“Might as well…stay,” he says to Angel as soon as the ambulance has carted Lacey off. “He won’t be coming back here tonight.”
Angel shakes her head. “You’re in trouble, Willie. We’re both in trouble. When Lacey gets back, he’ll kill us both. You shouldn’t have done that.”
Willie doesn’t get it. She should be grateful; Lacey was beating hell out of her. He can only stare.
“Christ,” she says, “I’ve been beat before. I get over it. But he’s gonna be killing mad.”
Willie nods. There’s a lot he’ll never understand. He’s known about Lacey’s mean streak all along, but he’s steered clear of it; never seen it so frighteningly close. He doesn’t know how to handle it.
“If…he stays…in the hospital,” Willie says, “I’ll go…talk to him; make sure…he knows…it wasn’t your fault.”
Angel just laughs. “You don’t get it, do you? Lacey’s a pimp. He doesn’t care whose fault it was. He just gets even. A pimp has to be mean or he won’t make a living.”
Fear creeps in. Willie knows Angel is right. But he’s tired of being scared and he’s tired of doing what he thinks is right only to have it turn out wrong. “Well, he…won’t be back tonight, so you…might…as well get…some sleep.”
Willie lies under the blankets on the couch, trying to get some sleep himself, but his mind races. Angel is upstairs, supposedly asleep, and he hates it that he can’t feel like a hero. Even if she does work for Lacey, he’s still very much drawn to her; emotionally—sexually—drawn. He should be able to feel like a hero with her, but the rules are different here; all she can think of is how nasty Lacey’s going to be. Tomorrow he’ll move into the basement room at the school. To hell with Lacey. His mind glides over conversations with Angel: future conversations, convincing her to quit working for him. Maybe André can help.
Early in the morning Willie packs his stuff into his duffel bag, makes up his bed, throwing his sheets into the hamper in the laundry room. He leaves the duffel bag next to the door, stuffs his books into his backpack and walks through the overcast morning to the bus stop. Earlier he knocked on the bedroom door to check on Angel, but she had gone. He plans to ride up to school and cover his A.M. janitorial work, then ask André to let him skip morning classes to go check on Lacey. Dealing with him in the hospital will be a lot easier than facing him at home.
André just shakes his head when Willie tells him the story. “You can set up the room downstairs after school. I’ll get a bed in there tonight, and we can move the furniture this weekend. I figured sooner or later your living situation would blow. Actually, it lasted longer than I expected.”
Willie asks if André had known about Angel.
“Yeah,” André says. “She’s the reason I even know Lacey. Enrolled her two years ago. Said she was his daughter.” He shakes his head. “I’ve seen enough shit go down since then to know that young lady is not Lacey Casteel’s daughter.”
“Why didn’t you…stop her?”
“Ain’t my job.” André mimics one of Lacey’s favorite sayings. Then, “Those aren’t the choices I get to make for kids here. I can only offer an education and what advice is asked for. After you’ve been around awhile, you’ll figure out that getting out of prostitution isn’t just a question of deciding to stop one day. There’s a lot more to it than that.”
Willie parks André’s ’69 VW bug in the hospital parking lot, lifts his cane from the backseat and walks easily around toward the front entrance, moving slowly, from the center. The change in his movement has been just short of miraculous for him, and the good feeling it gives him is reminder enough to keep him focused. It’s seldom now that his body gets away from him.
As he nears the information desk, his heart pumps almost out of control and he fights for some kind of inner calm, acquiring Lacey’s room number from the nurse, then moving down the hall toward the elevator, silently rehearsing what he’ll say. His mental words are drowned out by the drumbeat of his heart. In front of room 306 he takes a deep breath and steps through the open door.
Lacey lies sleeping, his right arm in a cast to the elbow, his neck in a brace. Willie can’t believe he did that. He stands over Lacey for a moment, then places a hand on his muscular upper arm. Lacey’s eyes pop open. He focuses on Willie’s face, struggling to place him, then squints his eyes and gives a grimace.
