by Sean Desmond
At that Pat did start paying attention to Shapiro. Let’s not forget that getting rid of Pat made it easier for him to save his own neck. His jowls flushed red like he had been drinking. But Shapiro didn’t drink. Didn’t know how. Not a hail fellow well met, Shapiro. You couldn’t get close. He wasn’t a better manager than Pat. He was just less risk, safer.
Shapiro continued to stumble through the package. “Also there’s a letter of recommendation from me and from Wallace . . .”
Bob Wallace, SVP of operations, and Crandall’s Crandall. A miserly Scotsman, he had put the fear of God into Shapiro for years. Pat knew Wallace was all bark, but he could smell it on his now-former boss—that nervous dread of the salaryman. And Pat realized he was already outside the bubble. Shapiro was talking and talking and explaining a bunch of shit that didn’t matter. And then he would tell Wallace that Pat took it hard, but he had coached him through it, managed it well. Gold star, Shapiro. It’s sad, but honestly: Pat Malone is a crippled drunk.
“The economy wobbled this quarter, but I think next year you’re going to find that you’re back on your feet in no time.”
Next year? Jesus, Christmas is coming. Fuck you, Bob Crandall. Twenty-seven goddamn years. I was here before you. Before deregulation, before you turned this place into a shit show.
“Really this could open up possibilities for you. You never know . . .”
Never tell an actuary what’s possible. But Pat held his tongue, and Shapiro leaned forward in his seat, signaling that this was about over. The personnel folks had warned the managers: don’t let them linger, don’t give them time in the chair to think about it.
Pat went blank and bitter. He had stolen the buyout idea after he read about it in Forbes. DuPont had done it with their executives, Firestone too. Compensating job loss was an airline tradition going back to when they pushed Howard Hughes out at TWA. Back then it was called the golden parachute. And now Shapiro was standing up, and Pat stood up, and here it came—the golden handshake. But really, Pat wasn’t that important an employee. As Forbes would categorize the different levels, this was the golden boot.
* * *
Pat sipped, still thirsty, still trying to catch up to some scherzo where drinking and thinking were reconciled. Three months paid in full. Three months after twenty-seven years. When Pat was little he read a story about Shackleton, how he survived on an iceberg for days, killer whales bobbing above the surface, auditing him with their tiny, evil eyes, and then ramming the ice floe, trying to break it apart and drop him in the water. Pat placed the letter in front of him on the bar but couldn’t bear to open it. Those killer whales knew exactly what they were doing. He had to plan, and realized there was a plan for this: You have savings, you have insurance. But he didn’t have luck. He had illness. He had a wife terrified they’d all end up in the poorhouse. He couldn’t bear that all her pessimism would be proven right. All his work-related functions—company dinners Anne came along on—were now cast in a polar light of failure. She would pointlessly second-guess everything and wear him down. And wear herself down. And then remind him that Dan was going to college in two years.
Pat put the envelope back in his jacket and rolled up his sleeves. He’d inherited this dark little cloud of misfortune from his mother. Hannah was born under a tough star. So what did she do? Work and worry. And that’s all Pat allowed himself to do. His father’s store, the airline. Work, work, work. And guess what, Mr. Malone: there’s no luck in it. Work just creates more work. I should have been smarter. I should have seen this coming. Not everyone is unlucky. And yes, Keith, I’ll have another.
Pat sat up on his bar stool, and a blue line of pain wrenched his left leg. He almost fell off the stool but steadied himself. The involuntary spasms of his left side were happening more when he drank, but he would drink past it. An ominous flare-up of the MS before everything went dull again. He ordered another drink from Kevin—Sorry, Keith—and Pat slid another $10 on the bar. He had to be careful or he’d be calling a taxi. Sip this one. Then maybe one more and that’s it. Pat dreaded the thought of going home. Into this anguish crept a warm female voice.
“Hola.”
Pat turned from the bar. She was brunette, pixie short but wearing heels with black jeans and a black bustier crop top. She was younger than Pat, but not by much, her skin no longer olive, more orange. She wore several gold chains, including one with a Guadalupe medal. She smiled.
