“What about news?” I asked. “What about generating my own stories? What about — ”
“Whoa, son. Forget the news. I hand you a simple format, you fill it in. Got it?”
Ode to the Status Quo. “Got it,” I said.
Most of my colleagues at the paper are quick and efficient, in and out of the office each day with barely a grumble or flourish, but a small group of us — Tony, from the church beat (the most profane man I’ve ever met), Ed Branigan, a typesetter, Scott Lehman, who covers the cops, and me — we meet late nightly for cards. None of us have family waiting at home. Tony’s separated from his wife; Ed and Scott are both divorced. We’re all insomniacs — which is what you say, when you’re grown, instead of admitting you’re afraid of the dark.
When I bustle in tonight, the boys are dealing their first round of Texas Hold’em on Tony’s metal desk. Cigarette smoke swarms the snicking yellow lights. The radio’s tuned to the blues: My man’s a busted tire on a muddy old road in Alabam.
“George! God, man, am I glad to see you,” Tony says. “This game sucks with only three.”
“Just like love.”
“You in?”
“I’m in.” I stow my recordings of Julio Zamora and Mr. Thuot in my gray steel desk.
“Tony, man, you shuffle these cards?” Ed asks.
“He never shuffles the cards,” Scott says. “Watch him. He just messes them up a little.”
I pull up a chair. “‘Shuffle’ is not in his vocabulary. ‘Shuffle’ is a sacred, ancient wisdom he’s somehow failed to grasp.”
“Yakking with your fer’ners?” Tony kids me.
“Yep.”
“Fuckin’ rice-eaters.” I count quietly to ten. He runs a hand across his bald spot. It’s shaped a little like Australia. “See you and raise you,” he says.
“Cold, brother.”
“Call.”
“Boat.”
“Damn. You didn’t shuffle.” Ed grabs his paunch as though he’s had a pain.
Tony reels off golfing jokes involving Protestant ministers, rabbis, priests. They all end with some form of indecent exposure. Scott and Ed are clawing into their wallets, inflicting on each other the latest snapshots of their kids, tamping back tears.
I don’t know what I’d do without these guys, but tonight — lately — I’m not sure why I’m with them, either.
“You’re drifting, George,” Tony warns me. “Cut ‘em.”
“Sorry.” I tap the tattered deck. “They’re good.”
Scott’s pale and thin from eating mostly Oreos — half-Oreos. He plucks them apart, chucks the creamy side, a nod to health. Ed’s a sure-fire heart attack: tomorrow, the day after. You can almost hear him ticking.
Pathetic.
And here I am.
“How many?”
“What?”
“Cards, George. How many cards?”
“Oh. Two.”
“I know about you,” Scott said to me one afternoon in the hall, near the men’s room with its river-water smell and its big red door. He’s short and aggressive and never finished his psychology degree. In the middle of a call or a raise, he’ll claim he can read our faces, sniff out our bluffs. But he always winds up losing.
“What is it you think you know, Scott?”
He swallowed the last of the ham sandwich he’d been nibbling all day, along with his cookies, and crumpled his yellow napkin. “The reason you’re so quiet. Why you’d rather just listen to others. Tape them and stuff.”
“And why is that?”
“The accident.” He can’t hide his pride, whenever he launches these little insight bombs. He’s lucky we still let him play with us. “You think you should have died.”
I stood limp against the bathroom door, like a well-thumbed poster for a long-past event. “Scott, listen — ”
“Survivor guilt. Why me, right? The miracle of your continuance.” He wrapped his fingers in his napkin and poked me in the chest. “Naturally, you’re anguished about it, George, so you imagine yourself gone.”
“You’re full of shit,” I told him, and he grinned.
Tonight, as the fellows joke and laugh — Scott watching, gleefully, anticipating my every bluff — I fold and fold and fold.
Driving home, late, I smell the city’s labors: dirt and sweat, the soft tar of the roads, the balanced tension of girders, rust, and air. Lights pulse. Jean loved these nights, stark and steamy.
Magnolia trees cluster around paint-peeled wooden homes on the edge of the First Ward. Moonlight glints off the glass of the downtown towers, blue and brown, green and gold, and makes glowing whips of phone lines webbed above hot streets.
The no-zoned neighborhoods make Houston a constant surprise: a palm reader next to a Republican campaign headquarters, a hot-tub dealer next to a strict-bricked Baptist church. One minute, the city’s a wise old matriarch — calm, cheerful, cautious — next thing you know, she’s ripped off her mask to reveal a snide, sneaky kid.
Tonight, my part of town — run-down, poor, slammed hard by AIDS — is dark and quiet. If I’d had the money, I might have moved. But I still live in the cheap little house I shared with Jean — a two-bedroom, musty with dust and too many memories in the old Montrose neighborhood, behind a small outfit, Sno King, that manufactures ice-makers. Sometimes, deep into the night, an out-of-whack ice-maker flings watery cubes at the walls. Jean and I used to laugh about it, lying in bed. Or we’d argue about having kids, after making love to a series of frozen thumps — the only time we ever fought.
Turns out, I wanted babies, she didn’t.
“Too settled, too tired,” she always said, like a long-standing threat, and I wondered, hearing the thrust of her voice, if she was capable of physical violence.
With the house, it was money. Mortgage insurance. Escrow. The usual worries. But the baby-talk — that riled her beyond reason.
“Julio’s little boy, Manuel, he’s so pretty, Jean, and lively,” I told her the night I met the Zamoras. I played her a tape of his voice. “I wish you could see him — ”
“George, please. I told you before we were married, I wasn’t interested in the diaper-mill. I’m an old lady.” (In her late forties, she was just a few years older than I.)
I was a “professional fuck-up,” she told me once — “I don’t think people really want to read this stuff, do they?”—but she loved me, she said, for my “empathy skills.” The first night I spent at her place, I offered to draw her a bath. She sat on her bed and cried. “No one’s ever done that for me before,” she said. “It’s so sweet.” She reached for my hand. I dried her face with a towel. “You’re a caretaker-type, aren’t you?”
I’d never thought of myself that way, but I liked who I was in her eyes. She was a physics professor at Rice, and gave me stability, maturity, calm.
We made — as folks like to say here in pigskin-crazy Texas — a pretty good team.
Now each ice ping recalls her face. “Tony was the big winner tonight,” I tell her. Gauzy as frost, she’s wafting in front of my pillow. Every night she visits, in a pale-white dress and blouse. Perfect hair. “I dropped forty bucks. Pathetic.”
She circles my head. I curse my imagination. With a punch of my pillow (aiming straight for its cottony heart), Jean disappears, replaced by the vibrant spirits of my current life: Mrs. Thuot sipping tea, Manuel shouting joyfully in the street, Lira hiding a puffy red welt on her face.
Fuck.
I shut my eyes and try to ease my breathing.
Two years ago — three? — Jean planted a skinny apple tree in our front yard. Now it whispers in a flat southerly breeze.