Right as Rain

3

He locked the front door of the shop and checked it, then walked up Bonifant Street toward Georgia Avenue, turning up the collar of his black leather to shield his neck from the chill. He passed the gun shop, where black kids from over the District line and suburban white kids who wanted to be street hung out on Saturday afternoons, feeling the weight of the automatics in their hands and checking the action on guns they could buy on the black market later that night. Integras and Accords tricked out with aftermarket spoilers and alloy wheels were parked outside the gun shop during the day, but it was night now and the street had quieted and there were few cars of any kind parked along its curb. He passed an African and a Thai restaurant, and Vinyl Ink, the music store that still sold records, and a jewelry and watch-repair shop that catered to Spanish, and one each of many braid-and-nail and dry-cleaning storefronts that low-rised the downtown business district of Silver Spring.

He crossed the street before reaching the Quarry House, one of two or three neighborhood bars he frequented. About now he could taste his first beer, his mouth nearly salivating at the thought of it, and he wondered if this was what it felt like to have a problem with drink. He'd attended a seminar once when he had still worn the uniform, and there he'd learned that clock-watchers and drink counters were drunks or potential drunks, but he was comfortable with his own reasons for looking forward to that first one and he could not bring himself to become alarmed. He liked bars and the companionship to be found in them; it was no more complicated or sinister than that. And anyway, he'd never allow alcoholism to happen to him; he had far too many issues to contend with as it stood.

He cut through the bank parking lot, passing the new Irish bar on the second floor of the corner building at Thayer and Georgia, and he did not slow his pace. He neared a black man coming in the opposite direction, and though either one of them could have stepped aside, neither of them did, and they bumped each other's shoulder and kept walking without an apology or a threatening word.

On the east side of Georgia he passed Rosita's, where the young woman named Juana worked, and he was careful to hurry along and not look through the plate glass colored with Christmas lights and sexy neon signs advertising Tecate and other brands of beer, because he did not want to stop yet, he wanted to walk. Then he was passing a pawnshop and another Thai restaurant and a polio house and the art supply store and the flower shop… then crossing Silver Spring Avenue, passing the firehouse and the World Building and the old Gifford's ice-cream parlor, now a day-care center, and across Sligo Avenue up to Selim, where the car repair garages and aikido studios fronted the railroad tracks.

He dropped thirty-five cents into the slot of a pay phone mounted between the Vietnamese pho house and the NAPA auto parts store. He dialed Rosita's, and his friend Raphael, who owned the restaurant, answered.

'Hey, amigo, it's-'

'I know who it is. Not too many gringos call this time of night, and you have that voice of yours that people recognize very easily. And I know who you want.'

'Is she working?'

'Yes.'

'Is there a c next to her name on the schedule?'

'Yes, she is closing tonight. So you have time. Are you outside? I can hear the cars.'

'I am. I'm taking a walk.'

'Go for your walk and I'll put one on ice for you, my friend.'

'I'll see you in a little bit.'

He hung the receiver in its cradle and crossed the street to the pedestrian bridge that spanned Georgia Avenue. He went to the middle of the bridge and looked down at the cars emerging northbound from the tunnel and the southbound cars disappearing into the same tunnel. He focused on the broken yellow lines painted on the street and the cars moving in rows between the lines. He looked north on Georgia at the street lamps haloed in the cold and watched his breath blow out into the night. He had grown up in this city, it was his, and to him it was beautiful.

Sometime later he crossed the remainder of the bridge and went to the chain-link fence that had been erected in the past year. The fence prevented pedestrians from walking into the area of the train station via the bridge. He glanced around idly and climbed the fence, dropping down over its other side. Then he was in near the small commuter train station, a squat brick structure with boarded windows housing bench seats and a ticket office, and he went down a dark set of stairs beside the station. He entered a fluorescently-lit foot tunnel that ran beneath the Metro and B amp; O railroad tracks. The tunnel smelled of nicotine, urine, and beer-puke, but there was no one in it now, and he went through to the other side, going up another set of concrete steps and finding himself on a walkway on the west side of the tracks.

He walked along the fence bordering the old Canada Dry bottling plant, turned, stood with his hands buried in his jeans, and watched as a Red Line train approached from the city. His long sight was beginning to go on him, and the lights along Georgia Avenue were blurred, white stars broken by the odd red and green.

He looked across the tracks at the ticket office as the passing train raised wind and dust. He closed his eyes.

He thought of his favorite western movie, Once Upon a Time in the West. Three gunmen are waiting on the platform of an empty train station as the opening credits roll. It's a long sequence, made more excruciating by the real-time approach of a train and a sound design nearly comic in its exaggeration. Eventually the train arrives. A character named Harmonica steps off of it and stands before the men who have come to kill him. Their shadows are elongated by the dropping sun. Harmonica and the men have a brief and pointed conversation. The ensuing violent act is swift and final.

Standing there at night, on the platform of the train station in Silver Spring, he often felt like he was waiting for that train. In many ways, he felt he'd been waiting all his life.

After a while he went back the way he came and headed for Rosita's. He was ready for a beer, and also to talk to Juana. He had been curious about her for some time.