“I’m Carmen.”
“Hola, Carmen.”
“You’ve been here before, no? We were talking? It’s John, right?”
“Pat.”
“Oh, sorry. It’s good to see you, Pat. How are you?”
Pat had seen her in Doll’s before. Maybe. He wasn’t sure.
“I’ve been better, Carmen.”
“I’m sorry, baby. Can you get him to come over?”
“Kevin. Sorry—Keith.”
Pat bought her a whiskey agrio, and Carmen pulled up on the bar stool next to him. Keith and Carmen eyed each other knowingly, which Pat, punching his ticket for another Bushmills, didn’t quite register.
“So what’s wrong?” she purred.
“I don’t know. A lot of things. Don’t want to be here. Don’t want to go home.”
“Oh yeah?” She bit on a red swizzle and toyed with it. “Sounds like you’re bored. I’m bored too. You bored, Pat?”
“This place could make you bored of being bored.”
Carmen threw her head back and laughed. It was too much for the joke and surprised Pat. By the time she had regrouped, she had put her hand on Pat’s arm.
“You are funny. You live around here? You don’t sound like a Texan.”
“No, no Tejano.” Something in Pat stirred as he looked down at her fake pink nails. Her smile, her slightly broken English, it all seemed gentle, just lonely and sad like him. Everyone is this way deep down, the whiskey told him.
“I’m from New York.”
“Wow. New York. So are you traveling? Are you staying at a hotel?”
“No, I live in Dallas now.”
“I see.” Carmen swizzled a little closer. “So what do you do, Pat, so you’re not bored?”
“Sadly, you’re looking at it.” Pat took a big pull off his whiskey. Is this my fifth? Wait, are we counting doubles? No, five. His new limit for driving and basic compos mentis. No mile a minute, no spins. Just warm and calm and dull.
“I like to drink too. Makes things . . .” She searched for a word. “Like, relaxed, cool.”
And so they had another drink, and then another, and Pat found out a few things about Carmen. She was born in Mexico but had lived in Texas since she was a teenager. She had been married, but it didn’t work out, and Pat nodded and sucked on his lip in sympathy. They both agreed on the weather, on sports—Carmen, like Pat, was a big baseball fan. In fact, everything Pat said or suggested found Carmen in agreement. They were very like-minded and very whiskey fueled. Carmen was from a different station in life, but Pat didn’t mind. He crowed about how he knew a lot of Puerto Ricans in the Bronx, and Mexicans weren’t much different. If anything he had an inebriate pride about how he had learned to walk with beggars and kings, and was Patricio Malone, friend to the Latin race. And now Carmen’s pink fingers were rubbing his shoulder.
“So listen, you’re married . . .”
Pat thumbed at his ring finger as reality returned. The glow became a thin gray cloud. Carmen whispered through a slick smile.
“It’s okay, I don’t care. We’re both adults, right?”
And Pat started to panic. His leg throbbed. He thought about Anne and the thousand questions she would have about the letter, and the package, and the extension of benefits, and for how long, and on and on, about this and that. What did Shapiro say to you? What are we going to do now? Jesus Christ. His head was spinning, and he had drunk three past where he promised hims
elf to stop.
“Listen, baby, we should get out of here.”
“Sorry, what?”
“We could go somewhere else. You know . . .” And then her lips came close to his ear and he couldn’t make out what she was saying. Her words just echoed like the sea, and he could only focus on the smell of her perfume, and her cheek grazing his.
“Carmen, I can’t.”
“No problema, I just thought . . .”
“What?”
She sat back in a half pout. “You have sad eyes, Pat. I like you. And you like me, right? And I want to help you. Make you happy, right?”
Pat, drunk and unsure, fell for this. What she said seemed so clear and simple. And Pat wanted what was easy, warm. Her hand came back in a caress. Pat’s head sank into his shoulders.
“What’s wrong? Did I say something wrong?”
“No, you’re right. I’ve been sad for a long time.”
“I know, baby. It’s okay.”
Pat patted her hand and forced his face into a grin of assurance. She had smooth skin and huddled together with him, so Pat could look straight down her top and peek at her bra, red and frilled with roses.
