She Took My Arm As If She Loved Me (23 page)

“Something else?” Alfonso asked.

“No.”

“Isn't there something else?”

“No, not now. Nothing I can't deal with.”

It was up to me. “Okay, due time,” Alfonso said.

I may have been hungry. I may have been scared. I may have forgotten how to say yes to opportunity. But I could still figure out how to say no to this opportunity. I could do without the new transportation and Priscilla wouldn't be happy with her surprise present anyway. Gifts from estranged spouses make some wives feel tender and regretful—not Priscilla. Sometimes I thought I knew her better than I knew myself, even if I also didn't know her at all.

I didn't want to depend on my new strength, being careless of whether I lived or died. It was the only power most of the Project kids ever learned. It may have been the power Alfonso's son had. Okay, thank you, Priscilla and Karim, thank you all. But the G. Press envelope was just tentative money, cash I came across, happened on in a game, not a real job. It was a speculation, just to see. It was a temptation, an easy win I wasn't going to repeat.

All this roiling inside, plus Karim's moldy Victorian on Guerrero, feeding at Panchito Three on Bryant, and the speculative bulk of Alfonso observing, parked opposite, helped me imagine I was still here on earth, still alive. That was something. Being still alive was progress in the sense that it was not retrogression.

I didn't mind lying to myself.

“So did you take the envelope and how much was it?” Alfonso asked.

I said nothing. Didn't like lying to Alfonso.

“We agree, don't we,” Alfonso asked, “that Karim he full of shit? Not like some other folks?”

His laughter came rumbling toward me again, deep and worried. The defendant in the corner behind us at Panchito Three was goddamn tired of having his arm tattoo stroked by his blubber-faced girlfriend and gave her his stone-cold, steely-eyed stare, enacting the role of Man in Control.

Chapter 18

Alfonso was on the phone in a voice that stopped my breathing.

“I gotta…” he was saying. He was flying east and would I drive him to the airport? “There's this long-term parking if I'm parking there long-term, man, but I don't want to drive. I don't think I can drive, man.”

“I'll be right there.”

“I don't know if there's any use in going, but I'm going.”

“I'll be there. Wait, I'm on my way.”

His son had lived in Trenton, New Jersey. His son was being buried in Trenton.

I was thinking of the nightmares fathers have, waking sick in the dark, far from their children. For Alfonso it came true with drugs and a drive-by shooting. He didn't tell me if Alfie was one of the shooters, one of the dealers, or just a kid passing by on his way. “He was still in school,” he said. “He was gonna make it.”

I asked him if he was trying to fly east with his service pistol and if he didn't want to leave it with me. He asked if I thought he was nuts, but he didn't answer the question. Then he felt me reach across to poke at his hip as I drove and he chuckled as if we were playing our bachelor games again. He couldn't get it on the plane. He couldn't shoot his former wife. He couldn't kill himself.

“Hey man, I might be crazy, but I'm not nuts.”

“Thanks for that reassurance.”

Then he was being silent about his son and I was being silent about mine. I drove through the morning traffic down 101 to the airport, the San Francisco commuters heading out to Silicon Valley and the peninsula commuters heading into the city, Alfonso heaving wide-mouthed yawns. He wasn't bored or sleepy. His eyes were red-rimmed and heavy-lidded as he slumped against the door. Men sometimes yawn when they mean to do that thing they somehow forget how to do around the age of eleven, the skill of weeping, although rumor has it that they are learning again and floods are being released all over America.

Alfonso's breath was bad, sour meat inside. I wondered if, to make sure, I should pat him down, body-search him for his pistol.

At the terminal I pulled up at the United entrance. If he carried a weapon, he might could talk his way on, a cop on duty. Okay, that was his business. Most likely he wouldn't be carrying it on his person if he was thinking rationally. He might not be thinking rationally. I wasn't my brother's keeper.

He swung his bag out of the back seat. The grace of some fat men. Alfonso's caramel voice running thick. He wasn't meant for sadness, but I couldn't tell him that now; sadness wasn't God's intention for Alfonso Jones. He was meant to be funny and easy in himself, hard on me, but people don't always play their assigned roles. Even as a cop, he was no longer at Park Station. Life doesn't make permanent assignments.

