Winners (20 page)

“When did this happen?”

“Just now, right now, we just came from there. Marathon session. I can’t believe it’s night. Time flies when you’re having money.”

“And now where are you?”

“I’m not sure. Where are we?” she shouts out, and someone answers. She repeats the name, address.

“Hot damn. Congratulations.” The word sounds stiff on his lips, too many syllables for feeling. “After all that, you did it. Made it.”

“Yeah. Well, in some ways it’s just beginning,” she says, sounding like a wise and impish child. “Anyway, get your butt over here.”

“I’m on my way.” He is about to explain the state he’s in—his clothes, his work-stained body—but she hangs up too soon. I just don’t really care, he thinks. He drives across the city, headed toward success.

Success sits plump in the meat of SOMA. At the entrance, three valets hurry to make the proud line of brand new cars disappear as eager diners pour inside. No sign hangs out front, but this has to be the place, and now he spots the restaurant’s name winking up at him in green glass etched into the sidewalk out front. A single word, uncapitalized, and he feels pretty sure that deep down it’s not a word at all.

Hundreds of people fit in there. They sit upstairs and downstairs, at tables and booths. They perch on the edge of beautiful backless stools at the multiple bars, touching crystal glasses. They stand casually in between, assessing the terrain. In the center of the room, a three-story transparent wall of wine rises above them all, the proud bottles encased in glass like priceless insects or the preserved penises of famous men. The whole place makes him think about impending earthquakes, and not just any earthquake: the big one. Everyone’s goblet leaping from their hands at once; the icy crack and avalanche of that great glass wall; grape blood running in rivulets through the crumbled brick. He can hear the screams as the earth shakes people from their stools, tossing them gently to the floor and folding the roof and walls around them like deathly tissue paper until those crushed and fancy bodies of once and future millionaires lie absolutely still, all shut up at last. Outside, the last elevated highways stumble and fall, rolling cars like craps dice through the streets and burying the tent and shopping-cart homeless in the underpass. The big one will go after everything and everyone as an equal opportunity destroyer. The differences come only later, when you realize what you’ve lost, what you’re willing to lose, and what you’re going to do now or next. Some will move back East, some will seek out former lives and homes, some will change their jobs and spouses, some will buy and most will sell, some will give up hope and some will decide to start for real this time, from scratch. Some will come out smiling into the rubble and get to work rebuilding, happy for profit, looking forward to the next one. It will be a day they all remember, at least, and an explanation for everything that follows.

He finds Lou and company near the back, at a big booth with too many bodies in it. His wife’s green eyes meet his as he approaches. In the tasteful light, her eyes look dark and rich and clever, that ancient shade of cash. Her eyes run briefly up and down the clothes he salvaged from his van: the gray poly pants, the clean but wrinkled shirt, the ratty shoes. She smiles to herself. She leans over two men he doesn’t know, her breasts suspended dangerously before their small open mouths. She gives him a winy kiss.

“Congratulations, baby,” he says again. Lou smiles her biggest smile and rocks back into place. “Congratulations, everyone,” he says, and they accept that with slight nods and inclined glasses, waiting for something smart to go with it but he can’t think of anything. He looks around for a place to be. The waiter has found a chair for him and perches him at a corner, not quite at the table, in everybody’s way.

“You missed the Harlan ’97, I’m afraid,” the stranger next to him explains, as the waiter reaches over to pour him a glass of wine.

“No thanks,” Shane tells the waiter, halting him with his hand.

“I mean, the Ducru’s no joke,” the stranger says ironically, nodding at the waiter’s bottle. “Excellent, excellent, excellent.” The stranger’s friend flashes a thumbs-up to confirm.

“No,” Shane says, louder than he wants to, and they both look at him for the first time, a little startled. He glances at Lou but she hasn’t noticed. “I’ll have a beer,” he tells the waiter. “Bud, if you have it. Something lager if you don’t.” The waiter disappears. His tablemates nod together, turn toward the conversation in progress, and delete him absolutely.

“That Russian duck,” Fulton is saying, his arms spread wide against the booth back. He takes up too much room, his trained arms bulging out of rolled-up shirt sleeves, extravagantly holding court. “Maine blue crabs or something. It was pretty amazing stuff, this whole place gutted and empty and they’re cooking on portable gas, you know. Spot lighting and impromptu tables, nice china, they had them in here like a movie set.” He waves his hand at the room around them.

