Читать книгу Waiting for Ricky Tantrum - Jules Lewis - Страница 10

“Hell you looking at, buddy?”

No answer.

“What, you don’t speak English? No speak-ee, you?”

Run. Run away.

“Huh? No speak-ee?”

He was leaning against the outside of the school, next to the front entrance, a navy blue San Diego Padres cap tipped back on his head. He’d been glaring at every kid who walked out the door. Why’d he have to pick me to start with? I could swear I only glanced his way.

“You in the special class or something?”

“No.”

“Then how come you can’t answer a question?”

He swaggered up to the front steps, hands jammed into pockets. I stood still, fists clenched, anticipating a blow. But he didn’t touch me. Just stared at my forehead for about fifteen seconds as if there was a purple growth the size of a baseball sticking from it. Then he asked, “You go to school here?”

It was the first day of grade seven at Lawson Street Junior High. Oleg, my only friend, had gone to a different school.

“Yeah,” I said.

“Me, too.”

“You do?”

“No, I’m lying to you.” He shook his head, rolled his eyes. “The hell else would I be doing outside this place?”

“Dunno.”

“Shit, if I didn’t have to go to class, I wouldn’t walk in a ten-mile radius of this stupid building. You know it used to be a jail, right?”

“What?”

“This building, it used to be a jail. You knew that, right?”

“No.”

“You didn’t know that? I thought everybody knew that. Ten years back it was a maximum-security jail, this school.”

“Yeah?”

“You really didn’t know that, eh? Man, oh, man. I forget sometimes how stupid some people are. Our school, buddy, is where they threw all the craziest serial killers. The worst ones. Guys that chopped up their wives, raped their pets. And they all used to sleep in our classrooms. Used to lift weights in the playground. And also they chucked Mafia and skinheads and all types of serious gang members in there, too. People got stabbed in those hallways every day. Had to have somebody go around and clean up the blood with a mop … every day. And it was maximum security, right, so they used to have guards armed with machine guns surrounding the place. And there was a fifty-foot barbed wire fence, and they put a force field on the fence, and if you touched it, you got an electric shock so bad you’d be paralyzed for a week … or maybe two weeks, depending on how strong you were. But, man, oh, man, I don’t believe you didn’t know about the jail. I thought everybody knew about that.”

“Oh.”

He stared at me for about ten seconds as if I had the words I AM A MORON written with pink marker on my forehead. Then he said, “You know I’m joking, right?”

“What?”

“This place wasn’t a jail, buddy.”

“Oh.”

“The hell would anybody put a jail downtown like this? That’d probably be the stupidest idea in the world. This area is full of houses. What kind of idiot would wanna live around here if there was a maximum-security jail across the street?”

“Dunno.”

“You believed me, though.”

“No.”

“Yeah, you did. Don’t lie. You thought this school used to be a jail. I bet you were gonna go home and tell your mommy you wanna transfer schools ’cause you’re afraid the ghost of some pedophile is gonna sneak up on you when you go to take a piss. I bet you woulda stayed awake all night if I hadn’t told you I was joking. I saw the way you were looking at me. You believed me.”

“No.”

“Don’t lie.”

“I’m not.”

“Whatever, you stupid dumbass. It’s not my fault you’re an idiot.”

“But I didn’t —”

“The hell were you staring at me before?”

“What? I wasn’t.”

“You were staring at me when you walked out the door. The hell were you looking at?”

“Nothing. I wasn’t. I mean, I didn’t think I … You were staring at everybody that walked out the door.”

“That’s ’cause I’m waiting for somebody.”

“Oh.”

“It’s important who I’m waiting for.”

“Oh.”

“Don’t you wanna know who it is?”

“Who?”

“None of your business.”

“Oh.”

He scratched his chin for a little while, glanced at the ground. “Well, it’s a girl I’m waiting for. This sexy girl. Probably missed her, though. I told her to meet me here around two-thirty ’cause I figured I could get out of school early behind a teacher’s back. But none of the teachers would let me leave my desk, not even to take a piss. Place might as well be a jail. But, anyway, she probably came already and thought I stood her up. It’s a shame ’cause last time I saw her she let me take a peek down her panties.”

