Queenpin

  Was that how she saw me?

  Sure, I wanted to ask her what exactly she did other than collect bets and protection money. But it never seemed like the right time and I didn’t want her to think I was square, that I didn’t get the whole jury-rig, that I was just some Ivory soap kid who took the bus to work and daydreamed about new dresses and dates with men who wore flowers in their lapels.

  So I nodded and paid close attention as she talked. I watched how she moved (like she’d thought through every finger lift) and the way she spoke (with care, in the same even tone all the time). I knew I was looking at the big time. I figured she might have to spend a few hours a week in this flea circus of a town, but she was big city all the way and somehow, somehow she saw something in me, something in the face like a bar of soap, plain, unshaped, ready for dirt. Made for it.

  “So, kid,” she finally said, setting a ten on the table to cover the eighty-cent bill, “what’s your take? You up for a new business venture? One that’ll make real use of that stuff I know you have upstairs. You’ll learn more in a week than in a decade at the Tee Hee or two decades in the classroom.”

  She rose, smoothing her skirt with a flash of the hand and looking me straight in the eye. “You want it?”

  I met her gaze for the first time. “Yes,” I blurted, standing too, if shakily. “I’m ready. I’m all yours.”

  She nodded and I got the feeling that nod was her version of a smile. “Good, kid. You did good.”

  It was early, maybe seven A.M. I was putting on my stockings, getting ready for my eight o’clock class. Two hours of blackboard staring in a lecture hall filled with yawning bean counters in training. My old man was already out on the route, his egg-daubed breakfast plate waiting for me to scrub.

  I picked up the ringing phone, tugging a curler out of my hair.

  “Do you know who this is?” The voice like a slither.

  “Yes,” I said. It’d been three days since our talk and I’d thought of nothing but. “Yes. I was hoping—”

  “Call in sick. You’re not working today.”

  “Not working? But I—”

  But she’d hung up.

  Between accounting and business writing, I called the Tee Hee from a pay phone and told Arthur I wouldn’t be in that day. I played it real regular, but when I got off the phone, I felt a funny buzzing in my chest. I tried to ignore it, and after classes I went home and cleaned the house, polished Pop’s shoes, scrubbed the toilet basin, anything to keep busy, record player blaring to drown out the buzzing, which was loud and, yeah, kind of exciting. Exciting in a way that threw me. I didn’t want to think about it. I did two hours of homework and made chops and creamed spinach for the old man.

  It was in the morning papers. When the Clarion hit the front porch at the crack of dawn, I knew what it would say. It had happened around four o’clock, and only Jerome and Arthur were there, along with a J&B sales rep. Arthur had to go to County for third-degree burns on his face, neck, and left arm. The sales rep was standing near the front window when the bottle came careering in and had to have a couple dozen pieces of glass removed, including one from his eye, which, in the end, they also removed. Lucky Jerome, sleeping one off on the couch in the back office, came out with nothing more than a bad cough.

  (But he wasn’t so dumb. Later, I heard he left town within forty-eight hours, family in tow. Thirty-five years living in this town and gone in a flash. But hell, he got off easy.)

  Later that evening, while Pops was at his regular Benevolent Committee meeting at Saint Lucy’s, a police detective came by my house. He had owlish eyes and round shoulders and a wry smile like he’d long ago stopped being surprised by anything. I was ready for him, thought someone might come. I told him I was washing dishes and would he mind if I kept at it while we talked because if they weren’t done by the time the old man came home, I’d get a beating. This was a lie—my dad had never raised his hand in all his days, didn’t have the brass—but I wanted to keep my hands busy, wanted to have something to do while I lied.

  “You’ve worked at Club Tee Hee for how long?”

  “Two months.”

  “Like it?”

  “It’s all right. I’m in school. I’m going to be a secretary.”

  “So you didn’t see a long future there?”

  “I was planning to stay a while, sure. It was good with my school schedule.”

