Pain Management b-13 Page 8

  “Is it true you were a mercenary?” he asked me.

  I kept my face blank. Maybe the girl’s father is nosing around again? Name-dropping while he’s at it? No point asking Bobby Ray where he’d heard something like that: the whisper-stream flows through every city in the world.

  “What do you mean by a mercenary?” I said. “Like a ‘soldier of fortune’ in the movies? Someone who gets paid to kill people in a country where the only law comes from killing people? What?”

  “I don’t know, exactly. I never really thought about it. A lot of Vietnam vets you meet out here say they were—”

  “I’m not a Vietnam vet,” I cut him off. I don’t mind lying about who I am or what I’ve done, but something about posing as a Vietnam vet makes me sick to my stomach. Tens of thousands of kids sacrificed to testosterone politics and business-worship while their better-born counterparts stayed home and partied. Back then, the only sincerity was in the antiwar movement. But that rotted at its core when movie stars started preening for the heroic torturers of the VC.

  It was an impossible tightrope to walk—oppose the war, but support the soldiers—and most fell off to one wrong side or the other. A few of the antiwar radicals died, and a few more went to prison. Some of them are still there.

  Some of the white members of the “underground” surfaced to yuppiedom. But the blacks couldn’t go back to where they’d never been. The profiteers and the cherry-pickers found new targets, the SLA survivors got paroled, and ex-Panthers and former SDS members ran for Congress.

  Some revolutionaries of that era stayed true. Leonard Peltier is still buried alive in a federal POW camp. But he gets less media attention than Vanilla Ice. And much less fan mail than Charles Manson.

  The war itself was as big a lie as the “war on drugs.” Politicians announcing a war, sending others to do the actual fighting . . . then fixing it so they couldn’t win.

  And the kids who died for the lie—all they got was their name on a fancy slab of marble.

  It’s a whole syndrome now: people pretending to be Vietnam vets. Especially popular among guys in the financial industry, for some reason I don’t get . . . probably the same twits who think they grow bigger balls every time some Internet stock runs up. See, it’s chic to “support” the people who fought over there, now that it’s over. So every guy who tries to glom a handout, he’s a Vietnam vet. People who would have had to be three years old when they enlisted, they’re Vietnam vets. They’re running for office, working a barroom, hustling women . . . all playing that liar’s card.

  And now we’re all buddy-buddy with Vietnam, right? Like it never happened. Hell, business is business, and the slopes over there like McDonald’s even better than the niggers do over here. Great market for cigarettes, too. And you can’t beat those cheap labor costs with a stick . . . although it’s okay to beat the laborers.

  MIA. Money Is All.

  I turned eighteen while Vietnam was still raging, but I was safe from being called up—they didn’t have a draft board in prison. They had one in court, though. Plenty of guys my age went when judges safe from the draft did their patriotic duty by letting young men trade a sentence for an enlistment. That’s how Wesley learned to work long-distance—Uncle taught him some new tricks.

  I got out of prison while it was still going on, but I never went near the army. I ended up in another jungle, on another continent. A genocidal war fueled by tribalism, but ignited by nondenominational lust for oil.

  Years later, a government spook told me I was still listed on the Nigerian registry of war criminals. Good joke. The Nigerian government is a fucking crime cartel, holding whole tribes down by military violence, while their privileged classes spend their time making the country the international scam capital of the world.

  I’m a veteran of a lot of things. War is only one of them. But Vietnam’s not on that list; and there’s something special about it keeps me from adding it to the fabric of lies I roll out for strangers.

  “So where’d you learn the military stuff, then?” Bobby Ray asked. A clever kid. Or one who had been interrogated by professionals often enough to learn some of the tricks himself.

  “Why is anything like that important?”

  “You never know,” he said, solemnly. “You never know what something’s worth.”

  “That’s true,” I said. Thinking I wouldn’t have to go through this crap if I was back in New York. My references were all over the street there. And the threads were never so tangled that I couldn’t find someone who knew me and whoever was asking about me, too. But in Portland, I was nobody and nothing.

  There was an upside, sure. Nobody looking for me, either.

