Collected Stories

by Lewis Shiner

  Here’s the carrot, was what he was saying, and here’s the stick. Good money, tax free, if you do it. Turn this case down because it sounds a little hinky and you’re back on the street.

  “What’s this woman’s name?”

  “Some horrible yuppie name...” He looked at the file. “Lane, that’s it. Lane Rochelle. Isn’t that a hoot?”

  I didn’t like the way her name made me feel. Like I was standing outside the window of one of those big Highland Park mansions back in Dallas, wearing last week’s clothes, watching guys in tuxedos and women in strapless dresses eat little sandwiches with the crusts cut off. I blamed her for it. “I don’t know anything about this kind of work,” I said. “I mean, if she sees me I’m liable to scare her off. I don’t exactly blend into a crowd.”

  “Let her see you. It’s not a problem.”

  I still wasn’t sure. “When would you want me to start?”

  He slapped me on the shoulder as he came around the desk. “There you go,” he said. He walked out of the office and I heard the hum of his big new copy machine.

  So I drove over to campus in my good corduroy jacket and my frayed cuffs and my black knit tie. I parked my pickup in the Dobie garage and walked down 21st Street to the Perry Casteñeda Library, where Lane Rochelle works. The piece of paper Dennis gave me shows her address and her job history and her criminal record (NONE). Also a xerox of a photo of her from the society page of the Statesman.

  She’s older than Dennis let on, twenty-eight, she’s working on her master’s degree in History. She’s paying her own way with her job at the library, not living off her rich parents back in Virginia, which makes me like her more too. The photo doesn’t tell me much. Blonde hair, nice smile, wears her clothes the way Dennis wears his.

  I went past the security guard and the turnstiles and looked around. I mean, I don’t spend a lot of time in libraries. The place is big and there’s this smell of old paper that makes me a little sick to my stomach. The circulation desk is off to my left and across from it there are some shelves with new books and a yellow Naugahyde couch. I found a book that looked interesting, a true-crime thing about this guy that kept a woman in a box. I sat down and every so often looked up and finally I caught sight of Lane moving around behind the counter.

  She’s not an ice princess, and she’s not some kind of sexpot either. She’s just a real person, maybe a little prettier than most. Right then she looked like somebody that didn’t get a lot of sleep the night before and is having a tough day. The second time she caught me looking at her I saw it hit home—some big guy lurking around her job. I hated to see the look on her face, which was mostly fear.

  A little before eleven o’clock she came out a door to one side of the counter with her purse and a bookbag. I let her get out the front door and then followed. It was nice out, warmer than you could ask February to be. The trees had their first buds, which would all die if it froze again. There were even birds and everything. She headed up 21st Street and turned at the Littlefield fountain, the one with the horses, and climbed the steps toward the two rows of buildings on top of the hill. Once she looked back and I turned away, crouched down to pretend to tie my shoe, not fooling anybody.

  I watched her go in the first building on the left, the one with the word MUSIC over the door. I followed her inside. The halls were full of students and I watched her push through them and go in one of the classrooms. Just before she went in she turned and gave me this look of pure hatred.

  Made me feel pretty low. I stood there for ten minutes just the same, after the hall cleared and the bell rang, to make sure she stayed put. Then I went outside and walked around the side of the building. The classrooms all had full-length windows. The top halves were opened out to let in the warm air. I found Lane’s room and sat in the grass, watching a woman teacher write on the board. She had heavy legs and glasses and dark hair in a pony tail. Charlene always talks about going back to college, but I can’t see it, not for me. I had a semester of junior college, working construction all day and sleeping through class at night. They didn’t have football scholarships and I wasn’t good enough for the four-year colleges that did. So I went with what I knew and took a job on my daddy’s drilling crew.

  By eleven thirty I was starving to death. There was a Vietnamese woman with a pushcart down by the fountain selling eggrolls. I walked down there and got me a couple and a Coke and took them back up the hill to eat. It would have been okay, really, eating eggrolls outside on a pretty spring day and getting paid for it. Only Lane knew I was there watching and I could see what it was doing to her.

