Winners (7 page)

“Mmm,” she says, as if trying to decide what to go with. “Debra. Debra Marks. Now tell me something. You saw him a month, or was it less?”

“About a month.”

She nods. A decision has been made. “Y’all got a car?”

“Up at the Rec Center.”

She frowns. “You do me a favor.”

“Be happy to.”

“Get your car and come back here.” She sucks in her bottom lip, calculating something, a math equation she hasn’t puzzled out for a long time. “I send Demetrius with you, he show you the way. Demetrius!” Her voice packs sudden power, and they hear feet pounding down the stairs. She crooks a finger and the boy goes quickly to her, bending his head next to her for whispered council. When he raises his wide eyes to them he gulps slightly, trying to see what his mother trusts in them.

“Come on,” he says.

S
HE’S WAITING FOR
them in the parking lot when they return. Changed: sweat suit in dark blue, a little crinkly and mildly shiny, as if made from the skin of some modern, urban reptile; white high-tops right off the shelf with bubble heel; thin gold chain and cross dangling loose around her neck; bright white Nike baseball cap wedged on tight. She looks young, a little brash and nervous at the same time.

Silent Demetrius all but leaps from the van, mission accomplished. He hasn’t said a word to them yet, doesn’t like what’s going on. He doesn’t like it when Debra tells him, “Y’all staying at Mimi’s, all right?” The boy purses his lips and stomps one foot gently before running down the building and around the corner, out of sight. She watches him go and when he disappears she doesn’t have kids anymore. She leans back, reading the side of the van.

“Chimney what?” She shakes her head. “Get the hell out of here.” The van continues to amuse her as she climbs inside. She takes in the chaotic innards, her eyes skipping quickly across the tools of his trade: wire brushes, extending rods, vacuum, carbide saw, cordless drill, palm sander. Goggles, knee pads, surgeon dust masks. Black vinyl gloves. A big reddish toolbox with wrenches, screwdrivers, pliers, hammers. A carpenter’s handsaw. It must seem like too much stuff to her. It does to most people.

“You really clean those chimneys?” she says.

“I really do.”

“You a story.” She shakes her head. “And you what Santa’s little helper?”

Jimmy grins. “Nah.”

“I didn’t think so. Uhn-uh. All right, go right out the lot, I’ll show you.” She sits pressed back against the front seat, her cap pulled tight over her eyes, calling out directions as her sweat suit snaps in the miles per hour breeze. They drop down the back side of the projects with the high cliff above them and the brilliantine bay to the right, turning on her mark until suddenly they’re on the clean, quiet streets of Potrero Hill, where pale faces talk calmly in the sun in front of a deli clutching clean brown paper bags with seeded baguette tops protruding like periscopes. A small phalanx of joggers trots by, chatting breathy as they stride, their slim albino legs slicing through the late afternoon. Shane smells yeast, a brewery brewing somewhere close.

“Here,” Debra says, leaning across him to jab a thin, sure finger at a large pastel-colored shopping center. Her shoulder hits Shane’s and she pulls back, leaving a scent behind her: glue, leather, plastic, tangerine, soil. She shoots him a look like he’s reached out and pinched her nipple, but before he can say sorry she pouts up her lips and smiles at him as if to say, Well you little dirty dog. He gives the road in front of him his full and undivided attention.

They park underground, follow her from the shadows to the stores above and into the stocked fluorescent aisles of the UrbaMart where she pilots a cart through the store as if shopping for an invisible family of eight. He and Jimmy trail behind, silently watching her gather: toothbrush, toothpaste, cough syrup, aspirin, soap, detergent, sponges, aluminum foil, ketchup, mustard, canned beans, tuna, boxes of flavored quickie rice, a bag of potatoes, multipacks of chicken thighs and pork chops, sausage, soda, cheese, chips. The store is huge—it’s been a while since Shane has been in a supermarket like this, far from Noe Valley. Jimmy watches Debra, transfixed as she evaluates every purchase, comparing the prices with a knowing finger aimed at cost-per-ounce breakdown. At first she pays neither of them any mind. Then she starts asking Shane the occasional question: has he ever tried this cereal they have on sale? Which kind of ant traps work best? Why are those light bulbs so expensive? He doesn’t know much but she listens to his best shot as if he’s written treatise on the matter. She has Jimmy push the cart.

