One Good Hustle (23 page)

It didn’t come off, though, and it was all because of me.

The maid ordered me to sit at the kitchen table, dialled the operator and asked for the police. Then she folded her arms and stared as we waited.

I started to cry. “I have to go. I need my daddy.”

“The police will find your daddy,” she said.

Outside, the squeal of the brakes: Sam’s truck. I jumped up from the table and raced to the front door, beating the maid.

On the street out front, Sam was opening the back of the truck. He looked over his shoulder, saw me ripping out of the house and down the stairs.

I tripped off the last step and landed on the pavement. “Daddy!”

“Get in the fuckin’ truck,” Sam yelled.

Freddy dashed back to the passenger side. The maid ran past me down to the road.

Back in the driver’s seat, my father turned the ignition. I screamed from where I lay there as the truck roared off down the tree-lined street.

The two cops who arrived minutes later asked me what my parents’ names were.

I don’t know, I said.

What’s your phone number?

I don’t know.

Where do you live?

I don’t know.

When they put me in the back of the squad car, I panicked and told them my address. They drove me back to the house.

Sam and Freddy’s truck was not out front and I was so relieved I thought I might wet my pants.

“Okay, then. Thank you for driving me,” I said and reached for the door.

One of the cops gave a nasty chuckle. “Not so fast, kiddo.”

“We’re going to have to speak with your mother,” the other said.

They tried the doorbell. No one answered.

There was a key to our front door hanging on a string around my neck but I kept it hidden under my clothes, afraid I’d get in big trouble if I let a couple of cops inside.

Finally I told them that Marlene was in the hospital. “She’s sick. Maybe you could drop me off there,” I suggested.

“What hospital?”

That one I really didn’t know.

“Remember your mother’s name yet?”

I started to cry.

Once I had confessed my mother’s name, one of the cops went back to the squad car. From the porch, I watched him talk into a little black gizmo attached by a cord to the dashboard.

“What grade are you in, kiddo?” the cop beside me asked.

“I don’t know,” I said.

He huffed through his nose and glared down the road.

I watched the cop in the car some more and tried to think what to do. Eventually he returned to the steps and said that my mother had checked out of Toronto East General about two hours ago.

“See, she’s coming home,” I said. “She’s on her way. Maybe in around ten minutes. I’ll be fine here if you need to go.”

The two cops and I sat on the front steps, waiting for my mother. It was nearly four in the afternoon when Marlene showed up. She got out of the cab and I watched her long slim legs, the high heels on her feet as she stood and stared up at the porch.

I rushed down the path toward her. Her nervous eyes darted to the police as she grabbed hold of me. “What the hell’s going on,” she whispered.

I couldn’t speak.

She glanced behind her and down the road at the disappearing taxi.

The two cops followed us inside and stood in the front room while my mother sat on the couch and I slumped against her. The cops explained how they had found me.

“What do you mean he put her inside a sofa?” she asked. “No.” She shook her head as if to make them take it back. “Jesus, Jesus, Jesus …” Her arms wrapped tight around me. “No one would do that. No one.”

TWENTY-FIVE

DREW HAS LISTENED
to the whole story without saying a word. When I finish, it’s so quiet I feel like I’m suffocating.

Finally his hand reaches for mine and I let him take it. He squeezes softly and I squeeze back, a little scared—scared of what he must be thinking and scared that I might be struck by lightning for shooting off my mouth. When Sam and Marlene and I were all together, Marlene would call me Benedict Arnold if I told Sam something she believed was our secret. Maybe she was right. You don’t go around knocking your crew or your family—even if it’s just a little thing.

The two of us are staring down the slope toward the field where that big black-and-white bull munches the grass.

Finally Drew says, “I wish I could meet Sam in person. I’d like to punch him in the face.”

I laugh nervously. He’s holding my hand with both of his now as though it’s a hurt bird.

“It’s wrong what he did to you. You get that, don’t you? You were a little girl.”

“No, he—” I want to say something good about Sam but I can’t think of anything at the moment.

