’s a cokehead who says he’s kidnapped the daughter I haven’t seen in seven years, and how I have two days to get him what I make in four months. I think how they will listen to me very intently at first, making notes with silver pens while they wait for my file. I think how when it comes, they will see arrests for assault, bad checks, unlawful entry, plus the conviction, five long years.
The note taking will stop. The pens will vanish.
Truth is, I don’t blame them. I really don’t. First rule is that everybody lies. Why would they bust their ass running around to check out a story like mine?
After all, they don’t know Jess.
I think of the last time she called, when all she did was cry. How each sob was like a spike through me, because I knew every single one was a wound done her. Done to my baby girl, who had once loved and trusted me, and then found me gone when she needed me most. Whose mother had died while I was inside, and who never knew what that did to me, how it emptied me out to lose my wife. My baby girl, who ran away before I was released.
Who had to do the things a sixteen-year-old runaway has to do.
I figure that if I sell my car and my records and empty my joke of a bank account, I can probably scrape up two, three grand.
So I put on a clean shirt and I go to work. I spend the longest afternoon of my life pulling Buds for losers. I greet the dusk rush eagerly, glad for the distraction. I pour shots and light cigarettes and forget orders and knock things over, and a couple of the regulars make jokes about it until they see my eyes, and then they wander away from the bar to the siderail on the back wall.
Finally, at eleven, Lester White comes in.
The place reacts the way it always does, shifting to acknowledge him, like sweeping a magnet above iron filings. Men who work for him nod and raise glasses. Hard kids vie for his attention. Suckers who owe him money stare at their beers and hope to Christ he won’t pick them to make an example of. I pour his Glenlivet rocks as he steps to a suddenly open space at the bar.
“Frank,” he says.
“Lester.”
He turns to lean an elbow, picks up the highball glass, and sips at it. “Heard on the radio, they’re saying snow tonight.”
“Yeah?” I can’t imagine anything I could care less about, what with the words my daughter, my daughter, my daughter going round and round in my head, but I can’t rush into this. Lester is the only option I have. How else am I going to get the money by tomorrow? Rob twenty liquor stores?
“Winter again.” He shakes his head. “This fucking town.”
“I hear you,” I say, and run a towel over a glass that’s already dry.
He nods, starts to step away.
“Hey Lester, you got a second?” I try not to sound anxious, but I can tell it creeps into my voice by the way he narrows his eyes. He turns back, rests his forearms on the bar. He knows something is coming. You don’t get where Lester is without an eye for desperation.
I set the towel down, take a breath. “I was wondering if I could talk to you about a loan.”
He raises an eyebrow.
“There’s a…” I sigh. “My daughter.”
“She okay?”
I think about telling him everything, the cokehead, the locket, everything, but I know it’s the wrong move. Lester may hang around after hours, but that doesn’t make us friends. He’s a big man, a player, a very dangerous guy. If I tell him the situation, it’s the same as asking him to help directly. A bad play for a couple of reasons. First, he wouldn’t do it. Second, I couldn’t afford it if he did. Third, and most important, Jess. If something went wrong…
So I just hold my hands open and look him in the eye. He finally bobs his head. “How much?”
I force myself to say it. He stares at me. Sizing me up. Wondering if I’m for real.
I stare back. My daughter, my daughter, my daughter. The bar noise goes away.
After a minute, Lester scrunches up his mouth. “Frank, you know I like you. But ten grand?”
“I’m good for it.”
“Say I give you a friend rate, call it seven and a half. Almost a grand a week, and that’s just the juice. You stop eating, stop smoking, give me your whole paycheck, it’s what, five? So you owe a full grand the week after. One and a half after that. Just in juice, you understand, I’m not talking principal.” Lester shakes his head. “Sooner or later, I’d have to send someone to put your fingers in a car door. Can’t do it. I like you too much.”
I pick up the rag, start wiping the bar. Truth is, I knew what Lester was going to say. But I had to ask. Now there’s only one option. The one thing I said I’d never do again.
My daughter, my daughter, my daughter.
I rub the same circle over and over. “What if I worked it off?”
“Doing what?”
I shrug. “Whatever you need.” I look up.
Lester meets my gaze, starts to smile like I’ve told a joke. Then something creeps into his eyes, but I can’t tell what it is. He breaks the stare and looks away. “Come on, Frank.”
“I’m serious. You’re always saying you need good people.”
He turns back, and I realize what I saw on his face.
Embarrassment. Lester White is embarrassed for me.
“When I say that, I’m just, you know. Blowing smoke, playing around.” He shrugs. “You were a serious man back in the day, but now…” He waves his hand, and doesn’t finish the sentence, which was probably meant as a kindness. Except that I can fill in the blank: Now you’re a fifty-one-year-old bartender. That’s all you are. The days when you were anything else—an earner, a husband, a father—those days are gone.
There’s a lead numbness in my stomach that I’ve only felt a couple of times. When the judge stole five years of my life away. When Lu
cy told me the doctors had found a tumor in her head. When my little girl called me to weep into the phone and I couldn’t do a goddamn thing about it.
Lester is clearly uncomfortable. He breaks the spell by downing the rest of his scotch, then pulling his roll from his pocket. “Look, don’t think I’m a bad guy, though,” he says. “Let me help you.” He flattens a wad of money a half-inch thick, and snaps off three crisp hundreds. As an afterthought, pulls off two more. “Here you go, pal.” He smiles at me. Then he sets his empty glass on the bar and gives the tiniest nod towards it.
And, sick to my stomach, I reach for the bottle and do what a bartender is supposed to.
Usually a couple of guys would stay after I lock the doors, but tomorrow is Friday, so tonight I kick everybody out. Then I pour myself four inches of Jim Beam, light a smoke, and sit on one of the stools in the dark. Through the front window I can see the snow falling. When the El clatters overhead, orange sparks spray out to shimmer amidst whirling flakes of white.
I’m short ten thousand dollars, and I have until tomorrow morning to get it.
I get off the stool and walk behind the bar, punch open the register. Maybe two dozen twenties, twice as many tens and fives, and a thick stack of singles. Call it a thousand dollars. If I’m lucky. Taking it means losing my job, but that doesn’t matter a damn.
But it doesn’t matter, because a thousand dollars isn’t ten.
I crush my square and light another. Suck hard, picture the smoke twisting and curling into my lungs. I tap my lighter against the bar and I take a belt of the bourbon and I think about the way my feet feel like someone is scraping barbed wire across my heels and I watch the sparks and snow mingle and none of it helps relieve the thought that I’m about to let my baby girl down again, maybe for the last time.
And before I can think too much about it, I lean down, grab a couple of paper clips from the junk cup beside the register, take the bat from beneath the counter, and head for the front door.
Sex, Thugs, and Rock & Roll Page 13
