Winners (17 page)

“Sure.”

“You know what I was most scared of?”

“My brother’s feet.”

“Nah,” she says, almost laughing. “Nah, I was scared I’d open up that duffel bag and find that watch and chain. And then I’d know he’s gone. You know, and I mean gone.”

He knows. He understands that. But where is Sam, Shane thinks. She can see the questions building in his face and she shakes her head.

“I don’t know where he is.”

“Staying with a friend.”

“Yeah. I don’t know.” She glances up at the counter, eying the clock on the wall. “It’s getting late.”

“I thought we were going to work on the résumé.”

“Don’t have time for that.”

“I already set up the interview,” he says.

She squints at him. “Yeah?”

“Yeah. You can’t back out now. You back out now and that’s it.”

“That’s it, huh? You do me like that?” He shrugs. “Oh you a tough guy today, huh. Yeah,” she says, grinning. “Okay. Tough guy.”

The café’s computers are set up on little painted kiddy desks, and the two of them have to crowd together to share. The place is packed now, and Shane feels elderly and unpierced. Debra eats a scone suspiciously, the dry debris crumbling to the wide hardwood floors. She watches the glowing busy screen while he shows her Lou’s company’s Web site. Pastel blue and Mexican yellow, an animated page of moving chalkboard squares and circles laboring to illuminate all. He explains as best he can, but she’s not paying much attention and he isn’t either. Both Debra and Shane keep sneaking peeks outside, where Friday cars are honking and the sidewalks are crowded with twenty-somethings renting videos and buying six-packs, crossing the street at a jogging run.

He goes to get another coffee and leaves her alone with the computer, letting her browse there on her own. The counter guy is not friendly but when pressed has some things to say about the CD in play. Counter guy answers questions. He’s from Texas and doesn’t think much of the San Francisco music scene, for instance. The city is too expensive. He’s thinking of moving up to Portland or Seattle. Café work doesn’t pay for crap. One month he had to put his rent on a credit card.

You see that woman over there, Shane wants to say, you see her? Don’t give me this Texas shit. I’ve had my foot woes and you’ve got your little rent dilemma but it’s a bunch of crap, isn’t it? Isn’t it? How selfish can a mammal be? Selfish. Life seems too hard for us to really give a rat’s ass about one another. He wonders if Texas knows that people in the projects don’t kill themselves.

When the kid is called away for lattes, Shane sticks his back against the counter and watches Debra for a while. Debra online: a ridiculous thought, although she seems as comfortable with it as anyone else. But then he notices the way she moves the computer mouse, touching it delicately with her painted fingers as if waiting for Ouija forces to guide her hand to truth. She doesn’t click on anything. Her mouth moves silently as she squints into the unchanging screen. One hand slips toward her mouth and she starts to bite her nails before she jerks away, clenching into fists. She stares at the girl typing and laughing vigorously at the adjacent computer, and then swings around and waves him over angrily.

“All right. Can we go.”

“No we can’t go. You’ve got to have a résumé.”

“What we gonna put on it?” She shrugs. “You think I’m really working there?” The way she points into the computer screen makes it seem unlikely. Really, in there, there’s a job for her?

“Maybe. Worth a shot, isn’t it.”

“Well let’s shoot then.” That neighboring girl, her fingers flying over the keyboard, her hand reaching out to point and click and drag and cut and copy and paste—that girl pisses Debra off.

Afterwards he takes her down the street to eat Thai. The restaurant is crowded for early evening, and they sit in silence, worn down by an hour of trying to fill an empty page with Debra’s past. Maybe everybody’s right: this is never going to work.

“You play basketball today?” Debra says, suddenly.

“No.” He smiles. Imagine a woman you could talk basketball with.

“Next time you come up the hill, you tell me. I’m coming over to watch you play. See what you got.” She laughs, the best one he’s heard all day. Him playing basketball is very funny.

“You ever play?” he asks.

“Naw, but I used to go see games all the time. I met Samson’s daddy at a basketball game.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. A white boy, too. He could play, though, shit. And good-looking, hmm.”

“This was in Oakland?”

“Oakland, right. By the time I had the baby, though, he was gone. I heard he maybe joined the army but he might just a moved away, you know?”

“You never saw him again?”

“Uhn-uh. He not important though, you know. Some is, some isn’t and he’s not. Not like he could come around anyway. My momma woulda killed him.”

“She’s still in Oakland, right?”

