Last Bender

Well, I’ve started a new novel. We’ll see where it goes. Here’s chapter 1.

THE WORST IS YET TO COME

 

By Buzz Callaway

“I see the girls go by

Dressed in their summer clothes

I have to turn my head

Until my darkness goes.”

 

–Jagger/Richards, Paint it Black

 

 

 

 

“My advice is to not let the boys in.”

 

–Bob Dylan, Tombstone Blues

 

CHAPTER ONE

She was seventeen and all leg. The way she was banging the hell out of the pinball machine I should have known better, but I decided to buy her a drink. Her back was turned and she had a cigarette going in her left hand with about an inch of ash hanging off the end, which somehow managed to hold on. The muscles in her thighs tensed up every time she bumped her pelvis into the coin box. As the ball shot towards her flippers she turned her feet in and banged with the right and then the left hand, knocking the ash to the floor. The red light on top of the machine started to turn and a police siren went off. The machine barked, “Pull to the side of the road…” and she slapped the flipper, sending the ball up the side and into a thousand-point hole. She took a drag of the cigarette. I moved my briefcase to the side of the stool, where I could keep an eye on it, hopped down and in two steps practically I was standing beside her. She was tense, waiting for the ball to release.

            “What are you drinking?” I asked.

            She didn’t look at me at all but eyed the ball, breathing through her nose. “Fuck you, I’m shooting,” she said, in some kind of an accent. One I never heard before.

            “It’s just a fucking game,” I said. “There’s no money in it.”

            “Where is there money anyway? Huh? Not in this machine? No.” Thwock. The ball knocked around making bing-bing noises and then disappeared in a shadow. Her neck tightened. She had shoulder-length hair, all in a jumble of mismatched dyes and cuts, but in that light it was hard to tell the color. I couldn’t tell the colour of her skin either; just that she was all lit up in neon beer signs and pinball. The machine exploded to life and the ball shot down the center; she hit both flippers and missed. “Fuck,” she muttered. “You did this. You owe me a drink.”

            “Sit down.”

            We took our seats. I moved the briefcase back in front of the stool and called Jerry over. “Make it Irish and a beer this time, and whatever she wants.”

            “That’s ok to me,” she said. Jerry slowly went about getting our drinks.

            “So what do you do?” I asked. I had her in the stool, so far so good, but she was just sitting there staring at the bottles with her chin propped up on the tops of her hands.

            “Nothing. Why do you ask? Where’s my drink?”

            “Relax, it’s coming.”

            “O.K.” She scowled, but her face still looked good. She had those sharp smart looks of a girl who’s going to get where she wants to go.

            Jerry put down the beers and poured the shots. She downed hers and drank some beer. I took a sip and looked at her. She didn’t sit still for long. She was like a long guitar lick. Every minute she pulled a new face on me, or the mirror, or she twisted back and forth on the stool, her eyes narrow or bobbing open.

            “You don’t go to school—“

            She stared at her fingernails and asked, “To what? That? No. Do you take me for an idiot?” She looked me in the eyes and said, “Why don’t you tell me what you do?”

            “Oh, sure. I’m in real estate. And I’m a small business man.” I was both of those in a sense. My father always told me, whenever he wrote from the Pen, to get a shingle and work my angle from there, inside the law. Real Estate, any kind of broker, CPA, lawyer. The money guys always come out on top. And lawyer is the top of the shit. So I went to college and law school.

            “Small business, right. Pimp?” She was sort of smiling at me now.

            “What the fuck is it with you?” I asked. “Pimp. Is that how I seem to you?”

            “Forty-year-old guy, seventeen-year-old girl. What do you call that?”

            “That’s bad math. I’m still in my twenties baby, you’re in range.” I raised my glass to her and smiled. “I wouldn’t expect no remuneration or nothing, for my greater maturity.”

            “You think I don’t know those words? Because of my accent?”

            I didn’t know what to think. “I’m all confused now. I was just making a lawyer joke. I’m a lawyer too.”

            “That must come in handy.”

            “Always looking for an angle. What’s yours then?”

            She rolled a thin cigarette up from a pouch and lit it. “No angle.”

            “Are you really seventeen?” She held her wrist up and showed me her scar code. “Who gave you that?”

            “Eemigration. Bastards.”

            “What the fuck are you doing here anyway?”

            “What the fuck is anyone doing here?”

            I had a phone call to make about the two kilos of cocaine in the briefcase at my feet. “You want to go for a drive? This place is beat.”

            “Maybe. I’m waiting for someone.”

            “You tell me that now? After all that?”

