by Tom Kakonis
“Place little messy.”
“That’s all right.”
“Gonna have to clean ’er up one a these days. Saturday maybe…no, that’s open house, gotta work. One a these days.”
“Don’t worry about it.”
“So how you feelin’ tonight?”
“Not so good, Lester.”
“You oughta go see a doctor. Get that face fixed.”
“That’s not the problem.”
“Don’t be so sure. Could get, y’know, infected. Or scarred. Like I was tellin’ this fella just now, tonight here, burned his thumb, see, watch out for the dog, I sez, tryin’ to tell him, nobody listen…” The head began sagging toward the chest, nodding, nodding, the words trailing away in slurry mumble.
“Lester?”
“Huh?”
“Don’t fall asleep on me.”
“I ain’t sleepin’.”
“Good. I need to talk to you.”
“What about?”
“My son.”
They were seated opposite each other, Lester precariously perched, swaying slightly, on the edge of his hide-a-bed, Marshall on a cloth-covered not-so-easy chair, its fabric stained and tattered. A TV tray was set up between them, makeshift dining table bearing two cans of beer, two unwashed knives, a nearly depleted jar of Cheez Whiz, and the pale film of gritty dust that seemed permanently settled over every surface of the cramped room like a shower of volcanic ash.
Lester reached for one of the knives, and with a decelerated deliberateness scraped the bottom of the jar. He paused, blinked up smilingly. There was a malarial cast to the whites of his eyes, not all that far off the color of the glutinous spread clinging to the blade. “Help yourself,” he urged.
“No thanks.”
“Gotta eat.”
“We have to talk, Lester.”
“ ’Bout your boy?”
“Yes.”
“Still lookin’ for him, are ya?”
“Yes.”
“How’s that goin’? Any luck?”
“Not yet.”
Lester brought the cheese-smeared blade to his lips, licked it clean. He chewed thoughtfully. A confusion of images—charred thumbs, dogs, lost kids, toes, beatings—jostled in his head. “Sorry hear that,” he said.
“You can help me, Lester.”
“Me?”
“You.”
“How’m I gonna do that?”
“Do you remember telling me about this friend of yours? Mike Wazinski?”
“Ol’ Wazzer. Givin’ me ride into work, y’know, till I get me another set a wheels. Good man.”
“I’m sure he is. But I went to his house today. Tried to talk to his wife. When she heard what it was about, she slammed the door in my face.”
A curtain of alarm fell across the rheumy eyes. “Went to his house? Why’d ya do that? You didn’t say I was the one tol’ you?”
“No.”
“You don’t wanna go botherin’ Waz. He’s straight.”
“They know something, Lester. She won’t talk to me, and it’s plain he’s not going to either. Not at his house. But if I could get to him inside the plant, he’d have to listen.”
“Inside the plant? Ain’t nobody don’t work there can get inside.”
“That’s where you come in.”
“Me? How?”
“You have an ID to get in? Badge?”
“Badge.”
“Let me use it.”
Lester slapped the air. “Use my badge? No way! They’d bounce me for sure, I was to do that.”
“I’ll pay you. Whatever I can. All I’ve got.”
“Can’t do it.”
“I need your help,” Marshall pleaded. “You’re the only one left.”
“Look, man, I know how y’feel, but—”
“No, you don’t!” Marshall interposed fiercely. “Even if you could, knowing’s not understanding. It’s not the same.”
“Maybe not. But I know it wasn’t Waz touched you up. Was Jimmie. An’ if he’s in this, I don’t wanna be no place in the vicinity. You either. Get crossways with guys like him an’ they send you home with your nuts in a paper bag.”
“Maybe they will,” Marshall conceded, speaking gravely now, patiently, the flash of anger throttled, adapting tone and vernacular to his audience. “But the way I see it, Lester, you do bad things, bad things get done to you. That’s all right. For us, it’s all right. You and me, Lester, we’re grown-ups. We get just about what’s coming to us. What we’ve earned. Maybe that’s how it’s supposed to be.”
