Richmond Noir (15 page)
“Sure. I guess. I don’t know.”
“Ah,” said Louis, seeming abashed. “Can I loan you an umbrella?”
“No, that’s okay.”
“Well then. Good night.”
“You too.” Tacko would’ve had to walk all the way around the mammoth sofa to shake hands, so he just waved to Louis. But it wasn’t like he
wouldn’t
shake hands. It wasn’t like
that
. Even so, riding the elevator down, he felt like a real shit, then had an abrupt impulse to push the button again and go on back up, saying he’d changed his mind, he’d wait out the rain and have that cup of coffee now, if they didn’t mind. Because you can do anything you want and nobody can stop you—wasn’t it true?
He’d have to think about that some more.
“Vincent!”
Tacko flinched. He’d flipped up his collar, hunched a little, and stepped outside into the gusting rain, but hadn’t gone three steps across the sidewalk before someone hailed him. Shit.
It was Dave Sandlin, a VP at the Eury Agency, wearing a tux and smoking a cigarette in a doorway not ten feet down the block from the Amboys’ street entrance. Tacko felt he had to go over. Had to? Had to.
“How you doin’, boy? Haven’t seen much of you lately.” Sandlin transferred his cigarette to his left hand and they shook. “Keeping busy?”
“Not really.” Tacko glanced past Sandlin into the gallery, saw the musicians picking up their instruments again, the drummer sliding behind his kit, an all-white, dressed-up crowd drinking and talking, and large abstract paintings, black the dominant color, hanging on the walls. “Just enjoying life.”
“Fuck’s that mean?” Sandlin laughed but looked skeptical. “I thought I’d hear back from you.”
Tacko, who’d been standing in the rain like an idiot, finally stepped under the overhang. “I’ve had a few personal projects I’ve been taking care of.”
“Yeah, well, you don’t want to stay out of sight too long, Vinnie. People forget you. Look.” Sandlin tossed away his cigarette and pulled out his wallet, extracted an embossed card. “Give me your hand.”
“What?”
“Put out your hand.” He placed the card in Tacko’s right palm, then tapped it. “Fax me your damn resume. What’s today, Friday? I want it on Monday. All right? Okay?”
Looking at the card, looking at Sandlin, looking at the people, many of whom he recognized, dancing now in the gallery, Tacko felt disgusted.
You disgust me. You’re disgusting
. “Thanks,” he said. “Monday. Promise.” Pocketing Sandlin’s card, he put out his hand again. “Well, let me run.”
“What the hell’re you doing down here anyway?”
“Visiting friends.”
“Fax me.”
Tacko dashed across Decatur Street and walked along the chain-link fence to the parking lot entrance. When he’d arrived there were only about a dozen vehicles, now there must have been close to a hundred, most of them Beemers, Lexuses, and SUVs, and he couldn’t immediately remember where he’d left his. Rain drilled on a diagonal through the vapor lights. As he peered up and down the lanes, then jogged to a red Cooper he thought was his but wasn’t, Tacko noticed a man sitting in a parked Saturn that was at least ten years old and badly dinged. The interior dome light was on. The man was rummaging through a leather satchel on his lap, but glanced up at Tacko. He looked about twenty-five, had stringy long dark hair and a soul patch. Tacko nodded. The man did not.
By the time Tacko found his car, he was drenched and his shoes and socks were infused. He got in and just sat there dripping. Then he glanced up and there were DaBlonde and Louis Amboy gliding up and down in front of their wall of windows, DaBlonde in that Chinese robe, her hair in a blue towel turban. The pair of them moving forward and sideways and back, box stepping.
They were dancing. Her tiny, him huge, they were dancing,
waltzing
—not gracefully, shamblingly, but still. Still, they were waltzing alone in their little weird-shit world.
Tacko turned the car on, and the heat, then just sat there watching.
He had his cell phone, he could call them, invite himself back. Nothing to stop him, if that’s what he wanted to do. He took it from his coat pocket and Dave Sandlin’s business card came out with it. He glanced at the card—exquisite printing—and then opened his window and tossed it out.
They were still waltzing up there, and Tacko started scrolling through his stored numbers—
Abbott, Bill; Adler, Ed; Agnew, Connie, Alman, Foster & Meeks; Amboy, Louis & Andrea
. Thirty-two on Tacko’s speed dial. He hesitated, then was startled by a car door slamming nearby.
The guy from the Saturn stood alongside of it now in the downpour staring at the Amboys’ brightly lit condo, staring up at them as they danced their mechanical waltz. Then he strode toward the open fence gate, satchel swinging in his hand. He crossed the street, passing a few people departing the fund-raiser under voluminous black umbrellas. He walked directly to the building’s corner entrance. Tacko glanced back up at the Amboys’ windows, but they were no longer in view.
