Tough Guys Don't Dance

  Yet when I drew the rock away, he gave a little moan. It was equal to the sound I might have made, for I did not wish to look. Then I could bear it no longer. The flashlight revealed a black and slimy plastic bag over which bugs crawled, and in a lathering of my own sweat, with fingers that shook as if they were being touched by spirits, I invaded the domain of the burrow—so it felt!—reached in, pulled out the bag. It was heavier than expected. I will spare you how long it took me to untie the knot, but I did not dare to rip my way inside, as if the rivulets of Hell-Town might well forth from such a tear.

  At last the knot came apart. I lifted the flashlight and looked at the face of my wife. A pistol might as well have fired through the fabric of a thousand nights of sleep. My wife bore a look of consternation on her face, and showed a red jungle at the base of her neck. I took one look, could not take another, closed the bag. I knew in that instant that I had a soul. I felt it turn in my heart even as my fingers retied the knot at the top of the bag.

  I stood up to leave then, swaying on one foot, then the other. I did not know if I could move. Nor could I decide whether to take her with me or whether I was obliged to let her rest in this foul place. As the swoon of my will continued, the dog ceased whimpering, stirred about, and began to push his head and shoulders into the burrow, pushed farther, and, on an instant, all of his movements reversed and he came out backward, dragging the end of a green plastic bag in his mouth. Now I saw the face of Jessica Pond. I could not call her Laurel Oakwode.

  Will it sound strange to you that I picked up both heads and carried them back to the car? One bag was in each hand, and I laid them in the trunk with some care not to confound whatever veils of death still adhered—how poor a shroud is a plastic bag! The dog walked with me like a mourner, and the trees on either side of the trail offered silence. The sound of the Porsche motor starting up was as loud as an explosion in that pall.

  We drove out. Since I did not know what I was doing, will it make any more sense to you that I stopped to get the beeper, and when I did, Stoodie and Nissen came up to attack?

  Later, when I could puzzle it through, I decided that they must have been following my car until the moment when I detached their instrument. Then they must have waited for a while. Then they must have driven to where they thought I was parked but found no car, no house, only the sound of the beeper tantalizing them. It was off the road, but where they could not quite determine. So they parked, and waited.

  I only saw them coming after I stood up in the trench by the milestone marker with the beeper in my hand. By then they were moving toward me on a run. I remember thinking that they wanted to recover what I had stolen from the burrow—that is the indication of where my mind had gone. There is this to be said for madness: your blood can pass from one transcendental moment to another without fear. I think, now that I consider it, they were befouled with rage after all the frustration of waiting for their beeper through thirty rain-filled fucked-up minutes. So they were ready to waste me for so misusing their fine technique.

  They came down on the dog and me, and Nissen had a knife in his hand and Stoodie a tire iron. The animal and I had never been bound in that compact of dog and man that vows you will die together, but he was with me then.

  I could not name the strength that came to us. I had the heads of two blonde ladies to guard in the trunk of my car. Those heads, if I were found with them, had to be worth two hundred years of incarceration, and that gave the strength to fight. My lunacy gave more. For by the exaltation of its logic, I was transporting my ladies from a foul grave to a finer one.

  So my rage was near to maniacal. It had packed itself like gunpowder these last five days into my head and limbs. The sight of Spider and Stoodie approaching with menace was as good as cocking a trigger. I remember how the dog stood at attention beside me, his fur stiff like steel nails. Then it all happened and was over for him. I do not know if it took even ten seconds, but the dog sprang at Nissen and caught Spider’s face and throat in his jaws. He also caught the point of Spider’s knife in his heart and died on top of Spider, who shrieked and ran away, holding his face. Stoodie and I took longer.

  He circled, looking to swing his iron, and I kept away, ready to hurl my beeper—it was my beeper now—at his head, but the instrument weighed no more than a small rock.