“Yeah?”

“You think I’m gonna lie about something like that? That’s the third time she’s let me see it.”

“Really?”

“She got red pubes.”

“Red?”

“Same colour as her hair.”

“Where were you?”

“What, when she showed me?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“None of your business.”

“Oh.”

He kicked a pebble, watched it roll. “Well, first time was on the train tracks. By Dupont, you know?”

“Yeah.”

“I took her walking down there, and right when a train went by, she stretched her panties out so I could look down.”

“She did that?”

“Swear to God.”

“For how long?”

“Till the train passed all the way. As soon as the train passed and the noise was gone, she didn’t let me look no more. It was a long train, though. So, I don’t know, probably a minute, two minutes, I seen it for.

“Holy.”

“Said she might let me touch it this time. You ever touched one?”

“What?”

“A twat. Pussy.”

“No.”

“But you’ve seen one, right?”

“A real one?”

“Yeah. On a real girl. A girl who showed it to you.”

“Dunno.”

“That means no. You should try and see one. A real one, I mean.”

“How many real ones you seen?”

He furrowed his brow, as if he were calculating in his head. “’Bout fifty.”

“Fifty?”

“Yeah, ’bout that. But, anyway, I figure this girl I was waiting for ain’t gonna show up. You know what a whore is, buddy?”

“Like a hooker?”

“Yeah, a hooker. A whore.”

“Yeah, I know what that is.”

“You ever seen one before?”

“Not really.”

“What do you mean not really?”

There was this Coffee Time near my house — at the edge of my street turn west on Bloor, walk three blocks, you were there — and if you passed by after midnight, you’d normally see at least one car pulled into a far corner of the parking lot with somebody in the driver’s seat, and if you looked closely at the driver, you’d notice there was something furry, dark, could be some kind of animal, moving up and down on his lap, and if you peered even closer, maybe snuck a few feet toward the car to get a better view, you’d realize that the dark, furry thing had a neck, two ears, a whole body, and if you got any closer, the guy in the driver’s seat would probably roll down his window and tell you to screw off and mind your own business before he got out of the car and punched your face in, you little pervert.

“I mean, I’ve seen one. Passed by one on the —”

“Yeah, whatever,” he said. “You wanna see a real one?”

“Where?”

“I know a place. She won’t come out till later, though. Time is it?”

My Timex said four-thirteen. “Quarter past four.”

“You gotta go home for dinner?”

“I think so. Yeah.”

“Your parents would let you come out afterward?”

“Yeah, I could come out.”

“So then meet me back here at six-thirty.”

“Six-thirty?”

“You didn’t hear me the first time?”

“I heard you.”

“Then the hell’s wrong with you?”

“What?”

“You’re retarded, eh?”

“No.”

“What’s your name?”

“Jim … Jim Myers,” I said.

“I’m Charlie.”

“Oh.”

“Retard,” Charlie mumbled, then crossed the road, slipping between idle traffic, and headed south down a side street. I walked west, back to my house on Concord Avenue.

* * *

My kitchen: a square white-walled room with white cabinets and a white counter and a white Bosche dishwasher and a white gas stove and a white table with four wooden chairs and a white fridge that had a white rectangular magnet sticking to the top left corner that read DR. R. BRUSILOFF GENERAL IMPLANT AND DENTISTRY in black print and below that had the address (somewhere on St. Clair Avenue West) and the telephone number (I knew it started with a nine) of Dr. R. Brusiloff’s office. Black and white tiles on the floor. Track lighting on the ceiling.

The sole piece of art in the room was a framed watercolour on the wall across from the sink that my sister, Amanda, had brought home the first summer she came back to Toronto from Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. It was a semi-bird’s-eye view of a dense pine forest that cut off into a glassy green lake, with the sun setting all purple and pink on the horizon.

