The Surf Guru (24 page)

“Was Katie there?” She'd left me, and I was avoiding her.

“She was,” he said. “She called you a useless fuck.”

“Which way did she mean that?”

“Whichever way is worse. She was pretty hostile.”

“She's a hostile person.” The night she left, she'd thrown her shoes at me, and I threw them out the window. She walked away barefoot. She wanted to go that badly. Her feet were salmon-pink under the streetlights.

“This is one way we're different,” Trace said. “I need Mo. You do better alone.”

“That's not true,” I said. I didn't want it to be true. It was April and warming up, and the smells of the wet piney morning and the flowers in the van made me feel like possibility was in bloom.

The hospital was a concrete tower the color of good teeth. While Trace finished another cigarette—for all he knew, he said, it could be his last—I took the metal cart out of the back of the van and loaded it. Most of the orders were Smiley Healthy Wishes arrangements. The glass doors of the hospital swung open, and we walked in together: Trace, the patient, about to receive a plastic miracle in his head, and me, the messenger of hope.

“Thanks again,” he said. “Mo will pick me up when it's over.”

“Do you know that for sure?”

“How much grief counseling could those girls need?”

“They're at-risk,” I pointed out.

“Fuck,” he said, “aren't we all?”

That made a certain kind of sense. “Good luck with your eye,” I said.

“I don't need luck,” he said. “What I need is less trouble.”

It turned out none of my people were dead. Mr. Popovich did look pretty bad. He was groggy and his room smelled like creeping fear, but he was still breathing away. His sunken eyes tracked the shiny Mylar balloon that came with his flowers. You could tell he liked the way the sun was shimmering on its surface. I spun the balloon a few times so he could watch it send disco-ball lights sweeping over the walls.

 

 

After that I delivered Smiley Business Is Blooming! baskets to all the suites in the office park out on 128, a
Merci!
Bouquet to an overperfumed real estate agent, and a cross made of white snapdragons and daisies to the funeral home. In the parking lot behind the funeral home, I shared a bent, skinny joint with a guy I knew called Black Swede, who worked there keeping the carpets clean and the bathrooms sparkling for the grief-stricken. My last stop on the morning run was at a gated estate up on Whippoorwill Road, where I brought fresh irises to a gray-haired lady who was wearing yellow gloves and polishing her silver. She told me she was hosting a prayer group dinner that night, and I guess I said that was nice. She tipped me a twenty that she slipped inside a glossy pamphlet. On the cover, in red block letters, it said, WHAT IS MINE WILL KNOW MY FACE.

“Do you understand the title?” she asked me.

I considered. “Does it mean that things work out in the end?”

“In a way,” she said. “As long as you believe.”

She waved from her window as I backed the van down her narrow driveway. She was still wearing her rubber gloves.

I pulled into the parking lot behind Smiley's just before noon. The store was sandwiched between a beauty salon and a Chinese restaurant, and by that time of day the air stank of burned hair and fried food. I rolled up the windows in the van, so that the flower smell would stay in. One of the Chinese waiters was outside feeding scraps to a skinny gray cat. I yanked open the steel door, freshly tagged with some word I couldn't make out, and sat at the workbench in the back room.

Smiley was at the counter with a customer, a tall girl in her mid-twenties, a vision of summertime two months early. She wore a white sundress and had a store-bought tan that made her look orange. She was crying, and Smiley was talking to her softly. His words were lost to me in the refrigerators' hum, but when he walked her to the door, she hugged him. Smiley was smooth. He knew the things to say.

Smiley came into the back room and tossed a dozen red roses onto the workbench. “Now, that was a sweet girl,” he said. “Nice-looking, too. I'd tell you to chase after her if I didn't think you'd fuck her up even worse.”

“She was orange,” I said.

“Nice attitude,” he said. “One of many reasons you're not getting laid.” He opened a cabinet, took out a can of black spray paint, and flipped it to me.

“You want me to kill these flowers with paint?”

“They're cut,” he said. “They're already dead.”

“But what's this about?”

He spread his arms wide. “It's about love,” he preached. “Love and desire and jealousy and hurt feelings and orgasms that make your ears ring for days and resentment and bliss and painful but treatable infections and comfort and yearning and our inevitable exposure as the fickle, craven frauds we all are.”

I shook up the paint can and aimed the nozzle at him. “Are you done?” I said.

“Of course, that's just one school of thought,” Smiley went on. “There's another that says it's just about some dick-head named Chip who got caught screwing someone he shouldn't have.”

The front door chimed open with the first notes of “Edelweiss,” and Smiley went to help the customer. I picked up a rose, wrapped a paper towel around the top of the stem, and sprayed in short bursts while I spun the flower slowly in my hand. Then I rained black on it from above, aiming into the folds where I could still see slivers of secret red. I watched from inside a sweet cloud of fumes as color turned into slick, inky black and paint clogged the soft petals, puddling where I'd oversprayed. I laid the roses to dry in a straight line down the edge of the bench. Twelve dead soldiers. My fingers were covered in paint. I should have thought to wear gloves.

I walked out front, where Smiley was misting the tulips. I was feeling spin-headed and a little numb. I wiggled my black fingers at him like a cartoon wizard. “Fear me,” I said. “I am evil.”

He snorted. “You wouldn't know evil if it crapped in your mouth. Now go clean your hands before you get paint all over my store.”

The paint wouldn't come off. I scrubbed and scrubbed, but I was marked.

