Tomato Red (4 page)

“What’s your story?” she said.

First off, her hair was red, a shade of red that would be natural on something growing in a garden but not on a person’s head. Her hair was cut in this real, real short yet ruffled manner that’s likely up to the minute, style-wise, off in other places, and costs plenty, I’m sure. The hair is short enough for an old-time marine but still somehow styled to give off loads of womanly oomph. That tomato-red hair was accompanied by fancy-pants ghoul makeup. She sported lipstick that I’d call graveyard black, and her fingernails could’ve been dead-baby blue. All this made her look hep to it all, jack, and a good bit foreign. Her eyes were of that bossy gray
hue, born to issue orders and have them followed to the letter.

I wasn’t instantly up for meeting new people, but no use in being rude. Friends come from anywhere.

“I don’t have much of a story really.”

“Surely you do. Tell us.”

I thought about trying a few themes out on them, such as: I’d been rich once too, had my own waffle house, say, but I wouldn’t pay off the Dixie Mafia so they burned me out; I’d been the number-seven middleweight contender until I got two detached retinas in a yacht fiasco you probably saw on the news; I was a kick-around mutt from Blue Knee, Arkansas, with a file number, on my own slow ramble throughout sincere poverty and various spellbinding mishaps.

The fella spared me my breath. He read from my driver’s license. The tuxedo sleeves ran down beyond his fingertips and had to be shoved back every breath or two. He kept that pipe in his teeth and kept it hopping as he spoke.

“Barlach,” he said, and he pronounced it with “lack” at the tail, which is how I say it, but lots don’t at first. “Sammy. He’s twenty-four, from the great state of Arkansas—which means he’s over seventeen miles outside his homeland—claims to be six feet two inches tall and to weigh one-seventy. Blond and brown.”

“That’s helpful,” she said. “But it doesn’t tell us if he’s dangerous.”

“Looky here,” I said. “I’m not truly that dangerous, I’m just sort of nutsy actin’, that’s all.”

She and him both began to slowly move around me, studying me close. They went
hmm
, and
mm-hmm
, and
uh-huh
. It hit me that I stunk and stunk fairly high, and likely didn’t seem an affable figure at all. They each smelled nice and seemed cordial.

“He could easily be remade to
look
dangerous,” the fella said. “It wouldn’t take much. Wrap him in a few he-man fashion clichés, give him a new hairdo.”

“Yes,” she said. She sat on the arm of my chair then, and I saw she held a kitchen knife loosely in her left hand. The blade displayed a row of mean-spirited teeth. “Awfully, awfully dangerous. Oh, goodness gracious, yes, he could be made to pass for a
mighty
bad man.”

“Do we trust him enough to cut him loose?” the fella asked.

“A close call,” she said. “He’s still pretty sleepy but he is a housebreaker, a thief.”

“I wouldn’t steal
valuables
,” I said. “I’m not
that
way. I only take nonsense stuff. You know: household drugs, neckties that blink or wave or have hula girls on them, that sort of silly shit. Snapshots of your wife gettin’ undressed, maybe any ol’ rockabilly music or gut-bucket blues you accidentally still got layin’ around.” The vodka bottle sat on a table behind the pair of them, and I took note it was empty. “And, okay, I’ll drink your liquor too. But, all in all, I’m not actually an outright
thief
type.”

The fella had wandered over to where I could totally see him, face on, in decent light, and how he looked—well, it ain’t easy for me to say out loud.

He’s the kind of fella that if he was to make it to the top based only on his looks you’d still have to say he deserved it. Hoodoo sculptors and horny witches knitted that boy, put his bone and sinew in the most fabulous order. Dark-haired, green-eyed, with face bones delicate and dramatic both. If your ex had his lips you’d still be married. His size was somewhat smallish, but he was otherwise for certain the most beautiful boy I ever had seen. I’m afraid “beautiful” is the
only word I can make work here, and I’m not bent or nothin’, but beautiful is the truth.

“God damn,” I said, looking at him.

That comment probably sounded like a gasp.

The girl grinned at me, looked at him, beamed, and giggled.