“How…you doing?” Willie asks, for lack of a better start.
“Be okay. Can’t say the same for you, though. Not when I get outta here.”
“C’mon, man. I…thought you…were going to…kill her.”
“She my whore.”
“I…know that. But I thought…you…were going to kill her.”
“She my whore,” Lacey says again.
Willie doesn’t pursue it. “Look,” he says. “I’m…sorry I had to…hit you. If…you get even…you get even. I’ll…be gone…when you get out of here. I’m going…to stay at the school. I…really appreciate all…you’ve done. I don’t know how…I would have made it if you hadn’t…taken me in. But I can’t be around…what happened last night. I just can’t. If…there’s a way…I can make it up, let me know.”
Lacey doesn’t respond. Willie’s surprised he doesn’t make more threats, but he just stares. Willie thinks it must be whatever drugs they have him on. “By the way,” he says, “your ex-wife, or…whoever she is, called. She…sounded pretty pissed. Says…she’ll call later.” He pauses a moment before saying, “She called you a killer.”
A fire lights behind Lacey’s eyes momentarily; is extinguished by welling tears. Willie sees a beaten look he hasn’t seen ever before in Lacey. He doesn’t understand. He says, “Look, I…gotta go…”
Lacey nods, but as Willie reaches the door, he says, “Don’ move out yet, okay?”
“What?”
“I won’ kick you ass. We talk. Jus’ don’ move out yet.”
“Yeah, okay. Sure. You…sure?”
“Yeah, I’m sure.” Lacey sounds irritated. He doesn’t like to ask for things.
This is turning out differently than Willie expected. He sees no threat, so he just nods and leaves.
School is out and Willie leans against the rest-room wall, pulling on his basketball shoes. He’s finished with his janitorial duties and Lisa is supposed to come back to work with him. He’s wishing he could contact Angel, tell her he thinks everything’s all right. She wasn’t at school today; he didn’t expect her to be, but he hopes she hasn’t disappeared or something. André gave him a phone number from the files, but no one answers. He walks out toward the lawn as Lisa pulls her car close against the fence. When she steps out, he sees she’s carrying leg and ankle weights; a basketball under her arm.
“Need to get an idea what it feels like to be you,” she says, strapping on the weights.
“It feels…shitty to be me.”
“I mean I need to know what your body feels like.”
“You might need…more weights,” Willie laughs. “Feels…more like a hundred pounds…than five.”
“I have more if I need them.”
A group of neighborhood kids stops their half-court game as Willie and Lisa start down at the other end. Everyone knows Lisa, and Willie feels embarrassment creeping up as it always does when he tries something in front of people. He fights it back and the kids resume their game.
Willie and Lisa shoot around awhile. At one point she stops and carefully watches him dribble and shoot layups, then runs back to her car and adds five pounds onto her leg. She works with his shot; gets him to picture how he used to do it, then adjust that to what he can do now. It’s frustrating, but after a half-hour or so, Willie starts to feel something familiar, and he works harder. After another fifteen minutes, they play a slow version of one-on-one. Lisa stops occasionally to help him make an adjustment, and occasionally to visualize an adjustment of her own because of the weights, so the game is interrupted, but when they’re finished, Willie’s worked up a sweat and it’s the
first time since the accident he’s done anything positive with his body.
“Think you could beat Telephone Man today?” she teases.
Willie smiles. “Nope. He…can sky.”
“In his head he can sky.” She shakes her head and smiles. “Telephone Man. Whew.”
Willie stops, philosophical for a moment. “I just wish I knew why.”
“Why what?”
“Why me.”
“You mean why you got hurt? Why you crippled yourself?”
Willie grimaces and nods. Lisa always words things like that; why you crippled yourself instead of why you got crippled, which he prefers.
She sits in the doorway of her car, pulling off her shoes. “What would be different if you knew why, Willie? You’d still be crippled.”