“How many were you?”

“About thirty, I’d say.”

“But you weren’t convinced.”

“It wasn’t that, you could see they were determined. But food and drink have never been my favorite pleasures.” He winks at them all, catches Shane’s eye across the table, smiles a wicked smile just for him. “Heavy on the taste and smell and sight. Light on sound and feel. You can have it all, you know.” He stares at Shane.

“Sports,” Shane says. They’re all looking at him, now, wondering briefly what’s going on. “Basketball.”

“Taste?”

The salty sweat at the edge of lips, Shane thinks. He shrugs.

“I was thinking sex and drugs,” Fulton says.

“Of course you were,” someone says.

“Come on, you were telling a story. About how you decided not to invest in this place.”

Fulton takes his eyes off Shane slowly, setting aside a puzzle he hasn’t quite solved. “It’s not that I didn’t believe they’d make it,” he says in a bright new voice. “They had an all-star team, the food was great, a thousand wines by the bottle, the drawings looked fantastic. But I dunno, a restaurant? Investing in a restaurant might seem sexy but doesn’t have nearly the possibility of, say, oh, let’s say a little tech company. How big can a restaurant really get?”

“Pretty big,” Sloan says, looking around.

“All right, but let’s be sappy and crass: how many restaurants stand a chance to fundamentally change the world? How many restaurants can make you twenty million overnight?” All their eyes rest eagerly upon him. “I dunno, it seems like something vain to do more when you’re rich and bored and done, you know, invest in a big-deal restaurant. Like some stupid sports celeb or movie star. Nah. Give me a handful of people in a room somewhere, figuring it out every day, doing something that really drops your jaw, something holy shit you got to call somebody up now and tell them what you saw. Give me people who use their brains.” He looks slowly from Sloan to Rich to Lou. “Give me you guys, any day.”

“Damn. I told you we could have pushed up the pre,” Sloan says, getting the laughs.

“Oh you did just fine.” Fulton catches Lou’s eye and winks her way.

Shane drinks his beer. He listens to their happy talk circle back to the deal’s specifics. He can’t or won’t follow, and after a while he doesn’t hear them at all. Their mouths are popping open and shut like fish, red mouths moving all around him, red mouths sucking down wine and wok-roasted lobster and crisp-crusted skate with picholine olives. How many nights a week can you do this? How many weeks? Table after table, men and women ordering without hesitation, spending hundreds, thousands of dollars here in the shadow of the great wall of wine. Will they remember this night for the rest of their lives? Will they remember it a month from now? He will. Lou will.

From the far side of the table, deep in conversation, Fulton finds him and raises his eyebrows lasciviously, can you believe this shit, can you believe all this, but Shane gives him nothing back. Fulton leans toward Lou and puts a friendly arm around her, pulls her in for a whisper, and they both look at him, smiling, agreeing about something that motivates Lou from her seat. The strangers rise and let her pass, and she comes to him. She scoots his butt over on the chair and sits down schoolgirl-close beside him.

“I’m glad you came,” she says, whispering and kissing his jaw just below the ear.

He nods, turns his head, and kisses her cool forehead. “I think I’m going to go, though.” He pulls her tight and awkward to him, shoulder to shoulder. He wants to say something else—something good, something right. “I don’t know how you do it,” he tries. “I don’t know how you did it.”

She smiles. “Yes you do.”

“Not really. You amaze me.”

“After all this time.”

“All this time.” 66.66 million dollars. He feels nothing.

“I guess I have to let you go,” she says, a little sadly. “Or I’ll come with you.” It has just occurred to her.

Yes, he thinks. Come. “No, you stay.”

“You sure?”

“Sure. You deserve this.” He makes some small movement with his hand and she looks around at the restaurant, the people, her co-workers and new partners, consuming it slowly, pixel by pixel. He looks with her and finds Debra sitting at a table nearby, her back to him, long gold earrings swinging as she throws her head back and laughs too hard. On the second floor, above her head, Jimmy is sullenly waiting tables, while downstairs in the basement Samson scrubs the duck-stained dishes. And Shane is leaving. Without realizing it, he’s risen now and the table halts the conversation briefly as they say well dones, good nights. Lou walks him towards the door.

“Are you okay?” she says.

“I’m good,” he tells her. “Don’t worry about me, I’m just tired. I’m happy for you, Lou.”