            “You never asked me. She will be here soon.”

            “Oh, a dyke now. My fucking luck.”

            She looked at me strangely, and the door outside opened, letting in a flood of sun that lit up her face and I saw that her eyes were blue. In walked a woman, blinking. She shut the door and looked around. My friend hopped off her stool and called, “Elma, over here, here.” Elma looked a little older, longer in the face, and she was a bad dresser. Her pants were like bags and her feet were filthy from walking in sandals. Her hair was cut nice though, and it was all one color of blond, with a few patches of LuminEssence flashing in the dark like sun. “This is my sister Elma.”

            She nodded and tried to smile.

            “Now I know who she is but who are you?”

            “She’s my little sister, who should not be talking to people like you.”

            “People like me? Now what is that?”

            “I won’t say. Irmela, are you done playing pinball?”

            “Yeah, I’m all done with that.”

            I got down off the stool and turned to face Elma. “We were just having a drink, I hope you don’t mind. If you want, you can chaperone us. I had just asked Irmela if she wanted to go for a drive.”

            “It’s out of the question.”

            “Now don’t be so harsh.” I could tell I had her, she just needed reeling in. It wasn’t gonna happen in two seconds. “She can sit in back; you sit up front with me. We’ll put the roof down and go for a ride along the coast. I know a bar with great food looking right out over the ocean. We can get steak and dance all night. And you can always rent a room if you’re too drunk to drive.” She pretended to grimace and now it was a matter of pride. “I’ll drive you to wherever you’re going.”

            “I have a car out front.”

            “Maybe I’m going at this wrong.”

            “Why don’t you buy me a drink here. Then I can decide about the roadhouse and all that.”

            This lightened the load all right. I was ready to go. I turned to Irmela, with a big smile on my face, thinking, now I got the little sister, and the time to work on her. But she wasn’t there. I had not seen her go out the door. I looked down the bar, and then, as I turned to look at the door it was open, closing slowly and I could hear her footsteps crunching on the stones of the parking lot. “What the fuck—“

            Elma’s face didn’t budge. She said, “Irmela does that a lot. She’s very moody. I’ll go after her.” She walked out the door and I sat down and started to sip my beer when I looked down and saw that the briefcase was gone. “Fuck!” I ran out the door into the blasting sun. Elma was trotting out of the parking lot, chasing my car on foot. I patted my pockets. She had taken my keys and wallet. “God damn it!” I screamed.

            She stopped running and turned towards me. “She drove off in someone’s car. I tried to stop her, but…”

            “But what? Fuck, that’s my car. And she stole my briefcase.” I was fucked. Two kilos. I never had to kill anyone before and I’d only known her five minutes and all I could see in either direction was murder. Five fucking minutes. The first no less.

            “She’s always doing this, I’m sorry. What was in the briefcase?”

            “Important court documents. I’m totally screwed with my firm if I lose those fucking things. Screwed. Like dead screwed.”

            “Well she doesn’t care about your documents!” Elma said, laughing. “You are like a child. She is only after money or drugs.”

            “That’s very reassuring. We have to find her. It would not be good if my associates or a competitor laid hands on them.”

            It was the hottest part of the afternoon and we were in the sun. The heat coming off the concrete baked my face and the wind made my eyes wince behind sunglasses. She looked around the parking lot and said, “There. That’s where I parked. Come on.”

            I followed her to the car and my spirits fell as soon as I saw it. “Oh man,” I said. It was pathetic, a solar toy made out of LitewOOd and ruBBer with two solARSAils. Useless at night after two hours. And a maximum speed of 60k. So fuck it. “Am I nuts? Am I getting in?” I asked. “Yes,” I said.

            “Put on the seatbelt.” She checked her mirror, the sails lifted taut and she spun us out of there. “We’ll go to her usual spots first.”

            “She has a route when thieving? I come from a place where that kind of behaviour is fatal.”

            “You think she’s very beautiful?”

            “How far did that get you?”

            She looked in the rearview. “Sometimes she follows me. I have to drive around until I catch her, and then I chase her around for a while. We learned that back home.”

            “Where would that be.”

            “Tell me your name first.”

            “Ken Alangga.”

            She turned onto a dirt road. The tires did ok, they had a cool suspension, so we raced along on the ruts and the sails turned this way and that. “Quebec. Montreal. Then New York, Vegas. We have an act.” She parked under a giant eucalyptus tree and we walked into this split-level ranch with a flat ground level reflective roof. There were three unoccupied hair drying domes against one wall and three sinks, where three people were getting their hair washed by decrepit, old men with long pink fingers. “Sometimes Irmela gets her hair done.”

