Double Take (5 page)

1975

“Why do you think Bando killed himself?” Joey was asking me.

“Your guess is as good as mine.”

“I thought you knew him pretty well.”

“I did. But the whole time I was away at college, he was still here and I was never sure exactly what he was up to. I mean, I knew he wasn't working. He was different when I came back—withdrawn. And then I knew. I kept expecting him to curl up in a ball. Like a hedgehog. A hedgehog on heroin. Another drink, Joe, my man?”

“You sure you need one?”

“Hey, you heard the bartender, it's last call. We gotta order.”

“Nothing for me, thanks.”

I went up to the bar and asked for another Old Style. The bartender glared at me as if he despised me. I wondered if Bert's bartenders had to go to a special class where they learned this sales technique.

“So what was all that bullshit about not drinking?” Joey asked when I returned with my beer.

“No bullshit, Joe. I never touch it. When I went away to college I turned over a new leaf. I was someone new, and that person didn't drink. I haven't had a drink since high school.”

“Can I point out to you that you're drinking right now?”

“Cheers, Joe.”

“Shouldn't you drink
to
something?”

“Old times?”

“Cookie, there's something I have to say to you. Something I want you to think about.”

“What might that be?”

“It might be, did you ever wonder if maybe Bando didn't kill himself? If maybe he was murdered?”

I was dreaming I was on the Illinois Central commuter train, which had somehow come loose from its track and was barreling across the sky. Through a dirty little window, I could see Bando in the next car. I raced down the aisle and tried to open the adjoining door, but I couldn't turn the latch. I pounded on the window and called his name, but he couldn't hear me.

When I woke up, I could tell it was a weekend morning. I smelled coffee and heard the rattle of pots and pans and the sound of tinny classical music on the old radio. When I was a child I found these sounds reassuring, and dashed downstairs to be greeted by my mother's cheeriness. But lately her cheeriness had been driving me nuts. Maybe it was because I could tell it was an act she was putting on for me, and that she didn't feel any more cheerful than I did. When she said, “Good morning, merry sunshine,” as she always did, I wanted to scream.

I lay in bed, waiting for the morning sounds to subside. My head was throbbing and my stomach hurt. I closed my eyes and tried to fall back to sleep, back into the dream I had been having. Then suddenly, I sat up in bed, remembering what Joey had said.

1969

Everyone hung around on the corner in the sweltering heat. A few barefoot girls sat curled like snails on the sidewalk in front of Casa Sanchez. Some members of a local street gang, wearing Navy-surplus bell-bottoms, knit shirts, and high-top sneakers, lounged in front of the dry cleaners, pitching pennies, their radio blasting “Sugar, Sugar,” by the Archies. Two greasy-haired bikers wearing heavy leather jackets despite the heat pounded on the mailbox in time to the music. In the window of the Christian Science Reading Room, an old woman peered out and frowned. Someone made a face at her, and she jerked her head away. A few of the gang members were dancing a complicated bop-step they did in unison.

A police car rolled slowly down the street. Everyone scattered, and for a few minutes the street was deserted. A few shiny pennies still lay on the sidewalk. When the police car disappeared around the corner, everyone materialized from wherever they had been and resumed what they were doing.

Bando had positioned himself outside Casa Sanchez. If he craned his neck he could see her inside. She was wearing a short blue uniform, bending over to wipe a table with a rag. He could probably have seen her underwear but was too gallant to look. He longed to go in and talk to her, but he knew Sanchez would throw him out again. One day he had been sitting there talking to her when Sanchez came over to his table and asked him if he had ordered anything. He hadn't. Sanchez told him that this was a place of business and that if he wasn't going to spend any money, he was going to have to leave.
Coldly, Bando requested a pot of Earl Grey tea and spent the next three hours drinking it. Cookie kept refilling his tea pot with hot water until he had squeezed every bit of action out of the teabag and was drinking hot water with lemon. After the three hours passed, Sanchez came back to his table and said, “Now get the hell out of here and I don't want to see you here no more.”

As Bando went out the door, Cookie remonstrated with Sanchez but he dismissed her, saying, “He's an arrogant little shit.” Though she tried to defend him, Cookie had secretly conceded that this was accurate. Bando had a way of looking at people as if he saw right through them and knew their intelligence to be subnormal but was too politely superior to call it to their attention.

Cookie had spotted Bando out the window and knew he was watching her. She pretended not to notice. In fact, she had sort of been avoiding him. One evening last month, they had been sitting together on a park bench and had somehow ended up kissing. Cookie was still not at all sure how this had happened, because the fact was, she was not attracted to Bando, at least not physically. He was too thin, almost insubstantial, his hands were cold, his skin was pale, he rarely smiled, though when he did, it felt like a burst of light. Only his hair, which he had been allowing to grow, was beautiful: thick, soft auburn with strands of gold. When they kissed, his lips felt wrong, too thin, too ungenerous—but they
had
kissed, and she could not honestly say it was his idea alone. Since that night they had kissed a few more times, usually very late at night when he was magically transformed—he became suave, witty, handsome, as they laughed and gazed up at the starless sky. Then in the daytime she would see him on the street and he would
be, well, just Bando. She liked him, even loved him, but not the way he wanted her to. Anyway, it was easier to avoid him.

