Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It (5 page)

After the funeral, Steven drove her home and they sat in his truck, talking about nothing, until finally she got out and went inside. He went back to his parents’ house feeling like death was on him, a film on his face and grit in his teeth. He took a shower in his old bathroom, wishing he had a warm-hearted girl like Acey’s cousin to hold on to, and cried under the stream of water. In the morning, he got up to go back to the clanging plant.

RITA CALLED HIM
three days later and said, “I want you to help me hold a raffle.”

“A raffle for what?”

“For me,” she said. “I want to charge five dollars a ticket.”

“What’s the prize?” he asked.

“
Me
,” she said. “I
said
that. For a night.”

He thought about it: her skinny body, the odd waifishness. “No one’s ever charged five bucks a ticket,” he said.

“No one’s ever got a five-dollar hooker, either,” she said.

“Some of them might have,” he said. “Some of them get it for free.”

“I’ve seen the way they look at me,” she said. “I think I can get five a ticket. That’s five hundred and forty bucks, with two decks. If I could get ten, it would be over a thousand, and I could get out of here. But I don’t know if I could get ten.”

“It’s illegal.”

“So is every fucking thing that goes on at that plant,” she said. “Jesus. Will you help me or not?”

He imagined himself pushing raffle tickets for Acey’s girlfriend’s pussy, for the girl who’d shown him how to cheat at spelling in third grade. “No.”

“You have to.”

“I don’t have to do anything. No one’s going to buy a ticket.”

“They will, too. Just get me the cards, and I’ll sell them myself.”

“Get your own damn cards. You can cut them with scissors.”

“It’s not the same,” she said. “It has to look like what they’re used to. I need you to help me.”

Steven hung up the phone and sat looking around his mother’s living room, at the curtains she had sewn, now long faded, and the flowered couch where she had sat, missing his father and dying. It seemed strange now, their long marriage, their total dependence on each other. His father couldn’t cook a meal or shop for groceries any more than his mother could gas up a car.

In the morning, on his way to work, Steven bought two decks of cards, one blue and one red. All he was going to do was give Rita the cut cards and let her do what she wanted, but Kyle Jaker, a kid on Steven’s crew, saw him at the bandsaw and asked what the raffle was for.

“Nothing.”

“Come on,” Jaker said.

“Acey’s girlfriend wants them.”

“For what?”

Steven paused too long before saying, “I don’t know.”

“Oh, man, is it for her?”

Steven wondered how Jaker had guessed that, and moved away. “I said I’d get her the cards, that’s all.”

Jaker was scrappy and vain and pale-skinned, with a wild cowlick in the back of his carefully combed hair. It gave him a roosterish look. He skipped along beside. “How much?” he asked.

“She wants ten.” Steven thought Jaker would balk at the price, and they’d be done.

Jaker pulled a twenty-dollar bill out of his wallet. “I’ll take two,” he said.

Steven had never seen a twenty come out so easily at the plant, or in the bar. Maybe not in his life, ever. “I’m not selling them.”

“You just sold two. Come on.”

He held the bill out and Steven finally took it, and dealt him two halves from the blue deck.

“The jokers!” Jaker said, grinning. “Jaker’s jokers. That’s good luck.”

Word couldn’t have spread faster if Steven had announced the raffle on the paging phones—which had gone eerily silent since Acey’s death—and by lunchtime he had sold all of the blue deck and started on the red. He had agreed to meet Rita at the bar, and she climbed into his truck. He put the wad of bills and the blue stubs on the seat between them, and she grabbed the cash.

“I knew it!” she said.

“I hate this.”

“I knew they’d buy them.”

“You could get hurt.”

“I can take care of myself,” she said. She lifted her hips to tuck the cash away in her tight jeans, where it bulged. Then she put the blue stubs in her jacket and zipped up the pocket, like a kid putting away her milk ticket.

“There are other ways to get money,” he said.

“I’ve tried them.”

“Have you seen those guys?”

“You know I have.”

“Why not just turn normal tricks?”

She gave him a level stare. “Do you know how many blowjobs it would take to make this much money?” She held out her hand for the other tickets.

“I’ll sell them,” he said. “You shouldn’t have to do it.”

