Winners (19 page)

“So.” Lou breaks the silence finally, rustling papers. Setting the résumé gingerly to one side like a court summons. “Shane speaks quite highly of you. You impressed him. Which takes some doing, let me tell you.” Where does she get that voice, Shane thinks, why does she talk like that? He’s sure that she is smiling her biggest smile, showing her well-kempt teeth.

“Thank you,” Debra says. He hears the sip of soda, thinks back on the growling stomach. She’s trying to calm it down.

“He must have told you a little bit about what we do, here.”

“Yes he did.”

“Probably confused the heck outta you,” Lou says. She’s trying to joke but then jumps in quickly, doesn’t want Debra to take that as an insult. “I mean,” Lou says, “I love him to death but it comes to the Internet? he doesn’t really know what he’s talking about.”

“I see,” Debra says, unsure if she’s joking or not. Yeah, Shane thinks, come on, give her a laugh. No laugh. Lou waits for Debra to volley something back her way, but Debra must be busy with fear. If he doesn’t know anything, then what does Debra know?

“So,” Lou continues, quickly. “Let’s see. Why don’t I back up and try to give you the big picture.” And she begins. Shane sits on top of the toilet’s water chamber, his feet resting on the toilet seat.

Lou is good. He has heard her customize the
Lever.com
story for the e-people and the bankers and the cocktail crowd and the old-economy standbys. She can reduce her work to a glib one-liner or expand it to fill the farthest corners of an evening. But she has no version that makes one lick of sense to Debra. Debra does not know what business-to-business means. She doesn’t know a click from a clack, a server from a sump pump, a page view from a donkey show, she simply does not know the lingo that fills Lou’s hours and mouth and mind day after day after day. He’s tried to prepare Debra, hasn’t he? He thought he did. But he has forgotten what it’s really like, that what his wife says to him at night is as simple as she goes. Lou has learned to talk to him but he has learned to listen too, and they’ve both forgotten that there are people who do not know what “content” means, who’ve never heard of an IPO. The difference between a Web page and a Web site? Then visitor, browser, HTML, XML, JavaScript—forget it. Debra has never opened an email attachment, never logged in or out of anything, never you name it. Hell, he thinks, I sent that woman in there and she’s probably never switched on a computer by herself. How can she have followed even five words of what his wife has been saying? By the time Lou finishes her pitch, Debra must be lost, frozen in her chair. And Lou is ready to wheel and deal, has got herself worked up now, forced herself to the task. Lou is on a roll.

Shane glances at his watch. Of the thirty minutes she’s allotted for the interview, his wife has just killed fifteen. In two hours she will be somewhere in SOMA with Sloan and Rich and Fulton, debating how many millions of dollars her company should be worth. Maybe if she just keeps talking and fills the whole interview with her voice, maybe everything will be all right.

“So Shane told me you’d like to do something in administration or customer service. Maybe you can talk a little bit more about what you’re looking for.”

Silence. Here we go. Does that seem like a trap to Debra? Maybe it is. If she says the wrong thing, Lou says well we don’t have anything like that right now. Come on Debra, what do you have to lose? Say something.

“Yes,” Debra says, finally, and Shane can breathe again. This is ridiculous. Leave them alone. Go. But he can’t go. “I’m a people person, so either way, administration or customer service.”

“If you could choose, though.”

“Anything is fine,” Debra says. Focus coming into her voice. He guesses: all this time she hasn’t been able to decide whether to meet Lou’s eyes or not but now she’s locking in on his wife’s eyeballs, attentive as can be. Here we go.

“Okay…” Lou says. Doubt—does she think this woman is staring her down? “In thinking about those two kinds of positions, maybe you could talk a little bit about the relevant experience you might have.”

“It’s good,” Debra says. “I always had good experience in the jobs I had.”

“But what kind of training, or, I guess I mean, what kind of work have you done that you’re hoping to build on now?” The rustle of résumé returns.

“Everything I got there,” Debra says. What if she can’t remember what they’ve written together?

“I guess I was wondering if there are things you’d like to expand on.”

“Oh, yes. Definitely I would.” Hesitant again, faced by an enemy: this man’s wife trying to trip her up. She is going to trip up, no doubt about it. Catch her in a lie. There are dates Debra can’t remember, approximations she can’t prove, names she can’t recall.

