Читать книгу Contenders - Erika Krouse - Страница 16

James “Quick” Tillis was the first heavyweight boxer to last ten rounds with world champion Mike Tyson. When Quick took a Greyhound bus to Chicago to begin his fighting career, he was just a young cowboy from Tulsa. He disembarked from the bus in front of the Sears Tower, a cardboard suitcase under each arm. He dropped them, looked up at the skyscraper and shouted, “I’m going to conquer Chicago!”

When he looked down, his bags were gone.

~

Nina made some of her best money at happy hour, especially in the bars near the Financial District. It was like stepping into a different era, one where people still wore shoulder pads and thought the Republican Party was moral. Filled with bankers and lawyers too scared to go home to their frigid, mean wives or empty apartments, the preppy bars were rife with opportunity—plus they always had fancy french fries. Parking was a bitch around commuter time, though, and her Pinto was starting to make a clacking noise the radio couldn’t mask, so Nina caught a bus.

Colfax Avenue is the longest continuous city street in America, and back when Nina had nowhere to sleep, she took the Colfax bus back and forth, dozing just short of REM. She had gotten to know the regulars—commuters, prostitutes, other homeless people. A man with bloodshot eyes and gray skin sometimes sat in the back, reciting the entire story of his life in relentless detail: how he lost his toes to frostbite while ranching outside of Gunnison; how he gutted salmon in Juneau until he cut off his index finger. Piece by piece, she heard about broken and lost limbs. She got occasional reruns, but she saved enough money for an apartment before she heard the whole story.

Nina didn’t fear other people anymore, but she feared that kind of poverty. It also made her sentimental. Life was simple when all she had was one duffel bag in a train station locker, when her armpits smelled of powdered hand soap and brown paper towels. She didn’t want to be hungry again, but she wanted to feel the lightness hunger brings. She didn’t ever want to be poor again, but she did want to hear the rest of the homeless man’s story.

The bus spit her out on Tremont and pulled away, vomiting exhaust. The street’s heat radiated through the thin soles of her shoes.

She stopped in front of a chrome bar called Nemo’s. Muffled noises leaked from inside—nasty laughs, tinkling barware. The windows showcased shadows of men with dark suits and loosened ties. A dirty boy in dreadlocks squatted next to the door.

“Aren’t you out of your neighborhood?” Nina asked him.

“Working.” He scanned her outfit and lit a hand-rolled cigarette. “Like you.” Crouching, his weight was on his toes. It would be easy to kick him onto his back.

She pulled out a cigarette and said, “Got a light?”

“I am the light. Baby, what you need is fire.” He clicked a purple Zippo and she leaned in. “So, chica, for a donation, I’ll create an original poem just for you.”

Lucky, Nina thought. She pulled a crumpled dollar from her pocket and dropped it into his hand. The boy looked at the dollar and recited, “Cheap chick gave me a buck. Fuck.”

Unlucky. She tried to snatch the dollar back, but his fingers closed over it. She kicked him onto his back, dropped her cigarette on him, and went inside.

Inside the bar, it was a sausage fest. Eyes lit on her from the neck down, and dotted away. A poppy-faced happy drunk kept smiling at everyone, his suit riding up in front. Another man with skidding eyes ordered another tequila. He stared down the shot like it was an opponent before swallowing it neatly, wiping his lips with a napkin that never left his hand. He had frayed cuffs, though, and Nina’s rent was due.

One guy at the bar, though—perfect. He wore a platinum Rolex with a pale blue watch face, which he flashed with a quick arm-jerk before asking his friend, “What time is it? Party time.” His shirt was tailored, and a bloated diamond ring swung on a chain around his neck, as mesmerizing as a pendulum. Nina wanted it.

Rolex man tipped the bartender twenty dollars for his dirty martini, pinching the bill on either side and tugging it tight before laying it flat on the bar. Nina thought, I’d better get things started before he blows all his cash. “Are you using this chair?” she asked.

Rolex’s friend leaned over. “No, ma’am, it’s using us.”

Nina flashed the friend a brief smile and sat next to Rolex, whose back was turned to her. He swiveled her direction partway and raised his voice so she could hear him over the bar noise. “…I told him, ‘Don’t sell the yacht. You might need it someday. With all those earthquakes, California’s going to break off the continent and the Pacific Ocean will wash onto your doorstep.’ That’s why I still have my little baby.” He glanced at Nina. “Not that it’s little. It’s big. Very big.”

“California isn’t next to Colorado. It’s next to Nevada.” The friend glanced at Nina. “Where’s Rhonda today?”

“Dumped her.” Rolex guy fingered his necklace. “You know why I wear this diamond ring around my neck?” He turned his face so Nina could view his profile.

“Yep,” his friend said.

“I wear it to honor the love of my life.”

“I know.”

“It was right after college, ten years ago. I got a job working at my dad’s stock brokerage firm, making obscene money. Nothing like what I make now, of course.”

The friend’s smile drooped as he glanced at Nina, sensing that he had already lost the girl to the schmuck, as usual.

Rolex raised his voice. “I was twenty-two, and in love with the most beautiful girl in the world, Penny.” He glanced around the bar, his gaze lingering on Nina. “Penny could have been a model. She had skin like, like,” he shook his head. “Anyway. It was great skin.”

“I know. I knew Penny,” the friend grumbled.

“She wanted to get married. So I said, ‘There’s no way you can tame me. I was born here, and I’ve got cowboy blood.’”

“You were born in Connecticut.”

“When she got pregnant, I bought her this diamond ring, but I couldn’t bring myself to give it to her. I told her, ‘Forgive me, for I know not what I do.’”

“Christ.”

“I wear it as a reminder of the man I am, the man I can’t help but be.” Rolex turned his back to his friend, leaning in on Nina. “What about you? Married? Kids?”

