“Oh, you haven’t tossed in your towel,” Mrs. Bliss reassured.
“Damn straight I ain’t,” he told her, cheering, “there’s still a few miles left in this model. So what do you want to do today, kiddo? Go fishing out on a charter? Catch the helicopter and do the beaches or downtown Miami? They got a new one in Fort Lauderdale. Takes us up the coast to Palm. I slip the guy ten bucks, he buzzes the Kennedy compound or flies low over the country club and spooks the polo ponies.”
“Oh, Junior,” Mrs. Bliss said laughing, “where do you get your ideas?”
“Oh, my ideas,” Junior Yellin said, “my ideas are a dime a dozen. What I’m looking for are a few good years.”
He really is a death-oriented man, thought Mrs. Ted Bliss. It was odd, death was something you worried about in middle age, or while your family was together. It was something she gave little thought to these days. Manny had drawn up her will shortly after Ted had died and, to tell you the truth, her death was the last thing on her mind—except those few times when she wished for it. So she was bothered to hear Junior talk this way.
She had an idea. She told Junior she had to go to the bathroom and asked if he would stop at the next gas station. When they stopped Mrs. Bliss went up to an attendant, turned, and walked back to the car. “You need a key,” she explained, but when she went into the office she took a small notebook from her purse, found a number she’d written down, then searched the purse for a quarter and called Hector Camerando from the pay phone.
She returned to the big off-road vehicle.
“I have an idea,” she said.
“Yeah? What?”
“Why don’t we go to the jai alai?”
“Oh,” Yellin frowned, “the jai alai’s a crapshoot. It’s fixed as wrestling. You don’t know that? Everyone knows that.”
“So what if it is?” said Mrs. Ted Bliss. “What if it is if a person happens to know a person in a position to know which players are going to do what to which other players?”
Something in Mrs. Ted Bliss’s grin caused Junior to examine her closely, almost to appraise her.
“Dorothy?” he said.
“Junior?”
“I know you what, five decades?”
“Something or other.”
“Sweetheart,” he said, “apples don’t fall far from their trees. Ted, may he rest, was a sweet, stand-up guy. You heard of painless dentists? Well, your husband was a kind of bloodless butcher. He took practically all the cholesterol off a steak he trimmed the fat so close. That’s how honest he worked the scales. I’ll tell you the truth, I was a pig in comparison. I’d weigh in my thumbs, my wrists. Sometimes I’d sit with my tochis up on the scale to help make us break even. If I made him a patsy, if I wronged him, it was just to get even—almost like honor.
“Well, you know how I screwed him over—the books, the farm. From my point of view it was a…vindication. But what troubles me now is how you, who I had this idea lived in his moral shadow, all of a sudden pops out from the shadow to tell me she may know a person who knows a person who can chisel the jai alai.
“Do you know what you’re saying bites deeper than mafia? It huffs and puffs harder than the trade winds the drugs blow in on. It’s one of the grimmest shows the INS runs. We’re not just talking Basque separatists, we’re talking international terrorists.
“Dorothy, dear, tell me, how did you come to know such a person?”
“Well,” said Mrs. Bliss, “I’m—”
“No, don’t tell me,” Yellin broke in.
“I’m holding his marker.”
Junior Yellin scrutinized the old lady.
“Back at the gas station. You called him?”
“We could go to the greyhounds,” she said.
“The greyhounds, too?”
“I’m holding his marker.”
The jack of all scams weighed the odds.
“How much?” he asked finally. “What are we talking here?”
“The sky’s the limit,” said Mrs. Ted Bliss.
Yellin shut his eyes, his face lost in concentration. It was as though he were trying to guess in which hand an opponent was holding a coin. He opened his eyes. “The jai alai,” he said hoarsely.
They drove in silence to the white rectangular building, long and low as a huge discount store or a factory in an industrial park.
“So what did he say?” Junior asked when they were inside.
