Chapter 13
D
estiny sat at the small table in the lounge of D-deck, drinking coffee and watching Remy play a game of solitaire at the bar. It was a little after seven, several hours before she had to squeeze into her hostess uniform, and she was dressed in blue jeans and an Arizona State sweatshirt. It was her favorite shirt, slightly frayed at the cuffs. Sometimes, when she wore it, she wondered if people thought she was an ASU alumni, an ex-sorority girl. It was a comforting thought, being mistaken for something she could have been.
She said, “You ever go to school?”
Remy looked up from his cards, eyebrows furrowed. “What you mean? ’Course I did, got a diploma and everything. All twelve grades, baby.”
“I mean college.” She took a sip of her coffee. Remy had made it in a French press and it was good, better than she was used to. He wouldn’t let her put in any cream, though, said it would be like adding Sprite to good wine.
“Nooo,” Remy said, looking back down at his cards. “See, my senior year high school, I got in a bit of trouble. Wouldn’t been a big deal, ’cept that I was born in October, trouble happened in February, so I was eighteen. Had to finish my education inside, took two years, but the diploma’s real. Stamped and everything. Got it in a file cabinet, somewhere back home.”
“Were you any good at it?”
“School?” Remy laughed. “Better than I was at stealing cars, anyway. I liked math and history; the rest wasn’t worth much.”
She smiled. “You ever wish you had?”
“And what,” Remy said. “Be a math teacher?”
“Sure, why not?”
“No,” he said. “I like the life I got. There’s rough spots, sure, but mostly good. I got a bit of walking-around money, a couple ladies happy to see me when I come visit. Lots of freedom, which I ’spect most math teachers think you get on summer vacation. Me, I got a little shack up near Thibodeaux, right there in the delta, go there anytime. Eat big old shrimp for dinner, have a drink, and watch the sun slide down.”
She took another drink of coffee and nibbled at the edge of the croissant Remy had brought her from upstairs. “Aren’t you going to ask me if I went to college?”
Remy laughed again. “College and Mizz Destiny? No girl, don’t believe I will.”
“I could have went to college.”
Her tone had been sharper than she’d meant. Remy moved several cards around the bar slowly, very deliberately, and she knew if he was going to answer, he would answer carefully.
“It’s all right,” she said. “I didn’t know it was that obvious.”
Remy sighed, scooped the cards into a pile. He shuffled and began to lay out a new game. “How long you been outta high school? Five, ten years?”
“Five years? Come on.”
“Okay, say ten. In those ten year, how many college-educated people you work with, side by side, any given year? Not counting managers. Not many, right?” He peered down, chuckled. “Them old suicide kings, they always get me. Man king of the world, stick a knife in his own ear. Where was we?”
“We weren’t anywhere,” Destiny said. “I’m going to go back to my room, take a nap.”
“That might be a good idea. Yeah, now I remember what I was saying. We don’t work with those kinda people, not usually. After a while, you get a feel for the people you do work with. Not saying we non-college folk dumb, not that. Fact, I think maybe some people go to college just so they get a piece of paper they can show people, say to them look, I ain’t dumb at all. No, whatever it is, they got a different way of looking at the world, like they done something a monkey couldn’t do.”
He looked up, and she was right: He had kind eyes, but they weren’t always that way. He was looking at her intensely now, not with malice but with a seriousness that was unsettling. “Lotta us, we
know
our work could be done by a monkey. Way we move, way we look at things. Jus’ a job, ain’t our life.”
She brought the cup and saucer over to the bar. “Sorry I brought it up.”
“What I mean is you pick up on that, right away. Way people speak, way they—”
“You don’t have to spell it out for me.”
He took the cup from her, pressing his hand against hers. “How long you been looking to break out?” he asked, almost like he was talking to himself. “Never mind, it don’t matter. One thing, though, you should quit asking questions if the answer already built up in your mind. ’Cuz, Destiny girl? The answers you want gotta be your answers.”
