Beautiful Children Read online

  And so finally, one morning—like a week or so ago—they'd been in the kitchen and the kid had been getting ready to go to wherever the hell she was shuttling him off to that day, and Lincoln was putting the finishing bites to one of them burnt pieces of toast, and when he rose from their dinner table, he happened to check out Lorraine's backside. She was wearing these ballooney palazzo pants, they were unflattering and made with chintzy fabric. And all of a sudden Lincoln had the tactile sensation of not wanting to be there. He literally regretted every major personal decision he had ever made.

  It was a passing emotion, one he was ashamed of, acted against, in opposition to. No matter how goddamn miserable Lorraine's unhappiness made him or what an awful burden her unhappiness was, no matter how many times he lashed out and shoved his foot in his mouth (asking her to please, please, please stop being such a cunt), the simple heart of things was that his wife remained the sun around which his universe orbited. The first person he thought of when he heard good news or juicy gossip. The wall he bounced ideas off and the ear upon which his worries fell; literally, the bottom to his line. She had introduced the son of a ranch hand to sushi, helped transform a minor league ballplayer into a corporate executive. Lorraine had shown him there were fine things in life, made him understand he was entitled to enjoy them—to say nothing of the importance of looking as if he were entitled to finer things. Lincoln's opinion on the war varied day to day, hour to hour, depending less on news from the front than on whether he wanted to piss her off or not; his relationship to immediate history was based on each particular event's relationship to their marriage. Even when black rage took him, when he thought of chucking it all—taking their meager savings and boarding a plane and starting over somewhere—what Lincoln imagined was not his new life on some faraway shore, but Lorraine's reaction; more specifically, he imagined the reaction he would have liked to see: her torn up, heartbroken, loving him with the same intensity as he did her.

  Thirteen years ago, when she had insisted on keeping her last name, he had not been able to complain. And thirteen years later, the simple sight of Lorraine wandering through the bedroom naked with that little Tampax string dangling from between her legs, this never failed to send an unspeakable, almost giddy affection through him.

  He leaned forward now, his arms coming to rest on his thighs, which were partially covered by the rumpled sheets. His head hung a bit and he looked out horizontally, at some unknowable point beyond the confines of the darkening bedroom. Lincoln rubbed his forehead with his palms, as if trying to will a thought into being. When he finally spoke, it was soberly, with a sad gravity, one that was not directed at Lorraine, nor at himself, but at the concept of what was true, as if he were trying to do justice to the notion of truth itself. Marriages have peaks, he said. They also have valleys. Sometimes you . . . sometimes we get caught in a valley. He took Lorraine's hand and his fingers, still callused after all these years away from the batting cages, entwined with hers, so delicate, manicured, perfect. He said if something was wrong with the kid, they'd deal with it. They would do whatever had to be done. Lincoln said he was tired of the spare bedroom. He'd spent six hours with clients today. Six hours on a Saturday. We get out without the kid, what, once a month, if that? Lincoln wasn't saying sex, not so much. Maybe sex in the way that the warmth of a body is sexual, the way that being here with you is nice. Was this so bad? A nice night with his wife? “We could go to Commander's Palace. Or the new place over at the Venetian. We'll pay too much for a tepid Beaujolais. Does this really sound so bad?” And now Lincoln Ewing faced his wife, intent on saying the right thing for once, this one time getting it right; fighting for what mattered most.

  2.3

  With stiff knees and sore behinds, Kenny and his aunt would disembark from the third bus of their journey, getting out where Main met Fremont. “Howdy, partner. Welcome to downtown Las Vegas,” always greeted them, booming through an overhead speaker system in a folksy western accent, the message delivered courtesy of the Pioneer Club, and its large mechanical figure, Vegas Vic. Vic wore a cowboy hat and a smile. His right eye winked suggestively and his mechanical arm waved visitors inside.

  Kenny's aunt knew better than to take the bait. Tucking her black pleather purse underneath her armpit, she'd wrap a meaty hand around Kenny's wrist as if she were holding a twig. Her sweatpants rubbing together at the thighs, she'd start down the gulch, leading the eight-year-old boy she called her little trooper underneath the first in a row of metallic awnings, rows of bulbs showering warm light onto the pedestrians. From inside each darkened open-air entrance, cool winds hummed.

  Past the Pioneer Club and Slots-O-Fun, too, she and Kenny ignored the costumed barkers who promised a free spin at the fortune wheel. They did not comment on the early-morning tourists who wandered, gape-eyed, half in the bag, holding Bloody Marys. Past Sassy Sally's now, and the Four Queens. Even the Horseshoe, host of the famed World Series of Poker. Finally they'd arrive outside the small one-story storefront, where at least two or three other people lingered, hands deep in their pockets.

  If Kenny had to pee, his aunt would say he should go now, around the side.

  In the large window that Kenny's aunt claimed bullets could not shatter, an aged man ignored the stares from outside and continued with his business, deliberately setting up the displays, cracking open small black boxes to reveal bracelets and rings that glittered against dusty velvet. This man, whom Kenny's aunt called the Jew, had a thick, pale face, blotched with red veins and dominated by a bulbous nose. His barrel of a belly stretched the polka dots of his wide-collared/rayon shirts. Making his way from the window, his attention would turn to a warden's ring of keys.