            “Yeah, well not in a while.”

            “Now you are catching on. If I had stolen your wallet I would have had a haircut, if I were her.” We got back into the car. It was getting late. The cocaine wasn’t due till midnight but I didn’t feel like relaxing.

            “Where does she drink?”

            “To my knowledge she doesn’t drink anywhere. She plays pinball.”

            “She sure knocked one back fine today. Plus yeah, she gave the pinball a work out all right.”

            “We will go to streep mall next.”

            She kept her eye on her rear the whole way to ‘streep mall’. It was the first time she had ever not used an article. It bugged me, like it was supposed to mean something, but it didn’t. She got off the highway and onto a local rutted road cutting through a field of low cactus and gnoutweed. The dust rolled up over the windshield and engulfed the car. Up ahead three white building ports shimmered in layers. They grew and grew; there were cars parked up along the ports, and bikes, and a few hovercraft. At the turn off there was a sign that said, ‘streep mall’.

            “So what’s here?”

            “A bar where she knows a girl. They all have big breasts there. Irmela could not get a job because she has a body like a boy. The owner said it wasn’t a Ruler bar. I have heard of Ruler bars only in ludicrous stories in newspapers, the kind you get at the train station, for the toilet and the waiting room. Where they make those lies to keep you quiet while the train goes.”

            “I’m familiar with those.”

            We entered the first pod. The stairwell was a little fetid. Not a sign of a class joint in my book. The air conditioners were on the crank and the air smelled like mildewy filters and damp carpet. There was a long bar full of men with boob jobs, or so it seemed. The bartender was a six foot blond dressed from the neck down in black. Elma spoke to her in what she later said was French, but I didn’t know French from German, if it’s not Spanish, what the fuck did I care. They oughta hang that shingle around your neck when they give it to you, or shove it up your ass where it will do some good.

            “We’ll look in back,” Elma said, taking my hand to lead me through a curtain into a dark room with ten pinball machines and a red light in the ceiling. We stood by the curtain watching till our eyes had adjusted and we saw she wasn’t there, though there was an unruly girl at one of the machines that looked like her for a moment, to both of us.

            We drove along. I was sweating. The vents were clogged with dust. The engine stalled slightly, as if it had a weak heartbeat. I was pretty much a mule on the cocaine job. Just something I did on commission. My real estate interests coincided with the interests of friends etc. So the trade was to occur in a house I was managing and renting out for a party. The owners were away for 9 months and I was handling the property for them. I pick it up and deliver it to my house, which I secure. And there are people there spending money on cards, food, drugs and liquor.

            I have no money in on any of it, but I take a cut of everything. It really wasn’t half bad. Not that I knew. I was still just one thing and then another then. You can get distracted from a good time just as easily as a bad. We drove till it was past dark and I knew at best we had two hours of power left. I was hungry. I had made a few calls just to say where I’d be and when, and called the house to speak to the caterer and the liquor people. No one would show up till after ten, but I wanted to be there. “Just one more place,” she said.

            “Doesn’t she ever get hungry? I mean, what kind of a game is this?” the blood was pounding in my ears. I had no reason to twitch yet, but without a decent car I’d be dead by morning if I missed this meeting. “I’m gonna lose what’s left of my mind here.”

            “You cannot stand a little hunger to get what you desire? What kind of a weak man are you? If it were my brief case I wouldn’t rest till I had it back again. I would not think of food.”

            “Well I want to eat your pussy too. Must be I can want two or three things at once.”

            “Lovely. Where we are going is a restaurant with a good pinball room that serves sticky rice.”

            “I am so fucking sick of sticky rice!”

            “Everyone likes that. With the dried shrimp and chilies.”

            “Yeah, yeah, and fish sauce. Ten years I lived down the block from the Kathasaritsagara Nam Pla factory. You know I learned to sleep with that smell in my head. I was once so drunk I curled up with my dog and slept with my face in his ass and didn’t even fucking know it, that’s how bad it was.”

            “This is the place. Can you try to control yourself a little?”

            “Whatever you say, if it will get my bag back.”

            The place was above ground on a desolate lot at the end of a block of one-story homes with all the windows broken out and live ammo rounds scattered on the ground. Inside was efficient, clean, with strong fans, and sweltering hot. There was a counter and three small tables against an opposite wall, with a view of a compost dumpster and some stunted thornbush, dimly lit by the interior lights, which were bright. The walls were white junk block, and the tables were boards screwed to ancient metal stands. Out back, under a corrugated roof with screened in sides and oil lamps were five pinball machines and a line for each. There was a small bar at the far end where a girl dispensed bottles of cheap lager and boiled water.

