Out on the street, Carney turned the ignition. “He was a happy kid.”
“Those the ones you have to look out for,” Pepper said. “They got a lot to catch up on if they start late.”
The old truck bucked as it always did, then they were in the street. Julius had inherited a building and an illicit bar, Carney this Ford truck. He didn’t see his father much once he got out of Queens College. Mike Carney had taken up with Gladys in Bed-Stuy and made Brooklyn his hunting ground. Carney was working in Blumstein’s furniture department and saving up his money in a sock in a boot under his bed. Saving up for what, he didn’t know.
Then the afternoon when Gladys came to the department store to tell him that his father had been killed by the cops. “There’s someone here to see you.” His father had broken into a pharmacy to steal a box of cough syrup, the strong stuff druggies were into.
“You still work here,” Gladys said.
“I’m working my way up,” Carney said. Last winter they gave him a shift in the Santa suit, a mark of Blumstein approval. The long-running Santa had taken to the bottle and they were teaching him a lesson. Can’t have people breathing rotgut on our customers’ kids.
“？‘Working your way up’—that’s what he said.” Gladys was a full-figured Jamaican gal with a thick, honeyed accent. His father had always liked West Indian women. “Manhattan is an island, too, I figure, so we got a lot in common. Even if I don’t understand half of what they say.”
Carney couldn’t bring himself to ask Gladys for details. Cut down by police—it was how he suspected his father would exit this planet. By police or another crook. The day he picked up his father’s truck was the last time he saw Gladys. She threw herself wailing over the hood as if it were his coffin. Two guys from down the street had to pry her off.
Carney had the truck a whole year before he ran over a nail on Lenox Avenue. He went to get the spare in back. That’s how he found the money. Thirty thousand in cash. Spare-tire bank. If he’d sold the truck, he wouldn’t have found it. That was just like his father, to make him earn his down payment. Three months later Carney signed the lease for 125th Street.
* * *
*
Carney’s companion had his face zipped up in contentment, twisting to check the derrieres of neighborhood beauties and narrating their travels down the avenues. “That’s a good chicken spot,” Pepper said. “You ever eat there?” The blood on his jeans had dried to a dark smudge, oil or grime from a distance. Pepper rode shotgun, but he was in the driver’s seat.
Pepper said he wanted to stop for lunch at Jolly Chan’s for chop suey. The owner knew Pepper and gave them a table in the corner, by the window. There was a fish tank with greenish water over by the kitchen door. Something moved inside it. Red-and-orange dragons writhed on the wallpaper, roiling like clouds.
They didn’t speak much and Carney’s stomach was too sour to accept food. Pepper was preoccupied as well and only ate half his plate. He sat so he could watch the street.
“What made you want to sell couches?” Pepper said, poking at his food.
“I’m an entrepreneur.”
“Entrepreneur?” Pepper said the last part like manure. “That’s just a hustler who pays taxes.”
Carney explained that he got a tip about a furniture store that was going out of business. The previous tenant had lit out in the middle of the night. The rent was cheap. It was a steal. Carney was nervous, and babbling prevented contemplation of Pepper’s stony face. What was in the man’s head? Might as well talk to a sidewalk. Carney shared tidbits from his business-school classes about the logistics of taking over a failing venture. Maintaining or severing existing relationships with suppliers, how to avoid the assumption liabilities. The couch in the basement, for example. It was there, this inherited problem, and he’d had to figure out how to deal with it.
Pepper said, “Didn’t matter how it got there. What you care about it is how to take care of it. An ax is good. Fire and a match, too.”
Carney took a sip of water.
“Though I’ve been told I am too quick to reach for the gas can sometimes.” Pepper gestured for the check and poured ketchup over what he didn’t eat. “So Chan can’t serve it to the next guy.”
Pepper had a different kind of brain.
“Where are you from, man?” Carney asked.
“New Jersey,” Pepper said, as if it were the dumbest question he’d ever heard.