Bomber's Law

by George V. Higgins

  “Well, that’s basically what it is Doug’s doing now, he’s out riding around in his boat. Except of course Doug now’s getting laid, of course, on a regular basis, even though he did have to get married to do it, just like the rest of us did. Mostly found out we hadda do, ’f we ever planned to get laid. On a regular basis, I mean. I think that’s what every guy hasta do, finally, he faces up to the facts. Maybe he’s rich and maybe he’s handsome, maybe there’s dames all around. But sooner or later, he’ll have to face it: for regular sex, if that’s what he wants, he is gonna have to get married. The dames got it worked out that way, a long time ago, and that’s how we get it: on their terms. Or pay for it there, you know, right? Or else we don’t get it too often—this’s ’fore all the broads would put out, at least if what I heard was true, but which don’t matter now again, I guess they stopped again: AIDS.

  “So anyway, that’s how it was and so on, and Doug hadda wait for the boat, when there really wasn’t no reason. But: so what, huh? Now he’s got it. And what’s it cost him? Five thousand bucks or so, the trailer and the boat. Six, he goes whole hog. Doug made that much easy; he had double that to spill. But Laura? Nothin’ doin’ with the boat, until they had the family, and no family until they saved up about as much as that old Jean-Paul Getty guy there. ‘Uh-uh,’ Laura says to him; Dougie told me this, and I even heard her say it to him once or twice myself. ‘Not if you want a family, like you’re always sayin’. We got to save our money, if kids is what you want.’

  “Well, there’s no two ways about it: Doug is pussy-whipped. Laura must be real dynamite, he gets her into bed, suck a goddamned golf ball through a hundred feet of garden hose, you ask her right. ’Cause what Laura says to do, that’s what Dougie always does. It’s kind of embarrassing, actually, seeing your own brother, kid you grew up inna same house with, acting like that around her. That’s … well, she is his own wife I mean, right? After all, they’ve been married for what, almost fifteen years now.

  “You see a guy Doug’s age,” Brennan said, “he starts acting goofy like that around some dame, it’s got to be the new girlfriend he just got. She’s probably about nineteen or so, va, va-va; va, va-va; voom. And also real bright, of course, too. ‘Meet my new receptionist, Heather.’ She’s gonna answer his phones for him now, really add some class to his office. Soon as he teaches her which end is which, you listen here, at this end and you talk in there to that. And then just hope she never forgets, doesn’t get confused, when she’s out front in the office and there’s other people there, that what she’s got in her hand there is a telephone you just put up to your mouth and not some other thing that you put right into it and then right down your throat. So sure, okay, it’s kind of funny, guy that’s at least middle-aged, he looks a little silly, hard-on’s almost tearin’ through his pants like he was a teenager again, but you’re really not surprised. The wives that also know him, his friends’ wives, okay? They’re not even that surprised, or mad. Guy finally makes a lot of money, he can rip the sweet stuff off? It’s not like he was the first one, took what he could never get. This thing goes on all the time.

  “But this other thing, that Dougie does? Guy’s still ga-ga, about his own wife? Makes no secret of it? Don’t see that, that often. Kinda like makes a guy nervous, you know? Your wife happens to be there, sees him acting like that around his own wife, which naturally my Maggie does, family get-togethers and all, all you’re gonna get for a week after that’s the old deli special, my friend: hot tongue in the mornin’, cold shoulder at night, and do what you want with your pickle, my friend—just don’t try to serve it to her. Doug and Laura, all their kissy-face and oh, sweetie-pieing? They don’t make it easy on the rest of us, they go around acting like that.

  “But still, they’re happy as hell; anyone can see that. And nobody can argue with that, am I right? Nobody can argue with that.

  “So that is fine, they saved the money, they had the kids, and now they’re all happy and all. Dougie’s got his boat and now the kids’re growin’ up. Oldest one is nine. And they can start doing things that up ’til now they’ve been, you know, they’ve been a little young. Such as for example the Hallowe’ening, there. Trick-’r-treating, right? This year they can do that.

  “Except,” Brennan said, “except that one of the things that everybody in the family notices, right off, everyone but Doug, that is, is that Laura … when the kids first start getting old enough to do some things on their own, like go on pony rides or get started down the Y—they got a real nice Y over Quincy, very nice Y there, lots of activities—they have a hard time doing that, because Laura’s coming too.

