Another smoke ring, a little one chasing through a big one.
His mind wandered, back to the most recent fall he’d taken. He had climbed through a window this time. Windows were the easiest, especially a couple of floors up. On hot nights, people left them open. All the way, a crack, it didn’t matter. He just picked an open one along a fire escape and climbed up there. He slipped inside and stood in the living room.
Pretty nice furniture in there. Somebody in the place was still working. He remembered hearing a car go by outside – cop car? No other sounds. The good stuff was usually in the bedroom, top dresser drawer in most places. Cash, maybe some gold. The place had wall to wall carpet, which was good – his feet would make no sound. He followed a short hallway. He passed a narrow door. It looked like a closet. Another closed door, maybe the bathroom. A sharp left turn and here was the bedroom. There was a sleeping form alone on the double bed. Foerster allowed himself another silent inhale and exhale, watching and listening. He could tell by the size and shape of the body, and by the hair sticking up from under the blanket. It was a woman.
That was better than money.
He went for her, of course. It was a stupid play and he knew it as he stood over her. But she aroused him and it clouded his thinking. Women didn’t always arouse him, and he had to take the opportunities when they presented themselves. He slid into bed with her, working on his zipper. She made a sort of welcoming sound, like a sigh. It should have tipped him off. In her sleep, she thought he was somebody else, somebody who was supposed to be there.
It didn’t tip him off, though. It got him excited instead.
Later, the cops were happy to fill in the gaps in his knowledge. The husband got up in the middle of the night, went in the bathroom and fell asleep on the can with the door shut. When Foerster grabbed the wife, she gasped, then screamed, and hubby woke up. The big boy came storming in and found Foerster on top of his lady. The next thing Foerster knew, the storm broke loose. Hubby let Foerster have it with a wind-up clock, a lamp, a glass candle holder, a metal magazine rack. They went around and around the room, the wife still screaming, the whole building waking up, Foerster trying to escape, trying to get his zipper closed while the husband clubbed him with everything in reach.
He made it back out the window, bleeding a river down his face. He didn’t get far. Two pigs in a patrol car picked him up a block away. He banged into parking meters and shit as he ran, half blind from all the blood in his eyes, half-mad from the pain, his zipper still stuck half way down.
A funny scene, even Foerster could see the humor in it. But it turned ugly once he got back to the joint. He spent a night in the precinct house, took a trip to the doctor, then did three nights on Riker’s.
The wounds he got in jail were worse than the beating from hubby. The black guys in jail didn’t need to beat him up. They just got him three or four at a time, stuffed a sweaty doo-rag in his mouth, held him face down and did it to him. Jesus. And the fucking c.o.’s didn’t give a shit. It was all in fun, right? A guard even told him he should act like a man, stick up for himself more. The piece of shit said it while standing at the cell door, looking down at Foerster spread-eagled on the floor, cons sitting on each arm, a big two-hundred pound shrieking porch monkey grinding away on top of him.
Foerster didn’t give it easy, though. They did him, but he fought them first, and he got his shots in. He could say that much for himself. No matter what happened, they hadn’t broken his spirit. But he couldn’t imagine what serious time would be like and for a second it had looked as if serious time was in his cards.
As it turned out, the cops knew about the old woman. Maybe they didn’t know for sure, but they suspected. He thought about the woman for just a second, got an image of her. A white-haired biddy, with a clean honest face. The skin around her throat sagged and creased like an elephant’s knees. He had seen her on the street a couple times. She plucked something in him, like a finger twanging a guitar string. So he had taken her. He hadn’t planned it that way, but Foerster hardly ever planned these things. His desires came to him from some other place – he could go for weeks at a time without feeling anything. But when the thing started flowing, he always flowed with it. It felt natural. It felt right.
His mistake had been to let the old woman live. He had seen something in her eyes that night. They’d remained wide open and staring the whole time. She looked so gentle, like a doe paralyzed by the headlights of an onrushing truck. He couldn’t finish her. Not with those big eyes looking right at him.
He wondered: How long could she put him away? Ten years? Twenty years?
Life?
Foerster shook his head. No way. He was never going back to jail.
He stood up and got another half-cold beer out of the box. He tapped the empty on the edge of the sink until it cracked, then he placed it on a rickety white table piled high with similar empties. He once hit a guy in a bar three times with a beer bottle and it didn’t break. Then he learned. Crack ‘em just a little and they break on the first shot. Nobody likes to get a head full of glass.
He stood in the kitchen with his next beer and looked around. Shabby ass apartment. Roaches in the cabinets. He didn’t even have sheets on the bed, just an old mildewed mattress and a quilt. He needed to start treating himself better. First and foremost, he needed to stay out of the joint.
On that end, he was in good shape. He had stopped showering in case the cops came while he was naked with the water running. Instead, he was dressed and ready to go at all times. Every dollar he had was in his pocket. He had his bottles, and leaning in the corner he had his table leg. If all else failed, he had practiced his escape route until it didn’t even scare him anymore. There was a trick to it, one so dangerous no coffee and donut cop would ever attempt it – why get killed over nothing?
Foerster glanced at the kitchen window, where a threadbare curtain billowed in the breeze. He was waiting here, and he didn’t like it. He wanted to get moving. Tyler Gant – his man down south – needed him for another science project. It was easy work, the kind of thing a smart tenth-grader could probably pull off, but Gant didn’t seem to realize that. Pretty soon, one of Gant’s goons was supposed to come to Foerster’s door with an envelope. When Foerster opened that envelope, he was supposed to find $5,000 in cash. Then he was supposed to get in a car with the goon and drive down to Dixie.
Shit. Five grand in cash, and Foerster hadn’t even done anything yet? This job must be something pretty big. Wouldn’t it be nice if the goon showed up here today?
Just then, the doorbell rang.
Jonah stood in the bleak hallway and faced the solid green door to apartment 5C.
Weak light filtered through a translucent window at the other end of the hall. Solid glass bricks half a foot thick. Some kid had probably gone out the original window by accident, ended up with a broken neck in the street. Those glass bricks gave the only light – the overheads were all out. At night, this would be one dark hallway. On the wall, some new Picasso had drawn a mural in black magic marker, a big penis rubbing between a pair of breasts.
‘Every nigga has 2 scheme 4 da creme,’ read the caption underneath.
Nice building.
Sounds echoed through the halls. Laughter. Somebody shouting. Running feet. TV sets – the power was on. Water dripped somewhere. Plunk, plunk, plunk.
Jonah’s body shook, a little nothing tremor maybe nobody could see but him. He always got nervous before one of these gigs. It wouldn’t have taken much to throw up – if he thought too hard about his finger approaching the back of his throat, that might do it. Taking a shit would have been even easier. All he had to do was sit down.