I said, “Give me a break, Clare.”
“I don’t know if you deserve a break, Bobby, you haven’t been much of a friend.”
I remained in the middle of the floor, talking softly, trying not to but occasionally having to glance over at the bedroom door. I wanted to sit down, but she wasn’t offering, and I was feeling too ginger to presume.
She said, “It isn’t one of your neat little fight analogies, but all three of us are in the corner now, and I’m sure as hell not going to stay in it.”
“Where will you go?” I asked.
“Who knows?”
“When?”
“When he’s straightened out,” she said, jerking her head in the direction of the bedroom.
It wasn’t until later I recognized the irony in that. Apprehension will do that to you. I stole another glance at the door and she saw it.
“Don’t worry,” she said, “he’s so tanked up he’ll sleep till midnight.”
“He’s in bad shape?”
“What do you think? His wife’s having a hissy, his daughters are calling him a traitor, and his son thinks it’s an opportunity to take over the business.”
After a long swallow of whiskey she said, “When he gets this bad, like tonight, he gets it in his head he wants to kill you. Now he’s beginning to say it when he’s only had a couple of drinks.”
“Should I take it seriously?”
She said, “I am.”
I couldn’t quite imagine the two of them talking about me. What did he ask her? What did she say? “What do you think I ought to do?” I asked.
“I’d get out of La Morinda for a while,” she said, “I’d get out of La Morinda. I don’t think he’s capable of doing much right now, let alone anything violent, but eventually he’ll regroup, and then I’d take it very seriously.”
“And he was trying to convince me that you needed him.”
She stubbed out the cigarette. “Well, everyone gets down once in a while, and you can’t always tell the form it’ll take.” She looked about the room as she said it.
I said, “Can you believe I love you, Mary Clare?”
She said, “I love you too, Bobby,” bringing her eyes back to mine. “Too bad we both have so much baggage to lug around. One thing this fiasco makes me realize, I want to get even. I have so much anger in me, towards daddy, towards Andy and Sandro Tate—he’s the one I left graduate school for, did Jake tell you? Sandro the degenerate, Sandro the equal opportunity satyr.”
She swirled her drink, watching the diminished ice cubes. “It’s funny, though, I don’t want to get even with you. You don’t make me angry, you make me sad.”
Her eyes filled with tears. She countered with a swift smile, embarrassed at her own vehemence. She said, “Too bad one of us wasn’t really up when we met, talked the other into a good belly laugh about—”
Just then her bedroom door opened, to reveal Meany. He’d been sleeping in trousers from a pin-striped suit, tie loosened over a starched white dress shirt, everything badly rumpled, his feet in stockings. He wasn’t wearing his glasses and when he came out he said, “Who is it, dear?” with the inflection of a man long married speaking to his wife. He looked old and befuddled.
“Get out of here,” Mary Clare hissed. “Use the elevator!” Which dissolved half of Meany’s befuddlement. When I turned and tried to shuffle quickly towards the elevator, another portion of it evaporated. He knew then to whom Mary Clare was talking. She came around the bar and moved to cut him off.
He didn’t hit her or shove her, he got a shoulder past her and kept his momentum, more like a linebacker than a tackle. I was concentrating as much on diminishing space as Meany, but Clare and I overlooked one thing, the elevator was set to rest at the bottom, not top. I was just reaching for the elevator button when I heard her shout, “Vatche!”
Just as it registered that I’d heard the dread secret of Meany’s given name, the tremendous force of a fist between my shoulder blades drove my face and chest into the elevator door.
four
I went down sideways, gasping for air, the friction between my shoulder and the polished steel facing of the elevator door just enough to keep my back straight as my knees hit the floor and I fell over on my side.
Polished terra cotta covered the area in front of the bar and just across to the elevator. It cooled my face, ice against a bruise, but melted as the long-secret name invoked again, the urgency and pleading as intense as if he were about to hit her, “Vatche!” and through some primitive instinct I brought my knees towards my chest and took the kick on the knee instead of in the crotch. I opened my eyes to the floor shaking, Meany, enormous and purposeful, moving towards the bar.
