American Heart

  The waiter came over, smiling again. We smiled back at him, looking normal, I hoped. But inside, I was thinking about how I’d just given pepper spray to a Muslim fugitive, and how that might look to a judge.

  “Everything all right?” the waiter asked.

  I nodded, and he went away.

  “You’ll be fine,” I said. “I’ll be right here, and I can see his door.” Like that would do her any good.

  But she nodded, her eyes on mine, as if what I’d just said mattered. And then she pulled her hood up over her hat, stood up, and walked out.

  I watched her white coat as she made her way across the parking lot. After she waited for a pause in traffic, she jogged across the street. And then cars rolled by from both directions, and I couldn’t see her anymore.

  After a while, the waiter came by with another Diet Coke, and I drank down half of it in just a few gulps, the Patchouli Kings blasting in my earbuds. I kept looking at Tess’s watch and tapping my foot. I told myself I shouldn’t feel guilty or worried, and that it was crazy that I felt both. I’d done what I’d promised. Anyway, she’d been over there for ten minutes already, and I didn’t see any police lights. I didn’t hear any sirens.

  She was fine. She was for sure probably fine.

  But I was also thinking that maybe I should have gone over there with her. If I put myself in her shoes, I wouldn’t have wanted to knock on that door all by myself. And it was pretty clear she was scared of dogs. It seemed like maybe, as part of the promise, I should have stayed right with her until she was at a bus station, ID and ticket in hand. That’s what Caleb would have done, if he could have. That’s what I would want somebody to do for me, or for him, if everything was changed up.

  She’d been gone for sixteen minutes when I saw her running back across the street, her white coat bright under the streetlights. She was moving fast, her boots keeping time with the drums of my music. I popped out the earbuds and sat up straight. She was still alive. And not in handcuffs. All of this was good. But then she got close enough to see my face in the window, she shook her head, and I saw she was crying.

  I put the money on the table, grabbed my coat and both bags, and hurried out. But by the time I got out into the parking lot, she wasn’t there. I turned in a circle, a bag hanging off each shoulder, until I saw her. She’d moved back to the brick side of the restaurant, where she couldn’t be seen from the road. She was still crying, but as I got closer, I saw she didn’t look sad or scared so much as crazy mad.

  “He stole it!” She pointed across the street. “He took my money, and then he said his computer wasn’t working, and he would not give the money back.”

  “No,” I said, like I was arguing with her, like I didn’t believe what she was saying was true. But even then, I knew how stupid that was. Of course it was true. Of course that was what he did. That way he could get paid without having to take any risk himself, or even do any work. She was lucky he didn’t turn her in. And I saw now that I should have known he would take her money, just because he could.

  “There was nothing I could do.” She wiped her face with the sleeve of her coat. “He said if I didn’t leave, he would call the police. He said he could put his equipment away in five minutes, and no one would believe what I said.”

  I still had a bag hanging off each shoulder, and my coat was rolled under one arm. The vapor of my breath floated out into the night. “Goddamn him,” I said. “Goddamn.” I probably shouldn’t have said that in front of a religious person, but I was so mad I couldn’t help it. And at least at the moment, she didn’t seem to care.

  “He made the dog growl and bark at me. There was nothing I could do. Nothing.” She put her hand to her mouth. “And now I don’t have much money left. I have just enough for the tickets now.” She put her arms up around her head, like she was blocking a punch. “I’m finished because of this. I’m over.”

  “Did you pepper-spray him?”

  She looked confused, peeking out at me from between her elbows.

  “You should have pepper-sprayed him,” I said. It was sort of a jerk thing to say to her then, because obviously it was too late. But it made me feel better to say what she should’ve done, to make it seem like she’d messed up. I wanted this to not be my fault.

  She shook her head. “He did not attack me.”

  “Well, he robbed you,” I said. “Same thing. You should have pepper-sprayed him.”

  She gave me a hard look. “You are a frightening people.”

  I blinked. “What?” But I knew what she’d said. And I knew what she’d meant. She meant Americans. She was upset, okay. I understood. But Americans weren’t bad or frightening or whatever. She was lumping me, and all of us, in with Matt P. That wasn’t fair.