  “You’re a real scholar, huh?”

  “What?” I said, scrubbing steak sauce from the prongs of a fork.

  “Skip it. You called in sick yesterday,” he said, leaning against the kitchen counter.

  “Yeah,” I said, crossing myself with one soapy gloved hand. It was a flashy move, but I took a shot. “Someone was looking out for me.”

  “So what’s wrong with you? You look okay to me,” he said, with a vague smile as he wrote on his pad.

  I paused, shaking suds off my gloves. “Feminine troubles,” I said.

  He looked up at me. I gave him the stare right back. I had already learned that stare from her. Even then.

  He looked down again and wrote something on his pad. “Can’t argue with that, can I?”

  She called me later that afternoon. I told her about the cop and what I said.

  “Feminine troubles, huh? That what you use to get out of speeding tickets?”

  “I don’t have a car.”

  “Not yet,” she said. “So I guess you’re looking for a new job.”

  “I guess.”

  “Meet me at fifteen-oh-one North Branston Drive tonight. Apartment 9-G. Nine o’clock.”

  It was a tall, pistachio-colored building along the scenic ridge outside of town. The lobby was covered with mirrors and tall, potted plants. There was an automatic elevator with a carpet in it and when the doors opened on the ninth floor, I couldn’t hear even one radio, crying baby, or arguing couple. It wasn’t like any apartment building I’d ever set foot in.

  She was there, ushered me in. The place was big, with a thick band of windows, but there was nothing in it except for a lamp plugged in on the floor.

  “Your new digs?” I asked, resisting the urge to take my shoes off and sink my feet into deep-pile carpeting.

  “Yours,” she said. “You can’t live all the way over in Pottsville for your new job.”

  “I’m going to be able to lay out rent for this?”

  “There is no rent. It’s part of the job.”

  I looked at her. “What is the job?” Thoughts of men in hotel suites came into my mind. Men in town for conventions with bottles of rye on the nightstand and loose suspenders. I squinted at her hard in the low light.

  “Working for me.”

  “Doing what,” I said.

  “You don’t have to jut your chin out for me, kid,” she said, stepping to my left and looking me up and down. “Your virtue is your own business.”

  She walked behind me, circling me. I felt like a rump roast hanging in Gus’s Butcher Shop.

  “You’re not ready yet,” she said, still looking at me, arms folded across her chest. “But you will be.”

  I didn’t say anything. And that was how I started.

  The next day, four men from Drucker’s Movers showed up with a living room set in maple and glass and a bedroom set in satin blond. As for me, I packed a wicker suitcase and my favorite pillow and bid a dry-eyed adieu to the family manor. The old man wouldn’t come out of his bedroom when I left. My sisters came over and gave me a hard time, guessed I was being set up by some married man, called me a whore. I didn’t care. I knew I had my ticket.

  The first week, I drove. She gave me the keys to a bubble-top Impala and directions first to a locking dock in Deacon City and then, as the week went on, across the state line to a series of warehouses.

  “If you get pulled over,” she said, “you’re visiting your sister in Titusville. Her name is Fern Waxman. If they ask to search your car, which they won’t if you’re worth a plug nickel, then say, Sure, officer, but I’m
going to be late and my sister just had a baby.”

  No one pulled me over. I watched the speedometer the whole way. I never drove so careful in my life.

  I didn’t know what I was delivering, not from her at least. Each time I got to my destination, there were always two or three men there. One would ask for the keys and they’d open the trunk. I never opened it, not once.

  At the beginning, the stuff was already in there when she gave me the car keys. Once, I snuck a peak when the fellas were unloading. They were lifting a false bottom and pulling out small sacks. After a few trips, I got to see more of the action, cartons of cigarettes, prescription medicine stuffed in long tubes. Once it was tins of Russian caviar, another time, box after box of Star of David pendants.

