“Pay me whatever, or nothing,” I said. “This job saved my life; I’m grateful to you, I’ll do anything I can to help your store be successful.”
I thought Ruplu was going to cry. He clapped me on the shoulder, gulped back tears.
“You are my good friend,” he said. “All right. If I make money from business you find me, I share some with you. Okay?”
“Sounds good,” I said. We shook hands.
Ruplu clapped me on the shoulder again, and I got back to work.
I felt a little taller as I swept. I didn’t want to feel too tall, because a man had died here this morning, but I couldn’t help but feel some hope rising. This could be a door opening for me, a chance to do more than count change into people’s palms. If I could help Ruplu, I knew he’d give me my fair share of the profit. I could become sort of a limited partner.
My head was spinning from the last twenty-four hours. I felt great and awful, exhausted and exhilarated. Afterimages of Ange in the shower were superimposed with the priest feeding me from a beverage lid. Now the puddle of blood where Amos had fallen swirled with this opportunity. I guess I needed to take my joys where I could find them, and the hell with the notion that it was selfish to be happy amidst suffering. There was always suffering.
Chapter 3
ROCK STAR
Pulaski Square was uncharacteristically crowded with teens and tweens and early twenty-somethings. They reminded me of pigeons, the way they milled aimlessly on the lawns and brick walkways, as if hoping to happen upon something interesting—a pizza crust or an errant cheese doodle. “Think she’s coming?” an acne-stricken kid said to his friend through a neon purple virus mask.
His friend, who had stripes of lamp black above and below his eyes to match his black mask (who could keep up with the pointless shit that passed for current teen fashion?), shrugged.
“Who’s supposed to come?” I asked.
“Deirdre,” the kid with the lamp black said. He pulled a pack of cigarettes from his sleeve pocket.
“Who’s Deirdre?” “Flash singer. The best.” He lit the cigarette, pulled his mask up to his forehead, took a puff, blew smoke into the Spanish Moss hanging overhead in an “Ain’t I so cool” way. “It’s going around there’s gonna be a flash concert here.”
“Oh,” I said. That I could probably do without. I nodded, the cool dudes nodded back, and I continued through the crowd.
“Jasper!”
I turned. “Cortez!” I pushed through the crowd to get to him, grabbed him in a bear hug. “Shit, I can’t believe it! I didn’t know you were back in the city.”
“Yeah, about six months now,” Cortez said, clapping me on the shoulder. He was dressed in a black t-shirt, black puffed pants. His head was shaved.
He was living with his dad, working security jobs when he could get them—mostly temp bodyguard stuff for semi-rich guys trying to impress their dates. Turned out he was on a job now—security for the flash concert that was indeed happening.
The rumble of the crowd on the west end of the square rose in pitch.
“Gotta go!” Cortez said. “Stick around, let’s have a beer after.”
So I stuck around.
A scrum of kids began chanting “Deirdre.” It spread, rising in volume. The crowd parted on the other end of the park, and there she was, surrounded by guys in black. Everyone cheered.
Deirdre was small, almost childlike. She was wearing six or seven pink neck rings that accentuated an ostrich-neck, and a black skintight leotard that accentuated enormous breasts. Her eyes bulged a little, her meaty lips formed an eager “o.” She was one of those women who was extremely sexy without being particularly pretty.
The stage was a bunch of two-by-fours on milk crates, hauled in by her roadies, along with amps, portable spotlights, and a generator. Deirdre paced, staring at the ground as they set up.
There was no introduction or anything. The amps squealed to life, there was scattered cheering, and Deirdre hopped onto the little stage and came to life.
Shit, did she come to life.
It wasn’t that she was a great singer—she had a decent voice, sure, but it was her energy that hooked you. Her voice was so
Her songs were angry and violent. Lots of things blowing up, lots of fucking, lots of death and despair and infidelity. She was a perfect voice for the times.
After every few songs, roadies circulated with plastic buckets, collecting money. Cortez stood beside the stage with the other men in black, his arms folded across his chest, looking all tough. It was strange reconciling this Cortez with the one who’d been part of my homeless band, my tribe, five years ago. He’d put on a good twenty pounds of muscle; though part of that was probably because he was eating more regularly now, and wasn’t walking miles every day.
After Deirdre’s final song, she bowed primly and left the stage to roaring applause. One of the bodyguards pulled off his t-shirt and handed it to her, and she put it on over her leotard. It came down to her knees. They headed off as the roadies gathered the stage and equipment.
Cortez said something to Deirdre as they walked. She nodded, and Cortez broke off and headed toward me, grinning.
“Come on,” he said, “we’re gonna meet them at the after party.”
The after party was at a bar called The Dirty Martini. At least it used to be called The Dirty Martini, before it went out of business. The front picture window was boarded up; the olive green bar, thick with dust and grime, was the only piece of furniture. Kerosene lamps hung from the rafters.
We got ourselves drinks and set up near the bar. Cortez asked if I’d seen Ange around, and I told him we were still in touch from time to time. I hated bending the truth like that, but what would be the point of telling him we’d had a friends-with-occasional-sex thing going for over a year? He might still have feelings for her. I caught him up on Ange’s progress on her Ph.D.
“She ever mention me?” Cortez asked. He saw me hesitate, waved off my answer. “Never mind. She probably still hates me like running pus.”
Their breakup had been about a bunch of little things, though the tipping point had come when Ange was accepted into the biotech doctoral program on a full scholarship, and Cortez didn’t fully embrace the idea. Ange’s take was that Cortez was threatened by it. Cortez said she used an offhanded comment he made about it not seeming practical as an excuse to break up with him. In any case, it hadn’t been the sort where you keep in touch. I knew how that was, and, given that no punches had been thrown in either direction, I didn’t feel a need to take sides. As far as I was concerned there were no bad guys when it came to breakups. Bad guys had guns, and forced you to eat things. I’d tell Ange I bumped into him. I doubted she would care much if Cortez and I became friends again. Ange didn’t seem to care who I was dating, let alone who my friends were. It amazed me how well she could handle the friends-with-sex thing; she never expected anything more from me than a good friend could expect, and she never gave any more, either.
Cortez and I talked about the tribe, about the days when we were even poorer then we were now, about how humiliating it’d been to be homeless, and, finally, about that day, when the tribe had been forced to kill. It had been almost seven years, but I still rode a black wave at the mention of that day.
That’s when Deirdre made her entrance.
She’d changed clothes: from upper thigh to just below her armpits she was wrapped in a continuous strip of
