All That Shines Isn't Golden

All That Shines Isn’t Golden




“You got that Canadian bacon or what?” she says to the waitress. She’s been at the counter for ten minutes, screwing our timing. Then a bullet rips through her shoulder and sprawls her backwards on the tile. I’m in the booth at the back of the restaurant with a limp slice of pizza greasing my paper plate. Holding an unloaded shotgun under the table.
“Holy shit, Jimmy,” Wiley says. “Run!”
He looks at me through the pantyhose on his head and hurries to the front door, back to the counter again. His face a sandy impression behind the fabric. Bushy eyebrows flattened. Nose and lips squished.
It’s before lunchtime, the kids and parents are in the back playing skee-ball, drowning in the pool of plastic balls. That’s why we’ve picked this joint, two separate rooms, thick doors between the restaurant and party area. But this one lady, this Canadian bacon lady, wouldn’t leave the damn waitress alone.
She moans, the waitress standing over her, thin tributaries of blood flowing across the rainbow colored polka dot floor. It’s amazing no one else is coming, not from the play room or the kitchen. Everything’s so loud in here they probably thought the gunshot was part of a video game, a balloon popping.
I’m up and next to Wiley, my partner and nephew. He’s wired, I can see the tendons working in his neck. His real name’s Wallace, but we’ve called him Wiley since birth.
“The cash,” I say, and try to sound hard. Fact is I’m pissed he had a live round. We talked about it in the car beforehand, no bullets. But he had one, moving the nubby bastard from knuckle to knuckle like you would a quarter. This is his first job and I told him he needed to work the nerves out in another way, that bullets just worsen it. He must’ve slipped it in the chamber when I wasn’t looking.
The waitress looks me in the eyes. She’s already seen my face. I ordered the slice of pie and an orange soda from her earlier, so it didn’t matter much. But I know she hadn’t gotten a good look. What does she make, five and a quarter an hour? You expect someone to remember every feature of every customer they served pizza to at that wage? But now she’s pegged me, there’s something about her face that’s changed. Probably tell a cop the size and shape of every feature above my neckline, make something out of them, like a goddamn Rorschach test.
“Marcy,” I say, and finger her towards me. She doesn’t move.
Rule #1: Know as many names as you can before you raid a place. Check name tags, tops of your receipts. Just open your goddamn ears when workers talk to one another. Knowing a small piece about them only helps.
“Marcy,” I say again, and nod at the floor.
The woman on the ground is wailing. Writhing. Smears blood all over the tile when she swipes her arms. I pump the shotgun for effect and point it down at her. Look at the waitress over the stock.
“Now.”
She stands in front of me, cute little thing, her knees touching one another underneath those ridiculous plaid pants they make them wear. Her head hangs and I can see small flakes of skin on her scalp.
“It’s okay,” I say, and drop a hand on her shoulder. Squeeze. Something about human touch in a time like this. I lift her chin up and say, “Get us a bag, sweetie.”
I know I’ve got her, but I make a mistake: I take my eyes off Wiley.
From nowhere he runs up and clocks the butt of the gun off the back of her head, drops her to a clump in my arms. The panty hose has wrinkled over his face and his chin pokes out. He’s breathing too hard, his eyes about to burst from their sockets.
“Your grandma’s bedroom,” I say, a device we’ve worked out a few days ago. A calming vision if something should go wrong.
He goes to the woman he shot and kicks her, gets down on all fours and screams in her face. So loud a Mexican peeks out from the sections of plastic sheeting hanging over the kitchen’s door. This Pedro motherfucker scans the scene and his eyes pop white.
“Freeze, homie!” I say, and lay Marcy on the floor. Shoulder the shotgun. Too late. Pedro’s gone.
Wiley stands up and spins around, blood stained knees and elbows. It’s as if he doesn’t know where he is, lost, looking for some sort of focal point. When he finds me, he smiles, and I step forward and slam the stock of the shotgun off his forehead. Drop him next to the woman who’s all but passed out.

