The Parallel Apartments (54 page)

Lou did not mention that she reminded him so much of Charlotte, and that Cherry had, in a few hours' time, almost replaced Charlotte in his head. The few women who'd ever allowed him into their beds had, afterward,
always
reminded him of Charlotte.

“Don't know.”

Cherry tossed the freshly cased pillow to the end of the bed. Lou tried to concentrate on a large Pepsi beach towel that seemed to be wider at one end and was proving a challenge to fold.

“Want me to drop you off at her place? Here, this is yours.”

Cherry tossed Lou a pair of holey and permanently stained briefs that time had rendered completely inelastic. Lou blushed.

“Ah, thanks.”

“How do you keep those from falling? A little cotton belt?”

She leaned back on her elbows. She looked at Lou with an expression he could describe only as mournful. Her eyes began to darken. Her tears fell in the same way Charlotte's used to: from the outer corners, the right tears following a shallow arc over her cheekbone and then reversing back until they disappeared over her lip and into her mouth; the left was a perfect mirror. But unlike Charlotte, who wailed like a twister siren, Cherry cried like she came: in perfect silence.

Lou looked away. He picked his jeans out of the pile of clothes.

“Your pocket stuff is on the bedside table. You don't have any money?”

Lou observed his pocket things. He still had the ninety cents he'd found in the cushions at home.

He stood up and put on his underwear. Holding them up with one hand, he worked his jeans on.

“Wah.”

“Legs ache?”

“Dammit. Ow. Yeah.”

“Mine do, too. But from sex, not pedaling.”

She smiled. The tear tracks were still there, drying in hourglass symmetry.

“I did accidental splits, too,” said Lou, not knowing what else to say. “Hey, does that hurt?”

He pointed to a bruise circling her calf.

“No, but my wrists do a little.”

She sat up and put her hands out, palms up. Lou sat on the bed. He held her wrists.

“I like you, did I mention that?” she said.

“I like you, too.”

“Don't go see her.”

She kissed him, softer this time.

Lou didn't know what to do, so he began to admire his stack of expertly folded towels. Cherry swept them off the bed.

An hour later Cherry pulled the van into the parking lot of Kincannon's Pawn and Pistol.

“What do you think you can get for it?” said Cherry, turning an earring this way and that to catch the noonday sun. “It doesn't look all that valuable.”

Lou had the feeling she wanted to know whose it was, but she didn't ask. Which was good, because he didn't know. It wasn't Dot's style; she favored thin silver hoops with dangling things. This was gold, heavy, solid, unremarkable.

“Don't know. It's pretty hefty. Ten dollars I'll be happy.”

“Why don't you let me give you a couple of dollars?”

“Don't know.”

“Why don't you let me give you my number?”

Lou blushed. He'd just spent a night and a morning having awfully good sex with this woman, without blushing, and now the blood in his face felt like it would make his whiskers pop out and rain down into his lap.

“Look in there for a pencil,” said Cherry, indicating the glove compartment. “Unless you can remember it.”

“I better write it down.”

Lou looked around. Pink traffic tickets, yellow traffic tickets. Unrefoldable road maps stamped with sneaker prints. The mattress. The pillow. A squashed cardboard box marked “hall closet” in a child's hand. At Lou's feet, a tidy stack of brown, smoothed-out Hershey-bar wrappers and a paperback on figure skating. But nothing to write with.

He looked on the floor while Cherry looked in the back of the van, but there was nothing.

“What about a lipstick?” said Lou, excited by the idea of having a beautiful woman's telephone number written in fiery, fragrant wax on a thirty-dollar speeding ticket.

“Not here. Look, give me those candy-bar wrappers.”

Drawn in pencil on the white side of the lowermost wrapper were the numerals and iconography of a five of diamonds. Lou looked at the next wrapper: the jack of spades. Jack resembled Brenda Starr, Reporter. So did the queen of spades.

“My mother taught me how to draw funnies when I was little.”

Cherry went through the deck and selected seven non–face cards, rearranged them, squared them up, and handed them to Lou.

“Keep them in order,” she said, “until you memorize them.”

Lou began to flip through the Hershey-bar-wrapper cards, but Cherry put her hands over his, stopping him.

“Not now,” she said. “Don't forget to call me when you get settled.”

“I won't.”

I really won't,
thought Lou.

“I mean it,” she said, withholding a kiss.

Me too.

The man in the pawnshop gave Lou six dollars and seven cents for his earring.

“This is a ten-dollar piece of gold,” said Lou.

“That is a six-dollar-and-seven-cent piece of semi-gold,” said the man behind the counter, who looked like a cadaver of Jack Ruby.

“How about a trade? I need a suit.”

“Ain't got suits. Why, we got rings and electric edgers and tennis rackets and pistols and One-Steps and… wait. We do got a diving suit. Comes with a spear gun and flippers. 'll that do?”

“I have to go to a funeral.”

“You can have it all for fifty-five.”

“I need a six-dollar-and-seven-cent-suit that is not composed of rubber and zippers, and that comes with a tie, and what will not stand out in a crowd at a boneyard.”

Both Lou and the pawnshop man leaned over the counter, studying the earring between them.

The pawnshop man picked up a phone.

“Helga, put that son of a bitch you married on the phone.”

Lou ran a fingertip along the sharp crease of the seven folded candy-bar wrappers in his pocket.

“Look here, Lyle,” said the pawnshop man into the phone. “Go in the den closet and get your Haggar Sunday suit and run it down here to the store. I got a man here who, unlike your shiftless Presbyterian self, will wear it.”