  “I wanted to come to this country since I was a girl,” she said, laughing, though her eyes were still shiny. “Everyone I knew did. I worked so hard, so hard to get here.” She shook her head, looking back across the street. “But this is the reality. This man can steal from me, and there is nothing I can do. There is no Bill of Rights for me. It means nothing. It’s a lie. You live in a lie. I worked for a lie.” She thumped her hand against her chest. “I was in love with this country. But it has broken my heart. And no. No, I did not use the pepper spray, because this is not the person I am.”

  I shook my head. I understood she was having a hard time, but it wasn’t fair, what she was saying. I mean, okay, maybe she didn’t want to use the pepper spray, but the whole country wasn’t a thief. The whole country wasn’t a skeevy guy who made fake IDs and scared foreign women with a pit bull. He was just one person. But I guess she’d been having a pretty bad experience with us in general by now.

  I looked back across the street, to the light still shining over his door. I damned him in my mind once again. You shouldn’t take somebody’s money, even a runaway Muslim’s, and not give them what they were owed. That just seemed un-American to me. However you felt about foreigners, if you had a deal, you had a deal.

  And really, it was my fault she’d gone over there. I’d kind of screwed her over.

  “Gimme the pepper spray.” I set the bags down and held out my hand.

  She waited a second, like she wasn’t sure. She started to shake her head, but I snapped my fingers. “It’s mine,” I said. “And I’d like it back.”

  She reached into her pocket and pulled out the pepper spray, setting it carefully in my palm. I pushed an arm through each sleeve of my coat.

  “You got money to go back in?” I asked, nodding back at the restaurant.

  She frowned. “Yes, but—”

  “Can you take my backpack in with you?” I was already walking away, my eyes trained on the Budweiser sign. She was saying something else to me now, but I didn’t hear what. I was too busy listening to my own head.

  We were not a frightening people. We were not all disappointing cheats. I knew it wasn’t true, but I didn’t even like that she thought it. And that she maybe had good reason.

  I was going to get that money back. I would do what I had to do.

  7

  MATT P. ANSWERED the door all mad-looking and frantic, like he was expecting a fight. He had on a red hooded sweatshirt and jeans, and his belt was undone, the ends of it hanging out from under the sweatshirt. The dog stood beside him, staring up at me with wide-set, serious eyes.

  “What?” Matt waved his hands at me like he was trying to break a spell. He was only a head taller than I was, short for a grown man, but he was twice as wide across the shoulders. I wouldn’t do well in hand-to-hand combat.

  “Sorry,” I said. My right hand clutched the pepper spray in my coat pocket, my finger on the trigger. “I’m looking for some help with some . . . laminated documents?”

  He leaned out onto the covered walkway a little, and glanced from side to side. When he saw the coast was clear, he gave me a long look. “You been here before?”

  I nodded. “Last September. I came by with my friend.”

  He bobb
ed his eyebrows. “I always remember the cute ones.”

  I forced a smile. I have to say, Matt P. might have been considered good-looking if you just saw him in a photograph—he had a full head of sandy hair, and pale blue eyes with dark lashes. But in real life he just wasn’t that appealing, maybe because of the lazy way he talked paired with this twitchy thing his eyes did sometimes. Like there was a glitch, and every now and then, it showed.

  He reached down to buckle his belt. “Why you need another one?”

  “My purse was stolen.”

  His gaze was free of sympathy.

  “You got cash?”

  I nodded, blowing on my hands. I’d left my mittens in my backpack.

  “Just you? You by yourself?”

  I nodded again, and he stepped aside to let me in. The dog backed up, his eyes moving back and forth between us. He was almost all white, with just a few brown spots on his muscled back, and another around one of his eyes.

  “Hey Boogie,” I said, looking down. “How you doing?”

  I didn’t get so much as a wiggle of a tail stub. Matt shut the door behind me.

  “He’s not doing so well. Excuse me, but he just puked on the carpet. I got to finish cleaning it, or it’ll stain. Take off your shoes and come on in.”

