Every Man a Menace (7 page)

Raymond didn’t like the question. He felt his stomach knot up. “Yeah, he’s a scary old boy,” he said.

“Yep, and Gloria’s a scary old girl.”

“So what are you saying?” Raymond asked. “Gloria’s going to stab Arthur in the arm? He gonna die of a fever?”

“She gonna stab somebody. She always do,” said Shadrack, shaking his head side to side like a man unhappily speaking the truth.

You are in the hands of a crazy man,
thought Raymond. “We gonna finish this deal tonight?” he asked.

Shadrack turned and looked at him. “Sure as a song is sung by a singer,” he said. “This deal will be done. Don’t you worry, Mr. Deal Broker. Look at that van,” he said, pointing at a white van that had veered in front of them, out of its lane. They drove in silence for a moment. Then, after taking a deep breath, Shadrack said, “I wish I could just do the deal with you, though. No Gloria, none of them Filipinos.”

Raymond glanced over at Shadrack and watched his head bump up and down with the road. He thought about that stolen boat. He thought about his mother, hidden away at Uncle Gene’s. When Raymond was twelve years old, she had tried to get him into the Best Buddies program. She thought he’d needed a positive male influence. Raymond was a sullen boy, and he’d told her he didn’t want to do it. Maybe his life would have turned out different. He might be working in a bank now, or be a paramedic, or some bullshit. You never know: he might have ended up with a child molester for a mentor.

Shadrack dropped him back at the Prita. Said he’d call him later, told him to shower and shave—get cleaned up.

“Since you been out,” he asked, “you go and get yourself a good meal? Steak, or some shit?”

Raymond said he hadn’t.

Shadrack looked him up and down. “My advice is make sure you get yourself pretty and fed,” he said. “It’s gonna be a long night.”

On his way upstairs, Raymond walked past a prostitute: a black girl wearing jeans with her hair pulled back. She nodded, and when he passed she called out, “Five-oh.” She thought he was a cop. Normally he would have felt insulted, but he was too preoccupied to care.

He half expected to see Gloria waiting for him, but there was nobody. The hallway was dark and empty. It smelled dirty, like old cigarette smoke. A handwritten sign had been taped to the door directly across from his own:
DON’T BOTHER ME.

Raymond lay down and tried to clear his head. His socks, damp and itchy, felt dirty on his feet. The muscles of his shoulders wrapped in painfully on themselves. Gloria would be calling any minute now. He closed his eyes and the image of a snake, black and yellow, its tongue hissing out of its mouth, jumped into his mind. When he drifted off he had a short dream about Shadrack burning his hands and holding them up, and yelling. The man’s teeth had turned shiny black. The dream was interrupted by his phone vibrating in his pocket.

It was Gloria. “Hold on,” she said harshly when Raymond answered. “Are you there?”

“Yeah, I’m here,” Raymond said, sitting up. He was covered in sweat. His room seemed even smaller; the walls suddenly looked like they’d been painted with dirt. A car horn blared outside.

“He’ll only do the deal with you,” she said. Raymond shook his head. “Listen to me,” she said. “We called him, and he said the deal was off, unless it was
you.
He said, ‘I only do it with Raymond Gaspar.’”

Raymond wondered why the hell Gloria would accept Shadrack’s damn orders. It didn’t make any sense. She told him she’d pick him up at seven that night.

He ended the call and looked at his hands. “Surprise, surprise,” he said to himself. What would they say at DVI if he came back after a week outside?
Well, you can take the prison out the man, but you can’t take the man out the prison. You’re supposed to buy a one-way ticket, not round-trip! Blah, blah, blah.
He felt then that life was sitting in dirty rooms being scared all the time. Men would continue to knock on his door while he slept for years to come. Every last one of his mother’s windows would be broken. People all around him would have their teeth kicked in. The world was rotten to its core.

At two minutes after 7:00 p.m., Gloria texted and said she was there. When Raymond stepped outside he could’ve sworn he saw the same young black guy that had been keeping him up at night walking away from Gloria’s van. He couldn’t tell, though; he didn’t see the man’s face. The van’s back door opened. Raymond walked to it and looked in.

“Who’s that black dude?” he asked.

“The black dude?” Gloria said, turning. “He’s asking for change. We told him we didn’t have nothing.” She shrugged.

