The Comedown Page 4

  Against her closed eyelids was the specter of her son again, sound of mind and steering her van around a treacherous pothole in the road. What road? Was it in Shaker Heights? The 490? Was it a memory or a dream? “Wake up, Mom,” he was saying, her handsome and capable son, pressing his thumb to the side of his chin. This was one of his habits when he was feeling tense. “He used you. I’m sorry to say this because it’s difficult to hear, but he used you—he used both of us—and bled you dry and left us for dead. So why let him win?”

  Tears slid from beneath her closed eyelids as the road and then the van fell away and her son shrank back to his pudgy child body, the space between his teeth widening. They were in his childhood bedroom in Glenville. He was pulling the comforter up to his chin. “Mommy,” he said, “can you please tell me what you do when the seaweed takes your legs and you can’t stand back up?” He’d been eight or nine when they’d last had this conversation. “You don’t need to stand back up,” she’d said, “because I’ll lift you back up.” How clearheaded she’d been that night! What a peaceful meal they’d all eaten together: vegetables (Leland Jr. cut them, she steamed them) and chicken Parmesan (Leland’s mother’s recipe). And they’d watched a movie on TV—a musical, The Music Man. No one was high. No one was even buzzed. That night was one of the few she could point to with confidence and say, “I started a family with the man I loved and it worked out.” It had worked out. Or it had seemed to.

  She put her bra back on, then her underwear, then her jeans. I’ll lift you back up, she heard herself saying, I promise I’ll lift you back up. He deserved her belief; she would find the briefcase for him if it was that important. She left the hotel and followed the Chicago Transit Authority’s winding, transfer-filled path to River Forest, where she debarked the train at 11:09 p.m. (her phone’s time, not hers) and walked the two blocks to her son’s minimansion. The lights were still on. She rang the bell twice.

  Jocelyn appeared at the front door, a giant, luxurious poncho-scarf wound around her tiny frame. Even in her own home, she seemed ill at ease. “Melinda!” she said. “What’s wrong?”

  “I’m sorry to be disturbing you,” Melinda said.

  “Disturbing me?” Jocelyn asked, and Melinda charged inside.

  She turned on the light at the basement stairhead and surveyed the room beneath her. Contrary to her son’s nature, the place was unfinished and disorganized. This was the kind of room she’d hide from prospective buyers if she were showing a house. She could see rebar in the exposed ceiling and tar splotches on the concrete floor. Jocelyn was tailing her, asking if she was okay, if there was anything she could do.

  “I just need to see the basement,” Melinda said. “For something for my son.”

  “Okay,” Jocelyn said. “That’s okay. Do you want to lie down first? Or I can come downstairs with you?”

  Melinda ignored her. She went down the stairs and began looking for that damn mustard-colored briefcase.

  Jocelyn’s shrill voice came down the stairs: “Is there someone we should call?” Better question, Jocelyn: Who was this “we” doing the calling? Melinda shouted back up that she was fine and widened her search to a part of the basement that was especially dark and chaotic. Storage boxes chafed as she moved among them. One was sitting wide open, full of silverware she recognized from the Glenville apartment. Another box’s tonguish flap lolled out to reveal a set of patterned blouses that were unmistakably hers. Both boxes had the word INHERITANCE scrawled on them. There was the wooden box with her grandmother’s brooches. There were her old shoes, Leland Jr.’s GI Joes, the picture of the weeping Jews. She had the weird, light-headed feeling that this basement was where her son’s dreams began, that the floor would give way to reveal his sleeping brain.

  “Hello,” said a male voice from the stairs. “Melinda?”

  She turned around. The man was young, black, dressed in what looked like an expensive sweater and jeans. He wore the kind of frameless glasses her boss at ReMax wore. He had his hands on the banister as though he anticipated needing the leverage to back away quickly. “Hi,” he said.

  “Hi,” she said back.

  “I’m Caleb Marshall. Your son’s attorney.”

  “Okay,” she said. The name had ignited a pinprick of light in the depths of her memory. “Pleased to meet you.”

