Trust (2 page)

The cop nodded. “And this is the right address,” he said. “The current one, I mean. She lives in Brighton, does she?”

“Ah, no,” Earl said. “That one’s her old one. She,
ah, moved a while ago. Moved to Somerville. But the registration’s still good. Way I understand it. Isn’t it, I mean?”

The cop frowned. “It’s supposed to have the new one written on the back,” he said. “She inform the registry? The registry up there?”

“Jeez,” Earl said, “I really don’t know. She just moved a while ago.”

“I see,” the cop said. “Well, this’ll just take a minute.” He started back to his cruiser, pausing to compare the 195–861 on the plate above the rear bumper with the 195–861 on the card. He got into the cruiser and made various movements partly obscured from Earl by the reflected glare on the windshield. Earl sighed. He stooped over again and picked up the stuff on the seat and shoved it back into the compartment. Then he took the two packs of Newports out again, pressed one of them between his fingers, felt the dry tobacco crumble, and dropped both of them on the floor mat. He slid into the passenger seat and forced the right locking lever closed on the top.

The cop came up behind the car and stood next to the door. He had the license and registration in his left hand. “Everything’s in order, sir,” he said, offering the documents to Earl.

Earl got out of the car. He took his wallet out again and put the license in it, holding the registration in his teeth. He started to put the registration in the glove box, then hesitated. “You know,” he said to the cop, “I don’t think I’m gonna put this back in that mess of shit right now. I might need it again, ’fore I’m through, and I doubt I can find the thing twice.” He put it in his wallet and shut the passenger door. He
grinned uncertainly at the cop. “Okay if I leave now?” he said. “I’m running a little bit late.”

The cop put his hand on the top of the door and peered down into the foot well. “That stuff on the floor—cigarettes?” he said.

“Yeah,
old
cigarettes,” Earl said. “She always does that. Leaves them around the house alla time, too. Lets ’em get real good and stale, ’fore she thinks about throwing them out. You light one of them bastards, boy, it’s been in that hot box all summer? Man, I wanna tell you, you’re gonna think you had a railroad flare in your mouth. I was gonna throw them out. But then I figure: ‘Hey. You found the registration here, and everything. You don’t want a ticket for littering.’ ”

The cop did not smile. “I’m sorry for the inconvenience, sir,” he said. “Just routine, I assure you. Any time we see someone pulled over, this stretch, well, we automatically check everything out. You mind if I look at those cigarettes, now? Now that I’ve seen them, I mean.”

Earl stared at him. “Mind?” he said. “No, I don’t mind. Don’t mind a damned bit. Not at all.” He opened the passenger door, picked up the Newports, and handed them to the cop. “You can have them, you want,” he said. “I wish you’d take them. ’Long with all of that other crap, too.”

The cop removed two bent cigarettes from one pack and held them under his nose. He put them back. He worked his forefinger deep into the second pack and selected a third cigarette. He smelled it. He put it back in the pack and handed the packs back to Earl. Earl tossed them back into the foot well. “That it?” he said.

The cop studied him. “For now, it is,” he said.
“Miss Slate shows up, her arraignment on that marijuana charge, she won’t have any trouble either.”

“She’ll show up,” Earl said. “You don’t have to worry, ’bout her. She was set up on that thing. Penny don’t smoke. Not the funny stuff, at least. No worries at all, about her.”

“I’m not,” the cop said. “I’m worried about you.” He nodded toward the cruiser. “The guy with the Teletype up at headquarters tells me that if you weren’t born this morning, you’ve led one charmed life. Because I keep looking at you, and I know I’ve seen you before. Know who you are, at least. And there’s nothing in the box.” Earl said nothing. “I don’t know all that many people,” the cop said. “There’s very few people around that I met, or I didn’t meet but I know, that I couldn’t place in my mind. Even without the damned box. And I know I know you, and that damned box doesn’t, and somehow, that bothers me.”

Earl remained silent. The cop shrugged. “You picked a bad place to stop,” he said. He gestured over his right shoulder toward the west with his thumb. “You know what that is over there?”

“I can guess,” Earl said. “I don’t know, but I can guess.”

“Yeah,” the cop said. “ACI Cranston. So you can understand, I’m sure, anybody stops along here, they’re almost always going to meet up with us. Identify themselves and state their business. I’m sure you understand why.”

“Not really,” Earl said. “All I was tryin’, do, was put the goddamned top up.”