“For us.”

“Yeah. Wow. I.” He waits for her to say something else, but she’s waiting for him too and all he has are questions he’s afraid to ask. He doesn’t ask.

Outside in the cool evening air his head feels clear again, or clear maybe for the first time all night. He finds his van in the alley where he’s parked it, pulls out and takes the right and then the left and then the right. Left. Potrero Hill is right there and has always been there, close.

A
WHITE
A
CCORD
sits in his parking spot in front of Debra’s house. The thought of a boyfriend crosses his mind, a brother, some angry man called in for comfort on a crappy night. On the other hand, he thinks, sometimes a white Accord is just a white Accord. He parks on the far side of the lot, locks up the van and crosses to Debra’s door. He’s poised to knock when he hears something behind him, and turns to see a guy slipping out of the shadows near his van.

Shane’s never seen him before but the guy nods, as if they’ve scheduled this appointment. From inside the project building in front of him, he can hear music, television, and children in progress. He feels his heart go double-time, pounding at the walls of his body as if it would like to get out. Instead of knocking he finds himself pushing off the door with one hand and walking toward the stranger in the lot. The guy watches him come, standing still and passive beside his van, and nods at him again. Then Shane feels the change in pressure behind him and plants hard off his right foot, that quick first step that serves him so well on the court. He ducks his head and cuts backdoor, away from whatever is coming his way.

The first guy behind him misses him almost completely, hand glancing off his sinking shoulder as momentum carries the man by, but the second connects hard with a kick to his right knee as Shane slips out of the way. It doesn’t hurt very much, just a ringing there, like banging knees with someone on the court. His body spins, and for an instant it seems possible for him to dig in and run, down the hill into the dark pupil of the projects where maybe he will get away or maybe things will get a whole lot worse. He doesn’t run. Kicks is leaning over him to kick again, thinking Shane is going down, but Shane is still spinning and then plants and straightens and punches Kicks in the neck. The man drops his chin at the last possible moment and they crack bone to bone, Kicks’ head snapping back, feet stumbling away from him and then miraculously, to Shane’s immense gratification, falling to the ground. His hand has gone numb, immediately. He is so surprised and happy he feels like laughing. He hasn’t punched anyone for years.

The other two come in to tackle him in tandem and he loses his cool. They’ve all been strangely quiet to that point but Shane starts bellowing now, yelling obscenities as loud as he can, and they start swearing too. He’s not sure exactly what is happening but he jams an elbow into something hard, sending the electric shiver up his arm. Then his head yanks back, someone has him by the hair and jerks him to the ground, pulling his skull inside out. The pain blinds him, he can’t see a thing as he flails one arm back. Something smashes against his ankle and he loses his feet. He twists sideways as he falls, reaching out to pull someone with him, hitting the ground shoulder-first.

Man is he down. The little pebbles of the asphalt dig into his temple, but his main sensation is of strangulation as a large foot presses down on his neck. “You move I kill you, motherfucker,” the foot explains. The foot sounds like it means every word but it’s not Shane’s choice, he can’t stop moving, his body keeps trying to wiggle and jerk out of that deadly position. He feels hands in his pockets. A robbery, he thinks, surprised. Then the weight leaves him and he manages to push off and roll away, is halfway up when someone kicks him in the chest, he grabs onto the foot and pulls the man down and jumps on top of him to bite his cheek off but another kick hits him just above the crotch and another on the hip, and he has to let go and roll again and cover up as best he can. He hears a voice that sounds like Tennessee but he can’t understand the words. Someone kicks him in the back and smashes his hands curled over his head and then it stops. The numb pressure expanding into heat, throb, deep ache. He hears them running and lifts up his head to watch the shapes drop off his horizon into the dark valley of the projects below. They run miraculously and finally he hears the reason, a police car burping sound and light on the projects road nearby. Amazing: somebody’s called the cops. He feels his face with his battered hands. His nose, his eyes, his teeth. Everything seems to be in place, facewise. The rest of his body who knows. He sits up in the middle of the parking lot, watching the police lights whiz by. They don’t stop, bound for bigger stuff than the likes of him. He smiles and half laughs and feels a jolt somewhere in his ribs. I don’t remember that one, he thinks. Fuck. He listens to the sirens Doppler out of sight. Get up, he thinks. Get up now and it doesn’t matter where they’re going. They saved your ass anyway. Get up before Tennessee comes back to top things off.