“Still in that same house. One person, that’s just fine, but you shoulda seen us then. My momma, Samson, sister and brother, in a one bedroom, know what I’m saying? You eat this stuff a lot?” An appetizer has showed up and they are digging in.

“Sure. It’s a favorite.”

“Some serious garlic.”

“You don’t like garlic.”

“Oh I like it, it don’t like me. Garlic don’t like nobody. Don’t know who you’re fooling.” She winks at him without quite doing it. “Your wife ain’t getting near you tonight. Y’all don’t eat dinner together?”

“Your mom a big cook?”

“Oh yeah, sure, when she around. She work over at the Kaiser? She used to be daytime but when Samson come along she switch over to night on the Emergency. So she take care of him in the day while I was in school. No teenage drop-out here, not in her house.”

“He was a good kid, I bet.”

“He was good, he was cool you know, didn’t cry too much. My momma crazy, you know, the religious thing but she good with children. She just happy to have another soul in that house worth saving. Gave up on the rest of us sinners, long long ago. I was there you know but she raised him practically.”

She tells the story. Her second son, her third. A boyfriend in the Tenderloin. Drinking and recovery and the warehouse job they put on the résumé. Her daughter. Losing the job. The projects.

“Let the good times roll. I mean things were bad before that but least ’til then we weren’t in no projects. You must be thinking my family tree like poison ivy, huh?”

“No.” Lou, he thinks, luck—how could you hear Debra out and not feel something? Maybe it will work after all. “How old was Samson then? When you moved to Potrero?”

“Fifteen, I think. Yeah.”

So he found us right away, Shane thinks. The kid, standing with his fingers hooked through the fence, pretending he didn’t want to play. “Can you tell me?” he says. “The last time you saw him.”

“Okay,” she says. She looks around for last bites but everything is gone. She taps her fork against the empty plate, trying to get her own attention. “The last time I seen him was a Wednesday. Just like every other day ’cept he left in the morning and didn’t come back.”

Wednesday, he thinks. The day after Sam left his bag up there, his last day on the court. “What did you think happened at the time?”

“I don’t know, like I said, he stay away before.”

“Didn’t you wonder where he was. Don’t you think he was staying with a.” He looks around the restaurant like there might be someone listening. “A boyfriend?”

“Probably,” she says.

“But you don’t know who.”

“I don’t know what I know. Yeah, he probably has a friend, you know. Now I don’t know, that little gangster Ty be bothering me, I don’t know what to believe.”

“Was he selling drugs.”

“How he sell drugs if he never had no money? When he work at that mailroom, he give me money every two weeks and I never even asked him.”

“This guy Ty says Sam was working for him.”

“I don’t give a fuck what he say.” She snaps the word at him. “You trust him? You like his information?”

“No. I don’t like anything about him.”

“All right then.”

“What about the gym?”

“What about it.”

“Maybe he met someone there,” Shane says, suddenly, speaking the words even as the thought comes to him. “Someone totally unconnected. And when things went wrong, that’s where he went. Maybe that’s where he is now.”

“Whole lot a maybe.”

She’s right—Lou maybe, gym maybe, Samson maybe. She’s right about all those maybes, but for the first time in a while he’s starting to feel sure about something.

T
HEY HIT
P
ARAGON
in the evening crush, Jimmy waiting impatiently as Shane slips into the locker room to change into workout clothes. Men in many stages of undress traffic between the showers and the sinks, filing off to a steam room and a sauna down the hall. Could be any one of them, Shane thinks: the monster with the neck tattoo, the skinny fat guy diving into his branded knit, the pair of frat boys tugging on their baseball caps. A sugar daddy, Jimmy chanted in the car, but Shane is not convinced. The gay kid from the projects who works out with the yuppies and the body goons, plays ball with aging amateurs a long way from home. Is that someone who finds a sugar daddy or simply runs away from home?

Shane meets Jimmy in the hallway and they find the manager in his office, not far away. The guy surprises them—a home-grown Dave, went to Wash, worked here when it was Mike’s, held over from the good old days. He knows Mario. He knows Sam.

“That’s his name?” Dave says. “I though it was like Sonny.”

“Samson, actually.”

“Yeah? You know, I feel bad about him. He seemed like a good guy to me. He been coming in here forever, too.”

“Since Mike’s.”

“Yeah, since Mike’s. There a few kids that started coming, you know, back in the day, neighborhood kids like Sonny. That bus stop always been out there, where they transfer up for Mission High.”

“And they’d join the gym?”

“Not many. Usually someone bring ’em in, you know, and Mike used to do a special for them, couple bucks a month.”

