Charlie tapped the brakes. He was so lost in his worthless family that he’d almost driven straight past the dry cleaner’s. He slid the Buick into the parking space beside a police cruiser. There was no one behind the wheel.
Charlie walked across the lot toward the building. The glass windows were floor-to-ceiling. He could see Mr. Salmeri behind the counter doing his crossword puzzle. The cold sweat was back, but not because of Mike Thevis. Charlie’s mind was veering toward panic lately. The constant sensation of something bad about to happen followed him around like a shadow. He didn’t know where this came from. Nothing had changed. Nothing except there had been a lot more calls lately from Mr. Chop, which was a good thing if you looked at the face of it. More Chop, more money. More money, more security. More security, less worry.
Why didn’t that math play out?
The bell over the door clanged as Charlie walked in.
Mr. Salmeri did not look up. He was a hairy Italian guy with a push-broom mustache and hair so black it glowed blue under the fluorescent lights. Gold rings were on his fingers. A rope chain as thick as Charlie’s pinky wrapped around the man’s neck. His shirt was unbuttoned so that the way the yellow necklace lay on his hairy chest reminded Charlie of the green polyester grass and pastel eggs in the Easter baskets he used to buy for his kid before she got too fat for candy.
Charlie guessed his daughter got her gluttony from him. He was a textbook example of somebody who didn’t know when to stop. He had a thriving business. He lived a good life. He lived in a big house and drove a smart car. But then he’d run into Mike Thevis at a party and decided he wanted more.
How it worked was like this: Mr. Chop called Mr. Lam and told him to pick up his dry cleaning. Charlie hightailed it over to Salmeri’s, where he was given a suit. The suit pocket contained a slip of paper with a very important man’s name written on it. The next day, that very same man showed up at Charlie’s dealership ready to pick out a brand-new car. Charlie would give the man whatever he wanted, no questions asked. Then he’d go to Mike Thevis’s joint and walk away with the cash to cover the cost of the car and then some.
Not that Charlie sought out the details, but usually a few weeks later, the commissioner or judge or deputy whoever it was Charlie had given the car to could be found in the newspaper or on the local news talking about how he was supporting or not supporting something that in the end would greatly benefit Mike Thevis.
Charlie wasn’t stupid enough to think he was the only man Thevis was using this way, but he was smart enough not to ask. He visited the dry cleaner at least once a week now, and while he never saw anyone else in the building, there were always plenty of clothes on the rack. Salmeri had a warehouse over in Colored Town where sixteen black women ironed and washed clothes for him. It was a nice warehouse, not what Charlie had been expecting. The women laughed and listened to the radio. Nobody laughed at Charlie’s dealership. Maybe he should hire some black women.
“Mr. Lam,” Salmeri said, his code to let Charlie know there was somebody else in the building. Everybody called Charlie by his first name. Nobody called Salmeri by his.
Charlie jammed his hands into his pants pockets. He was sweating for real now. It was always damp inside the dry cleaner’s, even though no work was done on site. He wiped his brow with his handkerchief. He could hear humming, which annoyed him, then he realized the humming was coming from his own throat.
That fucking Carpenters cover of the Beatles. He couldn’t get it out of his head.
“All right.” Salmeri finished filling out a word. He put down his pen. He turned around and pressed a button and the clothes behind him started spinning on the rack. Salmeri played both sides. There were police uniforms alongside the bright green pants and purple silk shirts that the pimps favored.
Salmeri asked, “You going to the game?”
Charlie had been hearing this same question all morning. It was code for “Are you for Aaron or are you against him?”
“Dunno,” Charlie mumbled, his pat answer.
Salmeri wouldn’t have it. “You think he’ll do it?”
Charlie shrugged. He was scared of Salmeri. Not Mike Thevis scared, but scared nonetheless. The guy owned several dry cleaners. He ran book on football games. He drove a nice Cadillac and he was Italian, which meant he was mobbed to hell and back.
Salmeri plucked a suit off the rack. The plastic dry-cleaner bag ruffled as it moved through the air. He showed a row of white teeth under his bushy mustache. “You feel it on the street?” He waited, but Charlie didn’t have an answer for him. “It’s like it was in ’64 when the civil rights bill passed. You could hear one side of the city letting out a long sigh, and the other side screaming out a lo-o-o-ng ‘Mothahfuckahhh!’ ”
A toilet flushed in the back. Charlie took this as an excuse not to respond. Salmeri was always trying to pin him down on something. How did Charlie feel now that the city was majority black instead of white? How did he feel now that they had a new black mayor? How did he feel when the white police chief was fired and replaced with an uppity black man from the North?
Each time, Charlie told him he didn’t feel one way or another. Salmeri couldn’t get it through his thick, greasy head that Charlie Lam cared about politics almost as much as he cared about Hank Aaron and Babe Ruth. He’d sell a car to a black man or a white man, so long as his money was green.
“Thank you,” a woman’s voice called. Charlie saw her a few moments later. She was a female cop with a pretty face if you were able to look past the uniform, which Charlie was having a hard time doing. His daughter wore pants sometimes, and it took everything he had inside him not to tell her she looked like a whore.
