The Wrong Man (4 page)

I said, “No, no, I don’t,” and slipped out the door, my heart pounding, pulling the cool night air into my lungs like I’d been suffocating. I made it to my car in the damp dark evening, in that sleeping, ugly, lower class neighborhood, relishing the solitude, reveling in the sudden silence, relaxing with the momentary relief from the high, tense feedback of misery emanating from Jill.

5

I
kept
the
F
airlane
at seventy-five along the deserted highway and got off at the familiar exit back in Blackmer. Mist was visible under the street lamps. The red traffic lights blinked over the deserted intersections. Thick clouds drifted in front of a full white moon like the backdrop in a vampire movie. I rolled into
Baron Square
and parked next to Rancho Bonita, the Mexican place across from Vanguard, and did something for which I should be dead.

How do you explain this? I guess it’s what guys do in war. They march
into
fire when everything in them shrieks to turn and run, to dive for cover, to cry and beg God or the enemy or fate to spare them. But they tromp onward with the bullets streaking past, blowing heads apart and snapping into chests and limbs, with bombs detonating and their friends doubling over, disemboweled, screaming, in little pieces. And at the end of it they’re either dead, they wish they were dead, or they’re appalled by their own ridiculous luck.

My palm hit the worn, metal plate and the door swung open. It was after
one a.m.
in the middle of the week and the barroom was alive in a slow, dark way like a welter of snakes in the bottom of a pit.

It was a small bar with a small stage in the corner where local bands and karaoke outfits set up a few times a week. The walls were spotted with the usual neon, relief tins from beer companies, and framed pictures meant to add character. There was a tropical Mexican motif, with a few clay parrots painted in primary colors and standing in metal rings suspended from the ceiling, and there was a shitty mural along the far wall that might have been painted by a ten-year-old, depicting a beach, blue skies and some palm trees.

As I stepped in I caught a glimpse of myself in a big wall mirror. I was all wrong here. There was no hazy smile floating on my face, no trickle of noisy, happy nonsense on my lips. My mouth was mashed to a thin line, my nostrils spread, my eyes banged open so the irises were like holes punched in the dough of my face.

I grimaced, tore my gaze away and scanned the fifteen-odd patrons. The obnoxious thumping and ranting from the corner speakers was black gangsta rap, the partiers were mostly Mexican with a couple of white wannabe gangsters in the mix and a couple of slutty white girls drinking and leering off in a corner. I knew I stood out in this ethnic, urban atmosphere. I looked like I belonged in
Del
Mar with the surfers and college kids. My heart was kicking like an animal trapped inside my chest cavity and it kicked harder with every step. But something in me had ruled out turning back. I would walk right into enemy fire. It was all I had tonight.

I recognized Owen’s buzz-cut, evilly shaped cranium from across the room. He had his back to the bar, around its far curve, so his back was toward me when I spotted him. As I approached I saw the side of his face and heard snatches of his nasally voice. He was smirking and jabbering with his outthrust lower jaw, pint of beer in hand, amid the scariest collection of macho, dangerous gangsters you’d ever want to see; belligerent, loud, arrogant Mexican-Americans with thick, powerful builds and huge shirts and baggy pants; young men who had lost their youth, hanging with an air of drug-smoke, marked up with haphazard tattoos barely visible against their muddy skin, their dog-like hair cropped down to close black mats on their sloping skulls.

 
I stepped toward them. Nobody was looking at me and I almost stopped, realizing the enemy hadn’t even opened fire yet—I could just sneak away, live to fight another day and all that. But then Owen’s gaze locked with mine as if he had been waiting for me.
 
Something shifted behind his eyes, utter confusion and surprise, and then the veil of stone-cold killer-cool dropped over his face again and it was like that flash of humanity had never been there.

I was standing three feet away. My hearing was clouded by blood pressure. The rap music and drunk conversations seemed like something off in the distance, the whole world a TV with the volume turned down. Everything seemed to have fallen away except the battered, malignant face of Owen Ferguson. He was wearing a loose, checkered, button-down shirt that looked right off the rack and he was holding a fresh pint of piss-colored beer at chest level. The Mexicans around him had gone silent, looking at me like they might explode to action and kill me any second.

“You fucking stupid, Homes, or what?” Owen said in his jaw-sprung, perpetual Brando imitation.

I found my voice wasn’t quite there. I wasn’t quite angry or high on adrenaline; all I had was the theoretical knowledge that I
ought
to be angry, that I
ought
to feel like killing, but I was deep inside my shell.
 

