Leave It to Me - Bharati Mukherjee [32]
“You don’t know it was your mother, do you? That’s why I say, it could get expensive.”
“Males too?”
“He’d fuck a cockroach if it were big enough, that’s his rep. What we used to call polymorphous perverse.”
Fred made that phrase sound a fun type to be. Even if I owed my existence to two of those sex-cult bozos, I didn’t have to out-polymorphous-perverse them; in fact I didn’t have to believe Fred and his Mr. Raj. “How do I know you aren’t kidding?”
“What do you want from me, jokes?” He parted his lips slightly, and moved his lower jaw laterally a couple of times. “Hear it pop?” he asked. “It’s tensing up. I could use some jokes myself. You know, loosen up.”
“What else did your man in Bombay fax?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” He pummeled lemon pulp with the back of his teaspoon. “That you want me to give the green light to Rajeev? He won’t come cheap.”
What choice does an orphan have? Ignorance is no choice.
“You want to sleep on it, and call me tomorrow?”
“Get me what you can find, Fred.”
“I’ll get you what there is to be found, period.” He stood, a tall man with a tortured face. The top of his bald head glowed in the diner’s silver-blue light. That’s the way a fed’s head must look to Loco Larry. “I’m the goddamn best there is.” He checked his watch. “What you do with the stuff, I don’t need to know. Goodnight.”
“What time’s it in Bombay?” I asked Fred’s long-waisted back.
“Thirteen and a half hours into tomorrow. Goodnight.”
Leatherpants on the bar stool said something that sounded dirty. He was looking at me, but speaking in loud Vietnamese to the waiter, who’d vanished into a storeroom for my cola. Putting together the two and two of my drama with Fred and getting it wrong, I assumed.
I took two dollar bills out of my wallet for Fred’s hot water with lemon wedge, but didn’t leave the diner with him.
The waiter came back with my Pepsi in a glass.
“I’ve changed my mind,” I said.
“You can’t change your mind now,” the waiter said. “Too late. You ordered a Pepsi. I brought you a Pepsi. Drink or no drink it, that’s your problem.”
I started to walk out of the waiter’s arm range. The waiter made a halfhearted show of blocking my path with his mop. Leatherpants slid off the stool and gave his duffel bag a quick, vicious kick. The duffel caught me in the left ankle before I could get to the door. My ankle felt as if it’d been clubbed, but I wasn’t about to give Leatherpants the satisfaction of a howl or yelp. I stepped over the duffel bag, and hissed, “The INS is on its way, mister.”
The man on the stool hooted. “And fuck you too, doll!”
“Hey!” I heard the waiter’s voice behind me. “Hey, you owe for Pepsi!” But he chose not to chase me. The wet mop was still going swish-swish and the man on the stool was still laughing when I left the diner.
The other day a man driving home from work on I-80 was shot by a sniper near Davis. The man usually stopped for a beer, but that day his son was pitching Little League, and nothing, he’d promised, would keep him away. He was the third red Honda Civic with bumper stickers to pass under the bridge between five and five twenty-five, fulfilling all five preconditions set by his anonymous executioner for moral target practice.
The other night in Oakland, the proud owner of an Asian-run market closed early for his daughter’s wedding. While celebratory firecrackers were being set off in Orinda, an elderly neighborhood woman was knocking on the store’s shuttered door looking for her usual small bag of scented kitty litter. The woman could have waited—the cat didn’t care—but she loved her cat Melba, named after an aunt, and so she embarked on a trek to the supermarket three long blocks away. She stepped off the curb without looking and was run over by a thirteen-year-old who’d stolen the car from in front of a 7-Eleven where the car’s owner was counting out enough change to pay for a Snickers bar and a quart of skim milk.
The other week a refugee, just arrived in San Jose from Banja Luka by way of camps and detention centers, was stepping out of the third-floor