“You got everything you need?” he said, looking over at me.
“Probably not,” I admitted. “I’ve got everything I own though. Mike slipped me an extra two hundred bucks.”
“Irma, you mean.”
“Could be,” I admitted. It was Mike who’d put the money in my hand, but when I’d tried to say no, he’d nodded in the direction of the kitchen as if to suggest that his life wouldn’t be worth much if he returned with the money. The funny part was that Irma wasn’t even in the kitchen, having gone home early, out the back way, which meant I hadn’t had a chance to say goodbye.
“Count on it,” my father said. “They don’t come any tougher than Irma, but once she decides you’re all right …”
I looked out the back and saw we were trailing blue smoke. The car smelled as if it were about to detonate.
“We’ll put some oil in in a minute,” he said.
What we’d planned was to catch the last afternoon of the Saratoga flat track and, depending on how that worked out, maybe the harness races in the evening. I’d get on a bus the next morning. I had about six hundred I’d saved from working at Mike’s, plus a certified check for a thousand from F. William Peterson, who didn’t mind calling it a loan if that would get me to take the money. He said my mother didn’t know anything about it, and I think he was telling the truth.
“We get lucky at the track, I want you to take the money,” my father said. “I owe you, anyhow.”
This I recognized as a reference to the money he’d borrowed over a dozen years ago, and I couldn’t help smiling. “Whatever you say,” I told him. We could fight about it later if we had to. I doubted we would.
For some reason we were not heading toward Saratoga, and when he turned down a dirt road that couldn’t possibly lead anywhere, I figured we were going to pick up Wussy. “Just as long as we don’t end up at the Big Bend Hunting Lodge,” I said.
“You don’t want to say goodbye to what’s-her-name?”
“Nor hello,” I said, though that was unkind. There were worse people than Marion.
When we pulled into Wussy’s drive, my father cut the engine and let the car roll to a stop about six inches from the end of the trailer, which was sunk into a hole so the doors would be at ground level. Then my father laid on the horn and the trailer shivered visibly. A few seconds later Wussy appeared in nothing but his shorts. He had changed very little since that morning so long ago when he had come out of the cabin in the woods. His needs hadn’t changed either, because he came right over and peed on the front fender of the convertible before my father could start the engine and back up. “There,” he said, putting himself back in his shorts.
“No class,” my father said. “And plenty of it.”
Wussy stretched, apparently unconcerned about standing there in his skivvies.
“Come on,” my father said. “We’ll go to the track.”
“Mind if I put some pants on first?”
“We insist,” I said.
Wussy and my father exchanged glances. I don’t think I had ever before intruded on one of their verbal sparring sessions.
“Wise ass, all of a sudden,” Wussy said. “Right before he’s leaving.”
My father shrugged, as if it were too late to do anything to improve me. In a minute Wussy returned, carrying his shoes and socks, but otherwise dressed. I offered to sit in the back, but Wussy said he knew how the front passenger seat was and thanks anyhow. Then he stretched out in the backseat.
Before backing out, my father studied him with mock seriousness. Finally he nudged me. “He’ll be good to have along,” my father said. “Otherwise we might be tempted to go someplace fancy for dinner.”
There was something obligatory about that last day my father and Wussy and I spent together. Timing had always been at the heart of such outings, and all that day we never did manage to hit our stride. It wasn’t just me out of synch either. We could have survived that. After all, it was only recently that I’d become tuned in to the rhythms of their drinking and wandering and peeing and pool shooting. The important thing had always been that my father and Wussy were in step.
Today though, even they were messed up, somehow. At the track, Wussy saw a guy he knew and stopped to talk and we missed the first race as a result. My father refused to accept that the accidental meeting was fortuitous, that the first race, at least, was one we wouldn’t lose. He preferred to think of it as the only sure thing on the whole day’s card. He said only a blind man could have missed it. The rest, the ones that hadn’t been run yet, were tougher to figure. I managed to break even by ignoring my father’s tips, but both he and Wussy took a bath.
