Shoedog (8 page)

On the way back out, Randolph took the biggest burlap shoe he could find for the woman in the colorful dress. She had said nine, but those big-ass, spread-out, Haitian-ass feet had to be elevens. Eleven at least—if they had stocked a twelve in the back, he would’ve brought that, too.

Out of the stockroom, Randolph surveyed the floor. The crowd had begun to thin out, the only new face a man who had entered and was now sitting on the bench. The man wore blue jeans and Timberland boots, and his black hair hung long and clean. A three-day black beard, trimmed and grown high, covered his jaw. His brow was thick and his eyes were blue and deep. Randolph’s first thought: Jesus, just like in the pictures. But what the fuck is he doin’ in my shop?

Randolph dropped the burlap shoes in front of the Haitian without a word, and moved to the woman in the red skirt. He opened the lid of the box, unwrapped the tissue with ceremonious care, and dropped to one knee. He took the right shoe and put it on her foot, and he placed the shoe on the top of his thigh as he tied it. He patted her on the ankle and ran his finger along it after the pat, saying, “Okay, darling,” as he stood and walked toward his regular seven and a half.

“How you been, baby?” Randolph said as he arrived at his regular, a fine light-skinned woman with a spray of freckles across the bridge of her nose. She smiled and moved her eyes shyly away from his. Had he ever taken her out? He couldn’t remember, just then. Randolph pulled the right slingback from the box, put her foot on his knee, and guided the shoe onto her foot.

The Haitian woman walked her shoes up to the register, where the manager, a balding, heavy-set young man, sat ringing up sales. Randolph yelled to the manager, “That’s a twenty-nine”—Randolph’s sales number—“on that one, Mr. Rick.”

Randolph excused himself, content that the Panis was going to fit just fine, and walked around to the freak in the red skirt. “Those spectators gonna do it today, girlfriend?”

She scrunched up her face. “These shoes are too
hard,
Randolph.”

Randolph countered: “Don’t you like hard things?”

She laughed. “Not my shoes!”

He took the shoe off her foot, patted her ankle once again. “I’ll stretch these out with some magic shit”—it was plain old alcohol, and he kept it in the back—“okay? And, oh yeah, don’t forget about Tuesday night, hear?”

The woman in the red skirt smiled. “I won’t forget. I’ll lay those spectators away today, get them out on Tuesday.”

Randolph grinned. The front door opened, and a man and three women walked in. The man wore a matching shirt and slacks combination and the women wore hot pants and halter tops and tight-assed skirts.

Randolph crossed the sales floor, stepping around Jorge, who was sitting on the bench next to his girlfriend-of-the-week, and walked up to the pimp, a guy by the name of Felix. Randolph shook Felix’s hand, using a handshake that he used only on Felix, a handshake that he had otherwise stopped using with friends since 1975.

“All right, man,” Felix said.

Randolph said, “All
right.
”

“You gonna hook my ladies up today, hear what I’m sayin’? Some evening shoes, man.”

“I got just the thing, man.” Randolph could feel Antoine’s envious stare burn into his back. He postured theatrically, spread his palm out in the direction of the ladies. “Sizes?”

Felix pointed down the line, starting with two pretty fine ones and ending with some West Virginia–lookin’ girl. “Nine, seven and a half, and ten.”

Ten said, “I be a nine, Felix.”
I be,
shit. Randolph had to check his grin. West Virginia talked blacker than the black freaks.

Felix nodded as Randolph, looked at her feet. Randolph said, “Have a seat, all o’ y’all. I’ll be right back.”

He started for the stockroom, noticing the man with the long black hair staring at him, from his seat. What did he want? If he was into pumps, then Randolph didn’t mind, he made plenty over the years, selling high heels to men. But this one didn’t look like a punk, didn’t even look like the type to be buyin’ shoes for his woman. No, this one wanted something with
him.

But Randolph put it out of his mind. When Felix walked in, twice a year, he dropped five hundred, sometimes a grand. So this was a special day, maybe a three-thousand-dollar day—a triple dot. At ten percent, three hundred dollars for a day’s work. Not bad for where he came from. Not bad at all.

In the stockroom, he tried to remember the sizes as he picked out the shoes. Nine, seven and a half, and … the West Virginia–lookin’ ho, with those country-ass feet—she had said nine. But she meant ten.

