Richmond Noir

Playing With Dablonde by Tom de Haven

Manchester

They’d finished having sex, Tacko and DaBlonde, but her husband Louis (you couldn’t call him Lou, she called him Daddy) was still taking pictures with a small silver Canon PowerShot. He’d circle the bed, crouch, loom, even push in between DaBlonde’s open chapped thighs. She’d threaten to trap him there, scissor him, and they’d laugh. Weird shit. Very weird shit, thought Tacko.

Louis was a big guy, obese, and whenever he’d kneel on the bed for another shot, it crunched and sank. He had on a tent-sized black T-shirt and gray Nike sweatpants. He always kept his clothes on. Well, both times so far. “That’s enough pictures, Daddy.” DaBlonde shook a foot at him, making short flicking motions with her toes.

She was at least fifteen years younger than Tacko, who was forty-eight. She might have been still in her late twenties — slight, almost skinny, a pretty face that looked dairy-maid wholesome when she took off her glasses. Just now, though, she’d kept them on through everything, fellatio included.

Louis was nearer Tacko’s age. A friendly, blunt-talking fat cuckold. Tacko didn’t use the word in mockery, merely as description. So the guy enjoyed watching his wife do strangers — so what? Other guys enjoyed tramping out in the dark and bitter cold to shoot at deer. And as far as Tacko could tell, DaBlonde loved the variety. She loved it, Louis loved it, therefore no problem. Weird shit, though. Tacko was in the presence of people the likes of whom he’d never come upon before. They were like TV Martians, human-looking but deeply different underneath. Being with them was exhilarating.

Till now Tacko had been a pretty standard guy, suburban youth in the ’70s, ever-rising, ultimately tiresome career straight out of college. He went to church. Episcopal, till he was thirty-five. All told, he’d had nine sex partners (including DaBlonde), considerably less than the national average for men, which he’d read was thirteen. With his first wife, but certainly not his second, he’d watched porn, but always the tame and corny stuff. Deep Throat. Devil in Miss Jones. He’d never been to an orgy, a strip club, a live sex show, or known any swingers or fetishists, that he was aware of. So yes, hooking up with the Amboys and balling her while the husband filmed it — that was extreme sport for Tacko.

“Really and truly, Daddy, no more pictures. Do you know if there’s still coffee to reheat?”

“Should I look?” Louis tapped the camera’s on/off button and the snouty lens retracted with a tootling whir. It amazed Tacko how agreeable the guy was, like a new boyfriend or a seasoned butler. “Mr. Tacko?” he said. “If there’s coffee, do you want a cup?” Louis only called him Mister. DaBlonde, come to think of it, never called him anything. “Or do you want another glass of wine?”

“Coffee sounds great.”

After Louis went out, Tacko turned on his back, pulled the sheet over him to mid-chest, and folded his hands behind his neck. He could hear it raining, a sleety, hard-ticking persistent March rain. He could also hear muffled sax, drums, and bass surging up from the art gallery below. Some kind of fund-raiser there tonight. Noticing a photograph in a pewter frame on the dresser, Tacko did a stomach crunch to have a better look. When he lay back down, DaBlonde loomed over his face. “What?”

“Just checking out the picture.”

“That’s our wedding.”

“Really?” He looked at it again, Louis in a dark-blue suit, DaBlonde in an Easter-pink cocktail dress. Outdoors on bright green grass, a flowering tree behind them. “How long ago?”

“Last spring.” Tacko watched her remembering, her mouth shifting into a private smile. “We’re still newlyweds. Year in May.”

A year in May, and practically from day one, they’d told Tacko, DaBlonde had been fucking strangers with Daddy’s blessing. Hot Wife/Husband Watches But Doesn’t Join In. That was their lifestyle niche. They’d started playing strictly for thrills, because they wanted to and could, but then Louis and DaBlonde wondered if they might earn some income from it as well. They recorded so many videos and took so many pictures, what were they supposed to do with it all? And frankly, they could use the extra money, what with their two divorces, which they hadn’t gone into in any detail about with Tacko. A website seemed worth a shot.

Louis, who was living on permanent disability (apparently he had twenty things wrong with him), was a seasoned entrepreneur. Before he’d hooked up with DaBlonde (they’d met online, each in a miserable marriage), he’d owned a small chain of video stores in the Petersburg area, and during the dot-com boom a website where he marketed things like patio misters and mosquito lures. He’d run that business out of the family garage in Chesterfield County while holding down a good job assessing and purchasing liability coverage for a residential building contractor. It wasn’t hard for Louis to do the research, stake out their domain, take care of all that technical stuff.

The site went hot six months ago. The original version was amateurish and skimpy, offering only a few dozen nude-slash-action pictures of DaBlonde and a handful of short clips. Over time it got better, easier to navigate, and grew to include thousands of photographs and more than eighty videos. About two thousand subscribers signed up, guys like Tacko paying $23.95 per month with automatic credit card renewal. Subscribers from all over the country, she’d proudly told him. Europe, Japan, Australia, Brazil, even the Middle East. “Arabs and blond women,” Louis said once, meaningfully clenching his jaw, and let it go at that.

Tacko had never intended to contact DaBlonde, even though as a member of her site he was encouraged to. But ten days ago — the same day that Dave Sandlin of the Eury Agency telephoned out of the blue and asked Tacko to fax over his resume — he’d impulsively written her an e-mail. Saying how much he enjoyed her newest video, adding that he’d been in the same bar dozens of times, the bar where she’d picked up that stringy Jamaican guy with the white teeth. It was the Tobacco Company, wasn’t it?

She’d e-mailed him back, using emoticons and u for you, which Tacko loathed. Would he like to meet? Tacko didn’t reply. Fantasy was okay, but actually doing something? Very damn unlikely. DaBlonde persisted. She wrote Tacko again, and included two cell numbers. When he didn’t call, she wrote a third time: they would be at Siné Irish Pub in Shockoe Slip on Wednesday evening at 8:30. It would be so great if he joined them.

By ten past 8 last Wednesday, Tacko still hadn’t made up his mind.

He’d been so nervous when they met that his lips kept sticking to his front teeth. He just nodded and smiled, sipped his beer, and let DaBlonde and Louis do most of the talking. This was their dog-and-pony show. Not that either of them had dressed to impress. Louis, in need of a beard trim and a haircut (his full beard was salt-and-pepper; the hair on his large head gray, thin, and wind-blown), had come to the pub wearing khaki pants and a plum-colored knit shirt stretched over his big stomach like a drumhead. He hadn’t worn a coat. Twenty degrees out and no coat. Louis was about five-eight, but his bulk made his presence overpowering; he took up so much room! They’d stood, all three of them, talking at the bar for more than an hour. Tacko wondered if they stayed there because the tables and booths were too confining for the guy.

DaBlonde introduced herself as “Ann-dray-ah but spelt like Andrea,” and Tacko thought she looked dowdy, a little drippy, in person. At any rate, in clothes. Charcoal slacks and a pale gray blouse, black vest hand-decorated with colored glass beads. A dobby four-button jacket. She’d dressed like a third-grade teacher out for a drink — a non-alcoholic margarita — on a Friday afternoon, even though it was a weeknight, and she drank a White Russian, then a second. This is what they liked to do, she said. She looked Tacko straight in the eye. He smiled back. There was their marriage, she said, and then there was this. She gave a happy shrug. This was just a hobby they shared.

But it was a business too, said Louis. Tacko would have to sign a consent form. They would try not to show his face in videos. Louis was careful about that. However, if Tacko were recognized, they could not be held accountable.

He had to think it over. What would happen if he were recognized? What could? Tacko wasn’t married, and his friends and professional acquaintances were universally unlikely to surf into DaBlonde’s “hot wife” site, although you could never know anything for certain. His parents were deceased, so was his brother, he didn’t plan on running for public office, and he’d been laid off from his job, so he couldn’t be fired.

Fuck it, he signed the waiver.

“That your real name?” said Louis Amboy.

Tacko blushed. Had he done something wrong? Was he supposed to make one up? “But nobody calls me Vincent,” he said. “Vin sometimes, but not so much. Never Vinnie. Usually either Tack or just Tacko.” Shut up.

DaBlonde had put her hand on his leg, right thigh, underneath the bar ledge. She moved it back to his crotch. At that moment her cell phone started playing Van Morrison’s “Have I Told You Lately?” and she withdrew the hand to root though her bag. “Excuse me.” She turned away and answered, frowning.

“Look, I’m in a restaurant. Because I am, that’s why.” She planted an elbow on the bar and slumped in dejection. “Nice. Classy. And I’m supposed to listen to this crap? Scott. I’m not listening to you. No, Scott, you may not speak to my husband, either. Because that’s who he is, Scott. And now I’m going to hang up. Same to you, asshole.” She listened a few more seconds, then snapped her phone closed. Flipped it back open and turned it off. Then she raised an eyebrow significantly at Louis. “That was Scott.”

“I gathered. And?”

“You heard me. I wouldn’t listen.” She looked testy, then didn’t. She widened her eyes, doing mock-waif, and smiled at Tacko. “Scott’s my ex-and-I-couldn’t-be-happier-about-it-husband. And I’m especially happy that he lives in Greensboro. He makes cheap furniture. And empty threats.” After a shrug, DaBlonde leaned forward and kissed Tacko on the mouth, with tongue.

“Well,” said Louis, recovering abruptly (he’d paled at Scott’s name) and paying for his and DaBlonde’s drinks with a twenty, “shall we continue this somewhere else?”

They’d gone to the Omni since they could walk to it from the pub, Louis explaining to Tacko on the way how it was standard practice for the single guy to pay for the room. Tacko thought, Standard practice. In the Amboys’ world it was standard practice for the single guy to pay for the room. In the Amboys’ world, and in Tacko’s world now too.

He’d felt a knot of fear when they arrived at their room and he unlocked the door with a magnetized card. (What if they robbed him? Tied him up and tortured him? What if—?) Then it was gone. DaBlonde threw off her clothes like it was nothing. White cotton underpants, white undershirt with spaghetti straps, no bra. Tacko was delighted by her smooth skin, her small breasts, impressed by her intensity. The more DaBlonde carried on, and the louder she got, the more Louis enjoyed it. That was demonstrably evident. All told, they were at the hotel for about an hour and a half.

Afterwards, Tacko felt conscience pangs. He’d wondered if he would, and he did. He felt like some kind of crazy amoral heathen, and as big a pervert as Louis Amboy. Well, maybe not quite as big.

He was surprised when the Amboys e-mailed him and suggested another get-together. He’d been flattered too by the follow-up invitation, but uncertain how to respond. He’d met them just to say (to himself) that he’d done it, to actually do something outrageous for a change. But what was the point of seeing them again? Sure, that. But did he really want any more of the Amboys? No. Yes. No.

Eventually, he decided to see them again, and then to his further surprise (and slight discomfort) they’d invited him to their condo on Decatur Street, just south of the Mayo Bridge. Tacko knew their pay site well, and all of the videos and pictures there had been shot in hotel rooms or in public or semi-public places, never their home. Till now they’d not so much as hinted at where in the city they lived. For all Tacko knew they actually lived somewhere else and just played in Richmond. No, it turned out they lived on Decatur and Third.

A few of the red-brick early-twentieth-century buildings in the old Manchester district still operated as factories (Alcoa had a plant, there were a couple of box companies), but most were either derelict or had been gutted and refurbished into work space for artists, art galleries, or luxury condos. Where the Amboys lived had once been the United States Cardboard Company and still bore the name chiseled above the entrance door.

They owned one of the few residential units that had been sold in the building. Two or three cooperative galleries, a banquet hall, a café, and about fifty artists’ studios comprised the ground level. Louis and DaBlonde lived on the third floor, a wide-open industrial space, exposed brick, timber columns and trusses, everything else chrome or glass or bleached canvas, Ultrasuede or black leather. The place was furnished, Tacko thought coming in earlier tonight, like a full-page design collection ad in the New York Times Magazine — except for all of the computers.

