He tried to put it into words, couldn’t get it straight in his head, but said, “I mean, you got thousands of years of human history, people thinking about how to get organized, how to distribute work and money, and what? This is it? This is the best we can do?”
He made a gesture that took in everything around them. The Korean dry cleaners and the Mexican kids standing outside the car wash, the lined and anxious faces of the women at the bus stop. Maybe the fix he was in, too.
“Every man for himself?”
“Worse. Worse than that.” What his mother had always said, bent over the unpaid bills like a galley slave over an oar, her face bruised with worry: “Dog eat dog.”
CHAPTER NINE
FOR TWO NIGHTS Ray stayed in a motel in Marlton across the river in Jersey. Clean, but the towels were like sandpaper and the bed sagged in the middle. He called Theresa on the cell phone the first morning. She’d won eight hundred dollars playing nickel slots.
“Christ, Ma, that’s like sixteen thousand nickels. What do they bring, a wheelbarrow?”
“They pay in cash, smart- ass.”
“Keep it somewhere safe, that’s all.”
“Don’t worry about my money, dope fiend. I’m saving it to spend on my grandchildren.”
“Okay, I can see where this is going. I’ll check in later.”
“I talked to the lawyer about your father.”
“That’s great. I’ll talk to you later.”
She started to tell him something else, and he hung up.
AT NIGHT HE cruised up and down 73 in Sherry’s Honda. He’d stop and get a drink at an empty bar, then get antsy and leave. He ordered from the drive- through at the Taco Bell. He felt like a shark circling in black water. Moving up and down from Marlton to Berlin, restless, jumpy, watching his rearview mirror and not knowing what to expect. The stations on Sherry’s radio were tuned to Jesus and teenage- girl pop, and he dialed around until he found a black gospel station promising hell but offering full-throated music against the Day of Judgment. He went around the circle at 70 and followed it west. He passed dark industrial parks and convenience stores, finally pulled in at a strip joint in Pennsauken that billed itself as an International Gentlemen’s Club. He sat in the car and pulled a one- hitter from under the seat and filled his nostrils with coke. He felt his pulse begin to race and his gums went numb. The car began to get hot, and when he opened the door he could smell the tar from the parking lot and the exhaust from passing trucks.
He sat at the bar and ordered a vodka and tonic and then turned to watch a short, wiry girl in a half- T move languorously up and down along the pole, her back arched. Her hair was a sooty, unnat ural black, and all he could think about was how different she was from Michelle. Her eyes were half- closed, her movements as slow as if she were a sleepwalker, or moving against a current in a dark sea. Waitresses with hair tortured blond moved from table to table under dim red and blue spotlights that made it look as if they were being alternately frozen and then roasted alive. He finished the first drink fast and took another to a table in a corner. There was a black light overhead that made his shirt an unnatural white. He had more drinks and went to the men’s room to do more blow, navigating the tables of gray- haired businessmen and kids with baseball caps doing a frantic pantomime of desire for their friends.
The girl from the stage came down and stood by him, her teeth brilliant in the ultraviolet light. He leaned into her, and she whis-pered to him. He took money out and gave it to her. She stood closer to him, and he felt heat in his face and along his arms. She smelled like perfume, something sharp and astringent, and beneath that sweat and cigarettes. She moved between his legs and breathed into his neck and somehow kept from touching him. Ray moved his hand along her leg, and she smiled and moved back a few inches. He held out a twenty, and she rolled a hip toward him so that he could put it beneath the band of the G-string.
“I know the rules,” he said.
“Do you?”
“I just don’t want to follow them.” He opened his fist and began counting off hundred- dollar bills. She closed her hand over his and told him she’d be done at eleven thirty.
HE WALKED OUT, crouching to hide his insistent erection until he reached the car. He did another hit and rubbed his cramping jaw, blinking under the lights, which now looked ringed with purple motes from the dope in his blood. He drove back out to 73 and went into a package store. He walked up and down the aisles, conscious of being high. The aisles tilted away from him; the labels were too small to read. He walked up and down with a basket, eventually getting the layout. In the end he took a bottle of vodka and two bottles of tonic to the front and also bought pretzels and a handful of lottery tickets to give to Theresa, who saw tickets from another state as exotic: unfamiliar fruit from another continent.
Back out on the road, he drifted again, killing time. At the last minute he caught the sign for a used- book store and cut the wheel fast to catch the driveway. He killed the engine and took a pull from the bottle and washed it down with a long swig from the tonic water, which fizzed hot in his mouth and dribbled down his shirt. He wiped his hand over his mouth and blotted at his beard.
Inside it was quiet. A young woman with her lip and nose pierced stood at the counter talking on a red cell phone. He walked up and down the aisles, hunched over and trying to read the flaked and broken spines of westerns, mysteries with culinary themes, horror novels with titles that seemed to leak blood. He settled on Louis L’Amour, one of the Sackett books he knew but hadn’t read in a while.
Next to the counter was a stand of cheap DVDs like the one in the store where Michelle worked. While the girl rang him up, the cell phone stuck between her ear and her raised shoulder, he flipped through the movies, looking for something he knew.
“Do you have Night of the Demon?”
She held out his change, shook her head, turned her back to finish her call. He felt the chemical thunderbolt of the cocaine in his blood and a flash of loneliness and shame that made his shoulders cave in on themselves, and he went to the car and pawed around for the vodka.
He went back to the club and waited for the black- haired dancer, who came out with a bouncer and turned and said a few words to him before he went back inside. He waited, then got out and gave a nervous half- wave, and she pointed to her car. He pulled out, and she followed in a black Jetta.
IN HIS ROOM, she said she didn’t have much time; her mother was watching her son and expected her home at midnight.
“He’s nine.” She held up a cigarette and raised her black eyebrows, and he nodded. She fished in her purse and brought out a Zippo and a scuffed photo of a tiny kid with a mass of black curls in an oversized football jersey and shoulder pads. He smiled at the picture, and she looked at it, and when she put it away Ray could see her hands were shaking. He watched her light the cigarette, her full lips pursed and her eyes watching his.
He sat on the edge of the bed, and she came over and sat in his lap fully clothed. He put one arm around her but thought of a small, black- haired kid in a messy living room watching TV, the grandmother asleep in the blue wash of light, mouth open, dentures loose. A smell of unwashed laundry and old cigarette smoke.
He could feel a tremor in her arm across his chest. At the club he had wanted her with an ache that seemed to run through him, carried in his blood. Under the yellow light from the cheap bed-table lamp, it all fell out of him and he could see she was afraid that he might be a cop, that he might beat her. She wanted him to know about her son. She wanted the money for her rent, or maybe to get high. He had always known this about the massage parlor women, the strippers he had briefly dated or just fucked for money. Something about killing a man with his hands, or almost getting killed himself, or turning thirty, or talking to his father had changed the way he saw things. The way he saw himself, moving through the world. Maybe it had just been the house on Jefferson Avenue, the picture of the girl in her cap and gown looking so much like Marletta, and her voice in his head again. The way she had looked at him and the things he had let himself want when he held her.