Ordell stared. He raised one hand from the desk, reached into the open neck of his silky shirt and came out with a gold chain hooked on his thumb. “I paid twenty-five hundred for it.”
“I don’t wear jewelry,” Max said.
Ordell let go of the chain and thrust his arm in Max’s face. “Rolex watch. Look at it. Worth five thousand, easy. Come on, write the fucking bond.”
Max said, “I don’t run a pawnshop. Hock the watch if you want, come back when you have the thousand bucks. That’s all I can tell you.”
“Look at it again,” Ordell said, turning his wrist, gold flashing in the overhead light. “She a beauty?”
6
Max sat talking to Zorro in a living room done in a mix of scarred oak furniture from another time, bright plastic patio chairs, framed holy pictures, and swords. They both had drinks, rum and Pepsi Cola. Zorro sat in a lounge chair holding ice cubes wrapped in a dish towel to the side of his face. The women were in the kitchen. Max could hear them, voices in Spanish blending with voices from the television in English. There were four sets in the living room; only the one in the kitchen was playing. He said to Zorro, “This hits the spot,” raised his glass, and was looking at bullfight swords in leather scabbards crossed beneath the Sacred Heart of Jesus. There were other mail- order swords on the walls, sabers, a cutlass, a scimitar, several pictures of the Blessed Mother, St. Joseph, different saints; Max recognized one as St. Sebastian, pierced with arrows.
He said to Zorro, “If we leave now you can be there in time for supper. Don’t they eat around five? Or you can have your dinner here, that’s fine. I’ll wait in the car, give you some time with your family.”
“You should fire that guy,” Zorro said, his mouth against the ice pack, “for what he did to me.”
Max nodded. “I’m thinking about it. I don’t know what happened to him.”
“He went crazy.”
Max nodded again, serious about getting rid of Louis. He said, “Listen, tomorrow I’ll talk to your probation officer. Karen’s a good kid, but she’s mad at you because you lied to her. That business about going to your grandmother’s funeral.”
Zorro took the ice pack away from his face to nod his head, Max looking at all that thick black hair, Christ, more than he needed.
“I went, I did. I took my mother and my sisters.”
“But you didn’t ask permission. You broke a trust. If you had asked, Karen probably would have let you. In fact I’m sure she would.”
“I know,” Zorro said, “that’s why I went.”
“But then you told her you were home.”
“Sure, ’cause I didn’t ask her could I go.”
Maybe it was a language problem. Max let it go. He said, “Anyway, if Karen’s willing to reinstate you, the judge might go along. But you have to show up at the hearing for it to happen.”
Max sipped his drink, comfortable in the plastic chair. “What was the original charge?”
“Burglary from a dwelling,” Zorro said. “I got a year and a day and the probation.”
“You did what, about three months?”
“A little more.”
“You’re lucky, you know it? How many burglaries have you done?”
“I don’t know.” He glanced toward the kitchen. “Maybe two hundred.”
“I would think you’d be tired,” Max said. He looked over to see Zorro’s mother in the kitchen doorway, a squat woman in an apron; she would be about his age but looked a lot older. He said, “It smells good, whatever you’re doing in there.”
They drove toward a red wash of sky, west on Southern Boulevard toward Gun Club in Max’s ’89 Seville. He had put away a big soup plate of
Zorro, wearing sunglasses, stared straight ahead. Zorro, with his two hundred burglaries and all that hair, being cool. After a moment he reached into his pants, dug all the way to his crotch, and brought out several cellophane squares of blotter acid.
“This is all.”
“Get rid of it.”
Zorro let them blow from his hand out the window.
“Are you clean now?”
“I think so.”
“Come on, are you clean?”
Zorro raised his knee. He reached into his boot and brought out the handle of a toothbrush with a single-edge razor blade fixed to one end, the plastic melted to hold the strip of metal.
“Get rid of it.”
“Man, I have to have a weapon in there.”
“Get rid of it.”
Zorro tossed it out the window.
“You clean now?”
“I’m clean.”
“You better be,” Max said. “They find anything on you, we’re through. You understand? I’ll never write you again. I won’t speak to you, I won’t speak to your mother or your girlfriend when they call. . . .”
What a business. Sit down to dinner with a burglar and his family and then take him to jail. Max moved his hand on the steering wheel to glance at the gold Rolex he was holding for Ordell. Half past six. He’d drop Zorro off and drive out to the Stockade for the stewardess, Jackie Burke. See what she was all about.
The house where Louis was staying, down in the south end of West Palm, might’ve been somebody’s dream thirty years ago. Now it belonged to a guy named J.J. who had gotten his release the same time Louis did and offered to let him stay if he wanted. J.J. had lasted less than a month on the street and was back in for conspiring to traffic. So Louis had the house to himself—still a mess from when the police banged in and tossed it. He’d replaced the front door with one he’d pried off an abandoned house and put J.J.’s clothes back in the drawers they’d dumped on the floor and cleaned up the kitchen, coffee, sugar, Rice Krispies all over the place. Louis hadn’t been home at the time of the raid and was lucky the cops didn’t know he was living here, or he’d be up at Gun Club with J.J. waiting on an arraignment. There was no way Max Cherry would have bonded him out. Max kept him at arm’s length, didn’t want him there, so they hardly ever spoke. Louis could understand how he felt. What was he doing for Max? Once in a while pick up a guy who’d FTAed. He was doing even less for the insurance company. Nothing.
Sunday, when Ordell dropped him off after the white-power demonstration, Ordell sat in his sixty-thousand- dollar car looking at the house. He said, “Louis, you on food stamps?”
Louis said, “It’s small, but I don’t need a lot of room.”
Ordell said, “Size ain’t what I’m talking about.
This house is the next thing to being condemned. I ’magine it smells bad in there, huh? Any place a junkie lived. You have bugs?”
“Some.”
“Some—shit. Nighttime, I bet you can’t walk in the kitchen without the roaches crunching under your feet. Turn on the light you see ’em split, gone. That’s your car, huh?”
The ‘85 Toyota Louis was making payments on sat in the carport attached to the house. (The insurance company paid him fifteen hundred a month in cash. They were giving him one more week to bring in some business or he was through.) There was a mattress in the yard the cops had torn up and trash barrels of junk Louis hadn’t set out by the street to be picked up.
He said to Ordell, “What do you want—I just got out of the can.”
Ordell said, “It ain’t what I want, Louis. It’s what you want.”
The next time they spoke, Wednesday evening, Ordell had come by while it was still light. Louis asked him in the house. Ordell said he was fine sitting in his car; his car was clean, had it washed and vacuumed.
He said, “You know what your trouble is, Louis? Why you ain’t ever going to make it less you change?”
