Chances Are

by Richard Russo

  If Lincoln was unable to answer such questions after four decades of friendship, how could he hope to fathom what Joe Coffin had told him on the phone just before Teddy fainted—that Mickey, for reasons Lincoln couldn’t begin to imagine, had beaten Jacy’s father, a man they’d all met for the first time at graduation, into a coma with his bare fists? What possible explanation could there be for that? Surely their meeting couldn’t have been coincidental. Had Mickey gone looking for him, and to what end? Did he have some reason to believe that Donald Calloway might know of his daughter’s whereabouts? If her father knew where she was, wouldn’t everybody? Unless it was the other way around and Calloway, hearing that Mickey was back in the States, had come looking for him. But again, to what possible purpose? Did he believe that Mickey was somehow involved in his daughter’s disappearance? That he’d gone to Canada not to dodge the draft but to escape interrogation and possible arrest? But that made no sense, either. If the man had been suspicious of Mickey, wouldn’t he, like Coffin, have suspected Lincoln and Teddy as well? Jacy had spent the weekend with all three of them. Why single Mickey out?

  “Any idea where he might be?” Lincoln asked. “I was really hoping to talk to him.”

  Kevin shrugged. “He’s staying someplace here on the island is my understanding. But he’s dealing with Delia now, so who knows? He might’ve hired a water taxi to take her back to the Cape.”

  “Delia?”

  “The singer? Purple hair?”

  “What’s her story?”

  The bartender made a syringe with his thumb and forefinger and injected himself in the arm. “She was supposed to be in rehab, but apparently checked herself out.”

  “She usually sings with the band?”

  “When she’s clean. Great set of pipes.”

  “Are she and Mickey together?”

  “That I wouldn’t know.” For some reason Lincoln suspected otherwise, but the man’s tone made it clear that he was through answering questions. “Can I get you something?”

  Not wanting to head back to Chilmark until he had a better sense of where things stood, he ordered a beer and checked his phone for messages. If Kevin was right and Mickey had taken this Delia person back to the mainland by water taxi, he’d probably call or text when he got there and return to the island by ferry in the morning. He had tried to reach Lincoln earlier, but the hospital had a strict no-cell-phone policy, so Lincoln’s had been switched off, and he didn’t see that Mickey had called until he went outside later and turned it back on. The background noise at Rockers had been so loud that he’d had to listen to his voicemail three times: Text me when there’s word on Teddy. Got a little problem here myself. I’ll explain later. Sorry about all this, Lincoln. Something about this message had felt off, so he listened to it again now. Was it the word all? If he was reading between the lines correctly, it wasn’t just what had happened to Teddy that Mick was feeling bad about, but also whatever had led up to it. In hindsight, he probably wished he hadn’t dragged them to Rockers to hear his band play in the first place. Since now the whole weekend was a clusterfuck. But maybe the regret was more specific—the purple-haired singer who’d shown up unexpectedly. Had Mickey known she’d be there, he maybe would’ve warned them that her voice was a dead ringer for Jacy’s—possibly why he had hired her—and that she’d be covering many of the same songs Jacy used to sing. Whatever. If Mickey had regrets, he could join the club, because Lincoln did, too. He never should’ve returned Coffin’s call. If he hadn’t been distracted by what the man was telling him, he might’ve truly registered Teddy’s distress and caught him before he passed out. Come to that, he wished he’d never gone to see Coffin in the first place. Really, had he done a single thing right since stepping off the ferry?

  “Jesus,” said a familiar voice at his elbow. “What kind of shape is the other guy in?”

  Lincoln had been so deep in thought that Joe Coffin, speak of the devil, had managed to slide unnoticed onto an adjacent barstool.

  “He’s in the hospital, in fact,” Lincoln told him. “It’s my friend Teddy. He fell on a wineglass.”

  Coffin studied him, blinking, his eyes red. He’d clearly been drinking, with purpose, unless Lincoln was mistaken. “Trouble does seem to follow you three guys,” he said, and then, before Lincoln could respond, he rotated on his stool and called down the bar, “Kevin! I hope you’re not pretending you didn’t see me come in, because we both know you did.”

