The Weight of Numbers (41 page)

‘The theatre is in my blood.' She says this in front of her bedroom mirror, wondering at this body that has always daunted her, like a boisterous pet she has no idea how to care for, this body, growing in maturity, which seems capable of no end of practical jokes, hair, farts, spots on the end of her nose.

Deborah comes into her bedroom without knocking. This is bad enough, let alone to be caught like this in front of the mirror, not even fully dressed.

‘Are you OK, sweetheart?' Deborah wants her daughter to give her a very big hug. This could be made easier on two counts: mum could just relax a bit and stop pretending that She is Comforting her Daughter (‘How are you feeling, sweetheart?' ‘Are you holding up, pet?' ‘Come here, petal, come on, poor lost lamb': all this in the last half-hour); second, she could take the goddamn chopsticks out of her
hair, agh,
that nearly went in my
eye
…

Deborah's kimono is black, or started out that way, though the black is hard to see beneath sequinned dragons and lotus flowers and thewed, half-naked samurai. Her face is panstick white, her eyeliner is red – art following grieving nature. Her fingernails, three-inch stick-ons, will have to wait till they get to St Patrick's because she still has to drive. They live out of Miami now, in Belle Glade, on the southern shores of Lake Okeechobee, well out of the operating range of the funeral home's cars. Deborah claims to be looking forward to the drive, that it will steady her nerves.

No one passing them is going to imagine they are on their way to a funeral. Deborah is dressed as a geisha; Stacey's own get-up is relatively conventional, but her wig is green, and Ben Donoso's charm is hanging on a silver chain around her neck. Pray it holds together for the day.

‘Come along then, my poor brave chicken,' says Deborah, releasing her at last. Deborah is running out of endearing animals. In the
driveway, waiting for her, a stab at her own father's brand of heartiness: ‘Hurry up there, monkeybrains.'

Stacey's surname is Conroy. The name lacks conviction. It lacks truthfulness. It does not capture who she is. It carries no echo of the man she considers her real father, the man her mother married and visited in jail every month until he was released; who filled her first conscious memories, ages two to five, with light, and now is vanished, breaking his parole: the felon Mo Chavez.

In the car, Deborah winds down the window and lights up a joint. She wouldn't normally drive while smoking but it is getting late, the service is at two and she needs time to put her nails on. Also there is the question of dosage and timing: she is fifteen minutes late. Since 1969, when she and Mo stumbled upon its happy side-effects, Deborah has been using cannabis to self-medicate her epilepsy. Fourteen years of trial and error have taught her to respect her body and its rhythms: in excess, or taken at the wrong time of day, her smokes can trigger the very seizures they normally suppress.

Deborah maintains that Mo's marijuana runs were for her, more or less. The weekends he spent on his boat, the nights drinking with Nick Jessup, his so-called business partner; all this in the interests of Deborah's health and well-being, with no eye to the profit or the danger to himself. Stacey knows this is crap: a comfort story for a child who's missing her daddy, OK, maybe, but not a line you can expect to keep on spinning, year after year, into the child's teens. Her mother smokes regularly, it is true, but how much pot can one reasonably together woman be expected to inhale in one lifetime? Deborah forgets that Stacey was there with her in court, listening to the coastguard's testimony. When they lifted the weed out of Mo's hold, the boat rose a good two feet by the waterline.

The journey to the church has the clean lines of a proposition in mathematics: when you leave the town behind you're in farmland. The farms stop and the wetlands begin: an abrupt, engineered transition. A canalized river separates the wetlands from the suburbs. You have taken
one road to get this far. The road is straight, the landscape is flat. This whole journey could be re-run in
Turbo
with virtually no loss of definition.
(Turbo
is the new Sega game in their laundromat, and Deborah thinks it weird that Stacey plays it so much.) From here the buildings rise in steps, and at a certain point – a point you have to learn is there, because there is no outward marker, no change of flavour or scene – you are in Miami.

Outside the church stands Michio Barondes, half-Japanese, half-Peruvian, the Yellow Peril, in joke-shop whiskers and a canary-yellow polyester cape, weeping into his embroidered sleeves.