Marcia, Amanda’s dorm mate during her first year of university — who Amanda said was pretty much like her twin, they had so much in common — had painted the watercolour at the family cottage in Muskoka (where Amanda had spent reading week) and given it to Amanda for her nineteenth birthday.

When I returned home from my first day of school at Lawson Street Junior High, Amanda — she was taking a bus back to Kingston the next morning to begin her second year of university — was standing in the kitchen, admiring Marcia’s watercolour from a few steps back, three fingers pushed into her cheek.

“Isn’t it just … beautiful, Jim?” she asked without taking her eyes off the picture. “Don’t you think it adds a lot to this room? Makes it a lot more, I don’t know … livable?”

I flung my knapsack onto the floor, looked at the painting.

“It’s the … colours,” she said. “Marcia has such a good sense of colour. There’s something about them that’s so perfect … so real … in a way … but not real. So … imperfect …”

“Imperfect?”

“Yes, Jim. Imperfect.”

“Oh.”

“Imperfect,” she whispered to herself, and stood there, neck hunched, chin up, knees locked, small belly pushing against her floral-patterned button-down blouse, gazing deeply into the watercolour as if she were trying to find Waldo, until I asked her — and this was an honest inquiry — how come she didn’t hang the picture in her room if she liked it so much.

My sister huffed loudly and turned to me. Her face was long, and she had a small, squishy nose like my father’s, a bum chin, tiny eyes, straight brown hair with blond streaks bunched together at the back of her head with a see-through plastic clip. She gazed at me in that I-know-something-you-don’t way she had of making her chin wrinkle and her upper lip touch her nostrils. Instead of answering my question, she turned back to the watercolour, stared at it silently for a few moments, then, still looking at the picture, told me that Marcia had spent the summer sleeping on the uneven giant-cockroach-ridden dirt floor of a thatched hut in a small, impoverished West African village helping to build a library with a youth organization, and she wished she had done something interesting like that with her summer, something meaningful, something challenging, something … altruistic. Altruistic. Did I know what that word meant?

“No,” I said, and instead of telling me what that word meant, Amanda scratched the back of her neck, made a face as if she’d just taken a sip of rotten milk, and told me how much it sucked being stuck in nothing-to-do Toronto all summer working as a stupid lifeguard at stupid Sunnyside Pool, and how she hated the guy who worked with her, just hated him. He was this annoying high-school kid who called himself G-Bone, and he was cocky and talked as if he was black even though he was skinny and white and was so ignorant about everything, so affected, so uninformed, so … high school. And it was a stupid idea to take the job, and when she thinks about it the only real reason why she worked here all summer was because she felt as if she had to be around the house, that it wasn’t fair for her to be away all the time, the way our father was so … old. Seventy-one. Could I believe Dad was seventy-one?

“I guess,” I said.

“He was sixteen at the end of World War II.”

“I know.”

“He walks with a cane.”

“I know.”

“It’s hard for him to get to the second floor sometimes.”

“I know.”

“He has dentures.”

“I know,” I said.

Amanda smiled at me in an older-sister-kind-of-way, cocking her head a little, peering at me as if I were still an infant, and told me again how miserable it was being stuck in Toronto, especially knowing there was sooo much to see in this world, soooo much to do, sooooo much to learn, soooooo many interesting people to meet, and how wonderful it would be to travel around Europe or South America or Asia for a year, and her and Marcia were planning to go on some kind of trip after they graduated but that was still a long way away and she didn’t want to start thinking too far ahead because you never knew how things were going to turn out, and I should always remember that, that you never knew how things were going to turn out.

“You don’t?”

“No,” she said, then turned back to the watercolour, made a face as if somebody were shining a flashlight in her eyes, and said that living in Kingston last year, being independent, going to university — all of that was a really good experience. She couldn’t wait to leave tomorrow and move into the five-room apartment she’d found with Marcia and this other girl named Deborah who lived on her dorm floor during first year. Deb was from Ottawa and was really funny, said the most random things, and the three of them got along really well. They were all pretty much like twins, triplets, really, and she knew she’d already told me about Deb a hundred times. It was just that she was really excited for everything, especially her courses. They all looked super-interesting and stimulating, and the professors all seemed sooooo smart … and one of them was really young, still in his twenties, she thought.