Half the remaining tickets sold to the lunch crowd in the bar. The other half sold by the end of his shift. Some guys pretended to be helping out Acey’s girlfriend, but most of them had a hungry glint in their eyes. She was a celebrity—Lovely Rita, muse of the pager-phone, the dead guy’s girl. Steven thought he was getting an ulcer.

She was waiting outside the plant when he finished his shift. He walked toward his truck and she followed. Inside the truck, he gave her the money.

“What do we do now?” she asked.

“There’s no
we
here.”

“What do I do? To run the raffle.”

“You put the cards in a hard hat and draw one out, and the holder of the other half wins.”

“Where does it happen?”

“In the plant.”

“Can we do it at the bar?”

“What the fuck is this we?”

“Can I do it at the bar?”

“You can’t do it alone.”

She blew her bangs off her forehead, exasperated. “Make up your mind,” she said.

“I’ll do it at work tomorrow,” he said. He pictured himself standing in front of the hungry crowd, and he was glad he hadn’t bought any tickets. If he won, having set up the raffle, they’d tear him apart.

“Thank you,” she said, and she gave him back all the stubs, checking her pocket for ones that she’d missed.

He drove her home in silence, and she kissed him on the cheek—an odd, dry, sisterly kiss. Then she clambered down out of the truck and ran through the dark to her apartment. He drove home to bed and lay wide awake, until he rolled on his back and imagined himself the raffle winner. He whacked off like a teenager to put himself to sleep.

When he got to work the next day, early for his shift, the place was crawling with white hats. They were everywhere: talking to the crews, poking around. He assumed it was because of the accident, and Acey, but Kyle Jaker told him that one of the foremen had been caught diverting stainless steel to replace the pipes in his house.

“That’s all?” Steven asked. The place looked like a kicked-over anthill.

“When’s the raffle?” Jaker asked.

“I can’t do it with all these hats here.”

Jaker scanned the busy plant. “I should’ve bought more tickets,” he finally said. “You got any left?”

“No.”

“You got your own?”

“I didn’t buy any.”

Jaker raised his eyebrows at him.

“I forgot to,” Steven admitted.

“So when’s the raffle?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “After the white hats clear out.”

“Hey,” Jaker said. “I was just asking.”

The white hats didn’t clear out, and everyone was jittery. There were too many men on the floor, and they got in each other’s way, with no one sleeping on the scaffolding. Steven kept waiting for someone to clap him on the shoulder, charge him with pandering, and throw him in jail.

Word started going around that the drawing would be at the bar, and the rumor became a kind of groundswell, it had its own momentum. The guys had given him ten bucks, or twenty, and they wanted a raffle. By the end of his shift, he had sweated through his shirt, and he changed to a new one.

He’d never seen the bar so packed. Kyle Jaker produced a hard hat and offered to do the drawing, so Steven gave him the cards. Jaker stood on a barstool and grinned down at the men standing shoulder to shoulder in the bar, staring up at him. He held the hat over his head and drew out half a card, slowly, as if performing a blood ritual. Then he held the card so everyone could see it. “Red-backed three of clubs,” he announced. “Fuck, that’s not me.”

Everyone in the room dug in his pocket or looked at the stub in his hand. Finally Frank Mantini came forward. He’d left the plant, and Steven hadn’t sold him any tickets. He handed Jaker a stub, and Jaker held it up to match the card he’d drawn. A sigh of disappointment rose up from the crowd, and there was a round of applause for Frank. Acey’s ruined foreman seemed to have some kind of right to the girl. Then the men poured out the door to go home to their families, or to bed. The built-up, waiting tension in the room was gone.

“Congrats, Frankie,” Kyle Jaker said. He clapped him on the shoulder and moved off.

Frank Mantini turned to Steven, still holding the cut card.

“Where’d you get that?” Steven asked him.

“I had twelve of them,” Frank said. “Someone called me. I came down and bought what I could off the guys. I’ve got daughters her age.”

“Don’t start,” Steven said. “I didn’t want to get involved.”

Frank handed him the halved three of clubs. A vein stuck out of his temple. He seemed to have more white in his hair than he had two weeks ago, but Steven could have imagined that. “You were Acey’s friend, right?” Frank asked.

Steven nodded.

Frank shook his head. He looked hollow-eyed. “When you see her,” he said, “would you tell her to knock this shit off ?”

