Drinking Coffee Elsewhere by Z. Z. Packer Page B

“C’mon, Spurge,” he’d said. “The pigs aren’t even looking.”
    He’s the only person I know who still calls cops “pigs,” a holdover from what he refers to as his Black Panther days, when “the brothers” raked their globes of hair with black-fisted Afro picks, then left them stuck there like javelins. When, as he tells it, he and Huey P. Newton would meet in basements and wear leather jackets and stick it to whitey. Having given me investment advice, he now watches the world outside the Honda a little too jubilantly. I take the curve around the city, past the backsides of chain restaurants and malls, office parks and the shitty Louisville zoo.
    “That’s your future,” he says winding down from his rant. “Sound investments.”
    “Maybe you should ask the pigs for your bail money back,” I say. “We could invest that.”
    He doesn’t respond; by now he’s too busy checking out my mom’s new car. Ray Bivens Jr. doesn’t own a car. The one he just got his DUI in was borrowed, he’d told me, from a friend.
    Now he takes out the Honda’s cigarette lighter from its round home, looking into the unlit burner as though staring into the future. He puts the lighter back as if he’d thought about pocketing it but has decided against it. He drums a little syncopation on the dash, then, bored, starts adjusting his seat as though he’s on the Concorde. He wants to say something about the car, wants to ask how much it costs and how the hell Mama could afford it, but he doesn’t. Instead, out of the blue, voice almost pure, he says, “Is that my old dress jacket? I loved that thing.”
    “It’s not yours. Mama bought it. I needed a blazer for debate.”The words come out chilly, but I don’t say anything else to warm them up. And I feel a twinge of childishness mentioning my mother, like she’s beside me, worrying the jacket hem, smoothing down the sleeves. I make myself feel better by recalling that when I went to post bail, the woman behind the bulletproof glass asked if I was a reporter.
    “You keep getting money from debate, we could invest.”
    When most people talk about investing, they mean stocks or bonds or mutual funds. What my father means is his friend Splo’s cockfighting arena, or some dude who goes door to door selling exercise equipment that does all the exercise for you. He’d invested in a woman who tried selling African cichlids to pet shops, but all she’d done was dye ordinary goldfish so that they looked tropical. “Didn’t you just win some cash?” he asks. “From debate?”
    “Bail,” I say. “I used it to pay your bail.”
    He’s quiet for a while. I wait for him to stumble out a thanks. I wait for him to promise to pay me back with money he knows he’ll never have. Finally he sighs and says, “Most investors buy low and sell high. Know why they do that?” With my father there are not only trick questions, but trick answers. Before I can respond, I hear his voice, loud and naked. “I axed you, ‘Do you know why they do that?’” He’s shaking my arm as if trying to wake me. “You answer me when I ask you something.”
    I twist my arm from his grasp to show I’m not afraid. We swerve out of our lane. Cars behind us swerve as well, then zoom around us and pull ahead as if we are a rock in a stream.
    “Do you know who this is ?” he says. “Do you know who you’re talking to ?”
    I haven’t been talking to anyone, but I keep this to myself.
    “I’ll tell you who you’re talking to—Ray Bivens Junior!”
    He used to be this way with Mama. Never hitting, but always grabbing, groping, his halitosis forever in her face. After the divorce he insisted on partial custody. At first all I had to do was take the bus across town. Then, when he couldn’t afford an apartment in the city, I had to take the Greyhound into backwoods Indiana. I’d spend Saturday and Sunday so bored I’d work ahead in textbooks, assign myself homework, whatever there was to do