“I’ve got the phone now. Now I’m dialling,” she called down softly.
I thought I heard a car’s engine somewhere not too far away. I ran back to the street.
“What is it?” Richard said as I got in.
Headlights came around the corner. A spasm ran through me so hard it shook the car. “Jesus,” I said. The interior filled up with light so that for two seconds you could have read a book. The shadows of dust streaks on the windshield striped Tom’s face. “It’s nobody,” Richard said, and the dark closed up again as whoever it was went past.
“Caplan doesn’t know where you are, anyway.”
The jolt of fear had burned all the red out of my blood. I was like rubber. “I’ll go after him, then. Let’s just have it out.”
“Maybe he doesn’t care or—I don’t know. What do I know?” Tom said. “Why are we even talking about him?”
“Maybe he forgives you,” Richard said.
“Oh God, if he does, then we’re comrades and so on, forever,” I said. “All I’m asking is just punish me and get it over with.”
The passenger wasn’t defeated. He gestured all over the place, touching his forehead and his armpits and gyrating somewhat in place, like a baseball coach signalling his players. “Look,” I said. “I know you can talk. Don’t act like we’re stupid.”
He directed us through this part of town and then over near the train tracks where hardly anybody lived. Here and there were shacks with dim lights inside them, sunk to the bottom of all this darkness. But the house he had me stop in front of got no light except from the streetlamp. Nothing happened when I honked the horn. The man we were helping just sat there. All this time he’d voiced plenty of desires but hadn’t said a word. More and more he began to seem like somebody’s dog.
“I’ll take a look,” I told him, making my voice cruel.
It was a small wooden house with two posts for a clothesline out front. The grass had grown up and been crushed by the snows and then uncovered by the thaw. Without bothering to knock I went around to the window and looked in. There was one chair all by itself at an oval table. The house looked abandoned, no curtains, no rugs. All over the floor there were shiny things I thought might be spent flashbulbs or empty bullet casings. But it was dark and nothing was clear. I peered around until my eyes were tired and I thought I could make out designs all over the floor like the chalk outlines of victims or markings for strange rituals.
“Why don’t you go in there?” I asked the guy when I got back to the car. “Just go look. You faker, you loser.”
He held up one finger. One.
“What.”
One. One.
“He wants to go one more place,” Richard said.
“We already went one more place. This place right here. And it was just bogus.”
“What do you want to do?” Tom said.
“Oh, let’s just take him wherever he wants to go.” I didn’t want to go home. My wife was different than she used to be, and we had a six-month-old baby I was afraid of, a little son.
The next place we took him to stood all by itself out on the Old Highway. I’d been out this road more than once, a little farther every time, and I’d never found anything that made me happy. Some of my friends had had a farm out here, but the police had raided the place and put them all in jail.
This house didn’t seem to be part of a farm. It was about two-tenths of a mile off the Old Highway, its front porch edged right up against the road. When we stopped in front of it and turned off the engine, we heard music coming from inside—jazz. It sounded sophisticated and lonely.
We all went up to the porch with the silent man. He knocked on the door. Tom, Richard, and I flanked him at a slight, a very subtle distance.
As soon as the door opened, he pushed his way inside. We followed him in and stopped, but he headed right into the next room.
We didn’t get any farther inside than the, kitchen. The next room past that was dim and blue-lit, and inside it, through the doorway, we saw a loft, almost a gigantic bunk bed, in which several ghost-complected women were lying around. One just like those came through the door from that room and stood looking at the three of us with her mascara blurred and her lipstick kissed away. She wore a skirt but not a blouse, just a white bra like someone in an undies ad in a teenage magazine. But she was older than that. Looking at her I thought of going out in the fields with my wife back when we were so in love we didn’t know what it was.
She wiped her nose, a sleepy gesture. Inside of two seconds she was closely attended by a black man slapping the palm of his hand with a pair of gloves, a very large man looking blindly down at me with the invulnerable smile of someone on dope.
The young woman said, “If you’d called ahead, we would’ve encouraged you not to bring him.”
Her companion was delighted. “That’s a beautiful way of saying it.”
In the room behind her the man we’d brought stood like a bad sculpture, posing unnaturally with his shoulders wilting, as if he couldn’t lug his gigantic hands any farther.
“What the hell is his problem?” Richard asked.
“It doesn’t matter what his problem is, until he’s fully understood it himself,” the man said.
Tom laughed, in a way.
“What does he do?” Richard asked the girl.
“He’s a real good football player. Or anyhow he was.” Her face was tired. She couldn’t have cared less.
“He’s still good. He’s still on the team,” the black man said.
“He’s not even in school.”
“But he could get back on the team if he was.”
“But he’ll never be in school because he’s fucked, man. And so are you.”
He flicked one of his gloves back and forth. “I know that now, thank you, baby.”
“You dropped your other glove,” she said.
“Thank you, babe, I know that, too,” he said.
A big muscular boy with fresh cheeks and a blond flattop came over and joined us. I felt he was the host, because he gripped the handle of a green beer mug almost the size of a wastepaper basket with a swastika and a dollar sign painted on it. This personalized touch made him seem right at home, like Hugh Hefner circulating around the Playboy cocktail parties in his pajamas.
