Winners (23 page)

It’s hard work in the dark, although with the moon and the city behind him he can faintly see the rim against the dark shape of the cliff behind and that’s all he needs to see. His body knows the distances and what to do but then he starts concentrating on his body and the sudden awareness does him in. Now the ball goes long or short or wild left or right. He shoots terribly like that for more than an hour until he smells his own sweat again and feels his hands black with the night court dust. He stops and rests, holding his hands out away from him as if they’re covered in blood. Then he goes back down to the van where he spits on his hands, rubs them clean together, and wipes them on a cloth before driving across the city to the nearest point of no return.

I
T’S ALMOST MIDNIGHT
when he parks the van in front of Fulton’s house and sits there watching the dark front windows. Maybe no one is home but from being in there before he knows there might be a big ol’ party out back and from the street you wouldn’t know. A formal house, in that way, to conceal the private goings-on inside.

He takes out his new cell phone and makes the call and listens to the phone ring out, imagining the atoms that go up into the universe and then down again to land in the house across the street from where he sits. It rings a few times and then Fulton’s voice is low and kind, asking him to leave a message. He doesn’t. He disconnects and the phone winks off into darkness as he sits there listening to the late-night sports radio and thinking.

Fulton might be out of town. The man might stay out all night, he might be over at a girlfriend’s or boyfriend’s, he might be in a swank or sordid hotel room somewhere. Sex and drugs and rock ’n’ roll. He might be gliding up the street any minute in his big black BMW, slipping into the auto-open gates of the garage that will swallow up the car and close to resume the compound’s dark impassive front. Might be inside with the music cranked up or taking a crap or fast asleep.

Shane tries calling the house again and then gets out of the van and sticks his flashlight and prybar in his belt. He waits for a car to pass and then walks up to the front of Fulton’s house and climbs up quickly onto the garage roof, moving from hold to hold: gas meter, window, gutter, ledge. It takes about ten seconds to go up one side and then he jumps down the other. Everything hurts as he lands, and he sits down for a moment, waiting for the pain to pass. He helps himself up and walks into the backyard slowly. The back is dark, a lone light squinting somewhere from the middle of the house. The kitchen, perhaps. He watches for a while but there’s no one moving inside. He fishes the painter’s ladder out of the bushes, extends it out to it fullest height. Then he climbs onto the roof and pulls the ladder up behind him.

Standing on the roof crest, he looks out over the city. It looks big tonight, big and cohesive, like a single organism with a million winking moving parts. The hip bone’s connected to the eye bone. He has seen this city for thirty years, he can name every hill and neighborhood, most of the streets. Lou is over there; Ma is over there; Debra’s over there. He knows the city’s parts but the sum is no longer known to him. The sum is up for grabs. The sum is what all of them are trying to figure out.

You can do almost anything on a roof. You can stay there as long as you want because up is the direction of disappearance. No one remembers to look up. He puts his ear to Fulton’s back chimney, listening for life. The chimney roars with the memory of a thousand fires, like an ocean in a seashell. He tightropes to the front chimney and listens there. He bends over and puts his whole head inside. Lou thought he should dress up in a Santa suit around Christmas one year, give everyone a kick—a rooftop Santa peering down the mouths of chimneys. Santa must be a tiny little person. Sweeps used to send little boys to crawl inside once, but no one can fit in chimneys these days.

He squats beside the single attic window. It won’t be alarmed, he thinks, all the way up here and hidden almost completely from view. The wood and metal is old and after five minutes of patient work with the prybar he’s snug inside.

The attic has a trapdoor with a retracting ladder that opens with a loud crack, dumping dust into the hallway below. He doesn’t climb down right away, dangling his head down through the hole like an inverse periscope. Hello hello, he says in a funny voice, but no one’s there to answer. No one’s there to laugh at his little joke. He climbs down into the hallway and stands there holding the prybar in one hand like a bloody knife. You could sink the single metal tooth deep into someone’s skull and that would probably do. That would probably take care of things. He heads toward the bedroom, catching a glimpse of himself in a mirror as he passes. Oooh, tough guy, he thinks. What are you up to, tough guy.

