One Good Hustle Read online

  ALSO BY BILLIE LIVINGSTON

  FICTION

  Going Down Swinging

  Cease to Blush

  Greedy Little Eyes

  POETRY

  The Chick at the Back of the Church

  PUBLISHED BY RANDOM HOUSE CANADA

  Copyright © 2012 Billie Livingston

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Published in 2012 by Random House Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited.

  www.randomhouse.ca

  Random House Canada and colophon are registered trademarks.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

  Livingston, Billie, 1965–

  One good hustle : a novel / by Billie Livingston.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-35990-2

  I. Title.

  PS8573.I916064 2012 C813′.54 C2011-907803-1

  Cover images: (tracks) Alan Powdrill / Getty Images, (girl) Joerg Buschmann / Millennium Images, UK, (hair) doglikehorse / shutterstock.com

  v3.1

  For Sweet Timothy, my believer

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  ONE

  THERE IS PROBABLY at least one good con for a situation like this, one decent, well-executed hustle that would turn the whole scene to my advantage. But I just can’t think straight lately. Feels as if I’ve been beating my brains out forever, just trying to get an edge. Like a total amateur.

  Jill’s mom, Ruby, watches me with a closed-mouth smile—almost a smirk from where I’m sitting. We’re in the basement, in Jill’s bedroom, but Jill isn’t here. The second that Ruby pushed through the beaded curtain in the doorway, Jill buggered off upstairs. Obviously a trap.

  Ruby is sitting on Jill’s bed now, one hand on either knee, her palms up like Buddha’s mother. She’s probably only forty but her hair is steel grey and she’s built like a chubby bulldog. She’s wearing this long, drapey vest-thing over stretchy black pants, which reminds me of Bea Arthur as Maude, except Ruby’s about half Bea Arthur’s height. Clearly Jill got her gargantuan size from her father’s side of the family.

  I tilt up the corners of my mouth but keep it shut. Ruby keeps on smiling, gives me a slow easy blink. This is no staring contest. It’s more like a game of inscrutable chicken.

  Finally she exhales through her nose and says, “Well, Sammie, you’ve been sleeping in our basement for two weeks and no one knows why.”

  I nod at the floor. She’s got a point. I’ve been hogging half of Jill’s bed now for two weeks exactly. I hadn’t meant to. I kept hoping my dad might show up and I’d get out of here before anyone knew what hit them. Fat chance. Sam’s nowhere to be seen. I’ve got noplace else to go and Ruby’s got me cornered. Sam once said, if you think you got to fight to win then you’re an amateur. “That’s the difference between us and them,” he said. “The professional works out everything that the amateur has to sweat out. If you got to sweat every move, that’s what you call a rough hustle.” He told my mother that shortly before he got arrested and did two years for grand larceny and contributing to the delinquency of a minor. I was the minor. I didn’t have to do any time, though. I was only eight.

  “Yup,” I finally say out loud. Ruby keeps gawking at me, waiting for an explanation. What does she expect? I can’t rat out my mother.

  If I don’t say something, though, she might turf me.

  “It’s my mom.” Fill in the blanks yourself.

  That is the heart of it, after all. My mother. Marlene’s been the problem for a while. Seems impossible when I think of how just a couple of years ago Marlene was a fucking force of nature! I suppose she always drank a little, but not like this. She was sharp. I told her everything. We trusted each other like crazy. She drilled it into my head that once you catch a person in a lie, it’s hard to ever trust that person again. By “person,” she meant me. Us. Everyone else was grey area.

  Nowadays, living with Marlene—talk about your rough hustles. She doesn’t even try to act decent any more. I am sixteen, though. Only one more year until I graduate. Four months after that, I’ll be legal. At midnight, on November 2, 1985, I will be eighteen years old. Until two weeks ago, I thought I could stick it out.

  Ruby watches me. She’s waiting for the rest.

  “I couldn’t stay,” I tell her. “She’s … you know.”

  Forget it. I’m not saying more. I barely even know Jill, never mind her mother. Jill and I only started hanging out a few months ago. She knows I was named after my father and that he doesn’t pay child support. And that Marlene thinks Sam’s a major prick. That’s about it, really. She doesn’t know what kind of people I come from.

  “She’s not feeling well. Flu.” I gaze up at Jill’s framed Foxy Brown movie poster, on the wall behind Ruby—Pam Grier in a long black wig with a little silver gun on her ankle. All around her a dozen little Pams beat the shit out of bad guys. Don’t mess aroun’ with … Foxy Brown. She’s the meanest chick in town. I’d never heard of this movie before I knew Jill.

  “Sammie,” Ruby calls me back. “Are you saying something?”

  I must’ve been moving my lips as I read. Ruby ducks her head, trying to make eye contact, but I’m not into it. I don’t want to deal with Ruby. I start fidgeting with the beanbag chair—the orange leather is peeling like bad sunburn.

  “Tell me about your mom. Has she been hurting you?”

