“No,” said Check, though Eaton had continued to look only at Rahim. “The translator doesn’t know an auspice from a hole in the ground.”
“He means—” Howard began.
“I mean,” Eaton interrupted, “he’s wet, isn’t he? From head to toe.”
The band squirmed. No one answered.
“Come on,” said Eaton. “I’m in the band now.” Eaton smiled.
“See,” said Rahim.
It happened the next weekend, and was over in surprisingly short order, though that is the nature of most events—with a few gory exceptions, murders are over in seconds; the most hurtful remarks often use the fewest words; neither falling off a cliff nor running a car into a telephone pole is a lengthy enough process to require scheduling into your day.
The band hadn’t taken the man seriously at first when he clumped over to The Derailleurs on their break—with the big biker boots and shredded T and bright pink bandanna knotted at his neck; why, the costume wasn’t even coherent. At the flap of his ID, they resettled in their chairs and time got very fat. The whole table was suspended in the interface between two alternate universes. Change is like that: you are no longer where you were; you are not yet where you will get; you are nowhere exactly.
Rahim answered the man’s questions idly, readjusting the brim of his Astoria Concrete hat, toying with the tail of the hattah he routinely wore underneath it—a winter one this time, with the black Armenian stitching. He stroked the little pom-pom on one corner like a rabbit’s foot not likely to do him a hell of a lot of good. If Rahim seemed a little sluggish, he was in hyperspace—journeying from the universe in which he was trying to remember if he still had a can of stew left in the room he rented above the fruit market to the universe in which he was being arrested by the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service and in real danger of being summarily shipped back to Iraq. It was a big trip for thirty seconds.
“Excuse me,” Checker interrupted politely. “But could I consult with my friend for a moment? He’s new in the States and could use a little advice.”
The agent began to explain about lawyers and rights, but Checker had already raised a just-a-moment finger and ushered the Iraqi smoothly through the back door labeled RESTROOMS.
Checker’s advice was fast and straightforward and supremely American. As soon as the door closed quietly behind them, he grabbed Rahim’s arm and pulled him through the exit to the back hall, where they’d often helped waitresses take out the garbage. Checker dribbled Rahim down the basement stairs and curled him around the back of the dripping water heater like sinking a shot. “Stay!” was all Check took time to say; whipping off Rahim’s Astoria Concrete hat and hattah and shoving it on his own head, he was off again, up the stairs and careening down the back hall at just about the time the INS agent had finished checking the bathrooms. When the man opened the last door he caught only the flap of an orange bill and a flurry of headdress as it flew out to the alley and past the trash cans.
As the agent rushed after him, Checker consumed Ditmars Boulevard with wider and wider strides, laughing out loud, leading the man into Ralph DeMarco. A big, sharp night, isn’t it? Feels good to run, without a coat, and it must be twenty degrees. But you aren’t cold, you’re excited. You loved our gig, didn’t you? Sure, you used to play a little guitar way back when, and you gave it up; you went to school, you kicked around and ended up working for the government, and you haven’t quite digested that yet. You never expected to be on this side of things, chasing a kid for Immigration—you haven’t run in a while and you’re panting and he’s laughing at you, he’s waiting for you to catch up, he’s rolling, clutching his stomach on that little knoll at the end of the park right in front of the Con Edison plant, and That’s the drummer, where is the wetback?
“Man, how the hell you get into this line of work?” asked Checker, still laughing on the grass.
The agent shook his head and caught his breath, collapsing on the hill, noticing how brightly the lights shone from the garbage-processing plant across the river. “Jesus,” he said. “That’s a long story.”
Which he told.
Even Eaton Striker is afraid of Syria
4 / the house of the fire queen
People had always talked to Checker, they never knew why. Even for chronic truancy, his high-school teachers preferred asking Check to stay after school to turning him in. They’d get feverish toward the end of sixth period, rushing the lesson, anxiously shredding spare mimeos after the bell, afraid he wouldn’t come. But usually, in his own sweet time, Checker would appear at the door, humming, and glide to the desk, a small secret smile pointed at the floor; he’d glance up shyly, down again, back, down, then suddenly, when they least expected it, whoom, he’d carve straight into their pupils, coring their eyes like apples. It was terrifying. Have a seat, please. Sure. The pads of his fingers on the desk rippling. His leg jittering up and down so the floor trembled. In trouble, and perfectly happy. No matter how severely the teachers began, his eerie blue irises flashed like heat lightning, his smile, a joke, would trigger an aside, and before they knew it they were talking about their children, their wives or husbands or lovers, the problems of teaching bored people, then all about what boredom was exactly, whose fault it was, until pretty soon Checker’s feet would be up on the desk and his chair tilted back on two legs; the teachers, too, would be leaning back and playing with their pencils and jabbing excitedly with the eraser to make a point. Checker would finally remind them that it was six or seven and dark, so the two of them would stroll out and stand another half hour in the parking lot, an hour if it was spring; only out of a reluctant sense of duty and decorum would the teachers pull into their dumpy cars and away from this—this—student. Sometimes they gave him a ride home.
Checker was not precisely rebellious; he simply had his own agenda, and if that happened to coincide with the school’s, good enough; but if it diverged, he didn’t let it “rattle his cage,” as Check would say. He cooperated with authority but didn’t recognize it; he was no more or less conciliatory with a principal than with the boy at the next desk. He was pleasant and attentive when called in, unless another matter took precedence, like a science exhibit on refraction at the IBM Building, or a variety of orchid in the Botanical Garden peaking that afternoon, in which case he might pencil a neat and polite note declining the invitation to the principal’s office, ending with the genuine hope that they could reschedule sometime soon. Dazed, the principal would read it over three or four times: Looking forward to our talk. Until our next mutual convenience, Checker Secretti. With even more incredulity, the man would find himself courteously negotiating with Checker over the phone, trying to find an afternoon he was “free.” By the time Check showed up, the principal would feel grateful and offer the boy the big armchair and a cup of tea.
After all, appealing to his mother was hopeless. Lena Secretti was illiterate; Check had been signing her name to permission slips and even money orders to Con Ed since the age of six. His mother had borne children much the way she scrounged junk from trash piles—she carted them from the hospital and placed them in the apartment and sometimes, at moments, would remember having brought something interesting home once and look around for what had happened to it. After picking up the roll of bubble wrap, checking behind the broken adding machine, and moving the big box of paint-sample strips, nubby crayons, and plastic surgical gloves, she would dig up a dirty, hungry, but contented son playing Olympics with roaches. Now, Lena Secretti was not exactly insane, and no one ever died or got permanently misplaced in her care, but she was not the kind of woman you sent curt notes about truancy.
In his obliviousness of rules and even of law, Check had been accused of being “unrealistic,” but in fact