Since the Layoffs (15 page)

Gardocki has given me an address, and I ask the hotel clerk where it is, and it turns out it’s less than half a mile from the hotel. “Oh, you can walk there,” he tells me cheerfully, and I decide it might not be a bad idea. I figure the rifle is going to be discreetly packaged. Perhaps it will even be one of those rifles which comes apart so it can be carried in a custom-made suitcase. I should be able to carry it back without any problems. I set off with my directions to get a ground look at Miami.

I realize I have made a mistake right away. The seediness of my hotel should have been a warning. I hadn’t noticed it before, but my beachfront hotel is actually the rule rather than the exception, and the pilot’s brand-new luxury tower is probably an attempt by local developers to invigorate the blighted landscape where I have rented a room. I’m in a neighborhood not unlike my own, trashed and neglected, decorated with broken doors and boarded-up windows and trash in the streets. The blazing sun and the race of the inhabitants are the only real differences. Young black men in NFL shirts, which have been picked for their colors rather than from any sense of team loyalty, lounge outside broken-down houses. The first group I see wears shirts from Indianapolis, Tennessee and Kansas City. No one has got a Dolphins shirt on. They eye me suspiciously as I try to put as much distance as I can between myself and them while not crossing the street, an obvious indication of fear.

A boom box is blaring as I get to the end of the first block, and I look to take a right, as my directions suggest, and I see that I’ll be walking through a minefield of young black men, many of them hanging out on the sidewalk. I doubt too many white people come down this way. I decide to press on. I’m a hit man. These kids may look tough, but how many of them have actually killed anyone? I look hard into their faces as I walk down the middle of the street and they watch me closely, a white curiosity in the middle of their neighborhood. If black men walked down our streets in Wisconsin, we always noticed, stared. Now I know how it felt for them. Maybe those guys were just looking for an address, too.

“Hey, you,” a girl calls from her porch. “Whatcha doin’ up this way?” I look over in acknowledgement, not wanting to appear rude or deaf, but not slowing down, either. Something heavy comes flying off one of the porches and bangs into a car which is up on blocks, maybe ten feet behind me. I look at it as it bounces past my feet. Half a baseball. There is some derisive laughter at my obviously startled jump, made embarrassing by my even more obvious attempt to control it.

It is, I realize, a Friday afternoon, a workday. This is my neighborhood in ten years. Not working for these people has become a way of life. Maybe some of them might get night jobs, janitorial work or room service, in the high-end hotels opening up over at the beach, but it’s over for them. They’ll never own anything or build anything or get off this street. Nobody’s even bothering to lie to them anymore that there’s a country that cares about them, the lies I believed so completely until the factory closed. These people never had a factory to work in, never felt safe, even for a moment. Their disillusionment is even purer than my own.

I see the second half of the baseball out of the corner of my eye as it comes whizzing just inches from my head. This time I don’t startle. There is more derisive laughter. Then one of them, a young boy, yells “Bang.” I’ll take that over the real thing. They are fantasizing about using me for target practice. To them, I’m Brecht, a symbol of what is wrong with everything. But their anger isn’t as fresh as mine, and they let me go. By the time I take a left at the end of the block I sense they’ve already lost interest in me, just a lost white guy wandering through on his way to somewhere else.

The next three blocks are deserted, except for an old black lady on a porch in a rocking chair who, when I ask her where the inappropriately named Rich Street is, points and says nothing. I find Rich Street, a long alley with no one on it. I hear some voices and follow them, and at the end of the street I see two college-age white kids, in loose T-shirts and backwards baseball caps, polishing surfboards in a garage.

“Hey, man,” I say. “I’m looking for 1502 Rich. Am I near it?”

The two look at each other. “Who you looking for?” one asks, returning his eyes to his surfboard.

I look at the piece of paper Gardocki has given me. “Gerald.”

“Jerry’s inside.”

I look around the trashed garage, broken fishing poles and mangled surfboards lying positioned over disused ovens and refrigerators. I don’t see a door.

“How do I get in?”

The kid doesn’t look up, but stops polishing for a second to mumble, “You gotta push the oven out of the way.” I go over and slide the oven to reveal not a door, but a hole in the wall which looks like it was kicked out during a drug frenzy, and the owners just made the best of it and used it as an entrance. I crouch down and manage to wriggle inside, covering myself with drywall dust.

