Authors: James Whorton
Like a machine built for one purpose, I walked my body across the station, dodging families and hills of luggage. I emerged into sunlight in the city of Baltimore, Maryland.
The cab at the front of the line was green. I didn't like that. The others were yellow. But you can't make them go out of order. I took the green cab downtown, then switched to a yellow one that brought me back up North Charles. I paid the driver and hopped out as he slowed for a red light. The city was new to me, but I matched up what was around me to the map in my head. I walked seven blocks in what would have looked on the map like a stairstep pattern. I passed a storefront with the words
Golden Monkey Restaurant
in cursive on the window. Next door was Lucky Bus Tour, and beyond that, an out-of-business tailor shop. I turned back. The block was empty of traffic. The time was somewhat past two in the afternoon.
Inside the Golden Monkey Restaurant I was met by a wiry, dark, mean-looking Chinese girl. She said something loud and short and had to repeat it before I understood. The phrase she kept saying was, “How many!”
I told her I was here to meet a gentleman. She led me past a carved wooden screen and some potted philodendrons to a corner where Ray sat with his back rounded and his right eye swollen almost shut.
“I
walked into a door edge,” he said. “Were you followed?”
“No.”
“Good. I had my little mother with me for another half hour after we diverged. Did you see her by the elephant? She had one of those crying radio babies.”
The old radio babies never cried but were little more than department-store baby dolls stuffed with batteries and electronics. There was a box full of them at the Farm. The new radio babies will cry and writhe.
“She handed me off when I came back onto the Mall. Then she picked me up again at the National Gallery.”
“How did you finally lose her?”
“I had some cabs waiting. It was pretty easy. These people have the resources of professionals, but they don't stick on you like professionals.”
There had been dozens of babies in that museum, but the only one I'd paid attention to was the Cro-Magnon baby made of wax. I was about to ask Ray who “these people” were when, from around the carved wooden screen, the mean-looking Chinese girl shot out and set a glass of beer in front of him. She gave me a hard, silent appraisal, turning away just as I was asking for a Pepsi. I felt the insult to be deliberate.
She fit in pretty well with the seedy ambience of the Golden Monkey. The floor was gritty, and the heart-leaf philodendrons were dying of thirst in their pots. It takes some serious negligence to kill that plant. Anyway, we were there. Ray was sweating a lot. He dabbed at his forehead with a red cloth napkin, using care around the swollen eye.
“Here is the point,” he said when I finally got my question out.
“Anyone we know, we must avoid. Friends and former colleagues, neighbors, everybody. But especially
GRISTLE
. Can we let it go at that?”
“I know
GRISTLE
wants to kill us,” I confessed.
“What are you talking about?”
“I heard it through the door. He wants us shot on the sidewalk so we can't tell about the Watergate.”
Ray shook his head. “Jumbo,” he said.
“You didn't tell me not to listen.”
“First of all, nobody wants to shoot
you.
He might want to shoot
me,
butâ”
“That's worse!” I started to break up at this point, against my will.
“It's not going to happen,” Ray said. “It won't happen. We're safe, okay? This joker was trained by the FBI, for heaven's sake.”
“You're not afraid of the FBI?”
“Oh, no. Not in the least. Go to any post office and look at the slobs they have on the most-wanted list. If they can't catch a bunch of hippies who bombed the Pentagon, how are they going to catch us?”
“I don't know.”
“Well, they're not. Tell me you're not scared.”
“I'm not scared.”
“Good. And if you do see
GRISTLE
, run the other way.”
A Chinese man in sleek black slacks and a V-neck pullover came to speak to Ray. His bald, shiny sternum showed in the V. Ray addressed him as Mr. Wang. He had cauliflower cheeks.
We rose and followed Mr. Wang through the kitchen and out the back. Down the alley a steel door was propped open by means of a rubber mat folded on top of itself. Mr. Wang waved us in, kicking the mat and closing the door. We were inside Lucky Bus Tour.
