Brief Encounters with the Enemy Read online

  “That would look good,” I said, but I didn’t think it would look good. I was dismayed by what had become of his body. He was round and spongy, as if he had rolled in a pan of chocolate dough. So was Quincy. The man I didn’t know was the opposite, tall and stringy, with ropy muscles and long fingers and protruding knuckles. He was thin but sweating the most. Sweat streamed down from under his baseball cap, and he dabbed at it with his handkerchief. He was oddly genteel about this. Then he cracked his knuckles loudly, aggressively, and it made a sound like tree branches snapping. Troy pulled his shirt back down, and I had a vivid recollection of him standing in front of the locker-room mirror after one of our games, completely naked except for his socks, flexing and preening. At fifteen, he already had a man’s body—shoulders, chest, and cock. He’d scored three touchdowns that game and knocked the opposing team’s star player unconscious. Coach Slippo had given him the game ball. He had five game balls. “I’ve got some cuts in here for you,” Troy had told the equipment manager, running his fingers through the creases of his stomach muscles and down to the edge of his pelvis. Everyone had laughed. The equipment manager had blushed. Troy thought he was going to make the NFL. All of the guys thought they were going to make the NFL. They didn’t even make college.

  I sucked the smoke in and blew it out, and as I did, it felt like my mouth was a furnace door that I was opening. The smoke was hotter than the air, and it made my face fiery and my eyes water. I felt light-headed, and the smell of the roast beef was sickening. There was a thrumming in my eardrums. I feared I might puke on the sidewalk.

  “You okay, Dean?” I heard Troy say. “You good?” His voice was far away. I wasn’t sure if he was asking whether my life in general was good.

  “It’s hot out here,” I said. It was all I could do to maintain my balance.

  “This ain’t hot,” said the man I didn’t know. “If you think this is hot, wait till August.”

  I was happy to engage in weather talk. “It’s probably going to be a hundred degrees in August,” I offered.

  “A hundred degrees?” The man I didn’t know was incredulous. “A hundred degrees?” He was outraged. He looked at me hard. “If it’s ninety degrees in May, how’s it going to be a hundred degrees in August? I’m telling you, my man, it’s going to be hundred and twenty-five degrees in August.”

  Against my better judgment, I took another drag off the cigarette, and it had a surprising calming effect. The smoke came out white and round and hovered around my head in the still, heavy air.

  “Hey, Dean,” Quincy said suddenly, “you looking for a job?”

  Troy said, “Dean don’t need no job.”

  “They’re hiring,” Quincy said. He nodded to the textiles building down the street.

  “Who’s hiring?” I said.

  “Mainframes, man,” Quincy said.

  “Chemicals and whatnot,” Troy said.

  “I don’t ask no questions about what they make,” said the man I didn’t know.

  “You watch,” Quincy said. “Once the war starts, they’ll be opening factories all up and down this street. There’s going to be an industrial revolution right here in the ghetto.” This broke them up. They slapped one another’s hands, stinging slaps. I smiled but I didn’t slap.

  “Where you working at now, Dean?” Troy said.

  I told him.

  “Damn.”

  “Damn.”

  “That’s a good job.”

  “How’d you get that?”

  “That’s the kind of gig I want.”

  “Damn.”

  “That’s what I’m going to get me,” said the man I didn’t know. He said this more to himself. Then he said to the rest of us, “I’m going to get one of those essential jobs, so that when the draft comes, they pass me up.”

  “There’s not going to be any draft,” I said. It was my turn to state something as fact.

  The man looked at me in astonishment. He cocked his head. Then he guffawed and wiped his handkerchief over his entire face in one swift motion. “How’d you figure that one out, my man?”

  “It’s going to be a quick war,” I said. “Marines are going to take the peninsula first thing.” I drew in the air as if I was standing in front of a map. “Here’s the bay … here’s the peninsula … you’ll see.”

  The guys got quiet as they pondered this.

  “Anyway,” I said cheerfully, “even if it’s a long war, there’ll still be plenty of people willing to join up.”

