You Have the Wrong Man (22 page)

“Henry will give you a cherry popper. Two-hundred-dollar stipend on your first night.”

Venice smiled at the word
stipend.
She recognized how these initiates might want to whitewash their everyday commerce with fancy words.

“In a little while, Cindy takes a shower.”

“You take a shower out there?” Venice asked.

“About ten times a night.”

“Hence the drain,” Venice said.

“That’s right, the drain. Who needs Liquid Plumr?”

“Forty dollars, they can soap us up. That’s forty dollars
per customer
.”

Venice said, “I guess you really clean up.”

The girls had heard this a lot.

Venice enjoyed the farce.

The one named Cindy unscrewed the cap from a big bottle of Spring Green Vitabath. She invited Venice to sniff the fragrant contents.

“That’s nice.”

“It costs me, but it’s extra emollient. Five showers in here and your skin gets chapped. We have to look out for ourselves.”

In the lavatory, Venice noticed the roach tape along the baseboards. She saw it the way an accountant follows the diagonal line through graph paper. For some reason she could not urinate. That part of her body wouldn’t open. Her whole pelvic triangle was tender. She stood over
the sink. A tiny mirror framed only her eyes. Seeing her eyes like that, without the rest of her face, was unnerving. Her eyes revealed something which her mouth, her lips would have erased with a quick smile.

She sat down beside Stephen. Another girl had climbed onto the runway. She said her name was Pepper. Pepper had red hair. She wore a minuscule g-string and she had combed her red frizz over the tight border of nylon. The men were calling her “Spicedrop” and “Fireball” because of her red hair. The men kept proposing new names relating to the combustion metaphor, drifting over to an arson theme, and everyone laughed. Venice thought of the rabbit with the twenty names. Stephen was laughing with the crowd, a short, disciplined bleat that was easy to discern.

She walked back to the dressing room. “Well. Where’s this Henry guy?”

“He’s in Atlantic City.”

“No kidding? I was there last summer.”

“So, you want to dance tonight?”

“That’s right.”

“You need to change into something. There’s a rack of stuff in here.”

Venice pulled the hangers across the rod until she saw a prom item, a floor-length gown in peach-colored satin.

She tugged the dress over her head and borrowed the lip pencil and mascara left out on the table. “You need one of these thongs,” a girl said holding out a wastebasket full of panty-hose sashes.

“I don’t need it,” Venice said. “I’m wearing a string, à la Calvin Klein.”

“You’re all set?”

Venice was ready. “I’ll go next,” she said.

The music churned on. Venice flounced down the runway, swinging her hips and paddling the air with her forearms, breaking her wrists in haughty birdlike gestures just like Bette Davis. The audience seemed stunned by the sudden shift from the continuous nude mural to this higher plateau of
entertainment.
They chided the new “actress,” for stalling. The men yelled at her to disrobe.

Venice started to peel the satin neckline off her shoulders, then tugged it back on. She rolled her shoulder free, then covered it up again. This went on for a while. She searched the bar rail for Stephen, but the tables were too dark to see him. She minced up and down the stage. Her fluid gait perpetuated a pendulum effect; she allowed her hips to slip left, then lock, slip right, then lock. She tossed her hair, wiped her bangs from her forehead with exaggerated pathos, like the crone in
Sunset Boulevard.
Again she looked for Stephen to see how she should proceed. Behind the runway, there was a screen with projections. Slides of sandy beaches alternated with slides of pinto horses. A single moth followed the cone of light back and forth, dipping from one end to the other. The insect landed on the screen, fanning its wings. Once it became the white eye of a horse, then the slide flipped and it was gone in the foam of the sea. The moth pulsed forward again. Instinctively it climbed the smoky column above Venice and its shadow grew monstrous against her.

  
ASBESTOS

I
t was dark at 5:00
P.M.
The streetlight churned with large, boxy snowflakes like erratic frozen June bugs. Peterson watched the snow until buildings lost definition. He was meeting a client and waited in a company truck, a new wide-bodied 4×4 that made him feel pleasantly self-conscious. He was working for his brother at Dover Environmental Consultants. At his brother’s request, he affixed a Dover sign to the passenger-side door, knowing it would leave an outline of adhesive when he removed it.

