Preparation for the Next Life (51 page)

On his stairs, Skinner found a business card for an escort service. It said Outcalls Only, there was a phone number, Flushing, New York, and the picture was a tan Asian woman in a thong, black-and-white palm trees. For Perfect Ass, it said.

Skinner kept it as evidence, storing it in his assault pack thinking, After I waste this motherfucker, I’ll show them.

47

F
OR A SERIES OF
days on and around July 4
^th
, when Monroe was at family picnics having roast pork with relatives he disdained, they let her work the front. By sometime in the afternoon, her feet would hurt from standing up all day and she would check the time, hipshot and bored in her tight jeans and the always-dirty food-encrusted uniform shirt. She dug the ladle into the rice, folded the rice over and glanced out over the counter, barely hearing the monotonous roar of the customers ordering in Chinese, the trays clattering, the kitchen racket, the syrupy pop songs. Only her predicament existed to her. She went round the elements of her life again: Skinner, papers, cops, marriage, lawyer, money, job, housing, Skinner, his illness, money. Every planet in the orbit was another unknown. At night, she turned the fan on in the hot plywood shed and couldn’t sleep until the room cooled off toward morning. Her head hurt. Periodically, day or night, she suffered a jab of panic: What if someone locked her up again just because he thought it was his job? And then she saw the cell. She tried to breathe and think of what to do. You will at least try to do something, she told herself. You will go with Skinner and get married. But should I get an ID in my legal name first? A good one? This reintroduced the problem of arrest. Or getting robbed or ripped-off. And money. Money. She was running out of money. If I can’t pay rent, then what? She lifted her foot and held the instep of her sneaker to stretch her thigh and a tremor such as you might see on a horse’s flank shot down her leg.

Above all, she wanted to do something she could control. She wanted to reject every solution that involved going through a government office. It wasn’t realistic, but she wished she could reduce everything to the simple physical test of running away.

That evening she went to see Skinner and he met her in a state of paranoia, pacing back and forth in the sunset shadows on the corner. The buildings across from the train tracks cast walls of gloom over the avenue. He greeted her by looking around her at the empty street,
the train tracks, the sniper positions in the windows, the roofs, hitching up his beltless jeans and saying come on, let’s get inside. Then he went around the basement checking their perimeter, looking in the bathroom, peeking around the corner into the kitchen area, opening his closet and gazing at the boiler.

To her horror, she saw he had the gun in his hand, and she told him to put it away or she would leave.

He had taken something that made him manic, she thought.

We have to try to take it easy, she said, to make the right decision. She told him she had decided that, if he was still willing, getting married was probably the best thing they could do to ensure that she wouldn’t be deported and that they shouldn’t delay any longer. What did he think?

He was all for it. Good to go. Let’s go now. You never knew what might happen tomorrow.

She pointed out they couldn’t go now, the office would be closed.

Then we’ll go tomorrow. You never knew what was gonna happen the day after tomorrow. Or the day after that. Or the day after that. They had to do it soon. He had a plan too. You wanna hear? I’ve decided I’m going back!

Back to where?

Where else? The Sand Box. I’m done here. Making all these thinking errors. All the problems. I used to be a highly locked-on soldier. I need to get back in there. And I know when I do, it’s going to be the best thing for everyone, instead of stewing over it from three thousand miles away.

He told her that in his first firefight he had been more excited than at any point in his life, before or since.

He told her he wanted to go back as a contractor. He would make one hundred forty thousand dollars in one year. Their problems would be over, he said.

Then the next day, Sassoon was back at work and Zou Lei was consigned to dishwashing duty again. As ever, she was reviewing her situation. Today was Friday. She would take action and go to the marriage office with Skinner first thing on Monday even if she had to miss a day of work. That was the first priority. The marriage
registration fee was forty dollars. Her rent, a hundred dollars for the week, was due every Monday; so she needed one hundred forty dollars on Monday, plus another twenty dollars to eat. Payday was the following Friday. She didn’t know what they would be paying her exactly—she expected to be shortchanged—but as long as she had enough to live on with enough left over to pay the lawyer to open her case, she could then work on getting another job. Other jobs might be out-of-state—you had to go where the work was. Could she travel back and forth to see her lawyer and for court? No, she thought. She had to stay here. She’d look for another restaurant job in the city. Money wouldn’t be a problem if Skinner made one hundred forty thousand dollars, but that wasn’t going to happen. He had been on cocaine or amphetamines, she thought. Maybe she could get him to invest in a vendor cart and they could work together selling shaokao right here in Flushing. The investment for a cart was ten thousand dollars. They could get the license in his name. She saw them working together at the top of the hill, living in their own apartment with a refrigerator and TV. How clean she’d keep it! Together they would go to the gym.

Zhang Zhuojin came over to Zou Lei at eleven-thirty and said: You better talk to someone. That boy is squeezing you out.

She went to check the schedule. All her days were gone.

At lunch, the illegal women talked about it.

Better ask for justice from the boss.

Speak a sentence of justice to him.

Speak to him. She should, shouldn’t she?

She still has hope. The boss likes her.

The boss likes her and Sassoon likes the boy.

An old leopard ensnaring a young lynx.

Talk to Polo. Shake your flowers and branches at him.

