Since the Layoffs (16 page)

No use crying over the past. Roll with the changes.

Sheila comes back from the beach later that evening while I am watching TV, the blinds drawn. She’s got a nice tan coming along. “You want to go to dinner?” I ask her.

“Sure.” She slips into the bathroom and showers off the sand while I watch some syndicated 80s family sitcom. I can never remember the names of these shows. There’s always a father, a mother, two or three precocious kids and a nice house with furniture I couldn’t afford even after the spring season got under way. Not with a car payment. If problems do occur in these shows, they are instantly solved with a long, sincere discussion. The kids always listen and the adults are always worth listening to. No one ever worries about money. No one ever gets laid off. No one ever smokes, for that matter, and it never snows, except in the Christmas episodes. Whose lives are these?

Sheila comes out, a towel wrapped around her and her hair neatly turbaned. She starts doing girl stuff in front of the mirror, where she has arranged eight or nine bottles of various beauty products. “Where do you want to go?” she asks.

“How about some place on the water? You like seafood?”

“Sure.”

I continue watching the show. A handsome young father who never seems to work, but nonetheless lives with his girls in a roomy house with antique furniture and hardwood floors, is lecturing his attentive daughter about the evils of drugs. The daughter hasn’t actually
used
drugs, but lately she’s been hanging around with a girl who might. The scene ends with the daughter nodding, saved from possible drug addiction forever.

This is how they cover it up, I realize. They make shows like this for a reason. They feed us an American dream, how things could be if only we’d close our eyes and just pretend. People watch these shows and feel that they haven’t measured up. I’m starting to think that the whole thing is a giant conspiracy, that these shows are funded by the corporations that own the networks, who are in cahoots with the corporations that own tractor-part factories, when Sheila sticks her head around the corner and looks at me.

“Hadn’t you better call for reservations?” she asks. “It’s Friday night.”

She looks stunning. She has put on a short gold dress which shows off every curve, and she is brushing her thick black hair. I like to watch the whole beautification process, the hair brushing, the make-up application. There’s something intimate about it. My attention doesn’t faze her.

“You look nice,” I say.

“Call the restaurant.”

Since our arrival in Miami, Sheila has been distant at best, prickly at worst. But after three drinks while we are waiting for a table at the finest seafood restaurant in Miami, a warm glow seems to come over her. I notice she is starting to smile more and become conversational. Maybe it’s the view of the ocean, the gulls, the boats passing by. Maybe it’s my calm demeanor. Maybe it’s the three Big Gulps of Bacardi 151 on what must have been an empty stomach.

“The drinks here are big,” she muses, smiling not exactly at me, but at life in general. “Don’t you think?”

“They sure are.”

“You’re nice,” she says softly, in her low, raspy voice, and she doesn’t sound drunk now.

My first impulse is to ask why, to demand an explanation for a compliment which I feel is largely an error of judgment. Then I remember something I was taught in kindergarten: If people give you a compliment, just thank them and move on. Adult experience has taught me not to get too wrapped up in them because the insults aren’t far behind.

“Thanks,” I say. It’s my first actual compliment from a woman in quite some time. “You’re nice too.”

She laughs knowingly. I’ve no idea what she knows. I’m out of the loop. As usual, I can’t think of anything to say, and she sits there, smiling at me. Maybe saying nothing is setting the right mood. I smile back, until I start to feel like an idiot, and then, with wondrous timing, our table is called.

I’m wondering what kind of conversation to start as I look at the wine list. I don’t want to pry too much into her personal life, but I also don’t want to spend the evening talking about the weather. I don’t get out enough to waste an evening discussing tides and rain possibilities. I could start telling her about Kelly on the theory that women at any given time like talking about relationships, but I don’t actually feel like it. Besides, Sheila doesn’t seem the type to fall for the whimpering boyfriend routine.

Sheila looks out the window at the darkening sea and sighs. “My life sucks,” she says.

That’s a good conversation starter. “Why?”

