Carla makes a couple of moves on a spare piece of glass tubing to recheck the torches while the Z of Seymour’s NUBIAN CZAR cools on a wire screen. The flame swells orange and narrows into triangles of blue and white. Carla’s been reading a Time-Life book about the history of fire and now she’s informing Hawk about some of the ways that fire has gone out of modern lives.
“People—I mean, those who can afford it—warm themselves by every imaginable form of artificial heat,” Carla says without turning her head. “Fire—actually flames—it’s an important thing that’s missing for many people.”
“Ain’t that the truth,” Hawk says, slumped against the plastic, leopard-spotted sofa across from her work desk, a slow-swiveling fan periodically cooling his face from the dead, late August air. Carla’s gleaming three-worlds tattoo dances as she torches the glass and moves with it and he feels himself crashing from the Amtrak, him and Mikey passing back a jug of red wine and smoking Marlboros without talking much in the dark hours.
When Hawk slipped into a doze he watched processions of buttons dance on upside-down peace-sign legs in the cupped palms of severed hands. Then he was floating over the city, dangling from an enormous bouquet of silver and green hearts, reporters snapping away as he landed in the middle of an elegant rooftop party. His picture on the cover of the Post and the Daily News gliding down. A dwarf in a tuxedo and white gloves appeared with a tray and said, “Some delicate crabmeat, my man?” Only when Hawk reached out for an hors d’oeuvre it turned into a packet of Sammy’s money. The dwarf burst into laughter and Hawk snapped awake.
Wordlessly, Mikey handed him the jug wine and Hawk stared into the rushing dark, seeing the outlines of his own face. There was nothing for Hawk to do but pay Armand and Phil with Sammy’s money and hope he could somehow return the whole eight thousand to the safe before the old man noticed, assuming he was above ground and alert enough to notice anything.
It takes seven or eight moves to complete each letter, several jumps and drops, and you have to do the whole letter over if you mess up one of the moves. The hardest thing, Carla says, are Chinese characters.
“Depending on fire for heat and sustenance is part of some collective human memory, going back to the time we lived in caves.”
“Like Raquel Welch or Fred Flintstone?”
“Be serious a minute, okay? It’s only a couple of hundred years that fire’s gone out of our lives. Fire’s more than heat.”
When Carla’s done attaching the A to the Z, with just an R to finish and attach, she joins him on the sofa for a sensemilla break, lifts her heavy work apron over her shoulders.
“Not half bad,” Hawk says, handing her the jay.
“For something that comes out of someone’s backyard. Carlos grows it on his rooftop from mail-order seeds from Holland. Twenty-five seeds to an envelope, each guaranteed to grow a plant.”
Her goggles hang around her neck above her sweat-soaked tank top. Hawk’s visualized her like this so many ways on the road and now she’s in front of him. He’s thought about the things he could say, how he’d be careful with his words. Now he runs his finger around her sweaty nipple but stops when she shifts slightly away from him, glances in Zoey’s direction.
The little girl is seated at a low desk, made of cinder blocks and boards, against Carlos’s letter-cutting machine. The lamp on the boards, over which she’s spread books and papers and crayons, lights up her red hair.
“I saw some of your convention on TV,” Carla tells Hawk. “Like you were saying. Everyone had on buttons. You never notice.”
“What a fiasco.”
“That Quayle’s a piece of work.”
“Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” Hawk says in a spooky voice. “They’ve probably already got him making fund-raising speeches all across the north of Idaho.”
Carla picks up a blowtorch, tests the flame a few times, sets it down.
“You guys make out?”
Hawk would just as soon not talk about the show, since it puts him in a negative light, but the weight of his dilemmas and the weed loosens his tongue.
“Get this: first me, Mario, and Mikey get arrested and spend half the night in tent city. Then the whole gang gets busted.”
“Busted?”
“Nine A.M. and the FBI breaks into the condo, thinking they’re stinging some drug organization. German shepherds barking and a swarm of crewcuts waving guns and flashing badges. All us wearing nothing but underwear, dogs sniffing up our legs.”
Carla snorts and shakes her head.