Marshall wasn’t sure where it was going, this meandering lecture, come to him spontaneously but with a certain detached quality too, the verbal levitation of an actor delivering lines committed to memory, or a shrewd pitchman closing a sale. He pushed on, investing his words with earnest emotion, letting them lead him: “But not kids, Lester. Think about it. They’re not like us. Look at them. They’ve still got a foot in heaven. If there’s anything innocent left in this sorry world, it’s them.”
Lester stared at the frayed carpet. Said nothing.
“Lester?”
“Yeah?”
“Look at me.”
Slowly, reluctantly, the eyes lifted. Marshall held them with a level, probing gaze. Finally Lester murmured, “Might be I could help little.”
“You’ll let me use it? Your badge?”
“Badge won’t work. Got my picture on it, an’ you’n me don’t look nothin’ alike.”
“How, then?”
“There’s this open house Saturday, show off the plant. Just for friends an’ family, though, grunts that work there. Gotta have a ticket, get in. Could maybe scare you up one.”
“Would you do that?”
“Yeah, I can do that,” Lester said and he did, removed a worn, discolored wallet from a hip pocket, fumbled through it, found a ticket, and slid it across the tray. “That’ll getcha inside.”
“Thank you, Lester.”
He gave a limp, doleful shrug. “Got nobody else give it to. Got no family. An’ I guess we’re sorta like friends now, huh?”
“More than that.”
“Waz a friend too. Don’t want you givin’ him no grief.”
“All I’m going to do is talk with him.”
“How come you think he knows somethin’ ’bout your kid?”
“It has to do with his license plate, Lester. It’s a long story.”
“I got time.”
“Some other time,” Marshall said, pocketing the ticket and coming to his feet.
“Speakin’ a that, license plates, I ever tell ya what happen, I go to get mine renewed?”
“No, but I have to—”
“C’mon, sit a minute. Won’t take long. It’s real comical.”
Marshall sighed. Sat. Figured he owed him that much.
“See,” Lester began, “what happens is I show up at the office there thinkin’ to just pay my money, get the plates, get gone. Only it don’t work that way. Ain’t gonna be that easy. There’s this lady behind the counter, mean mother, crabby, real skag too, look like a good fuck croak her. Anyways, she looks at my papers there, sez it’s time I gotta take all them tests again. Y’know ones I’m talkin’ about? Eyes, them road rules?”
“I know the tests.”
“Well, eyes I did good. See around a corner and up a skirt, I wanna look hard enough. It’s that other part, rules, I know right off gonna snag me up. Ain’t like I studied or nothin’. Take one look at all them trick questions an’ I’m thinkin’, Holy shit, Lester, you in the hot soup now.”
“So what did you do?” Marshall asked, to hurry the story along.
Lester grinned slyly. “What I done was I seen this dude takin’ same test, real intelligent-lookin’ gentleman, wears a suit. Figured if anybody know the answers, oughta be him, right? So I moseys on over, them stand-up tables they got, where ya do the writin’, an’ crowds in close, this fella. See, what I’m hopin’ is to get just enough right, pass the
test, so every chance I can I lift ’em, answers, I’m sayin’, off his sheet an’ copy ’em down on mine.”
“Using your keen vision?” Marshall said, more patronizing and ironic than he’d intended.
“Huh?”
“You mentioned your eyes were good.”
“That’s right. Tell ya, come in handy too. Saved my ass.”
“So you passed the test?”
“Flyin’ fuckin’ colors. Except while I’m takin’ it I peeks up once and catch the lady at the counter there eyeballin’ me good, got a look on her face like she got her first taste a dick an’ don’t like it one little bit. So what? I’m thinkin’, can’t prove nothin’. I go on over and give her my sheet and she checks it out and goddam if I ain’t got ’em all right. Perfect score.”
He paused significantly, as though awaiting an endorsement or a round of applause. Marshall looked puzzled. “I seem to be missing the point.”
“That’s ’cuz I ain’t got there yet. Best part’s comin’ up. She’s all hacked, see, knows I nicked the answers but nothin’ she can do about it. Know what she sez?”
