Bread to the Wise--Book I of The Libertine

  “If you were a feminist I’d say ‘piece of ass,’ get you good and riled.”

  “But since you know I’m in love with her, you’d watch your mouth, wouldn’t you.”

  “You don’t expect me to find her anything but a class A nuisance, do you? Com’on, Gattling, look at the troubles have followed her around.”

  “All she did was quit being a victim, Sergeant.”

  “Meany claims he was lifting her out of the gutter.”

  “For the love of Pete. Gimme another cigarette.”

  Rutledge shook the cigarette out until I could grasp it. “If he’s right,” he said, “ingratitude could make a fella upset.”

  “He saved her life. Then he tried to preserve it in liquid nitrogen. He could have let go of her long before I met her, she might have bitched and moaned, in the end she would have gone straight. He can’t cop a plea on that hogwash.”

  “So far as I know,” Rutledge said, “Meany never made a major mistake in business. Far as I know, he batted way over five hundred backing political candidates.”

  “He never fell in love with a subdivision or the Secretary of State.”

  Rutledge shrugged.

  I said, “Believe it or not, my dad opened the first supermarket in St. Louis: ‘Pritchett’s Grocomat.’ Huge success. Then he opened two more and went belly up.”

  “Over-extended?” Rutledge crushed his smoked cigarette.

  “He fell in love with his own idea. He didn’t notice that Piggly-Wiggly was putting a store around the corner from his first one.”

  “Shit,” Rutledge said, “like us competing with the FBI. —Well, I think I should call it a night. Can I give you a ride home?”

  “Not sure where that is, sergeant.” I told him about my run-in with Amanda.

  “You can’t blame her, can you? It’s for sure her husband wouldn’t be in there with the A-team surgeons if you hadn’t come along.” He walked in a slow circle. “Lemma talk to her, see if I can’t convince her the only way the cops can release the crime scene is if you’re on the premises.”

  “Hey, she’s not mentally deficient.”

  “I know, that’s the lamest thing I ever heard; I’ll think of something.” He walked off. I wanted to run after him and kiss him. He looked a little like Columbo with a fedora, or Jimmy Durante doing his closing TV business, walking through the receding spotlights.

  *****

  The dawn’s long shadows preceded us into the light Sunday morning traffic. Sergeant Rutledge looked very tired. He looked like a man who’d done this so often he’d taught himself not to fall asleep at the wheel.

  “What did you say to her?” I asked.

  “Please, Gattling, leave me my dignity.”

  “Do I clear out the minute she walks through the door?”

  “You grovel. I’ve made you out to be alive because Jake took a bullet for you. You’re a vicarious victim who needs understanding. You are ‘more to be pitied than censored,’ as the song goes.”

  I said, “Jesus. What about my dignity?”

  “There’s always Motel 6.”

  “The Pritchetts’ the only place Clare knows to get hold of me.”

  Rutledge said, “So grovel. A tear or two wouldn’t hurt.”

  As I approached the front door, Rutledge waiting to make sure I got in before driving off, Bienvenida came running out, and threw her arms around my neck and sobbed.

  I turned my head and gave Rutledge the high sign and he drove off.

  “How did you get in?” I asked her.

  “The last policeman to leave was real nice, a Mejicano. I made him coffee. The children are here and they real scared. Can you talk to them?”

  Jane and Jimmy were in the breakfast nook. Bienvenida had made bizcochos, a “special occasion” snack, rich comfort food, but the kids had eaten only a few bites and stopped. The looks they gave me said they’d talked to their mom and had picked up her animosity.

  “Your dad was coming out of surgery and he’ll be a long time in post-op, the place where—”

  “We know what post-op is,” Jimmy said in an annoyed voice.

  “Your dad’s going to be all right. I’m sure your mom will be with him till he gets out of post-op. It could take a while.”

  “Why’d my dad have to get shot?” Jane asked.

  “I doubt even the man who shot him knows that.”

  “Why not?” Jimmy asked, challenging.

