Shaking out the Dead (25 page)

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Spinning gold into shit.
Tatum tried to remember the story. Rumpelstiltskin was a nasty troll, she recalled. He spun straw into gold on behalf of some girl who pretended she was the one spinning it. She had to promise her firstborn in return for the favor. The girl got out of it somehow, though, pulled off some kind of double-cross.

Tatum flipped the sandwiches in the frying pan. Rachael appeared and slid into one of the chairs at the small table. Tatum spatula-ed the sandwiches onto plates, slid on an oven mitt, and poured the soup into bowls. She laid out the humble meal. They sat across from each other. Rachael's bandage made a bulge above her brow.

“I blew it today,” Tatum said. “And I'm sorry.”

“It's okay,” Rachael said, not looking up.

“I know how much you wish she were here.”

“But she's not here,” Rachael said.

Tatum looked down and saw two tears plop onto her plate.

“I'm sorry.” She blotted the tears with a paper napkin. “I'm just a crybaby today. I miss Margaret, I guess,” she blurted, not knowing the words were coming. It was the truth, though. Her missing of Margaret was a missing that stretched back in time to long before her death. It was a missing of Geneva too, unfolding forward into the future.

The snowball was rolling. Tatum knew she couldn't do this. Not in front of Rachael.

She sniffled and bucked up.

“How's your head feeling?” she asked.

“The doctor said I was going to have a scar.”

Their eyes reached across the table for each other's. Tatum wanted Rachael to know she would not be like her.

“It'll be a little one,” Tatum told her. “People will have to look real close to see.”

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Geneva stood in her kitchen. History, she decided, repeats itself not because we forget, but because we keep remembering, chewing and reviewing, mindlessly re-invoking. Something had to change. She wanted something different than what she had, and so she knew she had to do different. Think different. Be different. She was tired of being a control freak who knew that the only thing she could control was herself. So she decided to start with that. She would disavow her history of taking responsibility. Blame was to be the new name of the game. She did not feel good about the way she had spoken to Tatum, but she decided not to feel good about Tatum instead.

What else? She leaned on the kitchen counter, refusing to budge, not until she could make an original move. She blocked habitual thoughts and waited. And waited.

The mind can be quieted, but the senses don't sleep. The heady scent of lilacs snuck up again and licked at her. She involuntarily lifted her eyes to them, and it was as though a needle had dropped in a groove. She heard in her mind the distinctive opening guitar riff. The song was “Beast of Burden.” The band, the Rolling Stones.

She let the music play in her head. It took a verse for her to dislodge herself, to stand up straight and follow the path from her kitchen to her bedroom, where she retrieved the phone number from her jewelry box. Sitting on her bed, she dialed it, and when John answered, she said, “I want to accept your dinner invitation because I need to know how I'd feel when I got there.”

There was a pause. Then an audible shifting.

“I understand your motives,” he said.

Geneva believed that he did.

“How 'bout tomorrow night?” he said.

“That would be fine.”

“Are you a woman who will eat a pork chop?”

“I am.”

“Six-thirty, seven?”

“That sounds good.”

There was a spot of silence.

“Thank you for the lilacs,” Geneva said.

John gave her directions, and then they said their good-byes and hung up their respective phones.

Geneva sat there until a slow smile spread across her face. She rose from the bed and headed for the stereo. Her glass had been half-full for some time. But now, she wanted to pour that half down the drain. They say something is better than nothing, but Geneva did not think it was true. Sometimes, nothing
is
better than something. With nothing, there's no thing to judge as inadequate. There's no disappointment. Some glasses are only half-full because that's all there is of the beverage. No sense in asking the bartender for more. An empty glass at least holds the potential of being filled to the top with that which one desires.

Geneva dropped the needle on
Some Girls
.
I want to be happy
, she thought,
and I don't give a damn how I get there.

