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Prologue
The eighties came and went. The president who ruled over them flashed one last fatherly smile, bowed and exited the world stage to thunderous applause, with skyrocketing homeless rates, the '87 stock market crash and a hundred thousand AIDS victims at his feet. Replacing the communist boogeyman with the liberal boogeyman, he passed the reins to a new leader, the most powerful man ever to claim Texas residency as a tax dodge.
Texas, where politicians and other influence peddlers test out crimes they plan to commit nationally, faced the double-edged economic recovery of the early nineties. Quality of life eroded further than before for Texas's non-millionaires: Countryside and farmland paved themselves to make room for malls. Old neighborhoods got "renewed" for wealthier residents at a greater rate than ever. High-tech industries rolled over the northern part of town where small houses once stood, the industries spawning beehive apartment complexes and neighboring strip malls to house, feed and entertain the laborers who would build and buy the laptops, pagers and mobile phones of the new decade. Progress. Unemployment was down, at least on paper: in real life, the grunts struggled harder than they had in the depths of the recession, as rents climbed, social services were cut back and homelessness --- under the "anti-camping" law-was made punishable by arrest. That's where I come in.
At street level, an economy based on self-reliance equals every man for himself A free market cures all ills, and if it doesn't, screw the schools, screw housing, screw financial aid, don't tell us the details, just arrest everybody. Figure the twelve-year-old junkie you busted for dealing gets replaced by a new recruit before nightfall. Figure a joke among cops: "What's the best thing about crack? It lowered the price of a blow job to five bucks." Figure if your kid is lucky he goes to UT or maybe out of state; if he's not, maybe he's sleeping next to you in the back of your pickup, and dealing drugs looks better to him than flipping burgers. Figure it's the wrong time to be born unlucky.
So you're no dope, you go with the winner, you become a black conservative, a gay conservative, a poor conservative. Invite yourself to the party and sit at the back table, they'll get to you, sooner or later. Carve out a little corner for yourself, and to hell with everybody else, you've got dreams of your own. If you feel a little pang of conscience, for the friends and family you stepped on to get where you are, eat something, drink something, snort something, BUY SOMETHING! Anything. Because we need you to buy things.
And all this weaves through my mind at night as I dream my cop dreams. I'm stepping blind in this bricked-up department store, a shopping graveyard, dark and booby-trapped. My mouth is pasty dry, my eyes burn from the fumes of home-cooked crystal meth on the fire. Suddenly Rachel's with me, she's supposed to be safe and separate from this. And the building isn't gimmicked to keep people from getting in, it was easy to get in, anyone can get in: you can never leave. We can't get back the way we came. We can hardly see, save for cracks of light. My foot goes through a floorboard --- Rachel cries out and grabs me. Snakes wrap my feet and I shake them off. Any step could send us plummeting through the floor. The building is crumbling, the wrong time to visit him, a trapped, wounded animal, and the wrong night to bring a date. I might feel the cold of a gun barrel at the back of my neck, or not feel it, not see the bullet coming. No sooner do I think that than suddenly he's behind us, and I whip around, draw my weapon in slo-mo and fire and my bullets spit from the chamber; one, two, three, and fall flaccidly to the ground, and he's facing us down, and I realize too late that the guy I thought I trapped, trapped me; he's the cat, I'm the mouse, I'm weak and helpless, helpless to protect Rachel or even myself, and he's smarter than me, because he's high on the best stuff, and he's motivated by greed, and greed trumps justice and greed trumps vengeance even, and greed trumps love, and I'd trade my .38 for a flashlight and a way out, making bargains I can't make, like please God, please please please God, just get her out of here alive.
PART ONE:
Sweet Virginia
TUESDAY
January 15, 1991
10:45 P.M. --- Lamar Boulevard, Southbound
Rubin watched Jennifer as she breathed in and out through her mouth, puffing clouds on the car window, stripes of light wiping over them from the bright signs of stores and restaurants, past gas stations and convenience stores, past the gloomy horror of the State Hospital.
