by Ed Gorman
“And not just him. Myrna. She flirts with me all the time now.”
“Myrna’s an idiot.”
“She never paid any attention to me until I started going out with you.”
“I’m happy your social life’s improving. You still broke your word. You were the one boy I trusted and look what’s happened. Look what’s happened, Sully.”
“But I don’t give a damn about anything but you anymore, that’s what I want you to understand.”
“It’s too late, Sully.”
He put his arm around her shoulder and he almost winced, afraid she would slap him or jump up and scream or run inside. But she did none of these things. First she sighed and then she shuddered and then she moved over against him and then she found his face and kissed him.
“I knew you didn’t mean what you said,” Sully said.
“I did mean it, Sully. I was just saying goodbye.”
And then she did stand up and then she did go inside.
And Sully just stood there. There was really nothing else to do. At least for now.
The breeze stirred then and that helped some, the way the smoke from the leaves made the night air so rich and romantic-smelling.
He thought of farmfields and scarecrows and jack-o’-lanterns.
He thought of everything but Louise because that would be too painful.
The porch light came on. Mr. Malloy pushed his big, Irish face past the partly-opened door and said something that Sully didn’t hear.
He left then and he was thankful for the smoke that awaited him like wraiths along the curb. Because he could hide in the smoke. Inside the smoke he did not have to think about being second most popular or third most tough or any of it.
It seemed safe inside the smoke.
And he could blame his tears and his empty feeling on the smoke, the way it whirled around him and blinded him and suffused his senses.
He could blame the smoke.
BLESS US O LORD
I usually think of Midwestern Thanksgiving as cold, snowy days. But as we gathered around the table this afternoon, my parents and my wife Laura and our two children Rob and Kate, I noticed that the blue sky and sunlight in the window looked more like an April day than one in late November.
“Would you like to say grace today?” my mother said to four-year-old Kate.
Kate of the coppery hair and slow secretive smile nodded and started in immediately. She got the usual number of words wrong and everybody smiled the usual number of times and then the meal began.
Dad is a retired steel worker. I remember, as a boy, watching fascinated as he’d quickly work his way through a plate heaped with turkey, sweet potatoes, dressing, cranberry sauce and two big chunks of the honey wheat bread mom always makes for Thanksgiving and Christmas. And then go right back for seconds of everything and eat all that up right away, too.
He’s sixty-seven now and probably thirty pounds over what he should be and his eyesight is fading and the only exercise he gets is taking out the garbage once a day—but he hasn’t, unfortunately, lost that steelworker’s appetite.
Mom on the other hand, thin as she was in her wedding pictures, eats a small helping of everything and then announces, in a sort of official way, “I’m stuffed.”
“So how goes the lawyer business?” Dad asked after everybody had finished passing everything around.
Dad never tires of reminding everybody that his youngest son did something very few young men in our working class neighborhood did—went on to become a lawyer, and a reasonably successful one, too, with downtown quarters in one of the shiny new office buildings right on the river, and two BMWs in the family, even if one of them is fourteen years old.
“Pretty well, I guess,” I said.
Laura smiled and laid her fingers gently on my wrist. “Some day this son of yours has to start speaking up for himself. He’s doing very well. In fact, Bill Grier—one of the three partners—told your son here that within two years he’ll be asked to be a partner, too.”
“Did you hear that, Margaret?” Dad said to Mom.
Dad’s folks were Czechs. His father and mother landed in a ship in Galveston and trekked all the way up to Michigan on the whispered rumor of steel mill work. Dad was the first one in his family to learn English well. So I understood his pride in me.
Laura patted me again and went back to her food. I felt one of those odd gleeful moments that married people get when they realize, every once in a while, that they’re more in love with their mates now than they were even back when things were all backseat passion and spring flowers.
Of course, back then, I’d been a little nervous about bringing Laura around the house. Mom and Dad are very nice people, you understand, but Laura’s father is a very wealthy investment banker and I wasn’t sure how she’d respond to the icons and mores of the working class—you know, the lurid and oversweet paintings of Jesus in the living room and the big booming excitement Dad brings to his pro wrestling matches on the tube.
But she did just fine. She fell in love with my Mom right away and if she was at first a little intimidated by the hard Slav passions of my father, she was still able to see the decent and gentle man abiding in his heart.
As I thought of all this, I looked around the table and felt almost tearful. God, I loved these people, they gave my life meaning and worth and dignity, every single one of them.
And then Mom said it, as I knew she inevitably would. “It’s a little funny without Davey here, isn’t it?”
Laura glanced across the table at me then quickly went back to her cranberry sauce.
Dad touched Mom’s hand right away and said, “Now, Mom, Davey would want us to enjoy ourselves and you know it.”
Mom was already starting to cry. She got up from the table and whispered “Excuse me” and left the dining room for the tiny bathroom off the kitchen.
Dad put his fork down and said, “She’ll be all right in a minute or two.”
“I know,” I said.
My six-year-old son Rob said, “Is Gramma sad about Uncle Davey, Grandpa?”
And Dad, looking pretty sad himself, nodded and said, “Yes, she is, honey. Now you go ahead and finish your meal.”
