Fifty Grand (25 page)

“You know what I’m talking about?”

“
Sí,
it is fresh in today.”

“Great,” Paul said, and with a big show he reached into his sweats, produced his wallet, and gave me a twenty-dollar bill. I put it my pocket and as I turned he patted me on the ass.

I turned again, furious.
“Señor!”

Paul grinned. He looked like a Yankee in a Cuban newspaper cartoon.

“Hey, don’t
señor
me. Come on, you’re not bad-looking, María, I won’t take it for free. You wanna drop by this afternoon?” Paul asked.

“I don’t understand.”

“Sure you do. Esteban says we can get anything we want.”

“Ah, no. You are mistaken. I am not one of those girls,
señor,
” I replied.

He frowned and then nodded slowly. “Ahh, I see what you’re saying. Look, it doesn’t have to be anything formal. Just come by, you don’t even have to tell Esteban, this could be just between you and me. Ever tried that fucking Jap ice? Blow your mind.”

“No,
señor
.”

I could tell that Paul wasn’t used to getting no for an answer. All residue of his smile faded like the last ration of condensed milk in the coffee cup.

He leaned close, put his hand behind my neck, squeezed slightly. “I’ll make it worth your while,” he whispered in my ear.

“
Señor,
I have to—”

Paul tightened his grip. “More than worth your while.”

The curve of the staircase. Jack’s voice. Paul’s breath. The hold music coming from the phone.

Lightness.

Nausea.

The lipstick I’d put on for Jack, not you.

His fingertips greasy like yucca plant, his breath closer.

And I didn’t want to hit him, I just wanted to dissolve, to slide out of his grip, down through the carpet, down through the floor . . .

“Seriously, you and me and that Ice Nine, greatest fuck you’ll ever have—”

“Hi, sorry about that, Paul. Paul, are you there?” the voice on the phone said.

Paul let me go. When I got outside I crumpled the twenty and threw it away.

“Cabrón,”
I said, and barring some surprising development with Mrs. Cooper either Esteban or Mr. Paul fucking Youkilis was going to be giving me a lot more than twenty fucking dollars.

A
bus stop. Mountains to the west and east. A spear of cloud in a cobalt sky. The road a straight line running through woods on either side of a broad valley. The outskirts of Fairview to the south, nothing but forest to the north. Forest all the way to Canada.

The sound of a chain saw.

I have changed again. This time black jeans, a white blouse, and a blazer that Angela left behind. I have combed my hair and taken the slump from my body language.

Like Jack, I too will be performing.

From the direction of Fairview the bus comes.

It stops but the driver doesn’t open the door. He points at his watch and mouths the word
early
.

Sí, amigo,
and if I were one of those tall trophy wives on Pearl Street—

Not that they’d ever ride the bus.

A sound behind me. A Mexican laborer carrying sticks. He puts them down, walks a little into the forest, and relieves himself against a fir tree.

“Come on,” I mouth to the driver but he shakes his head.

Oh, America, you’re making it too easy for me.

Seconds go by. The cool sun. The idling bus. The sound of streaming piss.

When it’s exactly five minutes past, the driver pushes a button and a compressor releases its hold on the door.

A hiss of air. The smell of AC, coffee, people.

The laborer catches my eye. An older man. Not his first time over the border. I suddenly see his whole trajectory: a crossing in Juárez, a night journey through west Texas; a lecture in vulgar street Spanish from Esteban or a punk overseer just in from East L.A.; and then work all day until the sun goes down. Sleep in the Wetback Motel or some dive in Denver, up and work again.

A look passes between us.

A look of recognition.

Life is hard.

No fucking kidding.

The man nods. I nod back.

“Gittin’ in, miss?” the driver asks impatiently. I step onto the bus and leave five quarters. Exact change. I don’t wait for the ticket. I walk to the last row and take a seat. Six or seven passengers. I see them but I don’t see them. They don’t see me, either. Who does ride the bus in this town? Kids, DUI repeat offenders, foreigners. The door closes, the clutch slips, we shudder forward.