  “I’ve been in military conflicts under foreign flags,” I finally said. “Good enough?”

  “Do you know, like, karate and shit?” he asked, pronouncing the word “cah-rah-dee,” not “ka-rah-tay.” I liked him for it.

  “Nope.”

  “So you’re, like, into weapons?”

  “I’m a pacifist.”

  “You don’t look like that was always the case.”

  “When I was your age, I did a lot of stupid things.”

  “Yeah? Like what?”

  “Going to prison.”

  “For what?”

  “For being stupid.”

  He waited for me to add something. Finally, he realized I was done.

  “What kind of name is B.B.?” he asked.

  “Same kind as Bobby Ray.”

  “You know, I’m thinking it might just be. Bobby Ray, that was the name my mother . . . I mean, my . . . Anyway, that was the name I was born with. Sounds kind of like a hillbilly one, right?”

  “If you mean Appalachian, yeah.”

  “Well, so does B.B. You ever notice how, sometimes, the white people who hate blacks the most, they’re the ones most likely to have the same kind of names?”

  “It’s not so surprising. They come from the same places.”

  “The South?”

  “Poor.”

  “Oh. Yeah. Does B.B. stand for anything?”

  I measured the depth of his eyes. Made the decision. “Baby Boy,” I told him.

  His face went sad enough for me to know he got it.

  We talked for another hour or so; exchanging now, not fencing like before. A woman with one bad leg hobbled past, moving with the aid of a stout stick. A rednose pit bull trotted alongside of her, off-leash, but obviously hers, from the way it was moving. When she stopped to ask Bobby Ray for a smoke, the pit sat beside her. It was wearing a little white T-shirt, with “ICU” written across its broad chest in big red letters. I gave the woman a whole pack, saluted to tell her I got the joke. She gave me a ghosty smile back.

  I wonder if she knew that pit bulls were a “forbidden race” of dogs in some countries. Like Germany. Or if she’d get that joke.

  Finally, Bobby Ray did the mental math and figured I’d brought enough to get some. He said: “I know Peaches.”

  “Yeah . . . ?”

  “She’s not a runaway. Maybe she was, once. But she’s got to be thirty, at least. Been hooking out here even before I came.”

  “On the street?”

  “Sure,” he said. Meaning, “Where else?”

  I couldn’t picture the girl who’d braced me in the parking lot with a street pimp. She was too brassy-sassy for that. And way too fresh-looking. So I came in sideways. “I guess the johns couldn’t miss all that red hair.”

  “Red hair? Not Peaches, man. She sports a natural. Not many do that anymore—it stands out.”

  “She’s black?”

  “Peaches? Does Nike suck?” he said, the Portland street-kid equivalent of “Is the Pope Catholic?”

  “Hmmm . . . I must have been confused that night,” I told him, giving a cigarette from a fresh pack to one of the kids who stopped and stood in front of us, wordlessly.

  When the kid moved along, I tried to divert Bobby Ray off any trail he might have thought he’d discov
ered. “How’d you get into this?” I asked him.

  “This?”

  “Outreach . . . whatever you call it.”

  “Oh. Well, it’s a long story. But I’m sure you could put it together easy enough.”

  “You were out here yourself, once?”

  “No, man. I had a home. A foster home. That’s what saved my life.”

  “I’ve been in a few myself,” I said, my voice level, inviting more info. I didn’t think it would be a good idea to mention what happened in one of the foster homes I’d done time in. Or that I’d used one of Wesley’s credos to get out of it: “Fire works.”

  “Yeah, I know,” he said. “I’ve heard it all. Foster homes are just warehouses for kids, run by people who do it for the money. Or even abuse the kids themselves. You know what? Maybe that’s true for some of them. But the one I was in . . . man, they raised dozens of kids. And I mean radically fucked-up kids. Like I was.”

  “Drugs?”

  “Drugs? Maybe my mother’s drugs, I don’t know. Me, I was two years old when I came there. And I never left.”

  “I thought they usually bounced foster kids around from place to place.”

