Sweet Nothing (13 page)

The right woman can work miracles. I've seen beasts tamed and crooked made straight. But in order for that to happen, you have to be the right man, and I've never been anybody's idea of right.

WE CLOSE FROM
one to two for lunch, and I walk over and eat a cheeseburger at the same joint every afternoon. Then I go back to the store, the old man buzzes me in, and I flip the sign on the door to Open. Today the showroom smells like Windex when I return. Mr. M's been cleaning. I sit in my chair and close my eyes. It was a slow morning—one Mexican couple, a bucktoothed kid and a pregnant girl, looking at wedding rings—and it's going to be a slow afternoon. The days fly by, but the hours drag on forever.

Around three thirty someone hits the Press for Entry button outside. The chime goes off loud as hell, goosing me to my feet. I peer through the window and see a couple of girls. I don't recognize them until the old man has already buzzed them in. It's the two from the other night, from the party in J Bone's room. They walk right past me, and if they know who I am, they don't show it.

Mr. M asks can he help them. “Let me look at this,” they say, “let me look at that,” and while the old man is busy inside the case, their eyes roam the store. I realize then they aren't interested in any watches or gold chains. They're scoping out the place, searching for cameras and trying to peek into the back room.

I look out the window again, and there's Leon standing on the curb with J Bone and Dallas. They've got their backs to me, but I know Leon's suit and Bone's restless shuffle. Leon throws a glance over his shoulder at the store, can't resist. There's no way he can see me through the reflections on the glass, but I duck just the same.

I go back and stand next to my chair. I cross my arms over my chest and stare up at the clock on the wall. In prison, there's a way of
being,
of making yourself invisible while still holding down your place. I feel like I'm on the yard again or in line for chow. You walk out that gate, but you're never free. What your time has taught you is a chain that hobbles you for the rest of your days.

The girls put on a show, something about being late to meet somebody. They're easing their way out.

“I could go $375 on this,” the old man says, holding up a bracelet.

“We're gonna keep looking,” they say.

“$350.”

“Not today.”

The old man sighs as they head for the door, puts the bracelet back in the case. Every lost sale stings him like it's his first. The girls walk past me, again without a glance or nod, anything that a cop studying a tape might spot. The heat rushes in when the door opens but is quickly gobbled up by the air-conditioning, and the store is even quieter than it was before the girls came in.

I don't look at Mr. M because I'm afraid he'll see how worried I am. I sit in my chair like I normally do, stare at the floor like always. The girls are right now telling Leon what they saw, how easy it would be, and J Bone is saying,
We should do it today, nigga, nobody but the old man and McGruff in there, and him with no gun.

But Leon is smarter than that.
That ain't how we planned it,
he says.
We're gonna take our time and do it right.

Him sending those girls in to case the store doesn't bode well for me. There's no way he didn't think I'd remember them, which means he didn't care if I did. He either figures I won't talk afterward or, more likely, that I won't be able to.

THERE ARE LOTS
of Leons out there. The first one I ever met was named Malcolm, after Malcolm X. He was twelve, a year younger than me, but acted fifteen or sixteen. He was already into girls, into clothes, into making sure his hair was just right. I'd see him shooting craps with the older boys. I'd see him smoking Kools. The first time he spoke to me, I was like,
What's this slick motherfucker want with a broke-ass fool like me?
I was living in a foster home then, wearing hand-me-down hand-me-downs, and the growling of my empty stomach kept me awake at night.

Malcolm's thing was shoplifting, and he taught me how. We started out taking candy from the Korean store, the two of us together, but after a while he had me in supermarkets, boosting laundry detergent, disposable razors, and baby formula while he waited outside. Then this junkie named Maria would return the stuff to another store, saying she'd lost the receipt. We'd hit a few different places a day and split the money three ways. I never questioned why Maria and I were doing Malcolm's dirty work, I was just happy to have him as a friend. Old men called this kid sir, and the police let him be. It was like I'd lived in the dark before I met him.

