Swag

  Frank looked back as they passed it. “It might be an idea, though. U.S. Post Office. Save it for around Christmastime when business’s up.”

  Stick didn’t bite. He realized now what Frank was doing.

  Coming to Ten Mile Road, Frank said, “Hey, there we are. What do you say?”

  Stick looked at the bank on the southwest corner. Michigan National. He didn’t say anything.

  “You don’t like it?”

  “I like it,” Stick said. “It’s just I don’t love it.”

  “How about the Chinese place? All right, you guys, give me all your fucking egg rolls. You like egg rolls or you love them?”

  “The next one,” Stick said, “I think I might go for.”

  It was a Food Lanes supermarket. Stick turned in and pulled to a stop facing the building. He liked the location, the alley running next to the store, the ample parking on two sides. Or they could park across the alley at the Chinese place. That might be better.

  “It’s up to you,” Frank said. “Go in and look it over. I’ll wait here.”

  He was still playing his game. Stick didn’t say anything. He went in and took his time walking around the store and bought cigarettes. Frank had a bag of potato chips open when he got back in the car and drove out.

  “You still like it?”

  “Not bad,” Stick said. “The only thing, you notice the doors? The cashier’s place’s in the front, in the corner, and there’s doors on both sides. Two doors to watch. Also there’s a magazine rack. So from the cashier’s place you can’t see much of the store.”

  Frank put a potato chip in his mouth and crunched it between his teeth.

  “But no cops in there dressed up like grocery boys?”

  “Fuck you,” Stick said.

  “You want a chip? Lay’s. They dare you to try and eat just one.”

  “You didn’t like the looks of the guy any more than I did,” Stick said. “I said he looked like a cop, you agreed.”

  “I said you also thought the guy in the bar looked like a cop, with the fucking shotgun.”

  “You’re trying to make it look like it’s my fault we didn’t hit the place,” Stick said. “Like I’m chicken or something. You want to hit the post office? How about that bank there. All that shit.”

  “Watch the road,” Frank said.

  “Watch your ass. You don’t like the way I drive, get the fuck out.”

  “You know, it’s funny,” Frank said, “you come on as a very easygoing person. Then bang, no reason, you get a hard-on like you want to kill somebody.”

  “No reason, no, none at all,” Stick said.

  “I was being funny, for Christ sake, you get pissed off. Like the other day you’re pissed off at me using the car. Think about it,” Frank said. “You got this down-home, you-all delivery like nothing in the world bothers you, but you know what? I think you could be a pretty mean son of a bitch underneath it all.”

  Frank was turning it around again, making it all his fault. There was no sense arguing with him when he did that. Stick kept his eyes on the road and didn’t say anything. It always irritated him and he would begin to think about how he’d got into this and wonder if he should get out, now, while he still had a choice and could walk away.

  But he had to admit they were doing better than he’d expected, and maybe it was natural for two guys as different as they were to rub each other the wrong way sometimes. So what, right? He could live with it, as long as they kept the jobs simple and didn’t overextend themselves.

  Frank offered the potato chips again and he took some.

  “You want to do one or go home or what?”

  “Well, long as we’re out,” Stick said, “we may as well. You got a hundred on you?”

  The hundred-dollar bill usually worked. It was something they had thought of after the experience with the Armenian and could save a lot of threatening and gun waving. Make a purchase and hand the guy the bill. He would always hesitate, then look in the cash register, then hesitate again. Then, with Frank standing there looking prosperous and honest in his suit, the guy would fish a roll out of his pocket or say, Just a minute, and step into the backroom. Stick would come in and they’d find the guy taking his excess cash out of a safe or wherever he kept it hidden.

  They stopped by the T-bird to put their suit coats back on, cruised around for a while and found a drugstore with a liquor department. Frank bought a bottle of J&B and handed the guy the hundred-dollar note. This led them back to the prescription department where the pharmacist was making change out of a drawer. Stick tied up the clerk and pharmacist with Ace wraps and one-inch adhesive—the same tape he had used to do his ankles before a basketball game—while Frank hit the cash registers and the secret drawer for sixteen-fifty, their all-time record drugstore take.

