Please (10 page)

"That's all right," I said, "because I'm broke anyway."

He thought that over for a moment. "Well, you want to make some money then?"

"I just came in here to have a drink and play this game," I told him. But I'd already lost and I didn't have any more quarters.

Wyman nodded and lit a cigarette with a silver Zippo lighter. He kept flicking it open and shut while he watched the football game. "I need some help with a break and enter," he said.

I looked around the bar again, but I still couldn't see the waitress. I thought about going behind the counter to pour myself a beer. "I didn't know you were a burglar," I said.

He shook his head. "It's not like that. The stuff I'm taking is mine. But I have to break into the place to get it."

"I don't understand."

"It's my supplier's place." He leaned closer, glancing around the empty bar. "She's out of town, but all my stuff is there. I'm going to clean her out while she's gone."

"What's in this for me?" I asked.

"I'll give you two hundred dollars," he said.

"You want me to help rip off a dealer for two hundred dollars?" I laughed. "I don't know."

"You don't have to actually do anything," he said. "I just want somebody to go with me."

"I don't understand," I said.

"Call it moral support."

I looked at him closer. He hadn't shaved in days, and his upper lip was covered in little beads of sweat. "Who exactly is your dealer, Wyman?" I asked.

"My ex-wife," he said.

I stared at him. "You were married?"

WE WALKED DOWN the street to the coffee shop where Wyman had parked his minivan. Overhead, the clouds were racing past like the entire sky was some sort of time-lapse movie. There wasn't even a breeze down here.

The minivan's seats were covered with boxes and garbage bags full of clothing. Wyman had to pile them in the back to make room for me. "What's all this?" I asked, sorting through some shirts that couldn't ever have been in style.

"Jesse's been cleaning the apartment," he said, shaking his head. "She's making me get rid of all the clothes other women bought me. My closet's empty. It's like I'm eighteen all over again."

I looked at all the boxes and bags. "I've never had this many clothes in my life."

"I just can't bear to give them to Goodwill or someplace like that," he went on. "I mean, can you imagine some fucking stranger wearing my clothes?"

We drove to a subdivision in the north end of the city, a quiet and clean place that looked as if it had been abandoned and sterilized at daybreak. All the lawns were yellow. Wyman parked in front of one of the houses, in an empty driveway with dead grass sticking up through the cracks. There wasn't a single person in sight. I waited for Wyman to tell me what to do, but he didn't say anything or get out. He just kept turning in his seat to look at the other houses surrounding us.

"I've never done anything like this before," he finally said, turning off the minivan's engine and lighting a cigarette.

"Me neither," I said. "But this was your idea, remember?"

We sat there a moment longer, the clouds still racing past overhead, and then Wyman said, "All right then." We got out and went to the back of the van. Wyman emptied out a couple of the boxes, tossing the clothes over the back seat, and handed them to me. "Here," he said. "Take these to the side door."

"How big of a stash does she have?" I asked, looking into the empty boxes. They were bleach boxes, at least two feet deep and reinforced with extra glue.

Wyman crawled into the back of the van for more boxes. "What are you talking about?" he asked.

I went around the side of the house, to an old wooden door with a stained glass window. A mat on the step actually had the word Welcome painted on it, but you had to look close to see it under the dirt. All the blinds were drawn in the windows of the neighbouring house, so I figured no one was home there. I put one of the boxes over my fist and was drawing it back to punch through the stained glass when Wyman walked around the corner.

"What are you doing?" he asked.

"I thought we were breaking into the place," I said.

"Not like that," he said. He dropped the boxes he was carrying and took a gold card out of his wallet. I stepped aside as he inserted it between the door and frame. There was a soft click, and then he pushed the door open.

I looked around one more time before entering the house. In one of the neighbour's windows, a black-and-white cat had crawled in between the blinds and the glass. It sat on the windowsill, watching us with unblinking blue eyes. We went inside.

We were in a kitchen that was all wooden counters and shiny steel pots hanging from the walls. A skylight ran its entire length, giving the room a white glow. I could hear a clock ticking somewhere.

