“Like you told me,” I said, “I don’t talk to them, and I don’t sit at the bar.”
“How many words do you say between leaving and coming back?”
“I don’t know,” 1 said.
“Guess,” he said.
“Two hundred,” I said.
He thought a minute, then looked up from re-scribing edges in our device. “You get coffee at the Gas and Go.”
“Yes,” I said.
“That kid is going to remember you.”
“No more coffee,” I said.
“That’s a better plan,” he said. He set the hollow cylinder down. “You talk to Baby?”
“Some,” I said. “I tell her it went all right when she picks me up.”
“Good,” he said, palming the chips stack by stack. “You know my name?”
“Leo,” I said.
“My last name.”
“I don’t know it,” I told him. He looked me over and said again, “Good. You still headed west when we’re done?” I had told him I was going to take my share and go west.
“Yes I am.”
“Good deal, my man. Nine more days and you’ll be off to your new life, whatever.”
I slept poorly in the river cabin. My legs ached at night and I listened for Leo and Baby, and every night the noises came. I knew with certainty that Leo would kill me if he found out about Baby and me, and that thought kept the sleep off me. I had made a mistake, but instead of wanting to retract it, like every other sad turn I’d taken, I wanted to push this one through, keep it up, take Baby with me to a new life. I could see us happy. We’d be good together, but the clock was ticking over my head. At that point, I had fewer than nine days.
The Hotel Surplus Depot was two connected warehouses on a railroad siding on the west side of Phoenix, and there were great stacks of furniture inside, heaped like kids had done it. All the couches stood on end and the end tables themselves were piled up like boxes. There were two long rows of framed seascapes on the floor, the sun setting in every one. It was pretty interesting, all that used stuff. I’d never seen a mountain of a thousand lamps before. A handful or so other shoppers poked through, working in teams toward the dresser or
shelving that wasn’t scratched too badly, and that’s finally what Mr. Cuppertino and I did, selecting a dozen nice walnut-paneled bedside tables and a dozen chairs padded with a blue fabric and as many heavy-duty towel bars. These were heavy chrome affairs with a kind of rack shelf. Mr. Cuppertino was lit up by these bargains. I mean, the chairs were six dollars each and the racks four. He was really tickled to find twelve relatively decent cover quilts in a blue floral pattern for three bucks each. I had to agree with him when he said, as we loaded the truck, “We done good. We pillaged this place. Those towel racks would list for forty bucks on
The Price Is Right
! They are known as the Waldorf Towel Caddie and they are not cheap.”
It was a good feeling driving back with that big load of treasures. Mr. Cuppertino told me how he and his wife, Mickey, had done this in smaller vehicles over the years, waiting for a call from the manager of the Holiday Inn in Apache Junction and then going down for his leftovers. The Hotel Surplus Depot had only been going for about fifteen years, and it made things a lot easier. “We’ll do the carpet next spring,” he told me. “If you want to stay around.”
Well, I’d been thinking about it. Those towel racks weren’t going to put themselves up, and Mr. Cuppertino told me he had a good power drill for the job. What I was thinking was: I’d like to put something on the wall and have it stay for a few years.
It’s funny about writing things down. I was working in my notebook every morning, trying to get the bare bones of my times with Baby and Leo in there, just the facts, something the proper authorities could use. But I couldn’t do that. The way it works is that it’s never just the facts. Γ d write down the fundamentals, but when I came to the night: that Baby had dirtied the bottom of her feet by standing naked with me against the warm side of my Nissan, it all changed. I’d go on
a little bit. You’re writing in the predawn dark and you go on a little bit. I put in there about the way she’d slow down at the summit every night after our first night and look over at me in the dark and I’d nod and we’d go at it without a word, except maybe a hurried “Here,” or words meant only to indicate we were still breathing, like “Okay” and “Well.” Every night we stopped there in the thinner air and she mostly led the way, and I wrote in the journal that she led the way—and more than one way. She put her hand on my hip and on the back of my neck with an affectionate familiarity. This was every night with the clock ticking on our dubious enterprise, and I became joyously convinced that Baby loved me, for she came at me with an ardor I’d never known, and she held nothing back. One night, and I don’t recall which it was in that crazy week, she looked at me from where I had her on the tailgate of my vehicle and she said, “You like this, don’t you.” It wasn’t a question, but I answered it anyway and said that yes I did.