* * *
She went back to her room, rubbing at the corners of her eyes. She felt like an idiot, surprised a little Creole bartender could see how transparent her fantasy world was, how she longed for something more than this smoky, cramped world, for being someone more than an afterthought in this dull existence. A world peopled by savants. Pull a lever, get a few chips, hope for a draw card. Win, lose, drink, smoke, maybe tip the drink girl. Look at her ass, if it’s nice take a minute and stare. Above all: Forget the real world, lose it in the numbers and lights and chips.
And she was the one supposed to be a monkey?
She tried to feel indignant, but it wouldn’t come. That wasn’t what Remy was saying. She and Remy had jobs, not careers, and the distinction was reflected in their postures, their expressions. She did an adequate job, moving fast in a world where speed was expected, never forgot a drink order, almost always smiled, hardly ever had to fake it. If she had some talent in her job it was knowing how to read a customer, whether they wanted her involved in their world or not. If not, she stayed out of the way, made sure they didn’t wait for anything. Otherwise, she made sure to smile, to ask about them, to not only
act
interested but to actually
be
interested. People could tell the difference, and she was lucky; she found a lot of people genuinely interesting.
She’d made a base salary of thirty-two thousand the year before, and with tips had tripled that. Most of the tips were cash, or chips she cashed out, and was mostly tax-free. Two hundred dollars a day, average, though sometimes as low as thirty or forty bucks. Once she’d received a thousand-dollar tip, but that was a fluke, happened only once every couple years from what she’d heard, and she’d split it with another cocktail waitress.
Almost a hundred grand a year. It sounded like a lot of money, even to herself sometimes. More than her parents had made combined, outside Savannah on the old estate. Difference was they had been happy, or at least they had been before that sweltering August day in the garden. But she was getting closer to her goal, even after paying the ridiculous four-grand-a-month rent so she could live in a small condo in a gated community between Vegas and Henderson.
She had to get going . . . how would Remy put it? Shit or get off the pot. Good old Remy, he might have been trying to flatter her, he might not. She was thirty-four, but could pass for twenty-four . . . on a good day in the right light, she thought wryly. On a bad day she could see that old bitch Forty peeking around the edges of the mirror, lurking in the small crow’s-feet of her laugh lines. Soon the tips would start shrinking, and then she would be moved to another job, away from the high-stakes tables.
Or she could move on to her career. There was $53,412 in her savings account, another eight grand in her checking. With this payday—another cash job—she could finally do it, make the plunge. And to hell with trying to look like she was still in her twenties.
She leaned back into the pillows, knowing sleep was unlikely between the coffee and the jar of her emotions. And her daydream, which seemed to be taking on flesh every day.
There was a way to do it, she was pretty sure, where it would be like she’d always been part of the community. Start slow, set up the greenhouse first. Make gifts of flowers, donate to ladies’ clubs, combine a grand opening with a wine tasting, whatever. Keep the prices as low as possible without looking desperate. They’d show up, she knew they would, and if she set up somewhere where the locals and the winter tourists could keep her busy year-round, so much the better. The backyard garden, that was the important part. Make it a tour, or set up the greenhouse behind it so people had to walk through. A pool, a fountain, some trees . . . she had it all set in her mind, though she knew it would change when she saw the land, saw what the native plants were. That’s the way it worked, you had to use what you were given, enhance it instead of transforming it. She could see the ladies now, two or three of them. Standing, talking, pointing out the features with their wineglasses in their hands. Saying, I wish I could make my backyard look like this. The air heavy with the scent of chlorophyll, of blossoms.
And then she was there, saying, maybe I could come take a look? I might have some ideas.
She never heard the ladies answer in this vision, never knew what happened. But that point, getting to that exact point, she saw a path as clear as the green-edged gravel road that had led to her parents’ house.
Despite the coffee she managed to drift off into a light sleep, and in her dreams she was on her knees, kneeling in the rich black dirt of a garden. The sun was beating on the back of her neck, and the light breeze touched her hair, pulling it away from her head, letting her scalp breathe. It was just her, alone and happy with a basket full of seeds, and as she leaned forward to cut into the earth she saw the snake, inches away from her hand. It was jet black, curled up on a hill she had made for some red potatoes, long looping coils of scaly muscle. Its eyes were trained on the blue veins on the inside of her wrist.