For one second I admired the man. Distraught? Weak? He was very powerful and entirely in character as he reached across the bar and turned, grasping a half-full liquor bottle by the neck. He crossed the intervening space, bottle raised club-like behind his ear, wearing the most frightening face I ever looked into.
Admiration changed to terror as I realized what was happening. I sat up, heeding none of any therapist’s cautions, pushing my back against the elevator door, praying it would open and swallow me, get me away from impending murder.
At the last second I raised my fist alongside my head, the way you’re taught to block a left hook. The bottle bounced off it and smashed on the elevator door frame, raining glass and whiskey. I knew better then to flinch at a mere fist coming at me, but the glass and whiskey shocked me and threw off my reaction to the backswing, Meany, like a troll, half squatting in front of me, his face a mixture of rage and determination, while the remnants of the bottle slashed past my eyes just as I turned my head aside . . .
. . . to see Clare coming towards us, grimacing at the blood pouring out of my scalp, pointing an almost dainty .38. Meany never saw it coming.
Poised, not to miss this time, but arrested a split second by the sobbed “Stop! Please!” His hand at the top of the backswing, broken bottle above my whiskey-drenched face.
The flash from the barrel came fast as a right cross, the report echoing and the gun jumping in Clare’s hand, all one impression.
Meany fell, flash frozen slo-mo arc of bottle about to rip my face off but never reaches me, the teetering inertia of his huge body toppling, the other hand thrown out to catch himself on the door, diverting the bottle from its path, so that the freshly made edge plowed a thin furrow through my scalp as I reached up to deflect the falling giant.
The last of the arc I watched at full speed, Meany crashing on the terra cotta floor, the bottle and blood already there, drops amid the splattered whiskey and glass litter.
Mary Clare stood with the gun at her side and smoke around her head, a wisp like steam from a teapot spout trailing up her arm.
Everyone stone still for three beats.
Meany made a sound, curse or growl. I blinked. I saw the downed bear clench his teeth behind opened lips, the eyes above them looking into a world I couldn’t see. Then he closed his eyes and moaned, breaking the spell.
Clare echoed the moan with one of her own. She was at Meany’s side. Before I could warn her about the glass I saw she’d missed it all. Suddenly my head was light, arms and back shaking, I went down inside myself, hoping for the bell to save me from a KO.
I couldn’t watch but I couldn’t close my eyes, either, so I stared at the ceiling, when I heard Meany’s only words, “Don’t touch me.”
Clare passed back and forth, still missing glass. “How do I get an ambulance in this burg? I’ve got to get an ambulance.” One hand pulling the collar of the mink under her chin.
“Dial the operator; she’ll call the police.”
“Give me the police,” she said into the phone on the bar.
In a moment she said, “I have a man here who’s been shot and I need an ambulance. —Did I see who did it? I suppose so, I shot him.” Then I heard her giving directions for getting up to the penthouse, but I was too out of it to follow them.
br />
The next thing I remember, Clare was giving me a drink. I wasn’t sure I should be drinking alcohol but it was something to do and I did it. She came back with a bar towel and pressed it to my head. She put my free hand on top of it and said, “Hold that.” I had been bleeding freely. The blood ran down to the top of my ear and parted, some running down the front and some going under my collar. The alcohol made me aware that what was keeping me upright was the girdle, and I thought of Kennedy in the limousine in Dallas. “Oh Jesus, don’t let him die,” I said aloud; “don’t put me back in the hospital, either.”
Fear was better than any drink. The fear of going back to the hospital made me set the glass on the floor and claw my way upright before someone who knew better told me to lie perfectly still.
The towel stayed on my head. I stood. Tottering.
Meany didn’t move and Clare lifted his massive head and put a pillow under it and a blanket over him. I clung to the elevator. Clare had another bar towel and whisked away the glass in front of the elevator, still in her mink coat, though at some point she had put on loafers. I shivered as she whisked away the glass. She said, “Find some place out of the way and sit down.” For the first time since I climbed out of bed that evening I sat down voluntarily. It was all I could do to negotiate a bar stool.
