Richmond Noir (16 page)

“Hey, who’s Tanoura?”

He snorted. “Did somebody call you
Tanoura?”

“No, I just heard the name somewhere.” I wasn’t sure what he’d think if I told him about Saleem Hassan.

“It’s not a name. It means
skirt.”
Where’d you hear it?”

“I don’t remember. Somewhere. Maybe a song.”

I rushed through the afternoon cleaning session with the help of Iggy Pop and a lot of coffee. Then I took the Thalhimer’s bag back to my trailer and laid the fabric out flat on the floor, calling on all the Christiansburg Middle School Home Ec knowledge I could muster to convert that wrinkled old linen into a
tanoura
that would do Saleem Hassan proud. It wasn’t anything fancy, just an elastic waist and some high slits up the sides, down to my ankles and gathered up at the hips for some flounce. I had enough of a piece left over to crisscross into a skimpy halter—a trick I remembered from the trampy girls back home, although they’d used bandannas or Confederate flags. I checked out my getup in the mirror, fluffed my hair, and put on my finger cymbals. Then I played my record and danced, spinning and undulating and
tek-tek-teking
until the bottle hit the trailer and signaled me to stop. I took off my
tanoura
and cymbals and lay down on the bed, awaiting my next mission from Saleem Hassan. This time he was smiling. Just barely, but it was definitely a smile.

Inti jamila, ya habibi.
He nodded, puffing on his cigarette.
So pretty! And now you are ready to go back to the diner. Go tomorrow. Bukrah. At night
.

What did the diner have to do with anything? I woke up wondering if maybe I wasn’t getting omens, just going crazy. Saleem made more sense when he was talking in Arabic. Still, he was right about the rubber bands and the fabric—I was willing to take my chances on the diner. With Saturday coming fast, I didn’t have many options.

The next day I cleared the last boxes out of the trailer and gave it a good scrub with bleach water. It passed the Arab’s inspection with flying colors, so I had two hundred dollars in my pocket, plus the twenty he’d given me. Stepping out on faith, what little I had of it, I packed my new outfit in a backpack, borrowed Bobby Harvey’s bicycle, and headed up Jeff Davis toward the Lee Bridge. Just before the bridge, as I waited for the light to change at Hull Street, Gimpy-Arm loped across the parking lot of Church’s Chicken and screamed my name. “You better make that money,
bitch,”
she called, flinging a Styrofoam cup of Coca-Cola that exploded next to my tire.

Fortunately, Jeff Davis crack whores are like vampires in that they can’t cross moving water. She didn’t follow me toward the bridge.

Once I was halfway across, I stopped to smoke a cigarette and get my nerves back. The view from the Lee Bridge that night made Richmond look sparkly, more like a city than it really is. It was beautiful against the dark sky. Looking down, the glistening water was beautiful too, until I started seeing visions of my lifeless body floating in it. I forced myself to raise my eyes to the skyline. The city had seemed so big to me when I first got here. Now it was way too small.

I finished my cigarette and headed to the diner

Only when I got there, there wasn’t any
there
there. To be specific, there wasn’t a River City Diner there. The neon clock was out front, and I could see the grill of the Cadillac sticking out of the wall inside, but the sign had been covered with a hand-painted banner that said, BUBBLING. In the window, rows of hookah pipes like the one the Arab kept in the office stood at attention, and the booths were full of smokers, mostly men—young, swarthy men—smoking hookahs and scooping at plates of food with flat bread. I understood now what I was supposed to do. Of course Saleem Hassan hadn’t steered me wrong. I felt bad for doubting him. I locked Bobby’s bike to a parking meter and walked inside.

At the grill, a dark-haired man scurried to fill baskets with kebabs, fries, and pitas. He muttered as he worked, snatching order tickets from the carousel as fast as the waiters could tack them up. “Have a seat anywhere,” he barked. He turned his back to me and began shaking a basket of fries over the deep fryer.

“I’m not here to eat,” I said, then screwed up my courage and pulled a pair of cymbals out of my bag and slipped them on. “I’m here to dance. I mean, if I can, if you’ll let me.” I clanked the cymbals once for punctuation and he wheeled around.

He squinted at me through the grill fumes. “You bring a costume?” I nodded. “You bring music?” I shook my head. Saleem should have mentioned that.
“Ma fi mushkila
, it’s no problem, I have music. You change in the ladies’ room. But I no pay you! You dance free! If I like, next time I pay!”

