Three Twisted Stories (3 page)

“Nobody really likes change, even the people who need it most.” Salmeri hooked the suit on the valet rack. He straightened out the plastic bag as he talked. “For the first time on record, a black man hits a ball more times than a white man. A woman puts on a uniform and earns the same scratch as a man. You think these things don’t matter, but they do. Especially to a guy like you.”

Charlie couldn’t stop himself. “What do you know about me?”

“I know you’re in for a rough ride, my friend.” Salmeri turned away from the suit. He retrieved his ballpoint pen. “You’re the kind of guy whose entire life depends on the system never changing.”

“You think I got it easy?”

“I think when things start to change, you’re gonna be left standing with your dick in your hand wondering what happened.” Salmeri bent his head over the crossword and filled in some squares.

Charlie grabbed the suit and shoved it under his arm. It was gabardine, heavier than the
usual. He turned toward the door before he said something stupid that got his head blown off. This was all bullshit. What did this greaseball know about Charlie’s life? He’d changed plenty from the hungry kid who dug roots out of the wet ground so that his brothers and sisters wouldn’t starve to death. He’d skinned squirrels and eaten their meat raw. He’d picked cotton until his fingers bled. He’d gone to school two hours ahead of every other kid in class because the teacher brought him a sandwich if he had the fireplace going before she got there.

Look at the suit Charlie was wearing. Two hundred bucks off the rack. His tie was silk. His shoes were buffed. His hair was barbered by a man who called him “sir.”

Salmeri called, “See you next week.”

Charlie pushed open the door. The sunlight was sudden and unbearable. He held up his hand. The bell clanged as the door closed behind him.

That was when he saw the knife.

The blade was angling down toward his chest. Charlie wrapped both his hands around a black wrist. Realization dawned in sections. Camouflage coat. Mangy beard. Mushroom Afro. It was the homeless guy. How had he made it up the street so fast? How was it that even though Charlie had fifty pounds on him, he was losing this fight?

“Jesus!” Charlie screamed. His heart gagged into his throat. Sweat poured into his eyes. His shoulder banged into the glass door. Salmeri was yelling at him to move out of the way.

“Motherfucker!” the homeless man screamed. “I’m gonna kill you!”

Charlie was shaking from the effort of keeping the knife out of his chest. The guy’s face was inches from his. Their sweat mingled. Their body odors combined. He was older than Charlie had thought. Gray speckled his beard. His Afro was electrified with stalks of gray. Charlie should’ve been worried about the knife, but it was the look in the man’s eyes that terrified him most.

Recognition.

Charlie stopped fighting. His muscles went slack. He dropped to the ground.

“We are each other.” The man stood over him with the knife still gripped in his hand. “I feel it, Charlie. Do you feel it?”

Charlie was paralyzed. He couldn’t feel anything.

“It’s your turn now.” The knife arced into the air. Instead of driving the blade into Charlie, the homeless man stabbed himself in the stomach. There was a snap as the skin broke.
Charlie watched the knife sink almost to the hilt. Blood oozed out. Drops of it fell between Charlie’s legs.

The man fell to his knees. He was smiling. He started to pull out the knife.

“No.” Charlie put his hand over the man’s to stop him. He’d seen something on TV or heard a story about how you should leave in the knife if you ever got stabbed. “The blade will stop the blood.” Charlie looked inside the dry cleaner’s. Salmeri was behind the counter on the phone. “Salmeri’s calling an ambulance. Leave the knife in so it keeps the blood back.”

The man wasn’t listening. He was pulling on the knife as hard as he’d pushed it toward Charlie moments before. He said, “Fate put us here together.”

“Sure,” Charlie agreed, though he’d never seen this guy in his life. The man was probably on acid. His pupils were blown. And they were blue—so blue that suddenly Charlie felt mesmerized by the color.

“Charlie, listen to me.” Streaks of red tendrilled through the whites of his eyes. “You’re gonna lose everything.”

Charlie let go of the man’s hand. He tried to shake off the shudder that took over his body, like somebody had just walked over his grave.

“You’re gonna end up just like me.”