“Call me from Trenton,” I said.

“Yeah.”

“Okay, where will you be staying? I'll call you.”

“Never mind. I'll be back in three days.”

He hoisted his bag and straightened his back, stretching. The bottom button of his shirt was undone. “Just before this came up,” he said, “something else came up. Wanted to talk with you. I know Karim wants you to do some jobs for him.”

“I got to get some money. I got to get some variety in my life.”

“Don't.”

“I might.”

“Don't, you listen to me now.”

But Alfonso wasn't Dan Kasdan's keeper, either. On the way back to the city I switched on the radio, KSAN, and before I could turn it off I heard part of a golden oldie that said something like, Hello hello, I'll be your lover tonight. Wisps of morning damp on the highway, wisps of asbestos and oil particulate and a touch of San Francisco morning freshness being undone by heavy morning traffic. Alfonso, my buddy.

Alfonso, my fellow father. Perhaps I shouldn't put myself in the way of accident, just as Alfonso said. A philosophy to live by, if we were choosing to live. Having other people in mind sure does limit a person's options.

Alfonso had his son, I had Priscilla and Jeff, maybe Karim thought he had me. No telling what makes a person fall for someone, willing to give his life for someone, a ruinous meteor elevatoring out of control down from the sky here at the edge of the Pacific or any ocean. With fiery edges crashing and sputtering out.

He used to have his son.

Chapter 19

It seemed that my friends were falling into trouble; maybe I was a carrier. The day Alfonso was due back from Trenton, Fred, Fred Weinberg, Doctor Fred, called out of the blue, saying, “Need to see you in my office.”

“Sorry we haven't been in touch. I've been kind of busy—”

“Never mind, now you better come in right away.”

“What is it?”

“A little health problem's come up.”

It didn't sound like any health problem I knew about. I said cautiously, thinking that blood tests ripen a little faster than this, “Hey, it's been months since my physical. How come you just thought of it?”

“I'm in my office. You can get down here right now.”

And before I could point out that it was Wednesday afternoon, religiously his midweek afternoon off for catching up on the medical journals (golf), he had hung up on me. Didn't like this, but headed out to Fred's office on Sacramento.

*   *   *

There was no receptionist, this being Wednesday, but Fred buzzed me in. The waiting room where ailing patients and dead magazines kept each other company was dark. He came to the window and without a word beckoned me into his office. He switched on his desk lamp and said, “Karim.”

Karim was sagged comfortably in a chair, half out of the yellow circle of light, nodding and nodding, enjoying my surprise. There was a smell of cleaning powder in the room, that green chemical smell.

“Your friend, Dr. Weinberg, and there are so many doctors in our city, happens also to be my doctor.”

“What a coincidence,” I said. “Since when?”

“I thought I could ask him to help me,” Karim said.

Fred looked sick. He wasn't wearing his on-duty white smock. “Do it! Do it, Dan! Do what Karim says.”

Karim was shaking his head. “No, no, such a negative way from my good friend Dr. Weinberg. Do you think he sees too many people who are ill, sometimes seriously so, and that makes him feel negative sometimes? What he means is—”

Fred was standing by the tools of his trade, books, instruments, devices, a wall of diplomas and framed certificates, as if they should give him strength and authority, but they seemed to be choosing not to. His mouth was working but no explanation came out.

“What he means,” Karim said, “I need someone to help in my business and you, sir, have no good reason not to be the one.”

“I told you. I explained already. I don't do the sort of things you like to have done.”

Karim spread out his massive arms in his linen jacket. “Exactly! Exactly! We have already seen! And that is why you are the most marvelous person.”

I looked at Fred. I couldn't understand why a doctor didn't find his own drugs. What was he using? It shouldn't have been necessary to go to Karim.

