Westlake, Donald E - Novel 51 (30 page)

           
Pami just couldn’t figure out this
guy Frank. He didn’t want to fuck her, he didn’t want to pimp her, he didn’t
seem to want to make
use
of her at
all. Takes her to a doctor, gives her food and clothes, drives around with her,
and doesn’t want anything back.

           
Maybe I died, Pami thought
sometimes. Maybe I died in that fire with the cop, and this is what it’s like
after you die, you have a nice dream to make up for all the bad things that
went on before. She didn’t really believe that, though. No dream would have
that disgusting Jap in it. And if Pami couldn’t figure out what Frank wanted
with
her,
there wasn’t a hope in hell
to figure out what he wanted with the Jap.

           
But what difference did it make?
Being with Frank was a lot better than being with Rush, that’s all that
mattered. What did she care if things made sense or not? When had anything ever
made any sense?

           
They drove and drove, up through the
middle of
Manhattan
, spending most of their time stopped at
traffic lights, and at one of them the Jap came to and struggled up into a
seated position. He looked like hell, unwashed, caked with dried blood, a
little scraggly Oriental beard starting to grow. He smiled and bowed, head
bobbing in the backseat, thanking them for rescuing him, and Frank told him it
was okay, looking in the mirror at him, saying they liked the company, and they
were going to drive out of the city for a while. The Jap liked that idea.

           
Somebody behind them honked that the
light was green. Frank jolted them forward and said, “Talk to him, Pami, for
Chrissake. Find out if he’s hungry.”

           
What did she care if the Jap was
hungry? But she twisted around and looked at him and said, “You hungry?”

           
The Jap gave a mournful nod.

           
Pami nodded back. She said to Frank,
“He says yes. He’s hungry.”

           
“Maybe we’ll stop and get a pizza,”
he said. “So we can eat on the way.”

           
But the Jap was doing all kinds of
gestures, pointing at his throat and shaking his head and making disgusted
eating faces. Pami watched this for a few seconds and then said, “You got a
hurt throat?”

           
Big nod.

           
“Can’t eat?”

           
Sorrowing headshake.

           
Pami faced front again. “Says he
can’t eat,” she said, and went back to looking at the people on the sidewalks.
There’s
a hooker; that one right there.

           
“Liquids,” Frank said.

           
They were way up at the top of
Manhattan
by then, where it’s all Puerto Rican and
Central American, so Frank stopped in front of a bodega and went inside,
leaving Pami and the Jap in the car. The bums hanging out in front of the
bodega, beer in their bandit moustaches, leered at her but didn’t approach.
“Like to give it to you all,” she muttered under her breath.

           
Frank came back out and got into the
car with a plastic bag full of small cans of apple juice, plus rolls and cheese
and beer for himself and Pami. “Give him some juice,” he said, “and make us a
couple sandwiches.”

           
So she did, and at the next red
light the Jap cautiously took a sip of apple juice and made a horrible face as
though it really hurt. But then he managed to swallow some—the rest dribbled
down out of the corners of his mouth—and looked grateful.

           
Pami glanced back at him from time
to time, interested to see how he was making out, and as they drove up through
the
Bronx
and into
Westchester
County
the Jap very slowly put away two of the
litde cans of juice, one agonizing sip at a time. Then he setded back against
the seat, eyes glazing over, breathing with a raspy sound, his mouth hanging
open.

           
Driving along behind a very slow
pickup truck, waiting for a chance to pass, Frank said, “How is he?”

           
Pami twisted around to look back.
“Better,” she said. “He looks better.” And she faced front again. Greenery up
here, big houses. Like some of the hills north of
Nairobi
, the rich people’s places, only greener.

           
Frank got around the pickup truck,
then looked in the rearview mirror at the Jap. “Better, huh?” he said. “He
looks like a dog that fell out of an airplane.” He shook his head. “One halfway
decent score in my life,” he commented at the windshield, “and I turn into the
welfare department.”

           
Pami watched the fat men on the
little tractors, mowing their lawns.

           
The reason the doctors had said it
was all right for Grigor to have an overnight away from the hospital—his first
since he’d arrived in the United States—was that nothing mattered any more, and
everybody knew it, including Grigor, and including Maria Elena. But even though
everything was now hopeless, there was still a great deal of awkward
preparation to be made, medicines to carry, the foldaway wheelchair to be put
into the trunk of the car, instructions for Maria Elena to write down and carry
with her.

           
Grigor was in favor of the
expedition simply because he wanted to go on seeing and experiencing the world
for as long as possible, and he knew his time was growing very short. And Maria
Elena wanted it because, in some angry uncomplicated way she herself didn’t understand,
she wanted Grigor to see her life, to
see
it, before his own life came to an end. To see what she’d done wrong.

           
They would drive to Stockbridge, to
the house Jack had now vacated—sadly forgiving Maria Elena first for her
heartless treatment of poor Kate Monroe, with whom he would
not
be moving in—and she would cook a
dinner, tiptoeing as best she could through the mine field of Grigor’s dietary
restrictions. Tonight he would sleep on the living room sofa—the stairs would
be impossible for him—and tomorrow they would drive back. Exhausting, futile,
and more sorrowful than cheerful, but at least simple.

