Preparation for the Next Life (15 page)

I don’t know what time it is, he said when they were outside again. It was darker than before, maybe because some of the streetlights had timed out. She said she didn’t need him to take her home, but he said there was no way I’m not going with you, and they began to walk up the long incline of the avenue. They went under the railroad bridge and past the dead signs, seeing the tarps over the stands, the empty wooden trestles that held vegetables and fruit during the day. Skinner stepped on fruit mashed into the sidewalk like glistening organs.

They turned a corner by a parking lot and went down a narrow way between buildings with arched entrances. There were names and numbers written quickly in dripping spraypaint repeated on the concrete foundation, which came up to chest height before the bricks began. The street doglegged. They went around another corner, going downhill now. She led them under trees. There were clotheslines on the second-story decks. Hanging in the dark, he saw a flag with a crescent moon. The hill was very steep. A blue flickering light showed in a window and they heard gunshots, sirens and muffled music.

Somewhere down the hill, they turned again, onto a long block of row houses going out to the expressway. There were large expanses of blackness. They walked past carports, satellite dishes.

You live here?

She had stopped to get her key out.

Yes. I go home.

Let me come in with you.

No.

It’ll be cool, I swear.

No. We say goodbye.

He tried to reach for her and she caught his forearm.

What? I was just holding the door.

She let him hold her hand.

You don’t know what it’s like, he said.

I know.

Let me do this. That’s all I’m doing. That’s all I did last time.

Okay, it’s enough. Be a good boy.

Okay, he said.

8

S
HE TOOK HER JEANS
off and squatted on the mattress, barelegged beneath her t-shirt, and poked in the plastic bag which contained her things. She changed into tracksuit pants, hiking the ankles above her knees like shorts, her muscular calves flexing as she walked, bent, squatted. She took her jeans to the bathroom and turned on the water in the tub. A box of detergent had been wedged behind the toilet. She took it out and slapped it to knock the powder loose and poured out a handful of blue and white gravel and mashed it into her wet jeans. A cockroach decorated the wall. Humming, she grabbed the denim in two fists and rubbed them together.

The cockroach waved its antennas at her. You’re not so formidable, she told it.

She turned the faucet off, wrung her jeans out, hung them on the shower rod.

Still humming, she dried her arms, threw her peelings out in the wet bag in the kitchen. She rinsed her hands and looked outside at the expressway. It was the middle of the afternoon, the traffic sounds seeming to come through cotton wadding. She took the trash out and swept the grit up off the floor and put their sandals back in front of their respective sheds. She went back to check her jeans. When she squeezed the ankles, water ran down her wrists. She took them down and went outside.

Yesterday, she had bought a sweatshirt on the street for three dollars from an African. I’m cool guy now, she said, pulling the hood over her head like him, speaking English to herself as if he were here to hear her.

She went down a road beneath trees arched overhead, passing low-rise buildings in the trees, an American flag nearly shredded, the colors washed out, an old wide rectangular car beneath a rusted gate. The foundations were tagged with spray paint. At the end of the tunnel of trees a bus went by. Then the sound carried back to her.

At the laundromat, she spent her last quarter drying her jeans, leaning on the dryer, feeling the warmth through her side, hypnotized by the ticking and the lifting, falling, and lifting and falling of her clothes as the drum turned.

A Puerto Rican woman said do you mind? and Zou Lei moved.

A male wearing a massive down coat came in walking with a cane. His pitted face was very white. He sat down with his legs out, the only adult male, eyes hidden by the brim of his cap. The Puerto Rican pulled her kid over to him. Hold him. Don’t let him run.

When the drum stopped, she opened the door and put her hand in to feel.

Well, that’s not bad. And if they shrank, then even better when you put them on. Oh, you better not be crazy! I am a little bit. Fold them, smooth them out. Make them sharp. Everything military spirit.

In his shorts, his calves were white. He had low-bodyfat calves, which striated when he walked in the gym, across the corrugated rubber floor. From the back, he had a V-cut torso. Without his black hoodie and camouflage jacket, just in a skivvie shirt, you could see the apelike way he held his arms out, his stiff-legged jock walk, which resulted from his injured back.

They gave him a white towel and he carried it around with him from machine to machine, his image rippling along the mirrored wall, an olive drab torso with a yellow insignia on the chest. On his back, it said Third Battalion – Desert Tour – Playing in Ramadi – We Bring the Heat. He loaded plates on the leg machine, one at a time, as if pacing himself for untold hours of labor. He sat down in the sled, put his boots up on the black sandpaper treads, and released the brakes on each side. The plates clanked. Sharp ridges appeared in his white calves as he let the weight come down onto him and, straightening his legs, pressed it up again. When he was done, he swung up to his feet and changed the weight. He took a plate off and carried it over to the steel tree and slid it on. In the mirror, you saw his thick tattooed forearms, his head carried forward and down, as if he were sullen, but that was not exactly it. There were things he did not see. His towel fell and he walked on it.

How many more you got? he was asked.

A bunch. I got a lot of work to do. His attention seemed to spin off sideways following his uncentered eyes. Go ahead and work in.

That’s okay. Is that your towel?

What?

Possibly he had been angered by the question and he was left alone. He did leg presses for an hour. When he changed the weights around, he went back and forth to the weight tree, stepping on the towel, which he left where he could step on it. Eventually, he kicked it with his boot without looking at it as he carried a forty-five-pound plate in front of his chest and it went where he wasn’t going to walk on it.