  Rage or no, I wasn’t in shape to fight. My heart was burning already, and I could never match the tire iron. I had to catch him one perfect right shot to the jaw—my left would never be good enough—and for that I had to wait until he swung the iron. There is no other course when fighting a tire iron but to get the opponent to commit himself. You can only strike after the weapon goes by. Stoodie knew this. He lashed the iron back and forth and committed himself to no full swings. He would wait. Let me come undone from the tension. Stoodie waited, and we circled, and I could hear my breathing louder than his. Then I hurled the beeper and it struck him on the head. I threw my right after it, but only caught his nose, not his chin, and he brought the iron down on my left arm. He was off-balance, and so it was not with whole force, but my arm was dead and I was in such pain I barely dodged his next swing. Now he lashed the air again as the blood from his nose went into his mouth, and bones in his face, it came to him, were broken.

  He swung again. I ducked, grabbed two handfuls of roadside pebbles and threw them in his face. Blinded, he brought one huge swing down on me, and I skipped to the side and threw my right as hard as I ever hit anything, a thunderbolt went down my arm, and he and his iron fell together. Then I made the mistake of kicking him in the head. That broke my big toe. Be it said for the new pain that it kept me from beating on his skull with the tire iron. Picking that up, I hobbled down the road to the van. Spider was leaning against it, his head in his hands, moaning, and I knew the joys of going berserk. With the tire iron I smashed in his windows, his headlights, his taillights, and then, not content, tried to pry one of the doors off, but failing that, sprung the hinge at least.

  Spider watched, and said at the finish, “Hey, man, have a heart. I need medical attention.”

  “Why did you say I stole your knife?” I answered him.

  “Somebody did. I got a new one that’s no fucking good.”

  “It’s in my dog.”

  “I’m sorry, man. I got nothing against your dog.”

  It was as fractured as that. I left him by the van, walked carefully around Stoodie so that I would not turn the iron on him, knelt by Stunts, who had died near the Porsche, his favorite chariot, and managed with my good arm to get him into the front seat.

  Then I drove home.

  Shall I tell you the virtues of such a war? I held myself together long enough to take both plastic bags down to the basement, where I laid them in a carton. (I have not yet spoken of this, but their odor in another twenty-four hours would be a disaster.) Then I dug a grave in the yard for my dog and buried him, doing it all with one good arm and one good foot—the ground in this mist was soft—and then I took a shower and went to bed. If not for the war by the side of the road, I could never have slept and would have been ready for a mental home by morning. As it was, I slumbered as well as any of those who were dead and awoke in the morning to find my father in the house.

  SEVEN

  I cannot say that either of us was cheered a good deal by how the other looked. My father was making instant coffee, but at his first sight of me, he put down the jar and whistled softly.

  I nodded. I had come downstairs with a swollen foot, a left arm I could not raise above my head, and a bucket of ice water inside my chest. Who knows what circles were beneath my eyes.

  Dougy was the greater shock, however. There was almost no hair left on his head and he had lost a lot of weight. High on his cheeks was a fierce pink flush that reminded me of a fire in a windswept place.

  The recognition came like a touch of the crud itself. He must be on chemotherapy.

  I guess he had become accustomed to the quick wipe from people’s eyes of the
initial aversion, for he said, “Yeah, I got it.”

  “Where’s it situated?”

  He made a gesture to indicate that was neither here nor there.

  “Thanks for sending a telegram,” I said.

  “Kid, when there’s nothing anybody can do about your story, keep it to yourself.”

  He looked weak, which is to say, he did not look all-powerful. I couldn’t tell, however, if he was in discomfort.

  “Are you on chemotherapy?” I asked.

  “I quit it a couple of days ago. The nausea is a disgrace.” He walked forward and gave me a little hug, not too close, as if he felt infectious.

  “I heard a joke,” he said. “This Jewish family is waiting in the hospital lobby. The doctor comes up to them. He’s a prosperous son of a bitch with a peppy voice. He choips like a boid.” My father liked on occasion to remind me, as he used to remind my mother, that the roots were back in Hell’s Kitchen and be damned to you. His snobbery remained unflaggingly inverse, so he would go out of his way to say “boid” for “bird.”

