Wild World

by Peter S. Rush

  “What the fuck were you thinking? That’s not our job,” Crowley said as he drove Steve to Rhode Island General for a physical.

  “Guess I wasn’t thinking,” he said, but he was only thinking of Roxy.

  The International House of Pancakes, with its bright blue roof, was a stroke of genius when it opened on Thayer Street. It was the only place near campus to get food after midnight that didn’t have wheels on it. It was full of bleary-eyed students or stoned kids with the munchies. Two weeks had passed since that night with Roxy and Cal. He had stayed away, but he couldn’t not see Roxy. The shock was gone, the pain continued, but was it under control? Not wanting to lose her, he was beginning to blame himself for not seeing what was happening to them. But to do it with Cal? They sat in a booth in the small end of the restaurant, eating pancakes.

  “I know it’s going to work out. I mean, I’ll wait and wait,” he said, trying to convince Roxy that he was past the pain of that night. “Look, we’ll get married when you graduate, and then we can move. I . . .”

  Roxy’s face was drawn; there wasn’t any sparkle to her eyes. “I don’t know. I don’t know. I’m confused. I need more space; I need to figure out who I am, what I am . . . I need . . . time. I don’t know what happened. How can you say you still love me after . . .” Inverted parenthesis formed as she drew her eyebrows together.

  “No, I mean, fine. I’m not trying to . . . I’m trying to understand. I’m trying to give you space. I did what . . . I don’t know what I’m saying. I’m trying. I’m here for you. I won’t leave you. I miss you.”

  “Are you listening? I don’t know. I still have eight more years before I’m a doctor. It’s what keeps me going. You have to understand—watching my sister change from this wonderfully supportive person who I could fight with about clothes on the floor to a shrunken shell who I loved more each day. I couldn’t wait to see her, yet I hated the idea, knowing how powerless I was. I’m closer now. I’ll do it. You are, I’m . . . It’s different. When you’re in that uniform, I can hardly look at . . . You’ve become part of them . . . I don’t know if it’s you or me.”

  “But you, you . . . I mean, we talked about . . . You thought it would be . . .” Steve understood but didn’t want to accept the distance. She needed him less as her confidence and maturity increased. And he was trying to dig in, to stop her love from slipping away, but he was only making it worse. He knew she felt guilty, but what could he do?

  “I don’t know—it’s not the same. Things, you need to be going somewhere. To have bigger dreams than marrying me. I need to do this on my own.”

  “Would you have told me about Cal?” he asked, looking hard at her to try and see behind her words.

  “I don’t know,” she said, cocking her head to the side, a dark cascade of hair covering one eye. “Would you tell me? Did you ever cheat . . .”

  His mind raced to that day with Annie Chamberlin, blond, Main Line. It was in her dorm room last fall. They had met in class. She was a year behind him and when he saw her struggling with a box going into her dorm, he had gallantly carried it to her room. They had flirted over the years, but when she closed the door, stripped off her Lacoste shirt, revealing her small, white breasts, and kissed him hard on the lips, pushing him back onto her single dorm bed, he was shocked. But he returned her kisses, her expensive perfume filling his head as his guilt mixed with the unexpected desire. When his fingers touched the soft wetness between her legs, his penis hard with expectation, he stood up abruptly, leaving Annie on her back, glaring at him. “I can’t,” was all he said as he pulled his shirt on and raced down the stairs to the open air.

  Steve was beginning to tear, sensing she was feeling guilty about her betrayal. “Yes.”

  She stopped and stared hard. “Yes, what . . .”

  His heart was racing with fear as he tried to decide what was the right answer. “Yes . . .” He hesitated. “Yes, I did,” he lied, hoping she would feel better about her guilt. But the moment the words left his mouth, he knew it was the wrong decision. Her face, which was turned quizzically to him before, now had sharper edges around her mouth and eyes, as if chiseled by a master sculptor.

  “Who? When?”

  “Annie Chamberlin.” He compounded his mistake, hoping she could imagine how it could happen. But he was wrong again.

  “How could you? That pushy bitch. Would you have told me if you hadn’t? How could you?” Her angry tone cut deeply into him. He was trying to make it better, not worse. She gathered her books, blinking her eyes as if to hold back tears.

  “We need to talk. There is something I need to tell you. My day off is tomorrow.” He realized his plea was badly timed.

  “That’s not a good idea. Not now. I’m so . . .” She got up, and he sprang to his feet, putting his arms around her, hugging her tightly, but she went limp and pushed him away.

  “This weekend? I’m not working Friday night.”

  “We’ll see.”

  He watched her go out the door and realized that she was gone. Did it die or just slowly ebb away? He knew he couldn’t put the magic back in the bottle, but maybe he could recapture or reinvent them. She was still young, hadn’t seen the real world. Maybe . . . he was trying to think of a way to recreate himself for her. Bigger dreams? She was right, but now, on the force, he was living in the present. He had bigger plans and nothing to lose.

  He should have told her more about his plans and what he was trying to do. She would be proud of him. But the time to tell her had passed. She would see it as a desperate attempt to look heroic. He needed to do it, not just talk. Now, he needed to stay here in Providence with her but without her. He would let her set terms, he would be patient. He looked at the empty cup of coffee, knowing there was no refill.

