12 Bliss Street (8 page)

He took a step back, thinking maybe his arm or hand had strayed into camera range. It was late, very late. Downstairs, Marlina at last was quiet. Asleep, probably. He himself was tired, but he had much more to do.

“Shambhala is about waking up and bringing buddhism into your life. It’s a warrior’s buddhism, inspired by the ancient kingdom of Shambhala, an enlightened society based on wisdom and fearless action. Fearless action. It has a tradition of meditation and bravery combined. I myself went to a meditation center for eleven months and completed five levels of Shambhala training, beginning with the ‘Birth of the Warrior.’”

Chorizo paused, and looked at the girl.

“But you don’t care about any of this,” he said.

*   *   *

Later Nicola would
realize that the smell on the street that was almost like urine was really yeast from the brewing factory across the street. She would realize how close they were to Potrero Hill—only a block away, with projects and a schoolyard in between. There were plants in plant boxes and small stunted trees lining the sidewalk and a few blocks up antique dealers showed their merchandise upon appointment.

After Dave made the phone call they sat like before in the cold upstairs room, not so tired now although it was almost two in the morning. When at last they heard the garage door open, the boy got up and started downstairs. Nicola heard his footsteps going down and another pair coming up, then a pause as they met in the middle of the staircase. They spoke for a minute. The man with one liver said, “I’m not going in, then.”

“She’s still got the blindfold.”

“Is she taped up?”

“Her hands are … are tied.”

“Not her mouth? Why not her mouth?”

Nicola held her breath to hear better.

“Why did you call me?” the man asked. “Christ, you scared me. I thought she was dead or something.”

“She wants to talk to you.”

There was a pause.

“Do you know how stupid you are?” the man asked.

Nicola exhaled and waited. It would feel so good to get out of this chair.

As they walked into the room a bird from next door screeched loudly, and for a second Nicola wasn’t sure who was where; it sounded like maybe the girl got up as the men came in and the different noises competed with each other. She thought she heard heavy footsteps cross the room.

No one spoke for a moment. Nicola tried to guess where they were all standing so she could turn her face toward them.

She said, “Scooter. I thought that was you.”

The bird shrieked again. Nicola almost laughed—she could feel his surprise fill the room. Scooter, her ex-husband.

“Come here,” she said. “Come on, Scooter; undo my hands now.”

She could imagine him standing there weighing his choices. After a moment he came toward her. Even under Dave’s soft cotton shirt her skin was burning, the effect of so much tape coming on and off, and when Scooter untied her hands she reached up to her face and pulled hard at the blindfold. Jesus, thank God, Nicola thought. She was finished with all this. She was finished.

“Nicola,” Scooter began weakly. “But how did you…?”

“The liver story,” she said. “You’ve used that one before.”

“You told her that?” Scooter asked the Daves.

“Plus I know about the grain alcohol in kindergarten.”

“That was first grade. My dad’s still telling the story.”

“Your dad’s a sick man,” Nicola said. She looked around her. The room was larger than she had imagined. She glanced at the Daves, who were crouching by the dry wall staring at her. Dave looked a little surly. And there was Scooter, wearing the same brown overcoat she’d seen that morning—or was it yesterday by now?

“I saw you this morning, you know,” Nicola told him, “at the muni station. What is that coat you’re wearing?”

“I’m sort of in disguise.”

“Well, like everything else that almost worked.”

She felt sorry for him, a feeling she remembered better than anything else but not the feeling that ultimately made her leave him. Scooter felt for his wallet; the gesture was like a surrender. He was a small man, physically jumpy in a way that had been attractive in college.

Dave and Davette were staring at them. Davette stood with her hands dangling at her sides, her spiky hair in a mass over one shoulder, while Dave little by little pasted himself to the one wall: first his heels, then his back, his elbows, his head. Each of his motions seemed designed to look casual.

“Are we still gonna get paid?” he asked.

Nicola felt a spurt of anger. “I don’t think so, Dave.”

“Well, you can’t blame us for trying.”

