The Almanac of the Dead: A Novel (11 page)

Seese didn’t know where to begin. Cherie was nervous. Probably because the husband got jealous when she danced. “I guess you heard what happened—about Monte, I mean.” Seese was surprised at how quiet her voice was, almost a whisper. She felt nothing when she said “Monte.”

“Did David—?” Cherie stared down at the ashtray where her cigarette was burning into the filter. The husband reached over and squashed the butt. His jaw was set hard. Cherie was trying not to cry, but Seese saw big tears. Seese hardly cried anymore except when she woke up dreaming she was holding Monte in her arms. “Seese—it’s just so sad—not to know—”

Seese nodded at Cherie. The husband had relaxed. He leaned back in his chair and watched a tiny flat-chested blonde bump her way out of a belly-dancer skirt. Women’s tears or sad talk didn’t seem to interest him.

“You been back in town long?”

Seese shook her head. She finished the whiskey. Cherie signaled the barmaid for another round. Tiny let dancers have all they wanted. It kept them loose and limber. “I waited for a long time. I thought David took Monte.”

Cherie became alert. “You mean it wasn’t David?”

Seese could not shake her head or reply without something breaking wide open inside herself. She took deep breaths and sipped the whiskey. “There’s a woman who can help. I have to find her.”

Cherie glanced at her husband watching the stage. She was rolling
the hem of her shorty pajama top between her fingers. Seese could see Cherie was nervous, afraid something from the old days might slip out.

“Listen. I saw this woman on TV. She finds missing persons.”

Cherie had looked puzzled. “I don’t know anyone like that.”

“Look,” Seese said, raising her voice, “the only thing I have to go on is something about a crippled biker—a guy who works—”

At the mention of a man, Cherie’s husband sat up with both elbows on the table making a barrier between the two women. Cherie shook her head.

“The old woman is with this biker—” Seese began, but Cherie had pushed back her chair.

“I’m up now!” Cherie looked at her husband, then glanced at Seese. “Ask Tiny!”

Seese nodded slowly and leaned back in her chair. The husband moved forward in his chair, gathering himself like a rodeo cowboy. His turn next. For eight minutes he had to stay in his chair while the men at the edge of the tiny stage leaned over to pry their eyes into his wife. Cherie selects her music on the jukebox. Roy Orbison. Chubby Checker. She dances staring straight ahead, her eyes miles away from this place. Neither of them were ever really dancers. But the men never cared as long as they got an eyeful. Cherie’s husband looks down at his hands. He’s a blond cowboy with a pretty face. Green eyes. Hands and fingernails stained with motor oil. There never has been quite enough money for Cherie to quit dancing. The husbands and boyfriends come and go on account of this.

Cherie holds the filmy blue nylon in both hands and flips it over her face to reveal her breasts. Mangoes—golden flesh served peeled—Beaufrey’s morning meal in Puerto Vallarta. Metallic-blue sequins glitter on each nipple. The husband finishes his beer and motions for another. He ignores Seese. He ignores everything but the men reaching up on the platform, with both hands grabbing for her crotch or her breasts. An old man in white painter’s coveralls grins so wide his false teeth slip. He’s tucking five-dollar bills in the front of the shorty pajama bottom. Next to him, two men in identical work khakis huddle together, company logos and their first names embroidered on the front pockets. The black lights overhead make the scar and stretch marks on Cherie’s belly glow uranium blue. Cherie has never lost a baby. Cherie can’t stop getting pregnant. Still, the stretch marks only show under the black light. It doesn’t seem fair. Cherie has four, can have five more, and Seese could only have one.

“Mama’s got a squeeze box—Oh, my love, darling, I’ve hungered for your touch a long, lonely time—Daddy never sleeps at night”—off comes the blue pajama top. Cherie drops it casually, oblivious to the whistling and clapping. She stretches her arms up and can almost touch the purple tubes in the light fixture. Her breasts jut out. She turns away and shakes the cheeks of her ass, then spins back around. They want the bottoms off. They want the G-string now. The old man is standing up. He’s got a twenty-dollar bill in his hand. She smiles and tosses him the pajama panty. He tucks the twenty into the blue satin G-string. For a moment the attention is on him, not her. The old man lifts the shorty pajama bottom high over his head, then brings it down to his beer glass. He stretches the crotch across the rim of his glass and downs the last of his beer. The others applaud and laugh. The cowboy is sweating. Seese smells it—hard labor. Sweat, great exertion. His hands clenching and unclenching fists. Seese wonders how Cherie manages to always find men who will eventually want to kill her, but remembers the bullet through the penthouse window and has to laugh at herself. Cherie’s cowboy gives Seese a murderous look. She starts to explain that she is not laughing at anything here, that she is, laughing at herself, but the cowboy has already turned his head away. It takes a certain kind of man to watch his wife or girlfriend striptease in front of a crowd of drunk, grab-happy men and not blow up and kill them all. This pretty little cowboy was the wrong kind. The right kind would have been proud, would have had contempt for all the other men who did not have a beautiful woman—the right man would have enjoyed parading his wildly sexual woman in front of the needy and deprived. Seese had seen men who gloated over how badly the leering, shouting crowd wanted what was theirs, what the crowd could look at but never touch. But Cherie’s blond cowboy did not appear confident that the others were only going to look.

