Which may have just begun. Making his rounds this morning, he dropped by the police station to see Dee Romano, whom he’s probably related to in some bastard way. Playing pinochle up at the Legion last night (not part of his lucky streak), he had learned that Old Willie had been losing what few wits he had (as Cheese Johnson said, “Old Willie has lost his marble…”) and had been retired from the force, and though everybody at the table and no doubt half the town were applying for the job, Georgie decided to throw his own tattered sweat-stained cap in the ring. As he had expected, the chief, who had locked him up a few times in the days of his dissolute youth, only snorted at this prospect, but agreed to put him on his list of volunteer deputies in case of future need and suggested he go visit Mort Whimple at the fire station, he might have something. This cheered him up. He had always wanted to be a fireman, ever since he was a little kid. But Whimple said no chance, he was facing probable layoffs of his underpaid part-timers as it was, all he could offer him was a cup of coffee. Never say no. They sat in the sun by the firehouse door and gabbed about the disaster and the crazy evangelical doings back before Georgie left town, when Whimple was the town mayor, Whimple shaking his grizzled jowls and saying he couldn’t wait to get his fat butt out of the fucking Fort and back here to the fire station. He had eyes too close to his big nose, one a bit higher than the other, giving him a clownish look that made everything he said seem funny. The chief filled him in on the town’s nightlife—“After the Dance Barn burned down, whaddaya got? A coupla sleazy roadhouses, the old Blue Moon, and the Waterton whorehouses…”—and said that probably the worst thing he could do if the town were burning down was try to save it. Georgie spun him a line about the good times up in the city, hinting at important family connections and a debilitating sex life. Why didn’t he stay? Well, you know, dear old mammina, all alone… Whimple seemed interested in that and asked about other folks in the neighborhood, and then got up and announced it was time for his weekly visit to the crapper. “But stay in touch, Georgie,” he said. “If something turns up, I’ll let you know.”
Empty as that was, it was the first time Georgie had been treated with something other than derision in his job hunt, so it and the delicious weather lifted his spirits enough to go treat himself to a sandwich and beer at Mick’s Bar & Grill. He didn’t even have to dip into what remained of his mother’s pile to pay for it, having picked up a few bucks in the pool hall over the past couple of days, cleaning up on the young fry a quarter at a time, so he ordered up feeling virtuous. A man of means like other men. Mick, a heavy guy with a high squeaky voice, was full of stories, too. Georgie sat at the bar and heard about what a sinkhole the town had become since he left and how Main Street was dying as if it had an intestinal cancer, about all the people who had left or had popped off, who’d married whom and split with whom and screwed whose wives, about Mick’s troubles with his alcoholic Irish mother (they were trading bad mother stories), and about the decline of the high school football and basketball teams and how it all seemed part of the general decline of morals among the kids these days, not to mention the rest of the general population, which was going to hell in a hangbasket, whatever a hangbasket was. Georgie said he thought it was something they used to use down in the mines, back before they had mechanical cages. Mick had a good story about how the old guy who owned the hotel died right here in this room laughing so hard at a dirty joke about a priest, a preacher, and a rabbi that he fell backwards out of his chair and broke his neck. Mick pointed at a big table in the corner where he said it happened. “He just tipped back, hoohahing, and went right on over and—snap!—he was gone.” “Well, at least he died laughing. Not the worst way to go.” “That’s what I always say. Even the guys with him couldn’t wipe the grins off their faces.” Georgie elaborated on the line he’d just given the fire chief about life in the big city, inventing a few cool jobs, furnishing himself a swank bachelor’s pad, augmenting the bigwig connections, and throwing in a ceaseless parade of hot chicks. Mick, all agog, asked him what the hell he was doing back here then, and he began to wonder himself until he remembered he was making it all up. He shrugged and said he’d got in a little trouble and had to leave town for a while.
