Easy Street Page 3

  "I'm never gonna be rich," he muttered.

  "Well, neither am I. But the real trick is to be not poor. See? Help me roll up this piece now. Let's put it—yeah, good. The cool thing is not to get wasted all the time, so you can string together some kind of regular income. Then you can live under a roof and have heat and a refrigerator with food in it and quarters for the laundromat."

  "Mmm."

  "Doesn't that sound nice?"

  "Oh, I guess."

  "You remember what it was like, don't you?"

  "Yeah." And he told me about when he had the job running a salvage yard in Taylor. "I knew where everything was. You couldn't stump me, because I remembered where we put everything. People try to cheat you in the junk business, y'know."

  "Uh-huh," I nodded.

  "I handled money. Chased off thieves. Sonabitchin' drug addicts try to steal everything. I owned a car and lived in a room and ate in diners. Went to the strip club every other night. It was nice."

  "And then?"

  He heaved an enormous sigh. "And then one thing 'n' another. I got sick, had a hernia, had an operation. I never felt good since."

  "You're doing great work now."

  "Yeah, but my insides don't feel right."

  "The booze helps?"

  "The booze helps."

  Perceiving how little actual distance there was between Rick's life and mine, I felt a chill, a serious chill that ran from the back of my head all the way down my spine and deep into my butt and stayed there.

  Chapter 4

  After three and a half hours of steady work we'd denuded the floors in all but the bathroom. Beneath everything was the original planking, quite nice, but now covered more or less evenly with that skim of hard, old mold. A good bleach scrubbing would take care of it, I judged. "I could go for a sandwich and a cup of coffee," I said.

  "Me too." Rick's eyes were looking rheumy.

  I wanted to forestall Porrocks bringing anything out to us, so I went up to the house and found her. "I gotta go to the hardware store for something, 'n' thought I'd pick up something to eat on the way back. Hungry?"

  She had her hair in a black-and-white polka-dot scarf and was wearing stiff new jeans and a red sweatshirt without any logo or cartoon character on it. I liked the polka dots. I saw a small toolbox in the kitchen and figured she must be about to get going on some demolition herself.

  "Oh!" she said. She had a habit of saying "Oh!" like that when you asked her a question. "What do you need?"

  "Some blades for my utility knife. I have to cut up that flooring in pieces so I can roll it up and lift it. Thought I'd stack it in the front room until you get a dumpster or something."

  She checked in her toolbox and didn't have any blades, so she fetched her purse from the foyer.

  "This place must've come as is," I remarked. "Nobody even vacuumed."

  "Yes, the seller was in a hurry. They did at least clean the house—it's just the boathouse that's so dirty. Here, let me give you some money for those blades." She held out a five to me.

  I looked down and shuffled my feet and said, "Thought I'd pick up something to eat on the way back."

  "Uh, of course." She put the five back and took out a twenty. "Why don't you get the two of us some hamburgers from the White Castle on Fort Street? And some fries?"

  "Sounds great. Thanks, Erma." I folded the bill into my pocket and went out. As I backed the Caprice to the street I looked back at the boathouse, just part of which was visible from the house due to a large weeping willow between the two. The boathouse window that faced the house was small and dirty; I doubted she'd see Drooly Rick moving around in there. Anyway, I thought, he probably sat down to rest as soon as I shut the door.

  The hardware store was mobbed, it being Saturday, and they were shorthanded as well: Just one old guy was running around helping people. Watching him, I thought he might be the owner, the way he grabbed stuff almost without looking. He was piloting the cash register too, with arthritis-knuckled hands. The customer before me wanted four gallons of interior flat paint mixed to match a tiny beige chip he had taped to an index card. If I recounted the entire back-and-forth between him and the old guy, it'd take an hour. Every try the old guy made and daubed on a paper strip, this customer would fault it. "It's too seashell. It's way too seashell," he said after the first try.

  The old guy tried again, his knobby painful hands working the color device, not spilling, doing it right. It took about ten minutes per try.

  "Now it's not wheaty enough."

  The old guy tried again.

  "Now you've got it looking more like ginger."

  The old guy said, "You want beige paint, right? That's beige."

