Checker and the Derailleurs Read online

  They stood side by side before the furnace, staring at the eclipse around the door.

  “Now, Checko,” she said softly, right by his ear. “Now you may get out of it.”

  Checker leaned down and picked up a long glass drip he’d failed to sweep up, and held it up to the light of the fire. The bead at its end was crimson, frozen at the end of a thread of glass like a crystal tear. Sheckair! A wet napkin smoothed over his forehead; r’s rolled over his ears. “No,” said Check with a sigh. “I’m in.”

  It was over. So many dramas are decided in minutes, though the consequences may loiter in for decades, as leisurely as they are inexorable. Don’t worry. Sit back. Watch the show. It’s like after the polls have closed and there’s nothing to do but follow the returns, staring at the screen with Scotch as the numbers change, digit by digit. Once the votes are cast, it’s almost relaxing.

  They shuffled on their wraps with a curious embarrassment; the evening, especially the first of it—what is your story, long and easy on the bench—would not return. You are my good friend’s fiancée. I am the matchmaker, the go-between. The employee, too; a business relationship. Checker felt almost formal. “I’ll be in at nine tomorrow night.”

  “Just hold on there.”

  “What?”

  “How about my twelve dollars?”

  Checker laughed and fished out the tattered bills, counting them fondly one by one into her beautiful hands, so full of scars and hard work and twenty-nine years of stories.

  “Uhn-uhn.” She stopped him as he started to leave. “Twelve twenty-eight.”

  The last thirteen cents of Syria’s bride price were in pennies.

  Checker is about to make a mistake

  5 / Bye, Bye, Miss American Pie

  “Just to play the devil’s advocate,” said Eaton, “don’t you think this inundation of aliens has to be stopped? According to Kaypro, the U.S. is on its way to being a full third Spanish.”

  “Hijack isn’t Spanish,” said Checker.

  “By the turn of the century, over half the school-age kids in this country will be Spanish.”

  “Hijack isn’t Spanish,” said Checker.

  “We’re being overrun by Hispanics.”

  “Hijack isn’t—”

  “Foreigners, then.”

  “This country is made of foreigners.”

  A tired point. “Granted. But while personally we all like Rahim—”

  Caldwell guffawed. “Come on, Strike. That little terror would send an army of raving Shiites after your ass in a minute. He hates your ever-loving guts. Let’s not play pretty.”

  Eaton sat tapping his foot. It was impossible to have an intelligent discussion with these people. “I’m trying to approach this politically. While I’m not saying you’re doing the wrong thing with Rahim—”

  “Then why make the point?”

  “There’s something to be said for ideological discourse,” said Howard.

  “What?” asked Check.

  Howard shrank, and shrugged. Howard was often paralyzed by direct questions.

  “See, I’m not much of an intellectual,” Check went on, “like Howard here—”

  Howard beamed.

  “—But ideas in the air. They’re funny animals. They seem to come kind of—afterward. Like, you decide you don’t like some Iraqi, or Spanish people, and then you grab one of these flying things and make it squawk.”

  “You’re saying all abstraction is invalid?”

  “Just seems like a shifty business, you know? To talk about Hijack but to say that the one thing we can’t talk about when we talk about him is—Hijack.” Checker raised his eyebrows innocently. “That make sense?”

  “Not much,” clipped Eaton.

  “Let me put it this way. Hijack goes back to Iraq—”

  “Thwack,” said Caldwell.

  “Exactly. Or at least he gets drafted, and this thing with Iran—”

  “Which isn’t America’s problem.”

  “Everyone is everyone else’s problem,” said Checker promptly.

  “That sounds—burdensome,” said Eaton. “How do you take it all on and keep from killing yourself?”

  Checker studied the table. “Interesting question.”

  Eaton took a shrewd look at the other drummer. “The point is: personal loyalty is one thing. But if you look at the big picture, our borders are being overrun. It’s practically a national emergency. And you’re about to engage in immigration fraud. Sure, you want to help your friend. But morally—even if you won’t recognize the category—your operation is iffy.”

