Amor and Psycho: Stories by Carolyn Cooke Page B

too much noise,” Scarface said.
    “They didn’t even take the stereo. They only took my fleece jacket—but it had sixty dollars in the pocket.”
    “Sixty bucks would be enough,” he said with a tone that indicated I was a snob.
    He swept the broken glass into a piece of the cardboard and dumped it carefully down a sewer grate while I taped up the back window with strips of duct tape left over from my marriage, when I’d been prepared for everything. WhileScarface cut tape off the roll with his knife, he noticed a transgender woman in a blue dress and high heels crossing the street. “Jesus, what is that?” he said, grabbing my arm.
    “That’s a man who is taking hormones to make him look and feel more like a woman,” I told him.
    “I never saw anything like that before,” he said. “I do not approve of that.”
    “Oh, come on,” I said. “Lighten up.”
    “You approve of that?” Scarface asked, loudly enough for the transgender woman to hear. I saw, suddenly, what the transperson saw, a big kid, probably with a knife.
    “Of course I approve,” I said loudly.
    We didn’t speak again until we drove over the bridge and Scarface told me he was carsick. I took a detour to Mount Tam, and we talked and walked up a wide dirt path, higher and higher.
    “So can anyone just go to San Francisco?” he asked.
    “It’s a free country,” I said.
    “Is Los Angeles in America?” Scarface wanted to go there. He wanted to know if it was true that Juvie, where his older brother went, was a town run by Jews.
    “No—it stands for juvenile,” I said. “Kids.”
    “So where are the Jews?”
    “Jews live everywhere. In diaspora.”
    “Did somebody take their land?”
    “Usually, yeah,” I said.
    “That’s exactly what happened to Indians,” said Scarface.“That’s why I could never be racist against Jews like my mom is.”
    “There’s Israel, but it’s small, and other people were living there, too.”
    “Do the Jews have an army?”
    “In Israel, they have a pretty good one.”
    “That’s what I mean, man. Motherfuckers can’t
mess
with their land.”
    “Well, and there are all these different tribes of Jews, like Native Americans, and everybody’s mixed up, too, like on the rez. My mother was Jewish; my father wasn’t. My sister isn’t. I am—but I don’t even believe in God.”
    “How can you not believe in God? That’s fucked-up! What stops you from doing something bad?”
    “You can’t just be a good person because you think God is watching—”
    “Sure you can,” Scarface said gently, his voice encouraging.
    IF SOMEONE surgically removed my memories and let me keep one, this might be it—this day—though it was probably a mistake to take him on a four-mile round-trip hike. We started in a black blanket of fog and climbed up a steep grade on a gravelly path toward blue sky. Half a mile up, Scarface was sweating. It hadn’t occurred to me that he could be out of shape. “What’s the matter?” I asked.
    “I’ve got asthma and bronchitis,” he said.
    “Really?”
    “Yeah. And I’m obese.”
    A couple wearing spandex shorts and shirts rode past us on thousand-dollar bicycles. “This reminds me of the time I climbed Masada,” one of them said.
    “Hey, could I have a swig of your water?” Scarface shouted at the bicyclists. The couple pedaled faster.
    “I’m just messing witchou!” he yelled after them.
    I practically pushed him to the top, but we made it. I wanted this success, I thought, for Scarface. Before he filed for divorce, my ex-husband used to tell me that I always try to extract more from an experience than is there to be withdrawn.
    When we reached the top, Scarface wasn’t really able to talk anymore, and by the time we’d hiked two miles back to the car, the sky was dark. I’d planned to get him home at a reasonable hour. His mother wasn’t exactly overprotective, but she was still a mother.
    SCARFACE STOPPED WORKING on the mural. He just stopped