Want Not (42 page)

“What’re you talking about?”

He leaned in. “You know that dumpster, at the nursing home?”

“The one on Henry Street?”

“Yeah, that one. There was some valuable shit in there. And I’m not talking rice.”

“What kind of shit?”

“Keep your voice down, man.”

“What kind of shit?”

“Credit card statements. Bank statements. Social security papers. Motherfucking treasure trove.”

“Dude,” Talmadge said, with a burn in his chest. “Tell me you’re lying.”

“It’s so freaking
easy,
man.” Matty lifted his head at the sound of bat striking ball—but it was just a foul, shanked into the netting. “This guy I did time with, my cellie back in Oregon?” he continued. “He hooked me up with his, like, cousin or something, I dunno, this dude out in Brighton Beach. He can fucking do
anything
with that info, man. He’s got this machine, right? In his basement. That basement’s so fucked up, dude, it’s like Satan’s playroom. Anyway, there’s this rad machine down there, and you just plug in the numbers and it spits out a credit card. With the little name and everything.”

“Holy shit,” Talmadge said, not sure what was impressing him, if anything. Probably the machine.

“I mean, it’s not
that
easy. He don’t pay me that much. It’s mostly meth-heads bringing him shit so he just pays ’em with some tweak. But I’m going light on that shit, dude. Monya, he kinda respects that. We’re on, like, cash and credit terms.”

“Who’s Monya?”

“That’s the dude in Brighton Beach. Fucking Russian mafia, man. Face tats and all that. Honestly? He kinda scares the shit outta me.” Matty unloosed an intensely uncomfortable laugh, like that of someone tickled to the point of pain. “But it’s cool. It’s cool, Tal. It ain’t nothing to freak out over. It’s petty, dude. It’s just another angle.”

Talmadge’s face reddened, and shifting away from Matty he said, “Man, Micah would . . .”

“Micah’s not gonna do
anything,
dude.” There was menace at the bottom of Matty’s voice: an unfamiliar substrate, to Talmadge’s ears, despite all their years of friendship. “Okay? You follow?”

They sat in silence, only lightly clapping, while the Yankees chalked up another hit: a line drive by Matsui that bounced off the center-field wall and put Damon on third. Talmadge sipped his Miller Lite, which had a sour tinge to it—possibly the effect of its newly revealed status as contraband. None of this was really surprising, he concluded, just as it hadn’t been a surprise two years ago when Matty called to say he’d been busted in a Portland sting operation, or two years before that, when Matty informed him he’d been booted off the Ole Miss soccer team for failing a drug test even though he’d chugged seventeen cups of goldenseal tea to cleanse the urine sample. If anything, Matty was the consistent one in their friendship, the steady control—his desires never deviating, their outcomes measured and predictable. Talmadge was the wildcard, the one with all the surprises.

“So who are we today?” he asked Matty.

“What do you mean?”

“Like, who comped our tickets?”

“Oh, yeah. Him. That’d be Dr. Elwin Cross Sr.”

With equal doses sarcasm and earnestness Talmadge mumbled, “Sorry, Elwin.”

“Dude, fuck Elwin.” Matty’s eyes flared, but after a quick survey of the field they came back softer. “Elwin’s fine, okay? The banks eat up all this shit anyway. Bank of America, that’s who’s treating us today. People see the weird charges, they call the bank, the bank freezes the card and wipes the charges clean. It’s, like, an operating expense. Monya explained it all to me. They don’t even investigate it.”

Talmadge mulled this for a while, as Matsui stole second and the stadium quaked with the sudden stomp of forty thousand people springing to their feet (Talmadge excepted), the slippery chords of Metallica’s “Enter Sandman” overpowering the speakers and blowing sonic fuzz throughout the stands, Matty hoisting his beer to the sky and whooping and even Talmadge’s other seatmate up on her heels now, rocking her knees up and down as though gathering the kinetic force necessary to launch herself skyward. Or was she dancing? Talmadge caught himself staring at her ass, which was respectable so far as asses went though he’d never been an ass man so he didn’t really understand why his eyes felt suddenly locked to the thin blue satin clinging so faithfully to her buttocks. He had to remind himself that from all available evidence (the brusqueness, the store-bought tits, the tanning-booth patina, the sugar-daddy husband) she was flatly despicable—the tri-state equivalent of Sherilyn, his stepmom in technicality only, who’d transformed his father into a puddle of what he supposed was lust (though the idea skeeved him out) and in doing so sliced his family down the middle. He was both disappointed and relieved when the woman sat back down.