  “Now I don’t mean she’s the same as all the other mothers that drive the kids the Y and then sit up in the bleachers and watch them get their lessons. I mean what she does is butter up the instructors from the day she signs the kids up, and she makes sure the swimming teacher that they actually draw knows she’s got her Red Cross badge. Laura’s a certified lifeguard or whatever they call them. And then, when her kids finally start, who’s inna pool with them? Well, the young teacher is of course, but so is Mummy Laura, in her old teenage bathing suit with the Red Cross badge sewn on.

  “Now I can tell you, pal,” Brennan said, “Laura’s maybe still a damned good-lookin’ woman for a woman her age, and she is. But she still is her age, you know? And she’s still had the three kids now, since she was the Y teacher’s age, which I never knew to make a woman’s figure better-lookin’, unless she was ’way too fat when she got knocked up and her doctor said she either hadda lose a lotta weight or else she would lose the kid, and she got scared enough to do it. But that was not the case with Laura, and the long and the short of it is that as far as she’s concerned, there’s also a few years gone by since she came home after the prom and didn’t actually tell her mother that she finally let Doug use one of his prong-ons for what God meant it to be for. But of course she didn’t have to tell her mother, did she? No, because her mother already knew. She knew the minute she saw Laura come in through that the door. She was very pleased that night, Laura’s mother was. When she saw what’d happened, that she’d stayed up hoping she would see, well, she felt pretty doggoned good. Smart young girl her daughter’d turned out to be. Learned her lessons well, especially the ones her crafty old mother’d taught her, without saying a word. Just like her own mother taught her.”

  Brennan chuckled. “We can kid ourselves all we want,” he said. “It don’t change a goddamned thing. They all learn it from their mothers, and that’s how they get what they want.”

  “Which is what?” Dell’Appa said.

  “What is ‘what’?” Brennan said.

  “ ‘What they want’?” Dell’Appa said. “You took that turn kind of fast on me there. Sorta left me alone at the crossroad.”

  “Well,” Brennan said, “husbands, of course. Men. That’s how they get a man to agree to take care of them and support them and protect them, and help them make babies. They can make fun of us as much as they want, but unless they can get something from us—either we inject it with the tool that old Mother Nature gave us or else we lope our ponies into little plastic shot glasses, and then some doctor shoots it up into them with a big hypodermic needle like they knock the cows up with—it’s hopeless. Outta the question. They can’t make any babies. And after they’ve made the babies, or just plain-old gotten old, so they start to sag and so forth, and no man’ll look at them, and support them, and protect them in their old age, well, that’s when they’d better’ve played the cards right, done what their mothers trained them to do back when they were perky little virgins with their pointy little titties: grabbed back then what they need now by trading what we wanted then for what they were gonna need later. So they have to—that’s how they get those things. But they’re just foolish, silly, if they think they can pretend afterward, after they had those kids, that they still look the same’s they did when they were young. In bathing suits. No matter how much they want to. It isn’t gonna ha
ppen. Unless they have plastic surgery there—I don’t know anyone who did that, but I guess I wouldn’t know if I did, would I, if she got any kind of a job—it doesn’t matter at all. How much they want it to be. But that’s what Laura was doing, with the swimming thing, and it wasn’t happening. No way.

  “My mother doesn’t think that Laura even noticed. That it’s dawned on her even now. Because the same exact thing happened with the pony rides, which’re supposed to be the way the kids ease into it, get used to riding horses. So when they get a little bigger, they won’t piss their pants and cry, maybe, they get put up on a horse.”

  “Sounds like a pretty good idea to me,” Dell’Appa said.

  “Oh, it is,” Brennan said. “I was growing up of course, and the same with Doug and all the rest of us, and also the other kids we knew, hung around with after school: none of us, none of us had any trouble, learning to ride horses, not a bit. Because we didn’t. It was completely outta the question. What it cost back then, rent a horse an hour, it was half what my dad brought home.

