Chapter 3: The House Call

Hollis came down the alley and heard the trouble through his own open door.

He knew the loud one before he was all the way inside. The fat guy. The man had a first name and Hollis had used it, but somewhere in the back office of Hollis’s brain there was only ever the one label, and the label had been earned. Hollis had told him to stay off the block twice. The man had not taken it either time.

Hollis stopped in the doorway and looked in.

The shirt was up. The back was to the door. Shoulder piece — a phoenix, or what a phoenix turns into on a man who lives the way this one lived. Hollis had done that tattoo four months back, with a two-inch needle and a lot of patience. It had settled, the way things settle on people who won’t take care of them. That was all it had done.

“You did this,” the fat guy said.

“Did what.”

“Ruined it.” He was trying to turn his head far enough to see his own shoulder blade. “This whole line is blown. Look at the edge.”

Quin was behind the counter with his elbow on the register and his chin in his hand, watching the phoenix like it was a lecture he’d already sat through.

“Which line,” Quin said.

“Are you — “

“Show me the line.”

“Hey,” Hollis said.

The fat guy spun and found him, and for half a second he looked like a man caught yelling at nobody in a parking lot. Then he remembered the job and put his face back on.

“Owner,” he said. “There we go. Somebody who pays for what his — “

“I’m not paying.”

“ — for what his people do.”

“He’s not my people,” Hollis said.

He came in the rest of the way and let the door fall shut behind him. He put his keys down where the keys went. He did not look at the register drawer, which held the tips and nothing else and had held nothing else since Tuesday.

“One fifty,” the fat guy said. “That’s the number. I’ve got a client Saturday. This is the shoulder he’s going to be looking at while he decides whether to trust me.”

“It’s Thursday,” Hollis said.

“So?”

“It’ll still be there Saturday.”

The fat guy opened his mouth.

“He went in a pool,” Quin said. “Ten days after I told him to keep it dry.”

“You didn’t — “

“You had the earbuds in. I watched you nod at me.”

The fat guy worked his jaw. He wiped his face with the heel of his hand. He looked around the shop for somebody else to sell to, and there wasn’t anybody, and he came back to Quin.

“You’re a con artist,” he said. “You’re a con artist with a needle, is what you are.”

Quin said, “Tell me about it.”

And then he did the thing. He came around the counter and took the fat guy’s hand out of the air and shook it.

“You’ve got me pegged,” Quin said, shaking it. “Nobody in this city reads me like you. It’s like you’re living in my head.”

He shook it again.

“I’ve been looking for somebody to see me my whole — “

He shook it a third time.

“ — my whole life,” he said.

The fat guy tore his hand free and grabbed the first thing on the station, which was the ink bottle, and came at Quin with it.

“Hey — “ Hollis said, and had his phone out of his pocket before he had a number to put in it.

Quin didn’t move.

He didn’t flinch and he didn’t block and he didn’t get up. He watched the bottle come, and Hollis watched him do the math on it in the half second he had — the bottle, the floor, the call, the report, the photographs, the settlement. The settlement would keep this shop lit until spring. Hollis had seen Quin do that math before. He’d just never seen Quin put himself on the left side of the equals sign.

The bottle stopped.

There was a wrist in the air and a hand around it, and the hand belonged to somebody standing in the doorway who had not been standing in the doorway a second ago. The fat guy’s whole arm was folded at a joint that wasn’t in the manual.

“Who the — “

The kid turned his wrist and the fat guy came around it and lost his feet and hit the doorframe and slid down it, and then the kid stepped in and put a boot under his ribs. It wasn’t fast. It wasn’t hard. It was placed, the way you set the last nail.

The fat guy lay on the floor making a sound. The kid walked to him the way you walk to a light switch, bent, took the collar in one hand, and dragged him out the door. His arm didn’t slow down. It looked like dragging a duffel with a shoe in it.

Hollis looked at Quin.

Quin hadn’t moved off the counter, and there was a smile on his face now that Hollis did not care for at all.

Hollis went to the door and stood in it.

Out on the street the kid dropped the fat guy against the wall and stepped back and put his hands in his jacket pockets and watched.