“Funny thing about Elwin, though,” Matty said thoughtfully.

“What’s that?”

“This card’s been hot for, like, two months now. Normally you get a few days, max. I’m not even supposed to be using it like this. Mail-order only, that’s Monya’s rule. But fuck. The thing’s hot. Elwin must have some serious bank.”

Talmadge felt his face go hot. “Dude, are you insane? What’re you, missing prison or something?”

“It’s cool, man. I told you.”

“Naw, it’s bullshit.” Matty always had to
push
it. That was the thing with him: Whatever it was, he pushed it till it broke. “I’m not digging this.”

“Fuck you, dude. It’s from the same trash you’re scrounging through.” He was misinterpreting Talmadge’s objection as being on ethical grounds, though Talmadge hadn’t even broached that yet, to Matty or himself. “I’m just, like, recycling the information. It’s all the same.”

“Whatever. It’s a felony, man.”

“Would you keep it down?”

“This explains the Ho Hos, too.”

“The what?”

“All the Ho Hos you’ve been dragging in. You don’t never see Ho Hos in the trash. They’ve got the shelf life of, like, chainsaw oil.”

“Chainsaw oil?”

“Whatever. A ten-thousand-year shelf life.”

“Awright, fine. Busted. Maybe I was trying to make your chick happy.”

“She doesn’t eat Ho Hos.”

“So what if I was trying to make
me
happy, okay?” Cheering went rippling through the stands, which they both ignored. “They’re fucking
Ho Hos.
I’m supposed to tell her, what, some old dude in a nursing home bought ’em for us? I can’t believe you’re busting my balls over Ho Hos. I tried bringing steaks back once and you saw how that turned out. What a fucking party that was. Micah, man.” Talmadge caught a note of personal grievance in Matty’s voice. “She’s so, like—
hardcore,
man. Chick doesn’t bend. I’m sorry, dude, but I don’t know how you put up with her shit sometimes—”

“She’s pregnant, you know.”

The paralyzed expression on Matty’s face mirrored Talmadge’s own. He hadn’t intended to tell Matty—not yet, at least. And God knows not like this. It was like he hadn’t spoken it so much as allowed it to escape, had left the gate unlocked on this news that’d been fermenting inside him for three weeks now, this bubbling acid burning holes in his gut. He felt a panic beginning to swirl within him, second only to the panic he’d felt when Micah told him because now he’d just loosed it, brought it to life outside the narrow confines of their relationship, and in doing so had made it
real.
The weirdest thing was: He’d
felt
her getting pregnant, he’d actually felt the moment of conception as they’d exploded that night into some paranormal whoosh of synchronized climax, intertwined orgasms squared to the
n
th degree, as though right there, at the porthole tip of his dick, he’d sensed the sperm meeting the egg and doing whatever it was they did to begin construction on a microscopic head and heart, and when he’d rolled off her—Micah still quivering and spaced out, because her orgasms often resembled epileptic seizures, thrashy and prolonged—he’d felt strangely heavy, almost despondent really, despite having just experienced perhaps the deepest and most spectacular sex of his life. She’d fallen straight to sleep—which was also odd, because usually sex threw Micah into a talkative whir—and after a long dark while Talmadge found himself climbing to the roof and staring at the skyline as if somewhere in all those constellations of trembling yellow windows was the answer to a hard and essential question, if only he knew what it was, or how to ask it.

“No,” Matty said finally, with a grim edge to his voice. “I didn’t know. How would I know?”

“Because I just told you.”

The bases were loaded now, the Indians’ pitcher having walked Cabrera. On one of the digital signs over center field the word
THUNDER
appeared to wriggle and squirm. The stadium filled with the noise of banging and clapping, transfigured into a four-acre drum. Cellphone cameras rose from the crowds, held high and higher to record whatever might be coming from ten thousand vantage points at least, in an immense surge of preservation. Inside that volatile rowdy bowl it felt as though only two people remained seated.

Matty had to shout, “So where you guys gonna move?”

It was so brazenly self-serving, the question caused Talmadge to flinch. But the flinch was not without other origins. “That’s the thing,” Talmadge shouted back. “She’s saying we’re
not
moving.”

“What the fuck, dude? You gonna raise a baby in a squat?”

“That’s kinda what I said.”

“And she’s not open to, like, going to a clinic—”

Talmadge cut him off, knowing just where he’d been headed. He’d visited the same clinic in his own mind. “No chance, man. She wants this baby.”