  “Plenty of people?” The man I didn’t know snorted. “This here’s the guy”—he turned to Troy and Quincy—“who thinks it’s only going to be a hundred degrees in August.”

  At the hospital, the air-conditioning was going full blast and the sweat froze on my skin. It was almost twelve o’clock and I was exhausted and parched. I was also hungry. I went back to blaming Roberto for everything. People with all sorts of ailments came and went in the waiting room, and I thought about how this must be what it’s like when soldiers get back from battle. I wasn’t sure if Roberto had checked in under a false name. He was nervous about not being a citizen and was always going out of his way to cover his tracks. He had no driver’s license, no bank account, no telephone, and his new apartment still had the name of the previous tenant, Cynthia Abernathy, on the mailbox even though she hadn’t lived there for two years. Every so often he’d get a package for her, and he’d tell the delivery guy some elaborate and unnecessary story about how Cynthia was his wife but she was out of town because her mother was dying and he didn’t know when she’d be back but he’d let her know that a package had come for her when he talked to her next but he wasn’t sure when that would be because her mother was dying. It was always the same story. He was positive that the INS was tracking him and the delivery guy was an agent. In the meantime, he’d accumulated several mail-order kitchen gadgets, including an electric egg-beater.

  “Don’t you think they’re going to start wondering why your mother-in-law never dies?” I’d ask him.

  He never liked this. “You’re going to be penitent one day,” he’d say, dropping in one of those words he’d learned specifically for the SAT. “You’re going to be penitent when they come for me. They’re going to lock me up somewhere, like they did those apple pickers, and you’re never going to hear from me again.”

  “I’m looking for Roberto Díaz,” I told the hospital receptionist.

  She checked the computer. No, she said, there was no Roberto Díaz listed.

  “Then I’m looking for Rob Days,” I said.

  No, sorry.

  “How about Bob Hays?” I was trying to recall all the various permutations he had used over the years.

  No.

  “I’m looking for Tyler McCoy,” I said, because this was the name of the main character in his favorite gangster film.

  The receptionist punched in Tyler McCoy, and I could tell by the way she slowly struck the keys that she was getting suspicious or impatient. “You sure do have a lot of friends,” she said.

  “I sure do,” I said. And Tyler McCoy was in Room 831.

  He was asleep when I got there, lying on his back with his mouth wide open like a drowning man trying to suck oxygen. He had bandages running ear to ear, and his nose, always prominent, seemed gigantic under the bandages, as if he had an anvil for a nose. His eyes were swollen, his hair was matted, and a Reader’s Digest rested on his stomach, rising and falling with his haggard breath. Across the room a window faced out onto the roof of an adjacent wing of the hospital. The roof was white, and if you didn’t know it was ninety degrees outside, you could mistake the whiteness for snow.

  I pulled up a chair next to his bed and took a seat. He didn’t stir. I thought about turning on the television and then, when he woke, apologizing for having disturbed him. From my vantage point, he looked to be all torso, as if he were lying in bed after having had his legs amputated. This was a result of having spent ten years lifting weights constantly and incorrectly. I’d
experienced him straining, screaming, staggering, a terrifying sight to behold as he attempted to hoist more than was humanly possible, and the second the summit was attained, not one second more, he would discard the barbell midair so that it would drop and crash and bounce in explosive vanity. His chest was colossal and so were his shoulders and his arms, and he had a thick blue vein in his neck that was permanently engorged as it piped gallons of blood to his muscles twenty-four hours a day. But his legs were thin, the legs of a teenage girl or an insect, and they looked nonexistent beneath the pale blue hospital sheet. “Why don’t you try doing some cardio every once in a while?” I’d counsel. He either didn’t care or didn’t notice that his proportions bordered on the freakish. His physique had provided him with those coveted manual-labor jobs—mover, deliverer, unloader—and that was how he had survived all these years without any aid or assistance except what he got from me. Businesses needed men like him and were happy to pay him under the table. He’d carried bricks, drywall, bales of hay. “I’ve got a special job for Robbie,” my mother once said. He’d come over for dinner and wound up spending half an hour lugging a tree trunk from our backyard to the curb. She’d given him ten dollars. I’d yelled at her later for what I saw as an example of her condescension, but my father intervened, coming into the living room in his bare feet and no glasses and uttering one of his platitudes, “Every man has to make his own way in this world.”

