Lexicon (3 page)

[TWO]

“Hmm,” said the man in the trucker cap. “I think . . . no . . . just a second here . . .”

“Take your time, sir,” said Emily. “The queen isn’t going nowhere. She’s quite comfortable under there, in all her skirts. She’ll wait for you all day.” She smiled at a man standing behind the trucker. The man smiled back, remembered his wife, frowned. Forget that guy, then.

“On the left,” said a woman in an
I
❤
SAN FRANCISCO
sweater. Her eyes darted at Emily. “I think.”

“You think?” said the trucker.

“I’m pretty sure.”

Emily slipped the woman a wink.
You got it.
The woman’s lips tightened, pleased.

“I dunno,” said the trucker. “I was thinking middle.”

“The queen is quick on her feet, sir. No shame in not being able to follow her. Take a guess.”

“Middle,” said the trucker, because
Take a guess
meant,
That’s enough, Benny
. Benny wasn’t a trucker, of course. He had found that cap in an alley. With it pulled low, and his straggly sand-colored beard, he could pass.

“You sure, now? You got some advice from this lady here.”

“Naw, definitely middle.”

“As you say, sir.” Emily flipped the middle card. The crowd murmured. “Sorry, sir. She got away from you.” It took a little work to shift the queen from right to left, a Mexican Turnover, but she made it. “On the left, just like the lady said. Should have listened. Quick eye you have there, ma’am. Very quick.” She spread the cards, scooped them up, and flipped them from hand to hand, fast but not too fast. Sections of the crowd began to move away. Emily tucked a strand of blond hair behind her ear. She was wearing a big floppy hat with colored panels, which she had to keep pushing back to keep it from falling over her eyes. “Care to try, ma’am? Only two dollars. Simplest thing in the world, if you’ve got the eye for it.”

The woman hesitated. Only one game in her. Sometimes Emily would let a mark win the first game so they’d want to play again, and again, and again. But that only worked on a certain type of person. Still, two dollars. Two dollars was fine.

“I’ll play.”

The speaker was a young man with long hair in a cheap, not-quite-black suit and a pale yellow tie. A plastic ID hung from his shirt pocket. There were four of them, two more boys and a girl, all with that look, like college students on summer jobs. Salespeople, maybe, of something cheap and devious. Not cops. She could tell that. Cops were a constant hazard on the pier. She grinned. The woman in the sweater was moving away, but that didn’t matter. Cheap-suit guy was better. A lot better. “All right, sir. Step on up. You did me a favor, I think. That lady may have cleaned me out.”

“I may clean you out,” said the guy.

“Ho, ho. A big talker. That’s fine, sir. Talk as much as you like. No price tag on talking. The game, though, that’s two dollars.”

He dropped two bills onto Emily’s card table. She found him irritating, although wasn’t sure why: Guys like this, arrogant, an audience watching, they were gold. They would lose and double up forever. You had to throw them a win here and there, so they wouldn’t blow up, accuse you of cheating. But if you were smart, they would play all day. They would do it because once they were in the hole, their pride wouldn’t let them out. She’d taken $180 from a guy like this not two months ago, most of it on the last game. His neck had bulged and his eyes had watered and she saw how much he wanted to hit her. But there was a crowd. She had eaten that night.

She slung the queen and two aces onto the table. “Catch her if you can.” She flipped them, began to switch them around. “Loves her exercise, does the queen. Always takes her morning constitutional. Problem is, where does she go?” The guy wasn’t even looking at the cards. “Hard to win if you don’t watch, sir. Very tricky.” His ID tag said:
HI! I’M LEE!
Below that:
AUTHORIZED QUESTIONNAIRE ADMINISTRATION AGENT.
“Lee, is it? You must be good if you can follow the queen without looking at her, Lee. Very good.”

“I am,” he said, smiling. He hadn’t taken his eyes off her.

She decided to take Lee’s two dollars. If he ponied up again, she would take that. She would ask if he wanted to double up and she would take that and she would be merciless, not give him a single game, because Lee was a dick.

The crowd murmured. She was flicking the cards too fast, holding nothing back. She stopped. Pulled away her hands. There was a collective titter and some applause. She was breathing fast.

“Well,” she said. “Let’s see how good you are, Lee.”