“What courses you take?” I asked.

“Mostly soshe.”

“Soshe?”

“Sociology, Jim.”

“Oh,” I said.

Amanda walked to the fridge, opened the door, slouched down, and peered inside. Her grey sweatpants were riding low, and you could see the white elastic on her underwear pressing against the chubby pale skin where her back began, a few inches below where her blouse cut.

“Where’s Dad?” I asked.

“He’s asleep.”

“Oh.”

Amanda bent down farther, scanning the bottom shelves, and her sweatpants slid lower on her hips, making more of her underwear visible. Baby blue. Cotton.

“I gotta go then,” I said.

She turned around, let the fridge door swing shut. “You’re going?”

“Yeah, I gotta go … with Oleg. Play some ball in the alley.”

“Well, okay, Jim.” She walked toward me. “My bus leaves early tomorrow morning, so I probably won’t see you for a while. You’ll come visit me, right?”

“Yes.”

“Oh, Jim,” she gushed, and gave me a quick, tight hug, pulling my head into her bosom, then pushing it away.

Her blouse smelled like baby powder. Then she held on to my shoulders for a minute or so, looking into my eyes. I thought maybe she was going to cry. But suddenly her gaze dropped from my face and hovered directly below my belly. She stared at the small bulge for half a second, then, realizing it wasn’t piss showing through my light blue jeans, she whipped her hands violently from my shoulders, opened her mouth to speak — or scream, or vomit, or laugh — but I ran out of the kitchen before I could see which one it was. Ten seconds later I was jogging east through an alleyway, back toward the front entrance of Lawson Street Junior High.

* * *

Somebody was strangling me. An arm. Wrapped around my neck. Cutting my breath. Probably some homicidal maniac. No point fighting him, though. Too strong. I was a goner. Goodbye. Wouldn’t take long. Just let myself go. Don’t fight. Don’t scream. Couldn’t scream. Jeez, it was easy to die …

But suddenly the grip loosened, and Charlie was standing in front of me outside the entrance of Lawson Street Junior High, a half-finished cigarette hanging from his lips, feet turned out like a duck’s.

“Oh,” I said.

He took the smoke out of his mouth, ashed on the sidewalk. “You’re an idiot, you know that?”

“What?”

“I said meet me here at six-thirty.”

“So I came early.”

“What you do that for?”

“Dunno. Forgot which time.”

“You’re retarded, eh?”

“What? How … well, how come you came so early?”

“How come I came so early?”

“Yeah.”

He took a drag off his cigarette, blew the smoke in my face. “This girl kicked me out of her house.”

“You went and saw that girl?”

“No, a different one. This girl I know from my old school. Georgia. But she kicked me out when her mom came home. Made me climb out her window.”

“Yeah?”

“Swear to God. She was naked, too.”

“Her mom?”

“No, you idiot. The girl. I had her naked. Well, everything but her socks. She kept those on ’cause I told her to. But all her other clothes — bra, panties, all that — she stripped them off in front of me. In her room.”

“She did that?”

“Buddy, I’m gonna lie about something like that? Course, she stripped for me. This girl loves to strip for me. She puts on some music and does it like a stripper, teasing me and shit, dangling the panties down her legs and all that.”

“Yeah?”

“We were probably gonna screw, too, but then her mom came home, so I had to bolt.”

“You were gonna screw?”

“Course. But her mom’ll smack her hard if she catches a boy in the house, so I had to get out of there.”

“So you didn’t go home for dinner then?”

“Nah. Not today. I figured I’d just come by here after she kicked me out and hang around till you showed up. If you showed up. I didn’t think you were gonna show up.”

“How come?”

“’Cause you’re a retard.”

“Oh.”

He took another pull off his cigarette, then flicked the butt onto the road. “So you wanna see this whore or what?”

“Yeah.”