Mick was just telling him how, speaking of trouble, business was so bad a year or so ago he was at the point of having to close down, until the mayor stepped in and gave him a tax break, when who should walk in but Mayor Castle himself, along with Chief Whimple and a couple of others, including that snarling asshole Robbins, who runs the dimestore down the street. They took the same table where the old hotelkeeper keeled over. Georgie got a nod from the fire chief, who then leaned over and muttered something to the mayor, and pretty soon they were all looking him over. He grinned and raised his glass and they invited him over, bought him a beer, offered him a cigarette, while Mick retreated to his yard-square kitchen off the bar to burn some hamburgers. Georgie had had dealings with Castle and Robbins in the past, which he hoped they had forgotten, though as it turned out later, they hadn’t. It didn’t appear to matter, maybe even gave him an in. It seemed they were worried about the general flaunting of the fire regulations in town, and to avoid a senseless tragedy, they needed someone to help enforce them. What they had to offer was a sort of unofficial job both with the fire department as a part-time inspector and also with the mayor’s reelection campaign, helping with fund-raising. “He knows how to talk to his own people,” Mort said on his behalf, and the mayor explained that they didn’t have enough money in the budget to pay a salary, but they could cover him on a sort of contract basis: five dollars for each preliminary visit he makes for the fire department, fifteen for actual inspections, and two percent of all the money he collects personally for the campaign. He grinned and nodded, tossing back his lager, and he was told to report down at the fire station on Monday. They even picked up his lunch tab. On his way out the door, Robbins called out, “Oh earthling Ralphus!” and the mayor boomed, “The Destroyer cometh!” “Makest thee haste, our spaceship awaits thee!” Georgie, ball cap tipped down over his eyes, hunched his shoulders, waggled his arms as though shaking a sheet, and whooed like a ghost, which set them all off laughing so hard there was some risk of a sequel to the hotelkeeper’s demise.
When Georgie reaches Lem Filbert’s garage, Lem is not in, but Georgie’s old drinking pal and classmate, Guido Mello, is still working there, looking heavier and a lot soberer than he used to. Married now, couple of kids, as he says, he is showing the burden of that. Black grease on his fat nose where he’s rubbed it, adding to his general down-in-the-dumps look. Guido tells him Lem is out test-driving a car whose shocks and wheel bearings they have just replaced, but if Georgie has come by looking for a job, forget it. Lem has plenty of business, these being hard times when people have to fix up their old cars instead of buying new, but they also don’t pay their bills. “He’s an ornery sonuvabitch to work for and he pays shitty wages for too many fucking hours, but what can I do?” Guido says, and smears the other side of his nose. “Little as it is, my kids would starve without it.” “Maybe you should unionize,” Georgie suggests, and Guido snorts and says, “Yeah, me and who else?” “Well at least you could be union president,” Georgie says, but instead of laughing at that, Guido only shakes his round burry head and sighs. “Jesus, Georgie, we’re halfway through our fucking lives and what have we got?”
Long tall Lem rolls in then in the battered purple Ford he has been test-driving. Georgie greets his old mine buddy and baseball teammate and they shoot the shit for a while, Georgie filling Lem in on what little he knows about Wally Brevnik and the other Deepwater refugees who fled town after the mine closed and letting fly with his by-now well-rehearsed tales of the big city, which for the first time fail to impress, Lem meanwhile unloading all his sour gripes about the garage, the fucking irresponsible mining company, this pig’s ass of a town, and the whole stupid fucking world in general. No, there’s no baseball team; he hasn’t swung a fucking bat since Tiger Miller left
town. Lem’s brother Tuck was killed in the disaster and Tuck’s wife Bernice is now living with him, doing the laundry and housekeeping and fixing him his lunch pail every day, just as if he were still working a mine shift. She is some kind of a nurse and Lem figures Tuck married her to have someone to massage his hemorrhoids. A peculiar cunt who wears Bible clothes and lives in some fucking crackbrained dreamland of her own, Lem says, and she has recently gotten involved with those evangelical wackos out at the church camp. They have been having rows about that, but he knows Bernice was always close to Ely’s widow and needs a connection, and it suits her angels-and-devils nuttiness, so he’ll just have to live with it. Georgie asks him why he doesn’t just marry Bernice, and Lem says, “Nah. Then I’d probably have to fucking fuck her.”