Juana Burkett was standing at the service end of the bar, waiting on a marg-rocks-no-salt from Enrique the tender, when the white man in the black leather jacket came through the door. She watched him walk across the dining room, navigating the tables, a man of medium height with a flat stomach and wavy brown hair nearly touching his shoulders. His face was clean shaven with only a shadow of beard, and there was a natural swagger to his walk.

He seated himself at the short, straight bar and did not look at her at first, though she knew that she was the reason he was here. She had met him briefly at his place of employment, a used book and vinyl store on Bonifant, where she had been looking for a copy of Home Is the Sailor, and Raphael had told her that he had been asking for her since and that he would be stopping by. On the day that she'd met him she felt she'd seen him before, and the feeling passed through her again. Now he looked around the restaurant, trying to appear casually interested in the decor, and finally his eyes lit on her, where they had been headed all the time, and he lifted his chin and gave her an easy and pleasant smile.

Enrique placed the margarita on her drink tray, and she dressed it with a lime wheel and a swizzle stick and walked it to her four-top by the front window. She served the marg and the dark beers on her tray and took the food orders from the two couples seated at the table, glancing over toward the bar one time as she wrote. Raphael was standing beside the man in the black leather jacket and the two of them were shaking hands.

Juana went back to the area of the service bar and placed the ticket faceup on the ledge of a reach-through, where the hand of the kitchen's expeditor took the ticket and impaled it on a wheel. She heard Raphael call her name and she walked around the bar to where he stood and the man sat, his ringless hand touching a cold bottle of Dos Equis beer.

'You remember this guy?' said Raphael.

'Sure,' she said, and then Raphael moved away, just left her there like that, went to a deuce along the wall to greet its two occupants. She'd have to remind Raphael of his manners the next time she got him alone.

'So,' the man said in a slow, gravelly way. 'Did you find your Jorge Amado?'

'I did find it. Thank you, yes.'

'We got Tereza Batista in last week. It's in that paper series Avon put out a few years back-'

'I've read it,' she said, too abruptly. She was nervous, and showing it; it wasn't like her to react this way in front of a man. She looked over her shoulder. She had only the one table left for the evening, and her diners seemed satisfied, nursing their drinks. She cleared her throat and said, 'Listen-'

'It's okay,' he said, swiveling on his stool to face her. He had a wide mouth parenthesized by lines going down to a strong chin. His eyes were green and they were direct and damaged, and somehow needy, and the eyes completed it for her, and scared her a little bit, too.

'What's okay?' she said.

'You don't have to stand here if you don't want to. You can go back to work if you'd like.'

'No, that's all right. I mean, I'm fine. It's just that-'

'Juana, right?' He leaned forward and cocked his head.

He was moving very quickly, and it crossed her mind that what she had taken for confidence in his walk might have been conceit. 'I don't remember telling you my name the day we met.'

'Raphael told me.'

'And now you're going to tell me you like the way it sounds. That my name sings, right?'

'It does sing. But that's not what I was going to say.'

'What, then?'

'I was going to ask if you like oysters.'

'Yes. I like them.'

'Would you like to have some with me down at Crisfield's, after you get off?'

'Just like that? I don't even know-'

'Look here.' He put his right hand up, palm out. 'I've been thinking about you on and off since that day you walked into the bookstore. I've been thinking about you all day today. Now, I believe in being to the point, so let me ask you again: Would… you… like… to step out with me, after your shift, and have a bite to eat?'

'Juana!' said the expeditor, his head in the reach-through. 'Is up!'

'Excuse me,' she said.

She went to the ledge of the reach-through and retrieved a small bowl of chili con queso, filled a red plastic basket with chips, and served the four-top its appetizer. As she was placing the queso and chips on the table, she looked back at the bar, instantly sorry that she had. The man was smiling at her full on. She tossed her long hair off her shoulder self-consciously and was sorry she had done that, too. She walked quickly back to the bar.

'You're sure of yourself, eh?' she said when she reached him, surprised to feel her arms folded across her chest.

'I'm confident, if that's what you mean.'

'Overconfident, maybe.'

He shrugged. 'You like what you see, otherwise you wouldn't have stood here as long as you did. And you sure wouldn't have come back. I like what I see. That's what I'm doing here. And listen, Raphael can vouch for me. It's not like we're going to walk out of here and I'm gonna grow fangs. So why don't we try it out?'

'You must be drunk,' she said, nodding at the beer bottle in his hand.

'On wine and love.' He saw her perplexed face and said, 'It's a line from a western.'

'Okay.'

He shot a look at her crossed arms. 'You're gonna wrinkle your uniform, you keep hugging it like that.'

She unfolded her arms slowly and dropped them to her side. She began to smile, tried to stop it, and felt a twitch at the edge of her lip.

'It's not a uniform,' she said, her voice softening, losing its edge. 'It's just an old cotton shirt.'

They studied each other for a while, not speaking, as the recorded mariachi music danced through the dining room and bar.

'What I was trying to tell you,' she said, 'before you interrupted me… is that I don't even know your name.'

'It's Terry Quinn,' he said.

'Tuh-ree Quinn,' she said, trying it out.

'Irish Catholic,' he said, 'if you're keeping score.'

And Juana said, 'It sings.'