Ride Around Shining (2 page)

Passing through, I came to a room I hadn't noticed before. It must have been shut up the few other times I'd been in the house. Secure in my solitude, I looked in. It was a small gallery, empty of furniture but for a cushioned bench in the center of the room. Tribal masks hung on the walls and ebony statuettes stood on pedestals. On the far wall there was a painting of a huge leafless tree standing isolated on the veld. It took me a second to see there was also a giant man in a black T-shirt standing perfectly still and looking at it.

He had his back to me, but I must have made some noise, because as soon as I parsed his colossal presence he turned. He was dressed in shorts and flip-flops, like a teenager headed to a pool, but he had a thick and ancient-looking beard. A friendly look beamed out of his prematurely aged face, which was familiar to me already from the billboards across town.

“That's a baobab tree,” Greg Oden said.

I nodded. “Baobab,” I repeated.

He turned up his palm to show me a bright digital screen. “Says here they store up to thirty-two thousand gallons of water in their trunks.”

Again I nodded solemnly. From out of doors came the abrupt crack of what sounded like gunfire. Greg and I looked at one another, unsure, waiting for new sound. After a moment we heard again the far-off sound of cool talk and high laughter.

“It's probably not serious,” Greg said at last.

I nodded mutely back at him once more. Putting my hands into my pockets and pivoting with a casual air, I drifted away down the hall. Somehow this didn't seem rude. There was a dreamy feeling about the afternoon that neither small-arms fire nor the sudden appearance of our city's seven-foot basketball savior could dissipate. It seemed best to float lazily along in silent witness, declining to talk to anyone, until I found Antonia.

Out back, the billboard faces were everywhere. On the patio, LaMarcus Aldridge was cooking a line of meats on a blinding grill. He too was wearing a T-shirt and ball shorts, as was seemingly everyone comfortable in their status, with only here and there a man like myself wearing a tie like a slim form of permission. Aldridge popped a bright spatula from hand to hand and called out, “Turkey burgers, turkey brats, turkey steak,” in a stadium vendor's voice to no one in particular.

On a pedestal in the corner of the patio, a ten-foot ice sculpture stood gently melting in the sun, in case the casual dress should mislead anyone about the legitimacy of the celebration. She looked like a glistening Justice without her scales, sword and all, though someone had burned a hole in the palm of her empty hand to hold a blunt. She was getting freestyled to by a semicircle of guys who looked like the backfield of a college football team, though Ducks or Beavers I couldn't say. While I watched, a guy in a lavender hoodie stepped up and rapped something containing the phrase “nigga nail a bitch like a telephone pole,” to general approval.

“Don't say that word,” I said, under my invisible breath. No doubt the lavender halfback wouldn't care to be censured by the white help, but just five weeks with Calyph, together with my standard lifelong whiteboy fear of the n-word, had got me pretty attuned to which n's were being used organically to strengthen the patois, and which were just bad rap filler and objectionable to men of any color.

On the outdoor court, children who seemed to belong to no one played a violent game of 21, screaming so urgently at every foul that I imagined the McCalls next door pausing on the way to the pool, shifting their grip on their blow-up rafts, and listening intently to determine if a child's murder were occurring. Joel Przybilla stood in front of the basket, looming gentle as a birch tree, softly plucking up whatever air balls came his way and redistributing the rock to the lesser children.

In the Japanese garden, a dice game was on in the raked sand. I stood on the footbridge and watched the koi pass beneath me, imagining a monk clenching his fists in outrage, yet as I came closer, the tiny, austere dice seemed an extension of the blank beauty of the landscape. Three guys in the whitest imaginable T-shirts stooped around the roller, while a man who looked like a young Julius Erving stood holding a sheaf of bills.

“You wan crap, son?”

“I'm just watching.”

After a moment the roller swore and the men stepped back for him to stand. “White boy always wanna
watch
,” he said. He was older than the rest, and his thick face seemed familiar.

“You fuck up my roll, white boy.”

“You know you ain't used to rollin' on no cat litter, J,” somebody said.

“Sorry.”

“You come in here stirrin' up my chi and shit, you best roll yourself,” the older man said.

