Jack Strong: A Story of Life After Life (3 page)

But then it came out that Lance was the one who’d been stealing. He went to Lana’s, and she gave him a shot of whiskey. That was the last memory Richards could muster. She had probably killed him. He always carried the second key to the box in his wallet when they went to the bank in Phoenix. She probably thought he always had it there. It was only after he was dead that she must have realized her mistake.

He took the money, but Lana was the one who smuggled it out of the casino. Maybe Petron never suspected that Lance had a partner.

Lance hungered for his lucre. He lingered near the forefront of my mind.

Call Lana,
he said silently.

I ignored the plea, wasn’t concerned with the money.

Who was I? What was I?

“Mr. Strong?”

Wearing a tailored gray suit, he was my height and well built, the color of a denizen of southern Italy, tan tending toward olive. His eyes were a brilliant green, and his hair was black and shiny.

I gripped the pistol in my jacket pocket and took a quick look around the room. There was nobody there except a tired waitress leaning against the counter.

“Who are you?” I, and hundreds of others, wanted to know.

“May I sit?”

It took me a few moments to say, “Okay.”

He slid onto the long seat opposite me.

“Tom Grog,” he said. “I represent an organization called the Convocation.”

His green eyes stared into my multi ones.

“What does that mean to us?” I recognized the plural and accepted it.

“Why are those men after you?” he replied.

“I think I stole some money from them a few years ago. I guess they want it back.”

“You stole it with Lana Santini?”

“Who are you?”

“Tom Grog,” he said patiently.

“Is that supposed to mean something to me?”

“No. I suppose not.”

“Do you know what I am?”

“You are the phoenix. I’m here to witness your rebirth and transformation.”

“I could snap your neck like a twig,” Connolly Wright said from the chorus that made up the background of my mind.

“Can you help us?” Minna Achet, another of my personas, cried.

“Not if you break my neck,” Grog said with a frown on his lips and a twinkle in his jeweled eyes.

“Are you the guy in the black van?” I said, taking back control.

“My people. I drive a silver Benz.”

“What do you want, Mr. Grog?”

“Simply introducing myself, Mr. Strong, and possibly to offer an apology along with a little advice.”

“Apology for what?”

“The trouble you’re in,” he said, tilting his head slightly to the right as if gesturing toward a bow. “When Lana Santini brought you to our representative, we had no idea that the Steadman mob was after you. But now that the truth is known, you should leave Las Vegas and accomplish your tasks elsewhere.”

“What tasks?”

“That’s up to you.”

“Why is the ring finger on my left hand black?”

“It’s more a chocolate brown, wouldn’t you say?”

“Did I die?” I asked, remembering a child pleading with his mother to save his life and his leg.

“I shouldn’t even be talking to you, Jack. My job is purely that of a watcher. I am here to observe how you integrate into society and yourself.”

“You got to tell me what’s going on, man.”

“I cannot,” he said with some regret. “All I can do, I have done. Leave Las Vegas.”

When Grog stood up, I had every intention of stopping him. I was going to grab him and search him and maybe even torture him until he gave me the information I needed.

But instead, I became lightheaded. I wanted to rise, but I could barely keep my face from thumping down on the Formica tabletop. I shook my head like a beast in the wild.

For a moment, I was a creature, an animal in some deep wood.

“You’re a powerful man, Jack Strong,” Tom Grog said. “But we have ways to subdue you if push comes to shove. You’ll be okay in a few minutes. Have a cup of coffee and leave Las Vegas.”

I tried to speak but could not.

“The effects won’t last long,” Grog added. “When you have your strength again, leave town. We don’t have the manpower to protect you from gangsters.” He threw a large brown envelope down on the table. “This will help.”

I watched the suave man saunter toward the front. He said something to the waitress and then went out the door. I wanted to follow, but there was no strength in my limbs.

When Tom Grog was gone, I felt as if my last chance to understand had left with him. There were people who wanted to kill me, but that wasn’t nearly as important as who I was, what I was, and why.

The lethargy that my visitor had somehow induced got worse. I was looking down on the red Formica tabletop trying to keep from falling face-first into the chili bowl.