  The bartender regarded Coffin over his shoulder for a long, weary beat before heading in their direction.

  “Tell me something, Lincoln,” Coffin said when Kevin arrived and assumed the iconic stance, both hands flat on the bar. “Do you have an opinion about guys with goatees and tats who wear their baseball caps backward? Is that a thing where you live?”

  Kevin shook his head. “You gonna cause trouble, Joey?”

  “No, I’m not,” Coffin replied matter-of-factly, which Lincoln was relieved to hear, the same possibility having occurred to him. “How about you, Lincoln?” Coffin nudged him with his elbow. “You gonna cause any trouble?”

  Lincoln assured both men that he wasn’t.

  “There you go,” Coffin said. “No trouble at all.” He eyed Lincoln’s beer, saw that he’d barely touched it, and ordered one for himself.

  Kevin held a fresh glass under the tap. “One’s your limit tonight, Joey.”

  “And why’s that?”

  “Because you’re already shit-faced. Did you drive here?”

  “I didn’t walk.”

  “So, one beer. You get in an accident on the way home, your old friends will send me to jail for serving you.”

  “Ah, but you could go to jail for any number of reasons, Kevin.”

  “One beer,” he repeated, setting the draft down on a coaster.

  “You can leave us alone now,” Coffin told him. “I doubt this conversation will turn to sports, but if it does we’ll let you know.”

  When he was gone, Coffin clinked Lincoln’s glass. “The thing is,” he began, as if resuming an ongoing conversation, “we don’t do right by girls.”

  “Who doesn’t?”

  “Us. You and me. Men in general. We close ranks, every one of us. Cops especially. We shouldn’t, but that’s what we do.”

  “Are we talking about Jacy, Mr.Coffin?”

  As if Lincoln hadn’t spoken, he said, “There isn’t much real crime here. You know why?”

  Lincoln allowed that he didn’t.

  “Stands to reason, when you think about it. Say you do some shitty thing. You shoot somebody. You rob a bank.”

  Lincoln couldn’t help smiling. This morning Coffin had imagined him as a rapist and murderer; tonight he’d been demoted to a mere bank robber.

  “So, what happens next?”

  “I wouldn’t know,” Lincoln said. “I’m not a criminal. You run away?”

  “Close. You drive away. At a high rate of speed. At least that’s what you do other places. Here you wait for the ferry. Islands just aren’t conducive to crime, Lincoln. That’s a fact. Especially ones that require flight. Or premeditation. Impulse crime, where you know better, but just can’t help yourself? Like domestic assault? Our strong suit, especially in the winter, after all the tourists leave and times are lean. No rich people around. Nobody hiring you to mow their lawn or clean their pool. Columbus Day to Memorial Day. Hell, you do your best. You budget for this and that—kid needs braces, vehicle needs a new transmission, all the shit that’s gonna happen. Waves of it, believe me. But every year? It’s the thing you don’t see coming that fucks you up. Somebody slips on the ice and breaks a hip. All of a sudden you got medical bills. You’re behind on your rent, payments on that snowmobile you never should’ve bought in the first place. You start getting calls from bill collectors. Are you familiar with these problems, Lincoln?”

  “Not firsthand, no.”

  “I’m glad to hear it,” Coffin said unconvincingly. “But a lot of people who live here year
round are. Anyhow, come January, a friend of yours somehow scores tickets to a Patriots playoff game, say, in Denver. Wants to know if you’re in. You’re not in, Lincoln. You wouldn’t be in if the game was in Foxborough and you could fly there using your own arms for wings. But man, you’d love to go to that game. You try to think of somebody who might loan you the money, who might think you’re good for it, but you’re kidding yourself. It’s an island, Lincoln, and everybody you know knows you right back. You look around for somebody else to blame. Your wife’s handy, so you explain the whole thing to her. How she’s a piece of shit. How it’s all her fault.”

  Lincoln sighed and settled in. Like their conversation that morning, this one was clearly headed down a rabbit hole, and this time he was drunk to boot. “Why are you telling me all this, Mr.Coffin?”