  She turned back to rooting through the mess. She heard Caleb descending the stairs, approaching, then he was standing behind her; she fell backward when she saw him up close, partly crushing a box of Christmas ornaments. He offered her his hand and she took it. The yellow light above them made dirty gems of the shattered glass.

  “You’re looking for something we’ve all been looking for,” he said.

  “What?”

  His eyes softened, he raised his brows: she’d seen that same look of disgusted pity on so many faces before. “The briefcase. Jocelyn told me Leland can’t stop talking about it.”

  “Yes,” Melinda said, not knowing what else to say.

  “If it helps you at all, I found it.”

  Her breath caught in her throat. “You did?”

  Caleb nodded. “I hammered it open. Nothing but a couple of bricks and packing peanuts.”

  REGINALD MARSHALL

  (1945–?)

  May 8, 1973

  Cleveland

  The skyline over the buzz-cut prairie brush wore a glowing crown of electric fuzz as Reggie Marshall knelt on his right knee to address the bloody gash on his left. He looked up and there were Terminal Tower’s yellow-dot windows, the spire that doesn’t even come close to scraping the sky. He looked down and there was his knee broken open in the shape of a smile, his pants broken open, too, a smile within a smile. He touched the gash and winced so hard the pain made him drop to both knees, which hurt even worse. His whole body hurt like a motherfucker. Being him hurt like a motherfucker. He thought, I’m the motherfucker who hurts like a motherfucker. He thought, Happy motherfucking birthday.

  He spun his head on its creaking neck-swivel so he was looking over his left shoulder, then his right. No one, but they still could’ve followed him all the way from the garage. And he was collapsed, crouching not twenty feet from the highway with his back to them, just begging them to run up on him. He was a pischer, as Sunny would say, which he thought probably meant your fool ass can’t even remember to look both ways when you cross the street but in Hebrew-speak. Reggie put both hands on his head and dug his nails deep into his scalp, which he sometimes did to calm himself down. The right sleeve of his coat was torn up. A hollow-cheeked white man in a Cadillac drove by and slowed down to look at him like We need to clean up these streets, then sped off. If no one helped him, no one could find out what he was running from, and that meant much less of a situation. But if he was being honest with himself chances were small that he’d ever again walk into that apartment with the green tile on the ceiling, the apartment where Tasha had taken both his hands in hers and told him she wanted to spend the rest of her life with him. Six years after she’d told him that—just three months ago—he’d packed his father’s old leather bowling bag with the four fake passports Sunny had made for him, five grand in cash, two of Tasha’s old work dresses, a razor and shaving cream for him, and some jumpers and a picture book, Baby Bear Is Hungry, for the boys. That bag now stayed in the trunk of the sedan always. He was being realistic, not paranoid: shit happened in this business. He hadn’t told Tasha about it because things like that disturbed her. She was sensitive and hard to read and he still wondered what she’d been watching for, staring soft-eyed out the window of her daddy’s house on that first day he ever saw her. If he thought about it too hard, he got a tight little sadness in his chest. It sure as hell hadn’t been him.

  He could feel his heartbeat in his knee now, it was hurting so bad. His options were: (1) move back deeper in the grass and sleep there, or (2) walk west to Ohio City and find Sunny and tell him what had happened. Just below the skyline’s chin was a chain-link fence crawling with w
eedy vines, keeping him from the Flats and the river and the rich white boats with bullshit names like SS Salty Bottom that were tied up to the dock. He could lean against the fence and sleep sitting up with his legs out in front of him, but now the gash was so full of dirt that even the air blowing over it stung so bad he had to bite the inside of his cheek to keep from crying out. He was a wimp about pain according to Tasha, and she would know because she’d given birth to twins in the bathtub at home. When he’d sliced his thumb chopping potatoes once, he had screamed so loud it woke Aaron the Brick up and got him crying, and even after Tasha had gone into the room to calm him down, Reggie was still dancing around the kitchen shouting about an ambulance. She had just clucked at him and said she hoped he never grew a uterus because that was what really hurt, he better fucking believe it. He had been so mad he had forgotten about his thumb and started in on a you-don’t-take-that-tone-with-me lecture, the kind his father used to give. Then they both looked down at all the chocolate-syrup-colored spots on the floor and she looked back up at him like Are you for real right now? And she had been right. She had been so right.

