Nothing but a Smile

by Steve Amick

  “Brother …,” Reenie said.

  “I'd rather you didn't say anything to Wink. Or anybody, I mean. I'm not sure yet how I—”

  Reenie rolled her eyes. “Don't worry, I won't! I'm not sure I could keep a straight face.”

  Sal left it at that and didn't tell her the rest, though Reenie's comment about keeping a straight face reminded her of it—she'd felt almost that same pressure to compose herself at the end of their last date. It was the first time since the tenth grade that she'd kissed anyone other than Chesty—excluding, of course, that strange run-in with Wink the night of her anniversary, the nature of which she still couldn't quite catalog. That had felt more like a drunken fumble, like a fuzzy dream. With Mort, it had incontrovertibly been a kiss, not so much because she felt more than she had with that blurry slipup with Wink—she didn't, actually—but because this time, she'd known it was coming and allowed it. Mort had asked, “May I kiss you, please?” and she'd nodded, which was assent enough, and she hadn't moved away—though of course she didn't exactly step into it— and it was all she could do to keep from trembling.

  69

  He woke to a metallic rapping downstairs, like someone knocking on the front door with a cane.

  Wink was on the floor. Reenie was there, in the narrow bed. She'd spent the night, but as far as he could tell, she'd only done so in order to kick him to the floor. They hadn't fooled around— an activity that had become more and more infrequent, as of late.

  “What the good Lord …” she said.

  Pulling on his pants, he lurched out into the hall, ready to step down the stairs for a peek, but Sal was already up and standing out there, listening. She pulled him into her apartment, handing him a cup of coffee and leading him over to the front window. Kneeling on the big steamer trunk that served as a window seat, and that he'd always thought of as Sal's hope chest, he unlatched the window and got a blast of brisk autumn morning and a glimpse of a solid man, bird's-eye view, stationed at the front door.

  Wink called down to him: “It's Sunday, friend. Day of rest, you know?”

  The guy looked up at him, and he realized he'd studied that sad face for hours. It was the maimed vet from his photo. The metallic rapping had come from his prosthetic hand.

  “Day of rest,” the guy repeated. “Not a problem. I was just looking to rest my boot in your ass.”

  He rapped on the glass again, only this time, lining it up, Wink had a good hunch he was actually pointing to the clipping of the photo he'd had in the Tribune back in May—his depth-of-field “assignment.” Sal had pasted it up there months ago, with a hand-lettered note that read:

  OUR OWN WINK DUTTON ! !

  Come In & Have This PRO

  Help You w. Your Prints.

  “Someone told me they saw this here. You this Dutton character? The guy took my picture without my say-so?”

  Wink started to say he was very far away, meaning when he shot the photo—not sure himself how that made any difference, legally or morally—but the guy was taking it another way.

  “Then come down and talk to me man to man, you can't hear so well up there …”

  It was hard to judge if he meant that sincerely—if the guy would wait and hear him out before getting to the part where he would rest his boot in his ass. He sounded more and more reasonable, but the metal hook he had for a hand still looked awfully steely.

  Wink was already feeling some relief that this was what it was apparently about—that it wasn't yet another cop or mysterious government man or lurking threat in the shadows—though he wondered if this confrontation hadn't somehow been triggered by the recent beach bust. Possibly, they'd brought more attention on themselves because of that—folks starting to know who they were and talk about them, especially around the neighborhood. He wasn't sure he liked that, the public connecting their work to the shop, to where they lived.

  “We should feed him,” Sal whispered, pressing on his back, trying to see around him. “It's the least. And maybe he'll be more reasonable, after a full meal.”

  He heard Reenie sneering back there behind him, “Your cupboard is bare, Mother Hubbard. Unless you just want to give him the last of that coffee and some toast. Plus, you don't want that mug up here. Looks a little nervous-in-the-service, you ask me. Very well could be a shell shock, go wild man on us.”

