Shadow dance, p.7
Shadow Dance, page 7
I finally wandered into the house and discovered several women huddled over a laptop on the coffee table. They were watching a video of animals attacking humans. They looked up at me, embarrassed, and scattered when I approached. Perhaps, their demons were as powerful as my own. I sat at on the couch and brought up another browser, checking to see if anyone had responded to my posting on Craigslist. The room smelled vaguely like burned hair and fresh-sliced oranges.
The reply to my posting was short and it could have been from anyone, I suppose. Only it wasn’t: L Hotel, Vegas. It was from my folks. My goddamn Pops and my pissed-off Moms. They were alive.
8
Shadow Whisper
On Sunday, I slept for nearly a full day but felt more tired than ever when I woke for my first shift at Club Paradise. Outside, the sun was bleeding its arrival into the gray mass, the LA sky hanging over us like a giant lung. What combo of drugs had I taken? Solomon had loaned me a pair of black slacks and T-shirt, the unofficial uniform for security there. I showered and dressed in the bathroom, trying to make sense of everything that was happening. The door to his room was closed. He hadn’t been particularly helpful on the topic of my parents being alive. All Solomon said as I drove him home after the Goddess Guides party was: “This is what your folks do—the make you feel responsible for their shit. My advice is to ditch them like they ditched you.”
Why had Moms and Pops had faked their deaths in the first place? To trick their creditors? To pull a con? To lose the dead weight in their lives like me? The absorbed twin inside of me wanted me to drive to Vegas to confront them, but I knew that I needed to get my shit together first. The questions I had went deeper than why they were assholes.
There was no one on the street as I walked to Club Paradise. Very little differentiated early morning LA from a zombie apocalypse. I sensed a tiny figure following me but whenever I turned there was nothing but gray sidewalk and sky. Everything in Los Angeles was a shadow. I couldn’t help but feel that something bad was flickering on the horizon. Was I a parasite in LA or a predator to be snuffed out like my pal Conrad had doled out to all matter of insects? I would soon be entering a world as dangerous as the army, and I didn’t even know who I was.
Before long I found myself facing the closed doors of Club Paradise. It was nearly eight a.m., but I didn’t want to bang on the faux castle entrance. I thought about hanging out in the misfit statue garden or sitting on the lip of the moat driveway. I was too on edge, though. A thwapping sound drew my attention. It appeared to be coming from behind the club. The brick driveway circled around until it splayed outward in concrete to form a surprisingly large back parking lot. There were a few cars here, mostly junkers. I wondered if they belonged to employees or drunks who’d cabbed home after throwing back a few too many. A warehouse directly behind the club had a faded red sign that read Far Horizon. This could be a name for anything: import/export, machine parts, women’s underwear.
I cleared the corner of a building. A skinny boy on the verge of puberty, with black hair and light brown skin, was tossing a tennis ball against a metal garage door. The sound was louder now. CLANG. CLANG. CLANG. He wore a Yasiel Puig Dodgers jersey and fielded grounders with a worn leather glove and short steps that covered ground with almost supernatural quickness. Without warning, he speared a backhand, spun, and flung the tennis ball at my head. I held up a hand and snatched the ball before it could smack me in the forehead.
“Looks like you passed the first test,” the kid said.
“Hold your jets there, Yoda. Who the hell are you?”
“I’m your boss.”
“I met Biz Z and you’re not him.”
“Then I’m one of your bosses. My name is Iman Pourali,” the kid said. “I’m Big Z’s kid.”
“Name’s West and I’m here to—”
“Let me stop you right there, hired help. First of all, that Yoda shit pissed me off. I hate that Star Wars and Star Trek crap. I’m not a nerd you can sweet talk so put that shit back in your pants. Second, you have no idea what you’re here to do. Third, your name seems as fake as the breasts of the skanks at the club.”
“Is that right?” I asked, lobbing the ball back, trying to hide my surprise at the kid’s language and how quickly he was sorting me out. “What kind of name’s Iman Pourali anyway?”