  “Nobody was going to bounce anybody out of Mom’s place,” he said. “She was a tiger, man. Once they dropped you off, you were hers, that’s all there was.”

  “Your bio-mother,” I said, watching close as he nodded at the term, “she never tried to get you back?”

  “When I was around eleven, she did, I think. There were some people coming around, and I had to go to court, talk to the judge, and all. But it was nothing.

  “She was . . . I didn’t remember her. She was mad about that. Like it was my fault that I didn’t. Anyway, she said she’d give me up if she could have some pictures taken with me. I didn’t know what that was all about. But my mom—Mrs. Kznarack was what everybody called her—she said, Sure, go ahead, Bobby Ray. So I did. But as soon as . . . as soon as my ‘birth mother’ left, the fun started.”

  “The court wanted you to be freed for adoption, right?”

  “Yeah! How’d you . . . ? Ah, never mind, I guess that’s the way it always is. Usually is, anyway. My mom, she wasn’t going for that. I can still remember her yelling at the judge. At all of them. She said the time for me to be adopted was when I was little, but they kept putzing around, giving my bio-mom one chance after another, and now who was going to adopt me, eleven years old?”

  “How come she didn’t just—?”

  “Oh, she did, man. I see where you’re going, but Mom was way ahead of you. They told her the plan was adoption, and that’s the way it was going to be. So Mom told them, cool, she’d adopt me. There wasn’t a thing they could say. . . .”

  “Had she adopted a lot of—?”

  “Look, man,” he said, his voice turning hard for the first time since I’d met him, “this is my mom we’re talking about, not some Mia Farrow wannabe, all right? Foster mother, adoptive mother, didn’t make a damn bit of difference to her. Or to me.”

  “She sounds like one hell of a woman,” I said by way of apology.

  “She is. And Pop’s no slouch himself, although he lets Mom do all the talking.”

  “Working guy?”

  “Hard-working guy. He’s a stonecutter. Best around.”

  “I thought that was a lost art.”

  “Pop says it’ll never be lost, so long as someone’s doing it. He taught us all stuff, but we didn’t all have the gift for it. My sister Helene, she’s the one he picked to carry it on. She’s a genius at it, man.”

  “The foster kids those people had, they all turned out so . . . ?”

  “You’re cute, man. But I’ll tell you straight. Some turned out better than others. Like in any big family. But not a motherfucking one of us hurts their kids; you understand what I’m telling you?”

  “Yeah. That DNA doesn’t mean squat when it comes to how you act.”

  “On time!” he said, offering me a palm to slap. “Mom and Pop proved that one. Too bad the shitheads running the government never snapped to it.”

  “Too bad there aren’t more like your parents.”

  “Truth, man. But there’s a lot more than there used to be, if you get what I’m saying.”

  “Sure. Your parents couldn’t have had that many kids, but they raised a whole pack of them. That’s what counts.”

  “That’s what counts,” he repeated. “And that’s why I’m out here. What I do, it counts, too.”

  I didn’t know what the girl’s note about finding the “Borderlands” meant, but I knew she wasn’t going to be working at Starbucks to save money for the trip.

  I’d been trolling for Rosebud mostly on foot, using the Ford to get me to the starting spots. But if I was going to play it like she was out there using her moneymaker, the Ford’s plain gray wrapper wouldn’t do. It just screamed “unmarked car,” and I needed to make my approach from downwind.

  When I ran it down at dinner one night, Gordo offered me his ride. I was grateful—I knew how much he had invested in that car. Money was the least of it. But the Metalflake maroon ’63 Impala was as distinctive as the Ford was anonymous. And its dual quad 409 had a sound that stayed with you.

  I thought of a station wagon, but it wouldn’t go with my face. I could use some of that Covermark stuff Michelle got for me on the bullet scar, and the missing top of my right ear wouldn’t show. No one would see the mismatched right eye, either; there has to be some decent light for anyone to notice. But the one eye they’d make contact with would tell them I wasn’t a citizen.

  Flacco said they had plenty of cars in the garage. People who came to them for custom work expected their rides to be tied up for a while.