Georgie tells him he is back in town for a while and needs an old junker to bum around in, what has he got? Lem looks skeptically down his long nose at him, so Georgie, on the pretense of digging for a coin for the Coke machine, flashes his mother’s roll and mentions that he’s going to be working for city hall and might require wheels for that. Lem shrugs and takes him around to the back lot where a lot of old wrecks stand rusting in the sun. Lem recommends a small rebuilt Dodge coupe with about seventy thousand alleged miles on it, but Georgie’s lustful eye falls on an old two-tone crimson-and-cream boat-sized Chrysler Imperial with Batmobile tail fins and gunsight tail lights, a fucking classic and perfect for his more urgent needs. Lem says it has had a rough life and he can’t guarantee it will make it out of the lot without breaking down, but Georgie’s heart is set (“Well, it’s your money, go ahead and buy the goddamn thing,” Lem says. “I could use the fucking repair business…”), so they haggle for a while and agree on a price, and Georgie talks him into letting him give it a run around the block, setting his half-finished Coke down as if planning to come right back to it.
Inspired by the baseball talk and the lush weather, Georgie takes a run out by the high school athletic fields, first closing the glove compartment door on the top of the centerfold so that it dangles there to cheer him on his journey. He has done a lot of driving up in the city, that being mostly what he did except jerk off, and it feels good to get back behind a wheel again, and on mostly empty streets and roads where he can open up. The old crate makes a lot of clunky noises, has no pick-up at all, the gear shift is tricky and the steering wheel is pretty loose, but what it has, he knows, is presence. In it, he is somebody, and, window down and arm out the window, he blows kisses and tips his cap to all he passes to let them know he knows it. He decides to name the fading beauty after one or another of his favorite blue movie characters like “Nympho Nellie” or “Sadie Sucker,” but finally, given her colors, settles on “Red-Hot Ruby,” who, as he recalls, also had a big thrusting creamy ass and lipsticked her anus. It was an old black-and-white silent, but they’d gone to the trouble to hand-color the lipstick red. It jiggled around going through the projector, like the rear end of this old car on a rough road.
He is in luck. The boys are having their first practice of the new season. He stops, keeping the motor running, to jaw with the coach for a minute. He volunteers his services to help the kids with their hitting, while they gather around to admire Ruby. Georgie could never field a ball for shit, but he was a natural with any kind of stick in his hand. He had quick wrists, could watch a pitch until it was nearly across the plate, then whip the bat around like a fly swatter, and the coach remembers that and says, sure, come along any time. Georgie, waving goodbye, feels like this day is turning into the best day of his life.
After that, he rolls around the periphery of the town, the centerfold’s raised culo flapping merrily in the breeze, checking out the motels and roadhouses that the fire chief mentioned for later on. “Big night tonight, baby,” he says, rapping the dash. “Gonna get it on!” He passes, chattering away to Ruby, or else to the centerfold, they’re an agreeable blur in his mind, the Sir Loin steak house and abandoned drive-in movie, the sleazy old love-cabins motel which charged by the hour, the driving range and country club, a few golfers already out enjoying the first real day of spring. He’s joining the in-crowd, maybe he ought to take up the game, pick up a few bucks once he’s got the knack. He swings into the rootbeer stand with the intention of offering his bod to the short-skirted carhops, but there’s not a one looks older than thirteen, so he blows them kisses and rolls on out, passing the new shopping center, new when he left town, the turn-off to the gravel pits and old swimming hole, the road to the Waterton whorehouses, and the burned-out ruins of the old Dance Barn where the big bands used to come and where they served anyone who could see over the bar. First got his cork popped by the hand of another under the table in a hard wooden booth in there, the hand belonging to a girl just fifteen years old like his green young self. At the time, he didn’t really know what came next, or if he knew, didn’t know how to make it happen, so he lost out with that chick. Never mind. Many more to follow. Georgie Porgie, pudding and pie, kissed the girls and made them sigh.