  My eyes jerk up. Hurting? Does she mean hitting? “Shit, I could take my mother,” I blurt. Stupid thing to say. I’m stupid. “No. It’s her. She wants to, like”—I look back at Foxy, the silver gun on her ankle—“hurt herself. She wants to kill herself.”

  Ruby’s skinny, pencilled eyebrows rise.

  I feel like a fink—but really, it’s barely anything, what I told. It’s not like it’s illegal to have suicidal thoughts. Part of me is relieved. The rest is embarrassed like I just coughed up phlegm. Except it’s not my phlegm and I have no right coughing it up.

  “I offered to help,” I add. “No, I mean …”

  Ruby’s eyes are sym
pathetic all of a sudden. I have just become a pathetic little splotch on her daughter’s beanbag chair: some poor, sticky welfare kid with a mother who plans to off herself.

  Regular Ruby and her regular husband, Lou, in their regular house with their regular pickup truck. What’s a Regular Ruby supposed to think of a situation like this?

  I look at her. She has pink blusher on her freckled cheeks and stubby mascaraed eyelashes that I can just make out in the dim light of Jill’s hanging paper lantern. Jill told me once that her parents were real partiers until they became Christians. Then they gave up drinking and settled right down. It is a fact that I have not seen Ruby or Lou drink since I’ve been here, but I haven’t seen anyone go to church either.

  It’s probably true, though. I’m a total magnet for Jesus freaks. My best friend Drew is a Jesus freak but we haven’t spoken since I took off. He probably hates me now. Christian or not, you can only turn your other cheek for so damn long.

  “She’s depressed,” I explain to Ruby. “She always talks about it. She’s tried it a couple of times. Sort of. So, when she told me she was definitely going to do it, I offered to help her get pills. But I said I wasn’t going to watch.”

  Ruby winces and I go back to picking the orange skin on the beanbag chair. “Yeah,” I say, and suddenly I’m goofing with the ditzy hippie-voice that Jill and I like to do. “Like, a totally bad scene, baby. Not cool.”

  Ruby just sits, her stubby little hands on her knees. She has three rings on one and two on the other. I can hear Marlene sing the way she did when I was a kid: “With rings on her fingers and bells on her toes, she shall have music wherever she goes!”

  I don’t believe that my mother will actually kill herself. But I’m not telling Ruby that. Or the fact that I sort of wish she would. We really are fucked up, Marlene and me. There’s no greeting card for a case like us.

  Ruby lifts her hands off her knees, laces her fingers and looks into the empty bowl of her palms. Here is the church, here is the steeple, I think. Open the doors and where are the people?

  She lets a slow sigh go. “When’s the last time you saw her?”

  “A few days ago. I had to pick up some more clothes. She asked me to get her some stuff at the store.”

  Her eyebrows angle up again, then her mouth gets thin and hard and she gives me one of those solid looks of determination that grown-ups sport on kids’ TV. I can see now why little kids might like that sort of thing. It’s confidence building.

  “Did you know we used to run a group home here, Sammie?”

  I nod. Jill talks about those days sometimes, the harsh chicks and guys who used to stay here, prosti-tots and pickpockets. Jill told me that if one of those girls heard that a new guy was coming to the house, she’d go stand outside on the porch so that her nipples would get hard from the cold. I didn’t get it. Jill explained that it was so the guy would get turned on at the sight of her and then nipple-chick would be first in line for his weed or whatever he was carrying. I found that hard to believe. Jill put her hand on her hip, pushed her fat lips out at me and said, “Look, baby, I know more about sex and drugs than you’ll know in a lifetime.” Jill would kill to be a black chick. Pam Grier.

  “Do you want to stay on here for a while?” Ruby says.

  I take a breath and look her in the eyes for as long as I can stand it.

  “All right,” she says. “We need to set up an appointment with a worker at Social Services. And someone needs to check in on your mother. I’ll get Lou to take me over there when he gets off work tomorrow.”

  When she catches my expression, Ruby gives me a tough sort of chuckle. “We just want to notify Social Services of the situation. If Lou and I are on the record as your temporary guardians, they’ll send support cheques so we can afford to feed you.”

  Anyone can weasel her way around a social worker. But wait till Ruby gets a load of Marlene. And vice versa. I open my mouth to protest but there’s no point. It’s her own fault—Marlene’s got it coming.

  TWO

  THIS IS THE LAST DAY of grade 11. One more year and I’m finished. Forever. I’m pretty sure my dad is a high-school dropout. Maybe it didn’t matter as much forty years ago. But nowadays, “high-school dropout” sounds lame. And kind of skeevy.

  I stare up at the clock. 2:15.

  A monitor walks up and down the aisles, watching us. Not our regular English teacher. She taps the desk of one girl, two rows over: Eyes on your own paper.

  I’m sitting here in room 221 doing my final English exam and all I can think of is Ruby and Lou descending on Marlene.

