Three Twisted Stories (2 page)

The guy shot him two birds, one with each hand. “Motherfuck you, you honky-ass motherfucker!”

That was it. Charlie got out of the car. “You motherfuckin’ me, you black motherfucker?”

“That’s right, honky motherfucker.”

They were doing Shakespeare here.

Charlie kept a bat in his trunk and a Saturday night special in the glove box, but he didn’t have time for either. This guy was obviously a vet. He was about the right age and had that same vacant look in his eyes they all had when they got back home. His camouflage jacket had stripes on the shoulder. Charlie had missed the draft by a few years. He felt guilty, and then he felt mad because who the fuck was this guy anyway?

Charlie walked back to his car.

“That’s right, motherfucker,” the man yelled. “Walk away from me!”

Charlie got into the car.

“Coward can’t handle takin’ on no homeless brother.”

Charlie put his hands on the wheel.

“White boy too scared to go deep in the street.”

He watched his fingers wrap around the lever sticking out of the side of the wheel. Instead of going up into drive, the gear went down into reverse. Charlie’s foot slammed into the gas pedal. The car swerved back down the street so fast that the homeless man barely had time to dive out of the way. The shopping cart exploded with a satisfying bang. Something cracked the Buick’s back window. The tires screeched for purchase. Charlie bumped the gear into drive and sped off down the road. He felt a smile on his face, and he tried in vain to remember the last time he was happy about something.

This was not a new exercise for Charlie Lam, trying to find something that he was happy about. Generating a long list should’ve been easy. He had everything a man could want. He owned a successful business. He could fuck any slit he put his mind on. He had a wife to keep his house clean, his shirts washed, and his kid out of his hair. He had a girlfriend who went down on him every time she saw him. He was a deacon in the church. He led his Kiwanis club. People came to him for advice. They looked at Charlie Lam and saw the sort of man they wanted to be.

And Charlie saw a skinny kid, half-starved, with nothing but fear in his eyes.

He’d grown up dirt poor, his pockets filled with lint and low expectations. There were twelve of them by the time Charlie, the eldest, left home. He was sixteen. He’d never had anything permanent in his life except for turmoil. Every three months or so, the family would have to move because the owner of the shack they were squatting in would show up with a rifle. If they were lucky, they managed to take the floorboards with them to the next shack so they didn’t have to sleep on the dirt. Sometimes there was a loft, but that was for Mama and Papa, which meant Mama would start to get fat a month later and they’d end up either finding bloody rags in the burn pile or another mouth to feed nine months later.

Married white women couldn’t work back then. You just didn’t see it. The old man was their only source of money. They all knew Papa had another family somewhere. Charlie used to spend his nights thinking about them, wondering if they had a house with windows filled with glass instead of newspapers. Did they wear shoes that nobody else had ever worn? Did their underwear come from a store, or was it made out of the cotton sacks the flour came in?

When Charlie thought of his current life, he didn’t feel a sense of success or pride. He still felt that impermanence. The anvil hanging over his head was tied to a pulley that could swipe everything away at a moment’s notice.

The threat wasn’t just above Charlie’s head. He employed sixty-eight men at the dealership. Eleven of them were single, but the rest had wives or ex-wives who depended on those paychecks. Last count, there were seventy-two kids depending on Charlie to help put food in their mouths, shoes on their feet.

That wasn’t even counting Charlie’s personal life. He had a wife at home who expected him to buy her mink coats and expensive jewelry and fancy dinners at the Polaris restaurant at least once a month. A girlfriend across town who depended on him to help pay the rent and keep gas in her car. A spoiled daughter who was in private school, who took dance lessons she would never use, who drove a brand-new Mustang and went to nightclubs every weekend where she wasn’t pretty enough for men to buy her drinks.

What would happen to all of them if Charlie made one big mistake, or even several little ones, and the business went under? Here was a list that Charlie could easily generate. He knew his men. Most of his employees lived paycheck to paycheck. You could see it in their eyes if Charlie was late signing checks: the panic, the fear.

