Any Deadly Thing Read online

  Back at the house, I roast a couple of sweet potatoes and break one open for Assface, which thank god he eats instead of throws. The credenza’s mostly done, the drawer joints just as French and dovelike as I can get them. A little more sanding, a couple coats of lacquer, a long night of rubbing the top coat to high gloss, and I’ll be ready to mount the hardware. I’m already dreaming about the money, and there’s debts to pay and tools to buy but there should be enough left over to rent a little space somewhere, set up a proper shop.

  I sand for a few hours, fry up some plantains and salted pork for tacacho, sand for an hour more. Then there’s a knock, and it’s the Poetess on the stoop. I ask how she knows where I live, and she asks if I think I’m all that hard to find. Which, okay, and I invite her in. She runs her hand across the top of the credenza, and smiles at how smooth it is.

  I’m about to offer her some cold tacacho when I remember about Assface. There’s no way he’s blowing this for me, so I tell her I’ll be right back. I scout through the house expecting to find him tearing my pillows apart or relieving a little tension in the cupboard, but I don’t see him anywhere. I come back into the living room, and the Poetess is sitting on the sofa; Assface is hugging her leg and has his head on her knee, which is nice, but also creepy, so I ask if she wants to take a walk.

  Down on the river there are kids paddling canoes in circles, and a bunch of peque-peques taking tourists up to buy trinkets from half-naked Jibaros. The water’s a bright metallic gray, and butterflies come to check out the colors of the Poetess’s shirt. She asks me the usual questions, why I came here and why I stayed, and I give the usual answers.

  The sky clouds up, and two minutes later it’s raining so hard you can barely see where you’re going. The kids in the canoes are hiding under the blades of their paddles, and we take off running. The rain stops the instant we get back to my house, and the first thing I think is, God I wish her shirt were as see-through as mine, and the second thing I think is, Where the fuck is the credenza?

  There’s no one it could be except Lorenzo. I run out and down the steps, and the neighbor kids are there rubbing mud in each other’s faces. Miguelito’s the sweetest and dumbest, so he’s the one I go after.

  –I didn’t see anybody, he says.

  –I’ll give you a dollar, I say.

  –Nope.

  –Two dollars.

  –I wish I could help.

  –Or I could beat the living shit out of you.

  He smiles. We both know how many brothers he has, and what they can do with machetes.

  –Ten dollars, he says.

  Which is half of what his friends would have said. I give it to him, and he says he still doesn’t know, and runs away. I chase him a few steps, but there’s no point—no one ever sees anything here.

  I’m halfway to the Plaza de Armas when I remember the Poetess, but if she could find my house, she can surely find her own way home, and I’ll track her down later to say I’m sorry. The credenza weighs a ton and you just know Lorenzo and his buddies fucked up the finish trying to get the thing down the stairs. I run and run, check everywhere I can think of—the alleys where the glueheads hang out, the furniture stores where he’s maybe hoping to sell, the artisan market, even places he’d never go like school.

  Three hours of this, up and back. By now he’ll have sold the piece for a tenth of what it’s worth, split the proceeds however many ways, and inhaled his share. No one in town will give me more wood on credit, which means I’ll have to explain to my client that his credenza isn’t going to happen. I can’t even return his deposit, and for all I know that’s worth a bullet in my head.

  One last swing along the waterfront, and there’s Beto nursing a beer on the terrace of Arandú. He asks me what happened, and I tell him. He nods, gestures at an empty chair, says he’s got the first round. I’m out of other ideas so I sit down.

  I’ve got umpteen layers of dried sweat on my chest and stink like rotten onions, but there’s a nice little breeze, and the swallows are looping and flaring through the air. By the fourth or fifth round I’m thinking, okay, so I’ll probably end up dead or selling charcoal and socks in the market, but at least right now I’m here drinking beer at the river, and no one can take that away.

