Читать книгу In the Blind - Eugene Marten - Страница 13

I told Mrs. Ivy the bugs were getting to be a problem. She told me they sprayed once a month. She was filling out some kind of form. I asked her when the next time would be.

“Two weeks,” the maintenance guy said. Mrs. Ivy said nothing.

“It’s bad,” I said. “I don’t know if I can wait that long.”

She looked up at me, squinting, took a long pull off the plastic tube as if it were still a cigarette. “Two weeks.”

“What am I supposed to do in the meantime?”

Mrs. Ivy looked back down at the piece of paper she was writing on. “I don’t know what to tell you. If I have to call the exterminator in for one suite, I’ll have to charge you. It costs.”

I told her I could always go to court. “You could do that,” she said without looking up again. “Give your rent to a trustee and they send me a court order. They’ll give me thirty days to take care of the problem—thirty days because you couldn’t wait two weeks.”

I didn’t say anything. I looked the maintenance guy in the eyes and he didn’t, either.

“Or,” Mrs. Ivy said, “you could go to the drugstore, go to the hardware store. There are products. Don’t spend more than ten dollars and I’ll reimburse you.” She stopped writing. “Or you can find someplace else to live. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go throw somebody out on their ass.”

The oxygen tank rode on a small handcart and the maintenance main helped her trundle it into the elevator. He looked back over his shoulder and winked. “Had a strawberry up in his room,” he said. “Mrs. Ivy don’t play that.” I saw she was wearing slippers and the door closed.

The next day on my lunch break I found a drugstore and stood in an aisle. There were products. One was an ominous metal canister that looked intended for industrial use. The last one. Even the clerk at the checkout seemed puzzled, as if they’d stocked it by mistake.

After work I went straight up to my room and read the instructions. Cracked open the lid. There were holes in the top of the can stuffed with some kind of wadding. Fill a cup with half an inch of warm water and place can in upside-down. Then run like hell and don’t come back for at least an hour.

I left my receipt at the desk.

Summer wasn’t half over but today it was cooler, the air drier. I could kill an hour just walking around if I had to—I couldn’t afford to eat anywhere and bars were out of the question. It was better not having too many choices. It was hard enough deciding left or right, and I wasn’t exactly looking to expand my social circle. Three of us had been enough. I wanted to keep moving.

I experimented with eye contact, random hellos. Women looked past me. I went into a place consisting of a long hall with doors on each side. A man at one end of the hall made change. Another man with a mop and bucket and a large crucifix hanging from his neck showed you a booth where your shoes wouldn’t stick to the floor. The door locked. Dollar bill disappearing into the slot like a reptilian tongue. You flipped through a hundred and seven channels with one hand while the doorknob rattled behind you, some queer going booth to booth till somebody let him in. When you left nobody was there.

After the video I walked to Ninth Street, turned north and headed for the edge. Rush hour. A car horn blared and I retreated to the corner. I was called a name, still didn’t have this street-crossing thing down. But it was better to walk than to drive. The world showed itself to you, it took as long as you wanted it to take. Like when you stopped drinking and noticed after a while how much cleaner the light had become.

Going downhill now, the blue-green rising up at the end of it till the street became a pier and I was there. The restaurant was gone. The pier had been repaved and landscaped and there were benches and three trees. The crumbling steps that for some reason had disappeared into the water had been removed, the edges chained off, the chains connected by dock bollards that were now purely decorative—ships didn’t stop here anymore. It was a park.

I sat on a bench and looked. It wasn’t as big as the ocean but showed you as much of infinity. You could see to the curve of the earth. The clouds were big and white, their shadows whole. Seagulls sat on the water. The lake rolled under them, lifted them up and down and kept coming at you. The motion stirred the bottom so that when the waves rose in the light they seemed to be filled with smoke. A ship in the distance, a freighter—you could tell by the long flat deck in its middle. The super-structure in the stern was white, but pink in the late sun.

She could look at the ships for hours, especially at night, and I would watch them with her.

Friday or Saturday night we would go to the seafood restaurant at the end of the pier on Ninth Street. Besides work we didn’t get downtown much. She started with oysters and then she would have mussels in a red broth. I liked a little salmon with my beer, and then something stronger before we left. Something for the road. I would start that way.

They gave him the children’s menu but he ate grown-up portions with a knife and fork. He could swim but I couldn’t. He just knew how.

