One Good Hustle (28 page)

“What’s doin’ with your mother? She outta that place yet?”

I glance at him. “What place?”

“That mental health place. Your mother give ’em my number, I guess. They gave me a buzz to see if I knew where you were. I gave them your friend’s number.”

“I thought they called the Welfare to find me.” I roll my window down too.

“She out?”

“What? Oh. Yeah. Few days ago. Maybe more.”

“You and her are talking, aren’tcha?”

“I went and saw her there.” I steer us toward the aquarium and the zoo and glance sideways to read him. Can’t, though. No one can read Sam. That’s what makes him good. “She liked it there. She said she was scared they were going to send her home and so when she went to group therapy she put green eye shadow all over her face. They acted like it was no big deal. Kept her around another week, though.”

He laughs. I do too. Any hustle that works is a good hustle.

“You’re going back home, then?”

I keep my eyes on the road. “I don’t think she’s—”

“Peggy said you had a number for Freddy. I tried calling him and his number’s not workin.’ ”

“No.”

“How come you told Peggy you did?”

“I don’t have it with me.”

“Why didn’t you just give it to Peggy when you called. Your mother talks to Freddy still, don’t she? I got to get something from him.”

“She’s—” I was trying to figure how to put it. I didn’t want to knock my mother to Sam.
Benedict Arnold
.

As far as he’s concerned, the fact that a person would start drinking the way Marlene did in the first place is proof of weakness. If I told him that she was doing AA now, he’d make out like she was the most weak-kneed jerk on the planet. Sam figures if a person’s got backbone, he doesn’t need a crutch like AA.

I don’t like AA either, the way they pour their guts out to one another. But you have to give Marlene credit for making an effort.

“She threw out all her pills and she quit drinking,” I say. Then, so he understands it’s a real medical condition, I add, “That’s how she ended up in the hospital in the first place: grand mal seizure.”

Sam looks at me like I’m an idiot. Like,
What’s her health got to do with my Freddy shit?

“I mean she’s—” I lean my elbow on the window frame. Sam doesn’t need every goddamn detail. “She doesn’t talk to Freddy any more. We live in Burnaby.”

He mutters something out the window. Then, for a full minute the only noise is the truck’s rumble and the swish of trees passing us on either side.

Finally, I ask, “Did you ever actually sell houses? I mean in Toronto. Were you into real estate?”

“Sure,” he says. “Cars too. Freddy and I used to fix up these old heaps just enough so’s they’d make it around the block.” He laughs.

Trilogy of Terror
floats through my head. Cross-eyed Karen Black chased around her living room by the Zuni doll. Just four more houses to sell. Three more. I blink at the road ahead.

“You got a lot of games lined up while you’re out here?”

“Got a game this afternoon,” he says.

“You do?”

He shoots me a look. “Have you got Freddy’s number where you’re stayin’? Can’t you call those people you live with and—”

“Those people don’t know anything!”

Hard to say if that came out as loud as it did in my head. I swallow and put a hand out the window, let the breeze cool my fingers.

Out of the side of my eye I can see Sam’s mouth purse. He’s staring hard out the windshield as if the way ahead might look like a sun-dappled park road to the untrained eye but he knows something different.

When he speaks again, he says, “Things would’ve been different if I hadn’t’ve gone to jail. I only should’ve got a few months but they made an example out of me. In the end I did nearly two years.”

I watch the road, waiting for him to say something else. My thumbs rub hard on the grooves of Lou’s steering wheel. “Mom said if you’d had a decent lawyer you probably wouldn’t have done any time at all.”

Sam’s face sours as if his ex-wife’s lame ideas continue to disgust him. “They catch you, you do a little time.”

I wonder if he’s thinking of me, falling down John Reynolds’ front steps, not being where I was supposed to be. “I think about that day and I, I just wish I did things better than—”

“You never shoulda been there,” Sam says, and then he starts rambling about Freddy and the truck and I can’t follow the
story, all the dodging and weaving. He says he tried to offer John Reynolds a few bucks if he would keep the cops out of it. Sam doesn’t say what Reynolds’ answer was. I guess it’s obvious.

