Throw Like A Girl (18 page)

“I think it's because he's a foreigner. Stuff he says comes out funny. Where's Tuzla? That's where he says I should go.”

“Go where, what are you talking about?”

“Because he could get me a job there.”

“Absolutely not.”

“I haven't even told you what kind of job it is, you just start right in saying no. It's in the entertainment industry. Americans are very popular over there. Bruno knows some people who could, you know, sponsor me.”

“Now listen to me,” Olivia said, slowly, overenunciating, as if Roberta was the one who didn't speak English. “I want you to keep your phone on. Keep talking to me. And walk right out the front door.”

“Just a minute,” said Roberta. The phone made clattering noises, and the music surged again.

“What's going on?” Marlon asked, as Olivia shouted into the phone.

“Some Slavic pimp is trying to sell my daughter into white slavery.”

“Oh wow.”

“Roberta?” The music roared and bleated. “Roberta!”

“Hello?” A man's voice, furry with accent. “Hello in there.”

“Who is this? I want to talk to my daughter.”

“Mamma,” said the man. “We are good times.”

“How much English do you know, slimeball? Police?
Comprendes?
Police?”

“Mamma, this is Bruno. Your daughter friend. Beautiful girl. Very fun.”

“She's seventeen. She has no passport. After I shoot your sorry stinking ass, they'll put what's left of you in jail for the next hundred years.”

“Mom?” Roberta came back on the line. “Mom, I feel better now. I threw up.”

Olivia put the phone to her heart, then brought it up to her ear again.

“We're supposed to go see some guys he knows, so I should get off now.”

“Do not go anywhere with this person. Do you hear me? This is not negotiable.”

“I never should have told you he was a foreigner,” Roberta complained. “You are so totally prejudiced.”

“Are all your clothes on? Huh?” Olivia realized she was shouting into the phone. People in the bar were turned around in their seats, listening. “Excuse me,” Olivia said to the room. “Does anyone here speak Bosnian?” People turned themselves back around again, grudgingly. “Does Bruno have a last name? Does he have a visa? Where are you meeting these people?”

“Some club. It's not real far from here.”

“Where's here? Roberta!”

“Club Veejay. Or it sounds like that.” Olivia mouthed the name to Marlon, who nodded. He knew most of the questionable bars in the city.

“Fine, go there. We'll come get you there. Me and Marlon.”

“Marlon's such a loser. I don't think you have any business criticizing me when you hang out with him.”

“Stay on the phone,” Olivia ordered, but Roberta had already shut it off.

“Let's go,” said Olivia. She was already at the door while Marlon was still standing at the table, saying his good-byes. Then they were in the car. “What is this place, where is it?”

“Go north on Western Avenue,” Marlon told her. He was playing the piano on his knees, an unconscious, irritating habit that she tried not to let irritate her. He said, “I knew a Bruno once, but that was just a nickname. Are you sure you should be driving?”

“Do you want to?”

“I didn't say that.” Marlon hadn't driven a car in years. The reason involved something legal, or maybe illegal. She knew she shouldn't be driving. Traffic lights and street lights and car lights careened around them. The shapes of people and cars and buildings were both flat and menacing, like driving through a stage set for a horror movie. Marlon wasn't sure of his directions and they got lost in an evil near-west-side neighborhood, a district of dark underpasses and blind-eyed buildings and lurking figures in hooded sweatshirts. Figuring that crazy speed was her best option, Olivia floored it and the car fishtailed for the length of a block. She was crying by now, crying and hunching over the steering wheel as if the car was a horse that needed urging on. She hadn't thought she was a lousy mother but she guessed she was. The kind whose children appeared in lurid news stories and you thought what degenerate scum the parents must be. She had done everything wrong, not just with Roberta but everything her whole stupid life, and she was sick with shame, knowing she could never make it all right. Yet even her guilt, she knew, was suspect, that same old extravagance of feeling and weepy self-regard. She was disgusting, really.

“Try her phone again,” she ordered Marlon.

“I can never figure out how these things work.”

“It's a
phone
, how hard can it be? Do you really know where this place is?” Nothing looked familiar to her: gas stations and car lots lit with galaxy-bright floodlights behind chain-link fences. Brake shops, welding shops, exhaust repair shops, all the spoor and fodder of the automobile.

“Just keep going. Or no, go around the block.”

This was a neighborhood of tilting, two-story frame houses, each with some kind of appendage—porch, awning, outside stair—haphazardly built and almost visibly separating from the main structure. The yards were narrow lumps of dirt in which the occasional small tree stood, bare as a hat rack. She couldn't stand thinking that her daughter might be inside one of these ugly houses, drunk or drugged or worse. How many lives were carried on in such places, how vast was the world and all its wretchedness and meanness and clamoring greed, and how could she find the one human soul dear to her in so much darkness, ah help her, help her, she was losing her mind, it was peeling away in great sodden chunks, like wet cardboard.

Club Veejay was a building of yellow brick, not much bigger than a garage, with high slits for windows and a solid metal door. “What do we do if she's not here?” Olivia asked, shivering in the chilly night air. It had been spring earlier, but they'd taken it away again.

“Have a drink, I guess.”

“You were always one of the smart kids in class, weren't you?”

“Don't talk a lot,” advised Marlon. “And act like we just dropped in, we were just in the neighborhood.”

Olivia dialed Roberta's phone over and over, getting her languid voice message:
Hi. Roberta. Talk to me. I'll get you back.
What if she never saw her daughter again? It could happen. Things like that happened to people. At the entrance of Club Veejay, they paused, listening, but no sound came to them. Marlon shrugged and pulled the door open.