“Iman in Persian means faith, like you gotta have it in me, hombre. And Pourali sounds just Italian enough so that me and my brother can get tail without letting the chicks know we’re half Iranian and half Irish, or as we like to call ourselves Irishanians. Dad’s hoping my brother Malik settles down with a Persian princess even though he himself went out of the tribe to get busy with my mom.”
“You seriously want me to believe that you get tail?” I asked, and instantly regretted revving up this pint-sized chatterbox.
“Gentlemen don’t kiss and tell. But I’m not a gentleman!”
“And you think I am?”
“I’ve got more game than you.” As though to demonstrate, Iman hurled the ball against the garage door and turned his back to spear the tennis ball in a basket catch over his shoulder.
“Is that supposed to impress me?”
“No, but this will. Catch me if you can, slowpoke!” Iman yelled out as a challenge, his lanky legs instantly in motion. He sprinted toward an adjacent alley next to the loading bay. I launched myself in pursuit, careful to dodge the broken bottles and discarded trash. Iman showed no such restraint. The little dude churned up objects in his wake along the fenced-in parking lot next to an abandoned warehouse. The concrete plot was choked with weeds and machine parts that were too rusted or busted to steal. The concertina along the top reminded me of the motor pool in Bagram—the smell of piss and cigarette butts was like GI perfume. Perhaps I’d not traveled as far as I had originally thought. At the end of the alley, the kid stopped short of the sidewalk and yelled, “Iman gets the gold and West gets the silver!”
I caught up after a few more strides and doubled over, trying to control my breathing. How could I already be this out of shape? Civilian life was more dangerous to returning GIs than war. Boredom, booze, and bad decisions pulled soldiers into the drain of America, where they clogged the streets like discarded pubic hair and soap scum.
Iman waved me over to an immense stand-alone garage. The structure seemed misplaced in the alleyway, with an exterior that you would expect to see connected to a mansion. Did there use to be a house standing next to it? Two cameras slanted down from the roof, and Iman buzzed an intercom before flipping the bird to both lenses. A woman’s voice squawked on the speaker, “You better not let your father see you do that!”
“Everyone knows you wear the pants. Are you going to open up or what?” Iman asked.
The door slid open and the lights flicked on. The walls were painted the color of lime slices stuffed into Coronas in summertime. We stepped inside and the doors slid behind us, making me feel instantly claustrophobic. Two highly polished black town cars were housed in the four-car garage, next to a carport holding skis, tennis rackets, and golf equipment. A third car, a later model silver Mercedes, gleamed from a recent wax job. A woman waited for us impatiently, but it wasn’t Iman’s mother. It couldn’t be. For starters she was around eighteen, leaning against a closed steel door. She had hazel skin, almond-shaped brown eyes with flecks of gold, and light brown hair pulled back in a ponytail. She wore a smirk and was dressed in black yoga pants and a tube top, both too tight and displaying a muscular body with curves that made it difficult to look away.
I couldn’t help but stammer, finally spitting out: “I’m…”
“Late!” the young woman finished my sentence with a confident tone, part impatience, part sarcasm, part humor, difficult to read.
“Put your eyes back into your head, West! That’s my sister,” Iman said.
“I see you’ve met my daughter,” the woman’s voice on the intercom stated matter-of-factly. Her name is Nikki and mine is Bianca.”
“Please to meet you both,” I said.
“What a suck-up,” Iman said.
“West, welcome to our employ. Currently, Deacon, Flynn, and you are responsible for security at Club Paradise. I’m not sure if you’ve noticed, but the club also is connected to the Pourali family residence. My home is a place you will never see and is only accessible from this garage and a series of secure steel doors from the club. These two worlds do not and will not coexist. Do you understand?”
“Roger,” I said. I knew a little something about keeping personal and professional lives separate. While on leave, I’d refused to answer any questions from Deirdre or Solomon about the prisoners I’d guarded in Afghanistan or the war in general. I understood a mother’s desire to separate sin from the day-to-day workings of her family.
