Thorazine Beach (6 page)

There were those people who worked, left each day at regular times, returned. And those who stayed
all day
around the Benbow. What they did, I never knew. I do know I was more than once taken for a narc, more than once offered a flat-screen TV at a remarkable price, and one time, a dealer’s box full of coins, stacked in individual 2x2s, priced for sale. “Getting rid of my collection,” the guy said. A collection upon which he was devoid of numismatic knowledge.

And
just
once, a twenty-ish woman at my door, dressed in… I wasn’t quite sure, but it was
very
skimpy, a little exciting, and only half-covered in a Benbow-issue blanket hastily wrapped around her. Through the open door, left, end of the wing, I heard shouting. Over-the-top, raging shouting. She looked small, scared.

So plainly, so plaintively: “Can I come in?”

One second.

“No,” I said, and shut the door.

Such things were not to go on at the Benbow. And, largely, didn’t. Not visibly. “We are keeping
standards
,” Mrs. Patel would say.

Tonight, things felt
different
. Something bordering on happy. I’d half-laughed, half-cried as I’d cut into the crate MacDonald had shoved into my back seat. Weights. Dumbbells. Collars. Plates—two-and-a-half, five, ten, all the way up to forty-five. MacDonald knew I was an old lifter, gone to seed. And—I hadn’t seen it till minutes before on the back seat floor, wrapped in a square cardboard tube, a full-length, full-diameter Olympic bar. Chinese manufacture, a rough edge or two. But a good, solid set.
Enjoy
, MacDonald’s card said.
You’re on your own for the bench
. I smiled as I read the broken-English instructions for assembly:
Please the slot inserting be
.

I did enjoy. Years, it was, since I’d last hefted any weights. And more since I’d thought of myself as a half-decent amateur. All I did that night was sit upright on my desk chair, push a few five-pounders up and down. Lie on the bed for a dozen ten-pound chest-flys. A few chin-high pull-ups with the Olympic bar. Empty. But I felt that rhythm, that breathing, that rhythm, that breathing…wimpy weight, tonight, and I’d have to keep it wimpy for a while. But
damn
, it felt good.

I was still breathing hard quite a little while after I was done. Letterman was a rerun. As I half-watched, I began thinking about MacDonald’s “instructions.”

“I hesitate to use the term,” he’d said. “I can’t
make
you do this.”

The deal was: Every night I could, I was to set up shop—binos, scope, night-vision, video, still cameras, folding stool, thermos—at a particular spot inside the railway yards down the south end of the city. The CN yards. And watch.
For
something. But I didn’t yet know what the something was, and it didn’t seem he was about to tell me yet.

“Canadian National. Thought that would be a nice touch of home for you, Jack,” MacDonald said.

For about ten seconds, I thought about summer camping trips. Kicking Horse campground, just over the Alberta-BC border. Emerald Lake. Takkakkaw Falls, a ribbon of water in a thousand-foot tumble and that glorious spray on the rocks below. The best, for a twelve-year-old heavy-set kid into model trains: the spiral tunnels, where you could see a train boring into the mountain and crossing over itself as it came out. And lying in sleeping bags at night, the four of us, later five and six, the reek of wet canvas, the hiss of rain, and the roar of those five-diesel trains, the howl of those horns, echoing through the night off the walls of Gordon Lightfoot’s wild, majestic mountains.

That, of course, was the Canadian Pacific line, the one with all the romance. This was Canadian National, the old, plodding government railway that never got bold till it went private.

Canadian National had bought out the Illinois Central a few years back. Now you could see that curvy CN logo on diesel locomotives, boxcars, container cars, hoppers, car carriers, all the way from Chicago down to New Orleans. Funny to see the word
Canadian
slide along the tracks past towns Mark Twain had painted for Huckleberry Finn. And now, CN was Memphis’s third largest employer.

MacDonald had mapped the spot for me.

“How do I get inside the yard?” I asked. “You going to get me some CN company identification and some kind of a guide?”

“Arrangements are being made,” he said.

He’d handed me two of those little yellow stickies. On one, he’d written the names of two container companies and about half a dozen multi-digit numbers. On the other, he’d scrawled something that looked a lot like gang graffiti. Only it wasn’t for any gang around here. “Where from, then?” I’d asked.

“Elsewhere,” he said, and his eyes made clear that was all I was to know.

