The Time Travel Chronicles (37 page)

“Sure,” I say. “You wanna bet forty, that’s cool.” I smile and nod. It’s all about encouraging him, but I don’t need to. He’s already there. “Turn the card.”

The guy grins to his buddies, then looks at me. He’s got this. No way he’s going to be duped by some street punk like me. He turns the card and the smile vanishes. I’ve seen that look a thousand times. Disbelief.

Now it’s game time. The real deal. This is where I really take his money, because right now I know he isn’t going to give it to me. He can’t believe this happened. He’ll get angry, hold it back and accuse me, so I need this final stage to make him give me the money. It’s all about psychology.

“Hey, man,” I say. “Look, maybe that was too fast, okay.” Hands up all the time, showing him the cards. Drawing him in. “We’ll do it with two cards, okay? Make it easier. I’ll put the ace in my pocket.” Of course, I put one of the jokers there instead. This is the crux move. The one I have down, and sweet as hell. I show him the jokers, although since I’m using a double-facer he’s not seeing what he thinks he’s seeing. He’s following the ace, so I do it real quick, and he doesn’t see the truth behind the lie.

In the end, it’s too easy. It’s not even down to my sleight of hand; it’s who he is, his own bullshit, that lets me beat him.

He hands me the money, but I can see it in his eyes. The hate fuelled by shame—
failure is not an option
drilled into him since he was a boy. If I was smart, I wouldn’t play this corner again for a while. Let him and his kind cool off a little.

But I’m not.

That’s why, when I come again the next night, he’s waiting for me with his track-star cronies. They wait until I’m done, until it’s dark and I’m packing up. They take my winnings as a lesson to me; at least that’s how they see it, because they don’t really care about the green. They’re new money, old money—it doesn’t matter which, they don’t need it. Their parents front the Mustangs and Beamers and the Gucci loafers they wipe off on my jacket. When they’re finished, they toss me into an overspill of trash bags next to a dumpster and I lie there for a while, the tang of copper in my mouth all too familiar.

There’s only one place I can go, messed up like this, though maybe this time she really will slam the door in my face. I go there anyway. It’s late and I’m broke again, just like always. She’ll be pulling an all-nighter at the diner and her boss will give her shit for me being there, but there’s a chance she won’t turn me away.

I stagger through the door after a half hour of people crossing the street to avoid me. Amy’s behind the bar, pulling hot glasses from the washer. She’s willowy and small, and struggles with the steaming, heavy tray. A drop curl of her honey blonde hair tickles her cheek and she blows it away out of the side of her mouth. I’m reminded that it won’t be long before I never get to see her again, and there’s nothing in the world I can do about it. There’s a kick in my stomach that hurts like hell.

“Jesus, Will,” she hisses as she sees me and comes around the bar. “I said no more.” She doesn’t mean it. It’s in her eyes.

“I’m sorry,” I offer. “I wanted to buy you something, but I got jumped.”

“Yeah, sure you did,” she says thinly, but looks away to hide her pain. She hooks an arm around my back and tries to help me. From the cash register, Luanne throws me a look. I wave to her and she gives me the finger. She’s a fox, that Luanne, quite the gal. Amy sees all this and rolls her eyes. Luanne’s hated me since the day she met me. Amy spent the next eleven months telling her what a good guy I am, if she’d just get to know me.

Both Luanne and I know that’s a crock of shit.

There’s an old first aid kit in a cramped room at the back of the diner, so she leads me there. She sits me down in a familiar beat-up armchair. I know this place better than my own apartment. I’m guessing I’ve got two broken ribs, but there’s nothing she can do about that, so I don’t mention it. They’ll heal in time.

Time. Yeah, time heals all wounds.

“Will!” Her voice snaps me out of it.

“What?”

“Are you gonna help me do this or are you gonna stare at the wall? I gotta get back to work. I want you out of here when I’m done.”

