A Better Goodbye (4 page)

“Drink it. What else?”

The kid smirked while his buddies erupted in laughter.

“I better see your ID first,” Nick said.

“Left it at home,” the kid said. “Come on, man, just one—” Then his eyes got wide. His buddies' eyes did, too. “Shit,” he said, and spun away on his bike, pedaling furiously as his buddies scrambled to catch up with him.

Nick was watching them disappear behind the truck when he heard a voice at his back: “Your money, man, and no fockin' around.”

“Just let me put the bottles down,” Nick said.

“Nice and easy or I'll kill your ass.”

Nick lowered the case to the ground and turned around slowly. It was the gangbanger he'd seen when he was pulling in behind the bowling alley, still in black with his hood up and that life-is-cheap look on his face. The only accessory he had added was the pistol he was pointing at Nick, holding it flat instead of up and down, like he'd learned everything he knew about guns in the movies.

“You'll kill me?” Nick said, more curious than afraid.

“Goddamn right I will.” The banger was coming toward Nick, not too fast, not too slow, every move a message that he had done this before.

“What if I told you I don't care?” Nick said.

“You must be fockin' crazy.”

But something in the banger's voice betrayed him. Not doubt, really. More like discomfort at having to think in a situation where he was confronted by a kind of victim he'd never had before, one whose expression stayed as blank as the parking lot they were standing on.

“Keep talkin' and you're dead, motherfocker. Swear to God you are.” The banger stopped a step away from Nick. “Now quit fockin' around and give me the money.”

The pistol, whatever kind it was, was pointed at Nick's belly, and Nick could see the banger's finger tensing around the trigger.

His stomach muscles tightened reflexively, and everything after that became instinct. There were footsteps coming out the store's front door, letting him know there was still a world beyond the gangbanger's threats. Then a voice: “Hey, Nick, hang on a minute.” Sounded like Eddie. The banger glanced over to see who it was, maybe even flashed on shooting a second motherfucker if that's what it took to get the beer man's money. That instant was all Nick needed to unload a left hook straight out of his past.

His hands were at his side, so the punch had to travel farther than it would have in a boxing ring. Four inches, six inches, that was the ideal. But beggars can't be choosers. Distance be damned, everything else was the product of all those years in the gym—calling on the muscles on his right side to torque his left side, pivoting on the toe of his left foot, keeping his left shoulder back as long as he could until he brought his arm whipping around and unleashed a punch that crackled with violence. He caught the banger turning back to him, a lot of jaw, a little bit of that stupid fucking hood, and the contact sent a lightning bolt all the way to his armpit. The air filled with a crack—maybe it was the banger's jaw breaking, maybe it was Nick's imagination. Thought, consciousness, even precious seconds of breath ceased for the banger. He pitched to his side, motionless, and landed with a sound that was soft and wet.

Like shit from a high-flying bird,
a voice in Nick's memory said. Nick didn't want to hear any voices. But Eddie was standing over the banger, yelling, “Jesus Christ, I think he's dead,” and Nick knew it might be true—he'd seen it before—and it scared him more than the gun had. He was still scared when the cops showed up, uniforms first, then two in plain clothes. Even when the banger finally sat up and the cops cuffed him, Nick couldn't silence the cacophony in his head.

Eddie and his customers were chattering among themselves, saying they'd seen a lot of crazy shit in the neighborhood but never anything like this. The locksmith from next door kept wishing out loud that he'd had a video camera—he'd watched the whole thing—and the kids came back to stare at Nick with more awe than Anglos usually got from the locals.

Nick wanted to make it all go away, as if getting rid of the talk, the people, and the cop cars would bottle his memories back up. But the only thing he could do was watch one of the plainclothes cops walk up frowning and say, first thing out of his mouth, “I hope you realize that asshole could have killed you.”

“Yeah, he mentioned the possibility,” Nick said.

“Guess you weren't impressed.”

“That's one way to look at it.”