Salmeri’s smile went up a few watts. “My pleasure, Officer.”
She looked into the parking lot. “That your car?”
Charlie waited for Salmeri to give him his suit.
“Sir?” the broad repeated. “Is that your car?”
Charlie guessed she was talking to him. He looked at the Buick. The smile came back, tugging at his lips. The bumper was dragging. The back glass was cracked. He had until that moment completely forgotten about the homeless man. Fucking loser. Charlie had been homeless a few years. He was a kid then, barely more than a teenager. What was that guy’s excuse?
“Sir?” The cop sounded like she was talking to a retarded three-year-old. “I asked, is that your car?”
Slowly, Charlie turned his gaze back to the slit. He stared openly, taking her in from head to toe, then back up again. “Are you a man or a woman?” She started to say something, but he talked over her. “I see your tits under that shirt, but what’s goin’ on between your legs?”
Salmeri laid the suit down on the counter. He didn’t say anything, but he shot out a streak of heat from his eyes that burned the side of Charlie’s face.
The brunette shook her head once at Salmeri. “I can handle it.”
“So can I.” His hand went underneath the counter. He kept a shotgun there. He looked ready to use it.
“Jesus,” Charlie mumbled. Was he really about to get his balls shot off over some dyke? He walked over to the door and held it open with a maître d’s flourish. “Madam.”
The cop gave him a shitty grin that made Charlie want to smack her.
The door closed behind her. The bell clanged.
Charlie asked Salmeri, “You fucking her or something?”
Salmeri kept his hand under the counter for a second longer. And then he flashed some teeth under his mustache. “This is why you should care about the baseball game.”
Charlie cursed. He was so sick of that fucking game.
“Change.” Salmeri said the word like it was a hosanna from on high.
Charlie reached for the suit, but Salmeri pulled it out of his reach.
“Nobody really likes change, even the people who need it most.” Salmeri hooked the suit on the valet rack. He straightened out the plastic bag as he talked. “For the first time on record, a black man
hits a ball more times than a white man. A woman puts on a uniform and earns the same scratch as a man. You think these things don’t matter, but they do. Especially to a guy like you.”
Charlie couldn’t stop himself. “What do you know about me?”
“I know you’re in for a rough ride, my friend.” Salmeri turned away from the suit. He retrieved his ballpoint pen. “You’re the kind of guy whose entire life depends on the system never changing.”
“You think I got it easy?”
“I think when things start to change, you’re gonna be left standing with your dick in your hand wondering what happened.” Salmeri bent his head over the crossword and filled in some squares.
Charlie grabbed the suit and shoved it under his arm. It was gabardine, heavier than the usual. He turned toward the door before he said something stupid that got his head blown off. This was all bullshit. What did this greaseball know about Charlie’s life? He’d changed plenty from the hungry kid who dug roots out of the wet ground so that his brothers and sisters wouldn’t starve to death. He’d skinned squirrels and eaten their meat raw. He’d picked cotton until his fingers bled. He’d gone to school two hours ahead of every other kid in class because the teacher brought him a sandwich if he had the fireplace going before she got there.
Look at the suit Charlie was wearing. Two hundred bucks off the rack. His tie was silk. His shoes were buffed. His hair was barbered by a man who called him “sir.”
Salmeri called, “See you next week.”
Charlie pushed open the door. The sunlight was sudden and unbearable. He held up his hand. The bell clanged as the door closed behind him.
That was when he saw the knife.
The blade was angling down toward his chest. Charlie wrapped both his hands around a black wrist. Realization dawned in sections. Camouflage coat. Mangy beard. Mushroom Afro. It was the homeless guy. How had he made it up the street so fast? How was it that even though Charlie had fifty pounds on him, he was losing this fight?
“Jesus!” Charlie screamed. His heart gagged into his throat. Sweat poured into his eyes. His shoulder banged into the glass door. Salmeri was yelling at him to move out of the way.
“Motherfucker!” the homeless man screamed. “I’m gonna kill you!”
Charlie was shaking from the effort of keeping the knife out of his chest. The guy’s face was inches from his. Their sweat mingled. Their body odors combined. He was older than Charlie had thought. Gray speckled his beard. His Afro was electrified with stalks of gray. Charlie should’ve been worried about the knife, but it was the look in the man’s eyes that terrified him most.
Recognition.
Charlie stopped fighting. His muscles went slack. He dropped to the ground.
“We are each other.” The man stood over him with the knife still gripped in his hand. “I feel it, Charlie. Do you feel it?”
Charlie was paralyzed. He couldn’t feel anything.
“It’s your turn now.” The knife arced into the air. Instead of driving the blade into Charlie, the homeless man stabbed himself in the stomach. There was a snap as the skin broke. Charlie watched the knife sink almost to the hilt. Blood oozed out. Drops of it fell between Charlie’s legs.
The man fell to his knees. He was smiling. He started to pull out the knife.
“No.” Charlie put his hand over the man’s to stop him. He’d seen something on TV or heard a story about how you should leave in the knife if you ever got stabbed. “The blade will stop the blood.” Charlie looked inside the dry cleaner’s. Salmeri was behind the counter on the phone. “Salmeri’s calling an ambulance. Leave the knife in so it keeps the blood back.”
