“Here,” he said. “This belongs to you.”
He threw the money at me. But it fluttered up into the air, like tossed tissue paper or moths, and drifted down around us.
“Are you hurt?” I said. “Should I call an ambulance? Where’s Lisa?”
He had blood on his sleeves and the front of his shirt. But his hands were clean.
“She’s downstairs,” he said.
He was drunk.
“Downstairs. Waiting on you.” He laughed. “Them Indians,” he said. “Fucking cowboys and Indians.”
When I went downstairs I saw blood on the graveled steps. I had not noticed it coming up. He must have been drunk and fallen down the iced stairs. And climbed back up again. Or maybe they had carried him up and that was what cleared out the party. The two of them had a fight. Over drugs, and therefore the money in his hands. He was her connection, too, and she was always owing him money.
Lisa was not in the parking lot and her car was not there, so I supposed she had left. I checked around back. Then I saw her. She was folded into the Dumpster like she had been climbing into it and then, when she got to her middle, her hips, became discouraged and decided to lie there, bent over in half. I pulled her out. She did not look dead to me. I knew I should perform mouth-to-mouth resuscitation on her but the bottom parts of her face were not available. Her right eye, no, not her right eye, her left eye was out of its socket. Under her hair I could see a large part of her bruised brain. I tried to fold her arms around my shoulders. To lift her up, to carry her. But the whole thing was limp and heavy. We fell, and then we were sitting on the concrete and she was in my lap. Across my legs. I managed to rest her face on myself, by my chin and the knot of my tie. “She is pregnant,” I said. You better hurry. Come on, Lisa, let’s get going. Time to go, now. Up. She was always quick about getting ready. She was considerate that way. She was even quick in the bathroom. I was sitting there like that with my back against the cold metal of the blue and yellow Dumpster and my suited legs out in front of me when the prowlers arrived.
To look out on that sales floor of ours, customers like a sea, my salespeople’s heads bobbing among them, credit cards in the air, wrapped packages, Wayne Newton’s Christmas album on the CD player, a row of ten clients, fifteen clients, more, standing to see me, lined up outside my office door, one always at my desk, one leaves and as he opens the door the next rushes in, all men, all with their wallets in their hands, their wives’ presents already waiting like children in toy boats in my safe, beaming, steamed and shining, the preprinted receipts sitting beneath the little silk boxes. Seventeen thousand, twenty thousand, forty-five thousand, seventy thousand. Due. Receivable.
With that many people in the store I often looked up and saw Lisa among them. You know how that works, when you look up and you see someone you know, because the environment is familiar and you might expect them, there.
•
Jim leaned in my office door.
“Bobby, it’s time to lock up.”
“You go ahead,” I said. “I’ll close it down.”
I didn’t lift my eyes to see how he might be looking at me. I didn’t want to see his expression.
When he left I watched him walk out the door. Then I stood and looked around at my office. On the wall next to my desk was a picture of our father. Beside it was a framed-and-glass-protected carpet we bought in Tibet, from a man with no fingers: a carpet covered with semiprecious and several precious jewels, depicting a white elephant with a ruby-crowned prince on her back. I remembered when Dad’s picture was resting there, on the floor, where I was going to hang it. That was when we expanded the store, opened the new side, and put in our own private offices. I made sure the offices were separated only by a sliding pocket door. In the picture my dad is fifteen and crouching in the blocks before a sprint. His hair is brushed back, waxed, and he wears a loose-fitting sweat suit, blue or dark green (it is a black-and-white picture). The sleeves are pushed up the wrists. You can almost see the word SHATTUCK, his military school, printed across his chest, and the school logo beneath it. The number 5-something, his number, is on one arm. He had that same school logo tattooed in green ink on his left forearm. Sometimes a tan arm, sometimes white, on a white sheet.
The look in his eye, ready to sprint. Those eyes, triangular at the corners, eyebrows peaked over them, light shading half his face, a small frown for the camera, handsome, but soft in his chin.
Customers would ask me, “Why do you have a picture of your brother on the wall?” Or they said, “I did not know Jim was a runner.” The two of them are that much alike. Then they might say, “How much is that carpet? Is that for sale? That is really a beautiful rug. Is that real gold? Are those real rubies and sapphires?”
“Yes, it’s all real,” I would tell them.
I sat back down at my desk and looked at that photo of our father. This was not Jim’s fault, I knew.
But if it was Jim’s fault it was my fault, too.
I used to tell Lisa, sometimes, like if we were at Chuy’s on McKinney, where they have one of those black-and-white photo booths, “Why don’t we take our picture?” I knew better than to write her letters or manufacture documents of any kind but I thought I would like one strip of pictures and I worried that I knew why she did not want one. There was always a place you could secrete something like that and I was starting to feel like we might not have to be in secrecy all that much longer, and then we might want an image of this hidden time. But she would always say, “What’s wrong with your memory? Isn’t it nicer to remember it? That way you have to remember it.” I had no response to that. Well, I had one now, naturally.
When Jim had come to get me at the police station he had put his arm around my shoulders and said, “I’m sorry, Robby.” I had looked at him because of the tone in his voice. For a moment I had thought he sounded relieved.
But I had seen in his face that no, he was as lost as I was.
There are two cops waiting for you at your desk,” Jim said.
Granddad and I were walking in the door from the cold and everyone else was putting out the cases. He wanted to talk business, he had said on the phone, but he didn’t want Jim joining us.
We had breakfast together across the street. How’s your old man? I kept expecting him to say, to introduce a line of questioning. You know a father’s advice can be helpful at a time like this. But he was only asking for simple, specific stories about big deals I had made, about who was selling best among the sales staff, and other ordinary details of the season. He wasn’t even talking about the bank balances, or what we would have left over after we squared up with our vendors, like he should have been.
Am I being coherent? I asked myself as I replied to him. Can he understand what I am saying?
I see now that it was essential for him to hide what he must, of course, have known about my situation. In order to help me he had to communicate indirectly.
“Cops, Grandson?” Granddad said to Jim. “What the hell are you fellas up to over here?”
He wasn’t dismayed. He seemed unconcerned about everything. It was like he had the Christmas spirit. That didn’t happen to those of us in the business, though. He must have been faking it.