Читать книгу Checker and the Derailleurs - Lionel Shriver - Страница 14

Just to play the devil’s advocate,” said Eaton, “don’t you think this inundation of aliens has to be stopped? According to Kaypro, the U.S. is on its way to being a full third Spanish.”

“Hijack isn’t Spanish,” said Checker.

“By the turn of the century, over half the school-age kids in this country will be Spanish.”

“Hijack isn’t Spanish,” said Checker.

“We’re being overrun by Hispanics.”

“Hijack isn’t—”

“Foreigners, then.”

“This country is made of foreigners.”

A tired point. “Granted. But while personally we all like Rahim—”

Caldwell guffawed. “Come on, Strike. That little terror would send an army of raving Shiites after your ass in a minute. He hates your ever-loving guts. Let’s not play pretty.”

Eaton sat tapping his foot. It was impossible to have an intelligent discussion with these people. “I’m trying to approach this politically. While I’m not saying you’re doing the wrong thing with Rahim—”

“Then why make the point?”

“There’s something to be said for ideological discourse,” said Howard.

“What?” asked Check.

Howard shrank, and shrugged. Howard was often paralyzed by direct questions.

“See, I’m not much of an intellectual,” Check went on, “like Howard here—”

Howard beamed.

“—But ideas in the air. They’re funny animals. They seem to come kind of—afterward. Like, you decide you don’t like some Iraqi, or Spanish people, and then you grab one of these flying things and make it squawk.”

“You’re saying all abstraction is invalid?”

“Just seems like a shifty business, you know? To talk about Hijack but to say that the one thing we can’t talk about when we talk about him is—Hijack.” Checker raised his eyebrows innocently. “That make sense?”

“Not much,” clipped Eaton.

“Let me put it this way. Hijack goes back to Iraq—”

“Thwack,” said Caldwell.

“Exactly. Or at least he gets drafted, and this thing with Iran—”

“Which isn’t America’s problem.”

“Everyone is everyone else’s problem,” said Checker promptly.

“That sounds—burdensome,” said Eaton. “How do you take it all on and keep from killing yourself?”

Checker studied the table. “Interesting question.”

Eaton took a shrewd look at the other drummer. “The point is: personal loyalty is one thing. But if you look at the big picture, our borders are being overrun. It’s practically a national emergency. And you’re about to engage in immigration fraud. Sure, you want to help your friend. But morally—even if you won’t recognize the category—your operation is iffy.”

Finally Checker responded, with unusual gravity. “I live in a little picture. It’s the only picture I have. You say personal loyalty is one thing. I don’t think so. I think it’s everything. It’s the beginning of everything, anyway, Striker. It’s the bottom line.”

Checker had closed his eyes; finished, he opened them and the whole band applauded. Eaton didn’t know what had gone wrong.

Checker slid down the basement rail, swung around a water pipe, and tripped into the tiny alcove by the heater where Rahim was once more dripping along with the candle. Check threw the Iraqi a beer. Keeping Rahim hydrated was a full-time project, but with his nights in the glassworks Checker was getting used to cooling his own body like a nuclear reactor and never forgot to bring the hideaway something to drink. He whisked around the cramped back room picking up gyro wrappers and soda cans, noticing how in only a minute or two the steam from the leaky heater began to condense and bead on his skin. The wide cuff he wore on his left wrist shifted; constant perspiration was making the leather slick and Checker carefully readjusted it. In the light of the candle his muscles gleamed, the veins down his forearm shone in golden branches, and water ran in runnels between his tendons. Checker stopped to admire the shine. Sweat reminded him of Syria.

“Sheckair?” Rahim whispered, sitting in a puddle on the greenish concrete floor. “Not complaining and thanking you so much for the many drinks and the books and the tapes, but—”

“It’s hot here and this sucks,” Checker finished quietly for him, taking Rahim’s waste pail from the corner and running it unsqueamishly upstairs. “So,” he announced on his return, “a deal.”

“Wife?”

“Sort of, but you’re not going to like it.”

Rahim wilted a little further. “She is ugly?”

“No,” said Check, smiling at the picture. “She’s a knockout.”