He stands in slow motion and turns to face Debra’s building. His legs wobble as he takes the required steps, carefully, steps are an accomplishment right now. He doesn’t feel too bad for a five-hundred-year-old man. At the door he goes to knock and sees that his right-hand knuckles have ripped and split and are leaking liberally all over the place. He can’t remember how to knock left-handed as he listens to the television yelling inside. Maybe he’s okay. He almost turns around but then pounds righty with his wrist against her door until it opens.

Over her shoulder he can see her three kids whooping it up, rioting around the living room, full-contact TV night is what it looks like. The television set to stun and a stereo playing somewhere, the kids yelling at the top of their lungs. Life is boisterous and loud in there.

He says, “I’m sorry.”

“Goddamn.” She looks him over lightning-fast from head to toe and quickly checks over his shoulder. She reaches out and grabs his shirt, pulls him roughly inside, and slams the door behind him.

His hand is a big hit with the kids. They are in the kitchen at a little red Formica table under a bare lightbulb that hangs by wires from the ceiling, casting good hard light on his wounds as she cleans him up. She lets them watch the peroxide bubble up along his knuckles, their eyes skipping from the bloody foam to his face. The pain isn’t too bad but he opens his mouth and pretends he’s going to scream, and all three kids inhale with him before he smiles and winks at them and watches them release their breath. He laughs and feels the real hurt down below: his rib, his knee, his ankle. Thank god for Nike he thinks, if they’d been wearing anything but sneakers he’d be in a hundred pieces now.

“It was a fight, huh,” says the younger boy, seven or eight, examining the asphalt scrape across his face. Kaleb with a K, Shane remembers. Samson, Demetrius, Kaleb, Sharina. What a crew, Shane thinks.

“He was robbed,” little Sharina says, like she’s the only one who understands.

“Well,” Shane tells Kaleb, “there were four or five of them.” Debra shoots him a look to tell him true or false this is bullshit but she’ll humor him if he wants. He wants. “You see that hand?” It’s looking better now, raw but clean. “That was right on his chin, and he went down.”

“Dang,” Kaleb says, nodding serious and happy. He rubs a hand against his own chin experimentally.

“Always go for the neck if you can,” Shane tells him. “But be ready to hit the chin instead.”

“Like that,” Kaleb says, trying to hit his brother in the neck. Demetrius smacks his hand away.

“But they got you,” Demetrius says, determined to keep Shane in his place.

“Yeah they did. They won I lost, you’re right about that.” She’s doing his jaw, now, not gently, holding his chin firm with one hand and brushing the rocks out with the other, and that hurts like shit. The kids can see his pain and now finally the two boys smile, nodding their heads with satisfaction.

“But you got him good, huh,” Kaleb says. “You popped him.”

“Oh I popped him,” he says.

“Enough,” Debra says, and they all go quiet. “Meetri, get the man a beer out the fridge, all right. K get me the phonebook and phone. Sharina honey come over here and sit with momma.” The boys disperse and the little girl hops up on her mother’s lap. “Open it for him,” Debra’s saying to Demetrius, “get the man a glass.”

“I don’t need a glass. I appreciate it.”

“You a lucky man,” she says. “Musta been just kids. Up here, they serious? they bust your head with a piece a pipe, don’t even waste a bullet on you. They bust you, boy, they take you out.”

“They got me pretty good.”

“Shit. This like a kiss goodnight,” Debra says. “You should be dead.”

“Maybe.”

Demetrius returns with a tall golden can and Shane pops it with his good hand and takes a big sip. The best beer he’s ever tasted in his life. Then he notices the other can on the table, open. She watches him see it and she picks it up, takes a sip.

“What,” she says. The kids aren’t paying any extra attention to her as she drinks, and he thinks well shit, she lied to me about that too, didn’t she. “What,” she says again.

“Nothing. Thank you, that’s all.”

They all move into the living room and watch Debra call up his bank. She tells them he’s been robbed while he lies there with ice on his hand. The cold distracts his body from its other problems. The bank is giving her some trouble.