The problem was, every few years after that, a new Malcolm came along, and pretty soon I'd find myself in the middle of some shit I shouldn't have been in the middle of, trying to impress him. “You know what's wrong with you?” Queenie, the mother of my son, once said. She always claimed to have me figured out. “You think you can follow someone to get somewhere, but don't nobody you know have any idea where the hell they're going either.”

She was right about that. In fact, the last flashy bastard who got past my good sense talked me right into prison, two years in Lancaster. I was a thirty-three-year-old man about to get fired from Popeyes Chicken for mouthing off to my twenty-year-old boss. “That's ridiculous,” Kelvin said. “You're better than that.” He had a friend who ran a chop shop, he said. Dude had a shopping list of cars he'd pay for.

“Yeah, but I'm trying to stay out of trouble,” I said.

“This ain't trouble,” Kelvin said. “This is easy money.”

I ended up going down for the second car I stole. The police lit me up before I'd driven half a block, and I never heard from Kelvin again, not a
Tough luck, bro,
nothing. It took that to teach me my lesson. I can joke about it now and say I was a slow learner, but it still hurts to think I was so stupid for so long.

WHEN THE HEAT
breaks late in the day, people crawl out of their sweatboxes and drag themselves down to the street to get some fresh air and let the breeze cool their skin. They sit on the sidewalk with their backs to a wall or stand on busy corners and tell each other jokes while passing a bottle. The dope dealers work the crowd, signaling with winks and whistles, along with the Mexican woman who peddles T-shirts and tube socks out of a shopping cart and a kid trying to sell a phone that he swears up and down is legit.

I usually enjoy walking through the bustle, a man who's done a day of work and earned a night of rest. I like seeing the easy light of the setting sun on everybody's faces and hearing all of them laugh. Brothers call out to me and shake my hand as I pass by, and there's an old man who plays the trumpet like you've never heard anyone play the trumpet for pocket change.

I barrel past it all today, not even pausing to drop a quarter in the old man's case. My mind is knotted around one worry: what I'm gonna say to Leon. I haven't settled on anything by the time I see him and his boys standing in front of the hotel, so it won't be a pretty sermon, just the truth.

The three of them are puffing on cigars, squinting against the smoke as I roll up.

“Evening, fellas,” I say.

“What up, Officer,” J Bone drawls.

Dallas giggles at his foolishness, but Leon doesn't crack a smile. The boy's already got a stain on his suit, on the lapel of the coat. He blows a smoke ring and looks down his nose at me.

“I saw them girls in the store today,” I say to him.

“They was doing some shopping,” he says.

“I saw you all too.”

“We was waiting on them.”

He's been drinking. His eyes are red and yellow, and his breath stinks. I get right to my point.

“Ain't nothing in there worth losing your freedom for,” I say.

“What you talking about?” Leon says.

“Come on, man, I been around,” I say.

“He been around,” Bone says, giggling again.

“You've got an imagination, I'll give you that,” Leon says.

“I hope that's all it is,” I say.

Leon steps up so he's right in my face. We're not two inches apart, and the electricity coming off him makes the hair on my arms stand up.

“Are you fucking crazy?” he says.

“Maybe so,” I mumble, and turn to go. When I'm about to pull open the lobby door, he calls after me.

“How much that old man pay you?”

“He pays me what he pays me,” I say.

“I was wondering, 'cause you act like you the owner.”

“I'm just looking out for my own ass.”

Leon smiles, trying to get back to being charming. With his kind, though, once you've seen them without their masks, it's never the same.

“And you know the best way to do that, right?” he says.

“Huh?” I say.

“Duck and cover,” he says.

He's going to shoot me dead. I hear it in his voice. He's already got his mind made up.

YOUNGBLOOD SAYS HE
knows someone who can get me a gun, a white boy named Paul, a gambler, a loser, one of them who's always selling something. I tell Youngblood I'll give him twenty to set it up. Youngblood calls the guy, and the guy says he has a little .25 auto he wants a hundred bucks for. That's fine, I say. I have three hundred dollars hidden in my room. It's supposed to be Mexico money, but there isn't gonna be any Mexico if Leon puts a bullet in me.

