“But you know something?” he had said. “I still, I still, even after I was out and my ass was reasonably safe, I still wasn’t having any fun. I didn’t expect, you know, what I had. Before they caught up with me there. But, Jesus, at least some, now and then. It’s hard when you haven’t got money.”
“I know what we could do,” she had said. “I know exactly what we can do. You’re not going home. I can’t go home either. Us two, we just don’t exist. But I can still cook. I know how to cook. And I’ll fix us Thanksgiving dinner. Right here.”
“We haven’t got the stuff,” he had said. “Don’t you have start all that shit about a month ahead? My mother always did. I bet she still does. The onions and the stuffing, the soupy mashed potatoes and the goddamned squash. All that stuff. Relishes. Christ, I hated those relishes. Looked like a monkey threw up in a dish. Green stuff and red stuff and yellow stuff, and brown, all swimming around in this juice that looked like you stepped in cat puke or something. Supposed to dip the Ritz crackers in it. Yummy, yummy, yummy.”
“Oh,” she had said, “you can have all that stuff, if you want. But you don’t have to. We’ll keep it simple. Just a nice, small, frozen turkey. Not a chicken. A real turkey. But a small one. Eight, ten pounds. And some nice thick mashed potatoes, and some dressing and green beans. And maybe, this once, two whole bottles of wine. Wouldn’t that be nice? It’ll really be nice, Earl, you know? And then ice cream for dessert. We’ll get some celery, and some dip, and a couple six-packs of beer, and you can turn on the TV, and watch the … Lions, is it?”
“The Lions,” he had said, “always play Thanksgiving.”
She had nodded. “My father always watched. I thought that that was them.” She had waggled a finger at him. “But no betting on them, baby. You can’t watch, you’re gonna bet.”
“Huh,” he had said. “I never watched the games I bet on. ’Cept the ones I was in. Too damned nerve-racking. Besides, I got no money to bet, and Zack won’t let me have credit no more.”
“Oh,” she had said, “this is going to be fun. The market opens at eight, right? We’ll both get up early and be waiting there, when they open the door. And we’ll both do the shopping, quick like a bunny, and then you can drop me back here. I’ll put the turkey in the fridge to thaw, and the next morning when we get up, I’ll put the bird in the oven. Show those relatives of ours: we can do things too.”
He arrived at work on Wednesday twenty minutes later. “It was Penny,” he said. “My crazy girlfriend. Last night she gets the wild idea in her head, all of a sudden, nothing on earth is going to be worth doing if we don’t have Thanksgiving dinner. So, practically still dark out, we get up this morning and go to the store. The milkman’s still making deliveries? That’s how early it is. And as soon as it opens, we go in, and we fill up the fuckin’ carriage with more stuff’n I ever bought in my life. The smallest turkey we could find weighs almost fifteen pounds, for God’s sake. We’ll be eating it forever. And I drive her back home, help her carry it in, and that’s why I’m getting here late.”
Waldo forgave him. “You should marry that girl, Earl,” he said. “She’s a very good-lookin’ head, and the two of you get along good. This hell-raisin’ stuff is great when you’re young, but nobody stays young forever. Settle down, pal, you still got the choice. Settle down, and have a nice life.”
Right after lunch, Earl called the apartment to find out how Penny’s hearing on the marijuana charge had turned out, but he got no answer. He imagined her pacing the hallways of the Brighton-Allison District Courthouse, chain-smoking stale Newports and swearing to herself. He called her again at 2:30, getting no answer, and then at 3:10, with the same result. Shortly before 3:30 a woman about nineteen with a bleached-blond boy cut, white vinyl Eisenhower jacket, tight, faded blue jeans, and low white vinyl boots with chromium chains across the insteps made what he called “a dreamboater” visit to the metallic maroon ’sixty-five Chevy Impala hardtop that occupied the featured place on a platform in the center of the lot. She stood beneath the red, white, and blue plastic pennants that flapped in the breeze over the car and admired the highlights of the sixty-dollar paint job Waldo had bought to conceal poor repair of serious collision damage to the right front quarter panel and door. She did not ask to sit in the car, and did not deduce, when they were up on the platform, that Earl had a reason for showing her the clean interior only from the driver’s side—he was not sure she would be sharp enough to notice that the passenger-side door was badly out of line, and made grinding, groaning noises when it was opened and shut, but he saw no point in taking chances.