“Mario and those guys,” Shane says, “they brought Sam in.”

“Yeah? That’s cool. Not too many left, now, but when Mike’s switched over I got them grandfathered in, you know, lifetime pass. Seems like the least I could do.”

“Right on,” Jimmy says.

“Yeah, that’s what I thought. And Sonny seemed cool, the coolest, why it tore me up to kick him out. Hate that shit.”

“What shit.”

“Good guy like that, you know, these guys got tough backgrounds I guess, but this is where I work, shit. I mean I’m not blind, I know there’s drugs in here but if I catch you, man, you’re fucking gone.”

“Drugs.”

“Yeah. Not just weed, you know, hard stuff.”

“You caught him selling?”

“Twice,” Dave says. “I don’t think there’s another dude I’d a given a second chance to, but Sonny, you know, he’s such a kid. He was just messed up with the wrong people, you know. I thought maybe he could work it out.” Dave sighs. “I didn’t press charges or nothing, he’s just out.”

“When?”

“’Bout a month ago. Let’s see.” Dave taps at his computer, mouses around a bit. “Yeah, I got him in here under Sonny, just Sonny, like one of those stars who only has one name?” Shane waits for more, resisting the urge to lean over and stare at the screen for himself. “August,” Dave says. “First time was in July, but that time I just eighty-sixed his friend. He was bad news all the way.”

“What friend?” Jimmy says.

“I don’t know. He was in here on a pass. Fucking drug dealer all the way.”

“Black guy wearing a light blue jersey,” Shane says.

Dave nods. “Something like that. Yeah.”

“Sam have a boyfriend?”

“Boyfriend? You mean like.” Dave frowns. “I don’t know. If he was that way, there’s always hook-ups going on I guess. Though we’re doing better on the monkey business. Boyfriend, huh. I never saw that. But I don’t really pay attention. No one comes to mind.” His phone rings and Dave glances at it angrily. “I should get this. You find Sonny, see him, tell him hey. Maybe he gets things straightened out, we can do something for him.”

“We’ll tell him,” Shane says.

They find Mario in the big room, sitting glumly on a shoulder machine, cracking his neck. He brightens at the sight of them until they tell him their news and watch him shake his head. Poor kid. What a fucking shame.

“I had no idea.”

“Sounds like no one did.”

“Well, someone did. If he was selling, someone was buying. It must have just been recent. His locker was right near mine and I never saw anything funny.”

“Shane!” another voice calls out. The three of them turn to see a sweaty David Fulton striding past in short shorts. He points at Shane, laughing. “I’m disgusting!” he says. “Are you here?”

“Kind of.”

“I’ll find you,” Fulton says, power-walking around the corner, out of sight.

“You know him?” Mario says.

“Kind of. You?”

Mario whistles low. “Yeah, I mean, I’ve never talked to him. He owns my company.”

Shane shakes off the image of Lou and Fulton, sitting close together on those long white couches, cooing numbers at one another. He doesn’t want to talk about companies.

“Think he knows Sam?” A good candidate, Shane thinks, with drugs involved.

Mario laughs. “I don’t know. There’s an interesting conversation. You should ask him. I bet Fulton could have the kid reinstated here tomorrow. He pays for all our memberships. For all his companies, I heard.”

“Keep those worker bees healthy,” Jimmy says. “Productive.”

“I’ll ask around,” Mario says, ignoring him.

Shane hands Mario a business card. “That’d be great. See what people know.”

They find Fulton crunching on the ab machine, doubling his body again and again and again but snapping out of it the moment Shane pulls into range.

“I’m shocked,” Fulton says. “I thought you’d never join this gym.”

“I didn’t.”

Jimmy watches them carefully, seeing something in this transaction he doesn’t like.

“You know, in the end I’m glad. That would completely spoil my image of you.” Fulton smiles slyly. “The natural man.”

“I wish I liked working out.”

“Oh you have basketball. We all have our holy trinity of pleasures.”

Jimmy snorts. “What holy trinity would that be?” he says.

“This is my brother Jimmy. David Fulton.”

The two of them examine one another.

“You know,” Fulton says, answering Jimmy’s question. “Sex, drugs, rock ’n’ roll. Except rock ’n’ roll is just a metaphor, right? Rock ’n’ roll is just that other something physical where you lose yourself in your body. Basketball, for instance. Me, working out’s my rock ’n’ roll.”

“Oh Jesus,” Jimmy says. “You work with Lou?” He snaps the words like an insult, but Fulton doesn’t seem to notice or care.