“So how is problem?” Rahim immediately cheered. “I marry pretty girl, stay in Amedica.”

“She’s no girl, believe me.”

“How she is pretty, she is old dog?”

“English lesson, Hijack. Pretty is for sweet girls with pastel sweaters and heart-shaped lockets around their necks. Pretty girls had braces. Pretty girls take a shower at least once a day and never have dishes in the sink. They keep their nails trimmed and their shoes match their pocketbooks. Or they may even wear black leather and metal studs and ride a Harley, but they still have a way of looking at you, a way of smiling, that means they’ll never hurt you in a million years. They like to hold hands and they’re nice, they’re relaxing. But Syria Pyramus isn’t a girl and she’s not pretty and she’s definitely not relaxing.”

Rahim’s eyes widened. “Fire lady?”

“Yes, but—”

Rahim leaned back and stretched out his legs as much as he was able. “Not bad, Sheckair. But she need discipline.”

Checker groaned. “That’s what she said about you.”

“I work at my market. She make supper. Have rooms clean, flowers—”

“Hold everything.” Checker took the candle and placed it ritualistically between them, crossing his legs on the floor. “This is the scam, my man: You make the supper. You have the rooms clean. You buy the flowers.”

Rahim Abdul, loyal Muslim and recent Iraqi immigrant, born and faithfully raised in the bosom of paternity, looked genuinely confused. “What you say?”

“She wants—an assistant,” said Check uncomfortably. “To cook and clean and shop. She wants—”

“Slave!”

Checker shrugged. “Yeah. Take it or leave it.”

“Leave it!”

As Rahim glared, Checker stood back up and stretched, pointedly knocking his arms into the pipes overhead. “Well, I guess we could get you a little lamp here, a table. And maybe a TV, though with Kaypro around all the time you couldn’t use the sound …”

“Don make funny.”

“Well, is it a joke, Hijack? That they’ll shoot you for draft evasion, was that just a good story?”

“No story,” said Rahim glumly. “Only—shoot if lucky.”

“And we might be able to rustle you out of here, but you could never come back. You’d have to leave The Derailleurs—”

“I never leave Derailleurs!”

“Sh-sh!” There was scuffling in the upstairs hall. “All right, then,” said Checker softly when the steps retreated, kneeling to his saxophone player. “This is the real thing, Hijack. Pulling this off is going to be tricky. We’re going to marry you in a wet basement, real quiet, no champagne. And even when you’re married, the INS is going to investigate you down to the drawer you keep your underwear in. Frankly, they don’t like Iraqis. I’ve done the best I can and we don’t have any money, the woman has to get something out of this, okay? But I don’t want to see you ground into a falafel just because you’re too much of a man to fix her one yourself.”

The expression on Rahim’s face changed, and Checker wasn’t sure he liked it. “We make me Amedican,” said Rahim, eyes glittering with complicity. “Then we teach this Fire Lady to make her husband falafel with warm, fresh pita and walk three steps behind him in street.”

“No way, Hijack—”

Rahim raised his hand. “I do how you say.”

“You do what Syria says and agree to it now or we can’t go through with this.”

“No problem,” said Rahim mildly, who had learned this neutralizing phrase only lately and found it immensely handy.

“You mean you agree?”

“No problem,” Rahim repeated.

“There’d better not be,” Checker warned.

“Is one more thing.” Rahim put a hand shyly on Checker’s arm. “She is—clean?”

Checker guffawed. “Syria?”

“No, I mean—she is not used?”

Checker paused, and said carefully, “I’m sure Syria hasn’t ever done anything like this before.” He had the sensation with this statement of balancing on a very thin beam—he held his breath, every word a smooth, sure step, as long as he didn’t look down. He knew Rahim.

“Excellent,” said Rahim. “Because in my country, if she—”

“You really don’t need to worry about that,” said Checker hurriedly. “We have a deal? With cooking and cleaning?”

Rahim only rose and said eagerly, “I can go now?”

“Kaypro likes it here, bridegroom. You stay put.” Checker left the Iraqi in the basement to stew, much like shutting a child in his room to restore his good behavior. But Checker remembered grimly that the tactic just created wilier, more rebellious children in the long run.