L
ATER
, when the rush had ended, just as Felix and his girls had left the store, Randolph looked across the littered sales floor to the bench in the corner, where the man with the long black hair still sat. The Isley Brothers’ “Groove with You” came sweetly from the store speakers—Antoine had taken the funk down a few notches for the post-rush chill—while Jorge stood in the stockroom, putting dead soldiers back up on the shelf. It had been a good day, and Randolph had made some money. Now he’d see what that man had on his mind.

He crossed the sales floor, stepped up to the man. The man had risen out of his seat, a near friendly smile on his thoughtful face. He was taller than medium, like Randolph, though not as solid, more on the loose-limbed side.

Randolph stroked his black mustache, looking hard into the man’s blue eyes. “All right, man. What you want?”

The man took a piece of paper from his pocket and handed it to Randolph. Randolph took it, read it, tossed it on the bench.

“Right now?” Randolph said.

“Yes,” the man said.

Randolph shrugged sadly and headed for the front door, the man walking beside him. Before he reached the glass, Randolph shouted over his shoulder, to the manager. “I’m takin’ the rest of the day off, Mr. Rick.”

Mr. Rick, running a tape on his calculator, did not look up. “See you in the
A.M
.,” he said.

Antoine shouted from the entrance to the stockroom in the back of the store, pointing down at the erratic pile of shoe boxes at his feet. “Where you goin’, Shoedog? You ain’t goin’ nowhere till you put up these thirty-fours!”

“You put ’em up, Spiderman. I got something I got to do.”

Antoine shook his head slowly as Randolph and the man walked out the door.

Out on the sidewalk, Randolph turned to the man. “You got wheels?”

“Right over there,” the man said, pointing.

Randolph looked it over, said, “Uh-uh.” He nodded to a late-model T-Bird parked on the street. “We’ll take my short.”

They walked to the T-Bird, Randolph tipping a bill to an old man who sat by the car, putting quarters in the meter on the half hour. Randolph gave the old man some parting instructions, along with a handful of change. The old man thanked him and walked slowly up the street.

Randolph went to the driver’s side, put his key to the lock. He peered over the roof at the man with the long black hair, who was standing by the passenger door, waiting to be let in.

Randolph studied the man. “You’re new,” he said.

“That’s right.”

“You got a name?”

The man pushed his thick hair behind his ear, reached into the pocket of his denim shirt, and withdrew a cigarette. He paused before putting the filter between his lips, and squinted his blue eyes.

“Yes,” he said. “I’ve got a name.”

Randolph said, “What is it?”

And the man said, “Constantine.”

Chapter
8

W
EINER
looked down and studied the contents of the glass case. The ring he wanted sat near the back, wedged in the slotted felt of the display. He pointed in the general direction of the ring, waited for the liver-spotted hand of the clerk to light on the correct one.

“That’s it,” he said. “May I see it?”

“Of course,” the woman said, spreading cracked lips to reveal a perfect row of artificially white teeth. She retrieved the ring and laid it on a square of blue felt that she had spread on the glass.

Weiner picked it up—a simple number, a tiny diamond set in 14-karat gold—and examined it as he fingered the track winnings that were rolled in the pocket of his trousers. Nita had said, innocently enough, that she had never owned a diamond anything. She had said it the day before last, when Weiner had finally asked her out for coffee. She had said it as she looked down into the black of the coffee.

Weiner put the ring back down on the felt, deciding now that Nita would have her diamond.

“I’ll take it,” Weiner said.

“It’s lovely.”

“Wrap it for me, will you?”

“Of course.”

The clerk took the ring and glanced once at Weiner before she disappeared into the back room. Weiner took the roll from his trousers and unwound the rubber band, counting out the bills. He took what he needed for the ring and put it in his right pocket and rebanded what remained and put that in his left pocket. He looked into the mirror behind the counter.

He wasn’t so old. At least he didn’t look his age, not fifty-five. No way did he look fifty-five. He had put on a few pounds, but on him it looked good, and the goatee he had worn for thirty years had come back in style. He had seen it on the young people, first the African-Americans and later the whites, over the last few years. He looked good anyway, and now the goatee, it made him look younger. He figured he looked good because he had never married, since married cats always looked older, on account of all that stress. Some people said it was clean living, but clean living, in his case, had nothing to do with it. Anyway, he didn’t know what kept him young, but he knew he wasn’t too old for Nita.