“I never done it,” I said, and for a second I took in nothing else, only listened to the echo of my own voice, its new, sure sound. Almost as soon as I'd come to work for Calyph I'd grown tired of my bland white talk.

“It's aight,” the older man said. “Step in, I fade you.”

As he dropped the dice into my palm, I placed him. He was one of the old Jail Blazers. He hadn't been with the team since the late nineties, and I couldn't imagine he lived in Portland—his most remembered remark about Oregon was the opinion that they were probably still hanging black people from trees not forty miles outside the city. If the team had known he was there they'd have sent some PR men to kidnap him, so eager were they to distance themselves from the bitterness of his misbehaving era. Now he was just a thickset, permanently angry has-been with a rap sheet, but in high school he'd been one of those black figures who entranced the suburbs with all we were not, and I'd practiced his between-the-legs dunk whenever I could find a low-enough hoop.

I knelt by the garden, rolled a seven almost immediately, got strong-armed into a double-or-nothing, and rolled another. I got up forty dollars lighter and full of the conviction that my people had been sitting in the good chairs for so long that any game that involved squatting put us at a disadvantage. Still, I felt a strange excitement in kneeling in the billow of those immaculate shirts. I remember a long gold chain brushing the back of my neck and how I shivered.

Turning back toward the patio, I was hailed to try some turkey steak, and then a new voice hollered my name, from the balcony. I heard the crack of a shot and saw a bright flash growing at me.

Something hit me in the chest and rebounded and I dropped, holding the burning place. Having never before been shot by something so bright, I rolled away from what struck me, fearing another stage, until I came up against the feet of one of the dicers standing firm. I rolled back and lay on the footbridge, trying not to writhe, as a happy chorus of profanity went up all around the yard. My body told me nothing, but I could feel in the air that I'd not been shot really, not respectably—not with a bullet or anything. Already I heard bits of muffled laughter, and after a moment's relief at the promise of more life I began to feel angry that I'd been shot by some party weapon, and was not even close enough to death to distract people from their drinks. I'd been but trifling wounded, possibly for the pleasure of the crowd, and I was left now to lie among them as a feebly trembling figure of injured dignity. If blood had suddenly begun to spurt from my chest I would've felt a certain relief. Next to me the blinding core of the flare smoked and grew small.

“Damn, son!” Calyph cried from the balcony, over the disorder. He stood at the rail, the flare gun in his hand and Antonia by his side. He had on a plain blue plaid shirt and a pair of aviators he sometimes wore like a comic prop whenever he gave me orders. I hope they soothed him; the sight of him looking down on me like an amateur dictator only stoked my hot and disoriented humiliation. Antonia looked absorbed in something some sparrows were doing in a distant place.

“You steppin' all over this place like the
Family Circus
kid,” Calyph shouted down to me. “What I pay you for?”

I felt more feet around me and the dicers helped me up. As I brushed myself off, one of them crushed the flare's last embers beneath his shoe in a final gout of pink. There was a ragged hole in my shirt, just above my heart, and by the evening I'd have a quarter-sized welt I'd wish looked more serious.

I walked unsteady and stunned through the parting crowd, trying to look like my nerves were not twisted into fine fibers of hate. Once I even felt myself smile knowingly, as though this had been an elaborate practical joke we'd been planning all week to throw a little sizzle into his party. I tried to tell myself this was just a bad turn of an expected sort, that I'd fought for this sought-after job in a high-life world knowing that in its careless, loud dazzle sometimes the chauffeur got shot, for no reason at all. But seething with pride and shame, I could not sway myself from the conviction that I was less a man suffering the indignities of his job than a debased functionary of a failing empire. I felt that it was somehow correct, that I deserved it—for who can complain about being shot for being white people? And so I came under the shadow of the balcony, and looked up at this man, my master, and his wife.

“Next time, Jess, just wait with the car, okay?” Calyph had dropped his voice, but I knew it still carried to every ear that wanted to hear. “We got cameras here. We know when you're here. You don't have to call nobody. You don't have to go and look. We know. Okay?”

“Yessir,” I said.

“Good. She'll be down in a second now. Next time just wait.”

“Yessir.”

He sniffed in a tough way, and the violence was through. “Listen, I didn't mean to hit you or nothin'. This thing always buck and shoot high.”