Here comes the pitch. “I can’t go back to my place. The old lady wants her rent money. She sees me again without anything—”

“You’ll think of something.” Amy’s trying to be hard, but she’s not like that. That’s Luanne talking, right there.

“You’re right,” I say. “It’s not your problem. There’s a walk-in center in the Village. I can pitch up there and maybe pick up some cash from T-Bone tomorrow.” Her eyes widen and she shakes her head. I push on towards the home plate. Tie up the grift. “I gotta get some cash from somewhere, Amy.”

“By running drugs? That’s how you’re gonna do it?”

“I’m desperate.”

“You remember what happened last time? What he did to you?”

Sure I remember. He did it to
me
. The one and only time Amy ever took me to an ER. Cops leaned on me the whole time I was in there. First they played nice, like they usually do. Then they started in with the threats—they’d say they found this shit on me, they found that shit on me.  I’d better help them out or do some time.

Whatever.

Time doesn’t matter to me. Time is the one thing I don’t have.

I checked myself out and stayed low until I could get T-Bone his money. We’re cool now, he and I. As cool as you can be with an OG. But he’s my only in. And he’s Amy’s open wound. She sat with me the whole time in the ER. Things were pretty good between us back then—maybe she even loved me for a while. But these things break and there’s no way to fix them once they do.

Amy looks away and I swear her eyes are wet. For a moment, I consider getting up and leaving. Doing something classy for a change. Leaning down and kissing her hair and then just walking out the door. Taking that terrible choice away from her, so she doesn’t have to get involved with me again. If I was any kind of guy, that’s what I’d do. But I’m not any kind of guy.

I wait until she gets up and slips a hand into her leather jacket and pulls out her keys. I love that jacket—it looks so damn good on her. She presses the keys into my hand, but she won’t look at me.

“I’ll sleep on the couch,” I offer, and she nods. Then she turns away from me and heads back into the diner. I slip out the back door. I’m not sure I can stomach Luanne again right now.

I dip into a Korean market and lift some flowers, then sling them in a vase when I get to her place. I tidy up a little and put the vase on the table so she’ll see them when she gets in. Then I fix some mac n’ cheese and leave enough in the fridge for her. When she gets home it’s maybe three in the morning. She eats and finds me in her bed. She curls up next to me, and of course we don’t go to sleep right away.

We stay in bed and sleep away the morning, rising well into the afternoon. Sometimes we do a little more than sleep. I cook for us again and we watch old black-and-whites on her laptop. She doesn’t have a shift tonight so suggests we do something together. I tell her that sounds good to me, because it does.

But when she drifts off again in the late afternoon, I leave her sleeping and go to find T-Bone. I know where he’ll be this time of day. One last run, I promise myself on the bus as I stare out over Manhattan’s star-spangled skyline. Some easy cash to front up a better hustle than three-card monte. T-Bone will see me right. I know how to play him. He uses kids to run the street deals, but he doesn’t like to use them for the bigger pick-ups. He doesn’t go himself, and he likes to keep his connected guys away if he can. So from time to time, he’ll use me. He says he likes my eyes, that he’s sure I can see things, feel the subtle shifts in the street better than anyone else. Maybe he’s right. I’ve never been arrested—God knows what would happen if I were. If they dug into my juvie records, they’d want to know where the hell I was before four years ago. Because before that, there isn’t a single record with my name on it. So I’ve learned to watch my back.

T-Bone’s at the steakhouse he owns up in Harlem. He loves to sit in the back room with his guys while the moneyed cliques get their kicks slumming it up there. He brings in the best Argentinian beef he can, and even dragged over a chef from some high-profile place in Philly. He loves it when restaurant critics from the papers give his place star ratings. It makes me laugh. There are four strip clubs within two hundred meters.

My face must look pretty bad because he laughs when he sees me. So do his guys. I let them laugh because it gives me time to check out the room; it’s different somehow, but I can’t say how. Something’s off. There are two girls in here—lean and tall and glittering with bling. I don’t know them, never seen them before. One catches me staring. She sneers, then looks away and murmurs something to her friend, who laughs.