  Once the gauntlet of locks was run and the store was open, Kenny's aunt would compete for a place in line at the front counter, where all serious business was conducted. The boy's minute attention span would launch Kenny in the opposite direction, heading down the line of showcases, scanning walls yellowed with age, inhaling mothballed air. Kenny was too small to peer over the glass countertops, but he could still take in plenty: rope chains with glittering diamond pendants that spelled out the names of Arab sheiks; racing silks and rider's goggles from Del Mar and Hollywood Park; cigar boxes overflowing with war medals and fancy Confederate ribbons.

  Sometimes, when the store was empty, if Kenny was on his best behavior, the Jew might emerge from the back room with his tray of glass eyes. Other times he made a silver dollar stick to his forehead, shot nickels from his nose and ears, or stacked eight quarters on the back of his spotted hand, and then, whipping his wrist, caught them. Kenny's favorite was when those marvelously large hands blurred, crossing and re-crossing. Follow me closely, the Jew growled, his hard consonants stressed and overpronounced. Where's the quarter, come on. You sure?

  More often, the Jew had to deal with the foot traffic of tourists, gawkers who wanted to see this ring, asked for prices on cameras they didn't know how to use. The high roller on a hot streak who'd come to get his Rolex out of hock; the same high roller, head low, bringing back the watch. One time a smelly recluse opened a briefcase, revealing gemstones of such quality that the Jew kicked everyone out, locked the store, and engaged in private negotiations. Usually, though, it was weekend warriors on the other end of a sleepless binge. Men who'd emptied their wallets and cashed in their plane tickets, and were in need of enough money to get back to the tables. Standing in line they yawned, wiped red eyes, nursed hangovers.

  Behind the counter, the Jew would take out a magnifying glass. Examine a thin band.

  “I paid two thousand dollars for that,” its owner would volunteer.

  “The gold isn't a great weight.”

  “Two thousand dollars I paid.”

  “Maybe. But the weight isn't there. And see this—the diamond, it's more than a little yellow.”

  “Ten years ago I bought that ring.”

  “I can give you four hundred.”

  The guy's face would flush. For a mo
ment, it would look like he might weep.

  “Please, man. Have a heart.”

  “Maybe you should go around the corner.”

  “It's her engagement ring.”

  “They'll take care of you around the corner.”

  “MOTHERFUCKING KIKE.”

  Even as an eight-year-old, Kenny was no stranger to epithets, late-night screams filtering in through the cheap stucco of his bedroom walls, his mother complaining that if his dad would quit drinking for a month, maybe he could hold down a job, his father answering that if she'd stop blowing his money at roulette, maybe he'd have a reason to quit drinking. Inside the pawn shop, however, there were no sheets to hide beneath, no darkened closet to disappear into, only his aunt's ripe body, her ratty sweatpants, and these provided little camouflage. It never failed, though: the shouting would subside, the offended man would storm out. While the air might remain charged, the threat of violence would disperse slowly, like a cloud of cigarette smoke.

  Approaching the counter, his aunt would say the rent was late. Or it was the electric bill this time. Maybe she just didn't know anymore. She mixed familiarity with a tired resignation, and the Jew usually responded in kind, for Kenny's aunt had been coming to him for years, pawning her mother's communion ring, sometimes her grandmother's pearl broach and, also, when she was in dire straits, a small golden locket that she kept wrapped in the Sunday funnies. The loan amounts had long been set, and if Kenny's aunt needed an extra month to redeem her goods, it was understood this wouldn't be a problem. Placing the bills on the counter one by one, the Jew would explain the vagaries of compound interest. He'd put each item inside a manila envelope specifically designed to hold jewelry and/or folded money. Examining Kenny's aunt, he'd wink suggestively. “You here to stay? Just to play?”

  “Stop it. What I really need to do is quit playing the slots. Otherwise I'm gonna end up a bum.”

  They made this journey—their adventure, his aunt called it—visiting downtown, Vegas Vic, and Fremont Street each month, sometimes more often, their bus route and routine holding true whether auntie picked up Kenny to give his parents some quality alone time, or because she felt a child should not be in the middle of a war zone. Through the stints Kenny's father did in rehab and the times he stumbled back down the proverbial twelve steps; through his mother's attempts at night school and then her stops on Las Vegas's cocktail waitress circuit, and also the times she got really, really sad and cried all night and ended up getting high for a week and shacking up with some guy she barely knew. Through each of his parents’ trial separations, and every aborted reconciliation; through back-to-school shopping excursions spent among the sale racks at the outlet mall, and Christmas gifts from his aunt that Kenny recognized as coming from the pawn shop (an outdated Nintendo system whose right controller didn't work; knockoff brand CD players that fizzed out after a month); through Kenny's emerging awareness of his own pubescence, and that stunning first discovery of Dad's stash of explicit magazines. Through all the fare increases and missed transfers and convoluted detours, without fail and despite occasional interruptions of prosperity. Each trip took them beyond the unofficial demarcation point where the world famous Las Vegas Strip ended and Las Vegas Boulevard picked back up. Beyond the juncture where the gleaming hotels were replaced by an expanse of sky. Through the cheers of the paying multitudes and then those pitiless implosions, as each ancient hotel on the Strip became one with the true sands and dunes of the desert. From the viewpoint of unforgiving seats, through the darkened windows of public transportation, Kenny and his aunt made their trips, watching as each new generation of hotel and casino resorts slowly reconfigured the city's skyline—towers sculpted to appear as structural interpretations of department store birthday cakes, towers created as pop art oddities and streamlined glass palaces, the world famous Strip stretching even farther southward along its axis, moving farther away from downtown.