  The customer exhaled impatiently. "I would not call this chip beige. That's where we're having a miscommunication." He glanced around, eyebrow up, at the rest of us customers as if he expected us to applaud his outstanding wit. He turned back to the old guy. "I'd call it a very pale burnt umber—an umber about four shades toward a cappuccino, if you know what I mean."

  "Oh, for God's sake," I said.

  The guy turned to me. He was wearing one of those Burberry jackets with the plaid on the outside. That was about all I needed.

  "Just buy the paint, man," I said. "Buy the paint." I heard the by-now five or six other customers do a collective throat-clear, just a little catch of a throat-clear that conveyed their gratitude.

  Burberry Boy got instantly huffy. "Who are you?" he said in a snotty voice. He wore a pair of mirrored sunglasses pushed up into his sun-tipped hair.

  I said, "Either you are a pussy-whipped husband who's afraid to take this paint home to your wife no matter what the fuck shade it turns out to be, or you're just starting out in the decorating business and you think that being an asshole is part of the job. This is not a paint boutique; it's a neighborhood hardware store. The man can give you beige. Either take the beige paint or go the fuck away. Please."

  My God, what a hassle.

  Eventually, I was able to pay for my stuff. Burberry Boy waited while I did, then followed me into the parking lot, trying to decide how to insult me. His face got redder and more desperate until I was unlocking the Caprice. Then he got it. "Nobody wears sneakers like that anymore!" he hissed. "And your car's a piece of shit!"

  "Fuck you very much," I answered, and cranked the engine. I gunned it to the floor in a deafening display of the V-8's power as a vast cloud of black smoke poured from the tailpipe. I threw the car violently into reverse and stepped on it, and the guy leaped back even though he wasn't in the way.

  The line at the White Castle drive-through was long, but it moved fairly quickly. I kept checking my mirror, half expecting the guy to have followed me. He was probably a vegan, anyway.

  When I got back Porrocks met me in the kitchen, where I handed her the receipts and change. "You bought three coffees," she observed.

  "I really need the caffeine," I parried.

  "I'll come out to the boathouse with you. Let's take a break together."

  "Oh, uh," I replied. "Uh."

  She looked at me. "What is it, Lillian?"

  "It's just that I'd really like to get back to work right away. I'm just—I'm just really stoked to be doing this. I'll just gobble as I work, you know? Here." I dumped half of the burgers and fries on the countertop and dashed out.

  I strode quickly down the driveway, my mouth watering. The drive was gravel, pleasantly crisp to walk on, though I thought Porrocks might want to pave it to make snow removal easier. Oddly, there was no garage on the property. Porrocks had left her new Dodge Stratus on a parking apron next to the main house.

  I opened the boathouse door and went in, cradling the food and drinks. I'd shoved the package of knife blades in my back pocket. I had decided against investing in a second wrecking bar just yet, since I'd been doing pretty well with claw hammer.

  Drooly Rick wasn't in the front room. I set the stuff on the counter. "Rick, food!"

  Silence.

/>   No sounds of working or snoring or toilet-flushing.

  A funny dust hung in the air. I sniffed, but it wasn't cigarette smoke; it smelled like chalk, like dirty chalk.

  Then I noticed the wall, that Porrocks had said not to take down yet.

  It was about half demolished, having been torn into from the main room. The heavy plaster and its lath underpinnings had been bashed and pried away, revealing the stout studs and the backside of the laths and plaster on the other side. As the blood rose up to my eyeballs, I noticed furthermore that it was an insane job. Any ordinary person would have begun from one edge, the archway to the next room, and taken down the whole wall from left to right.

  "Fuck!" I spat. "Oh, fuck fuck fuck fuck! Rick!"

  He didn't come.

  I stripped off my windbreaker and threw it down. "Rick!" I stomped through the rooms, yelling curses. He'd understood me all right; he'd just gotten giddy with the power of deconstruction. "Goddamn it, come here, you son of a bitch! You stinking moron son of a bitch!"

  But he wasn't anywhere.

