CC got himself a beer and took a position at the end of the bar, under the television. He felt a tug on his arm, turned, and found Bernice.
“Hey,” he said. “You’re just in time for the show.”
“I saw Max,” she said. “He seems pretty fired up.”
“He did good. Invents his own lyrics on the spot. You hear about the sinkhole?”
“I came to tell you I quit,” she said. “Sorry.”
“That’s OK. You were never particularly hired in the first place. I mean, there was nothing official about it. And Mike was never going to go for changing the walls.”
She gestured toward his beer. “Can I get one of those?”
He went back behind the bar and pulled a Rolling Rock from the cooler, conscious that Mike was watching him. He brought it back to her. “That guy on the left? He’s going to hate that guy on the right.”
“The black guy?”
He nodded. “They might just kill each other.”
“It’s like this,” she said. “I have a boyfriend.”
“So? I have a girlfriend.” He looked toward the door, just in case Fiona might come in, but then remembered she had a catering gig in Cockeysville. “I don’t see what that’s got to do with anything. Why the hell did you come down here in the first place?”
“I think I just wanted to show you that I’d changed.”
“You can tell me anything you want to tell me. You know that?”
Bernice made a face. “Like what?”
“You know.”
“No, I don’t know.”
“Like about how that’s my kid.”
She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. “What most men know about reproduction, you could fit on the back of a postage stamp. You honestly believe our one night together knocked me up?”
“It didn’t?”
“Think about it like miniature golf. You’ve got a long, thin stretch of fairway, then a big old windmill with barely enough space between two of the blades for a ball to slip through, and then on the other side, there’s more green, with a little tiny cup, except that cup is up on a rise. You think that you took one putt and sent that ball right through the windmill and right up onto that hill and into the cup? That’s what you think?” She took a big sip of beer.
“You have changed,” said CC.
Night Train was talking to the audience. “All right now,” he said. “I feel the love out there.”
“See, this guy, Skate, he plays loud. And a lot of the time he’s out of tune, especially when he’s drunk. And Night Train, he couldn’t tell you what key he’s in most of the time, but he does know when things sound bad, and he gets really angry.” She didn’t seem interested, so he stopped. “I just thought you might like a little background.”
“And you set them up together?”
“Yeah.”
“Why?”
“Because I’m in charge. Because I can.”
“Well, there’s a philosophy to live by. So, anyway, it was a mistake, and I’ll be going.”
He hopped off his barstool when she did, and they stood looking at each other. Her hand was out, and he took it in his; they shook. He wanted her, he thought. Or maybe not. He wanted something, he knew that. He felt bad about Eve, didn’t entirely understand what had happened there, only knew he hadn’t been equal to the task of keeping up with all her moods. When he’d heard the news, he’d walked over to her empty apartment and stared at the door for a while, then decided it was none of his business. Done was done; everyone had to go sometime. But here she was again, in a way, a younger version, one that seemed to show up at regular—albeit infrequent—intervals, and he thought maybe some higher power might be trying to tell him something.
“Listen,” he said. “I don’t know about this boyfriend, but I’m quitting, too. I’ve got contacts down in New Orleans. Family. We could go there together.” As he said it, he saw a yard with a swing set, saw himself and Bernice on a porch, sipping beers.
“I’m impressed.” She looked around her approvingly. “You’d leave all this for me?”
“It’s not about you. I need to move on with my life.”
“I’m flattered.”
“Let me show you something. He walked her over to the front wall of the room, back in the corner. There, hanging somewhat crookedly against the cracking, black-painted plaster wall, was a photo of him in a dark shirt, open at the collar, a leather hat all but obscuring his face.
“I remember that guy,” she said.
“Me, at my peak,” he said.
The music was already coming apart badly, with Night Train trying to sing “Born in Chicago,” and Skate stepping all over his voice with guitar riffs. The deaf harmonica player had surreptitiously found his way onstage and was hiding in the shadows, tooting away in the wrong key. CC saw that Mike, seated at the front end of the bar near the door, was nervously peering back into the other room, trying to get a fix on what was going down.
