Ride Around Shining Read online

  Turning back toward the patio, I was hailed to try some turkey steak, and then a new voice hollered my name, from the balcony. I heard the crack of a shot and saw a bright flash growing at me.

  Something hit me in the chest and rebounded and I dropped, holding the burning place. Having never before been shot by something so bright, I rolled away from what struck me, fearing another stage, until I came up against the feet of one of the dicers standing firm. I rolled back and lay on the footbridge, trying not to writhe, as a happy chorus of profanity went up all around the yard. My body told me nothing, but I could feel in the air that I’d not been shot really, not respectably—not with a bullet or anything. Already I heard bits of muffled laughter, and after a moment’s relief at the promise of more life I began to feel angry that I’d been shot by some party weapon, and was not even close enough to death to distract people from their drinks. I’d been but trifling wounded, possibly for the pleasure of the crowd, and I was left now to lie among them as a feebly trembling figure of injured dignity. If blood had suddenly begun to spurt from my chest I would’ve felt a certain relief. Next to me the blinding core of the flare smoked and grew small.

  “Damn, son!” Calyph cried from the balcony, over the disorder. He stood at the rail, the flare gun in his hand and Antonia by his side. He had on a plain blue plaid shirt and a pair of aviators he sometimes wore like a comic prop whenever he gave me orders. I hope they soothed him; the sight of him looking down on me like an amateur dictator only stoked my hot and disoriented humiliation. Antonia looked absorbed in something some sparrows were doing in a distant place.

  “You steppin’ all over this place like the Family Circus kid,” Calyph shouted down to me. “What I pay you for?”

  I felt more feet around me and the dicers helped me up. As I brushed myself off, one of them crushed the flare’s last embers beneath his shoe in a final gout of pink. There was a ragged hole in my shirt, just above my heart, and by the evening I’d have a quarter-sized welt I’d wish looked more serious.

  I walked unsteady and stunned through the parting crowd, trying to look like my nerves were not twisted into fine fibers of hate. Once I even felt myself smile knowingly, as though this had been an elaborate practical joke we’d been planning all week to throw a little sizzle into his party. I tried to tell myself this was just a bad turn of an expected sort, that I’d fought for this sought-after job in a high-life world knowing that in its careless, loud dazzle sometimes the chauffeur got shot, for no reason at all. But seething with pride and shame, I could not sway myself from the conviction that I was less a man suffering the indignities of his job than a debased functionary of a failing empire. I felt that it was somehow correct, that I deserved it—for who can complain about being shot for being white people? And so I came under the shadow of the balcony, and looked up at this man, my master, and his wife.

  “Next time, Jess, just wait with the car, okay?” Calyph had dropped his voice, but I knew it still carried to every ear that wanted to hear. “We got cameras here. We know when you’re here. You don’t have to call nobody. You don’t have to go and look. We know. Okay?”

  “Yessir,” I said.

  “Good. She’ll be down in a second now. Next time just wait.”

  “Yessir.”

  He sniffed in a tough way, and the violence was through. “Listen, I didn’t mean to hit you or nothin’. This thing always buck and shoot high.”

  I didn’t know what to say to that, what absolution I could reasonably give. I just waved my hand a little, as if to say, Oh, did you shoot me?

  He sighed, and for a moment seemed truly sorry. “Yeah. The fuck you gonna say, right? You need some Neosporin or something? A bandage? You eat?” The aviators came off, and he turned his head incrementally to include Aldridge. “Fix him up a turkey BLT real quick. Man’s gotta eat.”

  I felt my posture relax, but the fibers of my neck were only twisted tighter by the shame of this reprieve. My nerves seethed, and it occurred to me the next time I did something wrong he’d cane me and then hand me a half-drunk lukewarm strawberry soda, to show everybody he was still a good guy.

  “Maybe he want a turkey steak, Leef,” Aldridge said, popping the spatula from one hand to the other with especial panache.

  “What is that made-up-sounding shit?”

  “Prime cut, Leef. Pure, hundred-percent prime cut turkey steak.”

