One Good Hustle

SIX




SOMETIMES I WISH Marlene did still hold a torch for Sam. She could probably get him back if she wanted to. We could all have each other back. But she doesn’t. That’s not to say she didn’t love him at one time. He loved her too—I know he did. The Lady Leni, my dad used to call her. He called her Leni when he loved her, short for Marlene. I was little then. We were all little, in my head.

“If you went bald, I’d shine your head every day,” my dad once said to her.

“That’s beautiful,” Marlene said. “I’d die without you, Leni,” she said, acting out what should have been his part. “I’m yours till the end of time.”

Sam grinned and went back to marking cards. This was early on, before he was a real card mechanic. Later, he could stack himself a nice cooler, slip the fixed deck back into a poker game without anyone having a clue. A true mechanic doesn’t need to mark any cards. He can stack the deck just so and deal what he wants to who he wants and nobody’s the wiser.

Sam raised the tip of the marker from the flip side of the card, squinted at his craftsmanship. “I never left nobody in my life,” he said and set the card aside to dry.

My mother told me about this conversation some time ago. The way I figure it, she and Sam must have been nuts about each other at one point or why would she have worked so hard to piss him off?

We were living in Toronto when Marlene split on me the first time. She had buggered off on Sam before, but never me.

It was August. The air in Toronto was muggy and hot. We’d left Vancouver in June and Marlene wanted to go back. She often dropped her head to wave a hand or magazine at her sweaty neck. “It’s like living under a dog’s tongue,” she’d say. Then she’d get all soppy about the Pacific, the pure sweet breeze of it, how gorgeous the hydrangeas would be—fat blue heads, big as basketballs. Not like these anemic little nothings that grew in Toronto. Hydrangeas seemed to be the symbol of all that was bad in Toronto and good in Vancouver.

The real problem was that Sam didn’t take her out with him any more. Not that my mother and father had ever worked together all that much. Sam’s forte was card sharping and Marlene didn’t play cards. But Sam stopped bringing her along altogether when we moved east. He said it was because they didn’t have a free sitter for me the way we used to in Vancouver. Back on Willow Street, I liked to sleep over next door with Abby Elliot and her big sister Joy, so my parents were all set. Once in a while, Sam would bring Mrs. Elliot a present—say a cashmere sweater or a Royal Doulton figurine. If Mrs. Elliot knew the stuff was hot, she never let on.

No Mrs. Elliot in Toronto, though. And Sam said we had to keep the nut down—he wasn’t going to work all night paying for a bloody babysitter.

Working all night was the other significant issue. The first time it happened in Toronto, Marlene was bug-eyed furious. He came home the next morning to a wife with sharp fists and a thousand teeth. My father wasn’t big on yelling. He closed the kitchen door as they argued. I crept into the dining room to listen.

“What do you think I was doin’ all night?” I could hear Sam’s playful chuckle. Out all night, but his shirt was still smooth. As if he’d ironed it just before driving home.

“They had no telephone?” It was the second time Marlene had asked this, and so she hollered to make sure he heard. “You couldn’t use a pay phone?”

“I didn’t have any slugs on me.”

“If you weren’t such a liar I’d say you were the cheapest prick I’ve ever known.”

“I had a game,” Sam told her again.

“Did Peggy happen to be at this game?”

“Peggy don’t play cards,” he told her. Peggy was kind of a family friend, a booster they knew. “Games go all night lotta times. You know that.”

“You had a game, all right. See how you like it.” I heard the zip of her purse and I rushed back to the living room.

The kitchen door flung open just as I made it into the armchair.

“Leni,” he called as she stormed over to where I was balled up in front of the TV.

I was supposed to start grade 3 in two weeks and already I missed the summer.

“I’m going out for a while, honey,” she said.

“Are you bringing me?” I didn’t want to stay with Sam if he was in trouble. Didn’t want it rubbing off.

“Daddy’ll make you lunch.” She smoothed the hair out of my eyes. Her fingertips were like feathers.

Marlene kissed my temple with loud lips, moved her nose to my hair and breathed deep. Standing up, she winked at me, her face stiff, as though she might break into a million pieces.

She threw open the front door so hard it slammed the wall. I remember the way the sunrays burst around her dark silhouette as she paused, looking into the light. It made me think of that song that kept playing on the radio, “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door.” She walked down the steps as if she’d be back any second, leaving the door open behind her.

By eight o’clock that night, Marlene still wasn’t home. Sam heated up wieners and beans from a can. The first spoonful made me gag. He looked at his watch and tossed me a banana. Got to go to work, he said. My father’s front was that he was an agent for First Rate Real Estate. He had business cards that said so, and once, while we were driving, he pointed out a For Sale sign on a front lawn that listed Sam Bell as the realtor. He’d only sold one house, so far as I knew.

“I got to sell some houses tonight, okay?” His voice was singsong dopey, as if I was barely out of diapers. As if I had no idea. “He thinks kids are stupid,” Marlene once told me. “He thinks they’re deaf, dumb and blind.”

Suddenly he produced a chocolate Easter bunny still in the box. The rabbit was warped and nearly flat, as if Sam had forgotten it on the roof all summer. “Don’t answer the door for anyone,” he warned me.

