No, Dan thought. She loves me. But he felt no personal triumph. “Sure she does,” he said. “She’ll come back.”
“She’ll have to. I’m not going near Mountain Avenue, you can bet your ass.”
“Give her time.”
“She thinks she’s going to fall in love with some millionaire at college. Mohawk isn’t good enough.”
“You’re wrong.”
“She listens to her old man all the time, and that’s what he says. To hell with him.” He made a sweeping gesture that encompassed his scattered Chevrolet, the garage, the county. “I love this place.”
Dan left him and drove over to the Mohawk Republican where Anne was working part-time until school started. He parked at the curb, three doors down, and sat there thinking about fate. Finally he made a deal. It was five o’clock and there was a good chance that Anne, who worked irregular hours, had already gone home. There was an equally good chance that if she hadn’t already gone home, she wouldn’t notice him sitting there when she came out into the bright afternoon sun. She would head home in the other direction, or perhaps she’d be with someone. More likely still, she’d be angry with him for the long days, nearly a week, during which he hadn’t even telephoned. There was also the remote possibility that during the week she had concluded that no decent people could afford to indulge the feelings she and he had confessed.
He waited until five-fifteen, slumped back against the door, smoking, watching the smoke crawl along the ceiling. Then the door on the passenger side opened and she got in. She didn’t look at him right away, didn’t move at all until he sat up straight and stubbed out his cigarette. Then she turned and smiled.
“Diana—” he began.
“Has the flu,” she finished. “And Dallas is making love to his car tonight.”
“Are you expected home?”
“Eventually. Not soon. If you don’t kiss me in about two seconds, I’m going to slap you.”
He did as he was told.
“And I want you to tell me you love me.”
“I already have.”
“I don’t want there to be any mistake. We were drinking.”
“All right: I love you. How’s that?”
“Wonderful. I might make you tell me every now and then. My only demand.”
“Fine,” he said. “I just hope you won’t make too much of it.”
She laughed. “It only means everything. It means that we aren’t bad people.”
For her it was that simple, perhaps because she didn’t love Dallas. Perhaps, Dan thought, because her love for him was all the credo she needed. If so, he was both frightened and grateful.
They drove to Albany and took a room in a small, out-of-the-way motel, and skipped dinner. He remembered thinking, as they made love, I’m gone … too far gone to ever return. He pictured himself breaking into the homes of all the respectable people he knew, and loading all their most valued possessions into a large canvas sack. He wouldn’t get caught, either.
As he drove back to Mohawk, with Anne cradled against him, a twinge took his breath away.
“What’s wrong?” Anne said.
“Nothing.”
“You just shivered.”
“The night air,” he explained, rolling up his window. “There’s autumn in it.”
“I’ve never felt warmer,” she said.
Dan Wood smiles at the recollection. Wheeling over to the shed, he unlocks it and pulls out onto the pool deck the large bucket of golf balls he has collected. He picks one out at random, fingering its dimples. He knows something about golf balls, how tightly wound they are, a mass of rubber bands wrapped under great pressure beneath deceptive white skin. He wonders, as he has since he was a kid, what magic is used to keep them from exploding. He gives the ball a heave in the general direction of the eighth green, watching its arc. But he can barely see the flag waving beyond the fence and cannot tell whether the ball has landed on the green. He flings another. It takes him twenty minutes to empty the bucket. Just as he unloads the last ball, the face of a teenage boy appears above the back fence. Undaunted by the frigid weather, he has undoubtedly sneaked on the course at number seven to get in some practice. He doesn’t look particularly bright. “Hey! What are you doing?”
“Golfing,” Dan tells him. “What does it look like?”
The boy stares stupidly, first at Dan, then at the green, now littered with over a hundred golf balls. “Which one is mine?”
“They’re all yours.”
“Really? You don’t want them?”
“What good are they?”
“Jeez, I’ll take them,” the boy says, and disappears.
“You do that.”
After a while the patio door slides open and Diana comes out. Watching from the kitchen window, she has waited until she thinks her husband will accept her company. In fact he’s glad to have it. From behind his chair she rubs his shoulder blades, and he smells the reassuring perfume she has worn since she was a girl. “I love you, you know,” she tells him.