  I wrote down the phone number for Ruby this morning.

  “We’ll just look in on her, make sure she’s all right,” she said. Ruby was stern but energetic about it all.

  Being looked in on goes against everything Marlene stands for. Unless it’s a guy. If Lou was going over on his own, Marlene would be all for it.

  Lou’s shift is the early one: 5:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. He works as a guard at Oakalla Prison Farm here in Burnaby. Jill’s dad is the opposite of my dad in just about every way you can think of. They’re both quiet, but that’s where the similarity ends. Lou is so tall he has to duck his head to come into a room; Sam claims he’s 5-foot-10 but he says a lot of things. Lou wears a close-cropped beard, I think to hide his pockmarks; Sam’s got no facial hair, I think so a potential mark will believe Sam’s got nothing to hide. Jill gets her jollies when people mistake her for Lou’s girlfriend instead of his daughter. Nobody would ever mistake Sam and me for a couple.

  Wait till Marlene gets a gander at giant Lou. She’s probably staring at him right now. It’s hard to know with Marlene if she’ll get scared, or turned on.

  At two-thirty I’m out the door. I love these final exam days. You just get up and walk out when you’re done. And English exams—I mean, for chrissake, if you have two brain cells to rub together, how can you not pass an English test? Mind you, I probably wouldn’t have said that a few weeks ago when I kept walking into things. Forgetting what I was saying and where I was going. Wondering if Marlene would still be breathing when I got home.

  It got so bad that Mr. Walters, my Trades Math teacher, asked if he could speak to me after class. It’s a bit embarrassing that I take Trades Math, but when things started to get hairy at home I didn’t want to take the chance of failing geometry or trigonometry or whatever else they were selling. I just wanted a class that would show me how to think on my feet, keep my funds in order. Sam would approve, I figured. My dad is a practical sort of guy.

  Mr. Walters, who is also one of the school’s two guidance counsellors, waited until the classroom was empty before he got serious with me.

  “Everything okay?” he asked.

  Without those student bodies filling up space, the words echoed off all Walters’ little chalk numbers on the blackboard. He’d been talking about taxes, I think. Or the way compound interest is calculated daily—something useful, but I couldn’t concentrate. Walters had a very concerned expression on his face and his long eyebrows pricked up like antennae.

  I waited for some smart-assed response to come out of me.

  Nothing. Blank. So I shrugged.

  “I know I should be grateful for small mercies,” he said, “but you didn’t say a word today. You stared right through me. Frankly, you have me a little worried.”

  Generally speaking, Mr. Walters is an easy target. Short, with a face like a penguin and a persnickety, anxious demeanour, he’s the sort of guy whose pants you want to pull down just before you leave him blindfolded on the front stoop of a convent.

  The fact that he wanted to know why I was too depressed to harass him seemed pathetic and beautiful all at once. I was scared I might start bawling. I wished I could hug him. I wished that he would hug me and pat my back with nice quiet thumps, the way Marlene used to do when I skinned the crap out of my knee.

  What I really wished was that I could just tell on her. What would a proper little guy like Mr. Walters th
ink if he knew that the night before, my mother had sat on the couch putting on her makeup because she was planning to off herself?

  “I’m going to throw myself off a pier,” Marlene had said, and then she put more lipstick on. My mother has always liked the idea of looking pretty when she dies. So she kept at it, putting on layer after layer of mascara while she talked about how she would dive into the ocean. “My bones drifting free, finally free,” she said, as if it was the most gorgeous ambition ever.

  In other words, I thought, you want to be a jellyfish, one of those floating, white ballerina-things that dance in the quietest parts of the water.

  She caught me rolling my eyes.

  “You know everything, don’t you.” She took another slug of her vodka and milk, zipped up her makeup bag, and announced that she was going to jump off the roof of our building instead.

  I didn’t respond. I was at the dinner table, trying to finish a short story for English class. Coming from a family of bullshit artists, fiction is the only school thing I truly excel at.

  “So s-superior …” Marlene sputtered. “I was going to get you some bubbly for your sweet sixteenth, a nice little bottle of Baby Duck maybe. But you’d have turned your nose up at that!”

  “My body is a temple,” I said.

  “Oh, for chrissake! Why couldn’t you just turn Catholic like a normal person?”

  It’s because of Marlene that I even know any born-again-Christian kids. I wouldn’t know a guy like Drew, that’s for sure, except that Marlene had the bright idea to send me to camp a couple of summers ago so she and Fat Freddy could take off for a week and work a few hustles in Los Angeles. It turned out to be one of those Jesus camps. The Welfare paid for it. Most of the camps Welfare pays for are Jesus camps. It’s like they think that poor kids must all be morally bankrupt too.

  The Hollow Tree Ranch was set up like the Old West and the pastor who ran the campground called himself Tex. I thought I’d died and gone to hell, sitting in the chapel the first morning, listening to Tex spout off about what it means to “put a spoke in the devil’s wheels.”