  The year Kenny turned fourteen, the fighting in his home reached a breaking point, and after a whole lot of fireworks, his dad moved out. Not long afterward, with much less ceremony, and a whole lot less screaming, a middle-aged woman appeared behind the front counter of the pawn shop. She was small, the woman, slight as a bird, with salt and pepper sprinkling unkempt bangs, and dog hair clinging noticeably to a coffee-stained blouse. She possessed the Jew's deeply set eyes, his sloped shoulders, and hard accent. Kenny's aunt asked what happened. “You want to interrogate me,” snapped the woman, “or you want to do some business?”

  Follow-up visits revealed her to be perpetually nervous and defensive. More than once she threw a customer out of the store for reasons Kenny could not figure. He'd stay as far away from her as he could, and stare anywhere but at her, avoiding all contact. Whenever she acknowledged his existence and wanted to know how he was doing at school, Kenny, unable to comprehend her attempt at kindness, answered in scared one-word exclamations. His darting eyes glanced over the shop's subtle changes, overlooking the china dolls that had been placed inside showcases, the lilacs and potpourri next to the gun rack.

  By the following spring, a painted portrait of the Jew wearing an unfamiliar silver toupee hung on the wall behind the front counter, near a framed proclamation, signed by Governor William Jefferson Clinton, which declared the Jew an official Arkansas Traveler. Kenny looked at the old document while his aunt explained how she usually kept her pawn ticket in her purse. “Wasn't until the bus was at Charleston, I realized I musta forgot.”

  The woman muttered an undecipherable judgment. Opening a file cabinet, she withdrew a series of index cards, and then saw the initials. Untold incarnations of the same two letters, variations on a theme: the strong, illegible script of a confident man with things to do; the distracted scribbles that landed halfway between the lined columns; the weak scratches of a cheap plastic ballpoint running out of ink; the luxurious thickness of in-delible black marker. Always capital letters. Always slanted to the right. As the pair of initials descended the card's final columns, each of the Jew's signatures appeared progressively gnarled, further and further cramped.

  “Oh, Daddy.” The woman's voice was halting, hesitant. “All those years. Back and forth. The same nickels. The same junk.”

  “I know it's not the best stuff,” said Kenny's aunt. “But it helps me get through.”

  From the back room a phone stopped ringing. The Jew's daughter's eyes had dilated and were wide as an ocean. They were soft and moist and she glanced back down at the ledger, her finger pressing the edge of the page.

  “You have a criminal record?”

  “Hmh?”

  “I asked if you have a record.”

  “No. No record.”

  “You a drunk?”

  “Not a drunk, no ma'am.”

  Again the Jew's Daughter looked down at the column. Again back at Kenny's aunt.

  “Maybe you need a job?”

  This was how the second seat appeared behind the counter. Mondays through Saturdays, eight A.M. to six P.M., Kenny's aunt rocked back and forth with a loaded Beretta in her lap. She moved in and out of the large walk-in safe, helping to carry heavy televisions and stereos into the back room. Whenever there were too many customers for the Jew's Daughter to handle alone, his aunt showed jewelry, answered questions, and simply waited people out. Whenever a gypsy family flooded the store—their diapered children crawling all over the floor, the adults spreading out, hovering over different showcases, demanding to see this ring, that bracelet, every damn one of them searching for the perfect opportunity to make a pendant disappear—whenever this happened, Kenny's aunt guarded the door, kept an eye wherever the Jew's Daughter could not look. She polished jewelry and made coffee, ran around the corner to get a new carton of 2 percent, and watched the clock, making it her business to beat the rush of dealers to the Horseshoe snack bar for lunchtime sandwiches. If a pawn ticket envelope went missing, Kenny's aunt helped search, assuring the Jew's Daughter they'd find it, the envelope had to be there. If the afternoon
was empty of customers, his aunt provided a running commentary on the old movie that the two women watched on a television with wavy reception. Sometimes the Jew's Daughter would vent about her children, complaining that they did not understand the sacrifices she was making every day on their behalf. Kenny's aunt would answer, calmly, sincerely, that she was sure the Daughter's children were more grateful than the Daughter could ever know. Whatever kept the Jew's Daughter from feeling too much pressure, Kenny's aunt tried to provide. Whatever talked her down off that day's ledge.