  She said she had an idea. Wink turned to see she'd just about finished pulling on her street clothes and her jacket and was heading for the stairs. He said nothing. If he'd learned anything about these two gals in the last two and some years, it was that he knew nothing. There would be little point in trying to guess what Reenie was about to do, let alone stop her. And then there was the sound of the back door downstairs, Reenie slipping out into the alley, gone.

  So they watched, leaving the window cracked, peering down on the steamed marine.

  Every now and then he'd squint back up at them and scowl, but it felt to Wink like the guy was losing just a little of his steam, as if each scowl felt a little more forced, each second a little more awkward.

  Wink was starting to consider the idea that Reenie's plan was possibly to ditch them, just tear out the back, every man for herself, as it were. He hadn't exactly been her favorite person these days, even if she had commandeered his bed last night. He even wondered if Sal had confessed to her about the night she got drunk and weepy over her wedding anniversary and kissed him— or rather, to be more accurate, jammed her mouth against his and breathed until she sobbed. Fun stuff to be sure, and nothing he had any say in, really, but maybe Reenie would have felt territorial about it even though she seemed to have moved on from such feelings and didn't, mostly, give a hang. Still, one never knew.

  “There she is,” Sal said.

  Wink spotted her, too, turning the corner at the end of the block. She'd come around the long way and was heading in their direction, swinging her pocketbook as if out for a Sunday stroll, not even looking straight ahead at the one-handed marine taking up sidewalk.

  When she bumped into him, Wink saw the look on her face and guessed at the general direction this was going to go: she was going to do her best acting routine.

  Sal cracked the window a hair more so they could hear.

  “Cheese and crackers!” she said, practically gulping with the wide-eyed ingenue bit and touching his chest where she'd just plowed into him. “I'm so sorry. But say! Don't I know you?”

  They were looking down at basically the top of his head, but they didn't need to be able to see his face any better to know the guy was thrown.

  “Hold on a sec! You're him. You're the handsome marine from the paper.” Now she was the one rapping on the glass, pointing to the clipping in the window. “Sure! Why, I've stared at that photograph so many times!”

  The guy appeared to be having some trouble forming words.

  “I swear I have! Almost too many times, really.”

  Wink exchanged a sideways glance with Sal. That crack had been for him, he was sure. Which wasn't fair—he'd never really bothered her with his work, anything other than the girlies.

  “Say,” she said again, digging through her pocketbook like a rabid squirrel. “Would you mind terribly giving me your autograph? My friends will never believe I met an honest-to-goodness cultural icon!”

  The marine was speaking up now, finally forming words. “Lady, I don't know what you just called me, but—”

  “That's how I heard it described, just the other day. Someone describing that photograph of you. A cultural icon, they said.”

  It was nice to know she was still reading the art critics, trying to improve her understanding, though he was pretty certain whoever used the term wasn't talking about his photo in the Trib.

  “Please,” she said, handing him an envelope and what looked like maybe an eyebrow pencil. “Please just sign your name. You don't need to write it out personal or anything. I'd really appreciate it.”

  Oh Christ, Wink thought. What if he's a lefty?

  But
he wasn't. He took the envelope and eyebrow pencil in his good hand and, as Reenie turned to offer her back as a writing surface, winking up at them, the marine pinned the envelope in place with his prosthetic and wrote with his right.

  He must have scribbled it, though, because when he handed it back to Reenie she squinted at it disapprovingly and said, “I can't even read what this says … Gee, you must still be learning how to use that thing, huh?”

  “You making fun or something, sister? It says my name. Keeney Trust me. Now why don't you—”

  She must have sensed, as Wink did, that the guy was about to give her the brush-off and reapply his energy to working his angry-villagers-at-the-gate bit, because she moved in on him again, beaming, all hands, patting him and hooking his arm. “Say! I was just about to collect my friends and get a late breakfast. Are you game?”

  The marine shrugged. “Sure. And I can afford to pay my own way, okay? I do work, no matter what they're trying to make it look like in this horseshit picture—pardon my French.”