I’m in the kitchen. Two kids are sitting at a table, eating cereal. Between the still-open cereal boxes I see a bong in the middle of the table, and the rich, musky smell of pot is in the air. Dishes are piled in the sink and a roll of paper towels lies partially unrolled across the stained and faded linoleum counter, the only cleaning apparatus in sight. They look alarmed when they both suddenly realize I’m not one of the kids from the garage.

“What’s up, man?” one of them says cautiously.

“I’m looking for Jerry.”

“JERRY!” screams the kid without moving from his seat, cereal spilling from his mouth back into the bowl with the force of his yell.

“WHAT?” screams back a voice from the living room.

I advance quickly into the living room to prevent any more yelling. Jerry is sitting on a worn gray couch, which used to be white, with his feet propped on a milk crate, watching a muted TV. Copies of
Details, Maxim
and
GQ
in various states of decay litter the floor. One of the magazines, hardened by time and fluids, is being used as a tray for another bong. Jerry turns to look at me. He stiffens when he realizes he doesn’t recognize me.

“Hey, dude,” he says, sitting straight up, his voice full of caution. “Do I know you?” I detect a slight Wisconsin accent.

“Ken Gardocki sent me,” I say. “From Wisconsin.”

“Ken who?”

“Gardocki. He gave me your name. Said I could buy …” I find myself suddenly unable to describe a rifle. A gun? A weapon? I feel some discretion should be used here. The kid seems skittish enough without me talking openly about firearms.

“Gardocki …” the kid says. He’s thinking. Slowly. “Is that dude a friend of my dad’s?”

“I don’t know. Who’s your dad?”

“Jerry Grzanka. He used to drive a truck in Wisconsin.”

By some miracle, I know the name and the man. I remember him because he had a huge, black handlebar mustache which gave him the appearance of always being in a rage. He was always telling foul, unfunny jokes which usually involved fecal matter. He left the plant about ten years ago, I remember now, to move south because he inherited a house in Florida. Things come together and I look around, hoping for his sake this wasn’t the house.

“I know Jerry,” I say. “I used to work with him at the plant. Big guy, handlebar mustache.”

“Dude!” exults Jerry Junior. “HEY,” he screams into the kitchen. “THIS GUY KNOWS MY DAD!” There is no response. Jerry looks at me and shrugs. “So, dude, how much do you need?”

“How much what?”

Jerry looks at me quizzically, becoming suspicious again. He shows me both his palms and shrugs, a gesture which means nothing to me. Then it occurs to me that he thinks I’m here to buy drugs.

“No, man,” I tell him. “I’m here for the rifle. Gardocki gave me this address to pick up a rifle.” I hand him the slip of paper, which he looks at like a bouncer checking an ID, though all he’s looking at is a cocktail napkin with his own address on it. While he is thoroughly examining it, it occurs to me that the chances of me getting a silver metallic suitcase with a scope and sniper rifle unscrewed and fitted nicely into small compartments, as I have imagined, are getting slimmer by the minute.

“Rifle?” Jerry asks.

“He told me this is the place. You’re from Wisconsin, right?”

“I lived there when I was eleven,” Jerry says, shaking his head.

“Gardocki said he paid you for the rifle already.”

Jerry stares at me, mystified. “HEY,” he yells into the kitchen. “DID YOU GUYS GET A MESSAGE ABOUT A RIFLE?”

There is silence from the kitchen. Then one of the kids comes in to the living room and says, “There was a message on the machine about it.” He picks a pack of cigarettes off the floor, takes one out, lights it and tosses the pack back down amid stained, overturned magazines and ripped carpeting. “I told you about it, man. You were high.”

“I wasn’t high,” says Jerry. “I would’ve remembered that.”

“I told you about it,” says the kid, and walks off.

Jerry looks at me and apologizes. “Maybe it was something to do with my dad,” Jerry shrugs and gets off the couch. “We have the same name. But he’s out of town right now, and he lives across town. Anyway, follow me. I think we’ve got a rifle in the storage room.”

I follow him into the “storage room,” which is a former bedroom in which everyone apparently throws their extra crap. There are fishing poles, musical instruments, garbage cans and paintbrushes, but no rifles.

“YOU GUYS SEEN A RIFLE IN HERE?” Jerry screams.

There is some shuffling in the kitchen, then one guy yells, “It’s in the bathroom.”