Ten minutes pass. Houses appearing through gaps in the trees.

I look for numbers on mailboxes. I spot 229 almost immediately and hunt for a way to stop the vehicle. I see a cable that runs along the window. I pull it and a bell rings and the bus comes to a halt at the next stop, a full kilometer up the road.

I stand, walk to the front.

“Thank you,” I say to the driver.

“Uh-huh,” he replies.

I exit. The bus moves away.

Back to 229. A two-story with four or five bedrooms, set off the road. Wooden deck running all the way around it, rusting iron sculptures littering a small garden. The trees big and oppressively close.

The path. The porch. Neat piles of raked golden leaves. A knocker shaped like a border collie’s head. I rap it. Clunk of boots. Door opens. Young man, twenty-five, jeans, black sweater, pale Asiatic features, a suspicious look. Huge. What do they put in the water out here?

“We never contribute to solicitors,” he says.

“I’m from Great Northern Insurance, I’m here to talk to Mrs. Cooper, if I may,” I state quickly.

The man frowns, hesitates, opens the door wider. “Is this about the accident?” he asks.

“Yes.”

“You better come in.”

The house is dark, cool, and smells of vinegar. Mahogany paneling, stone tiled floors, a few more of the ugly metal sculptures. I follow the man into a small cluttered living room. Hummel figurines, crystal animals, Indian tapestries, a beautiful worn rug hanging over the brickwork at the chimney, Chinese-style screen prints on the other walls. An oval ball in the middle of the mantel.

“My mother,” the man whispers, obviously referring to a white-haired woman sitting in front of a very large TV. A quiz show is on, people jumping up and down.

“I’m Jimmy,” he says.

“Inez Martinez,” I say, offering him my hand.

He shakes it firmly and quickly lets go.

“Mom, there’s a lady here to see you about the accident,” the son says. He repeats the statement but the woman is rapt in the show. This happens two more times and finally Jimmy resorts to turning off the set with a remote control.

Mrs. Cooper looks in my direction. She’s a seventy-year-old Chinese woman in a beautiful blue floral dress. Trim, neat, tiny. She has an ethereal quality about her that sometimes you find in the dying or in junkies.

“Mom, there’s a lady here to see you,” Jimmy says.

“I was watching that,” Mrs. Cooper protests.

Jimmy shrugs and rolls his eyes at me.

Over to you, Mercado.

Gentle voice. Fake smile. “Mrs. Cooper, I’m Inez Martinez from Great Northern Insurance,” I say, enunciating the words the way they taught us in English elocution class—our goal seemingly to sound like American actresses from the 1930s.

“Yes?” Mrs. Cooper says, looking at Jimmy as if she’s being sold down the river or carted off to that nursing home her son is always going on about.

“I’m eighty-one and I’ve never had an accident,” Mrs. Cooper says.

“Eighty-one? I thought you were in your early seventies,” I tell her, truthfully. With Americans, I realized, it was very hard to tell.

Mrs. Cooper smiles.

“Would you like anything to drink, Miss Inez?” Jimmy asks.

I can’t resist. “Do you have any orange juice?”

American orange juice is light-years from the ersatz stuff they pedal in Havana.

“We’ve got some fresh-squeezed,” Jimmy says. “Is that ok?”

Fresh-squeezed orange? It’s like breakfast with one of Ricky’s high-powered friends.

“That would be perfect,” I reply.

Jimmy smiles. “I got this new machine for squeezing juice.”

“Very nice.”

“A present. Little bonus we all got. I work for Pixar.”

Obviously Jimmy is trying to impress me, but I don’t know what Pixar is.

“Pixar, very impressive,” I tell him.

“We’re setting up a studio in Denver at the old Gates Plant. Us and Redford. You know, Sundance. I’m not one of the creative ones, but, you know, we all do our thing—”

“What is this all about?” Mrs. Cooper wonders, looking at me sharply.

