The Mortal Nuts (19 page)

Chapter 30

Sophie was on her knees, trying to change a tank of Coca-Cola premix, when she heard Kirsten say, “What's going on? Oh my God!” The urgency in Kirsten's voice brought Sophie quickly to her feet, and she cracked her head on the edge of the counter. Holding a hand to her head, she looked out across the mall. At first, she couldn't tell what she was seeing. Then she saw Carmen's bald friend, James Dean, stumbling backward through the crowd, crashing into people, spilling a little boy's sno-cone, the kid's mother shouting through a mouthful of cheese curd. The expression on James Dean's face was so wide-eyed and openmouthed that Sophie started to laugh. What was he doing? Then Kirsten screamed “Oh my God!” again, only louder and right in her ear.

Carmen pushed between them. “What?”

Sophie saw Tommy Fabian limping toward Dean, pointing with one hand, bringing up his other hand, holding something shiny. A huge bald man in a black leather jacket appeared, seeming to sprout up between the two, and dove at Tommy—Sophie was seeing it in slow motion now—and as the pistol flashed and bucked in Tommy's hands, Sophie saw it for what it was, heard the sharp explosion echo off the white brick sides of the Food Building as Tommy disappeared beneath the big man, then she heard another muted pop. The two men rolled, spilling a blue recycling can, white plastic cups exploding across the trampled grass mall. Those within a few yards of the tumbling pair fled, others rushed forward for a better view. The big man regained his feet and came up with one of Tommy's hands and a foot locked in his grip. Sophie heard a high-pitched keening. Tommy was screaming, and so were several people in the crowd. The big man swung his shoulders and his arms, and Tommy came up off the ground. Spinning like a shot-putter, the big man swung Tommy around in an airplane ride, two complete orbits, then let go and sent the little man cartwheeling through the air. Tommy hit the lamppost hard, with an audible crack.

A man in a white shirt and black suspenders appeared from the crowd. Sophie recognized Axel the way she might suddenly recognize an actor in an unfamiliar role. Where had he come from? Sophie leaned out past the edge of the counter and shouted a warning, but her voice was devoured by the buzzing crowd.

Axel had been feeling a little silly. He had walked up and down Carnes Avenue twice, from the Giant Slide to the midway, doing a double take at every bald head in the crowd. No Bald Monkey.

What did he think he was going to do if he found the kid? Lecture him? Beat him up? Make a citizen's arrest? He shook his head, smiling at himself. Just another old fool rushing off half-cocked, too mad to think straight. Besides, the girl was probably mistaken. These teenage girls, always looking for drama.

He was only a few yards from the Taco Shop when he heard Kirsten scream “Oh my God!” His first thought was that Carmen had put her hand in the deep fryer. He ran to the back of the stand, saw that they were all, Sophie and Kirsten and Carmen, staring at something outside, on the mall. Someone is having a heart attack, was his next thought, then he heard the unmistakable sound of a gun firing once—loud and sharp—then again, muffled. He was afraid he knew whose gun. He rushed around to the front of the stand in time to see Tommy Fabian's cartwheeling flight, arms and legs spread out like a sky diver's. Axel's senses grew suddenly, painfully acute. Everything stopped for an instant, formed a tableau: the big black-jacketed man, frozen in mid-stagger, Tommy striking the lamppost, and, a few feet away, sitting on his butt on the grass, Bald Monkey, holding his arm out toward the place where Tommy had been, one hand gripping a .45, the other hand fumbling with the trigger guard. Axel broke loose and ran, forcing his body through air gone thick as sand. He heard a strange howl, felt his throat shuddering, and realized that he was screaming. Bald Monkey's head swiveled, his eyes widened, he rose to his feet, and his arm came around with the gun. Axel saw the kid's thumb find the hammer, draw it back, saw the end of the barrel fix on his chest. He stopped, an arm's length away, eyes on the hole in the end of the barrel. The kid's hands were shaking. A glitter caught Axel's eye, and he saw a familiar horseshoe-shaped diamond ring on the kid's finger.

