Things are looking up for an evening in, when Carla’s ex calls. They’re eating Cuban takeout at the loft, having rented a double feature. One dinosaur cartoon film to be followed by Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome with Tina Turner. And this goon rants about being in Queens County and Hawk being next if he doesn’t … only Hawk passes the phone to Carla before he hears “doesn’t” what.
Carla pauses the VCR. She listens a minute, face burning, and yells into the phone, “Nelson, I don’t give a rat’s ass. I got no use for this shit.” The phone cackles on until Carla yells “No WAY, ASSHOLE,” then mashes the phone into the receiver. She explains that her ex has jabbed Kenny, her accountant lover, with an assortment of Ginsu knives.
“That idiot bitch wants me to bail his ass. I need to go straight to the judge and offer myself as a hostile witness.”
“Ever heard of restraining orders?”
“Wouldn’t work.”
“How’s Kenny?” Hawk asks.
“Unhappy, I bet.”
Hawk sits there, looking at the blurry brontosaurus on the screen as Carla phones the cops for the hospital number, and then calls her punctured accountant, who is in stable condition at Mount Sinai.
“Zoey-girl, my dancing star,” Carla says, “I need to go out for a little while. You be good and eat your string beans.”
“I would never put anything green in my mouth,” Zoey says.
“Not even a lime slurpie or a green candy cane?” Hawk says.
“Mommy, what did my father do now?” Zoey asks.
“Something he shouldn’t have. You eat a few string beans, honey, and finish watching the movie with Hawk. And later I want you to tell me all about it, okay?”
But Zoey runs and jumps around the heaps of merchandise: rolls of red-white-and-blue ribbon, drooping balloons, boxes of refrigerator magnets, old promo buttons for The Fonz, Bay City Rollers, Starsky and Hutch, strings of chili-pepper lightbulbs, logoed coffee mugs or ashtrays, ceramic Statue of Liberty lamps that Hawk’s hooked up around the room like holiday lights, Santa Claus on the Cross T-shirts, sad boxes of Earth Day balloons, helium canisters, hand trucks.
“You’re not a hunter, you’re a gatherer,” Carla says, looking for her boots.
“The stuff’s not mine. I just try to sell it,” Hawk says.
“You know, you could fix this place up,” she says, rummaging around. “It has potential. Sammy’s good enough not to charge much.”
Hawk wants to say that with all the boxes he’s hauled up the stairs, Sammy should pay him for living there. Or at least pick up the utilities. Sammy probably figures if Hawk lives there it protects his junk from getting robbed. And he only takes two bills for rent. They count out at a show and Sammy deducts Hawk’s rent from a pile of thirty grand.
“Maybe, like, we could fix it up together,” Hawk says to Carla.
Carla tightens her boot laces, picks up her denim jacket, and stares at him.
“You telling me now you want me to move in here?”
Hawk shrugs. He hadn’t planned on asking her. It just slipped out.
Carla tucks her narrow beaded braid behind her ear.
“You could still see whoever you want,” Hawk says.
“Obviously,” she says.
“You know what I’m saying, Carla. There’s plenty of room. You could move your stuff in one cab ride. We could fix it up nice together.”
Carla’s gotta be tight on money, trying to work as much as she can and raise a kid in the city by herself. She never raises a finger when Hawk pays the tabs.
“You wouldn’t have to pay rent. Zoey’s here a lot anyway.”
“You know what I like about you?” Carla asks, and puckers her lips at him.
“What?”
“Your timing,” she says, and slips out the door to see Kenny.
“What was your favorite part of the movie?” Carla asks Zoey later.
“The part when I sat on Hawk’s lap,” she says.
“That wasn’t in the movie,” Carla says.
“I know, silly,” Zoey says, and laughs.
However the chips fall with Carla, Hawk’s a goner over Zoey. So beautiful, and knows it. For a while she watches the video intently, and then she leans against him and falls asleep, snoring gently. Hawk turns down the sound and finds relief and comfort in watching the smiling green dinosaurs munch on the tips of trees.
When he babysits he clowns around with Zoey for hours and reads her Curious George Goes to the Aquarium and Winnie the Pooh and Babar Sees the World. He gives her piggyback rides, plays Go-Fish for jelly beans, Hawk pretending to feed her stuffed kangaroo, Hopabout, the jelly beans between games. He traded buttons for the blue kangaroo at a block party with a guy behind a Quantas Airlines Dream Vacation Getaway table. He bought her a tricycle on the street and jogged after her in the park, her starry helmet pulling away, and she laughed into hysterics when Hawk meowed at passing dogs.
She does love running around the loft in her cycle helmet and bumblebee tights or short polka-dotted pink and orange dresses. She tramples him or uses his back as an easel to make her watercolors with caption bubbles she fills in later. Or she makes him up in drag with Carla’s orange lipstick, giggling while he pretends sleep, then trails behind as he walks to the bathroom where he’ll look in the mirror and jump back.
Smelling like daisies, she finds dirt on him even after he’s washed. Street grime between his toes and in the crevices behind his knees. She clips his toenails and files under them. She pokes around his ears with moist Q-tips, laughing with half-feigned disgust at him, holding her nose and saying “pee-you” and “grrr-oss.” There she is with a halo telling him you’re a freak and you stink and he gets this tug in his chest and just says twinkle, twinkle. She cleans around the bumps and scratches on his knuckles. No one has ever paid him such close attention. She’ll trace the Q-tip along the whitened scar where his ear juts from his head.
He was a few years older than Zoey that morning, flying down a hill on a bike in Van Cortlandt Park, when he snagged his ear on a wire. Taken to the emergency room by some kid’s parents, shirt cupping the dripping flap of ear to the side of his head, he entered a whirl of lights and a corridor that echoed like a refrigerator. A nurse held an anaesthetic mask and told him to breathe deeply and count back from ten.
“Looks like you’re gonna keep it,” the doctor said when he woke. “But kid, you’re gonna have one cauliflower ear.”
For years he stood on the toilet counting his stitch marks.
“He’s practicing to be an artist,” Fat Frankie says. “Youse heard of Vince van Go. But have youse heard about Hawk van Went?”