First You Try Everything (18 page)

“OK. Let's get down to business,” Rocky said. “What
are your questions?”

What were her questions? For a moment her mind was
utterly blank. She looked back at the black glass building before which a woman
in a red coat paused on the sidewalk. The woman wore white mittens. Evvie looked
at her and asked, “When you kidnap people, you never, ever have a loaded gun. Am
I correct?”

“Might as well be a plastic water pistol,” Bruno
says. “We don't play with fire, Starshine.”

“We hate guns,” Rocky added. “We hope you're not an
NRA supporter ignoring the plight of the ghetto kids?”

“Of course not,” Evvie said. “I wish the NRA would
go fuck themselves.”

Bruno and Rocky laughed at this, turning toward
each other with eyes held wide.

“So how did you get into this business?”

“I was waiting for you to ask,” Rocky said. “And I
understand that you might want nothing to do with this when I tell you the how
of it in a nutshell.”

“OK.”

“Cards on the table. I'm a felon. Served time.
Twice.” He nodded his head to emphasize the truth of it.

“For?”

“Drugs! You could've guessed that now, couldn't
you? You're a smart young woman, I can see you putting two and two together, I
can see you looking at my eyes and knowing I'm just the kind of person who would
want to go exploring mentally. Just the kind of person who might hear that drugs
open a window to reality. Which of course they do. And when you see
reality
, you can hardly bear the colors or the truth.
But seeing reality happens to be quite illegal in this land of ours, and a
robocop threw me in the brig. Problem is, you get out of the brig, you go for a
job, and the man says,
I don't think so
.
I think you flushed your life down the shitter, son!
Excuse my language.”

“And you, Bruno?”

“I was Rocky's cellie.”

“We weren't doing anything together.”

“We were brothers, talking through the nights.”

“That's right.”

“And you did drugs, Bruno?”

“I'm afraid I drank. One too many times, in all the
wrong places with all the wrong faces.”

“Don't withhold,” Rocky said, turning to Bruno, his
chin lowered down. “Don't withhold a damn thing. We learned you can't do that.
Just
tell
it like it is.”

“Well, I got in a fight. In a bar. And I was
ramified, and broke some glasses, and one man had to get stitches, and next
thing I know, I was getting me a steady diet of brake fluid.”

“Brake fluid?” Evvie said.

“Brake fluid. Drugs they pump into you when you
spend those special months in the brig.”

“Brake fluid,” Evvie said.

“I never needed any, but they shot me up anyhow,”
said Rocky. “Like a vaccine just in case. If anything, I needed a good
counselor, seein' as I grew up homeless.”

“You did?”

“From third grade on, it was mostly an old brown
Chevy I called home sweet home,” Rocky said. “Parents were addicts. But I
educated myself.” She saw he was rolling himself a cigarette.

“Rocky's got a high IQ.”

Rocky narrowed his eyes on the front windshield.
Evvie watched him closely. In profile too he was somehow intensely familiar. His
profile was as familiar as the front of his face.

“Well, I do have that, but so do a lot of folks.
What you'll really notice most is I'm a creative entrepreneur. As is Bruno. I
told Bruno a man can have all the smarts in the world and still be a failure if
he doesn't understand people. If he understands people, he can be a creative
entrepreneur.”

A silence fell. She thought of Rocky the homeless
kid. How in third grade, the other kids would've started whispering,
He lives in a car.
She saw his mother dragging him
into a public restroom, holding him upside down at the sink to wash his hair,
then standing him in the sink to wash his feet.

“In any case, what else do you need to know?”

“Well, a lot,” Evvie said.

“Ask away,” Bruno said. He had a thick, baby-pink
bottom lip that didn't fit the rest of his face.

“How much does something like this cost?” Evvie
said.

Rocky laughed. “Something like this? There's
nothing like this, miss. There's only this.”

“We saw a need, and we filled it. There's no
competition. We believe in helping people in creative ways is all.”

