by Tom Kakonis
“Dingo calling, Jimmie.”
That’s as much as it took to restore a civil note, jocular but respectful, to the voice. “Hey, Dingo. Sorry it took me so long to get on the horn. Just comin’ outta the shower. Matter fact, I’m standin’ here in the bareass right now.”
An image, monumentally disgusting, took shape behind Dingo’s eyes. He did what he could to blot it, and said, “Perfectly all right, Jimmie. We connected.”
“So how ya been?”
“Good. Doing well by doing good.” He chuckled softly, got a responsive snicker.
“Doin’ good, that’s what cracks the nut every time,” the Jimmie voice allowed. “So what’s up?”
“Do you remember an inquiry, from one of your coworkers, about a child?”
“Sure do.”
“Well, it seems we might be able to help him out.”
Line full of dead air. “Anything wrong, Jimmie?” he asked into it.
“Y’mean, like now?”
“Very soon, I expect. No more than a few days.”
“Jeez, I dunno, Dingo. That was awhile ago, guy asked. Back in January, I remember.”
“January, June—it matters not. Money’s good anytime, Jimmie. Spends the same.”
“Well, yeah. But I’d hafta check with the fella, see he’s still interested. See, he come on real casual like, said it was a friend he was askin’ for.”
“Not our problem,” Dingo said, putting some of that January into it. “I’ve made a verbal commitment. With the wops. And as you know, with them that’s as good as a deal.”
“Yeah, I heard.”
“So what I want you to do is phone this person tonight, tell him where we are with it and—”
“Do better’n that,” the voice broke in. “Gonna see him, couple hours. Retirement party, one a the plant grunts hangin’ it up. I can talk to him there. Face on face.”
“Splendid, Jimmie. Meantime, I’ll be checking the merchandise. If it measures up and if the terms are satisfactory, I’ll call you later tonight with the details. Where can you be reached?”
“It’s a VFW. Down in Lockport.”
“Number?”
“Hol’ on. Get it for ya.”
Sounds of footsteps receding. Dingo got out his ledger book, skimmed its pages idly, tapping a loafer on the carpet and wondering how far off the day was when he’d be working with people of class, polish. Returning footsteps. A number read to him. He copied it down under the west side address. Meticulous man. “And the figure we’re talking about,” he said, “is 20K, correct?”
“That’s what he tol’ me his friend got to spend.”
“Should be some bargaining space inside that amount. A little finder’s fee.”
“How much you lookin’ to clear, Dingo?”
“Hard to say. In any case, you tell him to alert his friend. It’ll be a cash transaction. Funneled through us.”
“I’ll tell ’im.”
Dingo caught an edge of uncertainty there. Didn’t cheer him. So he said, “Make it plain there’s no room for skating here. No reneging if the deal goes through. He approached us, we’re delivering.”
“Do my best.”
Dingo didn’t like hearing that expression either, its undercurrent of pleading, apology in advance. Loser speak. “As long as your best results in a close,” he said. “You do understand that, Jimmie?”
“Yeah, I got ya.”
Dingo said, “Excellent,” giving splendid a rest. “Oh, one other matter. Looking at the accounts book here, I see we’ve got one that’s seriously overdue. Somebody named Caulkins.”
“Ol’ Lester. He’s a little light up top. Y’know, brains scrambled. But he’s okay, he’ll come through.”
“Let’s give him a nudge anyway.”
“Do that tonight. He’ll be down the party. It’s a not to worry, Dingo. Lester, he’s a good ol’ boy.”
“No doubt. But you talk to him. I’ll be in touch.”
Dingo carried the phone into the kitchen, recradled it, went back to the living room, and sank onto his cushy, velveteen-covered couch. He lit a cigarette, expelled languid streams of smoke at the ceiling. Reviewed his evening plans. Originally he’d intended to dine at one of the finer local establishments, in solitary (for he had no friends, wanted none) celebration of the benchmark day: Friday, June 3, his thirtieth birthday. He’d planned to linger over a martini or two (even though he didn’t much care for them), enjoy a fine dinner, reflect on the progress of his life to date, consider the lucrative possibilities of the decade that seemed to stretch out limitlessly ahead of him. Have to shelve all that now. Business comes first. But if he came away with a dime (thousand, he reminded himself: speak correctly, even in your thoughts) or so for his trouble tonight, he’d celebrate another time, maybe treat himself to a little getaway, hire a working girl to come along. Figured he had it coming, working man like himself.
