Ride Around Shining (16 page)

“How do I get here?” I asked.

He pointed past me to an old Mazda parked at the edge of the driveway. The white crescent of nail at the tip of his finger looked cut to exactly one thirty-second of an inch all around. “For de rest of de month, dat is yours. Keep it clean or you will hear about it. Dent it and it comes out your wage.”

From his pocket he produced a key on a long, yellow lanyard. The length of cord was a humiliation in itself, and I wondered if he would order it around my neck.

“What kind of driver don't have his own car!”

Getting into the thing, I slammed the seat back as far as it would go. The engine started with an ugly sound. I took it to the garage, and the car felt too light, too near the ground—it was as if I was piloting some child's kart. I took the spot farthest from the door, where Antonia used to park her scooter. Even the door handles felt flimsy.

Ras met me again at the door. “Now I'll show you your room,” he said.

“My what?”

“I hope you brought a day's change.”

“I don't understand,” I said.

“Den you should just nod and smile,” he said, leaning forward a little. “I cannot believe you do not know dese basic tings.”

He walked past me to a door in the back wall I'd never seen open. The recycling carts that'd stood in front of it had been moved away, and I could see the faint lines of broom tines on the concrete. He opened the door and I saw a handrail slanting upward.

I looked at the ceiling. I couldn't understand there being anything above the garage. The roof slanted up on one side, but I thought that was just, you know, architecture. The garage ceiling was lined with planks, spaced inches apart, through which you could see the emptiness above, but atop my new car the space above the planks was covered over in particleboard. Ras had gone away up the stairs; his shoes sounded harshly on the cheap steps.

At the top of the stairs was a cramped room with a low, slanted ceiling. A single tiny window gave a grimy view of the Japanese garden. The room held a card table, folded up and leaning against the wall, a folding chair leaning in front of it, and, in the middle of the room, a rolling metal bed frame, also folded up, with a meager mattress sandwiched inside. There was a large pitcher in the corner. The pitcher wasn't folded up.

“It has de Internet,” Ras announced in a jolly voice.

I felt the slant of the ceiling brush my hair. There was no hope of standing upright except against the far wall.

“You want to quit?” Ras asked. “Hmm? Dis is beneath you?”

“I want to serve out my time,” I said.

“Good,” he said, coming to the doorway and waiting for me to step aside. “Den make yourself at home, and wait.”

I pulled out the chair and sat, dazed, feeling a voluntary hostage. I touched my yellow eye, and the spectacular mottle on my side where Savier had punched me above the kidney, disgustedly, exactly once. Ras and Joseph Jones had dragged me still wet from the tub down the same hall Ras had just pulled Goat along, and the Pharaoh was waiting in front of my little room.

Jones had given me the shot on the eye, for illustrative purposes or just for sport. “See?” he said. “You see what he is?”

The Pharaoh seemed impatient to get back to his party, and punched me hard without remark. They threw me in my room and I lay there until dawn, the chlorine itch spreading slowly across my body.

I picked up the pitcher and held it in my lap, putting my palms around its curve. The ceramic was warm, and it seemed the only friendly object in the room. Within my reach at the top of the stair was an intercom housed in the wood. The hole was bigger than the speaker, and I could see the stud behind and the wires going away down the wall. I wanted to press talk and see if I could get Calyph; I wanted to locate some reminder of my dignity. I turned up the volume, just to see if anything could be heard.

“What?” a distorted voice swiftly asked. It sounded like Wedge or Maxim. I turned the knob back, but in a moment the voice returned. “Don't come in the house,” it said. “You ain't allowed in the house no more.”

I rose and unbundled the bed and lay on it blankly. An indefinite time later I was woken from my daze by a shriek of feedback. “This shit on? Yo, Jess.”

I stumbled over to the stair.

“How you like your room?” he asked. “We thought it'd be more convenient this way. They do it up right?” I couldn't tell if he was being flip or not, and looked at the plastic grille as though it might be of help.

“You got the wifi hooked up in there?” the speaker asked.