“Didn’t I tell you?”
“I was making a speech,” Junior said shyly. “I never gave you a chance.”
“Oh,” Mrs. Bliss said, “his line was busy.”
It was only minutes before the first match was scheduled to begin. They were standing near the five-dollar and ten-dollar windows. Yellin looked stricken. “The line was busy? It was busy, the line.”
“I tried two or three times.”
“Try it now,” Junior pleaded, “if he hasn’t got anything for us in the first match, then maybe a later one.” His eyes shone with an immense idea. Mrs. Bliss thought he looked fifteen years younger. She turned to go. “Oh, and Dorothy?”
“What?”
He signaled her closer, then, when she stopped, he stepped forward and closed the gap between the two of them even more. Mrs. Ted Bliss, who’d never see eighty again, watched him warily.
“Nothing,” he said. “Only when you talk to him, it might not be a good idea to tell him someone else is in on this, too.”
She was old; for a moment she’d had a crazy thought that Junior had been on the verge of trying something. She was relieved when he hadn’t. The shine in his eyes, the sudden, transient, ischemic pallor on his face like a sort of youth—she thought she’d felt the last weak rays of lust radiating out of him. She had, thankfully, misrepresented its source. It wasn’t the love of an old lady that had excited him but the action. The excited, polyglot voices of the crowds milling around the betting windows—his sense of connection and edge like deep drafts of ozone.
Mrs. Ted Bliss laughed. “What,” she said, “you think I was born yesterday? Why would I tell him I have a partner in crime? As it is we’ll be pushing up the daisies soon enough. Let’s just let nature take its course. Oh,” said Mrs. Bliss, “I’m sorry. I know this man, he wouldn’t lift a finger.” She was trying to comfort him. The pallor had returned to his face. All he wanted, he’d said, was a few good years. His bloodlessness was a sort of reverse blush. She understood. He was embarrassed by death. “Really,” she said, “if I call, I don’t even have to mention where I am. Maybe you’ve changed your mind.”
“Well,” Junior said, “if you’re holding his marker.”
It was odd about the high rollers, thought Mrs. Ted Bliss. Their lives, built around some tender armature of chance, were always deeply grounded in hedged realities. Briefly, Mrs. Bliss pitied the man, came within a hair of writing him off. If she got through to Camerando she might not only tell him up front where she was but tell him Junior Yellin’s name, too.
As it happened, however, she still couldn’t reach him. A phone company recording came on to tell her the number she was calling had been disconnected.
She went back to Yellin to tell him the news.
“No luck,” she explained, “the number’s been disconnected. I don’t understand. When I called a half hour ago I got a busy signal.”
“Hey,” he said, “no problem. It’s not a big deal. They’re here today and gone tomorrow these guys. Come on,” a restored, relieved Junior Yellin told her, “who needs the son of a bitch? If we hurry, we still got time to lay a bet down on the match. Any of the names of these bums mean anything to you?”
After that they were closer than ever. Junior was actually relieved to be back on terra firma. Perhaps the idea of edge, of extravagant advantage, made him nervous. It wasn’t the first time she thought the old bully was a piker, daring enough in his own small ponds but quick to lose heart where he knew he was beyond his depths. It was an insult to Ted, finally, whose measure he’d taken an
d relegated, whom he’d comfortably fit into manageable scale. On her behalf she was furious, on her husband’s, amused, come to terms with Ted’s forgiveness and understanding and philosophic scrutiny. On her husband’s behalf they were closer than ever, Mrs. Ted Bliss taking up their friendship like someone pledged to carry on the unfinished work of someone who’d died. Even that first day at the jai alai she allowed herself to be drawn into his piker schemes.