  “Ain’t nobody want that. Make Oden eat that. You leave Jess alone with that South Beach shit.”

  “Maybe I want it,” I heard myself say.

  Something in me hoped he’d rise to this, but he only turned away. “Trust me, Jess,” he said a little tiredly, his voice going away from the rail. “You want that BLT.”

  “Yessuh,” I said, because he’d stepped away, and would not hear.

  I went off to the nearest bathroom, to raid the medicine cabinet for ointments and pain pills and hope my wound looked graver in the mirror. When I returned, an overstuffed BLT was pressed into my hand by an underling and I was made to recount my entertaining experience next to Lady Justice, who was melting unevenly in the sun.

  “Coulda been worse, home,” one of the rollers said. “Coulda been Jayson Williams.”

  “Man had the whole world.”

  “I been shot before,” I said. I wasn’t about to abide my burning just being an excuse to talk about other people who shot people. I could see Calyph coming toward us, filtering through the crowd one complicated gesture of brotherhood at a time.

  “A nail gun,” I said, elaborating. “BB gun, too.” They did not seem impressed. “Got a fishhook in my scalp once,” I added.

  The men turned to me and laughed. “A real nature boy,” one of them said, draping his arm around me.

  “Give him a real squeeze. Shit, boy’s been beat up his whole life.”

  Just as Calyph broke through to us at last, the man wrapped me in a full bear hug. I took a bite of BLT over his shoulder and chewed it calmly, but as Calyph came near the Justice I lowered my arm and returned the hug fully, swinging into the embrace and then out again, maneuvering the larger man toward the sculpture until I felt his shoulder strike it and then stepping free. The Justice slid easily from its pedestal, and as I watched it drop toward Calyph I felt again a slow wonder at my strange new self.

  2

  To get the job I told just two lies. It’s not that I wasn’t qualified. When I heard Calyph was looking for a chauffeur, I knew he wanted someone like me. It’d be just his peculiarity to want a white guy with a lot of education driving him around all “yes sir, no sir,” and we had some history. I’d saved his cat.

  His accident was the first I’d heard of him in almost two years. Calyph had begun to look for a driver because of a crash on Macadam Avenue, which broke his clavicle and made ESPN. The team insisted he get a driver who could ensure his safety, or they would do it for him. I was living in Michigan then, in the Upper Peninsula, finishing up my second useless degree at Northern, the only graduate school to accept me, and trying to write music reviews for whoever would take them. My old Portland boss at the restaurant delivery service sent around the job notice. The sight of Calyph’s name was one of those details that recalls a gone world, as the smell of chlorine in a girl’s hair relumes old summers. I think even then I read his name as a destination, a way out of a life spent looking for the wrong things in books in the terrible cold, and I relived my six memories of him instantly. There I was, toting an insulated black food bag across white stones in the cool of the evening to deliver his Evil Jungle Prince. He’d always answer the door himself, always tip at least thirty percent, rounding up to the dollar, and always use a credit card that misspelled his name as “Caleef,” like it was pronounced. The year before I left Portland for grad school had been his rookie season, and he’d been the west side’s most celebrated customer of Takeout Train, Inc. He pretty invariably ordered the Jungle Prince, which was milkless house curry over rice noodles—and, after not very long, his nickname wit
h the other drivers.

  My chief memory from the old days was the incident with the serval. He was the last delivery of my shift one warm June night, and when I got to the door a little white girl answered. About a month before his orders had begun including fish curries, but it was the first I ever saw of Antonia.

  “Can you drive us somewhere?” she asked in a frantic voice, childlike and irresistible. She had a terrifically stylish haircut that was trying to fall over her right eye. I wasn’t sure about her face at first. It’s always that way with the ones who end up really mattering. She was holding what looked like an unusually long kitten with enormous ears. It was twitching its nose sluggishly and goop was leaking from one of its eyes. They’d recently bought this exotic cat, a serval hybrid, and now it was sick and refusing to eat and the only vet they knew could treat it wasn’t answering the phone. It was after ten, and they didn’t know what to do.

