one fluidseein one movement.
“I’ll be working here for a while,” I said vaguely. “Whatever deals I write, I’ll throw to you or Johnny. I might need you to protect me every so often from the office, in case I’m not here.”
“Uh-huh,” he said suspiciously, then jerked his head towards the door as the small bell rang. “Here comes your boy now.”
Johnny McGinnes blew through the front door and goose-stepped towards the back. There was neither surprise nor delight on his face when he saw me. In acknowledgment he pulled two sixteen-ounce cans of Colt 45 from each of his stretched-out pockets and wiggled his eyebrows in my direction, then continued by.
A young woman entered just behind him and hurried around the glass case, stowing her books and purse somewhere below the counter. I caught her eye and she straightened her posture.
Malone was walking alongside Louie now, pleading with him to call an irate customer and iron things out. Louie would eventually do it, but at the moment was torturing Malone with silence. I made my way across the worn gold-and-red carpet squares of the Sound Explosion and entered the back room.
I walked through a short hallway that contained Louie’s desk. The hallway led to the “radio room,” the toilet, and the entrance to the stockroom in the basement. I stepped into the radio room. McGinnes was finishing a swallow of malt liquor and hiding the can behind some stock.
He was not especially tall, though his perfect posture gave the illusion of presence. His clothing was invariably a polyester blend and always clean. He had lost more of his straight black hair since I had last seen him and had begun combing it forward, out and across his forehead in an almost Hitleresque fashion. His tiny nose was set on his flat Mick face like a blemish.
I looked at the top of the Colt can showing from behind a clock radio box. “It’s a little early, isn’t it, Johnny?”
“Early as hell. But if they get too warm, I can’t drink ’em.” He frowned. “Fuck are you, my mother?”
“Let’s go downstairs, man. I need to talk to you.”
I followed him down the noisy wooden steps to the stockroom. The musty odor of damp cardboard met me as I descended the stairs. Naked bulbs dimly lit erratic rows of cartons. We walked to the far corner of the basement. McGinnes pulled a film canister and a small brass pipe out of his pocket and shook some pot out of the vial.
As a stockboy, I’d spent a good portion of my first two years at Nathan’s in this room getting high with McGinnes. I was skinny but cockstrong then, usually wearing some kind of rock-and-roll T-shirt, tight Levi’s cuffed cigarette style, Sears workboots on my feet. My stance was straight up, cigarette between the first two fingers with the occasional thumb flick on the filter and a shake of my shoulder-length hair for punctuation. McGinnes had slightly longer hair in those days, and mutton-chop sideburns pointing in towards a Fu Manchu that he wore proudly. As we were always stoned, I considered his every word in that basement to be prophetic, and he played the role of sales sage to the hilt.
Somewhere along the line I became a salesman, worked on commission as I put myself through college, cut my hair, was promoted into management, got married and divorced, and generally lost the notion that life was a series of adventures and opportunities waiting to happen. One day a stockboy in one of the stores called me “sir,” and I was alarmed by that panicky, universal moment when we realize that aging is real and for all of us, not just for watery-eyed relatives and quiet old men on the bus.
“So,” he said, folding his arms and cocking his hip, “you’re back.”
“I’m on a sabbatical.”
“You’re no professor. And you sure as hell ain’t no priest, Jim.” McGinnes’ speech patterns were peppered with his idea of black slang, which he picked up not from “the street” but from the pimp sidekick characters on seventies cop shows. Though I had lived in D.C. all my life, I had never once heard a black person use the expression “jive turkey.” Yet McGinnes used it all the time.
“You remember a guy named Pence?” I asked.
McGinnes smiled nervously. “Yeah, I know the old cocker. Lives across the Avenue, in those apartments. I sold him a TV set a long time ago, something else this year.”
“Toaster oven.”
“That’s right. He came over the other day, wanted to bullshit about his grandson or something.”
“You gave him my name?”
“Yeah, I figured it couldn’t hurt. You worked with the kid, maybe you knew something.”
“It’s not like you to help somebody out for nothing.”
“He’s a good customer, that’s all.” McGinnes shrugged, pulled a plastic tube of eyedrops from his pocket, and tilted his head back for a double shot. When he brought his head back down, a tear of eyewash was rolling down his cheek. “So what are you gonna do, look for the kid?”
I nodded. “I only told him I’d ask around a little. The old man’s afraid the kid’s in with the wrong crowd. Drugs, who knows what else. If the cops find him first, he may end up busted. A mistake like that can blow your life before you get out of the gate. Maybe I find him, talk him back home, whatever.”
“So what do you get out of this?”
“I knew the kid and the old man’s desperate. I can’t just blow it off.”
McGinnes glanced over his shoulder at the stairs, tapped another hit into his pipe, fired it up, and tapped out the ashes into his palm. This one he blew towards my face. “Well, it will be a helluva lot easier to work on that out of here than in the office. You know Louie won’t bother you. Besides, you’ll be back on the sales floor, which is where you belong.”
“I might have to remind you how it’s done.”
“You’d just be remindingdo, be remi me of what I taught you in the first place, son.”
“Remember that day I sold a sandbox to an Arab?”
McGinnes said, “That ain’t shit. What about the time I sold a blind man tickets to a silent movie?”
Louie called down that there were customers on the floor. We approached the stairs, and McGinnes elbowed me in the chest and m oved ahead, gunning up two steps at a time. He was giggling like a schoolgirl as he hit the landing.
FOUR
McGinnes chewed on a mint and checked out the floor as we walked down the showroom’s center aisle. Malone stood in the Sound Explosion talking to a light-skinned woman in a leather jacket. He had a Frankie Beverly ballad playing through the stereo, and was close up in her face as he made a slow and awkward attempt at moving to the music.
A guy in a hundred dollar suit with disheveled graying hair stood with his hands in his pockets, blinking absently at the confusingly long line of TV screens lit against the wall. He unfolded my Post ad from his jacket, stared at it, then returned his gaze to the wall.
“Malone’s back there talking himself out of another deal,” McGinnes said. “I’ll take that yom over there by the TVs.”
McGinnes walked over to the customer, staying loose but erect. “How are you today?” he said, extending his hand. The customer shook it limply, without looking McGinnes in the eye.
“Fine. Thank you.”
“Something special for you today?”
“Yes.” The customer jabbed a finger at a spot on my ad. “I’m interested in the nineteen-inch Zenith for one ninety-nine. Do you have it to look at?”
“Oh yes, it’s right over here,” McGinnes said, pointing at the far left section of the wall and gesturing for the man to step ahead of him. McGinnes turned his head back to me, crossed his eyes and hung his tongue out of the side of his mouth. Following the customer, he dragged one leg like a cripple, recovering his posture just as the customer turned to face him.
“What can you tell me about this set?”
“It’s a fine set,” McGinnes said, “and a good value.” The picture on the set was lousy. McGinnes had attached