There were desktops and laptops, Macs and IBM PCs, and monitors either shining a dead blue light or playing explicit videos Tacko recognized from the pay site. DaBlonde with the Sports Bar Guy, the Sharp-Dressed Man, the Man in the Woods, the Cowboy Trucker. In the restroom at Chesterfield Towne Centre, on a farm, on a different farm, behind the Ashland Wal-Mart, at the Virginia State Fair. All of the monitors had the sound turned off. Even so, it was disorienting, porn everywhere you looked, and the actual woman, the “hot wife” herself, standing right there, dressed in herringbone slacks and a white fuzzy sweater, urging Tacko to sit down, then sliding onto the sectional beside him.

They drank red wine (Louis poured) and smoked half a joint (Louis rolled, Louis lighted, Louis declined to partake, same as he’d passed on drinking wine). DaBlonde pulled up her sweater and exposed her breasts, then slotted her tongue at Tacko while Louis talked geekishly about a new camcorder he’d bought that took higher quality videos. They required more time to load, he said, but it was worth it.

Once they’d moved into the bedroom, the sex was better than last time. Not so bing-bang-bing or as impersonal. They were learning each other’s moves, adding finesse. Tacko forgot about Louis and his camera, except for whenever the husband asked DaBlonde how she liked it so far and urged Tacko to come wherever he wanted, externally, internally, whatever struck his fancy. Unlike last week, Tacko wasn’t impelled by a flight reflex immediately afterwards.

“Tell me something,” DaBlonde was saying now. “You a cheater? You can tell me, I don’t care.”

“Cheater?”

“Married.”

“Jeez, no. I’ve been divorced since ninety... seven.”

Louis stuck his head into the bedroom. “There wasn’t enough to heat so I put on a fresh pot.” Then he was gone again.

DaBlonde flung herself upright as if suddenly and willfully were the only ways she could ever force herself to move again. She laughed when she almost bounced Tacko off the mattress, then swung her legs around, grabbed her Chinese robe (black and red with a firecracker dragon on the back) from a chair, put it on, and cinched it. “Do you want to take a shower first?”

“If you wouldn’t mind.”

“No, you go ahead.”

But Tacko felt like dawdling. “Do... do a lot of guys you meet say they’re not married?”

“You’re kidding, right? Because I’m not even sure I believe you’re not.” She laughed and came back and sat down on the bed. “You’re all a bunch of genetic liars.”

“Harsh.”

“Except Louis. Otherwise you’re all cheaters, if you ask me. Not that I give a damn.”

“I’m really divorced.”

“I believe you. No, seriously. I was kidding.” DaBlonde’s expression changed again, her long face looking placid, her gray eyes vacant. “But most men are cheaters. You know they are. And worse. Like my ex? Was just convinced that I screwed around, and I never did, not once in seven years. But meanwhile Scott’s out knocking off new stuff every other weekend. And — and carrying on with my best girlfriend, maid of honor at our wedding.” The corners of her eyes crinkled and her smile returned. “Louis is probably hovering out there right now, hoping we’re having sex again, and here we are having a regular conversation.”

Tacko thought, A regular conversation? That’s maybe not how he would’ve described it, but they were having... something. Something Tacko was okay with. That he was here for, present for. He was good with all of it. It was just — he still had a hard time convincing himself he could do something like this, weird shit like this, and get away with it. He’d probably get AIDS. Or maybe Louis was right that second dropping a diamond-shaped purple roofie into his cup of coffee, he’d end up with a ball-gag in his mouth and dangling from a ceiling beam. Jesus. Had he lost his mind? Had he lost his mind since he’d lost his job? He wondered.

For almost nineteen years he’d worked at Greene and Scivally Advertising, the last eleven as a group creative director. Then: new management, and out he went. Week before Thanksgiving. One day he’s brainstorming a new campaign for a national brand, the next he’s emptying his desk with a security cop standing by in case he goes berserk. But Tacko wasn’t the excitable type.

It was scary carrying away his carton of personal items, but also a secret relief. He’d been in career burnout a long time, he just hadn’t let on. In recent years, movies and novels and TV series about characters who found the courage and/or the foolhardiness to abandon stifling lives had held great appeal for Tacko.

The first two months he didn’t do much. Got out to the gym more regularly, subscribed to Netflix and caught up on the third season of Lost, scheduled and kept doctor and dentist appointments before his company health insurance lapsed, and worked on his screenplay, the one based on a botched kidnapping that happened in the early 1990s. But the story got trite as he was writing it, not basing it closely on the real case at all, and he gave it up again. He knew he wouldn’t go back to it.

During this period Tacko wasn’t dating, by choice. He’d had an on again/off again friends-with-benefits thing with a married secretary who used to work with him and now worked for the Virginia Bar Association. But when they didn’t get in touch over the Christmas holidays, Tacko wondered if maybe this time the off-again was permanent. Upon consideration he discovered that possibility not even slightly painful. Thinking about Connie Agnew and how insignificant she had become in his life was the first inkling Tacko had that he might have left more behind recently than his job.

People he knew well, whom Tacko considered friends, called and left messages. Tack, a bunch of guys are getting together for poker tonight, we’d love to see you. Vincent, my man, you at all interested in seeing a movie? Tack? I sent you an e-mail about Robin’s birthday party. Call me. Vin? Nikki and I were saying how we haven’t heard from you. Vincent? Tack? Tacko? He didn’t get back to most people. It just wasn’t anything he cared to do. After a while there weren’t many calls. Tacko had no problem with that.

At the end of December his brother died suddenly, but he didn’t fly out to Salt Lake City for the funeral. They’d been estranged. Their personalities, their politics, their dad’s will. His brother, though. Jesus Christ. Heart attack. And he was younger than Tacko by four years! His brother Kenny’s death shut Tacko down for weeks, well into the new year. Except for paying bills online, he mostly slept and moped around the house. He watched four seasons in a row of The Wire. Grew a beard and shaved it off.

He’d received a good severance package, and had significant savings, even some excellent technology stocks, so money wasn’t an issue. The rest of his fucking life was. But even deep into January his future remained a subject Tacko felt he couldn’t deal with yet. If something great, some fabulous new direction, didn’t happen or present itself by the first of February, he’d look for another job in advertising. First of February. February the first. He marked it on his calendar.

Often Tacko woke in the night and lay awake for hours. He couldn’t turn his brain off. One night, but just the one, he pondered ways a reasonable man might realistically kill himself, but otherwise he just thought about how much he didn’t want to resume his former life. Is that what it was already? His former life? What he wanted, what Tacko most needed, was something different, a fresh possibility, even the merest glimpse of one.

For a about a week he considered writing a novel, one set in the cutthroat world of advertising. He actually outlined one on the computer. But when he read over what he’d done, it sounded like every other story ever written about an ad agency, so he deleted it and looked at Internet porn instead.

Honestly, Tacko could not recall how the habit started — from boredom and curiosity, probably. But he’d also recognized just how infrequently (hardly ever) he thought about women these endless unemployed days and nights at home, and so it was possible he was using the stuff as proof he hadn’t lost interest in sex. Porn gradually became a daily routine, and one of his favorite pay sites (by the middle of February, he’d subscribed to six) was DaBlonde’s. Not only because she was located in his hometown, although it surely played a major part. (Finding her site had been a sheer accident, serendipity, link to link to link to link...) No, what he liked best about her? The woman seemed utterly reckless. Fucking men in stairwells, hallways, at highway rest stops. Behind the Museum of the Confederacy. That took guts. Her site biography (which Tacko figured was probably all bullshit, but he chose to disregard his cynicism) stated that she’d been raised in a strict household and had never even kissed a boy before she was twenty-one. And look at her now!

“You seemed like you were going to say something.”

“No,” said Tacko. “Just thinking.”

“What?”

“I don’t know.”

“Sure you do,” said DaBlonde.

“Who came up with your name?”

“It’s what my ex used to call me, but that’s not what you were thinking. He’d call me that when he called me a slut. So what were you really thinking?”

“All right. I was just wondering — you and Louis met online? At a chat room?”

“Yeah...? I was in North Carolina and Louis was living here. Well, out in the county. So?”

“I was just wondering. Was there, like, one day, one particular day, when the two of you just said that’s it, enough, and then packed your stuff and walked away and — got together?”

“I guess. But it’s not exactly an original story. It happens all the time.”

“Well, maybe.”

“It does. People walk away, Tacko. And the world doesn’t end. You can do whatever you always wanted and nobody can stop you. Is that what you’re asking me?”

“Yeah. No. I’m not sure.” He was babbling now because he realized this was the first time she’d called him by any name, and she’d chosen his last name, the least familiar, even the coldest, of the possibilities. His heart sank a little.

DaBlonde got up. “Go take your shower.”

“Yeah, sure.” Tacko rolled out of bed and started collecting his clothes from the floor (shirt, briefs, jeans, one sock, Clarks boots, second sock) while DaBlonde fingered apart two thin blinds and looked out the window. That side of the condo faced a gutted brass foundry covered by construction company signage.

“It’s still raining,” she commented. “Listen to that.”

“It’s supposed to stay like this till midnight,” said Tacko, just to say something.

He picked up the Amboys’ framed wedding picture. They were both laughing with their toothy mouths open. He set it down and thought he might not shower after all, just get dressed and go home. But since he was already standing naked at the bathroom doorway, he went in and turned on the faucet in the tub. This was so weird. The whole thing. Being here. Taking a shower now. Using their shampoo, their liquid soap, their scrubby.

As soon as he turns off the water, Tacko hears voices raised in an argument. The Amboys quarreling? But no, the man’s voice isn’t Louis’s. Tacko can’t make out what he and DaBlonde — it’s definitely DaBlonde’s voice — are hollering about. Then he hears the guy shout either “disgusting” or “disgust me” and feels a spurt of jangling dread. He starts to put his clothes back on without drying himself.

That’s a shot. Fuck.

Somebody just fired a gun, out there. Beyond the bathroom door, beyond the bedroom, out there in the loft.

And that’s a second shot.

He’s fully dressed now, but paralyzed, unable to decide whether to move — to investigate, to implicate himself — or to stay put.

He opens the door a crack and Louis Amboy’s hysterical voice carries in.

“Scott, please. Scott, please. Please, Scott.”

He makes cheap furniture. And empty threats.

“Scott, please, for God’s sake!”

Why isn’t DaBlonde saying anything?

It’s still raining hard and downstairs the band is still playing. Tacko quietly closes the door and locks it.

Three more shots in a burst. Silence, and then another shot. Then silence.

The first slap against the bathroom door is percussive enough to shake it; the second is the merest scratching tap.

Now a spot of dark red glistens in the narrow gap between the bottom of the door and the saddle. The spot widens, liquefies — blood. In its flow, carried along, comes an inch-and-a-half-wide sodden strip of black silk.

A tie end from DaBlonde’s Chinese robe.

Straddling the pool of blood, one foot planted on either side, Tacko unlocks the door, eases it toward him, and her huddled body insistently pushes it open the rest of the way. He glances down for only a moment, but long enough to register DaBlonde’s fixed eyes. His head goes groggy, and he wills it clear, staring through the bedroom and out into the living area, seeing part of the black-and-white sectional and a row of blue screen monitors on a molded glass table.

The only sound now is the rain lashing at the building, the windows, the roof. The band has finally taken a break.

Now Tacko is standing at the bedroom door, now he’s creeping out into the loft, and now crouching beside Louis Amboy sprawled on the floor, a bullet hole at the base of his skull. Blood runs down the back of his neck into his collar. Tacko’s mind fills with strobing light and he bolts for the front door.

“Hey!”

It’s a young guy, thirtyish, full head of brown hair, filthy tan barn jacket, short barrel revolver clutched in a fist streaked with mahogany wood stain. He steps out of the kitchen, or glides from behind a bank of computer monitors (sound on, DaBlonde groaning), or just leans forward in a flexible mesh chair, and says, “You’re disgusting.” Or maybe, “You disgust me.” And squeezes the trigger. A hundred times, like it’s a fucking machine gun.