And Lou. Lou waiting for something to make sense, and while she waits staring not at Debra’s eyes, but at the painted lips and then the smooth skin of this woman’s chin and neck, the deep rich color even in the florescent light. Lou, feeling small and pale, suffering one of her moments of pale dwarf there on the other side of the table from this strange taciturn black woman who has appeared in her husband’s life from nowhere. The woman who keeps staring. Is she trying to intimidate her? What has he promised her?

“I see that you’ve done some receptionist work.”

“Oh yes.”

“You answered phones?”

“Yes.”

“Tell me a little bit about that.”

“It was fine.”

“What kind of office was it you worked in.”

“Normal. It was a normal office.”

“Big?”

“I wouldn’t say big. Normal size.”

“What did they do?”

“Construction.”

“What else did you do there?”

“At the construction? Phones, I just answered phones. Wrote down the messages, you know.”

“And computers?”

“They had computers.”

“Did you use computers?”

“There? Yes, I did, a little bit.”

“And that job, it was something you enjoyed doing?”

“Mm-hmm.”

Silence. Lou waiting her out, Debra trying to shut up and stay quiet, not say anything wrong.

“You liked the, what did you like about it?”

“You know, the people you talk to. I like that. Talking to people, helping them out.”

Leave now, Shane thinks. Leave on a good note. He glances at the door. Her best answer so far. Leave now and leave them be.

“And you used computers.”

“Yes. Mm-hm.”

“What kind of computers did they have there?”

“Like these.”

“PCs, Windows.” Silence. “Which programs did you use?”

“I’ve used different ones. I just use the ones on the computer.” Her voice is very quiet, Shane has to close his eyes tight to hear her.

“Word?”

“Yes, I believe that’s right.”

“Anything else? Excel, Outlook?”

“It could be, I don’t really know the names so much.”

“Explorer? Netscape?”

“I’m not sure. I believe I have but not for a long time.”

“If you don’t, that’s fine too,” Lou says. She hates him, Shane thinks, she hates his guts but she refuses to hate this woman at least, this woman who doesn’t know anything about anything, but it’s not her fault. “Most of us only use one or two programs day to day, and they’re easy to learn.”

“Yes, that’s right. I agree with that.”

“There is a lot of multitasking around here. You feel comfortable with that?”

“Well, how do you mean exactly?”

A gimme, Shane thinks, and Debra lets it drop dead to the ground. He hears Lou’s sigh, disguised into a cough. “Doing lot of different things at once. You’re sending a fax over here, answering the phone there, sending an instant message to me, you know, all at once.”

“I got kids,” Debra says, “that all comes natural to me.”

Lou is trying to imagine it, right now: Debra sitting up at the front desk when David Fulton walks in with the CEO of whatever and Japanese investors and British journalists, Debra saying hello to them. Debra asking: what you want? Or Debra not speaking. Don’t do it Lou, he thinks, don’t do it, don’t go after her, don’t do it just to prove me wrong.

He steps toward the door. He is going to open and shut it loudly, destroy the moment and go back to his life. Ask his wife innocently that night: so how’d it go? But before he can he hears the mild hiss of a soda screw top coming loose. He sees Debra tilt back her head and finish it, swallowing as she places the bottle back on the table and finds Lou staring at her. Weakened by nerves and hunger and agitated by sixteen ounces of Diet Coke, her body jerks once, quickly, wracked by a grand hiccup, and then in its wake comes the enormous burp she’s been carefully holding at bay. It bursts from her mouth in a froggy baritone, filling the air with its gaseous ring that seems to hang in the silence before Debra can speak.

“Excuse me, oh, I’m so sorry. I have a uh, digestion. Problem.”

Lou is laughing as Shane flees, opening the door and letting it shut behind him, but not before he hears Debra laughing too, quietly and sadly, perhaps still tasting the acid unquiet of her stomach, perhaps thinking the ice is finally broken, that the interview is just beginning now again.

