Passenger (8 page)

“I don’t know.”

“Seriously,” Clarence says, “you think you’re really a governmental spy?”

“Sure,” I say, watching the row homes shuttle past the window, “why not?”

“Then we best be careful.  You dig?  Keep a lookout.”

“A lookout for what?”

“For the peoples who might be out there looking to kill you, dog.”

We spend the afternoon loading junk from different porches into the bed of Clarence’s pickup.  The porches are all residential and they are scattered throughout the city.  Often, there are people outside while we load the truck, and they offer us some coffee and, once, a plastic bag of potatoes.  They all seem to know Clarence.  Clarence works hard, whistling while he loads the truck, and we are both sweating and sore by the time we arrive at the Charles Street Salvation Depot and Auction Center.  It is an eclectic little shop with headless mannequins dressed in sequined harem garb and an old-fashioned bicycle with an oversized front tire in the front window.  Clarence winks and pulls the pickup down a brick alley that runs alongside the shop.  Someone has sprayed the phrase
nigel sweeny lives along the brick in bright orange letters.  The pickup truck bucks and sputters and dies.  We climb out and begin the arduous task of relocating the junk from the bed of the truck into the store.

Inside, the place is like a schizophrenic’s nightmare—a narrow corridor cluttered with relics of times forgotten, with papier-mâché parrots lazily twirling by lengths of catgut tacked to the ceiling tiles, with ceramic cats placed strategically about the floor like landmines, their eye sockets aglitter with emerald jewels.  Crossing through the corridor, I pass into the store itself, and I am immediately overcome by the mustiness of the place.  I get the feeling I’m breathing in the dust from an Egyptian tomb.  An enormous rainbow-colored parachute covers the ceiling, bowing slightly at its center.  Bric-a-brac gnomes patrol various shelves.  The hide of an alligator or crocodile—I cannot tell which—is splayed and pinned to one wall, directly below the mounted head of a rabbit with antlers.  A desk crowded with papers, books, a skateboard, a gold-leaf lamp in the shape of a nude woman, and a coonskin cap is shoved against one wall.  Behind it stirs a parchment-faced man in his seventies with great tufts of white hair sprouting like kudzu over his ears and large, roaming blue eyes.  A pair of suspenders is draped over his shoulders, but they hang loose, flapping against his ample belly and not affixed to his pants.  Much like everything else in the place, those suspenders serve no purpose.  Clarence sets down a bookcase he has carried from the bed of the pickup truck and introduces the proprietor to me as Wiley Jum.

“Jum,” says Clarence, “this here’s Moe. Short for Mozart.”

“H’do,” Wiley Jum growls, bobbing his head like a marionette.

“Moe here, he’s a governmental spy, Jum. Had his mind wiped clean after his las’ mission and now he’s workin’ for me.”

“Hmmm,” says Wiley Jum.

“How ’bout that, Jum?  Got me a governmental spy on the payroll.”

“Hmmm.”

As we continue stacking items toward the rear of the shop, Clarence elbows me in the ribs and says, in a half-whisper, “This some racket, eh, Moe?  I got fools payin’ me in cash to haul their crap away and Wiley Jum here payin’ me to stock his showroom.  You can’t beat a deal like that with a stick, Moe.”

“Who buys this stuff, anyway?”

“People who prob’ly make more money selling it somewhere else.  Making more money than me.  I ain’t sayin’ I’m the smartest cat on the food chain, you dig?”  Clarence wipes his nose on his sleeve.  “But even if they buy it, they’ll put it out on the curb eventually, and old Clarence will come and haul it away all over again.  See this lamp?  I done hauled this lamp three times already.  Some goddamn lamp.”  He smiled like someone who’d figured out the secret of life.  “Now
that’s
the racket, boy.”

There is a rocking horse, a grandfather clock, a collection of old bicycle tires hanging from a peg in the wall…

It takes a good twenty minutes to relocate all the junk from Clarence’s pickup truck to Wiley Jum’s shop.  In all that time, no one enters the place. When we finish, Clarence slouches against the cluttered desk while Wiley Jum digs around in an antique cash register with stumpy fingers.  Wiley Jum counts some money in a language that does not sound like English then fits Clarence’s hand with a fistful of bills.

“Right on,” mutters Clarence.