“Good,” Bianca continued. “I will set your schedule. In general, you’ll be on the night shift, except when I need you to give Deacon a day off, which he has today. Iman is my eyes and ears.”
“I’m a lot more than that,” Iman complained. “I’m the brains.”
“No, you’re not,” Nikki said in a bored, superior tone that reminded me of Deirdre.
“Iman will provide you with your schedule, your pay, and instructions that you will follow to the letter. I want to be very clear. Your job is to support the club and the Pourali family, but you work for me…and only me. Do you understand, Buddy?”
There it was—my real name. Somehow, Bianca had found out about my past and obviously wasn’t fucking around. It was also clear that if I didn’t watch my step, I could be turned in to the authorities. I wondered if they had something on the other club staff. There was so much that I didn’t understand and yet I managed to spit out, “I understand.”
“Jesus, he’s slow,” Iman said. “Mom, are you sure we want him working for us?”
“I’m sure. Iman, go see your father at the coffee shop and give him his list. West, you’re now running late getting Nikki to her job.”
“I’m on it,” I said as Nikki pressed the keys into my palm and gestured at the rear of the car with a flip of her ponytail. I tiptoed around and opened the door trying not to stare at her backside as she climbed inside. I shut the door to say goodbye to the pipsqueak, but Iman had already bolted off down the alley. They wanted me to be a chauffeur? Okay, so be it. I climbed in and adjusted the seat and side mirrors. There was a new car smell in the immaculate town car and the windows were tinted. I put the car keys in the ignition and a small pink note dropped to the floor. THE CAR IS BUGGED, was scrawled in block letters. Why would someone be listening in to a conversation between a teenager and her driver? I pocketed the note and started the car, backing out into the lot slowly, the garage door closing behind me automatically.
I was still groggy and trying to be careful, driving cautiously enough so that Nikki complained, “West, you ARE slow. And my brother is almost never right. Can you step on it?”
“Where to?”
“Punch ‘Hair Empire’ into our GPS and try not to go over any bumps. I have to put on my face.”
After a few minutes, I figured out how to program the GPS. Hair Empire was only a mile away. This new world seemed insular in such a sprawling metropolis. Nikki painted shadows around her eyes with a short brush as I inched into the street. I really didn’t feel like getting canned on my first day by smudging Nikki’s eyeliner.
“I don’t understand how that garage connects with the main building,” I said.
“There’s a lot you don’t understand,” she said. “Some Hollywood mogul built a tunnel, a bomb shelter, a bowling alley, and a movie theater below the castle. Only my parents would turn that monstrosity into a strip club and a home. I use both phrases loosely.”
The sarcasm was tangible, but beneath it was pain and frustration. I waited until I saw the brush drop back into Nikki’s purse before accelerating into traffic. In the rearview, she smiled and blew me a kiss, and I fixed my eyes forward, not without feeling dread that a crash of another kind was inevitable.
I saw more death in the waiting area of Hair Empire than I had witnessed on even the worst day in Afghanistan. It was not a hair salon. It was a lice removal business on the second floor of a dingy mini mall. There was no adequate explanation for what took place in that square room of death. It was a slaughterhouse of lice, plain and simple, a spectacle that my exterminator pal Conrad would have appreciated. It reminded me of cracking open crawfish for Moms after Pops boiled them, an activity that I’d despised with a passion. Was that why they’d let me think they were dead for so long…to toughen me up?
I was immediately given the once-over by Donya, Big Z’s older sister, with intense brown eyes and muscular hands, hair covered with a scarf. She shooed me over to the waiting area like a stray dog and waved her muscular arm at her niece. Nikki complied by shuffling over to a station between two Latinas. They were spritzing down the seats with a foamy green liquid from plastic spray bottles and homemade labels they hawked in a front counter display. Nikki did not look at her aunt directly and I could sense an undercurrent of tension. There was certainly no slack given for family members here. Minutes mattered. Donya closely supervised every aspect of the delousing, even after the doors opened to a steady stream of customers.
