Know Me From Smoke, page 7
There came another hmmm. “Maybe, baby. But I would have noticed you before now if you were around. If you were in the city, moved in my circles.”
“Nope,” Royal grinned and twisted her onto her back. “You would have looked right past me—I’m nobody, Stella.”
She pushed her hips into him and dragged fingernails across his neck. “I noticed you right away, the first time I saw you.”
“Oh, no you didn’t.” They were moving together like dancers. “I’m invisible. I’m a ghost. I’m Mr. Never-Been-Around.”
“Liar,” she said.
For a moment, Royal stopped, caught Stella’s half-closed eyes. “You want the truth then, what it really is that brought the ghost home?”
Stella gulped, ran a hand through Royal’s now long and curly hair. The trumpet and drum noise faded in the speakers, died to silence as the album ended. Stella shook her head. “No,” she said. “I want you to shut up and kiss me. Right…fucking…now.”
Part Two: Love Letters
Chapter 16
Royal tried to ignore the pounding rap music in the living room. He was so damn close to moving out of the halfway house it would be bad to cause trouble. One more week in the place—just had to get through the holidays—and he was cleared to move in with Stella. He needed to deliver a lease agreement to Argin. Had to have it soon, but he would figure that out later. It was nothing a smart little forgery specialist couldn’t make real easy. Put it on a letterhead and call it pretty. Like Royal learned in prison, you have money and you pay the right person, shit, you can get anything you want. That’s how the rich folks did it, he knew. The hard hitting bass wouldn’t stop: Markie and Phoenix kept the music channel going half the day out there. Not that Royal didn’t like music. But he liked a little quiet now and then. Especially because he’d been working a hard labor job downtown, and his shoulders and hands ached with fatigue.
Tomorrow, though, there’d be no work. It was Christmas Eve and Royal planned to meet Stella, spend some time with the lady and her restaurant business friends. He decided a nap wasn’t going to happen and sat at a small desk in the corner of the room. From a plastic shopping bag he pulled out a Christmas card. Green and red glitter splattered on the desk, floated to the carpet. The image on the card was a woman playing the piano—a kind of funny caricature—and she had elf ears and a Santa hat on her head. She was saying, ‘I wish you a merry Christmas…” Royal opened the card and ran his finger over the illustration inside—a stack of gift boxes in green, yellow, red. His first holiday outside the joint in twenty years and he was headed to a Christmas party with Stella—not bad. Royal picked up a pen and composed a note to Stella. Yes, he had a gift for her, but it needed a card. It took him a long time to get the words right, but he thought hard about what he wanted to say and put it down for her:
Stella,
I’m glad I ran into you down at the bar that night. And I’m glad about everything after that. You have a beautiful voice. I ever tell you that you look like an angel? You do. I like the way you stare at me in the bedroom mirror. You think I’m asleep but I’m not. I’ll tell you all my secrets. If you ask. What I want from you for a gift is a couple songs about making love and never breaking up. That okay with you? You’re going to sing to me all by myself. I want that smooth voice in my ear. I got a present for you too. And I think you might like it. I’m thinking about you while I write this. Merry Christmas.
He caught himself before he finished the note. He almost wrote, “Love, Royal,” but instead he put down: “Junior loves you.” He closed the card, sealed the envelope and, as he shoved it beneath his mattress, Phoenix burst into the room without knocking.
The man with the shot-to-hell face slid into the desk chair and leaned back like a big office executive. “What you up to, Royal? Writing a little love note to the lounge singer?”
Royal grunted. He liked Phoenix less and less each day. The man made Royal’s heart beat hard, but not in a good way. More in a fight or flight way. “What’s it matter who I send a Christmas card to?”
“Christmas card, huh? That’s real sweet.”