But then it was also difficult to understand why I was considering Karim's request again. I couldn't need money that badly. I needed it, but not that badly. I needed distraction from my life, but this wasn't as good as some distractions. Karim was threatening me. He was promising reward and threatening punishment. Like a vulnerable soft disc between the notches of the spine, worn down by use and abuse, caution was wearing thin. I had relished the visit to G. Press in her gold lamé jacket at the Clay-Jones Tower and he knew it. Karim had figured me out. He didn't plan to be the loser in this courtship.

“I am so happy,” he said.

“I didn't say anything.”

“But I see you are thinking logically at last. I am so happy for that, dear friend.”

He was right that I was thinking, even if I wasn't thinking with top-grain logic. I was considering. I was entering a full condition of off-legal estimation of gain, a state of mind not unknown to my profession. Launderers, hiders of fact, revealers of nonfact, there were operators like these who filled out the ranks of my colleagues. Why should I be different? I had already taken a share from the visit with Ms. G. Press. Like Fred, I needed a remedy for this time in my life; I
needed.
And today, whether I could use it or not, I was getting a down payment in amazement. Fred took my two paws in his, holding my hands together, and said, and begged … Fred was the man who had consoled me, made notations in my chart, eased a rubber-gloved finger up where no man's finger should go and told me my prostate wasn't too bad. I felt as dizzy and seasick as I had been in those post-forty rectal encounters. He was whispering, choked, “Dan. Do it for me.”

I barked at him. “What! What!”

“Oh dear,” Karim said. “Please instead do something for yourself. I'm not in the business of threatening your friends or your son—”

“What the fuck you say?”

Karim backed off. “No, no, for your own benefit and gain, my dear, this time all I want is for you to transfer a package, just once to see if despite so many difficulties we can work so well together … Be my friend just once more, and then we will see.”

Fred fell to his knees in his own office, amid the textbooks, charts, files, diplomas from Swarthmore and Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine, certificate of successful completion of residence in internal medicine, souvenirs and trophies of friendships and hobbies. His face was wet and swollen as he pulled at my hands:
“Please.”

I wouldn't fall to my knees even to bring Priscilla back—not noisily, anyway—no, definitely would not. Pride must be the last thing to go in certain cases. My addiction was different from Fred's. I might walk on my knees, but not fall to them. Not in public. Not with that craven plopping sound. Or if I did, I would explain it to passersby as an athletic event, tryouts for the Olympic knee-walking competition.

Fred and Karim were waiting. I needed to answer Karim and he offered soothing music to help me on my path: “I am the first son of a first son, dear friend, and I strongly prefer to get what I think is right. You have the qualities. I have studied your nature and I am sure of that. I am stubborn. Just like you, I have feelings, I am strong in that field. So, your favorable response?”

“Okay.”

“Isn't that what we all need?”

“Okay, just once,” I said. “One delivery, okay, and it's understood I'm to be well paid.”

Fred pulled himself lumberingly to his feet, whispering, “Thank you.” I didn't meet his eyes.

“Very happy, very pleased,” said Karim.

I looked straight into Karim's face with my own lying one. “Understand I'm only in this for the money. I may do this only once. Please specify exactly how much.”

“I understand exactly, that's best, my friend. Now are we once more good colleagues and friends?”

“How much, Karim?”

His breathing was audible, that of a heavy smoker burdened by both lung blockage and financial consideration. He was engaged in thought. In and out the breath, up and down the chest with its layers of linen. Finally inspiration arrived with a slow beaming grin. “I have a wonderful idea. Let's say this, Dan. I'll be appreciative.”

“What fun,” I said.

“Dan, don't spoil our association with bad sarcasticness. I'll be very, very … I don't want to say ‘generous' because that isn't the way I want it to be between us, I want more of a democratic feeling, two partners, equal in spirit and other ways…” He seemed to run out of breath but not out of smile. The grin was fat and tireless.

“Let me think.”

“Of course. As a friend I value your fine mind.”

“How can I turn down a friend?” I said.

Fred sat in his chair, staring at the framed photograph on his desk of his former wife and children, the wife in her haircut from better times, the children still babies when the photo had been taken and encased in its gold and velvet frame. “How can you?” Fred muttered.