Tough Guys Don't Dance

  “What are you saying?”

  “Two terrible things have to happen before the crud can get its start. The first cocks the trigger. The other fires it. I’ve been walking around with the trigger cocked for forty-five years.”

  “Because you couldn’t recover from all those hits you took?”

  “No. Cause I lost my balls.”

  “You? What are you talking about?”

  “Tim, I stopped, and I felt the blood in my shoes, and there was St. Vincent’s in front of me. I should have kept chasing the bastard who did the shooting. But I lost my nerve when I saw the hospital.”

  “Hell, you had already gone after him for six blocks.”

  “Not enough. I was built to be that good anyway. The test came when I stopped. I didn’t have the nerve to go on and catch him. Cause I could have. Something in the scheme of things might have made him trip. I didn’t push my luck. Instead, I stopped. Then I heard a voice clearly in my head. It’s the only time I would say that God or someone highly superior was speaking to me. This voice said, ‘You’re out of gas, kid. It’s your true test. Do it.’ But I went into St. Vincent’s and grabbed the orderly by the collar, and just at the moment when I got tough with that punk in the white jacket was when I felt the first switch get thrown in the cancer.”

  “What threw the second switch?”

  “It never got thrown. It corroded. Cumulative effects. Forty-five years of living with no respect for myself.”

  “You’re crazy.”

  He took a big belt of his watered bourbon. “I wish I was. Then I wouldn’t have cancer. I’ve studied this, I tell you. There’s buried statistics if you look for them. Schizophrenics in looney bins only get cancer half as often as the average population. I figure it this way: either your body goes crazy, or your mind. Cancer is the cure for schizophrenia. Schizophrenia is the cure for cancer. Most people don’t know how tough it is out there. I was brought up to know. I got no excuse.”

  I was silent. I stopped arguing with him. It is not easy to sort out what effect his words were having. Was I coming to understand for the first time why the warmth he had for me always seemed to cross a glacial field? I may once have been a seed in Douglas Madden’s body but only after that body was no longer held by him in high esteem. I was, to a degree, defective. Agitation had to be stirring in all my old wounds, well-buried and long-resigned. No wonder my father had taken no great joy in me. Intimations came how in years ahead—if I lived—the memory of this conversation might make me shake with rage.

  Yet, I also felt compassion for my father. Damnable compassion. He had cast a long shadow across my understanding of him.

  Next, I knew a considerable amount of fear. For now it seemed real to me again that I had murdered two women. How many times over these last few years had I come to the edge of battering Patty Lareine with my bare hands? And each time I resisted the impulse, had not a sense of oncoming illness settled more firmly into me? Yes, like my father I had been living in a harsh environment. I thought once more of the impulse that led me to climb the tower. Had that been the night when I hoped to keep the first switch from being thrown?

  I knew then that I would confide in Big Mac. I had to talk about the two murders and the plastic bags in the damp cellar of this house. I could hold it no longer. Yet I could not bring myself to speak about it directly. Instead, I more or less sidled up to the topic.

  “How much do you believe,” I asked, “in predestination?”

  “Oh, yeah,” he answered, “what kind of predestination?” The shift in subject made him happy. Long years behind a bar had left my father adept at living with questions as wide as the heavenly gates.

  “The football spreads,” I said. “Can God pick the team that will cover?”

  It was obviously a question Dougy had lived with. He revealed that glint in his eye which showed that he was debating whether to disclose useful knowledge. Then he nodded. “I figure if God bet the spread, He’d win eighty percent of the time.”

  “How do you come up with that number?”

  “Well, let’s say the night before the game He passes over the places where the players are sleeping and takes a reading. ‘Pittsburgh is up for this game,’ He says to Himself. ‘The Jets are jangled.’ Pittsburgh, He decides, is worth a lot more than three points. So He bets them. I’d say He’s right four times out of five.”

  “But why four out of five?”