He pulls into a filling station to add a few dollars of gas, patting Ruby’s provocative rear end while he’s got the pump in her (a patch of deep rust back there, he notes, like some kind of fatal crotch disease), and sees by the gauge it’s just a drop in her bottomless bucket. Ruby’s the deep throat kind of girl—he could run through a pile pretty fast just keeping her juiced up. He cruises the strip of car dealers, most of them closed down, their vast lots vacated, but still flying their faded flags and streamers, then Chestnut Hills, the cheap prefab developments built mostly for mining families at the edge of town where there are no hills, no chestnuts, looking for who knows what. Some broad from the past probably. A lot of scabby abandoned houses, muddy yards, old cars and trucks on blocks. Potholes that jar the dust out of the ceiling fabric. Then it’s the rich folks’ side of town with their big houses and flagpoles and fancy shrubbery—though even they are looking pretty seedy and uncared for, and there are FOR SALE signs on some of them—and finally, after a clanking cap-waving spin down Main Street and a kiss blown to his new employers at the Fort, on past the white RR XING signs, over the rusty unused rail tracks, and into his own neighborhood. “Home, baby,” he tells Ruby. Mostly painted frame houses in various states of dilapidation, many of them multifamily, overcrowded and depressed, but comfortingly familiar and welcoming in the warm afternoon sun. He tours all the houses where former girlfriends once lived, letting Ruby show them what they’ve been missing. Probably all married now, swarmed round with brats and gone to fat or worse.
He spies Vince Bonali rocking on his front porch with a beer in his hand, and, as Ruby’s been getting overheated, he pulls over to the curb to let her calm down and invites himself up past the molded cement Virgin foot-soldiering the muddy front yard, thinking he might be able to hit his old faceboss up for a buck or two of gas money. He is an understanding guy. They have been through a lot together, had some great old times. He would do the same for Vince. He’d heard that Vince had sunk pretty low after his wife kicked off, and he finds him so, a morose old musone, too grumpy even to stand up and shake his hand, but after commiserations and family talk and a few reminiscences about the old section, Vince lightens up enough to offer Georgie a beer and pop another for himself. Vince is wallowing a dead cigar in his mouth. “Want me to try to light that mess for you?” “Nah. If I smoked it, I’d have to buy another and I don’t have the dough. Eating it, it lasts longer.” He turns his pockets inside out in demonstration before settling heavily back into the rocker. There went that idea. Vince nods toward the car. “Pick that piece of faggot junk up in the city?” “No. Here. Just shopping. Giving it a trial run. Gotta go turn it in soon.” “Made a pile up there, did you?” “Well, hit it lucky a coupla times, but—” “You know, when I first seen you coming, Georgie, I had the funny idea you were looking for a handout. What a laugh that woulda been. All the spare cash in this town is at the bank. That’s where this comes from,” he says, holding up the beer. “That guy at th
e bank’s supplying you?” “No, Angie. She works there. She buys the groceries now. She gives me an allowance, Georgie. A fucking beer allowance. You’re drinking up part of my weekly allowance.” That makes him feel just great. What is he supposed to do? Give it back? It doesn’t even taste good anymore.
“You were smart to get your ass outa here, Georgie. Look at me.” He does. The old man is staring morosely at his missing finger joint. He’s got about as much life in him as his sodden cigar. “I haven’t had a goddamn day’s work since they shut the mine. It’s been a long, hard five years. And it’s gonna get worse. I don’t know what the hell you’re doing back here.” He can’t use his little mammina line, Vince knows better, and he doesn’t want to suggest to his old faceboss (he’s still the boss) that he has been in any kind of trouble (he hasn’t really, other than the everyday). So instead he tells him about his new job as a fire inspector, thinking to earn a little respect. Vince snorts and shifts his wet cigar to the other side of his mouth. That thing really is disgusting. “They’re using you, Georgie. It’s a shakedown racket. You remember old man Baumgarten?” “The dry cleaners?” “Yeah. He was asked for a contribution to the mayor’s so-called campaign fund, and when he didn’t come across, he got a visit from the fire department. They found a lot of things wrong. So he fixed them. They found some more things wrong and he fixed them again. He was reminded that it was costing him more to comply with the regulations than to cough up the campaign fund donation. Still, he wouldn’t go along, so one night his business burned down. The inspectors said it was faulty wiring and he’d been warned, he couldn’t even collect on his insurance.” “No shit.” Georgie’s good mood is sinking as the sun sinks. It’s clouding up and there’s a cold wind. It was a mistake to come up here and let this sick old man bring him down. “Robbins is in on it, too, right?” Georgie nods glumly. He really doesn’t want to hear any of this. “It was those two guys who dropped us in the shit five years ago, you remember that?”