Paul wants to meet on Sixth and San Pedro at nine p.m. It's a long walk over, and Youngblood talks the whole way there about his usual nothing. He has to stop three times. Once to piss and twice to ask some shaky-looking brothers where's a dude named Breezy. I'm glad I have my money in my sock. I don't like to dawdle after dark. They'll cut you for a quarter down here, for half a can of beer.

We're a few minutes late to the corner, but this Paul acts like it was an hour. “What the fuck?” he keeps saying, “what the fuck?” looking up and down the street like he expects the police to pop out any second. He has a bandage over one eye and is wearing a T-shirt with cartoon racehorses on it, the kind they give away at the track.

“Show me what you got,” I say, interrupting his complaining.

“Show you what I got?” he says. “Show me what you got.”

I reach into my sock and bring out the roll of five twenties. I hand it to him, and he thumbs quickly through the bills.

“Wait here,” he says.

“Hold on, now,” I say.

“It's in my car,” he says. “You motherfuckers may walk around with guns on you, but I don't.”

He hurries off toward a beat-up Nissan parked in a loading zone.

“It's cool,” Youngblood says. “Relax.”

Paul opens the door of the car and gets in. He starts the engine, revs it, then drives away. I stand there with my mouth open, wondering if I misunderstood him, that he meant he was going somewhere else to get the gun and then bring it back. But that isn't what he said. Thirty years on the street, and I haven't learned a goddamn thing. I hit Youngblood so hard, his eyes roll up in his head. Then I kick him when he falls, leave him whining like a whipped puppy.

I DON'T SLEEP
that night or the next, and at work I can't sit still, waiting for what's coming. Two days pass, three, four. At the hotel, I see Leon hanging around the lobby and partying in J Bone's room. We don't say anything to each other as I pass by, I don't even look at him, but our souls scrape like ships' hulls, and I shudder from stem to stern.

When Friday rolls around and still nothing has happened, I start to think I'm wrong. Maybe what I said to Leon was enough to back him off. Maybe he was never serious about robbing the store. My load feels a little lighter. For the first time in a week I can twist my head without the bones in my neck popping.

To celebrate, I take myself to Denny's for dinner. Chicken-fried steak and mashed potatoes. A big Mexican family is there celebrating something. Mom and Dad and Grandma and a bunch of kids, everyone all dressed up. I'm forty-two years old, not young anymore, but I'd still like to have something like that someday. Cancer took my daughter when she was ten, and my son's stuck in prison. If I ever make it to Mexico, maybe I'll get a second chance, and this time, this time, it'll mean something.

THEY SHOW UP
at 2:15 on Saturday. We've just reopened after lunch, and I haven't even settled into my chair yet when the three of them crowd into the doorway. Dallas is in front, the hood of his sweatshirt pulled low over his face. He's the one who pushes the buzzer, the one Leon's got doing the dirty work.

“Don't let 'em in!” I shout to Mr. M.

The old man toddles in from the back room, confused.

“What?”

“Don't touch the buzzer.”

Dallas rings again, then raps on the glass with his knuckles. I've been afraid for my life before—in prison, on the street, in rooms crowded with men not much more than animals—but it's not something you get used to. My legs shake like they have every other time I've been sure death is near, and my heart tries to tear itself loose and run away. I crouch, get up, then crouch again, a chicken with its head cut off.

J Bone tugs a ski mask down over his face and pushes Dallas out of the way. He charges the door, slamming into it shoulder-first, which makes a hell of a noise, but that's about it. He backs up, tries again, then lifts his foot and drives his heel into the thick, bulletproof glass a couple of times. The door doesn't budge.

“I'm calling the police!” the old man shouts at him. “I've already pressed the alarm.”

Leon yells at Bone, and Bone yells at Leon, but I can't hear what they're saying. Leon also has his mask on now. He draws a gun from his pocket, and I scramble for cover behind a display case as he fires two rounds into the lock. He doesn't understand the mechanics, the bolts that shoot into steel and concrete above and below when you turn the key.