“Not quite yet,” Fulton says, smiling with his teeth and giving Shane a conspiratorial wink. “I do work with several different companies like hers. What about you, Jimmy, you work around here?”

“Oh no,” Jimmy says. “Not at all. I’m a loser by trade.”

“I see.”

“Very good at my work.”

Fulton squints in a show of amusement, but he hasn’t quite figured them out.

“Where are you from?” Jimmy says.

“I grew up back East. Shane and I went to Cal together,” Fulton says, answering the question he thinks Jimmy must be asking. “And then met up again at a party. Quite a party it turned out to be. You missed one there, Jimmy.”

“Where back East,” Jimmy says, zeroing in on the differences. “Connecticut?”

“Sure,” Fulton says. “Why not? We all have to come from somewhere.”

“But we don’t have to stay.”

“I bought a house here. It’s pretty nice. Shane’s been there. Besides, there aren’t many other places that can compete with San Francisco, are there?”

“I wouldn’t know,” Jimmy says. “Do you mean compete in terms of pretty hills or the business opportunities of the moment.”

“Oh, am I being set up or what?” Fulton says to Shane in a good-natured voice. “Is he a hit man?”

“Aspiring,” Shane says.

“Everyone was new to this city once.” Fulton watches Jimmy, wanting to see how each word strikes him. “The Indians. The Spanish. The Irish. The hippies. The faggots. The losers. The dot-com kids.”

“Parasites come in bunches. The difference is this last bunch just came for the money. First sign of trouble, they’re gone.”

“You two should get a room,” Shane says.

“A padded one, no doubt,” Fulton says, rising. “One way or another, this gym never disappoints for entertainment. What should we do now? They do have boxing in the other room. Or maybe you’re more of a wrestler?”

“Whatever you want,” Jimmy says.

“Tempting.” Fulton holds Jimmy’s stare, purses his lips, deciding something. “You’re totally brothers,” he says, finally, in a completely different key. “So really, are you guys on legs or arms or what today?”

“We’re looking for that friend of ours, actually, this guy named Samson. Sam. Sauce. Lots of different names. I heard they called him Sonny here.”

“Sounds interesting.”

“You remember I mentioned him? Young kid, half black, bushy hair. Freckles. We play ball with him.”

“Ahhhh,” Fulton says, nodding slowly as if everything suddenly makes sense. “A bosom ball buddy. How old is he?”

“About twenty.”

“Black and freckles, huh.” Fulton nods. “Why you looking for him?”

Shane hesitates. “It’s complicated.”

“I bet.” Fulton smiles again. “Who knew that you were so interested in little boys.”

“What?” Jimmy says.

Fulton ignores him. “I think I know who you’re talking about. Sonny, you said? Guess I don’t know the names too well. It is the gym, you know, people leave their names at home.”

“But you haven’t seen him lately?”

“No. It’s funny how little you can know about someone who’s just right there.” He reaches out a hand to pantomime Sam standing next to them. “That’s one of the nice things about the gym. Or basketball, I guess.”

“You don’t play basketball,” Jimmy says.

Fulton flips his small white towel over his shoulder and takes a step back. “No,” he says, looking at Shane instead of Jimmy. “Good to see you,” he tells Shane. “Give me a call sometime.” Then Fulton turns and leaves them, striding with purpose through the aisles of machines and settling on a bench press without looking back.

“What the fuck,” Jimmy says. “Why do you put up with those guys? Why have you been to his house? Why do you party with him?” Jimmy’s voice drips acid, burning holes in Shane’s head. “What the fuck?”

“The thing is,” Shane says, “the thing is that guy remembers everyone.” He watches Fulton across the room chatting briefly with a guy beside him. “I wonder. The whole drug thing, it’s possible.” He tries to remember. Fulton outside the car in the projects, Tennessee calling out from the shadows.

“They’d never kick that guy out, huh.”

“No.”

“Although why would Sam stay here. This place makes me want to maim.”

Shane looks around again, trying to see it through Sam’s eyes. Escape, he thinks. Who wouldn’t choose a world of Fultons over a world of Tennessees. But even here, Sam couldn’t keep them separate. He couldn’t keep the projects out of Paragon, so Paragon had sent him back. Why does Shane think he can do any better? He is already thinking about Lou, Debra, the conversation that’s overdue.

“Can we go?” Jimmy says, staring off in the direction of the bench press.

“Yeah,” Shane says. “Let’s go.”