“The problem with fingers,” Armand says, “is it’s a cliché.”
Hawk looks at his own knuckles, puffed and discolored from punching them against each other or against lamposts or mailboxes or hydrants and scratched and pricked pink from button pins.
Armand sits on a chair in the kitchen area of Hawk’s loft, scowling at the boxes and loose merchandise, and then at his manicured fingernails around an Arturo Fuente. Mr. Skinhead stands beside him with his tattooed head, a quart carton of skimmed milk in hand. A few dozen of the heart-shaped, apple green Earth Day helium balloons nose along the ceiling, trailing strings. Hawk often stands by the window with a helium canister inflating them, watching the street hustlers below. The balloons drift about the room at night like sawed-off faces, and then droop downward for days.
“I thought you understood,” Armand says. “If we don’t honor our obligations, there’s a penalty. You didn’t apply for the no-penalty payback plan. If there’s no penalty, no one would pay.”
“I hear you,” Hawk says.
“ABC TV said Americans spend 15 percent more than they earn each year, which means they’re just paying the vig.”
“I’ll have a package of money for you after next week,” Hawk says. “I’ve got a beautiful show in Atlanta.”
“Hawk. Take off one of your shoes.”
Armand picks up a Statue of Liberty lamp and shakes his head at Hawk’s Daffy Duck-shaped phone that quacks instead of ringing.
“Why don’t you sell some of this junk?”
“I try,” Hawk says. “It ain’t like I collect it.”
Mr. Skinhead looks like he wears half a soccer ball on his head, only it is his head with the pattern of a soccer ball tattooed on it. How could you figure Armand going into business with this pentagon-headed jerkoff Hawk knows from years in the clubs when he dealt ludes and wisecracked games. Armand said they were assuming control of a moving business, pianos and stuff, with their employer Fives’ blessing.
Whatever he didn’t collect came out of his pocket.
“Armand, come on. A week’s all I need.”
“Take off your shoe, Hawk. I gave you several weeks already.”
Hawk mutters as he pulls the unlaced sneaker off his tired foot, trying to still his hand. He’d thought of Armand as someone he could reason with, though influenced by TV mobsters, like any gangster you’d meet. At the thought of which Hawk chuckles. Just the other night at the IHOB this angular Cuban guy who plays a low-level gangster-turned-snitch on Kojak walked out of the back behind Bitter Herb.
“What’s he doing here?” Toothless Jersey Joe asked. “Wasn’t that guy killed in the last episode?”
“Only wounded,” Fat Frankie said. “They shot him in the arm.”
“That’s why he’s in here,” Larry Lawyer said.
“What the fuck you grinning about?” Mr. Skinhead says, and walks over and lays a small pair of shears on Hawk’s thigh.
“Nothing,” Hawk says. “Look, this don’t make sense.”
“What doesn’t?” Armand says.
“I’m on my feet all day. If I can’t work, how do I get your money? I’m paying doctor bills, how am I gonna pay you?”
“Don’t pay the doctor,” Mr. Skinhead says.
“Listen, Hawk,” Armand says, calmly. “I hear you dropped four bills last night on one roll of the dice at backgammon. What do you think I’m going to do when you ask for another week?”
“This guy rolls a fucking eight-to-one shot on me. He picks up a cigarette from the ashtray and blows smoke into the rolling cup and covers it with his hand and shakes the cup and bumps it on the table. You never seen such shit.”
Larry had stared at him across the table, looking like the rich Eddie Murphy in Trading Places. He crunched a potato chip and the smoke swirled out of the cup followed by tumbling dice. Monkey, Larry yells. One die stops in the smoke. Five. And Hawk pleads, Help, Backgammon Gods, it’s Hawk, and the other die dances over the cork, hits the divider, kicks out, and spins to a stop. Snowflakes, three players yell at once, and it all comes back: Marcus the Doctor massaging his shoulder and saying, Tough beat, kid. You gotta pay a few people, and Toothless saying, His name is Crime, he doesn’t pay, and Hawk muttering about his luck, and Frankie saying, You know what, you’re really a great player. You just had bad personal luck the last ten years, and Simon from the shoe store saying, Good players roll good, bad players roll bad.
Now Armand’s snapping his fingers in Hawk’s face and saying, “You’re someone who seems to keep missing the point.”
Hawk holds his shoe in one hand, sets it by his foot.
“The sock comes off too. Look, Hawk. I don’t gamble. No cards, no horses, no bingo. I don’t even buy a lottery ticket.”
“The Connecticut Lottery’s at twenty-seven million. There’s guys selling dollar tickets for three dollars a pop all over Broadway. They take the train to Connecticut and come back with a hundred tickets.”
Armand flicks his ash into a Mickey Mouse coffee mug.
“I called Frankie’s place and he says you’ve been throwing a party, like you got flippers instead of hands.”
“They say, ‘Hawk brings his own tartar sauce,’” Mr. Skinhead says.
“Armand, I work fourteen-hour days to get your money.”
“Hawk, you need to learn fiscal responsibility. You do a thing with a negative result a few times, you’re supposed to change your behavior. Put the shears around your toe.”
Hawk looks at the nasty beak.
“What’s this show in Atlanta?” Armand asks.
“We’re selling buttons at the Democratic convention.”
“The Democratic what?”
“Convention,” Hawk says. “They come from all over the country, these delegates, to choose the candidates for president. Every four years. It’s a three-ring circus. You watch the conventions on TV? You look at the stage, the audience, the people in the streets, and they’re covered with buttons.”
“That a fact?”
“Yeah. Look, it’s always good for a few grand.”
Armand frowns.
“I got eleven hundred. It’s more than half a payment.”
“Give me what you’ve got.”
“I got unlucky this weekend. You invest in balloons at two festivals, three months apart, and get rained out of both! What’s the odds on that? You saw how it rained.”
“Unlucky, Hawk? You’re not smart. Next time you think about gambling with my money, you think about your toes. Go ahead, now.”
Hawk opens the beak of the shears and inserts the little toe of his left foot between the blades. He feels that icy thrill in his groin like when you’re about to jump from a high place. He read in one of the magazines lying around the IHOB that if you could jump from thirty-two feet you could jump from any height.