Freed from the obligation of taking a risk, they agreed upon a system whereby they pooled their money and, by wagering on opposing teams, in effect, covered each other’s bets. Even Mrs. Bliss understood that this was more like accounting or balancing her checkbook than like gambling. Except for the fact that neither of them stood to win or lose much money, Mrs. Bliss was content to go along with Junior’s reasoning that, what the hell, at the end of the day they’d gotten several hours of quite good value for their entertainment dollars—the price of admission, the cost of their programs, the tabs for their hot dogs, their coffees and Cokes.
And, for Mrs. Ted Bliss, it was entertaining. She meant the jai alai, the power and flexibility and stamina of the athletes, their lightning hand-eye coordination, the way they scooped up the small, heavy, hard-rubber pelota into the unyielding woven reeds of the curving cesta attached like a long, predatory claw to their arms and drove the ball flying back against the main granite wall. For all their athleticism and diving, driving speed, within the relatively close quarters of the wire mesh ceiling and vaguely chicken wire fencing of the viewing wall, they seemed to Mrs. Ted Bliss, protected only by their odd, single-winged arm, like nothing so much as wounded, desperate, captive birds fighting for their lives inside a terrible caged battlefield.
She was close enough to smell their heat and sweat. It was awful. It was wonderful. She was at an age, she reflected, past (if she’d ever been capable of them) such odors. Even her fevers when they came would be back-burner, a dry, desiccate desert heat—the almost pastel fragrance of old bone, ancient skin. Her stools, too, had lost force and sting. Only the ammonias of her pee seemed cumulative, consolidate. But she couldn’t remember when she had last perspired. On the hottest, steamiest days of the Florida summers she had felt the heat really as a kind of comforter across the lap of the sore, listless, stymied blood of her advanced age, and she could only marvel at the smells spilling from the cage of athletes even in the middling distance of her and Junior’s seats.
“Why did you cheer,” Yellin asked her, “for Berho and Hiribarren? Those characters were on the other side. Our guys were Darruspe and Urritzaga.”
She would have tried to tell him how she was drawn to what she could only have explained as their rugged vividness, but she would have sounded crazy even to herself.
So they played together. And it really was, Mrs. Ted Bliss supposed, quite like playing. She used as models her memories of Marvin’s and Frank’s and Maxine’s Saturday afternoon excursions with their Chicago buddies to the Rosenwald Museum of Science and Industry, or the Field Museum of Natural History, the Shedd Aquarium, the Adler Planetarium, double features at the South-town or Hyde Park, or important single features at big, first-run theaters like the State and Lake, the McVickers, the stage shows at the Chicago and Oriental; their forays into Jackson Park to the golf course and tennis courts, or out to see the Golden Lady, or the Japanese Gardens, to the archery range on the beach at Lake Michigan where they rented bows, arrows, leather bands for their arms, or their trips to the downtown stores on the I.C., or all the way to Wilmette to view the splendors of the Bahai Temple, shining, white as the Taj Mahal. And as asexual at her age with Junior Yellin as she assumed the children would have been when they had been tourists taking in the sights of their times.
So they played together, revisiting the jai alai, accompanying each other to the greyhounds, the track. Sightseers they were, the only difference between herself, Yellin, and her kids and their playmates was that Mrs. Bliss and Junior had more money to spend, but friendship at their level of disengagement as essentially touristic and hands-off as the kids had been when they aimlessly wandered from hole to hole on the Jackson Park golf course, or chased balls for the tennis players when they had been hit over the chain-link fences.
Playmates.
On rainy days playing the gin rummy variations (Hollywood, double points if the call card’s a spade, or being unable to knock until you had gin; the extra points, bonuses, and boxes in these refinements like a kind of runaway inflation) as her children might have stayed home and played Monopoly. Or shmoozing in restaurants over coffee after they’d eaten the Early Bird special. Playmates, but almost like courtship without any of courtship’s attendant anxieties. As comfortable with each other on these occasions as gossipy girls. (Junior Yellin unmasked, unmanned, sent home again to some almost virginal, pre-big shot condition, like a lion or tiger whose jaws and teeth are still undeveloped. Dorothy in her own way almost the same—their gossip making her nostalgic for something she’d never actually experienced, a life that, outside of family, had not yet happened.)