"Are you warm enough back there?"
"Yes, Mom," he said.
Jenny said, "Yes."
Their mother kept a woolen blanket in the back seat for these times, chilly nights on the way home from movies or restaurants or city council meetings, when the heat didn't reach the back seat. Rubin and Jennifer sat buckled up in back with the blanket pulled up over their legs as Mom drove and listened to the radio.
"...was inaugurated today under the cloud of impending war, the second female governor in Texas history and the first since 'Ma' Ferguson left office in 1935. Meanwhile, the president's deadline passed for Saddam Hussein's withdrawal from Kuwait. A White House official was quoted as saying, 'Only a miracle can prevent war now.' In Austin, local churches rallied for peace..."
Their mother whispered to the radio. "Talk about the meeting. Talk about the meeting."
And Jennifer turned to look at Mom, baby round cheeks, lips pursed in a curious expression, as if to ask, What's that? What's next?
But how can you explain that to a little girl! Rubin was old enough to know that something was next, and it was always bad.
"Mom!" he asked. "Is there gonna be a war?"
"Yes, baby."
"Will you be drafted?" "No."
He turned the idea around. "Will I?"
She looked at him in the rearview mirror and smiled. He had said something cute, but he didn't know what it was. He smiled back.
She'd brought them to Threadgill's again for a late dinner. Rubin could see the hostess's face pull tight like they always did when his mother asked for a table for three. In the silence that followed, his mother kept her own polite smile: she was the customer, she was a slim, pretty lady; and, if it came to that, she was a lawyer. Mom explained all this to them a hundred times, how white people were secretly afraid of them. But they never looked afraid to him, only angry. And while she was slim and pretty and a lawyer, he was short and fat and a fourth grader and he wanted to disappear. They were always the only black people, and she was always making a stand. Easy for her.
Mom had turned from the hostess and smiled at Rubin and Jenny like she'd won, then followed the hostess's clipped steps with her own graceful ones, past the tables and the posters and the lit-up jukebox toward the back dining room.
"No, I think we'd like to sit in front," his mother said. Mom's voice wasn't very big, but the hostess heard it, and held her breath.
"Those tables are reserved."
"All of them?" In the hostess's silence, his mother winked at Rubin and marched them all toward the front of the restaurant, past the jukebox, between the tables, flashing smiles at the white families. Rubin glanced back at the entrance and caught the eye of a scuzzed-out woman in a ratty coat. The woman glared at him and scratched. Even though she had a dirty neck, a hostess was leading her to the fancy chrome counter with a smile.
Rubin took Jenny's hand and followed mom to the very front table, in front of a bay window surrounded by old concert posters and pictures of some slutty hippie lady from the sixties. Green neon lights buzzed over the table. He helped Jenny into her chair. "That's my good little man," Mom said as she settled in. The hostess slapped three menus on the table and huffed away. A flash of wrinkled nose from Mom like they were in on some joke together. But he wasn't in on it.
Half the time, she seemed to miss it, the angry stares and the whispers. The other times she rolled in it, like, "Look how smart I am, look what I got away with!" She left the neighborhood every morning to go to work. He was stuck there, surrounded by the same white kids from the block who hated him, and he walked Jenny to school. How was he supposed to protect her from a bunch of big white kids? Sometimes six white boys would surround the two of them. He couldn't fight them. He couldn't run, not with Jenny there, and they'd catch him anyway. His skin burned as he stood through his punishment. Today his books were knocked down. Yesterday they punched him. Sometimes they'd just stand there and call him names, in front of Jenny, to remind him they were in charge, they could do anything they wanted.
There were days he'd drop Jenny off with her class and almost choke as she looked back at him, helpless, her face reading, "How can you leave me here?"
Mom was always planting time bombs and walking away, making the neighbors mad and sending him off to school, yelling at his teachers and leaving him alone with them. She didn't understand anything.