There it is
, she thought. As though part of her had been waiting for it, the snake a leading actor and she just support. The rest of it, the good parts, were just for contrast. This was the way it was. Every garden had a serpent, every dream had an end.
She woke, heart pounding. For a moment she thought her heart was going to hammer right through her chest, it was that loud, and then she realized someone was at the door. She sat up, trying to clear the cobwebs. The person at the door continued to knock, a steady rhythm like they weren’t planning to go away. Remy, no doubt, come to apologize. The little peckerhead, she thought, I bet he brought me another cup of coffee.
She went to the door. Frankie Rollins stood across the hallway, head slightly bowed, looking up at her with a serious expression on his face. His white silk shirt was one button too loose, especially for this early in the morning. To his side was a squat, close-shaven man with red eyes.
“Sorry,” Frankie said. “You sleeping?”
She nodded, running a hand through her hair. She could still feel that breeze from her dream lifting the damp tendrils of hair from the back of her head.
“Bartender said you were up,” Frankie said. “How you doing? Everything okay?”
“Fine,” Destiny said, stepping out into the hallway. It felt rude to talk across the threshold, make her employer stand out there like he was a Jehovah’s Witness or maybe a vacuum cleaner salesman. At the same time, there was no way she was going to invite these guys into her room, where the only place to sit was the bed.
“Everything working out okay with Remy?”
“He’s great,” Destiny said. “Is there something wrong, Mr. Rollins? They said we didn’t need to do the drill this morning, so I stayed below.”
“Really? Mister?” Frankie said, then smiled. “You heard right, no drills.”
The ship lurched slightly underneath them, and she stumbled a little, still groggy from her nap.
Frankie reached to steady her, holding her shoulder for a moment and then letting go. “I explained about the tips, before,” he said. “This is one of those jobs, the tips are included with the check?”
“You did.”
He motioned to the other man. “This is Kharkov. He works for Mr. Latham.”
Kharkov watched her, his eyes roaming across her body, then pulled an envelope out of his pocket. “From Mr. Latham. He was impressed with you, especially after we had ship problems last night. He said you were quite helpful.”
Destiny tried not to look at the envelope, thick enough that the flap wouldn’t quite close. “I just did what I was supposed to do,” she said.
Kharkov was impassive. “If Mr. Latham says you were helpful, be thankful. You should not contradict him.”
“I didn’t mean—”
Frankie held up a hand. “It’s fine. Mr. Kharkov here is a very literal man. Take the money, Destiny.”
She looked at the envelope. “Is that all right with you?”
Frankie smiled. “I like to see money moving around. It’s good for the circulation.”
Destiny reached for the envelope, but Kharkov held on to his end. “Mr. Latham was impressed. He said there could be even more of these, if you do a few other tasks. Very simple tasks.”
Slowly, so slowly she could feel her fingertips breaking contact with the envelope one by one, Destiny released her grip. She took a step backwards, the doorway to her room framing her.
“Hey,” Frankie said. “Hey, don’t get the wrong idea. Nobody’s forcing anybody to do anything.” He turned. “Give us a minute, Kharkov.”
Kharkov took a few steps away, and Frankie leaned a bit closer. “You might want to think about it some more. You know what I mean? Don’t say no right away, even if you’re gonna say no later.” He went to Kharkov, took the envelope from him and tossed it to her. “That can’t come back with us.”
“Was this part of the plan all along?”
“No,” Frankie said. “You’re a nice-looking girl, that was on purpose. Get a game going with a pretty girl watching, sometimes a guy will show off, build the pot a little. But that was it. Latham just took a shine to you. And he’s not afraid to ask for what he likes.”
She glanced down at the envelope. She could see the top two bills, both fifties.
“Don’t worry about that,” Frankie said. “Keeping it don’t mean nothing, no obligations. You really are doing a nice job.”