Zou Lei went up front to talk to Sassoon. The high school kid was standing right there laughing with Angela. What you want? Sassoon said, and the others turned to listen. Zou Lei said, Nothing. I forget.

She stole a piece of steak and ate it surreptitiously in the back corridor where the deliveries came in and the Mexicans were cutting vegetables.

Chinita! Cuál es tu comida preferida?

Adiós, she told them, and went to shake their hands after she was done eating and had wiped her hands off with the napkin she had held the steak in.

Welbe put down his knife and held her hand. Where are you going? he asked in Spanish. In English: Where? He smiled off at possible places beyond the walls—an engraved cross on his front tooth. She noticed she was a hair taller than he was.

I find out, she said.

He was in his basement dreaming. He was aware of the presence of life even though it was not directly audible through the structures of buildings. His mind was aware. On the other side of the shingles, tiles and sheathing, the reinforced block, gypsum, Douglas fir and paper, there were people breathing, watching TV, wanting to live. They had vital signs, blood pressure, pulse. Shine a light in their eyes and their pupils would contract unless they had a brain injury or were in shock.

They were locked up tight right now, but if a firefight exploded on this street right now—and Skinner could see the tracers leaping overhead, that furious popping, popping up like burning golf balls, stapling through autobodies, glass exploding—you would hear them screaming for it to stop. In the morning you would see the blood on the splintered walls. You would see them come outside blinking, coming together, picking through the sharp things, wood and metal, talking about what to do. Standing in groups, they haven’t slept.

His dream evolved. The firing had stopped. He was walking through the wreckage of a street, glass crunching beneath his boots. Blood was mixed in the glass, sometimes bright and shining red, almost orange in the air. He saw the inside of a car splashed and splattered with flesh. There was nothing human left. What had been done to the bodies was not possible to reconstruct. They had been wrenched by giant hands, smashed, severed, filled with gas, perforated, burned, flung across space. A limb lay on a seat—arm or leg, no telling. He saw clothing. A pile of organs, a liver in the red clothes. A vertebra in the driver’s seat. Everything had been blasted free of its identity—shirt, pants, or robe—male or female—you couldn’t tell from clumped wet hair.

The vehicles were transformed as well, the heat having created rainbows in the body paint. Past the cars, he saw holes in the buildings, in the storefronts, tunnels leading in, glass blown out, brand-new sneakers in the street.

He was not alone. There was a crater in the sidewalk. He lay down and put his arm inside and clasped hands with the occupant of the pit and pulled him out. His body lifted easily—Skinner had the necessary strength. It was his friend at last. They shared a cigarette.

The next store was a Dunkin Donuts. They went inside, cleared away the glass with their boots, picked their way around the dead woman who was stuffed behind the counter and started taking donuts out of the tray.

They were starved and hungry.

Careful, dog.

Sconyers picked glass off Skinner’s donut before he bit it.

Is there coffee?

They found chocolate milk in the drink case. They found a booth to sit in at the back and lay their weapons on the table.

Goddamn this is a score.

Hell yeah, doggie.

Skinner put his boots up and crossed his ankles. His boot toes were brown with dried gore. He tapped them together.

I’m glad you didn’t die, man. Everything’s good in my world now, he said.

Skinner’s friend had changed since he had seen him last. In the dream, the colorful tattoos that had always decorated Sconyers’ arms had apparently spread, now flowing up his throat and covering his face in black spirals, scorpions, and thorns.

After she left the mall, she went to Footlocker and asked for a pair of Asics. The sales associate who helped her was so silent and unspeaking that she almost thought he didn’t speak English, or that he spoke a different dialect. It turned out he only talked to a narrow group of people—other blacks with whom he was friends. He looked right through her when she asked if they had a smaller size. Then his face came alive when someone came out of the stockroom and whooped.
He hollered back, laughing and joking and full of comprehension. He told her to hold on, and went away.

She tried the shoes on and bounced on her toes. They made her feet feel spring-loaded. She stomped lightly on the carpeted floor.

The sales associate came back. Whenever she said anything, he pretended to be confused. What happened? he asked, meaning, What did you say?

How much the discount?

He wasn’t sure.

She tried to ask if you needed to have a social to work here.

Yeah, he said, and took the sneaker box up to the register.

She paid in cash, giving the young woman at the register a one hundred dollar bill. Zou Lei’s pay was issued in cash, usually in hundreds and fifties. The young woman, who had very dark skin, bumps on her cheeks, and a weave made of glossy black Chinese hair, took the bill. Then she seemed to forget what she was doing. She didn’t know how to ring the sale. She called out, How much do you take off on these? No one answered her. She made a snapping noise with her mouth. Her white eyes rolling at the boys, she murmured, They stupid.

A less-shy girl yelled, Yo! Malik!

What?

She asking you something. Tell her.

Malik said, No idea.

This whole time, the hundred dollar bill was in the woman’s hand and Zou Lei was watching it.

A manager came—a bigger man than all of them—an overweight unshaven man with a sloping head and sloping shoulders as if his entire body had melted down to his waist, and even his features had been affected, his eyes angling down, the sides of his mouth angling down like a picture of glumness—and then he spoke with this mouth in a businesslike and professionally courteous, corporate way. He told the woman what to do. The hundred dollars went into the drawer. The woman put the change on the counter. Zou Lei counted it. The woman said, Next.