  Now he could proceed with his joke. “ ‘I have,’ says the doctor, ‘good news and bad news for you. The bad news is that your father’s disease is incurable. The good news is that it is not cancer.’ The family says, ‘Thank God.’ ”

  We laughed together. When we were done, he handed me his untouched cup of instant coffee and started to spoon himself out another. “Here we have bad news,” he said.

  “It’s incurable?”

  “Tim, who the fuck can say? Sometimes I think I know the moment I got it. If I’m that close to the source, maybe I can find my cure. I tell you, I hate those pills the doctors push. I hate myself for taking them.”

  “How do you sleep?”

  “I never been a famous sleeper,” he said. Then he nodded. “Kid, I can handle anything but the middle of the night.” That was quite a speech for him. He cut it off. “What happened to you?” he asked.

  I found myself telling him about the fight.

  “Where’d you leave the dog?” he asked.

  “Buried him in the yard.”

  “Before you went to sleep?”

  “Yes.”

  “Somebody raised you right.”

  We stayed in the kitchen all morning. After I made some eggs, we tried the living room, but Patty’s furniture was not for an old longshoreman. Soon we were back in the kitchen. Outside it was another gray day, and looking through the window, he shivered.

  “What do you like about this godforsaken place?” he said. “It’s like the back coast of Ireland in winter.”

  “No, I love it,” I told him.

  “Yeah?”

  “The first time I came here was after being kicked out of Exeter. Remember we got drunk?”

  “I sure do.” It was a pleasure to see him smile.

  “Well, in the morning you went back to New York, and I decided to come here for the summer. I’d heard of this town. I liked it right off, and then when I was here a week, I went to a dance joint out near the highway one night. There was a good-looking girl I kept watching, but I didn’t go near her. She was with her crowd and dancing. I just kept observing. At closing, I took a shot at it. I went up to her on the dance floor, looked in her eyes, she looked in mine, and we went out the door together. Screw the dudes she was with. They didn’t do a thing. So the girl and I crossed the road, went into the woods, lay down, and, Dougy, I was in her. I figure it took six minutes from the time I walked up to her till I was in. That impressed me more about myself than anything I’d done till that day.”

  He enjoyed my story a good deal. His hand reached out in an old reflex for his tumbler of bourbon and then he realized it wasn’t there. “So this place is your luck,” he said.

  “To a degree.”

  “Are you all right?” he asked. “For a guy who’s just beaten up a hood with a tire iron, you don’t look too happy. Are you afraid he’ll return?” What a look of happiness came into my father’s eyes at the thought that Stoodie might decide to come back.

  “There’s a lot to talk about,” I said, “but I don’t know if I’m ready to tell you.”

  “Have to do with your wife?”

  “Some.”

  “Say, if I was going to be around for another ten years, I wouldn’t say a word, but since I won’t, I’ll tell you. I believe you married the wrong broad. It should have been Madeleine. She may be a vindictive guinea, but I liked her. She had class. She was subtle.”

  “Is this your blessing?”

  “I kept my mouth shut on too many things for too many years. Maybe it started to rot inside. One of the causes of cancer, says the choipy boids, is a harsh environment.”

  “What do you want to tell me?”

  “A guy who marries a rich woman deserves every last thing he gets.”

  “I thought you liked Patty.” They had loved to drink together.

  “I liked her guts. If all the other rednecks was as macho as her, they’d be running the world. But I didn’t like what she was doing to you. Certain dames ought to wear a T-shirt that says: ‘Hang around. I’ll make a cocksucker out of you.’ ”

  “Thanks.”

  “Hey, Tim—it’s a figure of speech. Nothing personal.”

  “You were always worried about me, weren’t you?”

  “Well, your mother was delicate. She spoiled you a lot. Yeah,” he said, looking at me out of his ice-blue eyes, “I worried about you.”

  “Maybe you didn’t have to. I took my three years in the slammer without a fall. They called me Iron Jaw. I wouldn’t take cock.”

  “Good for you. I always wondered.”