We passed a mop and a coat rack. Wang rapped on a door, and the answer came as a kind of bark. Again Wang motioned us in, only this time he didn't follow.
T
here was a camera on a tripod and a small steel desk with another Chinese male behind it. A tassel beard of forty black hairs grew off his chin. He came close in order to scrutinize Ray's face. He held a desk lamp on one side of Ray's head, then the other, studying the swollen eye.
“Her, too?”
“Yes,” Ray said.
“How old is she? Twelve?”
“She's eighteen.”
“She might be fifteen. No more than that, I think.”
His English was better than Wang's. He gave me the lamp treatment, then nodded at my knapsack. “Have you got some makeup in there, miss?”
“No.”
He opened a desk drawer and brought out a greasy tackle box, which he laid in my hands. He sent me to a small, grim lavatory.
There was my face in the cloudy mirror. Fatigue makes an adult look older, but it makes a child look younger and more childish. The skin under my eyes had a gray shine to it, and the knit forehead didn't help.
I put a lot of beige powder all over my face and ears, used a pencil around my eyes, and smeared some lipstick onto my mouth. I tried a few things with my hair, but it is the kind of hair that lies fairly slick no matter what is done to it. There was a comb in the tackle box, but I was unwilling to handle it. I pulled some hair forward to cover the sides of my face.
When Ray saw me he said, “Oh, that's not good.” I thought I had better go wash my face off, but the Chinese man said we'd try a picture first. He put me on a stool in front of some blue paper taped to the
wall and snapped a Polaroid. Then he took another with the hair pulled even farther forward so that all but a three-inch strip down the middle of my face was covered with my hair. In the picture, I did not look older so much as embalmed. Well, but that was a strategy. The thing in the picture was ageless.
On the desk he spread out a dozen driver's licenses from various states. The idea was to choose the ones that would need to be altered the least.
The faces had a sad foolishness about them. I suppose it is hard not to look foolish in your driver's license picture once it has been stolen from you. All of the licenses were current. They included a set of three that belonged to a husband, wife, and daughter, judging by their names and by the way the young woman resembled both of the older people, who did not, however, resemble each other, except that all three of them were black.
Ray had his mind made up on licenses from a southern state. “Don't you have a couple from Tennessee?” he said.
“No. I could get a couple.”
“Okay, get a couple.”
The man said it would take him one week.
Wang had waited in the alley. As he led us back through the kitchen, the mean-looking girl was receiving a good, loud scolding in Chinese from a gray-haired woman with an iron pot in her hand. The girl faced a few degrees to one side, as though to let the high-pitched coughing fit of language be deflected.
“My mother took the girl on for charity,” Wang said. “She is dull. Speaks no English, very little Chinese.”
“What does she speak?” Ray asked.
“A little Cantonese, that is all. We have a lot of trouble with that simpleminded girl.”
I twisted to get one more look at her and saw an interesting thing. The hard eyes that had at first seemed calculating and full of foreign malice now struck me as merely stolid and flat. There was something to learn in this. I had seen a face I couldn't read and attributed cunning to it. It never occurred to me that her face might be unreadable because she had been dropped on her head as a baby.
Wang left us at our table. When the girl came out again, a little pinker for being shouted at, Ray ordered more beer and a large meal of Chinese food, taking care to include the number of each menu item and see that the girl wrote it down. It was a relief to know she was simpleminded. That made it easier to put up with her slow pace and sullen manner. Ray left her an oversized tip, as was his habit whatever the service.
O
utside in the sun Ray patted himself for a matchbook. A cabdriver welcomed us to “Baldimore” and drove us out Harford Road to a used car dealer.
Ray liked a sky-blue Plymouth Scamp with a white vinyl top, but the salesman balked when Ray mentioned a test drive. “Maybe you've been drinking,” the salesman said.
“I didn't mean that
I
would drive the car,” Ray said. “My daughter will drive it.”
“I can't allow that,” the salesman said.
“Why? She's perfectly sober.”