“Listen, baby, let’s go somewhere else. We don’t need to be here, right?”
Pat sucked the last drops of whiskey out of the ice and nodded. He was entering a world below the one he normally lived in. “Where do you want to go? Can you drive?”
“I can’t drive, but I’m around the corner. It’s a nice place. Quiet. Private.”
“Oh, how far?”
“Just one block behind here. We can walk. And plenty to drink, baby. Beer, liquor.”
Pat checked his leg. Completely numb, which was good; he could make the walk slowly. Pat threw a final $10 on the bar, and that took care of things.
* * *
They exited to the outside world. The chilly evening air felt too deep, the parking lot somehow calcined and hyperreal, and this lacerated Pat’s senses, sending him into a slight stumble. Carmen held his hand, and he steadied. A few doleful Irish ghosts pilgrimed past his mind. His parents, various Christian Brothers, an uncle or two. No need for this, Pat, they told him. Like a bandit she lies in wait, and multiplies the unfaithful among men. But then at the end of the pockmarked asphalt—on the corner of Lovers Lane, no less—he overruled them. No one will know. We’re all damned anyway. Carmen’s hand was at his back as they turned the corner toward her apartment building. At the door Carmen pulled out her key ring, which held a rabbit’s foot dyed purple. Carmen pressed Pat’s shirt and straightened his Brooks Brothers pinstripes, her hand sweeping his chest and down his arms, half propping him up, half hugging him. Pat barely noticed because he had justified this to himself as all well and good, and he wasn’t stumbling along with some whore. As she popped the dead bolt, Pat did study Carmen in the streetlight—pancake makeup that now showed its brushwork, a few eyelashes clotted with mascara. The door swung open, and she swept them back into the darkness. Carmen took them three steps in and kicked off her heels, her dark red toes soaking into the burnt-orange shag carpet. The house smelled of a potpourri of adobo, incense, cigarettes, and Aqua Net hair spray. She turned toward Pat, and before his eyes could adjust to the dark she was kissing him and her lips tasted like whiskey sour and her fingers ran along the back of his neck and she took all the tension out there. Pat’s hands came around her awkwardly, embracing her back like this was a movie kiss. And it was so strange because this was a stranger he was kissing, and he didn’t know where to put his hands, but then lust finally kicked in and his fingers crept up to her chest.
“Oh, Pat, you’re a bad boy, huh? I like it.”
Carmen drew him farther into the cave of the apartment, and they kissed some more, and Pat was fine with that; he was nervous and needed a minute to remember how you made out with someone for the first time. As it got going, she pulled away, cooed, and went to get him a beer. He ignored the run-down, smoky, smelly apartment with dark feculent cloths draped over the blinds and a winking fluorescent light in a kitchen full of unwashed dishes and cruddy takeout containers. He was past everything that was sad and cheap about this. He teetered a little but tried to stand as still as was possible on his bad leg and against sloshing tides of booze in his bloodstream. Carmen returned with beer in a glass that Pat hadn’t seen her pour.
“Time to get comfortable.” She pointed up and down the line, at his shoes, his suit. “Do you want to take a shower first, baby?”
“What now?”
“Why don’t we take a shower together, okay?” Her mien was chorelike. And then Carmen started to strip down. There was the red bra, now matched with silky red panties, and she twirled toward him while taking off various threads of jewelry.
“What do you think?”
Pat chuckled and entered some soothing fantasy where his consort came toward him to take his shield and his sword, then undress and anoint him, and not because Pat was too besotted to get out of his own clothes. No, Pat was alligator hearted, in the full churn and rush of being ready for this. Carmen’s hand undid his shirt buttons, the zipper to his trousers, and . . .
“Oh, Pat, so nice to meet you.”
And when the clothes came off, she led him to the shower and stood him in the tub. The showerhead was on a cord, and she soaped him up. Bursting his priapic bubble, Pat imagined himself like a dog being hosed down. She stood outside the tub and just lathered him with baby shampoo and then teased his dick a little, and it smelled like talc and flowers, and when was the last time he got laid? That anyone besides Patrick Francis Malone had touched him there? She rinsed and toweled him off, and now he had to piss like a racehorse because of all the whiskey, and she positioned him over a trickling toilet made of blue porcelain.