She tells me about her boyfriend, with whom she has been living for five years. They don’t have conversations anymore. He is usually on the road somewhere, and when he’s home, he goes out drinking by himself. Or without her, anyway. She tells me about her job, which is shuffling papers for the police department’s public relations office. When she had heard rumors the factory was going to close, her uncle, a retired cop, had asked if she’d wanted to join the police department. She’d imagined arresting bad guys and helping people out of burning buildings, and she blushes as she describes her hopes of being able to provide some help for mankind. Then she laughs as she recounts the reality, a job in a musty office in the darkest recesses of the police building. She works for the police public-relations statistician whose job it is to figure out ways of keeping the crime statistics down. So, she explains, if “rape and kidnapping” is made a separate category from “rape,” then you can claim that fewer rapes have occurred, and the police department is seen as doing its job.

“So we don’t solve or prevent crimes,” she says. “We re-name them.” News of police impotence in crime solving is comforting to a man who commits them. I wonder if some time down the road she’ll be asked to come up with creative ways of describing a series of seemingly random, and hopefully unsolved, murders. Maybe Corinne Gardocki’s murder has already been through her hands. Perhaps it was described as “home invasion death by firearm” to keep homicide statistics down.

“So where’s the adventure?” she asks me. “Where’s the fun? Everything just became so dry all of a sudden.” She finishes her drink and looks at me. “That’s why I came down here. It was something different. And you’ve been nice.”

I haven’t been that nice. I’ve been preoccupied with buying a pissed-on rifle, and after that, I’ve been mostly thoughtful and quiet. But if she sees that as nice, who am I to argue?

“So what about you?” she asks.

The inevitable question. What do I say now? This is a hit-man situation I’ve never thought about. I’ve rehearsed a thousand times what to say to the cops, but what do I say to someone I don’t want to disappoint with a string of lies? I’d like to get closer to her by being honest, not verbally joust with her as if she is an interrogator. I can talk honestly about Kelly, so I figure I’ll start there.

“My girlfriend left me,” I say. “After the layoffs.”

“I know that. That’s not what I’m talking about,” she says. She doesn’t go for it for a second. Women have some kind of sixth sense for sniffing out the information you are trying to conceal. They immediately start digging in the right place, like a bloodhound after a buried bone. “I mean what are you doing here? For Gardocki?”

I must look speechless, because she laughs. “Come on, how bad can it be?”

I laugh too, knowing it is hopeless, but I still try to deflect the question. “How do you know my girlfriend left me?”

“Tony told me.”

“What else did he tell you?”

“That you’re a good guy. That you’ve been depressed lately. You need a good woman to cheer you up.”

“Is that what he said?”

She shrugs. “Word for word.”

I lean across the table flirtatiously. “Are you going to cheer me up?”

She stirs her drink with her finger. I’ve done it. The conversation is back on safer ground. “Maybe,” she says. Then she leans back in her chair as the waitress arrives with the wine. Right in front of the waitress she asks, “So, what are you doing for Ken Gardocki?”

“I’m just setting up some meetings,” I say, after the wine has been poured. I’ve tasted it as if I can tell one wine from another, and grandly pronounced it acceptable. I’ve been working on my answer all during the waitress’ spiel on the specials, my mind whirring to come up with an answer which would be neither a lie nor an admission of guilt. The final product would impress a philandering congressman, but I was paying no attention to what I ordered.

“That was one of your meetings? That guy today?”

“Yeah.”

“He didn’t seem like …” She trails off.

“Like what?”

“Like the type of person I’d expect you to be hanging around with.” She says
you
as if I’m some special, interesting person, a man with his life together and his goals and dreams clearly outlined.

“Thank you,” I say. No offense to Jerry, but I’m flattered that people find us an odd couple.

Sheila shrugs. “You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to,” she says, making it clear that further reticence on my part will disappoint her completely, and destroy any chances I have of not sleeping alone tonight, but she’s willing to accept it.

“I’ll tell you one day,” I say. Maybe. “I want to buy a convenience store back home. I want to run it. I need the money from Gardocki to buy the store, so I’m just doing him a couple of favors.”

