Winners (16 page)

She smiles, and then starts to laugh, the low lusty sound filling the car. “I’m too wired to sleep anyway.”

“Goodie. Follow me.”

He drives them to a place he barely remembers, down in the hinterlands of Daly City, an all-night bowling alley they used to hit in high school. Lou calls her people en route, Sloan and Rich, to shout the news. “I know!” she tells them, “I can’t believe it either! He said Monday. What a weekend. Okay. Okay. See you tomorrow.” She clicks off and grabs Shane’s arm, her small fingers digging almost painfully into his arm. “David fucking Fulton,” she says. “Did you know about this?”

“No.”

“I can’t believe it,” she repeats. She bangs her knuckles together, thinking, letting out breath as if practicing for childbirth.

The DC Bowl is still there, thank god, and halfway crowded on this Thursday night. They’ve added a karaoke setup in the side bar and he can hear bad singing blending with the sounds of clattering pins. Lou has removed her watch and put on the funny shoes, absolutely game. A memory in the making, Shane thinks. Remember the time? Remember that night? They bowl. He feels better already. The way she launches the ball toward the pins, crossing her body and holding the position for just a tiny extra comic moment. She’s not bad, actually. They bowl.

“He’s serious, isn’t he?” she says. “He wouldn’t do that to me. He wouldn’t do that to you.”

“No.”

“No. I’m just being a spaz. I’m gonna throw this bowling ball into the wrong lane.” She massages the marbled green and white bowling ball in her small hands.

“Matches your outfit,” he says.

“What am I going to wear?” she says. She shakes her head and takes two steps and rolls the ball slowly down the lane. It seems to take several minutes to arrive at its destination, where it calmly knocks down every pin in the vicinity. She hops lightly into the air, claps her hands.

“Who knew?” Shane says.

“I could probably do anything tonight. I could probably cure cancer.”

“Yeah?”

“Sure. But I think I’ll just bowl instead. I should confess. We do go sometimes, Thursday lunches, bowling with the office.”

“Do you have your own ball?”

“Sure. Shoes. Shirt.”

“Monogrammed.”

“‘Lou’ in little blue cursive on my tit.” She struts over to him and kisses him on the mouth, hard.

“That tit?”

“That’s the one.”

“I’m up.”

“Yes you are.” She fixes his collar, runs a rearranging finger through his hair, as if he’s going to meet someone important. She pinches his ear, hard. He sits there, content to be treated like a doll. “So you think he’s for real?”

“You’re really asking me?”

“You’re a good judge of people. I just wonder what he’s like in cold morning light. A businessman. A great white shark with something bloody in his mouth.”

“Why should he be any different?”

“Please. You don’t get to be a David Fulton doling out points or feeding the homeless.”

“I guess not.” He can’t see any way to talk about something else.

“If this happens?” she says. “This isn’t just money. This is success. That’s what Fulton means.”

“Fulton means I’ll get you back?”

“So back you won’t know what to do. I’ll be following you around like a duckling.”

“Good.”

She steps over to the line of waiting bowling balls, picks one up and plops it onto his lap. “Hurry up, now. Some have greatness thrust upon them, but it’s still the biggest school night of my life. You think you’ve seen me work hard? Three days. You ain’t seen nothing yet.”

He tries to think of a way to say the simple words: Debra Marks. But he can’t do it. “We’re pretty lucky, aren’t we?”

“Yes we are. But.” She shakes her head in self-disbelief. “Luck is luck. It’s the one thing you can’t worry about. You just do everything else and stay ready to take advantage when it swings your way.”

“What if it doesn’t.”

She points at their lane, the waiting pins. “Then there’s nothing you can do to stop me from beating your ass.”

“Yeah?”

“I’m gonna beat your ass and then we’re going home.”

He stands up, holding a bright pink ceramic ball in his hands. She winks at him. They’ve never been bowling before but something about being here with her drags him back through time, a wave of nostalgia for a moment just like this that never happened before. The night you took me bowling and Fulton made us rich. It will join the time she slipped her hands under his leather jacket to hold him on a motorcycle, her fingers warm against the soft skin above his waist. The sand rubbing between their thighs on beaches, grass beneath their bare backs on top of seaside cliffs. Their first awkward garlic-flavored kiss.

What am I waiting for, he thinks. He kisses her again and steps forward and takes his best shot.

She beats his ass. They go home.