  They stayed out, had dinner, and closed the bar at the Kingsley Inn, singing along with the piano player, talking and making friends but not seeing anything worth picking up; all too old. Driving home, going through the business section of Birmingham, they noticed an appliance store holding its Annual Twenty-four-Hour Marathon Sales Spectacular. They looked at each other, full of drinks, and grinned.

  The two guys who ran the store were dressed up in flannel nightshirts, still smiling and friendly at two thirty in the morning. Frank and Stick each got a free-gift yardstick with the store’s name on it for coming in. They looked around for a few minutes. Then Frank picked out a couple of ice trays that were sale priced at two ninety-eight each and handed the hundred-dollar bill to the cluck behind the counter in his nightshirt. The cluck looked at Frank and at the bill and finally shook his head and said gee, he was sorry but he didn’t have enough cash in the store to make change.

  Walking out, Frank said, “Bullshit.”

  Stick said, “You cheap bastard, why didn’t you pick out a radio or something?”

  “Don’t worry,” Frank said.

  A half hour later they met the cluck down the street, at the local bank’s night-deposit box. They pressed a free-gift yardstick into his back, relieved him of a little more than seven hundred in cash, and left the cluck standing there in his nightshirt.

  Frank could be a pain in the ass sometimes, but they usually had a good time and it was a pretty interesting way to make a living.

  11

  THE TIME BEFORE HE HAD looked for Mona and found Arlene. Tonight it was the other way around.

  Arlene wasn’t in her apartment. He went there twice and knocked and waited.

  Frank was out for the evening, with the car and probably Karen. Stick didn’t bring up the car again. If he wanted a car he’d get his own. He didn’t feel like going out, though. He made a drink and went down to sit by the pool for a while.

  He liked the darkness and the lights beneath the clear water and the sound of crickets in the shrubs. The bourbon was good, too. It was nice, sitting by himself having a drink and a cigarette.

  It could be his own private patio and swimming pool. He wondered if he’d enjoy it any more if it was.

  Mona appeared out of the darkness, without a sound, and sank into a lounge chair by the deep end of the pool. He wondered if she had seen him, the glow from his cigarette. She sat with the backrest up, her legs stretched out, staring at the illuminated water. She didn’t move. He wondered if her eyes were closed, staring at the water but not seeing it.

  Stick said, “How you doing?”

  Mona looked over.

  “Hi. How’re you?” She said it quietly, without putting anything extra into it.

  She reminded him of somebody. Her face was pale in the reflection of the underwater lights. Her hair seemed darker. It was her nose and her mouth and the way her hair hung close to her face. She reminded him of somebody in the movies he used to like.

  He almost told her that—bringing the aluminum chair over next to her lounge—but it would sound dumb, like he was making it up. It didn’t make sense, did it? Trying to think of something to say to a hooker that wouldn’t soun
d dumb. Hooker or call girl or whore, prostitute, whatever she considered herself. That might be something to talk about—if there was a difference between them. Get in a conversation about it, like he was making a study. When did you first consider turning pro? First accept money? What do you think got you doing it? Is it true whores really don’t like guys? And all that bull-shit.

  He had been with whores in Toledo, Findlay, Ohio, Columbus, Fort Wayne, Terre Haute, Rock Island, Illinois, Dubuque, and Minot, North Dakota. Most had been nice, a few had had no personality at all. But he had never met a whore with a nose and mouth like Mona’s. And he couldn’t look past her nose and mouth and see her as a whore. Also she seemed too small and frail to be a whore—even though he had read that women were better than men at withstanding pain or punishment. He pictured her taking her blouse off, no bra, and asking for the money; then imagined a guy punching her in the mouth, threatening to do it again, and getting it for nothing. It could happen, a guy who didn’t have any feeling. It must be a pretty tough life. He wanted to get into it with her, but didn’t know how.