There were three men with her, this time. The driver was the same one he’d seen with Gloria before, the man with the mustache. Next to him, in the front seat, sat another Filipino man. Gloria—dressed like she was going to a business meeting: black pantsuit, pearls, heavy makeup—sat in
the middle row. Another man, older than the rest, sat in the very back. Gloria didn’t introduce any of them.

“Only Raymond,” she said, shaking her head, as he got in, apparently imitating Shadrack. “I’ll only do the deal with Raymond Gaspar.” She scooted over so he could sit next to her. “If it wasn’t for Arthur, I swear to God I would feed Shadrack to the fish.”

“Where we going?” Raymond asked. The van pulled into traffic. Gloria’s perfume smelled like flowers. He closed his eyes and breathed it in, picturing a different place.

“We don’t know,” Gloria said. “He said he’d pick you up at a restaurant in Emeryville.”

“I still don’t understand how this motherfucker gets to set the terms.”

“He pays a high price,” Gloria said. Raymond waited, but that was all she offered by way of explanation.

“Let me ask you something,” he said. “How much we dealing with here? How much is it? How much you selling? How much he paying? You never told me any of that.”

Gloria chewed her gum and looked at him like she was trying to understand some deeper meaning to the question. Raymond could recognize her habits now, the way she tilted her chin up and gazed down at him when he spoke. She liked to pause before she answered his questions.

“We’re selling four hundred and forty pounds,” she finally said.

Raymond felt like he’d been hit in the gut. It was a lot more than he’d expected. Ten times more. Arthur had said forty, fifty at the most. Raymond had to stop himself from
reacting. Ten times more? Did Arthur know? “For how much?” he asked, trying to sound unimpressed.

“He’ll give you five-point-six.”

“Five million?”

Arthur should be getting half a million on the deal. His own little cut should be almost three hundred thousand, instead of thirty. Raymond’s heart was threatening to beat out his chest.

“Five-six, yes.”

“I gotta count it?” he asked, still trying for indifference.

“No, no, no. Just look at it. Examine it. Leaf through it. Make sure it’s real. He’s crazy, but he always pays.”

“And then what?”

“After he’s given you the money—you make sure it’s after—you’ll give him the address. The pack is in a storage locker in Vallejo.” Her accent made her pronounce it
Ballejo.
“Also, the key. That’s all.”

She handed him a slip of paper and a silver key. The paper had a handwritten address on it:
556 Lemon Street #342. Vallejo.

“After they pay you, they’ll give you a ride back to the restaurant. We’ll wait for you there. That’s it. That’s all. Deal done. Time for everyone to go home until we start all over again.”

They bounced along the road for a moment. Then Gloria said, “He’s a racist, too, you know. He called me a Chinese bitch. That’s why you’re here, Mr. Repair Man.”

Mr. Deal Broker. Mr. Repair Man.

They got onto the freeway at South Van Ness, looping around the ramp. Raymond looked at the frosted windows
of the jail as they drove past. He pictured all the men sitting in there, dressed in orange, breathing stale air, kicking themselves for stupid moves. Traffic was thick, but moving. His belly felt racked with nerves.
Ten times more!
Arthur was sure as hell going to want to know about that.

Quietly, almost to herself, Gloria was singing what sounded like an old disco song:
Something in the way you make me feel, it feels so good to me.
For a moment Raymond wondered if she was high. He pivoted in his seat so he could take a look at the man behind him: a skinny, older Filipino man with pockmarked cheeks who met his gaze and smiled. They were coming off the Bay Bridge now.

“Exit there,” said Gloria.

The driver pulled off the freeway and pulled into a parking lot alongside a Denny’s. They backed into a spot with a view of the entrance. The driver cut the engine.

“Now we wait,” said Gloria.

Raymond scanned the lot. He looked for occupied cars, looked in the restaurant windows, searched for groups of men that looked like cops. The driver of the van was sending text messages. He should’ve had his eyes up, Raymond thought, ready to move.

His mind cycled through a series of strange thoughts. He hadn’t eaten, and he imagined what Gloria would say if he got out of the van, went to the counter, and ordered pancakes. That thought was pushed out by a memory of a childhood friend of his, a boy named Rusty, who had once shit his pants in a parking lot much like this one. The boy had started to cry afterward.