The mechanics would probably be all right, but the parts department, the porters, the salesmen would all be fighting each other for scraps from the other dealerships around town. At least twelve of them would go to the bottle. He knew this for certain because they were halfway there. Another six might end up on the streets; porters, car cleaners, runners. They were all black, but still. Another nine just wouldn’t go home. They’d move in with their mistresses. They’d never see their children again. They’d grow their beards long and follow Skynyrd back and forth across the country.

And this list didn’t even include Charlie’s siblings, who routinely came to him with their hands out. He was the only one of them who had made a success of himself, and they felt he owed them for it. He had left at sixteen with a broken eye socket, cracked ribs, and a sprained wrist that still ached when it rained, and
he
was the selfish bastard who owed them for abandoning his family.

And what a family it was. They were all one long series of Irish twins, born close together because Charlie’s mother had figured out there was only one thing that would stop their
father from beating her. Deacon was the closest to Charlie in age. He was a charity case who couldn’t sell a car if you held a bazooka to his head, which scenario often played like a silent movie in Charlie’s brain. Then there was his baby sister who always had her hand in his pocket. His shifty brother who showed up once a month with the law on his ass. His stupid brother who kept losing his money on the cockfights. His other stupid brother who kept losing his money on tail. His asshair of a brother who had so many kids that he’d given two of them the same name.

Charlie tapped the brakes. He was so lost in his worthless family that he’d almost driven straight past the dry cleaner’s. He slid the Buick into the parking space beside a police cruiser. There was no one behind the wheel.

Charlie walked across the lot toward the building. The glass windows were floor-to-ceiling. He could see Mr. Salmeri behind the counter doing his crossword puzzle. The cold sweat was back, but not because of Mike Thevis. Charlie’s mind was veering toward panic lately. The constant sensation of something bad about to happen followed him around like a shadow. He didn’t know where this came from. Nothing had changed. Nothing except there had been a lot more calls lately from Mr. Chop, which was a good thing if you looked at the face of it. More Chop, more money. More money, more security. More security, less worry.

Why didn’t that math play out?

The bell over the door clanged as Charlie walked in.

Mr. Salmeri did not look up. He was a hairy Italian guy with a push-broom mustache and hair so black it glowed blue under the fluorescent lights. Gold rings were on his fingers. A rope chain as thick as Charlie’s pinky wrapped around the man’s neck. His shirt was unbuttoned so that the way the yellow necklace lay on his hairy chest reminded Charlie of the green polyester grass and pastel eggs in the Easter baskets he used to buy for his kid before she got too fat for candy.

Charlie guessed his daughter got her gluttony from him. He was a textbook example of somebody who didn’t know when to stop. He had a thriving business. He lived a good life. He lived in a big house and drove a smart car. But then he’d run into Mike Thevis at a party and decided he wanted more.

How it worked was like this: Mr. Chop called Mr. Lam and told him to pick up his dry cleaning. Charlie hightailed it over to Salmeri’s, where he was given a suit. The suit pocket contained a slip of paper with a very important man’s name written on it. The next day, that very
same man showed up at Charlie’s dealership ready to pick out a brand-new car. Charlie would give the man whatever he wanted, no questions asked. Then he’d go to Mike Thevis’s joint and walk away with the cash to cover the cost of the car and then some.

Not that Charlie sought out the details, but usually a few weeks later, the commissioner or judge or deputy whoever it was Charlie had given the car to could be found in the newspaper or on the local news talking about how he was supporting or not supporting something that in the end would greatly benefit Mike Thevis.

Charlie wasn’t stupid enough to think he was the only man Thevis was using this way, but he was smart enough not to ask. He visited the dry cleaner at least once a week now, and while he never saw anyone else in the building, there were always plenty of clothes on the rack. Salmeri had a warehouse over in Colored Town where sixteen black women ironed and washed clothes for him. It was a nice warehouse, not what Charlie had been expecting. The women laughed and listened to the radio. Nobody laughed at Charlie’s dealership. Maybe he should hire some black women.

“Mr. Lam,” Salmeri said, his code to let Charlie know there was somebody else in the building. Everybody called Charlie by his first name. Nobody called Salmeri by his.