“Yeah, well this his wife,” she says, not looking at him, “we in the hospital okay so he can’t exactly talk to you right now. That’s right. My husband, Shane McCarthy.” They ask her his mother’s maiden name and social security number and other things his real wife doesn’t know by heart. She repeats the questions aloud, sounding outraged—his mother’s maiden name?!?—waits as he murmurs back the answer and then passes it along. It takes a while but in the end everything sounds straightened out.

“Now don’t be waiting three weeks or something before you send out that replacement, all right?” She laughs. “You know I will. All right. All right. You too.” She hangs up and grins. There’s something about this she’s enjoying, although he doesn’t know what. If Lou could see her now.

“Credit cards?” she says.

“I can do that,” he tells her. “You don’t have to bother.”

“You sure? I don’t mind.”

“No, I’m fine.”

She shrugs. “All right. I’ll be right back.” She passes him the phone and the phonebook. “If you’ll be all right.”

“I’m all right.”

He listens to her lead her kids upstairs. He can hear her arguing with Demetrius about something. “You promised,” the boy is saying, but he loses that argument, a door closing to dissolve them into silence. Shane calls his cell phone company. Had to ditch that phone anyway. He lies back on the couch and closes his eyes. He hears the front door open and shut and lock. He sits up and the pain pushes a big blast of air from his lungs into the room. Debra is standing in the doorway with a paper bag in her hands.

“You sleeping?”

“No,” he says. He has no idea how much time has passed. He knows he never heard her leave. He doesn’t remember lying on his side.

“I get you a blanket,” she said. She looks huge right now, standing over him in a puffy jacket with a heavy bag in her hands.

He shakes his head: no. But he doesn’t get up. His muscles feel like they’ve been stripped of fiber, drained of blood. It reminds him of being a little kid ready to put a pillow over his head and sleep through everything. “You go get something for your son?” he manages.

“Nah, I got us some beer, what you talking about.”

“I heard him whining up there.”

“They always whining about something. You want a beer?”

“No,” he says. “You got any aspirin?”

She shrugs. “You don’t want a beer?”

“No,” he repeats. “I should go.”

“You came over here, didn’t you?”

“Yeah. But I’m scared to ask you,” he says.

“What,” she says. She squats down on her haunches so that they are eye level.

“The interview.”

She stands up again, sharply. “Oh, you don’t know already.”

“No I don’t. She didn’t tell me.”

“You didn’t ask her, neither.”

“No. I was scared to ask her too.”

She thinks about that for a moment, calculating an obscure sum. “You scared all sorts a shit, ain’t you?”

“Just tell me, will you? I. I know it didn’t go too well.”

“Oh yeah. It was like that,” she says, pointing at his bruised hand, “’cept at least you popped him.” She gives excellent sarcasm, under the circumstances. She pulls two beers out of the bag and clicks them open, placing them side by side on the little table. Slides one over in front of him and waits until he takes it. “I’ll tell you,” she says, “but you already know, don’t you.”

“I guess I do.” He doesn’t bother explaining.

“I fucked up. It’s almost funny.” She leans back and smiles. “I guess that happen enough it don’t seem funny anymore. I guess it’s not funny when you really are a fuck-up.”

She stands up before he can say anything and disappears into the kitchen with the other beers. When she comes back she brings the big boom box with her, plugs it into the wall, and lets the radio sing for them in the background. It sounds like an oldies station, hopeful and harmonic.

“I’m sorry,” he tells her. “Maybe I can talk to her about it.”

She shakes her head. “That shit ain’t gonna go, you know. That world? Come on, now. Look at me.”

He looks. “You might be right. But there some things going on you don’t know about, so let me talk to her anyway.”

“Okay. Talk whatever you want.” She smiles, then laughs softly to herself. “You a mess. You should see yourself. Sitting there like you gonna arrange all this and that. What happened out there?”

“I don’t know. Some kids. Why’d you lie to me.”

“To you? I don’t lie to you. You got to know someone to lie to them. I don’t even know what you are.”

“Drugs,” Shane says. The word sits there between them like a bloody glove. “Samson was selling drugs for Tennessee. Down at the gym. You knew.”

Debra rocks slightly in her chair, rubbing her nose gently with her hand as if soothing a slow itch. “Come on now,” she says finally, “you know he wasn’t no real dealer. You still don’t get it, you don’t know shit.” He doesn’t move. “What, he sell a bag or two to keep that punk up off him that make him some b-boy?” she says. “He do a little this that to make some money. What am I gonna tell you?”

“Just the truth.”