“Isn’t he something?” she said. “Grown women at the grocery store toss him their panties with their home phone numbers marked on in lipstick.”

“Quit it,” he said. “Don’t start in on me.”

“
Tsk, tsk
.” That knife was yet notably in her tiny hand, and not still. “Sammy,” she went, “I’m Jamalee, and this squire here is my baby brother, Jason.”

I strained at my straps some, then nodded.

“I’d shake, but . . .”

She leaned her face to mine, put her eyes six inches from mine, and stared. She was drilling something potent into me. She drilled it in deep.

“I hope this is for the best.” She put the blade to the strap across my chest and began to saw. Her eyes held steady and drilled past my crust to where I get gooey. “It seems I’m always doin’ the
noble
thing,” she said softly, “then regrettin’ it.”

CHANCES SUCH AS this come few and apart.

Jamalee and Jason introduced me to a bathroom upstairs that had a vast and nifty tub, with sort of a bench, even, underwater. You could stretch out, float, flop around, or sit on that slick bench in the hot bubble bath and have a deep think. I sank in among the steam and bubbles and lathered and scrubbed and dunked. When I climbed out there was this silk, or something of the silk type, robe for me to wear. The robe was the blue of a peacock fan. I found a blade, shaved clean at the sink. Six or eight flavors of cologne were on a stand there, and I splashed on one I never heard of, Vetiver, and the smell was fancy and wonderful.

This whole sequence was like a crazy dream you seem to understand.

I wore only that robe and my new smell back downstairs. The stairs went this way, then that way, then the other way again, and it amounted to a short dizzy hike. The kids didn’t have things too bright on the first floor. They seemed to enjoy candles but not lightbulb light. Three candles sat on a table and burned and cast a wavy sort of spiritual light that belonged at a séance or in a van when you’re undergoing sex.

I came into the dim light, and shadows had got up and were bucking and winging real festive across the walls. The pair of my new buddies sat at a long thick table with probably crystal wine goblets set out. The wine looked black. I noted three goblets.

She said the first words.

“We’d like to hire you.”

“Oh, now, I’ve
got
a job.” There was a shovel with my name on it in the burn room at the dog-food factory, but my name was only on a piece of gray tape that had already come a little loose at the edges. I’d made several sizable promises to get that shovel job. My work history was awful spotty, see, even with all the shit I invented to shove into the blank periods. “A pretty good one, too.”

“That’s nice,” she said. “It’s not what I want to hear, but it’s nice for you. This job, though. Do you work on Mondays?”

“Well, sure. Through Fridays.”

“Oops,” went Jason.

“Did you call in this morning, say you were sick?”

I reacted with a stare at her.

“Today’s Sun—”

“Huh-uh, Sammy,” she said. Her tomato head swayed about. “Sorry about this, but it is now approaching a fashionably late dinner hour on Monday evening. You overslept by half a day, I’m afraid.”

I took a seat at the table. I put my fingers to my ears and yanked and yanked until my eyes pooled and my brain snapped to attention. The foreman had barely hired me in the first place.

“I’m starvin’,” I said.

I stood away from the table, shuffled barefoot to the kitchen. Their footsteps followed close behind me. I got back there where all the glass and the great view were, and there was nothin’ but dark caused by heavy clouds and whipping rain all across the landscape. Big plump trees were waddling in place. I stood silent, quite a long minute or two, staring out, listening to the mud grow.

“Let’s microwave a dinner for Sammy,” Jason said lightly. “Him needs a hot meal.”

I couldn’t bother to watch.

That bank vault broke open with a suck noise, and he shoved around in the frozen food section, then shut the door.

“How does clam linguini sound?”

I spun around then, and went on and gave in, gave in all the way to who I was.

“Now I always have loved that dish,” I said, hoping I actually would, “whenever it’s been served.”

 

WE GOT ALONG real quick.

The two of them held candles and showed me about the mansion, escorting me from room to room. I still only wore that peacock-blue robe and a high-toned smell, yet this scene came across like a job interview, more or less. They had recruited me to be “security.” I was to adjust my criminal insights around to where I could defend the mansion, and the family of the mansion, from anything else of my stripe that might come along. They’d flick on a light at each room for a short burst, then flick it off and say “piano room” or “the squire’s room,” “tea parlor,” “maid’s suite.”