I didn't know what to say to that, what absolution I could reasonably give. I just waved my hand a little, as if to say, Oh, did you shoot me?

He sighed, and for a moment seemed truly sorry. “Yeah. The fuck you gonna say, right? You need some Neosporin or something? A bandage? You eat?” The aviators came off, and he turned his head incrementally to include Aldridge. “Fix him up a turkey BLT real quick. Man's gotta eat.”

I felt my posture relax, but the fibers of my neck were only twisted tighter by the shame of this reprieve. My nerves seethed, and it occurred to me the next time I did something wrong he'd cane me and then hand me a half-drunk lukewarm strawberry soda, to show everybody he was still a good guy.

“Maybe he want a turkey steak, Leef,” Aldridge said, popping the spatula from one hand to the other with especial panache.

“What is that made-up-sounding shit?”

“Prime cut, Leef. Pure, hundred-percent prime cut turkey steak.”

“Ain't nobody want that. Make Oden eat that. You leave Jess alone with that South Beach shit.”

“Maybe I want it,” I heard myself say.

Something in me hoped he'd rise to this, but he only turned away. “Trust me, Jess,” he said a little tiredly, his voice going away from the rail. “You want that BLT.”

“Yes
suh
,” I said, because he'd stepped away, and would not hear.

I went off to the nearest bathroom, to raid the medicine cabinet for ointments and pain pills and hope my wound looked graver in the mirror. When I returned, an overstuffed BLT was pressed into my hand by an underling and I was made to recount my entertaining experience next to Lady Justice, who was melting unevenly in the sun.

“Coulda been worse, home,” one of the rollers said. “Coulda been Jayson Williams.”

“Man had the whole world.”

“I been shot before,” I said. I wasn't about to abide my burning just being an excuse to talk about other people who shot people. I could see Calyph coming toward us, filtering through the crowd one complicated gesture of brotherhood at a time.

“A nail gun,” I said, elaborating. “BB gun, too.” They did not seem impressed. “Got a fishhook in my scalp once,” I added.

The men turned to me and laughed. “A real nature boy,” one of them said, draping his arm around me.

“Give him a real squeeze. Shit, boy's been beat up his whole life.”

Just as Calyph broke through to us at last, the man wrapped me in a full bear hug. I took a bite of BLT over his shoulder and chewed it calmly, but as Calyph came near the Justice I lowered my arm and returned the hug fully, swinging into the embrace and then out again, maneuvering the larger man toward the sculpture until I felt his shoulder strike it and then stepping free. The Justice slid easily from its pedestal, and as I watched it drop toward Calyph I felt again a slow wonder at my strange new self.

To get the job I told just two lies
. It's not that I wasn't qualified. When I heard Calyph was looking for a chauffeur, I knew he wanted someone like me. It'd be just his peculiarity to want a white guy with a lot of education driving him around all “yes sir, no sir,” and we had some history. I'd saved his cat.

His accident was the first I'd heard of him in almost two years. Calyph had begun to look for a driver because of a crash on Macadam Avenue, which broke his clavicle and made ESPN. The team insisted he get a driver who could ensure his safety, or they would do it for him. I was living in Michigan then, in the Upper Peninsula, finishing up my second useless degree at Northern, the only graduate school to accept me, and trying to write music reviews for whoever would take them. My old Portland boss at the restaurant delivery service sent around the job notice. The sight of Calyph's name was one of those details that recalls a gone world, as the smell of chlorine in a girl's hair relumes old summers. I think even then I read his name as a destination, a way out of a life spent looking for the wrong things in books in the terrible cold, and I relived my six memories of him instantly. There I was, toting an insulated black food bag across white stones in the cool of the evening to deliver his Evil Jungle Prince. He'd always answer the door himself, always tip at least thirty percent, rounding up to the dollar, and always use a credit card that misspelled his name as “Caleef,” like it was pronounced. The year before I left Portland for grad school had been his rookie season, and he'd been the west side's most celebrated customer of Takeout Train, Inc. He pretty invariably ordered the Jungle Prince, which was milkless house curry over rice noodles—and, after not very long, his nickname with the other drivers.