  The way Roberto was making his own way in this world now was through relatively sedentary employment as an assistant to a cobbler who also happened to be his landlord and who cut him a break on the rent in addition to giving him shoes if they were left in the shop past sixty days. Roberto would be turning twenty-five soon, and he’d come up with a fairly reasonable plan that involved learning a trade, saving money, going to college, opening a business, starting a family. The cobbler paid him in cash twice a month, so twice a month he had an enormous roll of money that he liked to caress as if it were a puppy. The roll was generally in fives and tens and added up to no more than a couple hundred dollars, but it made him look and feel rich. “Like Tyler McCoy,” he’d say, and he’d reenact in pitch-perfect detail the scene where Tyler McCoy is trying to get one guy to go in with another guy on the heist that turned out to be a double cross. “Me. You. Now. Together.” When Roberto had satisfied himself with fondling the roll, we would walk to the post office, where he would buy all the money orders he needed to pay all the bills that were under assumed names. We’d wait in a long line of poor people and illegal immigrants and that occasional unfortunate American citizen who had just come in to buy a book of stamps. When we emerged from the post office an hour later, Roberto would be broke.

  The mass of flesh suddenly shifted like an animal beneath forest leaves, and his swollen eyes opened. They were bloodshot and bleary, and it took a moment for him to orient himself. “Oh, shit,” he said when he understood who I was and where we were. “You came. My man.” His voice was thick and stuffy like air in a cellar, and I was surprised to hear the slightest trace of the accent he had rid himself of years ago. It could have been an earlier version of him rising from the dead. Oh, shee. You came. My main.

  “Of course I came,” I said, wounded, as if I had never contemplated otherwise. And because I knew it would make him happy and endear me to him, I added, “Of course I came, Tyler.”

  He grinned, and the bandages pulled tight across his face, and the grin evaporated as he cried out in agony. I stood in alarm, but the pain subsided quickly. He struggled out of bed, throwing the sheet back with determination, bringing both feet to the floor and forcing himself upright so that he could face me.

  “This is the best guy,” he said with the utmost sincerity, as if introducing me to an audience. “This is the greatest guy in the whole world.” This was an example of Roberto’s hyperbole.

  His trunklike arms came around my shoulders and squeezed me hard, until I felt like a child, even though I was taller than he was. I feared he would lift me off the ground and swing me. Instead, he laid his head against my chest, so that he was the one who seemed transformed into a boy, hugging his father the day before he left for good.

  In June, the marines were put on high alert, the temperature reached one hundred degrees, and the bill from the hospital arrived. It was three thousand dollars.

  I loaned Roberto two hundred to cover the minimum, and a few days later he called me from the cobbler’s phone to invite me over to his apartment to see his “special surprise.”

  “What special surprise is that?” I said, but he refused to tell me. He had to get back to work.

  So the following Saturday, which also turned out to be the hottest day of the year so far, I pulled up to his apartment building. It was early evening, but it seemed to be getting hotter, as if the setting sun were drawing nearer. Roberto lived in one of those neighborhoods that were either up-and-coming or on the way out, an equal mix of aluminum siding, college students, and small shops—one of which was the cobbler’s shop, whose awning I now stood beneath, waiting desperately for Roberto to come downstairs and let me in. His doorbell never worked but I had been forbidden by the cobbler to yell up at the window. Instead, I had to arrive at our mutually agreed-upon time and stand on the sidewalk patiently and quietly until Roberto opened the door. If I showed up early, I’d have to wait; if I showed up late, Roberto would have to wait. Today I showed up right on time, but there was no Roberto. Every few minutes, behind the window, the cobbler would rise from his shoe machine and eye me mercilessly, as if he’d never seen me before and suspected I was up to no good. He hated me, and I hated him. He was fat, and he smoked constantly, and he had a thick head of black hair. I had a theory that he colored it with shoe polish. He was Italian or Greek or Armenian—we could never figure out which—and he had been in America for fifty years but could hardly speak English. Even Roberto made fun of him. “ ‘I can no find a-black-a shoelazes …’ ” I’d gotten off to a bad start with him the first time I visited Roberto and screamed up at the window at eleven o’clock in the morning, “Robbie!”