“What?”
“ ‘Got ’em all right, did ya?’ ” he mimicked, pitching his voice a strident harpy squawk. “ ‘Mr. Perfect? Okay, perfect, step on over here and put your toes on the line.’ She’s pointin’ at where they take your picture,” he explained, “an’ way she’s hollering everybody in the whole place lookin’. Got a voice on her like a bullhorn, an’ by now she so pissed the steam comin’ out her ears.
“ ‘Give us a perfect smile,’ ” he went on, back in harpy timbre now, “ ‘See about perfect, then. You maybe get ’em all right on the test, but you’re still a rotten little cheat and you’re still ugly!’ Ain’t that somethin’?” he concluded, bursting into a sniggery little laugh that gradually inflated, and he rocked back and forth on the bed, suffocated with mirth, shoulders twitching, face pinking, a wetness welling in his eyes.
Marshall watched him curiously. Waited for it to run down. “What did you do?” he asked.
“Whaddaya mean?”
“Did you call her supervisor? Complain?”
“Why’d I do that?”
“Because you don’t have to take that kind of treatment. Not from some spiteful, insolent clerk.”
“Why not? She knew I was cheatin’. Had me dead to rights. An’ like you just said, do somethin’ bad, it gonna come back on ya. Remember sayin’ that?”
“I remember,” Marshall said. And because it seemed important somehow to know, he asked him, “Why did you decide to help me, Lester?”
“I dunno. Felt bad for ya, s’pose, your kid. I been on that end myself, manner a speakin’. Was a orphan. No folks. Grew up in them homes they dump ya in.”
“I see. I’m sorry.”
“Wasn’t so bad. Worked out okay. I’m doin’ just fine now.”
A silence opened. Lester grinned meagerly, examined his palms. To Marshall’s inspecting eye he looked suddenly smaller and, for all his pudgy roundness, pitifully frail. “I want you to know I appreciate it,” he said. “All you’ve done for me.”
“Forget it.”
“I’m going to have to leave now, Lester.”
“Yeah, gettin’ late.”
“Maybe I’ll see you Saturday.”
“Ain’t likely. Big plant.”
“Well, we’ll talk again sometime.”
“Sure.”
Marshall rose and moved toward the door.
“Mr. Quinn?”
“Yes?”
“You ain’t finished your beer. Wanna take it along?”
“You drink it.”
“Drive careful now, hear?”
Driving away carefully, as advised, already busily plotting his strategy for the Saturday upcoming, Marshall still found it impossible to erase totally the image of that hapless, witless orphan, alone in a deplorably shabby room, in the world. And it occurred to him, with a twinge of guilt, just how calculated it all had been, his seemingly halting plea for help, almost as though it had been lifted, like Lester’s lifted rules of the road, from some yellowing lecture notes, or the pages of the book that recorded the tale of his own vanished childhood, its mourned innocence outlived and irretrievably gone. And though he drove with the confidence inspired by a sense of destination, he was not unmindful of another, more disturbing sense of vast distances yet to cross.
Like Marshall, Dingo was pondering the future that evening, though he too was distracted by a persistent image, unsummoned and unwelcomed, flickering on the outskirts of his consciousness. Curiously, unaccountably, it was a visualization of his partner vexing him, not so much the rodent face and stringy form as the obnoxious swagger, witnessed only a few short hours ago and intruding now on his quiet deliberations. Dingo had seen that ostentatious strut before, in the Facility, many a time, and it stirred other images—stark, vivid, ugly, as feculent to the inner olfactory sense as perfumes of raw sewage to one’s exposed nasal portals—skulking at the borders of his memory. Lately he’d caught himself thinking often—far too often—about the Facility and about the sinister complicity of police and prosecutors and wise shrinks and luckless parents (whose incinerated remains somehow reached out from the grave falsely to incriminate him) that put him there. Too much remembering. More than was healthy.