Queerly dependent on each other as a sort of stranger, castaways, say, or folks thrown together on a difficult trip. With nothing but time on their hands now, and nothing to do with that time—it’s still rotten out, say, the weather still threatening—but fall if not into the story of their lives then at least into some confessional sideshow aspect of the story of their lives, not the high points so much as the oddities, like freakish, unbeautiful geological formations in nature.
Mrs. Bliss, for example, offered a few of the reddest herrings from the last third of her life.
She told Yellin about the sale of Ted’s Buick LeSabre and of all the trouble that had gotten her into, and was quite astonished to learn that Junior had seen the car, had ridden in it, and, when his own was in the shop, had actually driven it once.
“What? No. Impossible.”
“What impossible? Why impossible? A seventy-eight, right?”
“Yes, but I could have told you that.”
“You never mentioned it. It was green, I think.”
“Not a dark green.”
“No, not a dark green. Ted wouldn’t drive around in a pool table. A light shade, I think. Like the background color on a dollar bill.”
“That’s right,” Mrs. Bliss said. “But this was 1978, we were already living in Florida.”
“Didn’t he go back to Myers for a second opinion?”
“You know I forgot?” Mrs. Ted Bliss said, astonished. “So much happened that year.” Confused now, surprised she could have forgotten something like that but amazed, too, that Ted—the whole trip had taken less than a week—would have gone out of his way to look this man up, this son of a bitch who’d taken such advantage of him over the years and then, to add insult to injury, asked to borrow his car, a man who’d driven God knows how many miles all the way to Chicago to get a second opinion on his cancer—it was…it was outrageous! Why, her husband mustn’t have been so much amused by the man as absolutely fond of him!
She could do nothing more now but surrender to her dead husband’s wishes.
So she offered him Alcibiades Chitral, too, and Tommy Auveristas, and finally gave up Hector Camerando himself, the bizarre terms of Camerando’s arrangement with her.
“Four hundred dollars? A setup like that and all you took him for was four hundred dollars? Whatever happened to the grand views of Biscayne Bay, the penthouse in West Palm? You let that crazy spic off the hook for a lousy four hundred dollars?”
“It was embarrassing to me.”
“Embarrassing,” Junior said. “You got some sense of the proprieties. Didn’t it occur to you you might be hurting his feelings by running away from his generosity? Jesus! Dorothy!”
“It’s over anyway. His number’s been disconnected.”
“That don’t mean he’s dead. Where there’s life there’s hope, where there’s a will there’s a way. I bet that Alcibiades Chitral guy could put you in touch. One da dit dot dash o
n the jungle telegraph would do it.”
“An anti-Semite? I wouldn’t stoop.”
“Tommy Auveristas, then. I can’t get over it. You know Tommy Overeasy.”
“Well, know,” said Mrs. Bliss dismissively.
“You were in the man’s home.”
“It was open house.”
“He put a napkin over your lap. You sat on a sofa with him and ate his food.”
“Oh, his food,” said Mrs. Ted Bliss. “Drek, chozzerai. I barely moved it around on the plate.”
“You were the belle of the ball. You went mano a mano with him, you went tête-â-tête.”
“You know,” she said, “I’ve been thinking about that. This was right after my testimony. I think he may have been sizing me up. I think he must have been trying to see how much I really knew about Alcibiades Chitral. About Alcibiades Chitral and himself.”
“How much did you?”
“Nothing,” Dorothy Bliss said, surprised. “Nothing at all. My God,” she said, “I don’t even know Hector Camerando’s phone number. I can’t remember the last time I saw Tommy Auveristas,” she whispered, suddenly frightened by how much she had lost. “Can you imagine that?”
Junior Yellin shrugged. “Spilled milk,” he said.
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