Peter Abrahams - Lights Out

There was a tiny bathroom off the tiny bedroom, with toilet, sink, and shower stall all jammed together. Eddie had a shower, washing himself with a bar of soap that smelled like a freshly split coconut. After, he opened the bedroom closet. Women’s clothes hung from the bar, women’s shoes were scattered on the floor. At the back lay a cardboard box that had once contained a twenty-four-inch Gold Star TV. On top was an envelope. Eddie opened it, found ten or twelve blue Social Security cards with no names on them. Underneath were Prof’s clothes.

Eddie tried on a blue shirt with yellow parrots, and a T-shirt that read “Rust Never Sleeps-Neil Young 1978,” both too small. There was a pair of black Levi’s he couldn’t get into and baggy corduroys that he could fasten but were four inches too short. He settled for thick gray sweats that looked new-a hooded sweat shirt and drawstring pants with deep pockets at the front and a zippered one in back. Eddie put on Prof’s sweats and a nice pair of wool socks he found at the bottom of Prof’s box, laced on his own sneakers, stuck the Speedo in a front pocket and zipped the two hundred-dollar bills in the back, and sat down at the table to write Tiffany a good-bye note.

What to say? How to begin? Eddie didn’t know. All he knew was that he couldn’t stay. Not when the phone could ring at any time with Prof on the other end. What he’d done was wrong, even though Tiffany had been the one to start. All he had to do to know it was wrong was to put himself in Prof’s position, and he could do that quite easily. Choosing the right words to tell her was the problem.

Eddie sat at the table, a blank sheet of paper in front of him, a pencil in his hand. He doodled. He doodled a flower, a burning cigarette, a bird. A big bird with an enormous wingspan, gliding over a calm sea.

“Dear Tiffany,” he wrote. “I’m-”

There was a knock at the door. Eddie got up, sticking the sheet of paper in his pocket. It was probably noon-it could be anytime at all in Tiffany’s little bunker-and that was probably her. Eddie opened the door.

A woman stood outside, but it wasn’t Tiffany. This woman had thick black hair, red lips, smooth double-cream-coffee skin, and a voluptuous body under her short fur jacket and tight jeans.

“Whoop-dee-do,” she said. “My long-lost high-school graduate.”

He remembered her, remembered that mocking voice, remembered her red convertible in the Dunkin’ Donuts parking lot and the red jelly spurting from the cop’s mouth. But that was down south and now she was here. Meaning? His mind raced to find some meaning.

“Hey, graduate,” she said. “You’re forgetting your manners.”

“Manners?”

“Aren’t you going to invite me in? I don’t want to stand out here-this place gives me the creeps.”

Eddie stepped aside. She walked in. He closed the door.

“What a dump,” she said, looking around. She circled the tiny space like a big cat. Prof’s charcoal drawing lay on the kitchen counter. She examined it.

“Naughty, naughty.”

Then she glanced into the bedroom at the unmade bed, smiled as though amused by some private joke, and said, “So, Mr. Eddie Nye, a.k.a. Nails-are you going to play ball this time, or hard to get?”

“What do you want?” Eddie replied, remembering the way Tiffany had gone into the bedroom soon after his arrival, and how he’d heard her voice mixed in with the TV voices. The prison, so rigid when he was in, reached out elastically when he was out.

“Dyslexic,” said the woman with the double-cream-coffee complexion. “I forgot.” She sat down at the table, brushed away crumbs with her beringed fingers. “We had a date, chico,” she said, mouth smiling, eyes not. “Arranged by a mutual friend. Arranged and paid for, if you’re going to make me spell it out, by this mutual friend. Blink twice if you get it.”

Eddie got it. “It’s the money.”

“Wow. You’re something, you know that? Yes, chico , it’s the money. You weren’t trying to abscond with it, were you, like some little sneak thief?”

Eddie didn’t like that. She could see that, but it didn’t seem to impress her at all. “I didn’t even know it was there till I tried to smoke that cigarette. You and El Rojo or whatever he calls himself are the ones playing games.”

She studied his face for a moment or two, then nodded. “That’s what they thought.”

“Who?”

“It was all a mistake. No rough stuff necessary.”

“Rough stuff?”

“Nothing to worry about. Not necessary.”

The phone rang in the bedroom. Eddie let it ring. The woman watched him letting it, the mocking look in her eyes. It rang for a long time. When it stopped she said: “Have you still got it?”

Eddie unzipped the back pocket of Prof’s sweats and handed her one of his hundred-dollar bills. She stuck it inside her fur jacket.

“I love happy endings,” she said.

“What’s this all about?”

“You already know the answer. Money.”

Eddie didn’t believe that El Rojo would go to so much trouble over a hundred dollars. Some matter of principle was involved, macho Latin bullshit principle or crazy inmate bullshit principle.

“Just money?” Eddie said.

“That’s right,” she replied. “Now how about our date?”

“What date?”

“Madre de dios . The date that’s paid for.”

Eddie laughed. He was laughing a lot all of a sudden. “We didn’t sign a contract,” he said. “I’ll let you wriggle out of it.”

The woman wasn’t laughing. “You’re not very bright, for a high-school graduate. There’s no wriggling out where our friend’s concerned.”

She paused to let this sink in. Eddie thought of their long-faced friend in the prison library pushing away the bloodied Business Week with distaste, and tried unsuccessfully to see the danger in him. Then he remembered how those liquid brown eyes had reminded him of maple syrup, and felt a tiny wave of nausea.

“So let’s roll,” the woman said. “I’ve got a car outside.”

Eddie didn’t want to go on a date; on the other hand, he had to get out of Tiffany’s apartment, and a car was waiting. He turned over the sheet of paper with the doodles on it and wrote, “Thanks.” What else? Didn’t he owe Tiffany some explanation? Then he remembered her phone call, the one that had brought this woman. Maybe he didn’t owe her anything.

Meanwhile the woman was on her feet. “There’s nothing to say-don’t you know that by now?” She dropped an envelope on the table. It was a thin-papered envelope; Eddie could see that there was money inside. “Let’s roll,” said the woman.

Eddie tore up the note, tossed it in the trash, and followed her out the door. They walked down the dark basement corridor, through the entrance hall, outside.

It was night. Late night, to judge from the quiet. Eddie was wide awake and disoriented at the same time. The state had regulated his sleeping patterns for fifteen years; now that he was on his own they were falling apart.

“God, you’re slow,” said the woman, crossing the street toward a silver sedan. She unlocked the door and they got in. “Ow,” she said, reached into her waistband, pulled out a gun, and laid it on the seat between them. “These things are so uncomfortable.” She started the car and zoomed away from the curb without looking. Eddie fastened his seat belt.

“Don’t trust my driving?” she said, speeding up.

“I don’t trust anyone with a gun.”

She laughed. “You’re going to be a very lonely guy.”

She drove into a tunnel, emerged by a river, cut down a side street and double-parked outside a club called L’Oasis. The clock on the dashboard read two-ten, but twenty or thirty people who had given some thought to what they wore were waiting to get in. The woman went straight to the head of the line where a big man wearing sunglasses stood with folded arms. He smiled when he saw her.