When he looked back down, his eyes tracking past where it was chiseled
United States Cardboard Company
, the young man with the satchel had opened the door and was going inside. Had they buzzed him up? Had they invited over another “friend”? Or thought Tacko had come back?
He turned off the car, opened his door, and got out. Stood in the rain for perhaps a minute, but still didn’t see anyone in the windows.
Dave Sandlin, he noticed, had gone back into the gallery.
A middle-aged couple hurried by under umbrellas, squealing with laughter as they hit puddles.
Tacko started to get back into his car, but changed his mind and jogged up the line to the Saturn.
North Carolina plates.
And now when he looked back up, the Amboys’ condo was dark, except for an ambient blue wash that came off the computer monitors.
On his way back to his Cooper, he stooped and picked up Dave Sandlin’s card. Then he got in, tossed the card on the other seat, restarted the engine, and drove home.
Did he even
have
a fucking resume to send?
Dedicated to the memory of Saleem Hassan
T
hings were bad, real bad, when I went to bed that night. Coming up on one month without smoking rock meant having to deal with the mess I’d been making of my life since I first picked up the pipe. No job, hardly any money, and a real pisser of an attitude problem—not that I’d started with the friendliest personality, but you work with what you’ve got.
“For somebody so young and pretty, you sure are awful hateful, Kim.” This was something Beau said to me once while we dragged the stinking corpse of a harvest-gold Frigidaire down the steps of a trailer I was cleaning for the Arab. But that I could deal with. This particular night really started to suck when the sun went down and two of Ivan’s girls walked over from the City Motel to give me a gentle reminder about the money I owed.
“Ivan’s lonely,” the one with the broken teeth said. She grabbed a fistful of my hair and jerked my head to the side.
“He don’t miss you,” sneered the one with the gimpy arm. “He just miss his
money.”
She reached out with the good arm and smacked the side of my face, hard. The other girl let me go, and they stood there and looked at me with as much disdain as two twenty-dollar whores could muster.
“Ivan knows they fired me from the diner,” I told them, rubbing my cheek where it stung. “Tell him I’m looking for work.”
“You think he cares?” Teeth reached for my hair again but I stepped back. “You better get that pretty little ass out on the corner and
make
his money.”
“Just don’t do it here,” Gimpy-Arm warned. Then the two of them headed back out to Jeff Davis, where a car had already pulled over to meet them.
They didn’t need to worry about me horning in on their territory. I was already pissed off at myself for being a trailer park stereotype, what with the waitressing and the crack rocks and all. I’d only moved to Richmond from Christians-burg that spring and already I was like something out of a bad indie movie full of trailer park caricatures. Beau told me not to worry about it, that it happens to a lot of people when they first move into Rudd’s, but that hardly made me feel better. It’d almost been a good thing that the diner fired me and Ivan cut off my tab, because it did for me what I couldn’t do for myself.
I went to bed with my cheek still tingling, worrying and thinking about the money—a thousand dollars, not that much to some people but a hell of a lot to one unemployed teenage waitress in Rudd’s Trailer Park. I’d heard about things Ivan did to people who owed him less, and it wasn’t anything I wanted to be a part of. He’d told me stories, casually, while I smoked on his dime at the City Motel. At the time I thought he was confiding in me because I was different, like he could see the light behind my eyes. In hindsight, he was probably just issuing a warning. When I finally fell asleep, I dreamed of box cutters, of socks full of rolled nickels, of the gimpy-armed whore’s hard little eyes.
So you wake up from a night like that and you figure there’s nowhere to go but up, right? You figure you’ll make a pot of black coffee, warm up the old Emerson record player that came with the place, put on
Metallic KO
—Iggy Pop being the Patron Saint of Trailer Parks—and shake it out, clean a trailer or two, and go on with life. That’s what I figured until I opened my door and found a random crackhead on my steps, or what looked like a random crackhead until I realized he was there for a very specific purpose.
“Ivan says you gotta pay him before Saturday,” he said without looking up.
“I can give him something on Saturday, not all.” Realistically, there was no job, no legal job, that would make me that much money by the weekend.
“Ivan says he needs it all by Saturday.” He picked at a sore on his hand. “Or else you’re gonna fall off the Lee Bridge.” When he looked up I could see that he wasn’t telling me because he wanted to. He turned away. “Ivan says nobody would miss you.”
I like to think that I’m tough, but when he said that, it stung worse than the gimpy-armed whore’s slap.