***

Does he sleep that night? He must sleep, if you have to ask you probably do. But it feels the same to him when the morning light creeps down the hall and nibbles at his eyes, that feeling when something bodily happens that prevents you from switching off, shutting down. He feels not only like he hasn’t slept but that he’ll never sleep again. Maybe it’s the sex that wakes him up, the yelling breakage kind of sex that ends at the dressing mirror, watching: the hand knotted up in her long hair, the veins set to pop out of his neck, her cheek pressed against the dresser and her tongue visible, the muscles in his chest and shoulders pulled tight. An expression of unpleasantness or pain on both their faces. Who are these people? What is that? When does that happen? It happens. It happens but not often and not without embarrassment. And afterwards when her features have gone slack with sleep and she is once again the beautiful girl he married and loves and mother of his unborn children then he goes back to the mirror to recognize himself. That’s him. That’s his living body again. He pinches it. He punches it. He flexes his whole weight up on the foot, up and down, he bangs that foot against the frame of the bed and then he’s awake. Maybe he should go to a gym right now and work out all night, run in place, ab crunch till he cramps, jump rope and pump until he can do no more and collapses into some happy exhausted sleep. Maybe he should play ten games of basketball or have sex like that with anyone five or eight more times. Instead he lies in bed thinking about thinking and waiting for morning to come.

T
HE CAFETERIA AT
General Hospital doesn’t even look open. At the register sits a still-drab figure that could be a manikin, and the food service area beyond lies dark, the fluorescents dim or off. The main room is empty except for two guys staring at their coffee cups as if expecting them to speak. Outside on the patio, three homeless soldiers in headbands and fatigues chain smoke and yell conversation at one another. He sits inside at a long table toward the back, a little delirious, waiting for Debra.

The room holds no organized distractions: no television, no music, no newspapers, no colleagues cracking good ones over Diet Coke or pale iced tea. He tries to look over some material that he’s brought from Lou’s company, a press kit, brochures, trade show flyers. The brightly colored covers give way to interior diagrams where incredible things are apparently occurring, and Lou’s power verbs in bullet points explain all. Her words. He stares out the window. The homeless guys out there are having a better time than the rest of the world, chopping it up, smoking professionally. It’s hard to imagine the last job any of them might have had. Perhaps just killing people, far from home.

After a while a nurse comes in and sits at the table next to his, and he watches her read the paper. He can make out the headlines. The brouhaha for mayor continues. City budget surplus debates. More folks up in Humboldt are building bunkers for the impending Y2K apocalypse. Too much traffic, not enough housing in Silicon Valley. Little companies are springing up from the ether faster than the big companies can gobble them up. He remembers Sister Carrigan talking about maggots and spontaneous generation. The nurse glances over at him, her tight frown scolding his reading manners. He wonders if she’s seen anyone die today.

Hospitals have a way of making him regret everything, absolutely everything. He checks his watch. He thinks about asking the nurse for part of her paper. He tries to think of something to think about. He waits.

His last visit. His last time in his doctor’s waiting room decorated with framed pictures of obscure local heroes. Baseball players, mostly. thanks dr. cho for getting me back on base! There were never any baseball players around when he came in for his appointments. Would he have noticed if there were? Month after month, he sat in those plastic chairs so absorbed in his own broken foot that he hardly remembered seeing other patients. They must have had their problems too. They must have had their wives and husbands and et ceteras who didn’t think a dirty cast or neck brace or sling was very sexy or cool. They must have lost some swagger about the future. A few of them must have lost faith in themselves. He didn’t know because he didn’t talk to anyone. He’d just sit there and stare at his foot, trying to weld the thin crack closed with superhero eyes. He imagined what it would be like to have no legs, no arms. Or to be close to death, to reach out and touch it with your hand. He and Lou didn’t know how to be unhappy together. They’d never done it before. An overweight man with his arm in a sling walked into the office. Across from him, a leg-casted girl fidgeted next to her mother. Shane sat there for the last time in the waiting room while they avoided his healthy eyes except for the girl, who killed some time staring at him with her red mouth open.

By the time the nurses called his name he was fidgeting himself, gazing out the window at the bright afternoon like a dog longing for the grassy yard. His doctor led him to the small examination room, arranging his X-rays on the light board. They talked about the Giants and looked at the pictures together. His eyes skipped back and forth between the images, comparing that day’s set to the one from a month ago. The changes were subtle, almost imaginary, the triangle of new bone filled in one more subtle shade of fibrous white.

“How does it feel?” Dr. Cho asked.

“Good.”