“Scared?”

“No.”

I followed Charlie south through an alleyway, kicking pebbles and learning a lot more about Georgia and this other girl from his old school — Caroline, a Filipina, four years older than us, who had a piercing on her vagina and liked to screw so much she waited in a park by Yonge Street every Friday night and gave it to the first guy who came up to her, no matter who he was.

“Even if,” I said, “I don’t know … like if he had warts all over his neck and his chin?”

“I told you,” Charlie said. “No matter who he is.” Then he proceeded to tell me about the time Caroline had invited him to her house, the things they’d begun to do in her bedroom, and was just about to say what happened after her one-eyed older brother, a member of an infamously violent Filipino gang, barged through the door with a machete in his hand, when we came to a green dumpster in the alleyway.

We’d been walking for about a half-hour.

“This is the spot,” Charlie said, strolling up to the dumpster, which was in front of a criss-crossed metal fence, maybe six feet high.

“But wait,” I said. “So he cut you or what?”

“I’ll tell you another time.”

“What do you mean? C’mon. What happened? You get sliced?”

“I said I’ll tell you another time.”

“You had to fight him or what?”

“Shut up!” Charlie snapped. He hoisted his body on top of the dumpster and dangled over the fence, hanging from the top bar, then dropped onto the other side, where there was a small concrete yard that led to a flat-topped grey-brick building, two storeys high, with a fire escape zigzagging to the roof. Crouching down like a soldier, Charlie snuck across the yard and started climbing the fire escape.

Halfway up the black metal stairs, he turned my way (I was still on the other side of the fence), shook his head, then continued toward the top.

By the time I made it over the fence, Charlie was already on the roof. When I got up to the roof, he was lying on his belly by the edge and staring down at the sidewalk.

“That’s her,” he said.

I lay down next to him.

“Probably screws fifty guys a night.”

“Yeah?”

“Maybe more.”

“She could do that?”

“Buddy, that’s her job.”

We could only see her backside. She was facing the road, leaning against a street light, arms and ankles crossed. Doughnut-size silver hoops hung from each ear, and it seemed as if their weight was pulling her head to the ground, hunching her whole body forward.

“She Chinese, you think?”

“She’s Asian,” Charlie said. “But she ain’t Chinese. From Japan. Know how I can tell?”

“How?”

“She’s tall, right. Probably almost six feet.”

“So?”

“So it’s impossible for a Chinese girl to grow that much. There’s never been one taller than five eight in all of history. Never. The only Asian girls that could grow taller than that are the ones from Japan.”

“Really?”

“Swear on my balls. You could look it up in any encyclopedia.”

She seemed thirty-five, maybe forty years old, and had on a glittery pink tube top, a tight cheetah-skin-patterned skirt, and red knee-high boots made from material that if I hadn’t known better might think was strawberry Fruit Roll-Up. Her hair was paintbrush-black and was pulled back into a slick-tight ponytail.

“And she just … she … you think you gotta be a certain age or something to … you know … to …”

“Screw her?”

“Yeah.”

“Hell, no,” Charlie said. “As long as you got the dough, she’ll give you the goods. Could be six years old — doesn’t matter. If you fork over the cash, she’ll do whatever you tell her. There ain’t any rules or anything like that. You give her the money, she gives you the goods. Simple.”

“But what if your face was all burnt up or something?”

“What?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Like, if you were in a fire and you ended up burning most of the skin off your face … and all that was left was scars. Even your lips. She’d still do you if your face was like that … even if you gave her the dough?”

“Man, oh, man.”

“What?”

“You are retarded, eh?”

“What?”

“Sure she’d screw you if your face was all burnt!”

“Really?”

“Of course!”

“It’s the same for all of them?”

“Pretty much.”

“How much then … how much it usually cost, you think?”

“For a whore?”

“Yeah.”

“Depends,” Charlie said. “Some cost up to three, four hundred bucks. Some you could even pay, like, five, six grand. There’s this one girl in L.A. costs two million for one night. Two million. But with an older broad like this, I’d say somewhere around —”

“Fifty!” hollered a deep, patient-sounding female voice.