It was after the third night when we were back in the car straightening our clothes as she drove down the canyon toward Rock Creek that I asked her Leo’s last name and she told me Rosemont without hesitating and I knew our collusion was complete. She told me that she had met him at the River of Gold Casino last spring. He had been nice to her—courtly, she said—and they started to date. She didn’t know he was living in his car after his release from Medium, which is what they call Incon Medium Security Prison. He’d been in there two years for being part owner of a meth lab somewhere in the hard desert outside of Gallup, and in prison he had learned fine arts and crafts, carving wood, and wording with some jewelry. It was in Medium that he got the idea for our aluminum sleeve.
Right away he’d gotten into some trouble in the casino, was barred from it, because of a dispute over a slot machine.
A woman claimed he had distracted her with a story about her car in the parking lot and he had taken her place and her 640 credits on the Dollar Diamond Three Way slot machine she’d been playing. The security video showed she was right, and he was forbidden from the place. That had been almost three weeks before I had my ass chewed up by the wild refinery hounds and drove Baby home that fateful night.
I put this story in the record even though I had it second hand from Baby, and I put in the last four nights, including all the rough stuff I heard and saw before Γ went back to the cabin one last time and then slipped away through the trees and hitchhiked down Incon Canyon to Red Post and took a bus here to Globe and the El Sol Motel. I finished with the date of October 4 and the name of this motel, the El Sol, and the name of Mr. Cuppertino, my new friend. My notebook was fat as a Bible, swollen with all the inky pages, so that I had to close it with a rubber band. I signed the story as I had written it, and I clothespinned it to the hanger and put the hanger in the jacket in my closet, and I zipped the jacket up, and I was done with it.
There were various games that repeated on
The Price Is Right
—Bulls-Eye, Clock, Poker, Push Over, Groceries, One Away (where each digit in the price of the car is one away from the real number)—and while Plinko was Mr. Cuppertino’s favorite, he watched Groceries with real attention. He commented on all the products. “You ever had that toaster pizza?” he’d ask me.
“I haven’t,” I’d tell him.
“Let’s pick some up later and give it a try. Mickey would not approve, but this is my new life we’re talking about.”
We agreed that we neither one of us wanted to win a year’s supply of spray-on sizing, which they gave away freely in any week, and Mr. Cuppertino swore aloud when they offered the
jumbo bottle of Lightning-Rooter, which you pour in your drains to unclog them and which evidently had caused the motel some harm in years past. He liked the bakery goods, especially Aunt Dorothy brand this and thats, but he had no use for hair spray or the knickknacks like vases or picture frames or the set of miniature clocks that turned out to be worth nine hundred dollars.
“I’d like to go out there,” he told me. On the screen, they were showing the address to send away for tickets. “I’ve already got those two tickets.”
“To the show?”
“Right. That’d be a road trip. We’ll close up for a week or get George up from the Blue Door to run the place. I’d like to see Miss Roberta Gilstrand in person and get Bob’s autograph.” He looked over at me, then he scanned the upper corners of the office, all four. “We’re going to have to paint this place this winter. The latex they put out is about a four-year paint anymore.” He wove his fingers together. “This place about wears me out. You want a job?”
It was a good thing to hear, but then something happened that stopped my heart and made the world go slow motion. It was my old car. My Nissan turned in off Durrant Street and pulled to a stop under the El Sol’s office canopy. I felt a voltage bring me to my feet, and without a word to Mr. Cuppertino, I slipped past him and the counter, through the curtained door into his private quarters, where I had never before ventured. I stood in his dark little living room, leaning against the wall, listening to the voices from the office: Bob Barker on
The Price Is Right
, Mr. Cuppertino doing business, and then, another voice that I knew very well, Leo Rosemont.
A moment later Mr. Cuppertino stepped back and went past me to his stove for the coffeepot. Bringing it back, he said to me, “That’s the guy, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” I told him.
“Well, that’s a stroke of luck,” he said. “He’s checked in to number ten, and he says he’s looking for a fella owes him money. Medium build, short dark hair, name of Eugene, doesn’t know the last name. The guy may have a black cowboy hat.”