The phone in Gloria’s hand lit up. She looked at it, then looked at Raymond.

“Five minutes,” she said.

Raymond’s forehead was damp. He breathed deeply, trying to relax. Underneath all his nerves and dread, though, he recognized a new kind of feeling: optimism. The end was near.

The man sitting behind Raymond said something in their language and the man sitting in front turned around. Raymond expected to see a cool look on his face, but what he saw instead—sadness—made Raymond feel ashamed. The man looked right at Raymond, then answered the man.

“What are they saying?” Raymond asked, trying to sound good-humored.

“He said,” said Gloria, pointing her thumb over her shoulder at the man in back, “that you are a very important person. And that man,” she said, pointing to the front, “said he feels honored to have ridden in the same car with Mr. Repair Man.”

The man in back and Gloria both laughed. Their laughter seemed fake, almost violent. It sounded like barking. “Nothing,” said Gloria, as though Raymond had accused her of something. “They didn’t say anything important. They say, ‘You owe me this, you owe me that.’ They always argue, these two.” The man in front didn’t join in the laughter. “Stupid,” said Gloria.

All five of their heads turned as a police car sped past. Gloria organized her face into an expression of unworried confusion. Raymond looked at her pearls and thought about
snatching them off her neck; then he imagined grabbing her face and kissing her. He thought about the last girl he’d kissed, a girl from the Tenderloin named Emily. A man walked out of the restaurant with a phone pinned between his ear and shoulder, carrying large paper bags filled with food. He was muttering something. He looked like a trucker. As Raymond watched, he dug in his pocket, his eyes locked on the van, and a car alarm chirped. He got into the car beside them and drove away.

“Here,” said Gloria, pointing toward the entrance. John’s black SUV was pulling into the lot, heading for a space across from them.

“Hold on,” said Gloria.

They watched as the driver’s door popped open. John, standing tall, his chest puffed out, walked toward the door of the Denny’s. The way he carried himself, calm and slow, made Raymond appreciate him. He went to the cash register and spoke to a redheaded waitress.

“Is Shadrack with him?” Raymond asked.

“He’ll take you to him.” They watched John for a moment. Gloria said, “When he comes out, walk with him. Walk right behind him. Get into the front seat. Don’t talk until you’re in the car.”

John came out with a coffee in his hand. He walked back toward his car.

Raymond opened the door and stepped out. He and Gloria exchanged one final look; her eyes stayed flat and calm. Then he slid the door shut and walked after John.

For some reason, right then, he remembered that Gloria had claimed not to know John. The thought unsettled him,
but it was too late to do anything about it. A moment later he was in the SUV.

The inside smelled sweet, like pipe tobacco. John was already turning the car on. “Buckle up,” he said, fitting his coffee into a cup holder.

Raymond watched Gloria’s van—its engine and lights still off—until he couldn’t see it anymore. Then he turned to John.

“You good?” Raymond asked.

“I could complain, but it won’t do nothing,” John said.

Raymond touched the key in his pocket, nodded his head, and looked at the road coming at them. The lights of the dashboard glowed blue. John did something to the steering wheel and the radio switched on; the sound of an announcer providing play-by-play for a basketball game filled the car.
Draymond Green is having an MVP-type night,
the voice said. They were back on 80, heading away from San Francisco.

“Where we going?” asked Raymond.

“Gonna go meet the man.”

Raymond had a habit, when he was nervous, of working his tongue over each tooth in his mouth. He was doing it right then. He looked in the side-view mirror to see if Gloria’s van was following them, but all he could see was yellow headlights.

“They’re not following us,” John said.

The basketball game continued. John would occasionally react to a shot with a slight shake or nod of his head. When it went to commercial, he turned the volume down almost all the way. He kept the car on cruise control, driving exactly the speed limit, in the middle lane. Every few seconds, his eyes went to the rearview mirror.

“You ever do one of those pills?” Raymond asked. Maybe he’d take one tonight, he thought, after the job was done. Celebrate new beginnings. He hadn’t done that in a while.

“Hell no,” said John, quietly. “It ain’t pills, either. It’s powder.”

The man was acting grumpy. Raymond turned and looked at his face. John knew he was staring, but he kept his eyes on the road. Something about the way he refused to return his look rubbed Raymond the wrong way. He wanted out of the car.