And though he had ample leisure now (comfortably settled in the perfect solitude of his immaculate living room, the lights dimmed, snifter of brandy in hand, lulling plink of a piano floating off the stereo) to entertain all manner of irrelevant reflections, however absurd or infuriating, he pushed them away, resolved to steer clear of memory’s treacherous quicksand. To remain on the more elevated, inspiriting plane of aspiration and limitless possibility.
Roomy visions opened behind his eyes: himself striking out on his own, a solo player, unencumbered and (after Saturday) substantially bankrolled, breaking new entrepreneurial ground, boldly seizing new opportunities, cementing new contacts (the Rolex source, already fruitful, not least among them), networking with a better class of people. It was only fitting things should fall out that way. Only right. Hadn’t he, during and after the Facility years, applied himself, studied diligently, watched and learned, planned carefully and executed those plans flawlessly, mastered his calling? Who was more deserving than Odell DeCruz?
And it was time. Time to move on. The empty procession of events that mark the days that shape the directionless lives of other, lesser men, what they choose to label, mistakenly and in compensation for a flaccid will, fate or chance or wicked luck—that was not for him. Of that he was certain.
The shadows in the room lengthened, deepened. Dingo sipped his brandy, secure in the certainty of these splendid visions. And yet, perversely, another Jimmie thought returned to him, not the walk this time but the pestilent breath, so tolerantly left unremarked on over the lengthy course of their association. His nostrils twitched at the recollection. But he took a kind of whimsical comfort from the equally certain knowledge that, after Saturday, there would no longer be any need to equip his car with an air freshener.
PART SEVEN
“Ho-lee kee-rist!” Waz boomed, stringing out the syllables in a melodic rise and fall of astonished consternation. His shovel jaw dropped, mouth hung open, and as he absorbed and processed the dismaying news, his eyes narrowed dangerously. “Why the fuck didn’t you tell me?”
Della tucked her robe tight at the bosom, prim gesture of a haughty woman determined to abide no carping censure. Yet her face, pale in its absence of paint at this early hour, wore the pouty look of a child whose fear of punishment is veiled behind a wary impudence. “ ’Cuz I knew you’d just get all steamed,” she shot back. “Sure as hell got that one right.”
“Goddam right, steamed. Buck’s thinkin’ everything straight, nothin’ to worry about, and now you come tellin’ me some asshole shows up here. Right here at my house. Jeez-us fuck!”
“Well, least he never came back.”
“Not yet h
e didn’t.” Waz shoved his chair back and got up and paced the small kitchen furiously, scowling at its linoleum floor. “This happen when, again?” he demanded.
“Other night,” she said vaguely.
“I’m askin’ you which night.”
“It was Wednesday,” she sighed.
“And you gotta wait three days to let me know?”
“More like two. I was sleepin’ when you got back from bowlin’.”
“Two, three—fuck’s the difference? You shoulda told me.”
“Like I said, I knew you’d get bent outta shape. Especially comes to that subject. And I seen you mad before, Waz.”
“You sure it was the same guy from that day out on the road there?”
“I think so.”
“What’s that mean, think?”
“Means his face was all beat up, so it was hard to tell for sure.”
“Beat up how?”
“Beat up,” she repeated petulantly. “Like somebody punched him out.”
“How’d he find us?”
“He didn’t say.”
“What did he say?”
“I already told you.”
“Tell me again.”
Della’s eyes did an exasperated spin. “Okay, first he asks for you. I tell him you’re not here, and so he starts in on me. Says he seen us up on the tollway, shows me this flyer, like, got Davie’s picture on it. He says it’s his boy, somebody kidnapped him, and we know about it, got to help him.”
“That picture. Was it Buck’s boy?”
“It’s the same kid, Waz.”
“You didn’t tell him that?”
“ ’Course I didn’t. You said not to say anything about it. Any of it.”
Waz came over and flopped onto the chair. His shoulders sagged. He stared glumly into a mug of coffee, fixedly, as if the chilling black liquid somehow held a solution to his mounting miseries. All that it gave him was a warped and shimmery reflection of himself.