The sight of Tommy's ring shattered Axel's instinct for self-preservation. He threw himself forward, slapped his right hand down hard on the .45, a sharp pain lancing his finger. His palm wrapped warm steel. He hit the ground with his shoulder, rolled, came up with the .45 in his hand, swung it, giving it everything he had, slapping the steel slide hard against the kid's bald skull. He felt the shock travel up his arm, causing intense explosions of pain in his elbow and shoulder. He expected Bald Monkey to go down and stay down, but instead the kid jumped to his feet and took off like a startled rabbit, legs churning, his shiny head quickly melting into the crowd.

Axel pulled the hammer back, released his trapped and torn finger, and locked the safety. His right hand had gone numb.

The big skinhead had fallen to his hands and knees. Axel circled him and ran to Tommy, whose head had flopped sideways at an impossible angle. He tried to push Tommy's head back where it belonged, thinking that if he straightened it out quickly enough he might be able to undo what had happened. There was no response, no complaint, no sign of life. He looked up in time to see the big man crawling toward him.

“What did you do?” Axel shouted, the words rolling out deep and slow, as if shouted through molasses.

“I don't feel good,” the big man said. A peculiar-looking bruise covered most of his forehead, blood pulsed from his chest. “I gotta lie down.” He listed to his left, then relaxed and let himself fall onto his side on the grass.

Axel struggled to put it together, to make sense of things. The crowd had drawn back, forming a circle about thirty feet across, with Axel in the center. He looked down at the bleeding man, then back at Tommy. He didn't understand. The crowd was moving in on him, needing to be nearer the blood. He heard a siren. Axel stood. He could see two cops pushing through the crowd. He eased back through the crowd toward the taco stand, slipping the .45 into his pants pocket. There was nothing more he could do.

The fence at the north end of the fairgrounds finally stopped him. James Dean fell against the galvanized steel, pressed his face against the mesh, gasping for breath. He remembered his flight as a series of frozen, garish images. The back of his head radiated bright tendrils of pain. Had he been shot? He could not bring himself to touch it, afraid he might find a soft, pulpy mass of erupted brain tissue. Unlacing his fingers from the steel mesh, he turned his back to the fence, let himself slide down onto the grass, drew his knees up to his chest, wrapped his arms around his shins.

His heart was beating too fast. How old did you have to be to have a heart attack?

The donut guy coming at him with a gun. Unbelievable. He could have been killed! And he'd lost his gun. How could he lose the gun? One moment he'd had it, then a glimpse of the old man, then
wham
, something had hit him in the head, and suddenly he was running faster than he'd ever run before.

Curiosity overcame fear. Dean reached back and delicately probed his skull. It was swollen and tender, but not bleeding. The knowledge that his brain was still inside his skull helped him regain his feet. He had to get out of there. He had to get to Tigger's car. That was the most important thing.

It took him twenty minutes to cross the fairgrounds. He pushed through the turnstile in time to see Tigger's rusted Cadillac pulling out of the parking lot onto Como Avenue. Dean ran into the street, shouting at them to wait. He could see Pork's face through the tinted glass, looking right at him. The car turned away and accelerated, leaving behind an oily blue cloud. A blast from the horn of a Ford station wagon sent Dean hopping back to the curb. He couldn't believe it. Pork had been looking right at him. They left him there on purpose. A wave of dizziness, then of nausea, forced him to sit down on the curb. He closed his eyes, squeezed them until he saw flashes of light, remembering with a thud that he'd left his leather jacket in Tigger's back seat, its pockets solid with cash.

If someone had asked Axel how he was feeling, he would have said that he was feeling very, very old. And very sore. He would have said that his mind was hurting from too many fresh memories, and that his right arm was throbbing painfully, and that his finger was bleeding where he had caught it under the hammer. He would have said that it is the things you have to remember that kill you. Like it was the things that Tommy remembered that killed him. Memories, and his friend Axel Speeter, who had busted him out of the hospital so he could keep his appointment with death.

