Bad Juju & Other Tales of Madness and Mayhem (11 page)

When Amber moved in, Cy and I had been living together for about four weeks. By then we’d established an acceptable working relationship. We took walks three times a day, a bath once a week, using the same lavender bath gel. Cy ate dog crackers mixed with water. I ate frozen chicken or steak dinners and drank sweet tea by the gallon.

Sweet tea was a habit from my student days in the Deep South. I’d quite smoking three or four times, but I could never get off sweet tea.

We both liked
Law and Order
and
Nip and Tuck
. Cy slept on the extra pillow on my queen-sized bed.

When Amber moved in, that became a problem because now Amber used my extra pillow. Cy tried two or three times to sleep on Amber’s head. In response Amber locked Cy out of the bedroom. He sat by the door, barking.

As a compromise I moved Cy to a doggy pillow in one corner of the bedroom. He wasn’t all that happy with my solution. But I told him he didn’t have a choice.

Amber liked Cy well enough.

But after the pillow dispute they remained suspicious of each other. Cy was the old family retainer. Amber the blonde gold digger with the hot body.

Amber loved blow and giving blowjobs.

That’s how we met: sharing a few lines laid out like runways on the chocolate Naugahyde dashboard of my Mustang, after which she brought me to the point of ecstasy. This happened at dusk in the far back corner of the H-E-B supermarket parking lot near the recycling dumpsters. Afterward we went to Al’s N.O. Grill and sucked down fried oyster po’boys and Bud on tap.

But blow was expensive.

So a week after Amber displaced Cy on my extra pillow, I started siphoning small sums of cash into my front pocket rather than into my cash drawer at the BANK. This was facilitated by the fact that I handled mostly commercial deposits involving large quantities of cash and numerous small checks. Under these circumstances there was always room for discrepancies.

I became adept at fudging the numbers on deposit slips. Before taking a late lunch, I’d stash a couple of that morning’s deposit slips between the pages of the paperback novel I was reading. Alone in the employee break room, with a meatball sub, chips and a Diet Coke spread out as camouflage, I’d ease the slips from between the leaves of text and carefully change a three to a two or a five to a four. Back at my teller station I pocketed the extra hundred bucks.

The BANK’s privacy policy prohibited surveillance cameras in the break room or the bathrooms. And I was careful never to steal from the same account twice in the same week.

It was a bright June Tuesday around 1:30 when Mora, the head teller, barged into the break room. I was hunched over a deposit slip, pen poised like a tattoo artist. At the click of the door opening, my other hand flew willy-nilly, colliding with the meatball sub, sending meatballs flying. Tomato sauce dripped from my fingers onto the deposit slip. In the confusion, my pen fell to the floor and I kicked it under the table.

Mora stood at my elbow.

“What’s that?” she asked.

“What?” I replied.

“That.” Mora’s plastic glitter-nail decorated index finger pointed accusingly at the soiled deposit slip.

“The receipt for my lunch?” I said without conviction.

“No, it’s not. It’s a deposit slip.”

We both stared at it. Sweat poured from my armpits.

“It must have gotten caught in the pages of my book.” A pocket edition of
The Snows of Kilimanjaro & Other Stories
with meatball lay next to the meatball-less sub roll.

“Bank documents are not permitted in the break room,” Mora said. “You know that.”

“It was an accident.”

I dabbed at the tomato stain with a napkin imprinted with the sub shop logo. Mora grabbed the deposit slip, holding it aloft like a winning lottery ticket.

“I’m writing this up,” she said and walked out.

That night I told Amber I was done with embezzling. Working at the BANK was a good job. The best I’d ever had. No way was I going to jeopardize that over her drug habit.

“I’ll think of something,” Amber said.

Her words followed me down the front steps like a curse, as I took Cy for his before-bedtime walk. Outside Cy stopped and stretched; yawned and gazed up at me. Then raised his leg and urinated. Not a care in the world.

A week later Amber and I lay in a sweaty, naked post-coital heap on the sisal rug in my darkened living room. Amber leaned sideways, picking sisal fibers out of her ass. The lights from occasional passing cars sent weird heffalump-ish shadows rummaging across the ceiling.

The weather had turned hot and steamy as a Chinese laundry. That’s how it would be from now until mid-November. I’d cranked the window air-conditioning unit up to High but it didn’t make much difference.