  Finally Checker responded, with unusual gravity. “I live in a little picture. It’s the only picture I have. You say personal loyalty is one thing. I don’t think so. I think it’s everything. It’s the beginning of everything, anyway, Striker. It’s the bottom line.”

  Checker had closed his eyes; finished, he opened them and the whole band applauded. Eaton didn’t know what had gone wrong.

  Checker slid down the basement rail, swung around a water pipe, and tripped into the tiny alcove by the heater where Rahim was once more dripping along with the candle. Check threw the Iraqi a beer. Keeping Rahim hydrated was a full-time project, but with his nights in the glassworks Checker was getting used to cooling his own body like a nuclear reactor and never forgot to bring the hideaway something to drink. He whisked around the cramped back room picking up gyro wrappers and soda cans, noticing how in only a minute or two the steam from the leaky heater began to condense and bead on his skin. The wide cuff he wore on his left wrist shifted; constant perspiration was making the leather slick and Checker carefully readjusted it. In the light of the candle his muscles gleamed, the veins down his forearm shone in golden branches, and water ran in runnels between his tendons. Checker stopped to admire the shine. Sweat reminded him of Syria.

  “Sheckair?” Rahim whispered, sitting in a puddle on the greenish concrete floor. “Not complaining and thanking you so much for the many drinks and the books and the tapes, but—”

  “It’s hot here and this sucks,” Checker finished quietly for him, taking Rahim’s waste pail from the corner and running it unsqueamishly upstairs. “So,” he announced on his return, “a deal.”

  “Wife?”

  “Sort of, but you’re not going to like it.”

  Rahim wilted a little further. “She is ugly?”

  “No,” said Check, smiling at the picture. “She’s a knockout.”

  “So how is problem?” Rahim immediately cheered. “I marry pretty girl, stay in Amedica.”

  “She’s no girl, believe me.”

  “How she is pretty, she is old dog?”

  “English lesson, Hijack. Pretty is for sweet girls with pastel sweaters and heart-shaped lockets around their necks. Pretty girls had braces. Pretty girls take a shower at least once a day and never have dishes in the sink. They keep their nails trimmed and their shoes match their pocketbooks. Or they may even wear black leather and metal studs and ride a Harley, but they still have a way of looking at you, a way of smiling, that means they’ll never hurt you in a million years. They like to hold hands and they’re nice, they’re relaxing. But Syria Pyramus isn’t a girl and she’s not pretty and she’s definitely not relaxing.”

  Rahim’s eyes widened. “Fire lady?”

  “Yes, but—”

  Rahim leaned back and stretched out his legs as much as he was able. “Not bad, Sheckair. But she need discipline.”

  Checker groaned. “That’s what she said about you.”

  “I work at my market. She make supper. Have rooms clean, flowers—”

  “Hold everything.” Checker took the candle and placed it ritualistically between them, crossing his legs on the floor. “This is the scam, my man: You make the supper. You have the rooms clean. You buy the flowers.”

  Rahim Abdul, loyal Muslim and recent Iraqi immigrant, born and faithfully raised in the bosom of paternity, looked genuinely confused. “What you say?”

 
; “She wants—an assistant,” said Check uncomfortably. “To cook and clean and shop. She wants—”

  “Slave!”

  Checker shrugged. “Yeah. Take it or leave it.”

  “Leave it!”

  As Rahim glared, Checker stood back up and stretched, pointedly knocking his arms into the pipes overhead. “Well, I guess we could get you a little lamp here, a table. And maybe a TV, though with Kaypro around all the time you couldn’t use the sound…”

  “Don make funny.”

  “Well, is it a joke, Hijack? That they’ll shoot you for draft evasion, was that just a good story?”

  “No story,” said Rahim glumly. “Only—shoot if lucky.”

  “And we might be able to rustle you out of here, but you could never come back. You’d have to leave The Derailleurs—”

  “I never leave Derailleurs!”