  What had he said to all those other whores from Toledo to Minot? He’d said, “How much?”

  He said to Mona, “You want a drink? I can get you one.”

  “No, thank you, though.”

  “How about a sip then? It’s bourbon.”

  She hesitated. “All right.”

  As she was taking a drink he said, “No trouble to get you one. Salty Dog, anything you want.”

  “No thanks.” She handed the glass back. “I’m going up in a minute.”

  He wanted to say something so there wouldn’t be a silence, but it came. She was staring at the pool again.

  “You know, you remind me of somebody. I can’t think of who it is.”

  “Is that so?”

  “Somebody in the movies.”

  He said it and it didn’t sound as bad as he thought it would.

  “My dad used to say I reminded him of a Labrador retriever we had. His name was Larry. The dog, I mean.”

  “You sure don’t look like a Labrador retriever,” Stick said. “Maybe the hair.”

  “It was when Larry was a puppy. I think the feet had something to do with it,” Mona said. “We both had big feet.”

  Stick looked at her legs, at the white sandals pointing out of her white slacks.

  “They don’t look very big.”

  “Seven and a half quad.” She looked down at them and wiggled her toes. “I have trouble getting fitted, except sandals, something like that.”

  There was a silence again.

  “You sure you don’t want a drink?”

  “No, I think I’ll go up.”

  “I still can’t think of who it is you look like.”

  “Somebody in the movies, huh?”

  “Dark hair, really pretty.”

  “Oh, it’s a girl?”

  “Sure it’s a girl. She was in—I know she was in one John Wayne was in.”

  “I don’t know who it could be,” Mona said. “I don’t go to the movies much.”

  “It was on television. I think the Monday night movie about a month ago.”

  “I guess I was out.”

  Stick hesitated. “Working?”

  “Could’ve been.”

  “How much you charge?”

  “Fifty,” Mona said. “How’s that sound?”

  Mona squeezed her eyes closed and said, “Oh, God. Jesus.”

  Stick said, “Hey, don’t do that, okay? Unless you really mean it.”

  12

  STICK DIDN’T KNOW WHY HE expected her to be different. He realized now the person in there, behind the calm expression, was predictable and he’d met her before, many times. She wasn’t a mystery person at all; she was really kind of dumb. She had never heard of Waylon Jennings or his hit record Midnight Rider. She hadn’t even heard of Billy Crash Craddock or Jerry Reed, the Alabama Wild Man. She liked Roger Williams and Johnny Mathis. She also liked Tab with Jack Daniel’s. Stick was disappointed, then relieved. He fixed himself some greens with salt pork and ring baloney and Jiffy Corn Bread Mix, fell asleep watching the late movie, woke up, and went to bed. He didn’t know what time Frank got in.

  The way he knew he was home was seeing the colored girl in the kitchen the next morning.

  He got the paper in and came into the kitchen in his striped undershorts, scratching the hair on his chest, reading a headline about Ford and not sure which Ford they were talking about. A pan of water was boiling on the range. The colored girl was looking in the refrigerator. She had on a bra and panties, that’s all, and was barefoot.

  She looked over at him and said, “I don’t see no tomato juice.”

  Stick saw her as she spoke and maybe he jumped, he wasn’t sure. It was pretty unexpected. Good-looking colored girl standing there in her underwear, he walks in the same way, like they were married or good friends. He felt funny, aware of his bare skin.

  “What’d you say?”

  “Tomato juice.” She was relaxed, like she was in her own kitchen.

  “In the cupboard,” Stick said, “if we got any.”

  He watched her open the cupboard, look over the shelves, and reach for the gold can of Sacramento: slim brown body and white panties very low, legs stretched, on her tiptoes. He really felt funny. He didn’t know if it was because she was black or because she was in her underwear. He tried to seem at ease and sound casual.

  “You the maid?”

  “Yeah, the cleaning lady,” the girl said. “But I don’t do floors or any ironing.”

  “LaGreta,” Stick said. “Are you LaGreta?”