           
Until the blowout.

*
 
*
 
*

           
“Now what?” Frank said, seeing the
woman wave at him. Just beyond her, a car was pulled off the road, with
somebody inside. The right rear of the car sagged down almost to the weedy
ground. A few miles back they’d been delayed by some kind of demonstration in
front of a nuclear power plant—with everybody in the car shielding their faces
from the state troopers standing around—and now this.

           
“Stupid people,” Pami said.

           
“By God, I’m gonna get to change
another tire,” Frank said, pulling into a stop behind the woman and the car.

           
Pami said, “Another?”

           
“It’s just the way my life runs,”
Frank told her. Switching off the ignition, opening his door, he said, “Well,
maybe this one will have good advice, too.”

*
 
*
 
*

           
Maria Elena was too distraught to
notice how odd the trio was in the car that had come to her rescue. She only
knew this was a seldom-traveled road, far from the interstates and the
Taconic Parkway
, where all the traffic sped. She had Grigor
as her responsibility, and she had no idea how to change the blown tire.

           
“I’m sorry to have to ask you,” she
said, when the roughlooking man approached her from the
Toyota
.

           
“That’s okay,” Frank said. He was
feeling surly, because what was he going to get out of this? The hearty thanks
of some broad he didn’t know or give a damn about. Good-looking, in a kind of
exotic too-strong way, but so what? Already loaded down with Pami and the Jap,
he wasn’t going to score on the roadside with some damsel in distress. He was
just going to mess up his hands again and get all dirty, that’s all. And Ms.
Exotic here didn’t look the practical type; she wasn’t going to have any of
those nice wet towelettes. “You wanna open the trunk?” he said.

           
“Oh, yes.”

           
Pami got out of the car to stretch
her legs. Also, she was curious about the other person in that car. If he was a
man, why didn’t he change the tire himself? Why didn’t he even get out of the
car? She strolled forward.

           
Kwan had been napping. Now he sat
up, sharply aware again of the nasty sting and burn in his throat. It had been
so hard to get the apple juice down. He was very hungry, but how was he going
to eat? These people he’d fallen among wouldn’t be able to feed him
intravenously. Should he just give up, return to his fate? Or try again to kill
himself? He watched Frank open the trunk of the car and take out a wheelchair.
Kwan closed his eyes. I don’t think I can go on, he thought.

           
Frank put the wheelchair to one side
and went back into the trunk for the spare, as Pami strolled by. Grigor, seated
in the front passenger seat with the window open, watched the thin black girl
in the outside mirror as she approached. He readied a small smile, not showing
the interior of his ruined mouth, and looked up as she came parallel to him and
glanced in. “Hello,” he said.

           
“Yes, hello,” Pami said, looking him
over, understanding why he hadn’t leaped out to change the tire. Merely
curious, she said, “You got slim?”

           
“What?”

           
“No, that’s not it,” Pami corrected
herself. “Here it’s AIDS.”

           
Grigor smiled again, remembering to
keep his lips closed. “No, not me,” he said. Then he looked at her more
closely, the bone structure visible in her face, the darkness beneath her eyes,
the boniness of her shoulders. “But that’s what’s got you, is it?”

           
“Oh, yeah,” Pami said, with a shrug.
“Anybody can see it now. No more work for me.”

           
Grigor peered in the outside mirror
again at Frank, just hunkering down by the rear wheel, pushing the jack in
underneath. “Is that your doctor?”

           
Pami laughed. “You bet. Cure us
all.”

           
“Not me,” Grigor said.

           
“Why? What you got?”

           
“
Chernobyl
.”

           
“What’s that?”

           
While Grigor explained to Pami what
had happened to him, Maria Elena said to Frank, “I was feeling very lost before
you came.”

           
“Oh, yeah?”

           
“The tire breaking the way it did,
it was as though everything I touched had to fail.”

           
The lug nuts were giving Frank a
hard time. He said, “I know the feeling.”

           
“My husband has left me,” she told
him. “My friend in the car is dying. Everything I do has failed. I wanted to
make things better, but I didn’t.”

           
Frank stopped his work to look up at
her. A lid seemed to come off some boiling pot in his brain. He said, “I’m an
ex-con, habitual loser, I jumped parole, did a million litde burglaries. I
never hurt anybody, but then I went in with another guy, and an old man died.
That’s the money I’m spending. I still dream about that old guy.”

           
Maria Elena looked toward Kwan,
barely visible in the backseat of the
Toyota
. She glanced back at Pami, talking with
Grigor. She said to Frank, “Where are you all going?”

           
“To hell in a handbasket,” Frank
said, and pulled the ruined tire off its rim.

           
‘That work will make your hands very
dirty,” Maria Elena said.

           
“Yeah, I know that.”

           
“When you are finished,” she said,
“come to my house.”