  “Sh-sh!” There was scuffling in the upstairs hall. “All right, then,” said Checker softly when the steps retreated, kneeling to his saxophone player. “This is the real thing, Hijack. Pulling this off is going to be tricky. We’re going to marry you in a wet basement, real quiet, no champagne. And even when you’re married, the INS is going to investigate you down to the drawer you keep your underwear in. Frankly, they don’t like Iraqis. I’ve done the best I can and we don’t have any money, the woman has to get something out of this, okay? But I don’t want to see you ground into a falafel just because you’re too much of a man to fix her one yourself.”

  The expression on Rahim’s face changed, and Checker wasn’t sure he liked it. “We make me Amedican,” said Rahim, eyes glittering with complicity. “Then we teach this Fire Lady to make her husband falafel with warm, fresh pita and walk three steps behind him in street.”

  “No way, Hijack—”

  Rahim raised his hand. “I do how you say.”

  “You do what Syria says and agree to it now or we can’t go through with this.”

  “No problem,” said Rahim mildly, who had learned this neutralizing phrase only lately and found it immensely handy.

  “You mean you agree?”

  “No problem,” Rahim repeated.

  “There’d better not be,” Checker warned.

  “Is one more thing.” Rahim put a hand shyly on Checker’s arm. “She is—clean?”

  Checker guffawed. “Syria?”

  “No, I mean—she is not used?”

  Checker paused, and said carefully, “I’m sure Syria hasn’t ever done anything like this before.” He had the sensation with this statement of balancing on a very thin beam—he held his breath, every word a smooth, sure step, as long as he didn’t look down. He knew Rahim.

  “Excellent,” said Rahim. “Because in my country, if she—”

  “You really don’t need to worry about that,” said Checker hurriedly. “We have a deal? With cooking and cleaning?”

  Rahim only rose and said eagerly, “I can go now?”

  “Kaypro likes it here, bridegroom. You stay put.” Checker left the Iraqi in the basement to stew, much like shutting a child in his room to restore his good behavior. But Checker remembered grimly that the tactic just created wilier, more rebellious children in the long run.

  Sure enough, when Checker returned upstairs Gary Kaypro was back again, this time commiserating with Eaton about how the last thing you found in New York nowadays was “a real American.” Kaypro was drinking Wild Turkey, bemoaning the incompetence of the INS, and Checker wondered how Rahim had gotten snagged in one of its rare moments of effectiveness. As Kaypro went on about their tiny budget and ludicrous responsibilities, though, Check did start to feel sorry for him—though he wanted to play sax with The Derailleurs, Kaypro didn’t seem corrupt really, and he had a stupid, impossible job.

  “But it’s flattering, isn’t it?” Checker intruded gently. “Immigration?”

  “Yeah, how?”

  “Well, we can’t let everybody in. But it’s nice to run a place that everybody wants into instead of out of. Nobody’s beating down any doors to get into Iraq.”

  “God, no,” and Kaypro proceeded with a string of Middle Eastern horror stories, then back to nightmare bureaucracy and fraud. “You know, for a couple hundred dollars any wet can outfit himself with birth certificate, driver’s license, and social security card? They sell them in packets.”

  Checker restrained himself from asking. “Where?”

  During the week Checker dragged a doctor down to the basement and over to Vesuvius for blood tests, and stood in line for forms at City Hall. Most of his pocket money went to buying Rahim six-packs, most of his time to finding a minister, rushing pizza slices down Plato’s back stairs before the cheese congealed, and calming Syria after she inflamed at the least inconvenience this odd project cost her. But Checker didn’t mind being busy—he loved all forms of motion. He ran his errands with Zefal, and in January the roads were uncluttered with other cyclists, the air slapping his skin, sharp in his throat. Winter coloration in New York has a subtle palette—the ashen crust of dried salt on macadam, the dun scrub of dead grass in the parks, the dapple of tabloid pages flapping down cracking sidewalks, the flat card-boardy bark of beeches and ginkgos, the leaden loom and pulse of the sky—all these grays, depressing to some, were tender to Checker.