“Come out when you’re good.” Her accent sounded more crude. Pat started to piss and realized that his wallet was still in his pants, which were in the other room, alone with her. But he wasn’t worried. Didn’t seem like a thief, right? And as Pat peed he took a look in the mirror at an old man with graying chest hair who was thin and bony from disease. He heard Carmen patter across the apartment and a door to the bedroom open. Are you really going to fuck this strange woman? All the whiskey in the world couldn’t make this less surreal, and his alligator heart was really drunken panic that he was about to be beaten and robbed by her pimp hiding in a closet, and the desire drained out through his bladder.
And then Pat flushed and peeked out of the bathroom, naked at half-mast, and—he was not seeing double—there was another woman there.
She was a taller, more slender version of Carmen. She looked very young. Her jet-black hair fell past her satin black bra, almost to her black panties. Her face was long and oval, like a Madonna from an old painting, her skin a light color of wood stain.
“This is my girl Lupita. What do you think? She’s nice, right?”
“Muy linda.” Pat’s mouth was dry. The girl twisted into Carmen, trying to hide herself.
“You speak español now? Bueno, Pat. Listen, Lupita wants to join us. We can all have a good time together, no?”
“How old is she?”
“She’s nineteen.”
“Are you sure?”
“I should know. I’m her mother.”
This stunned Pat, who was on some sort of receiving delay. He was a million miles out in orbit, as far from Shapiro’s office or Doll’s Bar as he could get. Mother and daughter, huh? Well, that deserves a drink. But before he could reach for his beer, Lupita approached him with a silent smile and put her hand there. She smelled like baby shampoo too, and her hand was soft, more gentle than her mother’s, who earlier had milked him like a cow. The siren in the back of his mind wailed, but Pat ignored it and leaned into this young creature and her soft fondling. He touched her there, and this was what he wanted now. Both of them.
“That’s good. She’s nice, rig
ht? She go with you, then I go with you.”
Pat stumbled back to the bedroom. Thin pink sheets, one limp pillow, more perfume and sanitary smells masking other odors. A whore’s bed that could be turned over quick. He fell back onto the mattress. The girl slithered in between his legs and coiled into his chest. She unclasped her bra. They kissed as Carmen closed the door, and this girl looked at him with an expression that was neither here nor there, and again Pat thought of that pathetic distance between two people. Even in this moment. Especially in this moment. He took a deep breath and swung his hips into hers, his body seeking the concavity of hers, and she held him back and stroked him, and Pat buried himself in her hair and the nape of her neck. He tried to relax, but with all those drinks, he went soft, and Lupita looked up at him. His eyes rolled back into his head, and she tried again, more rubbing, her other hand brushing his chest, like she was applying a salve.
But Pat wasn’t there anymore. He had blacked out. A noiseless iceberg drifting across a dark and empty sea.
[ DECEMBER 7 ]
Rain drummed down on the windshield of the silver Mercury Zephyr as Anne Malone sat through a stale light, the screech and smear of the wipers keeping a bleary time. The hiccup in the wipers was a lot like the hitch in Pat’s stride, Anne thought, which reminded her of a lot of other worrisome things. So she sat there sadly, considering her life in three-second smudges.
A December Monday morning coming down—Pearl Harbor Day—and Anne was on her way back from jury duty. She had reported at eight thirty a.m. to the jury break room. Nine a.m. passed, then ten a.m., and the bailiff came in to take orders for a coffee run but shrugged when asked what the delay was. Then at ten forty-five they were called to the courtroom. The lawyers Whiteside and Blackburn were standing in conference with Judge Barefoot Sam, who was hunched over, a dark blue Kentucky bow tie dangling from his neck. The bailiff and the stenographer were the only other people present—the court was empty, the gallery cleared. Anne immediately noticed that Standing Raleigh was missing. Did they let him off? No, no way . . .
