KEITH GIVES JOE A RIDE TO JUNIOR’S AND SAYS HE’LL BE BACK to pick him up in the morning. When it was built in 1910, the big two-story Craftsman was one of the nicest houses on the block. Now it’s a wreck, the foundation cracked, the frame made flimsy by termites and dry rot. The cheap apartment buildings that surround it went up in the sixties and seventies. They used to be full of Filipinos, but these days it’s Guatemalans, Salvadorians, and Hondurans. Late at night Joe hears the old house groan, ready to lay down its burden, ready to fall in on itself and get some rest.
Robert and Candy are smoking weed on the porch, lazing on a cracked vinyl couch. They rent a room on the first floor. One or the other might be on the run.
“You look like a working man,” Robert says. “God bless working men.” He offers Joe the joint.
“Nah, I’m gonna be in and out,” Joe says.
Candy strums a ukulele. “Working man,” she sings. “Working man. Kissing the ass of the ruling class.”
Stepping into the house is like stepping into an oven. Joe feels like he’s struggling to breathe through a rag tied over his nose and mouth. Junior is lying shirtless on the living room floor in front of a big industrial fan. He weighs three hundred pounds, and his tits sag like an old woman’s.
“Got my money?” he says.
Joe hands him sixty dollars and promises more tomorrow.
Junior sits up and holds out a machete. “Look at this.”
“I’ve got to grab a shower and get going,” Joe says.
“Come on, check it out.”
Joe takes the machete and swings it back and forth.
“That’s a barong,” Junior says. “Weapon of choice for Moro suicide fighters in the Philippines during the rebellion against the Americans.”
Junior’s family has been in the U.S. for a hundred years, but lately he’s been getting in touch with his heritage. A few months ago he took to wearing a pointy straw hat he bought at a Philippine cultural festival, said it was the traditional hat of his people, and now it’s this machete.
“Suicide fighters?” Joe says.
“Crazy fucking Muslims,” Junior says. “They charged the American riflemen carrying just these blades after wrapping rope around their arms and legs to slow the bleeding in case they got shot. Fucking badasses, bro. Fucking jihad.”
You don’t know shit about jihad, Joe thinks. He hands back the machete and asks Junior what he’s going to do with it.
“You can do a million things with a machete,” Junior says.
Joe’s room is on the second floor of the house, up a creaking staircase. He unlocks the padlock that secures the door. The room is eight feet by twelve. Big enough some days, nowhere near big enough others. The single tiny window looks out on the pink stucco of the apartment building next door. The bed, dresser, card table, and folding chair were here when he moved in. He’s proud of not needing anything more, proud that everything he owns fits into a backpack.
He turns on a fan to stir the hot air and gathers up his kit bag, towel, and a clean shirt and jeans. The door to the bathroom down the hall is locked, somebody in there, so he has to shower in the one downstairs. The tub, toilet, and floor are disgusting. Junior has a maid in once a month, but that’s not often enough with eight people living, cooking, and shitting in one place. The secret is not to focus on anything. You have to get in and get out without looking too closely at whatever the hell that is on the tile next to the toilet. The hot water runs out while he’s washing his hair.
Returning to the second floor, he hears a door open as he reaches the top step. He peeks around the corner to see Janey the Jesus Freak, who lives in the room at the end of the hall, come out of the bathroom. Janey watches fire-and-brimstone preachers on TV and slides tracts with titles like “How to Get to Heaven” and “Now the End Begins” under everyone’s doors. Any conversation with her turns into a sermon, so Joe waits until she’s in her room before going to his.
He opens a can of tuna. He keeps his food in his room, cold stuff in a foam cooler, because the house is full of thieves. The ice in the cooler has melted, but his Diet Cokes haven’t gotten too warm yet. He drinks one with his sandwich, Fritos, and banana.
After he finishes eating, he carries the cooler down to the kitchen, fills it with ice from the filthy refrigerator, and takes it back up to his room. Robert and Candy are with Junior in the living room when he heads out. They’re watching a show about people who live in the Alaskan wilderness, Robert idly waving the machete over his head.
“Later, Joe,” they all say like it’s some kind of shared joke.
Joe splurges on an Uber to Wahid’s liquor store. It’s on Sixth east of MacArthur Park, next to a steam-table Chinese restaurant with a health department rating of C. A steel grate plastered with ads for Tecate and Marlboro protects the front window.
Wahid’s behind the counter. His family came from Pakistan twenty years ago, when he was twelve. Joe met him when they were both doing phone sales, pushing solar setups out of a boiler room in Glendale. Wahid was also clerking at the family store and driving a taxi, and Joe was bartending at night. They bonded over the fact that they were both hustlers, and kept in touch after the boiler room shut down. Wahid eventually began giving Joe occasional shifts at the store.