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Dirt and dead flies cut the glare of the florescent lights. Paris moved from table to table sorting the sugar packets from the Equals in their caddies. By the feel and texture of the night, by the weight of the casino up front, the balance of bodies and sound, Paris could calculate the hour. The women should be arriving before long. Paris refused to look at the clock, however, and tried not to think of the progression of the hours, one day turning to the next. To distract himself, he purposefully filled his head with numbers. He added up his wages over two months, then three. He added them to the five-hundred-dollar bonus he was promised if he stayed until closing. Then he counted back the hours to when he was in Tatum's bed, telling her about the women from the diner. In the telling, the number of facts he had omitted was one. Linda. He left out her entire existence, and the story suffered for it. He wanted to tell Tatum all of it, even what happened in the janitor's closet. But he found it to be a weighty recognition that now, what choices he made for himself happened to Tatum as well. Even retroactively. Love, it seemed, dragged the past forward into the moment and the moment into the future by the promises implied. Perhaps by its nature, love was sticky.

Having sorted all the blue packets from the white, Paris returned to the backside of the counter. There were no orders to fill or tables to clear. Undirected, his mind spit up another fact he had conveniently omitted when he told Tatum about the women of the Deluxe: Vincent had been there once in the diner among them.

The lies of omission were stacking up.

He grabbed the push broom and headed for the cooler. His eyes skimmed the metal shelves as he swept. How many days would the crate of tomatoes last, or the bin of sliced onions? He struggled to add up things other than lies. He bent to push the debris into a dustpan, and a carton shaped like a pizza box caught his eye. “Cheesecake” was stamped plainly on the side. Jerry had told Paris that the Deluxe was out of cheesecake and that they weren't supposed to restock. It had already been dropped from the menu.

Cheesecake reminded Paris of regular cake, and regular cake reminded him of birthday cake. The jig was up. He could no longer drown out the fact of the new day. His birthday. A date he tried to forget from year to year. It wasn't a fear of aging. It was an exercise, just as some people did crossword puzzles or refused calculators in order to keep their minds sharp. Paris was training his brain. He figured if he could forget his birthday, he could forget anything. Then, if anything really terrible ever happened, he would know he could bury it in his own mind until it was no more. Knowing one's birthday was sometimes necessary, he knew, but need be, he could always look it up. Some years, he had forgotten splendidly. Other years, like this one, it refused to be repressed.

Paris put the broom to the side and extracted the box from the shelf. He left the cooler and placed the box on the cutting board. Sliced up, the cheesecake would be eight good-sized pieces.

He turned a large knife one way and then the other, creating wheel spokes across the yellow surface. The lightest reflex of a smile lifted the corners of his mouth. He had told Tatum about his ambition to forget his birthday. It was shortly after they had met. It had been her own birthday, and she had come over with a bottle of wine. They drank it from juice glasses Paris had purchased at the Salvation Army. Birthdays were the subject de jour, and Tatum had asked him, casually as could be, “When's yours?” — a perfectly sensible question.

“I'm trying to see if I can forget,” he had told her, though he hadn't known her long. “I want to see if it's possible.”

“That would be hard,” she had said. She didn't say “How weird.” She didn't even ask why. It was a feat. She could see that.

“You just gotta not think about it,” he told her. “When someone asks,” — he put his fingers on his temples and closed his eyes — “you just make a lot of noise inside. Drown out the answer. Yell, ‘I don't know, I don't know' inside your head.”

“Interesting skill to cultivate,” she said. She swirled the red wine in the bottom of the cheap glass. “I'm scared to death of forgetting,” she said. “I feel like you have to remember everything in order not to make the same mistakes over and over.”

Paris spatula-ed slices of cheesecake onto small plates. He would appease his birthday this year. Make it an offering so it would recede back into his subconscious without a struggle.

He carried five plates at once toward the dining room, two in each hand and one resting in the crook of his left elbow. As he approached the swinging door beside the cook's window, he sensed a new body in the room beyond. He frowned, unhappy he had neither heard nor sensed someone enter. He stepped out from the kitchen loaded down with cheesecake, and she was there at the end of the counter.