Rob didn’t need much urging to do that.
A minute later, Mom was back at the table. “Sorry,” she said.
Laura leaned over and kissed Mom on the cheek.
Davey was my younger brother. Five years younger. He was everything I was not—socially poised, talented in the arts, a heartbreaker with the ladies. I was plodding, unimaginative and no Robert Redford, believe me.
I had only one advantage over Davey. I never became a heroin addict. This happened sometime during his twenty-first year, back at the time the last strident chords of all those sixties protest guitars could be heard fading into the dusk.
He never recovered from this addiction. I don’t know if you’ve ever known any family that’s gone through addiction but in some ways the person who suffers least is the person who is addicted. He or she can hide behind the drugs or the alcohol. He doesn’t have to watch himself slowly die, nor watch his loved ones die right along with him, or watch them go through their meager life savings trying to help him.
Davey was a heroin addict for fourteen years. During that time he was arrested a total of sixteen times, served three long stretches in county jail (he avoided prison only because I called in a few favors), went through six different drug rehab programs, got into two car accidents—one that nearly killed him, one that nearly killed a six-year-old girl—and went through two marriages and countless clamorous relationships, usually with women who were also heroin addicts (a certain primness keeps me from calling my brother a “junkie,” I suppose).
And most of the time, despite the marriages, despite the relationships, despite the occasional rehab programs, he stayed at home with my folks.
Those happy retirement years they’d long dreamed of never came because Davey gave them no rest. One night a strange and exotic cre
ature came to the front door and informed Dad that if Davey didn’t pay him the drug money he owed him in the next twentyfour hours, Davey would be a dead man. Another night Davey pounded another man nearly to death on the front lawn.
Too many times, Dad had to go down to the city jail late at night to bail Davey out. Too many times, Mom had to go to the doctor to get increased dosages of tranquilizers and sleeping pills.
Davey was six months shy of age forty and it appeared that given his steely Czech constitution, he was going to live a lot longer—not forego the heroin, you understand—live maybe another full decade, a full decade of watching him grind Mom and Dad down with all his hopeless grief.
Then a few months ago, early September, a hotel clerk found him in this shabby room frequently used as a “shooting gallery.” He was dead. He’d overdosed.
Mom and Dad were still working through the shock.
“Is there pink ice cream, Grandma?” Kate asked.
Grandma smiled at me. Baskin-Robbins has a bubble-gum flavored ice cream and Mom has made it Kate’s special treat whenever she visits.
“There’s plenty of pink ice cream,” Grandma said. “Especially for good girls like you.”
And right then, seeing Kate and my mother beaming at each other, I knew I’d done the right thing sneaking up to the hotel room where Davey sometimes went with other junkies, and then giving him another shot when he was still in delirium and blind ecstasy from the first. He was still my brother, lying there dying before me, but I was doing my whole family a favor. I wanted Mom and Dad to have a few good years anyway.
“Hey, Mr. Counselor,” Dad said, getting my attention again. “Looks like you could use some more turkey.”
I laughed and patted my burgeoning little middle-class belly. “Correction,” I said. “I could use a lot more turkey.”
FAVOR AND THE PRINCESS
Thursday, finally, something happened.
Favor had been tailing David Carson for two days, and they had each been equally dull days. Back when he was a city detective, there were two jobs Favor hated most: telling parents that their child had been killed, and tailing people. Favor’s ass always went to sleep.
For two days, Carson, a slender and handsome man, went to work, played squash, stopped by his country club for two quick drinks, and then drove on home to the wife and kids. Home being a walled estate complete with large gurgling fountain on the front lawn, and a pair of Jags in the three-stall garage.
Thursday, Carson was nice enough to do something different.
As CEO of the electronics firm he had recently inherited from his father-in-law, Carson didn’t have any problem sneaking off in the middle of the afternoon. He stopped first at a branch of the Federal National Savings bank. Favor figured this was going to be another nowhere tail. But Carson parked and went inside, and stayed inside for nearly half an hour. When he came out, he carried a manila envelope.
From the bank, he drove straight to the bluffs out in Haversham State Park. On a weekday May afternoon, the birds and the butterflies frolicking in the warm air, the park was empty. Carson angled his shiny black Lincoln Towncar into a spot near the log-cabin restrooms, and got out carrying the manila envelope. There was another car already parked there, a sporty little red Mustang convertible with the top up. He then took off walking toward a path that led straight to an overlook above the river.
Favor gave him a couple of minutes and then went after him, shoving his small notebook back in the pocket of his blue blazer. He’d written down the number of the Mustang.
All Favor could think of, as he wound his way down the forest path, the damp leaves and loam playing hell with his sinuses, was that he didn’t have a cap on and was therefore susceptible to Lyme disease.
Favor was a good-looking guy of forty-five who seemed competent and confident in every way. His darkest secret was his hypochondria. Being in a room where somebody sneezed pissed him off for an hour and he could feel the jack-booted cold germs invading his body and seizing control of it. Sometimes he was so upset he wanted to take out his trusty old Police .38 Special and waste the offender. If he ever got to be President of the United States, which, he had to admit, wasn’t real likely, he would make public sneezing a felony.