Through a labyrinth of junk, I see an old upright grand.  It is slouched in one corner, bookended by an old Naugahyde sofa and a plaster bust of the Venus de Milo, and burdened with time-dulled knickknacks, busted lampshades, dusty hardcover books with frayed corners, and what appears to be the speaker horn from an old phonograph.  I negotiate the labyrinth of junk, using the arms of coat-racks and the backs of dining room chairs as handholds, and arrive at the keyboard like a Sherpa at the crest of a Himalayan mountain.  The keyboard is powdered with bone-colored dust and absent a number of important keys.  I crouch and blow a stream of air over the keyboard, causing a sandstorm of yellow dust to billow and shimmer around my head.  There is a circular stool on rolling casters off to one side.  I roll it before the keyboard—it squeals and rattles—and settle down on it.  My hands lift, poise, my fingers splayed and strong, and I begin to play.

I begin with Beethoven’s
Moonlight Sonata
then segue into the melody of Dave Brubeck’s “Once When I Was Very Young.”  The higher keys refuse to cooperate (and some are just missing) but the melody is all there.  I play it simply and professionally, yet I do not know how I know it.  I cannot remember when I have learned these ballads—when I had first listened to them on a record or perhaps live in concert somewhere—but I know them as if they are my own.

After a few bars of the Brubeck number, I pause for a measure with my fingers holding down the low octaves, the deep-voiced resonance echoing in the cluttered little shop. Then I scale to middle-C and continue, this time playing the unknown, sad little melody I played that night at the Samjetta while Patrice watched from across the barroom.  That sad yet happy number.

When I finish, the last of the notes seem to simmer and die down all around me.  I can almost hear them fading into the floor.

Clarence is clapping at the other end of the room.  Wiley Jum looks cockeyed and bored behind his counter, the flaps of his unhooked suspenders bowing over the ample hillock of his gut.

“Check you out,” Clarence says as I get up and tread back through the maze of junk.  “I didn’t know you could play like that.”

“Yeah,” I say, “I’m full of surprises.”

“He’s something, ain’t he, Jum?”

“Hmmmm,” says Jum.

“An’ he’s workin’ for me.”

“Hmmmm.”

“Hey, Mozart,” Clarence says.  “Hey…”

But I am no longer paying attention to Clarence.  I am focused on a single item tucked between a filthy-looking upholstered armchair and a highboy that could use a good refinishing.  A small little thing, something I did not see until now…

Clarence comes up behind me, pokes me in the ribs.  “What’s up, Moe?  Find somethin’ else you like?”

“How much is this?” I ask, pointing to the item.  It is a gumball machine—a glass fishbowl atop a two-foot-tall iron pedestal painted bright red.  The fishbowl is only half-full of the small, colored gumballs.

“Hey, Jum!” Clarence yells.  “How much you want for this thing?”

Wiley Jum says something that still does not sound like English, although Clarence apparently comprehends.

“Twelve bucks,” says Clarence.  “You like gum, Moe?”

“Tell him to hold it for me.  I’ll come back and get it when I have the money.”

“Get it now,” Clarence says, and stuffs a wad of bills into the breast pocket of my shirt.  “Fifty clams.  Thanks for the help, Moe.  Some good biceps on them scrawny arms.”

I purchase the gumball machine and lug it back to Clarence’s pickup.

“You like gum, Mozart?”

“I don’t know, Clarence.”

Clarence laughs.  “You sure a strange cat, Moe.”

We drive through Mount Vernon and negotiate around the Washington Monument toward a series of fire-scarred tenements farther up the block.  We make a few more stops, depositing the last of the swill we collected all morning, and just when I think Clarence will drive me home, we pull up outside a Chinese restaurant on Calvert Street called Fung.

“Come on,” Clarence says, already climbing out of the truck.

“Where are we going?”

“Inside.  Take your gumball machine, too, ’less you want someone to glom it, man.”

So, like a fool, I lug the gumball machine into the Chinese restaurant.  Heads turn as we enter.  We must look like quite the pair.  But they seem to know Clarence—a Chinese man in a tall chef hat waves to him and Clarence waves back and actually executes a pretty decent moonwalk—and they soon turn back to their work.

“Come on,” Clarence says, and saunters toward the back of the restaurant, ducking beneath the lazy swing of paper lanterns.

There is a narrow passageway covered by a drape of oriental tapestry at the far end of the restaurant.  Behind the tapestry, a set of stairs files up to a second floor steeped in shadow.  Overhead, lights flicker in their casings.  It is like the set of some bad horror movie.  I follow Clarence to the second floor, the pedestal of the gumball machine thumping against my shins with each step.  When we reach the top, we are standing before a long corridor veiled by a beaded curtain.  I am out of breath.