He finds what he thinks he’s looking for immediately. There on the dresser, side by side, rests the gold and blue lapis watch and another one in platinum with diamonds crowded all around the bezel rim. Lord knows what Fulton’s wearing tonight. What else he has around. He starts sifting through the drawers. Clothes are folded in that expert way of people who fold clothes for a living. In one of the drawers he finds some diamond cuff links and a ring. There’s a stupid-looking pen that looks like it might be worth something too. Bling-bling. That’s enough. He’d prefer to find a large stack of hundred dollar bills, but for now this is probably enough.

He stands at the foot of the bed and pictures the two of them in there, bumping and grinding or maybe just at rest. Later they arrange themselves impeccably side by side, preparing for a party. The man has a new watch, bigger and brighter than ever before and the woman wears an emerald pendant at her neck to match her happy eyes.

He rests on the bed for a while, leaning back against the pillows, propping his dusty boots one on top of the other on the pale green spread. The details of the room itself are a mix of past and present: the high wood molding, the classy baseboards, the small Neo-Logic lights, the seamless closet door leading off to yards of fine Italian fabric. The old world and the new world have been thoughtfully combined, but there is nothing Fulton about this room. Take away his personal ornaments, stuff your pockets with his watches, cuff links, pen, and ring. There’s nothing left. The bedside table has no pictures, no knickknacks, not even a clock. The blown-up, framed satellite photos of San Francisco and New York and London are clever and edgy to a tee. Shane sits up and opens the little drawer, looking for something decadent and base: condoms, lubricant, molded plastic. A notebook, loose change, receipts. Instead he reaches in and picks up a thin gold chain. He holds it glinting up to the muted tasteful overhead lights, then pulls out the drawer and dumps everything on the bed. He throws the drawer across the room, watching it bounce off the wall. It leaves a gash in the plaster.

On the bedspread beside him, among the other trophies—a woman’s wedding band, surfer boy beads, some trashy plastic earrings—lies the cheap watch, looking small and shriveled in its worn leather strap. He runs his thumb along the leather. All those years we told Sam not to wear it, Shane thinks, but he never hurt anyone, never grazed the metal across your face or caught the buckle against your shorts or skin. He was right. He shouldn’t ever take it off. He holds the gold chain in one hand and the watch in the other. That poor motherfucker, he thinks. Did he think he might find refuge here?

Shane walks into the master bathroom and washes his face. He stares at his damp features in the mirror. It reminds him of being fifteen years old, drunk and stoned, trying to pull your shit together before you dared go home. That feeling of not knowing who you were but looking for yourself anyway in the center of your own pupils, trying to peer into your own head. He stares. Soon, in a week or two, he will be in the van again rising up and up the steep tilted slope, keeping the pedal steady as the once and future cons hop off their hoods and stoops and come running for him, what you need what you need, cursing him because he doesn’t need anything except one last safe passage in and out of this place he’s never once belonged. He will park the van near her door and watch out for Tennessee and hurry in with his big toolbox filled with money. Maybe there won’t be much to say. She will be happy or mad to see him or maybe she won’t care one way or another. They will sit on different couches, watching television with the kids until she puts them up to bed.

“I don’t have anywhere else to go,” he’ll say.

“Well you can’t stay here.” She will wait for him to budge and when he doesn’t she will shrug as if she knew this all might happen. “Just tonight. I’ll get you a blanket,” she will say, shaking her head as if he’s one more kid she has to put to bed. He will settle into the ratty couch, listening to her door click shut behind her.

Sometime in the early lightless morning someone will come into the living room. Shane will not hear him or see him or smell him but he will know that he’s there. His gaze will be a cool smooth metal ball resting on Shane’s temple, and even as sense and power begin to trickle back into his muscles, the weight of this look will pin his head back against the sofa cushions. He will hear the footsteps fading, crossing the linoleum of the kitchen, but by the time Shane gets there that room will be empty too. Then Shane will step down the hall and open the door to Debra’s room.