For a few minutes, as the path wended and wound its way through the deepest part of the forest, and possums and rabbits and raccoons lined up to look at him, he was a seven-year-old again, imagining he was Tarzan, and this wasn’t a forest at all but a jungle, and it wasn’t in Iowa, it was in Africa, and it wasn’t the real Africa, which was actually kind of boring, it was Tarzan’s Africa, which was about the coolest place on the whole planet. Favor had been a stone Tarzan freak until he was fifteen years old, when he discovered a) girls b) marijuana and c) Neil Young records. Neil couldn’t sing for shit but he did stuff to a guitar that never failed to give Favor chills. But now, for a brief time at least, he was Tarzan again and seven years old again and if he wasn’t careful he just might get himself attacked by an alligator…
The overlook was actually a kind of stone verandah set on the highest point of a woodsy bluff. It was the kind of aerie the Indians had no doubt used for spying on intruders. Beyond, across the wide rushing river, were other bluffs, gleaming with the skins of white birch trees that straggled all the way up the hill to the point where some old narrow-gauge railroad tracks could still be found. Jesse James had once robbed one of the short-haul trains that had used these very same tracks.
The man with David Carson was short, stumpy and bald. He wore a buff blue polo shirt, khaki pants, argyle socks and penny loafers. He put his hand out and Carson set the manila envelope on it.
Favor couldn’t hear what they were saying. A couple of motorboats were showing off below and drowning out the words.
Then Carson was angrily jamming his finger into the smaller man’s chest.
The man backed up but Carson pursued him, continuing to jab at his chest, continuing to spit angry words into the man’s face.
Favor could see that Carson was starting to glance back up the trail. He was probably going to leave soon.
Favor decided this would be a good time to leave.
He hurried back along the path, got in his car, and drove up near the exit, where he parked on the shoulder of the road and took out his trusty newspaper. The paper was ten years old. He used it for every surveillance job. Someday he’d have to get a new paper.
A few minutes later, Carson came shooting up the asphalt. The posted speed limit was 15. He was doing at least 60. When he reached the stop sign at the exit, he jammed on his brakes, fishtailing a bit. Then he peeled out, laying down rubber. He was sure pissed off about something.
Favor followed him back to the manse, then drove down to the police station, where he had an old buddy of his run a check on the Mustang’s plates.
“You know anybody who drives a red Mustang?” Favor said three hours later.
“I didn’t know they still made Mustangs.”
“Yeah, they do. This one is red.”
Jane Carson shook her wondrously lovely head.
Jane Dalworth Carson had come from one of the old-money families in the city. Favor had first met her when he was ten, helping his dad in the yard-work business. He got goopy over Jane. No matter what girl he met he always compared her to Jane and found her coming up short. Jane was not only blonde and beautiful and rich and fun to be around, she knew how to make you feel like the most special guy in the known universe. None of Favor’s first three wives had been able to do that.
Jane had called him three nights ago. She said her husband was acting weird. Would Favor kind of, you know, follow him around a little and see what was going on? She suspected he might have a woman. “Nobody married to you would ever have a woman on the side,” Favor had said.
“Oh, you haven’t seen me lately. I’m looking middle-aged, Favor. I really am.”
Today was the first time he’d actually seen her in eleven years, here in this fern-infested r
estaurant with the waiters who all wore bouncy little ponytails and nose-rings.
Favor made a point of it to be modern. It didn’t always work. As for Jane, she looked great to him. Maybe a teensy-tiny bit older. But nothing to take seriously.
She said, “Do you know anything about this guy?”
“He’s a male nurse. Sam Evans.”
“Are you serious?”
“Yeah. I was kind’ve of surprised, too.”
“Why would he be meeting a male nurse?”
“I don’t know. He handed him a manila envelope.”
“An envelope?”
“I think it had money in it. He went into the bank without it, and then came out with it. There’s only one thing I know you can get in a bank.”
“A male nurse and an envelope with money in it.”
Favor said, “Guy’s shaking him down.”
“Blackmail?”
“Uh-huh.”
She looked stunned by a thought she’d obviously just had. “I saw an Oprah once where this woman didn’t know her husband was gay till she found him in bed with another guy. I mean, a male nurse—”
For some reason, Favor was disappointed she watched Oprah. Princesses should have better things to do with their time. “I don’t think he’s gay.”
“How can you tell?”
Favor shrugged. “I just don’t.”
“Then what do you think it is?”
“He drink a lot?”
“Not really.”
“Take drugs?”
She laughed. “David? God, he’s the most conservative man I know.” Her laugh made him mushy inside. He knew that even if there happened to be a fourth Mrs. Favor, his last thought on planet earth would be about Princess Jane. She was drinking wine and he was drinking Diet Pepsi because he was afraid he might blurt out something embarrassing if he had any booze in him. Many, many drunken nights he’d come this close to picking up the phone and calling her and telling her something embarrassing.
“I guess I wouldn’t blame him if he did have a woman on the side.”