Steven said he would.

He drove by Rita’s apartment after leaving the bar. He was thinking that if he had bought a ticket and won, he would have wanted his prize. He’d been thinking of her the way everyone else had, of her small hands and her wide mouth, of her straddling him with her skinny legs. She was the girl in the Springsteen song, if anyone was.
Wrap your legs round these velvet rims, and strap your hands across my engines
. Now he could wake her up and tell her she was free—he could be the good-guy hero. Or, he realized as he sat in the dark in his truck, he could pass off Frank’s three of clubs as his own. She wouldn’t know until it was too late. Frank Mantini would shit bricks, but Frank had already made his noble gesture, and gotten his satisfaction from that.

Steven was about to drive away, undecided, when Rita came outside. She was wearing a white nightgown with a pink ribbon woven through the neck, left untied in the front. She was barefoot and she had been crying, and she got in the truck. He could see the outline of her small breasts inside the white cotton, and her face looked naked with no makeup. “He’s gone,” she said. “He’s gone.”

“Acey?” he asked.

“No, this guy,” she said. “My father—I wanted to find my father, so I got this missing-persons guy, you know, who finds people. He said he could find my dad, for sure. So I paid him, I gave him the cash, and he was supposed to look for my dad, and then he just, I don’t know, left. And took the money. I’m so
fucking
stupid.”

“I’m sorry,” Steven said.

“But you know what?” she said. “I’m almost glad. I think he would’ve found out my father’s dead.”

“Why do you think that?”

“Because he never
looked
for me,” she said, wildly, gesturing to the world outside. “He never
found
me!” Then she seemed to realize that he had never looked for her when he was definitely alive, and she deflated, shrinking into herself. “I don’t know,” she said. “No one can drink like that forever.”

“Maybe he could,” he said. “He was a tough guy.”

She wiped her nose. “Yeah,” she said. “So who won the raffle?”

“Frank Mantini,” he said. “Our foreman, the one who was fired.” He fished the card out of his pocket and gave it to her. “He bought a bunch of tickets. He doesn’t want anything. He said he has daughters your age, and he wanted me to tell you to knock this shit off.”

She looked at him, wide-eyed and forlorn, then made a small, anguished noise and covered her face with her hands. Her shoulders in the white nightgown shook. She crawled across the seat into his lap, fitting herself sideways between his chest and the steering wheel. Then she tucked up her legs and buried her wet face in his shoulder. He put his arms around her too-thin shoulders, carefully. Her hair smelled unwashed, but not in the way of adults: she smelled like an unshowered child, like summers at the public pool when he was ten.

They stayed there so long, Rita alternately sobbing and sleeping, that his arms grew stiff and the sky started to lighten. Rita finally woke, cried out, and extracted herself. At no point had she tried to kiss him, but he didn’t try to kiss her, either. It wasn’t because she was Acey’s girl. It was because she seemed to be drowning, and might drag him under.

She wiped her nose with her hand. “What do you remember about my dad, really?” she asked.

He didn’t say anything.

“You can tell me,” she said.

“I remember he came to school one time to get you, in the middle of the day. He just showed up in the classroom, and he was drunk, I guess. I didn’t really know that then. He knocked over a kind of easel thing. He called Mrs. Wilson by her first name and said he was taking you out of school. She said he couldn’t.”

Rita stared at him. “God, I don’t remember anything,” she said. “It’s like a big eraser came through that part of my brain. Did I go with him?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Why didn’t you tell me when I met you at the bar?”

“Why on earth would I tell you that?”

“Is that why you didn’t want me? Why you handed me off to Acey?”

“I didn’t hand you off,” he said. “Acey grabbed you and didn’t let go. He was crazy about you. He talked about you all the time.”

Her face crumpled. “Really?”

He didn’t want her to start crying again. He had to get out of the truck and stretch his legs. “Are you hungry?” he asked. He started the engine. “Let’s get something to eat.” Still in her nightgown, at a glossy diner table, she sat eating eggs and pancakes as if she’d never seen food before.

“Slow down,” he said. “You’re going to hurt yourself.”

She licked maple syrup off her thumb. “I think I’m going to go away,” she said. “Maybe find my brother. Do you remember him?”