  Friday, Kaypro showed up at Plato’s with his saxophone. He’d returned to the club every night that week, on the pretense of doing his job. Eaton, especially, seemed to like talking to the man, scattering their conversation with brands of shells and pedals and guitars, testing Kaypro’s knowledge of obscure bands and backup musicians. Eaton liked to prickle these games with “Of course, at your age…” “You must not get to…” “I don’t suppose you’ve heard of…” Check watched each “your age” hit Kaypro like a little dart. Eaton would casually refer to late-night recording sessions and wild impromptu coke parties by the river, full of spontaneous pranks and backslapping camaraderie. He must have enjoyed the pinched, left-out look on the officer’s face, an expression not even of nostalgia but of pure deprivation—Kaypro’s own youth wouldn’t have been like that, because nobody’s was.

  While the agent didn’t seem to mind Eaton, picking up the latest jargon and memorizing the names of hot bands and clubs, he virtually leaped at Checker whenever The Derailleurs’ drummer walked in the room. Yet Checker himself began to avoid the man. The carefully ripped T-shirts the agent appeared in every night embarrassed him, the same way fat people did who insisted on wearing pants three sizes too small. And Kaypro said “used to” and “I remember” far too frequently for Checker’s taste. He would lean too far over the knotty pine tables, he talked too loudly, he laughed too long, and in his rare pauses Kaypro’s wistfulness trailed under Checker’s nose like the smell of an electrical short. Kaypro was losing his hair and weighed too much and showed up every night in a different hat, trundling into the club with a panicked expression until he found one of The Derailleurs at the bar. He was a terrible influence on Caldwell.

  Later Checker wrote a song about their gig with Kaypro Friday night, though he never showed it to Gary for fear of hurting the man’s feelings. To this day Check hasn’t allowed his band to play “In the Pocket” publicly in case the agent might hear. For archival interest, though, this is the song, though Checker wouldn’t even approve of our printing it here:

  In the Pocket

  Last week tooted a few tunes through—

  Kids look younger than they used to.

  Rapped so fast with all new lingo.

  (We don’t say “rapped” now, Mr. Kaypro.)

  My reed kept rasping through their song;

  When they stopped I still blew strong.

  I missed the beat, I lost the key—

  But who wants teenage sympathy?

  My life’s on digital delay,

  Echoes the rate of my decay.

  Hey, Warhol, what are we to do

  When our fifteen minutes

  Are through?

  Extension cord


  Won’t reach the socket.

  Can’t seem to play

  In the pocket.

  On the charts in ’69—

  I’m a scratched-up 45.

  Fingerprinted, grooves grown moldy,

  Sunday morning Golden Oldie.

  I was once a pretty boy,

  Crooned a sax with purple joy.

  Was it good as I recall?

  Has purple haze obscured it all?

  My life’s on digital delay,

  Echoes the rate of my decay.

  Hey, Warhol, what are we to do

  When our fifteen minutes

  Are through?

  Still on stage

  But off the docket.

  I used to play

  In the pocket.

  It was a sad song.

  He’d thought Syria would find the afternoon amusing. She didn’t. He’d thought he would find it amusing. He didn’t. Oh, the band was having a good enough time. They’d snuck with muffled laughter down the back stairs, with napkin bow ties twist-tied to their collars. Caldwell buzzed the Wedding March softly on his kazoo. J.K. had snatched up a beer-can pop-top and a radiator hose clip for rings. Sure. Ha-ha.

  But as Check had escorted the bride to their ad hoc chapel she’d said practically nothing. “You don’t seem like the sentimental type,” he commented. “Are you?”

  “This sucks,” she said simply. Only several blocks later did she volunteer, “When I was growing up we thought everything was a joke—the prom, graduation. We mooned principals, crashed formal dances in patched jeans. But the joke was on us. It was a cheat.”

  “Why a cheat?”

  “Those ceremonies were for us. We only sabotaged ourselves.”

  She said sabotage. She said travesty. She even said violation. All she didn’t say out loud was disappointment.

  The basement was in top form, a steam engine. By this time Rahim’s complexion was the pasty, bloated color of some of the creatures that washed up on the rocks in the park. His hair had twisted into damp jerricurls; his fingers were pruny, and he claimed the back of his neck was beginning to mold.