“I can blame you for failing,” Nicola answered. She didn’t know what annoyed her more: the fact that they kidnapped her or that they were so bad at it. Scooter was watching her with the expression of a man used to conceding the point. He looked even smaller in his large overcoat, and when he sat down his eyes narrowed as if he were ordering the events in his head, still trying to work out how it all had come to this.

“So what’s the story this time?” she asked him.

“It’s more or less more of the same,” Scooter said.

“Money?”

“Pretty much.”

“Well you could have just asked.”

Scooter shrugged. “I thought you’d say no.”

“That you were right about. But hold on—” Nicola turned to Davette. “Are you both really called Dave?”

“Yeah,” Davette said.

“That’s just much too confusing. From here on you’re Davette. Okay? Okay, good. Now listen, Davette, this is the most important thing you’ll do tonight. Get my black bag and take out the address book, which is in the inside pocket—I believe you found it before. Go to ‘P’ and look under ‘pizza’ and call the number I have there, then order the largest pizza you can with tomatoes and anchovies. Got that? Tomatoes and anchovies. And I want one of their cornmeal crusts.”

Davette went off for the purse, her big black jacket making its usual puffy noises as she went, while Dave picked at his nails with his minitool. Meanwhile Nicola could feel Scooter watching her. Waiting for instructions.

So now things were different. Scooter, in fact, was a game she knew how to play. Nicola felt as though sometime in the night she had finally figured out how to get what she wanted. Now she knew. It was not about the situation, any situation, it was who you were—and trusting that. It was
knowing
you could get what you want. And what she wanted was to be the one in charge.

She pulled off her shoes and stretched, making Scooter wait. Here she was, the one in charge. She was in charge now and it felt great. Tonight she’ll sleep in her own bed on the white silk sheets she bought the day the divorce became final. She will wash her face, she will put on her silk jammies, and she will sleep in her own bed. And tomorrow, Nicola thought, I’ll get on with everything else. Davette came back into the room and Nicola checked the purse over quickly but everything was still there: her money, her credit cards, her keys, her picture of Lester.

“Okay,” Nicola said, and she turned back to Scooter. “Now tell me the whole story,” she said.

Eight

The story began
in the usual way: Scooter got tired of what he was doing and wanted to make money faster. He’d been working as a partner in a door-to-door seafood-and-steak operation in L.A. when he met a guy who knew a guy with a dog kennel in Apache Junction, and when the guy he knew headed out that way (actually he was on his way to Tempe to buy or sell or do something with a car), Scooter decided to hitch a lift and check out some races he’d heard about.

“Greyhounds pay better than horses,” Scooter told them. He was sitting in the desk chair, swiveling it slightly with his foot. “The trick is to stay out of the dog cage.”

The Daves were sitting near him on the floor while Nicola stood against the doorframe, drinking a bottle of water she’d found in the half-finished kitchenette. She watched Scooter swivel his chair again, then use one of the levers to adjust the backrest back and forth, back and forth—probably, she thought, without even noticing. Scooter was small but his body was lit with a constant nervous energy that made him seem larger. He had thick, rough hair in a light shade that was not quite blond, and his nose was noticeably long. Still, there was something attractive about him: the way he held his body, his excited interest in each project du jour.

She took a long sip of water. How long had it been, three years, since she’d seen him? Not counting this morning. As he spoke Nicola found herself thinking with no nostalgia about their old apartment above the bicycle shop (now an Asian fusion restaurant) near Golden Gate Park, which they decorated from catalogs—the Danish floor lamp, the futon couch, the mounted posters, a rough jute rug—when the only difference between them and their other coupley friends was that they were actually married. Married! Because that was another one of Scooter’s hot ideas: let’s get married!

Well, at the time it had seemed like it might be fun. At first Nicola imagined life with a visionary, someone surprising and entertaining, but as it turned out all his ideas were about the same thing: money. Once he got someone to pay him in cash, five hundred dollars in tens and fives, and he threw all the bills into their empty bathtub and brought her in: look at that! This was motivation.

“What’s the dog’s cage?” she asked.

“The Saturday night crowd, the house number crowd,” Scooter explained. “It’s hard at first for rookies because there are no pool totals posted on the tote board. You have to choose your race and wait.”