  “You no come here act like hoodlum,” the cobbler had demanded. “Like nigger.”

  “Hey!”

  “Hey!”

  “That word’s not called for!”

  “I call police!”

  “Fix the doorbell!”

  “I fix you!”

  “Fuck off!”

  “That word not called for!”

  “He’s my window of opportunity,” Roberto had shrieked when I told him what happened. So I went back downstairs, hat in hand, and apologized.

  “My customers good customers” was all he said.

  Fifteen minutes after I had arrived, Roberto still hadn’t come down to open the door. This wasn’t like him at all, and a subtle unease began to creep over me. I recalled the apple pickers who had been rounded up by the INS in the middle of the night, and I was on the verge of panicking when Roberto appeared from around the corner, carrying a big blue box that said DVD PLAYER. He was grinning freely, despite his nose being covered with bandages that made it look as if he had a small pillow in the middle of his face.

  “What’s in the box?” I said, though it was obvious what was in the box.

  “Robbie!” said the cobbler, waving. “You buy me DVD player?”

  Roberto laughed, and so did the cobbler. The cobbler’s laugh was intended to make me the odd man out.

  In his apartment Roberto sat cross-legged on the floor, tearing open the box as if it were Christmas Day. Styrofoam peanuts went everywhere, and when he removed the thin silver DVD player, it gleamed sharply in the evening light. He smiled at it lovingly. I sat on the sofa and fumed, dripping with sweat. His apartment was even hotter than outside. It was one square room with a kitchenette, a saggy sofa bed, and three folding chairs; the bathroom was down the hall and shared with six other tenants. All Roberto’s furniture belonged to the cobbler, and so did the television and dishes. The wall of his kitchenette had been cov
ered meticulously with those pictures of Arnold Schwarzenegger, the most prominent of which was him in a suit and tie with his arms and thighs pressing hard against the fabric. The apartment felt like a boiler room in a sub-subbasement. It even sounded like a boiler room, with the constant low-frequency vibration coming from the cobbler’s shoe machine. Roberto seemed wholly unaffected by the heat. He was always unaffected by the heat. I had never seen him sweat.

  “Can’t you open a window?” I asked.

  With one gigantic arm, he swung open the window and then got back to fitting inputs into outputs. Immediately a fly came in through the window, but no breeze. I watched the fly settle on a plate and crawl around. Then a second fly came in. Roberto turned on the television to a game show that was nearing its climax. A woman had to pick the right color if she wanted to win fifty thousand dollars. The audience was screaming at her, and she was flustered.

  “What will you do with all that money?” the host asked.

  “I-I-I-I don’t know.”

  “Pay back the greatest guy,” I answered for her.

  “What?” Roberto said. His pillow face swung in my direction.

  “Pay back the greatest guy in the whole world,” I said.

  He stood up straight. In his small apartment, his size was immense, his camel legs notwithstanding, and as he loomed over me on the couch, I felt a twinge of vulnerability.

  “I told you, I’m going to pay you every penny!” he said. His face twitched and the pillow-bandage bobbed, and from his pocket he withdrew a slip of paper on which was printed the company logo of Dr. Scholl’s. Beneath this he had written in very precise handwriting, “I O Dean $200.00.” He had dated it “June 14th” and added his initials, as if it were an official document he was endorsing. The gesture was surprisingly touching, and I felt remorseful, even guilty, as if I were the one who owed money.

  Out loud I said, “What the hell am I supposed to do with this? Get it notarized?”