Jerry pushes past me and goes into the bathroom, where there is a rifle propped against the toilet. A very old rifle. Jerry picks it up and water from the floor, or at least what I hope is water, drips off the butt.

He hands it to me. “Here you go, dude.”

I take the rifle gingerly. It isn’t water.

So I offhandedly mention to Jerry that I walked here, and now I have to walk back, carrying a piss-soaked rifle, through a neighborhood where last time they threw heavy objects at me. Jerry tries to adopt the view that the rifle should be good protection, a notion which I reject. But it does bring up the subject of bullets, which I suddenly realize I don’t have. After a brief search, six bullets are located in the obvious place, under the kitchen sink.

“I’ll give you a ride home,” Jerry finally offers, realizing I’m not leaving until this is suggested. As we are leaving, Jerry asks me to follow him back into the bathroom. He digs around behind the toilet for a few seconds, then comes up with … a bayonet.

“This goes with it,” he tells me.

“Thanks, man. I don’t think I’ll be needing that.”

“But they go together.” For some reason, Jerry, who to date hasn’t done a thorough job of maintaining this firearm, seems mortified by the possibility that a piece of it might be lost. I take the bayonet, which also has quite recently been pissed on, and we go outside and get into Jerry’s car. I place the rifle and bayonet in the back seat, on a pile of enough fast food containers to conceal a body.

We drive back through the hotel parking lot where the clerk, who gave me directions some time back, is standing, staring. Just staring into the parking lot.

“Christ,” I say. “Look, man, I can’t take the rifle into the room with him just standing there. Can you wait here for a second while I get a blanket?”

“Sure. But I gotta use the john.”

“All right. Come in.”

We go into the hotel room, and I am hit once again with the stale smell of mold. After the brightness of the outdoors, the motel room, with its drawn blinds and hardly adequate sixty-watt bulb under a dust-blackened shade, is almost like a coal mine. As I strip a blanket off the bed, Jerry thunders back toward the bathroom and nearly crashes into Sheila, who is coming out, in a bikini.

She screams.

He screams.

“Sheila,” I say soothingly. “It’s all right. He’s a friend of mine. I thought you were at the beach.”

She looks at me, still shocked, and I can’t help but notice how wonderful her body looks, better than I could have imagined. I notice Jerry is looking at her, too, and I begin to feel protective. “Bathroom’s free,” I tell him. He goes in and closes the door.

Sheila is still looking at me. I think she wants to ask questions, but she also doesn’t want to know. She’s probably wondering why I’m peering through the blinds, holding the bedspread in my hands, having just allowed a total stranger free run of our hotel room.

“I need you to do me a favor,” I tell her.

She reaches for a shawl as she slips into her sandals. “What?”

“That damned clerk is standing in the parking lot. I need you to distract him.”

“Distract him from what?”

“Me.”

She seems amused by this. “What do you want me to do? A belly dance?” She pulls her shawl on and goes outside as Jerry comes out of the bathroom. As she leaves, Jerry gives me the thumbs-up, an approval of “my woman.” I smile at him while I wonder if he’s pissed all over the floor.

Sheila goes over to the clerk and says something to him, and they both go into the office together. I run out to the car and get the rifle and bayonet and drag them quickly inside. Jerry and I say our goodbyes as Sheila returns with brochures for the art deco district and South Beach. There’s one for a topless beach, which she picks out and hands to me.

I look at it. I wonder what it means if a woman you’re interested in starts giving you ads for a topless beach.

“You wanna go?” I ask.

She laughs.

“Thanks,” I say, meaning for distracting the clerk, not for the topless beach brochure. She says nothing. But I have a sense of satisfaction. I’ve handled Step One. The rifle sucks, my car sucks, my hotel room sucks, but there is at least a possibility I can carry out my assignment.

I realize as I lean back on the bed, that this job is every bit as much stress as working on the loading dock during the busy season. I suddenly miss that stress, the comfort of knowing that what you are doing is legal. I wish I still had that job. I wish I still had Kelly. I wish I was back in Wisconsin, coming home from a day full of work, with Kelly already there, making dinner, the evening news on and a light snow falling outside. But it’s gone. It’s February and it’s ninety degrees out and I’m in a Miami hotel room with a stranger, from whom I am concealing a bayonet and a rifle under my bed.