“And the cost?” Evvie said. She could feel they
were stalling. They looked at each other. Were they trying to decide how rich
she was? Did everyone get a different price?

“Don't you have a set price?”

“Sure we do.”

“Then what is it?”

“Two grand.”

“Well, thanks anyway. That's out of my league.”
Actually, she'd been imagining this was the price. But now it seemed outrageous,
as did her presence in the car. To even consider such a thing! She reached for
the handle. She would walk through the cold and forget about these two. Forget
about the whole thing.

“One grand up front. The other you pay over time.
One lady took three years,” Rocky said.

“We understand how it goes. We been around the
block. I myself had to stand in line for food stamps years ago, and my ex-wife
and I, for many a year, had to save up for days just to get a pizza. I was poor.
Nurse's aide down at the VA.”

“Your ex-wife? Did you ever try to reunite with
her?”

“We didn't have the business then. Even if we did,
how could it work when I'm one of the workers? And she was much happier with her
new fella.” Bruno laughed.

Rocky kept nodding his head, as if to hurry Bruno
along. He had heard this story too many times. But Bruno still wanted to tell
it. The new fella, apparently, had blossomed into a multi-million-dollar casino
owner in Atlantic City, see. His ex-wife kept in touch for years just to tell
him about all the luxurious vacations they went on, see, but he didn't mind! He
was the type who would rather have his peace of mind than be rich. Far as he
could tell, rich people were some of the most miserable sonsabitches in the
world.

“And you, Rocky, are you married?”

“Very happily.”

“For how long?”

Rocky looked in the rearview and held her gaze. His
eyes were both dark and bright, with an earnest expression. “Forever. She fell
in love with me when I was still locked up in the stony lonesome. Rode on a bus
and brought me candy galore and a steady smile.” Rocky held up a picture of what
looked like an older Hispanic woman in a baseball cap, wire-frame glasses, and
silver earrings. Around the woman's neck was a small gold cross. “Read that
face. Go ahead.”

Evvie shrugged.

“Honest? Pretty as hell turned backward and
forward?”

Evvie smiled.

“I sang ‘You're the Best Thing That Ever Happened
to Me' the third time she visited.”

Evvie smiled again.

“Society's fallin' apart, but we don't have to fall
with it.”

“I guess not.”

“You guess not? You
guess
not?” Rocky was smiling at her in the rearview. “Come on,
Starshine, you
guess
not? That's not good enough. Is
it?”

She returned his smile. “I guess it's not.
Apparently.”

He laughed. He sighed, and shook his head. “Take
her picture, Bruno.”

Bruno snapped a quick picture on a tiny digital
before she could stop him.

“Why did you do that? I'm not comfort—”

“Don't you know you're beautiful?”

Evvie said thank you.

“Me and Bruno are not part of the Me First crowd,”
Rocky said, and the non sequitur made her lean back into herself. “We're not
down with the greed machine. We're trying to make ourselves a living without
dying.”

“And now we got the al-Qaeda terrorists on top of
everything,” Bruno said, and Rocky shot him a look of confused contempt and
asked what the fuck that had to do with anything.

Bruno started to answer, but Rocky stopped him,
hand up in the air. “I know, you're right, everything is everything.”

“Yeah,” Evvie said. This was a phrase from a line
in the devastating Springsteen song “You're Missing.”

“We thought 9/11 was it,” Rocky said. “Thought that
was the beginning to the end of the show.”

“The chickens came home to roost,” Bruno said. He
had taken off his coat and loosened his tie. He was looking at Rocky.

“That's right,” Rocky said.

Did they mean what she thought they meant? She
decided they did. At the very least, they were far from the sorts of people who
would ride around in a truck singing that song about the U.S. of A. putting a
boot in your ass.

“What'd you think that day?” Bruno said.

“I didn't really think,” Evvie said.