Sure enough, when Checker returned upstairs Gary Kaypro was back again, this time commiserating with Eaton about how the last thing you found in New York nowadays was “a real American.” Kaypro was drinking Wild Turkey, bemoaning the incompetence of the INS, and Checker wondered how Rahim had gotten snagged in one of its rare moments of effectiveness. As Kaypro went on about their tiny budget and ludicrous responsibilities, though, Check did start to feel sorry for him—though he wanted to play sax with The Derailleurs, Kaypro didn’t seem corrupt really, and he had a stupid, impossible job.

“But it’s flattering, isn’t it?” Checker intruded gently. “Immigration?”

“Yeah, how?”

“Well, we can’t let everybody in. But it’s nice to run a place that everybody wants into instead of out of. Nobody’s beating down any doors to get into Iraq.”

“God, no,” and Kaypro proceeded with a string of Middle Eastern horror stories, then back to nightmare bureaucracy and fraud. “You know, for a couple hundred dollars any wet can outfit himself with birth certificate, driver’s license, and social security card? They sell them in packets.”

Checker restrained himself from asking. “Where?”

During the week Checker dragged a doctor down to the basement and over to Vesuvius for blood tests, and stood in line for forms at City Hall. Most of his pocket money went to buying Rahim six-packs, most of his time to finding a minister, rushing pizza slices down Plato’s back stairs before the cheese congealed, and calming Syria after she inflamed at the least inconvenience this odd project cost her. But Checker didn’t mind being busy—he loved all forms of motion. He ran his errands with Zefal, and in January the roads were uncluttered with other cyclists, the air slapping his skin, sharp in his throat. Winter coloration in New York has a subtle palette—the ashen crust of dried salt on macadam, the dun scrub of dead grass in the parks, the dapple of tabloid pages flapping down cracking sidewalks, the flat cardboardy bark of beeches and ginkgos, the leaden loom and pulse of the sky—all these grays, depressing to some, were tender to Checker.

Friday, Kaypro showed up at Plato’s with his saxophone. He’d returned to the club every night that week, on the pretense of doing his job. Eaton, especially, seemed to like talking to the man, scattering their conversation with brands of shells and pedals and guitars, testing Kaypro’s knowledge of obscure bands and backup musicians. Eaton liked to prickle these games with “Of course, at your age …” “You must not get to …” “I don’t suppose you’ve heard of …” Check watched each “your age” hit Kaypro like a little dart. Eaton would casually refer to late-night recording sessions and wild impromptu coke parties by the river, full of spontaneous pranks and backslapping camaraderie. He must have enjoyed the pinched, left-out look on the officer’s face, an expression not even of nostalgia but of pure deprivation—Kaypro’s own youth wouldn’t have been like that, because nobody’s was.

While the agent didn’t seem to mind Eaton, picking up the latest jargon and memorizing the names of hot bands and clubs, he virtually leaped at Checker whenever The Derailleurs’ drummer walked in the room. Yet Checker himself began to avoid the man. The carefully ripped T-shirts the agent appeared in every night embarrassed him, the same way fat people did who insisted on wearing pants three sizes too small. And Kaypro said “used to” and “I remember” far too frequently for Checker’s taste. He would lean too far over the knotty pine tables, he talked too loudly, he laughed too long, and in his rare pauses Kaypro’s wistfulness trailed under Checker’s nose like the smell of an electrical short. Kaypro was losing his hair and weighed too much and showed up every night in a different hat, trundling into the club with a panicked expression until he found one of The Derailleurs at the bar. He was a terrible influence on Caldwell.

Later Checker wrote a song about their gig with Kaypro Friday night, though he never showed it to Gary for fear of hurting the man’s feelings. To this day Check hasn’t allowed his band to play “In the Pocket” publicly in case the agent might hear. For archival interest, though, this is the song, though Checker wouldn’t even approve of our printing it here:

In the Pocket

Last week tooted a few tunes through—

Kids look younger than they used to.

Rapped so fast with all new lingo.

(We don’t say “rapped” now, Mr. Kaypro.)

My reed kept rasping through their song;

When they stopped I still blew strong.

I missed the beat, I lost the key—

But who wants teenage sympathy?

