Lean on Pete (26 page)

“For your family,” I said.

He laughed at that and we went inside. I met his wife Nuria and her brother Carlos. Their house was nice, it had pictures of their family on the walls and it smelled good and they had music playing on a stereo. We sat around for a while, then we all went into the backyard where there was a picnic table that had a white cloth over it. We sat there and ate carnitas with homemade tortillas. They spoke in Mexican and the kids laughed and Santiago smiled and said things that made them laugh harder. His wife sat across from him and she was young and good-looking.

When dinner was over I helped clear the plates and his wife did the dishes. Everyone else stayed outside except Santiago, who I saw in the living room lighting a candle in front of a picture on the mantle.

“It’s my mother,” he told me. “She left us five years ago. Every Friday I light a candle for her to let her know that I miss her and that I have work and that I’m okay.”

The picture was old and in black and white and the woman in it was young and wearing a dress and a hat. She was leaning against a car.

“Was she nice?”

“She was my mother. Of course she was nice.”

I didn’t say anything. I just stood there with him, then one of the kids came and asked him to come back outside and so we did.

The box of donuts were sitting on a plate in the center of the table.

“You don’t have to eat those if you don’t want,” I told them and I was embarrassed.

He laughed. “I like donuts. My kids like donuts.”

“I’m gonna go now,” I said.

“You’re not going to have one?”

“I eat them every day,” I said and put out my hand. He shook it and I said goodbye to his family and he walked me out. When I left there I was pretty down. I never understand why seeing something nice can get you so down but it can.

I went to Colfax Avenue and stopped and bought an ice cream sandwich from a mini-mart and ate it while I was walking. It was Friday night and there were a lot of people out and I wasn’t paying attention and suddenly someone grabbed me from behind. I looked up to see it was Silver. He was with a skinny man who had a shaved head and tattoos on his neck. I’d never seen him before. They smelled. Even from where I was I could smell them. It was part smoke and alcohol and part sweat and wearing the same clothes for too long.

“Where’s my TV?” His eyes were red, he was upset.

“Your TV?” I asked.

“I remember you. You’re the little fucker that ran down my battery and ate all my food and skipped out.”

“You said I could have the chips,” I said.

“I let you stay in my place and now my TV and radio are missing.”

“I didn’t take them,” I said.

“Where do you live?”

“I don’t live anywhere.”

“He probably pawned them,” the other man said and coughed.

Silver grabbed me by the shirt and led me to a side street and then down to an empty parking lot. There was no one around. He made me empty my pockets. He took the fifteen dollars and the pocket knife I had in them.

“Where do you live?” the tattooed man said.

“I don’t live anywhere. I’ve been sleeping behind a stack of pallets where I work.”

“You have a job?” the tattooed man said.

“I mow lawns.”

“Where do you keep your money?”

“I don’t have any more money.”

“That’s bullshit,” Silver said. “If you got a job, you got more money than this.”

“He probably has it hidden somewhere,” the tattooed man said.

“Let’s go to where you’re sleeping,” Silver said.

“But I don’t keep anything there,” I said.

“Then take your shirt off,” Silver yelled and grabbed me by my hair.

I took it off.

“Take off your shoes and pants,” the tattooed man said.

I began to unlace my shoes and then I tried to get away but he kept pulling hard on my hair and then the tattooed man hit me in the stomach. Silver put his other hand around my neck.

The tattooed man took off my shoes and then my pants. He looked through the pants, then he felt in my shoes and found the money.

“I knew he’d have money,” he said and grinned. “I just knew it.”

“It’s all I have,” I said and started crying.

Chapter 28

Silver threw me down on the ground, then the tattooed man kicked me in the guts and they left. I just lay there. When I got up it was minutes later and I found my clothes and shoes and dressed. I made my way to Colfax Avenue but I didn’t see them anywhere. I began to panic. I was tired of being broke and I was tired of sleeping outside. I walked up and down long stretches of the avenue looking for them but they were nowhere. I didn’t know what to do so I began looking in bars and restaurants and stores.

