Authors: Matthew Louis
The Wrong Man (2 page)
I found my old sleeping bag in the hall closet, tossed it to him, and went to brush and floss.
Five minutes later, in bed with this warm incredible girl while that poor idiot stole a few hours of peace and safety on our couch, I tried to explain it to Jill, speaking just above a whisper. When I was eleven my parents were killed and I came to this town to live with my grandparents—this part she knew, of course, but my point was that, by luck, a kid who happened to be my age, Rich, had lived two houses down. “We were like brothers,” I said, halting, hearing how corny it sounded. “I mean, you know, we did everything together, night and day.”
“You mean you were
best friends
?” Her eyes were wide and mocking.
I knew she was in a mood about me not only coming home late, but showing up with this strung-out fool, and I said, “Yeah, I guess that’s it.” I reached over and snapped off the bedside lamp, then lay on my back, staring at the ceiling with my hand resting on the lush hill of her hip.
“Goodnight, Jill.”
“Goodnight.”
I exhaled the last of my energy and closed my eyes, feeling the city of
Blackmer
stirring in its restless sleep outside, feeling my thoughts starting to succumb to the strange logic of dreams.
Like brothers,
I thought. What a joke. Like a couple of broken pieces of a complete human being. I was smarter, more emotionally balanced, certainly a better athlete, but Rich had the attitude. Rich was attractive to girls
,
knew how to talk, was an incurable smart ass, was
cool.
Right up into high school, whenever he cut or stayed home sick I wound up sitting there and watching the other kids. Eating lunch alone, slinking off and hiding out in the library.
It’s been a problem my whole life, this goddamned timid streak. For most of my youth I had Rich to shove me or drag me into the mix, to get me into fights and, later, to make up for it by getting me laid. I used to need him, to lean on him, to seek his approval. But now I thought of the person out there on the couch and I felt nothing except a low-frequency disgust. Who gave a shit anyway? Nobody wanted to hear about Rich’s depressing life, nobody wanted to understand, so there was no point to any of it. The guy was broken. Too many years with nobody caring. Too many fucking drugs. Half the circuits on the board had been cooked.
When I awoke in the morning around seven, the sleeping bag was rolled up and tied off, sitting on the end of the couch, and Rich was gone, out wandering the early morning streets doing god-knew-what—panhandling next to the McDonald’s or maybe already trying to get a line on another fix.
I never found out if he went back for the weed. Probably some fieldworker or bottle-picker found it Monday morning and that was the end of Rich’s career selling pot.
The way things happened, it didn’t matter.
2
I
didn
’
t
it until I went back to work at Vanguard Liquors Monday afternoon. The guy who worked from
until two in the afternoon, when I came on, sold pot himself, right from behind the counter, and he had an amiable relationship with most of the lowlifes on this side of town.
He was called Sully although his last name wasn’t Sullivan, but Sulazar. I liked him well enough and he seemed to like me––at least we had never had other than respectful words. He was a shrewd guy. His face was a Halloween mask, a wasteland of pimples and pitted scars, but he got by and got ahead and was in a leadership position in a crowd of guys who all thought they were world class thugs. He had learned the virtue of taciturnity. Unless he had something to say he tended to just listen to you and respond in clipped, monotone phrases, single syllables, or grunts.
Today he watched me as I entered the store, kept his eyes on me until I was behind the counter with him, and said, “You heard about your buddy, Rich?”
“No.”
“He got killed—almost. You better watch your back.”
“
Me
?” I felt my eyes go wide.
“I’m just telling you what I heard. They say you guys stole some
shit.
” He put special emphasis on the word
shit
, as if he found this street jargon amusing. He had a way of speaking that made it seem he was always leading up to a punch line.
I started to say
no
, but he said, “Know that dude, Owen Ferguson?”
I said, “Yeah.”
“He fucked your buddy up is what I heard. Blackjacked him. Rich is in the hospital ’n’ shit.”
“This has got nothing to
do
with me!”
“I’m just telling you what I heard,” Sully repeated. “You guys gotta give ’em money or something. I don’t know. Owen
lives
over there,” he pointed to Rancho Bonita, the Mexican restaurant across the parking lot, “and he’s probably gonna come over and see you tonight. You might want to be ready. That’s all I’m saying.”