There’s a cop car idling through the parking lot soon after we get home. I lay Wiley on the couch, bolt the door and shut all the blinds in my apartment. Poke an eye through the kitchen window, the barrel of Wiley’s .38 against my cheek. His hands are bunched under his chin, knees clenched on top of the cushions. A lightning bolt blood stain on his forehead.
Outside, it’s one of those California winter days. If I could see the ocean, the sun would be sparkling off it right about now, a stiff breeze blowing sand and skittering pieces of seaweed. Dogs and joggers and paling December skin soaking up the heatless sun along the shoreline. But there’s a couple of miles of low grade apartment buildings and crossing webs of telephone wires blocking any sort of view.
Dealers in the apartment next to us stumble out to the patio, a couple of joints hanging from their lips. They about light up when they notice the cop, then rip the spliffs from their mouths and whistle down the walkway toward the stairs. Break into a sprint when they’re through the parking lot and out of sight.
“Trouble?” she says, and I turn the gun on her. Ram my elbow into the blinds and almost knock them off their brackets. She jerks back and puts her hands up.
“Jesus, Regan,” I say, and ease the gun’s hammer back down.
I knew she was home, waiting, but it’s still a fresh feeling having her around. She flips me off and sits on top of the kitchen table and stares at me, a towel wrapped around her, one turbaned on top of her head. Her body glitters with beads of water, and I can’t believe she’s kept up this well after all her years.
“No,” I say, and flatten my back to the refrigerator and watch the squad car park in the handicap spot in front of the manager’s door. “Everything’s peachy.”
Wiley stirs and rolls over, his face pressed into the back cushions. He mumbles something and swats a hand, coming to. Sits up and rolls his head from shoulder to shoulder, rubs the back of his neck. Regan rushes over to him and tries to rest his head on her chest, stroke his hair. She flashes me one of her squinty eyed looks when he pushes away from her.
“Pull the car around,” I say, and toss the keys in his lap.
Regan shakes a cigarette out from its pack on the coffee table, holds it between her fingers but doesn’t light it. Everything had been her plan, and I feel I should walk over and shake her. Push her for the way things had gone. Wiley stumbles into the kitchen and I grab his face between my hands, look him in the eye. Slap his cheek and squeeze the back of his neck before he goes to the front door. He cracks it open and checks the scene, and I can’t help but smile. When he’s gone, I grab a beer from the refrigerator and sit in the recliner in front of Regan. The way the towel’s open between her legs, I can see where Wiley came from.

What we have is a bad situation.
Wiley still doesn’t have his feet under him while he wavers through the parking lot towards the car. He regains balance against neighbors’ trunks, sits on open tailgates. Wades through a group of kids hopping a basketball back and forth to each other. Dodges cars backing out from their spaces. I pulled a hat down low on his head to hide the growing bump, wiped off most of the blood with a wet paper towel. To anyone else, he might just look drunk.
From the window, it’s like watching a movie. Everything in tangled motion. Panning and tracking in and out like a Ridley Scott scene. The cop’s talking to the manager, and the old super raises his cane and points out the entire complex. A community of thieves and murderers.
Regan’s getting dressed, packing up a few of her things because we don’t know how long we might have to run. I know they’ve tracked her to me. Like I said, this was her plan, the Pizza Palace. She worked there until last week as one of the mascots during parties. Some sort of cartoonish rodent. I’d gone to see her once, and she posed with kids for pictures, let them grab her pink tail and twirl around until she fell. Then got up and did it all over again without even a thank you.
Don’t know how she did it, the humiliation, her body wrapped in twenty pounds of padding and cloth, the grease and stink of dozens of little fingers streaked all over. Before she got fired, she said she kept working to case the joint out for me, three months worth of inside information. But I think she stayed as a matter of revenge against herself. Or tried to make up lost times. She never got to see Wiley grow up.
Wiley makes it to the car, shakes his head before he gets in the driver’s seat to clear what’s left of the cobwebs. I’ve been through this before, and I get butterflies that the cop’s on our trail. And I figure we could’ve just left breadcrumbs and gotten it over faster. But they have what you call standard procedures. Can’t go knocking down anyone’s door for nothing.
“Vamoose,” I say, and head into the bedroom. Open the back window and stuff the gun in my waistband. Regan’s got a couple of plastic bags full of clothes, some knick knacks she’s collected since she’s moved here. I don’t have time to argue and drop the bags out the window, grab her wrist and help her stand on top of the bed. Nudging the small of her back, I say, “Jump.”
Rule # 2: If anything should go wrong, have a getaway plan. Meet by the dumpster, that’s my plan, always has been for whichever partners I’ve had. Dumpsters are one thing that’s constant. Always in the back, rarely moved, and you don’t get any sort of regular individuals, the type that might point you out, hanging around them. Wiley knows this, or should. I’d told him half a dozen times before everything went to hell.
Regan and I make our way through the weeded gauntlet behind the complex, full of air condition units and broken bottles and blown over trash. Most of the back windows are covered with bed sheets or tinfoil or foggy bathroom glass. I point the gun at each one we pass, just in case some tweeker or shut-in happens to take a look at the view. Regan’s got her fingers dug in the back pocket of my jeans, keeping up.
“Oh God, Oh God,” she says. “My baby.”
I should slap her. She hasn’t been around Wiley for more than three months his entire life, just popped up when Mom died and begged to move in with us. And now she thinks she needs to protect him? That he needs her? With me here? I should’ve never taken her in. But when she showed up, hugging all up on me as if she’d just gotten back from a long tour of duty, how could I say no?
I hear the engine roar and kick through the weeds and blown over trash. Stand on the dumpster and see the chrome bumper shine around the corner. Then jump to the asphalt like it’s a black pool of water that’ll break our fall.

