Ride Around Shining (11 page)

“He's a big man.”

“He's always gentle with me,” she said scornfully.

“Training for Ali, huh?” Belmont said. He too was looking away, expressionless, like something boring yet absorbing was happening over his shoulder.

“I don't really fight,” she said. “But I need to train for my next set.”

We took this cryptic remark without comment, and the slow soft ripping of the tape filled the air. I wondered if I'd seen her somewhere before.

“I need to shower,” she said. “I only came down to steal a little food.” Pharaoh motioned to the tray and she lifted a sandwich, then, sneaking her “broken” hand in coyly, took another.

“Puma,” Pharaoh said sternly.

She put the second sandwich back sulkily and left the tent. No one watched her go.

That night Goat arrived
a little before dark, and I saw him pull in from my basement window. His ride was unmistakable. It was a dark-purple Maybach with the conservative style of a European luxury line, but set so low to the ground on wheels so large that it bore a passing resemblance to the Batmobile. It was a princely car for a moody prince. The sense of uniqueness, or personality crisis, was heightened by the fact that the Maybach, not known for its efficiency, had been converted to biodiesel—its license read “BIO3.” There was a dent in the rear fender that broke through the paint and didn't look recent.

Just three years ago, Lucas “Goat” Montaigne had been an All-American at Boise State, never much of a powerhouse. Goat didn't look like much of a player: he was a rail-thin wing, pale as a vampire, who came to fame wearing a black goatee with its mustache twirled. He was an incredible shooter and an emotional, almost hysterical player. He wept when he led Boise within a game of the Final Four, and once hurled a CBS camera off its stand after losing a rivalry game. All this made him a folk hero: the Larry Bird of the Northwest, or, as some magazine put it, The Great Emo Hope. When he declared for the draft, the Blazers were at their lowest and there was some local pressure to pick him in the top five to turn the franchise around.

Goat could score but he couldn't do much else. The Blazers passed on him and he played for two seasons in Milwaukee, where he was an epic bust. It's almost impossible for a rookie who's gone lottery to fall out of the league in less than four years, but Goat got exposed his rookie year and then he got injured. His contract was not extended, and when he was healed the Blazers brought him back to the city that had wanted him for its star on a ten-day free agent contract. He was just twenty-three.

I remember watching Goat's first game in Portland at a bar in Marquette, and when he was sent in with four minutes to go in a twenty-point loss, the crowd roared as it hadn't since the introduction of Oden. That roar was pure, the greeting of a savior, but the noise for Goat was louder, an outpouring of love for a neglected son whose failures were perhaps all attributable to the fact that we made him go and play in Milwaukee. We loved him guiltily and manically, even when we realized that his goatee was gone and his face looked sickly and ordinary. When he tore off his warm-ups in the fourth he looked stricken, a pariah edging back into society, and in four minutes he managed to miss three shots, turn the ball over twice, and get dunked on. In the final seconds, he caught a pass and swooped at the hoop as the defense sagged around him. As he got to the rim I had the inexplicable thought that if he blew the dunk, he would drown himself that night in the ocean. He didn't, but the buzzer rang too soon, and the shot didn't count.

Seeing he was alone, I stepped out and helped him with his bags. He was still clean-shaven and his hair was buzzed short for the court. After the almost Victorian poses of his popular years, this gave him the fragile look of a hospital patient newly released. He had a duffel and two sleek garment bags, both of which I managed to get from him after a little tussle of confusion. We didn't speak, and when Maxim met us at the door to take his luggage from me, Goat scrounged hastily in his pocket for a few dollars. It was a little endearing to deny him.

Because nothing could be drunk until sundown, everybody stayed up late. On every night of the week but the last, the party retired around ten to the after-dinner room. It was designed something like a huntsman's lodge, which I say with all the certainty of never having been in one any more than Pharaoh had. There were dark beams crossing the ceiling, a chimney made of jagged stones, and a big fire. In one corner sat an unplugged arcade hunting game complete with plastic rifles. On the second night, I asked the Pharaoh if he hunted.

“Who am I, Colin Powell?”