“So I told Freddy,” he fires on, “ ‘make him a better offer.’ What’s he do? He offers him some jewellery. Stuff from his
basement
.”

“You and Freddy still work together?”

“I know people everywhere I go. There’s practically no city in the country where I don’t know someone. In the States too.”

“But Freddy’s not your … Don’t you have a regular partner any more?” I glance at him. “Don’t you need—?”

He doesn’t look at me. Just the road. “I was working with a guy for a while. We played the Granny Game in Los Angeles mostly. A little in Florida. I don’t see him no more. He’s—” Sam pauses. He swipes at the air as if this guy he used to work with is a lost cause. After a few seconds, he says, “Once we were on our way to a game and he … He seen this little girl at the side of the road when we were driving. Twelve years old maybe and he says,
pull over
, and I says,
we don’t got time for that
, but he keeps saying how pretty she is and let’s pull over … I don’t know what was wrong with him. She was a little girl.”

Another rabbit punch.
Why did you tell me that?
But there’s something about the way that my dad just said
little girl
, the tone of it, as if maybe he’s using this half-assed story as a way into a real conversation.

Blue water flickers through the thick of the trees and then, just as I’m getting up the guts to ask about us, about him and
me and what’s going to happen, he says, “Me and Freddy did some work with the Italians in New York.
Those
guys—every time they pass a Catholic church, they’re doin’ this—” He crosses himself. “And they’re
killin’
guys!” He goes quiet again.

Some piece of me is winding tighter and tighter, and then, without looking, Sam asks if I still go to church.

“That was ages ago!” I snap.
None of your business
. I don’t want Sam even knowing about that stuff, or Drew or any of those people. “
Welfare
paid for that Jesus camp a couple summers ago, that’s all.” I hit the word
Welfare
extra hard so he won’t miss it.

Sam has no comment. He’s an atheist.

“Whatever,” I mumble. “It’s not my style.”

It’s true, it’s
not
my style. But just as I say that, it suddenly seems sad that I don’t see those kids any more, Mandy Peterson and the rest of them. Even that dorky youth pastor. A flash of movie night at Tenth Avenue Divine hits me again, Drew and me giggling in the hard wooden pew.

But I’m not one of them. I don’t need them. Doesn’t matter because I am right where I’m supposed to be.

I take the next curve on the smooth park road and suddenly the Teahouse is right in front of us.

“This is it,” I announce to Sam in a peppy kind of voice, and pull into a parking spot that faces the water.

Sam gets out of the truck. I look across Burrard Inlet and pause. My eyes get hooked on the glow of that heap of sulphur way out in the harbour. A massive mound of yellow powder has been in that spot since forever. When I was a kid I used to
imagine tobogganing down the slope and making canary-coloured sand castles and just generally romping around the way little kids do.

I look back at Sam as he walks toward the restaurant, stops and rummages in his pockets. His blue shirt radiates. The Teahouse looms fancy behind him. He’ll fit right in here. As long as he doesn’t say too much.

Maybe if we just sit down at one of those milk-white tablecloths, our faces reflecting in one of their shiny silver tea sets, everything will smooth out between us.

Shoving open my door, I steady myself to jump down from the truck, and as I reach out to grab the door frame, my dress strap snaps.

“Shit.” The white bodice droops down on one side. “Shit,” I hiss again.

I grab my purse. Two safety pins hold the ripped lining together. I unhook one of them. In the rear-view mirror, Sam shuffles as he waits. I slam the door shut behind me.

“Dad,” I call, and the word feels like a big marble knocking my teeth. “I broke my …” I walk toward him, hold up the end of the strap and then smooth it back over my shoulder. “Can you pin it for me?”

He takes the safety pin as I turn my back to him.

The feel of his hands as he fumbles at my bare shoulder blade—trying not to stick me, trying not to touch too much—is more weird than anything else today.

“There.” He steps back.

I roll my shoulders to make sure the strap is secure.

Sam looks at his watch. “Jeez, it’s late. I told these guys I’d meet ’em at three. Why don’t I take you for supper instead?”

It’s twenty after two now. I open my mouth: nothing comes out.