  I scanned the front room again, hoping that the wall wouldn't look as bad as all that, but it did. I saw the glint of something: a liquor bottle, sitting upright on the floor in the middle of the plaster debris. A film of dust was settling on it as I picked it up: an almost empty fifth of DeKuyper's peach brandy. Where did he get it? I crossed to the kitchenette cabinets and started flinging them open. I found a few plastic dishes, some mugs with pictures of fruit on them, and in the corner cabinet, a collection of half a dozen liquor bottles.

  It was the kind of liquor people give you when they move—no good regular beverages like whisky, vodka, or gin, just oddball shit people buy in order to make a new drink they want to try and then never use up: ouzo, crème de menthe, crème de cacao, vermouth, Galliano. I can't tell you how many half-bottles of Galliano I've been given over the years.

  "Oh, goddamn it." Why hadn't I thought to sweep the place for liquor? Because I hadn't. I'd thought I'd made the day safe for Rick by confiscating his Mad Dog.

  I opened the door to the boat well, ready to find him cowering behind the stuff we'd piled in there. But no Rick.

  "Son of a bitch! Stupid fucking addict shit-for-brains!" I stood with my hands on my hips in the gloom of the boat well.

  I saw a shoe floating in the water.

  I bent down to look more closely and sure enough, the shoe, a cordovan lace-up with a rundown heel, was positioned at the end of a floating pant leg.

  Chapter 5

  "Rick! Shit! Oh, man!" I dropped to my knees and almost fell in trying to grab the shoe, which was moving slowly in the current. All the stuff we'd piled into the boat well was in my way as I tried to belly down on the planks. I gave a shove to the dinette set. The table, delicately loaded with the long strips of baseboards, scooted and wobbled. The wood crashed down onto me and into the water. But I was able to flop down flat and plunge my hand into the water to reach the shoe. I got it, then hiked my hand up to the ankle. The leg felt like wood. I tugged, and the leg sloshed up into my face, but with nothing solid to anchor my grip I couldn't pull the body out of the water; it was too heavy. I wedged my foot against the wall to try to gain leverage, but it wasn't enough.

  I lay there on the board walkway of this boathouse, this little covered dock, holding a dead guy by the ankle.

  "Dear Jesus," I said.

  The body was trying to sink, weighed down by Rick's sodden clothes, especially the heavy wool overcoat. I couldn't see his head in the dimness. The current was tugging on him, pulling downward. My arm was stuck awkwardly over the edge of the planks.

  "Erma!" I shrieked. "Erma! Help! Somebody! Help! Aw, Rick!" I yelled his name down at the water as if I wanted him to know I was trying to do something. "Rick!"

  I hung on and hollered for what felt like an hour, though it was probably only five or ten minutes. Nobody came. My arm got tired. I hollered hopelessly. The boathouse was at least a hundred feet from the house on that deep lot, and its walls were built of thick planking. The willow tree, though leafless, was standing there absorbing sound waves, even the ones that made it out through the gap between the planks and the surface of the river. The houses on either side were shielded by fences and shrubbery. If someone had been near, I'm sure I would've been heard, but I guessed everybody was inside watching the Irish pummel the Wolverines on TV.

  I had to let Rick go and hope they'd find him after I ran for help, or else I had to find a way to secure the body where it was, then go for help.

  I'd scratched the inside of my arm on a nailhead that stuck out from the edge of the walkway, and now I felt for it with my free hand, trying to judge whether it'd hold Rick if I could snag his pant cuff on it. I tried that, but the cloth kept slipping off the nail's short shank.

  Still holding Drooly Rick's ankle, I sat up, then hooked my left leg around Rick's, trapping his leg against the edge of the walkway. I pulled off my T-shirt and ripped the hem to the neckhole but not through it. I worked Rick's foot through the neckhole, then crawled along the walkway towing the body until I reached the single mooring cleat at the end. I tied the shirt to the cleat. The body swung around and down, but the T-shirt held it.

  In my jeans and sports bra I sprinted to the house and burst in at the side door. "Erma!"

  Hearing her muffled voice upstairs, I thundered up the staircase to find her on a stepstool fiddling with the cover of the ceiling fan in the bathroom. She stepped down from the stool.

  Still somehow believing the situation was urgent, I blurted, "We gotta call 911. Do you have phone service yet?"

  "What happened? Are you all right? Where's your shirt?"