The fat guy got a hand up. “You know what you just did? You know who — “ He found some air. “Who the hell are you?”

The kid tilted his head.

Under the brim there was silver. Two studs above the eyebrow, one over the other, climbing the bone. And under the brim there were eyes — narrow, light brown, gray just at the middle of them — and Hollis had walked past this face two hours ago and kept none of it. From here, with the street light coming, they didn’t blink first.

“I come here every day,” the kid said.

Quiet. Flat. Not a threat and not a promise.

“See you tomorrow?”

The fat guy looked at him.

The kid didn’t move.

The fat guy got himself off the wall and went down the alley holding his side, and he didn’t look back once. The kid watched him the whole way, patient, like a man watching a bus pull out of a station he wasn’t going to.

Then he came back in.

Hollis got out of the doorway.

Black tee. The same jacket cracked pale at the shoulders. The same cap pulled down over the eyes. The same row of studs going up one ear. And the quiet — the same quiet Hollis had spent a whole drive home telling himself didn’t mean anything.

He’d told himself the kid with the fryer was a coincidence and the kid on Quin’s porch was a story, and neither of them was any of his business. He was looking at his business now. It was standing in the middle of his floor with its hands in its pockets.

“You’re the churro guy,” Hollis said.

Quin looked up. “The what.”

“The truck. Down by the corner.” Hollis pointed at the door, and then at the kid, and then ran out of places to point. “Two hours ago. I was at his window.”

“I’m not deaf,” the kid said.

“He’s not deaf,” Quin said. “He just doesn’t answer.”

Hollis said, “So you two — “

“The one from the door,” Quin said. He came off the counter and put his hands in his jacket pockets and found whatever he was looking for and came out with nothing and wiped his fingers on his jeans. “This is him. Stands outside my place and doesn’t knock. A welcome mat with a body.”

Hollis looked at the kid again. Then he looked back at Quin, and said it with his mouth and no sound at all, the way you get away with things in front of customers: that the groupie?

Quin’s hand came up and a tissue box left the counter at the speed of a slap.

Hollis caught it against his chest.

“You’re an animal,” he said.

“Put it down.”

“I said it with my face — “

“It was a whole sentence in your face.”

Hollis set the box back where it lived. So this was him. The kid with the plan. The one Quin had told him about on the phone with the street noise scrubbed out of his voice. The one who’d stood at a door for twenty minutes and then looked at a man’s throat instead of his face.

Now the story had bought a jacket and was standing in the middle of Hollis’s shop, having handled a man like the man was furniture. Hollis was forty-three years old and not a coward, and he found that he would have preferred to be almost anywhere else.

The kid said, “I came to find you.”

“That’s the part I was afraid of,” Quin said.

“The rest was on the way.”

Quin looked at him a while. Hollis could watch the math go across him — how in the hell did you find me, and who gave you the block, and how do I get you to stop.

Then Quin’s smile came back on, easy, a little late, like a light on a timer.

“Eli Nash,” he said, to the kid’s face, like a teacher taking attendance. “Isn’t it.”

Hollis thought it was a name you didn’t have to work at keeping. Short and hard, and it stuck on the tongue.

“Eli,” the kid said, and didn’t put anything else on it. Then: “Come watch one rehearsal. That’s all I’m asking.”

“No.”

“Why.”

“Because everything’s got a why,” Quin said, eyes half shut, “and people who’ve got a why never run out of them.”

He said it light. It landed flat.

“I’ll save you the trips,” he said. “Come by every day. Come by twice a day. The answer’s the same and it’s the same word and the word is no.”

The kid took it. He took it the way a wall takes a ball.

The last time, it had gone like this.

Quin had been awake for about four minutes. There hadn’t been a knock. There hadn’t been a buzzer. There had just been a shape on the other side of the door, and after the shape had been there long enough that he could feel it through the wood, he got up and opened.

The hallway was dark. The shape was a person, in black, cap down low, and a bottle in his hand.

Quin’s first words, before he had his eyes all the way open: “You here to collect?”

“No.”

