No Regrets, Coyote Page 7

  I asked her if there was anything I could do. She said she wouldn’t mind having some of my springwater. She smiled and told me her name was Gabriela. I got another cup of ice and poured. She told me all Junior cared about besides young pussy was his miserable paintball career even though he sucked at it. She said she kept on going back to him despite the beatings and the insults and the screaming in front of their daughter. But now she was moving on. She had no debt. She had her associate’s degree and a good, secure job. She had her mother, who helped her with little Avalon. She had a future. She was going to soar, and Junior, that asshole, was going to crash and burn.

  At ten seconds before five, more or less, the countdown to the new year began, and the balloons were released. I woke Dad, and we all sang “Auld Lang Syne.” I walked him to his suite. He showered while I made us a pot of coffee. He came out to the table in the Ralph Lauren Chelsea plaid pajamas I’d bought him for his birthday. He took his fifteen evening pills. He told me about the New Year’s Eve when he and Mom went to New York by train. “Before you kids were born.” They ice-skated in Central Park; they went to Mass at St. Patrick’s. “Your mother bought herself a silk kimono at Macy’s.” They stayed at the Taft Hotel near Times Square, ordered breakfast—Belgian waffles—from room service, ate the best steaks of their lives at the Taft Grill Room. “It was like we were in a movie, Wylie. Xavier Cougat and his orchestra onstage. We samba’d till two in the morning.”

  On the way to Bay’s house, I stopped at Publix for cat food, cat treats, and cat toys. In the shopping-cart corral, a Venise-sized woman with a roll of fat sagging over her crotch stood in front of the scale that promised your exact weight. She told her hefty daughter that no, she would not step up on the scale; it only goes to three hundred. The daughter wore a T-shirt that read, IS IT HOT IN HERE OR IS IT ME? I figured I should get Red a little something to celebrate with. I’d noticed empty bottles of gas-station beer in my recycling bin. I saw Wayne Vanderhyde stocking soda in the beverage aisle. My first thought was to avoid him, but that seemed reprehensibly childish. I said hello and asked him what kind of beer he would recommend for my guest.

  He said, “Beer’s beer.” He told me he drank Bud Light.

  I said, “Happy New Year.”

  He said, “Back at you.”

  I told him I’d see him next week. I bought Red a six-pack of Dogfish Head IPA. I bought a Styrofoam cooler and a bag of ice. So now I’d stop at home before going to Bay’s.

  When I got home, Red was gone. I left the cooler of beer with a note and a New Year’s greeting beside his recycled nylon camp chair. I gave Django a gourmet kitty treat, but he just batted it around the kitchen. We played with a rubber golf ball for a while until he decided that biting my finger was more fun. Reward the good; ignore the bad. That’s what the cat books say.

  I arrived at Bay’s canal-side home around seven and let myself in. I saw a lot of unfamiliar men standing around the living room in casino souvenir ball caps and those wraparound sunglasses that some Italian designer had decided we should all wear for the next few years, the kind you can wear backward on your head when you’re out at a fast-food restaurant with the kids. A couple of guys wore aloha shirts with pictures of Vegas landmarks and winning poker hands. More women than I would have guessed had plumped their lips and Botoxed their faces so that their conspicuously arched brows seemed similarly frozen in surprise. One slender and elegant gentleman in a white linen suit and black silk shirt stood facing the wall, stirring his drink and speaking earnestly to no one I could see and loudly enough so that I knew he had bought some doll named Yolanda a new silver Lexus. “That should clear up her psoriasis,” he said. I assumed he had a Bluetooth attached to the ear on the dark side of his skull.

  Bay handed me a glass of eggnog. We stood by the piano. He told me he had made $125,000 this year at the poker table, and many of the kind folks assembled here had made significant contributions to his income. They deserved a party. “I want to make two hundred thousand this year, but I’ll have to play four instead of three nights a week to make it happen.”

  “That almost sounds like work.”

  “It’s a hard way to make an easy living.”

  “What’s the hard part?”