The man wasn’t listening. He was pulling on the knife as hard as he’d pushed it toward Charlie moments before. He said, “Fate put us here together.”
“Sure,” Charlie agreed, though he’d never seen this guy in his life. The man was probably on acid. His pupils were blown. And they were blue—so blue that suddenly Charlie felt mesmerized by the color.
“Charlie, listen to me.” Streaks of red tendrilled through the whites of his eyes. “You’re gonna lose everything.”
Charlie let go of the man’s hand. He tried to shake off the shudder that took over his body, like somebody had just walked over his grave.
“You’re gonna end up just like me.”
Charlie felt sick, like the knife was in his own gut. He looked down at the ground. He watched the drops of blood turn into a puddle, the puddle turn into a river that ran down the gutter.
“Why?” Charlie asked. “Why are you saying this?”
The man was smiling. There was blood smeared across his teeth, dripping from the corners of his mouth. His skin was ashen, almost white. “Do I look like me?”
Charlie shook his head. He wasn’t making sense. “I don’t know you. What are you talking about?”
“I feel like me.” He put his hand to his face, scratched his beard. “Dear God in heaven, I feel like me.”
Charlie kept shaking his head.
The man grabbed Charlie by the shoulder. “You listen to me, Charlie. You listenin’?”
Charlie nodded.
“This is how you end it.” He looked down at the knife sticking out of his belly. “Only, when you stick it in, make sure you go deep.”
“Go—”
He pulled out the knife. He collapsed to the ground.
Two seconds later, it was over.
Chapter Two
Charlie forked a piece of steak into his mouth as he stared at the empty chair on the opposite end of the dining room table. The meat had been cooked to within an inch of its life, but he couldn’t taste anything but blood. He didn’t know why. None of the homeless guy’s blood had gotten into his mouth. There were barely traces of it on Charlie’s clothes. His hands were another story. They were soaked in red. No amount of washing could get the stain out. Charlie had been forced to use the edge of his teeth to scrape it out from under his fingernails.
And he still hadn’t gotten it all.
“More potatoes?” his wife asked.
Charlie grunted as he shook his head. He had his wife on one side of him and his daughter on the other, but he still felt alone. This was nothing new for Charlie Lam. He could be standing in the middle of a crowded room and still feel like he was all by himself.
The phone rang. His daughter popped up from her chair without asking for permission. She caught the kitchen phone on the second ring, and Charlie guessed that was all the exercise she was ever gonna get—running to the phone, hoping it was a boy but hearing instead one of her girlfriends on the line talking about another boy who was never going to ask her out.
When Charlie was her age, he was working at the cotton mill seven days a week. If he thought about it hard enough, he could still hear the thunderous clap of the belt that spun the gin. The vibrations shook the floor. Even when he wasn’t working, he could still feel the tiny earthquakes underneath his feet.
The whole time he worked at the mill, Charlie tithed to himself, keeping ten percent of whatever he made and giving the rest to his mother. He felt guilty for keeping that ten percent, but he kept telling himself that once he got out, he would find some way to save the rest of them.
That hadn’t exactly happened. By the time Charlie was standing on his own two feet, his mother was dead. Throat cancer, probably from swallowing down all the words she would never say to his father. The old man disappeared, which meant it fell to Charlie to make sure the last four kids who were still living at home were taken care of.
They were all adults now, but they still expected Charlie to take care of them.
What he learned early on was that people didn’t really want to be saved. They said they wanted help, but no matter what you did, they always found a way to end up back in the same place they started.
What was it Salmeri had said?
Nobody really likes change, even the people who need it most.
That was the damn truth. Charlie had
rented his sister an apartment to get her away from her abusive husband. Two months later, the husband was living in the apartment on Charlie’s dime. He bought his younger brother a bunch of Snappers so he could start a landscaping business, but then the brother pissed off all his customers and ended up drinking beer all day. Charlie paid off another sister’s credit card debt. A year later, she’d opened up three accounts and was planning a dream vacation to Florida.
Charlie hadn’t taken a vacation in sixteen years.
By far the stupidest thing he ever did for his family was buy them cars. Not new cars, but good cars. With the trademark helpless arrogance of the Lam family, the complaints started almost immediately. One brother said the other brother got a better ride. One of his sisters wanted a convertible, like she could park a car like that in her neighborhood and expect it to still be there in the morning. No one took care of the vehicles. They didn’t change the oil. They didn’t rotate the tires. Hell, they didn’t even wash them.
Three siblings failed to pay insurance; the cars were impounded and they all expected Charlie to bail them out. Another brother got so many tickets his license was pulled. He still drove the car. The car was impounded. He came to Charlie with his hand out. Yet another brother ended up getting drunk and mowing down a kid on a bike. A black kid, sure, but it still cost real money to get him out of the jam.
All of it somehow ended up being Charlie’s fault.
“Daddy?”
Charlie swallowed the lump of steak in his mouth. The way his daughter had said the word made him think this wasn’t the first time. “What is it, honey?”