Maybe two hours passed and I looked in a place called the Monroe Tavern and saw them sitting in a corner drinking. I went back outside, walked across the street, sat down on the curb, and waited.

They didn’t come out for hours. When they did you could tell they were drunk because the man with the tattooed neck kept dropping a cigarette he was trying to light. They talked for a couple minutes, then separated, and I followed Silver.

He walked slowly down Colfax, then took a turn and walked down an alley and I saw his truck and camper parked there. He got to it, stood outside and took a leak, then unlocked the door, and went inside.

I waited to make sure he was going to stay in there, then I walked to Walgreens. I took five packages of thumb tacks and a roll of masking tape and ran out the door. No one followed me but I kept running for a couple blocks, then I went behind a restaurant and looked through their dumpster and found a cardboard box. I ripped it down so there was a piece that would cover my chest and stomach, then I took off my shirt and taped it on my body the best I could. I stretched out a line of tape and stuck the end to my knee and began sticking thumb tacks all the way through it so the tape would hold them but nearly all the tack was facing out. I did four rows of this, then I taped those to the cardboard on my chest. In the end I had almost a hundred tacks facing out on my chest and stomach.

I put my shirt back on and began walking down the alley looking for an unlocked car. I found an old Toyota pickup that had a busted-out window and I opened the door and looked behind the seat and found a tire iron.

I walked back to the camper. I wasn’t even that nervous or scared, I was just mad and tired. I beat on the door and called out Silver’s name but there was no answer. I walked around to the side and knocked on the camper’s aluminum walls, then finally I just swung the tire iron into one of the windows and broke it.

It wasn’t much after that that Silver opened the door. He was drunk and naked.

“What the fuck?” he yelled.

I swung the tire iron at him but missed.

He jumped down from the camper and grabbed me and hit me in the face but it didn’t hurt that bad. Then he grabbed me by the hair and hit me in the stomach but when he did he also hit the tacks. He yelled out and looked at his hand and when he did I hit him in the knee with the tire iron and he fell to the ground. Then I swung it as hard as I could and hit him on the side of the head and he collapsed. His naked body lay on the pavement, and there was blood coming out of his head and he was slobbering, trying to move his lips to speak.

I went into the camper and found the flashlight sitting on the table and I shined it around until I found his pants and his wallet. There was only a hundred and nine dollars left. I took it and jumped down to the street. I shined the light on Silver. He was still lying there. His hair was dark with blood but he was still breathing when I threw the flashlight back in the camper and left.

Chapter 29

I walked a half a mile before I put the tire iron in a trash can. I took off my shirt and pulled the tacks and the cardboard off me. I hid in some bushes alongside a bank and waited for morning. I didn’t sleep at all. At sunrise I started walking again. I ate breakfast at a diner that was open and ordered two turkey sandwiches to go and left. I walked to the Greyhound bus station and bought a one way ticket to Rock Springs, Wyoming for sixty-eight dollars.

The bus wasn’t scheduled to depart until the afternoon but I didn’t leave the station. I sat in a chair next to where a security guard stood and kept a lookout for Silver. When the bus came I sat in the front near the driver and once we got out of the station I felt better and by the time we got out of Denver I couldn’t keep my eyes open.

It was three in the morning when we pulled into Rock Springs and it was cold. There were three other people that got off and then the bus moved on. There was a Denny’s sign in the far distance and I walked towards it.

Inside I sat at a booth and ordered a chocolate milkshake and fries and when the waitress wasn’t looking I took out my last turkey sandwich and ate it. I bought a paper and sat there and tried to read it to kill time but I started falling asleep so I left.

I walked around the rest of the night just going up and down the main streets and neighborhoods. I couldn’t recall much of it, but in every house and apartment and car that I passed I looked for my aunt.

When the sun came up I walked down a street and saw the auto parts store where my aunt had once worked. The front sign had an angry-looking man in a kilt holding a wrench. It was called Scottish Sam’s Auto Parts. I waited outside until they opened, then I asked a woman behind a counter if she knew Margy Thompson and she began laughing.