  “Coping with the idea that you aren’t doing anything worthwhile with your life, that you aren’t making a difference, not making the world a better place.” Bay pointed out a guy in a rumpled gray suit, sitting on the leather sofa absorbed with his PDA. “That’s Open Mike,” he said. “Mike Lynch.” What Open Mike was doing, Bay told me, was checking on the NBA scores and on the latest lines on the college bowl games. “If the Suns don’t cover the spread against the Celtics tonight, someone else will own Open Mike’s Escalade in the morning.” Bay told me that Open Mike had lost at least a hundred grand last year at the poker tables alone, money that should have gone to his son’s medical treatment. His wife finally left him when she couldn’t take his absence and heedlessness any longer. And through it all, the son’s battle with leukemia, the separation, the divorce, he never, when he wasn’t at work, missed a night in the chair.

  “What’s his job?”

  “Firefighter. Works twenty-four-hour days, ten days a month. One on, two off. Plenty of downtime at the firehouse for him to play Internet poker. He told me he could have five games going at once and in six hours could get in five thousand hands. You can imagine how much he hates fires.”

  Bay told me that Marlena was working a New Year’s party at the Universe. They’d hook up later at the Silver Palace, where he’d booked a luxury suite for the weekend. I told him about my wanting to get inside the Parkers’ house on DeSoto Street. I wondered if his old partner could get me inside under the pretense of showing me the place. Bay had been my real estate attorney way back when. In fact, he found my house, loaned me the down, and did all the paperwork. It took me years to repay him. Bay told me that the ex-partner wasn’t talking to him. “I got the bastard five hundred hits of Ecstasy, and he hasn’t paid me, doesn’t respond to e-mails, and won’t answer his phone.”

  I was able to repay Bay the favor about a year after I bought the house when I became his therapist. After listening to him twice a week for six months, I was able to testify at a court hearing that Bay was under tremendous stress and was headed for an emotional collapse. So now he collected disability, not a lot, but enough to cover his monthly nut. And I lived with the knowledge that I was complicit in a fraud. Bay consoled me. “Corruption is our default mode,” he said.

  When Georgia left me, Bay sent over an escort friend of his named Cinnamon to keep me company. He’d already paid for her services, she told me. “He said to give you the whole girlfriend experience.” Her driver, Franco, parked out front and read a James W. Hall novel while he waited. I told him he could sit on the porch. It would be more comfortable. He said he’d be fine. Cinnamon and I sat on the sofa. I apologized, told her I was constitutionally unable to proceed with our carnal commerce. “I think the nuns ruined me for this sort of thing.” I made us drinks. A 7 and 7 for her, a vodka on the rocks for me. I asked her how she’d gotten into this business.

  She said, “You don’t approve?”

  In fact, I didn’t approve, but I didn’t want to offend her, and she certainly didn’t need my or anyone else’s approval.

  She told me she was working her way through med school at FIU. She’d graduate without any debt, which was more than most young doctors could say. “The job’s boring, but it pays well.”

  “Boring?”

  “After you’ve sucked a thousand dicks, they all begin to look alike. And the dicks they’re attached to all begin to sound alike.”

  Bay told me later that Franco’s wife was expecting, so he’d taken on the second job at the escort service. His day job at the dog track was shooting greyhounds in the back of the head for ten dollars a pop. I said, He does not. Bay said, Okay, he doesn’t.

  Bay said he’d find out on Monday if the Parkers’ house was in f
oreclosure. When I told Bay about Carlos’s idea of the importance of order, he said it’s all just the illusion of order. “Everything is out of control, way beyond fixing. We’ve got about sixty years to right the ship before we reach the tipping point, and then all that’s left is the endgame.” On that note, I told him good night. I had one more stop to make.

  At Venise’s house the supermarket deli platters were spread out on the kitchen counter: Cubanitos, chicken tenders, peel-and-eat shrimp, and veggies with dip. I put the champagne I’d brought in the fridge, took the vodka out of the freezer, and made myself a martini. Venise, Oliver, and Patience were in the middle of a game of Monopoly. I refreshed their drinks. Oliver told me he’d bought twenty pounds of unrefined shea butter on eBay. Did I need any? I didn’t. Treats blemishes and burns. No, thanks. Any old wounds? he said.

