The Mortal Nuts (5 page)

Chapter 7

Sophie Roman pressed the Play button on her pink Emerson boom box, eased a heaping teaspoonful of International Coffee Orange Cappuccino into her cup, watched the pale powder sink into the hot water, stirred. The sweet sound of Luciano Pavarotti's voice poured from the speakers and echoed from the paneled walls. She lifted the coffee cup, closed her eyes, and inhaled the exotic aroma of Italy. Had she ever visited Italy, she was sure, the sweet, spicy brew would have returned her to that little cafe in Milan, just as promised in the commercials. This would be her last morning to herself before the fair started. She wanted to make it special.

Sitting at her fold-out kitchen table, the sun warming her taupe-colored velour robe, Sophie celebrated the deal she had made with Axel. It would, she believed, go down in Sophie history as a marketing triumph. Axel had agreed to buy her collection of condiments sight unseen, for their full wholesale price. The whole lot. Sophie knew from his weary acquiescence to her demand that he had not fully appreciated the scope of her program. For the past year she had loaded her purse at every meal out, stuffing it with sugar packets and ketchup pillows, like money in the bank. Axel would probably have his next heart attack right there in her kitchen.

She had separated her booty into eleven Folgers cans, now lined up neatly on the kitchen counter of her mobile home. Domino sugar packets overflowed one can. Sweet'N Low nearly filled another. The other Folgers cans contained, in order of decreasing volume, Heinz ketchup packets, salt packets, Equal, black pepper, Taco Bell hot sauce, Burger King salt, and coffee creamer. The last two cans were filled with miscellaneous condiments such as artificial horseradish, pickle relish, and barbecue sauce. Sophie reversed the Pavarotti tape in her boom box, lit a Virginia Slim, and congratulated herself on her foresight, industry, and bargaining skills.

The quantities were written in eyebrow pencil on the side of each coffee can. There were 443 sugar packets. She had actually counted only 419, but her count may have been off, and besides, Axel would never take the time to recount Sophie wasn't sure of the exact wholesale value of her hoard, but it had to be a nice chunk of cash. She thought two, maybe even three hundred dollars for everything would not be unreasonable. She turned up the volume on the boom box, sipped her cappuccino, and gazed out the window toward Tanners Lake. A strip of water showed between Laurie Armstrong's sagging pale-gray Artcraft and the Redfields' double-wide.

With the extra money she could buy a yellow metal awning for her home. She knew exactly what she wanted. She'd seen the metal awnings on other homes. They were popular at Pine Creek Village, an upscale mobile home parte down in Eagan, where they got three sixty a month for a single lot. That was a lot of money. Sophie would put her money toward an awning any day. With a nice awning across the front of her home, she could have the classiest-looking home in Landfall. Not that that would take much, given the motley collection of “manufactured homes” that surrounded her, not one of which had ever been profiled in House Beautiful.

A tiny, incorporated village of 685 souls, Landfall clung like a barnacle to the eastern margin of Saint Paul, bordered by Tanners Lake on the north and west, 1-94 roaring by on the south, and 694 squeezing against it from the east. At one time, Landfall had been a thriving community, with its own grocery store, beauty parlor, liquor store, and community center. Now the fiberglass-and-aluminum homes were disintegrating from age and neglect. The only surviving business was the Village Spirits Shop.

Sophie thought about something else then, something she'd been saving in the back of her mind. The bonus. Axel had promised her a bonus this year. If they had a good year, he'd promised to take care of her, give her a share of the profits. But he hadn't said how much. “Let's just wait and see how we do,” he'd told her. Numbers flickered behind the curtain in her mind. She let herself peek. Was that a thousand? Two? Five? She could buy a new car, put a payment down on one of those Saturns, replace her aging Plymouth. Wait. She squeezed her eyes shut. She could see it. A real house. One you could walk through without the dishes rattling. A house with a basement, a place to go when the tornadoes came.

She couldn't think about it. It was too exciting, and too unreal. Instead, she looked at the watch Axel had bought for her at a fair in Iowa. That was a real, solid object. Like the condiments, it was in her possession. A classy gold ladies' watch with the cubic zirconiums that you couldn't tell from real diamonds. A house was one thing, but looking good was important too. She reached across the table and ejected the Pavarotti tape. That was enough opera for one day. It was time for Phil Donahue, then Jenny Jones. Jenny always looked good. Then Oprah. She looked good too.