“What is she, twelve?”
“Why don't we let the salesman drive?” I suggested.
“I'm busy,” the salesman said.
Ray brought a thick stack of hundred-dollar bills from his wind-breaker pocket. The paper was so crisp and springy, it would hardly stay folded.
This caused the salesman to change his tune. Ray got in front on the passenger side, and I got in back by myself.
“I'm Armando Snacki,” the salesman said.
“Show us what the car is capable of, Mr. Snacki,” Ray said.
Armando Snacki accelerated evenly and took us through a few smooth turns. Ray closed his eyes and fell asleep. We were pulling a slow U-turn when the tires squealed and Ray woke up. He twisted and looked at me.
“We are test-driving a Plymouth Scamp,” I reminded him.
He touched his mouth, checking for a cigarette.
Back at the lot, Ray told Armando Snacki that we would take the Plymouth, but only with a new set of tires thrown in. “Those you have on there are noisy.”
Snacki capitulated. “I can't sell it to anyone else, now that it smells like egg rolls.”
I had carried a paper sack of egg rolls from the Golden Monkey. He was right, there was a smell.
I drank a 7-Up while the tires got put on. Ray gave Snacki some hundreds. Then the car was brought around front, and Ray got in on the passenger side again.
I reminded him I'd never driven a car.
“It isn't hard,” he said. “I will explain it right now.”
“A
ll I need to give you are a few simple principles,” Ray said.
“Number one concerns your feet. The right foot is for going and stopping. Does this car have a clutch?”
We established that it didn't.
“In this car, let your left foot rest. On rare occasions, you will use your left knee to hold the steering wheel, for example if you are eating food.
“Principle two: avoid left turns, and avoid reverse. Principle three: adjust your mirrors.”
Ray got out and stood in several positions around the car while I moved the mirrors so I could see him. Armando Snacki stood at the plate glass of his office.
Ray got back in the car. “Don't ever let the fuel level drop below half a tank. Top it off at the end of the day. Every week, check the oil. To check the brake lights by yourself, back up to a wall. Carry spare bulbs in the glove compartment, and carry a screwdriver.
Don't
give some bored police officer a reason to pull you over. The first thing he'll want is your license, and then there goes our cover. Above all, we must not go to Tennessee. It would be the worst place in the world for us, once we get our fake Tennessee driver's licenses.”
“We have no reason to ever go to Tennessee.”
“Correct. Let's drive.”
I got the Scamp started and put it in gear. When I lifted my foot from the brake, the car moved, and I stomped the brake again.
Armando Snacki came out of his building.
“Keep moving,” Ray said. “We're done with Armando Snacki.”
I raised my foot off the brake, and we idled through a wide turn across the lot. I did have to use the reverse gear once, when I came to a light pole. I aimed us out the exit. Then we were off. I was driving a car.
I had to corkscrew down on the seat in order to reach the pedals. I used my left leg to keep from sliding into the floor.
Ray flagged a liquor store. “Stop there, if you would.”
It was on our left, across three lanes of traffic. Remembering principle two, I got us into the liquor store parking lot by a series of seven right turns.
“Leave it running,” Ray said.
My hands and armpits were sweating. Wouldn't some country lane be a better place for my first driving lesson? But I decided to trust Ray on it, and when he came back, I drove again. He set two fifths in the floor and opened a pint to hold in his lap. “You are doing just fine with your driving,” he said.
W
e took a two-room apartment at the Fletcher Hotel on St. Paul and Madison. The front room contained one olive-colored sofa, one folding chair, and a card table with a hot plate on it. The black grime on the hot plate was hard like a casing. There was a bedroom and a minuscule bathroom. On the floor beside the toilet, someone had left behind a Donald Duck orange juice lid.
Ray settled in on the sofa with his two bottles of bourbon and three packs of Raleighs. The pint was gone. “I need a favor,” he said.
“What is it?”
He held out one of the bottles. “Hide this somewhere.”