“Yes,” Drew says. “You were. He was supposed to look after you and be a dad. I don’t know why you’re such a good person after all that stuff, but you are. You’re really good, Sammie.” His voice breaks a little.

I can feel him looking at me and it takes all my guts to meet his gaze. He brings my fingers to his lips and kisses them. Then he reaches for my face and I am melting through the grass at his touch. He leans toward me and then he brings his mouth close to mine. Our foreheads knocks softy.

My heart starts to slam.

“I love you, Sammie, so much,” he whispers.

He lets my hand go so that he can hold me with both arms. I hug back and it’s as if I haven’t been hugged for a thousand years.

“Me too,” I whisper back.

He lifts his hands to my hair, then kisses my cheek, softly, and then again, and suddenly his mouth is on mine and he is kissing me for real, the way couples kiss. The way people kiss when they’re in love.

We kiss and kiss and I’m shaking. Drew’s whole self is shaking too and he’s breathing as if he’s in a panic. Except I think it’s me who’s panicked.

We lie back on the grass. He keeps kissing me, his hand moving on my back, kissing and kissing. Then his hand slides under my top. I don’t wear a bra. His hand is on my back, right on my bare skin.

“Don’t,” I whisper.

I reach to push his hand off my back but he fumbles it around to my side and runs it over my ribs. I tuck my elbows in close.

“Drew,” I whisper.

His hand comes round onto my stomach, though, and then higher. He’s kissing and kissing me, kissing my neck. Then he’s touching my breast.

“Don’t!” I push him hard. “What are you
doing?
”

He sits up. “What? I’m sorry. I didn’t mean—I just.”

“I thought you said you
loved
me.” I yank my top back down over my stomach.

“I do. I—”

“Then, why are you trying to—?”

“I wasn’t!” His knees are up and his arms are wrapped around them now. “Sammie, I didn’t mean to. I just—I was touching you because I thought—”

“You thought what?” My knees are up too now. “You thought I was like
her?
”

“Who?”

“I’m
not
. I’m nothing like her. And I’m nothing like him.”

He looks at me, then looks away. “I know,” he says.

I hold my knees crushed to my chest. His hand was right
there
. The sensation won’t stop and I try to rub it off against my legs.

We sit that way for a while not saying a thing. Drew and I are sitting six inches apart and it’s the loneliest I’ve ever felt. The night Drew took me to pick up Marlene in jail flashes to mind—me alone in the hall when it was all over. This feels worse than that.

“I have to go,” I say.

He looks at me, his eyes red and watery. He nods.

We walk back to the bus stop. Drew keeps his hands in his pockets. I walk with my arms crossed and my head down as if it’s the middle of winter.

On the bus, we don’t speak all the way into town. I stare out the window and Drew looks at his lap.

When we get to the bus loop in Vancouver, his bus is already there. He’s going to head back to his family’s snazzy hilltop house in North Burnaby and I’m going back to Jill’s place.

“I’ll wait with you,” he says quietly.

“You don’t have to.”

“I want to.”

It’s only a few minutes until my bus rolls into the loop and pulls up in front of us. Drew meets my eyes and then stares down at the pavement.

“Please don’t disappear,” he says. “I’m sorry. I’ll never do anything like that again.”

Marlene’s voice echoes in my mind:
He’s a doll. You should marry him
.

I’m ready to start bawling all over. I can’t uncross my arms. At the same time, I almost wish Drew could hide me inside his coat and sneak me home with him, hold my two hands and look into my eyes the way he did before everything went haywire back there in Langley.

He puts a hand on my arm and I manage to open my arms up and we give each other a stiff sort of hug.

“Sammie? Aren’t we okay? Please?”

“Okay,” I say. “Yeah. Yes.”

The bus’s engine rumbles a little louder as the driver gets ready to leave and Drew and I let each other go. He watches as I run to get on board.

Sitting by a window, I mouth
goodbye
to him as we head out. He waves back, and stuffs his hands back into his pockets. His smile is weak and his eyes are still swollen.

Just before we turn a corner, I glance back, but I can’t see him. Can’t see the bus loop at all. And now that I can’t, there’s an empty dark room in my guts. He’d like to punch Sam in the face, he said.