  The girl turned and looked at him. “You know somebody that name?”

  “I don’t know her. I think I heard of her.”

  “Uh-huh. Where’s your opener, love?”

  “In the drawer there.”

  He watched her get it out and pry two holes in the top of the can.

  “You and him work together, huh?”

  “You left me,” Stick said. “I thought we were talking about LaGreta.”

  “She’s my mother.”

  “Oh.” Stick nodded.

  “You see it now?”

  “Well—not exactly. You might think we’re somebody else you heard about, I don’t know.”

  “Yeah, that’s it,” the girl said. “You’re somebody else.”

  “You and . . . my friend, you meet each other at Sportree’s, I bet.”

  “Hey, baby, don’t worry about it. Just tell me where I can find the vodka.”

  “I’ll get it.” Stick went out to the bar, still holding the newspaper in front of him, still not at ease talking to the girl. Young little colored girl, and he felt awkward. He came back in with a bottle of vodka. The girl was lacing a glass of ice with Lea & Perrins and Tabasco.

  “He like it hot?”

  “Probably.”

  “I hope so. It’s the only way I fix it.” She took the vodka bottle, poured in a couple of ounces, and filled the glass with tomato juice.

  “You work with your mama?”

  “I told you I was a cleaning lady.”

  “Come on, really. What do you do?”

  “I suppose you’ll learn sooner or later anyway,” the girl said. “I’m a brain surgeon.” She moved past him with the Bloody Mary.

  Stick watched her tight little can cross the living room and go into the hall, then heard her voice.

  “Come on, sport. Time to open those baby blues and face the world.”

  Stick made bacon and fried some eggs in the grease.

  When the girl came out again she was dressed in slacks and a blouse and earrings, a jacket over her arm. She didn’t care for fried eggs, asked if they had any real coffee and settled for freeze-dried instant. Stick got up the nerve to ask her a few questions while she drank her coffee and read Shirley Eder and Earl Wilson. Her name was Marlys. She was twenty years old, not a brain surgeon, she worked in the office of a department store as a secretary.


  Marlys grabbed her jacket and purse, yelled into the bedroom, “See you, sport,” and was gone.

  When Frank came out in his jockeys with the empty glass, looking like he’d been through major surgery the night before, Stick said, “What’s Rule Number Nine?”

  Frank said, “For Christ sake, lemme alone.”

  He looked terrible first thing in the morning, his hairdo mussed up and needing a shave, sad, wet eyes looking out of a swollen face. Stick could understand why the colored girl was anxious to leave. Frank’s bedroom probably smelled like a sour-mash still.

  “Don’t feel so good, uh?”

  “I’m all right. Once I have some breakfast.”

  “You throw up yet? Get down there and make love to the toilet bowl?”

  Frank didn’t answer. He turned the fire on under the pan of water.

  “Rule Number Eight,” Stick said. “Never go back to an old bar or hangout. You go to Sportree’s.”

  “An old hangout. I’ve been there twice, three times.”

  “Rule Number Nine. Never tell anyone your business. You pick up a broad, her mother knows what you do.”

  “She doesn’t know me,” Frank said, “not by name. We never met.”

  “Never tell a junkie even your name,” Stick said. “The place is a dope store, full of heads. Rule Number Ten—you want another one? Never associate with people known to be in crime. Your friend Sportree—into many things, right? beginning with dope—and probably everybody else in the place.”

  Frank jiggled the pan of water to make it boil faster. “The guy’s a friend of mine. I talked to him for a while, then Marlys came in, we been getting to know each other.”

  “Marlys,” Stick said. “I thought you went out with Karen.”

  “I went out with Sonny, since we’re keeping records. I ran into her coming in, waited an hour while she changed into an identical outfit, and we went out, had dinner.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah what?”

  “What happened?”

  Frank looked over from the range. “It’s a long, boring story. For your record, Sonny doesn’t kiss and hug on the first date. Maybe not on the second or third or fourth, either. Maybe she never does. Maybe not even if you married her.”