Cho ran his thumb along the side of Shane’s foot, starting at his little toe and working back toward the heel. Two-thirds of the way back he found the spot and pressed along the fault line. “Any soreness?”

“A little.”

“There’s still healing going on. It’ll keep healing for another year. Actually longer.” The doctor released his foot, let his leg slide back to dangling.

“Well. What do you think?” Shane asked.

“My permission certainly isn’t a guarantee of anything.”

“I know that. But your judgment’s a whole lot better than mine.”

“We could wait another month. We could wait another year. But the additional growth at this point is very slow. The next year or so is about the last five percent.” He leaned back in his chair.

“So what does that mean? Does that mean there’s a one in twenty chance I’ll break it again?”

“No.”

“What would you put it at.”

“I don’t make odds.”

“Damn. I was hoping to bring some odds home for the wife. She likes statistics. Pie charts.”

“Well.” Cho closed Shane’s file and stuck out his hand. “I’m sorry to disappoint her.”

Me too, Shane thought, shaking the doctor’s hand and leaving the office for the last time.

***

He’s been waiting at SF General forty minutes when Debra finally appears, busting through the doors with the tavern drama of the cinematic Wild West. Even the two guys look up from their engrossing cups, expecting smashed whiskey bottles, gunplay. She doesn’t see him right away. She doesn’t seem to see anything. She runs her hands over her face and hair like someone who’d been caught in a rainstorm. She approaches the counter manikin. All of them watch her show, leaning in to hear what she might say, but none of them can pick out the words. Then Debra’s head twitches slightly in his direction, as if she’s caught his scent. She turns definitively and strides his way.

“Did you call the police?” she says, first thing.

“The police?” Something has happened, some combination of the police and Samson. “No,” he says, trying to sound calm. “I didn’t call them.”

She slumps down into a chair, staring at the pile of brochures from Lou’s office.

“You’re late,” Shane says, when it seems like she might not speak again.

“I don’t have time for that,” she says, jabbing a finger at the pile.

“I don’t have much time either,” he lies. “I’ve been just sitting here. This place depresses the hell out of me.”

“All right, all right.” She seems surprised by him today. “It’s near my bus stop,” she says.

“It doesn’t matter,” he says. “I’m going to take us somewhere, we’ll get some work done and you can tell me what’s going on. You in?”

She frowns. “In?” she says. “I guess so.”

The closest Internet café he can think of is up on Valencia, so he drives up that way and hunts along South Van Ness where parking is theoretically possible. He finds a space and they walk the four blocks through the early evening Mission, past the shabby rent-a-cops and BART-dispensed commuters and Mexican men murmuring love or drugs or forged documents in other Mexicans’ ears. They cross the thin green line to the fresh paint and clean windows of the new economy. There’s a new bike lane there. Slipping between the Viet-Cal fusion on one side and tapas bistro on the other, they enter the café for business. He gets himself a double latte and her an iced tea.

“This one of your places?” she says. “This a place you go?”

“No,” he says. “I don’t know where I go.” If someone were to search for him, where would they look beyond the court, Ma’s place, and home? Maybe Shane could disappear as completely as Samson. “Tell me what happened,” he says.

Debra sighs, sniffs her iced tea. “They say they found him.”

“Who?”

“The po-lice. But it ain’t him.”

“Where? When?”

She shakes her head. “It ain’t him.”

“Tell me,” Shane says.

***

The police said the last Cal Train south for San Jose left the First Street station that day at 10:42, plodding through the crisscross track yards South of Market and crawling with its single yellow eye into the no-man’s land beneath the 280 spur downtown. The tracks there were lined with trash, with abandoned cars, with tents and tarps and old RVs, the makeshift homes of the homeless. At Twentieth Street the train disappeared from view and rumbled through a tunnel for several blocks, emerging very slowly at the platform-only station of Twenty-second Street where it stopped to pick up the occasional passenger. This was the closest station to the projects, a five- to eight-block walk away, depending on which side of the hill you were on. Sometimes you’d see kids hanging out there near the station and the barbed-wire bus lot, and sometimes they went climbing around that train tunnel because that’s what kids do.

The train couldn’t have been going very fast, but when it hit Samson he was right in the middle of the tunnel, so it was going faster than it would have been had it met him closer to the platform. The driver reported seeing the shape of a person on the tracks appear one instant before that shape vanished beneath the wheels, which meant that either Samson had jumped on the track at the last minute or been pushed or maybe that train driver wasn’t paying much attention. The body was smashed and ripped and crushed almost beyond recognition. By the time they tracked down Debra, it was a few weeks old, too.