“Not yet,” I said. I think I hoped he'd come up and check on the airwaves, and see my situation and be appalled.

“Ras put encryption on that mess, but we'll get you the code. Lotta changes around here I guess. Can you come down in about twenty?”

“I guess I can make that,” I said.

After our last night
at the Pharaoh's, we stopped at a seafood place on our way out of town. We got as far as the lobby, where a wooden sign hung with nets and rigging proclaimed famous clam chowder. Calyph's crutches stilled and he shook his head. He must have thought it too tacky a place to fire me in, and we turned around to find our fate on the public boardwalk. We ended up sitting on a sandy concrete slab by the sea, where I was given my thirty days' notice.

Thirty days! He had his moments of cruelty, his dictatorial sunglasses, and what his Hollinger profile called a mercurial persona, but Calyph was mostly too kind. Anyone with a less complicated relationship to his pride would've been able to fire me on the spot. He wasn't going to have to search very hard for a new driver—Joseph Jones had brought three newly trained servants with him to the Pharaoh's. I'll always be curious if he'd stowed them somewhere during the night, when I was stumbling around under the illusion that the world had suspended its moral judgment because the moon was full and somebody had brought a few masks, or if they had all filed in quietly at dawn, at the very moment the cognac glasses were taken away. So as not to breach taste, Jones treated them as his own attendants, but I knew that one of the dapper men avoiding my gaze as I took down Calyph's bags was my eventual replacement.

We sat on the slab and watched a bunch of children fly kites shaped like dragons and butterflies, until a kid wearing a hemp necklace came over and handed Calyph a marker and a soccer ball.

“I got Travis Outlaw's autograph,” the kid shouted to the kite-fliers, stumbling away over the dunes.

Calyph shook his head. “That hurts me, damn.”

“I'd have known it was you,” I consoled him.

“You sweet.”

“Sorry about the restaurant.” I'd seen the place on a billboard, so it was my failure. “Are you hungry? I saw a fish market down the street.”

“Kind of cheap of you to start being so thoughtful now.”

“That's true,” I allowed.

Keeping his face hard and unamused, he chuckled, like a cough. “So you're a good lackey when ain't no girls around? Have I got that right?”

I sucked in sea air, and felt the roots of my teeth tingle in the cold. I nodded humbly.

“Lucky I got no wife,” he mused. “You ever have any urges to, like, do some weird shit to the serval or anything?”

I informed him I had no weird serval urges.

“You locked that boy in the closet one time. Didn't know if it was a fetish.”

The memory of my doing that was such a fleeting part of a set of violent, confused images that for a moment I thought he was making it up. “I only have the usual fetishes,” I said stiffly, and we sat a moment in what felt like harmony. Having to fire me had brought out his tenderness, and being on the way out I could say what I wanted.

“I'll put that in your references,” he said.

“I'll never do this again,” I said quietly.

“No? You could. You aight at it.”

“I am?”

“Sure.”

“I broke your leg,” I said. “And your marriage. You ought to fire me faster before we see what else I can do.”

As soon as these words left me I had a moment of awful foreboding, for slipping the truth by him like that so flippantly, for no purpose but my own pleasure. I suspected him of being smarter than me all the while, and it was a terrible risk to give up anything his paranoia might so easily light on. But then I watched him let my words go by, like so much empty boasting. He let them pass so easily I wondered if his innocence was as much a pose as mine.

“You know I don't fault you, Jess. You know I don't wanna end it here, either. But I vouched for you, to people whose respect I gotta have. Ain't nothin' to be said now. Shoulda found some other girl. We might be able to find something else for you when your time is up, is all I'm saying.”

“If you aren't dead by then,” I said, and I laughed through my teeth, and he through his, and together we watched the wind blow clots of foam out of the sea.

When we got back from the coast, the house was as dark as I ever saw it. Within the security gates there was no need to keep an illusion of habitation, and as we came around the last curve the front of the house loomed before us in the twilight like a place where nobody lived—an abandoned construction or a foreclosure.