It felt as if the word had been whipped into my mouth and gotten stuck going down my throat, and now there was this awful lump jammed right above my Adam’s apple.

“Fifty dollars,” the woman repeated. Then she turned fully around, and she was Asian, from Korea, maybe, and her breasts were all shoved together and popping out of her bubblegum-pink tube top. You could see right down the dark crevice between them because she was staring up at us from beside the street light, hands pressing against her hips.

“Think I don’t hear you whispering up there?” She made a mouth with her fingers. “Chat, chat, chat, chat, chat. I got ears, right? I could hear you up there. I know what you want, right? Fifty dollars. You don’t get a better deal than that, right? Never. That’s the best price you’ll get. Wait till you —” She glanced over her shoulder as if to make sure nobody was around. Nobody was around. “Wait till you see what I can do for fifty dollars. Come down here and let me show you what I can do. Fifty dollars. You want me or what?”

She stood in the middle of the sidewalk, looking up at us, waiting for a reply.

There was no reply.

“C’mon, you two mutes all of sudden? What’s wrong?”

We were mutes all of a sudden.

“Don’t be afraid, boys. I’m not … I’m not gonna hurt you. There’s nothing to be afraid of.”

Charlie smacked my arm. “She thinks we’re scared?”

I didn’t answer.

“You think we’re scared?” he blurted down at her, his voice shaky.

She seemed much older and more tired as we got closer. She was leaning against the street light, facing the road, her ankles and arms crossed — the exact way she’d been standing when we were on the roof. Charlie was two steps ahead of me, moving slowly, cautiously, as if he were approaching a growling pit bull. Her cheetah-skin-patterned skirt had a silver zipper going up the side, undone halfway, and you could see part of what she was wearing underneath, something yellow.

We were only a few feet away when she turned and smiled grimly, rolling her eyes, as if one of us had told her a really cheesy joke. “Name’s Martina Hingis.” She took a step forward. Her face was much wider than it appeared from the roof, all powdered and pale save for a smear of turquoise above each eye and her eggplant-purple lips.

“Joe,” Charlie said.

“Well, hello, Joe,” she said, then turned to me. “Let me guess —” she pressed a finger against her chin “— Bob, right? Or wait, no … Bill? Fred? No, it’s Frank, right? You’re Frank. Frank’s your name, isn’t it?”

“Oleg,” I said.

“Oleg …” She seemed impressed. “Well, that’s quite a name. That’s what, Russian? Russian, are you?”

“Yeah.”

“I knew a girl from Russia.” She glanced at an empty Coke can lying on the sidewalk in front of her, re-crossed her arms. “Jumped on the tracks at Osgoode subway station, but the train didn’t kill her. Didn’t even break a leg. She believed in ghosts, the crazy girl. She was a sweetie, though. But ghosts …” She squinted at the label on the Coke can as if she were trying to read the small white print listing the ingredients.

Charlie and I waited for her to say something more, but she didn’t. She stayed like that for a half-minute or so. Then Charlie said, “You okay over there, miss?”

“But I believed her,” Martina said, raising her eyebrows — toothpick-skinny black arcs, painted on. “Ever since she told me about her grandfather, I believed in ghosts.”

Charlie flashed me a funny look.

She turned to me. “You’re Russian, right?” She said that as if the fact should make clear what she was talking about.

“Yeah.”

“Well,” she said. “I knew a Russian girl who believed in ghosts.”

“Oh.”

“Forget it,” she said. “You don’t … forget it.”

Then she walked up to Charlie, bent down to his height (she was about two and a half heads taller), and grinned at him in the same kind of lusty way Oleg’s older brother sometimes grinned at Oleg before he busted him in the face, or grabbed one of his nipples, twisted, then busted him in the face.

“Fifty dollars,” she said, breasts — softball size with freckled leathery tops — right under Charlie’s chin. “We could do whatever you want. I’ll do whatever.”