“I figured,” he said to Fritchie, when she left at 4:15, “that even though she obviously doesn’t have the money, her boyfriend might. Or her father. And she might make such a pain in the ass of herself with that horrible sharp voice of hers, one of them might loan her the money, just to shut her up.”
“Be all right if they don’t decide to come down here, see it for themselves,” Fritchie said. “Maybe even want to drive it, or something. That’ll crease it, if they do.”
“Oh, come on,” Earl said. “The tires’re new. There’s no tread wear, tip them off. It’s not like I’m gonna let ’em take out One-twenty-eight or something, and you don’t even notice that shimmy till you get up to fifty or so.”
Fritchie laughed. “I can’t help it,” he said, “but I love it when Waldo gets gypped on something. He brought that bucket in here from the auction down at Bridgeport, and he’s really pleased, himself. ‘Fifty bucks I got this for. Whaddaya think of that? Not a speck of rust on the thing. This is a Florida car.’
“ ‘I think you got took, boss,’ I tell him. ‘What’d they use to paint over that filler, huh? Finger paint like my kids get in school?’
“ ‘Ahh,’ he said, ‘I’ll ship it over Mikey’s there. He’ll make her shine like new.’ So naturally I’m the one who has to drive it over, but first I have to take Davey over the tire place, West Newton—he’s getting snow treads on his wife’s car, and he’s gonna drive me back here. So we’re running a little bit late there, and I take her out on Route Nine, and the fuckin’ thing starts to shake its guts out, soon’s I get over forty. I’m fighting the wheel like it’s a goddamned gorilla, and the goddamned gorilla is winning. So I say to him: ‘Hey, you follow me, Mikey’s, stay pretty close on my tail, right? See if what I think’s going on, see if you see anything.’ So he does that, and we get to Mikey’s and he tells me exactly I expected. ‘She runs like an old dog I had that got hit on the ass. Sideways, you know? You go in a straight line, that baby, right down the damned center-line, the front wheel’s a foot closer to it’n the back wheel behind it is. That rat just ain’t tracking right.’
“So we come back here, and I say to Waldo: ‘Hey, I hate to tell you this, but before Mikey starts with the paint sprayers there, I think he’d better straighten the frame.’ Not that I ever see one of those jobs that really did what it’s supposed to. They put the damned chains on and pull it and haul it, but it never turns out so it’s true. And Waldo just looks at me, and then he says, well I have got to be nuts. A frame job on that thing’s a four-dollar bill, and he’s not gonna part with the money.
“So, I don’t know,” Fritchie said. “I think Waldo might have to eat this one. Nobody smart enough to earn the kind of money he expects to get for it’s dumb enough to buy it. And the ones stupid enough to buy it, they’re too dumb to have the dough.”
It was nearly 4:30 when Earl called the apartment again. The line was busy. He called again at 4:45. There was no answer. He called at fifteen-minute intervals between then and six, when he took his dinner hour for pizza at the Pleasant Café on Washington Street and stopped to buy two six-packs of Budweiser and two jugs of Almaden wine—one California Mountain Red, one California Mountain Rosé—at Barney’s in the Square. He got no answer to the eight calls he placed between 7:10 and 9:05, time that he spent alone in the showroom before turning off the lights and locking up for the holiday.
The apartment in Somerville was dark when he opened the door, struggling with his bags from Barney’s while he groped in the dim hallway light for the lock. He shut the door with his right heel and turned on the overhead light in the hallway with his left elbow. He went into the kitchen and put the bags down on the counter. There was a note taped to the refrigerator door:
Honey. I wasn’t brave enough to call you. The court thing came out all right. I had Mr. Sweeney from the Mass Defenders, + he made the judge believe me that it wasn’t my stuff. The judge asked me if I knew who’s it was, + I just said my former roommate used to have all kinds of people in the apt., coming and going all the time, + that was the reason I stopped living with her, + it could’ve been anybody, really. So it was all thrown out, + that was pretty good, altho I did have to stay ’till after 3:30 + I didn’t get home on the trolley ’till after four. Anyway, Allen was calling when I got here, + he had a big fight with his wife this morning, + he decided he wants to go to New York tonight + see the Celtics play the Knicks for a change, instead of always seeing the Bruins, + I told him I couldn’t go, + about our dinner and everything, + he was upset + said I really didn’t care about him, after how he’s been so good to me, + he would give me $15,000 to go with him till Sunday, + I thought about how we really need money, + so I finally said I would. I’m really sorry, but I think we had to do it. I took a cab to the airport + I’ll find some way to get home Sunday night, so you don’t have to bother, + I hope you won’t be too mad + lonesome, because I love you a lot. Love, Penny.