He smiled at me and shook his head. “He can’t stay. Tammy doesn’t want him here.”
“Okay, whoever Tammy is,” I said. Around these strange people I felt hungry. I smelled some kind of debauchery, the whiff of a potion that would banish everything plaguing me.
“Now would be a good time to take him out of here,” the big host said.
“What’s his name, anyway?”
“Stan.”
“Stan. Is he really deaf?”
The girl snorted.
The boy laughed and said, “That’s a good one.”
Richard punched my arm and glanced at the door, indicating we should go. I realized that he and Tom were afraid of these people; and then I was, too. Not that they’d do anything to us; but around them we felt almost like stupid failures.
The woman hurt me. She looked so soft and perfect, like a mannequin made of flesh, flesh all the way through.
“Let’s ditch him—right now,” I cried, hurrying out the door.
I was already in the driver’s seat, and Tom and Richard were halfway down the walk, before Stan came out of the house. “Lose him! Lose him!” Tom yelled, getting in after Richard, but the man already had a grip on the door handle by the time I’d started pulling away.
I goosed it, but he wouldn’t give up. He even managed to keep a slight lead and look around right at me through the front window, keeping up a psychotic eye contact and wearing a sarcastic smile, as if to say he’d be with us forever, running faster and faster, puffing out clouds of breath. After fifty yards, as we neared the stop sign at the main road, I really gunned it, hoping to wrench free, but all I did was yank him right into the stop sign. His head hit it first, and the
post broke off like a green stalk and he fell, sprawling all over it. The wood must have been rotten. Lucky for him.
We left him behind, a man staggering around a crossroads where a stop sign used to stand. “I thought I knew everyone in town,” Tom said, “but those people are completely new to me.”
“They used to be jocks, but now they’re heads,” Richard said.
“Football people. I didn’t know they ever got like that.” Tom was looking backward, down the road.
I stopped the car, and we all looked back. A quarter mile behind us, Stan paused among the fields in the starlight, in the posture of somebody who had a pounding hangover or was trying to fit his head back onto his neck. But it wasn’t just his head, it was all of him that had been cut off and thrown away. No wonder he didn’t hear or speak, no wonder he didn’t have anything to do with words. Everything along those lines was used up.
We stared at him and felt like old maids. He, on the other hand, was the bride of Death.
We took off. “Never got him to say a word.”
All the way back to town, Tom and I criticized him.
“You just don’t realize. Being a cheerleader, being on the team, it doesn’t guarantee anything. Anybody can take a turn for the worse,” said Richard, who’d been a high school quarterback or something himself.
As soon as we hit the city limits, where the chain of streetlamps began, I was back to wondering about and fearing Caplan.
“I’d better just go after him, instead of waiting,” I suggested to Tom.
“Who?”
“Who do you think?”
“Will you forget it? It’s over. Seriously.”
“Yeah. Okay, okay.”
We drove up Burlington Street. We passed the all-night gas station at the corner of Clinton. A man was handing money to the attendant, both of them standing by his car in an eerie sulfur light—those sodium-arc lamps were new in our town then—and the pavement around them was spangled with oil stains that looked green, while his old Ford was no color at all. “You know who that was?” I told Tom and Richard. “That was Thatcher.”
I made a U-turn as quickly as I could.
“So what?” Tom said.
“So this,” I said, producing the .32 I’d never fired.
Richard laughed, I don’t know why. Tom laid his hands on his knees and sighed.
Thatcher was back in his car by this time. I pulled up to the pumps going the other direction, and rolled down my window. “I bought one of those phony kilos you were selling for two-ten right around last New Year’s. You don’t know me, because what’s-his-name was selling them for you.” I doubt he heard me. I showed him the pistol.
Thatcher’s tires gave a yip as he took off in his corroded Falcon. I didn’t think I’d catch him in the VW, but I spun it around after him. “The stuff he sold me was a burn,” I said.
“Didn’t you try it first?” Richard said.
“It was weird stuff.”
“Well, if you tried it,” he said.
“It seemed all right, and then it wasn’t. It wasn’t just me. Everybody else said so, too.”
“He’s losing you.” Thatcher had hooked very suddenly between two buildings.
I couldn’t find him as we exited the alley onto another street. But up ahead I saw a patch of old snow go pink in somebody’s brake lights.
“He’s turned that corner,” I said.
When we rounded the building we found his car parked, empty, in back of an apartment house. A light went on in one of the apartments, and then went off.
“I’m two seconds behind him.” The feeling that he was afraid of me was invigorating. I left the VW in the middle of the parking lot with the door open and the engine on and the headlights burning.
Tom and Richard were behind me as I ran up the first flight of stairs and banged on the door with the gun. I knew I was in the right place. I banged again. A woman in a white nightgown opened it, backing away and saying, “Don’t. All right. All right. All right.”
“Thatcher must have told you to answer, or you never would’ve opened the door,” I said.
“Jim? He’s out of town.” She had long black hair in a ponytail. Her eyeballs were positively shaking in her head.
