The Wrong Man (5 page)

“Yep, that’s us,” he said in his own voice again, pushing the gas and listening for the source of the noise. “Watch this, Sam. Just watch this. Wetbacks always got cold hard fuckin’ cash!”

He listened as he drove, smoking rapidly in his excitement, and finally turned the car around a bend, and said, “Oh yeah. They’re the ones.”

Before us, against the curb in front of a house with fresh paint, professional landscape design and a deep green lawn, there was a well-outfitted gardening rig. I looked at the new metal trailer loaded with equipment and the big white Ford truck in front of it, and I began to get the idea.

Tommy pulled up behind the truck, set the brake and turned off the car. He flipped his sweatshirt hood down and smoothed his hair, then got out and walked up to the house. After a moment he got the attention of a skinny, dark Mexican who was running a weed-eater. I heard Tommy shout something about a
“patrone”
a few times and the guy shut his machine off and went to the back yard. Tommy fidgeted and glanced up and down the street for a few seconds, until a boss-type emerged.

The boss was maybe forty, Mexican but Americanized. Thick and frog-shaped with the black caterpillar on his upper lip and an intensely skeptical glint in his eye.

I watched them approach the car. I just sat in the front seat, seeing myself and Tommy through this workingman’s eyes and feeling like something he had noticed in the uncut grass, left behind by a dog.

“That thing’s brand-new!” Tommy said. I had a view of the two men’s middle-aged midsections out the car’s window and I saw Tommy’s hands shape his thoughts as he spoke. “You gotta cut a tree down, this mother’ll go through a fuckin’ giant redwood like warm fuckin’ butter!”

“I already got a chainsaw,” the Mexican said in flat American.

I heard Tommy scoff. “What do you got? A fourteen-inch for chomping up trimmings?”

“That’s right.”

“What’re you gonna do to a tree with that fuckin’ toy? Hurt its feelings?”

I laughed and shook my head.

“Shee-yit.” The Mexican was laughing too. “I just rent one when I need to, man.” A moment passed, then the Mexican leaned close to the window so his jowly face was an inch from the glass. “This thing even run?” he said, and I knew the hook was in.

“Like a fuckin’ top!” Tommy said. “I’m telling you, it’s brand new!” He opened the door beside me, folding my seat forward as if I wasn’t in it as he reached for the chainsaw.

I just went for the ride. Let the time pass. Endured Tommy’s bragging and addle-brained ranting and unbroken chain of off-the-cuff jokes that sometimes were so clever I wondered why the guy was such an imbecile. We wound up in a filthy house on a backroad, occupied by an obese papa, a fat, scraggly mama, and a gothic teenage daughter who looked at me either like she was interested or like she resented me for seeing how she lived.

Tommy jabbed his chin at me and said, “This is my cousin, Sam. Don’t mind him, he fell down and hit his head a few dozen times,” then laughed at his own joke, coaxing laughter out of everyone else. I got the impression Tommy had spent a lot of time with these people and that he made them nervous.

Silence settled over the room again and Tommy laughed at nothing and said, “Don’t everyone talk at once,” which elicited another ripple of nervous laughter. Then he said, “Craig, we got some special business for you.
Garage
business.”

So we went through a kitchen of high stacks of dirty dishes, ancient appliances and peeling linoleum, and out a side door. Craig hit the switch and fluorescent lights stuttered to life and we filed into a garage with a tepid, dying smell to it, like a warm refrigerator. The place was piled with papers and rusty tools and a general, insane confusion of garbage from one end to the other. We followed the fat man as he picked a path through the junk, then watched as he keyed a padlock on the top door of an old metal locker of the kind that are racked up by the hundred in the hallways of high schools.

Inside were cardboard boxes, plastic bags and a couple of loose weapons. “There it is,” Tommy said. “How about some knucks?” He seemed a full foot taller than the fat man.

“How about
these
bad boys?” Craig was holding up something that didn’t resemble my idea of brass knuckles. They looked like a knife handle with a skull-head at the base and four loops of metal for fingers on the front. Without warning he tossed them to me and I jerked my hands up and caught them. I was immediately impressed by their weight. I put my fingers through the loops, closed my hand on the contoured handle, and there was a flutter in my stomach. If I’d hit Owen with
these
last night. . . .

“Those are a felony to even
have,
” Craig said, his black-bagged eyes weighing into me.

“Didn’t I tell you? This is my cousin, man.” All the humor was gone from Tommy’s voice. “He’s solid. He’s good. Don’t even sweat it.”

“I ain’t sweatin’ it, I’m just saying. He might not know how shit works. I don’t need anything coming back on me.”

“Sam’s good. You want those, Sam?”

“Yeah.”

Tommy looked at Craig. “I got two bills. We need something else too. Something that
shoots
.”

“Shit.”

“Don’t ‘shit’ me, brother. I’m talking a pea-shooter. No fuckin’ Dirty Harry cannon. Come on, man. What do you think, I’ve joined the force?”

Craig looked from Tommy to me, his head beginning to nod. “Okay.” He looked at me. “You ever shoot a gun?”

“No.”

“Don’t let this thing go off accidentally when you’re figuring it out. And don’t forget, you get caught with this motherfucker, you found it. You hear me? It was in the bushes by the sidewalk or something. I don’t give a shit. You make up something and you stick to it no matter what. You mention me to the cops? I mean, your cousin here, him and me go way back, but
 
. . .”