Cookie looked up as the door to Casa Sanchez opened and Victor came in. He was a blond, moose-like guy who had only been working at Casa Sanchez for the past three weeks, but they were already good friends. At first they had been suspicious of each other, but then it came out in conversation that they shared a passion for thumb wrestling. From then on when business was slow, which was most of the time, they would sit at the employees' table smoking Cookie's Kools and trying to pin down each others' thumbs.

“Hi, Rachel,” Victor said, slinging himself into a chair at the employees' table. Victor called her Rachel because he'd heard Bando do it. Bando had made it clear to Cookie that he could not possibly spend time with someone whose name belonged to a food. Cookie told him she loathed being called Rachel, but Bando said Rachel was a beautiful name and she ought to appreciate it. Cookie explained that Rachel was a priggish little girl who got good grades, put shiny pennies in her loafers, and had a drawer full of socks and hairbands rolled into symmetrical balls. In seventh grade, Rachel had turned into Cookie—maybe because her last name was Cochrane, or because she was always sneaking Oreos into class and scraping the white part with her teeth. When Bando called her Rachel, he told her, he was addressing her real self. Cookie told him he was wrong.

“That priggish little girl is
you
,” Bando said.

“Call me whatever you want,” Cookie said, not really minding. “And,” she added, “I'll call you Robert.”

“That is absolutely out of the question,” he said.

When Victor called her Rachel because he knew that Bando did it, it was because he knew that Cookie liked Bando. Victor wanted her to like him, too. It was that simple.

Cookie brought Victor a cup of coffee and some cream. She watched as he dumped sugar into his coffee and then poured cream in it until the cup was practically overflowing. “What's hap?” she asked.

“Nothing to it. Been busy today?”

“Not really,” Cookie said, sitting down next to him. “It's so hot out, everyone's probably at the lake.”

Everyone but Bando. He was still lurking outside, trying to look inconspicuous. It was hard to look inconspicuous in an American flag shirt.

Victor had a stubby, wide thumb, which matched the rest of him. He was stocky and hard, with fair skin and light hair that kept falling into his eyes as if just beginning to grow long. Many guys had hairstyles like this, though they tended to be thirteen years old with bangs that were emerging from a neat, boyish cut and had to be periodically removed from the eyes by a deft sideways toss of the head. Victor had developed this tic too, which struck Cookie as ridiculous.

“Thumbs at the ready,” he said, holding up his thumb, flipping his hair, and locking his fingers with hers.

Victor had recently come from Canada, he said, and had never been to the States before. Like many people Cookie knew he had just materialized on 57th Street one day. The first person he met was Sebastian, who, to impress him, had told him about the incredibly far-out scene at Casa Sanchez of which, if the truth were known, Sebastian
was not yet actually a part. Sebastian had made Casa Sanchez sound as teeming with chicks and drugs as a countercultural resort. Victor had asked Sebastian if he knew a good place to stay. Sebastian told him to ask Cookie.

Cookie's first impression of Victor was that he was sort of a nerd. Like his hair, his jeans were slightly too short, the kind people laughed at and asked, “Where's the flood?” He carried a guitar around with him, although, she soon discovered, he could barely play it. On his guitar case was a bumper sticker from an anti-war protest last summer in Boston, a proclamation of hipness. Cookie was not convinced, but she had soon grown to like Victor because whatever else, he was an efficient cheerful worker and a hell of a thumb wrestler. He had quickly made his way from dishwasher to bus boy to cook, and he was a lot more pleasant to work with than Sanchez, who was always griping about all the hippies hanging out in his restaurant. “This is my place,” he would say, as if that were somehow true, as if opening a restaurant in that particular spot had not been like trying to plant a formal garden in the middle of a jungle. No matter how hard you fought, the jungle would win.

“My shift,” Victor yelled through the kitchen window to Fletcher, the other weekend cook, as his thumb waved menacingly at Cookie's. Fletcher was from Canada too, but as everyone suspected—but didn't know for sure—his name wasn't really Fletcher. He was some sort of fugitive, Cookie guessed, and when he spoke it was with a slight Canadian lilt, but he never talked about where he had come from.

When Victor asked Cookie where to crash, she suggested he ask Rat. She didn't like Rat very much, but figured he would take care of Victor or else get rid of him, and either way, it wouldn't be Cookie's responsibility if Victor turned out to be a creep. Rat
had introduced him to Clay and Levar, and Victor had ended up “cribbing” with them, as Victor called it. He was picking up a lot of slang that sounded silly when he used it.

