“You were gonna ask if it worked,” I said.
“Oh yeah. Thash right.”
“No,” said Wexler, with a sudden, incongruous giggle. “The IRS apparently didn’t get the joke.”
We laughed. We ordered another round. For the IRS. Outside, I noticed, the storm was letting up. Inside, the club was beginning to empty out. Sodden reporters and editors were turning from their drinks to squint out the window at the slackening snow. Every few moments, one would head for the door, vanish into the night. The comfortable hum of voices was fading into silence. The further reaches of the club were slipping into emptiness and darkness. The barkeep was beginning to give us the eye.
“Last round, folks,” the waitress said as she dealt out the drinks.
“Hey,” McKay said. He lifted his head for the occasion. He pointed irritably at his watch. “Hey … ish only ten after midnigh here.”
“That’s the little hand, goofball,” Lansing told him. “It’s two a.m.”
Poor McKay’s mouth fell open hard. He tried to take his Lord’s name in vain but couldn’t handle the esses. He tried to stand up. He didn’t make it. “I gotta call my wife,” he said finally.
“Oh hell, Mac, you can’t do that,” I said.
“She’ll be asleep. Anyway, you’ll wake up the kid,” Lansing said.
“Thash righ … Thash righ … Then … then … I gotta go home. Thash it!”
“Now you’re talking,” I said. “That’s the old steel trap.”
Satisfied with himself, McKay tried to rise again. This time, Lansing got up and helped him.
“Come on, old sot,” she said. “We’ll find you a cab.” Steady as a rock, she stepped to the hatcheck counter. She returned to us with McKay’s overcoat and her own belted black fur over one arm. “I guess I better head home myself,” she said. “I’m sure to have more tiger work in the morning. Probably be assigned to cover the tiger’s stomach as it digests Suzanne Feldman’s arm.”
McKay turned green. His cheeks puffed. Lansing shunted him into his coat. Colt jumped up to help her into hers. I saw him smell her hair as he stood behind her, holding the collar while she closed the front around her.
“Maybe I ought to come with you,” he said to her. “Help you home.”
Lancer belted the coat, turned. She gave him a long look. “I know the way,” she said.
He nodded. Smiled down at her. “Maybe I could call you then,” he said softly.
Again she considered. “Let me ask you something.”
“Anything.”
“When are you leaving town?”
His smile soured a little. “Friday. For Nicaragua. I’m doing a piece for U.S. News.”
Lansing nodded once. “Another time, Colt,” she said.
He took a breath. “Fair enough.”
Lansing waved to us. She hung her purse on one arm and McKay on the other. Colt opened the door. The two went out onto the drifted sidewalk. I watched through the window as they wandered toward Madison, in search of a cab.
Holloway laughed as Colt sat down. His laugh seemed bigger, more wicked than it had before. Less like an elf’s, more like a giant’s laugh. “Well, he’s been through a snow-storm already. But I suspect a wifely shitstorm lies ahead for our friend McKay.” He laughed his giant laugh again. Wexler looked heavenward.
“Nah,” I said. “I know her. A good kid, definitely. She’ll just wag her finger a little in the morning, that’s all. Bring him the bromo. Mrs. Mac is okay.”
We hoisted our final round. To Mrs. Mac.
“Well,” said Holloway.
“Yes, it has been lovely,” Wexler said.
“Oh, don’t tell me you guys are packing it in already,” said Colt. “I got a whole bottle of J&B back in my room.”
But Holloway and Wexler had had enough. Their movements stiff and a bit unbalanced, they worked their way to the hatcheck. Colt and I followed.
The four of us stepped out of the Press Club. The chill hit me hard. It forced me to breathe. The cold breath went to my head. The tall concrete office buildings around me tilted. The bunting of snow that hung from their ledges clung weirdly when it should have fallen. I shook my head. The buildings righted themselves. I was officially smashed.
We strolled to Madison. We had to kick through the snow to get there. The street was still piled high with it. Madison had been shoveled, though, and lightly sanded. Miraculously, when we reached the corner, we saw a cab wending its cautious way up the otherwise deserted street. Its toplight was on. It was empty.