  I took a look. Finally, settled on a white Cadillac Seville STS. Central Casting for the role I’d be playing.

  I started that same night. They don’t mark the prostie strolls on tourist maps, but you don’t need to be a native to find them. I just nosed the Cadillac in ever-widening figure-8 loops, using a down-market topless bar as a starting point. It didn’t take long.

  They work it in Portland the same way they do in every city I’ve been. Brightly colored birds with owner-clipped wings to keep them from flying away, fluttering at every car that cruises by slow. Like Amsterdam, only without the windowboxes.

  The more subtle girls worked about half dressed; the rest of them put it all right out there. Lots of blond nylon wigs, torn fishnet stockings, and run-down spike heels. Cheap, stagy makeup around bleached-out eyes. A shabby, tired show that needed the murky darkness to sustain the illusion. Pounds of wiggle, not an ounce of bounce.

  If Rosebud had been younger, I’d have looked elsewhere. I didn’t know if the local cops swept for underage hookers, or kept tabs on their pimps, but I figured it was like anywhere else—if you’re pushing kiddie sex, you do it indoors. In America, anyway.

  Sure, Rosebud was underage, but just barely so. She could tart up legal easy enough, if that’s the way she was earning. And even gutter-trash pimps know where to get passable ID today.

  My own ID was top-shelf. A Beretta 9000S, chambered for .40-caliber S&W. You might think a handgun would be the opposite of a walkaway card if you got stopped by the cops . . . if you didn’t know how things work. A passport may be the Rolex of fake documents, but all it will do is trip the cop-alarms if you flash one around anyplace but the airport.

  An Oregon carry permit is a better play. Just possessing it tells the law you’ve already been printed and came up clean: no felony convictions, no NGIs, not even a domestic-violence restraining order to mar your record. Who could be a better citizen than a legally armed man?

  Oregon’s one of the few states that closed the gun-show loophole; you want to buy a firearm here, you are going through a background check. The piece I was carrying had been purchased new from a licensed dealer in a small town in eastern Oregon a couple of years ago. Then the dealer had gone out of business. But a back-check of his records would show that he’d s
old the piece to the same Joseph Grange my driver’s license said I was.

  In some towns, winos sell their votes once a year. In the more progressive jurisdictions, they can sell their prints once a week.

  Some of the working girls were more aggressive than others; nothing special there. Nothing special anywhere. I spent a couple of hours, crisscrossing, not making any secret of the prowling, as if I were looking for something a little different. In some cities, the legal-age girls act as steerers for the indoors-only stuff. I didn’t know if they did it that way in Portland, but I wasn’t going to ask around until I got a better sense of who was hustling.

  “You looking for a date, honey?” the high-mileage blonde asked. She leaned into the passenger-side window I’d zipped down when she’d approached. Her partner was dark-haired, but with the same tiny arsenal of seductiveness; she was licking her lips with all the passion of a metronome.

  “No thanks, Officer,” I told her.

  Her giggle was juiceless. “Oh, please. Do cops come right out and tell you they’ll gobble your cock for twenty-five?”

  “Nope. But I’ve had them promise to look the other way for fifty.”

  Her laugh was a snort. “You’re a funny guy. But I’m not out here to be talking.”

  “Fair enough,” I told her, feeling for the power-window switch with my left hand.

  “Wait!” the blonde said. “What makes you think I’m a cop?”

  “Cops work in pairs,” I said, nodding my head at her partner.

  “Oh, man, come on. We’re just selling sandwiches. And you look like you got just the right meat. Try some three-way; you’ll swear it’s the only way.”

  “Some other time,” I told her, and pulled away.

  I spent a lot of time listening to approaches, alert for the right girl—one who’d been out there for a while, kept her eyes open, wouldn’t mind making a few bucks doing something that didn’t require penetration. But no matter where I went, the approaches were mostly by pairs.

  It rang wrong. Sure, pimps would put a new girl out with a more experienced one. And some hookers—lesbians who knew that most of the action would be them playing with each other while the trick watched—only worked three-ways. But this was happening much too widely for those thin blankets to cover.