“The DEA man knocks a basket of plastic fruit off the mantelpiece. ‘What a fiasco,’ he says. You could tell they were disappointed they couldn’t shoot anybody. Jugheads squatting by boxes of buttons. ‘Shit,’ one guy says, ‘some tip. Impound this garbage.’ Guy finds a bag of Jesse Jackson buttons.”
“Jesse Jackson buttons at a Republican convention?” Carla says, wipes away sweat, walks to check the cooling letters.
“You cross his face out with a marker in front of the delegates. They go apeshit over that stuff,” Hawk says. “The FBI man says, ‘Who you guys for anyway?’ They tie the stock in evidence bags and old man Norman starts in about his rights and they cuff him and he does a night in jail.”
“For possession of Jesse Jackson buttons?”
“They found some bogus press passes he was selling. In the USA Today ‘Convention Watch’ there was a paragraph on Pass-O-Gate. They were investigating it like an assassination attempt.”
“Okay, I get it, jeez,” Carla says, and whistles at Zoey, who hardly looks up.
“She really digs those books you got her,” Carla says.
“I like buying her stuff,” Hawk says.
Carla doesn’t answer, but wanders to the open window, Hawk following. She puts one foot on the sill and massages her knee. The warm night air only a little cooler than inside. Across the street there’s a giant flashing Citgo sign. Carla says she finds old neon units and tosses them out the window as a sacrifice to the Great Neon God.
A clear night to clear his debts with Armand and Phil.
Hawk looks down the street at the slate gray Hudson.
“You think anymore about what I said?” he asks. “You know, about fixing up Sammy’s loft together?”
The area around Carla’s eyes is broad white circles from the goggles against her grime-blackened face, like some raccoon.
“I look at you,” she says, “and don’t know if we’re in the same tribe.”
“Is it my hair? You know, it doesn’t have to be Romeo and Juliet.”
“No shit,” she says, and looks at him from an angle, braid hanging straight down.
“It ain’t like I’m about to try a set of Ginsus on anyone,” Hawk says.
“No,” Carla says. “I suppose not.”
“I’m just asking if you’re open. I mean, open to trying.”
“The way you live,” Carla says. “I don’t know. We’ll talk about it another time.”
“What time is it, anyway?”
“Six, maybe.”
Carla stretches and turns to check the letters on the wire grid and puts the work apron back over her shoulders.
“Any chance that sign will be ready tonight?”
“I’ve got about a half hour on the R. Everything oughta be cool when I send the neon through.”
“I’d pay to see Seymour’s face when you hook it up. We could run it by together.”
“Maybe.”
“Look, I gotta few things to handle,” Hawk says. “Why don’t you and Zoey come by the loft later. I’ve got plenty of Jack. We can talk.”
“It’ll be a few hours before I finish and then I gotta clean up a bit.”
“Cab’s on me,” Hawk continues, laying a twenty on the arm of the couch. When she doesn’t move he lays another twenty on top of the other. “You could pick up a pizza.”
The swiveling fan shifts the bills on the couch arm and Carla looks at the twenties about to slide off and reaches out and puts them in her pocket. Then she puts her work apron back over her shoulders, and lowers her goggles, and looks at Hawk like a spacewoman and grins.
“Hi Hawk,” says Zoey, rubbing her eyes and stretching her arms.
“Hey monkey,” Hawk says. “You were working hard over there. I didn’t want to break your concentration.”
“I’ve been thinking about my retirement plan,” Zoey says. “Do you have any ideas?”
“Honey, I told you that you can’t plan for your retirement until you’ve had a job.”
“Tell the driver to get off at Dyckman and just a few blocks up on the left,” Hawk says. “There’s Mama Mia’s on the corner. It’s gotta be the best pizza in the city.”
“It wouldn’t bother me if you cleaned that kitchen of yours a little either.”
“Can do. Zoey, you make sure your mother gets us pizza and sodas.”
“Okay,” Zoey says.
“I mean, you talk about fixing up that loft of yours but I ain’t even seen you so much as rinse your own sink,” Carla says.
“Alright already.”
“Christ, why don’t you start by getting some Drano and stuff. Unless you’re planning on throwing a party for the roaches.”
“I said I’m all over it,” Hawk says.