While Dingo was consoling himself with visions of a brighter tomorrow, some twenty miles to the south and west Lester Caulkins was at that same moment regaling a group of his fellow workers with another in his endless accounts of antic misadventure. They were gathered at the Lockport, Illinois, VFW post, a macho knot of burly men standing hunched over the bar, popping back shots or pulling beer straight from bottles, dragging on smokes, sweating a little, all of them looking just a trifle uncomfortable in their dress-up slacks and sports shirts.
“So I talks Doug the Rug from over the Box Shop there into comin’ with,” Lester was saying, “an’ we wheels over this spook bar off Cermak, other side Pulaski, which shoulda tol’ me somethin’ right there. We struts in bigger’n shit, me’n Doug, an’ right off I see it’s superdumb, what we’re doin’ here.”
Somebody in his audience said, “You never was exactly famous for smart, Lester.” Ordinarily he would have been addressed by his plant tag, “Cock,” a mangling of the already trimmed “Caulk,” but since there were women present (though none at the bar or for that matter anywhere in earshot) and since this was, after all, something of a formal occasion, a certain propriety prevailed.
Lester’s chunky, boyish face enlarged in a broad grin. “Hey, listen, that ain’t what the lady at the license office said, last week I was gettin’ my plates renewed. I tell ya that one?”
“Maybe you oughta finish this one first,” drawled the honoree of the evening, one Arlo Harpstead. Because his tag was an innocuous “Harp,” that’s what everyone here called him tonight, including a man with an extraordinarily voluminous swell of belly, big as a feedsack but solid underneath as a battering ram, who seconded the suggestion with an amused “Harp’s right, Lester. Spit it out. Della’n me gotta be in by midnight.”
That got a laugh all around.
Thus encouraged, Lester pushed on with his tale.
“So here we are, see, room fulla bluegummers, only white faces in the whole joint. Doug, he’s yankin’ on my sleeve, sayin’ c’mon, we gotta bugass outta here, but I figures we come this far, what the hay, huh? So we sorta moseys over the bar, easy like, like we ain’t lookin’ for no grief, an’ I sez the bartender—mean-lookin’ spade, I tellya, an’ big!—holy shit, you shoulda seen!—make The Fridge—remember him?—Bears there?—make him look like one a them pygmies they got over to Africa—I mean, we’re talkin’ King Kong big here—”
Standing next to the man sporting the belly was another who might as easily have fit Lester’s description. Tall, square, thick-necked, keg-chested, shoulders with a powerful slope to them, wide waist and hips, trunks of thighs, he projected an impression of enormous contained strength. This large man elevated a shovel-sized hand in a stop signal gesture, and in a voice surprisingly gentle said, “What’d you say to him, Lester?”
Lester, his retrieval system never too quick in the best of circumstances and decelerated now even more by two hours of nonstop drinking, looked at him blankly. “Who?”
“The bartender you’re tellin’ us about. Remember?”
“Oh, yeah,
that one. What I sez is I asks him, real mannerly, nothin’ wiseass, he seen Miss Shineequa Washington around, and he goes—”
“I can remember when she first come to work,” Harp cut in on him, “her name was Lois. You remember that, Waz?”
Waz, the bellied one, shook his head baffledly. “Where they get them names, jigs?”
“Bowl alphabet soup,” somebody suggested.
“When’d she hire on?” Waz wondered aloud. He turned to the large man beside him. “You know, Buck?”
Buck shrugged. “Y’got me. Eighty-four, five, somewhere in there.”
“It was ’88,” Harp said confidently, and nobody contested it. Forty-four years on the job and an impeccable memory for plant lore had established him as indisputable custodian of all the significant facts, any worth knowing. “ ’Bout the time your blacks comin’ out with that crazy jungle music. She was always playin’ it on her portable, breaks.”
“Real loud too,” someone else remembered. “Way they do.”