  Which is when Mateo Tercero comes running by. He sees me and stops, says Lorenzo is beating at the door of the tour office with a stick and scaring all the Danes and could I please do something about it. To which I say that thanks to Lorenzo I’ll be eating grubs for the rest of my life, and he can ram the stick up his ass for all I care. Mateo Tercero stares at me. And Beto stares at me. And people I don’t even fucking know stare at me from nearby tables. So I stand up and say, Well I guess I probably should, though the truth is I’m thinking that Lorenzo might still have a little of the money left, and that kicking his face in will do me good either way.

  By the time I get there he’s gone, and Mateo Junior points me south on Grau. It’s ten blocks before I see him. I’ve only got twenty yards left to make up when a station wagon blows by me, and just then Lorenzo lurches off the sidewalk. The station wagon screeches, stops just before it hits him, and he falls down anyway.

  I stop for a breather. The driver gets out to see if Lorenzo’s okay. Lorenzo gets to his feet, wavers a little, brains the driver with the stick, and I’m guessing it’s bloodwood.

  Lorenzo slides behind the wheel and pulls away as the streetlights come on. I check on the driver and he’s bleeding but otherwise fine. I flag down a motocar, and up ahead the station wagon is weaving nice and slow from sidewalk to sidewalk. Five minutes later we’re headed out of town toward Quistococha, and fifteen minutes after that Lorenzo rolls up against a big palm right outside the zoo.

  The air has sobered me a little, and it doesn’t look like the car is too messed up. I pay the motocar guy and send him off. I slap at mosquitoes for a second. Lorenzo’s still got the stick, and now he’s ranting, out of his head and looking stouter than I remember.

  The zoo is closed, which would be a bigger deal if it had a gate instead of just a shack where you buy tickets. Lorenzo sets off down the walkway, trips and lands on his face. He wipes at the blood on his chin and starts off again. As always in the jungle there’s lots of stuff falling out of trees, leaves and fruit and branches, and together it all sounds like footsteps. Lorenzo’s still jabbering and I can’t quite make it out, but when he stops in front of the ghost boat mural I realize he’s reciting his guide boy spiel from all those years ago.

  Instead of heading down to the lake like I thought he would, he walks toward the jaguar cage. In the clearings it feels like dusk is just starting but it’s already dark in the groves. I circle around, can’t see the cat anywhere. Lorenzo rattles the bars with the stick and starts shouting, how long coatimundis live and what they eat. His facts are as bad as ever, and there’s a long low growl.

  I slip in a little closer, and he drops the stick, brings his face right up to the bars, screams that he wants his brother back, and his leather sneakers. He’s crying, and there’s blood and snot smeared together all over his face. He starts wrenching at the door, and if the cat comes for him he’ll never get back fast enough.

  There’s another growl and it’s not so quiet this time. Lorenzo keeps tugging, and it looks like the hinges are bending. There’s a roar and I jump up on Lorenzo’s back and we slide down the bars and roll away, but he’s way stronger than he should be and we roll back up against the cage. Another roar and I’m up and dragging him away but he twists and slithers, turns and jumps me, beats at me like I’m everything that ever went wrong.

  We end up rolling around on the ground until we’re both beat up and worn out. Then we just sort of let go. I pull away, lie back, try to catch my breath. There’s a couple of stars overhead. I close my eyes, hear a splash from the lake, a fish or maybe a big frog. The whole place smells like the world’s biggest lawn just got cut.

  I go over and pick up what I figure is all that’s left of the cr
edenza. It turns out to be nothing but a length of some crappy softwood stained dark, and all of a sudden a whole bunch of things don’t make sense. Why would a rich dude looking for a high-end piece go to the trouble of tracking down a hack out in Belén, instead of just hitting the big-name showrooms downtown? Why would the Poetess insist on doing English Hour when hardly anyone listens to it, and all of her work is in Spanish? And how could it be that she and the smuggler showed up in my life out of nowhere on the very same day—and that his credenza was stolen from my house while I was out walking with her?

  So: a small-time scam run by two assholes I’ll never see again, and Lorenzo had nothing to do with it. I turn to go get him, and he’s coming at me with a rock. As he swings I block his arm a little but pain sears the top of my head. I crack him on the jaw with the stick, but he doesn’t go down, and now he’s just standing there. There’s nothing in his eyes, nothing at all. Like he has no idea who I am or why he’s here. He drops the rock, and heads back up toward the entrance. Away, away and gone.