  At noon we went back to the library. Lane sat off to herself in the shelves behind the counter. She had brought her lunch in her bookbag, a carton of yogurt and a Diet Coke. She didn’t seem to be able to eat much. After a couple of bites she threw it away and went to the rest room.

  She got off work at two in the afternoon. I watched her climb on a shuttlebus and then I drove out to her apartment and waited for her. She has a one-bedroom on 53rd street near Airport, what they call a mixed neighborhood—black, white, brown, all low-income. This is where the rape happened. There’s a swimming pool that doesn’t look too clean and a couple of 70s muscle cars up on blocks. A lot like my neighborhood, over on the far side of Manor Road.

  She walked right past me on her way to her apartment. I was sitting in my truck, watching the shuttlebus pull away. She went right past me. I could tell by the set of her shoulders that she knew I was there. She went in her apartment, toward the near end of the second floor, and I could hear the locks click shut from where I sat. She pulled the blinds and that was it.

  I did what Dennis told me. I got out and made a log of all the cars parked along the street there, make and model and license number, and then I went on home.

  I was in time to give the kids a ride back from the bus stop. Ricky is fifteen and going through this phase where he doesn’t talk except to say yes or no to direct questions. Mostly he shrugs and shakes his head in amazement at how stupid adults are. So naturally he didn’t say anything about me wearing a tie. Judy, who is seventeen, wouldn’t let it alone. “What’s it for, Dad? You look way cool. You messing around? Got a girlfriend?” She doesn’t mean anything by it, she’s just kidding.

  I had TV dinners in the oven by the time Charlene got home. Salisbury steak, mashed potatoes, and that apple cobbler dessert she loves. Her new issue of Vogue was there and she took it into the bathroom with her for a while. When she came out she was showered and in her blue-gray bathrobe and fuzzy slippers, with her hair in a towel. She loves Vogue magazine. I guess it takes her to some other world, where she isn’t pushing forty and she still weighs what she did in high school and she doesn’t spend all her days answering phones for a heating and air conditioning company.

  “How’d it go?” she said. We had Wheel of Fortune on, the kids on the floor with their dinners between us and the TV.

  “I got four hours in today, ten bucks an hour. I should make at least that tomorrow.”

  “That wasn’t what I asked.”

  One reason I never ran around on Charlene is I don’t think I could fool her for a second. “I don’t like it,” I said. “I think he’s using me to scare somebody, because I’m big and ugly.”

  Charlene grabbed the back of my neck and shook me like a cat. “You’re big all right. But I always thought you was handsome.” Then she leaned back and picked up her magazine again and she was gone.

  Everybody was asleep by eleven. I went out real quiet and drove over to Lane’s apartment. There were a lot more cars out front this time and I wrote down all the new ones on my log sheet. The light was still on in her apartment. I was about to head home when the blinds moved and she looked out and saw my truck.

  I wanted out of there bad enough that I made the tires on that pickup squeal.

  I slept awhile and then laid awake awhile and then it was morning. I had a lot of coffee and not too much to eat which made my stomach hurt. />
  I was already at the library when Lane came in. She saw me and went straight through the STAFF door and stayed out of sight. A few minutes later a campus cop knocked on the door and she stood in the doorway with him and pointed me out.

  I felt like high school again, like I’d been caught with a Playboy in the toilet. The campus cop walked walked over and asked me if I had any ID. I showed him my driver’s license.

  “What you up to here?”

  I gave him one of Dennis’s cards, like Dennis said I should. “I’m doing research for a law office. Call this number, they’ll back me up.”

  “Don’t look like you’re doing research to me. Maybe you should move along.”

  “Fine,” I said. I put my book back on the shelf, which was too bad because it had gotten interesting. Only I couldn’t check it out because I wasn’t a student. I went outside and sat on a wall.