  I said, “Sometimes people do things without thinking. Your dad doesn’t. But others of us do. The man who shot him will probably tell the police he just reacted when he saw your dad’s shotgun, but I don’t think that’s the answer you’re looking for. Sometimes someone who didn't start out to hurt you can still mess up your dreams. Your dad didn’t start out to get hurt and the man who did it sure wasn’t after him.”

  “Was he after you?” Jimmy asked.

  “Maybe.”

  Jane’s head was hanging lower and lower. Finally a tear dropped onto her plate and she said, “Mary Clare’s so nice. She couldn’t have caused all this.”

  I said, “She didn’t. She’s got a right to live her life, and someone was trying to take away that right.”

  “That Meany,” Jane said.

  “I know how he got that name,” Jimmy said, “big meany.”

  “You got that right.”

  Jane started to cry in earnest and Jimmy put his arms around her. He was ready to cry, too. Bienvenida sat down next to Jane on the bench seat and put her arms around them both. I had to get up and walk into the other room. I saw the whiskey still sitting out on the salver that the Pritchetts never used, and I found a clean Old Fashioned glass and poured myself a slug. It burned going down. I followed it with another, which didn’t burn as much.

  Bienvenida, wiping away tears, came in and said, “Is for putting you to sleep?”

  “Yeah. If I’m not awake before you go, wake me. I have to get ready to go to work tomorrow.”

  “Do you need clothes pressed? Let me, please, I need something to do besides cry.”

  “Of course,” I said. “I’ll show you what I need. But promise not to cry on my clothes, will you?”

  She started to laugh and then she cried and then she put her arms around me and wept into my chest as if it were her own father who’d been shot.

  seven

  When she came through the door I expected the kids to run to Amanda with arms open, but they hung back, the expectancy in their faces saying they were waiting for word about their father. She gave them none. Rather, she turned to me and said, “Sic your cop friend on me. I won’t have it. You told me to my face you’re closer to my husband than I am, you arrogant twerp, now you want me to take you in again?”

  Bienvenida had been watching from the doorway to the family room. She took a step into the living room, her expression collapsing into anguish, taking up the hem of her apron and covering her face, muffling a wail that stopped Amanda’s rant. “Doan fight, for the sake of the children, please.” Still holding the apron as if ready to shield herself again.

  I said, “Mary Clare doesn’t know what happened and she needs to. The only place she knows to call is here.”

  “In other words, you want to use me, the way you used Jake.”

  I held my peace.

  “In my own home. Everything getting away from me. You don’t know what I’ve been through these last twenty-four hours.”

  Head down, for fear of inciting her by making eye contact, I said, “I’ll leave as soon as Mary Clare gets in touch.”

  “See that you do,” Amanda said.

  She went over to the children, who hugged her. All such fine-looking specimens, the three looked like an illustration from a fairy tale. I excused myself and went out the kitchen entrance to the garage. I looked for signs of the ‘Gunfight at the Pritchett’s Garage.’ I opened the door the Buick had gone through. Chalk circles on the cement indicated where evidence had been located. Sitting on the work bench was Jake’s cleani
ng kit, as if waiting for the shotgun to come home. I’d never cleaned a shotgun; mine was gone before I had a chance—if I'd been brave enough to clean it. My palms sweated.

  I looked for instructions on how to clean a shotgun in the cleaning kit, at which time Bienvenida appeared.

  “Sleep,” she said.

  “Mary Clare.”

  She said, “Doña Amanda and the children lie down on her bed. I tell you when Mary Clare calls.”

  She led me by the hand to the guest bedroom. “All God’s will, don Roberto, God’s will. Sleep.”

  I stripped down to my shorts and climbed into bed. It felt okay to be there, but I couldn’t sleep. I found myself rehashing, like an old pro might rehash his earliest fights, rehashing meeting Lana, the eternal Eve, every man’s idea of the girl next door grown to womanhood. At the end of our first date we walked into Berkeley Square for a nightcap. A regular I sometimes drank with, Buck Adams, said as I passed, “You win the Irish Sweepstakes?” I shook my head and he said, “You did something to deserve a looker like that.”