“Get him,” I said.
“He’s in California.”
“He’s in the bedroom.” I backed her up, moving toward her behind the mouth of the gun.
“I’ve got two kids here,” she begged.
“I don’t care! Get on the floor!”
She got down, and I pushed the side of her face into the rug and laid the gun against her temple.
Thatcher was going to come out or I didn’t know what. “I’ve got her on the floor in here!” I called back toward the bedroom.
“My kids are sleeping,” she said. The tears ran out of her eyes and over the bridge of her nose.
Suddenly and stupidly, Richard walked right down the hall and into the bedroom. Flagrant, self-destructive gestures—he was known for them.
“There’s nobody back here but two little kids.”
Tom joined him. “He climbed out the window,” he called back to me.
I took two steps over to the living-room window and looked down onto the parking lot. I couldn’t tell for certain, but it looked like Thatcher’s car was gone.
The woman hadn’t moved. She just lay there on the rug.
“He’s really not here,” she said.
I knew he wasn’t. “I don’t care. You’re going to be sorry,” I said.
Out on Bail
I saw Jack Hotel in an olive-green three-piece suit, with his blond hair combed back and his face shining and suffering. People who knew him were buying him drinks as quickly as he could drink them down at the Vine, people who were briefly acquainted, people who couldn’t even remember if they knew him or not. It was a sad, exhilarating occasion. He was being tried for armed robbery. He’d come from the courthouse during the lunch recess. He’d looked in his lawyer’s eyes and fathomed that it would be a short trial. According to a legal math that only the mind of the accused has strength to pursue, he guessed the minimum in this case would have to be twenty-five years.
It was so horrible it could only have been a joke. I myself couldn’t remember ever having met anybody who’d actually lived that long on the earth. As for Hotel, he was eighteen or nineteen.
This situation had been a secret until now, like a terminal disease. I was envious that he could keep such a secret, and frightened that somebody as weak as Hotel should be gifted with something so grand that he couldn’t even bring himself to brag about it. Hotel had taken me for a hundred dollars once and I always talked maliciously about him behind his back, but I’d known him ever since he’d appeared, when he was fifteen or sixteen. I was surprised and hurt, even miserable, that he hadn’t seen fit to let me in on his trouble. It seemed to foretell that these people would never be my friends.
Right now his hair was so clean and blond for once that it seemed the sun was shining on him even in this subterranean region.
I looked down the length of the Vine. It was a long, narrow place, like a train car that wasn’t going anywhere. The people all seemed to have escaped from someplace—I saw plastic hospital name bracelets on several wrists. They were trying to pay for their drinks with counterfeit money they’d made themselves, in Xerox machines.
“It happened a long time ago,” he said.
“What did you do? Who did you rip off?”
“It was last year. It was last year.” He laughed at himself for calling down a brand of justice that would hound him for that long.
“Who did you rip off, Hotel?”
“Aah, don’t ask me. Shit. Fuck. God.” He turned and started talking to somebody else.
The Vine was different every day. Some of the most terrible things that had happened to me in my life had happened in here. But like the others I kept coming back.
And with each step my heart broke for the person I would never find
, the person who’d love me. And then I would remember I had a wife at home who loved me, or later that my wife had left me and I was terrified, or again later that I had a beautiful alcoholic girlfriend who would make me happy forever. But every time I entered the place there were veiled faces promising everything and then clarifying quickly into the dull, the usual, looking up at me and making the same mistake.
That night I sat in a booth across from Kid Williams, a former boxer. His black hands were lumpy and mutilated. I always had the feeling he might suddenly reach out his hands and strangle me to death. He spoke in two voices. He was in his fifties. He’d wasted his entire life. Such people were very dear to those of us who’d wasted only a few years. With Kid Williams sitting across from you it was nothing to contemplate going on like this for another month or two.
I wasn’t exaggerating about those hospital name bands. Kid Williams was wearing one on his wrist. He’d just come over the wall from Detox. “Buy me a drink, buy me a drink,” he said in his high voice. Then he frowned and said in his low voice, “I come down here for just a short time,” and brightening, in his high voice: “I wanted to see you-all! Buy me one now, because I don’t have my purse, my wallet, they took all my money. They thiefs.” He grabbed at the barmaid like a child after a toy. All he was wearing was a nightshirt tucked into his pants and hospital slippers made of green paper.
Suddenly I remembered that Hotel himself, or somebody connected with him, had told me weeks ago that Hotel was in trouble for armed robbery. He’d stolen drugs and money at gunpoint from some college students who’d been selling a lot of cocaine, and they’d decided to turn him in. I’d forgotten I’d ever heard about it.
And then, as if to twist my life even further, I realized that all the celebrating that afternoon hadn’t been Hotel’s farewell party after all, but his welcome home. He’d been acquitted. His lawyer had managed to clear him on the curious grounds that he’d been trying to defend the community against the influence of these drug dealers. Completely confused as to who the real criminals were in this case, the jury had voted to wash their hands of everybody and they let him off. That had been the meaning of the conversation I’d had with him that afternoon, but I hadn’t understood what was happening at all.