“Oh, jeez, Mr. Beukes. It’s okay. You don’t have to. I’m glad to help. I don’t want . . . I’d feel stupid taking . . .”
He narrowed one eye and glared at me with the other. “Dis is more than a reward. Dis is a down payment.” He bent and scooped up a ten-dollar bill and held it out to me. “Go on. Take dis.” When I didn’t, he stuck it in the breast pocket of my Hawaiian shirt. “Michael. If I hoff to go somewhere . . . can I call on you to loog after her? I am home all day, all I do is loog after dis crazy woman, but sometimes I hoff to buy groceries or run to one of the gyms to put out a fire. Dere is always a fire to put out. Every musclehead who works for me can lift four hundred pounds, but not one of dem could count past ten. Dat is where they run out of fingers.” He patted the money in my shirt and took his wife’s coat away from me. It had still been hanging over my forearm, like a waiter’s towel, forgotten. “So? We hoff a deal?”
“Sure, Mr. Beukes. She used to babysit me. I guess I can . . . can . . .”
“Yes, babysit her. She has entered her second childhood, Gott help her and me, too. She needs someone to make sure she doesn’t go wandering. Looging for him.”
“The Polaroid Man.”
“She told you about him?”
I nodded.
He shook his head, smoothed a hand back over his thinning, Brylcreemed hair. “I worry someday she will see someone walging by and decide it is him and stig a kitchen knife into him. Oh, Gott, what will I do then?”
This wasn’t such a smart thing to say to the kid you were trying to hire to look after your old, mentally disintegrating wife. It was impossible not to consider the possibility that she might decide I was the Polaroid Man and stick a carving knife into me. But he was distracted and distressed and running his mouth without thought. It didn’t matter. I wasn’t scared of Shelly Beukes. I felt she could forget everything about me, and everything about herself, and it still wouldn’t change her fundamental nature, which was affectionate, efficient, and incapable of any real malice.
Larry Beukes met my gaze with bloodshot, miserable eyes. “Michael, you will be a rich man someday. You will probably make a fortune, inventing the future. Will you do something for me? For your old friend, Larry Beukes, who spent his last years desperate with worry for his fool of a wife, with her oadmeal brains? The woman who gaff him more happiness than he ever deserved?”
He was crying again. I wanted to hide. Instead I nodded.
“Sure, Mr. Beukes. Sure.”
“Invent a way not to ged old,” he said. “It is a terrible goddem trick to play on someone. Gedding old is no way to stop being young.”
3
I WALKED WITHOUT A PLAN, hardly aware I was moving, let alone where I was going. I was hot, I was dazed, and I had ten dollars crushed into my shirt pocket, money I didn’t want. My grimy Run DMC Adidas carried me to the nearest place I could get rid of it.
There was a big Mobil station across the highway from the entrance to the Golden Orchards: a dozen pumps and a deliciously refrigerated convenience store where you could buy beef jerky, Funyuns, and, if you were old enough, skin magazines. That summer I was drinking my own frozen slush concoction: a thirty-two-ounce cup of ice drenched in vanilla Coca-Cola and topped with a squirt of something called Arctic Blu. Arctic Blu was the color of windshield-wiper fluid and tasted a little of cherry and a little of watermelon. I was mad for the stuff, but if I came across it nowadays, I probably wouldn’t try it. I think to my forty-year-old palate it would taste of adolescent sadness.
I had my heart set on an Arctic Blu–Coca-Cola Slush Special and just didn’t know it until I saw the Mobil’s revolving red Pegasus atop its forty-foot pole. The parking lot had recently been repaved with fresh tar, black and thick as cake. Heat wobbled off it, causing the whole place to quiver faintly, a hallucinated oasis glimpsed by a man dying of thirst. I didn’t notice the white Caddy at Pump Ten, and I didn’t see the guy standing next to it until he spoke to me.
“Hey,” he said, and when I didn’t react—I was in a sunstruck daydream—he said it again, less nice. “Hey, Pillsbury.”
I heard him that time. My radar was attuned to any blip that might represent the threat of a bully, and it pinged at “Pillsbury” and the man’s tone of good-humored contempt.
He didn’t have a lot of room to go ragging on people about their looks. He was dressed well enough, even if his clothes looked out of place: In duds like his, he belonged at the door to a nightclub in San Francisco, not at a Mobil pump in a nowhere California suburb. He wore a silky black short-sleeved shirt with glassy red buttons, long black pants with a blade-sharp crease, black cowboy boots embroidered with red and white thread.
But he was feverishly ugly, his chin sunk most of the way back into his long neck, his cheeks corroded with old acne scars. His deeply tanned forearms were covered in black tattoos, what appeared to be lines of cursive script running around them in long, snakelike swirls down to his wrists. He wore a string tie—those were popular in the eighties—secured with a Lucite clasp. A yellowing scorpion was curled within.
“Yes, sir?” I asked.
“You goin’ in? Get yourself a Twinkie or somethin’?” He thunked the pump’s nozzle into the gas tank of his big white boat.
“Yes, sir,” I said, thinking, Suck my Twinkie, asshole.
He reached into his front pocket and wiggled out a wad of yellowing, dirty bills. He peeled off a twenty. “Tell you what. You take this inside, tell ’em to switch on Pump Ten and— Hey, Land O’Lakes, I’m talkin’ at you. Listen up.”
My attention had drifted away for a moment, my gaze caught by the object sitting on the trunk of his Caddy: a Polaroid Instant Camera.
You probably know what a Polaroid looks like, even if you’re too young to ever have used one or seen one used. The original Polaroid Instant is so recognizable, and represents such an enormous technological leap forward, that it became an icon of its era. It belongs to the eighties, like Pac-Man and Reagan.
These days everyone has a camera in his pocket. The idea of snapping a picture and being able to examine it immediately strikes absolutely no one as spectacular. But in the summer of 1988, the Polaroid was one of just a few devices that would allow you to shoot a picture and have it develop more or less instantly. The camera popped out a thick white square with a gray rectangle of film in the center, and after a couple minutes—faster if you shook the square back and forth to activate the developing agent within its chemical envelope—an image would swim up out of the murk and solidify into a photograph. That was cutting-edge back then.