  “Because footballs,” said my father ominously, “take funny bounces. It is not practical to get better than four out of five. That’s good enough. If He wanted to take account of the physics of every bounce, He’d have to do a million times more work in His calculations in order to get up from eighty to ninety-nine percent. That’s not economical. He’s got too many other things to work at.”

  “But why did you settle on four out of five?”

  My father took this as a most serious question. “Sometimes,” he told me, “a football handicapper can get a great streak going and hits up around seventy-five percent against the spread for a month or more. I figure that’s because he’s got a pipeline for a little while into higher places.”

  I thought of Harpo. “Can some keep it going longer?”

  My father shrugged. “Dubious. These pipelines are hard to maintain.” He showed no concern at mixing his metaphor: “It’s a high-wire act.”

  “What about a terrible losing streak?”

  “Those guys are on the pipeline too. Only the flow is in reverse. Their hunches are one hundred and eighty degrees wrong.”

  “Maybe it’s just the law of averages.”

  “The law of averages,” he said with disgust, “has done more to mess up people’s minds than any idea I know. It’s horse manure. The pipeline is either feeding you or it’s tricking you. Greedy people get fucked by the pipeline.”

  “What if your bets turn out fifty-fifty?”

  “Then you’re nowhere near the pipeline. You’re a computer. Look in the papers. The computer predictions end up at .500.”

  “All right,” I said, “that’s prediction. What I really want to talk about is coincidence.”

  He looked troubled. I got up and freshened our drinks. “Put a lot of water in mine,” he said.

  “Coincidence,” I said. “What do you make of it?”

  “I’ve been doing the talking,” he said. “You tell me.”

  “Well,” I said, “I think it’s not unlike the pipeline. Only it’s a network. I believe we receive traces of everyone’s thoughts. We’re not aware of it usually, but we do.”

  “Wait a minute. You’re saying people are able to send and receive wireless messages? Telepathy? Without knowing it?”

  “Whatever you want to call it.”

  “Well,” he said, “for the sake of argument, why not?”

  “Once,” I said, “I was up in Fairbanks, Alaska, and you could feel it. There was a network.”

  “Yes,” he said, “near magnetic north. What were you doing in Fairbanks?”

  “A scam. Nothing significant.” Actually, I had gone up on a cocaine run after Madeleine and I had split. It was in the month before I got busted on a quick trip to Florida for the same deed. Selling two kilos of cocaine. Only the services of a lawyer well paid for his powers of plea bargaining got it down to three years (with parole).

  “I had a ruckus one night with a guy in Fairbanks,” I told him. “He was bad news. In the morning when I woke up, I saw his face in my thoughts. His expression was ugly. Then the phone rang. It was the same fellow. His voice sounded as ugly as his face. He wanted a meet with me late that afternoon. All day I kept running into people I had seen the night before, and not once was I surprised by their expression. They looked angry or happy in just the way I expected them to look. It was as precise as a dream. At the end of the day I met with the heavy. But now I was no longer uptight about it. Because, as the afternoon went on, I could see him clearly in my thoughts and he was looking wasted. Sure enough, when I met up with him, th
at’s how he was, a bigger coward than me.”

  My father chuckled.

  “I tell you, Dougy,” I said, “I think everybody in Alaska drinks so they can shut themselves out from living in everybody else’s head.”

  He nodded. “Northern climes. Ireland. Scandinavia. Russia. Drunk like skunks.” He shrugged. “I still don’t see what this has to do with your argument.”

  “I’m saying people don’t want to live in each other’s heads. It’s too scary. It’s too animal. Coincidence is the sign that they’re approaching such a state.”

  “What kicks it off?” Dougy asked.

  “I’m not sure,” I said. I took a breath. Everything considered, there were worse matters to contend with than my father’s scorn. “I think that when something big and unexpected is about to happen, people come out of their daily static. Their thoughts start pulling toward one another. It’s as if an impending event creates a vacuum, and we start to go toward it. Startling coincidences pile up at a crazy rate. It’s like a natural phenomenon.”