  His face immediately clouded over. “Shut up, Lincoln.”

  “I’m sorry?” Because it was stunning. He tried to recall the last time someone had told him to shut up, and couldn’t.

  “I’m explaining something here, so do me the courtesy. Besides, you heard me tell Kevin there wasn’t going to be any trouble. Don’t make a liar out of me.”

  This, it occurred to Lincoln, was the sort of thing Anita had been worried about earlier—that left to his own devices he’d end up sitting next to a belligerent drunk at one in the morning. There were men who saw things coming and others who didn’t, and he belonged in the latter category. Wet Wipes weren’t the only thing he failed to anticipate the need for. He seriously considered just getting down off his stool and heading for the door, but he was pretty sure that if he did Coffin would lay a heavy paw on his shoulder and command him to sit. Seeing this, Kevin might come down the bar and intervene, but that wouldn’t be good, either. In the end, though, what kept Lincoln seated was that, in addition to menace, there was something almost plaintive in the man’s request that he not be made a liar of.

  “Thank you,” he said once it was clear that Lincoln had settled in. “Where was I?”

  “I was explaining to my wife how everything’s her fault,” Lincoln reminded him.

  “Right. Which she already knew because you and she have had this conversation before and it’s always her fault. She also knows better than to give you any lip, because that never ends well. So instead she just stands there between you and the refrigerator, not giving you lip and waiting for what comes next. Someday, Lincoln, somebody’s gonna do a study and what they’re going to discover is the one place you absolutely do not want to be, if you’re a woman living with an abusive drunk, is between him and the fridge. Anyhow, you shove her the fuck out of the way, harder than you meant to, and down she goes. Lays there whimpering on the floor until you order her to get up. No fool, she does as she’s told. Stands there looking at you, blubbering, all what did I do? And do you know what you think, Lincoln?”

  Having been warned against speech, Lincoln just shook his head.

  “You think, Not the girl I fell for. Sloppy fat now, hair all straggly. You never forgot how slim and sexy she used to be and it makes you want to punch her right in her fat, ugly face. Which you’ll eventually do, Lincoln. Not tonight, but no question, that’s where you’re headed. You know it and she knows it and finally it happens and this time when you tell her to get up off the floor, she doesn’t because she can’t. She just lays there, blinking, dazed. And even though you’ve known for a while this was inevitable, it still surprises you that you actually hit her, how quick it happened, and what surprises you even more is that you feel bad about it, because you can’t remember the last time you had any tender feelings for this fucking bitch. But there it is: shame. Shame … on … you. So you think, No more. Tell yourself it’s a one-and-done deal and you got it all out of your system. But in your heart of hearts you know better, Lincoln. You know you’ve got a lot more where this came from. She knows it, too, which is why the next time she sees it coming, sees that look in your eye and your hand balling into a fist, she doesn’t wait around. She locks herself in the bathroom with her cell phone and calls 911. That’s when we show up.”

  Lincoln decided to risk asking the obvious question. “What happens then?” Because now that he was down the rabbit hole, he had to admit he was interested. Also, thanks to all this you-ing, he felt personally vested. What would happen to him?

  “These days? I don’t know. I’m talking about how it used to be.” A subtle change had come over the man, with his earlier menace mostly dissipated and leaving him almost forlorn. “There’s more female officers now. Everybody gets more training. Back in the day, though, you and your partner would just take the guy outside.” Thank God, Lincoln thought. Coffin was still you-ing him, but at least now he was a cop, not a perp. “Not out on the front porch, where the neighbors can see. Out back, Lincoln, where it’s dark and private. You tell the guy: If you keep this up you’re going to hurt her bad. Whole thing’ll be in the newspaper. You don’t want that, do you? Everybody knowin’ you beat the shit out of your wife? By this time the guy’s drifted into a fugue state, so you can’t really be sure how much is getting through. He’s just standing there looking at you, like he’s waiting for this to be over, for you to stop talking and go away, which he knows you will, eventually. If you were going to arrest him, you’d have done it already. You tell him, Next time, maybe you kill her. That happens, you go to prison. You don’t think your life can get any worse, but it sure the fuck can. That gets through, because even this dumb son of a bitch knows that much. Life’s always getting worse. You can see how conflicted he is, Lincoln. Part of him would like to explain how this all came to be, but he resents having to. I mean, we’re all guys, right? The three of us? Why should he have to explain about women to another guy? It’s just that sometimes … he just gets so fucking angry. You gotta know what that’s like, right? How women make you feel? Fucking cunts, all of ’em.”