"Lemonade sound good?" his mother said, and turned to the chunky, dim-looking waitress standing over them. "And how's the fried chicken?"
"Best in the state."
His mother laughed like it was a joke and ordered two portions, three plates. When the waitress left, she said, "Always order a drink. Otherwise they'll think you're a penny-pincher and they worry about their tip. This way they might make sure no one spits in your food." She smiled at the waitress as their lemonade hit the table and Rubin looked in his glass for spit.
"So, " she said, and looked right at him, something she hardly did. She never seemed to be looking at anybody. "How was my speech?"
"It was great, Mom!"
"Really?"
Jenny said, "It was really, really, really good."
"Well, thank you, baby!" Mom said, and touched Jenny's cheek.
They had sat in the back of the auditorium, Jenny coloring in her book, Rubin just waiting, taking care of Jenny. He had always been taking care.
Why did she order fried chicken? The first bite was the only one he ever enjoyed. After that he was just calming his stomach, as he felt himself get fatter. Not fat, she always said. Chubby. And he'd outgrow it. He'd be slender like his mother, not short and stumpy like his dad. He tried to remember his dad. Nothing came back except a round face and a smile. But he could have dreamed that.
Jimmy Wrightington had the locker next to Rubin's and Rubin was always nervous going there. He'd mess up on his locker combination and by the time he got it open, Wrightington would be standing there, nose turned up like a pig, calling Rubin a retard and a queer and knocking his books down. He couldn't leave them on the floor, and if he bent over to pick them up, Wrightington would kick them away. Often as not, Wrightington would punch him. People kept telling him to stand up for himself, but that just made it worse. He had a dream of going psycho on Wrightington, jamming the boy's head in a locker and slamming the door on it over and over again, and people would respect him, for kicking Jimmy Wrightington's ass, for being tough. And it would feel good, revenge. He could feel angry enough to do it, but never figured out how. He just walked away feeling angry and frightened and stupid. The feeling would stay with him all day and into the night. One day he'd fight back, be a man and kick anyone's ass who messed with Jenny, he'd be big and tough and protect her. One day he'd stand up.
He was still thinking that later on, how he'd kick someone's ass and change everything, when they climbed out of the car, sleepy Jenny grabbing his hand as they walked up the path, when Mom unlocked the front door, let Rubin and Jenny in, followed them into the quiet house, flicked on the living room light, and locked the door, still thinking how he'd smash Jimmy Wrightington's head in the locker, slam, slam, slam, when suddenly someone was saying, "Hello, Mrs. Key."
They turned around to see a nightmare-looking man, a homeless man with a dirty sweater and bad teeth, pointing a gun, a real gun, at his mother. But Jenny was in the way. The man could shoot Jenny.
This was his chance. He could leap on it from the side, knock it out of the man's hand, shoot the man dead or pound him with the gun. He waited for his mother to say something but she didn't. Rubin's heart pounded in his throat, in his ears, telling him to jump, telling him to hold still. Without taking a breath, he jumped. And as he jumped, in his moment of flight and taking action, everything like a crazy dream, he felt for the first time he could remember that he was happy, when the sound began, Kup...
It went wrong. He grabbed at the gun, clutched the man's hand as a loud blast of thunder started and didn't stop, thunder crashing in a long, slow roar, a fire ripping through Rubin's fat belly, poking, puncturing, burning through and Rubin's head crashing down on the coffee table, the thunder echoing in his ears as his mother screamed and he knew how, in one second, in one moment of stupidity, he had ruined everything.
11:30 P.M. --- 706 East Thirty-eighth Street
In the dirt by the door sat a half-gallon stainless-steel dog dish with three hardened king-size dog nuggets, next to a coiled dog chain and monster collar, a silent unmistakable message to potential intruders to back off, low-tech security provided by an imaginary Doberman named Wolfgang. Woofles for short. I opened the door onto an American living room, so well-kept and at the same time inviting that I was always surprised to remember it was my own. Rachel trailed me in and pushed the door closed.