Royal watched the man carefully. He thought about the story Phoenix told him a week back, how the man holed up in an apartment building down in Mexico one night. He was on the run after robbing a bank—ten thousand American in pesos—and got popped with a round from a cop’s pump-action. He got hit on one side of his face, but still managed to get away. Imagine it, he told Royal, me driving through the border stop with shotgun pellets infecting my face. The way Phoenix told it, he got a suspicious look or two, but his passport was fine, and the line was three hours long. There you go. So much, Royal thought, for homeland security. After too long a silence, Royal said, “You want something, man? Or you just come in to make me look at you?”
Phoenix picked up a pen and clicked it. He scratched the underside of his chin with one end, sniffed hard while he thought what to say. “Here it is: I started thinking harder about this lounge singer, okay? Thing is, I bet she knows some real fancy people around town, right? Like, maybe she sings at weddings or something. The restaurants, sure, but she also does other stuff.”
“What about it, Phoenix?”
“She taking you to a Christmas party?”
“Maybe she is, man. So the fuck what?”
“So,” Phoenix leaned forward in the chair, tapped the pen against his knee, “I’m not doing anything tomorrow. Poor me, right? Sure would be nice to go to a little Christmas shindig.”
Royal began to shake his head.
“I’ll be on my best behavior. All gentleman-like, you know? Church-going and all that. I know there’s some room amongst the good Christians for an ex-con. Am I right?”
Royal stood, walked to the sliding glass door and peered outside at wet grass beneath afternoon sunlight. Now, he really was shaking his head. Hard, too. “I told you, Phoenix. I don’t want—”
“To do nothing to the lady. I understand you, my man. I got you with this. But what about all the other people there, huh? You know I got a whole—”
“Those are Stella’s friends.”
“We all got friends, Royal. I'm your friend, remember? About the only friend you got this side of a razor wire fence.” He said it long and drawn out, like he was from deep Texas. “We all got friends. And, if we want, we can just go get us some more.”
Royal’s head shook and shook and shook. He was doing it without trying.
Behind him, Phoenix said, “I’ll be ready around three tomorrow. Let’s leave early, go on and find us a bar for a couple drinks before we get there. Loosen up a bit, you know? Get our Christmas party going as best we can.”
Merry fucking Christmas, Royal thought.
And happy fucking New Year.
Chapter 17
Stella kept trying on different pairs of sunglasses in the little vintage store off Adams Avenue. It was one of those places where they have a buyer who goes around and finds the true vintage stuff, not the old boxes of clothes from when people take the dirt nap. She put on a pair of gold aviator-style glasses, bent down to see herself in the mirror. She liked the way the lenses reflected back at the world, how they shot her vision back into the mirror. Jeez, she thought, if the world could see what I see—how I see it—things wouldn’t be so damn hard. The reflection wasn’t perfect: The whole scene was reversed.
“They look good on you, girl.” It was the clerk behind the glass counter with all the old woman jewelry, things Stella imagined Billie Holiday might wear, big silver bracelets that jingled and bulky rings with vibrant stones not worth their own weight. “I love it when a lady wears a man’s things.”
Stella slid the glasses down her nose, put her eyes on the clerk and grinned—she knew her beauty came through in gestures like that. It was a vibrance she practiced as a young woman, and one she refined and began to conjure at will once she started singing in lounges. They like to look at you, and you can bet they like to hear you. Or, at least they’ll listen. “You mean these are for boys?”
The clerk laughed; she was a young white girl with too big front teeth. “I don’t think anything should be just for boys. Not anymore.” Her teeth fell over her bottom lip, hung there like clumsy fangs.
Stella said, “I bet you don’t. These here though are for my boyfriend.” She twirled the sunglasses with thumb and forefinger. “Christmas gift, you know?”
“You know what you should do?” The clerk pointed at her with a pink fingernail.
“What’s that?”
“You should buy a pair for yourself. Matching sunglasses—nothing says cute as a button like a matching pair of sunglasses.”
“That’s a thought.” Stella plucked out a pair of identical glasses from the display. “Like this one here.”