Charlie felt sick, like the knife was in his own gut. He looked down at the ground. He watched the drops of blood turn into a puddle, the puddle turn into a river that ran down the gutter.

“Why?” Charlie asked. “Why are you saying this?”

The man was smiling. There was blood smeared across his teeth, dripping from the corners of his mouth. His skin was ashen, almost white. “Do I look like me?”

Charlie shook his head. He wasn’t making sense. “I don’t know you. What are you talking about?”

“I feel like me.” He put his hand to his face, scratched his beard. “Dear God in heaven, I feel like me.”

Charlie kept shaking his head.

The man grabbed Charlie by the shoulder. “You listen to me, Charlie. You listenin’?”

Charlie nodded.

“This is how you end it.” He looked down at the knife sticking out of his belly. “Only,
when you stick it in, make sure you go deep.”

“Go—”

He pulled out the knife. He collapsed to the ground.

Two seconds later, it was over.

Charlie forked a piece of steak into his mouth as he stared at the empty chair on the opposite end of the dining room table. The meat had been cooked to within an inch of its life, but he couldn’t taste anything but blood. He didn’t know why. None of the homeless guy’s blood had gotten into his mouth. There were barely traces of it on Charlie’s clothes. His hands were another story. They were soaked in red. No amount of washing could get the stain out. Charlie had been forced to use the edge of his teeth to scrape it out from under his fingernails.

And he still hadn’t gotten it all.

“More potatoes?” his wife asked.

Charlie grunted as he shook his head. He had his wife on one side of him and his daughter on the other, but he still felt alone. This was nothing new for Charlie Lam. He could be standing in the middle of a crowded room and still feel like he was all by himself.

The phone rang. His daughter popped up from her chair without asking for permission. She caught the kitchen phone on the second ring, and Charlie guessed that was all the exercise she was ever gonna get—running to the phone, hoping it was a boy but hearing instead one of her girlfriends on the line talking about another boy who was never going to ask her out.

When Charlie was her age, he was working at the cotton mill seven days a week. If he thought about it hard enough, he could still hear the thunderous clap of the belt that spun the gin. The vibrations shook the floor. Even when he wasn’t working, he could still feel the tiny earthquakes underneath his feet.

The whole time he worked at the mill, Charlie tithed to himself, keeping ten percent of whatever he made and giving the rest to his mother. He felt guilty for keeping that ten percent, but he kept telling himself that once he got out, he would find some way to save the rest of them.

That hadn’t exactly happened. By the time Charlie was standing on his own two feet, his mother was dead. Throat cancer, probably from swallowing down all the words she would never say to his father. The old man disappeared, which meant it fell to Charlie to make sure the last four kids who were still living at home were taken care of.

They were all adults now, but they still expected Charlie to take care of them.

What he learned early on was that people didn’t really want to be saved. They said they
wanted help, but no matter what you did, they always found a way to end up back in the same place they started.

What was it Salmeri had said?

Nobody really likes change, even the people who need it most
.

That was the damn truth. Charlie had rented his sister an apartment to get her away from her abusive husband. Two months later, the husband was living in the apartment on Charlie’s dime. He bought his younger brother a bunch of Snappers so he could start a landscaping business, but then the brother pissed off all his customers and ended up drinking beer all day. Charlie paid off another sister’s credit card debt. A year later, she’d opened up three accounts and was planning a dream vacation to Florida.

Charlie hadn’t taken a vacation in sixteen years.

By far the stupidest thing he ever did for his family was buy them cars. Not new cars, but good cars. With the trademark helpless arrogance of the Lam family, the complaints started almost immediately. One brother said the other brother got a better ride. One of his sisters wanted a convertible, like she could park a car like that in her neighborhood and expect it to still be there in the morning. No one took care of the vehicles. They didn’t change the oil. They didn’t rotate the tires. Hell, they didn’t even wash them.

Three siblings failed to pay insurance; the cars were impounded and they all expected Charlie to bail them out. Another brother got so many tickets his license was pulled. He still drove the car. The car was impounded. He came to Charlie with his hand out. Yet another brother ended up getting drunk and mowing down a kid on a bike. A black kid, sure, but it still cost real money to get him out of the jam.