  “Hey, Dougy,” I said, “what’s the virtue? You think I feel like a man most of the time? I don’t. What was I protecting? You’re an old-line fanatic. You’d put all the faggots in concentration camps including your own son if he ever slipped. Just cause you were lucky enough to be born with tiger’s balls.”

  “Let’s have a drink. You’re off your feed.”

  “Should you have a drink?”

  He made a move with his hands again. “It’s an occasion.”

  I got two glasses and put bourbon in them. He added a considerable amount of water to his. If nothing else, that was enough to tell me he was ill.

  “You have me wrong,” he said. “Do you think I’ve been living alone for twenty-five years in a furnished room, and I do no thinking? I try to keep up. In my day, if you were queer, you were damned. Don’t even ask. You were an agent of hell. Now, they got Gay Liberation. I watch them. There’s faggots everywhere.”

  “Yeah, I know,” I said.

  “Ha, ha,” he said and pointed a finger at me. The early liquor was obviously doing angel’s work on his spirits. “My son wins the round.”

  “Good at dancing,” I said.

  “I remember,” he said. “Costello, right?”

  “Right.”

  “I’m not sure I know what that means anymore,” he said. “Six months ago they told me to stop drinking or I was dead. So I stopped. Now, when I go to sleep, the spirits come out of the woodwork and make a circle around my bed. Then they make me dance all night.” He gave a cough filled with all the hollows of his lungs. It had been an attempt to laugh. “ ‘Tough guys don’t dance,’ I tell them. ‘Hey, you bigot,’ the spirits answer, ‘keep dancing.’ ” He looked into the lights of the bourbon as if their kin could be found there, and sighed. “My illness makes me less of a bigot,” he said. “I think about faggots and you know what I believe? For half of them, it’s brave. For the wimps, it takes more guts to be queer than not. For the wimps. Otherwise they marry some little mouse who’s too timid to be a dyke and they both become psychologists and raise whiz kids to play electronic games. Turn queer, I say, if you’re a wimp. Have a coming-out party. It’s the others I condemn. The ones who ought to be men but couldn’t show the moxie. You were supposed to be a man, Tim. You came from me. You had advantages.”

  “I never heard you talk so much before. No
t once in my life.”

  “That’s cause you and I are strangers.”

  “Well, you look like a stranger today,” I said. It was true. His large head was no longer crowned by his rich white hair, white with the corrupt splendors of ivory and cream. Now he just had an enormous bald head. He looked more like a Prussian general than the model of an Irish bartender.

  “I want to talk to you now,” he said. “I may be acting thick, but it came over me at Frankie Freeload’s funeral: Tim is all I got.”

  I was moved. Sometimes a couple of months would go by, sometimes a half-year, before one of us called. Still, it seemed all right. I had always hoped so. Now he confirmed it.

  “Yes,” he said, “I got up early this morning, borrowed the widow’s car and told myself all the way here that this time we speak it out face to face. I don’t want to die without you knowing of my regard for you.”

  I was embarrassed. Therefore, I leaped on the way he said “the widow’s car.” “Did you have any hanky-panky with Freeload’s wife?” I asked.

  Not often did I see my father look sheepish. “Not lately,” he said.

  “How could you? With a friend’s wife!”

  “For the last ten years, Frankie was pickled in booze. He couldn’t find his tool or the pot.”

  “A friend’s wife?” I gave him the family laugh. High tenor.

  “It was only once or twice. She needed it. An act of mercy.”

  I laughed until the tears came. “ ‘I wonder who’s kissing her now,’ ” I sang. It was wonderful to have your father at his own wake. Suddenly I felt like crying.

  “You’re right, kid,” he said. “I hope and pray Frankie never knew.” He looked at the wall for an instant. “You get older and you begin to feel as if something is wrong. You’re in a box, and the sides keep coming closer. So you do things you didn’t do before.”

  “How long have you known you were sick?”

  “Ever since I went into St. Vincent’s forty-five years ago.”

  “That’s quite a while to have cancer and never show it.”

  “None of the doctors have a feel for the subject,” he said. “The way I see the matter, it’s a circuit of illness with two switches.”