Button Man Read online

  Hawk gets to Cannoli’s late and lit. The bar is made of blue glass with lights beneath. When Mario brings a shot of Cuervo, Hawk downs it and flaps his arms like Jack Nicholson in Easy Rider and makes a sound like the brakes on an 18-wheeler and most of the bar cracks up. He takes out a stash of lottery tickets—the kind with lemons you can scratch right there—and tosses some to Jep; Mario; Mikey; Jep’s wife Sarah; and her friend Sue, saying “sweets,” like Laszlo sprinkling chips.

  Next to him a couple argues about whether France is north or south of Spain and concludes it doesn’t matter unless you’re in a hurry. Jep smiles, his head so clogged with facts you fear for his mind. He qualified for Jeopardy but flunked the personality test.

  Now he claws at his back.

  “I studied like crazy for that tryout,” Jep says. “I used to memorize the World Book during commercials. I read that Hershel Walker did push-ups during commercials, so I felt like we’d bonded. I’d think of him doing push-ups while I memorized useless facts.”

  Jep scrapes by. He got several master’s degrees but shelved his dissertation in American history a couple of years back when he got steady adjunct work at two community colleges. He says his classes are so dead he should practice his lectures at Potter’s Field. When he’s not teaching he works for Sammy and Norman testing their products on the street—T-shirts, coffee mugs, visors—as long as they’re for causes he believes in, which means that on any given issue he only makes half the money he might.

  Sarah has her hair done straight up in a bun and wound around in an African batik headdress. Jep pays for their drinks and a banana split with his roll, pulling the wad out like a bull’s-eye.

  “Since when do teachers have money?” Susan says.

  “They sold buttons at the Democratic convention and it was a Georgia peach,” Sarah says.

  “Like street vendors? Me, I couldn’t sell. I’d be nervous if I had a cake in a cake show. I wouldn’t be able to stand it if people didn’t buy from me.”

  “I can’t stand it either,” Hawk says.

  “Hawk, you’re going to the Republican convention too, right?” Sarah says. “Not that there’s much difference between the two. Does either of them have a viewpoint? I mean, are there any ideas at all in this campaign?”

  “According to the The American Voter,” Jep says, “only 2 percent of American voters have any ideological position. You catch Dukakis trying to convince the press that he’s not a liberal? It’s a personality derby.”

  “Get me a mint julep,” Hawk says.

  “Dukakis a liberal?” Sarah says, practically choking on the banana split. “Give me a break. Just because he used to dress like he was in the Mod Squad doesn’t make him a liberal. He’s ethnic preppy.”

  “The Republicans win either way,” Sue says. “As the good Dr. Thompson wrote in the Voice the other day, it’s ‘the meanest yuppie who ever lived against a robotic Greek.’ After the election the homeless kids can say, ‘Hooray, my capital gains taxes are safe,’ the people in soup kitchens can say, ‘Yippee, my family values are safe.’”

  “Yo Jep,” Hawk says, remembering the bag with the leather briefcase. “I got you something to hold your things in. It’s made of genuine newspaper.”

  11

  MR. CRO-MAGNON AMERICA

  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, g
reat,” 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.”

  PART TWO

  12

  A BOUQUET OF BALLOONS

  Running her hand over his stomach, Carla says, “Hawk, you know what, you have a nice little body.”

  TV light frosts her face.

  “Just what every manly man wants to hear,” Hawk says.

  Carla exhales a stream of smoke, stares at the ceiling, and Hawk kisses her forehead and cheek and then licks his way around the outlines of her tattoo, a Hopi Indian design of the three worlds from a necklace that brought her luck. She had the pattern tattooed on her shoulder so she wouldn’t lose it.

  “How’s it taste tonight?” Carla says.

  “Salty, like luck.”

  “Yeah, maybe,” she says, and rolls over onto her back, puts her cigarette in her mouth and both hands in Hawk’s bushy hair and guides his head.

  His tongue swirls the fine hairs down her stomach. Then he goes to work in earnest for a time until she twists and shoves his head away. Hawk wipes his lips against her thigh and gazes at the whiteness of her body against the deep crimson sheets he bought from some mousey truck thief at the IHOB. He could use some matching pillow cases. Then Carla reaches for a tube of something next to the bed and squirts it onto her hand and massages his nuggets with it and then strokes him off.