Wussy kept on disappearing, sometimes for a half hour at a clip. I think he may have been feeling a little odd sharing that last day with my father and me. Either that or he thought maybe we had things to talk about before I left. But we must not have, because we didn’t, and we both felt relieved each time Wussy reappeared. I’d gotten over, long ago, my father’s need to have third parties around when we faced the prospect of a long period of time in each other’s company. I hadn’t figured out what it meant and didn’t want to, though I think I’d always known that we were both afraid. If we had too much time and too little to do, we’d be tempted to talk to each other. Say things. About then, and now, and why, and why not. It was Wussy’s job to prevent that.
On the way home from the track we argued about the function of the orange balls on the telephone cables that snaked along the edge of the trees that formed a green tunnel along the Saratoga road. My father said they were to keep animals off the lines. Squirrels would jump out of trees and onto the cables and scoot along them. When they came to one of those slick orange balls they’d have to turn around and go back. I couldn’t tell if he was serious. Wussy said that as usual he was full of shit. All right, you explain them, my father told him. Wussy tried. Somebody’d told him once that the orange balls showed up good from above, that the pilots of small planes could see them and stay clear of the power lines they were attached to. Out by the Albany airport he reminded us, there were orange balls everywhere. He had to admit he couldn’t say exactly what these particular orange balls were doing way the fuck out in the middle of the woods, the tops of the trees extending thirty feet above the cables and the nearest airport thirty miles away, but he knew they didn’t have a good goddamn thing to do with squirrels. Many years later I heard what I believe to be the explanation, though I may be mistaken—that in remote places where the winters were long and wet and cold, where ice would accumulate on the lines and make them heavy, the orange balls were used to keep the lines from crashing into one another and rupturing in the wind. But that day I had no explanation at all, and when the two of them wanted to know what the fuck I thought was so funny, I couldn’t explain.
We ate at a bar halfway between Saratoga and Mohawk, getting back to town around dusk. Wussy insisted my father drop him off at the trailer. When my father intimated that going home for the night so early was unnatural and perverse, he admitted that he’d been with a woman that morning when we blasted the horn. Since she hadn’t had any way to get back to town, he assumed she was still there.
“She’ll be madder than a wet hen,” my father said. “Where’d you tell her you were going?”
“Out for cigarettes,” he admitted. “You got a spare pack by any chance?”
When we pulled in, his pickup was gone.
“Looks like she got tired of waiting,” my father said.
“Must’ve hot-wired it,” Wussy said, his voice full of admiration. “I got the keys right here.”
I got out, pulled the front seat forward so he could too.
“Take it easy, Sam’s Kid,” he said. “Drop back by some day.”
I said I would. I thought we were going to shake, but we didn’t. When he turned toward the trailer, I asked him if it was the same one he’d had so many years ago when we’d gone fishing.
“Nope,” he said. “This here’s a
new one. Dead ringer though, ain’t it?”
At Greenie’s, my father and I drank a slow beer. It was Sunday night and slow and there was no reason to get involved, to buy a round or get one bought. We were there only because we didn’t want to go home and face the silent evening. So we shot the shit with Woody the bartender until a couple other guys came in and he went down to the other end of the bar to talk to them. Then Roy Heinz came in and asked my father if he could take twenty. When my father said he didn’t have it, Roy looked like he would cry. Then he saw me and remembered we’d been introduced. My father told him not even to consider it, that I was leaving Mohawk in the morning and that there would be no way to pay me back.
“I could just mail it to him, Sammy,” Roy Heinz said. “What’s a stamp cost? Hell, I could do it. You know Roy Heinz is good for it.”
“I do know you, Roy,” my father said. “And we both know you aren’t good for it.”