“Of course you do.” He smiles. “Who wouldn’t? A big, virile hunk of guy like me?”
18
“Look at you,” said Harry when the front door to the Mohawk Grill swung open and Dallas Younger sauntered in out of the gray afternoon. One of Harry’s regulars, Dallas usually came dressed in work clothes, but today he wore a fresh shirt, neatly pressed pants and a Madras sportcoat that represented a momentary lapse in judgment. The lapse in judgment had not been in buying the coat, but rather in accepting it, because somebody, Dallas couldn’t remember who, had given it to him, and this was the first time he had worn it. It had hung in the closet for over a year and for the last several months he had puzzled over its origin. The coat wasn’t the sort of thing he lost sleep over, though. Things came and went in Dallas’s life, and provided they came in at roughly the same rate as they went out, that suited him fine.
He was prepared for some razzing. As Harry opened his mouth to speak, Dallas held up one hand. “I always like to look my best when I’m in a classy place, Harry.” He chose a stool near the center of the counter.
Harry had been of two minds about opening. He knew there would be no business to speak of. Christmas and Thanksgiving were two holidays when lonely people felt self-conscious about eating in places like his. Most would skip the meal entirely before they’d admit they’ve no place better to go. Like them, Harry had no better place, so he opened. “You must be on your way to see your ex,” Harry said slyly. He was nobody’s fool. Not that you had to be genius to read Dallas Younger.
“My kid,” Dallas corrected him.
“Uh-huh.”
“I’ll take a cup of coffee if you aren’t too busy.”
Harry poured it and slipped a nondairy creamer on the side of the saucer. Dallas took the creamer and threw it playfully back at him. “Fifteen years I’ve been drinking coffee in here and you never got it right yet.”
Harry tossed the creamer back in the bin with the others, happy to have saved it. Coffee cost the same one way or the other, and he liked the sensation of having made more money when his customers drank it black. “I never see her on the street,” he observed.
Dallas shrugged. “You know how it is when you’re too good.”
Harry had seen Dallas’s wife only once or twice before they split up but not once since her return to Mohawk. Still, she was not easily forgotten, and it made him feel sorry for Dallas to have lost someone so good-looking. Harry himself had lost his share of girls, but none of them were the sort you spent your life mooning about when they were gone. “I got some turkey and dressing,” he offered. “Green beans, too. The whole shot for two and a quarter.”
Dallas shook his head. “I’m supposed to be there for dinner.”
Harry wasn’t surprised. “I haven’t served one dinner today,” he admitted.
“I couldn’t believe you were open. Too bad your illegitimate nephew isn’t around. He’s pretty good at scarfing up food.”
>
Harry involuntarily looked over at the vacant stool at the end of the counter. It was a matter of jest between Dallas and Harry that he and Wild Bill were related. Harry always pretended to blow up at the suggestion. Today, though, the joke was flat. “I ain’t even seen him since he got in trouble.”
The boy Wild Bill had flung against the dumpster was still in the hospital with a skull fracture and concussion.
“Serve those boys right if they all got their heads split, the way they torment him. Which is what I told the cops. His uncle was in here right away, all hot to arrest him.”
“Naturally,” Dallas said. Oddly enough, the subject of fighting was on his mind since Anne had told him over the phone that Randall had been in a fight and that it might be a good idea for him to have a man-to-man with his son. From what Anne said he couldn’t tell if he was supposed to teach the boy to run away or play to win. Not that it mattered. If this conversation ran true to form, he doubted he and Randall would get anywhere. Everybody said his son was supposed to be smart as hell, but Dallas privately abstained. The boy just seemed odd. Of course most of the smart people he’d ever run across were odd, too, so it was possible.
“I told that fat fuck I didn’t want him in here no more. He can write a hundred tickets out front if he wants, but he’ll never get another cup of coffee off Harry Saunders.”
“Gaff’s all right,” Dallas observed noncommittally.