He still hadn’t looked at the cards. The guy behind and to his right, one of the market researchers, smiled at her brilliantly, as if he’d only just noticed her. The other boy muttered to the girl, “Good thing is I’m right where I wanna be, right in the best possible place,” and the girl nodded and said, “Yeah, you’re so right.”

“On the right,” Lee said.

Wrong.
“You sure about that? Want a moment to think?” But her hands were already moving, eager to claim victory. “Last chance to—”

“Queen on the right,” he said, and as Emily touched the cards, she felt her fingers slide under and to the right. Her left hand went out in a flashy extension that did nothing but draw the eye, and her right slipped one card below the other.

There was scattered applause. Emily stared. The queen of hearts was on the right. She had switched them. At the last moment, she had switched them. Why had she done that?

“Well done, sir.” She noticed Benny shifting his feet, glancing around for cops, no doubt wondering what the hell she was doing. “Congratulations.” She reached into her money pouch. Two bucks. A difference of four, between winning and losing. That was a meal. It was a down payment on a night of chemical joy. She held out the bills, and when Lee took them, it hurt. He tucked them into his wallet. The girl glanced at her watch, something plastic and shiny. One of the boys yawned. “Play again? Double up, perhaps? A man like you likes to play for real money, am I right?” She was pushing, could hear the strain in her own voice, because she knew she’d lost him.

“No. Thank you.” He looked bored. “There’s nothing here I want.”

•   •   •

“What the fuck?” said Benny.

She kept walking, hunched over, her Pikachu bag on her back, the floppy hat wobbling about. The sun was setting but heat radiated out of the sidewalk, coming off the brick tenements in waves. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

“You
never
let a guy like that win the first game.” Benny was carrying the table. “He gets ahead, it’s over. He doesn’t care about money. He cares about beating you. You gave him what he wanted.”

“I flipped the wrong card, okay? I flipped the wrong card.”

“That guy was going to play.” Benny kicked a plastic bottle. It spun across the sidewalk and onto the road, where a passing car ran over it with a crunch. “He was good for twenty, easy. Maybe fifty.”

“Yeah, well.”

Benny stopped. Emily stopped, too. He was a good guy, Benny. Until he wasn’t. “Are you taking this seriously?”

“I am, Benny.” She tugged at his arm.

“Fifty bucks.”

“Yeah. Fifty bucks.” She felt her eyes widen. This would piss Benny off, but she couldn’t help it. She was perverse sometimes.

“What?”

“Come on.” She tugged his arm. It was like stone. “Let’s get some food. I’ll cook you something.”

“Fuck you.”

“Benny—”

“Fuck you!” He shook her off, let the table drop to the sidewalk. His fists bunched. A passing man in a collared business shirt glanced at her, then at Benny, then away.
Thanks, guy.
“Get away from me!”

“Benny, come on.”

He took a step forward. She flinched. When he hit, he meant it. “Do not follow me home.”

“Fine,” she said. “Jesus, fine.” She waited until the violence drained out of him, then put out her hand. “At least give me my money. I made a hundred twenty today; give me half.” Then she ran, because Benny’s eyes popped in the way that meant she’d pushed him too far, again. Her Pikachu bag bounced against her back. Her floppy hat fell off and she left it on the sidewalk. When she reached the corner, Benny was half a block back. He’d chased her, but not far. She was glad she’d held on to her bag. Her jacket was in there.

•   •   •

She slept in Gleeson’s Park, beneath a hedge that people didn’t notice and that had escape routes on two sides. She woke to a midnight screaming match, but it was nobody she knew and too far away to be a threat. She closed her eyes and fell asleep to
fuck
and
cunt
and
mine
. Then it was dawn and a drunk was pissing on her legs.

She scrambled up. “Dude. Dude.”

The man stumbled back. “Sorry.” He barely got the word out.

She inspected herself. Spatters on her pants, boots. “Dude, the fuck?”

“I . . . didn’t . . . see . . .”

“Fuck,” she said, and pulled her bag out of the hedge and went looking for a bathroom.