  Patience went bankrupt when she checked into Venise’s hotel on Indiana Avenue. She dropped her Scottie dog into the cardboard box, pushed away from the table, and told me I looked tense. She said, May I? and stood and massaged my shoulders, which suddenly felt like coiled steel.

  She said, “Holy moley!” She politely punched at the muscle. “I could hit you with a sledgehammer and you wouldn’t feel it. What’s going on?”

  “The usual.”

  “You need to get this mangle out of your body, Wylie. You’ll get sick.” She sat back down and took my hand in hers.

  Venise said, “Patience can tell your fortune.”

  I said, “You’re going to read my palm?”

  Patience said, “You can learn a lot about a person by watching his hands.”

  “But you can’t learn his future,” I said.

  Patience smiled. She turned my hand to the left and examined it, then to the right. She ran her fingers over mine. She looked at me and squinted. “You don’t want anyone to know you, do you?”

  Suddenly this parlor game was making me uncomfortable. I wanted my hand back.

  Patience said she had a confession. She didn’t read palms. “I just hold your hand, close my eyes.”

  I said, “What do you see?”

  Patience closed her eyes. She said she saw a shimmering green sky and a field of snow, not snow, actually, but sand, and now the sky is mauve, and there seems to be a man flying toward her.

  Venise whooped. She had vanquished Oliver.

  At midnight we toasted the New Year and listened to the drunken neighbors firing off their pistols. Oliver said he was about to collapse, bade us good night, and shuffled off to bed. Patience said she’d wait for the shooting to stop before pedaling her bike home. We cleaned up the kitchen and wrapped the leftovers in foil. Venise said it looked like she wouldn’t be starting her diet tomorrow.

  7

  I decided I’d get the year off to a flying start by making a list of everything I ought to do. Turned out I had eighty-eight items on my list, from Colonoscopy to Organize the garage. I drew empty boxes beside each task so that I could check them off as I went merrily along accomplishing the impossible. Django lay on his back and stared at me upside down. More cat toys. Lately I’d been getting these temporary floating zigzag question marks in my field of vision, which blinded me to whatever was behind them. That couldn’t be good. So number two on the list was Eye appointment. Number three was Solve the mystery of who killed the Hallidays. Even though I wasn’t sure it was a mystery. (I was sure, however, that the official version of events did not make sense. My response to their certainty would be patience. I trusted my intuition. I could afford to be wrong and had nothing to prove being right. I’d tell Carlos, You haven’t solved the case. Yes, we have, he’d say. But I wouldn’t take yes for an answer. I don’t like the idea of a person or persons getting away with murder.) Buy a camera was on the list; Reseat the toilet and Walk five miles a day. This would be the year when I finally read Proust. Number seventeen: Buy In Search of Lost Time, Modern Library set. I pinned the list to the bulletin board over my desk and decided to do something not on the list—visit the foreclosed house on DeSoto Street.

  I drove up the alley behind DeSoto Street and pulled into the gravel parking space behind the house. I grabbed my flashlight and hopped the fence. Something furry and freshly dead floated in the scum of the swimming pool. I reached through the tear in the screen and opened the patio door. The kitchen door was ajar. “Hello the house,” I yelled and waited. Nothing. I walked inside and sneezed. I noticed a brown stain on the ceiling over the stove, like maybe an espresso pot had exploded years ago. I could tell from the scuff marks on the white tile floor where the kitchen table had been situated and the two chairs that sat opposite each other. I smelled the dogs, and sneezed again, but I didn’t see the leashes on their pegs. I found a manila envelope stuffed with appliance warrantees on top of the fridge. I opened a drawer and found a note that read: I see you everywhere I look. Your secret admirer. And then in a different handwriting—printing, really: Love what you’ve done with the house, You know who. I put the note in my pocket. I walked to the master bedroom. I heard the squeal of brakes and I froze. The windows here in the front of the house were undraped and unshuttered. No cars out front. I relaxed, switched off my flashlight.