“Madam, I represent your former insurance company—Great Northern Insurance, I’m a claims investigator. We’re looking into an accident that you had on May twenty-sixth of this year,” I say.

“I’ll get that orange juice,” Jimmy says and slips out.

“What accident?” Mrs. Cooper wonders.

“The accident that occurred on May twenty-sixth, when you were driving your Mercedes,” I say with a mild panic—I couldn’t have screwed up the names, could I?

Mrs. Cooper shakes her head. “I wouldn’t call that an accident,” she says.

“Is there anything wrong?” Jimmy asks, coming back with a glass of orange juice.

“Nothing wrong at all, this is just routine,” I say with a reassuring smile.

“Mother admitted fault and they told us that it wouldn’t be a problem,” Jimmy continues.

“Oh no, it’s nothing to worry about, I’m only here to get the details of the accident, this doesn’t affect the claim in any way. In fact, confidentially, I can tell you that the check has already been cut. But for anything over ten thousand dollars we need to interview the claimant in person, it’s just our policy.”

Jimmy nods. It sounds plausible, and once you tell people that money is on the way that’s generally all they can subsequently think about.

“Mrs. Cooper, if I could bring you back to the afternoon or evening of May twenty-sixth, 2007.”

Mrs. Cooper still isn’t sure, though, and looks at her son for a prompt.

“Go on, Mother, tell her about it,” Jimmy says. “It’s all right.”

“Well, now that I think about it I do remember a little. There was still snow on the ground. It was a terrible winter, did they tell you that? We had a terrible winter up here, seven storms in seven weeks. One of the worst ones I can remember and I’ve been here for fifteen years,” Mrs. Cooper says with a soft and not unpleasant Chinese accent. The Chinese apparatchiks I knew in Cuba all spoke in harsh, clipped, imperative tones.

“Can you understand her, Miss Inez? Mother’s from Shanghai. Dad met her just after the war, he was an airman, the Flying Tigers. English isn’t her first language.”

“I can understand her perfectly,” I say with another reassuring smile. I give him a little nod as if to say,
And aren’t you great, Jimmy, looking after your widowed mother—the things you must have had to put up with all these years
. A lot to convey in a nod, but I do my best.

Jimmy returns the smile, completely warmed to me now. He walks to the mantel, picks up the oval ball, and begins tossing it from hand to hand.

“Go on, Mom, tell her,” Jimmy says. “Spill the beans.”

“I was coming back from the market in Vail,” Mrs. Cooper continues.

“You drove all the way to Vail to do your shopping?” Jimmy interrupts, shocked.

“No, no, of course not, but they don’t have a Chinese market in Fairview. Where else am I going to go, Denver?”

“You can get everything at the deli on Pearl Street. Mr. Wozeck—” Jimmy begins.

“Mr. Wozeck is a robber baron who charges an arm and a leg for—”

A brief conversation ensues in Mandarin before Jimmy turns to me and makes a slight solicitous bow. “Miss Inez, excuse us.”

“Not at all.”

“You don’t know, Fairview has really changed in the last few years,” Jimmy says.

Mrs. Cooper takes up the theme. “Oh yes, the prices in those stores on Pearl Street and Camberwick Street are preposterous. And they never have anything I want. Expensive delicatessens. Import stores. No, no. There is the 7-Eleven, but that’s in Brown Town. I wouldn’t go there. Old woman like me. No. You see the movie stars . . .”

I can see that I’m going to have to bring her back to business. “Now, Mrs. Cooper, this is important. At the time of the accident can you remember what road you were on?” I ask.

“What road I was on?”

Mrs. Cooper had not filed a police report and she hadn’t told the garage where the accident had taken place. This, therefore, was the key question. From this answer all things would flow. “If you could try to recall where the accident happened, I’ll be able to put it in our report and get the claim resolved as quickly as possible.”