“Clarence—”

Clarence shushes me.  Out of nowhere, the junkman has adopted a piety typically reserved for monks.

I pursue Clarence through the beaded curtain and down the corridor.  There are plaster molds of dragons fixed to the walls.  A door at the end of the hallway stands half open, emitting a warm tallow glow into the hallway.  Clarence goes directly through the door, easing it all the way open with one hand, and I follow, the gumball machine still banging against my legs.

It is a small, dark room, lighted only by the shifting, dancing glow of a television set.  A slim, young-looking Chinese girl sits on a futon watching MTV, the volume turned all the way down.  Posters of various pop idols fight for space on the wall above her head.  She is dressed in sweatpants and a loose-fitting Backstreet Boys halter-top through which the vague nubs of underdeveloped breasts protrude.  Her hair is long and as black as a sunless galaxy, straight as a razor and parted perfectly down the middle.  Her features—her body—are delicate to the point of fragility.

“Hey, Fortune Cookie,” Clarence says, and the words sound nearly blasphemous.

The girl turns and looks first at Clarence then at me.  I am shocked to see she has a dead eye, milky and gray and turned toward the ceiling.  She might be fifteen years old.

“Jesus,” I murmur.

“Sit down,” Clarence tells me, then immediately drops to an Indian-style position on the carpet himself.

I set the gumball machine down and follow suit, folding my long legs under my buttocks.

“I know you a skeptic, Mozart, but Fortune Cookie, she can tell you things.”

“Clarence…”

“Come on, now.”

“Hello,” says the girl.  Even with that one word, I can tell she is heavily accented.  “Name.  Please.”

“I don’t know,” I tell her.

“That’s the problem,” Clarence interrupts.  “He don’t know who he is.  We was hoping you could tell us something, baby.”

“Hands,” says the girl.  She leans forward on the futon and holds out both her own hands, palms up, one on each knee.  “Please.”

I extend my hands and, somewhat hesitant, place them in the palms of the girl’s. The flicker of the television against her skin makes her look translucent.  I cast a glance at the television and see a bunch of teenagers in bikinis frolicking around a pool.

“Heavy,” she says.  “Went.  Go.”

“I’m sorry, I don’t…”

“Went,” she says.  “Go.”

I look at Clarence for help, but the junkman is watching the television, enthralled.

“Went.  Stay.”  The girl turns over my left hand.  In the glow of the television set, I can see the address still written on the palm.  “Find.  Go.  Stay.”

“Aw,
shit,”
Clarence snickers, grinning at something on the television.  “Oh, hell, you see that, dog?”

“Stay.  Find.  Go.  Went.  Heavy.”

“I don’t—” I begin again.

“Find.  Find.”

She draws my hand up to her face so she can examine the address more closely.  Her one good eye scrutinizes my palm while the other floats toward the ceiling.  A coy smile overtakes her lips and, despite the dead eye, the girl is suddenly beautiful.  She brings the hand even closer to her face and I anticipate her nibbling on my fingers.  But instead, she forms an O with her mouth through which she pushes a tiny pink tongue.  She brings the hand nearer still, until the tongue hovers just above my palm.  I am aware my hand is shaking.  Sweat has broken from my armpits and rolls down the nape of my neck.  The television light flickers in her dead eye.

“Believe,” she whispers.

That little pink tongue sets down momentarily in the center of my palm.

The world seems to stop.

“Oh
shit!”
Clarence shouts, slapping his knee and bursting out in a laugh.  He’s hysterical over the television show.

Then: a Martian gibberish of jumbled Chinese shouts up from downstairs, to which the young girl holding my hand readily replies in a foreign tirade of her own.  She sounds like a spoiled child shouting at her mother.  And maybe she is.

Nonetheless, the moment is broken.  The tongue has retracted and the young girl drops my hand like a dead fish.  Wide-eyed, I stare up at her—and she smiles at me.  
Not fifteen,
I think.  
More like twelve, maybe thirteen.

She says, “Go.”  She says, “Backward.”

I shake my head.  “I don’t understand you.”

“Backward,” she says.  “Fine.  Fine.”

Two minutes later, Clarence is driving me back to the St. Paul Street apartment, mostly listening to the radio and playing percussion on the steering wheel.  When we pull up out front, Clarence doesn’t shake my hand or smile or clap me on the shoulder or anything.  Clarence only bops his head to the music as I open the passenger door to climb out.