“Thing is, I only got —”

“Fifty dollars,” she said again, louder this time. “I’ll take you right over there.” She nodded at the alleyway we’d walked out of. “We don’t gotta go anywhere far. I like you. You’re sexy. Your friend, too. Little hunks. I bet you guys know how to —”

“I only got twenty.”

Martina rolled her eyes. “Twenty? That’s it?”

“Yeah.”

“Let’s see it.”

“What? Why you need to see it?”

“Listen,” she said, voice suddenly firm, “if you’re gonna act funny, you can scram.”

“What?”

She stood back up, towering over Charlie. “I need the money first. Those are the rules, kid. No money up front and you can hit the road.” She stuck out an open palm.

Charlie stared at it.

“I don’t got time for cheapies, right?” she said. “Like yesterday, right? This short guy, this Paki, wouldn’t shut up. ‘The last prophet’s the only right one,’ he said. ‘Muhammad’s the last prophet. Muhammad’s this and that. You have to follow the last prophet, right, because that’s the way it goes, right? When a new one comes along, he’s the proper one. Jesus, Moses, Abraham — they’re all too old. Their time’s passed, right? Muhammad’s the only real prophet for our time. Muhammad, Muhammad, Muhammad. The newest one. Don’t believe what anybody else says. Pray to Allah. Listen to Muhammad. Somebody tells you something else, it’s wrong. I know the truth. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.’ Cheapie Paki didn’t have a penny. Wouldn’t leave me alone, right? Just wanted to yak my ear off. I don’t got time for that.” She glared at Charlie, palm out. Her face was like an angry bird’s. “You gonna pay or scram?”

Charlie raised his chin. “How about if I —”

“Pay or scram, kid?”

“All right, all right,” Charlie said. Warily, he took a crumpled twenty out of his pocket and placed it in her hand.

She stuffed the bill in her handbag.

“So, like, we could do —” Charlie began.

“Don’t worry, kid,” she said, zipping up her bag. “Whatever you want. We’ll have lots of fun. Buckets … buckets of fun.” She snorted, turned to me. “What about you. What’s in your pockets?”

I shook my head.

“You forgot how to speak?”

“No.”

“Then let’s see.”

“See what?”

“Show me what’s in your pockets.”

“Oh. There’s nothing. Nothing.”

“Then show me.”

I didn’t understand.

“Empty your pockets, kid.”

“Oh,” I said, pulling the lining out of my pockets.

She looked at each one closely, sticking her neck forward. They were empty save for my back-door key. “Cheapie,” she muttered, then turned to Charlie. “Twenty’s all you got, huh?”

“Yeah.”

“So if I checked in your wallet right now there wouldn’t be a penny?”

“You don’t believe me?”

“If I checked in your wallet, there wouldn’t be a penny?”

“No.”

“Then show me.”

“What?”

“Show me your wallet, kid. I wanna see if you’re messing with me.”

“I’m not.”

“Then show me.”

“I ain’t showing you my wallet,” Charlie said.

“’Cause you got more dough, right? Lousy cheapie. Trying to rip —”

“No.”

“Why not then?”

“’Cause I don’t want you touching my wallet.”

“Oh,” she said, throwing her hands in the air, “so you’ll trust me with your cock in my hand but not your money, eh? Want me to touch your little pee-pee but not your wallet, right? Ha! If I were you, kid, I’d be lots more afraid of the damage I could do with your —”

“Screw this,” Charlie said. “Give me back the twenty, miss. I don’t want nothing from you. Forget it.” Switching roles, he stuck out his palm.

She ignored it. “Won’t even fork over fifty for the best there is! Bet you buy your sneakers at Value Village, you misers, you … you stupid cheapie kids! Think I’m gonna give it up for nothing, right? Give you each a freebie? You think I’m gonna —”

“Listen, just give me the —”

“Six hundred, one fella pays!” She sliced her arm through the air. “Six hundred dollars! Just for an hour. Six hundred for one hour! That’s big time. More than a lawyer makes. And I work for myself. Every penny goes in my pocket. That’s real money. I make real money. I buy nice things. Prada, Gucci — all that shit! And you think I got time to give you two —”

“We don’t want nothing, lady. Just give me my money back and we’ll —”

“Lousy cheapskates!” she hissed, twirled around, and began strutting away from us down the sidewalk. “Misers! Cheapers! Cheapsters …”

“I ain’t leaving you alone till I get my money,” Charlie said, trying to catch up.