“You okay, Sugah?” The waitress was redheaded with widely spaced cornflower blue eyes. Her skin was pale and heavily freckled from the desert sun. She was attractive but no longer young. I was sure that she had been a Las Vegas beauty, a showgirl maybe with those long legs. But at forty, her loveliness would go unappreciated in the capital of gaudiness and glitter, youth and rot.

“What?” I said.

“Can I get you something else, honey?”

“Rosetta,” I said.

“You can read at least,” she said touching her name tag with a single finger. “That’s good. I have learned not to talk to a man who can’t read.”

“Oh? Why’s that?” My strength was returning.

“Because either he’s been to prison or he’s on his way there.”

At that moment, I appreciated being a repository for so many points of view. There was a seemingly natural inner desire to come to agreement among the chorus of my mind. We concurred that Rosetta had failed to attain the life she had hoped for. Too late she’d learned the lessons that beauty never lasted and that the love garnered by beauty was most often off the mark.

“How’d you like to make fifty thousand dollars, Rosetta?” I asked.

She took Tom Grog’s seat across from me.

“As long as I don’t have to kill or maim my son or my mother,” she said, “I’d like it very much.”

Rosetta looked at me in a way that beckoned my feminine side. This response was sexual and yet somehow social.

“What’s your name?” she asked.

“Jack.”

“Jack what?”

“Jack Strong.”

“Mmm. That’s a nice name. You got ID?”

“You think I’m lying?” I asked while taking the wallet from my pocket.

I handed her the license I’d found after coming awake in the Motorcoach Hotel.

She studied the picture and smiled.

“Drugs?” she asked. “Some kind of card-counting scheme?”

“I need you to pretend to be somebody else,” I said.

“That’s easy. I do that most of the time anyway. I spend whole days thinkin’ I’m Madonna or Fergie. Sometimes I’m Princess Diana, but I never got killed.”

“Do you live with your son?”

“He stays with my mama on weeknights, out in the burbs where they got good public schools. I get off in ten minutes. If you want, you can take me home and tell me how I’m gonna get so rich.”

I must have frowned because she asked, “What’s wrong?”

“You seem very willing to get into a deal with a complete stranger.”

“I was gonna start talkin’ to you anyway,” she explained. “You’re a good-lookin’ man, and I just spent the whole morning thinking about what I could do with just ten thousand dollars. Nobody’s knockin’ down my door or nothin’ anymore. I got responsibilities. And, anyway, if I don’t like what you got to say, then I could just say no.”

Sex with Rosetta Jeanette Lawson was a revelation for me, actually, a series of revelations. I approached her feeling as a woman, not a particular woman in my psyche but as the female anima. My whole purpose was to pleasure her to the heights of orgasm. It was a route I knew well as a woman but hardly at all as a man. And it was exciting because, physically, I was not the woman I felt I was. I didn’t have the genitals that were crying out for satisfaction in my mind.

And at some point, I realized—as a woman—my erection. At that moment, sex was a miracle unfolding like waves at the shore. Looking at her and looking at myself—a man with a woman’s soul, a woman with a man’s hard cock—I experienced an orgasm that wouldn’t stop, that echoed through all the personages inside me. The experience, in addition to its physical power, had the effect of bringing my disparate souls closer together. It bound us in a way so deeply satisfying I almost passed out.

Rosetta came on that journey with me, so to speak. She was saying things, but my ears could not hear. She was pounding my thighs with the heels of her hands, but it didn’t hurt until hours later. When the climax had crested and fallen, Rosetta stumbled from the bed and into the hall.

I crumpled on my side, half on and half off the bed. The power of the two sexes coming together inside me, and with Rosetta, too, was something I had never even suspected was possible. I shivered with intensity that was so charged that it couldn’t properly be called pleasure.

A few minutes later, Rosetta came back through the bedroom door taking a deep drag off a cigarette.

“You smoke?” I asked when she sat down next to me on the bed.

“Not for seven years,” she said. “But after that, I don’t care. I need this cigarette.”

She held the butt end toward me, and I took a grateful drag.

“Baby, you don’t need to give me no money at all,” she said. “Just do that once a month, and I will consider myself a rich woman.”

