Big Machine (15 page)

The driver wore his belly with a sense of pride. He wasn’t fat, average-size everywhere but the gut. He didn’t stoop to hide it, though. He leaned back to show it off. In order to get inside his pants pocket he had to twist the paunch. He took out a sheet of blue paper and unfolded it.

“Ms. Henry?” he asked.

“Claude! Stop playing games with Mr. Rice.”

That was the loudest I’d heard her get. It was sort of nice to see her irritated with someone other than me.

“Does that paper call me Larry?” I asked.

“Just says Ms. Henry plus one. That’s what I mean. I called back as I drove over here and was told that the plus one was a ‘Larry.’ Which is you.”

“My name is Ricky Rice,” I said.

His answer? There wasn’t any. He just looked at the Gray Lady and said, “I’ll go and get your bags.”

It was only when Claude returned, carrying hers alone, that I realized he’d meant the statement literally. I had to cast a line between the passengers crowding the baggage carousel and hook the handle of my suitcase with my finger. Felt better once I held it. I’d packed the heroin in my luggage, all six baggies. But I hadn’t tried bringing the syringe through airport security.

CLAUDE’S BLACK LINCOLN TOWN CAR IDLED
in the arrivals pickup lane, and I couldn’t believe airport security hadn’t called the bomb squad. But when he opened the trunk, one of the security guys walked over and shook Claude’s hand. They were pals.

The cuffs of Claude’s pants were frayed, bits of fabric dangling. The kind of thing I wouldn’t have noticed a year before. And what was that suit fabric anyway? Not tweed, not flannel, not worsted wool. Not cotton or even polyester. Carpet fibers, that’s what they looked like. A whole cheap suit made of the stuff.

We left the bright airport and rolled down Garland’s side streets. Block after block of single-family homes, one or two stories tall, with pitched roofs and little front yards. Places that were worn down along the corners and front stairs. They all had a little dirt under their nails. Garland had working-class hands. I became calmer because I recognized this kind of place.

There were the flatlands, which was the center of the city, surrounded by hills on three sides. I saw slightly nicer, larger homes at the base of those hills. And the nicest houses climbed even higher, at the middle and nearly the top of the mountains, scrambling up the incline like animals escaping a flood.

I got drowsy as we reached the highway, I-580, going west. Leaned against the car door, my face on the glass, soothed by a light rain that pattered against the windshield. I listened to it and looked into the sky.

The Washburn Library is under threat
.

I could hear the Dean’s voice now, as sure as the hum of Claude’s tires. It was like the Dean was whispering to me across the continent.

From one of our own
.

The Town Car rose and dipped as we took the West Street exit off the highway and coasted down a ramp. I saw a small flock of offices on the horizon, downtown Garland, the only buildings in the city that measured more than six stories. Downtown looked like a rogue wave on an otherwise calm sea.

Claude parked the Town Car in front of a hotel called By the Bay, its name in big letters spreading across the third floor. Claude turned in his seat and said, “This is your stop, Larry.”

I looked at the Gray Lady. “Just me?”

Claude spoke again. “Ms. Henry has a place at the Washburn estate.”

She looked at me, took off her hat. In the dark car her white hair looked phosphorescent.

The Gray Lady said, “I will fetch you first thing in the morning, Mr. Rice. There’s no need to worry.”

“I’m not worried,” I told her. “I’m pissed.”

“Don’t get ugly now,” Claude warned.

He liked bullying people out of their self-respect. That seemed obvious. I wondered what kind of job he’d done before this one. What line of work would suit that personality? Much as I hated it, though, the tone worked on me. I was already getting out of the car before I realized he’d said something that deserved a smack. Funny, but in a way I even recognized this back-and-forth between me and him. Felt as familiar as being fingerprinted.

“I’m not some dog you fetch,” I told them. It’s all I could muster in my defense.

“Oh, boo-hoo,” Claude answered.

I held the door open.

“Is there anything I can start doing tonight, Ms. Henry? I don’t want to just sit around guessing why I’m here.”

“I sympathize, Mr. Rice,” she said. “First time in the field can be overwhelming.”

“I just don’t like feeling left out.”

She put her hat back on. “I know it feels that way now, but you might regret it more when we let you in.”