  It was a nice day for something. Warm again, a few clouds, the birds getting ready for spring. College girls all around. I never saw so many good-looking girls in one place. Young and healthy, in tight jeans and running shoes, clean soft hair blowing around, sweet smells trailing along behind them. It hurts to see so much that you want, that you can never have, to be so close you could reach out and touch it.

  About a half hour later Lane came out of the library and headed down Speedway, right through the middle of campus. I didn’t think she saw me. I found myself noticing the way she walked, the way her young, firm ass strained against her jeans. Don’t even think about it. I waited until she had a good lead on me before I started after her.

  She turned left on 24th Street, by the Experimental Science building, and I lost sight of her. When I turned the corner she was gone. I hesitated for a second, kids shouldering by me on both sides and then I went up to the first door I came to and looked inside. Not there.

  When I turned around she was right in front of me. “What do you want?” she said. She was shaking and her voice was too loud.

  “I’m working for a lawyer—”

  “That defense lawyer? That fuck? Did he hire you to follow me around? What the fuck does he want from me? Is this Gestapo bullshit supposed to make me drop the case?”

  “I don’t think he—”

  “What kind of slimebag are you, anyhow? Haven’t I had enough shit already? How can you stand to go around and humiliate people this way?” Crying now, people stopping to stare at us. “Do you know what happened this morning? My boss called me in and wanted to know why I was being followed. Like it was my fault! I had to tell him everything. Everything! Can you imagine how humiliating that was? No. Of course you can’t. If you could imagine it you would go shoot yourself.”

  A boy walked up and put his hand on her arm. She shook it off and shouted at him, too. “Leave me the fuck alone!” She turned back to me, her mascara running all over her face, and spit on my left shoe. Then she shoved her way through the crowd and started running back down Speedway, back the way she came.

  I started shaking too, as soon as I got in the truck. I shook all the way to Dennis’s office.

  He was with “one of his people” when I came in. After a few minutes his door opened and this good-looking Chicano came out. He was in his twenties, with longish hair and a mustache and an expensive black leather coat that hung down to his knees. He smiled at the red haired receptionist and pointed at her and said, “You be good, now.”

  “You too, Javier.”

  “No chance,” he said, and rubbed his mustache and sniffed. The receptionist laughed. I couldn’t help but think that Dennis was paying him more than ten bucks an hour for whatever it was he did.

  Dennis was standing in the doorway of his office. “Come on in,” he said.

  I sat on the edge of the armchair. It wasn’t really built for that and it made me feel off-balance. There was a dusty-looking mirror and a soda straw on his desk.

  “You want a little toot?”

  I shook my head. “It’s about this case. This is really nasty. I don’t know if I can go on with it.”

  “Okay,” he said. He put the mirror and the straw in the top center drawer and then got a bank bag out of another one. It was one of those rubberized deals with the zipper and the little lock, except it wasn’t zipped or locked. “How many hours did you have?”

  I guess I expected him to argue with me at least, maybe even offer me something else. “Call it seven,” I said. “And two parking receipts.” I put my log sheet with the license numbers on it and the receipts on the corner of his desk. I felt small sitting there, just waiting for him to pay me.

  “So what happened?” he said.

  “She turned on me, started screaming. Said I was trying to scare her off.”

  “Gave you the old not-a-moment’s-peace bit, right?” He counted out four twenties and put them in front of me. “Haven’t got any singles, you can keep the change.”

  “Something like that, yeah.”

  “Well, I understand. If you can’t hack it...”

  “It’s not that I can’t hack it, I just don’t see why I should want to.”