Then, when he was done with the leg machine, he picked the towel up and threw it in the laundry hamper on his way into the locker room. His clothes were tossed in the bottom of a locker with no lock. There were other individuals in the locker room behind him. When he took his skivvie shirt off, revealing his ribs and spine, there was a catch in their conversation. Their discussion of good places to go bicycling on the weekend—up the Henry Hudson to the George Washington Bridge or even over to the Palisades where you could do a good ten miles if you were feeling strong—hung fire for a moment.

He put on his Army Strong shirt, the black one. Flipped his hood over his head. He looked like a monk. The pills rattled when he dug in his jacket for his Velcro wallet. He clumped out of the locker room in his boots. Noticing that they weren’t tied, he took a knee on the corrugated rubber mat and did up his laces.

He went to the supplement counter where they sold protein shakes. Sweat was welling out of his bad skin. He was asked what he wanted. The mass builder, he pointed. He circled the weight room floor, drinking from the paper cup with the heavy chalky liquid in it.

He went to the preacher bench and set his shake down on the floor. It was the middle of the afternoon and there was hardly anyone in the gym except a Caribbean woman folding towels. He leaned forward for the bar and started doing curls. Between sets, he poured the mass builder in his mouth and swallowed.

A manager appeared across the steel and white room and came over to him. Skinner, who seemed to be watching several things at once, kept curling the weight. The manager was over six feet tall.
He had muscular arms and wore his jeans pulled up in a way that divided his butt cheeks.

Excuse me, sir.

It was not clear whether the manager had his attention. The hooded sweatshirt concealed Skinner, draped him, radiating clammy heat, and the stink of sweat and metal, rubbed off the weights, came off him.

Excuse me, sir.

Air hissed out of Skinner’s teeth. He dropped the bar in the rack.

Yeah.

The manager, who outweighed him by perhaps sixty pounds, said:

We don’t allow boots on the exercise floor, sir.

I’m almost done.

Finish your next set, and then you have to change into sneaker attire.

I’ve got like five more, then I’m done.

But the manager insisted he change immediately. So he went into the locker room and pulled his boots off and tossed them in his locker. Then he went back out and worked out in his sock feet until he was spoken to again.

They were wrestling in a doorway. She pushed him off and pulled her sweatshirt down. Come on, come on. It’s cool. I won’t. He backed her into the door until she pushed him off. No wait no wait just trust me. It was cold. He tried to grind against her. She raised her knee. He jerked back. She put a finger in his face: I am you sister. I don’t have a sister. She held his wrists and when he broke her grip, she dodged away laughing. He hugged her and she took his hands off and forced them to his side. No touch. Just let me go like this. No. What’s wrong? They look at us. He turned to see who she meant, but there was no one there.

That’s funny. Come on. He leaned into her. He got his hand inside her sweatshirt and managed to touch her breast just barely as she struggled.

Stop! she ordered. She shoved him off and kicked him in the leg. He turned sideways and she punched him in the arm.

Let’s not fight.

She grabbed the fabric of his clothing as if to choke him with it or rend it. The strap of his assault pack got caught in her grip.

Wait up.

He stepped away and readjusted his pack behind him.

All right, game on.

No. You are bad boy.

Aw, come on. Come back.

No.

Seriously. Come back.

No. You are the wild boy. Out of control.

He followed after her as she went out onto the main avenue where there were people and lights. She acted as if she were browsing the markets, surveying this and that. She clasped her hands behind her back.

Look at this apple.

He had caught up with her.

Are you mad for real?

She looked at the crowd of people buying things.

Look at this peach. Pear. Melon. No.

They stood on the edge of the light from the bare bulbs that had been set up in the market so that people could see the produce, him in his pale loose camouflage gear, both of them unhooded, with their strong heads like two animals who had wandered in from the dark out of curiosity.

I carry maybe one hundred thousand or two hundred thousand of this melon, she said. Me and my mother.

She knocked one with her knuckles.

He rubbed it.

Feels like somethin to me.

Look at this fish, she pointed.

The fish were large and heavy. She read the cardboard sign planted in the ice. Six dollar. Hm, she said.

You into fish?

It’s expensive.

They wandered along the margin, shoppers streaming around them out into the night. He took a chance and put an arm around her. She said, No, like this, and took his arm in hers.

Wanna hit a bar?

But she said, No, we go up here.

At the top of the hill, there was a silver cart with a minaret spinning on top and smoke billowing out almost invisibly in the dark. You could smell the smoke. Painted on the side of the cart were the words Xinjiang Shaokao One Dollar. The vendor, who had a bag of charcoal by his cooler, wore a surgical mask and military fatigues. He was fanning the grill with a piece of cardboard. They watched the coals glow like red teeth. One by one the vendor turned the skewers over.

Liangge yang! Zou Lei sang out.

Two lamb, the vendor repeated in Chinese, from under his surgical mask.

What’d you tell him? Skinner asked.

I order the lamb kawap. I tell you before, I will invite you the real Chinese food.

Lade bulade?

Lade.

What’d he say?

He ask if he make it spice or not spice.

The vendor took a pinch of spice out of a cup and sprinkled it over the grill. When the meat was ready, he snipped the ends of the skewers off with meat scissors. Two lamb! He handed Zou Lei the skewers like a bouquet and took her money.

Your nanpengyou? the vendor asked.

You could say that.

American fellas have money, don’t they?

I wouldn’t know.

Everyone knows except you. Why don’t you have him pay?

You’re so concerned!