  Double Fish

  THE WIFE IS MOANING, her time now come. The husband puts his arm around her and guides her out the door. Her parents follow, ecstatic—a grandchild at last—and together the four of them make their slow way down the street, but at the hospital there are no doctors, just nurses, the doctors all long since executed or imprisoned or sent off for reeducation, and the nurses are young Red Guards, too young, practically children themselves but they and their comrades are in charge, here and everywhere. They lead the wife into the delivery room, shoo the parents out. They assure the husband that they know everything that needs to be known, that there is no reason to be afraid.

  As the grandmother-to-be sits down on a chair in the hallway, Zhao An pauses the film. He hurries to his kitchen for another bowl of jiaozi, returns to the bedroom, dips one in the dish of vinegar, soy sauce, and chili oil, puts it in his mouth and is about to start the film again. Then he sits straight up.

  Something was wrong today. He missed it when it happened, but yes, there was definitely something. He thinks through his day: dawn, bus, work, lunch, work, bus, home. Nothing comes to him. He rubs his face, takes another bite, chews slowly. As he’d walked up the alley toward his front door, there was a truck stacked with furniture blocking the far end, someone moving in or out. The driver, leaning against the door of the truck, had thrown a cigarette butt to the ground as Zhao squeezed past. But none of this means anything. Someone is always moving in or out. Perhaps he is mistaken, and there was nothing. He has not been sleeping well.

  Zhao wishes he could skip the rest of the scene—the hemorrhaging as the baby is born, the nurses panicking, the doctor brought from prison to assist but too weak from hunger to stand upright. Watching only the easy parts of these films is not an option, however; playing the scene only in his head is insufficient. He starts the film again, settles back into the old time, and it is just as he remembers, everyone so well-intentioned, but yes, this is how it was, and how we were.

  The following day, half an hour until closing time, and five children lean over the edges of Zhao’s small inflatable pool with their scoop-nets in their hands and their buckets half submerged. Three of them are Chinese, one is half Chinese and half something European, and one is black. The half-and-half smells odd, not the stink of a full diaper but slightly sour. The smell comes and goes, at times disappearing beneath the constant Happytime odors of feet and child-sweat and rubberized plastic.

  Zhao is quite sure that no one here knows how much money his little stand brings in. The habit of watching without being watched is something the janitors and snack vendors and activities staff are all too young to have learned properly. They see the children around his pool but make no note of how often each child returns, paying ten yuan for a net and a bucket each time.

  He pays rent on the forty square feet he uses, but covers that expense in the first few days of each month. The Happytime bathrooms provide the water, and in seven years no one has yet bothered to charge him for the electricity needed to run the pump that keeps the pool inflated. Even the fish he gets for free: there are two pet stores near his house and three more in the area around Happytime, and he visits each one once a week to take whatever the owners are willing to spare—the sluggish, the sick, the malformed. The owners think they are donating the fish to local orphanages, and brag to their friends about the worthy cause.

  He kneads his hands, tries to work the stiffness from his fingers. Twelve minutes to go, and only two children left. Each has an adult sitting alongside, parent or nanny, aiding in the scooping and dumping out, and why would anyone bring a child to Happytime on one of Beijing’s few clear summer afternoons? There are small parks throughout the city, temple grounds and play areas, but instead the parents pay to come here. Five years ago it was mainly foreigners, the wives of diplomats and businessmen, but now the majority are wealthy Chinese who should know better.

  He’s been thinking on and off about which film to watch tonight. If he still hasn’t decided by the time he gets home, he’ll turn once again to the shelves closest to hand. The staff begin chiding the parents who have not yet gathered their belongings and dragged their kids from the Olympic-sized ball pool or the video games or the four-story jungle gym. His remaining customers wander off, but then up comes a woman who has been bringing her daughter here regularly for the past two years. From the mother’s accent it is clear that she is from the southeast. She is in her late twenties, is thin and sad and beautiful, and he likes to think of her as the Woman from Hong Kong.