"Looks expensive," I said.

"Take off your shoes," he said, bending down to untie his own. "I don't want to be leaving dirt and shit all over the place. That's how they always track people down in the cop shows."

I kicked off my shoes. "What about hair fibers and that sort of thing?" I asked.

"They only do that for murders. As long as we don't kill anyone, we'll be fine."

I followed Wyman down the hall, into the living room. There was an Ikea couch and chair, a big-screen Sony television, a Toshiba stereo system, and some wooden bookshelves holding nothing but videotapes and CDs. The walls were covered with framed photographs, but when I looked closer, I saw the photos were the ones that had come with the frames.

"Where is she anyway?" I asked.

"Who?" Wyman said. He put the empty boxes on top of the Sony and started looking through the bookshelves.

"Your ex-wife."

"She's not here," he said. He began pulling videotapes off a bookshelf and dropping them into the boxes.

"I can see that," I said. I went over and looked at the tapes he was collecting. They bore handwritten labels such as Wedding Day and Disney World. "I thought we were here to steal some drugs," I said.

"You go right ahead," he said. "I'll be along in a minute."

I wasn't really sure where to look first, so I went upstairs. There were only three rooms up here: two bedrooms and a bathroom smelling faintly of bleach. I went through all the cupboards in the bathroom, but all I found was some toilet paper and tampons. The room was so clean I wasn't sure if it had ever been used.

The smaller bedroom was completely empty, nothing but vacuum cleaner marks on the carpet. I tried the master bedroom next. It was sparsely furnished, just a carefully made futon bed, a black dresser and two bedside tables holding chrome lamps with white shades. The walls were completely bare, something I'd never seen in a bedroom before. There were only a half-dozen dresses hanging in the closet, so I went through the dresser drawers. At first I was neat, gently pushing the clothes aside to look underneath them, and then I remembered this was a robbery. I dumped all the drawers out on the bed. I didn't find any drugs but I did find three hundred-dollar bills tucked inside a yellow sweater. I put them in my pocket and went back downstairs.

Wyman was sitting on the couch, pulling the insides out of a video tape. "What are you doing?" I asked him.

"I was going to record over them," he said, "but there's too many. We'd be here all day."

"I thought you were stealing them," I said, indicating the tapes in the boxes.

"Just the ones I'm in," he said.

I went into the kitchen and tossed the contents of the cupboards onto the floor, but I couldn't find drugs anywhere. I was thirsty by the time I was done, so I grabbed a Heineken from the fridge and wandered back into the living room. "I don't know," I said. "Maybe she knew you were coming or something."

Wyman was still ripping the insides out of the videos. He was covered in ribbons of the stuff now, and he'd somehow managed to cut one of his fingers, so little drops of blood were dropping onto the carpet.

I didn't know what to do, so I finished the beer in a couple of long swallows, then took the boxes he'd filled and went outside. There was a bit of a wind now, but other than that everything was the same. The cat was still in the window, watching. The day seemed like it would never end. I sat in the passenger seat of the van and put the boxes at my feet, then waited. I didn't want to go back into the house. It took Wyman nearly an hour to come out with the rest of the boxes. He opened the back of the van and shoved them in, tossing the loose clothes out on the lawn to make room.

When Wyman got back in, I asked him, "When do I get my money?"

He just looked at me for a moment, and then he started the minivan. We drove away from there slowly, the wind pushing his old clothes across the dried-out lawn behind us.

WHEN WE GOT TO Wyman's apartment, his girlfriend, Jesse, was stretched out on their leather couch, watching Letterman on the television. She was wearing a translucent silk nightgown and drinking something from a blue martini glass. The television was a big-screen Sony just like the one in Wyman's ex-wife's house. I decided not to say anything about that.

"What are you doing home already?" Jesse asked when we walked in, but Wyman didn't answer her. Instead, he walked through the living room and down the hall, disappearing into one of the bedrooms.

I put my box down in the entranceway and watched the television for a moment. "I didn't know Letterman was on in the afternoon," I said.

