A Surplus of Piano Players

“Nakata!”

BAM BAM BAM. The redheaded girl checked her knuckles for damage, changed to the heel of her fist. “Tony!" BAM BAM. "It’s JoJo, from Ridge Runners. Open the goddam door, it’s important.”

“Gimme a minute…” Tony Nakata, a forty-ish, tall for a full blood Navajo, pulled himself out of an Indian blanket covered La-Z-Boy recliner that had been slowly collapsing for at least fifteen years, waved his feet around on the floor looking for his moccasins, realized they were on his feet. He shuffled to the plank door on his grandfather’s hogan, thumbed the latch. “JoJo?” He blinked away the momentary sun blindness. “You delivering for your dad now?”

“No way. You want it, you gotta come get it. But,” she smiled a mouthful of teenage braces, held out a piece of torn in half envelope. “Your niece called from the Crownpoint laundromat. Says it might be life-changing. Or maybe that was what the man who called said…” she tossed a long braid over her shoulder. “Anyway, she said you should sober up and drive to Crownpoint.”

“I am sober. What’s this,” his finger on the paper. “‘Shoo feeld’?”

“Dunno,” she pulled the paper back, squinted. “I couldn’t hear that good, the connection was pretty scratchy. Sounded that way, though. Some kinda Navajo, maybe?”

“No kinda Navajo I ever heard,” he scratched his chin, looked around the darkened hogan. “I don’t have any tip money…on me…”

“More like anywhere, ‘till the fifteenth. That’s the third Monday this month.”

“Awful smart-assy for a blue-eyed kid surrounded by Indians, arntcha?”

“I know when every 15th is, ‘cause I don’t get paid till all y’all Indians pay my Dad. So, smart? Yeah. Surrounded?” She glanced around at the high desert emptiness, showed him the braces again, cocked her head. “You have enough gas to get to Crownpoint? I got a full five gallon can in the back of the truck if you don’t.”

“Plenty of gas,” he dropped a sweat stained black felt cowboy hat on his head, shrugged a fleece-lined flannel shirt over his t-shirt. “It’s the flat—”

“Seen that on the way in,” she said, walking toward an old dually pickup converted to wrecker. She reached into the bed, lifted out an impact wrench and a handful of rolled air hose, knocked a lever with her elbow and a compressor hummed to life. “Grab the jack, Mr. Tony. You’ll be on your way to that life change in ten, tops.”

***

Tony dumped yesterday’s, or maybe the day before’s coffee from the pot into a saucepan, kicked on a burner of the two burner Coleman, splashed water on his face, dumped the saucepan coffee into a thermos and drove to the Crownpoint Regal Laundromat.

“Sheffield?” he said, reading the note his niece handed him from behind the fold counter.

“You know him?”

“My old military operations officer. He say what he wanted?”

“Said he runs a security company now and has an important client with a problem she wants solved that involves a runaway Okie white kid, a loud car and most likely Interstate Forty west.” She caught his eye. “He also said there’s real money and expenses in it. That’s his number there on the bottom.” She eyed Tony, caught his hesitation. “He said call collect.”

“Good.” Tony borrowed a pen and a notepad, called Sheffield collect from the pay phone in the front corner of the laundromat. He listened, took a few notes, told Shef yeah, he’d look around New Mexico for a missing kid named Jackson driving a hopped-up Camaro.

He’d been looking for work, anyway. Sometimes. Most of the time he drank beer in his grandfather’s hogan in the tumbleweeds between Grants and Crownpoint, wondering what happened to his life after Nam and Laos and Cambodia. His white, reservation schoolteacher wife took off with their daughter after he’d had another night of a few beers too many in a long string of nights exactly like it.

“Shit,” Tony slowed his truck, closed his eyes and drove by the last beer stop on the way home, asked himself why he’d made a promise he’d get off his ass and track a runaway to the only man who’d know he was bullshitting if he just bought a six-pack, waited a few days and phoned in an “I tried, where’s the check?”

***

On his second day out Tony spotted Jackson’s car in a grocery store parking lot close to the square in Santa Fe. It was unlocked, wires hanging where the stereo should have been, glove box open and empty. A few clothes scattered in the back seat, no sign of any keys. Kids, probably twelve or thirteen, had stolen the tapes and stereo. Pros would have taken the car or at least popped the trunk. Car like that had more valuable parts than a tape deck. Sheffield had said the kid liked girls and Nakata knew just where to find some a long-haired kid might like.

The square, as always, lined with jewelry makers. Mostly Native American, a couple of old white women, and the three girls who pretended to sell jewelry as a front for the weed, hash, and peyote they sold to tourists into that sort of thing.

He squatted down in front of them and their blankets full of cheap, Indian looking Taiwanese jewelry. “Where is he?” He held out the Teletype picture of Jackson. “He had to be here,” tilting his chin slightly toward the grocery store lot. “I found his car right over there.”