If someone had asked Axel how he was feeling, he might have said something like that. Or he might have simply said that he felt lousy.

But nobody was asking.

He could hear the honking and short siren blasts of an ambulance working its way through the crowd. It pulled up onto the pounded grass mall, and two paramedics rushed toward Tommy and the bald giant. After a brief examination the paramedics relaxed, their movements becoming slower and more deliberate.

None of the police officers—there were five of them now—asked him how he was feeling. One of them, yellow- haired, still with a trace of his grandfather's Swedish in his voice, asked Axel if he had seen what happened. “Not a thing,” Axel said. “When I got here, it was all over.” The officer took his name and address anyway, then turned to Sophie.

Axel wrapped a few scoops of ice in a towel and held it against his elbow.

Sophie said she had been under the counter, changing the Coke canister. She hadn't seen a thing, either. Carmen, sitting on the grass behind the stand, hugging her knees to her chest, claimed she had been busy making a Bueno Burrito. The police officer wrote their full names and addresses on his clipboard. He had better luck with Kirsten Lund, who was anxious to share her experience. She related the events in detail, pointing to places on the mall, acting out the way Tommy had waved his gun, describing with her hands the way he had sailed through the air, her face was flushed and bright. Axel had never seen her so animated, her Nordic reserve forgotten in the thrill of violent events.

Making careful notes, the yellow-haired cop asked her to go over several points again. Axel listened carefully as Kirsten related the events of twenty minutes earlier.

So Tommy had been the shooter, just like he had thought, and it was the big man who had broken Tommy's neck. And Bald Monkey was mixed up in it somehow. Tommy chasing the monkey with his six-gun, that made sense. Tommy would do something like that, probably thinking he was going to make a citizen's arrest. Or maybe he was just going to shoot the kid. Either way, it hadn't worked.

The ambulance backed off the mall out onto Carnes Avenue and moved slowly through the crowd. The cop was asking Kirsten to tell him again, was the man from the Tiny Tot stand firing the gun before the big man tried to stop him? Or was he just waving it about in a threatening manner? What the hell difference does it make, Axel wondered, with both of them dead? Kirsten went over her story again, adding some detail about the wild look on Mr. Fabian's face. She described how Axel had run to help Mr. Fabian and how the big man had fallen almost on top of them. The cop frowned at Axel, who smiled grimly and nodded, relieved that Kirsten had not noticed or had at the least failed to mention that there were two guns and that one of them was at this moment distending the lining of Axel's right-hand pants pocket.

Axel put his hand on the gun, discovering a prideful place inside himself. He'd disarmed the little shit, just like that. And given him one hell of a headache to boot. Bald Monkey must have a thick skull to take a hit like that and then go running off. He'd think twice before messing with Axel Speeter again. Axel inhaled deeply, taking in the smells of the restaurant—the hot oil, the tangy aroma of fresh salsa, the heady mix of scents from Sophie, Kirsten, and Carmen. He could even smell himself, the old boomer, reeking a little after defending his fliers. Axel shifted the ice pack to a new spot on his elbow and smiled, seeing himself as this grizzled old kangaroo. Then it hit him again, low and hard. Tommy Fabian was dead. He closed his eyes, shutting out the color and heat of the fair, letting the cold truth settle deep in his gut.

Chapter 31

James Dean sat on the curb outside the fairground fence, waiting for the numbness to pass. He needed an idea, an impulse, a reason to move. It could have been anything at all. A pang of hunger, an itch that needed scratching, a question demanding an answer. He kept seeing Pork's face in the car window. The donut guy pointing the silver gun. Sweety's broad, black-jacketed back. Tigger nailing him with the dodgem car, pinning him against the rail, not letting him move, laughing. He could not move now. How could he stand up? He had nothing left, no place to go.

A horse stopped in front of him, nearly crushing his foot. He looked up and saw a helmeted cop sitting on the beast, leaning over, asking him if he was okay.