She liked to sit up front in class. The girls she had made friends with at school, the ones who had no clue about her other life and knew her only as Jenny, said she wanted the professors to see she looked like Lucy Liu, only cuter. Though she never said so, she enjoyed the flattery. But she certainly wasn't glammed up for Modern American Poetry, no makeup, her hair pulled back in a ponytail, wearing jeans and a cotton sweater. On the first day of spring quarter, she was raising her hand with a question she couldn't wait to ask, and not because she wanted to score points, which might otherwise have been her strategy. This time she really wanted to know something.

The instructor, a middle-aged woman in the midst of dropping the country's big names in poetry—Frost, Plath, Berryman, Schwartz, Jarrell, Lowell—looked mildly amused by her eagerness. “Yes, Ms. . . . ?”

“Yee,” Jenny said. “Will we be reading anything by Elizabeth Bishop?”

“Are you an admirer of Bishop?”

“Kind of, I guess. I mean, I read ‘One Art' and . . . ” Jenny searched for the words to describe the way the poem had hit her, and haunted her.

It was ironic the way Bishop had written about mastering the art of loss, insisting that you could lose anything in your life and get on without it. Jenny knew from experience that wasn't true, and she knew Bishop had known it, too. That was the connection she had made with a poet who was a lesbian, an alcoholic, and dead, three things Jenny wasn't, but this didn't seem like the time to be baring her soul.

“And it was just, like, really beautiful,” she said at last, taking refuge in the inarticulate.

“It's a villanelle,” the instructor said.

“Excuse me?”

“‘One Art' is a villanelle, a nineteen-line poem consisting of five tercets and a final quatrain in two rhymes.”

Jenny couldn't resist smiling. “If I promise to remember that, can we read Elizabeth Bishop?”

“I'm afraid that's a promise I can't make,” the instructor said. “We're dealing with a finite amount of time and I'm forced to exclude some poets whose work I truly admire.”

“Like her?”

“Afraid so.”

“That's okay,” Jenny said, and she sounded so sympathetic that the class erupted in laughter.

She was the only Asian, so maybe they didn't expect her to have a sense of humor. They probably couldn't understand why she wasn't with all the other Asians, studying computers or math and science. But like almost everybody else—Caucasians, Latinos, African-Americans, Russians, Persians, maybe even the students in their forties and fifties—she wanted to move on to a four-year school. Bay City College was a way to get there, a two-year stepping stone to UCLA, although this was actually the third year she had taken classes there, off and on. She kept telling herself she was finally getting it together.

Sara and Rachel, the girls she went to have coffee with after Modern American Poetry, assumed she always had it together. Sara was the first to get that idea because she and Jenny were so crazy about video games that they once spent an entire weekend, nearly sixty sleepless hours, killing the zombies and dragons that populated
Gauntlet: Dark Legacy.
They finally beat the game around ten on a Monday morning and celebrated by calling Rachel and convincing her to skip class so they could go shopping for lingerie.

All Jenny bought was a fishnet teddy, but it was enough to make Sara and Rachel attach themselves to her because they thought she knew something about guys they didn't. The best Jenny could say on the subject was that she had reached the point where she could take them or leave them.

It was kind of boring but Sara and Rachel would practically break out in a rash if they had an inkling that they were on a guy's radar. Jenny assumed it was partly because they were always struggling with their self-image, although right now both of them had lost weight and looked pretty good. The other thing was that they were so much more innocent than she was. When a guy checked them out, she could practically hear the girls' hearts thumping. With her it was like whatever, one more moron on a mission to get her naked and prove his manhood. It had got so every time she saw the private-caller ID pop up, her eyes rolled. Talk about jaded.

This morning, when she was still trying to wake up, her latest ex-boyfriend had called all pissed off about his cell. “What happened?” he whined. “You didn't pay the bill,” she said. It was the same message she had been delivering for the last six months, since he'd confessed that his credit was so lousy he couldn't get a cell without putting down a thousand-dollar deposit. She had opened a Verizon account for him in her name, even agreed to pay half the bill, but it wasn't because he was a great lover or anything. He was just a cute guy she'd met doing massage, back when she was going through a lonely spell, before she learned he was still living with his parents.