Roberta wasn't there. It only took a moment for Olivia to scan the dim precincts of the little bar, and another to want to back right out again. But Marlon was behind her, an obstacle to retreat, and besides, maybe they were supposed to stay there, she couldn't remember.

They stood at one end of the bar, which was a block of stained and scarred pine, and Marlon ordered two brandies. He gave her a nudge, a cautionary reminder, and Olivia gave him one back, harder. She kept her gaze down, not meeting anyone's eye. The bartender had hands like lobsters, red and scuttling. Bits of murmured conversation reached her, full of sinister consonants.

When she raised her head for a look around, she saw eight or ten men at the bar and the two small tables, all of them drinking in a steady, businesslike fashion. It was not possible to tell, from observing them, if the alcohol was cheering them up or sinking them further into some expatriate melancholy. The walls were paneled with cheap wood veneer. The furniture, what there was of it, had the same look of dismal thrift. Where was her daughter? Weren't they supposed to be doing something about her? She drank her brandy. It crawled down her throat like something alive. “Let's go,” she said to Marlon, but he was asking the man next to them if he had a light.

“You can smoke in the car. Come on.”

Marlon said, “Yeah, I've been here a time or two,” and Olivia realized he must have been talking for a while, having a whole conversation without her noticing. “I came with a friend, and my friend had this other friend, what was his name, honey?”

“Bruno,” said Olivia. She was sweating beneath her clothes. She felt poisoned.

“That's it. Bruno.”

“Bruno,” said the other man. Olivia tried to get a good look at him. She had to tilt her head back because her eyes wouldn't open all the way. He was plaid. “Big Bruno or Little Bruno?”

“He kidnapped my daughter.”

“Oh, that would be Little Bruno.” The plaid man laughed, which made her indignant. But then she realized she hadn't really spoken. Something else had been said that she'd missed. Sweat was rolling off her.

“Ladies' room,” she said, very carefully, and the plaid man conferred with the bartender, and the bartender's lobster claw pointed to the corner.

“You all right?” Marlon asked, and she would have liked to say something witty and caustic back to him, but instead concentrated on putting one foot in front of the other until she was behind the door of the little toilet room, where she vomited and urinated and vomited again in such quick succession that she had to keep hopping up and down.

She splashed her face with cool water, avoiding the mirror as much as possible. She made a promise to the universe: Give me my daughter and I will…What could she promise? Who was in charge of these things anyway?

Olivia loosened the hook that provided the bathroom's minimal privacy. The door didn't close all the way and an inch or so of space allowed a view of someone's stolid backside, shifting his weight from one haunch to another. A thin, indirect current of cigarette smoke filtered through. The bar had grown noisier, more crowded, and she had to push past a layer of thick-bodied men who made amused, possibly obscene comments. Screw you. She was going to learn enough Serbo-Croatian to say that, she was going to make a point of learning it and coming back here to tell them.

“Mom? Hey, Mom!”

Roberta was waving to her from one of the little tables, where she sat with Marlon and the plaid man and a creature who must be Bruno. Olivia fell on her. “Ow, you're smooshing me,” Roberta complained.

“I should only kill you.” Olivia had been blubbering, but now that was over and she was ready to be furious. “What the hell kind of stunt was this? And what are you wearing?” Roberta had on an unfamiliar blouse, emerald green, made of some shiny, stretchy, cheaply glamorous fabric. “What did you do to your face?”

“It's professional makeup. It's for my photographs.”

“You look like a clown.” Or like the girl in the Korean shop's calendar, rouged to the eyebrows. “Since when did you do pink? What photographs?”

“This is Bruno, Mom. I told you about him.”

Bruno was draped across the chair in the corner. He was younger than Olivia had expected, twenty-five, maybe, with blond curls slicked down with hair goo, and pale blue eyes set a little too close together. His face was long, horsey, with sunken cheeks, but still a face girls might persuade themselves was rakish and desirable, oh yes, she knew a thing or two about girls. “Mamma,” said Bruno, nodding and grinning.

“Creep,” Olivia said, sitting down across from him. There was some new problem or danger here that she would have to deal with, but she was still too sick and liquor-dazed to see the shape of it and navigate it successfully. “What photographs?” she repeated.

“For my portfolio. Heeheehahahah.” Roberta squealed and squirmed. Bruno had made some under-the-table contact.

Olivia said to Marlon, “If I hit him, do you think anyone in here would care?”

“This is Drakko,” said Marlon, indicating the man in the plaid shirt. “He's from Bosnia too. He's a doctor. Of philosophy.”

“That's not a real doctor, what does that mean? Anybody can call themselves that.”

“It is an honorary title,” said Drakko.

“What's that you're drinking?” she said to Roberta. “How did you get in here anyway when you're underaged?”

Drakko, said, “It is a family place. Family atmosphere.” His English was better than Bruno's but still heavy going. He was Marlon's age or older, a big, sagging man with ill-fitting dentures.

Roberta said, “I'm almost eighteen. When I'm eighteen, you can't tell me what to do anymore.”

“If you live that long. Let's go home now.”

“This is all because I said I wasn't going to college, right? So anything I want to do instead, you won't let me.”

Marlon said, “You used to hear a lot of bad things about Bosnia. But I believe that's changed.”

“My country is my broken heart,” said Drakko, with genuine, if drunken, sadness.

Marlon said, “I think it would be an interesting place to visit sometime. For the experience.”

“See? Even Marlon thinks you're overreacting.”

“Marlon's just making noise. He's improvising. Tell Bruno it's been nice knowing him.”