“Hey! Tacko!” DaBlonde: tapping on the shower glass. “You want to leave me some hot water?” She pulled open the door, shed her robe, and stepped into the spray, smiling as she nudged Tacko from under it. “Can I have the shampoo?” He plucked it from the caddy, Elizabeth Arden, and handed it to her. “You can stay. We can share.”

But he was already out. “No,” he said, “I’m done.”

Louis Amboy was conveying a French press and three ceramic mugs on a service tray from the kitchen to the coffee table when Tacko came out of the bedroom fully dressed and grabbed his leather coat from the sectional.

“You’re not leaving, I hope.”

“I should.”

Louis carefully set down the tray. He cocked his head. “Well, if you have to.”

“This was fantastic.”

“Tell me something, Mr. Tacko. Would you be interested in making it a regular thing?”

“Sure. I guess. I don’t know.”

“Ah,” said Louis, seeming abashed. “Can I loan you an umbrella?”

“No, that’s okay.”

“Well then. Good night.”

“You too.” Tacko would’ve had to walk all the way around the mammoth sofa to shake hands, so he just waved to Louis. But it wasn’t like he wouldn’t shake hands. It wasn’t like that. Even so, riding the elevator down, he felt like a real shit, then had an abrupt impulse to push the button again and go on back up, saying he’d changed his mind, he’d wait out the rain and have that cup of coffee now, if they didn’t mind. Because you can do anything you want and nobody can stop you — wasn’t it true?

He’d have to think about that some more.

“Vincent!”

Tacko flinched. He’d flipped up his collar, hunched a little, and stepped outside into the gusting rain, but hadn’t gone three steps across the sidewalk before someone hailed him. Shit.

It was Dave Sandlin, a VP at the Eury Agency, wearing a tux and smoking a cigarette in a doorway not ten feet down the block from the Amboys’ street entrance. Tacko felt he had to go over. Had to? Had to.

“How you doin’, boy? Haven’t seen much of you lately.” Sandlin transferred his cigarette to his left hand and they shook. “Keeping busy?”

“Not really.” Tacko glanced past Sandlin into the gallery, saw the musicians picking up their instruments again, the drummer sliding behind his kit, an all-white, dressed-up crowd drinking and talking, and large abstract paintings, black the dominant color, hanging on the walls. “Just enjoying life.”

“Fuck’s that mean?” Sandlin laughed but looked skeptical. “I thought I’d hear back from you.”

Tacko, who’d been standing in the rain like an idiot, finally stepped under the overhang. “I’ve had a few personal projects I’ve been taking care of.”

“Yeah, well, you don’t want to stay out of sight too long, Vinnie. People forget you. Look.” Sandlin tossed away his cigarette and pulled out his wallet, extracted an embossed card. “Give me your hand.”

“What?”

“Put out your hand.” He placed the card in Tacko’s right palm, then tapped it. “Fax me your damn resume. What’s today, Friday? I want it on Monday. All right? Okay?”

Looking at the card, looking at Sandlin, looking at the people, many of whom he recognized, dancing now in the gallery, Tacko felt disgusted. You disgust me. You’re disgusting. “Thanks,” he said. “Monday. Promise.” Pocketing Sandlin’s card, he put out his hand again. “Well, let me run.”

“What the hell’re you doing down here anyway?”

“Visiting friends.”

“Fax me.”

Tacko dashed across Decatur Street and walked along the chain-link fence to the parking lot entrance. When he’d arrived there were only about a dozen vehicles, now there must have been close to a hundred, most of them Beemers, Lexuses, and SUVs, and he couldn’t immediately remember where he’d left his. Rain drilled on a diagonal through the vapor lights. As he peered up and down the lanes, then jogged to a red Cooper he thought was his but wasn’t, Tacko noticed a man sitting in a parked Saturn that was at least ten years old and badly dinged. The interior dome light was on. The man was rummaging through a leather satchel on his lap, but glanced up at Tacko. He looked about twenty-five, had stringy long dark hair and a soul patch. Tacko nodded. The man did not.

By the time Tacko found his car, he was drenched and his shoes and socks were infused. He got in and just sat there dripping. Then he glanced up and there were DaBlonde and Louis Amboy gliding up and down in front of their wall of windows, DaBlonde in that Chinese robe, her hair in a blue towel turban. The pair of them moving forward and sideways and back, box stepping.

They were dancing. Her tiny, him huge, they were dancing, waltzing — not gracefully, shamblingly, but still. Still, they were waltzing alone in their little weird-shit world.

Tacko turned the car on, and the heat, then just sat there watching.

He had his cell phone, he could call them, invite himself back. Nothing to stop him, if that’s what he wanted to do. He took it from his coat pocket and Dave Sandlin’s business card came out with it. He glanced at the card — exquisite printing — and then opened his window and tossed it out.

They were still waltzing up there, and Tacko started scrolling through his stored numbers — Abbott, Bill; Adler, Ed; Agnew, Connie, Alman, Foster & Meeks; Amboy, Louis & Andrea. Thirty-two on Tacko’s speed dial. He hesitated, then was startled by a car door slamming nearby.

The guy from the Saturn stood alongside of it now in the downpour staring at the Amboys’ brightly lit condo, staring up at them as they danced their mechanical waltz. Then he strode toward the open fence gate, satchel swinging in his hand. He crossed the street, passing a few people departing the fund-raiser under voluminous black umbrellas. He walked directly to the building’s corner entrance. Tacko glanced back up at the Amboys’ windows, but they were no longer in view.

When he looked back down, his eyes tracking past where it was chiseled United States Cardboard Company, the young man with the satchel had opened the door and was going inside. Had they buzzed him up? Had they invited over another “friend”? Or thought Tacko had come back?

He turned off the car, opened his door, and got out. Stood in the rain for perhaps a minute, but still didn’t see anyone in the windows.

Dave Sandlin, he noticed, had gone back into the gallery.

A middle-aged couple hurried by under umbrellas, squealing with laughter as they hit puddles.

Tacko started to get back into his car, but changed his mind and jogged up the line to the Saturn.

North Carolina plates.

And now when he looked back up, the Amboys’ condo was dark, except for an ambient blue wash that came off the computer monitors.

On his way back to his Cooper, he stooped and picked up Dave Sandlin’s card. Then he got in, tossed the card on the other seat, restarted the engine, and drove home.

Did he even have a fucking resume to send?

Midnight at the Oasis by Anne Thomas Soffee

Jefferson Davis Highway

Things were bad, real bad, when I went to bed that night. Coming up on one month without smoking rock meant having to deal with the mess I’d been making of my life since I first picked up the pipe. No job, hardly any money, and a real pisser of an attitude problem — not that I’d started with the friendliest personality, but you work with what you’ve got.

“For somebody so young and pretty, you sure are awful hateful, Kim.” This was something Beau said to me once while we dragged the stinking corpse of a harvest-gold Frigidaire down the steps of a trailer I was cleaning for the Arab. But that I could deal with. This particular night really started to suck when the sun went down and two of Ivan’s girls walked over from the City Motel to give me a gentle reminder about the money I owed.

“Ivan’s lonely,” the one with the broken teeth said. She grabbed a fistful of my hair and jerked my head to the side.

“He don’t miss you,” sneered the one with the gimpy arm. “He just miss his money.” She reached out with the good arm and smacked the side of my face, hard. The other girl let me go, and they stood there and looked at me with as much disdain as two twenty-dollar whores could muster.

“Ivan knows they fired me from the diner,” I told them, rubbing my cheek where it stung. “Tell him I’m looking for work.”

“You think he cares?” Teeth reached for my hair again but I stepped back. “You better get that pretty little ass out on the corner and make his money.”

“Just don’t do it here,” Gimpy-Arm warned. Then the two of them headed back out to Jeff Davis, where a car had already pulled over to meet them.

They didn’t need to worry about me horning in on their territory. I was already pissed off at myself for being a trailer park stereotype, what with the waitressing and the crack rocks and all. I’d only moved to Richmond from Christians-burg that spring and already I was like something out of a bad indie movie full of trailer park caricatures. Beau told me not to worry about it, that it happens to a lot of people when they first move into Rudd’s, but that hardly made me feel better. It’d almost been a good thing that the diner fired me and Ivan cut off my tab, because it did for me what I couldn’t do for myself.

I went to bed with my cheek still tingling, worrying and thinking about the money — a thousand dollars, not that much to some people but a hell of a lot to one unemployed teenage waitress in Rudd’s Trailer Park. I’d heard about things Ivan did to people who owed him less, and it wasn’t anything I wanted to be a part of. He’d told me stories, casually, while I smoked on his dime at the City Motel. At the time I thought he was confiding in me because I was different, like he could see the light behind my eyes. In hindsight, he was probably just issuing a warning. When I finally fell asleep, I dreamed of box cutters, of socks full of rolled nickels, of the gimpy-armed whore’s hard little eyes.

So you wake up from a night like that and you figure there’s nowhere to go but up, right? You figure you’ll make a pot of black coffee, warm up the old Emerson record player that came with the place, put on Metallic KO — Iggy Pop being the Patron Saint of Trailer Parks — and shake it out, clean a trailer or two, and go on with life. That’s what I figured until I opened my door and found a random crackhead on my steps, or what looked like a random crackhead until I realized he was there for a very specific purpose.

“Ivan says you gotta pay him before Saturday,” he said without looking up.

“I can give him something on Saturday, not all.” Realistically, there was no job, no legal job, that would make me that much money by the weekend.

“Ivan says he needs it all by Saturday.” He picked at a sore on his hand. “Or else you’re gonna fall off the Lee Bridge.” When he looked up I could see that he wasn’t telling me because he wanted to. He turned away. “Ivan says nobody would miss you.”

I like to think that I’m tough, but when he said that, it stung worse than the gimpy-armed whore’s slap.

Ivan’s messenger skulked out of the trailer park, and I sank down and sat on the step where he’d been, picturing my waterlogged remains floating down the James River, wondering how long I would lie on a slab at the city morgue before somebody claimed me. If anyone ever did.

To say the trailer park governs itself would be true, but the real truth is that the place is run like a kingdom, the Arab’s kingdom, and he is a benevolent ruler. If you follow the rules and pay your rent, you’re a subject in good standing. If you follow the rules and can’t pay your rent, you’re afforded leeway because you’re trying. If you don’t follow the rules and you can’t pay your rent, he’ll cuss you out in two languages, but he’ll let you stay because you might be trying. And he’ll probably slip you a twenty when you leave, because Allah forbid you go hungry. Really, as long as you don’t smoke crack or steal anything, the Arab has your back.

A lot of the folks in the trailer park don’t work; the Arab keeps about half the residents on a casual payroll, with salaries and titles that vary depending on how bad you’ve managed to fuck up lately. Take Beau, for instance — because he’s the biggest guy in the park and is always being called on to break up fights or scare off crack dealers, he’s designated Trailer Park Police. The week he tried to move a trailer without permission and destroyed the Arab’s old Ford pickup, he got demoted to Raccoon Wrangler. Bill Baldy is the Arab’s assistant, and as far as I can tell that job involves drinking beer and doing crosswords in the office — which is actually just a trailer with OFFICE written on the door. Bobby Harvey’s been here the longest, so he’s Senior Manager, but it’s more like Señor Manager, since that job is mostly steering drunk Mexican dudes into their trailers on Fridays. And Judy is the Arab’s secretary even though she doesn’t read or write. Her job qualification is her diabetes; unsupervised, she’ll sneak to the 7-Eleven and eat herself into a coma on Bama Pies. The Arab made her his secretary so he could get her into the office and keep an eye on her.

Ever since I lost the diner job, the Arab had been letting me clean trailers whenever somebody skipped out and left one full of junk. My title was Home Improvement Expert. He paid me a hundred bucks a trailer. He had at least one every rent day. But not lately. When things get tough all over, the trailer park business booms. Folks were beating down the door to get into Rudd’s. To make a little more room, because Allah forbid somebody gets left in the cold, the Arab offered to pay me double to clean out the big trailer on the property’s back edge. Nobody had lived in it for decades. I was grateful for the chance to make double pay; at least I’d have something to try and buy time with on Saturday — but that was between me and Ivan. The Arab just thought he was giving me grocery money.

