Portland Noir - Kevin Sampsell [44]
I caught the table, stopped it from rocking. “He’s not my boyfriend.”
If Rebar hadn’t been there, just out of the psych ward, working hard to not drink and keep his head together, maybe I would’ve walked over and reached for Tino. Maybe I’d call him a boyfriend, or close enough to it.
I never did get the dating thing, where it stopped and started.
Tino saw us. He said, “Hey. What’s up?” He looked tired, his eyes ringed with circles. His top lip was chapped, cracked in a brown spot of dried blood.
Rebar said, “When do I get my Dr. Martens back?”
Tino half-laughed, blew it off.
I said, “Criminey. Not the shoes again.”
Rebar’d lost his Dr. Martens to Tino in a minor drug deal. Rebar made his dough in construction, old houses, but that didn’t always come through. He’d been broke that day. The shoes, as a trade, were a compromise. Rebar couldn’t let it go.
He said, “Serious.”
Tino said, “I’m not a hawk shop, friend.” He was wearing the shoes.
I said, “Rebar’s fresh out of the funny farm. Trying to put a life together. Those shoes might be part of the picture.”
Rebar’s house was a bigger part of that picture.
Tino said, “Down here, or up on the hill?”
“I was up on the hill,” Rebar said, and he said it so quiet his mouth barely moved. He shook his head, like he didn’t get it himself.
Tino said, “I’m headed to Good Sam.”
Rebar said, “You going nuts too?”
“Going to see Eileen.” He turned a chair backward, sat on it that way, then lit a cigarette. “She had an aneurysm in her brain.” He pointed to his head with the orange tip of the smoke, his thumb aimed at the ceiling. His hand was like a gun, at his own head.
I said, “No way.”
Rebar said, “Who’s Eileen?”
I said, “Waitress at Chang’s, dyes her hair.”
Tino said, “Living with Ray Madrigal.”
That was the part I didn’t want to say, and didn’t want to hear, the reason I knew who Tino meant—Eileen and Ray. Ray, who I’d lived with, before. I pulled the ashtray out of my purse, kept it hidden by my palm, and put it back on the table. I didn’t need that ashtray. But I couldn’t let go. I moved it to my purse again.
Tino said, “They cut her head open and clamped a vein or something shut. She’s fine, but she’s bald.”
I slid a salt shaker into my purse and said, “No shit?” Ray’s new girl, with hardware in her head.
The bathroom at the Marathon was down a glowing turquoise hall, like a pool drained of water, and it smelled from mildew. It was the hallway to the rooms for rent upstairs. Just outside the women’s bathroom somebody had written in black marker, MEN WHO FATHER CHILDREN LIVE HERE. I read those words every time I turned the corner. I’d memorized the writing—all capital letters and jagged angles. The sentence stuck with me. It seemed wrong, reversed, blaming the men for where they lived instead of what they did, maybe even asking for sympathy, or renovation on the building. MEN WHO LIVE HERE FATHER CHILDREN, it should say. MEN WHO LIVE HERE ARE BAD—but the men in the building weren’t bad, only lost and lazy. Drunks. Only men nobody should have kids with in the first place. Men who father children live everywhere.
I came out of the bathroom. Tino was in the hall. We went out back, to the alley between buildings, beside the dumpster.
Tino pulled a pipe from his coat pocket.
Pot smells good in the cold. There’s the density of it, that soft sweetness. I’d like to find that same sweet edge in something solid.
Tino passed the pipe to me. I didn’t reach for it. “You shake down a freshman for that herb?” I said.
“Maybe.” He was still holding smoke in his lungs. “What’re you doing with Rebar?”
“Helping him out.” I shrugged.
Tino said, “Watch him close. I don’t want to lose more teeth.”
“That was a long time ago.”
“They don’t come back.” He smiled, to show a gap at the side near the front. His eye tooth, his dog tooth. A fist, a party. Like two years before, but it seemed forever. I put my lips to his cracked lips,