Last winter he had the snow-removal contracts for food franchises on Route 202 north of Wilmington. Then he worked on a crew clearing the Delaware Memorial Bridge. He plowed nights, driving back and forth across the
double span, raising the blade at the little hitches at each expansion grid. Using guardrail posts as checkpoints against the dark industrial skyline, he knew when to elevate the blade and when to drop it back down.

The client was scheduled to meet him outside of the Glenside United Methodist Church. She would stop by on her way to work. She was hostess at the Fairfax Supper Club and had to be there by six. It might be just as well if she was a no-show, because the woman sounded a little too fired up; she wasn’t going through the proper channels. His brother instructed him, “If she doesn’t have anything on paper, say goodbye.”

A car pulled in behind his truck and he was surprised to see it was an old Caddie, salmon pink. Then he recognized it, one of those used Mary Kay Cosmetics sedans; the chrome rims of the headlights were rusted out and lacy as garters. A rock must have hit the right side of the windshield leaving a shattered web a good foot in diameter. He watched her in his mirrors as she locked her car and walked slowly across the white scrim. She was wearing spike heels that didn’t grab the snow. She walked carefully, with a delicate wobble, but she didn’t seem threatened by the unpredictable surface. He focused ahead as she came up beside him. The snow was still light but it had a funny, gluey look as it touched the truck’s glossy hood and layered the smoked windshield.

She tapped on the truck window. He turned, his breath rising on the glass. He was out of the truck shaking her hand in a quick tingling motion.

“Mr. Peterson?” she said, when he dropped her hand.

“No, not
the
Mr. Peterson. I’m his younger brother.”

“And, your name is?”

“Peterson,” he told her.

“Of course. How stupid of me,” she said. She looked over his shoulder for a moment then looked at him again. “Angela Snyder. Angela,” she said.

“Angela? That’s nice,” he told her. “Root word being
angel
, I guess.” He looked the other way.

“Just another cross to bear,” she said.

At the Halloween party at the firehouse just a couple of months ago Peterson had seen a little girl in a white satin costume. Her mother had written across the skirt with a gold glitter pen: “Daddy’s Little Angle.” Hardly a soul noticed the spelling error. Who was going to break the news?

“So it’s Peterson, plain and simple?”

“Right,” he said. He knew she had expected him to give his first name, but he wasn’t happy to tell it to people. He was named after a middle child who had died in the cradle. He didn’t trouble her with the story, but throughout his whole childhood he had to visit the cemetery and stand before the marker with his own name chiseled on it. He went by his last name only. The one name.

“No first-name basis?” she said.

He stared at the whorls of snow which collected and condensed momentarily into reassuring shapes, cartoon cats and rabbits, and then dispersed, sifting right and left.

“Well, I understand these things,” she told him, “names are such a grab bag.” She looked as if she was trying to decide if she was going to accept him instead of his brother, the certified inspector whom she had spoken to over the telephone. “You’re an expert? Like your brother?” she asked him.

“My brother couldn’t make it tonight. I can do the job, same as him.”

“The big thing,” she said, “is how to get inside. Just look at it, will you? This church is spooky when it’s empty—sort of Gothic.” She looked up at the high windows, which were an impenetrable slate-green.

Peterson said, “There’s no one here to let us in? I thought it was funny not to see anyone. I don’t know about this.”

“It’s locked. But it’s to our advantage that there’s no one here. You see, they think I’m a nuisance. I’m sort of eighty-sixed.”

“You asked us to come out here unannounced? The place is dark.”

“It’s always dark somewhere. At any one time, half the world is dark—did you ever think of that? Does that stop the professionals?” She looked at the empty building. “This is the fellowship hall and the preschool wing. I know where the lights are once we get in there.”

