Zoey sits on Hawk’s lap investigating his nose hairs with a magnifying glass, saying “dis-gust-ing” and “pee-you.” Then she’s making a mess of Carla’s carpet trying to eat fruit cocktail with plastic chopsticks. The fruit cocktail is 90 percent squishy grapes, though the can has all kinds of peaches and pears on its label. Grapes must be cheaper than pears. With Zoey on his lap and six grand for Armand, his problems seem small.
When the buzzer rings Carla gets up, thinking it’s the Chinese-food delivery guy. She opens to the chain and then says, “Nelson. Damn it. How the fuck did you …”
“My friend got me out.”
“You don’t have any friends.”
“Remember Fitz?”
“That freckled bitch?”
“He pulled some strings.”
“You mean he ratted some ass.”
“Babycakes, I came to see my kid. Now open the fucking door.”
“You ain’t coming in here.”
“I’ll kick down that chain. Babycakes, you know I will.”
“Don’t babycakes me. Aren’t you in enough trouble already, sticking Ginsu knives into people?”
“Go figure. This lawyer says I committed a ‘crime against the state.’ I try to explain things to that fuck you been balling and he mouths off at me and then they act like I stabbed ‘the state’?”
“Go away, you’re bad news.”
“Babycakes, I’m gonna count,” Nelson says.
There’s a moment of quiet, Hawk about to say ‘hell, might as well let him in before he busts the door,’ and the hinges throb.
“One.”
Then a crash as the chain flies off with bits of plaster. Zoey turns into Hawk’s chest.
“Happy now, babycakes?”
“I said don’t call me that.”
“I said I wanted to see my kid.”
“Okay, you saw her. Now get your sorry ass out of here before I call the cops.”
“I was hoping you’d lend me a couple of bucks.”
“You need to seek psychiatric fucking help.”
Nelson looks around at the bare apartment. Other than her cheap couch and a futon there’s just the few posters Hawk gave her from the Statue of Liberty Festival, the earth as seen from space from Earth Day, the Happy One-Hundredth Birthday from the Brooklyn Bridge centennial, and the God Bless America on July 4th.
“You getting patriotic, babycakes?”
“You and I ain’t talking.”
“How about you, Mickey Mouse?”
“He ain’t talking either.”
“Everyone loves a parade,” Hawk says.
Nelson’s hair is slicked back in a ducktail, cigarettes in the rolled-up sleeve of his T-shirt, leather boots, an upside-down horseshoe earring, what looks like a Rolex, and he’s carrying a dirty Pan-Am bag you’d find in the trash. He wets a loose strand of hair with one finger and pastes it behind his ear. There’s an American flag tattooed on his forearm.
“Hello, Zoey-girl,” he says, looking at his girl faced away from him on Hawk’s lap. “Gimme a kiss, Zoey-girl.”
Except for an unusually thick skull Nelson isn’t that large. Nowhere near Mr. Skinhead’s size. But his broad torso and thick arms look inflated, the veins on his biceps like twisted and tied-off necks of a balloon.
“I wouldn’t lend you any money if I had any,” Carla says. “Sell your watch.”
“My mother gave it to me. You got any dineros, Mickey?”
“Just enough to eat and play the horses with.”
“Just enough … Look, gimme your wallet. Unless you wanna start something.”
“I don’t have a wallet.”
Nelson walks to Hawk, strokes Zoey’s hair. She peeks out at him with a squinty, hostile look and a tear on her cheek and turns back into Hawk’s shoulder.
Hawk reaches in his pocket for a clump of bills. “I guess I’d rather not start anything,” he says. “Would fifty dollars help?”
“Hawk, you better not give him a cent,” Carla says.
Nelson just grabs the clump from Hawk’s hand along with press passes he traded for at the convention that make him a reporter for both CBS and NBC.
“I should open a can of ass-whip on you.”
Just then the bell rings and the delivery guy, a large, blond, tattooed kid, visibly stoned, stands in the doorway. He looks at the busted chain and the chips of plaster and press passes on the rug.