“I got it,” I said.

“Didn’t I tell you?” Tommy said, looking disgusted. “This is my cuz, man. Me and him are cut from the same cloth.”

Craig responded with a pregnant glare, but just said, “Hang on. I got just the thing for you.”

Tommy sang as he drove, jabbing his thumb at his chest:
“He’s Mister Save-The-Fuckin’Day when he wants to be! He’s one heck of a guy and I’m talkin’ ’bout
 
. . .
Me!” He was proud of himself. I had asked and he had delivered as if he could magically produce money and weapons any day of the week. He had sold the chainsaw for nearly three hundred dollars, cleared a little cash for himself and armed me as well—all, he pointed out, before lunch time. It was a rush, a morning of pure hustling, and only now did Tommy say, “So what the fuck you gonna do now that we got you armed?”
 

     
“I don’t know,” I said. “Nothing, maybe.” I was holding the little revolver between my knees, carefully pointing it at the floor of my car, imagining thrusting it into Owen’s face and saying, “What now, bitch?” I felt alternately dangerous and foolish. At moments I was outside myself, looking down, and it seemed I was a character in some alarmist film about lost kids turning to crime and dying in hails of bullets. The gun smelled like oil and I couldn’t tell for sure, but it looked quite old. I had heard of it—a thirty-eight-special—and recognized its snub-nosed shape from television and movies, but couldn’t say much more about it—except it felt nice, substantial and menacing, in my hand.

We parked and bought hot dogs at Duane’s Dogs on
Beach Street
. I bought. Tommy got three dogs and a large Coke and was still in the driver’s seat as he ate. The sun beat on the windshield and it would have been a pleasant enough little lunch if it wasn’t for the circumstances
.

Tommy leaned in front of the rearview and cleaned mustard off his lips, checked his teeth, and said as he swallowed, “Come on, man, I thought my little cousin Sammy was a pacifist, so spill it, will you?” He gestured at the gun.

“Jill,” I said. “She was raped.”

He froze. His tongue was digging at food-mush and he stopped with the bulge in his cheek and rotated toward me.

“And I know who did it.” My voice sounded strange.

“So you went off all heroic and pissed off and got your ass beat?”

“There were five guys there.”

“Sammy, Sammy, Sammy.” He took my knee in his meaty hand and shook my leg. “Why didn’t you call me? Who the fuck is it, some fucking
Del
Mar punks? We’ll just catch your guy somewhere, Sam. They’ll never find him. Fuck. You know where he lives? I’m serious here.”

     
“Naw, he lives in this town. It’s a guy I knew in school. Owen Ferguson—”

“
That
guy? Oh, man.”

I felt a change in the air; a change in Tommy. I looked over. “You know him?”

“Shit, man. What’s that song? You don’t pull Superman’s cape, you don’t spit into the wind? You don’t fuck around with Owen Ferguson.”

“Yeah, well, I already did.” I told Tommy how I’d spilled Owen’s beer down his shirtfront and socked him, and how it had ended. Tommy shook his head over and over as I spoke, muttering
fuck
s and
shit
s.

“Listen,” Tommy said. “Those dudes are serious. Owen Ferguson’s got him a reputation. He thinks he’s fuckin’ Tony Soprano. I mean, what do you think you’re gonna do?”

I looked at his forced expression of sincerity and concern and my horizons shifted again. I had been imagining Tommy as my ace in the hole, a sort of lowlife superhero I could summon in my hour of need, but I saw how foolish I had been. It should have dawned on me when he didn’t even ask why I wanted a gun, for Christ’s sake. He was too much what he was to help someone—even me—if he couldn’t make out some shitty little profit margin for himself. I knew he would make promises and I would be waiting for him to show up and help me and I’d be waiting forever. And the next time I saw him—if I was still alive to see him again—he would make jokes and act as if none of this had ever happened. And if I pressed it, if I confronted him, flat-out called him a liar, he would become indignant and find a reason to storm off.

“Forget it, Tommy,” I said.

“Look, I mean, you can’t just wave a fucking gun at Owen Ferguson and think you made your point, you know? You gotta be as bad as him, and that’s pretty fuckin’ bad.”

“What about you?” My voice was rising. “You’re ‘pretty fuckin’ bad,’ aren’t you? You’re always saying it.”

“It ain’t just me, Sam! You’re talking about starting a war. I could fuck your friend Owen up, okay? I could slap that kid around and make him fuckin’ like it. But what? Do you think it’s gonna end there? You tell me.”

I could see his point. We stared at each other for a moment. He dragged his sleeve across his mouth.

“And it’s all or nothing,” he said. “Say I back you up, and say you give him a beating and then we get out of there. You think you’re gonna be safe the next day? The next week? Ever fuckin’ again? You might as well just walk up to him and shoot him in the face if you’re gonna do anything at all.”

A few seconds lapsed while I frowned and nodded. “Well, what would you do if you were me?” I said.

He started to say something, then stopped, thought it through and started again.
 
“I don’t know, Sam. I don’t know. I guess if I was you I’d have to decide if I was willing to do some time over this shit. You got things pretty good. You’re going to college.”

“Fucking
junior
college,” I said.

“Yeah? Well, then you transfer, right?”

“Yeah, sure.” I wanted to end the discussion. “Listen,” I said, “I’ll figure out what I’m gonna do and just call you if I need anything else.”