  Good Christ he missed her and it’d only been eight hours since he’d last seen her. He rose to his feet and stumble-jumped into the brush behind him, the grass whipping hard against his knee as he walked. He was lucky, actually. This whole thing could’ve gone a lot worse. He’d probably pissed off Shondor a little, but everybody pissed off Shondor. Shondor was born pissed off. Sunny would understand the situation. He was like the Shondor whisperer: if you did something dumb and you didn’t know how to put it into words that wouldn’t get you killed, you told Sunny and he’d make something up for Shondor and all you’d get was a slap on the wrist. One time a guy on the corner had gotten lazy and started letting junkies use in an alley a few blocks away; Reggie remembered the guy had these huge teeth like a cartoon horse and a permanent drip from blowing through Shondor’s product. But luckily for the guy he was close with Sunny, they’d gone to the same temple growing up. Sunny told Shondor that he’d gone out to Glenville to see the guy and they’d fucked up the junkies and it turned out it wasn’t Shondor’s, it was Irish. And that calmed Shondor down and probably saved the guy’s life. The guy told Reggie the whole story like he was preaching gospel. I swear, he kept whistling through his horse teeth, I owe my life to Sunny. It ain’t nobody else who’d put his neck on the line like that for me. But then Shondor caught the guy in a smoke shop in Collinwood cutting fatties for his friends and he took him outside and shot him in the head.

  Now all that stood between Reggie and the chain-link fence was a sick-looking tree. He watched the boats bobbing silently at the dock. He was about to sit down when the SS Goodtimes in front of him caught the reflection of some high beams. He took three steps back and kneeled on one knee again. The beams rolled across the riverbank, lighting up Reggie’s torn right sleeve, his trembling hand. He ducked and threw himself back-first into the brush behind him, landing miraculously clear of any twigs or rocks. The mud was damp and thick and seemed to be filling his ears. He listened to the muffled sound of the truck’s wheels. He thought about what he’d do if the truck stopped. It wasn’t five-o in that truck, he knew, but it was probably the kind of redneck who’d kill to be one.

  The truck stopped moving but the beams still shot light through the tops of the grass. Reggie tried to breathe less. He tried to count the number of windows in the skyline but it was too far away. He tried to remember the last time he’d been up close to Terminal Tower. It’d been when he’d taken Tasha to the West Side Market on their second date. He had bought celery, bell peppers, onions, and shrimp and taken her back to his place and cooked her gumbo. She had said he was a good cook and she wasn’t expecting him to be one. His father was stretched out on the sofa that day, trembling and sweating, trying hard to pretend he didn’t need his forty. Had his father met the boys before he died? It embarrassed Reggie that he couldn’t remember. That was the sort of thing he should know.

  Reggie’s had been the last daddy standing in Hough, had only gotten locked up twice, once for less than a gram of grass and once for public urination. Reggie’s mother used to call him “docile,” which was the kind of word that made Reggie think of a deer or a dove. He was either happy or he was seeing withdrawal ghosts—the meanest he ever got was when his breakfast didn’t come hot, and even then he just frowned and wouldn’t talk to anyone for an hour or so. After Reggie’s mother got taken away he made a habit of bringing Reggie to Hot Sauce Williams every Saturday. Reggie had liked watching him when the ribs were set down in front of him: his sleepy eyes got wider, his mouth smiled so his gums showed, his shaky hands tucking his napkin-bib into the front of his shirt. They had gone there so regularly that Lemaud Williams himself became friends with Reggie’s father, calling him Sly because “I’m not tryna say ‘Sylvester’ every damn time I see you.” It got so whenever they walked in the door Lemaud would walk out from the kitchen, wiping his hands on the towel in his apron, shouting, “Sly Marshall and Little Green Eyes are back!” The walls had been pink in there: whenever Reggie had a good dream as a little kid, even if he didn’t remember anything in it, he always woke up seeing pink.