The women worked with assembly line speed, brushing out the hair of children and their parents. None of the customers were happy, much like in a dentist’s office, and I could see why. Their scalps were scraped and hair was pulled back to reveal the parasites. I leaned forward in my seat to make sure that my hair didn’t touch anything, even by chance, and I started to itch from head to toe. I had, more than once as a kid, had lice, which my mother treated with a painful home remedy that included kerosene and camphor before shaving me bald.
The clicking of ticks being crushed between the fingernails of the attendants was making me sick to my stomach. The appointments were steady all through the morning, and I managed to kill some time finishing my novel before I was left with a choice of observing the death squad or reading health and glamour magazines.
Finally, Donya had mercy on me for staying in my post. She winked at me and handed me a lunch order, written in what I assumed was Persian, along with the name and address of a restaurant called Kafir. I punched the directions into the town car’s GPS but decided to hoof it after finding out that it was a few blocks away. I found myself navigating streets that alternated between Persian and Hebrew characters. Someone would later tell me that this area was called Tehrangeles, and that it was one of the largest populations of Iranians outside of the country. Many were refugees from the Shah’s displacement, and some had come over with their wealth intact. I wandered past a bustling stretch of nail salons, small grocery stores, cafés, and an ice cream parlor with flavors like saffron, rose petal, and sage.
I dropped off the food order at Kafir, a tiny restaurant with signs in three languages. Next door, I ducked into a used bookstore, where a kid my own age had separated the stacks between Persian books and American paperbacks for the college students at UCLA just down the road. He was kind enough to trade in The Green Ripper for The Girl in the Plain Brown Wrapper—another Travis McGee mystery. The photo of the striking woman on the cover made me think about Nikki. She was a presence I couldn’t escape.
My eyes were too tired to focus the rest of the afternoon and I passed into the world of daydreams, the monotony of hair-picking sending me into a trance. The feeling of waiting was familiar in a lifetime of waiting. I found myself thinking back to the first of a string of apartment complexes I’d lived in as a kid. One was on the outskirts of Lake Charles, next to a pond where I caught frogs and messed around with my friends. Solomon was always there in my early memories, but I sometimes dreamed about a girl, barely old enough to walk, who followed after us until one day she was gone. I couldn’t remember her name, but for some reason, she reminded me of Nikki. I couldn’t shake the feeling that I had somehow let this girl down. I occasionally caught a glimpse of her in the periphery of my vision when I was awake. But she wasn’t there when I turned my head. Perhaps she had never been there.
I’d watched over destructive parents, headstrong friends like Solomon, dramatic women like Deirdre, and suffering prisoners of war. I cast myself as a protector without understanding why I felt the compulsion. There was some sense of loss always there just in the shadows, behind my back, outside of my reach, and I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was responsible in some way for the family curse and my place in it.
At four o’clock, Nikki nudged my shoulder and I tried to shake off my daydreams. She gestured toward the door and I went to open it for her. I waved at Donya and the tired women cleaning up their stations. Passing close to Nikki’s perfume, I caught a scent of vanilla, lavender, and something else familiar, from some past life, perhaps. As she passed, she whispered something that would change my life, two simple words in a barely audible whisper: “Help me.”
9
Shadow Cards
Help me. The plea echoed in my head for days, even while I was on security detail at Club Paradise. Sometimes I heard Nikki’s voice, husky and needful. At other times, it was Solomon’s voice, but mixed with the music at the club, the wall of sound he lived in to keep me from prying into his life of drugs and women. At other times, it was my own voice, the one that barked at me to hightail it back to Louisiana, return to the army and face my punishment. I attributed the voice to my dead twin inside me. My parents’ voices were silent, of course. I wondered if they even wanted to see me again. Then there was a voice that bubbled from the cocktails and gray clouds, a tiny insistent cry like a small girl in the netherworld, or an underwater angel. I felt as empty as the kegs I wheeled out back for Flynn during my shifts. Even scaring the perverts from groping dancers and listening to the film-talk of the regulars didn’t do anything to distract me.