“None that I know about,” she said. She could see why he hadn’t turned his face until then. He had a scar on his other cheek. It wasn’t a knife fight kind of scar—more like a fishhook scar, puckered like an anus.

Rolex nudged his friend, who looked down at the oily surface of the bar. Then he said to Nina, “I’m better looking than you, so why don’t you buy the next round.”

Nina shook her head and tapped the bar in front of her, right where a drink should be.

Rolex smirked and pulled out his wallet. “I can tell you’re the kind of girl who gets what she wants.”

“And I can tell you’re the kind of guy who’d insult me and ask for something in the same sentence.”

His friend laughed. Rolex man said to him, “Stop laughing or I’ll tell her about your herpes.”

“I don’t have herpes,” the friend said. Then, to Nina: “I really don’t.”

“That’s really douchey,” Nina told the Rolex man.

“A what?”

She shouted over the bar din, “Douchey.”

The corners of his mouth pulled downward. He said, more quietly, “Nobody talks that way to me.”

“Not to your face, maybe.”

His nostrils flared, one and then the other. “If you were a man, I’d kick your ass.”

“If you were a man, I’d kick yours,” Nina said. But this felt wrong somehow, like she was taunting a caged animal. Ugh, she thought, and spun away on her barstool.

Rolex pulled on her shoulder and turned her around again to face him. She wiped his hand off her shoulder. “Don’t touch me,” she said.

He wedged his knees between her legs, spreading them. “I’ll do what I want to you,” he said.

So she punched him in his open jaw. Every bit of her meanness exited her body through her fist as his jaw clacked against it. It was in him, now, and his face slackened at the impact. He fell off his stool.

The bar fell silent. Rolex blinked on the floor, but didn’t get up.

Nina slipped off her seat. The friend’s mouth was stuck open. Nina drained the rest of Rolex’s dirty martini and wiped the brine from her mouth with her wrist.

“Forgive me,” she told the friend, “for I care not what I do.”

The wallet lay on the bar. She flipped through it. There must have been five hundred dollars in there. The bar collectively murmured as she deftly pocketed the wallet and then bent down to slip the Rolex from the man’s damp wrist.

A flat male voice said, “Someone stop her.” Nobody did. Nobody ever did.

She reached for the diamond ring. The chain left a red crease on his neck before snapping and snaking from her hand to the floor.

The Rolex(less) man opened one eye and said, thickly, “Not the ring.”

The female bartender reached for a phone.

Nina looked at the diamond in her hand. “But I’d like a reminder of the man you can’t help but be.”

“I misspoke.” His voice rasped so hard, Nina had to lean forward to hear him. “I found my girlfriend in Ohio, but she told me to fuck off.” He groaned. “I keep it with me in case she changes her mind. Don’t take it.”

Nina spun the ring once around her finger. She dropped it onto his chest.

The man closed his eyes, just as if he weren’t lying down on a barroom floor. “Everybody needs a little redemption,” he said.

The crowd parted to let Nina pass through the bar, their hands up in finicky gestures. Untouchable. She erupted out the back door into the bright street, sirens in the distance. She couldn’t breathe.

The air above the street condensed in the heat, making straight lines curve. Nina felt like she was swimming. She ran through a parking garage. As the sirens grew closer, she took a shortcut through a hotel where she had once spent the night with a German tourist, through an alley, through a back kitchen, and out the front of a pho restaurant.

She couldn’t wait for the bus—she’d have to zigzag back to Capitol Hill on foot. What had she been thinking, anyway? The bus? This wasn’t a desk job. You don’t commute. She couldn’t take success for granted. Jackson used to say, “Tether even a roasted chicken.” A swell of loneliness mingled with the backwash of adrenaline. The sirens took a lateral turn, but she kept moving. The Rolex cut into her palm. She hoped it was real.

She caught a flash of red in the dusky air, a man carrying a big bunch of red roses, “I’m sorry” flowers. You can tell a lot about a person from the back of his head. He had an expensive haircut, the kind you have to blow-dry. Same asshole, different pants, she thought. This man would bring the flowers home to his wife. His wife would smell the roses, not the perfume on his neck, which he’d shower off the minute he got home. “Racquetball,” he’d tell her. “I’m disgusting.”

Later, Nina would remember the other details caught in the dirty filter of her memory: that he was smiling back at someone through a window, that he looked scared, that he looked familiar.

But right now, she only noticed flowers, crimson against the gray concrete. They were some other man’s redemption, for some other woman, someone loved. Nina wanted them, too.

~

“What if she’s dead?” Kate asked, carefully carrying her fast-food tray.

“She’s not dead.” Isaac pointed with his elbow at an empty table by the window. “Sit there.”

On their way to the table, a boy Kate’s age with froggy glasses stuck out a foot to trip her. Isaac opened his mouth, but Kate had already stopped. She looked down at the foot, and then at the kid’s freckled face.

“I’m an orphan,” she told him.

He withdrew his foot slowly, sneaker scudding against the carpet.

Jesus, Isaac thought.

They sat, and Isaac rubbed his forehead. Kate leaned over her beige tray, which was covered with food in varying shades of beige—beige bun, beige french fries, Sprite. Isaac squirted ketchup on the tray for color, and went back to rubbing his temples.

By day three of their trip, they had gotten lost eleven times, and were no closer to finding Nina than when they started. Isaac checked his list, scarred with cross-outs. They had visited every Nina Black listed in the Denver-Boulder metro area. Each person at the door was exactly wrong—a short African American woman, a sixteen-year-old girl, a housewife with a lazy eye, a shut-in who weighed at least four hundred pounds, and an elderly woman who kept saying, “Actually, I don’t know what my name is.”