I was trying to grasp it, my eyes losing focus as I stared at the diamond and gem-colored bottles of hard liquor in their neat shining rows on the far wall, watching them through the dust specks swimming in a ray of afternoon sunlight. “Hey,” I said, looking back at Sully. “Thanks for taking the trouble to warn me, man. I appreciate it.”
He looked at me for a moment, thinking, and when he spoke, his casual mockery of everything in the world wasn’t present for once. “Just be aware, dude,” he said. “These are the gangsters you don’t fuck with around here. What I heard is, Owen was trying to kill your buddy, and it didn’t work out, but Rich has got it coming sooner or later. And you’re next on the list. All kinds of people saw you guys at that party, saw you leaving, and
you
got named. I’m just warning you, dude. You’re in it.”
I nodded again. “Okay. Thanks, man. Seriously.” It seemed I couldn’t quite fill my lungs. You live like a maniac through your twenties, do so many idiotic things for so long, and nothing much ever happens. And here, now, I didn’t want to take any chances in my life, just wanted to get the fuck home and work my job and go to my classes, and the worst kind of trouble had latched itself onto me. It was like winning some lottery of shit luck.
Sully had his jacket draped over his arm now and was fitting the earbuds of his iPod into the sides of his head. We didn’t close out the register between shifts and he simply stepped away from it as the door buzzer sounded and a customer came in. I had to step up to my post behind the register and as I did Sully said, “Adios, Sam,” and sauntered out.
By the time I closed the cash drawer and thanked the customer, Sully’s VW was gliding away through the parking lot. I was alone, wondering what the fuck I was supposed to do now.
I wouldn’t claim to understand gang politics in this town any more than a man outside a zoo cage can understand how hyenas choose their alliances and organize their hierarchy. All I know is the Mexicans who shoot and beat on each other and operate Blackmer’s drug trade aren’t anything like the East Coast gangsters you see on TV. The organized criminals in this town will never run bookkeeping operations or protection rackets or have the mayor or chief of police on their payroll. They have only one consistent trait that I’ve ever observed: massive, steel balls. Their only rule of conduct is
Don’t go out like a pussy
. They don’t give a second thought to trading blows on the sidewalk downtown with complete strangers who wear the wrong color or say the wrong word in passing. They keep pit bulls and behave like pit bulls, and, as with pit bulls, your best bet is to not move too suddenly, not raise your voice and not make eye contact.
But, like I said, I’ve only ever been on the outside looking in.
Blackmer, you see, is a community divided along racial lines, a mixture of two groups that don’t tend to mix—the remnants of the Okies who came to work the fields three generations ago, then moved up or at least moved on, and the Hispanics who have been working the fields ever since.
Racism, in a town like this, just is. We’re animals, and when we’re penned with animals that have different colorings and markings, the males of the species are going to get nervous. You’re going to hear a chorus of growling, and we’re going to bare our teeth and raise our hackles and occasionally try to rip the throats out of the alien creatures.
But then, maybe I’m dead wrong. Maybe a racial utopia is possible. After all, the hardest Mexican gangster I ever met had a ghost-white complexion and pale blue eyes.
I had known Owen Ferguson, or known of him, for most of my life. It made sense he would insinuate himself in this because he knew both me and Rich and had never liked us. I could just see him in a murky, smoke-filled living room in some little back-alley house, vacuuming up a line off the communal mirror, then glancing around at his red-eyed associates and saying in that nasal voice of his, “Yeah, I know that guy, Sam Schuler. He’s a punk, aye. I’ll go hit ’im up an’ he’ll just fork over the money, man. Don’t even sweat it.”
The joke we used to make was that Owen Ferguson was like Tarzan, raised among the apes and then gone on to lead them. When I entered Conejo Junior High I was surprised to discover this homely white boy was the toughest kid on campus. Most of us Caucasian youths had to tread lightly, to stake out our territory at the corner of the grounds and endure the sneers and scoffs and Spanish insults we couldn’t understand. But not Owen Ferguson. He was one of them. He lived in the middle of gangland, had a Mexican stepfather and a half-Mexican half-brother, and he had run wild in the dirtiest streets and alleyways of Blackmer his entire life, until his English was spoken like a second language and he sneered and scoffed at white people and thought of them as a separate species from himself.