After he’d gone, I curled up on the couch in front of a movie-of-the-week called Trilogy of Terror and ate the rabbit with a carton of milk.

My father phoned sometime around ten. “What’s doin’?”

I stared at the TV as a come-to-life Zuni doll chased cross-eyed Karen Black around her apartment with a spear. “Bring me home some Kentucky Fried Chicken?”

“In a while,” he said. “I got four more houses to sell.”

It must have been midnight when he called back and woke me. Now there was a western on television.

“How come you took so long to answer?” he asked me. “You okay there?”

He said he’d be home to tuck me in soon, just two more houses. I hung up the phone and stared at the TV. Did he think I’d shoot off my mouth if he talked straight with me? Was he showing off for someone in the room with him?

When the front door finally opened, yellow sunlight was streaming through the windows. Heels clacked on hardwood.

“What are you doing on the couch?” Marlene asked. She looked like she hadn’t slept. “Where’s your father?”

I shrugged. “He had to work.”

Her mouth opened but nothing came out at first. Finally she said, “All night? Are you saying that he was out all night?”

I sucked in my lips and kept quiet.

She stomped upstairs. I followed, watching her go from room to room. She hauled out a suitcase, threw it on my bed and chucked in clothing from my drawers. She had just put a pile of her own stuff in when the front door slammed. Marlene tossed a sweater at me and told me to get my shoes on.

Suitcase in one hand and my arm in the other, she shoved past Sam on the stairs. “You left your kid by herself all night. You puke.”

He looked to me, his eyes pleading. “Why’d you stop answerin’ that phone?”

“I fell asleep,” I said, my eyes down. No one wants to be on the losing team.



“We’re going to stop in and visit Mel,” Marlene informed me after she gave the taxi driver an address on College Street.

“Who’s Mel?” I asked, staring back at our house as the cab pulled away.

“My friend,” she said. “I should have taken you with me yesterday to meet him. You’ll like Mel. I bet you two will get along like a house on fire.”

Mel and his buddy Rick were sitting on Mel’s front porch in lawn chairs, drinking and watching the traffic on College Street, trolley cars clanging back and forth. When Marlene and I stepped out of the taxi, the cool smirk slid off Mel’s face. His jaw clenched at the sight of our suitcase.

“Miss me?” my mother called to him in a smooth, light voice, the one she used when she really wanted something. “We were on our way to a hotel,” she said as we climbed the stairs. “Thought we’d drop in.”

The house looked a little beat-up, the way a place does when everyone’s moved out and you’re the last one left.

Mel’s pal Rick stood up, grinning. They both stank of rum-and-Coke. “Hotel? Why don’t you stay with us and loan the place a little class.”

Mel shot him a look.

I kicked the word class around in my head. Classy. Marlene Bell was classy, I thought. The Lady Leni, Sam called her, and she did look like someone you might see come feet first out of a limousine, followed by long legs and a sleek dress. Mel and Rick were more like the guys who call at you from a carnival booth.

Rick rubbed his hands on his jeans and stepped forward to take our suitcase. He was lanky with pinched, ropy muscles. He wore flares and a black tank top.

Mel grunted as he pushed himself out of the chair. He put a hand on my mother’s elbow and kissed her cheek. His mouth tugged to one side when he looked at me.

Back in Vancouver, Amy Elliot’s big sister, Joy, used to refer to old guys who thought they were groovy as dinks. “Man, what a dink,” she said when she spotted fat old Elvis squeezed into his jumpsuit on TV. Mel was a super-dink, from my perspective, swaggering around in a slippery shirt, three buttons undone and a gold cross dangling. He wore a brown leather blazer though the city felt like a tropical terrarium.

As the rum flowed that night, the mood lightened. Out on the front porch, Mel sprawled in his lawn chair, one hand clutching the glass on his knee, the other draped across Marlene’s shoulders. My mother perched next to him on a kitchen chair and matched him nearly drink for drink.



Later that night, I lay in a spare room that seemed to be Mel’s storage closet. His house was cluttered with full ashtrays and thumby, scratched records. There were busted appliances here and there, each one with its guts hanging out, as if he had tried to fix it with no idea how to put it back together. Aside from the single bed against the wall, the spare room was a home for banged-up packing boxes, some filled with stacks of old Penthouse magazines and others with little kids’ stuff: a baby chair, a toy xylophone, a plastic baseball bat, trains and little cars. A mountain of rumpled women’s clothes spilled out of the closet.

Eventually Marlene came in and curled up beside me on the bed. There were no blankets or sheets, just a sleeping bag.

“How long are we going to stay here?” I whispered.

“Until your daddy learns his lesson,” she told me. “We’re having an adventure!” She blew a raspberry into my shoulder and the smell of rum wafted.

When I woke again she was gone. Low moans mixed with shushing came from the room next door. I thought of Sam in his and Marlene’s bed. I imagined my father lying in the same position I was, thinking of me at exactly the same moment.



On day two at Mel’s, I became the official gofer.

Mel might say, “Where the hell are my matches,” which would immediately be followed by, “Hey, Suzie Q!” That was me.