We said good-bye to each other. The booze made us affectionate. But when Wexler and Holloway and Colt clasped hands, it was genuine enough. They had been through the fall of a country together. That welded them. It always would.
Holloway, Wexler, and I decided to share the cab. Colt was near enough to his hotel to walk. I held the door while Holloway and Wexler slid into the backseat.
“Well …” I said to Colt. He looked forlorn, standing alone on the sidewalk, ankle-deep in snow. I could almost see the empty hotel room in his eyes. Nothing better was waiting for me. A one-bedroom up on East Eighty-sixth where the light from the movie marquee showed up the cracks in the wall. The old place had brightened some since I’d started going out with Chandler Burke. She’d hung some pictures. Bought a couple of chairs. Fought off the cobwebs whenever she came into town. She hadn’t come in for a while, though, and the apartment showed it. Solitude seemed to be creeping out of the corners.
“Oh what the hell,” I said. I shut the cab door. I saluted through the dark window. Holloway and Wexler were driven off.
I joined Colt on the sidewalk. I felt the cold snow cover my shoes.
Colt grinned his slow cowboy grin. The crags in his face lifted. He patted me on the shoulder.
“Well,” he said, “I guess it’s you and me, pardner.”
We started up Madison together.
Madison Avenue stretched downtown before us, a canyon of snow. The snow limned the mansard roof of the Polish Consulate hulking above us. It covered the solid Palladian block of the Morgan Library just ahead. It hung from the window ledges of the seedy gray apartments over the Korean grocery. It hung from the edge of the gutter. It hid the dirt and the gritty stone. It frosted them over, made them softer somehow. It muffled the hum and throb of the early morning.
Colt and I walked side by side in silence. We looked at the street around us. The light was like crystal in the thin, cold air.
“Nice town,” he said after a minute. “Nice town, Manhattan.” He was slurring his words a little.
So was I. “Yeah. In the snow. It’s quiet in the snow.”
He gave me a glance. “Ah. You’re not from these parts, are you?”
“Nah.”
“Massachusetts?”
“Maine.”
“Maine,” said Colt. “I was wonderin’. I knew you weren’t city bred anyway.”
“Oh yeah? Why’s that?” I made an overly expansive gesture. “I got rid of the accent years ago, man.”
“I know, I know. And you’re a city slicker now but … I saw it in you. I did.” He shoved his hands in his pockets, breathed plumes of mist into the night. “The way I figure it, a man always has something in him from the country. If it was ever in him at all, it stays that way.”
“Aw, it’s a long time ago, Colt, long time ago. I haven’t even been back.”
“Still,” he said. He gazed down the street. “When you come from the country to the city, it’s always as if you were living a second life somehow. There’s always a whole part of your mind set in different places, with different colors, different smells.”
I grunted, nodded. “I was just thinking about that. I was just thinking how when I was a kid, when the first snow came, my old man used to take me up into the woods. On this mountain out in front of our house, see. And he’d take me way, way up there and man, sometimes, it’s just like you say: sometimes, standing right in the middle of town here, I can still hear the quiet of it. So quie
t. And white. And nothing moving. No motion at all except sometimes you’d see a drift tumble out of the highest branches of the pines, and then you’d hear it go whump in the snow.” I looked over at Colt. He hoisted his shoulders. Shivered. He was gazing way downtown now where a golden campanile gleamed against the black sky. “He was a forest ranger, my old man,” I said. “He’d take me to this stream he knew. All frozen over except for a trickle down the center between the ice. And he’d show me the tracks in the snow where the animals came down to drink. Raccoons, deer, even moose sometimes. He taught me all of them. I could tell them all.”
“Yeah,” Colt said vaguely. Then more clearly: “Yeah, that’s what I mean. City folks never know that stuff. Not really. And we never really know what they know either. Doesn’t matter how long we stay.”
“What’re you?” I asked him. “Oklahoma?”