“Yeah,” the cop said. His face below the glasses
creased into a small smile. “You played
basket
ball,” he said. “You played basketball.”

Earl shrugged. “Didn’t everybody?” he said. “I thought everybody did.”

The center of Lafayette is eight miles east of the Connecticut border, six miles east of 95 on R.I. 189. On the eastern side of the road, the water of Rhode Island Sound shines blue and choppy white on sunny days; sailboats shimmer in the wind, and the waves roll in on small patches of tawny sand between big, black rocks. The westerly side of the road, bulldozed during the late fifties into a flat about two hundred yards deep and three-quarters of a mile long, is crowded by small shopping plazas and a small supermarket, all surrounded by asphalt parking lots and made of cinder block with brick fronts and flat, tarred roofs decorated with ventilator shafts and massive, faded green air-conditioning condensers.

Earl turned in at the third parking entrance and parked very close to a pair of white posts supporting a white sign made of hollow glass, very far from the yellow line marking the limit of his space and the vacant one next to it. The sign had been damaged by a thrown rock that had broken a jagged hole in the glass, exposing three fluorescent tubes inside and breaking
a fourth in its trajectory. The remaining glass was block-lettered in red paint: “
CHUCKIE’S DIS NT LIQUORS
.” Earl put up the windows of the Dodge, got out of the car, and locked it. He surveyed it from the rear and satisfied himself that he had left as much space as possible on the right side. He made his way through three double rows of angle-parked cars to the liquor store, its windows plastered with posters—red paint on white butcher paper—advertising “
UNBELIEVABLE
” savings on wines, “
PRICEBUSTER SPECIALS ON BEERS FOR YOUR BUSTS
,” and “
EVERYDAY PRICE-SLASHING BONANZAS
.”

There were three aisles of shelved stock inside and a wall-to-wall glass-doored refrigerator across the back. Three middle-aged men in faded plaid shirts peered myopically at the labels of imported wines and stocked their shopping carriages with half-gallons of Ballantine’s scotch, Gilbey’s gin, Jim Beam bourbon, and cases of Löwenbräu. An elderly woman with flying white hair and puffiness around the eyes made quick movements, selecting openly a bottle of domestic sherry, using it and a bag of unsalted potato chips to conceal partially the bottle of blackberry brandy she had furtively picked up first and placed at the bottom of her plastic basket. Her lips moved rapidly in silent speech as she went to the registers at the front.

Three large young men—gray sweatshirts, the sleeves ripped off at the armholes, Hawaiian-print surfing jams, and sneakers with no socks—carried three cases of Budweiser each from the cold room behind the refrigerator. The one in the lead stopped next to the gin. “I’m telling you, shithead, it’s true,” the first said over his shoulder to the one last in line. “You can
ask Joanie, don’t believe me, that’s exactly what Patti did. Right after you left, we went down to the cove, and Patti is so fuckin’ drunk she’s got no
idea
where she is. And Tony says: ‘It’s too cold to go swimming. Too cold for that. Patti, show us your tits.’ And she says: ‘All right then, I will.’ And she did. Took off her sweater and did it. And then Philip says: ‘I don’t believe it. Too dark to see if they’re real.’ And she says: ‘Oh yeah?’ and goes over to him, and says: ‘Give ’em a squeeze, and you’ll see.’ So he does, and says: ‘Fuck, what do I know? They sure feel like real tits to me.’ And she says: ‘For punishment, suck ’em,’ and sticks them way out. And, he’s lying down. He says: ‘How?’ And she kneels down, you know, and then sits on his crotch, and sticks them right in his face, and he’s sucking away, and she’s grinding, and then she stands up, rips down his pants there, and of course he’s as hard as a rock. And she jerked him off. He’s lying there, moaning, ‘Blow me, blow me,’ and she’s pulling away at his dick, and then he comes, all over his stomach, and she puts her hand in it and rubs it into his mouth.”

“What’d he do?” the second one said.

“Tried to spit it out,” the first one said. “Making all of these kinds of faces, and Patti puts her top back on and says: ‘Well, I don’t like sluck either. Not in my mouth, at least.’ And she went home.” He shifted the cargo of beer in his hands and resumed the march toward the front. The last one in line said, “Shee-it, those Texans’re tough. She prolly blows horses at home. Should send
her
to Vietnam. Few broads like her got over there, war’d end tomorrow. Chinks’d drop their guns.”

