By the time Tacko found his car, he was drenched and his shoes and socks were infused. He got in and just sat there dripping. Then he glanced up and there were DaBlonde and Louis Amboy gliding up and down in front of their wall of windows, DaBlonde in that Chinese robe, her hair in a blue towel turban. The pair of them moving forward and sideways and back, box stepping.
They were dancing. Her tiny, him huge, they were dancing, waltzing — not gracefully, shamblingly, but still. Still, they were waltzing alone in their little weird-shit world.
Tacko turned the car on, and the heat, then just sat there watching.
He had his cell phone, he could call them, invite himself back. Nothing to stop him, if that’s what he wanted to do. He took it from his coat pocket and Dave Sandlin’s business card came out with it. He glanced at the card — exquisite printing — and then opened his window and tossed it out.
They were still waltzing up there, and Tacko started scrolling through his stored numbers — Abbott, Bill; Adler, Ed; Agnew, Connie, Alman, Foster & Meeks; Amboy, Louis & Andrea. Thirty-two on Tacko’s speed dial. He hesitated, then was startled by a car door slamming nearby.
The guy from the Saturn stood alongside of it now in the downpour staring at the Amboys’ brightly lit condo, staring up at them as they danced their mechanical waltz. Then he strode toward the open fence gate, satchel swinging in his hand. He crossed the street, passing a few people departing the fund-raiser under voluminous black umbrellas. He walked directly to the building’s corner entrance. Tacko glanced back up at the Amboys’ windows, but they were no longer in view.
When he looked back down, his eyes tracking past where it was chiseled United States Cardboard Company, the young man with the satchel had opened the door and was going inside. Had they buzzed him up? Had they invited over another “friend”? Or thought Tacko had come back?
He turned off the car, opened his door, and got out. Stood in the rain for perhaps a minute, but still didn’t see anyone in the windows.
Dave Sandlin, he noticed, had gone back into the gallery.
A middle-aged couple hurried by under umbrellas, squealing with laughter as they hit puddles.
Tacko started to get back into his car, but changed his mind and jogged up the line to the Saturn.
North Carolina plates.
And now when he looked back up, the Amboys’ condo was dark, except for an ambient blue wash that came off the computer monitors.
On his way back to his Cooper, he stooped and picked up Dave Sandlin’s card. Then he got in, tossed the card on the other seat, restarted the engine, and drove home.
Did he even have a fucking resume to send?
Midnight at the Oasis
by Anne Thomas Soffee
Dedicated to the memory of Saleem Hassan
Jefferson Davis Highway
Things were bad, real bad, when I went to bed that night. Coming up on one month without smoking rock meant having to deal with the mess I’d been making of my life since I first picked up the pipe. No job, hardly any money, and a real pisser of an attitude problem — not that I’d started with the friendliest personality, but you work with what you’ve got.
“For somebody so young and pretty, you sure are awful hateful, Kim.” This was something Beau said to me once while we dragged the stinking corpse of a harvest-gold Frigidaire down the steps of a trailer I was cleaning for the Arab. But that I could deal with. This particular night really started to suck when the sun went down and two of Ivan’s girls walked over from the City Motel to give me a gentle reminder about the money I owed.
“Ivan’s lonely,” the one with the broken teeth said. She grabbed a fistful of my hair and jerked my head to the side.
“He don’t miss you,” sneered the one with the gimpy arm. “He just miss his money.” She reached out with the good arm and smacked the side of my face, hard. The other girl let me go, and they stood there and looked at me with as much disdain as two twenty-dollar whores could muster.
“Ivan knows they fired me from the diner,” I told them, rubbing my cheek where it stung. “Tell him I’m looking for work.”
“You think he cares?” Teeth reached for my hair again but I stepped back. “You better get that pretty little ass out on the corner and make his money.”
“Just don’t do it here,” Gimpy-Arm warned. Then the two of them headed back out to Jeff Davis, where a car had already pulled over to meet them.
They didn’t need to worry about me horning in on their territory. I was already pissed off at myself for being a trailer park stereotype, what with the waitressing and the crack rocks and all. I’d only moved to Richmond from Christians-burg that spring and already I was like something out of a bad indie movie full of trailer park caricatures. Beau told me not to worry about it, that it happens to a lot of people when they first move into Rudd’s, but that hardly made me feel better. It’d almost been a good thing that the diner fired me and Ivan cut off my tab, because it did for me what I couldn’t do for myself.
I went to bed with my cheek still tingling, worrying and thinking about the money — a thousand dollars, not that much to some people but a hell of a lot to one unemployed teenage waitress in Rudd’s Trailer Park. I’d heard about things Ivan did to people who owed him less, and it wasn’t anything I wanted to be a part of. He’d told me stories, casually, while I smoked on his dime at the City Motel. At the time I thought he was confiding in me because I was different, like he could see the light behind my eyes. In hindsight, he was probably just issuing a warning. When I finally fell asleep, I dreamed of box cutters, of socks full of rolled nickels, of the gimpy-armed whore’s hard little eyes.
So you wake up from a night like that and you figure there’s nowhere to go but up, right? You figure you’ll make a pot of black coffee, warm up the old Emerson record player that came with the place, put on Metallic KO — Iggy Pop being the Patron Saint of Trailer Parks — and shake it out, clean a trailer or two, and go on with life. That’s what I figured until I opened my door and found a random crackhead on my steps, or what looked like a random crackhead until I realized he was there for a very specific purpose.
“Ivan says you gotta pay him before Saturday,” he said without looking up.
“I can give him something on Saturday, not all.” Realistically, there was no job, no legal job, that would make me that much money by the weekend.
“Ivan says he needs it all by Saturday.” He picked at a sore on his hand. “Or else you’re gonna fall off the Lee Bridge.” When he looked up I could see that he wasn’t telling me because he wanted to. He turned away. “Ivan says nobody would miss you.”
I like to think that I’m tough, but when he said that, it stung worse than the gimpy-armed whore’s slap.