The smallish girl in the back with nervous fingers pretending to bead some fishing line didn’t bother to look up. “Why us? We’re not runaway lost and found.” That elicited light humor snorts from the other two.

Tony palmed his thigh with a loud pop, and they all three jumped.

“Because you three, and this kid?” He shoved the picture under their noses, looked up at the sky and slowly waved his other arm. “I see a rainbow. Hear a big choir singing like God’s fabric softener commercial.”

“We don’t know him or what you’re talking about. We’ve never seen him, okay? So beat it and take your mystical medicine man laundry moment with you.”

“How about I dump your purses on the sidewalk, one at a time, before I ask again?”

The nervous girl in the back reached for her over-sized saddle blanket purse and locked her small black eyes on him. “You can’t do that. We know our rights.”

“All this ‘we know’ talk. I’m no cop, ladies. I can dump your purses just because I’m a big Indian asshole.” He picked the leader of the pack. Pretty, in a rough sort of way. Dressed the part of a hippie jewelry maker. Too much makeup and a touch too old for anyone paying attention. He could see how a young guy could get hooked right into her. He snatched her purse away from her.

“HEY HEYYY, Big Chief asshole! DON’T!”

Tony held the purse out of reach in a hand that would have made six of hers. Her eyes bounced between his eyes and the purse.

“He bought some peyote…and some other shit, alright? We drove around and partied and then he got out of the van to puke. In Taos.” She turned to her friends for support. “Like almost three days ago? We couldn’t find him when we were leaving, so he’s still there.”

“No, you got him fucked up and ripped him off before you dumped him. You hope he’s still there.” Tony dumped the purse in disgust with what the Square had become and watched the girls scramble after the pharmacy that rolled out all over the sidewalk. There were never cops around when you needed them.

***

“Jackson, have you ever wondered what a life is worth?”

He felt her presence, knew she was there without seeing her. All he could see was an out-of-focus pile of clothes that might be him, lying in the dust next to a dilapidated, unpainted house on the edge of old downtown Taos. “Not really. I guess I never thought much about it…”

“Not many do. You offered your last five dollars along with a rather superficial prayer, and made a promise if it would go the way you asked. Have you tired so soon of your five-dollar life?”

“I guess five wasn’t enough. Not the way it’s gone since then. I got close, but never close enough.”

“Self-pity is a pair of lead boots. You are responsible for where you are. Now you’ll throw the gift of your life away, possibly hers as well, because you don’t understand it, can’t see beyond your own instant gratification? Can’t accept the journey that is yours?”

“There’s not much left of where I was going, is there? There I am, right down there. I tried, you know?”

“No, you played your own game of emotional dodge ball, just as you accused your five-dollar young woman of doing and put up a good front. Disguising anger and frustration as caring and supportive, using them to force volatile confrontations to get the emotional feedback you wanted from her. That was as unfair as her not sharing herself with you. Now it’s all come down to a pharmacological potpourri and a pile of dirty laundry in Taos?”

“I only took what I could handle. Whatever they gave me in the Gatorade I didn’t ask for.”

“That isn’t exactly true. You wanted to continue joyfully and irresponsibly fornicating your way through life and drank what they told you would give you the strength, and them the willingness, to let you have them all. They knew what you wanted. Those three women have dealt with banes like you their entire lives. Yet you trusted them to find you irresistible when in truth they found you an expendable nuisance with four hundred dollars in your front pocket, and there you are.” He felt his eyes drawn to the pile of clothes. “Robbed, humiliated, out of your mind and near death. Instead of irresistible you have discovered yourself to be a horny, lost, heartbroken, insignificant almost dead sucker in a pile of dirty laundry. A self-realization that need not be accompanied by pity, self or otherwise. ‘Is’ just is, if you follow me.”

Jackson could feel the desert breeze blowing through him, holding him in position, a low-flying kite and realized that he, and the woman’s voice, her ethereal touch and the wind were all one essence, floating together.

“So now what? I don’t know how I know, but when it gets dark and cold again, I’m toast. I can’t do another night out. I’ll die, if I’m not dead already, self-pity and all. Ripped out of my mind with a mouth full of sand. And nobody gives a damn.”

“That is far from the truth as well. It is all much bigger than you. Don’t think, don’t surmise you understand a pinhead of valuable truth or run your mouth. For a moment, simply Feel.” He floated. The wind warmed him. “You have come to me at this crossroads for a discussion of the Big Two. Forgiveness, and Participation. You need to grasp both. That you may use them to find a way to make a difference with every opportunity you are shown. Right now, there is a man in a rusty old truck coming this way who needs to meet you as badly as you need to meet him, or he will also end up a pile of dirty, drunk dead laundry in New Mexico. He will turn left or right. Left, and after dark, he will find a pile of laundry that was you. Right, and before the sun sets he will find you. You may choose to meet him and return to your five-dollar life, or not. Left or right. Your call.”

“What happens after, either way?”

“That is not for me to say. But if it will help you with your decision, I can tell you that we have a surplus of piano players right now. Really good piano players.”