Linda.

Words caught in his throat.

“What's the occasion?” she said.

Her hair was somewhat rumpled. She looked tired, but then, she always had. Paris unloaded all but one of the plates on the work space behind the counter. He extended the last one in her direction.

“My birthday,” he said. He told the truth.

Linda waved off the plate.

“Well, happy, happy,” she said. She reached into her coat pocket and pulled out several crumbled singles. “I'd like some soup,” she said, “if you've got it.”

Both the request and crumpled singles caught Paris off guard. She did not make eye contact, almost as though her having the money embarrassed them both.

Just then, the two retarded girls passed through the doorway and slid into a booth. An older woman with a dry drunk's twitch tailed the girls and seated herself in the corner. Paris poured coffee for Linda — the old habit — and then picked up three slices of cheesecake and took them to the other women. They accepted it without question. Then he filled a bowl of soup for Linda and delivered it with packaged saltines. As he placed it before her, she looked down at her hands, which she took turns with, one rubbing the other. The first wave of relief upon seeing her had blinded him to what he now saw. Her facade had melted. He had known it was a facade but had believed it was sadness below and not what he now saw. Fear.

The retarded girls talked in a low murmur. Paris ladled soup for them and for the older woman and dropped it at their respective booths. Back behind the counter, he pulled plastic wrap from its roll to cover the remaining slices of cheesecake. He stole a sidelong glance at Linda. He hoped her fear was not related to his own past bad judgment. She lifted her eyes and returned his gaze. For a moment, it seemed like she had something to say, but then her face went white.

In a single movement, she was up and over the counter, banging her knee, and spilling her coffee. She bit her bottom lip and crouched low, hop-limping her way into the kitchen. Paris dropped the plastic wrap and moved swiftly toward where she had been seated. Instinctively, he dumped her soup and spoon into the bus pan and wiped away all traces of her. The retards watched with wide eyes. The older woman kept her eyes averted.

Paris turned to face the doorway. A man stood there, arms puffed slightly at his sides. Paris assessed him quickly: Sober. Clean. Wound up tight. Weak and violent, a bad combination in a man for all women, children, and small animals. The man's eyes darted through the room, landing on each woman in succession and then to Paris, who was hanging up his rag.

Paris thought the man might turn and leave, not finding among them what he was looking for. But no such luck. He took a seat at the counter, sitting sideways on the stool. He ordered only a Coke. A bad sign. A Coke is an excuse. It's putting money in a meter. Buying a place to park.

The retarded girls focused on their soup and did not speak. Paris sat on the stool behind the counter that Jerry used during the day. Rarely did Paris sit at work, but he did so now, a sentry in the corner. Paris felt the man sizing him up, but he kept his own eyes unfocused on the space before him. But it was to no avail. Paris had lost his invisibility.

The man bought twenty tense minutes with his Coke. Paris wanted to go back into the kitchen and check on Linda, but he didn't want to leave the man unattended. He wondered what the man's relationship was to Linda. Pimp? Husband? Boyfriend? Some combination? He felt certain the retarded girls knew. The threat he posed was not that of the unknown.

Finally, the man stood and dumped change from his pocket onto the check. But instead of heading for the casino and exit, he turned and approached the retarded girls' booth. He looked back and forth between them.

“Where the fuck is she?” he said softly, but with menace.

Paris slid off the stool and came to lean with both hands on the counter. “Hey, hey, hey,” he said. His biceps peeked out from his white T-shirt sleeves.

The man turned around.

Paris pointed downward at the top of the counter. “Bring it here,” he said.

“I'm looking for my wife,” he said, his back now to the girls.

“Which of you is married to this guy?” Paris said to the retarded girls. They looked back at him with blank faces. Then they looked at each other, and the white one seemed about to speak. Paris was relieved the man spoke first.

