You Have the Wrong Man (19 page)

“What’s your baby’s name?”

“Terrell. If he was a girl, you know, her name would have been Tammi.”

Rick said, “No kidding?”

“Did you see
Essence
? It’s all about what happened.”

He told her, “That’s a story, I bet.”

“I hate Marvin Gaye,” she told him. “I could write his epitaph. I’m just about a Motown widow myself.”

Rick shrugged.

“It couldn’t have happened soon enough for me.”

Rick didn’t punch the button on the radio and the music she loathed drifted up to Iris; it was Gaye’s famous erotic anthem:
“Get up, get up, get up. Wake up, wake up, wake up.”

“I hope he rots in hell,” she said.

Rick was surprised by her voice; its natural timbre suggested a plaintive, desolate truth. He looked up to the
second-floor window to somehow acknowledge it, but she was gone.

Where the girl had been lounging on the sill, dangling her leg, her baby was left by himself, hunched in a jumbled position.

Rick stood up. Terrell was centered on the ledge, crumpled over in his terry suit. The baby appeared to be a complete amateur as he practiced the seated posture, his spine still too weak, and yet he didn’t fall backwards or forwards. The baby held the plastic toy, hitching his fist up and down until Rick heard the loose particles inside the rattle. The noisemaker, alone, appeared to be the magical counterweight which kept the baby from falling.

Rick hollered up at the window but the girl did not come back to collect the child. He wondered why the child guard had been removed in the first place. There was nothing but open space between the baby and an entire spectrum of chances and fortunes.

Rick hollered again. No one came to the open window. Then, he watched the rattle fall from the baby’s fingers and bounce off the siding. Like a white bone, it tumbled end over end, and hit the pavement.

He saw the baby tipping and Rick lifted his arms. He waited to intercept the bundle of chaos, to cushion the terry-clad icon of man’s entire mortal profile, condensed in a split second, but someone pulled it off the window sill and slammed the sash. Rick stooped over to collect the plastic rattle. His heart was thudding. His chest felt tight and he recognized the sensation of his airways pinching shut. He walked over to the apartment for his inhaler. He sat on the edge of his bed and puffed the medication.

When he came back outside an hour later, he was just in time to see a familiar procession. The blond girl was leaving the shelter with her baby, accompanied by two other women. The women had arrived by taxi and they were helping the girl put the baby’s safety seat in the cab. Rick still had the baby’s tiny white barbell and he walked over to the car. He stood beside the taxi until someone noticed him. He handed the rattle to the nearest black woman, who handed it to the next one, who then handed it to Iris. Iris put the rattle in the baby’s hand. One of the women wore the familiar
Thriller
T-shirt which Rick had seen everywhere that spring. Each time he saw the solitary glove, its disembodied hand modeled by all sizes and generations, the day acquired a forlorn tinge.

“Maurice is awake,” Vicki told Iris, as if this was his ultimate gesture of a reconciliation.

Iris sat down in the backseat. She held an empty S.O.S. coffee mug on her knee. She saw Rick and called to him, “Hey, kid, can you give this back to your mom?”

Rick didn’t want to be called “kid” when the girl was his own age, or younger, yet he sensed she was many dangerous miles ahead. He wanted to ask her why she had carried the cup outside in the first place, but he knew that Carol would gladly pass it on to the next one.

When he leaned into the taxi and took the mug from her hand. Iris could smell his breath, a tart medicinal odor which she found to be slightly disturbing. She recognized the scent from a previous trip to the hospital, when they gave her a drug and tested the congestion in her lungs on a Peak Flow Meter.

The taxi left the curb. The driver had tuned his radio to “a full day of Gaye,” and Iris immediately recognized the
iced crooner’s sonorous murmur as he delivered his lyrics with silky pathos. This particular song had always crossed over the color line and was doing it again, tweaking her pink heart. Gaye whispered contrite, universal admissions to his female chorus, who replied in a breathy I-told-you-so singsong.

Rick was smiling at Iris, but she was riding away. The cab passed the entrance to the Stop Over Shelter and she read the sign with its foolish sentiment that seemed to openly misconstrue human failure for human promise. Such a banner was hurtfully misleading. Iris had told Carol during her intake interview, “
Change
. Find me something hopeful in that.”

“Embrace it as your starting place,” Carol had said, her eyes heated and luminous, as if lit by the pyres of the martyrs.

  
EXCHANGE STREET

T
hey were living in Providence again after spending the summer in Wildwood, New Jersey. In Wildwood, Stephen worked on a fishing boat, a deep-sea charter named the
Pied Piper.
It was a bad name for a fishing boat, since it made people think of rats in the water. Families and businesses hired the boat for reunions and other celebrations when their members wanted to reaffirm their brotherhood. Occasionally, someone brought his wife along and it was a sore spot with the others. After a couple of weeks on the boat, Stephen’s burn turned deep bronze and he oiled his arms and chest every morning to enhance muscle definition.

While Stephen was on the boat, Venice worked at the
Acme supermarket, which was giving double pay for inventory; then she stayed on to stock the shelves there. She’d been working an act on the boardwalk but Stephen wanted her out of that line of work. Venice agreed it was better to stock canned goods in Acme than to earn your money as a spectacle.