Okay, I thought. What are you going to do now? Pout about it?

Yes.

I also slammed the door. When I went to the trunk, I pounded on it until Claude popped it open. After I got my luggage, I left the damn
thing open so Claude had to get out and close it himself. What can I say? You take your revenge where you can get it.

While all this happened a half dozen men watched me from inside the lobby of the hotel. Not interest, just assessment. Town Car. Three-piece suit. Carrying a wardrobe trunk. Meanwhile they wore threadbare sweatpants and decaying T-shirts, shabby shoes and scruffy haircuts. Which is a kind of ensemble too. The vagabond. The pauper. The bum.

But despite these differences we recognized one another. Like knows like. It’s in the hardened skin and haunted eyes. Those didn’t change just because I wore a vest. The men saw beyond my costume.

And in return I recognized not just them, but their surroundings. Suddenly I understood this hotel. The smudged front windows. The clusters of cigarette butts on the sidewalk, a medley of mentholated brands. Pea-green lobby walls for that institutional feel. I’d stayed in SROs many times and saw what happened when they tried to privatize. The rooms were slightly refurbished, but the clientele stayed the same. By the Bay was just a flophouse that went pro.

The guys inside must’ve been wondering the same question I asked myself.

Why was a guy dressed like me staying there?

All of us watched as the only person with the answer had her driver put the Town Car in gear.

HEROIN
, like I said before, robs you of your empathy. And that’s a problem, because empathy is what separates human beings from teenage boys. A real heroin addict is as callous as your average fourteen-year-old, and even after you kick, there’s a long period before your sense of mercy returns.

Once that’s back, you feel the rest of yourself resurface too, including your libido. And that part doesn’t thaw. It flashes from frozen to blazing. Your resting body temperature even goes up a few degrees. That’s probably a fact. So all this recent abstinence had been an extra special trial. It made my body fussy, touchy, even a bit vengeful. Just caressing a keyboard could give me an erection. Without the proper outlet my head had even started to hurt sometimes. So when my room phone rang, I hardly noticed because my chastity headache had a ring to it.

When I finally realized the bell wasn’t going between my eardrums, I rolled over, onto my stomach, so I could reach the phone. This was the closest thing to sexual contact I’d had in well over a year. When I picked up the receiver and tried to say “hello,” all I managed was a deep, long, nearly orgasmic groan.

A distracted woman’s voice replied, “You have a wake-up call.”

I’m ashamed to admit this, but when I heard it was a woman, I nearly finished myself off right there. I humped my mattress on instinct. Nothing crazy, I wasn’t thrashing around, but if anyone had been there, they’d have noticed the faintest tremor, side to side, going on around my groin. A breath escaped from deep in my lungs. Maybe lower.

“You there, Mr. Rice?” she asked.

“Almost,” I muttered.

“What is going on?”

Clarity finally returned to me.

“Didn’t ask for a wake-up call,” I groaned.

I heard the air from her nostrils through the pinpoint end of my phone receiver.

“That’s not what I mean, Mr. Rice. There’s someone here in the lobby. They asked me to wake you. Understand?”

“Uuhhhh.”

“What?”

Quiet.

“Hello …,” the woman said.

A little more quiet.

“Mr. Rice?”

“Tell her I’ll be down in a few minutes,” I said. I reached the first floor feeling relieved.

And I entered the lobby of the undead. There were four figures who’d gathered around a cheap big-screen television as if it were a trough full of brains. Occasionally they’d talk or clap and laugh while watching a basketball game, but they still seemed like zombies to me.

The tiled floors of the lobby were so scuffed I thought the streaks
were
the design.

And the walls gave off the perfume of stale beer. Even this early in the day.

What a palace. Thank you, Washburn Library, for helping me relive my twenties.

But I guess the real reason I suddenly felt pissy was because I thought I’d left places like this behind. I’d been an Unlikely Scholar for less than a year, but already felt entirely changed. Maybe I’d hoped that the Library had made me elegant. Like I’d become a viscount in Vermont.

“Surprise!” yelled one man in a wheelchair.

I thought, for a moment, that he was talking to me, but he pointed to a player on the TV screen. I stepped out of the elevator and passed that mad crowd. I expected a cross-looking Gray Lady to be waiting, but she wasn’t.