  “He was in charge of Produce there, down the A and P. Thirty-one years, until one day they just announce they’re gonna close the place, and then the big day comes, and a buncha guys in trucks drive up and boarded her right up. The good old A and P. The Great big Atlantic and Pacific, goddamned, no-good, double-crossin’, son-of-a-bitchin’, Tea Company.’ That was what he always called it after that, when he come home at night after he’d been out there all day onna street, like all the other days after his store shut down: lookin’ for another job. Not havin’ any luck.

  “It wasn’t anything that complicated, so no one could understand it. He was too old. He knew it himself. No one was gonna hire a guy in his position then, not for the work he did. Almost sixty, a job in which you got no choice, you got to lift those crates? Fat chance. It wasn’t gonna happen. You couldn’t really blame those guys, the hiring guys, I mean. Men back then, in their sixties, most of them back when he was that age looked like over seventy today. Those store managers took a close look at him and they said themselves: ‘Uh-uh, no part of this guy. He comes in, he lasts three weeks, and then: “Uh-oh, I hurt my back.” And he goes off to see his doctor, that he went to grade school with, and the next thing that we’re hearin’ is that he’s disabled. On our insurance plan. Which is where he’s gonna stay, the next twenny years or so. Guys like this guy don’t get better. Once they get disabled the only best thing left that they can ever hope to get is the one where they get dead. And when they’re on your insurance, that can seem like it’s taking a very long time. A hell of a goddamned long time.’ So it’s: ‘Sorry, we got nothin’ open just now. Drop by some other time.’

  “But that isn’t what they mean,” Brennan said. “What they mean, what they meant then: that they never dared to say, and they never would today. Because then they would get sued, if they said what they meant: ‘Not today, old buddy, nope. Not in our lifetimes. You’re over the hill now, Granpa. Road-kill. Dead meat. Fossil City and long gone.’ Even though Dad never would’ve done that, pretended he was hurt if he wasn’t really hurt. He was the type of guy that wouldn’t even fake a real bad cold into a case of flu, take three or four days off and maybe catch up on his sleep. He was ’way too honest. To him that was just stealing; my father didn’t steal.

  “But those strangers that he talked to, that were interviewing him? Had no way of knowing that. You couldn’t blame them at all. But you still couldn’t blame him, either. There wasn’t anything he could do. It wasn’t anything he’d done. It was just something that’d happened and then gone on and left him there, helpless, where he stood. He maybe smelled like beer those nights, like he didn’t come straight home? Well, that was the reason. He knew what he was up against, and what he could do about it. Nothing. So on the way home he’d stop off at Sweeney’s. Sweeney’s at the bridge. It’s gone now, years ago. Sweeney’s ain’t there any more. It got torn down. But it was there then, and he liked it. All of them old guys liked Sweeney’s. Sweeney was an old guy himself. Shoot the shit with his old pals, my father would, all of them still pissed off, too, the stupid thing the company’d done to them and all their friends. After all those years. In jobs they were proud of, doing work that they did well. That was the last one for them, too, for most of them at least. Last job they ever had. Dad never got another one, ’til the day he died. Tried for over fourteen years, but he died unemployed, and at least ten or a dozen of those years, he could’ve done a job. It was really sad. A man, I think a man that wants to, and’s in good health and all, I think he should be allowed to keep his job ’til he decides he wants to quit. Not ’til some young wise guy that he never even saw but who knows everything, of course, says: ‘Everyone this old or older is too old to work, so boot their asses out.’ ”

  “Isn’t what you mean,” Dell’Appa said, “that he died retired? Not that he was unemployed? He must’ve been well into his mid-seventies by then. They must’ve had pensions, the retirement plans and all.”

  “Oh, sure,” Brennan said, “they had those. They had the pensions. Nothing like Fat City, no, but they were union men. So, yeah, they had their retirement pay, and their Social Security. It wasn’t like he and Ma were destitute or anything. House was all paid off. There were six of us kids, but only four of us in school. Rest of us all were working. Still living at home, sure, we all were. Either ’til we got drafted, the boys, or made up our minds to enlist. And the two girls out fishin’ for marriage proposals, even though they were both still in school, but still working part time after school and on weekends. We were all paying our way. Dad and Ma had no reason to worry. They were all right as far as the money, as far as that was concerned.