“Sure, I’ll clean it,” I said, taking the keys from him and sticking them in my jeans. “How long has it been vacant, anyway?”

“Ain’t nobody ever lived in that goddamn thing,” he told me. “Not as long as I been runnin’ this shithole, anyway. Most of what’s in there probably came out of the house, when they tore it down.” The house was where the Arab’s aunt had lived, a rooming house on Jeff Davis, which used to be part of the biggest travel highway on the East Coast. When Interstate 95 came through in 1958 and the tourists dried up, the rooming house was left to fall to pieces until the city finally made the Arab tear it down. He put up the trailer park in its place. It’s that whole Islamic revenge thing.

The Arab said I could keep whatever I found in the trailer, but after I got through the first room it was pretty obvious that there were only a bunch of dusty old ledger books and guest registers. I pitched box after box of ledgers and files out the front door for Beau to load into the dumpster. Then I pitched one that clanked instead of thudded. I figured it was office supplies — pencil sharpeners and staplers, you know, more useless crap. I wasn’t expecting a passport from Beirut, Syria, for Saleem Hassan, born 1890. Tucked under that a stack of letters, written in Arabic, mostly postmarked in the 1930s and 1940s. And sepia-toned pictures of the man from the passport standing with a woman I recognized as the Arab’s aunt, whose picture hung in the office. In the bottom of the box was a thick layer of Arabic newspapers, and between every couple of sections there were records, old 78 RPM ones, with Arabic writing on the labels. And, in the very bottom of the box, the source of the clank — wrapped in a handkerchief, four brass cymbals the size of Oreos.

Since the Arab said I could have anything I found, I took it all home with me that night. I brewed myself up a pot of coffee and put on one of the records. I never thought I’d see the day that I’d need the 78 setting on the old Emerson, but then I’ve done a lot of things I never thought I’d do. While the stereo went through its ancient ritual of dropping the record onto the turntable and situating the needle in the groove, I unfolded the letters. Not that I could read any of them. I wanted to take them to the Arab, but then again I didn’t — I figured he was related to Saleem Hassan, and who would want their family reading their letters, especially ones so personal they were saved in a box? The passport revealed that Hassan had traveled a lot — mostly back and forth from Lebanon to New York. His last stamp was for entry to New York in October 1960. His picture was grim — gray hair and a droopy, permanent frown that pulled his whole face toward the lapels of his black suit. I squinted and tried to see my Arab in his face, to no avail. There was nothing there but something that felt like loneliness, radiating off the page.

The records were the opposite of the picture. Between the crackles and pops there was a celebration, shrieking and ululating and drumming and the rhythmic clanking of finger cymbals, tek-tek-tek-a-tek! I unrolled the handkerchief and took out the cymbals. They didn’t have any handles or straps, just two slits in the center, like buttonholes. I held one in each hand and tried to hit them together, but they made a muddy sound, not a bright chime like on the record. I rolled them back up in the handkerchief and set them on the table.

That night, when I went to sleep, Saleem Hassan came to me in my dreams. Droopy frown and all. It was just his face, black-and-white like in the passport photo, surrounded by a gray haze, cheesy, like in the movies. The Arabic record was playing in the background.

Rubber bands, he said. He nodded and pointed his finger at me through the haze. Get you some rubber bands.

The next day I got up early. When you might only have a few days left on the planet, you want to make them last, even if they are spent scrubbing down old trailers on Jeff Davis Highway. You just have to appreciate life for what it is.

When I stopped by the office to report for duty, the Arab asked how it was going. “You find anything good yet?” He was eating his usual, meat and eggs with sliced onions on the side. Judy was tending to her secretarial duties, watching Jerry Springer and painting her nails. No one else was up, seeing as it was the crack of 9.

“Just papers, mostly.” I opened his desk drawer, pulled out a handful of rubber bands, and slipped them onto my wrist like bracelets.

“What do you need out my desk? You need money?”

“No, I’m good.” It was pointless to even answer because when the Arab asks if you need money it isn’t really a question, it’s a statement of intent. “You said it was your aunt’s stuff in there?”

He shrugged and bit a big wedge of onion. “Mumkin. I don’t know whose it is. Just get it out of here.” Then he reached in his pocket and pulled out a roll of bills. Peeling off a twenty, he threw it on the desk and pointed at it like it was a cockroach. “And take that and get you some goddamn food. You’re gonna blow away.” Which is what he says to everybody when he gives them money, even Beau, who weighs three hundred pounds easy. Then he added the footnote that comes when you don’t reach for the money fast enough, “Take it and kul khara! Eat shit!” I took the twenty. Saying no was not an option. I tucked it into my pocket and headed back to tackle the old trailer.

Day two of cleaning didn’t bring any more mystery boxes. Old sheets and towels mostly, some dishes, all of them covered with fifty years of dust and grime. The first thing I wanted to do when I got home was take a shower. I stripped off my filthy jeans and T-shirt right inside my trailer door and was slipping the Arab’s rubber bands off my wrist when I saw the cymbals on the table. I remembered my dream from the night before. Get you some rubber bands.

I took one of the cymbals and looped a rubber band through the slits in the middle, making a slipknot underneath. I did the same with a second cymbal and stuck my finger and thumb through the bands. Tek-tek-tek-tek-tek! They rang clear and true, just like on the record. I rigged the second pair and put them on and then, just because why the fuck not, I carried my butt-naked dusty self over to the record player and started up the music again. I danced like a whirling dervish in my eight-foot-wide living room, clanking my cymbals and shaking my hips, moving ways I’d never thought about moving with muscles I didn’t know I had, until Bobby Harvey threw a bottle at my trailer and yelled at me to shut up the noise. Looking at the clock, I realized I’d been dancing for hours. I fell into bed, filthy as you please, and closed my eyes — only to see Saleem Hassan’s grumpy face. But where the frown had reached almost past his chin the night before, this time it stopped just before it got there. He was nodding, like he approved.

Tanoura, he said through the haze. At the top of the kitchen cupboard. Tanoura! He lifted a cigarette to his lips and drew on it, then blew out more gray haze. Then he was gone. The music kept playing.

In the morning I went straight to the old trailer I hoisted myself up onto the red Formica countertop and opened the kitchen cupboards. In the first three, nothing. In the last one, there was a rolled-up Thalhimer’s bag stuck way back on a shelf. Inside the bag was a single piece of fabric, a black mesh diamond-patterned linen with strips of silver woven through. Unfolded, it ran the width of the trailer and the length of the kitchen. I stuffed it back into the bag and walked over to the office. The Arab was watching CNN and drinking red soda out of a plastic mug.

“Hey, who’s Tanoura?”

He snorted. “Did somebody call you Tanoura?”

“No, I just heard the name somewhere.” I wasn’t sure what he’d think if I told him about Saleem Hassan.

“It’s not a name. It means skirt.” Where’d you hear it?”

“I don’t remember. Somewhere. Maybe a song.”

I rushed through the afternoon cleaning session with the help of Iggy Pop and a lot of coffee. Then I took the Thalhimer’s bag back to my trailer and laid the fabric out flat on the floor, calling on all the Christiansburg Middle School Home Ec knowledge I could muster to convert that wrinkled old linen into a tanoura that would do Saleem Hassan proud. It wasn’t anything fancy, just an elastic waist and some high slits up the sides, down to my ankles and gathered up at the hips for some flounce. I had enough of a piece left over to crisscross into a skimpy halter — a trick I remembered from the trampy girls back home, although they’d used bandannas or Confederate flags. I checked out my getup in the mirror, fluffed my hair, and put on my finger cymbals. Then I played my record and danced, spinning and undulating and tek-tek-teking until the bottle hit the trailer and signaled me to stop. I took off my tanoura and cymbals and lay down on the bed, awaiting my next mission from Saleem Hassan. This time he was smiling. Just barely, but it was definitely a smile.

Inti jamila, ya habibi. He nodded, puffing on his cigarette. So pretty! And now you are ready to go back to the diner. Go tomorrow. Bukrah. At night.

What did the diner have to do with anything? I woke up wondering if maybe I wasn’t getting omens, just going crazy. Saleem made more sense when he was talking in Arabic. Still, he was right about the rubber bands and the fabric — I was willing to take my chances on the diner. With Saturday coming fast, I didn’t have many options.

The next day I cleared the last boxes out of the trailer and gave it a good scrub with bleach water. It passed the Arab’s inspection with flying colors, so I had two hundred dollars in my pocket, plus the twenty he’d given me. Stepping out on faith, what little I had of it, I packed my new outfit in a backpack, borrowed Bobby Harvey’s bicycle, and headed up Jeff Davis toward the Lee Bridge. Just before the bridge, as I waited for the light to change at Hull Street, Gimpy-Arm loped across the parking lot of Church’s Chicken and screamed my name. “You better make that money, bitch,” she called, flinging a Styrofoam cup of Coca-Cola that exploded next to my tire.

Fortunately, Jeff Davis crack whores are like vampires in that they can’t cross moving water. She didn’t follow me toward the bridge.

Once I was halfway across, I stopped to smoke a cigarette and get my nerves back. The view from the Lee Bridge that night made Richmond look sparkly, more like a city than it really is. It was beautiful against the dark sky. Looking down, the glistening water was beautiful too, until I started seeing visions of my lifeless body floating in it. I forced myself to raise my eyes to the skyline. The city had seemed so big to me when I first got here. Now it was way too small.

I finished my cigarette and headed to the diner

Only when I got there, there wasn’t any there there. To be specific, there wasn’t a River City Diner there. The neon clock was out front, and I could see the grill of the Cadillac sticking out of the wall inside, but the sign had been covered with a hand-painted banner that said, BUBBLING. In the window, rows of hookah pipes like the one the Arab kept in the office stood at attention, and the booths were full of smokers, mostly men — young, swarthy men — smoking hookahs and scooping at plates of food with flat bread. I understood now what I was supposed to do. Of course Saleem Hassan hadn’t steered me wrong. I felt bad for doubting him. I locked Bobby’s bike to a parking meter and walked inside.

At the grill, a dark-haired man scurried to fill baskets with kebabs, fries, and pitas. He muttered as he worked, snatching order tickets from the carousel as fast as the waiters could tack them up. “Have a seat anywhere,” he barked. He turned his back to me and began shaking a basket of fries over the deep fryer.

“I’m not here to eat,” I said, then screwed up my courage and pulled a pair of cymbals out of my bag and slipped them on. “I’m here to dance. I mean, if I can, if you’ll let me.” I clanked the cymbals once for punctuation and he wheeled around.

He squinted at me through the grill fumes. “You bring a costume?” I nodded. “You bring music?” I shook my head. Saleem should have mentioned that. “Ma fi mushkila, it’s no problem, I have music. You change in the ladies’ room. But I no pay you! You dance free! If I like, next time I pay!”

Dance free? The doubt crept in again. What the hell was Saleem thinking? And, really, the bigger question was: what the hell was I doing, about to belly dance in a hookah bar because a dead Arab told me to? As Iggy said at the last Stooges show, I never thought it would come to this.

After I got changed and combed my hair out with my fingers, I put both pairs of cymbals on and closed my eyes, calling on Allah, Jesus, Saleem Hassan, and whoever looked out for crazy trailer park girls who needed money bad to help make this whatever it was supposed to be. Then I slipped out of the ladies’ room and stood in the dark corridor until one of the waiters came back and asked if I was ready.

“Muhammad wants to know your name so he can introduce you.”

“Kim,” I told him. He looked at me like I stank and walked away. A minute later he came back and said, “Muhammad says your name will be Jamila. It means beautiful.”