“Sure,” Harry admitted, “except he’s an asshole, like his brother. The Gaffneys are all peckerheads, every one of them.… You sure you don’t want some turkey?”
Dallas was tempted. The food smelled good and he wasn’t looking forward to dinner at the Grouses. He’d been talked into it by Loraine, who said that if he called wanting to take his son out for Thanksgiving dinner, Anne was bound to invite him to eat with them. “And if that doesn’t work out, you’ll eat with us,” she added. Unfortunately, the first plan had worked out. Dallas would have much preferred dinner at his brother’s. Or rather his brother’s wife’s.
For a long time after they split up, Dallas had assumed that he and Anne would get back together. But then ten or twelve years slipped by, and one day it occurred to him that he might be wrong. Even more surprising was the fact that he didn’t miss Anne very much, and couldn’t remember having missed her, though he might’ve for a while and then forgotten about it. He was pretty content with his life, and Anne was more trouble than any other five women he knew. Even if by some stroke he should win her back—something he wouldn’t make book on after all the intervening years—there would be the daily struggle to keep her and figure out why she wasn’t happy. All of which he could live without.
There was a time when he hadn’t minded fighting over women. He lost his front teeth over Anne when he was nineteen, in a fight people in Mohawk County still talked about, at least the ones old enough to remember it. The whole thing had started when he got off work one afternoon and ran into a buddy of his who told him he’d seen Anne parked outside the newspaper with Dan Wood, that the two were kissing. Dallas was too fair-minded not to give the boy a chance to take it back, but he stood grimly by his story, even after Dallas knocked him flat on the pavement. “It’s the freakin’ truth,” the boy had insisted. “I can’t take back the freakin’ truth.…”
When Benny D. got to his feet, Dallas hit him again, but this time he managed to stay perpendicular and, seeing no alternative, took the liberty of breaking Dallas’s nose. Despite being naturally athletic, Dallas wasn’t much of a fighter. He was game to a fault, though, and took a terrible beating at the hands of his more talented adversary, who jabbed and ducked and weaved in workmanlike fashion. Time after time Dallas was surprised to discover himself on the ground, and he no sooner got up than he was promptly seated again. Soon Benny D. was covered with blood, which gave Dallas the unfortunate and entirely mistaken impression that he was unaccountably winning, despite being beaten to the punch on every exchange. He had no idea that his own broken nose was responsible for the ghastly appearance of his opponent. He actually expected Benny D. to concede at any moment, until the boy hit Dallas in the mouth so hard that several teeth gave and the pain was so bad Dallas couldn’t hold back the tears.
The fact that he was crying made him mad. Giving up on his fists and lowering his head like a battering ram, Dallas drove forward into his opponent’s midsection. Benny D., much surprised by this eleventh-hour tactic and suspension of the rules heretofore in effect, was lifted high in the air and brought back down to the pavement on his tailbone with a loud crack, whereupon all the blood went out of his face and with it the fight out of his heart. Dallas then sat on his chest and thumped his head into the pavement like a melon until Benny D.’s eyes rolled up in his head. Not one to press an unfair advantage, Dallas then proclaimed the fight finished, which of course it was.
In Mohawk news of fights traveled fast, and before long Dallas’s victory passed from fact to fable. Both combatants were admitted to the hospital, Dallas with a broken nose and smile, Benny D. with wounds less noticeable but more severe. Both winner and loser were tremendously admired, because it had been a real fight, not just profane taunts and a little shoving. The fact that the two were friends added a bittersweet quality and made the whole thing seem even more noble. The fact that so much damage had been traded over a girl elevated the contest into the realm of heroism.
After two days in the hospital, Dallas was allowed to go home. Anne picked him up in his own car and helped him up the stairs to his flat above the drugstore. Her face was ashen and he was proud of having defended her honor to the point of maiming and of the effect his doing so apparently had upon her. For months he had feared that she didn’t love him as she once had and was now delighted to discover how wrong he’d been. On the way up the narrow stairs she let him lean on her, and it occurred to him that there might be no better time to press his advantage, even if he did look like a B-movie zombie.