The kid will be wearing what he always wears: the sweatpants with the stripe down the side, the matching lightweight jacket, the white long-sleeved shirt beneath. The thin gold chain looking loose around his neck, the cheap watch with the leather band clinging to his wrist. His face will bunch up in the middle, all frown and forehead and tight jaw wrinkles. His hair cut millimeter-short. His shoulders will slump down and his arms will hang long at his side. The kid will not look at Shane at all. He will look down at his mom, sprawled out there in the sheets, her thigh and haunch exposed. The son will reach down as if to cover her, his hand stopping short of the bed and retreating at the last minute. His face will relax. He’ll look so young, he’ll look like his ten-year-old brother upstairs just blown up a bit for size. He’s a funny-looking kid but with his face relaxed and in that dark room light he’ll look almost handsome. Shane will watch him watch her sleep, and then Samson’s head will turn quickly as if he’s heard a sound. His eyes will travel around the room from the wall to the dresser, to the clothes stacked on the chair beside the bed, until finally they will come back to the doorway and settle upon Shane. The kid will stare at him and then shake his head. Come on, Sam’s head will say. Come on outside, come with me. He will nod come on again and then look at his mom and turn around and brush past him out of the room.

Shane will lie there on that ratty sofa and open his eyes and close them and open them again. He will get up slowly, carefully, fishing around on the floor to find his clothes. Put on his pants, his shirt, his dirty socks, his stained work boots. He will go to the front door and unlock it and step forward and look around. There will be no one there. The van will sit waiting, nervous for its windows, like a horse tied up outside the trouble saloon.

“I’m coming,” Shane will say. “Okay? You hear that, I’m going. I’m gone.”

He will search around the kitchen for a piece of paper and write Debra a note. He will not write that he’ll miss her or think about her or remember her or anything like that. Instead he will write:

I’m sorry about everything, and I’m sorry Samson’s dead. Please take this and take care and go as fast and far away as you can. Please don’t look back or come back. I won’t follow or come or call again.

I know it’s not this simple, but I hope you make it. I think you will.

He will not sign it. He will pull the money from the toolbox, $10,000, the most he could get for Fulton’s things. He will pull out the thin gold chain and the watch. Then he will place everything neatly on the kitchen table and walk outside and never see any of them again.

His knuckles are turning white from gripping the bathroom sink, and he relaxes, runs one hand through his short hair. A car honks noisily outside, and he freezes again, caught in the headlights of someone coming home. But the honk fades away as the car passes. Not this time. He thinks about it: I could wait here for him. I could make him tell the story: when he picked him up, what they did, how he spit him out again. How many he toyed with, these years, how many white ones, brown ones, boys, girls, how many wives, how many poor ones, rich ones. The story of Fulton’s pleasures. And then I can tell him a story too. I can fight or flee or burn the house down. If I wasn’t such a coward, he thinks, I would kill him just because someone else should have to die. But that would be simply damage, wouldn’t it. That might feel great but it wouldn’t do a single person any good. Still, he thinks. Still.

He opens Fulton’s medicine cabinet, the door gliding open on expensive hinges. It’s a minor pharmaceutical treasure trove in there. Did Samson take some too, that night? Did he think he might find refuge here? Sure: the rich pleasure-seeking savior probably doesn’t even remember his name. A fuck, a toke, a snort, another night gone by, while Sam slinks off stoned to wander into that tunnel, sick of this shit, heartbroke, head broke. Shane grabs a couple bottles for good measure, without any particular reason. Although he hurts. He does hurt, he takes a pill and cups his hands with water to wash it down. Maybe tomorrow, maybe tomorrow I’ll need something to take an edge off the pain. Or maybe seven months from now, when business is slow, and Lou does not exist anymore except as a distant voice on the phone. He’ll be sitting in his childhood home at sunset, the phone tucked under his chin, talking to his wife. They will call each other. They’ll have to. Every couple weeks or so, a brief or medium-length conversation, avoiding both the future and the past. Maybe she’ll never know why Fulton quits her board or what her husband did that night. Maybe she’ll never know the full extent of Shane or Fulton’s sins. She won’t care. She’ll have other things to worry about. Her business world, the whole world, will be a very different place then, crowded with failing falling stars, companies winking out one by one, their Web sites going dark. Her own company will change its suffix from Dot-Com to Technologies and step up layoffs as they count their ten months left of money. The city will slowly shrink again as the people leave, as the jobs disappear. Lou will explain these things on the phone and a mystery pill and an Anchor Steam will taste good right about then. They will agree they miss each other although they’ll both know some things haven’t changed. In their different ways, neither of them will trust the other, and at that moment this will be all they need to know. Nothing is final. You can always do something about it, or go down trying.