Earl opened the refrigerator. Penny had removed the top shelf to accommodate the enormous turkey thawing on the second shelf. She had relocated all his beer to nooks and crannies among the pickle jars, cans of Pepsi, the bunches of carrots and celery, the English muffins and bread, and the cartons of cottage cheese jumbled on the lower shelves. She had put three cans on the shelves built into the door. He stared at the disorder for a while. Then he removed the turkey, cold and wet in its plastic shroud, oozing water and blood, and put it in the sink. He found the top shelf in the space between the side of the refrigerator and the cabinet that housed the sink. He replaced it in the refrigerator. He put his beer back in its regular place: two rows of six cans each stacked against the right inner wall of the refrigerator. He went to the Barney’s bags and took out the two fresh six-packs. He stacked them next to the old supply. Then he recovered the scattered Pepsi cans and arranged them next to the beer. He took two of the cold beers and shut the door. He went into the living-dining room without turning on the light and sat down in the chair at the end of the table nearest the door. He cracked the first beer and drank half of it, sitting in the faint light from the streetlamp outside, and thinking.
It was just after 2:00 A.M. on Thanksgiving when Earl went to bed. There were thirteen empty beer cans stacked in a five-four-three-one pyramid cluster on the lemon-scented polished table, with another, half full, balanced on the top. He did not undress, except for his shoes. He got up to urinate twice, once while it was still dark and once when it had begun to get light. He noticed that rain was driving against the frosted glass of the bathroom window, and that there seemed to be some crusted material on his shirtfront. He got up at 3:20 P.M., this time switching on the fluorescent light over the mirror in the bathroom. He was able to identify the crusted material as the semidigested remains of the pizza he had had for supper the night before. He removed the shirt and dropped it on the floor. He brushed his teeth and rinsed. In his stocking feet, pants, and undershirt, he went into the kitchen, noticing as he passed through the bedroom that the pillow-case, sheet, and blanket were also encrusted.
The turkey had thawed completely in the sink; he prodded it with his forefinger—the breast was soft and yielding. He opened the refrigerator and got two cans of beer. He returned to the living-dining room and turned on the football game. He sat down in his black vinyl armchair next to the window that looked out on Cedar Street. He put his feet up on the matching ottoman, opened the first beer, and drank. The game between the Detroit Lions and the Green Bay Packers was over. He watched the San Francisco 49ers play the Los Angeles Rams in brilliant sunlight in the Coliseum. “That’s where I should be,” Earl said. “Some place where it’s fuckin’ warm, and isn’t raining all the time.” As he drained each beer, he set the empty in the row he was arranging on the windowsill.
The news came on after the game was over. He learned that nine people had died in highway accidents in New England since the start of the four-day holiday, and that police, while pleading with motorists to drive carefully, had called out all available manpower to patrol the highways, looking especially for drunk drivers and speeders. A spokesman for Logan International Airport said that passenger traffic through the terminals had been light, and that the last departures and arrivals delivering passengers to family reunions at 1:40 that morning had justified Wednesday’s traditional reputation of being the busiest travel day in the year. The Red Cross had announced that it was critically short of blood supplies, particularly type O negative, and urged all potential donors to report immediately to any one of seven convenient locations that would be open all night in the Greater Boston area. The cardinal archbishop of Boston had joined volunteers serving Thanksgiving dinner “with all the fixin’s” to toothless, hairless, and confused residents of two Roman Catholic homes for the elderly; the diners gaped dazzled into the camera lights as the prelate held compartmented metal trays of food under their chins, and beamed into the lens. The weatherman predicted rain ending shortly after midnight, with the skies clearing and temperatures “in the balmy low sixties” for Friday and Saturday, but feared that another moisture-laden warm front moving up the coast from the Carolinas would bring more rain on Sunday, “just when most will be leaving for the long return trip home.” He reminded motorists that roads would be slick, and that police would be out in force. The sports reporter hurried over the professional football scores and said that the Celtics would be leaving in the morning for their game with the Knicks Friday night at Madison Square Garden, after enjoying two days off at home with their families; John Havlicek, who had suffered a slight ankle sprain in Tuesday night’s game against the Pistons at Boston Garden, was expected to start. The announcer commented on film of the high school football games between Wellesley and Natick, and Brockton and Framingham, “played in a sea of mud,” before introducing a long list of other scores in white lettering that crawled down a blue screen against background music—the fight songs first of Georgia Tech and then of USC.