Ivan’s messenger skulked out of the trailer park, and I sank down and sat on the step where he’d been, picturing my waterlogged remains floating down the James River, wondering how long I would lie on a slab at the city morgue before somebody claimed me. If anyone ever did.
To say the trailer park governs itself would be true, but the real truth is that the place is run like a kingdom, the Arab’s kingdom, and he is a benevolent ruler. If you follow the rules and pay your rent, you’re a subject in good standing. If you follow the rules and can’t pay your rent, you’re afforded leeway because you’re trying. If you don’t follow the rules and you can’t pay your rent, he’ll cuss you out in two languages, but he’ll let you stay because you
might
be trying. And he’ll probably slip you a twenty when you leave, because
Allah forbid
you go hungry. Really, as long as you don’t smoke crack or steal anything, the Arab has your back.
A lot of the folks in the trailer park don’t work; the Arab keeps about half the residents on a casual payroll, with salaries and titles that vary depending on how bad you’ve managed to fuck up lately. Take Beau, for instance—because he’s the biggest guy in the park and is always being called on to break up fights or scare off crack dealers, he’s designated Trailer Park Police. The week he tried to move a trailer without permission and destroyed the Arab’s old Ford pickup, he got demoted to Raccoon Wrangler. Bill Baldy is the Arab’s assistant, and as far as I can tell that job involves drinking beer and doing crosswords in the office—which is actually just a trailer with OFFICE written on the door. Bobby Harvey’s been here the longest, so he’s Senior Manager, but it’s more like
Señor
Manager, since that job is mostly steering drunk Mexican dudes into their trailers on Fridays. And Judy is the Arab’s secretary even though she doesn’t read or write. Her job qualification is her diabetes; unsupervised, she’ll sneak to the 7-Eleven and eat herself into a coma on Bama Pies. The Arab made her his secretary so he could get her into the office and keep an eye on her.
Ever since I lost the diner job, the Arab had been letting me clean trailers whenever somebody skipped out and left one full of junk. My title was Home Improvement Expert. He paid me a hundred bucks a trailer. He had at least one every rent day. But not lately. When things get tough all over, the trailer park business booms. Folks were beating down the door to get into Rudd’s. To make a little more room, because
Allah forbid
somebody gets left in the cold, the Arab offered to pay me double to clean out the big trailer on the property’s back edge. Nobody had lived in it for decades. I was grateful for the chance to make double pay; at least I’d have something to try and buy time with on Saturday—but that was between me and Ivan. The Arab just thought he was giving me grocery money.
“Sure, I’ll clean it,” I said, taking the keys from him and sticking them in my jeans. “How long has it been vacant, anyway?”
“Ain’t nobody
ever
lived in that goddamn thing,” he told me. “Not as long as I been runnin’ this shithole, anyway. Most of what’s in there probably came out of the house, when they tore it down.” The house was where the Arab’s aunt had lived, a rooming house on Jeff Davis, which used to be part of the biggest travel highway on the East Coast. When Interstate 95 came through in 1958 and the tourists dried up, the rooming house was left to fall to pieces until the city finally made the Arab tear it down. He put up the trailer park in its place. It’s that whole Islamic revenge thing.
The Arab said I could keep whatever I found in the trailer, but after I got through the first room it was pretty obvious that there were only a bunch of dusty old ledger books and guest registers. I pitched box after box of ledgers and files out the front door for Beau to load into the dumpster. Then I pitched one that clanked instead of thudded. I figured it was office supplies—pencil sharpeners and staplers, you know, more useless crap. I wasn’t expecting a passport from Beirut, Syria, for Saleem Hassan, born 1890. Tucked under that a stack of letters, written in Arabic, mostly postmarked in the 1930s and 1940s. And sepia-toned pictures of the man from the passport standing with a woman I recognized as the Arab’s aunt, whose picture hung in the office. In the bottom of the box was a thick layer of Arabic newspapers, and between every couple of sections there were records, old 78 RPM ones, with Arabic writing on the labels. And, in the very bottom of the box, the source of the clank—wrapped in a handkerchief, four brass cymbals the size of Oreos.
Since the Arab said I could have anything I found, I took it all home with me that night. I brewed myself up a pot of coffee and put on one of the records. I never thought I’d see the day that I’d need the 78 setting on the old Emerson, but then I’ve done a lot of things I never thought I’d do. While the stereo went through its ancient ritual of dropping the record onto the turntable and situating the needle in the groove, I unfolded the letters. Not that I could read any of them. I wanted to take them to the Arab, but then again I didn’t—I figured he was related to Saleem Hassan, and who would want their family reading their letters, especially ones so personal they were saved in a box? The passport revealed that Hassan had traveled a lot—mostly back and forth from Lebanon to New York. His last stamp was for entry to New York in October 1960. His picture was grim—gray hair and a droopy, permanent frown that pulled his whole face toward the lapels of his black suit. I squinted and tried to see my Arab in his face, to no avail. There was nothing there but something that felt like loneliness, radiating off the page.