“You’re the guy that keeps calling here,” she said.

“Yeah,” I said.

“Like I’ve said, there ain’t a Margy that works here, and I’ve worked here the longest except for the boss. But the good news is that he’s started to come back to work. I could ask him.” She was chewing gum and drinking a bottle of diet Coke. She was pregnant.

“Is he here today?”

“No,” she said. “He only comes in on Mondays to do the books. So he’ll be here tomorrow.”

“What time?”

“I’m not sure,” she said. “But he’ll be here by lunch I bet.” Then another customer came and she began helping him.

I sat outside the building for a long time. I counted my money but I only had nineteen dollars. I began walking around town but I saw two police cars go by and they made me nervous so I found a movie theater and went to the first show at noon and then I jumped from movie to movie until the last one was over sometime past eleven o’clock. When I got out I was starving. I went to a mini-mart, bought a couple cans of SpaghettiOs and hid behind a dumpster at a grocery store, ate, and spent the night there.

When I got to Scottish Sam’s the next morning the same girl was there behind the register eating a Pop Tart and drinking a diet Coke.

“You’re back?” she said.

I nodded. “Is the owner here yet?”

“He’s in the office.”

“Can I talk to him?”

“Sure,” she said and went into the back and came out with a fat old man in a wheelchair. He only had one leg.

“You’re looking for who?”

“Margy Thompson?”

“Why do you want to know?”

“She’s my aunt and I’m trying to find her.”

“Well,” he said, “she used to work in the office here years ago. She did the accounts payable and receivable.”

“Do you know where she is now?” I asked.

“I know she left here to go work at the library.”

“The library?”

He nodded.

“Do you know where she lives?”

“Like I said, I haven’t seen her in years. But the library is just up the road, maybe they know.” I asked him for directions, he gave them to me, and I left.

It was Monday and the library was closed until Tuesday. I had to wait out another night. I sat down on their front steps and worried. I was almost out of money and what if I couldn’t find her? And if I did, what if she had a new family and didn’t want me around? Then I started thinking about Pete and then about Silver and things started spiraling. I made myself get up and start walking. I ate my last can of SpaghettiOs and counted my money. In my pants pocket I found Lonnie Dixon’s phone number and that afternoon I got quarters from a grocery store and called his ranch in Nevada.

An old woman’s voice answered.

“Is Lonnie there?” I asked her.

“No,” the woman said. “He’s in Colorado. His brother just died.”

“Oh,” I said. “Is he gonna be back?”

“He said he would be, sooner or later.”

“He told me you guys might be hiring.”

“You’ll have to talk to Ralph about that and he ain’t here right now.”

“Will he be back today?”

“He’ll be back tonight. The best thing would be to call him tomorrow.”

“Did Lonnie leave a number?”

“No,” the woman said.

“Alright,” I told her, and then I left my name and we hung up.

I spent the rest of the day in a park, then I went back to the movies and watched all the same ones I had the day before. After that I hid behind the grocery store dumpster, but I couldn’t sleep.

In the morning I cleaned up in the grocery store bathroom. I was down to three dollars. I bought a couple donuts and sat by the library and waited for it to open. When it did I went to the front desk where a middle-aged woman stood and I asked her if she knew Margy Thompson.

“Of course I know Margy,” the lady said and smiled.

“She’s my aunt.”

“Really?”

“Does she live here?” I asked.

“She moved to Laramie maybe three years ago. She got married and last I knew she worked at the university library.”

“She got married?”

“She did. I was at her wedding.”

“Who did she marry?”

“A guy named Jerry.”

“Jerry?”

“He was a chemical salesman when I met him. I don’t know if he still does that. I didn’t really know him.”

“But she got married?”

“Yeah.”

“What’s his last name?”

“Piotrowski, I think. It’s a hard one.”

“Could you spell it out?”

She wrote it on a slip of paper and handed it to me. “I think that’s right,” she said.

“In Laramie?” I asked.