I hit a 7-11 with my brother, Frank, when I was thirteen. He pulled us up around three in the morning, when cops throughout the city switched shifts. Shifts last twelve hours. A new, weary eyed group of piglets punch in before the sun’s even a fetus in the great dark womb. Drink coffee and eat donuts for the first hour of their day. And every convenient store in the county’s for the picking.
The 7-11 was just off I-5 in National City, a land of gangsters and illegals. Plastic nativity sets in front yards, drying clothes forever dangling and swaying from lines stretched between trunks of dead palm trees. Spray paint tags scratched across stucco and concrete.
The on-ramp was a few blocks away. Wiley was about six months old then, asleep in his car seat next to me. Pacifier in the shape of a butterfly puckered halfway out his lips. Frank had told Mom that we were going on a drive around the neighborhood, that the curves would ease Wiley back to sleep. Which was true, my brother was never a full-blown liar. But reasons behind my coming along were never explained.
The pellet gun he’d given me warmed against my stomach. It looked real enough, stark black, lined sights. A little weight to it. I asked Frank if the cashier would notice how small the end of the barrel was. He pointed his .38 inches from my nose and said, “Would you?”
He parked in the farthest spot from the entrance, turned the headlights off and kept the engine going. There wasn’t another car around, the streets behind us a foggy orange glow from the streetlamps. Wiley stirred and let out one single cry. Frank turned and covered the gummy mouth with his hand, stuck his pinky in and let Wiley suck.
“Go get em, Jimmy,” he said, and winked at me.
I put a finger in one of Wiley’s sprawled hands, his weak grip tightening before I pulled away.
With the hood of my sweatshirt low over my face, I couldn’t look up all the way, so I watched my feet make careful steps over the parking curbs, up onto the sidewalk leading inside. I could see my breath but it didn’t feel cold. The door chirped when I pushed it open.
Lights hummed overhead, machines percolated and sloshed at the back of the store. There was a woman, Chinese, something, standing behind the counter and shuffling through rolls of lottery tickets under the glass. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Frank’s car half washed from the security lights in the lot. I stood in front of the Slurpee machine, watched the blues, greens, and reds being paddled around. Soft music playing somewhere, a different language maybe. The clerk knocked on top of the counter.
“Can help you?” she said.
Making a line for the front door, I saw Frank stand from the car, shooing me to stay inside. I pulled the gun out and held it close to my leg, sidestepped to the magazine racks. Rolled my shoulders. Cracked knuckles against my thighs and watched a single car rolling by on the street. I almost dry heaved over the boat trader weeklies when Frank flashed past, kicked through the doors and held the gun at arm’s length.
“Ain’t got all day,” he yelled, and stepped to the counter. The clerk fell back into the display of beef jerky and tobacco and collapsed. Frank looked at me, his eyes wild, nostrils flared, and I wondered if Wiley was sleeping through all of this, the gentle vibrations of the car’s engine lulling him to sleep.