At the register she removes a wrinkled blank check and a book of food stamps from her pocket, glaring at the price screen as if she has memorized the true cost of every item and stands poised to cry foul at the smallest misprint or mistake. The three of them watch the numbers. Without quite realizing, Shane is holding his own wallet, pressing it flat in his hand like a courtroom bible. When the clerk turns to announce the total, Debra puts her head down and begins her calculations, tilting open the corner edge of the food stamp book to count, but maybe now she’s also watching him out of the top of her eyes as he slides his bank card through the reader. She stops counting as he punches in his passcode, OKs the total, no cash back. The register rattles it home.

“Thank you Mr. McCarthy,” their thin clerk says, reading his name off the receipt and handing it to him without a glance.

She doesn’t say a word as they head back to the car, Shane and Debra walking side by side as Jimmy madly kicks and wheels the cart ahead like a kid. When they’ve loaded the last bag into the van she makes a thoughtful noise, as if a brilliant idea has just occurred to her.

“Y’all mind I stop into the Fit Right,” she says. She seems about to explain more but instead waits for them to nod. “While I’m here. Y’all come along you want. You need you some new kicks.” They all examine Shane’s
b-ball shoes together.

“These still got life in them.”

“Yeah. ” She disagrees. “Well they having a sale.”

The sale at Fit Right is in full swing, and the clothing racks look like they’ve been ransacked by angry Huns or Mongols unable to find their size. She starts in shoes, drilling in on a simple pair of black flats and some silver spaghetti-strap medium heels designed for a party on a hot and distant planet. When she heads into the bra section, Jimmy follows but Shane wanders away with propriety. Lou would never shop here, would she? He didn’t know where she shopped, but not here, ever. He stands in front of a dress rack, fingering clothes his wife would never wear.

By the time he finds Debra and his brother again, their cart is filling up: the shoes, the bras, sweaters, a blouse, a pair of pants, a small collection of assorted items for her kids. A man’s jacket made out of some light phosphorescent skin.

“That’s for your brother,” she says, catching him. “You get some kicks?”

“No.”

“Come on now, you didn’t even look.”

“I’m not much of a shopper.”

“Well I’m here now,” she says. “What size you got?” She moves quickly, yanking samples from the shelves and putting them into his hands. “What’s wrong with those?”

Jimmy and he shake their heads together. “They’re too low,” Shane says. “No ankle support.”

“Oh they good enough for Iverson but not for you.”

“I’m gonna pass.”

“Suit yourself. You got to do something, though, those are embarrassing.” She’s as appalled as Lou at his inability to consume.

“I can stand it.”

“The rest of us can’t,” she says, smiling and nodding at Jimmy, her new best friend. “Help your brother, will you?” She glances down at Jimmy’s feet, shakes her head. “Damn boy, what size you wear? Got you some flippers.”

“You know what they say.”

She grins. She and Jimmy are getting along famously.

Her last stop is sunglasses and a high-tech fabric handbag that looks like it’s made from liquid mercury and atomic waste. “That’s bad ass,” Jimmy says, taking it out of her hands, running his fingers along the seams.

“Nice, huh,” she says.

“Yeah.”

Jimmy and Debra keep chatting about her other purchases as they load them onto the moving belt, and this time she doesn’t take out her check or anything as Shane pays for the stuff and watches the clerk pack everything into two enormous plastic bags capable of suffocating many babies at once.

They carry everything into the kitchen, piling things carefully on the Formica table in the middle, and then stand back waiting to be told to leave. Kitchenwise, the place isn’t much to look at. Dishes crammed dirty into a too-small sink, the lingering smell of instant food. Linoleum gouged and stained and scarred. Fiberboard cabinets. The kitchen sucks. A few appliances sit bulky on the counter: plastic toaster, plastic coffee machine, a boom box perched on top of the refrigerator in the corner. On the front of the fridge, a few magnets hold school drawings signed Sharina and Kaleb, and as Shane steps over to take a polite and closer look he sees it, clinging to the side: a picture of Sam.

To his surprise, it is exactly the Sam he has in his head. The kid’s shoulders are back, chest forward, he’s puffed up in his basketball strut. Between his strange freckled skin, his bushy hair clipped close to his head, jaw tight, chin up, eyes focused through Shane to the beyond, the kid looks like a draft recruit bound for an unknown war. Despite all that tough, this Sam looks like the thinner, slighter kid of the early days and not the more substantial Sam who later acquired biceps, triceps, deltoids, pecs. This is the Sam he knows: the kid who looks like he’s not going to talk to you, no matter what, but then at the last minute his eyes slip to one side, his chin dips, the weight of gravity seems to open his mouth into a childish O, and a low, soft sound escapes. Hey Shane. You on next?

