Уолтер Тевис - The Steps of the Sun

But as I had hoped, Fatty suddenly gave up. “Look, Billy Bob,” he said, nodding toward the handcuff that joined us, “undo this thing for a minute.”

Billy Bob looked doubtful. “What in hell…?” he said.

“Come on !” Fatty said, in desperation. “He ain’t going nowhere with you attached.”

“Okay,” Billy Bob said. He got the little magnetic key out of his pants pocket, walked in front of me and undid the cuff from Fatty’s wrist, letting it dangle from mine. Then he stepped back out the door and I followed him for a step, so that I was now all the way outside.

“Close the door,” Fatty said. He was standing in the doorway. I had already seen there was no bolt latch on the inside. Only a knob.

“Sure,” I said, casually. I took the knob firmly in my now free right hand, felt the steel heft of the door, and slammed it powerfully right into Fatty’s face. The door clicked shut and I could hear a thud. The strength in my pectorals felt like a triphammer. Then I jerked my left arm toward me with everything I had and Billy Bob’s head shot past my face and into the door. I smashed into the back of his head with my closed fist and felt him go slack. Then I turned the bolt on the men’s room door. It clicked into place beautifully.

Billy Bob was out cold with his face bloody enough that I could see the mess even by moonlight. I had no pity for him just then; he had chosen a violent profession for himself and should have been more alert. I bent down and examined his left hand for the key. It wasn’t there. I’d been afraid of that. He’d probably dropped it when I’d jerked him. I began looking around the grass as well as I could by moonlight. No luck. I dragged him over a few feet and looked where he’d been standing after he’d unlocked Fatty. Still no luck. It was just too dark . From inside the restroom came Fatty’s voice now, shouting, “Get me out of here!” He began banging on the door.

I was getting worried. I had just about made up my mind to pick up Billy Bob and carry him back to the car with me when a small miracle occurred: a light over the men’s room came on. I looked back toward the front of the building and, sure enough, Chinese Mama stood there, with her cigarette and comic book in one hand and her other on a light switch. She must have heard the commotion.

“Thank you, ma’am,” I said politely and began searching the grass with my eyes. And there it was, about a foot the other side of where Billy Bob had been standing when I’d decked him. I dragged him a bit farther, stretched out and got it. I was astonished at how steady my hand was when I unlocked us.

I looked back at Mama. Inscrutable, unperturbed. Billy Bob and I could have been discussing the weather. And the louder Fatty shouted and banged the door the calmer she looked, a genuine flower of heavenly repose all by herself. I could have kissed her. I checked out Billy Bob and figured he’d be all right in a few minutes, since his neck wasn’t twisted in any serious way. The poor son of a bitch.

I started walking toward the front of the store, where I’d seen a cigar-and-candy rack. When I came up to Mama I said, “What’s your name, ma’am?”

She took a puff from her cigarette. “Arabella Kim,” she said. “Are you Captain Belson from outer space?”

I grinned at her. “Oh yes.” And then, “I’d like to buy some cigars.” I gave her my whole forty dollars for ten cigars—cheap two-dollar ones, but what the hell—and six Mars bars. Mars seemed appropriate for a space pirate. “Keep the change,” I told her, “and I’d be obliged if you didn’t help these two for a few minutes.” I was still out of breath a bit and my voice was husky.

“Many people are on your side, Captain Belson,” she said. “People write letters to the Washington Post and say we should have your uranium. I think so.”

“Why, bless your heart,” I said, stuffing the cigars in my shirt pockets and the candy bars in my pants. There was no telephone at the store. I went over to Billy Bob’s car, lifted the hood, took out the distributor, and threw it into some bushes.

Then I stood there in the moonlight for a minute and a power realization dawned on me: I was flat broke. Here I was reborn into the world after nine months in the sky, and I had come back to be indeed naked and helpless. I took a deep breath of the night air and felt my heart speed up with it and the small hairs at the back of my neck tingle.

I had to begin somewhere. I turned and walked back into the shop and said, “Arabella, I need some cash.”

She just looked at me imperturbably. “How much?”

“I’ll sell you my watch for five hundred dollars,” I said. It had cost me eight thousand.

“One needs a watch,” she said. “I’ll see what I can do.”

She got up from her chair, went to a closed door at the back of the little shop, and opened it. I peered in. There was a small room filled with tobacco smoke, with Chinese revolutionary posters on the wall, some of them in tatters. At the back of the room was a cot with a wrinkled red coverlet on it and a tiny, wizened Chinese man lying on it reading Sports Illustrated . Probably Mr. Kim. She spoke to him in Chinese in a no-nonsense kind of way. He mumbled something that sounded surly but got off the cot meekly enough. She reached under the mattress and pulled out a little red plastic purse, opened it and took out six hundred-dollar coins. She handed them to me, smiled faintly, and said, “Keep your watch and pay me back when you sell the uranium.”

I glanced out the window to where the stacks of cordwood lay piled and said, “That uranium will put you out of business, you know.”

“It’s a dull business,” she said.

I nodded and put the coins in my pocket. “You’re a good woman, Arabella,” I said. Then I left the shop and took off toward Union Station.

I got about five minutes of exultation out of overcoming my arrest before I remembered that remark L’Ouverture had made about snobbery. The son of a bitch had a way of getting under my skin. In a sense I am a snob about good food, good china and good theater. I like Shakespeare immensely, as a matter of fact, now that I’m not trying to win points with Isabel. Bless her heart, she never knew the competition she entered when she took me on as a lover! But I like the good things of the modern world too. I thought of my running shoes. I’d bought them at a place on Forty-sixth Street a few weeks before the Isabel took off. You put your feet in a pretty little device called a Contour Reader, and the son of a bitch makes you a pair of Adidas right there. I mean right on your feet . It’s weird to watch but it feels good to have the warm polymers and rubber molded to your personal arches and to the ball and the heel and then up over the great toe. Like a Japanese massage. The machine even puts laces in, a sight more interesting to watch than most contemporary movies. And Jesus, do I love those gym shoes! Sky blue and made by electronic wizardry right before my eyes, between Madison and Fifth. Five hundred dollars. Eighty more if monogrammed. Mine have a white “B.B.” where the rubber disk used to be on a pair of Converse.

But I was pissed at L’Ouverture. Maybe because he’d pulled racism on me. I pounded along the predawn pavements, through silent suburbs and then along the “Ghost town” where all the poor blacks who did the paperwork for the U.S. Government used to live. Empty high-rise housing glowing dully by moonlight, emptier and spookier than Belson. I felt lucky to have been born in rural Ohio; those places, filled with the smells and sighs of government clerks and their dazed families, back when I was sleeping with Juno, were authentic anger factories. They used to defecate in the elevators in places like that, and do casual rapes on the staircases. No proper life for man at all.