“I got sick days,” he rasped, but I couldn’t tell if this was an extension of my lame joke or simply an explanation of his idleness as of late.
I fought a strong impulse to mention the fact that our lives, for the most part, continued on their normal trajectory, that we had not been witness to other abductions or subject to mayhem of any kind. Don’t get me wrong: this is a big city and any given day finds its share of tragic accidents and random violence with a few odd disappearances thrown in for the good of the order. You develop a thick skin or you leave, and I’d always assumed Cooper had one. But witnessing that . . . abduction had broken him. I fought the impulse to bring it up; any mention of the subject—or of the group meetings or of the suitcase—tended to end poorly.
I asked instead if he wanted to head out to the IMAX after supper, and he said it sounded good to him.
Up at the bar, paying our tab, the TV blared as it always seems to in such places. On the twenty-four-hour news channel, a woman much like the blue-suited woman back at the recreation center interrupted the host’s question and looked directly into the camera. “I’m going to say this while I’ve got the chance. There are things going on . . .” she began, but they cut to a commercial for expensive dog food. I tried to drag him away, but Cooper insisted on seeing the rest of the interview. Back on the screen, a famous football player had taken the lady’s seat. Cooper went into the bathroom and vomited into the sink.
* * *
I did not return to the “support group,” and I told Cooper that I thought it did him no good to hang out with those people. He froze me out after that; the most he offered me was a barely companionable grunt when we passed in the center of the apartment.
I ran into the woman with the gnarled mahogany hands in the produce aisle of a health food store and I found myself happy to see her again. She agreed to let me buy her a smoothie.
We took our drinks to the patio and I chatted with her as if she were an old friend—rather than an odd acquaintance who happened to share the same conspiracy-oriented imagination as my roommate. Still, I felt drawn to talk to her again, and found something soothing about sitting there under the trellises with her.
She asked me about my work and I wondered if she was from here, or, if not, what had brought her to the city.
She’d come in the wake of a corporate giant—“I used to live that life, you know”—where she’d done various kinds of public relations and advertising. She sang a jingle for a consumer staple that she claimed to have a hand in, a song I remembered from early childhood—from the Transformers days—and I realized she must be even older than I’d first guessed.
I still found her appealing, in a way somehow not quite sexual. I wanted to be her . . . friend. She made me comfortable in some way.
“These corporations,” she said, “they’re their own little kingdoms, with their own cultures, their own ethics, their own everything. We had a song we would sing every Friday morning, at ten o’clock sharp. At your desk, at the coffee cart, sitting on the toilet: it didn’t matter. The clock struck ten and you stopped what you were doing and sang. It’s all about making you feel part of it. One big happy family, and all that garbage. You reach a point and you realize that there is no there there. If you’re smart, that is. Much like your job, I imagine.” With her index finger she tapped at a bead of sweat on her plastic cup as she spoke, releasing a waterfall of condensation to the patio table.
“What are you doing these days?” I asked.
“This.”
That was her reply, said as flatly and as matter-of-fact as could be imagined, and while clearly “this” had not meant to indicate idylls on the veranda of a grocery store, there was zero ounce of irony in her voice. I waited for her to say more; but she simply drew on the straw and I watched the tube of peach-colored liquid reach her lips.
“Your turn,” she prompted with that same flat tone.
I told her about life in a twenty-first-century high school and how despite all the tests and paperwork and budgetary constraints, the kids were the thing: they were what kept you coming back every day. I told her about a few of my seniors—Tasha, Ramon, Zeke, Kiana—and how hard they were working to get ready for college in the fall. They were great kids, I told her, and I tried to make it clear that my enthusiasm was sincere—which it was.
“They’ve got great things in store for us, this crew,” I told her. “This next generation. They’re going to change the world.”
I mistook her warm smile as approval of my hard work teaching the city’s youth.
Instead she said: “I wasn’t sure before, but I’m now pretty sure you are just some kind of a fool.”