Debra is still putting her groceries away while Shane stares at Sam, building questions in his head. But when she turns back his way she asks the question.

“You smell that gas?”

They sniff in unison. There’s a lot of scent in the kitchen and it’s hard to tell what’s what. She waves Shane over.

“Put your head in there.” She points to a gap between the stove and the wall, and when he puts his head in there and breathes in deep there it is: gas.

“You’re right.”

“Yeah, huh.”

“Did you call PG&E?”

“Yeah, right.”

“They’re usually pretty good about coming right out if you say you smell gas.”

“I bet. Up there in Noe Valley.”

“Well. I can probably take care of that, you want.” He slips out to the van to get the wrenches and tape. When he comes back he sees Jimmy waiting for her to answer him, as if he’s started a conversation she doesn’t want to have.

“Huh,” is all she says, her voice final and flat. A stack of tuna cans comes down on the counter with a loud and solid thwack. Shane edges between them apologetically, pulls the stove out a little bit, tries to get at its important stuff.

“It’s all who you know,” Jimmy says, “and we know some people, that’s all I’m saying.”

“That’s all you’re saying.”

“Jimmy,” Shane says. “Gimme a hand here.”

Jimmy doesn’t move, still waiting for something else from her.

“Yeah,” she says. “Okay, I heard you. Go on, now, you gonna help your brother?”

They pull her stove out away from the wall. Back behind is a compacted honeycomb of dirt and dust, buoyed by shards of brown glass and a plastic toy and other tiny ruined secrets they don’t have time to identify before she’s shooed them aside and cleaned everything up. Then she and Jimmy both watch him rub a dab of spit on the connection until he can see it barely bubbling up, watch him close the cutoff and then unscrew the cap and wrap the threads in clean white silicon tape, wrench everything back up tight. He spit-checks the connection again but it seems fine.

“That’s it?”

“That’s it. Should be good.”

“You handy, huh.”

“Basic things.”

“Yeah he is,” Jimmy says.

“Yeah, huh, he know his stuff.”

She looks at the clock on the wall but there isn’t one. “I got to get my kids.” She glances around her in a sudden panic and flaps her arms to herd them towards the door. “Thank you, all right?”

“Any time.”

“What about the job?” Jimmy says. Shane’s about to ask what they’re talking about but decides to let them play it out.

She sucks in a breath and holds it. “You, uh, you got a phone number or something?”

Now they both look at Shane, for some reason. He fishes a business card from his wallet and she accepts it with a confused expression, holding the paper between the tips of her fingers like a dirty wrapper from the sidewalk. “That’s my cell,” he says, “so we’re always pretty much in reach.”

“What about your number?” Jimmy says. “In case.”

“Yeah,” she says, seeming less sure of herself, fishing around for something to write on. “All right.”

The door clicks shut behind them as they step out into the late late afternoon, the sky still blue and bright.

“What was that about?” Shane says.

“I told her we’d help her get a job.”

“A job.” Shane laughs. “What’s that, like the deaf leading the blind?”

“Man, she needs out. We got to get them out of here, you know what I mean?”

Shane is about to answer but then they spot someone waiting for them in the parking lot. His Tennessee Titans jersey hangs off him like an older brother hand-me-down as he leans comfortably against the van with the air of someone deputized to guard it. Shit: the van. Shane finds himself walking faster. Tennessee straightens up as they approach, waiting. There doesn’t seem to be anyone else around.

“All right,” Tennessee says. “What you need?”

“Visiting a friend,” Jimmy says.

“Nothing,” Shane said.

“Friend, man, I’m your best new friend. Got a one-stop shop here.” He’s calm, watching one of them and then the other.

“No, man, we’re cool, man, thanks. We’re not looking.”

“Everybody looking,” Tennessee says. “Huh.”

“Not this time.” They’ve stopped a few feet away from the van. Tennessee doesn’t move, slouching comfortably in the way. Shane can feel his blood moving quickly now, the little adrenaline warriors beating their breasts and racing through his veins to battle stations. Ready to run run run.

“Yeah,” Tennessee says. “Next time, right.” He smiles hugely, bright white teeth shining out at them before he takes two exaggerated side steps away from the van. “Y’all friends a Sauce, huh? You say hey for me, right. Yeah.”

They step silent to the van doors. Shane fumbles with the key, unlocks.

“It’s all there,” Tennessee says. “I made sure nobody touch it. That hardware safe inside.”

“Okay,” Shane says. “I appreciate that.”

Tennessee laughs softly. “Next time.”

Shane closes the door. Tennessee stands in the center of the lot, watching them go.