I pulled her down on top of me and kissed her eyes, which fluttered shut with each osculation.

“Did you go to school for all that?” she asked.

“Many.” My erection was returning.

“I know you want it, Jack Strong. I do, too. And you know I can, but I can’t. If I go through that again, I might just die before you can get to tell me where all that money’s comin’ from.”

“I thought you didn’t want the money.”

“I’ll use it to feather your nest.” She kissed my lips and rolled off.

I got up and walked for the door.

“Where you goin’?” she demanded.

“Into the other room until this dick goes down.”

In the dark of the living room, I peered out between shuttered slats of the venetian blinds. The black van was parked out there, silent and still.

I took the envelope Tom Grog had given me and tore it open. It contained six thousand dollars in hundred-dollar bills and an address on Park Avenue in Manhattan.

Manhattan. I used to sleep in various grottoes formed by huge boulders in Central Park there in the summer. In the winter, I knew every grate that spewed heated steam. My life had been contained in a Grand Union shopping cart. I had my football award from Perry High and a loaded pistol I’d found and kept.

“Jack?”

She had come to the doorway of the darkened room.

“Why’d you put your robe on?”

“You don’t wanna be lookin’ at no middle-aged woman’s skin.”

“Take it off.”

“How about your dick?”

“He’ll behave as long as you don’t tickle him.”

She let the white silk kimono fall from her shoulders, and I sat on a stuffed chair. She lowered into my lap and I gave her the money, minus ten bills.

“What’s this for?” she asked.

“Down payment on the money I promised.”

Leaning over, peering into my eyes, Rosetta asked, “Where did you learn to make love like that?”

“From a woman.”

She smiled. “Did that woman ever tell you that it’s not a good manners to give a lady a wad of cash when she’s naked on your lap? Might give the wrong message.”

“We struck the deal about something else before the wrestling match.”

“I won,” she said.

“Me too.”

We kissed.

“Okay,” she allowed, moving over to the green sofa placed at a perpendicular angle to my blue chair. “What are we gonna do for this money?”

“A while ago another woman and I stole a great deal of cash from a bad man who stole the money from a worse man. She tried to kill me but failed. Now I need her key to the safe-deposit box that holds the money.”

“How long ago?”

“Four years.”

“Four years? Where’ve you been all this time?”

“Recuperating.”

“Damn. You must’ve been somethin’ else before you got sick.”

“I’m something else now.”

“Is that why your skin is all patchy?” Rosetta asked. “Did she burn you with acid or somethin’?”

“Something. Are we in?”

Rosetta’s visage became very intent. She said, with a sneer, “All the way in.”

After my temporary lover and partner in crime had gone to sleep, I used her phone to call a guy Lance Richards once knew.

“Hello,” he said in the smallest possible span.

“Roaches?”

“Who’s this?”

“Lance.”

Silence.

“Roaches?”

“Lance who?”

“You know damn well who. You still workin’ at the Beamer Motel?”

“Uh-uh, but my cousin Rolly is.”

“Somebody is gonna call there for a Carl Rothman. You take the message and call this number with it.” I gave him the number of a cell phone that I’d found in Rosetta’s purse.

“Okay. Okay. Where you been, Lance?”

“Away.”

“Away like the joint?”

“Just like that. And let me tell you something, Roaches.”

“What’s that?”

“I still know the address of the liquor store got robbed in L.A., the one where that cop was wounded. All I got to do is say your name, and that video will be looked at next to your mug shot.”

“You don’t have to threaten me, man.”

“No threat. I just want you to know that even if I’m dead and cold that information will be delivered to the LAPD.”

I hung up on the petty thief and armed robber. Roaches was a little soap-colored man who was always scratching. Whether the itching came from psoriasis or neuroses, no one knew, but the name Roaches stuck on him because he always seemed a little dirty and disheveled, you expected to see bugs darting out from a pant leg, sleeve, or collar.

A certain glee appeared at the deprecation of the criminal, and my persona, randomly named Jack Strong, mentally shrugged off the unclean Lance Richards. I was, Jack Strong was, the top man in the pyramid of innumerable personalities that made up my mind. This certainty caused a sense of security throughout the fields of thought and feeling that comprised me, were becoming me.