Except that I dream about those girls. Dreams like I haven’t dreamed in years. Wild dreams. Teenage dreams. And when I wake up humping nothing but the sheets, the disappointment almost does me in.
The darkness is a dead weight on my chest, and the hot air is like trying to breathe tar. My mind spins itself stupid, names ringing out, faces flying past. The little girl who’d lift her dress for us when we were eight or nine and show us what she got. My junior high and high-school finger bangs and fumble fucks. Monique Carter and Shawnita Weber and that one that didn’t wear panties because she didn’t like how they looked under her skirt. Sharon, the mother of one of my kids, and Queenie, the mother of the other. All the whores I was with when I was stationed in Germany and all the whores I’ve been with since.
The right woman can work miracles. I’ve seen beasts tamed and crooked made straight. But in order for that to happen, you have to be the right man, and I’ve never been anybody’s idea of right.
We close from one to two for lunch, and I walk over and eat a cheeseburger at the same joint every afternoon. Then I go back to the store, the old man buzzes me in, and I flip the sign on the door to Open. Today the showroom smells like Windex when I return. Mr. M’s been cleaning. I sit in my chair and close my eyes. It was a slow morning — one Mexican couple, a bucktoothed kid and a pregnant girl, looking at wedding rings — and it’s going to be a slow afternoon. The days fly by, but the hours drag on forever.
Around three thirty someone hits the Press for Entry button outside. The chime goes off loud as hell, goosing me to my feet. I peer through the window and see a couple of girls. I don’t recognize them until the old man has already buzzed them in. It’s the two from the other night, from the party in J Bone’s room. They walk right past me, and if they know who I am, they don’t show it.
Mr. M asks can he help them. “Let me look at this,” they say, “let me look at that,” and while the old man is busy inside the case, their eyes roam the store. I realize then they aren’t interested in any watches or gold chains. They’re scoping out the place, searching for cameras and trying to peek into the back room.
I look out the window again, and there’s Leon standing on the curb with J Bone and Dallas. They’ve got their backs to me, but I know Leon’s suit and Bone’s restless shuffle. Leon throws a glance over his shoulder at the store, can’t resist. There’s no way he can see me through the reflections on the glass, but I duck just the same.
I go back and stand next to my chair. I cross my arms over my chest and stare up at the clock on the wall. In prison, there’s a way of being, of making yourself invisible while still holding down your place. I feel like I’m on the yard again or in line for chow. You walk out that gate, but you’re never free. What your time has taught you is a chain that hobbles you for the rest of your days.
The girls put on a show, something about being late to meet somebody. They’re easing their way out.
“I could go $375 on this,” the old man says, holding up a bracelet.
“We’re gonna keep looking,” they say.
“$350.”
“Not today.”
The old man sighs as they head for the door, puts the bracelet back in the case. Every lost sale stings him like it’s his first. The girls walk past me, again without a glance or nod, anything that a cop studying a tape might spot. The heat rushes in when the door opens but is quickly gobbled up by the air-conditioning, and the store is even quieter than it was before the girls came in.
I don’t look at Mr. M because I’m afraid he’ll see how worried I am. I sit in my chair like I normally do, stare at the floor like always. The girls are right now telling Leon what they saw, how easy it would be, and J Bone is saying, We should do it today, nigga, nobody but the old man and McGruff in there, and him with no gun.
But Leon is smarter than that. That ain’t how we planned it, he says. We’re gonna take our time and do it right.
Him sending those girls in to case the store doesn’t bode well for me. There’s no way he didn’t think I’d remember them, which means he didn’t care if I did. He either figures I won’t talk afterward or, more likely, that I won’t be able to.
There are lots of Leons out there. The first one I ever met was named Malcolm, after Malcolm X. He was twelve, a year younger than me, but acted fifteen or sixteen. He was already into girls, into clothes, into making sure his hair was just right. I’d see him shooting craps with the older boys. I’d see him smoking Kools. The first time he spoke to me, I was like, What’s this slick motherfucker want with a broke-ass fool like me? I was living in a foster home then, wearing hand-me-down hand-me-downs, and the growling of my empty stomach kept me awake at night.
Malcolm’s thing was shoplifting, and he taught me how. We started out taking candy from the Korean store, the two of us together, but after a while he had me in supermarkets, boosting laundry detergent, disposable razors, and baby formula while he waited outside. Then this junkie named Maria would return the stuff to another store, saying she’d lost the receipt. We’d hit a few different places a day and split the money three ways. I never questioned why Maria and I were doing Malcolm’s dirty work, I was just happy to have him as a friend. Old men called this kid sir, and the police let him be. It was like I’d lived in the dark before I met him. The problem was, every few years after that, a new Malcolm came along, and pretty soon I’d find myself in the middle of some shit I shouldn’t have been in the middle of, trying to impress him. “You know what’s wrong with you?” Queenie, the mother of my son, once said. She always claimed to have me figured out. “You think you can follow someone to get somewhere, but don’t nobody you know have any idea where the hell they’re going either.”
She was right about that. In fact, the last flashy bastard who got past my good sense talked me right into prison, two years in Lancaster. I was a thirty-three-year-old man about to get fired from Popeyes Chicken for mouthing off to my twenty-year-old boss. “That’s ridiculous,” Kelvin said. “You’re better than that.” He had a friend who ran a chop shop, he said. Dude had a shopping list of cars he’d pay for.
“Yeah, but I’m trying to stay out of trouble,” I said.
“This ain’t trouble,” Kelvin said. “This is easy money.”
I ended up going down for the second car I stole. The police lit me up before I’d driven half a block, and I never heard from Kelvin again, not a Tough luck, bro, nothing. It took that to teach me my lesson. I can joke about it now and say I was a slow learner, but it still hurts to think I was so stupid for so long.
When the heat breaks late in the day, people crawl out of their sweatboxes and drag themselves down to the street to get some fresh air and let the breeze cool their skin. They sit on the sidewalk with their backs to a wall or stand on busy corners and tell each other jokes while passing a bottle. The dope dealers work the crowd, signaling with winks and whistles, along with the Mexican woman who peddles T-shirts and tube socks out of a shopping cart and a kid trying to sell a phone that he swears up and down is legit.
I usually enjoy walking through the bustle, a man who’s done a day of work and earned a night of rest. I like seeing the easy light of the setting sun on everybody’s faces and hearing all of them laugh. Brothers call out to me and shake my hand as I pass by, and there’s an old man who plays the trumpet like you’ve never heard anyone play the trumpet for pocket change.