Tino said, “I’m not a hawk shop, friend.” He was wearing the shoes.
I said, “Rebar’s fresh out of the funny farm. Trying to put a life together. Those shoes might be part of the picture.”
Rebar’s house was a bigger part of that picture.
Tino said, “Down here, or up on the hill?”
“I was up on the hill,” Rebar said, and he said it so quiet his mouth barely moved. He shook his head, like he didn’t get it himself.
Tino said, “I’m headed to Good Sam.”
Rebar said, “You going nuts too?”
“Going to see Eileen.” He turned a chair backward, sat on it that way, then lit a cigarette. “She had an aneurysm in her brain.” He pointed to his head with the orange tip of the smoke, his thumb aimed at the ceiling. His hand was like a gun, at his own head.
I said, “No way.”
Rebar said, “Who’s Eileen?”
I said, “Waitress at Chang’s, dyes her hair.”
Tino said, “Living with Ray Madrigal.”
That was the part I didn’t want to say, and didn’t want to hear, the reason I knew who Tino meant-Eileen and Ray. Ray, who I’d lived with, before. I pulled the ashtray out of my purse, kept it hidden by my palm, and put it back on the table. I didn’t need that ashtray. But I couldn’t let go. I moved it to my purse again.
Tino said, “They cut her head open and clamped a vein or something shut. She’s fine, but she’s bald.”
I slid a salt shaker into my purse and said, “No shit?” Ray’s new girl, with hardware in her head.
The bathroom at the Marathon was down a glowing turquoise hall, like a pool drained of water, and it smelled from mildew. It was the hallway to the rooms for rent upstairs. Just outside the women’s bathroom somebody had written in black marker, MEN WHO FATHER CHILDREN LIVE HERE. I read those words every time I turned the corner. I’d memorized the writing-all capital letters and jagged angles. The sentence stuck with me. It seemed wrong, reversed, blaming the men for where they lived instead of what they did, maybe even asking for sympathy, or renovation on the building. MEN WHO LIVE HERE FATHER CHILDREN, it should say. MEN WHO LIVE HERE ARE BAD-but the men in the building weren’t bad, only lost and lazy. Drunks. Only men nobody should have kids with in the first place. Men who father children live everywhere.
I came out of the bathroom. Tino was in the hall. We went out back, to the alley between buildings, beside the dumpster.
Tino pulled a pipe from his coat pocket.
Pot smells good in the cold. There’s the density of it, that soft sweetness. I’d like to find that same sweet edge in something solid.
Tino passed the pipe to me. I didn’t reach for it. “You shake down a freshman for that herb?” I said.
“Maybe.” He was still holding smoke in his lungs. “What’re you doing with Rebar?”
“Helping him out.” I shrugged.
Tino said, “Watch him close. I don’t want to lose more teeth.”
“That was a long time ago.”
“They don’t come back.” He smiled, to show a gap at the side near the front. His eye tooth, his dog tooth. A fist, a party. Like two years before, but it seemed forever. I put my lips to his cracked lips, kissed his gap-toothed mouth, breathed his secondhand pot smoke. I held onto the fake sheepskin of his Sears corduroy coat. Tino’s skinny body blocked the wind. One time, when he was still underage, Tino’d been busted for dealing and his folks sent him off to boot camp in Idaho. He broke out, hitched home, and hid in Forest Park at night when he couldn’t find a place to crash, until he hooked up with me for a while. I don’t know what happened to him out there in Idaho, but now, best thing about Tino was he wouldn’t leave the neighborhood. He said it himself-he’d never go anywhere he couldn’t walk home from.
One of these days I’d go as far away as I wanted, and I knew he’d be there, home, when I got back. Tino was home, and he was mine.
We went back in the tavern. Rebar worked his muscled jaw. Maybe it was time for more meds, I had no clue.
Someone said my name, Vanessa, in the hiss of a whisper. I looked. The men lining the bar had their backs to our table. Music rattled under bad speakers. Nobody said my name. It was just noises, a cloud of tavern sounds; my name was a patchwork put together from scrap.
Tino said, “Come see Eileen. She’d like it.”
My hands were light and far away with the cold. I rubbed them together. “I don’t think we should visit Eileen. I’m fine here.”
Rebar said, “Jesus, Vanessa, she had brain surgery.”
I said, “Hospital-land. It creeps me out. All that mortality.” Then again, the bar was lined with vulture fodder.
Rebar said, “I started to like it.”
Tino said, “Ray won’t show up.”
I said, “You going?”
Rebar shook his head.
I said, “Okay.” So I’d shake off Rebar. Maybe I’d get lost on the way too. Except when I stood, Rebar stood. He said, “Swap shoes with me, man.” He kicked off a Sketcher. Tino ignored him. Rebar worked his shoes back on and hustled to catch up, snagging my arm to hold me back.
The hospital halls were miles of white, somebody’s idea of a sterile heaven, broken by red emergency phones and inset shrines of faded saints. Rebar put his arm over my shoulder. I hadn’t shaken anybody. He stooped to bring his face closer to mine and said, “Where I was, we had big rooms and new carpets. We had coffee machines.” His big feet swung out, ready to knock things down.
I heard my name again, in a whisper: Van-ess-a, Van-ess-a… It was under the swish of clothes and the wheels of the carts. Rebar’s coat sleeve rustled against my ear.
Tino skipped the reception desk.
“You been here before?” Rebar asked me.
“I was born here, but never been back.” The hospital was its own world, all clean, creased green uniforms. Aluminum carts, Formica. It was a different place from the world outside. In the hospital, pretty much I didn’t know anybody.
Rebar, Tino, and me-we were a walking cloud of tavern air, smoke, and beer breath. I reached a hand, laced one finger through Tino’s belt loop.
Vanessa.
I heard my name in the squish of shoes on hard linoleum, and the breath of coats as they exhaled. This time, though, when I turned, it was real. It was Mrs. Petoskey, our old grade school teacher. “Vanessa.” She said it.
She was in scrubs.
Rebar, Tino, and me, we stopped together. I said, “Hi.”
Mrs. Petoskey said, “Good to see you. How’s your mom?”
I shook my head. Brushed my hair out of the way. My mom? I didn’t know. I said, “Fine.”
Mrs. Petoskey smiled.
I said, “Still in the slammer.” Tino laughed, flashing his gapped teeth like it was a joke, and the funny thing was, it wasn’t. Mrs. Petoskey moved some tubes around on her cart. I said, “Meth charges.” Then I asked, “You don’t teach school?”
Mrs. Petoskey said, “No, well, things change.” And she waved a hand over her cart, pulled on a face mask, and pushed on through a set of swinging doors. “Take care.” Her voice was muffled by the mask.
Tino said, “Didn’t she have cancer before?”
I didn’t remember, but she probably did.
Eileen was in bed, watching TV, same as everyone in every dank hole of a tavern all over town. Her head was shaved and bandaged. Her face was puffy. She’d put on makeup and it sat like paint over her drained skin.
I said, “They told me there was a dead hooker in here.”
Eileen said, “Thanks a lot. Got years ahead’a me.”
I said, “Isn’t that how every story goes?”
I gave her a kiss on her pale forehead. I wasn’t glad to see her, but that wasn’t her fault. She was the only patient in a room with two beds, wearing a powder-blue hospital gown. She leaned against pillows.
“’S good to see you,” she said. Her voice was slow and stuttery.