  Reenie said, “Great,” and with that she turned and let herself in with the spare Wink gave her long ago and honestly had forgotten about, and the guy looked frozen in place down on the sidewalk, staring at her slipping into the shop, clearly surprised that the friends they'd be joining included the very guy he was yelling up at. But he didn't walk away, and he didn't rampage in after her. He stood his ground, took off his hat, wiped his forehead with his nonhook hand, and squinted up at him, giving him a smirk like, Well, don't that just about beat all.

  They rushed back to confer in the hallway.

  “He's a lot of bluster,” Reenie said, when she met them at the top of the stairs. “I think he just wanted to be asked permission first. We should do this.”

  So they hopped to, throwing on their shoes and coats, and let her lead on.

  Halfway down the stairs, Reenie stopped up short and said, “Listen, you two maybe better act like you're together, and I'll smile and make nice with the one-handed grouch. Don't you think? He seems like putty, if you know what I mean.”

  He and Sal exchanged an awkward sideways glance. He wasn't sure which one of them spoke up in agreement first, but, of course, it made sense.

  Keeney preferred to just be called Keeney

  Sal tried calling him Mr. Keeney and Corporal Keeney a couple times, but it sounded too formal.

  Pressed for a first name, the only hint he gave was, “Well, see, I'm half Irish, and I'm half German, on my mother's side, so …”

  Wink remembered the photo and the name stenciled on his seabag. “His first initial is A.”

  They sat there for a long moment, he and the girls presumably running through the A‘s.

  Reenie was the first to put it together. “Adolf? Really? Well, I, for one, am not calling you Adolf !”

  Keeney smiled sadly. “Exactly. So it's Keeney.”

  They'd secured a booth at the Zim Zam, where the breakfast left room for improvement, but it was served late into the afternoon, and the wide windows faced the sun and felt inviting on a chilly September day like this.

  Despite his earlier venting outside the shop, he was surprisingly slow in voicing his complaints about the photo, and Wink took this as a good sign—that he waited to examine the menu and order before launching into any real harangue.

  He did make a point again of explaining that he wasn't jobless. He said he worked a corner newsstand, which he thought wouldn't be a bad life, if it continued, but he'd like to eventually own his own newsstand, if that was going to be his career, not work it for the owner the way he did now in an arrangement that sounded, to Wink, a little better than a sharecropper's setup and a little worse than that of a cabbie who didn't own his hack. “Either own my own corner stand one day, or at least get inside— one of them slightly bigger, indoor deals—a news shop. If I have to work for someone else, I might as well be cozy. Don't feature freezing anything else off …”

  Wink liked him for making this crack. The guy was brassy about his handicap without coming off too bitter. According to Keeney, it rarely got in the way with his current work. “In fact, a couple tasks, it actually helps. I can sling a stack of bound newspapers like nothing, cut the twine if I flick it just right.” The metal on his left glinted in the bright sunlight as he demonstrated.

  He said he served aboard a North Atlantic sub that was torpedoed, and he was left floating on a crate in the water so long, in and out of consciousness, that his fingers rotted and they had to remove the hand.

  “Wink here got himself a Purple Heart, too,” Reenie blurted out, being less than helpful.

  “That right?” said Keeney. “Where'd you get it?”

  Because the guy didn't seem particularly sarcastic or challenging, Wink decided he must be simply asking where it had occurred.

  “Same,” he said, withdrawing his bum hand under the table. “I mean, I was also on a submarine when it happened….” Hopefully, he could avoid the silly details.

  Compared with this guy, he felt like a fraud, and he didn't really appreciate the arched eyebrow Reenie was shooting him across the table, like she was about to bust out laughing any second.

  He liked the guy. He was bold and funny. And talking to him here, the four of them getting along now like old pals, it sort of put things in perspective. So they'd screwed the pooch up at North Shore Beach and with Sal and her in-laws, the Chester-tons, and these strange visits from shadowy men in overcoats seemed to be on the upswing … Still, obviously, things could be worse.

  He remembered how Uncle Len had always said Feeling better don't mean feeling better than and Life's not a misery contest— meaning not to go around grinning because you've lost a row of corn to locusts but your neighbor's lost sight of the sun on account of locusts. And it wasn't that—it wasn't just feeling better about things because the guy had a hook while he himself only had some loss of use, dysfunction, as the doctor put it. It wasn't a misery contest.