Surprisingly, Roy Heinz did not take this as an insult. “You’re lucky, Sammy,” he said. “You got your boy here. I lost mine—”
“I know that, Roy,” my father interrupted. “But I don’t want to hear about it this once, if it’s all the same to you. We aren’t going to even get started with that shit tonight. I’ll spring for one beer if you’ll take it someplace else and drink it.”
Roy Heinz looked at him, then at me again. “Your old man, he’s the nuts. I just wisht I’d been the right kind of father to my boy—”
“What’d I just say, Roy,” my father said.
Roy’s eyes had gone liquid. “Hell, Sammy, I just—”
“What’d I say?”
“Sammy. I’m gone.”
He wasn’t though, for another minute. First he had to look at us both lovingly and make sure we had a chance to reconsider and give him the twenty. Then he wanted to shake. But finally he couldn’t take the way my father was glaring at him and he turned on his heel.
“What a fuckin’ pain in the ass,” my father said when he was finally out of earshot. “I get like that you have permission to shoot me.”
I said Roy Heinz was a pretty sad case all right.
“Pathetic is more like it. Most of the time I can take it, but the son of a bitch hasn’t got any other speed. You can only milk a dead kid so long.”
When I laughed out loud, he said what.
“It’s just a funny image,” I said.
My father got Woody’s attention and bought Roy Heinz a beer. Then he handed me his car keys. “I want you to take it when you go in the morning.”
“What,” I said. “How will you get back and forth to work?”
“Walk. Mike’s is just up the street. He’ll pay me under the table and maybe I’ll be okay if I can stay on the side of the bar where there aren’t any stools. Try, anyway.”
I said it sounded like a good idea. If things didn’t work out, he could always go back on the road come spring. I didn’t want the convertible, but taking it would probably be doing him a favor. It would certainly be a good deed to other motorists.
“Can’t go on like this,” my father said, examining his bad hand, the black stub of his shortened thumb. “The next dumb son of a bitch that drops a pipe might drop it on my cojones, and then where would I be.”
“Right where you are now.”
He grinned at me. “Grown up to be a regular smart-ass, haven’t you.”
When I took a swig of beer, he cuffed me hard on the back of the head, the way he always did when I was a kid. This time I rattled my teeth on the bottleneck and soaked the front of my shirt.
“I can still kick your ass, you know. Old and tired as I am.”
We played Liars on the bar for a while, got nowhere. Finally, he said to hell with it, it must be Dummy Day, and we walked back to the apartment. He’d borrowed a folding cot from somebody, and we went right to bed. My watch said ten o’clock.
By ten-thirty he was snoring loudly and I was wide awake. The street below was noisy. Several times drivers honked and stopped, their conversations rising up from the street like mist and in our open window. I kept thinking about Roy Heinz and my father’s remark about how you could only milk a dead kid so long, grinning to myself in his dark flat, his peculiar smell permeating everything, even the borrowed cot. Then I thought about Willie Heinz and how useless he’d been standing watch when I dove in the country club pond for golf balls, and how when we all fled from the victims of our senseless vandalism, he’d been incapable of running more than two blocks or so without doubling back toward home. He had to be dead, I thought, or he’d have doubled back by now. And I thought about Drew Littler and how he’d reacted to my mentioning our old friend.
I must have fallen asleep thinking about him, because when I awoke it was first light and the street below was quiet and I knew something I hadn’t known before. And I realized I had one last stop to make before leaving.
The screen door was just slamming shut behind him when I pulled my father’s convertible up into the drive behind the big Harley. Eileen’s car was gone, for which I was grateful. When I turned off the convertible’s ignition, hot blue smoke belched from the tailpipe, then floated in a lazy cloud up the drive. Drew Littler waved the air with one big hand.
“What an ugly piece of shit that car is,” he said. “Your old man always owns piece-of-shit rust buckets.”
“This one’s mine,” I said, not getting out. “He just gave it to me.”
He chuckled without the slightest trace of good humor. “Must’ve got tired waiting for somebody dumb enough to steal it.”