At the sound of the sirens Clare took up keys. “It’s the police,” she said, “I have to let them in.” When she came back she was followed by two policemen with hands atop their guns, then two men in the blue polo shirts of the EMTs, one with an oxygen bottle, the other with a black bag. Then another siren.
One of the paramedics came over to me, lifted my hand and the towel, then replaced it, saying “You’re fine for right now,” and continued to Meany’s side.
five
The new janitor was shaking out his dust mop when I approached the front of the office building. He stopped shaking it and stared at me—with good reason. I was still in my Hawaiian shirt, which was sticky with drying blood fore and aft. The paramedics had their hands full with Meany, though the back-up crew that rode the pumper bandaged my head with a turban-like affair that at least soaked up the blood. So either I hitched a ride to the hospital with one of the cops or they’d call another ambulance. I opted for the former, but I didn’t tell any of the cops that, because I wasn’t going back to the hospital. No ER doc would turn me loose after he stitched me up. Freedom was the only thing I could think of other than needing to talk to Jake.
I found that by taking steps half my normal stride I could fool myself about being mobile. The janitor, built like a fire plug, was about to challenge me when I said, “I’m seeing Mr. Pritchett in one-fifteen.” He just stared, no longer shaking his mop, as I made the stairs one at a time and had to put out a hand to steady myself on the door jamb as I entered the lobby.
For just a second—a light rap on Jake’s door—it was back before Homer Smith went berserk, coming from the utility closet, finished work for the night, to have my nightly libation with him. It must have been the same with Jake. He said, “Come in,” in an everyday tone of voice.
“Good God!” Jake bounded out of his chair and had me by the forearm, guiding me to the couch.
“No, I’ll mess it up.”
“Sit,” he said in his MP voice.
“You want your couch messed up?”
“I’ll mess you up if you don’t.” He had both my hands and he lowered me into a sitting position. “I’ll call you an ambulance.”
“Didn’t you hear the one that just drove away from here? I’m not going back to the hospital.”
“Don’t be an ass.”
I said, “Clare shot Meany.”
Jake went goggle-eyed for one heartbeat. “When?”
“Two hours ago? I’ve been knee deep in cops till I lost track of time.”
“And?”
“Didn’t kill the sonofabitch.”
He pulled his desk chair over and sat. “Is it bad?”
“They took her away, that’s what’s bad. Took him away, very hastily. Yes, I’d say it’s bad.”
I gave Jake the shortest resume possible of the goings on—my brief exchange with Mary Clare, Meany coming out of the bedroom where he was presumably in an alcohol daze but still bear enough to almost kill me. “From the questioning, I’d say the police like Clare and me for conspiring to kill him. We set him up, they think.”
“Did they arrest her?”
“The word they used is detain.”
“Stay put.” Jake slid over to his desk, rotated his Rolodex, called a former classmate, now a Superior Court Judge, to get the name and number of a crack defense lawyer. I couldn’t follow what he said, I was zoning out, in fact, it was all I could do not to fall asleep. ‘Don’t put your head back,’ I told myself; then I put my head back. Another call. He was talking to a nanny or a baby-sitter, his voice assumed a cajoling tone. He went back to his man-to-man tone when he finally got the lawyer, who was at a party. I heard Meany’s name but I didn’t catch the lawyer’s. It dawned on me through the haze, Jake was a whiz-bang at what he did, because he got the man out of the party and on his way to La Morinda when half its citizens were brushing their teeth and climbing into their jammies.
“Done,” he said, looking pleased. “I’ll take you home.”
“I’d rather stay, thanks.”
He stood and leaned over me, looking into my eyes the way a referee does when he’s thinking of stopping a fight. I knew he could smell the whiskey Meany had doused me with, and maybe even the blood and sweat.