“I know, but…if there’s a reason; a purpose.”
“I’m going to do you a favor. I’m going to tell you why.”
Willie waits expectantly.
“You crippled yourself because you stretched the rules till they broke. Simple as that.”
Willie knows her line of thinking; it’s a little like Cyril’s, only further out. “But if there’s God…I mean, I…didn’t do anything…so bad.”
“To have him cripple you?”
“Yeah.”
“God didn’t cripple you, Willie. You did. You stretched the rules till they broke; had to go a little faster than you could, push out there at the edge because you thought nothing could hurt you. You said that yourself.”
“But…I didn’t know.”
“The rules don’t slack off for naïveté,” Lisa says. “Physics doesn’t work on a sliding scale. You broke the rules, you got hurt.” She nods a big nod. “So, now that you know why, how does that help?”
Willie shakes his head. “It doesn’t.”
“Might as well quit asking, then.”
In Lisa’s car, headed for the hospital, Willie tells her about Lacey.
“Don’t know why you stay with him, Willie. Man’s a pimp and that means he’s dangerous. I’ve tried everything I know to get Angel away from him, but I’ve had no luck. She says she’s got to stay with it another year till she gets out of school and can get a place. But I’ve known my share of whores, and you don’t just get out when you want to.”
“Think Lacey…won’t let her out?”
“Would you turn Secretariat out to pasture three days before the Kentucky Derby because he said he didn’t want to run?”
“Not…without a fight,” Willie says.
“That’s what I mean.”
Lisa lets him out in front of the hospital and drives off; he’ll take the bus from there. He finds Lacey sleeping and the doctor says they’ll release him in the morning; wonders if Willie, or someone, will be there to pick him up.
Willie says he will and heads for the bus stop. He had hoped Lacey would be awake so they could talk about the living situation, but it will just have to wait.
At home he tries the number André gave him for Angel again, but there’s no answer, so he heats up a can of chili on the stove and cranks up Bruce Springsteen on the sound system, pulling the shades in case he gets the urge to dance again. He does get the urge, so he sets the bowl on the coffee table and moves into the dining room. He can feel it; the same thing he felt on the court. He throws away moves he can’t make, replaces them with ones he can. Somewhere down in there, maybe deep in his center, Willie can feel himself starting to come back. Tears fill his eyes as he realizes it’s the first time since he got here that he thinks he may see his family again. But not yet.
CHAPTER 16
“You’re starting to look like a player,” André says, popping one from twenty feet. Willie moves under the basket a little to the right for an unlikely rebound should André miss. He takes the ball out of the net and fires a hard one-handed bounce pass back; André, taking it on the move, pops another.
“Thanks,” Willie says. “Actually, thanks to…Lisa. Boy, she never…gives up.”
“Yeah,” André agrees, “she’s a good one. But she says you deserve all the credit. Says you been working your butt off.”
“Only because…of what she’d do to me…if I didn’t.”
André laughs. “And best you don’t forget it. Hey, Willie, you have friends back in Montana?”
“Yeah, I had friends.”
“A lot, or a few?”
“A lot, I guess. Why?”
“I don’t see you mix with kids much here. You work and you do your therapy with Lisa. But I don’t see you with friends. Don’t you ever get lonely?”
“Yeah, well, it’s…a little lonely sometimes…”
“Having a hard time finding anyone you want to be close to?”
“Yeah,” Willie admits. “A little, I…guess.” Willie has been getting more and more comfortable with André over the past weeks, in the same way he felt close to Cyril. He doesn’t feel that safety with other kids, though. Especially these kids. They’re so tough. So grown-up.
André drives to the hoop, springs from the court as if in slow motion and slams the ball over the rim down into the net. It’s effortless and Willie is envious. André sees his look. “Don’t get to feeling sorry for yourself,” he says. “You couldn’t do that even if you hadn’t whacked your bean. Listen, are you giving these kids a chance?”
