Orientation (13 page)

He slammed the cage door shut and stabbed at the buttons. He would not be her go-between. He was no flirting conduit. “Fuck her,” he said. He liked hearing the words. “Fuck that shit,” he said, alone in the elevator that ticked like an old clock as it carried him down. He stepped outside into a cold autumn night. He couldn’t quite remember where his car was. He had drunk several beers really fast, and he was still buzzed. He guessed uphill, so up he went, chanting “Fuck her” in cadence to his steps. He could see his breath in the air before him. Maybe it was the brisk night air, the bracing uphill trudge. Maybe it was the cathartic power of the F-word, spoken aloud, over and over. But soon he wasn’t angry anymore, only embarrassed. He’d probably had six conversations with her in the past year, mostly work-related, and from them he had constructed the framework of a relationship and conjured the hope of something more. But between his conversations with her she had a life all her own and, before them, an entire history he was not a part of. You can’t know anybody, not really, not in the brief overlaps of flimsy acquaintance, nor in any of the tenuous and fleeting opportunities for connection that we are afforded. It was a bleak little moment of clarity, but it was for Bennett a certainty he could find comfort in. He felt better, tramping the streets of the city he was born in, pondering opportunity and connection, gauging his prospects—the next disappointment, perhaps. Or maybe not. And suddenly he remembered where his car was parked—clarity begets clarity!—when a voice very close behind him asked: “Fuck who?”

Bennett turned around, and two men were on him, shoving him swiftly backward and crowding him into a gap of hedge and against the wall of a brick building.

“Wallet. Money. Now.”

He looked at the one who spoke, a tall young man in a dark hooded sweatshirt, holding tight fistfuls of Bennett’s jacket and pushing hard against Bennett’s chest. He looked at the other man, who was shorter, and older. He wore a sport coat and slacks, and he was pressing a pistol into Bennett’s belly. Bennett had never had a gun pointed at him before. He thought it would be bigger.

“So are you deaf or what?”

He looked back up at the man who’d said this, the younger one, the one without the gun. Shouldn’t the one with the gun do the talking? Bennett was not deaf, but he wasn’t sure which one to tell this to. He looked from one man to the other and back. The face of the younger one was an inch away from his. His breath was sweet, cloying and thick, like rotted candy. Bennett felt sick. He couldn’t breathe.

“What are you going to do?” he gasped. “Shoot me?”

It was his most immediate concern, and a legitimate question, although maybe not the one you ask out loud. It was the wrong thing to say. Bennett was a little drunk, and suddenly very afraid, but also confused. So he smiled.

It was the wrong thing to do. The younger man loosened his grip. “Shoot him,” he said.

*   *   *

So Costas shot him.

They were driving to Astoria, Costas and the kid, to get ahold of some methamphetamine. They had dipped into their buy money, splurging on rib eyes and dirty martinis at a Black Angus in Bellingham, and they needed to make that up. They pulled off the I-5 in Seattle, parked the car, and walked up this hill until a man came out of a building, and they followed him.

Every four weeks or so they made a run to Pasco or Yakima, or as far south as Ashland if they had to. But Astoria was their favorite. Yakima was touch and go these days. The town had gone all fancy and upscale with the winery boom. There were too many strangers, and the supply was not always steady. And Pasco was just a fucking chore. The Mexicans they dealt with were quarrelsome and ill-tempered. They enjoyed needling the kid—
maricón
this,
maricón
that—and got a kick out of it when he invariably flared up and Costas had to settle him down. But Astoria was steady and mellow. The connection in Astoria was
tranquilo.
They always looked forward to that run. Costas drove, and the kid would stuff the CD changer with Led Zeppelin, slapping John Bonham’s drum work on the dashboard and screaming the lyrics out the open window into the rushing night. They pulled into rest stops, where they would do more lines, and the kid would go down on Costas, who hung on, knuckling handfuls of hair, bucking and groaning, and astonished still at the good fortune of this boy in his life.

They had met six months earlier when Costas went down to the carport one night and climbed into his car and started it up. He turned to back out and looked into the rear seat and saw this boy sleeping hard, dead to the world. It was a cold, damp spring, the usual in Bellingham, and Costas brought him inside and made him pancakes, and one thing led to another, and the boy stayed. Would it last another six months? Would it last through Christmas? What lasts, anyway? But it would do for now because that’s what matters, after all—the Right Now. Money in your pocket and cocaine’s rush and buzz, and this beautiful boy’s head in your lap.