I was about to banish myself to silence for the rest of the week when he shook his head a little wistfully and continued.

“I'd like to shoot a elk,” he said. “Make me feel part of somethin'.”

“Make you feel part 'publican,” Belmont sang.

“Imagine that, doe,” Pharaoh said, laughing huskily. “Half a dozen brothers go up to Montana, lookin' right, showin' dignity, shootin' at some elk. Why don't that happen?”

“Only baller who hunts is Karl Malone,” Calyph declared.

“Nobody wanna be like Karl Malone,” said Belmont, shaking his head with animation. “I mean, Utah
infect
a man. Who you know grew up in Louisiana, star baller, next thing you see he wear those tassel country vests and, like, drive an eighteen-wheeler for fun? Nobody. You play for the Jazz, things happen, man.”

“Things happen everwhere,” Pharaoh rasped. “Even Cleveland.”

“Never picked up a gun till Utah,” Belmont said sadly. “Now they want three games' pay.”

The Pharaoh was staring into the fire. “I'm just sayin', we shouldn't shut ourselves out. This America. We want to try that country shit, we ought to.”

Framed jerseys hung on the walls, where the moose and elk might have been, and I took the cognac Ras had given me and went into the shadows. Over the set of bronze fire tools was a George Gervin, behind the humidor a Len Bias, and opposite the small library a Bulls-era Dennis Rodman. The shelves held at least two copies of
The Autobiography of Malcolm X
, and I wondered how Malcolm and the Worm would get on.

Ras came over, with the house's lone female servant trailing behind. He took on the air of a host in the evenings, as though it were his house to run so long as the Pharaoh was laying his purity aside. He was the cognac steward and dispenser of cigars, responsible for our pleasures, and, it would be seen, their consequences.

“You like de cognac?”

“It does taste like money,” I said, holding it up with what felt like appropriate veneration.

He frowned. “It supposed to taste like gold.”

I took another sip and my reply rang up in my ears with an unfortunate James Bondian quality. It was getting to be a strain to calibrate to Ras. His attitude toward me was one of paternal fraternity, which I was surprised to find I didn't resent—because he took me into his confidence, and he really did have all those polishes I hadn't even heard about. But sometimes I felt the awkwardness of trying to wear one mask over the other. I didn't know whether to reveal that I knew how the real masters did it, or the real servants. Any entry-level connoisseur knows your basic Hennessy is a sickly drink, but how could I get this across when what I was supposed to feel was the servant's gratefulness for being given anything at all?

“Was it Napoleon who liked Hennessy?” the woman asked.

“Courvoisier, Shida,” Ras said in a flat, learned voice, like a historian of the haute, moving away as Pharaoh signaled him.

“I thought that was Busta,” she chuckled, remaining.

“I thought you didn't talk,” I said, looking curiously into her warm, dark eyes. Beyond Ras there were three other servants, all black. Maxim was a sort of butler and the daytime staff leader, and Wedge did all the outdoor work and made the espresso and was as tall as Pharaoh himself. Then there was this woman, Shida, who could make up my room expertly in about forty-five seconds, whose cooking was badly hit-and-miss, and whom I had never before heard utter a word.

“I talk,” she said shortly. “I talk to people harmless like you.”

“Busta's a Courvoisier guy, too,” I said, like I'd made a chart of this all sometime back. “I'm not harmless, I'm just biding my time. Who's Hennessy got?”

“Hennessy got Kim Jong-il! Who else they need?”

“Okay okay,” I said. “I'm writing this all down. Rémy got anybody?”

“Dre!”

“Rémy and soda pop.”

“You judgin'?” she asked suspiciously. But still her eyes were laughing and dark.

“It's easy to disagree with Napoleon,” I said. “I mean, if I don't want to eat a leg of lamb every day, that's fine too, right? But Dre . . .” In my mind I saw the rapper turning to me from the grainy videos I'd puzzled over the lyrics to in middle school, compelling belief, and then the squat, florid conqueror at his oaken table, mutton juice on his sleeves, looking like anything but a reliable judge of taste.

“Always easier to cross your own,” she said, and I felt a strange rush at being instinctively understood.