“Dan came by the hospital last night,” he ventured.
“Did he,” she said as if she hadn’t really heard.
“He said he and Di are getting hitched next month.”
“Yes.”
“I guess I was the first one he told.”
“Yes. Di told me this morning.”
“I wish I didn’t look so beat up. Otherwise, I’d ask you.”
She studied him, then—a little sadly, it seemed, and not at all surprised, but with more affection than he had seen for some time. She took out a tissue, wet the corner with her tongue and touched it on one of his swollen eyes. “I wouldn’t make you happy,” she said. “Besides, I promised my father I’d give him one semester at school.”
He shrugged happily, having anticipated a much more forceful objection. “How about January? I can wait.”
She smiled. “People don’t get married in January.”
“They do in Austria.”
“You mean Australia?”
Well, he had meant Australia. “I mean I love you.”
His room overlooked Main Street, and from where they sat it was possible to see all the way up past the hospital into Myrtle Park, which overlooked the entire county. Only when Dallas finally noticed that she was crying did he realize how much she must love him, and he vowed from that moment to be worthy of her.
But it hadn’t worked out. He did not blame her for ending the marriage when she did. She deserved better, and he couldn’t see how there was much advantage to starting up again. He’d make all sorts of vows and end up breaking every one. He knew himself now, and he knew he could live without her.
“All right, Harry,” he said. “Give me some of that turkey before you start crying. And don’t be a cheapskate with the gravy, either.”
19
Dallas Younger was Harry’s last real customer at the Mohawk Grill, which meant there would be a special on turkey-and-dressing over the holiday weekend. Dallas lingered until late in the afternoon when he heard feet tromping up the stairs on the other side of
the wall. Then he borrowed fifty from Harry and joined the game upstairs. The other players were family men who’d seen enough of their families and grown depressed by the sight of the turkey carcass.
Harry was cleaning the grill and preparing to close when Officer Gaffney came in. He was looking a little sheepish since Harry had read him the riot act. For two days he had obeyed the injunction not to show his face in the Mohawk Grill. But lacking a convenient place to drink coffee was beginning to wear on him, and he looked haggard.
“No,” Harry said when the policeman straddled his favorite stool.
Officer Gaffney did not dare sit, though his rump hovered mere inches from the round stooltop, his legs bowed like a cowboy’s. “Hell, Harry,” he complained. “You can’t refuse to serve me—”
“I can do anything I want. This is my place, paid for by me, run by me, according to my rules.”
“Hell, Harry.”
“Anyhow, I wasn’t refusing to serve you. I was answering the question you’ll get around to asking when you’re through pissing and moaning. No, I didn’t see Billy. No, I don’t have no idea where he is. No, he’s not downstairs hiding in the basement or the storeroom. And no, you can’t just look around to make sure. No.”
Gaffney squirmed, still astraddle the stool and unsure if he had permission to sit. “It ain’t like we don’t trust you, Harry. Everybody admires the hell out of Harry Saunders, and nobody’s been better to that boy than you. We just need to talk to that boy for his own good.”
“No,” Harry said.
The officer lowered himself subtle fractions until he felt the stool. “Hell, Harry, I understand. Why wouldn’t I understand? We’re friends for God’s sake. It’s just I can’t help being what I am. I got to enforce the law. A policeman’s just got to.”
Harry stopped working on the grill and turned. “We aren’t friends, Gaff. Don’t say so, because it ain’t true. And don’t talk about the law, because that’s not it. If you’re all worked up about the law, there’s a game upstairs right now. Gambling’s still against the law, so you can start right here where it’s convenient. And when you’re finished, there’s some other things. I can tell you about who’s stealing leather over to the Tucker Tannery, and who’s cutting and selling it, too. Unless maybe you already know. And then you can go after Old Man Tucker himself and jail his ass for all that shit in the crick that’s making the whole county sick. You could clean up the whole town, Gaff. Be a regular goddamn hero instead of chasing around the goddamn county after unfortunate retards like Billy that nobody cares nothing about until there’s trouble.”
Mohawk Page 12