Astoria was their hideaway, their love nest, whatever you want to call it. They would stay an extra night or two at a Red Lion down along the river, where every room had a balcony with a view of the marina and the Astoria Bridge, a very narrow two-lane steel structure that shot high over the Columbia to the Washington side. In the evenings, when mist whirled and settled onto the water in the distance, the bridge seemed in its trajectory to fall short of the opposite bank and plunge into the river, a bridge to nowhere.

Some nights they drove across into Washington, to a seafood restaurant in Chinook. It had once been an Episcopal church, and the nave was now the dining room, overlooked at one end by a stained-glass window of wooden ships on a storm-tossed sea. They ordered cioppino, and it came in a huge bowl with clams and mussels and crab parts sticking out. They put on bibs and used tiny tools to get at the meat and sopped up the broth with crusty bread. They lit up cigars and took a late-night stroll to walk off their meal. It was a small, narrow town, maybe five blocks wide, and made up mostly of vacation homes strung along a riverfront highway. Costas was a dog lover, and he kept kibble in his coat pockets to toss to the pooches that ran along the fences they walked by. Sometimes they set their lit cigars on the curb and stepped between the darkened houses, moving through open garages, peeking into the glove boxes of unlocked cars. Back doors were invariably unlocked, and they went inside just to see how easy it would be here, listening to the folks asleep in their rooms somewhere, and pocketing an insignificant trinket or two—a magnet off the refrigerator or a TV remote control—with only the dog of the house sniffing solemnly at Costas’s pockets for more treats.

But usually they stayed in Astoria. They got a bottle of Hennessy and a bucket of fried chicken and lay in bed watching cable TV late into the morning. They smoked cigarettes on the balcony and flicked the butts into the water and watched the gulls fight over them. They went to a bar on the main drag that was underneath the bridge. The boy marveled, running back and forth, gawking overhead like a rube in the big city. A massive three-storied slab of concrete anchored the trussed roadway above, and he pressed himself against it and peered along its vertical surface up into the crossbeams and struts as if drawing a bead on the secret of bridges. Then he ran into the bar to report to Costas, who was playing liar’s dice with the barkeep. Outside, then in again, tugging on Costas’s sleeve like a child, nattering about smallness and bigness, and vastness and scale. “Bolts the size of your fist!” And then mile-by-mile replays of bridges he’d crossed—Pontchartrain in Louisiana, the Seven Mile Bridge in the Florida Keys, and one in the Chesapeake Bay that he swore to God dipped underwater and became a tunnel, then rose out to become a bridge again. And then in movies—the rope bridge quivering over a sheer ravine with a warlord hacking at one end of it, a bridge in Europe strapped with dynamite as Nazis swarmed across it, bridges that rattled apart in awesome earthquakes or got bent and twisted under the magnetic power of alien forces. He was jacked on coke and speed, wound tight and motormouthing, and so in and out, in and out, in and out, until the barkeep begged Costas—whom he knew from prison in Vacaville many years before—to please shut the boy up. “Put a leash on your pup, Costas!” And it was a good laugh for everybody, even the boy joining in with gulping, ratcheting hiccups of laughter. But back at the motel he wanted the gun so he could go shoot that fat fuck bartender in the mouth. Costas was rolling around in a tight ball on the carpet with his gun pocket underneath him, the boy kicking at his head and ribs. Then he tried for the car keys, but Costas got to them first, and the boy jumped up and down on Costas’s fisted hand until the bones broke. Costas was tenacious. There was nothing you could do to him that had not been done to him before. And even as cranked as the boy was, he relented, heaving and exhausted, and settled for the wallet on the nightstand. He took all the cash and left. He turned up in Bellingham two weeks later, grimy and red-eyed. “Happy to see me?” the boy said, pushing past Costas into the apartment, glancing at the cast on his hand. He pulled off his clothes and headed for the bathroom, reeking of the street and of whatever he’d gotten into. “What, you gonna cry?” he said, watching Costas watch him, standing naked in the steam and letting the hot water run, then stepping into the shower stall.