“Had a cute little rump on her back when she was Lois,” Harp said after first glancing over his shoulder to be certain his wife was out of range. “One a them high ones they get. Like a porch.”
“Ride ’em high, huh, Harp?”
“Wouldn’t know ’bout that. Ask Lester. He’s the one nosein’ around that black butt, tryin’ to jump it.”
All eyes returned to Lester, momentarily forgotten in the wandering excursus. He snapped a recollective finger. “Talkin’ music makes me think, part I was gonna tell ya. See, this bar had a band, call ’emselves The Confederate Niggers, all duded out in army uniforms, gray ones, South. They was playin’ all them South songs, y’know, ‘Dixie,’ ‘O’l Man River,’ that Black Joe one, only in hip-hop. Rappin’ the words. I’m tellin’ ya, it was somethin’ to hear.” He paused, evidently trying to recapture the moment. “Went sorta like this,” he said, stepping back from the bar and offering a chanted, swaying, finger-popping rendition: “Massa inna col’, col’ muthafuckin’ ground.”
“Watch the language,” Harp said, scowling. “My grandkids around here someplace.”
“I was in a place on Rush Street once,” somebody remarked, “had same kinda thing. Only it was Jews. Went by Ikey Finkelstein—somethin’ like that, Jew name—and His Texas Sheenies. Did all country, only in New York accent, y’know. How they talk. ’Cept it was singin’, course.”
The one called Buck rolled his eyes heavenward, or as near heaven as the smoke-fogged ceiling allowed. “Jesus, Lester. What happened to the story?”
“Which one?”
“Back in the bar there.”
“Where ’bouts was I?”
“You was askin’ the bartender he seen Shineekeefoo,” Waz reminded him, “or whatever her name is now.”
“An’ whose ass now-days blown up big as a whale,” somebody interjected, “an’ ol’ Lester still can’t mount it.”
Everyone chortled, even Lester, pleased to be center stage again. His story resumed: “ ‘What you boys doin’ in here?’—this is him now, bartender, goin’ to us—‘You lookin’ to hit on a sister? That it? Split some dark oak?’ I tells him Shineequa’n me works same plant, she asks me meet her here. Which is a true fact, only now I’m thinkin’ maybe she bendin’ me over, tellin’ me meet her this place.”
“You always was a deep thinker, Lester.”
A new voice, this one, tinny edge to it, coming off a wiry little fellow, blade thin, just now arrived and swaggering through the press of bodies deferentially parting at his advance. Lester swung around, churned a pudgy fist in salute. “Hey, Jimmie Jack, how they hangin’?”
“Hangin’ hard, Lester. Like always.”
“Yeah, like a case a the permanent stone balls,” Buck muttered, but under his breath. He picked up his beer and pushed away from the bar.
Waz looked at him puzzledly. “Where ya goin’?”
“Over by the girls.”
“Can’t leave now,” he protested. “Lester’s just gettin’ to the good part.”
“You can fill me in how it comes out,” Buck said, marching off.
“Which story’s this?” Jimmie wanted to know.
“Time I was in that spookadoo bar, askin’ for Shineequa,” Lester said.
“Already heard it.”
“Let ’im finish, f’chrissake,” Harp said.
When he smiled, as he did often and easily and was doing now, James John (familiarly known as Jimmie Jack, or simply Jimmie) Jacoby’s upper front teeth protruded slightly, and with his recessive chin, pitted cheeks, snub nose, squinty eyes (which seemed to squint even here, in the subdued indoor light), low shelf of brow and knobby skull only partially covered by lank, mouse-colored hair, his features, normally unhandsome anyway, took on the feral aspect of a toothy sniffing predatory rodent. He brushed a hand through the air, show of indifference. “It’s your party, Harp.”
Harp merely grunted, signaled for Lester to proceed.
“Forget where I was at,” Lester confessed sheepishly.
“Eight ball behind the bar startin’ to lean on you,” Waz prompted him.
“Oh. Right. Bartender. Well, rest of it y’can pretty much figure. Him’n bunch his bro buddies boost me’n Doug right off our feet—I mean, we was doin’ the ozone boogie there—an’ heaves us out the back door, alley, where they tune us up good. Me, I end up facedown a trash can, chewin’ on cold ribs, got a zipper in my arm off a broke bottle or a shank, never did find out which, an’ hafta turn in the hospital, get it stitched up an’ one a them shots they give ya, the lockjaw.”