Wahid is wearing a dress shirt and tie this evening and has his Pakistani music turned up loud. “My friend, good to see you,” he says to Joe.
“What’s happening?” Joe says. “You getting married?”
Four more Pakistanis, dressed up like Wahid, spill out of the stockroom, laughing and singing along to the song that’s playing.
“It’s my mother’s birthday,” Wahid says. “My nephew was supposed to work, but he’s sick. Thank you for coming in.”
“Anytime,” Joe says.
“Here are my cousins from San Diego. Guys, this is my buddy Joe.”
“Hey, Joe, where you going with that gun in your hand?” one of the cousins sings.
Wahid says he’ll be back around midnight. He follows his cousins out to a minivan parked in front of the store. They’re all still singing as the van drives away.
Joe turns off the music and settles in behind the register. A TV mounted on the wall above the beer cooler shows the views from four security cameras, three inside the store, one outside. A sign above it says SMILE.
A man comes in and buys a quart of Olde English. A girl pushing a stroller uses an EBT card to pay for half a gallon of milk and some Flaming Hot Cheetos and counts out nickels and dimes from a Ziploc bag for diapers.
Between customers Joe plays poker on his phone. He used to watch tournaments on TV and got to thinking it might be an easy way to make some money. He started going to Commerce and playing low-stakes hold ’em, but every time he sat down at a table, he got his ass handed to him. Playing there wasn’t like playing with friends. Everyone was so goddamn serious, telling him to shut up whenever he made a joke. And he discovered winning had little to do with luck. It was all about numbers, and he has no head for numbers. He also might have done better if he hadn’t drunk so much while playing.
He sells a pint of whiskey, a pint of tequila, two cans of beans, a dozen tortillas, and a jar of instant coffee. And lottery tickets. Lots of lottery tickets. Scratchers, Powerball, SuperLotto, Fantasy Five.
An old man in a Dodgers cap steps up to the counter and says, “Cuatro.”
“Cuatro what?” Joe says.
“Where’s Wahid?”
“It’s his mom’s birthday.”
“He knows what I want.”
“Well, he’s not here.”
The old man blinks his watery red eyes. The wrinkles on his face look like furrows left by a rake drawn through dust. “Four of them little vodkas,” he finally says. Joe grabs four Smirnoffs from a display of airplane bottles. “And one of the dollar scratchers.”
The old man methodically scrapes the ticket with the edge of a quarter. As each number is revealed, he brings the ticket close to his eyes and squints to see if it’s a match. Not tonight.
At ten Joe steps outside for a cigarette, smokes it standing in the doorway. Another hot summer night like this one comes back to him so clearly he flinches, another night when he stood smoking in a doorway, fluorescent light behind him, watching traffic roll past. He was young then, and happy about something, but that’s all he remembers. Couldn’t tell you what street, what year. These moments when the time line of his life doubles back and crosses itself always come out of nowhere, sucker punches.
A speed freak scuttles toward him, a little zombie girl looking over her shoulder and mumbling to herself, tugging at her oversize Minnie Mouse T-shirt and swiping at the black tears crawling down her cheeks.
“Can I use your bathroom?” she asks. She walks in a circle, stuck in fifth gear.
“It’s out of order,” Joe lies.
“Let me have a cigarette.”
“This is my last one.”
The girl scoffs at this and zooms off down the sidewalk, collides with a woman carrying a basket of laundry, screeches, whirls, and disappears around the corner.
Joe sells beer and a bag of chips; beer and Gatorade; beer, a bar of soap, and a pack of tube socks. A woman asks if he’ll break a hundred. No bills over twenty. He IDs a kid for cigarettes and gets told to fuck off. Around eleven he’s staring at the TV above the cooler and sees someone tagging the Tecate banner outside. He runs out and chases the asshole off.
Things slow down after that. He plays more poker. He spins a quarter on the counter, clocking how long he can get it to go before it falls. Wahid returns at twelve-fifteen with one of his cousins. They’re both drunk.
“Everything cool?” Wahid asks.
“Nothing too crazy,” Joe replies.
Wahid gives him a hundred in twenties and says to take a pint of whatever he wants. He walks back to Junior’s, cracks the Wild Turkey on the way. Everyone’s still out on the street, trying to cool down. Old folks gossiping, kids riding scooters, teenagers groping against cars. Tonight, Joe loves them all. Whiskey’s good that way sometimes.