  I stood where I imagined Wayne had stood, and I looked across the room to the corner where his lion had crouched. And then I saw what could have been a bloodstain or a wine stain in the shape of Africa in the center of the gray carpet. Had the stain provoked Wayne’s fantasy? I wondered. And then I heard what sounded like a hoist and the clanging of chains. I listened. It was coming from out back. I tried the front door, but couldn’t get the dead bolt to cooperate. I went to the kitchen, hoping no one would walk in and ask me what I was up to. I got out my cell phone and prepared to speed-dial Carlos. I peeked out the back door and saw my car hooked to the back of a wrecker. I ran out to the yard. Too late. The wrecker pulled away, towing my car behind it. I yelled and waved my arms over my head. The driver had to have heard me. I called Carlos. He told me where I could pick up the car. “Bring a hundred bucks cash with you,” he said.

  I cleared my throat and sat beside a blind man on the bus-stop bench. I wrote a reminder on my hand to check Wayne’s signature against the note I’d found. The blind man quit his humming and asked me where I was going. He nodded and told me to transfer at Cypress to the #12 west, get off at Arborvitae, and walk through Maplewood Plaza to Oleander. He wiped his brow with a bandanna. I asked him if he had change for a dollar. No, he didn’t. He had a bus pass—he tapped his shirt pocket—and had stopped carrying cash money altogether. “Been mugged six times.”

  “You’ve got a fork in your pocket.”

  “A knork.” He took the flatware out of his pocket and ran his finger along the outer tines. “Sharp. Slice and spear with the same utensil. Take it with me everywhere.”

  I said, “I’m Wylie.”

  He said, “I’m Sly.”

  I said, “No way.”

  He punched a button on his watch, held it to his ear, and a woman’s voice told him the time. He wiped the lenses of his sunglasses. His left eye was a pulpy red mass. I told him he seemed to be bleeding from his eye. He said it was a busted blood vessel. “The Cumadin makes it look worse.”

  “It looks really, really bad, Sly. I could take you to the emergency room.”

  He put his glasses back on. “Glad I don’t have to look at it.”

  A blue Mini Cooper pulled up to the curb in front of us. A woman with a shaved head in the passenger seat took our photo with her iPhone. The Mini drove away.

  Sly said, “I got twenty-twenty vision in my dreams. Can see the wives, my children, even the dead ones, my fourth-grade classroom, my dog Shep. And I can see myself. Yes, sir, I can see in my dreams all right. And I’m always a little sad to wake up in the dark.”

  When I got off the bus, I saw a postman in blue shorts and a pith helmet delivering mail to the apartments along Arborvitae Street. He was being shadowed by another postman with a clipboard. The shadow’s iPod wires went from his ears d
own the back of his shirt. I had never heard the phrase “muscle milk” until two days earlier when I was in Shore’s Diner sitting next to a thirty-something couple. She said to him, “You drink your muscle milk, and you smoke your cigarettes.” They had my attention. Sounded like the beginning of a blues song. She folded a slice of limber bacon and laid it on her buttered toast. Then she folded the toast, dunked it in her coffee, and bit into it. He said, “Who taught you to eat like that?” She said, “No one has to teach you to eat or to pee.” He said, “Someone taught you to squat so you wouldn’t have urine running down your leg.” Anyway, as I was walking past the golf store in the plaza, I looked down and saw a flattened carton with the words MUSCLE MILK. I don’t think I would have noticed the carton if I hadn’t heard the phrase recently and for the first time.

  At the edge of the Home Depot parking lot, behind the tent where they had sold the Christmas trees, two uniformed police officers watched six guys transfer unmarked crates from one semitrailer to another. One of the cops could have been the seemingly ubiquitous Shanks, but I had to walk closer to find out. And it was. Shanks and Clarke. When the guys loading the truck saw me, they froze for just a second. I said, “What are you boys up to?” Shanks and Clarke both jerked and turned to see who the hell had gotten the jump on them. They looked spring-loaded. Shanks folded his arms across his chest and tilted his head back so he could look down at me. Clarke made sure I saw his hand resting on the butt of his service revolver. He said, “Get the fuck out of here, jerkwad.”

  “I’m just standing here.”