I
T’S TOO LATE
but he goes to the court anyway. The last game is under way, tired guys dragging themselves up and down the asphalt, forgetting to play defense. Only the ball keeps them going, its electric orange power instantly possessing anyone who holds it in his hands. He waves at Jimmy and sits on the sidelines to watch them run. On the bay the fog is creeping in as the tugboats blow their two-tone chant: Sam-son, Jim-me, De-bra, next-game, hi-low hi-low whatever the hell they’re saying. They blow and he listens as he sits on their smooth pavement on the hill. He is a rare spectator. There’s a difference between watching the game and waiting for your turn. He tries to clear his mind by following the bouncing ball. It’s not easy. He’s tried before. One afternoon, still broken-footed, he snuck out here onto the hill above the court. There’s tall grass up there where you can settle down to spy like a big savannah cat. From a distance, his boys didn’t look that good, unimpressive dots doing unimpressive things. The patterns meant nothing to him. He sat for only a few minutes before a longing in his muscles gave him cramps. Don’t go back unless you’re ready to play, ready to stride out onto the court to take your place. Your day will finally come. He closes his eyes and listens to the ball, remembering the feeling of stepping back on the court for the first time. The shouts that went up around him as he arrived.

“Damn, is that Shane?”

“Holy fuckin’ shit.”

“Back from the dead.” Dragon was the first to reach him, putting one fist out. Up, down, knuckle to knuckle bump.

“What’s up,” Paul said, “Good to see you, man. Been a while.”

“You healthy, Shane, or what?” Brian put out his hand for a simple shake. “You look pretty goddamn healthy.”

“They hook you with a titanium replacement or something?” Rex pointed at his culprit foot, even getting the right one.

“Check out the kicks, man.”

“Insurance pay for those?”

There were a million million things to say, the tiny possible responses to this homecoming, but for a moment he was struck mute with happiness.

“We been asking your brother when you’re coming out. He’s always like, Shane who?”

“Naw, he don’t know nothing,” Shane said, finally managing something. Jimmy was there already, grinning too, ripping away his sweats, the buttons popping like caps down the side of his legs.

“That’s right,” Paul said, “you broke your foot, huh?”

“Twice,” Brian said. “Broke that bastard twice.” Dragon shook his head and exhaled softly.

“Three times.” Shane almost whispered.

“Three times.” Dragon nodded. “Three times is better, that’s the fairy tale, you know, it’s over.” He whisked his hand through the air, banishing the injury and all the months of misery like a conjurer.

“That’s right.”

“I don’t know, we’re just getting old,” Rex said. “My knees hurt when I whack off.”

“Your knees? Whatya, kneeling in front of the throne?”

“I like to keep it clean.”

“You try arnica?”

“Glucosamine.”

“My arm don’t even straighten anymore, neither.”

“Your arm don’t need to straighten, ugly ass shot you got.”

“Goes in.”

“That is one of the great mysteries of the world.”

“You should talk. That crazy Dragon shit.”

“We are all a mystery,” said Dragon. “That’s exactly what I mean.”

This, Shane thought, stepping out on the court, feeling the old chemicals coursing through his chest, this this this.

He hit his first shot of the game, losing his defender off a down pick and slipping to the shallow wing for a wide open ten-footer. The pick was Sam. The kid hadn’t said a word to him but the minute Jimmy checked the ball, Sam stepped up quickly behind his man, planting himself down perfect to spring Shane free. Shane leaned left and cut right to brush off the kid’s shoulder, popping out to find the pass from Jimmy waiting. It was like a play the three of them had been planning for months, planning their entire lives. It was three sets of instincts and shared expectations triggering one another—if you do this then he does that then I do this. He resisted the urge to dribble and simply jumped, just enough to put his legs into it. The ball left his hand and he watched the net sway like a hula skirt as the shot wiggled through. He glanced back at Sam and Sam nodded at him, sliding back on defense. They didn’t say a word to one another until after the game.

Shane wanted to hug him. He wanted to hug every one of them but instead he nodded, put his hand out for a slap. “Hey, Sam my man, thanks for getting me going. Good to see you.”

The kid nodded. “You been out, huh?” The way Sam spoke was almost despite himself, as if his mouth made one last ditch effort to snuff itself out. His voice still wanted to be high, a voice that had never really wanted to change, and he made an effort to bring it down low. He was twenty now and in some ways barely different from all those years ago when they first started playing together. His body had filled out, his huge shorts and shirt swinging loose around real muscles. But he still looked awkward. Still something in him like a kid.