They both had problems at their jobs. Venice wasn’t careful with the Exacto knife when she opened cartons and she slit the boxes of cereal and crackers. Laundry soap sifted over the floor. Then she ruined crates of coffee and cigarettes and was caught when she tried to throw the damaged cartons in the Dumpster in back of the store. Stephen fared a little better in his job. He knew when to tell the captain to head in because of rough weather. He watched the clients getting queasy and they docked just in time, so that the people were seasick on shore instead of getting sick on the boat. He wouldn’t have to hose the deck and gunnels. He didn’t get along with the people who hired the charter. He was called a first mate, but they treated him like a slave. He had to fetch them cold beers, bait their lines, scale the catch, and the tips were sometimes insulting. At the end of the summer, just as the schoolkids started buying notebook paper at the Acme, Stephen and Venice left their jobs. They prowled the tourist attractions at Atlantic City before going back north.

Whenever Stephen was out of work he suffered an unpleasant mix of feelings. He had some anger about not working even if he himself had resigned, writing a short note to the boss, explaining that the work just wasn’t his “cup of tea.” Crewing for the
Pied Piper
was seasonal work, and when he was dismissed he took his freedom seriously and wasted none of it. He approached Venice three and four
times a day, and when he wasn’t in that privacy with her, he was leading her somewhere else, strolling down the tide line or through the alleys behind the hotels searching for another place where it would happen again. Atlantic City was a perfect town for him. Outside the glitzy facades of the boardwalk and betting parlors, everyone minded his own business. No one talked to them except for the occasional hick who had to explain his lucky streak to passersby. There were losers everywhere, and this gave Stephen a combined sense of doom and gratitude. He wasn’t at the bottom. He was between jobs. He still had a wad of cash. After a week of roaming around, he got nervous again. He became cranky thinking about jobs. “I’d rather be digging a ditch than nothing,” he said.

Then they were back in New England. They found a furnished apartment on the fringes of College Hill, where the rents edged down near the Chinese section. Stephen liked to blend with the dispossessed; it was live and let live, and he was happy not to see all the university students nosing around. They found immediate employment, both worked days and they had the nights together.

Venice worked at Industrial National Bank, in credit card operations. Her job was in the Customer Service Department and she was on the telephone all day. She retrieved credit card statements on her computer, consulted celluloid microfiche or daily printouts. The telephone was heavy in her hand, like a clot of hot tar resting against her cheek. The tendon of her thumb became sore after pressing the receiver to her ear for eight hours, and she often had to stop to wiggle her thumb as if she was playing “Thumbelina.” Credit card customers called in to complain about
their MasterCard accounts. A cardholder screamed at her about his trip to Mexico, where a hotel had submitted erroneous charges for numerous Papaya Softees and other blenderized drinks. He wasn’t paying for drinks he never had. Venice listened to the customer, but she couldn’t keep from questioning him about these Papaya Softees. What did they taste like?

Women called in to ask about charges on their statements which they couldn’t identify. The charges might be for “Fantasy Phone,” “Date Lite,” or “Miss Paula,” all dial-a-porn operations which the women’s husbands or sons had contacted. Venice liked to advise her customers to have a “family powwow.” “Bring it all out in the open,” she told them. When her customers complained about their MasterCard errors, Venice told them to use cash instead of plastic. There was the matter of the finance charges: twenty-one percent, accrued daily from the day the charge is posted to the account, before the customer even received a statement. “With plastic you lose your dignity. It’s out the window,” she said.

Venice enjoyed finding the microfiche that had her ex-lover’s statement. It pleased her to read the list of businesses and to see just where he was putting his money. She could tell by her ex-lover’s purchases that he was certainly not someone to have second thoughts about, and the little bits of information revealed in the billing was affirming to Venice. She reported to Stephen that her ex had charged items at The Gentleman Farmer, a fancy garden-supply store for suburban types. “Shit. He’s changed his stripes, you know that? He’s scared himself completely into squaresville. He’s backed into a corner.”

They laughed about it. Sometimes her ex’s new wife would make charges at clothing stores called Ample Beauty and Added Dimensions.

“His wife can’t lose those pounds,” Venice told Stephen.

Even with these few laughs, the job in the credit card department was bad and she was always looking for something better. Stephen was at Sears, in the key center. He made keys for housewives who had had recent close calls locking themselves out of the house or locking their babies in the car. They came in to get backups, and they watched him carefully to make sure he wasn’t making a key for himself. Sometimes landlords Stephen recognized came in to get keys made. They said, “Are you still in town? Didn’t you ever graduate from the university? You’re at Sears?” When he wasn’t making keys, he was in kitchen appliances; sometimes they even made him sweep something up. Stephen wasn’t too happy about his position and together they looked at the Sunday paper.

There were always ads for couples in the paper. Couples were sought to run group homes and halfway houses for the retarded, for substance abusers, or for the elderly. Venice didn’t like the idea because it usually required residence in a place and the shifts were three days on, then three days off. She believed that kind of a cycle was disorienting. “You have to keep an overnight bag all the time. You have to sleep there with those kids,” she told Stephen.

“It’s worse to eat with them. They slobber,” he told her. “It’s like living with monkeys.”

“That’s probably not for us, even with my experience.”

He looked at her and smiled at her joke.

Before anything better came up, Venice had to quit her job at the bank. She couldn’t sit at her desk after she had had some reconstructive surgery. She tried using a rubber donut, but the pillow didn’t help much. She couldn’t sit because of the stitches. Worse than the stitches were the spasms. The doctor told her the sphincter would take a little longer to heal. As it healed, the stitches would trigger spasms. He told Venice that her body was having a spastic response to trauma. “It’s trying to tell you something,” the doctor said. “The natural contractions of the colon are solely for expulsion, it won’t tolerate invasive friction.”