  Coffin paused here, studying Lincoln and looking perplexed. “What I fear, Lincoln, is that you’re not really following me here.”

  “I am, though.”

  “Then tell me. What’s my point?”

  “That we don’t do right by girls?”

  The other man cocked his head, his eyes narrowing dangerously, and Lincoln could read his mind: Are you making fun of me, Lincoln? And he did his best, wordlessly, to convey that nothing could be further from the truth.

  “No, Lincoln, that would be my … my overarching theme. My point is that when we take this jerk-off outside, it’s really him we’re trying to protect, not her. If he keeps this up, something bad is going to happen to him, and we don’t want that. We don’t want him to lose his job, if he’s got one, or his kids, if he’s got any.”

  “Right,” Lincoln said. “I’m with you.”

  “I’m glad to hear it, Lincoln, but ask me why we even care about this asshole. You gotta be at least a little curious.”

  “Why do you care about him, Mr.Coffin?” Lincoln said, because, yeah, he did want to know.

  “Well, probably back in high school we knew him, or somebody like him. If we’re the same age, maybe we were teammates.”

  “Like you and Troyer, playing for the Island Cup?”

  He ignored this. “Or if we were younger, maybe we watched him play and wanted to be like him when it was our turn. Okay, sure, now he’s this pathetic fuckwad, but we knew him when. In our opinion what he needs to do is remember who he used to be and become that guy again. It’s that guy, the one we used to know, that we’re really trying to get through to out there in the dark. What we’re hoping is that he’s still in there somewhere. That’s where we’re not too bright, Lincoln, because he’s long gone.”

  Gone as in long, Lincoln thought, the phrase Mickey had used that morning to describe Jacy. “Mr.Coffin—”

  “Whoever the fuck we’re talking to, we need him to say he understands what we’re telling him, because those are the magic words that’ll make us disappear: I understand. As soon as he says that, poof, we’re outta there.”

/>   “Mr.Coffin—”

  Now he held up a cautionary index finger. “You’ve been a good boy, Lincoln, and we’re almost done. This is the home stretch we’re in.”

  Lincoln nodded, took a swig of shitty warm beer.

  “Here’s something else you’ve got to be wondering, Lincoln. After he says those magic words, do we go back inside and check on the woman before leaving?”

  “I’m going to guess no.”

  “And you’d be right. We do not. Why? Well, to be honest, we don’t want to see her sitting at the kitchen table holding a sock full of ice cubes on her eye or lip. What would we say to her then? You know this guy’s not going to stop, right? She knows that already, or part of her does. You’d be better off leaving him? Maybe she would and maybe she wouldn’t. The next guy could be even worse. Damned if she knows how, but she always seems to attract the bad ones. There’s a safe place you can go? Yeah, we could say that. And maybe there is someplace safer than where she’s at right now. But eventually, unless she goes off island, he’s gonna find her. That’s a given. In fact she’ll probably call him herself, tell him right where she is. So no, Lincoln, we don’t want to talk to her. We’re a couple of big, husky guys, but you know what? We’re scared of her. Afraid that if we go back in that house, she might actually thank us. Thank us for coming out and calming him down. Because that’s all he really needed to do. Sitting there bleeding into a paper towel, that’s what she wants us to understand—that deep down he’s a good man. Give her half a chance and that’s the lie she’ll tell you.”

  At this point Coffin unexpectedly exploded into laughter, causing Kevin and the men at the other end of the bar to glance over. “See, Lincoln, if I was to write that book my daughter-in-law wants me to, about my experiences as an island cop? What I’ve been telling you would be that book.”