I nodded. Over the chatter and clatter and bubbling hookahs I heard Muhammad yell something in Arabic, and then he called my new name and the lights dimmed. The opening strains of an Arabic song I’d never heard poured forth from the vintage Wurlitzer. I danced down the aisle fast, giving everyone a quick taste, twirling in great cursive loops and clanging the cymbals together over my head like an ambulance siren, clearing my way through traffic. Then I made my way back up the aisle more slowly, stopping at each table for an undulation or a stomach flutter, teasing, flirting, and charming the men, flirting more with the few women there just to show there were no hard feelings. They ululated as I spun, and each time I presented a piece of myself to a table — a bobbing hip, a shrugging shoulder, or a beckoning arm, someone would tuck a bill into my costume. As I tek-a-teked to the music on the Wurlitzer, the men got up one by one, leaving their hookahs to dance with me for a measure or two, showing off to their friends, snapping and clapping and blowing clouds of fruity smoke around me. Through the smoke I could see Muhammad in the kitchen, nodding along with the music and shaking the fryer basket to the rhythm of my cymbals.

When the instruments fell away and the song was nothing but drums, two waiters cleared the backgammon boards from the front table and hoisted me up without asking. I stood, covered in sweat, dollar bills lining the waist of my tanoura. I translated the beat of the drum into motion, hips snapping left left right, up up down, circle around and back. Whenever the drums paused, I answered with my cymbals, clanking in syncopation. The longer I danced, the more bills the men stacked on their tables, and as the drums built to a crescendo that I followed with my hips, the men leaped up to flick the piles of bills at me like dry leaves. They fluttered down around my feet for the waiters to scoop into a paper bag.

When the song ended, I wiped the sweat from my eyes, blew kisses, and bowed, then grabbed my paper bag and hustled back to the ladies’ room to see if I had enough to save my ass. The bag was stuffed full — I had to have enough, after all of this craziness with the dreams and the tanoura and the dancing and all, right? Isn’t that how stories like this end? I was confident, giddy. I pulled handfuls of ones, fives, tens, and twenties out of the bag and piled them on my lap. Sitting on the toilet and stacking bills on the sink, I counted three hundred and forty-two dollars. Three hundred and fifty-two, after someone slid a ten under the door. Which put me at five hundred and seventy-two dollars. Four hundred and twenty-eight short of what I needed.

Pulling my jeans on and folding the money into my pocket, I felt betrayed. By Saleem Hassan, by Saint Iggy, by my own stupid-ass choices and bad decisions. I was a cliché. I was going to be a dancing girl who gets murdered in a trailer park on a Saturday night over crack money. Fuck irony. All the way from Christiansburg to Richmond and this was what my life had become. I might as well have stayed a waitress and called everybody honey.

A knock on the bathroom door pulled me out of my self-hating trance. I opened it a crack and saw nothing, then looked down and saw an Arab guy, a kid really, a head shorter than me, in a black shirt and a silver tie.

“Jamila, right? Jamila.” I nodded. “I’m Marwan. Can I talk to you for a minute? All business, I promise.”

What did I have to lose? I followed him to his table. Marwan’s heavy, copper-colored eyes locked on mine as he pulled from the hookah.

“Jamila. You’re a good dancer, Jamila. How much you make tonight, two hundred, three hundred?”

I shrugged. “I don’t talk money with strangers.”

“Good policy. Smart girl. Hey, Jamila, I’ma be honest with you. I run a club. A nice club. What you call a gentleman’s club. The best one. I can tell you for a fact you could make a thousand dollars a night there, easy. You dance like that, Ma fi mushkila, no problem. Only just a different costume.” He leered a little and licked his lips. “So what do you say you come by tomorrow and work for me? I put you on the main stage, none of this tables. Inti Jamila. You so pretty.”

I reached across the table and took the hookah tube from him and sucked in a deep draft of gray smoke. I held it in my lungs and considered my options. I could be one kind of cliché and end up dead in the trailer park on a Saturday night. I could be another kind of trailer park cliché and dance around a pole with my tits out for money. Or I could go back home tonight and see what Saleem Hassan’s next piece of advice was for me, with a couple of hundred dollars in my pocket for which I had him to thank. That looked like the best choice. If dancing around a pole was what he wanted for me, I’m sure he’d tell me — though from what I’d heard the Arab say about girls who did that, I had a feeling it wasn’t what Hassan wanted. I blew the smoke politely toward the floor and shook my head.

“I appreciate the offer, Marwan, but I don’t think I’m cut out for that kind of dancing. Thanks anyway.”

Before he could argue, I threw my backpack over my shoulder and walked out. As I unlocked Bobby’s bike, I could see Marwan scrambling to throw money on the table, but I was down the street before he made it out the door There are men you trust and men you don’t, and there was something sketchy about that little dude I just didn’t like.

Back at Rudd’s, I locked Bobby’s bike to his porch and walked across the gravel road to my trailer I could see Beau through his window, drinking a beer and watching wrestling. I went inside and sat down at my little kitchenette, wondering what tomorrow was going to bring. I could stay and try and reason with Ivan, giving him what money I had, or I could just disappear — but to where? To do what? Although it felt strange to even hear myself think it, the idea of leaving the trailer park filled me with sadness I’d never felt when leaving Christiansburg.

For once, I realized, I was living in a place where the list of things I didn’t hate was at least as long as the list of things I did. I didn’t hate the fact that I shared my walls with no one, thin and aluminum though they were. I didn’t hate the way outsiders avoided our potholed roads that were occasionally blocked by the Mexicans’ work trucks and junker cars, because that meant I didn’t have to deal with anyone I didn’t want to. I definitely didn’t hate the cheap rent. And, though it’d taken me awhile to trust him, I didn’t hate the Arab. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that Rudd’s was the closest thing to a real home I’d ever had, and the Arab was the only person I’d been able to count on in my whole life.

I knew that if it came down to it and I told him what was going on, I would have sanctuary in the trailer park as best he could provide it. I’d watched him pretend not to speak English and stall the inmigradón, the cops, and the dogcatcher long enough for Bill Baldy and Bobby Harvey to hustle folks — and dogs — to higher ground. And when the people from Social Services came to take Judy to a group home, he’d chased them all the way out of the trailer park and up Jeff Davis, spitting and cussing in two languages. “Neek hallak! She already lives in a goddamned group home! What the fuck do you think this is?”

I had no plans to ask the Arab for help, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized I wasn’t willing to take my chances anywhere else. This was where I belonged. Whatever was going to happen would just have to happen here.

A knock at a trailer door after midnight is never good news. Sometimes it’s crack whores, sometimes it’s drunk Mexicans, and occasionally it’s Bobby Harvey coming home to the wrong place after too many sips of Wild Irish Rose. But tonight? Since it was technically tomorrow, it must have been the knock. I took one more sip of coffee and one more drag off my cigarette. At least I would get it over with now, without the dread. It’s the dread that kills you. Well, the dread and the four hundred and twenty-eight dollars in old crack debts that you didn’t make back belly dancing in a diner.

I stood behind the closed door and said a quick prayer of intercession to Jesus, Allah, Iggy, Saleem Hassan, and whoever else might be listening. I hoped that it would be Ivan himself, and not one of his lackeys, so that maybe memories of all the good times might buy me another day or two. Or less cruelty, at least. Not that there had actually been any good times.

I opened the door and looked out, and then down, to see not Ivan but Marwan standing on my step, his low-slung champagne-colored Mazda as out of place as he was in Rudd’s Trailer Park.

“Jamila, habibi, I followed you here. Look, I want to talk to you for real, because you’re making a mistake.”

“There’s no mistake,” I said, angry that he wasn’t Ivan. I had already gotten psyched up for getting killed. “I’m not going to work at your club and I don’t like being followed, so get lost.”

“No, seriously.” He placed his hand on the door to my trailer. “Lemme talk to you because you’re making a big mistake.”

“I think you’re the one who’s mistaken,” I said through my teeth, leaning my weight against the door to keep him out. “I don’t want anything to do with your club. Now get lost.”

“Fuck you. I drive all the way to the Southside to a fucking trailer park to give you a job and you don’t have no manners?” He stuck the toe of his Italian leather shoe against the door and kept it there. “You fucking piece of trash, you should be grateful I even talk to you!” His breath came through the crack of the door, hot in my face, smelling like fruity tobacco. Over his head I could just see the window of Beau’s trailer. Beau stood up slowly from the sofa, looked my way, and turned out his light.

“Fuck you, sharmouta!” Marwan spat once, twice on the steps of my trailer. “You’re not even beautiful! Kelbeh!” After his last insult, he smacked the side of the trailer hard with his open palm. The vibration made the cymbals on the table chime faintly, like a distant call to prayer. Marwan wedged his arm and shoulder into the crack of the door and grabbed a handful of my hair. I leaned back to pull myself loose, but I couldn’t get far enough away and keep the door shut, so instead I tried to twist around and bite him. I had just gotten a good toothhold on his wrist when his body jerked up like a marionette. Through the crack of the door I saw Beau’s big arm hooked around Marwan’s neck. Beau pulled him out of my door, off my step, and up into a standing camel clutch that would have made the Iron Sheik proud.

Beau held Marwan like that for a good thirty seconds, just long enough to scare him, and then flung him loose onto the ground. It was a short fall, broken by an errant cinder block. Every trailer park has them. Unfortunately for Marwan, this one happened to be exactly where it was, and its corner made a sickening thud as it connected with his temple.

Beau and I stood there for a long time. Looking at Marwan, looking at each other, feeling bad, but not as bad as we might have.

Bobby Harvey came wandering through after a while, making his last evening check of the trailer park.

“I didn’t see anything,” he said to us. “Did y’all?”

We both shook our heads.

“Good. Now get on inside before somebody does.”

There are some things that don’t warrant much investigation. A dead strip club manager in a shiny tie on Jeff Davis Highway is one of those things. Particularly if nobody in the trailer park heard anything or saw anything. And, not to gild any lilies, but just suppose there was a crack rock or two in his hand when the police got there, well, these things happen in trailer parks all the time. Such is life. I’m sure the Arabs have a saying about it, and it’s probably close to what my Arab said when he realized that the body he’d been called out of bed for was one of his guys. “Rahimahullah! His daddy should have beat him harder.”

The police took a report, but beyond that there was no investigation to speak of. The man’s wallet was empty. According to the girls at the club, he usually kept about five hundred dollars in cash on him — usually meaning on the nights he didn’t drop seventy-two dollars at a hookah bar on baba ghanoush and shoulder shimmies — so robbery was the obvious motive. The police made a point of coming around and reminding us to lock our doors. They were especially concerned about me, what with it happening right outside my place. I told them not to worry, that the Arab was letting me move to a bigger trailer in the back of the park. Same rent, more room — and with nobody next door, I could play my cymbals as late as I wanted every night.

Now, instead of waiting tables, I dance two nights a week at the hookah bar for better tips than I ever got slinging eggs when it was a diner. Word’s gotten around and the place is usually packed — Muhammad actually pays me now, and he’s even put a picture of me in the window, next to the picture of his famous kebabs. I still clean a trailer for the Arab every couple of months, not so much for the money but just to keep my title and help out. Because that’s what I guess family does. Saleem talks to me in my dreams every now and then, mostly to call me Jamila and ask me when I’m gonna get married. And sometimes he tells me I should eat more, I might blow away.

Untitled by Meagan J. Saunders

Jackson Ward

An uneasy silence engulfed him. Occasionally, he would glance toward the driver’s seat and stare at Janie, who still wore her factory clothes. She didn’t look at him. Sighing, he moved his eyes back to the window. They flew past abandoned buildings, past Ebenezer, where he found God, and Armstrong, the school where he discovered Janie and everything else. Men sat on curbs heading nowhere, complacent. He knew them intimately — knew their stories, their fears, and their delusions. “So you ain’t gonna talk to me?” he asked, finally.

She hesitated. “What you want me to say? You don’t wanna hear what I gotta say. I ain’t ready to talk to you yet.”

“Well, you could say somethin’.” Her eyes narrowed. Still, he pushed the conversation: “How’d you pay the light bill?”

Words flew from her mouth like venom. “You ain’t gotta worry ’bout that, Jayden! I found a way. Not that you helped me. Not that you care.” The silence lasted until she pulled onto Marshall Street. She slammed her car door and pushed past him, through the overgrown grass and the trash people constantly threw into their yard. He followed close behind.

Once inside, he rushed to the back room. He opened the door. Nothing.