“There’s this house on Gulf Drive,” said Amber. “I’ve been watching it every time I drive you to and from the BANK. I think it’s closed up for the summer.”

“That’s nice.”

Amber’s fingers ran playfully across my chest.

“No … listen … There’s probably some really good stuff in there. Stuff we could boost and unload in one of those consignment shops.”

I sat up, the tip of my dick tingling. It wasn’t a sex tingle.

“You mean as in breaking and entering?”

“I’m sure the window locks are all rusted out from the salt air. And there’s an overgrown camellia hedge between the house and the one next door. At night no one will know we’re there.”

“What about alarms, attack dogs, security guards, cops with guns?”

Just then Cy got up from where he’d been stretched out on the sofa watching the action and padded across the room to his water dish. He came over and stood next to me. His chin dripped water on my hand. I couldn’t see his expression in the gloom of the unlit room but I knew he was rolling his one good eye.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“It’ll be easy,” Amber said. “Easy as pie.”

It was a moonless night when Amber backed the Mustang into the broken shell driveway of the house she’d been scoping out. Camellia branches scraped the roof like fingernails on a blackboard.

“You see,” Amber said, turning toward me. “We’re completely hidden from the street and the neighbors.”

“I can’t believe we’re doing this,” I whispered.

She put her hand on my knee. “Everything’s cool, baby.”

I set the stepstool we’d bought at the hardware under the windows of a Florida room that looked off over the bay and climbed up. Amber was right. When I pushed up the old wooden window frame, the latch gave way with a splintering sound. I scrambled up and over the sill. It was hot as Hell in a ski mask, black sweatshirt and navy blue work slacks.

I carried two canvas sacks and a flashlight. We’d agreed I would take only small antique-looking objects. I made my first find in the sunporch: a bronze statuette of a naked nymph bolted to a crystal ashtray.

In the kitchen I scanned the countertops with the flashlight. They were bare except for an ancient toaster. I opened several cupboards, discovering only stacks of plates and rows of mismatched glassware. Amid a drawerful of rusted knives, I found several silver or silver-plated spoons. Into the bag they went.

My jitters had dissipated. I was into the rhythm of the thing now, moving silently from room to room in my black suede Vans. A Chinese-looking lamp base, a pair of Tiffany-style vases from the mantle, more silverware from the dining room sideboard, some old leather-bound books. Another bronze statuette in a western motif: an American Indian on horseback with drawn bow and arrow riding down a luckless buffalo.

One sack was full. I leaned it in the doorway to the front hall and started up the stairs. The third step groaned like an old harmonium under my body weight. For some reason I stopped dead in my tracks. That’s when I heard a shuffling sound. Like a zombie moving in the pitch-blackness of the upstairs hall.

Or a person!

In the next instant, the overhead light above the stairway snapped on. I slammed my eyes shut.

When I opened them seconds later, side-by-side shotgun barrels confronted me like twin black holes punched in the universe.

Gradually additional details filled in as the camera pulled back and upward. A pair of eyes as cold as blue-veined marble, hollow cheeks peppered with stubble. The maw of a denture-less mouth dripping with spittle.

The mouth closed.

Then opened again:

“Get out!”

I ran like a motherfucker.

After the burglary fiasco, I insisted Amber get into rehab. I couldn’t afford to fund her monkey any longer, monetarily or emotionally. I’d been that close to getting my head blown to smithereens.

Nightmares of doing jail time haunted my sleep. Huge tattooed convicts, group showers, etc. You get the picture.

I went back to driving myself to and from work. Amber didn’t get to use the Mustang any more during the day to cruise around looking for trouble. After she refused to sign up for a rehab program, I gave her a week to find someplace else to live. Cy got his pillow back.

On our walks Cy and I discussed the vagaries of women. More particularly, I ranted and raved about what a scary slut Amber was, while Cy listened patiently. When I finally stopped talking, Cy gave me a quizzical look. Then wiggled his tail like a cheerleader’s pompom, as if to say:
Jerk, I told you she was trouble from the get-go.

The next afternoon Amber started working at a gentlemen’s club.