  Dennis sat back in his chair. Today he was wearing his casual outfit. I’d never seen a silk jacket before, but Charlene had showed me pictures and I was pretty sure that’s what it was. The pants were khaki, the shirt was pale blue, the shoes had little tassels on them. “Let me explain something to you. This business isn’t about who makes the most noise or who sheds the most tears. At least it’s not supposed to be. It’s about the truth. And the truth is not always what it seems. Ever have some asshole nearly run you off the road, and then he gives you the finger? A guilty conscience can make for a lot of righteous-sounding anger. This Rochelle bimbo has been going to one of those dyke counselling centers, and who knows what kind of crap they’ve been feeding her.”

  “But what if she’s telling the truth?”

  “If she is, my client goes to jail, probably does ten years of hard time. If she’s lying, she could go up herself for perjury. These are not matchsticks we’re playing for, here.” He leaned forward again. Every time he moved he did something different with his voice and I felt my emotions getting yanked around in another direction. “Look, I understand where you’re coming from. It takes a while to build up your callouses. Just like working on an oil rig, right? You get a lot of blisters at first and it hurts like hell. Then you toughen up and you can really get the job done.” He put the bank bag in the drawer. “Take the afternoon off, think it over. If you still want out, call me tonight, I’ll put somebody else on the case. I’ll be here in the office, I’m working late all week. Okay?”

  “Okay,” I said. I took the small stack of bills and folded it and put it in my front pants pocket. I wondered when was the last time Dennis got a blister on his hands.

  As I got up he said, “Just one thing you want to keep in mind. Everybody’s got something to hide.”

  I can’t remember the last time I had that much cash in my pocket. It made me a little drunk. I drove to the Victoria’s Secret store at Highland Mall and spent $58 on a crepe de chine sarong-wrap chemise in mango, size L. I took it home and hid it in the bedroom, and all through supper I was goofy as a little kid, just thinking about it.

  I gave it to Charlene after we went to bed. She started crying. She said, “I’ll get back on my diet tomorrow. It’s so beautiful. I can’t wear it the way I look now.” She put it in the back of her drawer. She didn’t even try it on.

  She kissed me on the cheek and lay down with her back to me. I sat there, my hands all knotted up into fists. After a while she went to sleep.

  I just sat there. I hadn’t called Dennis. I was supposed to call him if I wasn’t going back on the job. If I didn’t do it he would just get somebody else. Somebody with all those callouses I don’t have. Finally I got up and put my clothes back on and went out driving.

  I guess I was supposed to be thinking things over, but what I did was drive to Lane Rochelle’s apartment. It was a quarter to twelve. I wrote the time
down on a new log sheet and walked around and wrote down all the cars and license numbers. Lane’s window was dark. I got back in the truck and tried to find a comfortable way to sit. I wondered what she wore to bed. Maybe it was a crepe de chine sarong-wrap chemise in mango, size S. Maybe it was nothing at all.

  A car door slammed and woke me up. The digital clock on my dash said one AM. I saw a guy walking away from a black Trans Am, two slots down on the right. It was the guy I saw in Dennis’s office that afternoon. I slid a little lower in the seat.

  I wondered what was he doing there? Did Dennis give him my job? He went through the gate by the pool, headed for the far set of stairs.

  The apartments are kind of L-shaped, with the long part parallel to the street and the short part coming toward where I was. There was another set of stairs on the end of the building closest to me. I got out of the truck as quiet as I could and went up the stairs. I got to the corner just as the guy knocked on Lane’s door.

  I could hear my heart. It sounded like it was in my neck. The guy knocked again, louder this time. I heard the door open and catch on its chain.

  “Javier,” Lane said. She sounded only a little surprised.

  “I got your message,” the guy, Javier, said.

  “It’s late. What time is it?”

  “Not that late. You gonna let me in or what?”

  “Not tonight. Come back tomorrow, okay?”

  “Listen, I went to a lot of trouble to drive over here. How about a beer or something, anyway?”

  “Fuck off.” I wondered where she learned to talk like that. “Come back tomorrow night.”

  The door slammed and two or three locks turned. I didn’t hear any footsteps. Javier was still standing there. Then he said, “Chingase, puta!” and walked away.