A suicide, the police said. Or maybe an accident. They’d found some dope on him, too, three tiny little ziplocks of marijuana. Not a robbery, then; someone would have taken it. Not an overdose, no needle in the arm. And not a drug killing, either—those you always found with a bullet or eight in the head. Trains were too complicated for murder. Doped-up suicide on the tracks.

“Bullshit,” she says. “That’s all they say.” The café music rumbles low around them, a repeating chord hungry for attention.

Shane wants to ask her to tell him again. He wants to go to the train tunnel and see the blood on the tracks. He wants something more than this flimsy little story, because he doesn’t believe it either. Sam isn’t dead. “How bullshit.”

“First of all, ain’t no suicide. No one kill themselves, up there. You fighting for your life every day, you gonna kill yourself? Shit.”

Is that true? Shane thinks. It sounds true. “And it wasn’t him,” Shane says.

“No.”

“Why do they think it’s him.”

She shrugs. “They caught this graffiti kid down there, tagging in the tunnels. Said he saw Samson go in there.”

“He knew him?”

“I guess. Everybody know everybody.”

“But you know better.”

“Listen,” she says. “I don’t know what he saw. I just know when they call you up late one night, when they say they got the body of your son—that’s a call you been waiting for since he was old enough to walk out the door. You feel me?”

“Okay.” He’s trying, but she shakes her head, his voice not convincing either of them. She tries again.

“Well you been waiting for it. And you show up, and they tell you some reasons, and they ask you some questions and you just thinking: shut up and show me. Time they show you, they already know what they want you to say. They got their case closed.” She ripples her fingers in front of her mouth like she’s playing a flute, trying not to bite them. She sees him watching and closes her hand into a fist. The music drones on. She’s lying, he thinks. She’s not making any sense.

“Okay.” He’s going to figure this out. “You saw this body.”

She winces at the word. “Yeah. And I was ready for it to be him, too. They told me it was. And I believed them. But when I saw it, hell no, that ain’t him! You know, a mama recognize her son.”

He looks away. He sees it: Jimmy crushed dead on a metal tray downtown. He feels something jerk through his muscles, a silent electric sob.

“What did you say?”

“I said yeah.”

“Yeah what.”

“Yeah that’s him.”

“Why?”

“Because the po-lice never helped nobody. You sure you didn’t call them?”

“Sure.”

“You gonna call ’em now?”

“I’m not.”

“Sometime maybe you better off if everybody thinks you’re dead.” She says it slowly, as if she knows this is something he won’t easily understand. “So they want to tell the whole world Samson’s passed, I say, go ahead.”

Shane pictures Tennessee’s young face smiling menace out over the light blue jersey. “You think that will protect him? Maybe. But maybe not, maybe he needs help.”

“Who gonna help him. The po-lice?” She snorts. It’s one of the best jokes she’s heard in a long time.

“Debra.” Her head whips at him as if she’s surprised he knows her name. “How do you really know? I mean are you sure? Tell them the truth, you know, and they can run some.” Some what? “I don’t know, tests.”

“Don’t need tests.”

“You’re sure?”

A woman at a nearby table laughs, a fat obnoxious sound. Debra doesn’t seem to notice. “Yeah. They didn’t find any of his things, either.”

“What things?”

“His watch. His daddy’s gold chain.”

“Maybe someone took them.”

“You didn’t see that…body. Nobody gonna take a cheap-ass chain and ten-dollar watch offa that, I’ll tell you right now. Take a cheap-ass chain off that neck and leave three bags a weed? Nah, that don’t make no sense.”

They sit in silence. From across the café, the sound of chattering keyboards explodes in conversational bursts.

“He never took them off when he played ball, either,” Shane says. She stares at him. He can see it—for the first time she’s looking at him like he actually might have known her son. “Never. We used to argue with him about it, when he first showed up. But he wouldn’t take them off.”

She shakes her head. “Uhn-uh. My momma gave him that watch. And the chain belonged to my babydaddy. Samson never take them off.”

“We used to give him hell. You know, you can’t wear a watch, you gonna hurt someone. You can’t wear a chain. And Sam just look at you like you were speaking Eskimo or something.” Year after year after year. When we gonna plant that tree. Sam, when you going to take off that damn watch and chain.

She finishes her tea with a big gulp, examines the lemon and ice left behind as if for fortune-telling signs. “You remember that first day you came to my door?” She’s smiling, now, like this is a choice piece of nostalgia from their long shared past.