            A short man with bags under his eyes and a pot belly stood behind the counter leaning on his hands, staring glumly out into his empty dining room. There was a strong scent of toasted dried squid in the air. He looked at Elma and smiled. “Oh, Elma, long time you haven’t been in.”

            “I was not working for a while.”

            “Sit down, please. And your friend,” he looked at me, a little critically. I tried to get a line on whether he was her dad or not, but got nowhere with that. I looked at my watch. It was nearly nine. My stomach roared. “You have roast pork sticky rice?”

            “Yeah. With sauce?”

`           “Sure, with sauce. And a side of toasted squid.”

            She said, flipping the menu over twice to check between two things, just to be sure, “The greens, with tempeh.”

            “And brown rice.”

            She smiled. “You remember. Thank you. And a mango juice with vodka.” It was a sweet smile she had. It was like her whole face changed when we walked in. So it was a good place for her.

            “I don’t really even like toasted squid, but it smelled so good,” I said.

            “Thaksin chars it. They all come here for dried squid.”

            “Who?”

            “Bikers, who else?”

            I made a little air noise with my throat. “Is Irmela friends with them?”

            She smiled again, only this time she was up to something. “Irmela is friends with everyone.”

            “Does she steal everyone’s wallet and keys, and their briefcases?”

            “No, not everyone. Everyone else though.”

            I could not bear to have another one of these conversations with her. She was probably the most sexless, unwholesomely unpleasant person I had ever hung around with, except maybe for the bitter Ruler reject who was my guide in Junior High. One of those cloning errors where the potato genes take over and the Ruler bitch is too soft to put it out to die.

            Smile or no smile, she wouldn’t shine for me. I’d have to sell her fish to get her to do that and check out her men for her. I looked at her and thought, only a mad man would turn her down for that imp sister of hers, but that’s just what I’m gonna do. I remember that like it was yesterday.

            Thaksin brought our food and I sat in silence dipping balls of the sticky rice in the dried shrimp sauce while she ate the greens and brown rice with a spoon and fork. It was good and I felt better, at least better enough to start hammering away at her again. “That car of yours hasn’t got two hours left on it. I’m under a very serious deadline.”

            “What do you mean? The charge? I have two spare batteries. I always can go all night.”

            “Well in that case, I’m belching, let’s go.”

            “Can you get the check?” She looked at her feet.

            “Look, I don’t care about the check, but don’t hang your head. You’re in the shit as much as she is, don’t forget.”

            She looked at me without any feel at all. “I don’t like asking for things.”

            I got the check. “I’ll take it out of your end.”

            “My end? Of what? I’m not in on any cut. Don’t try to make me think I am.”

            I paid Thaksin and we took our food in paper. As we headed out into the parking lot, a pair of headlights came on. “That’s my car,” I said.

            “You see? She’s waiting. Now she is done chasing us and we have to chase her.”

            I ate the food out of my lap while she cruised around after Irmela and my car. It was block after block of boring shithouse homes. Lumps of clay in the desert. I could have been in the hills sipping mock blue gel out of a martini glass and screwing an actress in the pool. The caterer would have the grilled prawns out early. The band would be tuning up. (I can miss the sound check but the first set, I want to hear what I’m paying for. It’s got my name on it.) A few people would be there, but the big crowd wouldn’t arrive till after midnight, after Carlos picked the cocaine up.

            As long as the Priest was there, I knew things would be ok. He ran whatever I needed run. He treated my money like his own, so I had to be careful and know exactly what he was stealing. He had the ultimate shingles, doctor and priest. Or at least, he once did. He was defrocked in both professions, shorn of his titles and rights to practice, but not of his abilities. A medical man is invaluable in all kinds of endeavors. And a priest instinctively knows how to win the trust of others.

            The taillights were more or less in view for about an hour, and I was getting antsy to find out if she even had the briefcase or if she’d turned it over to her biker friends, who might very well have known that I would be in Jerry’s bar. You can set a clock by that and I’m not totally unknown around South LA.

            Finally she pulled into a rest area off the highway north. Elma drove up along side her and I rolled down the window.

            “Do you have his briefcase?” Elma shouted. “He says he needs it. There are men who will kill him if it goes missing.”

            Irmela smiled and laughed and bit her nails.

            “Look kid, I know you got the bag.”

            She shook her head and then her eyes welled up. “I gave it to David. Like he asked.”

            “Asked what? David who?”