  As Lana grew up, her mother told her to avoid eye contact with men, advice she was constitutionally unable to act on. If Mary Clare had eyes that transmitted messages from her soul, Lana’s pale blue eyes were receivers, inviting advances from those who looked into them. If she’d been dumb it would have been one thing, but she was bright, the brightness and the trusting calm came through, the message of those eyes. After I dropped her off from our first date, I found myself humming “Them There Eyes” all the way home, thanking my good luck she hadn’t gone off to Reno before I met her.

  It was spring when I asked her to marry me. We were driving around the two lane roads behind Reno and stopped to take in a particularly striking vista. I said, “You had enough of being a blackjack dealer?”

  “Yes.”

  I said, “Let’s get married and take a long trip together.”

  That’s when I fell asleep. Just as well. Reliving the good part of my life with Lana would surely have led to reliving the nightmare parts. Still, I awoke with a pang, recalling the difference between the first impression of Lana and the last. Both had to do with eyes, frank, inviting eyes at the beginning of our romance; at the end withdrawn eyes. I said, the last time I tried to talk about the shooting, “Look at me, Lana, goddamit, look at me.” I even grabbed her lower jaw and forced her face around until she had to look at me. There was nothing but resentment in her look, underlined with fear and anger.

  Bienvenida woke me.

  “You snore a lot,” she said as I blinked at her.

  “I never snore.”

  “Like a pig.”

  “Do pigs snore?”

  She said, “A call comes from the hospital. Don Jacobo is awake. Doña Amanda goes to see him.”

  I started to bound out of bed but stopped short of exposing myself. “Vayas,” I said.

  “I hoped you forget,” she said, with a twist of her shoulders and a smile back at me.

  Bienvenida never flirted like this. “Why so happy?”

  “Don Jacobo gonna be okay.”

  “Go. So I can dress, so I can see him.”

  She was suddenly serious. “The doctor say only doña Amanda can see him.”

  “Did she say that, or one of the doctors at the hospital?”

  She shook her head, her expression still serious. “I’m afraid, Roberto.”

  “Afraid of what?”

  “I doan know. Like an earthquake is coming.” She threw herself on me, on the bed, and sobbed.

  “Like you said, don Jacob is going to be all right.”

  She looked into my eyes. She wasn’t flirting now, fear among the tears, a woman more substantial than Mary Clare, who smelled of sun-dried cotton and vanilla beans, who didn’t think twice about throwing herself on a man in his bed. “My brain say he okay, my heart tell me he not okay. So I am afraid. My uncle, Ernesto, die of a blood clot in the heart. He was muy robusto.”

  “In a hospital?” I asked.

  “He live in Cañas; no hospital.”

  “There you are. Jake’s in a hospital, they watch for things like that.”

  She said, “He has to come home sometime. And you will be gone.”

  “He’ll come home when he’s strong.”

  She wiped her eyes on her sleeve and left. I threw on last night’s clothes, splashing water on my face and slicking my hair with wet hands. If Clare hadn’t called by this time, she wouldn’t before late afternoon. I drove down the freeway in my truck, a strange vehicle after the Triumph, concentrating as hard as I could on sending out a plea through the ether, looking for Mary Clare in the clouds. “Call me,” I said in my mind over and over, “call me.”

  I ran into Amanda coming out of the intensive care unit. “Can I see him?”

  “No.”

  My face asked why; she said, “Look for yourself.”

  What I saw through the glass partition was a body with snaky wires and tubes, a portable suction unit draining the hole in his chest. A nurse hovered.

  I must have bored a hole in his subconscious, because Jake’s lids went back and he locked me with an unblinking stare.

  Talking Without Words

  one

  This is woo-woo stuff, but it happened, believe me. Jake says he remembers none of this, which is reasonable, given he was in a literal sense non compos mentis, or, to put it more crudely, off his rocker on morphine and whatever.

  “Meany,” came a message out of the ether, sent by Jake’s eye.

  Meany was the farthest thing from my mind at that moment. So was “Penthouse”—a bygone memory, a relic. But I asked anyway—asked who, asked what?—I found myself mouthing the words, “Look there?” Jake said, without twitching a facial muscle, “He will double back there. Tonight.”

  Jake closed his eyes. He reminded me of my father on his death bed, not just unconscious, but all his inherent culture stripped away, just this immanence half sad half humble. I shook my head, turned on my heel and headed for the pay phone in the lobby.