He adjusted the angle of the chair back then swiveled back and forth and back and forth.

“So one night I was talking to one of the announcers just to, you know, sound him out a little because in something like this you want to find an insider. And this announcer let me in on a secret: the dogs run faster when they’re in their favorite box.”

“How do you know which is their favorite?” Nicola asked.

“That’s where the skill lies.”

He smiled and swiveled. Nicola looked at the Daves, who were sitting on the floor like kindergartners looking up at him. Rapt.

She put down her water bottle. “What’s the bottom line here,” she said. “How much did you lose.”

“Wait, let me just finish, it’s pretty exciting. In fact, I would definitely advise you to try this sometime. I found this one dog that was really fast and I watched him for a couple of races. Primogeniture. The races where Primo did well he was in an inside box. So in his last race I went with him in four to seven all and keyed him in with five other dogs for sixty bucks and then I did seven six-dollar keys with Primo on top plus one hundred bucks to show plus the quinella.”

Nicola had never been to a racetrack. “I have no idea what that means.”

“What it means is, when Primo won I got fifteen hundred dollars. Fifteen hundred dollars in thirty point oh two seconds!”

“NFW,” Dave said.

“FW,” Scooter told him.

Nicola looked over at Dave, annoyed. Had he already forgotten that Scooter had tricked him into perpetrating a felony? Her wrists were still burning and she thought there might be something in the corner of her eye, a piece of silk or something from the blindfold, which she couldn’t blink out. Dave was sitting on a strip of carpet looking very rugged with his army haircut and his untied boots and his legs stretched out before him. Part of her wanted to humiliate him, which surprised her—she had no idea she was so retaliatory. On the other hand, she was also willing for him to wait around until it was time to do her tedious chores.

She looked at her watch. “You should pick up that pizza now,” she told Dave.

“But I want to hear the end!”

“The end is, he lost it.”

“Not lost, not lost, because what I’m doing here is developing a system,” Scooter said. “I just need to plug up a couple of holes.”

He hadn’t changed, she could see that. She asked him how much he lost. The whole fifteen hundred?

“Actually,” Scooter said, “and this I admit was another mistake, I borrowed some money too because that’s how sure I was about Primo, I was thinking this could be it for the year, no more door-to-door lobsters.”

“How much?” Nicola asked again.

“You know, not much, I don’t know, about twice that again, or what’s that come to, maybe four times. But the people I borrowed from, they’re pretty cool. It’s a small business, family-owned. Right now they just need the interest, you know how that works,” Scooter told her. “I have to show my good faith. So I thought, cool, I’ll get like six hundred dollars and that will tide them over a while. I thought of you right away. Only I knew that with you the bank was closed. I knew that. So I thought I’d just…”

“‘Borrow’ a little something?”

Scooter stopped swiveling and smiled at her. “Exactly! But I couldn’t actually, you know, do the kidnapping myself. For one, you’d know my voice. Plus I’m too nice.”

“Hey, we’re nice,” Dave protested.

“Technically,” said Nicola, “I don’t think that’s true.”

“I thought we did a pretty good job.”

Nicola stared at him. “Dave, you failed.”

“We learned something, though,” he said.

Scooter caught Nicola’s eye and smiled, and Nicola smiled back, thinking one of the things she always liked about him was how he had absolutely no sense of irony. He was misguided but upfront. He was not cynical, not usually. Once just before she left him Nicola found one of his lists:

New house with new appliances (alarm systems etc.)

Flat-screen TV

More olives, mangoes, avocados, organic fruit (organic OJ)

Exercise room (hardwood floor)

Pool? Outdoor/indoor?

Child’s name: Griffin

It was a list of things he wanted. Why did she think he was idealistic? He was practical and literal, and in many ways she was the same, although it was his perceived difference that had originally attracted her.

Nicola sent the Daves out for the pizza, then she went around the room opening the heating vents. The room grew noticeably warmer. Meanwhile Scooter swiveled around in the desk chair and played the backrest back and forth. No doubt cooking up some new plan, Nicola thought.