“Everything okay?” he asks.
“Everything’s hunky-dory,” Nelson says, counting out twenty-five bucks from Hawk’s clump and taking the Chinese out of his hand.
“Ma’am. You sure everything’s okay?” the delivery guy asks.
“Yeah, great,” Carla says.
“He was just leaving,” Hawk says.
Zoey still has her head turned in against Hawk’s shoulder.
Nelson stops, turns, and walks back.
He stands in front of Hawk, looking at him and Zoey.
“Hawk,” he says, and snickers. “You know what?”
“What?”
“Don’t use that tone with me.”
“What tone?”
“This tone,” Nelson says, and jabs Hawk hard in the eye.
“Hey, now, ain’t no call for that,” says the delivery guy.
“Learn to zip it, little man,” Nelson says to Hawk. Then points his fingers like a gun. “I’ll see you another time.”
Hawk puts his hand to his eye, already swelling.
“Lighten up, kid,” Nelson says to the delivery guy, who looks like he’s got a notion to do something. “I’ll walk you out. I already ate. That’s my daughter. Cute kid, right? Takes after her old man.”
The door shuts and locks but the chain’s off and will need screws and plaster. Carla looks at Hawk’s eye, shakes her head.
“Get yourself some ice.”
“It’s nothing.”
“‘He was just leaving, Don’t you have more sense than he does?”
Hawk shrugs.
“You’re cute when you’re mad.”
“You want him sticking Ginsu knives in your ass?”
“No.”
“Pair of idiot bitches.”
“Man, he’s a few French fries short of a happy meal.”
“Gimme a cigarette.”
Hawk flicks open his Zippo, which a guy threw in a poker pot one night, king of hearts on one side. He snap-lights a Marlboro for Carla, who snorts at the sight. He lights one for himself. Wasn’t it her ex that just popped him in the face?
“He get a lot of your money?”
“Nah.”
“Good thing you’re rich.”
“It comes in handy.”
Carla’s furious, pacing around her couch, taking fierce drags from the cigarette.
“Look at you.”
“He hardly hit me,” Hawk says.
“This time. Shit.”
“Easy as I bruise, I better not enter Golden Gloves.”
“Busting my door. Zoey, come here.”
Zoey jumps up onto her mother’s lap and hugs her.
“How’d he get out so fast?” Hawk asks.
“Some snitch he knows.”
“He on some sort of James Dean kick?”
Later, after they’ve taken turns reading to Zoey and she’s asleep on the bed snoring gently, arms around Hopabout, they sit on Carla’s couch.
“Why’d you marry Ginsu anyway?” Hawk asks.
“Nelson? Shit, I thought he was funny.”
Hawk takes a sip of Jack Daniels from a plastic cup, passes it to Carla.
“Really?”
“At the time. Like, we were in a restaurant and there was this Navy dude all decked out and Nelson taps him on the shoulder and says, ‘Waiter, could we have some more garlic bread?’”
“That’s pretty funny,” Hawk says.
“He was a hard worker, too. I was stripping a night or two after work and he found out. He’d come and make change from my G-string with a hundred and then give it all back to me five bucks at a time. We worked all over the place, welding mostly, until I got pregnant. I thought he was handsome.”
“He’s almost handsome,” Hawk says, making herky-jerky moves, dragging one arm.
“Shit,” Carla says, runs a hand through her hair.
“He’s handsome by Cro-Magnon standards. His eyes are too far apart. His skull is too thick by a half a million years. He’s midway in Darwin’s series. Maybe he could be Mr. Cro-Magnon America.”
“You think people will change because you’re ready to,” Carla says. “Only sometimes they change in the wrong direction.”
“Seymour, guy who takes care of my car, he says that personality-wise positive change only comes about when it’s a relief to you. When you can’t stand the shit you’ve been doing to yourself and it feels better to be another way.”
“Nelson likes how he is.”