  Five minutes later, all three members of the household were in the back of my Corolla, which smelled like every restaurant I’d delivered from that night. The hood would have still been dented from one of the accidents, but they were too intent on the cat to notice.

  In the old days I lived down the street from a twenty-four-hour animal hospital, and I drove them there, feeling that great importance of purpose that most any urgent night errand bestows. As we sped across streetlit pools of moist night, the kitten ate a little mango sticky rice off Antonia’s finger and I remember feeling relieved and unnaturally triumphant.

  The cat got well. I hardly saw them again before I moved away, but when I did the tips were embarrassing. I think it was that night of impromptu chauffeuring that allowed everything to come after. I became a very minor memory, of a man who might be good in a pinch, and who knew how to get somewhere.

  Even so, I knew it wouldn’t be easy to get the job. Just because Calyph conducted his hiring like young money living by whim didn’t mean he wasn’t looking for some expertise parallel to his own. I knew, too, that there were better ways of expressing my qualifications than those that were strictly true, and that I wanted the job badly enough to use them. Why I wanted it so much, I almost couldn’t say. There was a draw to the simplicity and old-fashionedness of the vocation, to being a servant almost. I got to bathe in the reflected glow of their luxury while assuring myself I was not so shallow as to actually want such things. But really it was them. If it’d been a quarterback and his blond wife I’d never have done it. It had to be a black man, exactly like Calyph in his unpredictability and buried intelligence, and his aloof and difficult white wife, his Antonia. They were like some obscure royalty, so obscure they hardly knew they were anything special themselves. To be in their lives would be the promise of a new beginning in a more vital world. Anyhow, I guess I needed the money.

  When Calyph saw me turn up again, there was just enough in his attitude that I could see he wanted me to lie. When I came into his study, he was sitting behind an immense oaken desk no one his age could hope to command. It must have felt like I’d come back to him from a long way away just to be the right man for the job, and he looked relieved somehow. We shook, he offered me a seat, and then he wandered the room, whistling and inspecting its books and prestigious-looking brass items like he’d just discovered this was part of his house. There was a globe sitting on a floor stand, and he spun it slowly as he talked.

  “How’s your driving record?” he asked eventually.

  “Spotless,” I assured him.

  Later he asked, with what seemed like particular interest, if I’d know how to carry myself with the dignity of one who served in a great house. “I don’t want any of this humping around like a pizza boy,” he explained. “Nobody got more class than a good chauffeur.”

  I assured him I knew this was true. Then I sat up a little in my chair and invented an explanation why.

  “I came from money,” I said. “We squandered it, though. I was the last of the line.” The last bit was a little rich. It conjured a scene with a country house, a landscape garden—who knew what. I didn’t even know what I meant, and I was afraid he would laugh and expose me. But, being nouveau himself, he nodded in perfect satisfaction.

  “Y’all ever have a Bentley?” he asked.

  I nodded.

  “Cool, cool.”

  “Yeah,” I said, faintly let down by his credulity.

  It’s not that I was ashamed of my past, exactly. My parents died young and I came up among aunts and uncles in an obsolete railroad town in Wisconsin; it was the most ordinary possible thing. When I got to college, to a school my teachers assured me was the Harvard of the Midwest, it was paid for with the life insurance money, and I found I was poorer than the people I wanted to know. Lacking even the explanation of being a scholarship kid, I just stopped talking about my hometown. My past became like one of those paper fortune-tellers, a device to be manipulated. By the time I came west and met Calyph I was pretty used to making it up anew.

  The other lie was strictly necessary: of course I couldn’t talk about the crashes. I knew I was sound, in spite of my priors. Really, no one is more cautious about stopping distance than the man who’s seen the highway freeze fifty feet in front of him and burst into a red nova of brake lights. No driver is really defensive until his cabin has filled with the cry of his helpless brakes, which sound like the air is full of angry metal birds.