Seese was drunk enough not to worry whether Tiny really did have the information she needed. If she had to, she could press Cherie in front of her cowboy, and Cherie would get it. Because Seese knew that Cherie didn’t want her new husband to know any more about the past than he had already guessed or suspected. The favor Cherie owed Seese actually wasn’t much. It had happened a long time ago when they had been so much younger and under Tiny’s thumb. Cherie had gotten set up by some undercover cops. Seese had noticed that “the college boys” always had money for their grams, and each time they had pressed Cherie to sell them more. Seese kept telling Cherie to be careful of people who
didn’t beg you to front them three or four grams. Narcs always had money. But Cherie hadn’t worried because they had always snorted or shot up in the kitchen, right in front of her. After that the tall one who had played pro basketball always wanted to take her to bed; then he’d always leave $50 or $60. Cherie was sure undercover cops didn’t do that even when they were undercover. They hadn’t been anything but babies then, and Cherie never liked to tell Tiny what was going on. Tiny didn’t ask as long as the cash rolled in and the girls weren’t snorting too much themselves. So Cherie had set up a half-ounce sale.

The arrangement had been that once Cherie had the money, she would tell the guys to step out to the alley behind the apartment to get the goods from Seese, who would wait in the car. Cherie had wanted Seese to keep the half ounce right beside her in the car, but Seese had been wary. She had hidden the plastic bag with the cocaine inside a cardboard milk carton, which she left next to a trash can in the alley.

When Cherie’s ex-pro basketball player and his buddies had pulled their guns, and then their badges, and pushed Cherie outside into weeds and old dog shit in the backyard, Seese had not panicked. It occurred to her this might be a heist, and if it was, then they might both be killed. But Seese knew if it had been shooting they planned, the gunmen would not have marched Cherie out the back door in broad daylight. It might only have been an alley, but the alleys in the neighborhood were well populated with university students. Gunmen would have shot Cherie inside, then come out to get Seese in the car. So Seese did not move, although she could see Cherie’s eyes urging her to run. One cop had stuck a .44 and a badge in her face while the other slid into the front seat beside her. Seese had pretended to glance at the cop as he opened the door on the passenger’s side, but what Seese had really been looking at was the old milk carton lying in the weeds and trash next to a trash can.

“What’s going on?” Seese had asked Cherie just as the ex-basketball pro had opened the car door and pulled her out. “Can’t these guys take a joke? Hey, it was a little joke, that’s all.” The cops did not like the word
joke
. The ex-pro squeezed the handcuffs around her wrists so tightly tears came to her eyes.

Tiny had got them both out of jail before the evening shift at the Stage Coach. The interior and the trunk of the car had been torn apart by the ex-basketball pro and his pals. Seese had never bothered to have the door panels or rubber floor matting replaced afterward because as long as she owned that car, she wanted to remember the April afternoon
she had outmaneuvered the narcs. The cops had searched everywhere, but they didn’t notice the old milk carton lying on the ground. Without the goods, Seese had only been charged with conspiracy to distribute or sell. Cherie they hit for the sale of the grams in the past, and for prostitution. But none of the charges were big enough to interest the DA’s office. “Goddamn it,” Cherie said, “I wish we would have gone to trial. I wanted to testify about all those grams the scummy niggers shot up and snorted. Taxpayers’ money buying toot for nigger cops.”

Tiny had been furious. He had slapped Cherie so hard that she fell to her knees in the parking lot outside the city jail. Seese had tried to stop him by telling him not to worry, the half was safe. But Tiny had spun around, fast for a fat man, and the murder in his eye told Seese it was about sex with the black narcs, not the half ounce of coke. Tiny had not even thought of the half ounce yet. Cherie had, though. She started crying while she was still on the ground, promising to make it all up to him, promising to borrow the money and pay it back right away. Tiny had kicked Cherie in the ribs, and only Seese, pointing out a patrol car approaching on Stone Avenue, had stopped Tiny from really hurting Cherie.

Cherie had curled up in the backseat of Tiny’s big Buick and sobbed and moaned about broken ribs. All Tiny kept saying was, “Bitch! Dumb cunt bitch!” He had repeated it again and again. He told her he should kill her for it. He told her anyone else in his place would. He told her that she owed Seese, not him. She owed Seese because the half ounce was safe. If the half ounce had been lost, Tiny told Cherie he would have killed her.

•   •   •

Cherie comes off the platform breathing hard. She wraps a red-flowered cotton kimono around herself tightly. At the table she takes both her husband’s hands in hers and squeezes them while she kisses him so that all the others can see them. The last girl has Pink Floyd on the jukebox, and they watch her adjust the crotch of her leotard as she comes onstage. The husband relaxes and pushes his glass of beer across the table to Cherie. She is still breathing fast and the hair around her face is dark with perspiration. “Pretty good for an old lady,” Cherie says to Seese, and they both laugh. Tiny would have beaten Cherie bad, but probably not have killed her. Not in those days. They had all been much younger. Actually all Cherie owed Seese was for stashing the cocaine in the milk carton. Seese had started to say she didn’t like to have to ask favors when Cherie finished her husband’s beer and said, “Look. I think you
can find them on the south side—South Park Avenue. Almost to the airport. Look for a real old house trailer with a wrecked motorcycle outside.” Seese finished the whiskey. She gave Cherie a hug and smiled at the husband, who turned away rudely. The bartender had already yelled “Last call!” Seese told Cherie to take it easy, she’d be in touch, and they would have to get together for a beer sometime. But Cherie had glanced nervously in the direction of the blond cowboy, then back at Seese. They both knew they probably would not see each other again for a long time.

Tiny had watched Seese from the doorway of his office but she had pretended that she was too drunk to notice. The whole taxi ride back to the motel she was glad she hadn’t had to ask Tiny for help. Tiny calculated the loss of her baby as the price she had paid for fucking with David and Beaufrey. Tiny was right of course. But Seese didn’t have to give him any more satisfaction than he’d already got.