A few minutes later a man entered the store with a brown suit on a hanger.

“What took so goddam long, Lyle, goddammit?”

“Helga made me iron it.”

“Go away,” said the pawnshop man, taking the suit. Lyle went away.

The slacks were too small, but the jacket and white shirt and green tie fit fine. Lou tucked the shirt into his jeans.

“Too bad about them cow kickers,” said the pawnshop man, indicating Lou's flayed boots. “You can polish up that belt buckle, though.”

“Which way's Oakwood Cemetery?”

With a fountain pen the pawnshop man carefully drew a detailed map.

“Pawnbrokering might not have been your first calling,” said Lou, admiring the man's cartographic draftsmanship.

“I know that,” he said.

The pawnshop man pushed Lou the finished map and seven cents, then sent him away.

The funeral was still hours away.

Lou sat down under a tree at the edge of a parking lot to rest. He took off his jacket and loosened his tie so he wouldn't sweat right through them before the funeral. The jacket seemed to be made of fine material, and Lou

felt sharp. He wished he had a comb, but the combs at the Standard station he'd stopped at after his visit to the pawnshop were nine cents apiece.

“Your hair looks fine as it is,” the girl at the register had said while Lou stared at the spinning comb display. “Really.”

She smiled. She had many dimples. Lou left the station in an excellent mood. Austin, Texas, was going to be his new home.

The parking lot was crowded, and getting more so. The drivers seemed ornery, and there was occasional yelling. Lou couldn't tell what they were all doing there; the building that the parking lot appeared to service was free of identification. The people coming in and out looked either furious or depressed. A few looked addled, like those war veterans you see on street corners or sometimes in grocery stores, staring timelessly at the cabbages.

Two men burst out of the doors, fighting like hockey players. Their shirts were torn. They let go heavy but badly aimed swings at each other's heads. It looked like it was going to end in a draw, with both foes prostrate on the parking lot, spent and bloodied, but then one man slipped on what looked like a Vienna sausage, falling hard and smacking his head, audibly, seismically, on the curb. The other man stole something out of the vanquished's hand, then went back into the building.

Lou got up, put his coat over one arm like a French waiter, and went into the building. He found himself in a large room with a few rows of folding chairs in the center. All the chairs were filled, and many other people were sitting on the floor, some in sleeping bags. The graying head of a middle-aged fellow was visible through the slit in a pup tent. One wall of the room was fenestrated with a half dozen clerk's stations, their glass barriers scratched and yellowed. A despairing citizen slouched before each of them.

Oh. The Department of Public Safety.

Leaning against a wall near the door was the man who'd recently prevailed in the parking-lot mixitup. He was concentrating on adjusting his nose, which had apparently been knocked out of alignment. In his lap was a slip of bloody paper numbered 88.

“Eighty-two!” shouted a resentful government voice.

A woman lying on a blanket in the corner of the big lobby leaped to her feet.

“That's me,” she announced to the room as she sauntered victoriously to the newly available clerk's window. “Out my motherfucking way.”

After a moment's thought, Lou took a number. In Austin, Texas, not only was his luck with women proving quite excellent, but he felt much smarter, too. Lou took four more tickets. He sat down next to the man who'd won the parking-lot fight.

Lou looked at his tickets: 21, 22, 23, 24, 25. He put his head on his chest and tried to sleep.

Hours later the government voice said, “Seventeen.”

The funeral was still an hour away. Lou had no intention of arriving before it started. His plan when he arrived was to skulk humbly next to an appropriately distant cemetery tree, then, just after Mère and her hopefully worm-porous coffin disappeared beneath the ground, he would emerge, and wait for Charlotte to see him.

“Eighteen.”

Lou went outside. He put his tie and jacket back on, and stood next to the door.

A woman carrying a damp-bottomed sack of groceries approached. She appeared to be in charge of twin girls, five or six years old, deep into a teary bicker. Lou opened the door for them.

“They're up to number 18 in there,” Lou said to the woman. “I've got number 21, right here. Just five dollars.”

The woman gave him a look one might give a pervert or a tax auditor. The two girls stuck out their tongues at him. They went inside.

After a moment, one of the little girls came out with a five-dollar bill. Lou gave her the 21 ticket.

Lou sold 22, 23, and 24 the same way.

He raised his price to ten dollars for ticket 25.

An elderly man afflicted by an oystery cataract in one eye, and a young woman in a meager burnt-orange minidress both came up to Lou with tens in hand.

A fight all but started.

“Wait,” said Lou. “An auction is the only answer here.”

“Fifteen,” the woman instantly said.

“Twenty-five,” said the man, with the kind of eerie calm that attends financial confidence.

“Fifty.” The woman hissed at the old man. He hissed back.

“One hunnert dollars.”

He took a wad of cash out of his pocket and skinned off a hundred-dollar bill. The wad looked like it contained many, many of them.

The woman began to tremble, then cry. She kicked feebly at the old man, who just smiled at Lou.

“See ya later, alligator.”

The woman trudged into the DPS building.

“Here, son. Hand 'er over.”

The deal was done.

“Sir?” said Lou, trading the golden ticket for the hundred. “What time do you have?”

Lou stood under a prairie oak about fifty yards from the ceremony. There were at least two hundred people there, virtually all dressed in black, and many of the women veiled. Melodramatically veiled, thought Lou.

The crowd was standing around a mahogany casket that hovered over a big rectangular dirt doorway to hell. How could there be that many mourners for the woman? Maybe some are here to rejoice, like me, thought Lou.