  “So: No,” Brennan said, “it wasn’t that. It was the job itself. It was not having the job. Dad’d always had one of those, ever since the Japs surrendered, he got discharged and came home. When he got laid off, it was like he’d been beaten himself, worse’n the Japs ever were. By his own people, people he fought to protect. That’s what he couldn’t get over: Americans did this to him.

  “When he still had the job, which he did until we were mostly all grown up, like I said, he was a different kind of man. He was proud of himself. Oh, sure, he was always griping that he should’ve had more money. Or some big promotion with a nice raise that some young college boy’d gotten should by rights’ve gone to him. But just the same, he knew what he was then. And whether you and I now’d look at what he did back then and say: ‘Well, it wasn’t all that much, throwin’ cabbages around,’ well, that doesn’t really matter now. And it wouldn’t’ve mattered then, either. At least not to him. Right or wrong, he was proud of what he did, proud of the job he had, and that he did it well.

  “And so he was also proud of the money that he earned, and that was the end of horse questions. Those were honorable wages he brought home. Dollars that he worked for so he could take care of his family. As he’d promised he would do, and as a man did anyway, if he was a man. So how those dollars got spent, what they got spent for, that was also important. They couldn’t be wasted. What they went for had to be something just as honorable and important as his work that’d earned them. Because if it wasn’t, well then, he was a fool to be taking the whole thing so seriously and working so hard to bring those dollars home. So, when he figured out that for working that same hour that one of us would spend riding the horse, half of what he made would’ve gone to pay that horse, Dad got good and mad. He hit the roof. ‘I will be damned,’ he said, when the question came up that once—I think it was my sister Amy was the one that brought it up—‘I will be damned if I will work half of every hour, or half of any goddamned hour, just throw away thirty goddamned minutes out of my damned life that I will never see again, to pay a stupid goddamned horse to work for only twice as long.’ And that was the end of it. Never come up again in our house, least that I ever heard.

  “But Doug, like I say, he’s done real good, and this is a different generation. So his kids’re now gonn
a learn how to ride. The horse could be making as much as, oh, one of us is, even one of those so-called major-league ballplayers you got now—two-million-a-year, two-thirty-two banjo-hitter who lets the easy grounders go right through his legs, and when he does catch one, throws it over the first baseman’s head into the dugout, and then shoots off his mouth to the press about how it wasn’t his fault. It wouldn’t matter to Doug. Those kids, to Doug: it’s like they’re, you know, the British royal family there, fuckin’ dummies they are. But, something along that line, right? Prolly grow up chasin’ foxes and stuff, screwin’ everyone but their own husbands and wives, the ones they’re supposed to be screwin’.”

  “I still don’t see anything wrong with it,” Dell’Appa said. “The horses, I mean. Maybe not with the Royal Family either. I woke up every day, had to look at one of those dames over my newspaper and my morning coffee, I think I might run around. And considering how I look, how I am most mornings, I dunno as I could really blame a dame who got so bored she couldn’t stand it, and then fooled around on me.

  “But, your brother’s young kids learning horseback riding? Sounds just great to me. All this screaming bullshit about the yuppies and their kids: the ballet lessons; private schools; the gymnastics, vacations, and music lessons; blah blah blah: ‘These kids’re growin’ up spoiled.’ Well, so what if they are? I wish when I was growing up, my parents’d had that kind of money, spoil the ass off of me. Buy me computer games and stuff, take me to Disney World. But okay, so they didn’t. Shame on them and shame on me. I still’ve done all right, I think, even with my dee-prived childhood. I checked my head this morning, I got out of bed, and it’s still screwed on nice and straight. But, would I’ve liked it better, if my folks’d had the money so that they could buy me everything my little heart desired, and so that was what they did? Go to Boston, or New York, even, every Saturday, and wall-to-wall FAO Schwarz? Leavin’ nothin’ but the shelves and my orders for next week? You bet your ass I would’ve. I would’ve gone apeshit for that, if I’d grown up that way. So, you can afford it? Fine. If you can, and if you want to, then by all means do it. If you got the money, and your kids appreciate it—because not all of ’em will; some of them’re little shits, just like some grown-ups are—but if they can have a good time and then still be nice kids afterwards, well, take ’em to Saint Louie, Louie, take ’em to the fair.”