“This isn't your business,” he said to Paris.

Paris lifted a hand and waved him closer to the counter, away from the women. Then, he leaned forward, looked him in the eye, and spoke softly.

“Those girls,” Paris said, “they don't know anything.”

“They know plenty.”

“What's she look like?” Paris said. “If she shows up here, I'll tell her you're looking for her.”

Paris forced himself to hold the man's eyes. Still, he could sense the woman in the corner booth trembling. This was not what she was told to expect. The man's eyes couldn't quite hold Paris's and made small movements back and forth as ideas and strategies unfolded and crashed against the wall of possibilities. There was no getting past Paris, he must have decided, because he backed away from the counter and pointed at him.

“Fuck you,” he said.

Paris placed his hands on his apron-clad hips.

“Fuck me,” he said, as though in total agreement.

The man pursed his lips and bobbed his head in three short, tight nods. Blair met him when he reached the casino and escorted him to the front door.

Paris came out from behind the counter and watched him go. Then he turned to the retarded girls. The cross-eyed Indian one said, “He's bad.”

“He's gone,” Paris said. Then he went back behind the counter and wiped him away with a rag. He pocketed the eight-cent tip. The dining room exhaled, and Paris went to the kitchen to look for Linda.

His eyes panned the room, the floors and the counters and sinks. He stepped toward the janitor's closet and crooked his neck, looking inside. Nothing. He moved toward the rear of the kitchen and checked the cooler. She was not inside, wrapped in her own arms, shivering. Paris then pushed on the metal bar, opening the heavy back door that led to the Dumpsters. A motion detector light ticked on above him. The alley cut through the purple night like a river, the cracked brick buildings rising up on each side like carved out canyon walls. Paris looked both ways. Angled light reached the Dumpsters, potholes, and fire escapes. But Paris saw her nowhere. The motion light ticked back off, detecting nothing either. Linda was gone. Paris hoped her small fistful of singles wasn't all the money she had.

The image of Linda clutching her dollars made Paris's hands tingle. He curled his fingers to his palms as though he, too, could feel the soft, kneaded texture of the bills. He stepped back inside the kitchen, pulling the door closed behind him.

But Linda didn't need to be drawn. She needed money.

Paris looked at the carton from the cheesecake, still on the work counter. He was going to give Linda his five-hundred-dollar bonus, he decided, to help her get to somewhere where she didn't need to hide. He had the money in savings from his last paycheck. He would give her that and cover the loss with the bonus. He would right past wrongs. He would be a man. If he were going to remember his birthday this year, this would be his birthday present. To himself.

He returned to the dining room just as the women were emerging from their booths to walk back into the dark.

“Tell her to come back,” he said to the retarded girls, and they stopped and turned. The Indian one said, “Okay,” and they continued out through the casino.

Paris cleaned up after them all. He loaded the dishwasher and then lined up doughnuts like neatly fallen dominoes on an orange Rubbermaid tray. He did what he knew how to do. He worked.

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Light pressed against the dark sky. Blossoms that had survived the hail glowed. The first birds chirped, waking the others. Paris walked the cracked sidewalks until he reached the duplex. He crept downstairs and sat on the edge of his mattress with his work boots still on, contemplating the logistics of his feet. He liked to wash them first thing after work, but he didn't want to wake Tatum and Rachael. If he set his feet free, without washing them, the basement would be contaminated, and if Tatum came down later, she would be exposed. He realized he no longer had a deep corner closet where he could stash his offending footwear. He scanned the room for nooks and crannies. He stood to take a tour. He pushed through his own boxes and thought of the box he had left behind, the one with his paints and charcoals. He thought of Linda, and again, there was the tingling in his hands. He continued shuffling through the rummage that surrounded the rug Geneva had unrolled for him. He made his way to Tatum's cluster, the place where he had surprised her earlier. He reached down and picked up a green leather book from the top of a box. It looked old. Expensive. Permanent, like a Bible.