The person crouched and put the bottle back in the crate by the door — Quin’s crate, the empties, the one he hauled down to the curb on Sundays — and stood up and wiped his hands on his jeans.

Quin put a hand on his own chest. He did that now. He’d started doing that a while ago and hadn’t noticed starting.

“Okay,” he said. “So what’s with the face.”

“Born this way.”

He said it without looking at Quin’s face. He was looking at Quin’s throat, at the ink over the windpipe, and then down the length of Quin’s forearm to the second piece near the wrist, and he looked at both of them the way a man reads a serial number.

“I’m Eli Nash,” he said.

“Great,” Quin said. “Why.”

And Eli Nash said he wanted to start a band with him.

Quin laughed, because it was eleven in the morning and he was still tasting last night, and because the answer had been in the house before the question was out of the kid’s mouth.

“A band,” he said. “Say it again. I want to see if I can get to the bathroom in time.”

The kid stood there.

“Hear what I’m saying,” Quin said. “The word makes me sick. That’s not a bit. That’s a medical fact about me now.”

Nothing moved on the kid’s face. He was quiet the way a phone is quiet right before it rings.

“How’d you find me,” Quin said.

The kid didn’t say.

“Right,” Quin said.

He had a whole speech for this. He’d been giving a version of it for a year — to a label, to a producer who’d driven down from the city twice with a folder and a plan, to a man who’d offered him a stage and a number and called it a family. The speech was that he was done. The speech worked better than it should have. He gave the kid the short version of it in the doorway with his voice still bad from sleep, and at the end of the short version he said, “Don’t come to my place again. Next time I’m calling somebody.”

The kid looked at him a second longer than the sentence needed.

Then he went down the stairs, and his steps didn’t hurry, and Quin shut the door and stood behind it in the dark and listened to him leave, and didn’t know why he was listening.

Somebody should have told him he was being rude. There wasn’t anybody.

A few years ago he couldn’t have bought a coffee without a stranger at the end of the counter telling him what he was. They’d found his building. They’d found his door. Somebody had gotten up on the back of a stage in the middle of a set once and pulled the shirt off his back while he was still wearing it. And after it had all ended — whatever the official word was, whatever it said on whatever they’d sent him — the labels had come with paper, and the producers had come with paper, and they’d all used the same voice, and he’d developed, over one long bad year, a good ear for that voice and a better one for the other kind.

The other kind looked you up and then decided. One of them had decided he owed her a version of himself she’d liked better, and she’d gotten close enough to throw a record at his head. One of his own. From the first pressing, back when they still put the good paper in them.

He’d touched his forehead and looked at his fingers and said, out loud, to nobody, “Damn. Good pressing.”

That was the whole trick of the last few years. He’d gotten very serious about forgetting. Drinking until the memory went down and stayed down, which took more every month, and which he’d gotten good at, and which had exactly one problem, which was that he was also good at coming back up.

You’d think the word band would hand him back the hum of an amp — the sound under the sound, the thing he used to hear in his sleep. It didn’t. What he got instead was an ambulance, going somewhere, getting smaller.

He stood in the kitchen with a cold glass against his forehead until it went away.

The kid didn’t argue, which was worse than arguing. Hollis stood where he was and watched him not do it.

They looked at each other past the open door, and the end of summer came in through it, and brought a leaf. The leaf rode the hot air in a slow spiral and landed on the floor by the kid’s boot.

Nobody had swept since the last customer. Nobody said anything.

The kid looked down at it.

“Something else, then,” he said.

“Something else,” Quin said. “You want something else. You came to my place, you found my shop, you pulled a guy off my floor, and now it’s something else.”

The kid didn’t answer that. He didn’t have to. He waited, and the waiting did the work.

“Sure,” Quin said. “Let’s do something else. You want a piece?” He nodded at the door, where the fat guy had just gone. “My work. That’s my regular. That what you want?”

“That one’s not — “ Hollis said.

It was his piece. His needle, his four months, and he was not going to hear it handed to somebody else in his own shop.

“Yours,” the kid said.

The shop went quiet. Quin had his mouth half open, and he closed it.