I turned to her. With her going-out-to-dinner heels on, she nearly reached my height at six feet even. We squared off, Rachel staring me down with her big, dark blue eyes with a slightly Asian turn at the corner, smooth skin and chestnut brown hair brushed back from her low forehead. She moved near, a close-cut dress calculated to show off the curves of breasts and hips, to show others what they were missing, what I went home with. I kissed her, then drew back and looked into her eyes.
If I had a photo album, it would look like this: My mother, a glamour shot, taken around 1950. My parents' wedding picture, her hair piled up as she towered over my scrawny dad, the unlikely Mr. and Mrs. Reles (rhymes with "zealous"). Me as a baby, my mother cradling me, kissing my tiny hand; my dad looking on, brooding. Me at ten, in the front window of my parents' apartment in Elmira, New York, the day of my father's release from prison, as my mother packs her bag, kisses me goodbye and disappears in a blue-and-white taxi. Me at fourteen in boxing gear, at a Mafia gym in Elmira, a hard look in my eyes as I fight my way up the ranks of the Golden Gloves competition. Bleary-eyed at fifteen as my father wakes me in the middle of the night to tell me he's made an influential enemy and we're leaving the state-now! At eighteen, graduating from Austin High School, class of '71, capped and gowned, my eyes blank. In my MP uniform in Frankfurt. At the University of Texas in jeans and a T-shirt, but on the inside, wound up to my core: uptight in relaxed clothes, looking like a narc. Marrying Amy, a tiny blonde with a domestic dream, cuddled in my big arms. Being left by Amy, punching the walls of our little, empty house on Avenue F. Making rank, Sergeant Dan Reles, and no one to share it with. Appointment to Organized Crime Division. Reassigned to Homicide. With my mentor Joey Velez. With his widow, Rachel.
Rachel and I had gotten a place in the Cherrywood section of Austin. I'd pushed for a rental, even though she could have gotten us a great deal and added her commission to our bank account. She laughed off my reluctance to buy, tacked it on to the fact that, after two and a half years together, I hadn't dropped a hint about marriage. She'd dropped a few. The house itself sat on the south side of a public golf course, a run-down patch of grass and shrubbery with a few holes and no fence around it. A gesture of democracy, it allowed the poor to impersonate the space-consuming rituals of the rich. If you grew up in the area and wanted a place to get high at night or make out with your girlfriend or maybe rape someone, that was the spot. A hundred feet away, on the western border of the golf course, sat the house Rachel used to share with Joey Velez.
Senior Sergeant Joey Velez had recruited me eight years earlier to work on the Gautier case, pulling me from a low-level assignment I'd been working since I'd made sergeant. With a little help from me and a dozen others, the Gautier case targeted major and minor players of a cocaine and car-parts racket operating out of Bertrand Gautier's famous blues dub, and landed them in prison; and it got Joey and me assigned to the newly founded Organized Crime Division. A political shift bounced us off the division, and Joey saved me, mentoring me onto the Homicide squad and becoming my first real friend. He was like a father to me, except that he gave useful advice. If he knew my greatest desire was to jump on his wife, Rachel, he kept his mouth shut about it. And then he died. Now, three years after he was gone, I'd still catch him whispering advice, or as often, goofy things into my ear when I was supposed to be paying attention. I tried not to listen, part of my practice of pretending to be sane. I tried not to blame Rachel for his death, for not loving him. And I tried not to blame myself, for loving his wife.
A while after Joey died, I got promoted to senior sergeant. At work, I still missed Joey, the way you'd miss your father if he died when you were young, his absence felt keenly each day. At home, I tried not to think about the fact that I was sleeping with his widow. Rachel took my promotion as a good sign. We rented this house. She got up every morning at six to stretch and aerobicize in the living room, sunlight scorching her from the east window. I would sneak peeks at her by way of the hall mirror, watch her desperately pounding against the inevitable changes of time and gravity. I kissed and treasured the occasional gray hair I spotted on her head before she found and painted it, the slight shifts in weight and shape that made her more real and human and mine.