“I remember once, with my ex, we took a picture at the Santa Monica Pier. We both had on those cheap pairs of wayfarer sunglasses, like what old rock stars used to wear. He had green and I had pink—absolutely adorable. I still have the picture on my phone. I can’t bring myself to delete it.”
Cute as a button, Stella repeated to herself. She didn’t see her and Junior as button-cute, no way that was the case. They were both worn in and worn out. Or, as Stella always thought of herself, sucker punched by life. Still, Junior was set to move in soon and wouldn’t the two of them look cute in matching sunglasses? If she could get the man to wear them—we’ll have to see. “And if he doesn’t wear them with me,” Stella said, “what do you think that would mean?”
“That he’s a prick. That he doesn’t really love you.”
“I don’t know if I want him to love me.”
“Do you want to love him?”
Do I? Hell, Stella thought, I have no idea. What in the fuck is love anymore? Cell phone pictures and matching sunglasses? A shared apartment? Maybe a vacation in Hawaii. Someone who doesn’t—who can’t—hurt me, Stella told herself. That’s what love is. She said, “I think I want to love him, but I don’t know if I can. Do you know how that is?”
The clerk nodded. “Sometimes, you just want to love so fucking bad, but that puts you in a bad spot. It happened to me before.”
“With your ex?”
“Yeah. I guess,” she paused and sighed. They were the only ones in the store. “Wanting love is different than having it, okay? But having it is not the same as wanting it, you know? It’s like, if I could have both the wanting and the having, that would be the best love there is.”
“Right. Because you want to want, but you also want to have.”
“And they’re different things—”
“But they seem like they go together.”
“Except they’re always separate. And you search for the one when—”
“When you have the other,” Stella finished. She lifted the sunglasses and slipped them over her eyes. The store grew dim and she tilted her head, tried to bring back a little of the vibrance. “So, what do you think? These still look good on me, or what?”
Chapter 18
Phoenix, in gray flat-front slacks beneath a striped vest and hot pink tie, slapped Royal on the back and stepped into a ray of sunlight on the porch. “Tell me I look like a professional, a real bad boy.”
Royal fingered his starched collar—he wore nice Levis with a blue button-down and a cheap fedora from the nearest thrift store—and squinted at Phoenix outlined against the backdrop of the city street. “You like like you’re trying for something,” Royal said. “What it is, I don’t know.”
Phoenix grunted and hopped down the steps toward the street—the man moved like a cat at times. “You’re jealous, my man. I know a jealous look when I see it. But that’s okay. Merry Christmas to you too.”
Royal shook his head, followed Phoenix to the curb. They were waiting on a cab. Christmas Eve, Royal thought, and it’s sunny as hell out. You’d think San Diego could give him a little cloud cover, maybe even some rain, but that wasn’t in the forecast for today. Or tomorrow. Sun, sun, and more sun is the way it was. Royal shouldn’t complain, not even to himself, but something about the day made him wary. It was Phoenix, most likely. Royal didn’t tell Stella he planned to bring Phoenix to the party and he had no idea how she might react to the man. Gracious, he told himself. Stella, if she’s anything, is gracious as hell.
“There he is.” Phoenix nodded at a yellow cab as it turned the corner.
When the car reached the curb, Phoenix climbed in first and Royal followed. The cab driver, a white dude with yellowed front teeth and an unlit cigarette between his lips, asked them where they were headed.
Royal started, “We’re going to—”
“We're going to the liquor store on the corner of El Cajon and Thirtieth,” Phoenix said. “You know the one I’m talking about?”
The driver nodded and swung north to the boulevard, hung a left toward the sea. They passed a used car dealership with its dust-covered auction resales, a few corner stores, and a food truck hawking tamales for five bucks a dozen.
Royal watched the buildings slide past his window. He noticed his teeth pinching into his upper lip. Stress, man. Bad feelings. “Why we headed to the liquor store?” He settled a gaze on Phoenix.