“We going to Mexico?” Wiley says, and I look at him in the rearview. Nod.
“Si.”
He hasn’t shaved in more than a month, patches of wiry hair on his cheeks and jaw. Circles of smooth skin between the hairs. If he still went to school, I’d make him shave. But he made the decision after Mom died. Didn’t think anybody could teach him as well as her.
He bites into half a taco and hot sauce sticks along the corners of his mouth. We drove through Jack-in-the-Box and bought bags full of dollar menu items. I can’t eat at times like this, my chest compressed and full of thrashing beats.
Regan’s next to him. She pushes up his hat and examines the purpling bump on his forehead, licks her fingers and rubs off the remainder of dry blood. She leans in and tries to kiss it.
“Better?” she says. Wiley finishes his taco and wipes his mouth with the inside of his bicep.
“No,” he says, and scoots away from her.
We’re still half an hour from the border without traffic, but rush hour’s starting to build once we pass downtown. The sun’s dropped behind the horizon of skyscrapers and new condos and construction cranes. Slivers of it sectioning the freeway in pillars of dull light. The harbor gleams in front of us.
There’s a gap in the lane next to me and I roar into it. Yards of empty concrete. A sea parting. I think we’re through the worst when a line of cars merge in front of me, like it’s their last road to salvation. Salvation. I laugh that I even thought of this word, probably heard it in a late night black and white movie while I was blueprinting the robbery. Laugh harder when I think we’ll find it in Tijuana.
We inch, a girl in the car next to us screaming along with a Christina Aguilera song. Bass thumping in another car I can’t make out. The .38’s a click away in the glove box, but I have to tell myself ten and two. Whiten my knuckles along the steering wheel—ten and two.
“Look at that bridge,” Wiley says. He leans forward and crosses his arms on top of the front seat, rests his chin on the back of his hands. Taco breath gushes out of him. Regan looks too and tries to caress his shoulder, but he shakes her off. She turns toward the back window and covers her eyes with strands of her hair so we won’t see her sob.
Wiley’s seen the Coronado Bay Bridge countless times, I’d taken him to Silver Strand beach when he was younger. Carried him over washed up syringes and Styrofoam. But the bridge is always a welcome sight for him. Maybe he’ll be an engineer, an architect. Something he can use that abstract brain of his for, the way he looks at things that nobody else appreciates.
He slides across the seat and sticks his head out the window and looks at the curve of the structure rise and rise above the water, falling, like a bad case of scoliosis, to the strip of land on the other side.
“We going across it?” he says.
I look at the ocean of cars corralling us in and shake my head.
“Don’t got our swim trunks,” I say.
Regan’s crying now. She has a tough go at controlling the dimples on her chin, two shotgun streams of clear snot snail tracking from her nostrils. She bumbles and Wiley brings his head back in. I adjust the rearview.
“What’s wrong with her?” he says.
I reach back and thumb some of the sauce off his struggling mustache.
“Don’t know,” I say, and press the horn until the entire freeway follows in an orchestra of fried nerves.

Car chases were rampant the summer Frank was released from jail for the second time. A new California fad ever since Orenthal James. Seemed like there were several breaking news flashes on the hour. One afternoon, I watched his Honda swerve through traffic from the city of Orange to Oceanside to halfway to Coronado. Swipe a motorcyclist into the median, fishtail into the cement divider. Eye in the sky followed him for miles. The car was easy to recognize, the roof oxidized to a rusty color, splashes of yellow over the hood.
About eight years earlier, the year Frank was first sent up stream to serve a two to five, Mom thought it was a good idea to keep Wiley occupied. Me and the kid did odd jobs around the house. He was three or four then, handed me the wrong tools to fix leaky faucets, helped pulled weeds from the herb garden. One day, I thought we’d paint the garage door. But when I fell asleep under the orange tree in the front yard, before we even got started, Wiley snuck away with the paintbrush and Jackson Pollacked the car.
“Daddy pretty,” he said, and flicked the paintbrush several more times before I grabbed him.
He smeared paint on my cheeks, started to cry.
“Yeah,” I said, and kissed his temple. “Daddy pretty.”
Every channel aired the chase, and Mom didn’t realize it was Frank’s car. She was just disappointed they cut away from the Price is Right. I was glued to the TV, couldn’t get away. I cheered him on, pumped my fist when he dodged a school bus, slapped my knee when a good Sam tried to block the lanes only to get spun around by Frank’s fender.
He’d promised Wiley he’d take him to the beach that afternoon. Hadn’t seen his kid in years and Wiley sat on the floor in Mom’s bedroom, waiting. Legs spread wide so I could see the netting of his swim trunks, his face and upper body pale, almost blue from the amount of sun block he’d put on himself. He bounced a Superball between his legs, and looked disappointed it didn’t catch much air off the carpet.
Mom stood at the window with the drapes parted, rose to her tiptoes whenever a car passed by. Although Wiley was almost a teenager then, she still covered his ears when those cars kept going.
“Goddamn him,” she said, and looked at me.
I could’ve told her Frank was preoccupied, but the way Wiley looked, bouncing the ball a few inches off the carpet, I didn’t have it in me.
The news broke to another story, said they’d keep us up to date on the situation. When it switched back, squad cars and sirens surrounded the Honda on the middle of the Coronado Bay Bridge. Half its front end smashed into the railing. The camera was shaky, the whirr of the helicopter cut through the newscaster’s report. Wiley came and sat with me when the picture zoomed in on the car, yellow paint crinkled and bent from the impact. Panning to the horizon, the sun was a great orange ball floating on the choppy water. I put my arm around him, held him close as the shot scanned and focused on the ornate roof of Hotel Del Coronado, fronds of palm trees. Then the screen went black, fuzzy, faded in to the reporters live in-studio. Their stunned faces told the story and I told Wiley to go wait outside.
They said the driver had jumped.