  The truck finally drove off. Reggie exhaled hard and sat up. What the hell was he doing acting like a condemned man already? He bent his knee and inspected it in the moonlight. It was swelling up now, leaking still. He wasn’t a condemned man. He hadn’t used up his chance with Sunny. That was why he’d gotten as fucked up as he’d gotten—he was almost one of the guys as far as Shondor was concerned, he’d just run into a little trouble. Small-timers didn’t run into trouble like this. Small-timers were disposable. Not Reggie. Reggie made bricks disappear. Shondor called him Black Lightning, which Reggie hated at first but minded less when he’d heard guys calling Sunny the Schnoz. “The name’s a compliment,” Sunny told him. “It means he actually notices you.” There was a lot worse in the world than being noticed. Why would you start anything if you’re making 15K a year? Whenever he used to get mad at school, his mother would tell him never to bite the hand that feeds him, which was ironic since she’d pretty much bitten his father’s hand right off and here Reggie was in a bunch of grass by the highway, not biting Shondor’s hand. He dug both his hands in his pant leg at the knee and ripped it off. He tied it around the gash, whispering motherFUCKER the whole time because now it was Dockers against his blood and pus. If only his mother could see him now, hobbling back to the side of the road, breathing hard through his mouth because breathing normal somehow made the knee hurt more. She’d at least be impressed by his loyalty, probably raise those drawn-on eyebrows and say, “You starting to make your momma believe in God again.” Now he could feel all the other places they’d fucked him up, the bruises on his sternum and right hand. The .45 was heavy against his belt. He still had that, at least. If he’d lost it, that’d be grounds for Shondor to end him.

  He walked slowly, foot in front of foot, like his father used to walk right before he died. The skyline was still twinkling ahead of him—he was surprised by it. Why wasn’t it giving up like the rest of the city? His father hadn’t met the boys, Reggie remembered now. When Tasha was pregnant Reggie’d stopped by the place in Hough to tell his father the news, but his father had been on the floor when he walked in. He had rolled off the sofa onto his stomach. There were cornflakes sprinkled on his back and the Supremes blaring on TV. The cornflakes were damp with milk; the bowl was upside down on the sofa, still dripping onto his father’s snoring head. “Dad?” Reggie had said, and his father didn’t respond, didn’t even move. “Dad!” he yelled, and his father’s foot twitched, and Reggie felt small and pathetic the way he used to feel as a child, when his father would fall asleep on the sofa and his mother would smoke and stare at him like he was a stain she wanted out of the carpet. “Why did I ruin my life?” she’d ask him, and he’d say, “What you mean, Momma?” And she’d just shake her head at him, take a drag from her cigarette, and let the tears start fall
ing behind her glasses. She had a rash across her nose and cheeks that never went away and always made her look angry. She said it was Reggie who made her tired, but he figured out later it was her body attacking itself. His parents had been given bodies that hated them, made them grab for pipes and bottles—he’d done the same, he’d be lying if he ever claimed he hadn’t. But they were worse and always had been. He only kept a little blow for special occasions because Tasha liked it, and he did knee-highs and sprints around the block and bench presses every morning. By the time Tasha was pregnant, he was stronger and sleeker than he’d ever been. When he found his father that day he had wedged his hands under his father’s armpits and picked him up from behind, pivoted him, and sat him back down. “I was eating breakfast,” his father had said, spitting milk as he spoke. Reggie asked him what else he remembered, but he just massaged up and down his left arm and stared into the obsidian of the now switched-off TV. The room had smelled like stale Schlitz and Maker’s Mark. Reggie told him that this was the last straw, he couldn’t keep on if he didn’t go to a doctor or stop the drinking or both, and did he know that the whole reason Reggie came over was to say he was going to be a grandfather? His father turned to him and said, “A grandfather?” Reggie was hot with anger by then but not so much that he couldn’t answer: “Yes!” Then he hung his head and whispered, “Goddamn,” and his father wrapped his hand around Reggie’s wrist like Reggie was a little kid again. That afternoon he made an appointment at the free clinic for his father but his father never went. Three months later, Reggie found him dead in the same position next to the sofa.