  I didn’t like the idea of that. My plan had been to keep by the door for easy escape—I remembered that his apartment was laid out like a snake den, with a long hall you had to go down before you got to any rooms. But Matt was already walking down the hall. Boogie stayed behind, staring up at me. I held out my hand for him to sniff, but he wasn’t interested.

  “You coming?” Matt called out. “You’re perfectly safe. He only attacks on command.”

  “Hold on.” I pulled off my boots and followed his voice down the hall and into the living room, Boogie’s collar jingling beside me. I remembered the living room’s track lighting and cream-colored carpet, which looked as freshly vacuumed now as it had in September. That had surprised me and Tess both. If I’d met somebody like Matt P. on the street, or when he was working at the arcade, I would have probably guessed right away he was a skeeve, but I wouldn’t have guessed in a million years he was a big neat freak. That’s what he was, though. His living room looked like something you’d see in a catalog—the furniture was all modern and black, and there was no clutter anywhere, no dust. The remotes and game controllers were all lined up parallel on the glass coffee table, and the black throw pillows were set on the white couch just so.

  So it made sense that he was freaking out about the stain on the carpet. The stain was mossy green, about the size of an outstretched hand, and not too far from the couch. Matt was down on his hands and knees, and he’d pulled on yellow rubber gloves, going after the stain hard with a sponge and frequent sprays from a bottle of pink liquid. Boogie went over and sat beside him, looking up at me like maybe I shouldn’t move too fast.

  “Take a seat,” Matt said.

  I walked slowly to the other side of the couch and sat on the very edge.

  “I’m sorry he’s feeling sick,” I said.

  “Yeah. He just does this sometimes. He’ll be all right.” He looked up from his scrubbing and leaned over to nuzzle the dog’s forehead. Boogie looked up to lick his face, and Matt turned away, gagging.

  “He’s got breath that’ll burn your eyes.” He laughed, his eyes twitching a little. I had to smile back to be polite, but nothing in me was happy. The whole way over here, I’d been so mad I hadn’t considered that I didn’t have a real plan. I was just going to come over here with the pepper spray and get Chloe’s money back. But I hadn’t really thought things through. If you threaten somebody with something like pepper spray, you’ve got to be prepared to actually use it. You’ve got to be ready to pull the trigger. And I wasn’t sure that I could do it anymore—not looking at Matt the way he was now, cleaning up dog puke and rubbing the neck of the dog who did it. He’d stolen Chloe’s money. I hadn’t forgotten that. Still, there was a big difference between thinking you should pepper-spray someone in the face, and actually doing it when he was a real person sitting four feet away from you.

  Also, if I pepper-sprayed Matt, or even threatened to do it, Boogie would probably come after me. So I’d have to spray him, too. I didn’t like to think of myself as the kind of person who would hurt a dog.

  “Boy,” I said, looking down at the stain, or what was left of it. “That stuff’s zip. It’s really working.”

  I said this to get him friendly with me. I knew from experience, mostly with my manager at Dairy Queen, that people who really like things clean love to talk about their methods. You start conversing with them about what kind of cloth or spray or special concoction to use to make something especially germ-free and shiny, or what kind of tool you need to get down into that little crack where the gunk hides, and they get this look in their eye like finally they met someone who gets it, and they don’t have to be alone anymore.

  Matt was exactly the same. He held up the spray bottle and showed me the label, which had some kind of Asian writing on it.

  “I had to order it special from Japan,” he said. “Let me tell you, it gets out anything. But it doesn’t have bleach in it, so it doesn’t affect the color of the carpet. I don’t get it. But it’s a game-changer, for sure.”

  “For sure,” I agreed, leaning down to look at the carpet, which was just damp now, no stain. It really was impressive. So I wasn’t completely acting, and when I looked up, he smiled at me like he was having a moment with an old cleaning friend.

  “Where’d you come in from?” He stood, pulling off the gloves. The dog stood too, stretching.

  “Joplin.”

  He nodded and carried the cleaning supplies through an open doorway to the kitchen. Boogie followed him as far as the doorway then stopped, turning back to keep an eye on me. He was like the Secret Service with a jingling collar, who sometimes puked on the carpet.