  Because things could even be worse for this guy, too. After all, Keeney did still have his dominant hand intact, which was more than Wink could say for himself. If he were truly getting into comparisons, unlike him, the guy could still draw—if he could draw. So it wasn't a matter of feeling better through pity.

  It just felt nice. It just felt like things could be a hell of a lot worse for Wink if he didn't have great folks to sit with in a booth and just bull and laugh about whatever came up. And it was nice to have another guy be a part of that.

  Of course, the fact they were getting along didn't mean the guy didn't let him have it. His objections were quite clear, as if he'd had them ready to lay out for some time now, storing them up to reel off if he ever ran into the “sumbitch who made that picture.”

  As he counted them off, he touched his hook to his right hand, working his way down the intact fingers. “First of all, I had a job at the time. I was working the afternoon you snapped the photo, actually. Right around the corner there's that outdoor newsstand where I work. Second, I wasn't anywhere near that NO LOITERING sign. You've got it worked out so it looks like I'm leaning up against the mother! Pardon my Swahili, ladies … Any rate, I wasn't loitering, I was taking a five-minute smoke break on account of the owner gets all hinky I'm gonna burn his shack down. Had one too many run-ins with O'Bannion and the protection racket back in the dinosaur days. Guy gets worked up anytime some punk kid walks by with a bottle of pop—guy's convinced it could be kerosene … Any rate, I'm actually minding the store. Also—”

  “But your duffel bag,” Sal said, speaking up. “I'm not doubting your claim, but it appears—”

  “That's my laundry, lady, if that's quite all right with you. I'm waiting for Vin at the cleaners there to reopen after his lunch— you can't see it behind that deli truck that's in the way, sticking out of an alley.” He turned back to Wink. “And I know you want that to look like it's want ads I'm reading, like it's job listings, but it's the Business Opportunities section, friend. Big difference. I'm keeping my eyes peel
ed for someone wants to unload their newsstand, you know—buy my own. Now, the NO VACANCY sign across the street? It says that, partly, on account of me. I got one of the last apartments they had. And the cold cuts part—what is that, some kind of sick crack about my hand? Maybe you need to be a college boy to get that one. That's your idea of a sophisticated joke, yucking it up over the handicapped?”

  At this, Wink decided it was time to show him his own hand “in action or, rather, lack thereof.” He demonstrated with a fountain pen how he could no longer sign his name even, let alone do the work he'd been trained to do, had his heart set on doing. “I know it's maybe not the same,” he said, “but I know something about that. A little.” Then he told him he was sorry, that he'd write a public letter of apology or maybe request a different sort of retraction, if he wanted, but he should know, a lot of people who saw that photo saw a lot of different things in it. And none of them were meant to ridicule him.

  “Yeah, I know,” Keeney said, waving him off. “Skip the letter. This is just junk I've been saving up. I pretty much figured a lot of that out myself, since. I just promised myself, if I ever met the fella, I'd give him a piece of my mind. So I did. You're lucky— if I'd run into you a few months back, you'da gotten more than a piece of my mind, believe it.”

  It still felt like he should do something to make it up to the guy, and he had the thought, though he knew better than to promise it yet, that maybe he could talk to the grump at the news shop, that Sunshine character, about taking this guy on. It was the same work, but at least he'd be indoors.

  But for now, Wink put out his good hand, which was his left, and Keeney put out his good hand, his right, and they shook, a little awkwardly, like old ladies shake, he thought. But it also felt deeply personal, like he'd known the guy for years, the two of them putting what was left of themselves out there, reaching out with no more apologies or excuses, just clutching hands.

  70

  If she hadn't gone back for her gloves—the white evening gloves she felt necessary for an opening like the one Mort was taking her to—she would have been in the clear. But she imagined herself among the posh patrons and art critics mingling at the new photography exhibit, a dowdy shopkeeper with fingers pickled from darkroom chemicals, and she insisted they return to the shop.