“I need to pick something up. Then, we’ll hit a little drinking hole, freshen up before we hit the party.” His voice was half-bored, uninflected.
“I told Stella—”
“You must be joined to this woman at the hip—she got a chain around your ankles? You still in prison or what, man?”
Yeah, still in prison or what? The cab driver’s eyes flashed to them in the rearview mirror.
Royal met the look and raised his eyebrows. Well, you going to ask us to get out of your cab? The driver looked away, changed lanes into faster moving traffic. “I’m not in prison anymore, and I’ll be damned if I’m going back. I’m just going to see a lady about a good time.”
“Now you’re talking like you should.” Phoenix shook his head and sighed from deep in his belly. His eyes lifted as they came to the cross street nearest the liquor store. “Make a u-turn right up there. Pull to the curb and wait. This’ll take, like, a minute or two. You stay here, Royal.”
The cab driver followed instructions.
As they pulled to the curb, Phoenix was out the door and into the liquor store, a tall ugly-faced man moving into the sidewalk crowd with a well-tailored outfit sketching the movements of his loping frame.
The cab pulled forward slightly and the driver hacked spittle into his fist. He lit his cigarette with a match and puffed smoke out the window.
Royal could see into the liquor store. The front door was propped open and he made out the front counter, a backdrop of glass refrigerators with beer bottles many dozens deep, and Phoenix high-stepping across slick tile floor. As he was about to pull his eyes from the store and watch the street, something caught his attention. Royal saw Phoenix’s left hand go to the small of his back, slide beneath the vest, and come out with a small pistol, a toy-like thing with a silvery gleam to it. The fuck was this? Phoenix raised the pistol across the counter and he was saying something. What was he saying? The pistol lifted a bit, like a finger pointing at a distant sight. It fell to the counter, lifted again.
Royal whispered to himself: “Holy-fucking shit, man.”
The cab driver puffed on the cigarette, made little smoke rings out the window. The sidewalk crowds kept moving and car horns sounded at the nearest intersection. The world moved, spun onward into its own anonymous existence.
And Phoenix rubbed the back of his neck with a hand, lowered his chin and thrust the gun at the clerk behind the counter. All Royal could see was Phoenix, but he knew some poor sucker was trying to get at the cash register behind the counter, trying to slow his heart and get Phoenix the money. He imagined how the guy felt in there, how his mind probably flashed to a wife and baby at home, to his shiny economy car parked in the alley out back, how he thought about death right then and wanted to go to a safe, safe place where no ugly, well-dressed crook could point a pistol at his unshaven face.
What was Royal feeling? His heart was in his throat, right there where his tongue pressed against the roof of his mouth. He was excited; it was a familiar excitement, almost sexual. Like the first time he saw a girl naked in the back seat of a stolen sedan. Watching the crime from the cab, he got the sense that life was starting over again, that he was in a place he knew, and that he belonged right where he was—Royal was a crook and, watching Phoenix thrust that gun at the air, he knew a crook was what he always wanted to be. Maybe, always would be.
Phoenix moved toward the counter, took a bundle of bills, shoved them into the left-front pocket of his slacks. The money made a bulge there, like a man carrying a wallet with receipts from all his years of purchases. But Phoenix didn’t stop with the money—his left hand shot across the counter and, before Royal could groan, the clerk flew onto the slick tile floor. He twisted onto his back and held his hands up toward Phoenix: the man was pleading for his life. Phoenix slid the tiny pistol back where it came from, lifted a wingtip covered foot, and plowed it into the clerk’s belly. The man curled into the fetal position, rested his head against the tile. And Phoenix was out the door, into the cab.
He sank into the seat and said, “Around the corner, down Thirtieth Street, there’s a bar I know. Head that way. We’re getting ourselves a drink. We’ll walk after that.” He dug into his pocket. His hand came out plastered in green. He licked a thumb and started counting the bills.