  “You drove here all the way from Joplin?” I heard water running, shutting off. “All by yourself?”

  “That’s right.” As soon as I said it, I wasn’t sure that had been the smartest thing to say. I should have said I had a friend, or friends, waiting for me. Too late. I’d already committed.

  “Last time you came with a friend.” He was back in the doorway now, drying his hands on a checkered dishcloth. “Your blond friend.” His eyes did the twitchy thing.

  I nodded, but I had to pretend to sneeze so he wouldn’t see how skeeved out I was.

  “Bless you,” he said. “And I’ll need the money now.”

  “Okay. But I got something to tell you.” I lowered my chin and tried to sound as sweet and pitiful as I could. “I only have a hundred dollars.”

  “Forget it. Get out.”

  I pressed my palms together, like a child saying her prayers. “Please? For a loyal customer?” I was as desperate as I sounded. If he said no, I was going to have to do something drastic immediately. “Look,” I said. “I could have gone to somebody right in Joplin, but I drove all the way here because you do such a good job. My friend Tess said you were the best in the state.”

  “Yeah.” He blew through his teeth. “Which is why I don’t work for cheap.” But then he checked his watch, and he was quiet for a few seconds. I guessed he was thinking that it didn’t look like the tall girl with the huge eyes, who’d called earlier from a truck stop, was going to show after all. He twisted his mouth to the side and looked back at me like he was making a calculation.

  “Whatever. It’s a slow night. Give me the hundred now, and I’ll do it if you have a drink with me.”

  It was like my body got scared before I did. My stomach clenched, and my forehead went damp.

  “That’s great!” I laughed. “But first let’s make the ID, okay?”

  “Nope. Drink first. I want to unwind. And you gotta pay me now, too.”

  I took a deep breath. I’d be fine. I could be careful. I just had to think. I took out the five twenties that Chloe had
given me. He took his wallet out of the back pocket of his jeans and slipped the money in.

  “Pick your poison,” he called out, heading back to the kitchen. “I got wine, stout beer, some hard stuff . . .”

  I could see the outline of his wallet in one of the back pockets of his jeans. “I’ll have what you’re having,” I said.

  I didn’t know what to do. It wasn’t like I could run in after him. Boogie stood just outside the arched doorway to the kitchen, watching me.

  Matt leaned back out, bending down to rub the dog’s head. “Gin and tonic okay? I got limes.”

  “Whatever you’re having.” I wiped my palms on my jeans. “Hold up. I’ll come talk to you while you make them.”

  “Nope. Don’t come in.” He was back in the kitchen. “I’ve got to feed the dog in here, and he gets anxious about his food.” He made a sound like a clucking squirrel. “Come here, Boogie. You ready to eat? Come here, boy.”

  He poured Boogie’s food into a silver bowl that was right off the doorway to the kitchen, so Boogie’s body, once he started to gobble up his food, made a little fence that I wasn’t about to try to jump. I craned my neck, trying to see where Matt was making the drinks. But the wall hid him. I looked down, rubbing the back of my neck. I supposed it was possible that he really did need to feed the dog just then, and that he wasn’t just trying to keep me out while he made the drinks. It seemed pretty late at night to feed a dog. Then again, that was when he usually got off work.

  Anyway, it didn’t matter now. If he was putting something in my drink, he’d already had time to do it.

  “Can I use your bathroom?”

  “Yup. Down the hall. You’ll find it.”

  The bathroom smelled faintly of bleach, and everything in it was too-bright white: the towels, the walls, the little rug in front of the toilet, the shower curtain, and even the shower curtain rings. I sat on the toilet with my face in my hands, my breath warm on my palms. I could get out of this now. I could come out and say that I’d changed my mind about the drink, and that I’d called my friend when I was in the bathroom, and he was coming by to pick me up right now, and oh, by the way, this friend’s dad was a cop. Maybe Matt wouldn’t give back the hundred dollars. I’d still be fine. I’d be a whole lot better off than I might be if I stayed here and had a drink.