Dance free? The doubt crept in again. What the hell was Saleem thinking? And, really, the bigger question was: what the hell was I doing, about to belly dance in a hookah bar because a dead Arab told me to? As Iggy said at the last Stooges show, I never thought it would come to this.

After I got changed and combed my hair out with my fingers, I put both pairs of cymbals on and closed my eyes, calling on Allah, Jesus, Saleem Hassan, and whoever looked out for crazy trailer park girls who needed money bad to help make this whatever it was supposed to be. Then I slipped out of the ladies’ room and stood in the dark corridor until one of the waiters came back and asked if I was ready.

“Muhammad wants to know your name so he can introduce you.”

“Kim,” I told him. He looked at me like I stank and walked away. A minute later he came back and said, “Muhammad says your name will be Jamila. It means
beautiful.”

I nodded. Over the chatter and clatter and bubbling hookahs I heard Muhammad yell something in Arabic, and then he called my new name and the lights dimmed. The opening strains of an Arabic song I’d never heard poured forth from the vintage Wurlitzer. I danced down the aisle fast, giving everyone a quick taste, twirling in great cursive loops and clanging the cymbals together over my head like an ambulance siren, clearing my way through traffic. Then I made my way back up the aisle more slowly, stopping at each table for an undulation or a stomach flutter, teasing, flirting, and charming the men, flirting more with the few women there just to show there were no hard feelings. They ululated as I spun, and each time I presented a piece of myself to a table—a bobbing hip, a shrugging shoulder, or a beckoning arm, someone would tuck a bill into my costume. As I
tek-a-teked
to the music on the Wurlitzer, the men got up one by one, leaving their hookahs to dance with me for a measure or two, showing off to their friends, snapping and clapping and blowing clouds of fruity smoke around me. Through the smoke I could see Muhammad in the kitchen, nodding along with the music and shaking the fryer basket to the rhythm of my cymbals.

When the instruments fell away and the song was nothing but drums, two waiters cleared the backgammon boards from the front table and hoisted me up without asking. I stood, covered in sweat, dollar bills lining the waist of my
tanoura
. I translated the beat of the drum into motion, hips snapping left left right, up up down, circle around and back. Whenever the drums paused, I answered with my cymbals, clanking in syncopation. The longer I danced, the more bills the men stacked on their tables, and as the drums built to a crescendo that I followed with my hips, the men leaped up to flick the piles of bills at me like dry leaves. They fluttered down around my feet for the waiters to scoop into a paper bag.

When the song ended, I wiped the sweat from my eyes, blew kisses, and bowed, then grabbed my paper bag and hustled back to the ladies’ room to see if I had enough to save my ass. The bag was stuffed full—I had to have enough, after all of this craziness with the dreams and the
tanoura
and the dancing and all, right? Isn’t that how stories like this end? I was confident, giddy. I pulled handfuls of ones, fives, tens, and twenties out of the bag and piled them on my lap. Sitting on the toilet and stacking bills on the sink, I counted three hundred and forty-two dollars. Three hundred and
fifty-two
, after someone slid a ten under the door. Which put me at five hundred and seventy-two dollars. Four hundred and twenty-eight short of what I needed.

Pulling my jeans on and folding the money into my pocket, I felt betrayed. By Saleem Hassan, by Saint Iggy, by my own stupid-ass choices and bad decisions. I was a cliché. I was going to be a dancing girl who gets murdered in a trailer park on a Saturday night over crack money. Fuck irony. All the way from Christiansburg to Richmond and this was what my life had become. I might as well have stayed a waitress and called everybody
honey
.

A
knock on the bathroom door pulled me out of my self-hating trance. I opened it a crack and saw nothing, then looked down and saw an Arab guy, a kid really, a head shorter than me, in a black shirt and a silver tie.

“Jamila, right? Jamila.” I nodded. “I’m Marwan. Can I talk to you for a minute? All business, I promise.”

What did I have to lose? I followed him to his table. Mar-wan’s heavy, copper-colored eyes locked on mine as he pulled from the hookah.

“Jamila. You’re a good dancer, Jamila. How much you make tonight, two hundred, three hundred?”

I shrugged. “I don’t talk money with strangers.”