“Janie!” he screamed. He found her on the living room floor peeling potatoes into an aluminum bowl. He could barely breathe. “Where’s my piano?!”

She didn’t look up. “We need to do somethin’ ’bout all these holes in the roof. Don’t make no sense. I wake up every mornin’ and start my day covered in—”

He squatted in front of her, lifting her chin until their eyes met. “I said, where’s my piano?”

She smacked his hand away. “You ain’t gonna put your hands on me. You better get that idea out your head right now.” Her voice intensified. “Don’t you dare disrespect me, Jayden. Today is not the day.”

He paced, hands shaking. A lump grew in his throat.

Janie sighed. “Naw, I ain’t sell your piano. Things hard but they ain’t that hard. All these damn holes in the roof. I had to move it.”

“Where?”

“Back there.” He raced to the bedroom, where he saw it pressed against the window. He collapsed beside the doorway, smiling. But his smile didn’t last long. He walked back into the living room, dragging his feet. Janie looked up momentarily, then continued her work.

“I’m sorry,” he stumbled, “guess I overreacted a little. Who helped you move it? Quincy?”

“It got wheels.”

“Guess it does. So how’d you pay the light bill?”

“That was Quincy.”

His eyebrows rose. “Really?”

“I called my mama, Jayden.”

“Oh. You want help with them potatoes?”

She shrugged. Jayden grabbed a knife and sat beside her. They peeled together in silence, the tension building with the rhythm of the wall clock.

Then she exploded. “Where were you, Jayden? You couldn’t call me and let me know where you were?!”

“I was over Charlie’s place.”

“For a week? Tonya told me she saw you over on Belvidere talkin’ to Angelo. Called me all frantic, told the whole neighborhood, making me look like a fool. I rush from work, drive up and down the street tryin’ to find you, beg you to come with me, and for what?”

Jayden gawked but said nothing.

She slammed her knife into the bowl, producing a harsh ring. “You ain’t gonna say nothin’, Jay? You gone for a mutha-fuckin’ week and you ain’t got nothin’ to say?”

“It was only five days.”

Tears fell, but she wiped them away. “Don’t you know how worried I was? What am I supposed to do with you? What am I supposed to do?”

“I’m sorry, baby—”

“You’re sorry?”

The words slid off his tongue as if rehearsed. “That was the last time. I promise. You know I got that big audition comin’ up soon—”

“It’s always the last time. Always for some reason or other.” Their eyes met. “It’s always a lie.”

He dropped the knife and hurried down the hall. He made his way to the piano, tracing the contours of the keys before he pressed down. A minor chord rang out. He exhaled, then modulated. Notes at first, then the sounds became something deeper. Ellington. “In a Sentimental Mood.” After some time, he sensed Janie in the doorway watching him; sensed her anger, her sadness, and her love. He played harder, letting his soul seep through the music. “I’ma change, baby. You wait and see.”

“What are words?” she replied, and walked away.

“Don’t forget I got you booked at the Hippodrome. The gig’s tomorrow.” Quincy mixed bacon into a sea of hard-cooked eggs. He barely swallowed, yellow bits sprinkling an unkempt goatee. He wiped it away, greasing crisp sleeves.

Jayden tried to lift coffee to his lips but his hands shook uncontrollably. Coffee spilled down his shirt before the cup finally made its way to his mouth. He gulped, then placed the cup back on the table. “I’ll be ready.” He smiled uneasily. “Ain’t no thang, you know? I was born to do shit like this.”

Quincy leaned back in the booth and laughed. “Fuck. You can’t even drink coffee, let alone play some keys.” He pointed his fork toward Jayden. “I can’t have you embarrassin’ me, man. I have a reputation.”

“I said I’ll be ready!”

“You got a song, at least? Know you’ve been strugglin’ to find somethin’ that works.”

Jayden wiped sweat from his forehead. “I’ll have some-thin’ by Thursday.”

Quincy dropped his fork on his plate, the metal clanging obnoxiously against the porcelain, drawing the attention of the other restaurant patrons. He moved to the edge of the seat, folded his arms on the table, and looked straight into Jayden’s eyes. His voice lowered. “What happened to you, Jay? What are you thinkin’? You tryin’ to go cold turkey right before the Hippodrome? The Apollo of the South. Ella Fitzgerald, Duke Ellington, and Billie Holliday all played there. You know how many people get discovered.”

“I gotta,” Jayden said defensively. “If I don’t, Janie’ll leave me.”

“So what? You gonna let some bitch destroy your dreams? Never knew you as a pussy.” The bell on the door rang furiously as a young man entered the diner. He wore a button-up at least two sizes too big; still, he stood confidently. Third Street smog mixed with the smell of bacon, but the harmony ended as the door slammed. Quincy’s eyes sparkled. “Tré! Tré, over here.”

The boy approached them briskly, a saxophone case in hand. His hair was conked, he whistled loudly. He looked no older than fourteen.

“Tré, I’d like you to meet Jayden. With some development, I think Tré’s got a future.” The young man extended his hand. Jayden reluctantly took it. “Jay here’s playin’ at the Hippodrome tomorrow night. He’s gonna sit at the piano and stare at the audience. It’s revolutionary.”

“I’ll have somethin’ composed,” Jayden mumbled.

“How’s it comin’?” Tré asked.

“It’ll come.”

“He’s goin’ cold turkey.”

“Damn!” Tré looked around the restaurant nervously. Satisfied, he reached into his coat and took out a small plastic bag. “Here.”

Jayden examined its contents, then pushed it away. “Naw, man, can’t do it. My girlfriend would have a heart attack.”

“And so will I if you fuck this up!” Quincy growled. “It was real nice of Tré to help you out.” He leaned closer. “You’ll stop shakin’ and you’ll get a song. Win-win, you feel me?”

Jayden paused, staring at the bag on the table. He wrapped his hand around the plastic and placed it in his coat pocket.

“Now you’re thinkin’.” Quincy smiled. “That’s my boy! I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow,” Jayden replied. He placed a few dollars on the table. “Thanks for the chance, Q. Nice meeting you, Tré. You’re real generous.”

“Ain’t nothin’,” Quincy replied, finishing off his potatoes. He looked up. “Just don’t mess it up.”

Tré nodded in agreement. Jayden walked away.

He tried to find his song; tried to find that brilliance — that excellence — everyone said he had, but the more he played, the more frustrated he became. He wanted to play more than music — wanted to give the world something deeper than a beautiful arrangement. He wanted to play his life in song. But this tune wouldn’t come, no matter how much he tried. He pressed his fingers hard against the ivory, filling the room with dissonant noise.

Gingerly, hands embraced him from behind. They made their way across his shoulders, then traced his spine.

“You know, when I was a boy, my daddy used to play all night long,” Jayden said. “I’d listen from my bedroom as my Mama cursed and cried, but he’d keep playin’. Like she was just singin’ the words to his songs. After she fell asleep he’d come get me; sit me down on the bench and teach me. Then he’d put me on his lap and play poetry with glazed eyes. I wanted to be him, baby.”

Janie sat beside him, running her fingers down his thighs. “It’ll come. You’re just puttin’ a lot of pressure on yourself, that’s all.”

“I got a reason to be nervous, don’t I? This can make or break me — set us up for life — and I ain’t got any ideas. I can’t stop shakin’ and I’m sweatin’ all the time.” He looked into her eyes, asking for understanding; asking her permission for the easy way out. Instead, she wrapped her arms around him.

“It’s late. Come to bed.”

“I can’t. I ain’t got no melody. No song—”

“Yeah, you do. It’s inside. You just gotta let it go.”

“What if it don’t come in time?”

“Then it just isn’t time. Not the end of the world. There are other gigs, other clubs—”

“Of course there are other gigs and other clubs, but you only get one shot at the Hippodrome.”

Janie moved from the piano bench to the side of the bed and patted the mattress. He hesitated. She frowned. “Look, baby, you’ve been playin’ all day. I don’t think your song is gonna break through tonight.” She grabbed his arm. “Let it go.”

“A little longer, Janie.”

She sighed. “Maybe tea will calm you down. I’ll be back.” She left the room.

Jayden fumbled with the keys a little more before finally giving up. He shifted to Miles Davis’s “My Funny Valentine,” played half the song, then stopped, his muscles tensing. He took the plastic bag out of his pocket and held it, running his fingers down the smooth shaft of the needle. Frantically, he searched for a lighter.

“What you looking for?” Janie asked.

Jayden shoved the bag back in his pocket. “Nothin’.”

“I love it when you play that song.” She handed him a steaming cup.

“Thank you.” He drank quickly. She watched intently from the bed.

“I want you to know that whatever happens tomorrow, I’m proud of you.” She tugged on his arm, gently but with persistence.

Reluctantly, he moved toward her. Without wasting time, she kissed his cheek. She moved her lips down to his neck while unbuttoning his shirt. He ran his hands down her curves. His body shook. He tried to push past it — tried to take control — but there was no use. Janie moved away from him.

“I’m sorry, baby—”

“Don’t be.” She laid her head against the mattress, pulling Jayden to her chest. She wrapped her arms around him, gripping him tighter when the shaking grew more intense. He stayed in her arms all night.

Streetlights illuminated the stone exterior of the Hippodrome. Ivy covered the building; portraits of Jackson Ward adorned its façade. The marquee read: Come See the Stars of Tomorrow. Rain fell like the notes of a sonata, but that didn’t stop people from coming. Smooth lavender music filled the air, blending with the sound of rainwater. On most nights, people only danced on stage. Tonight, however, bodies trickled down the aisles, whiskey perfuming conversation. Women swayed their hips to syncopated music and men smiled because they knew it was all for them. The vast majority dressed casually. Janie and Jayden stood out, she wearing a tight red dress and he dressed in a five-button suit. They grabbed a booth against the back wall.

“This place used to be classy,” Janie said.

“This whole neighborhood used to be classy.” He fiddled with the plastic bag in his coat pocket. “I don’t know what I’m gonna do, baby.”

“Play something old.”

“I need something new.”

“Improvise.”

An announcer in a bright white penguin suit marched to the center of the stage and grabbed the microphone. “Are y’all ready for live music?” he called out.

People clapped and yelled in excitement.

“We’ll start the show in about ten minutes. Until then, enjoy the piccolo, get loose, and relax.”

Janie placed her hand on Jayden’s thigh. “You’re gonna do fine.”

He smiled uneasily. “I gotta run to the bathroom. I’ll be back.” He made his way through the crowd of staggering people. In the haze he saw Tré sitting at the bar. The kid lifted his glass. Jayden nodded in acknowledgment. Once inside the bathroom, he headed straight for the stall. Muted music leaked inside. He took out the bag, mouth watering, hands shaking in anticipation. Thoughts of his father, his dreams, his future overwhelmed him. The music shifted from the jitterbug to classic jazz. “My Funny Valentine.” He pressed his head against the cold metal of the door, fighting. The room spun. Jayden leaned against the toilet, nauseous. He breathed hard into the bowl until the feeling went away. Slowly, he made his way back out of the stall; stared at his blurred image. “I can do this,” he whispered, splashing water on his face. He reentered the club, body shaking once more.

“Jay! Jay, over here!” Quincy sat in a booth surrounded by beautiful women. Grudgingly, Jayden approached him. “You ready?”

“It’ll be the best you ever heard, man.”

Quincy smirked. “Took your medicine, ay?”

“Naw, don’t need it.” Quincy’s smirk turned to a frown. Jayden headed back over to Janie. She took his hand.

“You gonna be wonderful, baby.” Her eyes sparkled, confident reassurance.

He believed her.

But the moment of truth came too soon. The announcer reemerged. People dashed to empty booths and chairs. “I got a real treat for y’all tonight!” he exclaimed. “This first act comes to us from the business management team of Quincy Freeman. Now, y’all know Quincy only works wit the best.” Jayden’s heart pounded through his chest. The world moved in slow motion but the announcer’s words blared with the intensity of a thousand trumpets. “I want y’all to give a warm welcome to that most excellent, that most gifted, the fifteen-year-old sax phenom himself, Tré Andrews!”