Even then you could tell the place was declining, the service and the kitchen, like they knew what was coming and had stopped trying. But we enjoyed it while we still had it and pretended not to notice, though it was hard pretending not to notice what sometimes scurried across the cracks and craters in the pier as we were leaving. He’d get excited at them and we held his hand. There were no benches, no chains, just a battered low guardrail and nothing to block off the steps that for some reason led down into the water at the end of the pier. We would sometimes sit in the car before we left, waiting for the ships to pass through far off in the dark. The lights. I didn’t mind thinking about that part of it now. I didn’t even mind thinking about the rats.

In Reception they called the new ones fish.

Nearby a girl was counting. She stood with her family near the edge, looking in where the sun was headed.

“Five, six, seven,” she counted.

A car pulled up and someone threw bread out the window. A flock of gulls imploding around it, applause of white wings.

“Eleven,” the girl said. “I see eleven colors.”

I wanted to drown in all of them. I got up instead. The haze that was there the first time, when I’d gotten back into town, was gone, but something was still in the way.

When I got back the place was littered with corpses. There was a smell and I opened the window. I’d expected to see some survivors, crawling sluggishly or on their backs with their legs waving feebly, but there were no wounded, only dead. Even the ones nearly as big as your thumb. I’d wondered about driving them into neighboring apartments but you had the impression nobody had made it out alive.

I cleaned them up. I wiped down all my flat surfaces and washed everything I ate from—which took about thirty seconds. Then I boiled some water. Macaroni and cheese, five boxes for a dollar. It was the best the world had to offer me and it tasted like it. Somebody should have won a prize.

I slept a little better. There were still hot nights ahead but this wasn’t one of them. I left the window open. I woke up every couple of hours but eventually I would steal back into sleep. I wished I had some new books to wait with—with the right one you weren’t waiting anymore. Get a library card. A place to manage evenings, weekends. Everything was different now, all chopped up into yesterdays and tomorrows. I was used to something else, a continuing that flickered with nights and days but was all one thing. I wasn’t sure which to believe. Someone was getting loud in the street, angry or just enthusiastic, but I left the window open.

IN the mornings I was early and then they were late. I sat on the front step and watched the women hanging out near the building across the street. Once in a while a man would call down to them from a window and they would go inside, or a car would pull over and take one of them away. I watched and one of them saw me and licked the air but she was skeletal and sexless and I dropped my eyes, my looking-for-something look.

She yelled something to the effect that she was a lesbian first and a whore second. “Got my girlfriend to suck my pussy,” she yelled.

Yusuf came and unlocked the security gate. He apologized. Wanda should have been there, he said, but he didn’t say anything about Ibrahim. He’d been on a service call. Service was available twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, and Yusuf and Ibrahim took turns sleeping with the pager on. They took turns not sleeping at all. When Wanda arrived he left. She didn’t explain and I didn’t ask.

People started coming in right away but not all of them were customers. The man with the newspaper came and sat on his stool and hid his face behind his paper. “Now somebody messed around and slowed a beam of light down to thirty-eight miles an hour,” he said. Turned the page. Later he was joined by the man whose son was a genius, and then they were replaced by the barefoot girl from the projects. She didn’t have far to walk and she brought three kids who were so dark-skinned they couldn’t have been hers by anything but association. She tried to sound like one of them and it came out so ugly you wished she would step on a nail in the middle of a sentence.

“I’ll tell her to start wearing shoes,” Wanda said. They seemed to know each other but she didn’t say how.

A man wanted me to copy a key for a vending machine. It was round like a small tube with notches on the end and I couldn’t find the blank. I asked if he could wait. He said he couldn’t but I couldn’t find the blank and when Wanda came out of the bathroom he’d already gone. She sighed.

“Small children won’t die,” she said, “but Ibrahim would. He’d rather eat pork than let one get away.” Then a man came in and asked for Rikki’s mail. He was big and he wore a sweat suit, a baseball cap turned around on his head. He said Ibrahim knew about it.

I told him nobody had told me.

“Well, I’m telling you,” he said.

Wanda came up front. She had a stack of envelopes rubber-banded together, and she handed it to him without looking at him. He watched her walk back to the office. He looked at her the same way I had the first time I’d been in the shop. He looked at me another way. I took a whisk broom and went at the key dust on the machines and counter. He left muttering, everything under his breath except the word asshole.

She said his name was Angel. I knew who he was.

