hadn’t moved yet. He was clearly the bag man, the negotiator. Without his strong arm, he was terrified. I tossed the first out the door, making sure his back would hit badly and hard against the Ford parked at the curb. It crunched. So did he. Good, I thought. I don’t like Fords much better than I do punks. Turning to his partner, I asked:
“And what do you want?”
“Nothing. No, no…nothing.”
He was scared. No one had thought collection was going to be much of a problem. If someone refused, the gang would just come back later and take care of things. But fighting back—defying their goof shit little band of thugs—his eyes told me that such a thing had never crossed any of their minds. Not even for amusement.
“What do you mean, nothing?” I asked the question with angry suspicion. “You came into a store for nothing? I think you must be with that real tough guy out in the street.”
“No! No I’m not. I’m not!”
“Then what are you here for?”
The sweat was beginning to break out on his forehead. He was carrying the money they’d already collected. He was a runner, not a fighter, but I was between him and the door. If he lost the money he had, he’d be in for even more trouble than the talker outside.
“I mean no trouble. I, I—I came in for…,”—his eyes darted in every direction, finally hitting on an idea—“…for some candy. Yes! Candy!”
“Well, then…, buy some candy.”
As the runner dug into his pocket, I told Lo, “Sell him a crate of candy.” As the punk’s eyes came back to me, I said, “A big crate. Something expensive.”
Lo disappeared into one of the back aisles and then returned with a large cardboard box on a hand truck. Total cost: four hundred and fifty four dollars. I asked, “This is what you came in for, right? Candy?”
The runner kept his eyes on the newspaper still in my hands and nodded vigorously. I opened the door for him after he paid for the box, watching him struggle his purchase out behind him. Just as he began to pass through the doorway, I slid the paper under his chin to catch his attention.
“Now; you collect up your future cellmate out there and you go tell the rest of your crew that this store is off limits until after the New Year. You tell them this…Mr. Lo will happily pay his respectful fees when you kiddies have sorted out your boundary problems, but not before. Go shake down someone else. Anyone else. But not this store; not until after the New Year.”
He nodded vigorously, keeping his eyes away from mine. I pulled the newspaper away from his throat and let him pass. As soon as the door shut, he abandoned his crate, running over to the tough guy still pulling himself up off the sidewalk. They stared at the store for a long time. I lit a cigarette and waved. Finally they walked off down the street, leaving the candy behind.
The box sat in the snow, abandoned like the Japanese gun emplacements along the beaches of Okinawa the day after the Marines landed. It sat in view as a marker, commemorating the winning of a battle before the war had actually started. With a shrug, I went out and fetched it back inside. Then I helped Lo pull the steel shutters down over the window and door.
Satisfied we’d secured our bunker as well as we could, we went upstairs to the second floor where the old man and his family lived. I took my by-then familiar place at the table and started in with everyone else on Mrs. Lo’s spread. As usual, it was terrific. The food sat in colorful bowls on a large lazy susan; celery and crab meat, bamboo shoots and peppers, freshly roasted cashews, pork ribs and chicken wings crusty with barbecue sauce, two different kinds of steamed fish, bean sprouts and hamburger heavily doused with black pepper, and a bowl of large, batter-dipped shrimp flash-fried so evenly you could eat them shell and all without even noticing the crunch.
The food wasn’t the best part of dinner, though—it was eating with Lo’s family. It’d been a long time since I’d eaten a meal with other people at the table. My own childhood hadn’t had a family that met at the same time every day to eat together. My own childhood hadn’t bothered with a family much, period.
Lo and his wife had five children, as well as a few brothers and a sister who gathered every night to eat and discuss their businesses and jobs and school. The first few nights I made the mistake of filling up on whatever I saw in front of me, forgetting the dessert to come. I remembered that night, though, and left some room for the peaches, apple cakes, coconut rolls, and oranges which followed.
Keeping the pounds off wasn’t easy under Mrs. Lo’s watchful eye. She’d figured out what kind of eater I was the first night and made sure plenty of what I liked was on the table every night after that. She didn’t speak more than a handful of English, but so far we’d had no trouble communicating. I’d been made to feel like an adopted son, and what loving mother can’t communicate with her little boy?
Lo told the assembly what’d happened in the store earlier, the end of the story meeting with everyone’s approval. The general consensus was that more of them would be back the next day, but I’d known that when I’d started in on the tough guy. Lo’d known it before he’d come to hire me. But we were in it now, with no turning back. Figuring I might need some extra beauty sleep, I excused myself from the table and headed downstairs to my cot.
I thought about the family as I lay in the cold aroma of sawdust and dried fish, trying to figure them out. They were proper people, loving people, happy people—the kind I don’t spend much time with usually. They all had their own chair around the table, and their own place in the living room for watching TV. They even changed clothes for bed, wearing pajamas, or nightgowns, one of the smaller girls even sporting a little tasseled cap. As I scratched at my underwear, the same I’d worn all day, I had to admit a lot of their lifestyle was very appealing.
In their home, which was in effect their own little world, they had so far managed to keep the rotting decay of progress out of their lives. True, they dressed in Western clothing, owned stereo systems, televisions, a computer, and a garbage compactor. The girls wore makeup and the boys had Walkmans. The travel pictures we went through one night showed me they’d seen a lot of America—a lot more than most of the people born here.
And yet, somehow they’d managed to work and live here for years, in the heart of one of the country’s dirtiest, nastiest, most corrupt and violent cities and not be overly affected by it. They had a set pattern to their lives, and the backbone to hold them erect against any kind of outside interference. Every day as we worked and ate and lived together, the time seemed to go faster. Actually, I had to admit the eight days we’d spent together had practically flown by.
Closing my eyes, I scrambled toward the back of my mind, searching for sleep. Day eight was going to be day nine before I knew it.
* * * *
The morning Post was its usual treasure trove of laughs. “BACKYARD BODIES SURFACE THROUGH AIDS CONFESSION” was the field day they picked to go after to catch the commuter crowd, reporting on the activities of a pair of lesbian dominatrixes and their male slave. One of the women had posed for a number of bondage magazines. The dutiful reporter on the story only had room to list PUNISHED!, HOT n’ HELPLESS and WHIPMASTER. The other had made a splash for a while in a variety of HOM, Inc. videos.
The gist of things was that slave would go out to bars, pick up girls, bring them home, and then turn them over to his mistresses. They would then ‘punish’ him for ‘seeing’ other women, getting around to the women he brought home a little later. His punishment would be to get his plugs and rings