Dean said he was fine. He said he was waiting for somebody to pick him up.

The cop gave him the look, waited for him to stand up, then clopped off down the fence line, his horse leaving behind a pile of steaming manure. Dean tried to remember a line from Donne, something he had read weeks before. Something like if you cut off part of your body, you save what is left, but it's better to cut off part of a dead man.

Something like that. He wished he had the book, but he had left it back in Carmen's room. He started walking along the curb, placing one foot after the other.

Everything seemed complicated and uninteresting; he needed one clear idea, something to get him going. Or maybe what he needed was some more crank. He thought about some other things he wanted, listed them in his mind.

His book. At the motel.

Carmen? Did he want Carmen? He wasn't exactly aching for her, but it was nice to have company.

His money. Shit. What was he thinking of, leaving his jacket in Tigger's car? Stupid, stupid. He had forgotten to be smart. He didn't even know their real names—he sure as hell wasn't going to find a Tigger or a Pork in the phone book.

He stopped walking. Would Tigger and Pork be dumb enough to return to that basement after ripping him off? It didn't seem possible. On the other hand, he had nothing to lose by going there and waiting for them. He dug in his pockets, coming out with two twenties, a five, and a few ones. Whatever else, he would need some money, and soon.

A block ahead of him, an ambulance pulled out of the fairgrounds, lights dead, and drove up Como Avenue. First thing he had to do, he had to get out of there. Maybe just get on one of the buses and figure out where he was going later. He had just turned back toward the bus stand when he saw the old man, Axel, not fifty feet in front of him, crossing the street toward the parking lot, moving slow, looking like he was about two hundred years old. Dean froze. The old man didn't see him. Dean felt his face grow warm with anger and dread. He watched until Axel faded into the parking lot. As soon as the old man was out of sight, the heat in Dean's face flowed right down into his balls.

It felt good. Suddenly he felt his perspective shift, as if he had stepped around a dark corner and found himself in full sunlight. He had been thinking that everything was fucked up, but what if it wasn't? If you looked at it another way, he was the luckiest guy in the world to come through all that with just a bump on the head. He could have been shot, like Sweety, or had his neck broke like Tiny Tot. As it was, he still had his moves to make, and nobody to stop him. The old man had given him his best shot. Next time, next time he'd be ready, he'd be the man in charge.

It was all about attitude. You had to be smart, and you had to have the right attitude. You couldn't afford to feel sorry for yourself. It was the same thing as doing time. You had to be cool and smart, and you couldn't afford to get all emotional.

He recalled another line from the book. Mostly, reading John Donne had been a show-off thing, a way to prove to Mickey that he wasn't the illiterate she took him for, a way to fuck with Carmen's head, a way to impress Tigger and Sweety and Pork. But there were a few times when he'd sat by himself and tried to make sense of the words. It was nothing like reading a newspaper or magazine. Everything was spelled weird. He could pick his way through a few pages, but the type would quickly fuzz into a gray, meaningless mass.

But then some stuff would jump out at him. This one thing was coming back to him. Shit, he wished he hadn't left the book in Carmen's room. But he remembered the one line, word for word:
This Soule, now free from prison, and passion, hath yet a little indignation….

Carmen remembered a thing she used to do. When she was a little girl and she and Sophie were living in the projects up north of University, she had learned to turn the world into a cartoon. Sometimes she could force it, other times it would just happen on its own. Colors would brighten and flatten, and people would form black outlines and move in little jerks, like Yogi Bear. In the cartoon world, she would get her own black outline, and she could make her arms and legs stretch or shrink or get heavy or change color or disappear. Usually she would do this at night in her bed, closing her eyes and watching it happen, but sometimes she could make it happen outside in the daylight. Carmen had not turned the world into a cartoon or even thought about it for many years until now, watching Sweety get shot and Tommy Fabian flying through the air and Axel bending over him and Dean standing there and then running and the cops asking her questions, and all of a sudden the outlines came back and the colors were cranked way up. Carmen looked at her hand and made her fingers stretch.

