‘That fucking guy,’ Jonah said. ‘All these skips are crazy, man.’
Gordo seemed fixated on the letter he was reading. There were so many envelopes, it seemed that Foerster hadn’t opened any of his mail in a month. ‘You know,’ Gordo said, ‘this guy tells his landlord his name is Mark Foster, then goes ahead and tells half the world his real name. All his bills at that address came to Davis Foerster, not that he paid any of them. Isn’t that dumb?’
Jonah said nothing.
Gordo peeled his eyes from the paper and peered at Jonah for a moment. ‘Sure you didn’t get any glass on your brain?’
‘Fuck you,’ Jonah said.
Gordo frowned. ‘Relax. We missed one. Granted, it was the big fish, but that’s the first one we missed in a month. And maybe we’ll pick up his scent again. What more do you want?’
Jonah shook his head. ‘I want some more money. How about that?’
Gordo smiled. ‘The money’s coming, brother. You just gotta stick with it a little while longer. We catch this guy and then we’re talking about real money, right?’ He picked up his beer glass and took a long sip. ‘Listen, you need to think like me. I’m in the same boat as you. I’m just about flat busted. But I don’t worry about it. As long as I’m still breathing, I’m cool, because I know something big is just around the next corner. Every dollar I get, I put it back into this business. I’m building for the future. See?’
‘I got you,’ Jonah said. ‘Look at the money like it’s no big deal.’
‘That’s right. If everybody’s going broke, then the fact that you’re going broke is no problem.’
There was some truth to that. Jonah wasn’t the only one going under. The modern world – the world Jonah had grown up in – hadn’t exactly rolled over and died. But it was going away and faster than anyone could have imagined. It was already a disintegrating remnant, a pale shadow of its former self. Economies had ground to a halt. Millions were out of work. Governments fell apart overnight. In the Third World, there was mass starvation and disease. Earlier this year, for the first time, there were food shortages in the United States. Food shortages in the land of fat people? It was hard to accept.
Jonah remembered, as a child, being comforted by the fact that the grown-ups were in charge. Now, as a grown-up, he realized no one was in charge. In this new world, you had to make your own way and figure it out for yourself. Nobody was going to do the figuring for you.
Gordo was wrong. It was a problem. It was a big fucking problem. The year was three quarters over and Jonah had pulled down less than half his old salary. It wouldn’t have turned out so bad, except he had lived a high-flying lifestyle in years past, and he still had the bills to prove it. Gordo might be busted or he might not, but one look at the man would tell you that he’d never spent money the way Jonah had.
Less than three years ago, Jonah had been driving a sleek white Jaguar XJ8 with a luxurious interior. He thought of that car as a high-water mark of sorts. At some point he had stopped making payments on it and one morning it just wasn’t there anymore. Goodbye to the leather bucket seats and goodbye to the lamb’s wool foot rugs. Goodbye to the walnut trim with the Peruvian boxwood inlays, and goodbye to the charging silver jungle cat on the hood. Jonah had heard that all the jaguars in the wild were dead – the only place they still existed was in the zoo and as hood ornaments on expensive cars. When he heard that, it made him kind of sad to keep driving it. So when the repo men took his fancy ride, Jonah didn’t even bother to call anybody. It didn’t matter anyway. He knew what they would say.
The weird thing about it was that every now and then, Jonah would get the suspicion that Gordo himself had taken it. And why not? Gordo was a repo man – even now, he wasn’t above a repo job if one came in. Gordo knew where the car was, and he knew how far behind Jonah was on the payments. He knew Jonah’s personal habits and schedule. It wouldn’t take much for Gordo to put out a feeler and see if the car was slated for repossession – probably no more than a few phone calls.
Jonah brought up the issue over drinks one night.
‘What?’ Gordo said. ‘Are you crazy? Why would I repo your car?’
Jonah shrugged. ‘Money. Why else?’
‘Man, you are crazy. You’ve obviously lost your marbles. Listen, I’m not even going to dignify this by talking about it.’
Now Jonah owned a brown 1992 Toyota Corolla, which he rarely even drove. Jonah was just not the type of man who spent his days scrounging for gasoline. In any case, the car was a joke. The rear bumper was missing, although the black rubber covering of the bumper was still there. To the naked eye it seemed as if there was still a bumper, but there was no substance to it. If he ever got rear-ended, the other driver would be sitting in the front seat with him.
The cable TV was gone, and had been for months – no more watching the big booties shake it on BET, no more watching the white girls spank each other on the Playboy channel. He was months behind on the telephone bill, and every now and then the phone company sent him a threatening letter. When the letter came, and he knew the letter by the red envelope it came in, he would open it and send them a check for half of what he owed. Otherwise he didn’t open their letters. Losing the phone wasn’t on his mind. What needed to go was the apartment itself – it was the crib of a man who could blow money on Hudson River views. He was no longer that man, but he had renewed when the lease expired, more out of a misplaced sense of optimism than anything else.
He’d had a bad couple of years. Every time he thought he’d hit bottom, that things couldn’t get much worse, life dropped him another notch. A few weeks ago, he would have thought this had to be it – flat broke, deep in debt, working with Gordo, wrestling crazies back into police custody for chump change – that had to be the bottom. But today was a new bottom. He had risked his life for nothing, no reason at all. Tomorrow he’d probably get killed for the same reason.
If he really wanted, he could remember the exact moment when things in his life first started going dark. It was the day Melinda met Elaine.
Melinda kept her pubic hair shaved clean.
Whenever Jonah thought of her, that bald mons was the first thing that leaped to mind. She was a nice little white girl and Jonah often worried that he didn’t deserve her. She worked that body until it was lean and tight and hard. She cut her brown hair in a short bob. She wore Donna Karan for nights out, with white gold from Fortunoff. For casual times, she picked the smallest clothes she could find at Eileen Fisher. Beneath everything, she wore only Victoria’s Secret. When she slept she wore nothing.
She and Jonah looked good together, whether sitting at a table in Carmine’s after taking in a Wednesday evening Broadway show, or cruising home in the Jag with the sunroof open, or wrestling nude on silk sheets later that night. She was fair and small and smelled like money, and he was brown, but not too brown. No, too brown wouldn’t look right, but the kind of brown that came from his mother’s honest blackness and his old man’s rumpled, cigar-chomping whiteness, that was a good soft brown. Jonah thought Melinda liked them together, the look of it. She liked his money, although she had her own, more than he would ever have. She liked that he was strong. Above all, she liked his skin against hers. Yes. She had a taste for brown. It made for three years of damn fine rutting.
But Jonah had a problem. He was not a one-woman man.
It was the Sunday morning just after Thanksgiving. It was rainy and overcast, and they had wasted the weekend and each other in bed. By Jonah’s count, they had fornicated nineteen times since a good-morning romp on the kitchen table the day before.
He lay sprawled on his back in the bed, head resting on the pillows, watching himself in the mirror embedded in the ceiling, and listening to the sound of Melinda taking a shower in his bathroom. After a moment, the water stopped and he waited for her to come out. He felt sexy and pretty damn good about himself. The soreness, the physical emptiness was like a tingling throughout his body. Just seeing his body made him feel pretty good, too. It always did. Other men bought magazines and lotions and uppers and downers because they wanted a body like his. He worked out like they did, but not as hard and not as long. The body was just there for him, better than most of them would ever have. Washboard abdominals without the infomercial gimmicks. Wide round shoulders and a broad chest. And down below the waist… If he was half-black, it was the half that mattered. Little Melinda was fascinated by his size, obsessed with it, maybe addicted to it.