  Several weeks passed before he saw Roxy again. They walked down Hope Street toward Fox Point as the neat historic houses around the university changed to two and three-family working-class rentals. Fewer people were on the street, and broken glass and overflowing metal trash bins reinforced the changed social status. Experience had taught him that the population was transient and distrustful of the police.

  “Thank you for coming with me. I was a little nervous going alone,” Roxy said, holding on to his arm in a playful way. He smiled, feeling a genuine warmth return from her. The weeks had passed in painful silence since their meeting at the pancake house. Without her, he was very alone.

  “No problem,” Steve answered; pleased she had asked him to join her. He didn’t want to miss an opportunity to spend time with her, even if it meant listening to the Brazilian priest again.

  “It should be interesting. They’re trying to organize a community-wide boycott, something to really punish those greedy landlords. If the merchants complain, then they will know it’s real,” Roxy said.

  “As long as it’s not violent,” Steve said, hearing himself speaking against a protest he would have joined as a student. “Captain Lynch doesn’t like protests.”

  She looked at him and shook her head.

  They entered the one-story wood storefront that was being used as the parish hall. The room was set up with bare metal folding chairs, the type he remembered from his grade school auditorium. He had liked volunteering to help the custodians clean up after school events, folding each chair exactly, getting into the rhythm of putting them back into the rolling rack until the auditorium was ready for gym class.

  Metal venetian blinds covered the windows, concealing the group from the casual passersby. Steve knew he had passed the building a hundred times, but it had never attracted his attention or interest.

  The room was filled with Portuguese working men and women of varying ages, dressed in thick clothes against the cold air. A group of young students in a variety of pea coats and watch caps, long hair, and boots, leaned against one wall. Steve and Roxy were to the far side of the hall—Steve’s clean-cut look stood out in the crowd. He held onto Roxy’s arm a little tighter.

  “The time has co
me for increased action,” Father Schmidt said in his booming missionary voice. “We can no longer tolerate the actions by these capitalist landlords. We must fight back.”

  “Alleluia,” the room responded in almost complete harmony. Father Schmidt changed to Portuguese, and the crowd was wrapped around his words. The students were looking toward the door, so the priest switched back to English.

  “The landlords are doubling the rents when they come up for renewal. Sometimes tripling to say get out, get out. We don’t want you. We must organize our protest to put pressure on it where it hurts the most.” He motioned to his pocket. “Right here.”

  Doubling the rent—it didn’t make sense unless the landlords would get a better return. Basic economics. Steve wondered if the series of bogus calls—the reports he had typed—were related. How? He would have to figure it out.

  “Right on,” a young man said from the side.

  “But Father,” a woman in her early forties, her face creased with worry and poverty, asked, “What do I do when they come and tell me to leave? Where do I go?” Her pleading voice had a sense of desperation.

  “You will not be dispossessed,” Father Schmidt said in his Portuguese/German-accented English, raising his voice on the last syllable. “We will protect you.”

  “We’ll protect you with force.” A young man raised his arm in a clinched fist salute. “Fox Point is our home.”

  “Sim, Sim, nosssas casas.”

  A number of the other men raised their arms and nodded adamantly.

  “We’ll burn ’em down before we give ’em up,” a couple of the young college students shouted, jumping to their feet to show their support.

  The priest held up his hands to quell the restive gathering. “We don’t need to resort to violence yet. But we can appropriate their property for the good of the working man. We can demand justice from the ruling class by overthrowing their privilege.” The priest continued with his speech about how God was with them in their struggle against oppression.

  Steve leaned over to Roxy. “Isn’t that kid with the green cap the head of the SDS chapter? What’s he doing here?”

  She looked at him. “They want to overthrow the capitalist imperialist government in Washington, but they want to begin it here.”

  “This is Providence,” he said. “Nothing big starts here. They’ll just create trouble.”

  “They will stand with the working class.”

  “Like me?” He was amused at her touting the pseudo-Marxism of the priest.

  “Aren’t you the establishment now?” she asked, looking back toward the priest, who was wrapping up his speech.

  “We will begin the boycott on Sunday after Mass. No more purchases from the local merchants. We will be organizing van trips to the Star Market each week. We will also run a food coop out of this parish house. We’ll make it hurt them.”

  “Hallelujah,” Roxy said, standing as the crowd chanted. Steve surveyed the parish room, filled with a revivalist energy to take on the landlords. What am I doing here? he thought as the puzzle turned over in his mind. It was as if he were undercover and learning about a protest before it began, but the reports and Fox Point stuck in his mind. If the community was coming together to protest, then there had to be a pattern—someone was looking to push these people out. He would dig deeper.

  The bell on the beige rotary phone rang loudly next to the foam mattress on the floor, rudely waking Steve.

  “Hello.”

  “Is there a street address that goes with this number?”

  “Huh, who?”

  “I know you don’t live in that walk-up, so do you mind giving me the address?”

  “Tommy?”

  “Shit, you’re detective material.”