This intrigues her. We talk about the store. We talk about things we want to do with our lives. Sheila wants to quit the police department and have three kids and sell homemade goods over the Internet. She has quite a flair for crafts. I want to run a convenience store, and three kids sounds like a nice number. We’re feeling each other out for something long term here, and just when I think the whole Gardocki line of questioning has been forgotten, she says, “You don’t seem like someone who’d work for Gardocki.”

“He’s not so bad.”

“But he hires … criminals. I’ve met the people who ‘do him favors.’ They’re criminals, Jake. You don’t seem like that.”

I’m a late bloomer, I almost say. Fortunately, my internal spin doctor comes up with a better response. “It won’t be much longer.”

She looks at me, clearly worried. “These meetings … are they dangerous?”

I think about the answer, perhaps too long.

“Let’s talks about something else,” Sheila says. She starts mentioning that while she was at the beach today, she saw a man parasailing, and she would like to give it a try tomorrow, if time permits. While she is talking, I say, “Yes, they’re dangerous.”

She stops talking. “Do you think you’ll be okay?”

Her concern is touching. I’ve been alone so long, taken the hardest hit of my life with no support, that I never imagined anyone would care about me again. All those days walking back and forth to the library, I figured it was over for me. Love, romance, work: Those were things of the past. The misery was so real, I didn’t think that things might turn around for me. It creates a fear. For the first time since I took on this hit-man career, I find myself afraid of being caught. I have something to lose. I look into her brown eyes, see her thick, dark hair falling on her shoulders, notice the smooth skin on her neck. I don’t want those to be memories I have while I’m waiting on death row in a Florida prison.

“I think I’ll be fine,” I say shakily. I nod my head once or twice to reassure her, but I can tell she is not convinced. “We’ll go parasailing in the afternoon.”

She smiles at me, but it’s a sad smile, as if she’s never going to see me again.

It’s five thirty in the morning and I can hear traffic. People are going to work. I lie in bed and look at the stained, moldy ceiling and wonder about their lives, these people who go to work so early in Miami. I’ve never met any of them, I’m sure, but any one could change my life, simply by calling a cop on a cell phone when they see me outside a Miami motel with a very big rifle.

I can feel Sheila’s heartbeat as she sleeps next to me, hear her gentle breathing. I stroke her arm, partly out of affection, partly to determine if she’s deep enough asleep that I can carefully wriggle away from her and get out of bed. She doesn’t stir. My other arm is under her side, and I gently pull it out.

“Mmmmph,” she says, and rolls over and sighs, her eyes still closed. She mumbles something and I think she is talking to me, then realize she is dreaming. I sit next to her on the bed for a few seconds, watching her sleep, stroking her hair. She is a beautiful woman. I want to spend the day watching her sleep, enjoying the peace of this moment, remembering the night before. I think of the moment when we returned from a walk on the beach, and I took my shoes off to get into my bed, expecting her to get into hers, and the thrill I felt when she cuddled up next to me and with a tipsy smile asked, “What’re we going to do now, Jake?” I liked hearing her say my name.

I pull my jeans on quietly, then my socks and shoes. I can hear someone snoring in the next room, the same guy who was banging on the wall a few hours earlier, tired of the moaning and squeaking bedsprings he must have been listening to for hours before he finally lost his temper. We were louder than either of us realized. After that, we giggled for a few moments, enjoying the irritation we had caused, then both drifted off to sleep. I had forgotten to set an alarm, but woke up in time anyway, the novelty of having someone beside me again shaking my sleep patterns.

Sheila’s gold dress is lying on top of my open suitcase, and I drape it on my bed, careful not to crumple it. I regard it for a second, laid out on the bed. It looks so small. Without her in it, it is just a piece of gold cloth. I take a white T-shirt out of my suitcase and pull it on, then reach under the bed and extract the rifle and the bayonet. I pull the bedspread off the bed and wrap it around the rifle.

I debate for a second whether to take the bayonet. What the hell am I going to do with it, charge him like Sergeant York if I can’t make the shot? I think about tossing it back under the bed, but I like the feel of it, the heavy weight. Having it gives me some kind of psychological lift. I slip it into my belt loop, stand up, and see myself in the mirror. My hair is everywhere. I look like I’ve been having sex all night.