They paid me in leftover change to run down to the corner store. I didn’t like the way Mel called me Suzie Q, or the way he said, Heavy! all the time and, Can you dig it? like a dink-and-a-half. But being the gofer was something to do and there was dough to be made.

Late that afternoon, just after a third cola run, my father pulled up in front of Mel’s house. He got out of his spotless Cadillac and called up to the porch. A passing streetcar clanged through his words.

My mouth hung. I wondered if Sam had just happened to drive by and spot us or if he’d done some detective work.

Mel and Rick stared down from their lawn chairs. Perched between them, Marlene straightened, peering hard like a snake about to strike.

Sam came around the nose of his car and stepped up onto the sidewalk.

“I thought I told you to go ahead and f*ck yourself, Sam the Man,” Marlene sang down the steps as if it were all a game. She folded her arms and gave him the smuggest look she had.

Mel took a drag off his smoke. Skinny Rick set his rum-and-Coke down on the porch and stood. He wore a translucent purple shirt. I caught sight of his nipples and felt bad for it.

“I want my kid,” Sam said. His lips were thin and hard. He looked rich in his starched yellow shirt and smooth slacks. Classy.

My guts zipped as Sam came toward the steps.

Rick moved to the edge of the porch, staring down as my father made his way up. Just as Sam veered in my direction, Rick’s hand shot out and he shoved my dad.

Sam stumbled back, arms pinwheeling. My bare feet dug at the porch as he lurched backward to the pavement. But he didn’t fall—somehow he got his feet under him.

Once he’d caught his balance, Sam looked from Rick to his Lady Leni. I didn’t turn my head but I knew Marlene was grinning. Sam’s eyes never once met mine.

Look at me, I thought. Take me, take me, take me.

“I’ll be back,” he said, his voice high and tight. He turned and walked back to his car, climbed in.

Rick’s hands twitched as if he’d been gypped somehow.

“That was heavy,” Mel said, exhaling.

“Thank you, Rick,” Marlene said.

I stared after Sam’s disappearing Cadillac.



The next afternoon, the mood on the porch was sulky. I offered the same gofer services, but refused to hand anything over until whoever had done the hiring paid up. Mel had stiffed me twenty-five cents the day before.

“Knock it off, kid,” Marlene snarked. “You sound like your old man. Big Man Short-shit.” Her eyelids were thick and her enunciation had gone sloppy.

Mel kept his eyes trained on the sidewalk, and Marlene followed his gaze to two long-haired girls: teenagers in faded denim shorts and kerchief blouses. Mel and Rick were mute as four long, thin legs scissored past.

Marlene snorted. “Could they yank those shorts any higher up their cracks?”

Mel shifted in his chair. A minute later, he announced that he was heading to the store to get his own smokes. He could use the exercise, he said.

“See if I care,” I muttered.

Rick drummed fingers on the arm of his lawn chair.

I moped on the top step and watched the streetcars pass while my mother squinted down the block. Mel stopped on the corner and wangled his way into a conversation with those two long-haired girls.

“Sammie,” my mother hissed. “Go down there to where Mel is and say, ‘Daddy, Mommy wants you to come home now.’ ”

I picked at some dry skin on my foot. “No.”

“Don’t be such a spoilsport. Come on. I’ll give you fifty—I’ll give you seventy-five cents. ‘Daddy, Mommy wants you to come home now.’ ”

I held out an open palm in her direction. Three quarters later, I trudged down the porch steps.

The girls stood close to one another, arms crossed. Kerchief blouses floated in the traffic heat. Feet set wide like a cowboy, Mel kept one hand on his belt and gestured with his cigarette as he gabbed.

When I reached them, I paused, trying to get up the guts.

Mel eyed me. I stared down at the sidewalk and mumbled my line.

Glancing at her friend, the bonier girl said, “We better get going.”

“She’s not my kid.” Mel smiled at them. “Her old lady just got dumped. You know how it is.” He gave them a wink.

“My boyfriend gets really pissed off when I’m late,” the girl explained.

“He’s mental-jealous,” the other one added. She smirked and tugged the bony one by the belt loop and they walked away.

“Come by for a drink sometime,” Mel called after them.

Shoulders hunched, the girls giggled their way down the sidewalk.

Mel snatched an angry drag off his smoke and headed off toward the store. He didn’t turn his head when he said, “Tell your mother to call her old man.”

I headed back to the house, hopping on the hot pavement.

Marlene was now sitting halfway down Mel’s steps. Rick had disappeared. My mother’s face moved from stony to something like pity as she touched a dry leaf on the sickly hydrangea bush beside her.



I still wonder how Sam found us that day. He’s like that, though. He knows things.

That’s why I know he’ll come looking for me now too. He came that time and he’ll come this time. Because I’m his kid. I want my kid. I bet he’s thinking that right now.

It’s hard for him because he works a lot. And he has to travel for work. He’s just really busy. He owns two buildings in Toronto. Probably others that I don’t even know about. All that and he’s never had a joe job in his life. That’s my dad for you. He doesn’t talk, he acts.

He hasn’t called me back yet but he will. I’m his kid.