  "We gotta call 911!"

  "The phone's not on yet, but my cell phone, uh, I think I left it in the car. Lillian, what happened?"

  "I hate to tell you this, Erma, but there's a dead body tied to your dock in the boat well. I used my T-shirt to tie him so he won't sink. It's a guy I know."

  Porrocks went into cop mode. "Are you sure he's dead?"

  "Yes, I've been out there with him for maybe fifteen minutes."

  "What?"

  "I was trying to get him out! I called and called for help, but nobody heard me. His name is Drooly Rick. He's a street guy I subcontracted to help me do the work for you. Come on, I'll show you."

  "Oh, Lillian."

  As we hurried down the stairs, she said, "What else do you know?"

  "It happened when I was gone," I panted. "The son of a bitch found some liquor in the cupboard. He got excited and probably drank a lot all at once, and then he did some unauthorized demolition, then he passed out and fell into the water. That's what had to have happened. I mean, I was gone at least an hour. I don't know his real name—everybody calls him Drooly Rick. Which seems disrespectful now, considering."

  We reached the boathouse. Porrocks threw her arm out, barring me. "Lillian, wait. I'll go in first."

  "Oh, God, Erma, you're gonna kill me."

  "Go find my cell phone. It must be on the front seat of my car. Wait." She began to pull up the hem of her sweatshirt but stopped. "Oh, hell, I don't have anything on under this either."

  "I don't care!" I ran to her car.

  Porrocks's Dodge was neat inside, but I didn't see her cell phone on the seat. I lunged around, feeling beneath the seats, opening the glove compartment, but didn't see it.

  "Shit!" I slammed the car door.

  An elderly woman shuffled into the entryway of the apartment house across the street. I bounded over and up the concrete steps.

  "Ma'am, ma'am!" I shouted.

  She turned and saw me.

  "Please, I need a phone."

  Had I said, "Ma'am, I want to slash your face off," I'm sure she couldn't have moved any faster. She accelerated as if she'd been shot out of a howitzer and disappeared into apartment 1-D.

  I followed her and knocked. "I'm sorry if I frightened you! I'm half naked by accident! Will you please call 911 for me? We need some help
across the street. Your neighbor heeds help!"

  Silence from behind the door.

  "Goddamn it!" I returned to the small lobby with its bank of mailboxes. There was no pay phone.

  I heard someone on the wide staircase at the end of the lobby. The footsteps were measured, unhurried. I waited.

  A pair of legs in bright-red tights appeared. They descended. A somewhat reedy voice said, "If you yell fire, you get more attention."

  Appearing one by one atop the tights: an extremely short, extremely pink fuzzy skirt, then a white pullover sweater housing a round, nicely separated pair of breasts, then a neck curved slightly sideways to the left—a graceful curve it surely was—then there was a head inclined according to the angle of the neck, with a pleasantly inquisitive facial expression. The chin was small and pointed, the eyes frank, the damp-looking dark hair grabbed up in a tiger-striped plastic clip.

  She looked at me. I looked at her.

  "Fire," I said.

  "That's better," she said. "What's wrong?"

  "I need a telephone."

  "Come on up."

  Her apartment, 2-B, was bright, its windows facing the street. That's all I noticed then. She handed me a cordless phone and I braced a hand against the wall while 911 rang. I told the dispatcher the basics, and she promised help right away.

  Red Legs had left the room, and now she stood before me with a glass of water in one hand and a white shirt in the other.

  I drained the water and reached for the shirt, a guy-type. She said, "I actually hate to give you this, but …" She stopped, staring at my midriff and what boobs I had, flattened as they were by my sports bra. I put on the shirt and moved to the door.

  "Thank you. I'll return the shirt."

  "It's OK. I'm sorry there was trouble."

  "I'll tell you about it when I bring the shirt back."

  "Please do."

  "Oh, God," I said, thinking about Drooly Rick's last miserable moments. "Oh, God. Oh, God."

  Red Legs's face was like a smart little schoolgirl's—enthusiastic, fascinated, concerned. That valentine-point chin, those tendrils of hair creeping naughtily from their clip. She stuck out her hand. "I'm Audrey Knox."