Then he heard that tremulous little voice. “Farley, you home?”
“I’m home,” he said. “And I need to catch some z’s, Olive. Take a walk for a while, okay?”
“We working tonight, Farley?” She entered the bedroom.
“Yeah,” he said.
“Want a knobber?” she asked. “Help you to sleep.”
Jesus, her speed bumps were worse than his. They looked like she scratched them with a garden tool. And her grille showed three gaps in front. When the hell had she lost the third tooth? How come he hadn’t noticed before? Now she was skinnier than Mick Jagger and sort of looked like him except older.
“No, I don’t want a knobber,” he said. “Just go play video games or something.”
“I think I got a shot at some extra work, Farley,” she said. “I met this guy at Pablo’s Tacos. He does casting for extras. He said he was looking for someone my type. He gave me his card and said to call next Monday. Isn’t that cool?”
“That’s so chill, Olive,” he said. “What is it, Night of the Living Dead, Part Two?”
Unfazed, Olive said, “Awesome, ain’t it? Me, in a movie? Of course it might just be a TV show or something.”
“Totally awesome,” he said, closing his eyes, trying to unwire his circuits.
“Of course he might just be some Hollywood Casanova wanting in my pants,” Olive said with a gap-toothed grin.
“You’re perfectly safe with Hollywood Casanovas,” Farley mumbled. “You got nothing to spank. Now get the fuck outta here.”
When she was gone he actually succeeded in falling asleep, and he dreamed of basketball games in the gym at Hollywood High School and boning that cheerleader who had always dissed and avoided him.
Trombone Teddy had a decent day panhandling on Hollywood Boulevard that afternoon. Nothing like the old days, when he still had a horn, when he’d stand out there on the boulevard and play cool licks like Kai Winding and J.J. Johnson, jamming as good as any of the black jazzmen he’d played with in the nightclub down on Washington and La Brea forty years ago, when cool jazz was king.
In those days the black audiences were always the best and treated him like he was one of them. And in fact he had gotten his share of chocolate cooz in those days, before pot and bennies and alcohol beat him down, before he hocked his trombone a hundred times and finally had to sell it. The horn had gotten him enough money to keep in scotch for oh, maybe a week or so if he remembered right. And no trash booze for Teddy. He drank Jack then, all that liquid gold sliding down his throat and warming his belly.
He remembered those old days like it was this afternoon. It was yesterday he couldn’t recall sometimes. Nowadays he drank anything he could get, but oh, how he remembered the Jack and the jazz, and those sweet mommas whispering in his ear and taking him home to feed him gumbo. That’s when life was sweet. Forty years and a million drinks ago.
While Trombone Teddy yawned and scratched and knew it was time to leave the sleeping bag that was home in the portico of a derelict office building east of the old Hollywood Cemetery, time to hit the streets for some nighttime panhandling, Farley Ramsdale woke from his fitful hour of sleep after a nightmare he couldn’t remember.
Farley yelled, “Olive!” No response. Was that dumb bitch sleeping again? It burned his ass how she could be such a strung-out crystal fiend and still sleep as much as she did. Maybe she was shooting smack in her twat or someplace else he’d never look and the heroin was smoothing out all the ice she smoked? Could that be it? He’d have to watch her better.
“Olive!” he yelled again. “Where the fuck are you?”
Then he heard her sleepy voice coming from the living room. “Farley, I’m right here.” She’d been asleep, all right.
“Well, move your skinny ass and rig some mail traps. We got work to do tonight.”
“Okay, Farley,” she yelled, sounding more alert then.
By the time Farley had taken a leak and splashed water on his face and brushed most of the tangles out of his hair and cursed Olive for not washing the towels in the bathroom, she had finished with the traps.
When he entered the kitchen, she was frying some cheese sandwiches in the skillet and had poured two glasses of orange juice. The mousetraps were now rigged to lengths of string four feet long. He picked up each trap and tested it.
“They okay, Farley?”
“Yeah, they’re okay.”
He sat at the table knowing he had to drink the juice and eat the sandwich, though he didn’t want either. That was one good thing about letting Olive Oyl stay in his house. When he looked at her, he knew he had to take better care of himself. She looked sixty years old but swore she was forty-one, and he believed her. She had the IQ of a schnauzer or a U.S. congressman and was too scared to lie, even though he hadn’t laid a hand on her in anger. Not yet, anyway.
“Did you borrow Sam’s Pinto like I told you?” he asked when she put the cheese sandwich in front of him.
“Yes, Farley. It’s out front.”
“Gas in it?”
“I don’t have no money, Farley.”
He shook his head and forced himself to bite into the sandwich, chew and swallow. Chew and swallow. Dying for a candy bar.
“Did you make a couple auxiliary traps just in case?”
“A couple what?”
“Additional different fucking traps. With duct tape?”
“Oh yes.”
Olive went to the little back porch leading to the yard and got the traps from the top of the washer, where she’d put them. She brought them in and placed them on the drain board. Twelve-inch strips of duct tape, sticky side out with strings threaded through holes cut in the tape.
“Olive, don’t put the sticky side down on the fucking wet drain board,” he said, thinking that choking down the rest of the sandwich would take great willpower. “You’ll lose some of the stickiness. Ain’t that fucking obvious?”
“Okay, Farley,” she said, looping the strings around knobs on the cupboard doors and hanging them there.
Jesus, he had to dump this broad. She was dumber than any white woman he’d ever met with the exception of his aunt Agnes, who was a certifiable re-tard. Too much crystal had turned Olive’s brain to coleslaw.
“Eat your sandwich and let’s go to work,” he said.
Trombone Teddy had to go to work too. After sundown he was heading west from his sleeping bag, thinking if he could panhandle enough on the boulevard tonight he was definitely going to buy some new socks. He was getting a blister on his left foot.
He was still eight blocks from tall cotton, that part of the boulevard where all those tourists as well as locals flock on balmy nights when the Santa Anas blow in, making people’s allergies act up but making some people antsy and hungry for action, when he spotted a man and woman standing by a blue mailbox half a block ahead of him at the corner of Gower Street. The corner was south of the boulevard on a street that was a mix of businesses, apartments, and houses.
It was dark tonight and extra smoggy, so there wasn’t any starlight, and the smog-shrouded moon was low, but Teddy could make them out, leaning over the mailbox, the man doing something and the woman acting like a lookout or something. Teddy walked closer, huddling in the shadows of a two-story office building where he could see them better. He may have lost part of his hearing and maybe his chops on the trombone, and he’d lost his sex drive for sure, but he’d always had good vision. He could see what they were doing. Tweakers, he thought. Stealing mail.
Teddy was right, of course. Farley had dropped the mousetrap into the mailbox and was fishing it around by the string, trying to catch some letters on the glue pad. He had something that felt like a thick envelope. He fished it up slowly, very slowly, but it was heavy and he didn’t have enough of it stuck to the pad, so it fell free.