I nodded and said, “Yeah, I’m fucking stupid,” so quiet I could hardly hear myself, and Owen watched, completely dumbfounded as my hand reached out and tipped his pint glass into his chin, washing the amber liquid down the front of his button-down shirt.
 
I did it with my left hand, and I managed to square off during everyone’s collective gasp and immediately snap a punch into his cheek with my right. I had the satisfaction of seeing him cower against the bar, squinch his face and cover up with his hands for a split second, and I stepped back and elevated my fists in a silly boxer’s pose.

“Let’s do it, bitch!” I said, so loud that the entire room stopped dead and watched. “Come on, you faggot rapist piece of shit! Bring it, motherfucker!” I heard my speech tinged with the pseudo-black street dialect the gangsters use and I had no idea where it came from. The action had cracked me out of my shell and I was suddenly a stranger to myself.

There were four of Owen’s friends mere inches away, but I was guessing Owen would need to rescue his reputation by personally beating me, at which point I would beat him—to death if I could. That was the plan that I hadn’t articulated to myself. That’s what had brought me here, and that’s what I was expecting to happen when the plug was pulled on my consciousness
.
 

I learned later, of course, that one of the big Mexicans had simply set his feet and slammed a fist into the side of my head and then it had been basketball shoes, boots and fists striking me like bricks swung on the end of ropes.

The bartender was a youngish Romeo-type with his hair slicked back from his widow’s peak and his chest hair coming out of his open collar. Maybe he recognized me as one of the clerks at Vanguard, or maybe he would have done the same for anyone, but he saved me, yelling, “Hey! Hey! I’m calling the cops! Knock it the fuck off right now!” as the gangsters stomped on me or bent down to land punches. I heard all this later, from the bartender himself, after I woke up to the sound of sirens. He actually did call the cops and even scampered around the bar, phone in hand, yelling and warding my attackers off, telling them there was a room full of witnesses. They had finally listened to him and hustled out and roared off in their lowered cars.
 

As I crawled up to a stool it felt like half my face had been torn off. My fingers explored the parts of it that were bigger and squishier and sorer, and the parts of it that were split open. I needed ice and maybe stitches. The inside of my lip was shredded. At least one tooth was loose. My left thigh had a cruel cramp stitched into it and my left arm, around the elbow, felt either sprained or broken.

Two cops strolled in—the big one who had harassed Owen last night, and a smaller one with a mustache. They were both white. They sat at a table with me, two scrubbed healthy faces, two cropped scalps and black outfits, their crowded tool belts and bullet-proof vests making them stiff and awkward in sitting positions. The bartender worked with one ear cocked toward us. I told the cops I had no idea who had done it. Bunch of Mexicans, I said. My own fault, I said. I had a few drinks too many and I mouthed off and swung first.

That was good enough for the cops, and they radioed it in as “mutual combat” and left, telling me I might want to get myself to the emergency room.
 

Last call had come and gone by then and the place was empty. The bartender put both hands on the bar when the door shut behind the cops. He had big, glassy black eyes and the typical Latino caterpillar mustache sitting on his thick upper lip.
 
He said, “That was smart, bro. You don’t want to rat on those guys. I was you, I’d go home and pack and leave town right now.”
 

I thanked him for his advice through my damaged mouth and I dragged myself out. There was nobody waiting for me in the parking lot. I made it to my car and went home, but I didn’t pack and leave town.

6

M
y
cousin
T
ommy
had
spent good portions of his life in county, state and federal lockups. He was well into his forties and usually had half a dozen girlfriends waiting in the wings that he liked to brag about but didn’t like anyone to actually see.

When I was a kid his girlfriends looked like TV stars. They were wholesome or sleazy or somewhere in between; they were sprightly and high-breasted or busty and hippy or somewhere in between; they were blonde or brunette or redheaded or some mixed shade. But they were always something to look at. They never rated any lower than an eight-point-five, and it seemed they’d do anything for him. The last I’d heard, Tommy had made me eight second cousins by five different women.

But as the years went on his girlfriends became rougher, tougher, sleazier, shadier, older, meaner, fatter and generally lower on the attractiveness scale until Tommy left them at home, snuck over and fucked them when he needed to, strung them along, used them for their cars or food stamps or drugs, and then casually strolled out of their lives when they had a fit of self-respect and started screaming at him.

Tommy was still the cool character he had been from maybe 1982 to maybe 1996, but he was trapped in an aging husk. Time had carved lines into his face, bled the gold from his hair and laid a layer of grizzle around his middle. He was still a presence; still a big, loud, powerful, vaguely gorilla-looking shape, but none of the dewy young girls who made him antsy would look his way any more. He knew this but if you spent any time around him you would never know he knew it.