“Yeah. My first real day back for almost a year.”

“Feels good, huh?”

Shane gave him the biggest smile in his arsenal. “Hell yeah,” he told him. “Hell yeah.”

The kid shuffled in front of him, nodding, fighting his shyness, trying to continue the conversation. “A year,” Sam said.

“You been coming out?”

Sam nodded, shrugged. “You know.”

“Games been good?”

“They ai-ight.”

“Bunch of old men up here, Sam. We’re headed for the retirement homes, you gonna have to find a new game.”

Sam smiled his smile, the mouth bunching up in the middle, almost turning down in a scowl. “I didn’t know you was coming back,” he said, finally.

“Shit, yeah. What else am I gonna do.”

“I know, huh.” He snuck a peek at Shane. “That last day you went down, though.” Shane felt his throat contract, a sudden allergic reaction to the past. “Yeah,” Sam said, “you said ‘that’s it, I’m finished.’ I almost believed you. Way you said it.”

Shane had forgotten that, had forced himself to bury that memory in clay. The moment rushed back to him: the burning in his foot as the real jolt came from the center of his head. A moment when you remember: soon the flesh will rot. Soon it’s time to die.

“I’m glad you’re back,” Sam mumbled, not looking at him, walking back out on the court to play.

What Shane felt as he watched him go was not that moment of death, but the feeling when you realized you were taking up a little space inside someone else’s head. It meant that you really existed not only in your own imagination or in your family’s but out there in the republic, because someone who owed you nothing remembered.

Now he is the one remembering. Now his mind is busy keeping Sam alive.

The guys finish, a game point no one seems to care about. They come slumping off the court.

“Bronze loquat,” Dragon says by way of greeting. “We’re thinking bronze loquat.”

“What kind’s that?”

“Tops out at about twenty feet, gets about half again as wide. Leaves a little shiny, little white flowers, needs a monthly deep watering. Tough little tree.”

“Great name.”

“How’d it go this morning?” Jimmy says.

Shane shrugs. “I dunno,” he lies. “You win today?”

“Yeah. Good run, you know.” He nods at Finesse and Rex, sitting on the sidelines, sharing a joint. “I was telling the guys about Sam.”

“What about him.”

“You know. Everything.”

Shane feels a moment of panic, as if he’s been caught at something. He feels a sudden urge to take the joint from them and suck himself out of this world. “Anyone hear something?” he says instead, trying to sound casual about it.

“Nothing,” Rex says. “The whole thing don’t sound right.”

“What.”

“I mean I bought pot from him before? but the hard stuff’s a different genre.”

“Sound like his friend to me,” Bindo says. “If his friend’s a real dealer, he’s looking at Sam like a gold mine at that gym. Maybe Sam didn’t have no choice.”

“Yeah,” Dragon says. “Maybe that guy’s got a spell on him.”

Shane glances at Jimmy. Tennessee and Sam. Sam and Tennessee.

“I hope he’s okay.”

“Let us know what we can do,” Dragon says. “Anything you need.”

“All right,” Shane says. “Yeah, ask around, you know.”

“Wait. He got a locker at that gym?” Rex says.

“I guess,” Shane says, glancing at Jimmy.

“You check it?”

“Open it?”

“Yeah,” Rex says. “Open that shit up. A kid living at home, you never know what you might find inside.”

***

He sends Jimmy to the gym and goes to work a new job in the Haight. The appointment is near the Panhandle, home to the city’s most psychotic basketball games, although the afternoon courts are empty as he loops past. Back on Haight Street, the commercial strip looks almost respectable, the narrow sidewalks swept and tidy, storefront windows unusually clean. Even the slovenly Haight Street kids, quintuple pierced and dreadlocked, seem not as slovenly as he remembers them. Healthier, tanner, less likely to drop dead of a strange blood sickness at any moment. On the corner of Haight and Ashbury, he sits at the stop sign for a moment between the Ben and Jerry’s and the Gap across the street, a sight he simply can’t get used to. The Gap’s storefront window is plastered with images of teenage androgynes in multicolored down puffs staring offscreen, searching for something to steal or screw, with the tagline in big block letters below: “Everyone in Vests.” The hell they do, Shane thinks.