Earl finished his last beer shortly after 9:30. He put it at the end of the row he had arranged on the windowsill beside him. After urinating for the fourth time since he had gotten out of bed, he returned to the kitchen and took the jug of rosé wine from the Barney’s bag. He got the cork stopper out and took a tumbler from the cabinet over the sink. He put four ice cubes in the tumbler and filled it with wine. He replaced the stopper in the jug and put it in the refrigerator on the top shelf, on its side. He punched the turkey lightly and returned to the living room, momentarily and vaguely surprised to see that he had begun watching The Sound of Music. “Well, why the fuck not?” he said to the screen. “I’m a fuckin’ human being. This is my day off. I got some fuckin’ rights.” He sat down in the chair again.
When he awoke there was a constant blizzard of gray snow on the screen, and an insistent, hissing buzz from the speaker. It was dark outside the window. He was surprised again when he saw the jug of rosé, nearly empty, on the floor beside him. He lurched his way into the bedroom and groped on the bureau until he found Penny’s alarm clock behind the upraised cover of her jewelry box. “Twenty past nine,” he said. “Fuck it, so I’m late. ‘You gonna do about it, Waldo, huh? You gonna fuckin’ fire me? Well, fuckin’ fire me, then get it fuckin’ over with.’ ” He collapsed onto Penny’s side of the bed and resumed sleeping almost at once.
10
Earl awoke shortly before 7:00 on Friday morning, sprawled on
top of the quilt on Penny’s side of the bed. He had a desperate urge to urinate, but held back until he had looked around the bedroom and identified enough objects to satisfy himself of where he was. His neck and shoulder muscles on the left were slighly stiff, and he felt somewhat groggy, but he knew what to do. He sat on the edge of the bed, his head lowered, and pressed the heels of his hands down against the mattress until his mind began to clear. Then he stood up and went into the bathroom. He relieved himself, and brushed his teeth twice, repeatedly rinsing with cold water and a gargle of mint-flavored mouthwash.
He shut the bathroom door. He took off his clothes and turned on the shower, three parts hot to one cold, and stuck the plastic curtain wetly to the pink tile tub enclosure in order to trap as much steam as possible. When the steam began to billow above the curtain rod, he stepped into the tub, shivering and flinching as the hot water sprayed over him, and gritting his teeth. “Poison goes out through the pores,” he remembered, “poison goes out through the pores.” He recalled his father’s daily ritual of showering in cold water: “People ask me,” he would say, at every opportunity, “how I stop my teeth from chattering. ‘Why, it’s easy. I leave ’em in the glass on the commode till I get out and dry.’ ” The old man was all right. Had been, at least, or would’ve been if Donsie hadn’t set his mind against Earl.
The heat reddened Earl’s skin and made him sweat. He put his hands on his pelvis and arched his back, bending and stretching his torso down-up, right-left, twenty times. Then he turned around and put first his right foot and then his left on the faucet that let water into the tub, tensing and relaxing the muscles in his calves and thighs; he did that twenty times with each leg. When he felt limber, he soaped himself all over and then shampooed, rinsing all the lather off at once. He shut off the water and stepped out of the tub, his skin very red, and grabbed the big, rough, white bath towel that Penny saved for her weekly sessions of bubble bath with oil. “Close those pores, close those pores,” he muttered, rubbing himself vigorously and soaking the towel through. He wrapped it around his waist and opened the door to let the steam out. He returned to the sink and used Penny’s facecloth to wipe the condensation off the mirror. He shaved and rinsed his face, splashing on heavily spiced Jade East shaving lotion. He dropped the towel on top of his dirty clothes and returned to the bedroom, naked. He felt wonderful, and hungry, and he dressed rapidly in khaki pants, a clean pink shirt, a maroon tie with narrow gold and silver stripes, and his maroon blazer, thinking of the $1.89 Special Breakfast served at Dean’s Red Spot at the intersection of Massachusetts and Western avenues in Central Square in Cambridge. He checked his wallet after he had slipped on his brown loafers. He had twelve dollars. He looked at his watch; he had plenty of time. He would have two Special Breakfasts. He gave the wet, soft turkey a friendly pat on his way out.
Trust Page 10