•   •   •

There was a public restroom in a corner of the park. It wasn’t a place she went if she could help it, but the sun was rising and her pants were stiffening with urine. She circled its cinder block exterior, carrying her boots, until she was sure it was empty, then stood in the doorway, thinking. Only one way out, was the problem with public restrooms. One way out and you could holler all you wanted; nobody would come to help. But she went in. She checked the lock, just in case it had been repaired since the last time she was here. No. She tugged off her pants and stuffed them and her sock under a faucet. Concrete air tickled her skin. She threw glances toward the doorway, because this was a really bad position to be in should anyone appear, but no one came, so she got confident and lifted her leg to wash beneath the faucet. The paper towel dispenser was empty, so she mopped herself dry with translucent squares of toilet paper.

She opened her bag. Maybe better clothes had materialized while she wasn’t looking. No. She closed the bag and wrung out her jeans as best she could. What she would have liked to do was carry them over to the park and dry them on the grass while she lay in the sun, legs bare, eyes closed. Just soaking up rays. Her and her jeans. Another time, maybe. Another universe. She began to pull on her damp pants.

•   •   •

As she wandered down Fleet, her stomach tweaked. It was too early for the soup kitchens. She thought about hitting up a friend. Maybe Benny had cooled down. She chewed her lip. She felt like a McMuffin.

Then she saw him: Lee, of the long hair and cheap suit, Lee who had taken her two dollars. He was planted on a street corner, clipboard in hand, approaching commuters with a fake smile. He was in market research, she remembered; she’d seen that on his ID. She watched him. It felt like he owed her.

When she approached, his eyes shifted to her briefly from the man he was quizzing. “You owe me breakfast,” she said.

“Thank you so much,” Lee told the man. “I appreciate your time.” He wrote something on his clipboard and flipped the page. When he was done writing, he smiled at Emily. “It’s the hustler.”

“I let you win,” she said. “I took pity on you. Buy me an Egg McMuffin.”

“You let me win?”

“Come on. I’m a professional. You don’t take a game off me unless I give it to you.” She smiled. It was hard to tell if this was working. “Fair’s fair. I’m hungry.”

“I’d have thought a professional could afford her own Egg McMuffin.”

“Sure,” she said, “but I’m letting you pay because I like your face.”

Lee looked amused. It was the first nice expression she’d seen from him. “Okay.” He tucked his pen into his clipboard. “Tell you what, I will buy you an Egg McMuffin.”

“Two Egg McMuffins,” she said.

•   •   •

She bit down and it was as good as she’d imagined. Across the Formica table, Lee sat with his arms spread along the back of the booth seat. Outside, children yipped and chased each other around a neon playground. Who brought their kids to McDonald’s for breakfast? She shouldn’t be judging. She gulped coffee.

“You are hungry,” said Lee.

“Tough times.” She chewed her muffin. “It’s the economy.”

Lee wasn’t eating. “How old are you?”

“Eighteen.”

“I mean really.”

“Eighteen.” She was sixteen.

“You look young to be on your own.”

She shrugged, unwrapping the next McMuffin. Lee had bought her three, plus the coffee and hash browns. “I’m okay. I’m fine. How old are you?”

He watched her devour the muffin. “Why did you want a McMuffin?”

“I haven’t eaten in, like, a day.”

“I mean a McMuffin in particular.”

“I like them.”

“Why?”

She eyed him. It was a stupid question. “I like them.”

“Right.” He looked away for the first time.

She didn’t want to talk about herself. “Where are you from? Not here.”

“How can you tell?”

“It’s a gift.”

“Well,” he said, “you’re right. I travel. City to city.”

“Asking people to fill out questionnaires?”

“That’s right.”

“You must be really good at that,” she said. “You must be, like, extremely talented at asking people to fill out questionnaires.” His expression didn’t change. She didn’t know why she was trying to needle him. He had bought her food. But still. She didn’t like him. It took more than McMuffins to change that. “What brings you to San Francisco?”

“You.”

“Oh yeah?” She hoped this wasn’t a running situation. She’d had enough of running. She swallowed the last of the McMuffin and started on the hash browns, because it would be good if she could get all this down first.

“Not you in particular. Your type. I’m looking for people who are persuasive and
intransigent.”

“Well, bingo,” she said, although she didn’t know what
intransigent
meant.

“Unfortunately, you failed.”

“I failed?”

“You let me take your money.”

“Hey. That was a pity win. I already said. You want to try again?”

He smiled.

“I’m serious. You won’t win again.” She meant it.