“That girl is going to need a father.”
“You are assuming an awful lot.”
“She looks like me.”
“She looks like me. And what kind of father do you think you’d make, really? You seduce the daughters of your girlfriends.”
“I’m still living in the same place. It’s just a couple of blocks from here,” he said. “You want to take a walk?”
“Aren’t you working? Isn’t this your job?”
“I told you, I’m done.” He looked toward Mike again, but he had apparently removed himself to the upstairs.
“You have anything to drink?”
“Everything,” he said. “You name it. Jack Daniels, right?” He noticed the muscle coming up from her shoulder to her neck, thought how he’d like to kiss its graceful curve, considered that he had probably already done this at that hotel—what, six?—years ago, though he couldn’t remember for sure.
“What about them?” As she gestured toward the stage, the song they’d been trying to play came clattering to a halt. He heard Freddy smack a few drums with an indifference that told him he’d gone into his I’m-not-really-here mode. Zimmer was at attention, face like a pit bull, framed by his thinning long gray hair, his Little Shop of Horrors T-shirt—he’d done a road tour—soaked through.
Skate stepped to the mic. “Now we’re going to do some fucking blues,” he said. He began soloing, without communicating anything to anyone else, leaving his fellow jammers all looking slightly baffled as to what song he was starting, although eventually they managed to fall into a kind of lurching accompaniment behind him. Night Train was clearly at a decision point—he could leave the stage and admit defeat, and possibly appear never to have been in control, or he could ride out this spell of bad weather as if nothing were wrong at all and assume that, somehow, all would be fixed. Choosing the latter, he put his face to his harp, affecting the kind of intimacy CC associated with a Rastafarian and a big spliff, closed his eyes, and breathed away.
“The street is crying,” sang Skate. “Look at the tears rolling down the sky.”
More than a few of the waiting musicians had their eyes on CC, nervously wondering how he was going to restore order, and if they were going to be on next. It was nearly eleven, and this thing ended at two.
“Take a walk with me,” he said. “Come on.”
“Do you have a view from that rooftop deck of yours?”
“You were never up there?”
“No,” she said. “I never was.”
“Of the harbor, yeah. You can see straight across to the Domino Sugar sign.”
“Sugars. You can see it from your house, and you still don’t know what it says?”
There were now three harmonica players onstage, as the guy in the tie-dyed shirt, apparently sensing a free-for-all, had simply climbed up and commandeered a microphone. He was swaying as he played, and ignoring everyone else. CC recognized him as one of Jerry’s kids, those lost souls living out their days in search of the perfect drum circ
le, arguing the merits and fine points of different Dead shows like wine connoisseurs or theologians. Night Train had stopped playing his harp and was standing with hands on his hips, uncertain what to do next. Skate, who had never stopped soloing, was on his knees in front of his amp, back to the audience, encouraging feedback from the thing, Hendrix-style.
“Let’s get,” said CC, taking her hand, and he was pleased when she followed along. He figured whatever happened, his guitar would probably be all right. Those Fenders were made tough as baseball bats.
NINETEEN
Landis wished there were a television to watch. Emily was in bed, and it was his job to—well, he wasn’t sure what his job was. To be patient. To expect Bernice to do the right thing. Which seemed, given her history and their current situation, a fairly thin hope. He’d already combed through the basement. There were some decent power tools, a radial-arm saw and a table saw, and stacks of unframed paintings against the walls. The brick was crumbling, leaving little piles of red dust in places on the floor, and there were cobwebs everywhere. He found all kinds of boxes and old appliances—a toaster oven, a Mr. Coffee that looked like one of the original Joe DiMaggio ones—but no television. He’d tried all the closets. Nothing. He didn’t even want to watch anything in particular; he just needed to get outside of himself for a while. A baseball game, an old movie, hell, even the shopping channel. Just something to keep his mind off how Bernice had gone back to see this guy again.
