“I’m not aware we’ve placed an ad. Where did you see it, sir?”
“It’s on the sign outside the Flamingo.”
“I’m sorry?”
“It’s a bar in Desprit.”
“Desprit?” she said, as if someone had forced a swear word into her mouth. “I’m sorry, sir, that ad is over a year old, we’ve asked for it to be taken down.”
“Nothing works in this town,” Joe said, as he hung up the greasy receiver.
Outside his feet felt leaden on the hard road. Turning the corner to Railyard Street he bumped into Rocco, with his salesman’s eyes, hair greased back, collar up to hide the scar that ran in a red streak from his neck to his ear.
“Hey, Joe,” he said. “Thought you’d left town, the amount of times I knocked on your door. How’s Mandy?”
“I been busy, Mandy’s good.”
“I’m sure she is. You got work?”
“I heard you got out, I was going to visit you.”
“All that time inside, Joe. I saw you only once. I been out for months.” Rocco laughed. “It’s OK. I got plenty of visits, from people a lot better-looking than you.”
“I wondered how you been doing.”
“Well, here I am, Joe. I got a job going if you’re interested.”
“I dunno.”
“No killing involved. Shooting that cop was dumb. Shit, do I look like a cop killer?”
“Nah.”
“Exactly. I got style…feel this coat.”
Rocco offered his lapel and watched with canine eyes as Joe ran his hand across the material.
“Nice.”
“Joe, there’s a cool four K riding on this, you get half. Wanna be a loser all your life?”
He playfully jabbed Joe in the shoulder.
“Doing what?”
“Simple job, you’ll be in and out quicker than a whore’s snatch. What do you say?”
“Half, huh? Maybe I’ll come round later and you can tell me more about it. I ain’t promising nothing though.”
Rocco straightened Joe’s dirty collar.
“You need to smarten up, Joe, you look like shit.”
Mandy was sleeping back at the damp apartment. Her naked legs were astride the night table, her arms sprawled out on the grey sheets. A train chugged by and the bedroom shook as Joe read the note she’d left him when she staggered in at five: “Either you get a job or I’m leaving. I ain’t doing this no more.”
He ran his eyes down her back and stared at the tattoo of a naked woman wrapped around a dollar bill that spread from her spine to her buttocks. He leaned and kissed the nape of her neck, admiring the shape of her breasts from the side as they squashed into the mattress. She’d gained some weight lately and he liked it.
“I’ll buy you more tattoos, Mandy, you’ll see.”
He lay down and shut his eyes.
When he opened them it was dark. He rose and tried the light. There was no bulb in it. He navigated the room in the lurid beam shed by the streetlight, which illuminated the rusty water dripping down the back wall. Mandy’s purse lay on the edge of the sofa. Joe reached inside and took out ten bucks. He walked two blocks to the store, where he bought some razor blades and a can of shaving foam. Back at the apartment he stared into his blue eyes in the tarnished mirror as he scraped the beard from his face, waiting for the revelation. He looked in his late thirties, and the struggle to survive showed in the lines around his eyes. He was putting his best shirt on when Mandy stirred and got out of bed.
“Hey, Joe, your beard.”
“Darlin’, I’m gonna get a job, I’m gonna get us out of here,” Joe said, running his eyes down to the sculpted tuft of dark hair at her crotch as she put on her bra from the night before.
“An’ how you gonna do that?”
“You’ll see.”
“Joe, we’re only in our twenties and what have we got?” She fished her panties off the chair, which sported a broken spring. “This wet hole by a railway line that keeps us awake and drives us to drink.”
He looked at Mandy and thought how with her deep green eyes and black hair she could have so many better men than him. Then her lightbulb crackpipe on the broken coffee table caught his attention.
“We’re another bulb down,” he said.
“I’ll get a straight shooter later so you can watch me get dressed under the overhead light.”
“Don’t you want to be more than a crackhead?”
“What about you and your whisky?”
“I wish you wouldn’t do that.”
“What?”
“Put on your panties when another man’s fucked you in them.”
“They don’t fuck me in them, baby, they fuck me butt naked. An’ now’s not a good time to get jealous.”
“What does that mean?”
“I’m pregnant.”
“Is it mine?”
“Sure it’s yours, they all wear a rubber.”
“Mandy?”
“It’s yours.”
He reached out and touched her arm and she turned her head away.
“I want it,” he said.
“How we gonna bring a kid up?”
“I’ll make money.”
“Doing what? You ain’t had a job in years, you got no qualifications, we live in the poorest town in America.”
“This time it’s gonna live, we’re dying in Desprit. Sometimes when I lie awake at night this apartment feels like a coffin in the damp earth and the only living thing is a train rattling by.”
“What future does our baby have, Joe? With you and me as parents to look after it?”
“Give up crack and it will live.”
“I’ll have to give up my career first.”
“Do it.”
“While you go and work in Wall Street?”
“Remember burying her, Mandy? That night, you and me over by the park with a stolen spade? Remember that tiny body in the cold ground? You puked your guts out.”
“How could I forget?”
“I read your note.”
“I ain’t doing it no more.”
“Give me till tonight.”
He left her standing there and headed out beneath the rusted iron bridge which cast a constant shadow on their apartment. A train thundered by as Joe made his way to meet Rocco.
They sat on a leopardskin sofa at Rocco’s apartment. Joe looked with envy at his lifestyle: the plasma-screen TV, iPod, clean furniture, new carpet.
“Where d’you get all this?” Joe said.
“Does it matter? I’m getting out of here, I’m getting out of Desprit, it should be called the town of no hope.”
“So what’s the job?”
“It’s simple,” Rocco said. “This friend of mine owns an office block. It’s all legit, I got the keys.”
“He wants you to rob his office?”
“He ain’t got no insurance, wants out, he’s given me the combination. We go in, get the cash out of the safe, and leave.”
“Simple as that?”
Rocco laid a steady hand on Joe’s shoulder.
“One thing I learned inside is not to go back in.”
“So why do you need me, Rocco?”
“There’s a security guard, I know the times he does his rounds. We get to the office by the back stairs, he never uses them, but I need you to keep watch while I’m getting the cash. My friend takes sixty per cent, and between you and me it’s a straight fifty-fifty cut.”
“That’s kind of generous of you, Rocco.”
“I’m a generous guy.”
“It’s like you’re doing me a favour.”
“Joe, I got responsibilities. My kids ain’t getting all the things I’d like them to.”
“I seen them, they’re doing OK.”
“You don’t know. You ain’t a father yet.”
Joe thought of Mandy, of new tattoos, of another town away from Desprit, where he didn’t feel like spitting at himself every time he caught his own reflection. He nodded and Rocco drew his cashmere coat around his broad shoulders.
Beneath a sullen moonless sky they made their way to the office block that stood out like a scar on a street teeming with restaurants and late-night bars. Raucous drunks staggered out on to the stained pavement, arms heavy on their women, who wobbled on high heels, spraying cheap perfume into the air. Joe and Rocco scurried by, collars, up, heads down in the anonymous night.