I shrugged.
“I heard you’d left.”
“Now, actually,” I said. “I just came over to say goodbye.”
“She’s over at work.”
“To you. You had any luck looking for work?”
“I’m not looking for work.”
“You ever check out that job at The Bachelors?”
“I’m not looking for work.”
“All right,” I said. “Forget it. I’ll see you around sometime.”
“It must be true then,” he said. He was fiddling with the convertible’s door lock, up and down. “She told me they were broke, but I didn’t believe it.”
I took a deep breath and almost got out of the car. It would have been suicide, of course. Besides, I didn’t really want to fight Drew Littler, wouldn’t have wanted to even if I’d had a chance of winning. In a way, I had him good, though he didn’t know it, and it occurred to me then, as I sat there bristling under the force of his insinuation, that perhaps that was why I’d driven out there. To finish Drew Littler off. There he stood, big as a house, smirking at me, imagining that his bulk counted for something, that he could by sheer size and strength and intimidation crash through life’s barriers. It was what he’d imagined when we were boys and he’d pumped iron, the vein in his big forehead wriggling angrily. At some level, he still believed it, his experience of life notwithstanding. Believed it, though he’d been to jail, been behind iron bars that would not be budged.
He must have guessed that he was wrong about things that first time he went to jail after battering the Negro boys outside the pool hall, must have seen the significance of finally getting out as a result of judicial discretion, not force of will. In his cell he’d have had plenty of time to think about the iron that neither bent nor moved. He had little else to think about in that cell. In there he would not have heard of Jack Ward’s death and would not have known that it was a dead man’s car he and Willie Heinz were stealing the minute he got out of jail. He must have found that out only when he got back to town, and by then everything in the world had changed. He’d still been damp from the river when we’d found him braced up in the entryway to my father’s flat, raving and belligerent, the two deaths merging in what was left of his rationality. It must have taken Jack Ward’s Lincoln a while to sink, and depending on where he had driven it into the river, the car may have made it a fair distance out into the current. Even in the dark he must have see
n its black silhouette drifting downstream toward Amsterdam. They had barrel-assed down to the water’s edge, no doubt, whooping all the way, and then something had gone wrong. Willie Heinz, who couldn’t swim, had remained in the drifting car, trapped, probably afraid to open the door. Or perhaps they’d been drinking all during that long afternoon joyride and Willie Heinz had passed out or been drunk enough to imagine he wouldn’t be afraid, until it was too late. I’d thought of a dozen or so variations on this basic scenario, and one of them had to be the truth.
There was now very little of the young Drew Littler it had taken three men and a needle-wielding physician to subdue that night. And I couldn’t think of much to be gained from the truth. Maybe truth wasn’t a concept I’d ever been all that devoted to. For the sake of the human race, it wouldn’t be wise to execute all the liars.
“Actually,” I told Drew Littler. “I dropped by to ask a favor.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. I’d like to ask you not to let my father pick a fight with you.”
“Tell him.”
“Nobody can tell him anything,” I smiled. “You know that.”
“Then I’m not responsible, am I.”
“Nope,” I said. “That’s why it’s a favor. Say it’s for an old friend.”
He studied me then and what he said surprised me, though it probably shouldn’t have. “We was never friends,” Drew said. “I’d’ve known.”
The simple truth of his statement shamed me. He was right. I had no business asking him for a favor. I had always blackly hated him, even worse than my father hated him, perhaps. He was almost as dumb as my father thought, and twice as dangerous, but he wasn’t the sort of man you could flatter into thinking you’d once been friends.
On the other hand, he wouldn’t hold it against you that you hadn’t been, and a second after he’d said his piece, he held out a hand. “We could shake anyhow,” he said.
I took the hand. We shook.
“Don’t worry about Sammy,” he said.
I waited, but that was all he had to say on the subject. “All right,” I said. “I won’t.”