My life’s on digital delay,

Echoes the rate of my decay.

Hey, Warhol, what are we to do

When our fifteen minutes

Are through?

Extension cord

Won’t reach the socket.

Can’t seem to play

In the pocket.

On the charts in ’69—

I’m a scratched-up 45.

Fingerprinted, grooves grown moldy,

Sunday morning Golden Oldie.

I was once a pretty boy,

Crooned a sax with purple joy.

Was it good as I recall?

Has purple haze obscured it all?

My life’s on digital delay,

Echoes the rate of my decay.

Hey, Warhol, what are we to do

When our fifteen minutes

Are through?

Still on stage

But off the docket.

I used to play

In the pocket.

It was a sad song.

He’d thought Syria would find the afternoon amusing. She didn’t. He’d thought he would find it amusing. He didn’t. Oh, the band was having a good enough time. They’d snuck with muffled laughter down the back stairs, with napkin bow ties twist-tied to their collars. Caldwell buzzed the Wedding March softly on his kazoo. J.K. had snatched up a beer-can pop-top and a radiator hose clip for rings. Sure. Ha-ha.

But as Check had escorted the bride to their ad hoc chapel she’d said practically nothing. “You don’t seem like the sentimental type,” he commented. “Are you?”

“This sucks,” she said simply. Only several blocks later did she volunteer, “When I was growing up we thought everything was a joke—the prom, graduation. We mooned principals, crashed formal dances in patched jeans. But the joke was on us. It was a cheat.”

“Why a cheat?”

“Those ceremonies were for us. We only sabotaged ourselves.”

She said sabotage. She said travesty. She even said violation. All she didn’t say out loud was disappointment.

The basement was in top form, a steam engine. By this time Rahim’s complexion was the pasty, bloated color of some of the creatures that washed up on the rocks in the park. His hair had twisted into damp jerricurls; his fingers were pruny, and he claimed the back of his neck was beginning to mold.

Checker introduced the minister, a Quaker who saw Rahim as a persecuted political refugee and who was therefore feeling liberal and pleased with himself. He was elaborately understanding when Rahim began to carp: in a Muslim wedding, men and women should stand on opposite sides; though in the cramp of Plato’s basement it was more practical to divide them into separate layers. Wasn’t Syria going to sit the Seven Days, with seven different dresses, each more exquisite than the last?

“No, we’ll do a variation,” Syria proposed. “For a week I’ll wear the same green work shirt, and every day it will get a little bit dirtier. Then finally the big night will come, just the two of us, and you can wash it.”

Rahim didn’t laugh.

As the minister began, mopping his forehead between vows, Checker didn’t look at the couple but down at the pop-top in his hands; by the time he offered the ring to Rahim, he’d twisted the tab off, leaving the aluminum jagged; slipped on Syria’s finger, it must have scratched. “Best man.” He thought about the term. It was a role he could tire of.

Instead of “I do,” Syria said, “I suppose.”

Rahim had finally stopped whining. Through the ceremony he kept slipping his gaze over to Syria, rippling his eyes up and down her lanky figure, darting incredulous glances at the wild Picasso angles of her face. Little by little he was starting to smile, until his small even teeth were spread so wide and white that he had to look down at the floor. He couldn’t have stopped smiling if he’d tried.

When the minister said, “You may kiss the bride,” Rahim’s smile spread more extravagantly than ever, and Syria paused to examine her new husband; perhaps for the first time he was real to her, an attractive, exotic boy soon to be installed in her apartment. She leaned over with exploratory care and kissed him on the cheek; but Rahim reached over to that serpentine neck and kissed his new property on the lips with victorious possessiveness.

Syria laughed, uneasily at first, but soon with real humor, and she tied her apron under her eyes like a hajab. They went upstairs to the club, closed in the afternoon, and drank beer out of plastic champagne glasses. Syria belly-danced to the refrain “Never gonna do it without the fez on” with Rahim, then to “The Sultans of Swing” with Checker, until, abruptly, she stopped in the middle of the song, untied the apron, and announced coldly that she had to get to work. She was such a strange combination of flamboyance and rigidity, Checker couldn’t figure her. Rahim called forlornly after her, “Don stay with husband?” but already he was making entreaties rather than firm Muslim demands. The two of them watched Syria stride away, her hair shooting by the yard behind her like a train, her big work shirt billowing like a gown, both wondering whether any bride in white lace could be more splendid.