Business was slow, as usual. Smiley's ex-wife Charlotte had opened up her own flower shop a few blocks away, just to ruin him. Smiley was fighting back—he undercut her prices, had his friends phone in fake orders, put sugar in her delivery van's gas tank. Neither place was doing very well. People could sense that both were trading in spite.

The roses were still drying, and I didn't have any other deliveries, so I told Smiley I was going for a walk. He told me to check behind Charlotte's store and see if any packages had been left there.

“I'm not going to steal anything from Charlotte,” I said.

“There's a fifty in it for you,” he said. His eyes looked lidless, reptilian.

“Forget it,” I told him.

I walked a circle around downtown. I watched a swarm of boys play kill-the-carrier on the middle school field until one kid got tackled on his face and came up bloody. I walked past the bank where Katie worked, but I didn't see her car in the parking lot. I looked into Charlotte's flower shop and saw her sitting at the counter, her chin in her palms, the place empty except for her. I called the hospital from a pay phone to find out about Trace, and when the girl asked if I was family, I said I was his brother. She shuffled some papers and clacked some keys and told me they didn't have any information yet. When I got back to the store, Smiley was in the back room, laying the black roses to rest in a long white box. He put the last one in, fitted the lid on, and tied the box with a black bow. I could see he was having fun.

“These are ready to go,” he said. “Got another one for you, too.” He passed me a delivery tag. It was an order for a dozen roses, red, long-stemmed, in a Deluxe De-Lovely decorative vase. The tag said the roses were for Mo.

I was about to ask Smiley if Trace could use my employee discount, so maybe he could get back some of what he'd paid, but I stopped myself. Trace couldn't have ordered these roses. Not while he was laid out in a white room with masked people looming over him and wielding lasers and blades, all to fix the damage done by a steel-toed nobody he'd caught pissing on the rug in Mo's bedroom during a party.

“Who ordered these?” I said.

He went out to the counter and came back with the sales slip. “Guy named Archer,” he said. “You know him?”

I didn't. I'd never met any Archer.

“Here's the note,” Smiley said. He handed me a sealed envelope.
Maureen
was written on the front in bold blue ink. On the other side, this guy had drawn a blue heart over the flap, like it was a seal. He'd drawn badly. The heart was uneven, distended on one side like it had a valve about to blow.

“Can we open this?” I asked. “I need to read it.”

“I can't do that,” Smiley said. “It would be a serious breach of professional ethics.” He took an electric hot pot off one of the shelves above the workbench and filled it in the bathroom sink. He set it in front of me. He plugged it in. “You, on the other hand,” he said, “are not bound by any such code.”

The water bubbled hot and I waved the envelope gently in the rising steam until I could peel the flap open. On the card inside, the guy had written Mo a poem. A poem that rhymed. Heavy with the platitudes of love. The last line:
Til the next sweet time our bodies meet.
The whole thing was one big sloppy overshare. I'd have been embarrassed for the guy if I didn't already hate him, whoever he was.

“That's some of the cheesiest shit I've ever read,” Smiley said over my shoulder. “She ought to dump his ass on principle. Though I do admire his rhyme of ‘lilacs are mauve' with ‘plush treasure-trove.' ”

“Is this a joke?” I asked. “Are you behind this? Is someone fucking with me?”

“What's the problem?” Smiley said.

I told him what the problem was. How Mo was
Trace
's girlfriend, how they'd been together for some crazy number of years already. How Mo, who was older and had money, had bought us alcohol since we were way before legal, and she hadn't ever minded cleaning me up whenever I got sick on myself or talking me down when the night suddenly turned hopeless. How the two of them had written a toast for me to give at my dad's fourth wedding when all I wanted to do was curse everyone there. How, as combustible as they could be, Trace and Mo were the one thing I could count on anymore. How there wasn't any room for some rhyming motherfucker named Archer.

“Hmm,” Smiley said. I knew he'd quit believing in borders like these a long time ago. “The guy paid with a credit card,” he offered. “I'll give you the number, if you want.”

I told him I needed the rest of the afternoon off. He put his hand on my shoulder. “I'll make you a deal,” he said. “Take these to your friend, and deliver the black ones, too, and then you can call it a day. Take the van home with you, just in case Charlotte's thinking about slashing the tires again.” Then he disappeared into the front room, carrying a pail full of lark-spur and Queen Anne's lace.

 

 

I stood at Mo's door, holding tightly to the smooth female curves of the vase. The day remained cloudless. A bluer sky never existed.

I rang the bell three, four times. I knocked. I called her name.

She answered the door in a thick green terry-cloth robe big enough for a boxer. Her face was pink and small and her hair was wet. She smelled like lavender.

“I was in the bath,” she said. “I was thinking.”

“You've had a hard day,” I said.

“Like you wouldn't believe.”

I handed her the flowers. “Maybe these will help.”

“They're beautiful,” she said. “Thanks, Phil.” She led me into the living room and set the flowers on the coffee table. The air was cool and sweet. Ringo, her German shepherd, was lying on his side in a rectangle of sunlight. He was an old, old dog, arthritic and crooked. Around his head was a plastic cone to keep him from chewing himself open.

“How long does he have to wear that?” I asked.

“Until the end,” she said. “Which is probably going to be soon.”

“That's sad,” I said. “He's a good dog.” All around the house were photos of Mo and Ringo growing up alongside each other.

She closed her eyes and smelled the flowers, and while she was doing it I counted the seven freckles on her nose. I'd been counting her freckles for years. Usually I did it when I was loaded, to reassure myself that things in the world outside my head were still the same.