            Elma yanked my sleeve and I turned on her and her cold face was an inch from mine. I could smell her breath, shrimp and garlic and limejuice. “Let me talk to her. You want the briefcase back?”

            “Yes I fucking do want the briefcase back.”

            “Then please shut up for a moment. Irmela, David has the briefcase? For how long.”

            “While you were at the restaurant.”

            “Goddamnit, would he open the thing, what kind of a scumbag is this guy?”

            “A real one,” Elma said. “Much worse than you. He is a pig. He makes me give him blowjobs.”

            “I’d make you do that too.”

            “I hope you will not find out.”

            “He said we owed him money,” Irmela said.

            “But it’s a lie,” Elma said.

            “But we have to pay. You know we have to pay. It was what you always told me. Why wouldn’t I take it and give to him. All that cocaine? You will never have to suck his dick again. We don’t even have to sing for him.”

            “If you think,” I said.

            “Shshs! Cocaine? Why didn’t I know that? Am I so stupid? Court documents.” Elma shook her head.

            “Oh, you took pity on a poor lawyer, but a mule in a drug deal, that’s another story then? It’s my stuff and your sister stole it and gave it to your pimp.”

            “I only fuck a few guys if he asks me. He pays us to sing,” Elma said.

            Irmela said, “I think we should go back before it is too late.”

            “I agree,” I said.

            We drove back across town to a strip of music clubs and bars. There were a few 500-seat theaters in the area running old TV comedies, Bewitched, The Honeymooners, Dragnet. I screwed Samantha Stevens a couple of times, different ones in different seasons, and a Trixie understudy when I was 19.

            But they weren’t on that block. They were off of Coyote, on Calle Glint, a toilet; their end was the back end. There was a dairy on the corner and a peyote shop that also sold toilet paper and water and chocolate bars. I knew that block well. I had a vending route in high school. I rode a solar scooter around making sure the machines were running right, and getting the game count. I was always in that place buying smokes at the end of the day and I got to know the old lady a bit. There were three clubs and a bunch of bars. The clubs were small and unhealthy. The singers there were up and coming. Her place was The Broken Morrow, a doorway squeezed between a boarded up bar and an open one. There was grit blowing in the hot night air. Irmela yanked open the door and we made our way up a stifling small stair into a blacked out room with a folding table set up for a bar and a small stage with some lights and amps. It was early and only a few friends of the bartender, a ghastly looking girl, were hanging out. Behind the table hung a black curtain which served as a door to David’s business office. There was a couch and a desk and a worn-out swivel chair that smelled like a fat man’s behind.

            “Where is he?” I asked.

            “He may be in his room,” Irmela said.

            “Maybe,” Elma said. “And maybe we don’t want to know what he’s doing.”

            Irmela looked at me. She was afraid. “Let’s go.”

            We went through a door and up a back stairs to a dented, unpainted metal door. It smelled like goat piss. The stairs were soft under foot. She opened the door and we entered a room where the air was curdled. Seated in a reclining vinyl easy chair, was a large man with a big head and a roll of belly fat. He hadn’t shaved in a few days. He wore tinted glasses and breathed through his mouth. Under his arm were big patches of perspiration. He had a remote control in his hand and he was watching two women fuck each other with dildoes. On the floor was the briefcase, unopened. He turned the sound off. “Hello ladies,” he said, without taking his eyes from the television. “And whoever the fuck you are.” It smelled like dirty laundry and unwashed scrotum. The air was warm and still. It was like he was controlling us with his sweat.

            “I would be the fuck who owns the goods in that bag.”

            He turned from the TV and looked at me. I could see his eyes behind the amber lenses. “I can’t say I wasn’t expecting whoever she took this from to show up. I was trying to protect her is all. She’s like a daughter to me. Ever since they came to audition. Have you heard their act? They play two electric guitars and sing their native Austrian folk songs.”

            “Ew,” said Irmela.

            “I thought you said you came from Montreal?” I asked Elma.

            “After Wiener we came from Montreal. What, you want genealogy from me?”

            “Hey,” David said. “We aren’t getting very far with this.”

            “There’s nowhere to get here.”

            “What’s it worth to you this much of a find?”

            I cleared my throat. “I’d be willing to consider not killing you if you give it back for free.”

            He nodded. “That’s about what I figured.”

            “Is that it,” Irmela asked.

            I took the briefcase. “Yeah why not. Oh yeah, David. I’m taking the girls out tonight. I hope you don’t mind.”

            His eyes widened and he looked at Elma.

            “Let’s go,” she said. “Goodbye David.”

            Irmela followed us out the door.