Dean woke up on the sofa with the TV still going, Phil Donahue talking to three black couples. He was in his sister's apartment. It continued to surprise him, almost every morning, to discover that he wasn't in his cell at Lincoln. Mickey's door was still closed. She hadn't come out all yesterday afternoon or evening. When he'd checked on her around midnight, she hadn't moved. He yawned and sat up. The black couples were arguing, but he couldn't figure out what about. Donahue also seemed at a loss. Dean never could figure out black people, even before his thirty months in Lincoln, where he'd actually had to share a cell with one of them, and where, first day in, he'd been accused of being one on account of his curly hair and dusky skin. His first night there, his cellmate, a guy named Chip, whose skin was the color of a chocolate-chip cookie including the chips—some sort of skin condition—had asked him what way he was going. At first, Dean thought it was a come-on, an invitation to bend over and hug his pillow, but Chip had quickly made it clear that he was talking politics, not sex. “You got two ways to go here, a kid like you,” Chip had explained. “You hang with the brothers, or you hang with them Air-yan mothafuckas.”

“I don't hang with nobody,” Dean had told him.

Chip had said, “Then you fucking bait.”

“Anyways, I'm white.”

Chip raised an eyebrow. “An' I'm the fucking man on the moon.”

“Fuck you.”

Chip had laughed. “Ain't no two ways about it—your mama went and got herself some dark meat, boy.”

Dean almost jumped the guy right then and there. He had held himself back only because Chip had been hitting the iron pile for years and looked like a polka-dot Mike Tyson and would probably have killed him. Also, it might have been true. Dean didn't know his father, and his mother had never been very selective about her dates. This wasn't the first time Dean had been called a nigger, but it was the first time he'd been called a nigger by a nigger.

Chip turned out to be a nice guy. Eighteen years into a thirty-year bid, he'd learned to get along with just about everybody. He said he didn't care what way Dean decided to go. “You seem like a good kid,” he'd said. “I'm just sayin', is all. You got some choices to make, boy. You go with the powers, or you wind up in Punk City. Ain't no two ways about it.”

The two powers, according to Chip, were the Black Muslims and the Aryan Circle. There were other affiliations as well, but those were the only ones likely to accept him. “Punk City,” also known as Protective Custody, was where all the snitches and baby-fuckers and weaklings ended up. That wasn't an option, so far as Dean was concerned. He decided to go with the Circle, since they scared him only half as bad as the Muslims.

Chip recommended that Dean shave his head.

“You lose the hair, you can pass for white bread all day long, boy.”

So Dean had shaved off his nappy, ginger-colored mat and done his best to fit into the Aryan Circle, most of whom, it turned out, were not bad guys, and just as scared as him.

An advertisement for bathroom cleanser, a talking toilet brush, jerked him back to the present. He found the remote between the sofa cushions and turned off the television.

Ten weeks out of Lincoln, and so far nothing had turned up for him. He supposed he could get back into dealing, buying and selling ounces and grams. It was easy money, but chancy, likely to land his ass back in jail. That was the thing about dealing. The mathematics was for shit. Ninety- nine times out of a hundred you did the deal and that was that. The problem was, to make a decent living at it, you had to make a lot of deals, which meant you had to have a lot of customers. Sooner or later, someone was bound to fuck you over. No, to make money in the dope business you had to move the big weight, three or four deals a year and no more. The problem with that was the same as in any other business—it required an initial investment, a reputation, and connections, none of which he had. He knew plenty of people in the business, sure, but all of them were small time and most of them were in jail. Lousy way to make a living anyway, hanging out with people who were all the time fucked up and broke. He'd learned his lesson. Aside from scoring for Carmen, he'd been more or less behaving himself—hanging out, killing time, keeping his eyes open, waiting for the right situation to present itself.

The phone rang. Dean tensed up. Mickey would not sleep through a ringing phone. He watched her door. At twelve rings the caller gave up. Dean opened the bedroom door and looked in. Mickey looked the same as before, only paler. He walked to the bedside. Her eyes were open slightly. He reached down and touched her face. She was cool. He felt her neck but could detect no pulse.