And then MacDonald told me, his voice conspiratorial: “When you’ve read these, when you have the numbers memorized, and the little gang symbol thing…”

“What? You gonna get dramatic now?”

“Sorry,” he said. “But anyway…eat them.”

The lobby. Sunlight through the uncharacteristically open drapes of the east side. Sunlight, in sharp, dust-revealing rays.

I looked for a paper, found yesterday’s. It sat beside Mrs. Patel’s duct-taped clipboard, so I dared not touch it. Or, for that matter, be caught looking. I heard her in the hall. All I could catch safely was a snippet. Inside:
Wharton promises task force crackdown on human trafficking
.

“LaKenya,” Mrs. Patel said, gesturing. “You are washing the windows now, please.” She had a way of making the word
please
sound like it wasn’t there at all. LaKenya began, not without the occasional barbed look at Mrs. Patel. Bucket. Squeegee. “Too much soap, you are using.” Another look, as Mrs. Patel turned elsewhere to address the momentous matter of a dropped towel. I’d never known her first name. Even her badge said: Mrs. Patel.

“Mornin’, Mr. Minyard,” LaKenya said.

“Morning,” I said with a forced cheer. “And it’s Jack.”

She turned, whispered conspiratorially. “Fresh coffee this morning, Jack,” she said. “Saw to it myself.”

“Thanks, Kenny,” I said. “Pastries, too, I see, for a change.” I grabbed and unwrapped a cream cheese danish, took a bite, then remembered—weights, diet, new beginning. I tossed the rest, wrapped in a napkin so Mrs. Patel wouldn’t accuse me of wastefulness. It was pretty good, that bite, notwithstanding it was an undersized, cellophane-imprisoned thing bought, the label said, at Fred’s Discount Drugs. Crap food has its virtues. Never spoils. Enough fat and enough sugar can kill anything.

I busied myself fixing my coffee in a styro cup—a big one LaKenya produced from a cupboard, special for me, to replace the thimble-sized styro sample cups Mrs. Patel favoured. I thanked her. Cream. (Powder. Partially hydrogenated soybean oil. White death.) About eight packets of Splenda. (I’d long since started carrying my own, and made sure Mrs. P. knew it, thereby enabling me to escape the lecture. “Using two, using two, please. Two, you are allowed.”)

As I fumbled to find a stir-stick—management preferred guests use the common spoon, laid in the upturned lid of a mayonnaise jar—Mrs. P. reappeared. “Mr. Jack Minyard,” she said—the form she used when, occasionally, she meant to mark respect. “A woman was earlier seeking you.”

“A woman?”

Nobody knew where I lived. Even Eileen had only my box number at the Ellendale post office. Far as I knew, anyway. Four years, and no one had
ever
called on me. No one, at least, whom I actually knew, from anywhere.

“Yes. Very nice lady. Very stylish lady.”

‘Stylish.’ I wondered what that meant, in Mrs. P’s world. And would that be a
good
thing? It did seem pretty strange, just after seven in the morning.

“Not ten minutes ago. She is asking suite number, I am saying we are not revealing suite number, according to policy. She ask if you are in, I am saying I don’t know, I think you are not currently on premises. I ask if she is wanting to leave message, parcel, anything. She say no, she is not wishing. But very polite. Very nice, very stylish. Look, now—out veendow.”

I turned, caught barely a glimpse. SUV. Moving rightward past the window, rather too fast for a motel parking lot. Looked like an Escalade. Black. No—maybe an extraordinarily dark purple.

Stylish.

Bloody insufferable already. The walk from car to door, all by itself, left me with dark, wet circles under my pits, to match the circles under my eyes.

Left side of the counter, taking all the cushy chairs, what looked to be a pharmaceutical sales team meeting. Easy to spot: impossibly crisp dress shirt, a tall, good-looking salesman type—yeah, there
is
a type—with five or six thirty-something babes, all with product binders, folding portfolios, expensive purses. Heels, lipstick, skirts at just the right length to get them in some busy doctor’s office door. And not a glance to me.

Right side: nobody. Not till I saw her in the corner chair. Fragile. Dark hair, which she brushed away from averted eyes. Hand curled around a paper cup. A hesitant hand.

From elsewhere: “Jack.”

I had never heard Nikki’s voice so small, so near a whisper. But we’re all small sometimes. I thought nothing of it. “Yeah, Nick, gimme a venti blonde…” I’d expected some smart-ass remark, but it wasn’t there.