Even then, at twelve, Owen had been lanky and rangy, half a head taller than most of his friends. And he was already renowned as a fighter—always willing, eager, desperate to square off and start swinging with anyone, any time. He was a tyrant on the school grounds, holding court at a blue fiberglass picnic table, “talking shit” with a Mexican accent among the budding twelve-year-old Hispanic thugs whose big brothers and uncles and fathers were the veteran criminals and warriors of Blackmer. Even then, Owen was already a
vato
in his soul and a favorite of the
vatos
in his neighborhood despite his blue eyed, raw-boned, ridge runner ancestry.
That he would come for me seemed inevitable. As Sully had pointed out, Owen “lived” just across the parking lot. He and his crew had made a sort of clubhouse of the bar off the side of Rancho Bonita, the Mexican restaurant that was just a two minute walk from where I now stood.
I tried to imagine reasoning with him, explaining what had happened and seeing his eyes soften with comprehension, but I shook my head and cursed. He didn’t have the capacity. The arc of his evolution had been completed in junior high.
3
W
hen
I
saw
O
wen
entering the store about a half-hour before closing, my body stopped being mine. My legs went rubbery, the room seemed to tilt and swing around like a carnival ride, and I couldn’t do a thing except stand there and stare.
Up to that point I had succeeded in putting it out of my mind. I had to write a report on a hundred-year-old novel called
The Octopus
for my class on local history and I was trying to force the story down in huge gulps, to take it like medicine—and was surprised to find myself enjoying it. The evil thing lingered just outside the spotlight of my thoughts, and every so often I would look up and think about Rich getting his head split open with a blackjack, but I had made up my mind not to fall to panic until I knew for certain that there was something to panic about. I was almost ready to sigh relief, at least for tonight, when the electric sensor on the door sounded and I marked my place with my forefinger, lifted my eyes, and felt my heart clench to a stop.
Under the fluorescents Owen Ferguson’s crisp white T-shirt shimmered, his loose khaki pants were pressed and new. His hair was mowed tight to the scalp, darkening the top of a long, insect-looking head that was dented and scarred from his uncountable street fights. The overall effect of him was clean and utilitarian, but somehow disposable. Cheap. The only blemish on his appearance was the line of dark green cursive tattooed at a crooked angle on his neck, under his right ear.
My mouth fell open and I said, “Hey . . .” Nothing else occurred to me. Owen’s face showed only that slack, somehow demented look of a person whose mind is steel-reinforced against fear. I wondered if he could jump out of a tenth story window and never change that dead-faced expression all the way down to earth. He had tight, thin lips, close-set eyes and a smattering of freckles over the bridge of his nose.
I couldn’t move as he drew close. I just blinked ahead, cleared my throat and tried to find words that might save me. I didn’t even flinch when he didn’t break stride and sprang forward and socked me under my left eye. I didn’t fall either. I guess my head just snapped over and then back like my neck was a spring.
“What do you think, bitch?” he said.
I blinked at him. I still had the paperback in my hand, closed on my finger as if I was going to go back to reading. My other hand, I realized, was now holding my face.
“You think it’s over or what? You think you and your faggot friend can pull that shit and then you don’t gotta pay?” He sounded a little like Marlon Brando. His voice seemed to be generated in his nasal passages and he had a painful-looking underbite that you didn’t notice until he spoke.
“Look, man.” It was a strangled, distant version of my voice. “I didn’t—”
His hand slapped the glass lottery ticket display that was built into the counter. “
Shut
the fuck up! You know what I’m talking about. You know me, right?” He pointed at his own chest. “You know what I’ll
do
, Homes. You heard about your buddy. I’m gonna be outside.” He seemed to think a moment. “Five hundred bucks,” he said, drilling me with his look. “And don’t give me no stories. You got it in
there.”
He jabbed a finger at the cash register.
“Aw, no man, I can’t—”
He froze me with another look, his bulldog jaw a challenge, his eyes like little blue pools of congealed gel, his whole head like a wax sculpture some kids had played football with. “Who the fuck you kidding, Homes?” he said. “You think I don’t know what happens in this fucking place? You’re a fucking thief already so don’t even try to blow smoke up my ass.”
“I’ll lose my job!” I was fighting the whine that wanted to creep into my voice. “I didn’t take anybody’s fucking weed, man. I don’t know what you heard but it’s bullshit.”