This place, even seen in short bright moments, was revealed to have double of everything worth having, just about.

Looking at this place I could understand how tremendous a responsibility it amounted to, and I was thinking that probably I could work for folks with their pluses.

Now these two had presented themselves as savvy youths and seemed that and more, even, because they’d been exposed to most of the world and studied on it from a lofty sharp angle. I knew the Delta up and down, and the Ozarks a good bit, Memphis of course, and had took a big taste of Houston once; but everywhere I knew, I knew only the
lower-priced, fewer-questions-asked parts of. They, though, ran down a few casual memories to me about Greece (the bright white islands and topless crowds), Tokyo (you needn’t wash your own self in the hot tubs over there, no sir), London (best bring an umbrella), and their second home, Paris (where the chefs all knew their birthdays and sprang parties on them with these delicate celebration foods I’d never come across and might not have the balls to eat).

We came to a large window that had large panes at the end of the staircase, and there was a jumbo vase with some sort of plumes towering out, and over to the side of it was a black door that Jamalee pushed open and found a switch and lit the room. She looked at the olden bed with a posh canopy and at the walls coated with mirrors and artwork, and dear wooden furniture.

“This,” she said, “will be your room, Sammy.”

I gave that room a once-over and had a flush dart up to my head, out to my ears.

It was as though I had busted into a dark mansion and somehow woke up inside the dream I
should’ve
been dreaming my whole life long.

Jason slid from the room and down the hall, and I said to her, “For real? This room is really, really choice. A choice fuckin’ room.”

Her eyelids had shadow laid on so heavy it seemed she peered at me from two blue knotholes. Her face, Jamalee’s face, had already plopped down into my mind like a hook.

“Now,” she started, “if in any way it’s not—”

That’s when Jason jumped into the room, blew out her candle and his own, and said, “The law is out there with flashlights. Time to choo-choo, Sis.”

Jamalee’s response was she laughed wide open. Her sound vibrated the blackness. She beat my back and laughed
toward my ear. She enjoyed this moment, the moment when danger has arrived and I’m revealed as a cranked-out dipshit. It’s for the best that I couldn’t see her expression.

“That’s never goin’ to be my room, is it.”

PANIC PUT WINGS on our feet. The flashlights of the law beamed behind us and not far. I had my hands in my cowboy boots up to the elbows and my true clothes were pinched in my armpit. Their true clothes were in a tote bag; they’d been prepared for this event. Mud grabbed at us up to the ankles. My feet were bare. Our six feet flew through the fresh mud, and the mud tagged along in flecks and speckles on legs, hands, faces, hair. At this speed that bathrobe flapped wide and exhibited me. Each step down into and up out of the mud emitted a sound like something starved chased one step behind, smacking its lips.

Mist hung in heavy drapes and made every direction a question mark to me. Jamalee and Jason knew where we were and how to exit and I did not contain that knowledge. Jamalee set the style, leading us in a furtive-monkey sort of scoot, bent low so any silhouettes blended into the blot of the dark ground, then a sudden scurry from this tree to that bush to the hedgerow and escape.

Now, you listen, here’s a key point: Despite this moment of panic and flight, and everything else, I never did get it deleted entirely from my assessment of this pair that they were smart, important rich kids. I knew the truth on one hand, but I’d been so
moved
by the lie! That lie had been good to believe, and it lingered and lingered as that type of lie is wont to do.

All I could do was follow.

Along the route these things were said:

“Vassar, my ass. You ever even finish high school?”

“When I left high school you can be
sure
I was finished with it.”

“Hey, cowboy, don’t you wear underwear?”

“I guess I was robbed while I slept.”

“Hold your robe shut, then. Be decent.”

“That’s too much strain.”

“We truly live in Venus Holler.”

“Oh, yeah? My mom left home just before I was born.”

“We do. Truly. Merridew is our name.”

“You could bunk with us. There’s a spare bunk in my room. Sis’n me, we really could use ‘security.’ ”