Triptych

His father came to see him twice in all the time he was locked up, but John didn’t like to think about that.

“Excuse me?” The woman with the cell phone was beside him. He could smell her perfume. Her upper lip was a little bow tie, gloss making her mouth look wet.

“Hello?” she said, half-laughing.

“Sorry,” John managed, shocked that she’d gotten this close to him without him even noticing. In prison, he would be dead right now.

“I said ‘thank you,” “ she told him. She held a dollar in her hand and he took it, feeling cheap and dirty at the same time.

John made a show of putting the bill in the communal tip box, knowing every eye in the place was watching him. He did the same thing when a customer handed somebody else a tip. No one trusted anybody around here and for good reason. You didn’t need a college degree to figure out why a bunch of middle-aged guys were working for minimum wage plus tips at the Gorilla Car Wash.

Art came out of the office, yelling, “First shift, lunch,” as he walked over to the cop standing by the vending machine. Shit, John hadn’t noticed that, either. The cop had come outside, had been watching him, and he hadn’t seen it happen.

John tucked his head down as he went into the back, clocking out and grabbing his lunch off the shelf. He had a soda in the refrigerator, but there was no way he was going back out there until the cop was gone and Art was back behind his desk counting his money.

Chico, one of the other workers, was sitting on the cement wall under the shade of a big magnolia tree that grew in the strip of grass in back of the car wash. John liked to sit there under the tree, enjoyed the solitude and the shade, but Chico had beaten him to it today. This sort of thing wouldn’t have happened in the joint. Taking a man’s space was like fucking his sister up the ass. Nothing happened in that place that didn’t have some kind of price attached to it.

“How’s it going?” John said, nodding at Chico as he walked past him to the carport that served as a detail shop. The detail guys went out for lunch. They made enough money to afford the luxury.

John sat on the ground under the canopy. He took off his ball cap and wiped the sweat off his forehead with the back of his hand. November used to mean winter, but now it meant you were lucky if the jacket you put on in the morning didn’t have you sweating by noon.

Christ, even the weather had changed without him.

He glanced around before pulling a piece of paper out of his back pocket. The credit report. Part of him had wanted to shove it back in the trash bag last night, just let it go. So some motherfucker was pretending to be him. What did that mean to John Shelley? Obviously, the poser wasn’t ru

He folded the report and tucked it back into his pocket. He should leave it be. No good would come out of any of this. What John should do is exactly what his parole officer said: Concentrate on rebuilding your life. Get a steady job. Show people you’ve changed.

It bothered him, though. Like a splinter that wouldn’t come out, he had picked at it all night, trying to see the angle. There had to be an angle. Why else would someone do this? Maybe somebody with a past was using John’s vitals as a cover. Could be some escaped ax murderer or blue-collar guy was on the lam and John Shelley seemed like a good cover.

He laughed at this idea, taking a bite of his peanut butter and banana sandwich. You had to be pretty desperate to assume the identity of a convicted murderer and registered sex offender.

The peanut butter caught in his throat and he coughed a couple of times before getting up and going to the coiled hose on the ground. John turned on the spigot and took a drink, watching Ray-Ray talking to some woman over by the vacuums. John could tell the other man was doing his usual jive, trying to work his magic on the woman. Judging by the way she was dressed, Ray-Ray could have saved some time and just given her some money. Most of the guys around the Gorilla availed themselves of the local talent. Straight up Cheshire Bridge Road, you ran into the Colonial Restaurant, a meat-and-potatoes kind of joint with hookers a plenty trolling the apartments behind them. John had often heard the guys arguing Monday mornings about which was best: get them early when they were fresh and pay more, or go later when they were sloppy and pay less.

Street economics.

“Fuck off, asshole!” the hooker screamed, slamming her hands into Ray-Ray’s chest.

Ray-Ray growled something and pushed her back until she fell on her ass.

John’s first impulse was to stay exactly where he was. You didn’t get involved in other people’s shit. That was how you got yourself killed. This was a woman, but she worked the streets. She knew how to take care of herself. At least it seemed that way until Ray-Ray hauled off and punched her square in the face.

“Damn,” Chico muttered, ringside at a championship wrestling bout. “Didn’t even give her time to stand up.”

John looked down at his shoes, which were soaking wet. The hose was still on. He could get into trouble for that. He went back to the spigot, turned it off, forgetting for a minute that it was righty-tighty and turning it lefty-loosey. He coiled the hose back in place. When he looked back up, Ray-Ray’s foot was in the air, sailing down toward the hooker’s face.

“Hey!” John said, then, “Hey!” again when Ray-Ray’s foot made contact.

John must have run over to them. He must have said something else along the way, something loud that called even more attention to the situation. By the time his brain caught up with his actions, John’s fist hurt like a hornet had stung him and Ray-Ray was splayed out on the ground.

“What the fuck,” Art yelled. He barely topped five feet on a good day, but he stopped about two inches from John’s chest, screeching up at him, “You fucking monkey!”

They both looked down. One of Ray-Ray’s teeth was on the sidewalk swimming in a puddle of blood. The guy looked dead, but no one was dropping to check his pulse.

The cop stood in the doorway. Slowly, John let his eyes trace up the man’s thick black shoes, following the sharp crease in his pants, skipping past his gunbelt where a large hand was resting on the butt of his gun and forced himself to look the guy in the face. The screw was staring straight back at John as he turned his radio down, the calls from the dispatcher turning to a whisper. “What’s going on here?”

It took everything John had in him not to just assume the position right then and there. “I hit him.”

“Well, no shit, asshole!” Art barked. “You are so fucking fired.” He prodded Ray-Ray with his foot. “Jesus Christ, Shelley. What’d you hit him with, a fucking hammer?”

John’s head dropped, and he looked at the ground. Oh, Jesus. He couldn’t go back to prison now. Not after all of this. Not after everything he’d been through.

“I’m sorry,” John said. “It won’t happen again.”

“You’re damn right it won’t,” Art snapped. “Christ.” He looked at the cop. “This is the thanks I get for giving these guys a second chance.”

“I apologize,” John offered again.

“Hey!” the hooker yelled. “Somebody wa

All of the men looked down, shocked, like they had forgotten her existence. The whore had a hard face, the kind that told her life story in the millions of lines wrinkling her skin. Blood poured from her nose and mouth where Ray-Ray’s foot had done its damage. She was propped up on her elbows, a filthy white feather boa wrapped around her scrawny neck, a purple plastic-looking miniskirt and a black tank top that showed the bottom of her sagging breasts barely covering her wasted body.