He laughed. “An Okie from Sutterdale, that’s me. A town with a population of seven hundred, and most of them lived out on ranches, somewhere way the hell out in the plains. I’ll tell you, I can remember runnin’ through the dust of the streets of that town, out to the edge of it. Standin’ there on the brink of this plain of grass that I swear to God went on as far as the ocean. I’d run out there to catch sight of the train, the freight train, rollin’ out to the northwest.” He took one hand from his pocket. He raised it in the night air. Extended it to show me the train rolling away from him. “I’d stand there and watch it, Wells, this long, long line of cars runnin’ deeper and deeper into the plains. And I’d stand there at the edge of town and, so help me, if my soul could have left my body, I’d have been on that sucker. I’d’ve been gone, boy. Gone, gone, gone.” He laughed again. “Hallelujah.”
One corner of my mouth lifted. I didn’t have to answer.
“That’s what I mean, I guess, more than anything,” he said. “What I mean is: I been everywhere, man. Everywhere. I seen everything, been shot at, captured.… You ever cover a war?”
“Nah. I was a local crime boy from the start.”
“Yeah, well, it’s something. I mean, you just see everything.” Colt stopped on the sidewalk. I stopped, turned to him. He shook his head at the long stretch of avenue ahead. “And no matter how much I see, no matter where I go, sometimes I feel like I’m still just standin’ there at the edge of town. Like there’s still someplace out there I’m tryin’ to get to.” He faced me. “Like I never got on that train. You know? Just like I never got out of Oklahoma.”
We stood silent for another moment. “Oh hell,” I said.
He snorted. He slapped my shoulder. We started walking again.
We reached the hotel. Young men dressed in black flanked broad glass doors. We passed into the lobby, the boys attending. Colt collected his key. We passed into the elevator. Silently we were hoisted up to the seventh floor.
I leaned back against the wall.
“Whoosh,” I said.
“Yeah,” said Colt. He laughed. “All that air.”
He let me into his suite. Two rooms, both small. There was a sitting room with two stuffed wing chairs in the middle of it, a sofa against the wall. A coffee table, long, low, and topped with glass. A TV in the corner. A bureau beside it. A window on Madison. A door into the bathroom, another into the bedroom. I glanced through the bedroom doorway, saw the usual pair of beds crushed close to either side of a lamp-stand, a writing desk under a mirror against the wall. All of it fancier than most, I guess, but a hotel room is a hotel room just the same.
I took my coat off, dumped it on the sofa. Sat down heavily in one of the chairs. Colt carried his coat into the bedroom. There must have been a small refrigerator hidden in there, because he came out with two plastic cups filled with ice. He extracted the scotch bottle from a drawer in the bureau. He poured with a liberal hand. He took his place in the chair across from me.
“She’s something,” he said. He’d been following some thoughts of his own. When I raised my eyebrow at him, he said: “Lansing. She’s something all right.”
“Yeah,” I said. “She’s something.”
“She sure can hold her liquor.”
“Oh, man. Can she ever. You ought to see her sometimes.”
“Damn! She any good?”
“What’s that?”
“As a reporter, I mean.”
“Oh. Yeah. Yeah, she’s good. She goes for it, anyway. She once drove me up Fifth Avenue at maybe sixty miles an hour to beat the cops to a murder scene.” I paused for effect, sipped my scotch. “Fifth Avenue goes downtown.”
I saw something flicker in Colt’s hard brown eyes. The crags around them bunched together. “I reckon that was just to impress you,” he said.
“Oh hell. What’s that supposed to mean?”
“What’s that mean? It means she’s mad about you, buddy.”
I waved him off.
“She is. The way she looks at you.”
“She’s twelve years old, Colt.”
He laughed once. He drawled: “She ain’t twelve. And you ain’t eighty. She’s … what? Twenty-five?”
“Close enough.”
“And you’re fifty?”
“Forty-six, thanks. Just worn by hard living.”
“You married or something?”
“Something. Divorced.”
“Kids.”
“I had a daughter once,” I said. “She killed herself when she was fifteen.”
“Christ,” said Colt. “That is hard livin’.”
He drank. He did not drink lightly. He did not drink like a man already drunk, trying to make it last. He took a long draft, like he wasn’t there yet, wherever he wanted to get to. Wherever the pain ended.