He stared at himself in the mirror over the dining-room mantel. Behind him, he could see the chandelier, and the parlor to one side, the long entrance hall leading to the front door on the other.
He got a beer out of the refrigerator and sat at the large dining table, which was an old, farmhouse kind of thing, very beaten up and not at all in keeping with the grandeur of the room’s original aspirations. There wasn’t even a radio anywhere. His thoughts echoed in his head. Anyone else would have walked by now. Making him get his own place—this was ridiculous. Earlier, after he’d driven Tessa Harding all the way downtown to her hotel, he’d come back to find Bernice dressed up to go out again, the kid put down for the night.
But for some reason, he’d agreed to stay and babysit.
He just wasn’t able to be alone with himself the way he used to be. In the past he’d been so good at it: sitting outside his trailer with a beer, listening as the distant wash of the rush-hour traffic grew thinner in its tidal retreat. But even then there had been a sense that time was running out on him, as on the night when he’d purposely picked a fight at the Old Towne Tavern with a guy who bumped his cue while Landis was getting ready to shoot the eight. It had been an accident, and there was no need to fight, but Landis had been walking around with a knot of frustration in his chest, and so there followed what might best be called a scuffle. He’d pushed the guy, the guy had pushed him, he’d swung and missed (his back sending him a telegram—which he ignored), and then the two of them had hit the floor, Landis on top, his hands around the guy’s neck. After which there had been some commotion around them, and a couple of very beefy guys had removed them both to the parking lot.
Although he’d often thought of Bernice as something that had happened to him, Landis now wondered if he hadn’t been looking for her, just as he had that fight. You got what you wanted in life, his dad had always told him. “If I’d wanted to be rich,” he used to boast, “I’d have been rich.”
His father had been like that, without any apparent enthusiasm, dutifully going to work and coming home, plugging himself into the television when he had downtime, a full glass of Gallo sweet vermouth on the rocks near him.
There was one place Landis hadn’t checked, and that was the bedroom Bernice shared with Emily. It had a closet—maybe there was a TV in it. Of course, if there were a TV, why wouldn’t it just be on a table? But Bernice might have stowed it away for some reason. Maybe she thought if she didn’t watch the news, there wouldn’t be any news. Who knew what internal conversations she had with herself? He thought he ought to at least check it out.
He climbed the stairs to the second-floor landing, stopped outside the empty master bedroom. It was dark, though the yellow light of a streetlamp filtered in through the upper part of the big bay window. The lower part of the window was closed off by interior shutters, a medieval-feeling wooden barricade. He stuck his head in and something skittered off into a corner. He’d have to look into getting a few mousetraps.
On the third floor, he paused outside the door and listened for sounds of Emily’s breathing. He pushed the door open as gently as he could, then stepped in and tiptoed toward the closet. Something wasn’t right.
“Emily?” he said.
He turned on the light. Her bed was empty.
He tried to stay calm and think it through. Tessa Harding was back at her hotel—he’d taken her there himself. How could she have returned, sneaked in, and spirited the kid off? Plus, he couldn’t see her doing it. Don’t panic, he thought. Maybe she’s just in the bathroom.
“Emily,” he said. Then he said it louder. “Hey! Can you hear me?”
He walked through the whole house, calling her name, hoping grimly that at any moment she’d pop out of some little recess and tell him she’d been talking to Jesus, or playing some other game. It was a big house, big enough to get lost in, and to a little kid, it would feel like the ultimate playground. Surely she was around somewhere.
At last, he went out the front door onto the large wooden porch. A couple of moths drew scribbles around the dusty yellow light overhead. He looked out into the street. There was no sign of her out there, either. If she wasn’t still in the house, then she must have left it, perhaps while he was in the basement. He went in and climbed quickly back to the third floor and reexamined the room for clues. There were clothes all over the floor, both hers and Bernice’s mixed together, and it was hard for him to tell whether anything was missing. Shoes. She had a little pair of blue sneakers she liked to wear. He looked around in the piles, but couldn’t find them. He decided that meant she’d put them on.