  After, in the dark, covers slowly drawn off him until he’s lying wide awake in his drawers, Carla having curled the blankets off of him and snoring, Hawk sees Ginsu coming at him, snatching money out of his hand, jabbing his face, threatening his nice little body. He remembers Carla’s look when Nelson snatched his money, embarrassed for him. Hell, there was too much scar tissue around Ginsu’s eyes. What was he supposed to do, fight the numskull? And he lies there, constipated for sleep in its dog-hot borderlands of busy dozing, where squirrels scamper along rotten branches and shadowy figures threaten and you can’t stop them, interrupted only by a trail of flashing clock numbers—3:42, 4:27, 5:05. The irony of the phrase, “try and get some sleep.”

  You try.

  So often he lies there until the hard morning light slants in. And people say a place gets the morning light like it’s a good thing.

  Now, having dozed or been so close to dozing he doesn’t know where he is, Hawk hears shrieks and sobs—Zoey—and he starts up, a spike of pain in his foot, his eye pulsing. He sees Zoey’s image in the gray light, looking like she’s dangling from a bouquet of Earth Day and July Fourth balloons they inflated the night before. Shower running. Zoey has her hands in balloon strings and can’t get free.

  Barely wrapped in a Jobs Peace and Freedom towel, Carla scrambles over stuffed Mickey Mouses and Donald Ducks. Together they untangle the twenty-odd balloons. Zoey’s bony frame squirms. The little girl stands, passive in her apple green jumpsuit, smudged from the dust of cardboard boxes and piles of product, rubbing wet eyes while Hawk untangles the balloons.

  Carla smoothes Zoey’s wild hair and wipes her face with the corner of her towel. Both ladies give off that it’s Hawk’s fault. Zoey struggles from his grasp, weeps harder, crying at the sound of her own sobs, while the heart-shaped balloons look down on them.

  “You okay?” he says, squatting by Zoey. “Want a Dove Bar?”

  “Before breakfast?” Carla asks.

  “It’s milk,” Hawk says.

  Zoey peeks at Hawk, eyes still puffed and frightened and red, but not above the concept of ice cream. Hawk bought a hundred fake Dove Bars for seventeen cents each and moved fifty the first day at a buck a pop.

  “It might help me to relax,” Zoey says, and after a few bites. “Hey, who are you trying to fool? That is not a real Dove Bar.”

  “Not every fish,” Hawk says, puffing his cheeks and closing his fingertips like a fish’s mouth, “can be a goldfish.”

  “G-g-goldfish are orange,” Zoey says, sul
len again.

  “Sometimes they’re purple,” Hawk says.

  This kid is worth a thousand street vendors.

  Maybe she’ll let him buy her gummy sour-things and pink lemonade balls so big he’ll have to crack them so the pieces will fit in her mouth and read to her from Curious George Comes to America. He’d like to stand over one of the bridges in the row-boat lake in Central Park and feed Ritz crackers to the ducks. But its a nice day to take the cart out and he should keep his economic momentum going through the weekend and the Broadway Festival, where you’ve got to make five bills. If the next few weeks go okay and he has any kind of payday at the Republican convention he can settle all of his accounts.

  For the Broadway Festival Sammy printed some event T-shirts and buttons, but will go about half with button boards from the convention and old buttons from Earth Day, the No Nukes Rally, July Fourth products, and a variety of shows, cleaning shop. Hawk’s thinking he’ll bring one of his canisters and see if he can fire-sale off a batch of his Earth Day and July Fourth balloons at a buck a pop, since he doesn’t have to cut Sammy in on those.

  “Damn,” Hawk says, picking up the lotion he was wanked with. “Aloe-Vera, nongreasy, scented insect repellent.”

  “Oooops,” Carla says, and shrugs while Hawk stares bug-eyed down the ravine of her chest where the towel’s knotted.

  “Damned balloons.”

  “Everyone likes balloons.”

  “Shit.”

  “Why do they call you Hawk?” Zoey asks, red eyes bright.

  “Well, young lady. Bozo was already taken.”

  “Are you bad news like my Daddy?”

  Hawk kneels beside her.

  “Your Daddy’s not so bad,” he says. “He’s just going through a phase.”

  “What’s a phase?”

  Hawk hesitates.

  “You remember you had diapers, honey?” Carla says.

  “I had diapers,” Zoey says, and nods. “Yes, I did have diapers when I was a little girl. That’s true.”

  “The diapers,” Carla and Hawk say at once, “were a phase.”