Jayden’s world came crashing down. The kid marched onto the stage wearing a light blue suit and top hat that almost swallowed his eyes. He took a bow, and started playing.

Janie rose from her seat. “Come on, baby,” she said softly. “Let’s get outta here.” He followed her in disbelief.

Before they got to the door, Quincy jumped in front of them, sweat dripping from his forehead. He started talking fast.

“Look, man, it’s nothin’ personal. It’s just that the kid is marketable and he got looks and he dances real good. That, and he’s ready. Don’t be mad. It’s just business.”

Hot anger rose from the depths of Jayden’s soul. It took everything he had not to swing his fist. Instead, he reached into his pocket and pulled out the plastic bag. He threw it at Quincy, then walked away.

The two wandered down 2nd Street, silent. Graffiti covered most buildings, others were boarded up. The few businesses that remained opened were deserted, the owners sitting alone, watching people pass by. Janie walked close to the buildings while Jayden dragged his feet on the far edge of the sidewalk, unmoved by the world. Relentless weeds grew in the cracks of ragged streets. Jayden focused on the smooth emerald of each blade basking in the moonlight. The rain had stopped falling.

Janie finally broke the silence. “Look, I look too damn fine not to do somethin’ tonight. I at least want a drink. You wanna get a drink with me, baby?” Jayden shrugged.

They found a scarcely populated lounge, indiscriminate save the red neon OPEN sign on the window. They walked straight to the bar.

“Two rum and Cokes,” Janie said, leaning against the counter. “And make one a double.” Scuffed wood paneling covered the lounge floor. Posters of Charles Mingus, Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, and Thelonious Monk decorated the walls.

Jayden watched a man in a sharp black suit flip chairs onto empty tables; watched him grab a broom and start sweeping. On stage, a grand piano shone in soft blue light.

“Y’all close soon?” he asked the bartender.

“Closin’ now,” the bartender said back. “Last call.”

The man in the suit looked at his watch, then dropped the broom. He took slow, exhausted strides to the stage and grabbed the microphone. He jumped when it screeched. Once the noise stopped, he began: “We got time for one more performance. So if anybody out there wanna do a poem or sing a song or play somethin’ up here, then you’re welcome to it.” He jumped from the stage and went back to sweeping.

“Get up there, Jay!” Janie exclaimed. “You know you wanna!” He hesitated. “Go on,” she persisted.

Slowly, absentmindedly, he made his way onto the stage. He looked through the blue haze out into the audience. He saw his lady. She smiled. Slowly, he sat.

“What ya playin’?” a lady in the audience called out. Slight laughter hummed throughout the room.

Jayden pulled the microphone close. He paused, contemplating. “This is untitled,” he said finally.

He pressed down. Notes at first, then, to his surprise, they turned into something more. He moved between major and minor chords — modulated between his joys and his pains; his past and an uncertain future. First major and he tasted his mama’s lemonade — remembered makeshift water parks on hot summer days and his first kiss. Then minor and he relived cold winter nights with no heat and no love. He saw the look on his daddy’s face, those glassy eyes, and feelings took over. His fingers moved, pumping life into music. They told his story; his life in song.

He asked no questions, simply let go and was. He played an unknown melody, forgotten once he touched the keys. Memories he’d never experienced danced through his fingers, scenarios that had never crossed his mind, but two things were constant, his love and his lady, moving together throughout time.

Then the final chord. He struck it hard and didn’t move. He was afraid to move. The sound resonated throughout the room, blending with the pitter-patter of the rain against the aluminum roof. An eternity before he lifted his hands from the keys. After that, silence. Smoke stood in its place, refusing to rise, and people stared, not breathing. He squinted through the haze and saw his lady. She wiped away tears.

Marco’s Broken English by Conrad Ashley Persons

West End

Meredith Lewis, housewife, mother of three, sat watching her second hour of television on a cloudless morning in Virginia. Dressed in a pink robe with matching slippers, she wept furiously. One of those advertisements, from Oxfam or Greenpeace or some organization like that, ran and ran and implored her to help the starving denizens of some small nation in Africa whose name Meredith didn’t even dare try to pronounce.

The situation there seemed tenuous. She couldn’t tell whether the government was a victim of imposed circumstances, whether they were especially corrupt or just poor. The camera panned across another woeful scene, and more buffalo tears welled as Meredith realized how fragile everything was. The most permanent of fixtures was nothing more than a well-built tent, houses shoddily constructed of canvas, threadbare schools with throwaway books, scantily dressed children in scantily fed bodies, and dust everywhere. Everything was so thin she knew that one brave gust of wind could push this tiny civilization into the sea.

But there was hope. Development could come into existence and be sustained, but it wasn’t going to be easy. It was going to take money. It was also going to take fundamental changes in politics, collective amnesia about colonialism, and faith. But the money was what they needed now. Some busty celebrity came in from camera left and made the final plea. Her chest heaved from grief. The situation was as follows: no food — ribs bravely protruding through skin, thirsty flies who, finding no safe ponds, feast on eyes instead — vague, beige bags of rice flown in from the good guys, seven cents could feed seven children, no clean water here, the heat: unbearable, the wind off the vast sands: bitter, the great rivers: gone dry. Simply put: this was not fair. Meredith Lewis, help us, help us help these children. Cry for the horror of this world, for its depravity, for its interminable thirst for entropy. Help us now.

She thought to light a cigarette, didn’t, and chewed her lips instead. She shuffled to the bathroom for a fistful of tissues. Like the rest of the house, this room was modestly appointed, with a lavender ribbon pattern running from baseboard to ceiling. A bowl of potpourri rested by the sink, a medley of dried purple flowers. She took a fluffy towel, also purple, and used it to cover her face. And suddenly the sweetness of the room, its scent, its color — each piece a cute counterpart to another — it all seemed unbearable: a morbid lightness amongst so much horror.

Staring into the mirror, with its gilded frame, she was utterly confused by her appearance. A housewife all cried out in the suburbs. With no mascara, the tears did little to disturb her face. But they made her eyes raw and red and searching. Were her tears for Africa? Or were they for that feeling, deep in her belly, a sad expectancy that any day now she would find lipstick on her husband’s collar, or that he would rush through the door and make straight for the shower, with no explanation save a liar’s grin?

She had not looked at herself for a very long time. She viewed her face shyly at first, then with immodest intent. Meredith had medium-length brown hair, which was burnished by the naked light. Her green eyes were as flat and clean as a newly clipped lawn. Her cheekbones were substantive, but not pronounced, which made her appearance delicate and accommodating. She had once been beautiful.

She rarely flattered her appearance with the many products she spotted in other women’s cabinets. Meredith’s morning routine consisted of the same old foundation and blush she’d first bought the night before prom. She had always clung to simplicity like some familiar womb. But she could feel things unwinding, felt some loosening that precedes a clamor.

She’d spent time in Lyon looking at churches when she was a student, and had once even skinny-dipped in Interlaken on a dare. But adventure was a short-lived pursuit; she loved the cozy streets of the West End and the circumstances of home best. She had never wanted to be anything other than a mother, and since she had birthed her boys she thought of nothing else. She sighed, said her name, and turned her head from the mirror.

To her left was a window. Pear trees were heavy, threatening to bear fruit. Local university boys walked by all dressed in khaki, their hair wet, books shoved tightly in their cases. There was no breeze; not a single branch stirred.

Stepping into the living room, she realized that half an hour had passed. Could I have spent that much time in dumb contemplation? Or was it like all other days when tasks ate her time like corrosives? The commercial was still running on the television. The number on the bottom had been there so long she feared it would burn its impression into the screen: a 1, an 800, and a reminder of suffering in some part of the world she would never, ever want to visit.

Meredith gave Harry’s sixteen-digit credit card number with expiration date, was promised future mailings and a picture for her refrigerator of a darling black girl, and in exchange received relief, temporary relief from all this shit.

The rest of her day spread before her. She had watched her boys go to the bus long ago, and recalled their three heads in single file as they walked: capped, small, anxious. Harry had left this morning quietly. He tiptoed in the mornings, his thin black socks barely touching the hardwood floors. Lights flickered on and off in quick succession as he made his way from room to room. And the way he left the bed was an elaborate, silent ceremony, sliding off in an awkward balancing act so that he wouldn’t wake Meredith and her desire.

The house was empty and ready for more of her tears. She decided to leave it. She went to her closet and decided to not wear much. She donned a white sleeveless crochet dress that finished just above her knees. She wore white shoes with modest heels. Around her neck hung a cheap Spiga necklace that had the pin and sprawl appearance of a bolo tie. She got into the station wagon and, as if seeing it for the first time, thought it old-fashioned. She drove north to Monument Avenue without thinking, jerking the stick, switching gears, the mindless radio playing songs she already knew, or thought she did. And soon, without any recollection of her journey, she was at Hash and Mash.

Hash and Mash occupied a low-slung building walled with windows and topped by beaten-up brown shingles. The day’s specials were painted on the glass, inventive and banal interpretations of the diner’s muse: the potato. Meredith walked in and heard the loud crackle of a sizzling grill, smelled the sharp hint of fried onions. Will, the manager, had droopy eyes, which looked at her, then directed their gaze to his right, where an empty booth sat. He never moved, just walked patrons to their seat with those eyes, which always seemed on the verge of bored tears. A waitress came and took her order, never looking up from her pad.

Pennants and posters of athletes lined the walls. All the short order cooks wore paper chef hats and grease-stained white polos. The local radio played music but was occasionally interrupted by news bulletins, Harry’s news bulletins. He had been reading the news for seventeen years now, his voice the city’s voice; he had delivered Richmond new presidents, used car sales, and the impending doom of market indicators. It was the voice that sent them to sleep, and got them up at an hour when everyone was dreaming except for maids and truck drivers. Here was Harry, on the radio, only a voice, a faceless bogeyman, as he was at home.

She could hear that voice and imagine him at his desk, a packet of Pall Malls beside him, reading the wires, breathing down a ribbon microphone, all the better to catch his timbre, which was querulous, slightly frightened at what the AP might send him next. Privy to too much war, too many fires, too many car crashes in the night. All of it had made him tired, just as something was making Meredith tired, making her fear that she wanted something more.

Harry never came to Hash and Mash. It was local, and cheap, and he said he thought it was the sort of place where you might run into someone you’d always hoped you’d never run into again. For Meredith, this made it sweet.

Her hash browns arrived like a mountain of steaming flesh. She wished she was wearing sleeves, so that she might roll them up in order to properly enjoy this meal. She devoured it, nothing but streaks of ketchup left on the plate. She left a five-dollar tip, left Will in his dependable stupor, and drove to Short Pump. To paradise.

For Meredith, the American mall — with its anchor stores and boutiques, its cacophony of sing-along music, its sheer level of harmlessness — had always been a world unto itself. For Meredith, this was the ultimate escape. She bought lots of things. First Bouvier glasses too big for her face. Then a dress covered in sequins that made her look like she was coated in the eyes of sea monsters. And finally she went to the counter for a makeover. She wanted to make over her face — make it new again, wipe out that carrot-shaped birthmark beneath her chin, the slight wrinkle that had erupted on her brow, and the permanence of worry that she never asked to be there. And after the formulas and approving looks from the makeup girl, she believed it was gone. She critically gazed into the mirror, and unlike this morning she was utterly pleased. With her face fixed and her donation made, she felt downright cheery: about Africa, about herself, about everything.

She returned to the car and did what she never did: she ventured to the Tavern, a place she hadn’t visited in three careful years. This was a rare treat, but with the way the morning had gone, with this rare and acute sensation all over her like a happy rash, she pulled the wagon out and headed down Broad Street toward a once familiar bar and its reliable disrepair.

Inside the main entrance, she pushed through the set of saloon-style louvre doors, practically made of plywood, weighing nothing. They made a clatter, which meant her entrance was noted by the patrons. Her white dress was the only unsullied thing there, as everything else was worn but handsomely dirty. The bar was full, but there were no groups, no polite chit-chat, only the friendly haggling over life’s minutiae that preoccupies barflies at midday. She found her second booth of the day and sat down.