“Meany hit me with a whiskey bottle,” I said. “First he punched me in the back, and then when I was down he swung a bottle at me but I deflected it and it broke on the elevator door, and then I got this”—pointing to my scalp—“when he was going to murder me with the broken bottle. Then Clare shot him.”
That didn’t deflect Jake from his purpose. He said, “Going it alone has got you a studio apartment in La Morinda, a push broom and fantasies about being through with the world. You never learned to rely on people because you spent most of your life not needing to. This time leave me to do what you’re in no shape to. I can handle this. The world won’t come to an end tonight if you don’t do it yourself.”
I had tears in my eyes when I said, “Thanks, Jake. I’m so tired. I’m tired of guns, I’m tired of people coming after me.” And I was tired enough I don’t remember him walking me to my apartment or keying the door. I remember him putting a bath towel on the bed and taking my moccasins off.
“Pissed me off, Jake. The police asking me why I was in her apartment. I told them I had as much right to be there as Meany. You know, he doesn’t own her. I wanted to sock the frigging cop but I was too shaky.”
Jake said, “Sure. You get some sleep now.”
And I did, so I must pick up from Jake’s memoir to tell what happened while I was in the land of Nod.
*****
From the recordings of Jake Pritchett:
Robert was out before I reached the door, chest not moving perceptibly, lips parted. I called Amanda when I got back to my office. She said if he was that exhausted it could wait until morning and she would look in on him.
I sat in my office, just staring and thinking, until I heard three beeps on a car horn and let the lawyer in the back door.
Much later that evening I would sit where Robert had, in rapt conversation with Tony Arcata, sipping a whisky while he talked of Masai initiation rites, how the candidate warrior went out and baited a thick-maned old lion and took his charge with only a bull hide shield as protection. Then his uncles and other sponsors converged on the lion and speared it to death. I reminded the lawyer of how the Eskimos, in the days before firearms and canned salmon, took their sons out on the ice to hunt polar bear. Sometimes the initiate died; he didn’t make it to manhood.
Tony Arcata said, “I refuse to believe that men who can afford to be willful and charge about like baited lions—I refer to the Meanys of the world—should alw
ays prevail.” He smiled across his glass. “Not while I carry a spear.”
I said, “I’m the one to blame. I prodded Robert into taking on the lion. I’m not sure I was right.”
“Well,” Tony Arcata said, “unless he’s non compis mentis, your Robert Gattling’s past the age of initiation and I doubt you had a gun to his head. On the other hand, we’re always coming up against ravening lions in this world, and we’re no different from those Masai youths. They may have thought they had a choice of whether to take on the lion: we both know they didn’t.”
My judge friend had turned me on to the man who could take care of Mary Clare. I already knew the person to take care of Robert.
During a quiet drive home I reflected that tonight Robert learned something I’d learned at an earlier age. When I was an MP, working in an Army psychiatric hospital, I learned that people can take away your freedom based on what they thing is happening rather than what you know is happening. More than one GI conned his way in there thinking he’d put one over on the Army, get out of all the short order drill, the long marches in full gear, only to discover he had even less freedom than in the barracks. An inductee taking shit from a drill instructor at least knows he’s going on home leave after a certain amount of time. You get thrown in the Army’s loony bin it’s worse than the stockade, you have to wait until an Army shrink thinks you’re straight before he lets you out. Your freedom depends on what’s going on in his head—and who knows what that is?
The way Robert put it, someone can take away your freedom not based on fact but on their perception of fact. He came to my office, the night Mary Clare shot Meany, more shaken by the police suspicion that the two of them had conspired to murder Meany than by Meany’s barefaced attempt to murder him.
My pulling into the garage at that hour woke Amanda, who was putting on a robe as I came into the house. I told her about the night’s events: Tony’s visit to the police station, where Mary Clare was being detained while they sorted out the legality of the weapon she fired, her perception of imminent danger to Robert, the amount of force necessary to prevent Meany doing harm to him. He had come back to my office while they were waiting for Sergeant Rutledge to get to the station.