Some of the people who came and didn’t buy anything were named Bashir, Tariq, Fuad, Ayman. They filled the shop with the sound of “Salaam,” their common aftershave, their dark eyes and hair. Their business cards. I figured they were friends but Ibrahim never used that word. Wanda said he didn’t have the time. One of them dropped off the Arabic newsletter, one had designed his Yellow Pages ad. Another was a tall man with a pockmarked face who was friendly and polite but moved around like he owned the place. Then I found out that he did, that Ibrahim leased the space for the shop from him.

One of them was a woman and all you could see were her eyes. She came in and sat down by the counter. I asked her if I could help her and she didn’t answer or look at me. Wanda came up front and told her we expected Yusuf back within half an hour. She nodded and sat there behind a veil, wearing a sort of mantle that covered her head and shoulders but with colors in a pattern, like something from a designer catalog. Slacks, sandals, thick white socks. She waited a while and then she drove away in a brand-new Toyota. Wanda told me who she was. I could still see her eyes but even when I thought of them they wouldn’t look at me. I was the one across the street.

THERE was a problem.

“I told you,” Wanda said. “Didn’t I tell you?”

“Believe me,” Ibrahim said, “we not trying to run a game. You get what you earned.”

“Ibrahim would never do that,” Wanda said. “You have to trust him.”

“She has a court order. I am lock out of my own home.”

“She’s there right now with her two . . . family. Whatshisface, too, I’ll bet—and she has a house of her own for God’s sake! Ibrahim had to spend the night in the van.”

“She puts hold on all the accounts,” he said. “All I have is what’s in the drawer and what’s in the safe.”

“I don’t think there’s anything in the safe.”

I said I understood but they didn’t seem to believe me.

“You have to understand,” Wanda said, “she won’t get away with this. She was only able to pull this off because Ibrahim was late for the hearing. They let her write her own ticket.”

“I was on a job,” Ibrahim said. He said Haleel would straighten everything out, but Haleel couldn’t do anything before Monday.

“There wasn’t even a judge—they had a referee.”

“Then you get paid. Cash, check, you tell me.”

I told him that part was fine. The problem, I told him, was that I had to pay my rent.

“He stays at the Avenue,” Wanda reminded him.

Ibrahim looked at me. “I talk to Miss Ivy about this,” he said. “Get you some time.”

I didn’t say anything at first. I didn’t have much choice but I was wary of people doing me favors, especially when pulling strings was involved. It took the little that was in your hands out of them.

“Alright,” I said then. I said thanks, for lack of a better word.

“You need something to get through the weekend? What we have in the drawer?”

“I’ll be okay. I can wait till next week.”

“You have enough to eat? You have food on the table?”

I’d forgotten about that. I remembered there was a blood bank next door but it was closed for the day.

“We straighten you up,” Ibrahim said. “Wanda, where are my keys?” She’d gone in the back. “Wadiya!”

The van was in the parking lot next to the shop, a small fenced enclosure. The gate was padlocked after hours, there was barbed wire on top. No one had managed to steal the van since the barbed wire.

Ibrahim gestured at the van and it chirped, the lights flashed. I’d never had one of those. There was a laptop computer in front of the dashboard between the seats, and I’d never had one of those, either. It swung on a movable arm but I wasn’t sure what Ibrahim did with it. I’d used one the last time I’d had a job, but it sat on a desk and I only knew what I’d needed to know about it.

We pulled out.

“Is not far,” Ibrahim said. “I appreciate this.”

“You’re taking care of business.”

“But some people,” he said, “when it comes to the money—”

“I know,” I said.

“I want this to be like family. Family has to trust each other.”

“I know,” I said. I’d almost said I trusted him. It wasn’t that I didn’t, I just didn’t want to be part of another family. I didn’t want to belong in that way.

I didn’t know where we were going.

“You know anything about the law?” he asked me.

I shrugged. I’d learned some things.

“You think if she could prove adultery, she could take the business away from me?

“I don’t think she could get any more of it than she already had.” I wasn’t sure but it made sense and he needed to hear something.

“You think the settlement is nullify if she can prove?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe.”

We drove a little further, and then he said, “Maybe someone try to talk to you sometime.”

“What do you mean?”

“Maybe someone come to ask you questions—lawyer, detective. Maybe we go back to court and you have to testify. What you going to tell them?”

I didn’t know where we were going and I didn’t want him to ask me to lie for him. “Have you thought of putting the business in Yusuf’s name?”