"It's a tape," Jesse said. She stood up and came over to look in my box. This close to her, I could see the little flowers she'd painted on her toenails and the Superman tattoo on her ankle. I'd asked her about the tattoo once, when we were dancing together at a warehouse party, but all she told me was that it had cost her an acting gig in a beer commercial. Wyman later told me she'd never auditioned for any beer commercial.

"What is this?" she asked, pulling out a tape with the label Honeymoon.

"I don't know," I said, but she wasn't listening to me now.

"No," she said. "These are not coming in here. Not where we live." She tossed the tape out onto the front walk and kicked the box after it. "You hear me, Wyman?" she called down the hall.

When he didn't come out of the bedroom, she asked me, "How could you let him do this?"

"I tried to stop him," I said in a low voice, "but I think there's something wrong with him."

"Jesus, there's no getting anything past you, is there?" she said. She started to laugh.

Wyman still hadn't come out of the bedroom. Outside, the wind had picked up, and now it looked like the clouds were falling right out of the sky on top of us.

"Wyman said he was going to give me some money," I told Jesse.

"No," she said, shaking her head. She pushed me out onto the step and kept repeating the word for the entire time it took her to close the door and lock it. "No no no no no no no no no no."

IT'S NOT MY RESPONSIBILITY By Peter Darbyshire

I WAS ON MY WAY to the liquor store when I passed him for the first time. An old man, fifty, maybe sixty, hard to tell exactly because his hair covered most of his face. He was lying asleep on the sidewalk outside the Happy Harbour, a bar where the lights were so dim it looked as if the people inside were underwater. He was right in front of the door, the way you sometimes see dogs outside a place, and drops of water from an air conditioner in a window overhead were falling onto his chest. He was wearing wool pants and two ski jackets, even though the day was so hot it felt like we were being sucked into the sun. And there was a little margarine container beside his hand, with some pieces of bread inside it.

The liquor store was at the end of the street. People lay in the passenger seats of the cars outside, eyes closed like they were unconscious. I spent the last of my money on two six-packs of the most expensive beer they had. Kennedy had called that afternoon to invite me to his wedding. He'd said that Rachel was going to be there. I thought she might call.

The man was still there when I came back from the liquor store, only now there was a woman with him. She was young, twenty or twenty-two, and she was wearing amber sunglasses and a Calvin Klein baseball cap. When I walked up, she was shaking him and saying, "Are you there? Are you there?" I tried to walk past, but she looked right at me. "I can't wake him up," she said.

I suddenly felt guilty, like it was my fault he was lying there, and I stopped. "He's probably just drunk," I told her. "I wouldn't worry about it."

"He shouldn't be sleeping in the sun," she said. She looked around and shook her head at the passing cars. "I can't believe people just let him lie here."

"I'm sure he's all right," I said. "Otherwise someone would have stopped by now."

When she brushed the hair out of his face, though, it was clear he hadn't been all right in some time. His face was a mask of broken blood vessels, and yellowish drool coated his chin. He looked as if he'd exploded inside. The woman stroked the side of his face, but he didn't even twitch an eyelid. "Who knows how long he's been lying here," the woman said. "With people just walking past."

"It looks like he's breathing regular," I said. "If he's breathing regular, then he's probably just sleeping."

She looked up at me and squinted a little through her sunglasses, like she was concentrating. Then she stared back down at him. "We should call someone," she said. "Paramedics or somebody like that. They'll take him to a shelter. Someplace cool, where he can sleep and not have to worry about exposure."

Her choice of words implied I was in this with her, so I put my beer down in the shade at the side of the building and squatted down on the other side of the man. I studied his chest for a moment. It didn't move much, but when it did, it was regular. I thought about shaking him myself, but I didn't really want to touch him.

"We should call someone," the woman said again. When I looked at her, I saw her skin was all flushed and she was shaking a little. She kept biting her lower lip, like she was actually worried about this man.

I thought about Rachel calling, maybe right at this very moment. And then I thought about answering the phone and telling her how I'd saved the life of someone I didn't even know.