I thought of Tommy the next day as I awoke alone in the apartment Jill and I shared. I had slept, or tried to sleep, on the couch in the little living room and I lay there staring at the ceiling as the dawn became morning outside. I was sore all over. I had leaned in front of the bathroom mirror, gasped at myself, but determined that I didn’t need stitches. My face was just well tenderized. And I had heard that a tooth knocked loose would set again if left in its hole, so I did just that. When I walked back from the bathroom I could feel where each foot or fist had dug into my torso and limbs, but nothing was so smashed that the pain wouldn’t fade. Or so I guessed. Owen and his “boyz,” it seemed, hadn’t had quite enough time to work.

I thought of a lot of things as I lay there, in the little living room Jill had decorated and spent so much time with me in. I thought of the past, of my childhood, of what I believed I was and how all of that had turned out to be a cheap facade. I thought that if I let this thing slither away into yesterday, and then last week, and then a month ago, without grabbing onto it, without taking hold of it and mastering it—or at least making my best attempt—I would be looking back on it with shame for the rest of my life.

And so the little footpath of my thoughts wound around and brought me to Tommy again. Some people have friends on the police force or local government. Some can pay high-powered attorneys to start the wheels of so-called justice turning to draw in and grind up their enemies. In my hour of need, when I was confronted with my own impotence, I could only think of Tommy
.

He was as soft-hearted in his own way as he was malicious and self-serving. He was a street kid who my aunt hadn’t wanted or cared about, and who had raised himself in the city, fighting and cheating and winning from his earliest childhood. It left him a compulsive hustler and, like every one of this breed, it had cultivated in him rare talents. He was vastly intelligent, with surprising imagination and lighting wit, but the spinning gears were set too far apart, never meshing, never taking him anywhere. He had never had a steady job that I was aware of but he worked relentlessly, seven days a week, scavenging scraps of other people’s wealth, foraging like a wolf, swindling fortunes and waking each morning with nothing again.

And there was another side of him, a vicious Mr. Hyde that emerged when the fast talk and the smiles and lies had failed. Tommy was dangerous. A big man with quick, fluid strength who had spent half his life in cages with other desperate and angry human males. He had bragged to me when he was drunk that he had never lost a fight. “And that,” he said, “ain’t on the fuckin’ playground, Sammy. I’m talkin’ in the worst places in the world with the toughest motherfuckers in the world.”
    

None of it left him much of a human being, but it left him with a specialized set of skills. And this morning, as I washed up and burned on this sandbar, as I marshaled my energies and prepared to croak for help, he was the only person I could make out in the distance.

He answered his cell phone by saying, “This is Tom.”

“Tommy,” I said. I was sitting up on the couch. Morning light was pouring in the front window. I had the phone against my head and his cell number, scribbled on a scrap of paper months ago, sitting on my knee.

“Who’s this?”

“Tommy, it’s Sam, your cousin. Listen—”

“You sound like shit, kid.”

“Yeah. Hey, I need to talk to you about some stuff. Can you meet me somewhere?”

“Sure. Well, shit. Can you come get me? My car ain’t running.”

I had the immediate thought that his car was running just fine, but he was working some angle—maybe just trying to save gas, for fuck’s sake. “Yeah. You still out there by the beach?”

“Yeah, but, fuck
 
. . .”

So I ended up arranging to meet him by the Amoco station out on Highway 1. Like everything with him, there was a story that didn’t add up explaining why he couldn’t drive and why I couldn’t pick him up at wherever his current home was. Something about a new place that was hard to find, a bitchy old lady, a dangerous dog. I spaced out while he delivered his spiel. I didn’t give a fuck.

When he got into my car, for the first time in my life, the guy seemed speechless. He looked at my face in the harsh
ten a.m.
light and said, “What the fuck
 
. . .” and that was it for several seconds. He reached out and took my chin in thick, grease-stained fingers, turned my head and pursed his lips, furrowed his brow like a mother contemplating her sick child.

 
“You fall into the tiger cage at the zoo?”

“Something like that. I need to get some stuff,” I said. “A gun, I think.”

This was supposed to raise the question of why the fuck I, his relatively clean-cut cousin, would need a gun. This was supposed to awaken his sense of family honor and make him vow to never rest until I had been avenged. But he wasn’t biting. His large, blue, once-attractive eyes stared right through me a moment and then he said, “You got money?”

“A little in the bank,
 
not much but—”

“Never mind.” He waved his hand. “We can get some.”

Tommy practically ignored me. I was merely a sounding board for his bullshit. He was off and running on his hustle. He only discussed his plan to “get funds”—which was simply to make me steal a chainsaw.

