“Sick?”
“Yeah. He called in.”
Sick. Could that just be a coincidence—just bad luck? Or had my man Winston smelled something coming?
This woman, meanwhile, was looking at me, fingering the pages of her magazine, waiting for me to split. I could appreciate that. I was back in Albie’s rumpled gardener’s outfit, stained grass-green at the knees, bits of soil clinging to the cuffs. I was putting on a full show here, huffing and puffing, wiping sweat off my brow, drumming my fingers on the counter. “Just my luck, boy. Sick! Boy.”
“Yes.” She shrugged. Obviously she was supposed to say Can I help you with something, but it was equally obvious that she did not want to help me. “Do you want to leave him a message?”
“Naw,” I said. “No, thanks.”
Still I didn’t leave. She cast a longing glance at her magazine. Thin white celebrities in swimsuits, lying like famine victims on a scorched beach. Winston Bibb’s colleague was dark-eyed and plumpish, her hair elaborately woven, her forehead high and gleaming under the fluorescents. Her skin was coffee, light-toned, in the number 120 range. I did this evaluation by reflex, then found that just doing that quick calculation, for some reason, made me sick. My stomach rolled. This here was a free woman, after all, a northern woman, a vested citizen. What right had I to look at her that way, to size her up, mark her down for a Gaithersburg file?
“Well…” she said. Poor girl: I had given her no choice. “Maybe I can help.”
“Oh, I don’t know; I hope so. I don’t know. I really don’t know.”
At last she closed her magazine and looked straight on at my face, and her expression softened. I saw it happen, and I doubled down. I tilted my head a certain way I had, and I grinned a soft grin of mine, narrowed my eyes in a way that I knew put light in them and crinkles at their corners.
“My name’s Angie, by the way.” She slipped the magazine under the counter. “Tell me what you need.”
“Okay, well,” I said, “it’s a little complicated.”
For Angie I rolled out a long story, one with several twists and turns in it. My boy Sully, see, had gotten me a gig not two dang weeks ago, driving a light truck, just around the city, nothing long-haul, nothing complicated! ’Cause you know I just last year got my CDL, see, and Sully’d hooked me up, man, a nice gig driving for this garden supply place, loading a pickup with different kinds of supplies, you know, mulch, topsoil, garden rocks—I ticked it off on my fingers—all that kinda shit. Sorry, Angie, that kinda stuff—she smiled, waved it off, go on. Part of the gig was to meet up with the long-hauls coming from outta town, help ’em unload at the company warehouse down there off Troy Avenue.
Angie nodded sure. Her cousin Addy, as it turned out, lived near there. Near Troy Avenue.
“Oh, yeah?” I said. “No kidding.”
The warehouse address I’d pulled off my mapping software. Everything else was pure spun sugar, a song I was singing, finding the tune as I went. I talked as quickly as I could, gesturing a lot, charging my voice with exasperation. Angie was nodding, magazine forgotten. On the clock above her head, it became midnight in Abu Dhabi.
“Anyway,” I went on. “Easy gig. Just load it up, drop it off, nothing to it, you know?”
When I said that I gave Angie a smart look, like, Yeah, right, there’s always more to it, whatever it is, and she returned the look with a smart one of her own, shaking her head, Yeah, right. Angie and me, we were no dummies. We knew the score.
“Oh, hey, look at that,” I announced suddenly. “Loving those nails.”
She beamed, held ’em up. This stray compliment was just icing, just a little conversational texture, although I did mean it sincerely. Each fingernail was painted a different color, and together they formed a sparkling ten-finger rainbow across the faded yellow of the countertop. She spread her fingers for further inspection, which I supplied, whistling admiringly before getting to the heart of the matter.
“But so Monday morning Sully tells me about a job. Truck left the supplier sometime Sunday night, and now I’m supposed to go and do the pickup at a vacant lot on Twelfth Street, maybe two miles past the Speedway, almost out in Hendricks. Paperwork ain’t come in yet, he says, but I better get moving. Two barrels of pit-run gravel, two cubic yards to the barrel, we’re talking, like, a couple tons of this shit—sorry, Angie, there I go again.”
Angie cased my hand for a wedding ring when she thought I wasn’t looking.
“But so I pulled up the light truck Monday morning, to this lot, and guess what?”
“No rocks,” said Angie.
I slapped the counter. “No rocks! You believe that?”
She shook her head. She clucked her tongue. “Your boy messed you up.”