“You’re gonna walk me home?”

“If I have to.”

She didn’t answer, kept walking. I was following, too, a little way behind Charlie.

“You think I’m stupid, lady?” Charlie said. “Give me the money.”

“Don’t got it.”

Charlie sped up. “What?”

“You never gave me shit, kid. Nothing. Never paid me nothing. Don’t know what you’re talking about. You’re talking nonsense. Trying to rip me off.” She took longer strides. “Now get outta here. Quit bothering me. Go to bed.”

Charlie ran up beside her. “You think you’re gonna rob me, lady? Give me the money.”

Again she picked up her pace. “Scram, kid.”

Charlie matched her speed. “Give it.”

“Dunno what you’re talking about, kid.”

“C’mon, lady. Enough of this. I gave you my twenty. Hand it over.”

She gained a step on him. “It’s past your bedtime. Go home. Your mother’s probably wondering where —”

“You stupid whore! You ugly … you …”

She stopped, didn’t turn around, waited.

Crying.

She must be crying. Sobbing silently, a hand over her mouth, eyes squeezed shut the way my sister did for three weeks straight after being dumped by her first boyfriend.

But when the hooker turned around and looked down at Charlie, her face was dry and she was smiling, squinty-eyed, cheeks all bunched up as if he were a dressed-up little girl or a cute-eyed kitten. She put her hands on her knees, again crouched to Charlie’s height, and said, as if he were an old friend of hers, “Used to sleep in her bathtub, right, ’cause she figured it was the only safe place in her apartment. Her bathtub. She put a mattress in her bathtub, right? Pillow, blanket, everything. Figured there were ghosts in all the other rooms, right, and they’d get her at night, so she sleeps in the bathtub. Tub’s the only place she feels safe, right? And her home’s in Russia. Has no family in Toronto. She’s the only person in her family to ever leave the country, right? And listen, one night she’s about to go to bed and she sees something buried in the plaster on her bathroom wall, a piece of paper or something, right? So she digs it out, and it’s a photograph. It’s her grandfather. It’s a picture of her grandfather who never left Russia. His picture’s buried in the wall of her apartment. In her bathroom. In Toronto. How did it get there, eh? She showed me the picture, too — this old, wrinkled guy with no hair. Says she’s a hundred percent sure it’s him. And I believe her. It makes sense, right? The only place she feels safe sleeping, and there’s this picture of her grandfather buried in the wall. Like he’s protecting her and she could sense it. Spooky, eh?”

“The hell you talking about lady?”

“I didn’t used to believe in nothing like that.” She shook her head to animate the point. “Aliens, zombies, ghosts, spirits — all that X-Files junk. But ever since she told me about her grandfather, I believed in ghosts. You never know, eh? Never know what’s out there. Never know what could be watching you. Never know what —”

“You gonna give my twenty back?”

“You want me to tell you a secret, handsome?”

Charlie didn’t answer.

She moved her face closer to his as if she were going to kiss him. “I’m not,” she whispered very slowly, “a woman.”

“What?”

“Only half, darling.”

“What?”

She straightened. “It’s Joe, right? Your name’s Joe?”

“What?”

“That’s your name, isn’t it? Joe?”

“What?”

“Anybody ever call you Joey?”

“Joey?”

“Joey. Like the Joey on Friends. Chandler’s roommate, you know? Anybody ever call you that?”

“No.”

“Really?”

“Yes.”

“Strange,” the person who called herself Martina Hingis said. She turned around and kept walking west along the sidewalk. Neither of us followed. The cheetah-patterned skirt became an orange blur in the cool September night.