But I hid in the sofa. I knew what I was there for. It’s true that Sam tried to tell me that it was just a game, but that’s what dads do with little kids. That’s how you make work seem fun.

I shouldn’t have knocked Sam to Drew, but it hurts like hell that Sam doesn’t call me. Maybe all I wanted was for someone else to be the asshole for a few minutes. But that’s what a phony does: he rats out the other guy and then makes like he’s just an innocent.

I’ve always felt shitty about that sofa story. Sam tried to
include me in a sure thing and I made a hash of it, breaking things, stumbling around—I didn’t even have the sense to boost the stuff I was sent for. John Reynolds, the mark, likely had it coming. He probably tried to sneak a cooler into Sam’s poker game and then refused to cop to it. Why blame Sam for wanting to get his money back?

Staring out the window, watching the buildings swipe past, I imagine Drew as he arrives home, walking past his father’s shiny car in the driveway, coming through the front door of that big clean house. Drew’s bedroom is at the very top. It’s almost an attic: wooden beams cut across the ceiling—rich, dark, beat-up wood, like people with money always seem to have—and there’s a big picture window. It’s a real guy’s bedroom: his older brother’s model cars are on the shelves and he has a ship-in-a-bottle that his grandfather made.

I picture him walking through the house now and going straight up to that bedroom of his. I can see him looking out the window at his fresh view of the water and the mountains. Everything around him is sweet and rich and homey. In the midst of all that, if Drew thinks of me, the things I told him about my family, touching me and being touched by my skeevy little world—I bet he’ll want to shower and wash me off.

Sam used to say, “Not much about a rounder squares with a square john.” What he meant was that, most of the time, straight people just don’t get it. Marlene, Sam and me—and Freddy too—we don’t think like regular people. After that sofa hustle, the cops picked up Sam and Freddy and threw them in the can. The two of them did almost two years.

Marlene packed the two of us up and moved back to Vancouver. The fall I started grade 5, though, I heard my mother on the phone in her bedroom, honey-voiced, a little giggly when she said, “Boy oh boy, some friend you are.” The tone of her voice made a little part of me pop like a firecracker, hoping to hell it was Sam at the other end of the line.

I loitered around her bedroom door, trying to hear. The second my mother hung up, I plagued her with questions.

Turned out it was Fat Freddy on the phone. He was out of the joint early: a free man.

“What about dad? Where’s dad?”

“Supposedly they’re not in touch—Freddy’s moved out here now.” She rolled her eyes a little, her mouth flirtatious. “
Come on, Leni
,” she imitated a whiny, needy Freddy. “
Let’s have dinner
.”

Two days later, Freddy called again. He had done a little investigating and discovered that Sam was out and shacked up with Peggy in Toronto. My mother’s friend, Peggy. Peggy, the booster. Freddy then proceeded to invite himself over to our place for a drink. Marlene hung up in his ear. She was spitting fire for weeks. You can bet she lit into Sam when he finally got around to calling her.

Regular people wouldn’t even be speaking to each other after all that’s happened with us. But a rounder has got to make a living. It sounds ruthless. And sometimes it is. Actually, most of the time, the life of a hustler is pretty much the same as the one that regular people live. Straight people don’t like to admit it but they work with jerks they don’t like and they sell
situations they don’t believe in every day to make a buck. If you step back and squint you realize that most legit businesses are working a hustle too. Go into a supermarket and they’ll sell you a bottle of water for a whole dollar when all you have to do is go home and turn on the tap for free. Stick the word
France
on the label and the suckers’ll line up and pay double! And what about the banks? They take all your cash and charge you for it every time you ask for a little back. They get you to use their credit cards and then make you pay them twenty percent interest. You pay if it’s your money and you pay if it’s their money. If that’s not crooked, I don’t know what is. That’s as good as loan sharking. Sam doesn’t even have a bank account. Marlene says he’s a dope on that count and that sending cash through the mail is moronic. But I think he’s got a point. Pay cash and keep the rest.