The records were the opposite of the picture. Between the crackles and pops there was a celebration, shrieking and ululating and drumming and the rhythmic clanking of finger cymbals, tek-tek-tek-a-tek! I unrolled the handkerchief and took out the cymbals. They didn’t have any handles or straps, just two slits in the center, like buttonholes. I held one in each hand and tried to hit them together, but they made a muddy sound, not a bright chime like on the record. I rolled them back up in the handkerchief and set them on the table.
That night, when I went to sleep, Saleem Hassan came to me in my dreams. Droopy frown and all. It was just his face, black-and-white like in the passport photo, surrounded by a gray haze, cheesy, like in the movies. The Arabic record was playing in the background.
Rubber bands
, he said. He nodded and pointed his finger at me through the haze. Get
you some rubber bands
.
The next day I got up early. When you might only have a few days left on the planet, you want to make them last, even if they are spent scrubbing down old trailers on Jeff Davis Highway. You just have to appreciate life for what it is.
When I stopped by the office to report for duty, the Arab asked how it was going. “You find anything good yet?” He was eating his usual, meat and eggs with sliced onions on the side. Judy was tending to her secretarial duties, watching
Jerry Springer
and painting her nails. No one else was up, seeing as it was the crack of 9.
“Just papers, mostly.” I opened his desk drawer, pulled out a handful of rubber bands, and slipped them onto my wrist like bracelets.
“What do you need out my desk? You need money?”
“No, I’m good.” It was pointless to even answer because when the Arab asks if you need money it isn’t really a question, it’s a statement of intent. “You said it was your aunt’s stuff in there?”
He shrugged and bit a big wedge of onion. “Mumkin. I don’t know whose it is. Just get it out of here.” Then he reached in his pocket and pulled out a roll of bills. Peeling off a twenty, he threw it on the desk and pointed at it like it was a cockroach. “And take that and get you some goddamn food. You’re gonna blow away.” Which is what he says to everybody when he gives them money, even Beau, who weighs three hundred pounds easy. Then he added the footnote that comes when you don’t reach for the money fast enough, “Take it and
kul khara!
Eat shit!” I took the twenty. Saying no was not an option. I tucked it into my pocket and headed back to tackle the old trailer.
Day two of cleaning didn’t bring any more mystery boxes. Old sheets and towels mostly, some dishes, all of them covered with fifty years of dust and grime. The first thing I wanted to do when I got home was take a shower. I stripped off my filthy jeans and T-shirt right inside my trailer door and was slipping the Arab’s rubber bands off my wrist when I saw the cymbals on the table. I remembered my dream from the night before. Get
you some rubber bands
.
I took one of the cymbals and looped a rubber band through the slits in the middle, making a slipknot underneath. I did the same with a second cymbal and stuck my finger and thumb through the bands. Tek-tek-tek-tek-tek! They rang clear and true, just like on the record. I rigged the second pair and put them on and then, just because why the fuck not, I carried my butt-naked dusty self over to the record player and started up the music again. I danced like a whirling dervish in my eight-foot-wide living room, clanking my cymbals and shaking my hips, moving ways I’d never thought about moving with muscles I didn’t know I had, until Bobby Harvey threw a bottle at my trailer and yelled at me to shut up the noise. Looking at the clock, I realized I’d been dancing for hours. I fell into bed, filthy as you please, and closed my eyes—only to see Saleem Hassan’s grumpy face. But where the frown had reached almost past his chin the night before, this time it stopped just before it got there. He was nodding, like he approved.
Tanoura
, he said through the haze. At
the top of the kitchen cupboard. Tanoura!
He lifted a cigarette to his lips and drew on it, then blew out more gray haze. Then he was gone. The music kept playing.
In the morning I went straight to the old trailer I hoisted myself up onto the red Formica countertop and opened the kitchen cupboards. In the first three, nothing. In the last one, there was a rolled-up Thalhimer’s bag stuck way back on a shelf. Inside the bag was a single piece of fabric, a black mesh diamond-patterned linen with strips of silver woven through. Unfolded, it ran the width of the trailer and the length of the kitchen. I stuffed it back into the bag and walked over to the office. The Arab was watching CNN and drinking red soda out of a plastic mug.