He knew the guy who possessed the chainsaw—“owned” might be too strong a word here—and some deal had gone bad that Tommy wanted to set straight, maybe; I still don’t know with any certainty. But they knew his car in this neighborhood, and he might have been spotted doing this himself, so he had rifled the mental files, done some kind of calculation and decided me needing something presented him with an opportunity to even up with this guy.

Tommy got out of the passenger’s seat and we switched places. He was dressed in clothes that had lost their bloom, a crusty leather jacket with a blue sweatshirt hood hanging over the collar, loose-fit jeans that were still new and wanted to be nice but had become grease-spotted while Tommy tinkered with stolen bikes or made quick adjustments to idling engines. His hair was longish, but not long, washing out from dark blond to gray. Tommy was once extraordinarily handsome and his face, when I bothered to consider it, made me give the amused grunt you give when you see an aging starlet. The striking, bright-eyed kid from those early publicity photos is still there, but distorted, transformed by the wicked workings of time, and the starlet just looks that much more pathetic as she tries to drape herself in the glamour of the old days. That was Tommy, except he was a little too scary to be pathetic.
  

As he walked around the hood of the Fairlane he slipped on wraparound sunglasses—right in style, circa 1990—and pulled the sweatshirt hood up so he looked like the Unibomber. We climbed in on opposite sides and I watched as he settled his large gorilla frame into the driver’s seat.

He pursed his lips, orienting himself to the gear lever on the steering column. “Good old three-on-the-tree,” he said. “This got the four-twenty-seven?”

“Yeah.”

“You want to get rid of this thing, lemme know. I know a guy loves these fucking cars.”

“Maybe after today,” I said, “When it’s known by the police.”

He threw me a mirror-lensed glance and said, “Don’t go gettin’ nervous on me now, honey, when you got me all hard and ready.”

“Jesus,” I said. “Stop.”

He turned the key, listened to the motor and revved it up to a snarling scream a couple of times. “Don’t worry. I’ll snuggle you afterward, Sammy-boy!” He braced both arms against the steering wheel as he popped the clutch. The tires screeched as the V-8 yanked us forward and flung us out of the Amoco lot. Tommy said, “That’s what I’m talkin’ about!” as we fishtailed, kicking up gravel at the edge of the road and then grabbing the pavement and rocketing onto the freeway. My stomach lurched, the engine yowled higher and higher until I thought it was going to shatter, and he finally punched the clutch and shifted into second when we were doing forty.

We rolled into the poor side of Blackmer ten minutes later. It was a nice day for robbing houses. The blue sky was only marked with a couple of fading chemtrails, the sun was flexing and a friendly breeze sprinkled the dandelion seeds across the ragged lawns.

I did just as he said, and just as he said, there was nobody home. Maybe Tommy had killed the guy last week and he was rotting inside the place. Who knew? We backed into the driveway of a gray-white house with a front yard of dirt and a layer of grime on the windows. It was located behind another house. Someone’s rental unit. The operation took five minutes. I got out and let myself in the side gate, limped to the backyard, and went to the old rust-rotted hardware store tin shed Tommy had described. It wasn’t locked, and when the door opened daylight fell on the big orange Husqvarna chainsaw Tommy had described.

“That’s a goddamned thousand-dollar piece of equipment!” Tommy said as we drove away. The chainsaw was on the backseat. It looked brand new and it was huge, although it had been unexpectedly light as I carried it out. Tommy was agitated now, high, drugged by the success of the caper. “Motherfucker stole it from
me
,” he said as he drove. “Sneaky prick didn’t think I’d come take it back ’cause he called the cops when I beat his ass. That thing better still run.”

I just looked at him, still donning his Unibomber shades and hood. I was unable to discern what the reality of the situation might have been. Who knew who stole what from whom in the circles Tommy moved in?

“Where we going now?” I said.

We were wandering from the residence I had just robbed, cruising the neighborhoods of Blackmer, working our way out of the homely, poverty-ridden streets to where lawnmower wheels left geometrically perfect stripes in the front yards; where the sidewalks were uncluttered and uncracked and the cars clean and new. Tommy rolled down the window as he lit a cigarette, speaking out the side of his mouth, impersonating what was probably supposed to be a
Texas
tycoon. “I’m gonna show you how we do things in the big league, son! Market conditions are favorable to sell at a profit this morning!”

“What, you gonna pawn that thing?”

“Shhh! You hear that?” Tommy had his left ear cocked toward the window, he plucked the cigarette from his mouth and said, “That’s oppor
toon
ity knockin’, boy!”

I listened. I heard a small engine grinding away somewhere.