“Go out diving for baby food?” Matty said, veering back. “Dude, I seen enough to tell you you’d have better luck finding Ho Hos.”

Giambi was up to bat, and after two balls and a strike, the crowd settled into an eager hush, holding its breath for him.

“I hear you, man, I do,” Talmadge said. “You know how she is. You said it yourself.”

Matty grunted, looking almost satisfied to no longer be on the defensive. “And you think I’m the fucked-up one.”

“And the worst part, man,” Talmadge went on, with a squeak to his drawl, “is that I can’t fucking talk to her about it. She’s always going on about the way her dad did things. The way he raised her. But her dad, man—he’s batshit crazy! Everyone but Micah thinks he killed her mother! He got hauled into court when she was a kid for, like, child neglect or something.”

“Like I said,” Matty muttered.

“Yeah, well.” Matty was over-hammering the point. “You’re fucked up too.”

Matty disliked Micah. This was clear and maybe always had been, as much as Talmadge longed to deny it. That wink he’d given Talmadge, that very first Thanksgiving night: It’d signaled he would play along for however long Talmadge needed, that he’d be there when this fever broke. But what did Matty know? He’d never been in love, as he freely admitted. He’d never even had much in the way of a girlfriend, so far as Talmadge knew. All his feelings were aimed inward. But then who else did Talmadge have? He’d whittled his allegiances down to two, and just one if you discounted Micah: the wild kid from Mahwah who’d cradled Talmadge’s head above a Deaton Hall toilet one long-ago night, after Talmadge had mixed two hits of blotter with a couple ecstasy pills on top of bourbon, sponging the vomit from his lips and assuring him over and over again, as Talmadge bawled in hallucinatory terror, that he wasn’t going to die, to stop talking like that, that everything would be okay, that he wasn’t going to let him die no matter what. The memory sent a tremor of affection through Talmadge’s chest, and swishing the last warm remnants of beer in his cup he said, “I’m empty. Can ol’ Elwin buy me another beer?”

“Ol’ Elwin’ll buy you anything you want, man.”

Giambi struck out, retiring the inning and with his last whiff at bat sucking all the oxygen from the stadium, causing everyone to gasp and sink back into their seats as if felled by the toxic fumes of dashed hopes. A low mutinous grumble overtook the stands as Matty disappeared to fetch more beer. In the solitary interim Talmadge tried to unknot what he was feeling but found himself distracted by the legs of his seatmate which, now that she’d perched her feet on the armrest in front of her, thereby jackknifing her legs in Talmadge’s direction, were both obnoxiously and breathtakingly close. They were Ole Miss legs, he realized, though of an older and slightly distressed vintage: of that variety of shatteringly perfect limbs he’d come to know and ogle from his first day at the university, as seen on the girls navigating Sorority Row in their hiked-up Umbro shorts, the negligible variations in shape and skin tone melding into a burnished uniform gleam as they’d go power-walking up or down the hill in clutches of three or four, those legs like sharpened scissors cutting straight into the monkey recesses of his stupefied brain. In the languid sunlight the woman’s legs appeared not just shaved (they were) but sanded down to their lustrous core and then oiled to bring out the barely perceptible grain, like the mahogany gunstock of his grandfather’s .30-30. He wanted to touch the leg nearest him—mere inches from his hand, he could almost detect the 98.6-degree heat it was exuding, could almost feel the microclimate of her skin—as he’d been allowed to touch his grandfather’s rifle as a boy: with a sacred reverence and an awareness of danger that prickled the skin on the nape of his neck. He pulled his hand away, however, cursing himself and looking the woman up and down with a sneer that seemed callous but necessary. Micah had amazing legs, too, of course. She did. He loved the downy chestnut hair on them, the way the hair submitted to his tongue when he’d run his mouth down her lower legs leaving a slickly flattened row—

Who am I? The question burst into his consciousness with such jarring suddenness that he glanced around to see if maybe someone else had just stabbed it into his brain. Maybe the announcer? But no, the announcer had another script before him as he broadcast the start of a between-innings race featuring a trio of people dressed as bottles of ketchup, mustard, and relish. He chanced a quick peek at the woman’s lower thigh, as though it could supply him the answer. He wasn’t convinced it couldn’t. Maybe this was the question he’d meant to ask the skyline that night. Or maybe the skyline was no wiser and no more forthcoming than Dick Bertrand’s prized bug zapper. As usual he didn’t know.