“Actually,” Willie says, popping in a jumper from about fifteen feet, “probably not. The only girl…I’m interested in works for the pimp…I’m living with, and the only guy I can beat in any athletic contest wants to be president…of the telephone company.”
“That might not be true anymore,” André says. “You should try to get into some pickup games out here. Lisa says you’re coming along pretty fast. I’ll bet you’re better than you think.”
Willie shrugs. André might be right. Something about this visualization Lisa has been working with him on has made his moves feel almost natural. He’s starting to be able to see what’s coming while he’s wrapping up what’s happening; it’s working its way into a flow. He doesn’t feel like the old Willie, but he feels like a different Willie and, as Lisa says, that’s not all bad.
“And start hanging out with some of these kids,” André says, taking his own shot out of the net and flipping it behind his back to Willie.
Willie catches it, parking it under his arm for a moment. “I don’t…do any drugs,” he says.
“So don’t do any drugs. You think that’s the only way you can get in at this school?”
Willie shrugs again. “There…are probably other ways, but…I don’t know what they are.”
“Then your job is to find out. But you can’t find out if you don’t put yourself out there.”
Willie nods a big nod and fires a jumper from about twelve feet out on the baseline. It bounces straight back to him off the rim and he catches it, turning to go.
“Stop!” André hollers, pointing to the hoop. “Never leave the court on a miss. Never leave the court on anything but a swisher. Always go on a success.”
Willie looks at him like André’s crazy, but André only points again to the hoop. Willie fires two more from the same spot and the second one snaps the net.
André nods. “Better.”
Willie finishes the polishing job on Lacey’s car and leans over the hood, careful not to touch. “Like a mirror,” he murmurs to himself, “only clearer.” He wonders if he could be considered an accomplice to Lacey’s life for keeping the car looking so good, but decides ladies probably don’t go to work for a pimp just because of how clean his car is. Besides, if Lacey didn’t have to feed Willie, he could have it done professionally every week.
Lacey should be home soon. He had a morning-and-afternoon route today and told Willie before he left he wanted the car looking “like a fine piece of jewelry, jus’ sparklin’ down the street” for this evening. They haven’t talked much since Lacey got out of the hospital four weeks ago; just enough to let Willie know that Lacey “done buried it, but jus
’ this once; no more.”
The ringing phone pulls Willie’s thoughts from Angel; she’s back in school, but acts as if the night at Lacey’s never happened. The voice on the other end is now familiar to Willie; Lacey’s ex-wife. “Lemme talk to Mr. Casteel.” She says the name as if she’s spitting out raw sewage.
“He’s…not here right now. Can I take a message?”
“Yeah, you can take a message,” she says sarcastically. “You tell Lacey his baby boy still rotting away in the institution. Tell him what he done ain’t never goin’ go away.” A pause. “Who is this anyway?”
“My name’s…Willie Weaver. I’m…staying here for a while.”
“Well, Willie Weaver, I don’t know who you is, but if you got a brain in you head, you best get away from Mr. Lacey Casteel. He turn you life to heartache.”
This is the first time Lacey’s ex-wife has actually said anything of substance to Willie and he doesn’t know how to respond. She sounds rough. “Would…you like me to…have him call you?”
She laughs. “Tell you what, honey. You can have him call me all you want. Won’t change nothin’. He won’t call, an’ even if he did, his baby still be rottin’ away. An’ for that, Mr. Lacey Casteel gonna rot in Hell.” A loud click signals the end of the conversation.
Willie scribbles a short note on the miniature chalkboard he installed beside the phone for Lacey’s messages: “Your ex called.”
Sometime after midnight Willie hears fumbling with the outside lock. It takes longer than usual and he knows Lacey’s drunk. He pretends to be asleep for a few seconds, but when it seems he’s never going to get the key in, Willie gets up. Lacey’s surprised when the door opens; stands swaying, eyes blood red, wondering how it opened magically, then spies Willie. “You don’ have to get up,” he slurs. “I woulda got it.”