On the fourth day following my ultimatum, I came home from the BANK to find the dinner table set with plates and glasses, a bottle of wine and a bouquet of daisies. Amber, standing in the kitchen, lit a scented mood candle the moment I walked in the door. She wore an old Eurythmics T-shirt that had shrunk in all the right places. Tex-Mex takeout steamed on the kitchen counter: seared meat with
jalapenos
and onions, beans and corn
tortillas
.

“What’s up?” I asked.

“I thought we should give it one more try.”

“No way, José.”

“I got beef
fajitas
. Your favorite.”

“You’ve got three days left to find a new place. Then I put your stuff on the curb.”

“You’re such a Blue Meanie.”

“I just want to work at my job at the BANK, hang out with Cy, lead a quiet law-abiding life.”

Amber walked out from behind the kitchen counter. She was barefoot. In fact she was stark naked below her belly button where the bottom of the Eurythmics T-shirt ended.

“Oh, no,” I said.

“Oh, yes,” she said.

A while later, as I lay on the couch, my head cradled in Amber’s lap, she explained about the guy she’d met at the tits and ass club where she’d started working. A wholesale diamond dealer drunk as a skunk. He had an office on the sixth floor of the old Bradbury Building downtown. A shipment of stones was arriving tomorrow worth over a hundred thousand dollars. A once in a lifetime opportunity.

“No, no, no,” I said.

“Oh, yes, yes, yes,” said Amber. “All you have to do is wait downstairs with the engine running. I’ll take care of the rest.”

At which point she put her face in my crotch and began performing CPR.

It was the nadir of the afternoon of the next day. Three-thirty. Everyone was asleep at their desks or sales counters. Only rich lesbians on the make cruised the mall department stores at that hour seeking desperate housewives with whom to perform lewd sexual acts.

I pulled my white ’03 Mustang with the chocolate Naugahyde interior to the curb in front of the Bradbury Building. It was a six-story Deco job with elaborate geometric tile work like the teeth of a hip-hop artist. The shoeshine guy inside the lobby slouched in the customer’s chair, sound asleep.

The same Eurythmics T-shirt as the night before fondled Amber’s chest. Hip-hugger jeans hung below. The front of her jeans bulged with an evil-looking 9mm.

“I’ll be back in fifteen minutes. If you have to move, circle back around.”

She leaned over and kissed me on the mouth.

“Wish me luck,
chico
.”

I watched her walk silently across the lobby, her hips barely swaying, and go into the elevator.

I waited five minutes, the engine running. Then I slipped her into gear, moved my foot from the brake to the gas and pulled into the street. That time of day there were almost no other cars on the streets. In no time I was out of downtown and heading along Gulf Road. I pulled into the BANK and went inside.

The head teller looked surprised. I’d called in sick that morning.

“I couldn’t stay away,” I said.

Next morning’s
Caller-Times
carried the story of a shootout during an attempted jewelry holdup. There was a picture of a woman’s bloodstained body. A cloth covered her face. Her T-shirt advertised a band called the Eurythmics.

After that Cy and I just hung out and drank Corona. On the weekends we might go to the beach. The dog days of August were just too hot to do anything else.

Looking for Goa

1.

The exact location of Goa is a question that has plagued scholars for centuries. Some believe it resides like a black freckle on the subcontinent’s right nipple. Others point to a small protuberance on the Buddha’s right testicle, noting also the similarity between Goa and gonad. Still others delimit a ragged sweep of Indian coastline abutting the Arabian Sea midway between the Gulf of Klambhat in the north and Cape Comorin at the southern tip. In any case, Portuguese adventurers stumbled upon it in the fifteenth century and refused to let go for the next 450 years.

2.

Over the summer I pulled off a series of bank heists among the lesser-known burgs of North Jersey, using a Dick Cheney Halloween mask and a Browning .45 I inherited from my father, a World War II vet. He gave it to me as he gasped his last emphysemic breath inside an oxygen tent at the Sioux Falls, South Dakota, VA hospital.

He started smoking after he made his first landing on some god-forsaken rock in the Pacific. As his platoon slogged up the beach, they came upon a Jap trooper leaning against a shattered palm tree, his guts hanging out like an exploded party favor. He was moaning in Japanese, a goner for sure. But when the G.I.s walked past him, he pulled out a revolver and shot dad’s best buddy in the back of the head. Splat. Kind of a mini Pearl Harbor. Then the Jap keeled over dead.