Earl went up the aisle between the second and third
rows of shelves and found a quart bottle of Cossack vodka on sale for $4.99. He retraced his steps toward the back and went up the last aisle between the fourth row of shelving and the cases of beer and soft drinks stacked high against the wall. He took two six-packs of canned Coca-Cola and headed toward the registers at the front. A tall woman—five nine or so, around thirty-five—in a dark leopard-pattern leotard top, very tight faded jeans, and camel-colored shoes with stubby high heels was in the act of bending over the lower basket of a two-tiered display of liqueurs. She had platinum hair, and she was deeply tanned. The neckline of the leotard plunged to the middle of her cleavage; she had a large costume jewelry brooch of fake diamonds pinned to it there. She had very long legs. Earl stopped and pretended to be interested in various brands of rum. She straightened up without taking anything from the basket when a blocky man in a blue windbreaker, sleeves pushed up, yellowed white polo shirt, and shorts came up behind her with two cases of Miller beer. He was running to paunch, and losing his blondish hair. “You want any, that shit for diabetics?” he said. She shook her head, and preceded him into the checkout lane. Earl followed them toward the register. When he reached the place where she had stood, he could smell a lingering aroma of perfume. It grew stronger as he came up behind the man, who was presenting a twenty-dollar bill. “Don’t worry,” the man said. “It’s not one of those.”

The cashier was a woman just shy of forty. She wore a short black wig with ringlets that framed her face, and a pink smock with “Chuckie’s Discount” embroidered in red over her left breast. She accepted the
money and snorted, ringing up the sale. “It’s fifties now,” she said, tapping a notice taped to the glass partition on the other side of the register. “I guess they’re movin’ up inna world.” She glanced sidelong at the woman in the leotard. “Like lots of us’d like, and some already did.” The woman did not say anything. She stared into the middle distance, and licked her bottom lip once.

The man chuckled and accepted his change. “Good thing for you, I guess,” he said, “they didn’t start two months ago.” He picked up his beer, and the woman went ahead of him toward the exit, her buttocks swaying smoothly under the denim. She used her right hand to brush the hair from her right temple, tossing her head back as she did so. She gave the blocky man half a smile, her eyelids lowered, as he followed her out through the door.

“You, ah,” the cashier said to Earl, “you want me to ring that stuff up, sir?”

Earl took a deep breath and put the bottle and the two six-packs on the counter. He shook his head as he pulled out his wallet. “Fine lookin’ woman,” he said.

“Best advertisement Revlon ever had,” the cashier said, running her forefinger down a flip-card list of prices. She rang up the price of the vodka, and added $3.29 for the Coke. “Eight twenny-eight,” she said.

“Revlon?” he said.

She nodded. “The perfume,” she said. “She douses herself. Must pour it on over her head.”

“I kind of liked it,” he said. “I thought it smelled nice. Sort of spicy.” He separated one bill from a respectable wad in his wallet and handed it to the cashier.

“Hell,” she said, “I used to like it myself. Wore the stuff all of the time. But that was before she started coming in here every week, absolutely reeking of it. Now I wouldn’t wear the damned poison. I dumped all of mine down the toilet. Right after the rest of my life.” She rested the bill on edge on the buttons of the top row of the register. “Course the fact that the guy she comes
in
here with now, happens to be my ex-husband—well, that might have something to do with it.” She peered at the bill. “Hey,” she said.

“Your ex-husband?” he said.

“You deaf or something, mister?” she said, offering the bill back to him. “I can’t take this.”

“You used to be married, that guy?”

She sighed. “I swear,” she said, “you got wax in your ears. You oughta go to the doctor. Yeah, I used to be married, that guy. We got what they call ‘divorce’ in this state. ‘Providence, and these Plantations.’ You come from some other planet or something, you never heard of divorce? You should live in Italy. But what I’m talking about now, though, is this.” She waved the fifty under his nose. “This’s what I’m talking about, all right? I can’t take this, for your stuff. You got something smaller, that’s fine. Or something bigger, a hundred—also fine. But no fifties no way now, in Chuckie’s—we eighty-sixed them ’fore Memorial Day. Hell, we didn’t even take twennies, till almost the Fourth of July. Counterfeit, you know? Like ‘No good’? Like ‘Dunno where you got this, ma’am’—you take it to the bank—‘but the Treasury didn’t print it and we sure don’t want it here.’ And you say: ‘Do I do?’ And they look at you, and they just sort of shrug, and they tell
you that that’s your decision. Paper your spare room, if you got enough, or use them for toilet paper.”