Peterson said, “Let’s see if I understand this. There’s nobody in the building? We aren’t expected tonight?”

“No. But, Christ,” she snapped at him, “it’s not exactly an ice cream social.”

“We have a problem here.”

“Can’t you get the samples?” she told him. “You don’t need the pastor for that. Let’s just take the dust and say no more.”

“We told you we need something in writing before we take the samples,” he told her. He noticed how he had switched to saying “we.” He decided he wouldn’t let that happen again.

She, too, changed her tone; her voice became more solicitous, girlish but firm, like a waitress running out of patience when sometimes he was too sleepy making his
breakfast order. “Look, is it the money?” she said. “I’m going to have all the parents chip in once I explain the situation to them.” She shook a tight leather glove from her left hand, using her teeth to tug it free. “Do you want me to pay now? I’ll pay you in advance. I don’t have anything on me, but I can get an advance from my boss at the Supper Club. I’m hostess there. I can get something like a down payment.”

“Money isn’t the first consideration. The problem is,” Peterson was telling her, “you don’t own this building. Am I right?”

“Correct.”

“Need permission from the owner,” he told her.

She lifted her shoulders and tugged the collar of her coat higher. She walked in a small circle before him. He watched her profile one way, then the other. There was something feral in the way she shifted back and forth before him. She was wearing a cranberry leather trench coat, open at the collar. Beneath that, she wore a deep V-neck sweater, something like mohair. The fluff against the crisp leather upset him. His sister-in-law sometimes wore sweaters like this, the feathery hairs rising and falling with her breath, or she’d wear a quilted satin bathrobe. Certain fabrics hitched and draped around a woman’s curves—these odd textures, mohair or pillowed satin—made his abdomen clench.

His brother and sister-in-law took him in after his trouble at the dog track last spring. He had been hired to clean the pens. It was tedious work, scooping the loops of waste into a barrel and hosing the cement. He cleaned the drains, running a snake rather than using Liquid Plumr. Chemical solvents caused fumes to permeate the kennel. Kennel
maintenance was the only work he could get after he had wrecked a big Massey-Ferguson plow and his urine test turned up a profile of cannabis-related enzymes.

He had worked at the dog track only two months when two men came into the barn. They walked directly into the pen with the ex-champion, Believe Me, a veteran brindle greyhound. The dog hadn’t been winning for a year. Peterson was at the far end of the barn, teasing the string open on a bag of garden lime. If the men saw him, they didn’t much care. He figured they were up to no good. The dog was overinsured. Its time was coming up. He heard one of the men talking to the doomed mutt, punctuated by the other’s bitter chuckle. When Peterson walked over there, he saw a man cutting silver duct tape from a roll while his partner straddled the dog, resting one knee on its withers to keep it still. He pinched its muzzle as the other wound the duct tape around the dog’s delicate, dished face until its chops were sealed shut. He wrapped the tape around its narrow snout, pressing a sticky strip across its glistening black nostrils. The dog reacted immediately, bucking loose from the man’s legs, whipping its head right and left and pawing its face with its dewclaw hooks. The men turned away and lit up smokes. Peterson walked up to the pen. The men looked right through him. He was invisible. They were so secure in their fiendish system, they didn’t expect interference. Not from him. The dog had fallen back on its haunches. Its eyes rolled back in its head, then refocused once. It quite suddenly reclined on its side and convulsed. Peterson started for the greyhound, but the men flicked their butts to the cement. One said, “Don’t touch anything.”

Later that summer Peterson was arrested for possession
of marijuana and his brother bailed him out of the city jail. His brother gave him work at Dover Environmental. Peterson took the job and tried to move to his own apartment. His sister-in-law went to inspect the rental property and found it unsuitable for him. His sister-in-law had the final word as surrogate matriarch or warden. He had to watch her drift around the house in her nightie and polish her toenails in front of the TV, bending her knee and resting her foot on the ottoman until the soft, creamy bulge of her inner thigh was revealed. She wasn’t aware of him. He was nothing to her but a delinquent foster child.