  I could almost feel him brooding over his own past. Had he lived through experiences to compare with this on the morning he was shot? “What kind of impending events do you mean?” he asked.

  “Evil events.”

  He was being cautious. “What kind of evil events?”

  “Murder, for one.”

  He pondered what I said. Then he shook his head as if to say, “I do not like your input.” He looked at me. “Tim,” he said, “do you remember the bartender’s guide?”

  In my turn, I nodded. When I started my first job as a bartender, he had given me a schedule. “Son,” he had said, “keep this in mind. In New York, on the streets, it’s Peeping Toms from twelve A.M. to one A.M., fires from one to two, stickups two to three, bar fights three to four, suicides four to five, and auto accidents from five A.M. to six A.M.” I had kept it in my head like a typed schedule. It had proved useful.

  “Nothing special about murders,” he now said.

  “I’m not talking about New York,” I said, “but here.”

  “You’re saying a murder in this place is an extraordinary event?” I could see him all but measuring the cold damp of Cape Cod air against the blood and steam of the act. “Yeah,” he said, “all right, I’ll grant the point.” He looked not altogether happy. “What’s the purpose of this discussion?”

  “I’m tangled up in coincidences,” I said.

  “Well, by your line of reasoning, you must be close to something bad,” he said.

  “I’m closer than that.”

  He took the pause.

  “There was a suicide last week,” I said, “although the man may have been killed. I believe I stole his woman the night it happened.” The most curious thought came to me next: because my father had cancer, whatever I told him would never touch the air for others. That might be one of the virtues of his cancer. He could receive messages like a tomb and never send them out again. Was my father now on the other side of the spirits from all of us?

  “There’s more to tell than that,” I said. “It’s not public knowledge as yet, but two women have been killed in this town in the last week.”

  “My Lord,” he said. That was a lot of news, even for him. “Who did it?”

  “I don’t know. I have a few ideas, but I’m not certain.”

  “Have you seen the victims? Are you sure of your facts?”

  I hated to reply. As long as I said no more, we might still cling to the premise that we were drinking in the kitchen: we could surround his visit with lulling recollections of other boozy meanderings through the uncharted spaces of philosophy. But by my next remark, we would both be brought up dripping, sober, and on another beach.

  I suppose I took so long to reply that my father repeated the question. “Have you seen the victims?”

  “Yes,” I said. “They’re in the cellar.”

  “Oh, criminey!” His tumbler was empty. I saw his hand go for the bourbon bottle and then withdraw. Instead, he turned his glass upside down. “Tim, you do it?” he asked.

  “No.” I couldn’t refuse my own liquor. I swallowed what was left in my glass. “I don’t think I did,” I said, “but I can’t be certain.”

  So we got into it. Bit by bit, detail by detail, I told him more and more of what I could remember of each of these days after the night I went to The Widow’s Walk, and when I soon confessed (for confession is indeed how it felt) that Patty Lareine was one of the two women dead, my father gave one groan of the sort you might utter if you fell from a window to be impaled on a spike.

  Yet I cannot say he looked terrible. The fierce pink flush, which had been restricted to his cheekbones and left the rest of his face pale compared to his once red color, now spread a flush to Dougy’s forehead and chin. That provided the illusion he was less ill than before. Indeed, I think he was. No matter his antipathy to cops, he looked so much like one himself—Captain of the Precinct or Lieutenant of Detectives would have been seized on instantly by any casting director—that willy-nilly he found himself playing the role for a good part of his life. I have to say on the strength of his questions, he was no mean interrogator.

  Finally I came to a halt in my account (although in the telling we passed from morning to afternoon, made a few sandwiches and drank a little beer). He said at last, “There are two questions that keep me from seeing straight on this. One is whether you are innocent or guilty. I find it hard to believe the first, but then, you’re my son.” He stopped and scowled, and said, “I mean, I find it hard to believe the second—that you’re guilty.”