His eyebrows shot up his forehead. His pupils were small as pinpricks in the faded blue irises, but those tiny spots seemed to be pouring forth animosity. He couldn’t believe, evidently, that we were still having this conversation. “Try me,” he said. “Just try me, motherfucker. I want you to.” And he stepped backward and finally released me from his glare, turned around and glided away over the maroon utility mats. I watched him exit the bright store and stride into the nighttime parking lot toward his lowered, black-windowed Celica.
I felt like I had entered a dream state. I found myself moving with the studied deliberateness of a drunk. My hand rattled as I marked my place in
The Octopus
with a register receipt and laid it on the shelf under the counter, beside the basket of matches. I stared down for a moment, concentrating on breathing, then forced myself to move. I went into the walk-in cooler to throw some beer onto the shelves and create the impression I had done some work tonight. There was no one in the store and while I was back there I half-hoped that Owen would come in, lean over the counter and hit NO SALE and grab all the cash he wanted. But I knew it wasn’t going to happen. I had to submit. It was a street-dominance ritual.
Everyone who worked here stole from this place, and Owen knew it. Hell, half the town knew it. But nobody stole five hundred bucks in one shot, and I sure wasn’t going to risk my job, kill the goose that laid golden eggs, just to give it to this semi-literate fucking cretin for something I didn’t do.
So where did that leave me?
I could fight him, I guessed. I even thought I could win if I really wanted to. He was a couple of inches taller than me, but I had twenty pounds of muscle on him. I had wrestled in high school—senior year I was second place in the county in my weight division—and the three drunken fights I had been in since then were decided by my ability to maul and pin my opponent. I began to imagine myself “shooting the legs,” taking Owen to the ground, twisting him up and holding him paralyzed, but then I shook my head. I may win the battle but did I think the guy fought by any rules? Did I think he wasn’t armed? I was practically guaranteed a bullet through the neck or a switchblade buried in my kidney.
No, what I knew I had to do was let him sock me a few times, knock me down, and then let him pull out my wallet and get the thirty bucks in there and call me “pussy” and “bitch.” And then maybe he’d let it go. There was a chance, anyway.
I came out of the walk-in cooler and went to the breaker box and flipped the green-painted breaker switches, darkening the store. I had pulled the newspaper display in at nine. I crossed the shadowy room and locked the door, leaving the keys dangling in the slot. With the illumination inside the store gone I could see Owen’s car in the empty parking lot, a high lot-lamp shedding dull whiteness down on it, and I could hear the faint thump of rap music. He was parked right next to my Fairlane. This thing was going to happen. I went behind the counter, punched in the code so the register popped the cash drawer and started grinding out its report, and I started gathering the cash from the compartments. I tore off the three feet of register tape and took that and the cash into the back to count up and fill out the closing sheet. When I was done I bound it all up with a rubber band, put the package in the floor safe and spun the dial with a determined twist of my wrist, locking all the money away from myself and Owen.
I stood straight and realized this was it. I took a deep breath. Fuck it. I’d do it. Face the music and all that. I stepped out of the back and I blinked and my mouth dropped open. I pulled a sharp breath and said, “What the fuck.” There was a black and white cop car nosed up behind Owen’s
Toyota
—and my Fairlane—in the otherwise empty parking lot. Owen was out, ass against the back corner of his car, and a big cop was passing a flashlight beam over the seats through the open driver’s door. Owen appeared bored. Then his head turned and he seemed to look right at me.
I stood there. I waited a full minute while the cop harassed the thug, and then they had some parting words and Owen got in his car and the cop got in his. The cop seemed to wait for Owen to start the Celica, back out and begin crawling away, and then the black and white slid along behind him. The parking lot was empty except for my Fairlane—a white, used-up junkyard relic waiting off to the side, leaking its nightly puddle of 10-40 onto the asphalt.
I didn’t know what to make of what had just happened except I was certain it wasn’t good. Cops interrupting anything short of a child-murder is never good, but there was something especially horrifying about this. I punched in the code with a trembling hand, activating the alarm, and got out of the store. No headlights appeared. Nobody bothered me as I walked to my car.
The only other remarkable thing about this night was that as I slowed to turn into my apartment complex a pair of headlights swelled up close to the back of my car, as if the driver was trying to tell me something, and then their motor bellowed and the car bore hard to the left and careened away. I couldn’t see if it was Owen’s
Toyota
, but I assumed it wasn’t, because Owen would have kindly followed me in and worked me over in the dark parking lot. Just some tough local gorilla beating his chest. At least that’s what I told myself.