Around us on the patio shoppers munched on their kale casseroles and organic quesadillas, not noticing, I hoped, the taken-aback look on my face.
What exactly had I done to deserve her reproach? And how the hell was I supposed to respond?
I opened my mouth to speak, but she put up her hand to silence me.
“The complacent burn in the same circle as the complicit,” she said. “I’ve got little time for either.”
She glared at something over my shoulder, and before I could tell her what she and her ersatz Dante could do to each other, she rose and pulled me up by the arm and demanded I accompany her to the dry-goods bins.
“Don’t turn around,” she whispered. “Look like we’re together.”
In the store she peeled open a plastic bag and began purposefully scraping through a bin of dried cranberries.
I inclined my head toward her ear and implored an explanation.
“You know. Don’t be stupid.” She scooped up oats and hominy and a small cluster of dried apricots. Dutifully she wrote the bin numbers on the strips of paper twist ties and lined them up on the counter. Then she stealthily slipped the last of the ties into my pocket.
“I’ll . . . I’m . . . Look, if that gentleman in the madras shirt follows me down the aisle, you know what to do.”
She strode quickly toward the meat department, turned the corner, and was gone. That was the last time I saw her.
For a few long minutes I waited there with the food, but I knew she wasn’t coming back. The man in the madras shirt bagged up coffee and a selection of dried nuts. He seemed more interested, frankly, in the dried lentils than in me or in whomever I’d been standing with moments earlier. I felt badly about the abandoned dry goods, so I loaded them into my arms and purchased them myself. I don’t even like apricots.
I texted some friends to meet me over by the college for pitchers, and we ended up closing the place down for the night.
* * *
A few weeks later, cleaning out the change tray, I came across the twist tie, which I’d forgotten she’d slipped me. On the back she’d inscribed nine numbers. One short of a phone number, but I dialed it anyway, trying a few logical digits up front to round it out. “The number you have dialed . . .” was the only answer I ever got.
Cooper by this point stayed mostly holed up in his room, but he would emerge now and then for a glass of water or some crackers. I stopped him that evening, and I realized I’d not seen him at all in many, many days.
“You look terrible, dude. Really terrible.”
“Huh?” I’d been perhaps his only human contact for weeks. He seemed to have forgotten how the conversation thing works.
“Say, take a look at this.” I handed him the strip.
He looked at it, alarmed.
“I thought you’d be interested. That woman gave it to me. You know, the one from the rec center.”
He burbled a bit, like someone with too much liquid in his mouth. “Oh God!” he cried. “God Almighty! Oh my God!” And he collapsed against me.
There was almost nothing to him anymore. Holding him up, I could feel the ribs and elbows piercing through his skin.
The next morning, I acted—did what I ought to have done months earlier. I called his parents, who came that afternoon and fetched him home to the small city in th
e piney woods where he’d grown up.
For a while there, I would call to check on him. Daily for a while, then days turned into weeks, and so on. The last time I called, it was the “the number you have reached” woman again. The Coopers had lived in that town their whole lives. I can’t imagine what happened to them.
* * *
As for me, I press on with life here in the city—and an odd enough place it is, this metroplex. The South, but not really the South; the West, but only sort of. A little bit of everything mixed in, which produces a quirky personality all its own. There are plenty worse places in the world.
Which has not come to an end, at least not yet. There are rooms full of people out there who are expecting it to, soon, at any moment, tomorrow, this afternoon—but the thing is, if you don’t know those people you don’t ever give it a thought. Which is a good thing, right?
I remain optimistic, then, despite the city’s craziness. I teach the kids, who continue to amaze me. I hang out with friends, do the dating thing when the spirit strikes. I am determined to stay in this game, to see it out to the end, whatever and whenever that might be.
There have been no more abductions.
And yet, sometimes I, too, find myself collapsing a bit on the inside, when the noise gets a little too much—when another mother kills her own children, when another bank fails, when another tornado scrapes a town off the prairie—and I find myself, like Cooper, plastered to this couch, exhausted by the thought of it all.