“What are you doing?” Sophie asked.

The cartoon version of Sophie was pretty, Carmen thought. Prettier than the regular Sophie. She looked a lot like Wilma Flintstone. No wrinkles. “I'm looking at my hand,” she said.

“I can see that. We've got a business to run, don't forget. People don't stop eating just because somebody gets killed.”

Carmen looked toward the front of the stand. “We don't have any customers,” she said. “What do you want me to do?”

“I don't know. Clean something. Never mind. Take your break. Be back here in a half hour, okay? Kirsten and I will handle things. You get out of here—you're dangerous. You and your friend.”

Carmen said, “Friend?”

“Your friend with the gun. Just because I didn't tell the police, don't think I didn't see him.”

“You mean Dean? It was Tommy shot the gun.”

“Your friend had a gun too. I saw it in his hand. Now get out of here, take a break.”

Carmen shrugged and left the stand. Who knew what Dean was doing? Him and his cranked-up hairless friends. She was glad she and Dean hadn't found the money in Axel's room. That was crazy, the idea of going to Mexico with Dean. A sense of release rolled up her body; she did a little dance step, causing a few people to veer aside, giving her room. An image appeared in her mind of a Mexican village on the sea, a thick packet of U.S. dollars in her purse, an icy pitcher of margaritas, and a man. Not James Dean, but a new man, with hair. Curly hair on his head and on his chest, and buried in it a nice gold necklace. Tropical sun beating down on them, a nice breeze coming in over the surf. ..

Without warning, the image faded and she became suddenly aware of herself as alone, without substantial funds, standing in the midst of a hundred thousand corn-dog- eating yokels. She was nobody, nothing, going nowhere. The realization nearly caused her knees to buckle. She felt it in her stomach, and in a band of pressure against the nape of her neck. She stumbled toward an empty bench a few yards away. Carmen knew what was happening. She was crashing, coming down off the meth. She'd come down off Dexedrine before, and coke, but never crank. This was different, more intense. She sat on the bench and squeezed her eyes shut and forced her thoughts away from herself, back to the image of a wad of money. Thinking about money was good. That was the trick to crashing—you had to keep grabbing onto the good thoughts. If you let the bad thoughts in, it would get bad. She summoned up the image of Axel's coffee cans.

Cans and cans and cans. She felt her chest swell, her breasts rise. The thought of the money stroked her body like a plunge into warm water. She could see herself walking along the ocean toward her Mexican beach house. She could see a shelf in her bedroom lined with a row of Folgers cans, cans full of green corn cash tamales.

Axel's nylon socks. Like a slow-motion punch to the stomach, the thought brought her crashing down again. How could she think about the money when she didn't know where the money had gone? She tried to think of places he might have hidden it, but she couldn't think while she was crashing. She squeezed her teeth together until the pain in her jaw shattered her thoughts, focusing her senses on the outside world. A few yards away, a cartoon Indian was selling cartoon fry bread to cartoon fairgoers. The outlines were there, but the colors seemed muted. She watched him until his movements began to recycle.

Carmen lit a cigarette and sat back and closed her eyes. She was getting a new buzz now, not unpleasant, a sort of smooth, rolling vibration. She imagined herself floating over the fairgrounds. She thought about the places the money might be. In Axel's room. In Axel's truck. Her imagination stopped there. In his room or in his truck. What did he do with the money every night? He put it in his burlap shoulder bag. They walked to his truck. He dropped her off at her room. In the morning they drove back to the fair. Was the bag empty in the morning? She thought that it was. Her mind drifted back to an imagined Mexico.

When she opened her eyes, the cartoon show had ended. Objects had become dull and three-dimensional. How long had she been sitting there? Had she been sleeping? Carmen wasn't sure. When she stood up, she knew from the way her legs felt that she'd been there for quite a while.