  As she sorts through her purse, she chats into her cell phone about her recent divorce, talking mostly in Mandarin with bits of English scattered in. She pays Zhao without looking up, and the little girl is already at work netting two at a time—he keeps the pool well stocked so that no one will notice when one of the fish floats wrong-side-up to the surface. But now the whistles are blowing, far louder than is necessary, as always. The woman folds her phone closed with a click, says something to her daughter in Cantonese. The girl complains, and the mother touches her shoulder. The girl nods and empties her bucket into the pool.

  Zhao brings out a plastic bag, scoops it full of water, tells the girl to catch one last fish and dump it in, says that she can keep it, free of charge, and this can be their secret. The girl laughs and reaches out, nets a small white one with black and orange spots. Zhao ties the bag closed, holds it up, and already the fish is swimming not quite erect. It will be dead by morning, but no one will blame him. He hands it to the girl and smiles at the mother, who thanks him, smiles back, leads her daughter away. This is the longest chat the three of them have ever had.

  It takes him half an hour to clean up: ferrying the remaining fish to the holding tank in the storeroom, emptying the pool two buckets at a time, deflating and folding and carrying it to its place beneath the tank, mopping the floor, rinsing out the mop. He wonders what the Woman from Hong Kong would think of his apartment. Her daughter is exactly the sort of child he once hoped for, quiet and neat and polite, but also clever, trapping the fish easily along the side of the pool. It’s been twenty-five years since a doctor said there weren’t any children in Zhao’s future. Then his wife’s anger, her insults, her leaving—

  Zhao stops short. His supervisor is standing in front of him. He leans the mop against the wall and nods to her. She is perhaps ten years younger than he is, a thick, sallow, officious but not unpleasant woman from Tianjin. She asks how his day went. He smiles and shrugs, and she nods.

  –Tomorrow will be better!

  The way she says this makes it sound like an order. He thanks her anyway. Back in the storeroom, he picks up the canvas bag in which he brings his lunch each day, and sees a small piece of paper taped to the outside. He pulls the note off and opens it. The characters are smudged but still clear enough to read:

  It took me years to catch up with you.

  He glances around. There is no one else in the storeroom. He steps to the door. Ever
yone is gone but the janitors. He watches them for a moment, but none of them look up.

  Zhao pushes his way onto the first bus that comes, observes everyone around him, waits for the bus to start moving and shouts to the driver that there is an emergency and he has to get off immediately. The other passengers glare and mutter. Zhao ignores them, hurries down the steps, stands on the sidewalk and waits to see if anyone follows him off. No one does.

  The next bus he boards loops up to Dongzhimen, then cuts west across the Second Ring, the road thinning and strung with lanterns, the terraces of the restaurants to either side now full. He steps down at his neighborhood bookstore, moves quickly up the street to the hospital, turning to glance behind him every few steps. Around to the back of his building, and he looks up, checks each window, sees nothing unusual—birdcages, plants, clotheslines hung with laundry. Up the alley to the entryway, wincing at the sound of a table being slid across a floor. Up the stairs.

  It is not that he is too nervous to notice the cobwebs and dust, the dirt pooled in the corners of the landings, and it is not that he doesn’t see the stacks of broken clay flowerpots, the empty plastic bottles and scraps of plywood; it is that he has never seen the staircase otherwise and stopped caring long ago. He climbs to the sixth floor. Perhaps his neighbors have noted the number of locks he has installed. He does not care about this either. He pulls out his ring of keys, and the first lock is sticky as always, the next three easier. He is breathing hard as he steps inside.

  A year ago he did not need so many locks. Then he spent his entire savings on the plasma-screen television that takes up most of one wall in his bedroom. He has since started building his bank account back up, but everything he can spare goes into his collection: thousands of DVDs filling the shelves that cover the other three walls of his bedroom and the walls of the short, wide hall he calls his sitting room. All of them are pirated, and some do not work so well. They are missing scenes, have audio from other movies entirely or are marred by the shadows of cinemagoers who stood up in front of the illicit camera. He has a copy of every film he has ever seen except two, and nearly a hundred he has not yet had time to see.