Still, I push through. I like my life here and, as I said, all and all, it isn’t so bad when you run the numbers.
So I sit tight. I am resolved, fixed, stolid, and mostly a very satisfied person. Unable to imagine where I might even go that wouldn’t be here.
THE STICKUP GIRL
BY HARRY HUNSICKER
South Dallas
I’m a bandit.
Hands up, sucker, and give me all your money.
A gun and a mask, getaway cars, the whole enchilada.
Call it a family thing, if you want.
My name is Nadine Parker.
I’m twenty-seven years old and the great-great-grandniece of Bonnie Parker. You know, like Bonnie & C lyde?
I used to be a stripper, along with my twin sister Chloe.
Before that I was the night clerk at a twenty-four-hour Stop & S hop on Singleton Boulevard in West Dallas, down the street from the site of Clyde Barrow’s family’s service station and not too far from where my great-great-aunt grew up.
Now Chloe and I rob places, which, occupational hazards aside, is a lot more fun than dancing. Not always as lucrative but sometimes you gotta make sacrifices for quality of life.
We mostly hit liquors stores, bars, and gas stations, with the occasional fast food joint. I handle the weaponry and the actual stickups; my sister drives.
Speaking of weapons, a gun is a hell of a piece of equipment. Much more than just the bang-bang-you’re-dead stuff you see on TV. There’s that, of course, but the real juice comes on the other end, the butterflies-in-your stomach feeling of dominance for whoever’s grabbing the handle.
That’s the part I like, the control that the gun gives me, especially when I’m telling some gold-chain-wearing, convenience-store-working dude to hand over all the cash or I’m gonna pop a cap in his skinny ass.
See, me and Chloe have never had a lot of control in our lives.
First there was Mama with her gambling after Daddy died in the Gulf War in ’91. Then there were all those low-life boyfriends of Mama’s groping after us as we got older.
All of which was accompanied by a steady downgrade in our living arrangements: the snug two-bedroom cottage with the porch swing replaced by a double-wide near the Goodwill store, followed by a HUD-voucher apartment on Westmoreland, a couple of streets over from the crack houses, the only gringo family for blocks around.
So the guns and the robbing, that gives us a little control.
But not when someone gets shot.
Chloe and I are in our hideout du jour, a motel on Fort Worth Avenue, next to a lube-and-tune shop and a used-tire store.
My sister’s lying on top of the covers, and she’s in a bad way.
I ease back the bloody bandage from her abdomen. She doesn’t open her eyes this time, doesn’t grimace in pain. Her breath comes in shallow gasps. Her skin is unhealthy-looking, gray like storm clouds rolling in from Oklahoma.
At least the wound has stopped bleeding.
It’s a puckered, ugly little hole a few inches to one side of her navel. The room smells like blood and sweat and human waste.
I mop her forehead with a damp washcloth. Tears well in my eyes.
She’s the only family I’ve got left. Nothing to my name but the three thousand dollars in cash in the closet, the results of our last two months’ activities.
I turn the television to the Oprah channel, volume low, and place the remote on the bedside table by a cell phone and a bottle of water.
A feeling of being out of control washes over me, and I realize the danger that comes from this sensation.
I kiss my sister on the forehead—her skin is hot—and walk to the door. I know where I have to go, and the thought fills me with dread.
* * *
This morning I decided we should rob my second ex-husband, and that’s what started all this.
I actually like Daryl, despite him being an ex and all.
Maybe it’s because he actually fessed up about getting chlamydia from that waitress at Sizzler, giving me a chance to get on antibiotics before the STD kicked in full force. Or it could be because he only slapped me around at the end of our marriage, and then just a little bit, like his heart wasn’t in it.
Or maybe it’s because he’s not real bright, and I feel sorry for him.
Hard to say. Emotions are funny things.