Why are you so angry?”

Syria threw the punty halfway across the studio like a javelin; it landed in the barrel with a clang. “I’m not angry,” she said, tossing the pieces she’d just made crashing into the trash. “I’m normal.”

“Why are you normally so angry?”

“Why aren’t you?”

There was more tinkling and clattering; Syria slid the door of the furnace fully aside, the gas up high; it roared so that Checker couldn’t answer her question, which was fine—he didn’t understand it. When she’d finished swinging her glass around the shop, wielding punties in the big turns of a baton twirler, she reluctantly rolled the door shut again. He’d never seen her motions more graceful or more dreadful, either.

“So,” she turned to him. “This is my wedding night.” She whipped off her apron and threw it up so it looped around a pipe over the ceiling. “Tell me,” she said, with the dark glasses still on, “you did everything for the license, didn’t you?” Checker shrugged. “And that kid isn’t going to know how to apply for a green card by himself, is he?”

“Maybe not.”

“But of course you’ve already found out how it’s done.”

“Federal Plaza.”

“That’ll take days, you know that. All the forms?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“I don’t understand.”

“Why all this? Why everything?”

“Why not?”

He’d never seen her look so disgusted. The emotion suited her. The only thing he could imagine as more flattering was full-fledged disdain. “Are you always so good? Because it’s gross to be around. You still use that word, ‘gross’?”

“Not much.”

She couldn’t stand still, and kept ranging around the studio, throwing her coffee cup in the sink so the last sip splotched over the counter. She drank it strong and black. “Don’t know if I can stand you around here five nights a week. You annoy me.”

“Sorry,” said Check, and a quiver ran through him, a ripple of distortion like a wave of heat.

She turned fast enough to catch it. “Don’t wilt! Say, Fuck you! You’re a mess, you know that?”

Another ripple.

“Say, I am not. Say, Leave me alone. Say, I do my work and this is none of your business.”

“It’s your business if I annoy you.”

“God!” She looked around the studio and, finding nothing to smash, turned on Checker—he would learn not to clean up so well. “Those friends of yours,” she said. “They’re sickening.”

“Why?”

“The way they coo and prate over you. Really, it makes me want to puke. But they ever do anything for you, mister?”

“They’re good musicians. They make me laugh—”

“I’m not impressed.” She cut him off. “And what’s this about your being so happy all the time?”

“I get pretty—worked up. They like it.”

“You don’t seem that happy to me.”

“At the moment I’m having trouble.”

Checker was sitting on a bench; she glared down at him. “Why don’t you tell me to cram it? Why don’t you say, Leave my friends out of this?”

Checker was frantically sifting through everything he’d done in the last few hours for what could possibly have offended her. “I’m sorry I got you involved with Hijack—”

“You damned well better be. And sorry now? Just you wait.”

“I’ll do what I can to make it easy—”

Syria pushed the bench with her boot and it toppled over, Check with it. He picked himself up and dusted his hands of glass slivers. “You’ll do what you can! Tell me, You said you’d marry him, no one forced you! Say, You accepted, it’s not my problem!”

“You did say yes,” Check conceded.

“Oh, that’s powerful,” she taunted him. “And do you have anything to say about being thrown on the floor just now? That was fine, you just pick yourself up and clear your throat?”

Checker decided that doing anything she told him to do, saying anything she told him to say, would drive her all the more into a rage from his sheer obedience. He stood, then, quietly. She breathed at him, and if there had been fire shooting from her nostrils, not hard to imagine, it would have been in the ensuing silence gradually reduced to smoke.

“Do you,” said Check with perfect gentleness, “ever do anything else at night? Anything but glass?”

“Why?”

“Answer me.”

“… No.”

“Do you ever wish you did something else, once in a while?”

“Like what?”

“Just go to a bar. To a movie. Go dancing.”

“I’ve done those things before,” she said warily. “I need glass now.”