“Look like it didn’t take, though,” somebody said, and they all hooted.
Even Lester, who, beaming with pleasure at his audience response, went on: “Listen, think that’s bad, y’oughta seen what they done to Doug. Just torched his rug is all, an’ stuffed it down his pants, backside, give ’im a real case the red ass.”
Now everybody whooped.
When the laughter dwindled some, Jimmie said, “I told Lester he shoulda come see me. Open that zip up again, make it look like it happen at work.” His elastic smile widened. At nobody in particular, he winked slyly. “Good for a Caddie in the plant there.”
“ ’Less they find ya out,” Harp said. “Then it’s good for a walkin’ ticket.”
“Do it right, nobody find you out.”
“No, thanks,” Lester said. “Once plenty. I ain’t big on blood. ’Specially my own.”
“Little blood, lotta bucks,” Jimmie opined philosophically.
“No way. Ain’t pushin’ my luck.”
“Only luck you ever had, Lester, is the lame kind.”
With the entertainment apparently over, most of the men drifted away, Waz and Harp among them. And when the crowd at the bar was sufficiently thinned, Jimmie leaned over to Lester and murmured, “Speakin’ of which, luck, like we was minute ago, there’s somethin’ I gotta run by you. Whyn’t you meet me back in the pisser? Smoke a bone, talk a little.”
The Quinns were sitting in a cramped, windowless cubicle on the first floor of a Chicago P.D. precinct station, which one they had no idea. Somewhere in the vast and tumultuous and suddenly fearsome city. Down the hall a riot of furious activity rose from the entrance: chorus of strident, squawky voices, interminable jangle of phones, the occasional peal of coarse laughter, occasional trumpeted obscenity or curse or plaintive wail.
For well over an hour they’d been waiting, and for Marshall the three hours before that had flashed by in a dizzying blur. A clash of disjointed images crowded his head. There was himself (seen now rather like a bumbling player in a surreal film, some grotesquely warped fantasy) frantically combing the emptying auditorium, calling his son’s name in a voice hollow as an echo off a mountain lake. There he was tracking down a planetarium security person, baby-faced kid assuring him nothing to be alarmed about, sir, these things happen all the time, the boy’s probably wandering one of our many corridors, got turned around, we’ll find him.…His son’s fate in th
e hands of an insouciant infant. Now see Marshall sprinting down the boulevard, weaving in and out of the crowds like some accomplished broken-field runner, catching sight of Lori waiting perplexedly in the lengthening shadow of the redoubtable charging Thaddeus. Watch her face crumple at the news, agony of fright. See them both standing in the parking lot outside the museum, mouths—his, anyway—going mile-a-minute, arms flagging, gesturing wildly at a pair of uniformed police officers phlegmatically taking notes while the dome light of their squad car pulsed like an accelerated heartbeat and a circle of curious onlookers, faces flushed with that glow of importance witnesses to catastrophe will get, widened around them. Follow the Quinns on a backseat ride in that squad car through some mean, maimed city streets; into a dingy building, its air hot, sluggish, thick; past a block of counter behind which more cops, some uniformed, some not, scurry; through a poorly lit hallway to the cubicle—two metal folding chairs, a rickety wooden table and nothing else—they occupy now; handed forms to complete, which he dutifully does; instructed to wait right here, somebody be with you soon.
Soon? By whose measure, soon? Not his.
He studied the worn black linoleum at his feet. Stole a glance at his wife. All the implicit accusations (“Asleep!—but how?—how could you?”) and recriminations (“I don’t know how—it was dark in there, cool, out of the heat—anybody would have—you would have”) were over now, and she rocked back and forth in her chair, eyes squeezed shut, moaning softly, as if to ward off everything she was experiencing, this alien assault on her senses. Her abundant ash blond hair was sadly disheveled, her face, a perfect heart shape, streaked with tears, white as bone dust. She seemed to have arrived at some plateau of infinite dread, a terror abstract and unalloyed. “Goddam it,” he muttered. “What’s going on? Where are they?” She said nothing, and no one came.