That day in the coffee shop he had asked her to go to the Sonny Rollins show at One Step Down, the jazz joint in the West End. He had met her buying music at Olsson’s at Dupont Circle, where she worked as a clerk when she wasn’t studying for her undergrad degree at GW. He had been looking to pick up an old disc, “Mulligan Meets Monk,” that had been reissued on CD. Olsson’s didn’t stock the CD, but she knew of it, and he had been impressed. Her looks—dark hair, black clothes, heavy on the eyeliner, heavy in the hips—had impressed him as well. She reminded him of the zaftig beat chicks he had known in the old days, at Coffee and Confusion. The memory saddened him, but at the same time it made Weiner realize that all he wanted was to get next to it—to touch it—just once.

But Nita had hedged on the date, telling him to swing by Friday afternoon, her next shift, where they’d discuss it. He figured she needed to think it over—the age difference, and like that—and that was natural. But the ring might help things along. The ring might close the deal.

Three C notes seemed steep and a bit of a gamble, but that day Weiner felt lucky. He had cased both liquor stores in the morning, diagraming them and taking notes just after his visits. As usual, his memory had been dead on, his stay brief and uneventful. Afterward he had driven out to Laurel for the one o’clock post, settled in his spot in the grandstand, and quickly surveyed the form. For the first race he laid a win bet at the five-dollar window on the four horse, Arturo. Arturo was to be ridden by Prado, the hot and hotheaded Peruvian. Weiner gave equal weight to the jockeys as he did to the horses, and Prado had been his man since Desormeaux had hightailed it for Del Mar. Arturo went off at eight to two and won the six-furlong contest; Prado had pushed him to a roll at the rail.

In the second race Weiner played the seven-two combination and hit the exacta for six hundred twenty-six dollars and twenty cents, his biggest payday in months. He would have stuck around for another race—his friend Kligman pleaded with Weiner to “parlay it,” the favorite strategy of track losers—but he had to make the two-thirty meeting. He felt relieved, really, driving to the jewelry store at Laurel Mall, that the money he had won still rested, for a change, in his pocket. He’d pick up the ring, drive out to Grimes’s house, and lay out the whole deal.

As for the twenty grand that Grimes would give him to strategize the job, that would pay off old debts. And of course there was his debt to Grimes, for keeping the shylock’s muscle from crippling him that one time, two years back. He owed Grimes for that one still, and he supposed he would always owe him. Everyone owed Grimes something.

The thought of it made him feel hollow, but only for a minute, when the clerk returned from the back room with the ring and placed it, beautifully wrapped, in his hand. He gave her the three hundred and asked for a receipt. Walking out the door, Weiner could only imagine the look on Nita’s face when she would unwrap the paper, and open the box. Maybe then she’d let him get next to it. Maybe then, he decided, she’d let him touch it.

V
ALDEZ
stared out the window of his room, stroking the long whiskers of his black mustache. His room was small, with a perpetually unmade bed and an unvarnished nightstand and bureau, and a color television on an unvarnished stand set in the corner. His .45 sat on the nightstand, under a naked-bulb lamp, next to the bed.

Valdez didn’t mind the room. After a while he really didn’t notice the size of it or the furnishings. When he used the room, it was only to watch television or to sleep. It had been generous of Mr. Grimes to let him live there, in the back of the house, though at night he could often hear Gorman coughing into his shitty handkerchief in the next room, forcing up and then hocking phlegm. That would annoy him, the way a bug might annoy him, but Valdez would just turn up the sound on the television, and that would be that.

Anyway, the room in this house in the country seemed a million miles from where he had been. First Mexico, then Los Angeles as a kid, then back down to Mexico, the border towns where everything—reefer, coke, pills, and women—could be bought, and everything of value needed protection. Valdez used muscle and a major set of balls there to earn his rep—he killed his first man at eighteen, one bullet to the head—until he became as valuable as that which he had been hired to protect. In Miami, in the early eighties, it had spun out of control; the ones he went up against had crazy, speed-stoked eyes. The retribution kills piled up and got bloodier—near the end, Valdez macheted a man in a dirt-floored warehouse, hacked at his shoulders and neck while the man cried out for his “mamacita”—until finally he gave up on it and drifted north, where an old contact put him on to Mr. Grimes. His decision to move on had nothing to do with fear. Valdez didn’t know fear, not like most men know fear. But he figured that the odds would catch up with him soon. And Valdez had no particular wish to die.