“Good policy. Smart girl. Hey, Jamila, I’ma be honest with you. I run a club. A
nice
club. What you call a gentleman’s club. The
best
one. I can tell you for a fact you could make a thousand dollars a night there, easy. You dance like that,
Ma fi mushkila
, no problem. Only just a different costume.” He leered a little and licked his lips. “So what do you say you come by tomorrow and work for me? I put you on the main stage, none of this
tables. Inti Jamila
. You so pretty.”

I reached across the table and took the hookah tube from him and sucked in a deep draft of gray smoke. I held it in my lungs and considered my options. I could be one kind of cliché and end up dead in the trailer park on a Saturday night. I could be another kind of trailer park cliché and dance around a pole with my tits out for money. Or I could go back home tonight and see what Saleem Hassan’s next piece of advice was for me, with a couple of hundred dollars in my pocket for which I had him to thank. That looked like the best choice. If dancing around a pole was what he wanted for me, I’m sure he’d tell me—though from what I’d heard the Arab say about girls who did that, I had a feeling it wasn’t what Hassan wanted. I blew the smoke politely toward the floor and shook my head.

“I appreciate the offer, Marwan, but I don’t think I’m cut out for that kind of dancing. Thanks anyway.”

Before he could argue, I threw my backpack over my shoulder and walked out. As I unlocked Bobby’s bike, I could see Marwan scrambling to throw money on the table, but I was down the street before he made it out the door There are men you trust and men you don’t, and there was something sketchy about that little dude I just didn’t like.

Back at Rudd’s, I locked Bobby’s bike to his porch and walked across the gravel road to my trailer I could see Beau through his window, drinking a beer and watching wrestling. I went inside and sat down at my little kitchenette, wondering what tomorrow was going to bring. I could stay and try and reason with Ivan, giving him what money I had, or I could just disappear—but to where? To do what? Although it felt strange to even hear myself think it, the idea of leaving the trailer park filled me with sadness I’d never felt when leaving Christiansburg.

For once, I realized, I was living in a place where the list of things I didn’t hate was at least as long as the list of things I did. I didn’t hate the fact that I shared my walls with no one, thin and aluminum though they were. I didn’t hate the way outsiders avoided our potholed roads that were occasionally blocked by the Mexicans’ work trucks and junker cars, because that meant I didn’t have to deal with anyone I didn’t want to. I definitely didn’t hate the cheap rent. And, though it’d taken me awhile to trust him, I didn’t hate the Arab. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that Rudd’s was the closest thing to a real home I’d ever had, and the Arab was the only person I’d been able to count on in my whole life.

I knew that if it came down to it and I told him what was going on, I would have sanctuary in the trailer park as best he could provide it. I’d watched him pretend not to speak English and stall the
inmigradón
, the cops, and the dogcatcher long enough for Bill Baldy and Bobby Harvey to hustle folks—and dogs—to higher ground. And when the people from Social Services came to take Judy to a group home, he’d chased them all the way out of the trailer park and up Jeff Davis, spitting and cussing in two languages. “
Neek hallak!
She already lives in a goddamned group home! What the fuck do you think this is?”

I had no plans to ask the Arab for help, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized I wasn’t willing to take my chances anywhere else. This was where I belonged. Whatever was going to happen would just have to happen here.

A knock at a trailer door after midnight is never good news. Sometimes it’s crack whores, sometimes it’s drunk Mexicans, and occasionally it’s Bobby Harvey coming home to the wrong place after too many sips of Wild Irish Rose. But tonight? Since it was technically tomorrow, it must have been
the
knock. I took one more sip of coffee and one more drag off my cigarette. At least I would get it over with now, without the dread. It’s the dread that kills you. Well, the dread and the four hundred and twenty-eight dollars in old crack debts that you didn’t make back belly dancing in a diner.

I stood behind the closed door and said a quick prayer of intercession to Jesus, Allah, Iggy, Saleem Hassan, and whoever else might be listening. I hoped that it would be Ivan himself, and not one of his lackeys, so that maybe memories of all the good times might buy me another day or two. Or less cruelty, at least. Not that there had actually been any good times.

I opened the door and looked out, and then down, to see not Ivan but Marwan standing on my step, his low-slung champagne-colored Mazda as out of place as he was in Rudd’s Trailer Park.