“You mind drivin’ me to Bosman’s Motor Inn?” he asks.

I look at him.

“It’s just over on Howe Street.” He looks down the park road.

“Sure thing,” I say.

I wish my sandals were cowboy boots, big mean shit-kickers with pointy toes and square heels. But they’re not, so I spin toward the truck like a dancer instead. I don’t think I ever said
sure thing
in my life before today.

I stare at the water and the sulphur as we walk back to the truck, that yellow mountain with no kids on it. It looks different to me all of a sudden. An ugly, wrong type of yellow.

We get back into Lou’s pickup and drive out of the park. We don’t say a word.

In front of Bosman’s, Sam says, “I’ll call you later, and we’ll go for a nice Italian supper.” He digs into his pants pocket. “Listen, give this”—he takes out a folded wad of cash and peels off two hundred dollar bills and two fifties—“to those people you’re stayin’ with. Give it to the parents. Say thanks.”

I nod. He nods.

As he walks quickly toward the motel, I can’t get that mountain of yellow sulphur out of my head. Some guy my mother dated when we first moved back to Vancouver explained to me that that stuff was not for playing in, it was for fertilizer and gunpowder and if I were to get close it would stink like rotten eggs.

At Tenth Avenue Divine, the youth pastor said that hell smells like sulphur.

Why would they put that sort of stuff by the water? At the beach. Seems mean to me now. Cruel.

I wipe my eyes, put the truck back in drive and head east.

THIRTY-ONE

A FEW BLOCKS
past Boundary Road, I turn down Patterson Avenue and then putter slowly along Sardis until I come to our apartment building. There aren’t enough trees to keep me hidden but I suppose there’s no point in trying to hide a monstrosity like Lou’s truck.

Doesn’t matter anyhow. No way in a million years would Marlene expect to see me pull up in a big black pickup.

I ease in along the curb, turn the volume down on the radio and let the engine idle. The curtains are open today and they flutter a little in the breeze.

Leaning forward, I peer at the apartment window. I can just make her out, moving like a shadow from the hall into the living room. She sits down on the couch and disappears from view.

I turn off the ignition, climb out of the truck and lean on the
front fender, watching. My head feels blank, as if I could lean here all afternoon trying to put a thought together. What would I say to her if I did go to the door?

I hear Sam’s old words in my head: “That’s the difference between us and them—the professional works out everything that the amateur has to sweat out. If you got to sweat every move, that’s what you call a rough hustle.” If he was telling the truth, if he really wanted to teach me something, he would have hauled off and admitted that the whole thing is a rough hustle, this whole damn life.

I rest my face on my purse: one less safety pin and three hundred more dollars. I could get my own car with this if I wanted. I could get a plane ticket.

Two floors up and one balcony over, that unemployed loser with the moustache is out on his patio lounger with a beer, tanning his leathery skin. I wonder if Marlene remembers the night she knocked on his door with a plan to jump off his balcony. I wonder what they said to each other. He doesn’t notice me out here leaning on the truck. He’s too busy staring into his apartment. Must be watching television because he suddenly sits up and hoots and claps as if he’s got a game on.

After another minute or so, I shove myself up off the truck and kick my way through the low shrubs at the back of the building, toward our suite.

The sliding glass door of the patio is wide open. Marlene is leaned over the coffee table again, playing solitaire. The TV is on too, only this time it’s an old episode of
The Rockford Files
.
She loves Rockford. After Vegas, I used to wish I could find James Rockford and get him to take my mother out on the town, get him to fall in love with her and make her right again. Rockford seemed like the sort of guy who could do that. Except that there’s no such guy. Just some actor named Garner, that’s all. The really great stuff always turns out to be phony.

I stand to the side of the balcony and watch Marlene as she picks the crossword book off the couch. She stares at the puzzle on the page and bites the end of a pencil. Her fingernails catch the light. They’re shiny, as if she gave herself a manicure this morning. My eyes follow them like fishing lures. Seems like ages since I saw shiny fingernails on my mother. It gives me a little flicker in my throat.

Inside my purse, three hundred bucks are breathing heavy. I put my hands down on the balcony railing and face east, the direction those crows fly home to bed every night.