When the car came to rest, the security lights clicked on, and I got out to retrieve the bags. Everything I did seemed to make a lot of noise. Calyph stood on his sticks, looking up at the dark windows with an unreadable expression.

“Told the fam I wasn't coming back till tomorrow,” he explained at last, handing me a ring of keys. The use for each was written on it on tape, and I crunched the front door key into the lock.

As I carried the bags upstairs, Calyph swung into the living room, but when I got back he hadn't turned on any lights. He stood awkwardly looking out the window at the driveway, and the last weak traces of day just lit the edges of the suit of armor behind him.

“Let's go for a walk,” he said.

He waved off a flashlight, and we circled around the edge of the house in the gloaming. The grill that had shone so blindingly that midsummer day was covered in canvas, but the outdoor court looked like it might have still been full of hidden children. We passed by the spot where I'd been berated and then given a sandwich, and I thought how long it had been since Calyph had worn his aviators to upbraid me. That joke wasn't funny anymore—it seemed the tic of a younger man.

Along toward the Japanese garden, we stopped on the path, and I saw that flowers grew at our feet in a rough half-moon of dirt. Most of them were dry and withered, but a few yet stood upright, bright yellow even in shadow. There was a tentative look to them somehow, like they'd been planted by a regular person and not a landscaper. They must have been Antonia's flowers.

Calyph tried to lower himself to look, but his braced knee could hardly bend, so he only hung there, half-swooned between the crutches.

“Getting late in the year I guess,” he said at last.

As he stood meditating over her little half-withered garden, I heard the drone of an engine coming nearer. He straightened quickly, and the same unreadable expression came onto his face.

“We left the gate open,” I said. “Should I—”

“I got it,” he said, and as he swung himself quickly through the wet grass, I saw his face was lost in hope, and guessed the source of his strange mood at last. He'd hoped to come back to find her home.

I trailed him as the sound grew louder. As he went around the front corner of the house, the engine quit, and when I came around I saw a big red Avalanche sitting in the driveway like a giant toy. Calyph stopped short at the edge of the drive.

“'Sup, Greg,” he called.

“Hi,” said Oden, stepping down from the cab with a tin in his hand. His ancient child's face jutted forward eagerly. “I brought you some macaroons.”

“That sweet.”

“Mom made 'em. Haven't seen you round the way, so I thought I'd bring 'em by.”

“It's lucky I'm here,” Calyph said quietly.

“What?”

“I said it's lucky I'm here,” he said, louder, and his voice went out among the trees.

Sometimes I'd have dreams
of staying with them forever. Getting an omelet in the kitchen, or even caught in traffic on some blue fall day, I felt at peace with my devotion, and optimistic of its future. If I could just find something to do, some act that would restore me to the dignified position they'd so naïvely started me in. All it would take was one perfect stroke, to bind me to them more tightly than ever.

Other times I felt just as sure we weren't really friends at all, that he was having me on. It was a social experiment, watching my character bend under his influence; or maybe he'd just grown accustomed to the queer allegiances of white boys tired of their own skin, and had got to missing them in the married, professional life.

As the days drained away, the only acts that made sense were the selfless ones and the sabotage. I knew there was only one thing of any value within my power to recover for him, and I daydreamed great plots for getting Antonia back. I wrote elaborate formal letters, all unsent, and imagined the day when I would don my somber best and ring her bell and tell her simply, we need you, come home.

But at the same time, on the same day even, I'd get suspicious and want to terrorize him a little, just to see if I could get away with it. When he was asleep and there was no one around I'd whisper at him through the intercom. I put a shard of ceramic flooring in his eggs and then pointed it out before his fork could reach it. He'd given up his crutches—I was sad to see them go—and I liked to loosen the rubber end of his cane.

But mostly I spent my days on some of the most trivial errands of my tenure. All the afternoon and into the evening we'd go to one wholesome place after another. To his local knee doctor, to the rehab center and the practice facility. One day, as though inspired by all this self-maintenance, he made me get a pointless oil change.