He is stuck behind a parallel-parking car when one of the street kids comes tearing down the sidewalk with a cop behind him. The whole street freezes to watch, and the kids sitting on the sidewalk cheer their fellow delinquent on, pulling back their legs as he passes and then sticking them out again for the cop trailing behind. The cop trips but doesn’t fall, staggering and turning on the kids while the whole block cheers for the fugitive. The cop is furious. He marches toward one of the kids who’s tripped him, barks at him to get up, the kid stays seated, raises his arms in protest, I didn’t do nothing, the street yells at the cop, leave him alone, the cop grabs the kid, puts him against the wall, calls on his radio, I need backup, the street yells police brutality, the store owners and restaurant owners come out to the curb to see what’s up, shake their heads, go back inside. Shane smiles, rolling forward thinking hey I recognize this wacko city after all.

He works until the day’s last light is all sucked out and his client kicks him out. It’s the first day of a partial rebuild that looks like it might take weeks, but there he is on day one working into the night. Why not. Where else would he go right now? The guts of the chimney pour out onto his plastic tarp, the ruined brick and crumbling mortar spilling out like the house’s spinal fluid, pooling around his dusty high-tops. He has his head in the chimney when the guy pops in to suggest it’s time to call it a night. Shane usually knows better than that. Being sensitive to dinnertime and family time and the public-private lines of clients is important in his business. You have to know when to leave. You have to know when they want their house back. The guy’s an ex-hippie lawyer, pretty laidback, but still. The mistake bugs him as he hustles to clean up and get the hell out of there.

By the time he hits the street it’s almost eight. He checks his messages: one from Jimmy, one from Lou. He calls Jimmy first.

“So?”

“I found his shoes,” Jimmy says.

“The Jordans?”

“Yeah.”

A bad sign. “What else.”

“Some clothes and that’s it.”

No $10,000. No drugs. No suicide note. “That’s really it?” he asks his brother. He is in the van now, letting the engine warm up.

“Yeah. But a lot of clothes. Like he’s living out of there, you know? What about this?” Jimmy says. “He gets busted at the gym, right? And maybe he can’t go back to Tennessee. Maybe he’s in love with the shithead, who knows, but now he’s lost his usefulness, he lost the drugs, he can’t go back. So he tries to stay with some boyfriend. Not a boyfriend, just some guy he slept with once, some guy barely even remembers him, a one-night stand from the gym. Where else does he have to go? But the guy kicks him out, doesn’t let him in, and Sam is fucked. He thought he had a way out. Then suddenly he doesn’t.” Jimmy’s voice is quiet, he’s speaking with more calm and quiet than Shane has ever heard.

“Why doesn’t he ask us?”

“Because we don’t want him to. We’re like that guy. We have our thing we do together and that’s all we care about. We don’t give a shit about Sam.”

Shane listens to the cell phone crackle, almost hoping it will die. “Go on.”

“I don’t know. I don’t know what he does next.”

He gets high, Shane thinks. He goes down to the train tracks and gets as high as he possibly can. He takes BART to Oakland. He buys a bus ticket for L.A. He wanders into that dark tunnel all alone as he can be. The van is running smooth now, gurgling 1977 six-cylinder delight. Shane sits there without speaking until his phone clicks softly, another call coming through. “I gotta run, Jimmy.”

“We should go back to the hill,” Jimmy says. “Call me later, okay?”

The new connection is chaos. In the background, Shane can hear the raucous rhubarb of a crowd. A bar, prize fight, bachelor party. A woman laughs soprano and insane while a low rumbling voice pounds home emphatic points somewhere nearby. He can hear Lou’s voice but not the words until she moves away from Babel, burrowing into a quieter alcove.

“Are you at the circus?” he says.

“We are the circus.”

“We who?”

“Sloan, Rich, David. Fat lady, strong man, tigers all.”

“David. Fulton?”

“Yes. It’s done. Done deal,” she says, and he can hear that it’s true, that it’s a wonderful amazing thing. He sees six black briefcases filled with hard-packed bricks of hundred dollar bills. The brilliantine coast of Spain.

“You got it.”

“The term sheet’s signed. Everyone’s on board. There’s good faith flying all over the place. They’re in. We’re in.” She’s shouting the details in his ear but the sounds could be Outer Pigmy or Hindi-Urdu for all he understands.