  “What you’re saying,” I told him, “is that I could have done it. You said it! The reason is: You are capable of murder. In fact, maybe you did pull off one or two in the union days.”

  Dougy gave no reply to that. Instead he said, “Good people kill for duty, or for honor. Not for money. A sleazo kills for money. A coked-up greed bag slays for money. But not you. Do you stand to benefit from her will?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “If her will leaves you real money, you’re in a load of trouble.”

  “She may have had no money left. She was always secretive about how much was there. I suspect Patty Lareine made some terrible investments in the last couple of years. We could be broke.”

  “I sure hope so,” he said. Then he laid his frozen blue eyes on me. “The problem is in the manner of those killings. That’s my second question. Why? Why would someone decapitate those two women? If you did it, then you and me, Tim, have to pack it in, I figure. Our seed has got to be too hideous to continue.”

  “You speak calmly about such matters.”

  “That’s because I don’t believe you’re capable of such an atrocity. I mention it only as an option. Set the record straight.”

  His monumental sense of always knowing the right thing to do irritated me in the most peculiar fashion. It was as if we were not speaking of ultimate matters so much as having a family spat. Ideological divergences. Kill the son of a bitch, says Dougy Madden. No, says the son, put him in a home for the mentally ill. I wanted to shake my father.

  “I am capable of such atrocities,” I said to him. “I can tell you. I know that. I’m prey to the spirits. If I did do it, I was in some kind of coma. I would have been carried to it by the spirits.”

  Big Mac gave me a look full of distaste. “Half the killers in this world make that claim. Fuck ’em all, I say. What does it matter if they’re telling the truth? They’re just a lightning rod for all the shit that other people are putting on the air. So they’re too dangerous to have around.” He shook his head. “You want to know my real feelings? I’m hoping and praying you didn’t do it because, in fact, I couldn’t off you. I couldn’t even turn you in.”

  “You’re playing with me. First it’s one option, then the other.”

  “You damn fool,” he said, “I’m trying to find my own head.”

  “Have a drink,” I said and spilled a little more bourbon down my
throat.

  “Yes,” he said, ignoring me, “the second big question takes care of the first. Why would anyone perform a decapitation? All you do is avoid a maximum prison in order to get a maximum mental hospital. You can even bring capital punishment on yourself by the hideousness of the crime—at least if they hang you in this state. So you’d have to be nuts. I don’t believe you are.”

  “Thank you,” I said, “but I don’t believe the killer is nuts either.”

  “Why would anybody sane cut off the head?” he repeated. “There’s only one good reason. To entrap you.” Now he beamed like a physicist who has found his hypothesis. “Is the burrow in your marijuana patch large enough to hold an entire body?”

  “Not unless the footlocker is removed.”

  “Could it hold two bodies?”

  “Never.”

  “The decapitation may have been reasoned-out. There are people capable of anything once they decide it gives them a practical advantage.”

  “You’re saying …”

  But he was not about to relinquish the fruits of his thinking process to me. “Yeah, I’m saying those heads were cut off so they’d fit your burrow. Somebody wants you to take the fall.”

  “It’s got to be one of two people,” I said.

  “Probably,” he said, “but I can think of a few others.” Now he tapped the table with his middle fingers. “Were the women shot in the head?” he asked. “Can you see from the heads how they were killed?”

  “No,” I said. “I didn’t study them.”

  “What about their necks?”

  “I couldn’t look at that.”

  “So you don’t know if the beheading was done by a hacksaw, a knife, or whatever.”

  “No.”

  “Don’t you think you ought to find out?”

  “I can’t disturb them any more.”

  “Tim, it’s got to be established. For our own sakes.”

  I felt ten years old and ready to blubber. “Dad,” I said, “I can’t look at them. It’s my wife, for God’s sakes.”

  He took that in. The heat of the chase had made him oblivious to much.