Maybe she’d just gone for a walk.
He went back downstairs, calling her name every now and then, although with less hope this time. When he was back on the porch, he decided to walk around the block. Leaving the door ajar in case she should return while he was gone, he headed north, resisting the impulse to shout her name as if she were a lost pet. And if she were lost—irretrievably and forever—what would that mean for them? Jail, probably, the way things were going. He’d been thinking maybe, just maybe, if they could get out of their current predicament, send the girl back to Jesusland with her other mother, maybe Bernice and he could see about having their own kid. If Bernice would go along with it. Except what were the chances of that, if they were going to be carrying around the memory of this night from here on out, the night when he lost track of her little girl because he’d been too distracted by looking for a television to watch? He’d need a better story.
A round-bellied man in a wife-beater walking his pit bull materialized out of the haze ahead of him. Some other, smaller dog, probably peering out through a curtain, began a high-pitched, muffled barking. Landis said to himself, “She’s OK, she’s OK. Nothing to worry about. No big deal.” But after he’d made a left at the end of the block and there was still no sign of a precocious five-year-old out exploring the neighborhood, he began to phrase it differently. “Please, let her be OK,” he said. Then, after a while, he just started saying “shit,” over and over.
He rounded the next corner, past a boarded-up house with turrets on it and an overgrown yard full of flowers and plastic bags and stray advertising flyers. A bus rumbled past, heading north, its elevated exhaust pipe coughing out a cascade of black fumes so thick they momentarily obscured the vehicle entirely.
It began to rain lightly, and he hurried. He was now more than halfway around the block. What next, two blocks? He tried to think it through mathematically, but kept running up against the sinking rea
lization that there was little point to the effort. One person could not effectively search a large area. Being someplace meant not being someplace else, possibly the right place. If he found her, it would be by thinking like her, or by dumb luck. And he really had no idea how she thought, which just left luck, which—in spite of all the breaks he’d caught in his life up until now—was a lousy thing to count on.
He rounded the last corner, hurrying against the big raindrops smacking the top of his head. Safely back on the porch, he tried to remain calm. It was nearly 11:00 PM. The thing to do was not to panic. This was a problem, and problems had solutions. He would fix this, somehow.
TWENTY
Bernice felt she was entering into a dream knowing exactly where it was going and unable to do anything about it. CC’s keys in the red door, the slightly musty smell of the living room of the narrow row house, a cat that appeared from nowhere and rubbed up against her a couple of times.
“That’s Rooster,” said CC. “He likes you.”
“When did you get him?”
“He showed up about a year ago.”
“He’s just marking me,” Bernice said. “I know all about it. They have scent glands in their faces. Now he thinks he owns me.”
“Well, you figure he must like you if he wants to own you.”
“You got anything to drink in this place?”
He hustled around the kitchen and she observed the surroundings, which had changed: an entertainment center kind of thing where before there had been her mother’s sideboard. It held a TV and some assorted and mismatched stereo equipment, everything covered in a good layer of dust. A nearly dead cactus poked up out of a small pot, looking like a pickle run through with toothpicks.
She sniffed. She was having an allergic reaction to the cat.
He came over with two glasses of whiskey and ice. “You want to go up on the deck now?”
They climbed narrow stairs from which the brown paint was chipping, and she tried to think of ways she’d cheer the place up if it were hers. Off the third floor, where the bedroom was, they stepped out onto a porch, then from there climbed steep steps to a wooden platform. In front of her lay the water, with boats tied up to a pier, and the other way, to the west, the lights of the inner harbor and the downtown skyscrapers glimmered silver and blue and red.
Hot Springs Page 21