  By week two, I was going to a bank with an ID that said Coral Meeker and emptying a safe-deposit box filled with sparklers like I’d never seen: big, chunky sapphire stickpins, ropes of glossy pearls, an opal ring the size of a golf ball. That time, she had me wrap the pieces in a bag of diapers and baby clothes “for my sister’s newborn.” Other times, I’d use the phony bottom. Once, she had me tuck a stack of passports into the lining of a suitcase. Another time, it was some kind of foreign currency packed tight in a bag attached to a new vacuum I was bringing for this same sister, the luckiest sister in three states.

  I did it all just like she wanted. Soon, she saw I was simon-pure and no fool either. I was ready for more. I wanted more.

  I was going to the track.

  “For this, you gotta look the part,” she said. I looked down at my off-the-rack acid green rayon number, shiny with wear. “You can’t look like a kid eating dinner off a hot plate. You can’t look like a table-hopping pickup either. We gotta believe there’s nothing funny about big money in your hand.”

  “Big money?”

  She nodded. “You ready for soap, kid? ’Cause you’re going to be elbow deep in it now.”

  I ran a hand over my dress and looked over at her. I smiled for her. I think she wanted me to. I said, Yes. Yes.

  Maybe you think during all this I must have felt some pangs of guilt, some doubt. It’s true, this wasn’t the way I was brought up. It wasn’t most families’ idea of good girl behavior. Sometimes I even tried to talk myself into feeling bad, into thinking for a second about the regular joes and why should I get away with nice things without working an honest job. But the second always passed and then the seconds stopped coming at all. Truth was, who was getting hurt by my doings, except those who chose to buy cigarettes and booze without sales tax, gamble away their paychecks, skimp their wife by paying back-of-the-truck prices for an anniversary string of pearls? They took their chances and I got the sweet butter skimmed off their bad luck.

  It was going to be like my coming-out party. And the getup really mattered. There was a way you had to look at the track. That’s what she said. Tasteful picture hats, spare makeup, a few good pieces of jewelry, nothing flashy. Don’t want to stand out too much, don’t want to be picked out in a big crowd. She took me to her apartment in a sparkling high-rise in the city. She had a walk-in closet big enough for a pair of chairs and a smoking table, big enough for rows and rows of satiny, lustrous fabrics, from gauzy to thick brocade, eggshell to midnight blue. And next to this finery, she had a long row of stiff, tailored suits in pastels. These she wore to the races.

  “You save the golds, the patterns, the lipstick red for carpet joints, or for your own time. You want to play uptown at the track, dolly. With the wad you’ll have, you gotta look like class.”

  So she took me to the big department store downtown, the one with all the mirrors and twinkling chandeliers. Bought me three fine suits—cream, oyster white, periwinkle blue. The skirts hit well below the knee but still fit snug in the right places, because she was no fool. You had to play that angle too, she said. Get a second glance from the high rollers.

  She watched me in the three-way mirror of the dressing room. She was smoking a long, gold-tipped cigarette, leaning back in the lounge chair.

  “Honey, I got the legs, but your ass is your ticket,” she said, waving her finger to get me to turn around. “And that rack won’t hurt either.”

  I looked at myself in the mirror. I could see her behind me, leg swinging. I could see her watching.

  On the way home, she told me that my sugar blond dye job had to go. Too late for the hairdresser, she did me herself, peeling off her doeskin gloves. I sat in a chair in front of the kitchen sink, leaned my head back far, and she plunged her jagged-emerald-covered hands through my hair again and again, turning ratted blond into smooth honey brown. I remember looking up at her, into her eyes, husk of creased skin hanging over them. Heavy-lidded like a snake. She’s figuring something now, I thought. She never stops running the odds.

  We sat in her living room late into the night and she schooled me. Boy, did she school me. She talked to me, low and cool, for hours, never losing her ramrod posture, never raising her voice above her near-whisper. She told me all I had to do was go down to the Casa Mar bullring and place dime bets on a few choice horses. Taking out the racing form, she went through the Friday races and wrote “place” next to some horses and “show” next to others.