She wondered if they'd been listening this morning when he told her, “I'll go pay it now,” and she had told him, “It's okay, it's already been paid—and the phone's turned off.” After he got all the “fucks” and “goddammits” out of his system, he'd uttered the magic question: “I mean, shit, how could you?” And she'd said, “You don't need a cell phone. You don't deserve a cell phone.” And it felt good.

Now Jenny's cell was ringing again, another private call. It seemed like her entire life revolved around that phone, her worth as a human being measured by the enormity of her monthly bill. She would use her cell to get together with somebody, and when they were finally at the same club or party or whatever, she would talk to someone else on the phone about getting together with them. She wondered if life was like that everywhere, or just in L.A.

“Excuse me,” she said to Sara and Rachel, who were in deep yenta mode, talking about their respective hair colorists, giving no sign that they heard her.

It was Jeff calling. He ran a small construction company and dealt drugs on the side. She'd met him at a party when she bought Ecstasy from one of the girls he called his elves, twenty dollars for a few hours of guaranteed mindless entertainment.

“Hey,” she said. “I thought you were in New Zealand.”

“Just got back.”

“So soon?”

“No point in staying. I sold all my tabs.”

“You're joking me. The whole bible?”

“Yeah. I cut it up and told the Kiwis, ‘Here, take the word of God.'”

Something in Jenny's laugh made Sara and Rachel start sneaking looks at her, really straining their peripheral vision. Their curiosity always soared when they sensed that Jenny had a man on the line. Sometimes she thought it was adorable, sometimes annoying.

“You must be rich now,” she told Jeff.

“I couldn't spend all the money I made down there.”

“What about up here?”

“We should hook up and see. You and me, you know?”

“Is that right?”

Coy or not, Jenny couldn't help thinking about a weekend in Vegas. Or a trip to Mexico, maybe Cabo. It had been two months since her last job ended ugly and she still hadn't taken the time to unwind. Maybe Jeff would come through for her.

“Let's check out some boxing,” he said.

“I'm really not so crazy about boxing,” Jenny said, too bummed to keep the disappointment out of her voice.

“It's not that Oscar De La Hoya bullshit. I'm talking about, like, underground boxing. In a warehouse or something. They won't even tell you where it's going to be unless you're tight with somebody. The guy that runs it gets his drugs from me. I don't know where he finds the fighters, jail maybe, but you wouldn't believe how these crazy fuckers fuck each other up.”

Jeff was laughing, but Jenny said, “It doesn't sound funny to me.” That was when Sara and Rachel stopped pretending they weren't eavesdropping and started staring.

“Come on, lighten up,” Jeff said. “It's just a bunch of assholes who'd be kicking the shit out of each other anyway.”

“I've got to go, okay?”

“What's wrong?”

“Nothing. It's just, I'm being rude to the friends I'm with and—”

“Aw, you gonna be like that? Okay, fine. But sooner or later we're getting together, and you won't be sorry, I promise.” Jenny didn't take the bait, so Jeff plowed ahead. “This is your cell, right?”

“Right.”

“I'll call you tonight.”

“Cool,” Jenny said, hanging up without a goodbye and knowing he wouldn't call because guys in his world never did.

Now she had to deal with Sara and Rachel, incredulity frozen on their faces by the chill she had put in the air.

“I can't believe you blew that guy off,” Rachel said.

“I was talking to a guy?”

“You are such a bitch,” Sara said.

“I thought you'd never notice,” Jenny said, smiling sweetly.

“Well, we did,” Sara said, “but you can make up for it. Tell us about the guy you were talking to.”

“The truth wouldn't be half as fun as what you're imagining.”

“No way,” Rachel said. “The truth will set us free.”

“Sorry, you'll have to set yourselves free.”