The double doors swung open, and Goat and Odette came in. Her hair was damp and she was wearing a thick green robe. She seemed to exist in a constant state of going to or coming from the shower, and it was maybe this as much as anything that lent her the air of accidental provocation. She would put on a dress for every dinner, for an hour or two, and then it would be off again, on some pretext. Goat had changed into a black silk shirt, buttoned to the neck, and to talk to her he had to bend down cripplingly.

“And then as a sophomore I broke my foot,” he was saying. “I broke my collarbone at Red Rocks. And of course I've sprained my ankles five or six times each, that happens to everyone. But that was all kid stuff next to the ACL.”

She nodded up at him, then lifted her hand. “Look at my bruise,” she implored. They went past.

“Have they been here before?” I asked.

“He hasn't. She comes and goes.”

“Are she and Mr. Ramses . . . ?”

Shida scoffed and looked at me sideways.

“It's not like that,” I said, not sure what I was denying.

She nodded wryly and the short, banded knots of her hair bobbed. “We don't ask. While he's here, Mr. Ramses prefers to live chastely. What happens in the city isn't our business.”

“Nor what happens here,” I reminded her, very noble, with what I thought was a flash of
Upstairs, Downstairs
inspiration.

She looked at me and made a little choking sound in her throat.

In the center of the room, Odette sat with Calyph on a tan leather couch. It had a faded, Western-looking throw over the back, and as I watched she lifted a corner and sniffed discreetly, as though it were full of the pungent musk of woodsmoke and men.

Odette still changed every room she graced, but after a day and a half the other guests were starting to get acclimated. Belmont still tried to ignore her, becoming involved in some game or conversation whenever she came near. The first night he'd roped Calyph into a game of dominoes on sight of her. Calyph soon got tired of it, leaving an opening, and to Belmont's obvious distress Odette had asked to be taught to play.

“I got to go to bed,” he said, racing the dominoes back into the box, and then of course staying four more hours. Maybe Belmont was shrewd, and knew that by denying her so completely he was piquing interest. More likely he had a new wife.

By the first night she'd already broken Goat. He was docile, and held in her sway. Now he stood a little off, glancing at her with uncomfortable frequency. Pharaoh sat in his own chair, his back to the fire, eyes drooping but never closed. The skin on his forehead stood out in furrows too deep for a man who was all of about twenty-six. He was dark as French roast, and it looked like it withered him to be so tall and thin and black all at once.

Calyph had most nearly adapted to Odette. He acted amused all the time, and held his own. Whenever her flirting and uncertain relation to the Pharaoh caused a contagion of embarrassment, he looked not away but at her, and talked to her normally.

“You thought any more about your job?” he asked her now.

“Why would I?” she cried.

“I asked her today what she want to do with herself,” he said, leaning over to Belmont. “She said she wanna be an art star.”

“Huh!” Belmont said, making a big, square sound of it.

“I don't propose to discuss it with you.”

“Art star,” Belmont repeated. This phrase again stirred the sensation that I'd seen Odette somewhere before, but I still couldn't match her to a memory.

“And what would
you
be?” she pressed him. “If you didn't play?”

Calyph looked at her flatly, pretending to chew on something. “Rapper,” he said, out of the side of his mouth.

“Come on!”

“Entrepreneur. Record producer.”

“Don't mock me,” she said, and for an instant her voice came out clear and strong. “What I want isn't anything like that.”

He put up his hands for peace, and his pale fingers and palms had a sensitive look—they seemed to calm her. Still the Pharaoh looked on impassively.

“What does your wife do?” she asked him shrewdly, after a few moments had passed.

“Who?”

“Your wife. You have a ring,” she said, pointing.

His hands flashed out, almost violently. The ring he still wore caught the light. “What?” he asked, louder.

She was flustered; she must have seen she was paining him. But her curiosity was implacable. “If you're not married, take off your ring,” she told him.

He looked down and I saw him start to shake his head, but then he stilled himself, and only looked at the ground, bright-eyed, saying nothing.

Odette patted him on the shoulder gently with her wounded hand, on which the smallest two fingers were splinted together.