Inconstant moon.
Costas didn’t remember where he’d heard that, but that’s what the boy was. One day, he would not come back. So the boy showers, and grateful for his return, Costas cries. He is enthralled, and he knows it. Would he do anything for this boy? Well, no. Not anything. But okay, he might. All right. Yes. He would.

Shoot him.

So Costas shot him. The gun was small and didn’t make much noise, two benign pops, like the rap of a knuckle on window glass or the click-crack of a walnut being opened. Costas hated the gangbangers with their huge pieces and all their stopping-power bullshit. Up close, a .22 stopped you just fine. He shot him twice in the belly and put the gun away, and they both eased him onto the ground. The man was watching them go through his pockets. Then he said a woman’s name and closed his eyes. They got around sixty dollars, plus ATM and credit cards. The cash would cover them tonight, and they knew somebody who’d pay a hundred dollars for each card.

They took two steps out of the hedge and another step over a grassy strip and stood on the sidewalk nose to nose with a woman staring at them. She was a chubby, moonfaced girl, all big-eyed and O-mouthed. She dropped a small paper bag that hit the pavement with a tiny thud, then rolled in a half circle and began to wigwag down the hill. The kid retrieved it before it got away. He opened the bag and peered inside. He pulled off his hoodie and looked into the woman’s face and smiled. “Chunky Monkey!”

“C’mon,” Costas said. “Shake a leg.”

The kid rewrapped the bag carefully and held it out to her. She took it. “Thank you,” she whispered. He flipped his hoodie back up, and they walked past her and loped down the hill.

“What’s the matter with you?” Costas said, and the kid only grinned. She had gotten a good look at his face, and he didn’t even care. Costas thought a moment: if, when he turned around, she was still standing up there goggling at them, then he would trot back and pop her. But when he looked, she was gone. All the better. They needed to get to Astoria. Their buy was going down and they could not dillydally.

*   *   *

When she got home, she dumped the ice cream down the sink and crawled into bed in the clothes she was wearing. She lay there listening to sirens in the night, to jets passing over on approach to the airport, to the drunks stumbling home from the bars on Capitol Hill. She heard the birds at sunrise and the garbage trucks wheezing up the streets. When it was light, she got up and used the phone. She left a message at work, then changed her clothes and went outside. It was a clear and cold fall morning, and she had her down jacket on. She could see her breath in the air. She walked three blocks and spotted a patrol car parked across an intersection just ahead. The street behind it was cluttered with more cars—blue-and-whites and unmarked sedans and a gray, windowless van up on the sidewalk. She asked the policeman sitting on his car what happened. He said nothing happened and told her to go on to work. “I called in sick,” she said. “I’m not going to work today.” The cop stared at her until she walked away. She tended to be overly thorough in conversation in a way that made her seem insolent or flip. She tried too hard, believing that being as precise as possible about what you thought and felt was how you connected with people.

That afternoon she read in the paper that somebody had been shot and killed. She sat at a small dining table in the kitchenette, drinking a medicinal tea. Because she had called in sick, she now felt sick. She lived in a basement apartment, and feet went by in the slot window above her dining nook—people coming home from work, footsteps and voices approaching and receding, approaching and receding. The man had let her get a good look at him. He had pulled back his hood and smiled into her face. He held her ice cream out to her. She took it. She thanked him.
I should be dead.
This is what she was thinking when she ran home last night and as she lay in her bed until the sun came up. This is what she was thinking now, running her hand across the newspaper spread on the table, smoothing it out. She believed she would never forget his face. She believed it would be sliced into her memory forever.

I should be dead. But I’m not.

She called in sick the next day, and the day after that. Maybe he was out there, looking for her. She stayed home and indulged in fearful fantasy. She peeked out her window at the steps that led down to her door. She jumped when the mail dropped through her mail slot. She gazed anxiously at the phone, which did not ring. She drank tea and dozed fitfully through the day, awaking at dusk to her darkened apartment. She kept the radio turned off. She did not need to hear about what had happened. A man was dead, and his killer was out there. She imagined staying in her apartment forever—the Woman Downstairs. But the romance of her fear soon dissipated, and she grew restless and bored and ran out of tea, and after three days she went back to work.