That night we'd been out for dinner with Ray and Marissa Tierney, "old friends from Houston, lawyers both." I wasn't supposed to know from the awkward pauses and the avoided eye contact that Ray, now a criminal defense attorney, was an ex-boyfriend of Rachel's, and Marissa his clueless wife, or that Ray had hurt Rachel bad. The bridge-night fantasy Rachel staged served multiple purposes. It convinced Rachel we'd be like other couples no matter how we'd met, no matter that we'd first kissed under the watchful eye of Joey's ghost. And it sent out a message to Ray, one I was glad to back up: cop trumps lawyer.
I left the porch light on, hung up my jacket, looked through the house and checked the locks. The carpet everywhere muffled my footfall, I worried, as it would muffle the steps of an intruder. I spotted Rachel wiggling her ass up the short hallway to the bedroom, wearing a black satin robe I took as a good sign.
By the time I reached the bedroom, she was lying under the blanket with the lights dimmed. I undressed and slipped in beside her. At thirty-seven, I'd kept my boxer's build --- beefed up with strategically rounded shoulders --- and made a pretty good appearance in spite of a hairline that had slipped a few degrees north at the temples and halted, as if to remind me who was in charge. Along with that, I showed a dozen odd scars and a boxer's nose: broken once when I was a kid and again a few years back. You should see the other guy.
Rachel slid into my arms and greeted me with a full, wet kiss, then settled in and kept still.
I asked, "Is something wrong?"
"No," she lied, it's just...We're always working. We come home in time to floss and go to bed. On weekends we clean the house and play catch-up."
"We just went out tonight."
"That's what made me think of it."
I didn't want to blow the moment if it wasn't already over. Here was a woman who spent her youth coked to the rafters, cleaned up and spent the last ten years making money. She didn't know what a real home was any more than I did.
"Well..." I said, warding off frustration. "What do you want to do besides this?"
"I don't know," she said. Then, "What do people do?"
Between us grew a box of sad, empty space. We had decent jobs, a nice house, each other. Now what?
"Do you have Monday of" I asked.
"Why?"
Monday was Manin Luther King Day, an optional holiday in Texas, on the same level as Rosh Hashanah, Good Friday and Confederate Heroes Day. You could take off anyone of them, depending on your religion or your politics.
"We could take a long weekend, maybe go away. Do something fun."
She thought it over. "Like what?"
"Whatever. We'll think of something."
The space between us fizzled and she was pressed against me, sweetly kissing, when the cordless phone rang on her nightstand, splitting the night, and I clicked that I was the detective on call. Rachel grabbed it on the second ring as I said, "No, don't."
"Yes?" she said, as the hope drained out of her eyes. She held the receiver out to me. The base should have been on my side of the bed since I was always taking the midnight calls, but the line from the base to the wall wouldn't reach and we should have gotten a longer line but we didn't.
"Who?" I said.
She imitated the operator's twang. "'Dispatch, Mrs. V.'"
I took the receiver with a standard apology written on my face. "Reles."
"They need you at 1610 Confederate Avenue. Behind Matthews Elementary. Now.
"Who died?"
"I think a kid."
When I reached over her to hang up, Rachel was facing the wall and smoking a cigarette.
"I'm sorry," I said.
After a while, she shook off an idea and flicked the ash in a tray by the phone.
I stood and dressed. "It could be over by the weekend. We could still go away."
And again nothing as I left the house and double-locked the door behind me.
* * *
Excerpted from BODY SCISSORS © Copyright 2005 by Michael Simon. Reprinted with permission by Penguin, an imprint of Penguin Group, USA. All rights reserved.
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