“Fuck happened to you, Flipper?” T-Bone says.
Flipper
. Not Ace or Joker or something clever. I’d have even taken Jack. He went for Flipper because he knows I flip cards. Fucking great. At least he didn’t call me Snot-Boogie.

“I like it rough, you know,” I say, bobbing my head like some banger. Always the wiseass, but T-Bone digs it. He nods at the girls in the room and they turn to leave. I’ll admit to a little jump in my chest when I see them walk out. T-Bone likes good-looking girls.

“What can I do for you?” he asks as he relaxes back in his chair. Dark eyes watch me. The halogen light kicks off his smooth, dark skin and picks out his cornrow hair. A diamond stud glistens in each ear.

I run my tongue along my teeth. There’s something hard balling in my throat. “I need some quick green. You got anything you need picking up?”

“You remember what happened last time, Flipper?”

“That was a misunderstanding, T,” I protest, with the right amount of respect for the guy with a nickel-plated, ivory-handled nine-mil tucked into his pants. “You know that’s not going to happen again, right? You made your point.”

“True that—it won’t happen again, Flip,” he says, eyes tight, making him look just like the predator he is. “You ain’t getting no green until you deliver. You feel me? Zee’ll wait for you an’ drop the dollars when you come back.”

I don’t have a whole lot of options, so I say, “Of course.”

T-Bone holds out a hand to one of his guys, who passes him a cell phone. He tosses it to me. Catching it twists my ribs, but I think I manage to hide the pain.

“You call the number in there at eleven tomorrow night,” T-Bone says. “You be ready, you hear me?”

“You got it,” I say. “Eleven.”

“You can go now,” he says. I don’t wait around.

It wasn’t always like this, running smack for gangsters and pulling street hustles. But the truth is, I’ve always been different.

I was five years old when it first happened. I didn’t understand, of course, because I was just a kid and it had never happened before. I woke up in a garden that looked like the one outside my home, only it wasn’t. I was eventually found wandering a street that was very similar to the one I remembered, calling for my parents at the door of a house that wasn’t mine. The people who found me did the first thing they could think of when faced with a child so young, alone, and apparently delirious—they called the police.

I told the tall cop who knelt beside me my name, of course, and my address. I insisted that house, that one there, was mine. And that my parents would be in it. They knocked on the door, but the owners were away. Whoever they were, they weren’t my parents.

They searched their records for any sign of the two people I told them I belonged to. They were in those records, and their faces sure looked like those of the people I had loved from the very first moment I was born. I screamed and pointed, defiant and triumphant. I tore the photographs from the page and held them. Nothing could have prepared me for the shock of being told they were dead. Killed years before in a car accident. The police made enquiries with friends, neighbors, and relatives. All agreed on one thing: the two people in those pictures I clutched in my hands had never had a child.

I refused to believe anything I was told, and eventually there was only one place they could send someone like me.

I cried the whole of that first night, until I learned there are people in institutions like that who prey on those who cry. Not all of them are kids, either. I never cried again after that. I learned to hit first and keep hitting until they went down. Kids stayed away from me, and the wardens gave me space when I was calm. They never took those photographs from me.

Five years later, when I was ten, it happened again. I didn’t realize at the time—it would only become clear to me later—but it was precisely the same time and date, to the second. I can’t say it surprised me any less. I had come to believe that the photographs I carried were totems—memories I had somehow created for myself. That’s what years of psychiatrists and psychologists poking around inside your head will do to you, washing away every genuine thought and replacing them with pre-packaged, mass-produced notions of truth. Of course, I didn’t have a clue what was happening.

But when I woke again in a new place, I was streetwise enough to keep my mouth shut and get to know the area first. It was then that I knew the photographs I still carried—now faded and torn, yellowed with age and touch—really were of my parents. That everything I had been forced to believe about myself, every lie I had been fed about my sanity, was in fact utter bullshit.