“I’m sure that man intends to kill me.”
“Because of that girl,” Mr. Cuppertino said.
“Because of the girl and that I took a packet of money from him.”
“Those are reasons,” he said to me. “Those are good ones.” My heart was driving me into my chair deeper and deeper. Mr. Cuppertino put a spoon of sugar in my coffee, which he knows I like, and we sat in his crowded parlor, and he talked to the contestants all through the “Showcase Showdown” while my mind raced, stalled, and spiraled.
The last time I’d seen Leo Rosemont, he’d been mad. In the morning dark at the cabin, I heard the two of them struggling in their bed. Baby was noisy in a struggle and I knew the rhythm of her cries very well, but that last day it was different, broken and odd, and I understood that he was hurting her. Suddenly the sounds stopped and I heard Leo’s footsteps. With my eyes closed tight, I felt his rough bare foot on my face. “Hey, boy.” He rocked his foot. “Let’s have a meeting.” I opened my eyes and said, “What?” but he kept his foot hard against the side of my head. He was naked. “The truth has come out, and your ass is grass.” With that he gave me a little kick, shoving off. I sat up and he returned in a pair of Levi’s. He sat at the splintered table and lit a cigarette. “You’re fired,” he said. “Did you think Baby wouldn’t tell me?” He blew a tremendous column of smoke at the ceiling, a gray plume in the raw light. “It never works with three, that I’ve seen. Three just don’t work.” Baby padded to the doorway wearing only her white work shirt, and she crossed to Leo and
sat on his lap with her head tucked up under his. “It works with two mostly and with four, but not three. You think you want her, that she’d be better off with you, away from the likes of me. You could take care of her. You’re only about half dumb, and you’ve got a bad case on this cutie, right? And me, I think she’s mine, of course, boy, because she is. She’s exactly the kind of woman who needs to stay away from the likes of you. You, my friend, are a sinking stone. You’re sunk here.”
Leo leaned forward and crushed his cigarette onto the rough plank, and I saw Baby cling tighter. “But I’m not going to kill you, so that’s the good news. But you’ve lost your share and you’ve lost your car and you got to get off the property in the next five minutes, and if I ever see you again, I will hurt you.” He pointed his long dirty finger at me and I stared at it, past it, at the side of Baby’s streaked face, but she did not turn.
I squirmed into my clothes and tied my shoes tight, and I stuffed the black cowboy hat on my head. I stood and said good-bye, but neither of them replied. So I dropped out of the front door and hurried down the lane as if headed for the canyon road.
Three hours later I heard the Nissan growling along the dirt lane, and I saw it bump away toward the canyon highway. Her days of driving to work were over. 1 lay in the leaves all that time. When it grew quiet again and I could only hear the river and the voices in it, I walked back to the terrible cabin, and on my hands and knees, I fished all the black and gold casino chips from the center hollow of the wooden spool table where Leo Rosemont had stashed them. He should have considered my point of view as I lay on the floor every night. It was no wonder with Leo and Baby raising a lusty racket that my eyes stayed open, and that from that vantage I spied the edge of one of the chips where it lodged in that cracked wooden cylinder. I stuffed newspapers into the space and covered just the top with a scattering of chips; he wouldn’t find
them gone until he and Baby cashed out. 1 shouldered my little day pack full of my clothes, such as they were, and about a pound of casino chips—$5,100—and I hit the highway and hitched west.
At the El Sol, I spent the whole morning in a sour sweat hiding out in Mr. Cuppertino’s apartment. At noon he told me that Leo Rosemont had finally gone out, probably to find some lunch, and so I slipped down to my room. I was at the curtains every ten minutes, but my car did not return. Finally I lay on my bed and my thoughts lay upon me like cold stones.
After nine
P.M
., Mr. Cuppertino came in with a white paper bag of sandwiches in one hand and something in his other that I recognized: my spiral notebook. He put them both on the kitchenette table and spread the food onto two napkins under the hanging lamp: pastrami sandwiches, dill pickles, and two paper cups of coffee with sugar packets. Mr. Cuppertino sat down and touched his fingertips together. “Let’s eat something,” he said. His eyes were bright, tired. I went to the window and peeked out yet again, and this time I saw my Nissan right in front of my room. “Oh my God.”