“How would you — “

The kid had already stopped listening. He’d turned his head. He was looking at the wall behind the counter, where Hollis kept the earrings on their cards — studs and hoops and little barbells, four rows of them under a strip light, the way the supply rep liked it.

“Not the tattoo,” the kid said. “Pierce my ear.”

Quin blinked at him. Whatever he’d braced for, it hadn’t been that. He took a beat to find the shape of it.

“Sure,” he said. “Cash. Now?”

“No.”

“Then when.”

“Soon.”

That was all of it. He turned around and went to the door.

“Riddles,” Quin said, to the room. “The guy talks in riddles and I’m supposed to — “ He didn’t finish it. He raised his voice at the kid’s back. “Hey. Don’t come back here. I won’t be here much longer anyway.”

The kid didn’t stop and didn’t turn around, and the door came shut behind him.

Quin stood in the middle of his own shop and looked down the alley after him. The alley was empty. He kept looking.

He’d had the feeling before. He’d had it on his own porch last week with the door open and the hallway dark. That he’d seen this person, or the shape of this person, and that the shape was a little out of focus, and that if he could get the cap off and a full minute of the face in good light, he’d know where he knew it from.

He’d asked himself why he wanted that. He’d given himself an answer, and the answer was that it would help him avoid the guy. He’d known at the time it was a bad answer. He’d taken it anyway.

Hollis sat down on the stool and looked at the open door and then at Quin.

“You know what you are,” he said.

“Go on.”

“A jinx.” Hollis counted on his fingers for a man who wasn’t watching. “Nine years I’ve had this shop.”

“Ten.”

“Nine. You’ve been down here ten days and I’ve had more trouble than in the nine years in front of it.”

“Bodies come with the neighborhood,” Quin said. He picked the ink bottle off the floor and turned it in his hand and put it back on the station and checked the cap.

“Weren’t you supposed to be teaching kids to sing?”

“It’s a theory class,” Quin said. “Theory. Not sing-alongs. I keep telling you. The studio’s owner is out of town till Friday. Then I’m back in the little room with the little chairs and you can have your ten days back.”

Hollis looked at the drawer and then at the counter and then at the door.

“Hey,” he said. “The people from before. The ones who came around for money. Have they — “

“No.” Quin was resetting the ink caps, one, two, three. “Not this week.”

“Right,” Hollis said.

He had the envelope in his car, in the console, with the dead charger and the registration. He had read it. It had one line inside it he had never once said out loud to another living person. This was the moment — the shop torn up, a man on the sidewalk an hour ago, the door still open — and all he had to do was say a sentence.

He let it go past.

He got the broom.

He swept up what the fight had knocked loose and what the fight hadn’t, because it was his floor and the broom was already in his hand. He was reaching under the end of the counter with the dustpan, back against the baseboard where nobody ever looked, when his fingers found something the pan couldn’t get.

He fished it out.

A card case. Black, soft at the corners from years in a pocket. And in the lower corner, stitched in white by somebody with a machine and a good hand, two letters.

E N.

Hollis turned it over twice. Custom work. The kind you had made, or the kind somebody had made for you.

He thumbed the zipper. Bank cards, three of them, one with the chip up. And folded in behind them, once and then in thirds, a slip of paper.

He opened it.

A preregistration printout. The word EXAMINATION in a box at the top. A name in the blank. A date under the name — tomorrow, 8:00 a.m.

And under the date, the school.

Hollis read the school twice and got the same answer both times. It was the one Quin had gone to. Hollis knew that the way you know a thing about a friend that the friend has never once brought up.

He stood up with the broom and set the card case on the counter and pushed it across.

“Your friend left this.”

Quin looked at it. He didn’t pick it up right away.

Then he did. He opened it the same way Hollis had and went through the cards, and he found the slip and read it and held it up to the light for no reason at all, and he was quiet with it a second longer than the slip deserved.

Then he folded it and put it back in the case and tossed the case down on the counter by the register, and tipped himself back in the lounge chair, and shut his eyes.

“He’ll come back for it,” Hollis said.

“Uh-huh,” Quin said.