Probably the last one. Daryl is—no fooling here—as dumb as a carton of hair. He believes snow is frozen sand and that fish get into stock tanks by rain. He thinks Christmas is a celebration of Santa rising from the dead with his army of zombie elves.
Six months after our split, and Daryl is still assistant manager at Big Odelle’s Pawn, Stereo, and Latino Music Store on Jefferson Boulevard in South Dallas. He still wears short-sleeved polyester dress shirts, clip-on ties, and a Joe Dirt–style mullet.
At the moment of our glorious reunion, Daryl’s polyester-clad armpits are sweating dark moons as he holds his hands high, arms shaking, fingers splayed.
There’s nobody in the store but the two of us.
I aim the Smith & Wesson 9mm at the name tag clipped to his breast pocket, my face hidden by a bandanna. Adrenaline sharpens my senses, makes everything tight and clear.
“P-p-p-please, don’t sh-sh-sh-hoot me.” Daryl’s face turns pale. His skin color matches the shapeless jumpsuit that hides my figure, a svelte outline he might recognize. To complete the bandit ensemble, I’m also wearing knock-off Wayfarer sunglasses and a frizzy wig, bright red like the color of fresh apples.
“Give me all the money.” I alter my voice, throat gravelly.
A glass display case separates us. It’s greasy and scratched, contains only three or four car stereos, two fake Rolexes, and a half-dozen radar detectors, most of which are probably stolen.
Daryl gulps, no clue that the robber in front of him used to be his wife. I feel a moment of pity for him. Poor guy’s so dumb he doesn’t know the difference between his ass and fried chicken.
“And the money in the TV.” I point the 9mm at a thirty-year-old set on the back shelf.
Big Odelle, Daryl’s boss, runs a betting operation on the side. He keeps the cash from the bookie business in an elderly Magnavox that nobody would ever think of stealing.
Daryl’s jaw drops, his hands lower a few inches. Nobody’s supposed to know about the money in the TV. The dipwad has obviously forgotten that he told his ex-wife. He shakes his head slowly like that’s going to stop me.
The Smith & Wesson is not a D
irty Harry cannon, but it’s big enough to make an impression. In the quiet of Big Odelle’s shop, it’s pretty darned loud when I fire a round. The bullet tears into the wall of CDs on one side of the room.
The power of the weapon, the slap of recoil against my palm, fills my stomach with warmth, makes my thighs tingle.
Clear plastic cases and silvery shards of compact discs scatter everywhere.
Daryl cringes.
Early afternoon on a humid, overcast June day. The light streaming in the front windows makes the linoleum floor look extra dirty. The air smells like dust, gun smoke, and fear-sweat wafting off Daryl’s armpits.
He begins to blubber. Tears stream down his cheeks.
This infuriates me. It’s not the display of weakness or the terror etched across his face.
It’s the visible signs of emotion that make me shiver with anger, remembering the times I wanted to see any expression of feeling from this mullet-haired dimwit, a display of some concept above his hunger or perpetual horniness.
My arms throb with rage.
He senses my fury, rushes to the cash register, scoops up a handful of bills, a hundred bucks or so. From the Magnavox, he removes a thick stack of currency. He shoves everything into the empty McDonald’s sack I gave him a few seconds before.
“D-d-don’t hurt me. Please.” He tosses the sack on the counter. “I got a wife at home.”
I grab the sack with my free hand, ponder this new morsel of info.
“What’s her name?”
Daryl blinks several times but doesn’t say anything.
“Your wife.” My words are icy. “What’s her name?”
Silence in the store. Chloe is waiting in the side lot in a stolen El Camino. Outside, a car with glass-pack mufflers rumbles by. A heavy bassline from some Mexican rap song rattles the windows.
“I, um, don’t know.” He licks his lips. The expression on his face is a weasel-caught-in-headlights.
Neither of us speak. The situation is evident: dumb people shouldn’t try to lie.
Dallas Noir Page 20