The church is packed. There's Jackie Gleason, sat discreetly near the back. He must be seventy by now; his TV career has pretty much bombed but he still crops up in
Smokey and the Bandit
movies. The Mexican old-guard have turned up in their stage gear, and one or two of the home-grown boys have followed suit; Chuck Ryan, resplendent in his heel's garb, a Northwest Mounted Police parade uniform with white dress gloves, stands just inside the door to conduct the family to the front pews. Donoso the Vampyre delivers the oration, his white-face and blood-dribble ruined by tears, his thick black hair plastered down like lacquer. He leans on his best stick, the knob fashioned like a skull, red glass jewels for eyes.

Ben Donoso is a trainer now; one of the best. His fighting days are behind him. In 1980 a visiting fighter hurled him through a table. This was in the ring, a stunt both fighters had paced out a hundred, a thousand times. The table was mocked up the way it was supposed to be, each joint carefully weakened, the whole thing hefted and swung, tested for weight and balance. No one, least of all Ben, cared much about the prop's appearence. It was bright yellow, it looked good under the lights; no one, in the heat of preparation, thought to wonder what happens to linoleum veneer when it shears.

Donoso hobbles off the podium in tears. Harry was his friend, the man who used his own shirt to staunch the blood when Ben's femoral
artery was severed, who rode with him in the ambulance as he faded out of consciousness, who was there with his wife and kids when he woke up. Harry funded the wrestling school he runs now, and from which he turns loose, each year, arguably the best fighters in the country; not just showman wrestlers but shootfighters, too, athletes and innovators.

Stacey hasn't seen Ben Donoso in a while. She has fond memories of him from when she was a little kid. Why else, on this day of all days, would she be wearing this weird mumbo-jumbo charm he gave her, back in Mexico? Since his accident he has not been around so much. He has the school to run. Also, things were not so easy with Grandpa. After the accident, Harry was not such an easy person to be around.

It occurs to Stacey, sat in front with a view of the coffin, that some of what she feels is relief. For a start, there is only one coffin; whereas there had definitely been more than one Grandpa, especially towards the end. There was the absent man, the man depressed by all the misfortunes he had failed to prevent: Deborah's childhood accident, Deborah's marriage, Ben's public and very bloody maiming. Then there was the smiling Harry, who was somehow worse: the man determined to shoulder every burden, prevent every misfortune, reliably accompany everyone he loved through every step of life, padding the world's every blow. The needy man. The drunk.

It's been nine years, following Mo's trial and sentence for marijuana smuggling – and, Stacey wonders, where was the snake Jessup while all this was going on? How slippy did he turn out to be, that all the shit was laid at her daddy's door? – nine years, then, since Harry stepped in to save the day, playing both father and grandfather to little Stacey. His daughter and his granddaughter were his burden, and he shouldered them gladly, dismissing every protest. He never let them down.

Ben settles into the pew a few places to the left of her, and she wonders if, sat before Harry's coffin, he feels the same secret relief she does. Ben was Harry's friend, but it must have been exhausting being
friends to so many different versions of the same person. Absent Harry had no friends, had betrayed his friends, was a danger to his friends. He did not deserve them and did not know what to do with them. And needy Harry? The hospital bills, the school, could only be the tip of the iceberg: needy Harry would not have stopped there. Desperately wanting to be wanted, he was a smothering presence, his cheerful manner an unhappy, rum-fuelled fiction. No wonder Ben has been keeping his distance. Between one version of himself and another, Harry's been tearing everyone in two.

At home, at school, her name is Stacey Conroy. The name does not do justice to her Miami tan, and at the television studio, in her acting classes and on the billing for this amateur show, that student revue, Stacey uses the name she intends to adopt permanently when she is old enough, especially now that Harry is no longer around to be hurt by the change. A name to reflect her tan, her memories, hers and her mother's heart.

Stacey Chavez.

The priest's homily is rushed and nervous. Surrounded by wrestlers in wild costumes, perhaps he expects the service to climax in an eruption of spectacular comic-book violence. Stacey loves to watch the fights, not least because Deborah tries to steer her away from them.