  Rutledge said, “We have someone watching Bobwhite Court, figuring he might try to get some cash from his office safe. You say Pritchett suggested the penthouse? How is he?”

  I didn’t try out the idea of telepathy on the sergeant, he already harbored doubts about my sanity. I said, “He was delirious, but it kinda makes sense, don’t you think?”

  So much for getting the police to do it. I headed back to Moraga, and, on the way through Orinda, pulled up in front of the Baskin-Robbins as someone pulled out of the parking space under the only shade tree on the block. I went in and ordered a double scoop of lime sherbet in a waffle cone. I sat in the truck eating it, dripping on the steering wheel and horn button, going in and getting more napkins, when I realized Jake had also sent a message about his novel, but I was too tuned in to the Meany message to register it.

  Even though it was Sunday, Meryl was at her desk. She tried to look deadpan for once, but there was a lightening-struck snag smoldering in the forest of her soul, her boss’s descent from undisputed eminence had wounded her.

  And she looked stout, she’d gone an ounce beyond the brink of too much.

  “Just wanted to tell you, I’m going into Mr. Pritchett’s office to pick up something for him.”

  “Don’t you need a key?”

  I held up a key: “His.” Only it wasn’t his, it was the passkey I didn’t turn in when Meany scared me for the last time.

  In Jake’s office, dyed copper by the sunlight through drawn drapes, I found myself unable to enjoy a good snoop. My only concession to innate curiosity was to pick up the mail from beneath the mail slot and sort through it. Among junk mail and bills I found only one first class letter, postmarked Berkeley, a woman’s hand. I put the others on his desk and stuck the letter in my back pocket. In the file cabinet I found a drawer labeled CURRENT WRITING, in which was the manuscript of “Death, Resurrection and Death,” as he called his witch novel. There was another folder, labeled “Th
e Room of the Two Barbers,” which another time I would have snooped on the spot, but instead took with me. Finally, there was a folder labeled “The Role of Third Party Payers in Medical Care Cost Increases,” which I didn’t take.

  In spite of its being Sunday, the Reproduction Clinic was in operation as well. Mary Chin was there. She came up to me, close enough to touch, and said, “How’s your friend?”

  “Pretty bad.”

  “Where was he shot?” she asked.

  I showed her, by touching the place on her chest where the bullet went in. “The bullet fragmented.”

  “Some left inside?”

  I nodded.

  She said, “I’m doing a rush job, but I’ll do his before I leave. You can pick it up tomorrow. I’ll take good care of it.” She touch my arm and we spontaneously hugged. “Poor baby. You have a lot on your plate just now.”

  “I start a new job tomorrow. I’ll pick it up after work.”

  Back in Moraga, Jimmy and Jane were alone, watching the evening news, something they never did. I asked them if they wanted to swim; they declined with a shake of the head. I spent the time until Clare called reading “The Room of the Two Barbers.” I was at the part where the hero, rescued by the mysterious young lady in the VW van, reaches Virginia City, where the two barbers are going to show up, when Jane came in and said, “Mary Clare’s on the phone for you.”

  “Did you tell her about your dad?”

  She shook her head.

  Clare’s voice sounded so unlike the last twenty-four hours I delayed telling her a second, by saying, “I have something to tell you.”

  “What?” she said in alarm.

  I said, “Brace yourself. Jake’s been shot.”

  “Not him, too.” Then after a second’s pause she said, “It was those men. Did they kill him?”

  I told her everything.

  “Which one of us did they mean to kill?” she asked when I paused.

  “Maybe no one.” Suddenly I was in the Buick, hearing the cars pull up outside, realizing I’d done a stupid thing, stupid like the way I’d been trapped in the elevator going up to the penthouse to scope out Mary Clare’s “place of work.”

  She said, “That was no accident, but it wasn’t your fault, either. No more than mine, anyway.”

  Fault? Mine? She put into words what had been hiding in the purlieus of my mind since the Buick rammed the Triumph. “He’s not going to die,” I said, “so we’ll have plenty of time to sort out fault.”