“‘kay.”

She slipped behind the capp machine, down to the rack of urns at the far end. I hadn’t yet seen her face, but knew something was off.

“On the house, hon,” she said when she set the cup down before me. I’d been looking in the direction of the pharmaceutical bunch—a pair of legs, I think. When I turned to face her, Nikki was gone, slipped away in the back.

She was whispering—into a phone, I realized.
What?
…
Jesus, no. I can’t go back there
…
because I can’t
…
somebody’s after me
…
no, I don’t
…
I don’t have the money, I don’t have any fucking relatives
…
I don’t want to see anybody
…
I didn’t know who else to call, I
…

I busied myself at the counter. Cinnamon, Splenda, half-and-half. Tossed out the wooden stir stick.

“Jack?” Her voice, still small, came from the back room.

“Yeah!”

“Can I…speak with you?”

“Sure, Nikki.”

I stepped up to the counter.

“No. Back here. It’s okay, this once.” It sounded muffled.

The break room. Half a dozen lockers, aprons, clipboards, schedules. And, at the little table, Nikki sat under a
NO SMOKING
sign, smoking a cigarette, her hand shaking as she flicked ashes.

She turned toward me. The right side of her face bulbed out, black and purple, her right eye a ring of bruises. The
J
of
Jack
slurred out from her swollen lips.

Nikki had whatever insurance Starbucks grants to those who tough out enough months or years of twenty-five hours a week or less, part-time, and finally bag full-time and benefits. Not the best plan, I was sure, but I was equally sure it beat the crap out of whatever Wal-Mart did. I’d called ‘Bucks’ district manager, Johnny Broome—a favourite of Lynette’s, from some charity board—and he’d sent someone to cover the store. I persuaded him to cut out the whole gotta-fill-out-the-company-form thing, and got her to ER I’d been afraid she’s busted her zygomatic arch—the cheekbone that buys those supermodels their supermodel money. I’d seen it happen to a big, dumb Newfie sergeant in Cyprus. It wasn’t pretty, and he wasn’t right for months. Luckily, the ER doc said, no breaks—just one hell of a bruised mess.

The doc and Nikki both kicked me out of the exam room, so I called MacDonald from the waiting room, left three messages.

At long last, Nikki came out, a nurse on one arm, orderly on the other. Wouldn’t get in the wheelchair. “No way,” she said. “I’m not some invalid, for—” The look she directed at the orderly said there was no point his insisting any further. Still, she added, “Don’t you make me talk.”

The pain got to her sharply, suddenly, ripping past whatever the doc had used to dull it. A nurse handed me two prescriptions and some kind of high-end, fancy icebag contraption that would hit her insurance at fifteen times the drugstore price. The doc gave me a shrug and said he was handing off to Nikki’s doubtless nonexistent primary care physician.

A stop at the pharmacy, then I asked her, “Where’s home?” I hadn’t thought till that moment about where she lived.

A deep wince, silent tears, and a hoarse “your place” was all I got.

I did ask questions.

Who? Nothing.

What with? Nothing from Nikki. But the nurse had told me she’d said something about a two-by-four the guy had picked up by the BFI bin back of ‘Bucks.

Why? Any idea? The slightest shake of her head, and another wince.

Why the hell did you keep working? I asked her, and got “It’s what I do.”

Then: Who were you talking to on the phone in the break room?

Her face said: Don’t you know?

Dumbly, I didn’t.

I knew better than to protest the destination. Safe enough—my room held two queen beds. I laid her out in the spare, gave her three of the pills she was only to have one of, and that was that.

Save for the little kiss on her forehead and the pained little smile that came in its wake.

Saskatoon, on a hot day, cools at night. Memphis, on a hot day, doesn’t. And South Memphis, somehow, stays even hotter. Sometimes, during the night, you can hear gunfire.

The neon sign out on Raines said grocery. No name. The neon sign by the door said open, but the look of the place said closed. Till the kid, eleven or twelve, came out, hopped on his banana-seat bike and pedaled across the gravel lot into the dark with what looked like a clutch of red licorice sticks in his shirt pocket and a brown bag with a couple of quart Colt 45s. You’d see these little groceries everywhere in South Memphis, even where the regular streets gave way to long stretches of what looked like countryside, hiding shotgun houses here and there amid the brush. Rattletrap little oases, if you will. Beer. Cigarettes. Lottery. Food stamps…ok.