Instead, once the service is done, everyone files meekly out of church, the men's costumes tawdry, the bodies beneath them lumpen and stiff and the worse for wear, the women thickened by childbearing, the children, in their best clothes, bored and whining, and one thought hanging over all their heads: is it over?

Have we been dreaming?

This good life: is it all over now?

The funeral tea and the wake are being held at Donoso's wrestling school, one of those white, ship-like Deco properties in Little Havana that the realtors get so excited about these days. Tables are set out front among the trees and flowerbeds. It looks like a rest home more than a
place of sweat and strain – and before Harry took over the lease, this is exactly what it was.

The inside looks like some sort of political prison. A
Time
magazine photo special from darkest Latin America. Punchbags dangle from the ceiling, their khaki wrappers sweat-stained: complex, liquid patterns that lend the bags a personality. There are mats and weights. Stacey tries hefting a dumb-bell from its stand. The showers smell.

She has come to think about her grandpa, to lose some of the flipness that has been her armour and support during the service and the funeral; to cry, maybe; and to stay well away from the food Deborah has had catered in, weird English nonfoods made of filo pastry and frozen prawns and spit. Later comes the beer, the key lime pie, the hog-roast – probably in that order. Michio's sweating his guts out round the back of the property now because the kid he left in charge of his fire has let it reduce to smoulder and fizz.

She looks at herself in the wall of mirrored tiles, her hair a green cloud, her body broken, factored into neat squares. Like maps of hill country, flattened, idealized. All those damn bags of potato chips her mother kept forcing into her hands, every recess and pee break: ‘Got to keep your strength up, little one.'

Throwing up comes naturally to her. She found that out in the courthouse. It was easy to do. Most of her friends at school use two fingers, three, hell, the entire hand, but she can do it with the tip of one finger: as quick and reliable as pressing an elevator button.

Her whole body trembles when she does it. Not to mention before and after. The tremble seems out of scale with the pleasure, as if her body is getting more out of it than she does. It's the same when she touches herself, and it's the same tremble she gets when she does it, if she has the patience, if she doesn't fall asleep or just get so damn bored and sore and what-really-is-the-point? She doesn't like to touch herself so much, because when it's really good it only reminds her of all the other tricks her body is playing on her.

She really ought to try and eat something, but by the time there's any real food around here, Deborah will have whisked them both through their quick-change routine and off to one damn starchy place or another for pine nuts, edible flowers and
ceviche.
Next week it'll be nuts and dried fruits from a post-Woodstock hole in the wall and the following week, God knows, some ethnic horror. One of the great things about your own sick, Stacey tells her friends, in her best, most urbane style, is the constancy of the flavour.

She walks out through the entrance hall, pausing to study the framed photographs: Harry, Harry's crew, Harry's empire: maybe this is why she cannot cry. It is virtually impossible to imagine that he is dead. There is so much evidence of him.

‘Come along, little rabbit, eat a little something.'

Right by the door, there is Deborah, waiting to spring her trap. Stacey plucks a vol-au-vent from off the tray, palms the crumbly, slimy thing and secretes it, when her mother isn't looking, in the fork of a nearby tree.

Yesterday, tickling up her sick, she overdid it and hawked up blood. She didn't even know that this was possible
.
She wants to eat, but even if there were some real food here, she's too freaked out to put it in her mouth. After all –
blood
.

Who wants to throw up
blood
?

A man is watching the property from across the street. He is leaning against a beat-up cream Thunderbird. She spots him through the chainlink.

‘Stacey!' Deborah is calling her. ‘Jackie's leaving. Come say goodbye to Jackie.'

Stacey goes off to say goodbye to Jackie, and there is a little flurry as some other acquaintances take their leave. Rod Rodriguez – ‘The Rod', another of Harry's early discoveries, rescued from a roadhouse outside Teponahuasco where Harry found him trading bouts for beers – is handing round the bourbon now, driving the event forward: Stacey can only imagine how things will be tonight: the wake's raucous, teary-drunk
conclusion. She wants to be a part of it. She deserves to be a part of it. She's
fourteen
, for heaven's sake, she needs release.