“Thanks, man,” Fletcher shouted to Victor in his languid voice. He came out of the kitchen and lit a cigarette, then sat down at the employees' table. Cookie looked up at him. He was about six feet tall, with dark wavy hair and bright blue, heavy-lidded eyes. As she took her eyes off of Victor's hand for one second, he smashed his spatulate thumb down hard onto hers and pinned it.

“Ow, shit,” Cookie said.

Victor grinned at her. “Another triumph.” He made a hissing noise that sounded like applause.

The front door opened, and Cookie could feel stagnant air wafting in from the street. A short stocky man with crew-cut hair and a military carriage walked over to the employees' table and sat down. Sam was the co-owner of Casa Sanchez; in fact, it was Cookie's assumption that Sam was the money man, and that Sanchez was a figurehead. According to Sanchez, he and Sam had met years ago at a bar in Miami as Sanchez was in the process of trying to get his family and their money out of Cuba before Castro took over. It hadn't worked out, and Sanchez had ended up an impoverished refugee with a chip on his shoulder. Sam had at that time been in the U.S. Marines and was en route to Guantanamo. They had exchanged addresses, and five years later, when Sanchez—tired of working as a bus boy at restaurants in Miami—decided to head north, he had looked up Sam, the only American he knew outside of Florida. They had opened a restaurant together on the Northwest Side, but it had soon failed. There was no demand for Cuban
food in the neighborhood, which was predominantly Polish and Irish. They had better luck in their present location near the university, except for all the goddamn hippies.

Unlike Sanchez, Sam got along well with the locals. Despite the fact that he had been a Marine and half of them were draft dodgers, despite the fact that he had short hair and was pushing fifty, they soon realized that they had something profound in common: they were all interested in drugs. Some people were interested in using them, and others were interested in selling them.

According to rumors Cookie had heard, Sam had made some Mafia friends down in Florida, and he knew how to set up a business. Slowly and carefully, he had gotten to know the people who hung out on 57th Street and, after studying the situation for a while the way any potential investor would, he selected five people he knew he could work with—guys with brains, business acumen, and loyalty. One night at a party Clay, who was obviously tripping, had told Cookie that Sam was a silent partner, so if anyone got busted it was understood that their boss wasn't doing any time.

It had worked perfectly, everyone was happy. Sam and his five dealers made lots of money, and the neighborhood was plentifully supplied with pot, an innocuous substance the populace enjoyed. So far there had been a few arrests, but charges had always been dropped due to lack of evidence. Sometimes this lack of evidence was the result of a few discreet payments to strategic law enforcement officials; it was Mayor Daley's town, and anything was possible. Unfortunately, however, not all cops were on the take, and there was a constant police presence on 57th Street, but Sam was the kind of guy who could relate to cops. He was, after all, an ex-Marine, and he treated the police like colleagues.

As Sam sat down, Cookie jumped up and brought him a coffee, black. As she set it down in front of him, Sam handed her a dime. She walked over to the jukebox, put in the coin, and pressed W2. “My Way” by Frank Sinatra began to play. Every time she heard it, which was every time Sam came in, Cookie wanted to clap her hands over her ears.

“How ya doin', Sam?” Victor asked.

Sam regarded Victor coolly for a split second before answering in a hearty voice, “Doin' great, buddy, how 'bout yourself?”

“Gettin' ready to flip some burgers,” Victor said, heading into the kitchen.

Cookie could not help noticing that every time Victor talked to Sam, he mirrored Sam's good-ol'-boy way of speaking. Maybe they talked that way in his part of Canada, she thought.

“Get a haircut,” Sam called after Victor in a good-natured voice. “And how's my little Cookie?”

“Great,” Cookie said, catching a glimpse of Bando's American flag shirt out the window. “Made ten bucks today.”

“Ten bucks.” Sam emitted a dry laugh with an edge of smoker's cough. “You ought to come work for me.”

“I do work for you,” she said.

Sam slurped air into his mouth as if he wanted to suck back what he had just said. “Of course you do, baby.” He looked at her and laughed again. It was a salt-and-pepper laugh, Cookie thought, the colors of his hair.

Cookie knew he was wondering how much she knew about his business, as he called it. Because she was around Casa so much, without really realizing it or even caring, she knew most of what there was to know. You could tell when people were dealing—they made a lot of calls from the pay phone and talked in hushed voices. She had figured out who the dealers were, the Big Five. They drove nice cars, though they didn't seem to have jobs. She often saw them—Clay, his friend Levar, Rat, Fletcher the cook, and a creepy guy named Brunette—conferring with Sam at a corner table.

“How do you like Victor?” Sam asked. “He a good worker?”

“He's a nice guy. If that isn't damning him with faint praise.”

“Say what?”

“We're good buddies.”

“You going to his party Friday night?”

“Party?”

“He didn't invite you? I thought y'all was good buddies.”