He came gasping out of it. “So are you really as good as they say?”
“Hell, no. Are you?”
“Nah. But I’m good.”
“Yeah. Yeah, you are.”
“You, too, my friend.”
I shrugged. “They make it easy for me. The pols in this town. This town …” I waved a hand around. “Politically, this town is about as healthy as a cancer on a leper’s ass.”
He tilted his head, eyed me shrewdly. “And what’re you? The good doctor?”
I heard myself make a harsh, guttural noise of dismissal. “I’m just taking notes in the cesspool, pal. I don’t fix it, I just write about it.”
Colt made a quick movement with his tongue, like a man spitting the Oklahoma dust from his mouth. “So how come you’re too all-fired pure to make it with a pretty young thing who’s dyin’ for you?”
The question took me off guard. I shifted uncomfortably between the wings of my chair. I was beginning to feel like I was being interviewed. I didn’t like it. If I’d wanted to be held accountable for myself, I’d have gone into another business.
“I got a woman,” I said tightly.
“She doesn’t seem to be waitin’ up for you,” Colt shot back.
“She works upstate. Runs a suicide hot line up there.”
“Ever see her?”
“When I can. Right now things are kind of busy.”
Colt sat relaxed, one leg crossed over the other at the knee. But his eyes stayed sharp. His hand gripped his glass tightly. “When’s the last time you saw her, Wells?”
“What?”
“You don’t see her. I’d bet cash money on it. You never see her.”
“What is this, Colt?”
“Ah,” he said drunkenly. “You don’t give a shit. I know your type.”
“You’re drunk.”
“I know your type. You don’t give a shit about anything.”
“You’re drunk. What is this garbage?”
He pointed a finger at me. “You’re workin’ all the time. Right? You bury yourself in your work. You don’t want to give a shit, that’s what. That’s why you keep away from Lansing.”
“Oh yeah?”
“You think I don’t know you.”
“That’s what all this is, huh. That’s what it is.”
“I know you, Wells. I know you. I was just like you once. I was just like you.”
I’d had it. “Cut the shit, Colt. Just because Lancer kissed you off, I don’t have to take this shit.”
That seemed to stop him finally. The fire in his eyes dimmed. He looked down at the standard, hotel-issue shag rug.
We sat in silence for a few seconds. My head was spinning. My mind was dull. Vaguely I found myself wondering about the incident in the bar. The confrontation between Colt and the haunted man. We’d all politely let it go unmentioned, but it had cast a pall over the night. It had sparked the serious drinking. Now it seemed to me that this discussion was related to it in some strange way. Some way I couldn’t make out. It was all too complicated for my pickled brain.
Colt started talking again. To add to my confusion, he seemed to have gotten off on a whole new topic.
“We were in Jacobo when the rebels broke through.” He was still staring at the rug. He spoke quickly, in a low, feverish murmur. “Me and Wexler. We knew the capital, Mangrela, we knew it was going to fall. You have to understand. There’d been weeks, months of … of boredom. Of nothin’ but the heat and the mosquitoes. Then there’d be some sudden rush of vengeance out of all them jungles around the cities. The rebels would come whompin’ down on some little town, kill the men, rape the women. Then the government’d hit back and a bunch of rebel sympathizers’d up and disappear. And then … and then it would all calm down. All sink back into the heat and the boredom. It didn’t seem to us like anything would ever really … happen.”
He took a long breath. It shuddered as it came out. He wiped his mouth with one hand. “And now it was comin’. Finally. All of it. The bloodshed … not just bloodshed … the … the torture, the mutilations. The long, long killings in the hot, hot sun. Mangrela was goin’ to fall, man. Me and Wexler, we knew we had to get back.” He lifted his eyes to me. Eyes as haunted now as those of the man in the bar. “Not just to get the story, Wells. Not just to get the story. We had to get out. That’s where the yank choppers were. The capital. And once the capital belonged to the rebels, we were finished. All of us.”
His whole body shook once in the chair as he let out the memories of a decade ago. He blinked—hard. He was fighting the liquor, but soon it would win. He wanted to get it all out first.