When the planes crashed, she'd been on the bus not
far from here, going to a job interview at a radio station where she'd hoped to
spin records in the middle of the night to make a little extra cash. She could
still remember the people she rode with. A child in a red jacket speaking loudly
about a vampire to an enormous woman who kept saying, “Mmmm-hmmm, that's right,”
as if the child were a preacher and she in the pew.
This
vampire he eat babies!

Mmmm-hmmm
. The woman
had her eyes closed.

Ben had called her, watching people jump to their
deaths.
Get off the bus and wait on the corner of Murray
and Flemington. I'm coming to get you.

She'd wanted everyone to get off the bus with her.
Ben had come fast. They'd gone home, watched the television, and huddled
together for two whole days.

Ben!

“God help the little guy,” Rocky said, facing her.
She saw a rich melancholy come into his face; then his eyes widened in
resistance. “In a country like this, God help the average working man.”

“That's right.”

“We took a wrong turn,” Bruno said. “Someday the
poor man will rise up.” He clapped twice. He looked at Rocky while he spoke. It
was clear that Rocky had schooled him on such matters. Rocky, had he been given
a few breaks in life, could've been some kind of history professor. It wasn't
hard to imagine him pacing back and forth in front of a classroom, his hand on
his square chin.

N
ow,
if she was really interested (and there was no pressure, they kept insisting,
she could just slip out of the car at any moment, no need to explain or even say
good-bye), but if she was interested, then, like they said, they would need a
hundred dollars right away, then a thousand up front before the operation (they
kept using this word
operation
and she wasn't crazy
about that), and the way the operation would work is Starshine would have to
visit her husband somewhere, maybe his work, or his apartment, or even just on
the street, but the timing was crucial. If she got the timing wrong, and they
showed up and found she wasn't there with him, they were sorry to say it, but
they would have to keep the money and she'd get no second chances. This
unfortunate policy was because of someone they called the dame from Denver.
(Evvie laughed at that and said, “The
dame
from
Denver
?” Rocky laughed with her, and
winked.)

They'd worked with the dame from Denver for two
weeks. They'd show up, and she wouldn't be there; she was a nice gal, a great
gal, actually, a beauty-full lady in heels, said Bruno, but she wouldn't be
there, or he wouldn't be there, and, well, after that grand waste of precious
time, they got tougher with the rules.

“We had to. We're actually softies. Do you know how
many people out there like to take advantage of softies?”

So now they couldn't mess around, they were in
demand at various places in the country, they depended on people who respected
them as professionals and so behaved like professionals themselves.

“Sure. I can see that.” Her voice was thin and
off-key and her mind was frozen.

It started to rain a little. She turned and looked
out the back window and saw the PPG. One summer night, just a few years ago, she
and Ben had met a nine-year-old break-dancer, and talked with him for hours. The
boy had regaled them with stories about his intergalactic travels. In the middle
of his stories he would stop occasionally and salute the sky above the PPG,
suddenly in contact with someone on another planet.

“Can I write you a check?” she said, eyes on the
building.

“We prefer cash. First we work out the details. We
give you a secure plan.”

“You have a say in it. We work on it together,”
Bruno said. “All our customers are creative people. Risk takers. We value their
input.”

“OK, OK,” Rocky said, reeling him in. “Don't pile
on the BS.”

“I don't have the cash,” Evvie said.

“But you can get it?” Rocky said, calmly,
hopefully.

“Tomorrow.”

“We'll take the check,” Rocky said. “Just this
once.”

Bruno shrugged. “He must like you,” Bruno said,
looking at Rocky. “Rocky hardly ever takes a check.”

“I can judge a person's character,” Rocky said.
“You ought to know that by now.”

Evvie smiled at him. She could see that this was
the truth. She could read his eyes as they read hers. She could see him seeing
that she wouldn't steal or cheat. She understood that the two of them had an
understanding of sorts. These stirring connections were rare in the world. They
always took her by surprise and filled her with relief and gratitude.