All of it somehow ended up being Charlie’s fault.

“Daddy?”

Charlie swallowed the lump of steak in his mouth. The way his daughter had said the word made him think this wasn’t the first time. “What is it, honey?”

“I asked is it all right if I go to the baseball game with Gina and Libby? Their father got tickets from work.”

Charlie seldom looked at his daughter, which was why he was always surprised when he actually saw her face. In his head, she was a chubby, sticky little girl with fat fingers that reminded him of Vienna sausages who could be bribed to go away with either candy or cash.

He saw her now. She was fifteen years old. The baby fat had left her waist but still settled in her cheeks. She was wearing too much makeup. The foundation was thick enough to scratch his name in. The green eye shadow was the wrong color for her complexion. Her eyebrows were plucked into shaky lines over her eyes. Why did she do that to herself? She’d never be pretty, but she could pass for all right if she didn’t paint herself up like that.

His wife said, “That sounds exciting. I wish I could go.”

Charlie picked up his knife. He cut into the steak. Instead of taking another bite, he looked at the knife.

This is how you end it
.

That’s what the homeless man had said right before he died. He had told Charlie he was going to end up the same as him, and then he’d driven a knife into his own belly.

“Charlie?”

Charlie looked up from the knife. His wife was standing in the kitchen doorway. She was wearing her bathrobe. Pink foam curlers were in her hair. His daughter was gone. He looked out the window. The sun was down. He couldn’t remember when that had happened.

“Charlie?”

He put the knife down beside his plate. The pat of butter on his mashed potatoes had congealed.

“Are you going to tell me what happened today?”

The ice was melted in his scotch. He drank it anyway. “Nothing happened. I’m just stressed from work.”

“You always say you’re stressed.” She frowned, but her eyes softened around the edges. Fine lines spread at the corners. She was getting older. Most days, he thought this was a bad thing, but right now, all he could think about was that no matter how shit Charlie’s world could be, this woman in front of him always made sure that he had a safe place to come home to.

“Charlie?” Her voice was pitched low. “Are you all right?”

Charlie gritted his teeth, not because the question annoyed him but because he had the sudden urge to tell her what had happened outside the dry cleaner’s. The fear. The blood. The terror he couldn’t shake even when it was over.

Salmeri had told Charlie to leave before the cops got there. Charlie wasn’t about to argue. He’d thrown the suit into the back of his car and peeled out of the parking lot. Between the blood
and the hot sun, the flesh of his hands had been glued to the steering wheel.

He’d driven around for hours, finally pulling to a stop on the gravel road across from the Lenox Square shopping mall in Buckhead. Charlie got out of the car. He wiped his hands on the grass. He spat on them to try to get the blood off.

When he reached into his jacket pocket for his handkerchief, he found the knife. Six-inch blade. Pearl handle with gold rivets. A finger ring at the guard. The pommel had a deep slash across the bottom like the knife itself had been cut.

This is how you end it
.

Charlie didn’t know how the knife had come into his possession. He didn’t remember picking it up from the ground. He didn’t remember wiping off the blood. He sure as shit didn’t remember putting it in his pocket. The blade was sharp. Why hadn’t it sliced through the cloth?

You’re gonna end up just like me
.

What the hell did that mean? That Charlie was going to be homeless? Fuck that. He’d been homeless before. If he ended up on the streets again, he’d do the same thing he did the last time: fight tooth and nail to get back on top. No way would Charlie Lam ever put a knife in his own gut. He was a lot of things, but he wasn’t a coward.

His wife put her hand on his shoulder. “Charlie? Charlie?”

“I got work to do.” Charlie stood up from the table. He grabbed his keys off the kitchen counter and he walked out the door.

Charlie forced his jaw to unclench as he walked toward his girlfriend’s apartment. His palms felt sticky. His sweat had rewet the blood on the Buick’s steering wheel. His hands were never going to be clean again.

“Charlie!” The door flew open before he could knock. She was always happy to see him.

“You look good,” he said, because she did. Even at ten o’clock, even without knowing he was coming over, she still made an effort.