  As the Justice tipped sunward and came free of her base, I saw Calyph lift his hands and freeze, and felt my wonder chilled by a distant remorse. She had to fall, there was no way around that, and yet, having brought it off, and so neatly, I now wished myself on the other side of things. I wished I could be the one to rush forward and throw my body against the ice, to keep him safe from harm. The Justice fell with the dignity of something elemental, as if she were slipping unnoticed into some Arctic sea. She fell sword-first, and gathering his weight Calyph twisted awkwardly at the knees and sprang away as the man who’d hugged me looked over his damp shoulder, dumbfounded. She hit the ground, and I remained a moment longer to savor the crash, but instead of the million splendid shards I’d hoped for, she only cracked in two and fell into an unremarkable rubble. For the second time that hour, a cry went up among the crowd, and I saw Calyph clutch his knee, and lingered in spite of myself, to see what I had wrought. But as the men rushed to attend him, he shook it off and straightened again, joining the crowd in looking for someone to blame, and I turned quickly away amid the brief chaos and slipped into the house.

  When Antonia finally came out to the car, the taste of blackened bacon stuck like ash-smear to the roof of my mouth. Brushing flecks of char from the ragged hole in my shirt, I opened the door for her with my face turned away, but she didn’t get in.

  “Close that,” she said quietly. Then she got in the front seat.

  When I had come around to the driver’s side, she was still settling in, drawing the belt around her. She was a little one, with delicate-looking wrists and knees, and sometimes she seemed to be using a little of her concentration to keep her movements slow, so she wouldn’t look like a child. Yet the effect made her seem strangely ageless, like she was younger and older than me at once.

  I asked where she wanted to go and she named a clothing boutique in Southeast. When we’d pulled out onto the main road, I heard the pluck of her little lips pulling apart, and she said, “I’m sorry that happened.”

  It took me a moment to realize she wasn’t talking about the sculpture. She’d turned her head a little toward me, as minutely as if she were looking in the rearview. I could only see it because one of those dangling housewife earrings I didn’t like her to wear trembled a little, to announce the movement, but I didn’t pay her any mind.

  “You bandaged it?” she asked. “Does it still hurt?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “Your poor shirt.” She must have felt she could be tender to my wardrobe where sympathy for my actual skin would only feel like pity.

  “Before people came we’d been watching t
hat show,” she explained in a slow voice, finishing on a down note like that was all I’d get. She most always spoke this way, when I could get her to speak at all—with a hesitance that implied the rest of the world spoke too carelessly.

  “The people-hunting show?”

  She only winced. She seemed truly pained, as though no answer were possible, but then Antonia was very good at saying nothing. So often in those early days our talk was like a stoics’ game, where the object was to get the other to reveal more than you. There was a tension to the game that I enjoyed as a stand-in for other tensions, and she was a worthy competitor.

  “You know the one where the good chef yells at people?” she said finally. “Sort of inspires him.”

  I checked my blind spot, even though I knew there was no one, and turned down the air as the car shot along the leaf-darkened road.

  I could see her shake her head at the edge of my eye, the earrings going off again. “He should know better than to speak to you that way, with other people around. On your day off.”

  “It’s not my day off if you need to get somewhere,” I said, giving the phrase the rich, earnest sound of a platitude. In my mind this had been the finishing volley, and I waited, swelling with humility, to be given the point. But Antonia only looked out the window and let the silence take us.

  “Madame didn’t enjoy the party?” I asked, after we’d driven awhile.

  I stole a glance and saw her small mouth compress. Her lips had a loose look for one who spoke so rarely, like they’d be supple if you bit one. She was always twitching and pursing them, and making little moues.

  “Madame,” she said, like a curse.

  Her mouth seemed to have an active life of judgment all its own. At first I hadn’t liked this, thinking that behind her reserve she was censuring everything by some merciless private code. At any moment I thought the barely parted lips would shrivel in disdain and I wouldn’t know why. Eventually they did, but it was only rarely, and most always correctly, so that even when she looked the picture of a snotty little rich girl, I agreed with her, and approved.