The front desk would be familiar to anyone who’s bought Chinese food in a ghetto. Inch-thick bulletproof sheets between you and the money.

Behind the Plexiglas shielding I found a beefy short-haired woman with her arms crossed, sitting at the front desk. She had wide little feet that she balanced against the desktop as she leaned backward in a chair. There were four textbooks set out on the counter, and her stubby toes
curled over the pages as if it was them doing the studying while her hands and mouth went about the work of answering the hotel phone.

“I’m Ricky Rice,” I said. “You called my room?”

She pulled her feet off the counter and slipped them into a pair of red flip-flops waiting on the floor. I wondered if she was a Samoan. I’d never seen one in person before, but her color looked right. That and her thick, curly brown hair. A wide face that spread into a soft chin.

“You said there was a woman waiting for me?”

She stood up. She shimmied to get a better view. She was a woman who really liked to dance, I knew this about her instantly. Her gestures showed a graceful pep.

“Where’d he go?” she asked.

“It was a man?”

“Sure was.”

“What did he say?”

“ ‘Is Ricky Rice staying at this hotel?’ And I checked, said you were up on the fourth floor. Then he asked me to call, so that’s what I did. He walked around the lobby for a minute. But he’s gone now.”

“Did he have a big gut? Cheap suit. Face like a dog biscuit?”

She laughed. “He was thin enough.”

Now I looked out those front doors, expecting the stranger to walk in. It couldn’t have been Claude anyway. Since he’d dropped me off, he knew I was there. So who? The uncertainty made me twitch.

I asked, “Did he dress as well as me?”

This wasn’t my finest outfit, but still a blue-ribbon winner when you consider how men dress today. Just a sports coat and a pair of gray flannel trousers, my white shirt from the plane trip, a tie, and a pair of black Derbys. She leaned forward, forehead against the spotty Plexiglas, inspecting my outfit.

“He dressed better,” she said.

Not the answer I’d been expecting.

“Did he say anything else?” I asked.

“You in trouble with the cops?”

“Not in a long time.”

I tried to make it sound casual, goofy, but I felt like she could hear snippets of my court appearances playing in the spaces between my words. The woman even cocked her head, as if listening. I felt ashamed, so I turned to go back upstairs and wait for the Gray Lady’s arrival.

Then the woman at the front desk knocked on the glass.

“He said one more thing.”

I walked closer again.

“Asked if there was a lady with you.”

MY FATHER DIED ALONE
. Died that way even though my mother lived in the same town and I was two hours away down in New York City. My older sister, Daphne, was probably the farthest off, out in Long Island, and couldn’t visit. But distance wasn’t the issue. He wanted us to keep away, and we agreed.

Not that the rest of us were all that chummy. We weren’t the family that gabs on the phone every Sunday. My mother, Carolyn, and I had a habit of sending birthday cards to each other a few weeks late. Sometimes we even misspelled each other’s names. I felt closest to Daphne and visited her when the weather was nice. (Those Long Island buses leave you standing in the cold too damn long.) Maybe most families are closer than ours turned out to be, though I wouldn’t bet money on that.

Sargent Rice—that was my father’s given name—remembered how much he paid for a meal in a Spokane restaurant back in 1959. Could even tell you what he tipped, down to the cents. Absolutely rhapsodized about that meal: two eggs sunny-side up, four sausage links, two slices of toasted white bread, only one pat of butter but they gladly brought more, a cup of black coffee, and a glass of freshly squeezed orange juice. All for $3.01, including gratuity.

It wasn’t the food that mattered, but the bargain. He bought zipper-less jeans from the “defective” bins. Found my mother a ten-cent iron missing its cord, bought a cord for a nickel, and fixed it himself. The iron didn’t actually work, but what a savings that would have been! More than practical. Not simply frugal either. While most people like to
dream or hope or fantasize, Sargent Rice never indulged. Instead he devoted all that human passion to finding cheap deals.

You don’t exactly love a guy like that. Not because you don’t want to, but because his nit-picking frustrates that emotion. To love a guy you have to think he’d run in front of a subway train to save you. My father would’ve stopped at the turnstile, hesitating because the fare had been increased.