A wisp of sadness came and went, leaving nothing behind. He looked at his right hand, curled it into a fist. He was stronger than he had thought. Well, shit happened. Now he had to deal with it. Obviously, he couldn't call the cops. He'd be back in Lincoln, accident or no. He packed his few articles of clothing in Mickey's gym bag, then added the John Donne book and the three hundred dollars she had stashed in her drawer. He found another forty-odd dollars in her purse, along with the keys to her Maverick.

It was another hot day in Omaha. Not even noon yet, and the seats of the Maverick scorched him right through his jeans. He drove to Ames Avenue, turned left, no destination in mind yet, letting the flow of traffic pull him from one intersection to the next, thinking. Clenching and unclenching his fist, feeling strong. Dean the killer. A guy who you did not fuck with, who could end a life with a single blow. He was surprised how good he felt. Everything he'd heard before had led him to believe that killing another person would have severe emotional consequences. No one, not even Chip, who had killed three people, had told him how easy it would be. As with any other crime, it seemed, feelings of guilt came only when you got caught.

Am I a monster? he wondered. He had always thought that those guys who killed their relatives were nuts, but he didn't feel nuts at all. He felt clear and clean, as if he had shed a rotting old skin.

He wanted to tell someone. But of course that would undermine the feeling—others could look at him and have their own inconsequential thoughts, but only he would know what he had done. He turned onto 1-80, drove east. Hours later, the sun fell behind him and the approaching headlights became balls of sparks. He felt totally alert, ready to drive all night long. As he approached Des Moines, a brown bat struck the windshield and stuck there for an instant—he could see its tiny, pointed teeth—before sliding up and over the Maverick. An omen, a sign that his life was about to get interesting. He turned north on 1-35. For the first time since he'd been sentenced to the Nebraska State Penitentiary, he knew exactly where he was going.

The ringing telephone would not stop. Carmen opened her eyes. The room was dark except for two bright lines of daylight squeaking past the sides of the heavy curtain. She carefully elevated herself to a sitting position, feeling a little sick but overall not bad, considering that she didn't know where she was. She cleared her throat and stared down at the ringing telephone. The last thing she remembered was Axel meeting her at the airport. She was probably in a room at the Motel 6, or so she hoped. She picked up the handset between her thumb and forefinger, the way she might handle a dead bird.

“I'm sleeping,” she reported.

“I can't get my lens in. Did I wake you up?”

It was Axel, of course, calling her from room 3. Axel had lived in room 3 ever since she had known him.

“Christ, Axel. What time is it?”

“Eight-thirty in the morning. You've been sleeping for twelve hours.”

Carmen shook her head to clear it. “Oogh,” she said, sinking slowly back onto the mattress. “Big mistake.” The pain in her head, she recalled from her studies, was due to dehydration of the lining of the brain. She needed some water.

“What's that?”

“Talking to myself. I feel a little sick.” Carmen groped for the light switch, squeezed her eyes closed, and flipped it up. She let her eyes open slowly, taking in the light a photon at a time. Axel was still yammering on about his contact lens.

“Okay. Okay. Give me a minute, okay?” One night, and already he needed a nurse. She looked down at her uniform and grimaced. The crisp whiteness had given way to the look of a well-used flour-sack dish towel. Carmen unzipped and unbuttoned, let the dress fall to the floor, then kicked it aside. Her mouth tasted awful. She could smell herself. She needed a hot shower, bad.

“It's open!” Axel shouted.

Carmen opened the door, stepped into room 3 and was instantly transported back in time. The smell of Mennen Skin Bracer. The bed made military style. The first time Carmen had visited Axel's room, he had tried to bounce a quarter off the taut bedspread to show her how tight it was. The quarter hadn't bounced very high. Actually, it hadn't bounced at all.

“How come you make your own bed?” she'd asked.

“I don't like the maids in here messing with my stuff,” Axel had replied.

Axel's big thirty-one-inch TV dominated the wall opposite the bed. It was turned on to a fishing show, the sound off. The rest of his possessions—his “stuff”—were still neatly arranged in red plastic Coca-Cola crates stacked nine across and six high against the wall. Back in the sixties, he claimed, he had been able to make do with three crates: one for shirts and underwear, one for pants and shoes, and one for miscellaneous.