  “You don’t want to hurt the odds, so never bet to win,” she said. “You spread the money around and bet to place and show and you get a return on investment at least seventy percent of the time. That’s the stuff. More important, the dough gets cleaned and the tax men only see racetrack winnings.”

  She explained it all and made me tell it back to her to see if I understood. Oh did I.

  When I was kid, once a year my dad’s boss, Mr. Risniak, would invite all his drivers and their families to his big house over in the gold heel part of town. There were frankfurters and hamburger sandwiches and games for kids and the parents all got soused. Mr. Risniak wasn’t around too much. He’d usually make an appearance midway through, standing by the barbecue with his sunglasses on, talking discreetly to a few of his favorites, never my old man. I remember thinking he sort of looked like a movie star or a singer in his maroon sports jacket with that poker face. Once, when I was about twelve, I was sitting by myself, eating a plate of Jay’s potato chips and he came over and sat down across from me. He was drinking out of a tall glass with a lime and ice and he smoked one thin brown cigarette after another.

  “Murray’s kid, right?”

  I nodded.

  “So, you get along with your dad?” he said.

  I looked up from my paper plate and nodded again.

  “Good people,” he said. “Your dad, he’s on the road a lot though, huh? You miss him?”

  “Yeah,” I said, looking over at the badminton net. I didn’t know how to talk to men yet.

  A moment later. “You’re what, thirteen?”

  “Next month,” I said, wiping salt from my chin.

  “You’re gonna be a woman before you know it.”

  I could feel my face reddening.

  “That’s when the trouble starts.” He grinned, white teeth dazzling. “I married my wife when she was sixteen. She already had lots of boyfriends. You will too.” He took another sip, then looked back at me. “You ever have a drink?”

  I shook my head.

  “Not champagne at a wedding? Well, wine at communion.”

  I nodded, trying to meet his eyes.

  “Wanna taste?” He nudged his glass towards me on the picnic table, looking around, as if for witnesses.

  I stared at the clear glass, tinged with the green of the lime. I pushed my finger against the sweaty side, feeling the cool of it.

  “Go on,” he whispered. “Just one taste, though.”

  I kept looking at it, thinking. Then on some kind of hard impulse, I grabbed the glass with both hands and brought it to my lips. It ran down my throat.

  Water. It was water with lime.

  Mr. Risniak laughed hard, even slapping the table. I set the glass down and pushed it back to him. My face was burning. He took off
his sunglasses and looked at me.

  “I thought so.” He grinned.

  I can’t say I wasn’t scared, making the hour drive to the big track the next day. Sure, I had the props, I had the drapery, down to silk handkerchiefs in my purse and silk underwear under my new suit, its basting stitches scarcely out. And I had the scratch in nice, clean bills. But I didn’t have her attitude, her steel. I felt like a kid knocking around in her mother’s high heels.

  But I followed orders. I did everything exactly as she said. I checked out the morning line to make sure the odds were where we wanted them. I placed the bets, polite and brisk with the teller. I was careful not to lock eyes with any of the regulars, the daily bettor types who knew the score. “You don’t ever want to be seen with one of them,” she told me. “Eyes are everywhere at the track. Your cherry is our big advantage. Let’s keep it intact as long as we can.”

  It was during the second race that I noticed the man watching me. I tried to play it casual. I watched the action. I listened for the call and marked the winner on my racing form. I took out a compact and powdered my nose. But as I peered in my compact, I could see him still watching. A smooth-faced man of about forty-five in a blue linen suit and straw boater, smoking a cigar.

  He stayed behind me, eyes on me, for the next four races. By then, it was past time for me to take wing. Teeth gritted, jaw set, I stood up, trying hard not to wobble, to let my eyes dart, to show I even noticed him. But then he got up too and I felt something twist in my stomach. Was this it? My first real gig and I’m fingered?