Charlie jammed his hands into his pants pockets. He was sweating for real now. It was always damp inside the dry cleaner’s, even though no work was done on site. He wiped his brow with his handkerchief. He could hear humming, which annoyed him, then he realized the humming was coming from his own throat.

That fucking Carpenters cover of the Beatles. He couldn’t get it out of his head.

“All right.” Salmeri finished filling out a word. He put down his pen. He turned around and pressed a button and the clothes behind him started spinning on the rack. Salmeri played both sides. There were police uniforms alongside the bright green pants and purple silk shirts that the pimps favored.

Salmeri asked, “You going to the game?”

Charlie had been hearing this same question all morning. It was code for “Are you for Aaron or are you against him?”

“Dunno,” Charlie mumbled, his pat answer.

Salmeri wouldn’t have it. “You think he’ll do it?”

Charlie shrugged. He was scared of Salmeri. Not Mike Thevis scared, but scared
nonetheless. The guy owned several dry cleaners. He ran book on football games. He drove a nice Cadillac and he was Italian, which meant he was mobbed to hell and back.

Salmeri plucked a suit off the rack. The plastic dry-cleaner bag ruffled as it moved through the air. He showed a row of white teeth under his bushy mustache. “You feel it on the street?” He waited, but Charlie didn’t have an answer for him. “It’s like it was in ’64 when the civil rights bill passed. You could hear one side of the city letting out a long sigh, and the other side screaming out a lo-o-o-ng
‘Mothahfuckahhh!’
 ”

A toilet flushed in the back. Charlie took this as an excuse not to respond. Salmeri was always trying to pin him down on something. How did Charlie feel now that the city was majority black instead of white? How did he feel now that they had a new black mayor? How did he feel when the white police chief was fired and replaced with an uppity black man from the North?

Each time, Charlie told him he didn’t feel one way or another. Salmeri couldn’t get it through his thick, greasy head that Charlie Lam cared about politics almost as much as he cared about Hank Aaron and Babe Ruth. He’d sell a car to a black man or a white man, so long as his money was green.

“Thank you,” a woman’s voice called. Charlie saw her a few moments later. She was a female cop with a pretty face if you were able to look past the uniform, which Charlie was having a hard time doing. His daughter wore pants sometimes, and it took everything he had inside him not to tell her she looked like a whore.

Salmeri’s smile went up a few watts. “My pleasure, Officer.”

She looked into the parking lot. “That your car?”

Charlie waited for Salmeri to give him his suit.

“Sir?” the broad repeated. “Is that your car?”

Charlie guessed she was talking to him. He looked at the Buick. The smile came back, tugging at his lips. The bumper was dragging. The back glass was cracked. He had until that moment completely forgotten about the homeless man. Fucking loser. Charlie had been homeless a few years. He was a kid then, barely more than a teenager. What was that guy’s excuse?

“Sir?” The cop sounded like she was talking to a retarded three-year-old. “I asked, is that your car?”

Slowly, Charlie turned his gaze back to the slit. He stared openly, taking her in from head
to toe, then back up again. “Are you a man or a woman?” She started to say something, but he talked over her. “I see your tits under that shirt, but what’s goin’ on between your legs?”

Salmeri laid the suit down on the counter. He didn’t say anything, but he shot out a streak of heat from his eyes that burned the side of Charlie’s face.

The brunette shook her head once at Salmeri. “I can handle it.”

“So can I.” His hand went underneath the counter. He kept a shotgun there. He looked ready to use it.

“Jesus,” Charlie mumbled. Was he really about to get his balls shot off over some dyke? He walked over to the door and held it open with a maître d’s flourish. “Madam.”

The cop gave him a shitty grin that made Charlie want to smack her.

The door closed behind her. The bell clanged.

Charlie asked Salmeri, “You fucking her or something?”

Salmeri kept his hand under the counter for a second longer. And then he flashed some teeth under his mustache. “This is why you should care about the baseball game.”

Charlie cursed. He was so sick of that fucking game.

“Change.” Salmeri said the word like it was a hosanna from on high.

Charlie reached for the suit, but Salmeri pulled it out of his reach.