The music on was known to her; she could not be sure but it sounded like Elvis, the voice muffled by the crowd’s screams, while little girls at home bemoaned the fact that he was only filmed from the hips up. She had two glasses of Pinot Gris and smiled as the wine opened in her mouth like a flower. She sat in the quiet corner and tried her best to think of nothing. When she departed, the bartender stood up and doffed his hat.

She got into her car, turned the ignition, and prepared to head home. The front of the wagon peeked out of the road like a turtle’s head and was smashed, mercilessly and with great violence, by a roadster. The last thing Meredith Lewis ever saw was an old Mustang speeding toward her. She did not see three-by-five shots of her little boys — John, David, and Robert — in her mind’s eye, nor did she see the wrinkled and cavalier face of Harry; she saw red, coming at her all too heavily and too soon and she was dead.

The driver of that red roadster was Marco Dogliotti, on his way to Atlanta to deliver three suitcases to two sweaty men who wore open collars. He had a belly full of vodka, what looked like paper cuts all over his face, and a wrecked auto — but he was alive.

It was just after dusk south of New York City and Marco had the swagger of a man with a country. America, it was like a song on his tongue, each new detail embellishing this embarrassment of riches. Here he was, behind the wheel of a convertible, registered to his many-syllabled name, tumbling down a highway so fast the windows shook, hatless, with his brown, thinning ponytail tousled by the wind.

Route 78 was a four-lane highway. Traffic lights interrupted its flow only every few miles. On each side was the detritus of a country with too much land: gas stations, junk shops, car washes. Otherwise just concrete trying to squash grass — so nothing to visit but a lot to see. The monotonous scenery thrilled him because this was American soil, and American boredom was a new sort of boredom — bigger, more of it to study, somehow pretty in its unnaturalness.

Mother of God, how far am I from Naples? Only two months and he was already forgetting its sooty port and oranges. Its gawking visitors, pickpockets secreted in the very cracks of walls, unruly traffic, and girls’ skirts that never lifted an inch above the knee. Its rituals, its thievery, its charm. Here in the U.S.A. everything was too new, hung too loosely. One moment it all seemed too transparent and simple to read. Other times he saw only tops of icebergs, understood only parts of meanings — things slipped away in translation. He would think e but say or, bow his head in thanks as locals eyed him queerly. He could not yet trust his tongue.

In his car he drank heavily from a thermos. His sunglasses had white frames and had come free with his last tank of gas. He straightened his ridiculous posture and grinned for no other reason than it was morning. This hour was often accompanied by a giddiness that would die just before lunch, that could somehow never be sustained. Today, though, he would find out what this giddiness ate, and would feed it luxuriously: pollute it with rich foods, regardless of the cost. Today he would genuinely try to be happy. For he wanted, very badly, to be a smiling American, and make this place’s incorrigible sweetness a daily habit.

He mouthed the names of gas stations, fiddled with his dial, ignored the speed limit, and waited, as he always waited, for something significant to happen to him, for a simple change of luck. Engrossed, he didn’t see the red light until it was flush upon him.

His foot flattened and the car groaned to a stop. After the shriek of the brakes died down, he heard that rapid and aggressive sort of chatter that reminded him of talk radio. To his left was a bearded man in a big white make. The man rolled down his window and screwed his face. He said something so angrily that spit flew from his mouth and speckled Marco’s closed window.

He was unable to interpret the English fast enough, only picking out words here and there: mother, dumbest, cunt, ugly. He felt unsure and unwanted and as if a door to a very comfortable room was being closed before him. The stranger stared, shook his head purposefully, and finally pulled away.

The shadow cast, his mood soured, Marco pulled to the shoulder of the road and sat quietly. The rearview mirror had been affixed to the front window by glue and wire. But the heat, which made dreamy lines rise from the asphalt, had melted the adhesive, so that the mirror had started to come off, and was attached only by a thin, naked wire. So now the wind pushed the mirror back and forth like a pendulum. In it, Marco saw flashes of his face, seesawing so as to make him slightly nauseous.

It was olive-skinned with slim features. His hair was the color of assorted, processed tobacco and his eyes were doleful but prying. His mouth was tight and dry, as if his face was in pincers. He viewed the reflection in the mirror, and was disappointed that this new country had done nothing for his appearance. He frowned at its smooth, unblemished contours, wishing a scar or some other mark of distinction might emerge, thinking America at least owed him that. He felt that in this nation of so many, he might never be able to distinguish himself. And surely not with a face so plain it was rendered blank.

He started the car again. He drove seventy miles an hour for as long as it took both sides of a Sam Cooke album to play on CD. At the sight of a sign that read, Middletown, he turned off the highway and went to the first bar he saw. It was just before noon but already raucous inside — tight, big-hair riffs came from the juke box, while boys in baseball caps raised hell and screamed in shorthand. A girl sat alone at the bar. She was his type — destitute — so he crawled over and asked if she liked the vodka.

“That and anything else,” she said, so he ordered two, and two again, and it didn’t stop until his vision was so blurred it was like seeing the world through tears.

When they got to the hotel she silently disrobed. He offered her his white bag, and she unfurled a line long and thin as a snow corn. She took the scraps and applied them to her gums, which made her wince, then blush.

Twelve hours later they hadn’t slept. Unaccustomed to attention, she was talkative. He learned that a perm couldn’t tame her hair and she liked waterfalls. She’d traveled. Done a tour of Texas, where her ex lived. Farthest she’d ever been from home. Sick on the plane. In a monotone voice she listed cities visited like exotic but affordable items from the market: Plano, Dallas, Argyle, Cee Vee. He pretended to be impressed, widening his eyes each time a name left her lips. But all he was thinking of was if she would lay him again, and if not, what he might do to keep her quiet.

She said they had a bond, but the bond wasn’t forever, because when the coke ran out so did she. Her possessions looked like trash, but she put them in her purse anyway, and then shuffled out, scrubbing her nose. She left the door open, letting a ruler-straight line of light into the room.

Feeling unclean, he showered, and when he returned there was less money in his wallet than there used to be. Inwardly he shrugged his shoulders: so life would be as life was. This land did not want him but he wanted it, could already taste a new existence. He slept like the dead and promised himself that he would cross the Mason-Dixon the next day.

He woke up wet from the heat. Sometime in the night the air conditioner had given out. The hotel robe was thinner than a paper napkin, but he wore it anyway. He put on a ragged pair of sandals too, and came out of his room looking like a forlorn Jesus, all disciples up and gone, no one but he and the Bible out here in a forgotten-about America, lost counties abutted by lost counties, weak radio signals, shabby concrete, and long highways, the very end of some backwoods called Earth. He wanted to say a prayer but could think of none.

He went out to the car, tiptoeing on the hot asphalt. The key entered the trunk’s lock, pricked the spring, and he heard the satisfying pop. It yawned open, revealing three gray suitcases. One would be innocuous, but three, lined so neatly, sitting so idly — made him think of gravestones in an abandoned field. He staggered back — awed yet again by his smallness and the sheer stupidity of his task. It had sent him north, south, and sideways. They told him to never go in a straight line, to never give the appearance of making sense, to always take the circuitous route of a phantom or an idiot.

He cleaned up in the shower, then returned to his car and drove the speed limit forever. Delaware looked no different to his eyes than Pennsylvania had, and Maryland was but a field of grass. To Virginia then, with a red cardinal on its welcome sign, and the instant and confused surety that he was no longer North.

The buildings were suddenly squatter. There were advertisements for grits, pancakes, and cobblers. A hotel offered rooms for twelve dollars a night. Pines crowded oaks out of the landscape and hawks flew in wide arcs over the crown of his thinning head.

A few hours in and he neared Richmond. He got flustered though, and when 95 and 64 split, he choked. The simplest decisions flummoxed him, and at the last minute he went west on 64. Then came the sense of stupidity that follows such an error. He called himself horrible things. Impatient, he got off the highway. He followed the Broad Street exit and proceeded to drive in circles. Finally he parked his car, preferring to use his feet.

Walking, he came upon a restaurant called Dune, standing two stories tall. Its first-floor windows were closed to the heat, blacked out by plantation shutters. The second floor had French doors that opened onto a short patio, with a sturdy guardrail protecting the diners. He sensed something closed about it: colloquial, clubby, but full of black sheep. He decided that it might be a pleasant place to lunch.

But instead of lunch he had five vodkas with tonic water. The day was clear and the view from the second floor laid the town out like a canvas. He was confused by the sprawl’s repetitiveness, how, in an effort to be neat, people could make things ugly.

He settled into his seat. He settled into the voice of his waitress because it too was a place — a lazy hammock in the sun. The hours passed with his eyes closed not in sleep but in something like mental dawdling.

He felt an angel touch his shoulder and tell him the restaurant closed between lunch and dinner, and so he was asked to leave so that they might clean up. The pretty waitress chatted to him amiably, said she wished he could stay. He heard her but didn’t hear her, for they spoke differently down here, vowels stretched like rubber, the pitch nasal and too sweet.

He left Dune and got into his car. Stationary, he turned the dial and fished out a college radio station. The song was one of the Stevie Wonder numbers from back when he was called “Little Stevie.” The crackle of an old record like fat in a pan. The instruments made noise first and the singers followed. The tune featured gospel-style call and response. Little Stevie lets go an outrageous howl that sends the piano jumping. The engine turned over and purred. He put the car in reverse and swung it to the left real easy. He started to navigate his way through the parking lot. The call comes like it deserves an answer; the singer pleads for assurances. He edged forward at a slow pace and the gravel went crunch underneath. He pulled into the long line waiting to leave the lot. Shifting the vehicle into neutral, he hopped out and rolled the canvas top down. The interior was flooded with light. He pushed the car forward. The response comes: six women, six women with thighs like hams sing a chorus. Finally at the front of the line, he turned his head left to address the attendant. A lanky boy with pimples and a bowl haircut told him that it was five dollars. He went to his wallet and handed over the first thing that his fingers found, producing an enormous tip. He wanted to congratulate himself for this, for having made this kid’s day. The song slows now, not with an abrupt bang but with one of those old-school Detroit fades. Turning right out of the lot, he gathered speed as he crossed over Glenside. The outdoors was all around him. With few cars on the street he felt alone. Then something timidly pulled out on his right-hand side. His foot just could not find the brake, and then the sound of metal going through itself. He had crushed her.

The road is closed and the cops’ lights blaze brightly. Shrill whistles direct traffic elsewhere. The ticket boy says the man slurred, “Good afternoon,” and the Italian is rabid and gesticulating wildly. He is sweating and looks like a tortured, bleeding child. A helicopter makes awful noise overhead. A man with aviator shades looks down and tells the city how to crawl around the accident. There are so many people crying that it is like a wake. But the woman is newly dead and her body is still warm. Three newspapermen drive up in town cars and all smoke cigarettes in the same deliberate way. And the corner of East Broad and Willow Lawn has now become the city center.

In his office miles away, Harry dreams of making love to his secretary, which he has lately had the pleasure of doing. She peeks her head through the door and raises an eyebrow. She’s too young, and her come-hither gestures are unschooled, sophomoric. But she gently rubs her calf against the door and Harry feels like he is breathing pure air, like everything and everyone outside this room is as dour and sluggish as church. She has long bangs and a porcelain face. Her lips are red and easy. But she hasn’t come here to give him satisfaction. She says in a voice that is mock professional that he should go to the newsroom right away, that there is something coming off the wires that needs to make the 6 o’clock feed.

Harry walks over to the wires and sees what is there. There is one scroll of paper, bright yellow. The ink is applied by a machine that runs back and forth over the paper like a cross-cut saw. The effect is that these stories come in line by line, inadvertently making revelations tortuous, overly long. He sees that there has been a car crash. A man and a woman, and the woman is dead. An idea begins to form but tears start to swell in his eyes like blisters and the water washes the page. It is very sunny outside and he suddenly becomes aware of the immense noise of the tiny newsroom. His neck cranes and he looks toward heaven, but all he sees is a coffee-stained ceiling.

Harry gnaws his fingers, says the name of God, and all at once realizes his dirty, fitful prayers have been answered.