Everything felt and looked different. The day crowd had begun to thin out. There was a general movement toward the fairground exits, eaters of cheese curds and Pronto Pups and Tiny Tot donuts and sno-cones moving slowly and uncomfortably toward the turnstiles, parents herding flocks of exhausted kids, ignoring their automatic whining about having to leave so soon.

It was still daylight, but the crowd was changing. The after-work crowd had begun to arrive: the teenagers and the beer drinkers, adults in groups of two and four, people coming to see the show at the grandstand or to ride the Ferris wheel in the dark or to stroll up and down the clattering, blinking chaos of the midway, trying to win a four-foot-tall Barney. There were fewer farmers, fewer children, and fewer old folks. The people looked fresher, not yet bagged out from massive infusions of sugar and lard.

Before returning to the taco stand, Carmen went to one of the rest rooms and unfolded the square of paper Pork had given her. She licked the last traces of crystal from Nancy Reagan's smiling face, then flushed her image down the toilet.

Sophie was loading the fryer with tortillas when Carmen entered the stand.

“Sorry I took so long,” Carmen said.

Sophie said, “You're fired.”

Axel fiddled with the truck radio until he stumbled across a classical music station. He was thinking that it would make him feel better to listen to a wordless yet coherent progression of sounds. It wasn't working; the sounds were too complex and insistent. He turned off the radio and sat in silence, giving in to the flickering memories of Tommy alive, Tommy dead. Trying not to think about the Bald Monkey, struggling to find a tolerable balance between anger and grief. He would feel the tears mounting his lower eyelids, will them to come to wash it all away, then his jaw would clench and anger would squeeze his eyes dry. It was too soon to grieve. He sat and let his mind turn this way and that, like a driver lost in a strange city.

Carmen rapped on the window, startling him. He touched a dry eye with the back of his hand and rolled down the window. “What's the problem?” he asked, his voice ragged. He cleared his throat.

Carmen was smoking a cigarette, kicking the packed dirt with her pink-and-white Reeboks.

“What's the problem?” he asked again, forcing concern into his voice.

She flicked her cigarette straight down and ground it out with her toe, crossed her arms, and looked up at Axel. “Can Sophie fire me?”

“Why would she want to do that?”

“You got me. She says I'm fired.”

“What did you do?”

“Nothing. I took a break, and when I got back she says, ‘You're fired.'”

Axel waited.

“Maybe I was a few minutes late getting back. I don't know. Can she fire me? I mean, am I working for Sophie or am I working for you?” She had her arms crossed, squeezing her breasts in her Axel's Taco Shop T-shirt. Her eyes half scared and half angry, she waited for Axel to pronounce his judgment.

Axel said, “Carmen, what do you want me to do? Sophie's running the stand; I can't just tell her to hire you back.”

“So fire
her
!”

Axel said, “Why?”

“I can run the stand better than Sophie any day. She's so cheap she's got us counting olives. I put four olive slices on a tostada, and she's all over me. People like lots of olives.”

“I can't do that, Carmen. Your mother's my partner now, you know.”

“She's what?”

“I took her on as a partner, and part of the deal is she runs the stand the way she wants. Maybe if you go back and talk to her….” He shrugged. Carmen was lighting another cigarette.

“No way. You don't know my mom.”

She's right, Axel thought. Both of them are right. Sophie was probably right to fire Carmen, and Carmen was right—no way would Sophie change her mind so easily. She would stay mad for at least a day, maybe longer. If he told her to hire Carmen back, she would fight him on it through the last day of the fair. He sighed and wondered how he was going to keep his family together.

Carmen paced a circle on the packed dirt. The sun was near the horizon. She moved in and out of the shadow of the truck, smoking her cigarette with rapid, jerking motions. My family, Axel thought. He had never before thought of it that way. Or maybe he had, but without using the word out loud in his mind. What did that make Carmen—his daughter? Something like that, he decided. Or something else. In any case, he knew what he should do. He should let the women deal with each other, keep his nose out of it.