  “Yeah, why—where are you?”

  “I’m in Providence, and my dime is about to run out. Address?”

  “485 Waterman Street. Apartment 2R.”

  Ten minutes later, there was a pounding on the door. Tommy took off his sunglasses as he entered the darkened apartment.

  “Living like a vampire?” He walked to the window and opened up the bed sheet curtains, letting in streams of light. Tommy looked around the bare apartment with the desk and chair, foam mattress, and milk crate dresser-bookshelf combination. “They don’t pay you to be a cop?” He sat in the only chair. “Shit, I bet your prison cells are better furnished than this.”

  Steve was still in his athletic shorts. “I haven’t gotten around to decorating it yet,” he apologized, realizing how Spartan the place really was. He only ate there and did his one hundred push-ups and sit-ups every day.

  Tommy was tanned and dressed in a green silk shirt and cream linen trousers. The size and weight of the gold rope chains around his neck had increased. His dark curly hair had some blond highlights, and he wore a gold ring with diamonds on the middle finger of each hand.

  He began to move around the room nervously. “Not even a stereo? The divorce must have been a . . . the bitch get everything?” He looked at Steve contemptuously. “Shit, I have a sound system that could blow you through the wall—big KHL speakers and a thirty-five-inch television. Get dressed. I need something to eat, and this apartment is starting to depress me.”

  They got into Tommy’s new maroon Monte Carlo SS. “This thing can fly. Four-fifty-four V8,” Tommy boasted. “You still drive that insect?”

  “Yeah, gets me to work. What brings you to Providence?” Steve asked the question but really didn’t want to know the answer.

  “Business. A friend from Long Island put me in touch with a kid at Providence College. Gonna meet him this afternoon. Come along; I could use the company.”

  Tommy pulled the car into a parking lot near the diner on Admiral Street.

  “Tommy, I shouldn’t be doing this. I should be busting you.”

  “Relax, brother. Nothing’s gonna happen. And if the shit goes bad, you get to bust these kids and become a hero.”

  “That’s not what I mean. You got to get out of this business.”

  “Who am I hurting? It’s supply and demand. If I don’t sell it, someone else will.”

  Steve was trying to be the big brother, but Tommy had always lived on the edge. “That’s not the point. You know it. Cops are busting kids like you all the time. You’ll make a mistake, or someone you’re selling to will and they’ll nail you.”

  “Look, I’m making great money, and I deal only with friends or friends of friends. Be cool. You just sit in the booth. If these kids know I’m not naked, they won’t try anything stupid. Now look mean.”

  They entered the diner, and Tommy eyed the room, quickly picking out two nervous college kids in a booth by the window. Steve chose the last booth in front so he had his back to the wall and could see the parking lot. He could feel his .38 dig into his side as he slid into the seat.

  A tall, thin boy with acne on his face and bushy brown hair nervously approached them.

  “You Tommy?” he asked with a thick Long Island accent.

  “I said you couldn’t miss me.” Tommy looked around at the few working-class patrons. The boy sat. “My name is Willie, you know Hank. We went to high school together in Lynbrook. He told me . . .”

  Tommy cut him off. “Enough information. You cool?”

  The boy looked hurt.

  “Business.” Tommy lowered his voice. He looked conspicuous in this place in his Florida clothes

  “Yeah, sure.”

  “Okay, listen. I’m going to the men’s room. You go back to your friends and come back to me alone.” He gave the kid a hard stare until the kid nodded and got up.

  Tommy watched him talk to his friends. He looked at Steve. “Watch my back.”

  He got up casually with a gym bag in his hand and walked to the men’s room to the left of the counter. The tall boy followed with a backpack. Several minutes seemed like hours to Steve, who was watching the parking lot and the diner.

  If there was a sting, he would have recognized it by now. He k
new most of the cops by sight. And Gaeta was doing the undercover college thing. Steve had seen him up at Brown again, and he’d heard he’d made a bust at PC.

  He shifted nervously as the waitress refilled his coffee and scanned the parking lot again, trying to look down the street to see if any cars might be parked out of view. Tommy came out and motioned him to go as he dropped a twenty-dollar bill on the table for the two coffees. Getting into the car, Steve saw the two college kids with their backpack exit and scurry excitedly back toward campus. He checked the street; no one followed.

  “Easy ten grand,” Tommy said, driving back across the city with Steve directing.

  “You got to stop.” Steve was emphatic. He was afraid for him, knowing how they treated drug dealers in Providence. But he knew there was this burning anger in Tommy that was always just below the surface. Tommy always was showing Steve his money, his clothes, his car. Steve had tried to reason with him, but the money now possessed him. Money—it just wasn’t that important to Steve. He had a bookcase full of it.

  “I’m not hurting anyone. Just supplying pot the market needs.”

  “Yeah, maybe. But now you’re in my town, and it’s not a good idea.”

  “And why is it illegal? Someday it will be legal again. It’s a weed that makes people feel good. And in the meantime, I’m going to get rich.” He smiled with satisfaction, but Steve was not pleased with the answer. He knew Tommy would fly into violent rages as a kid. Now he seemed consumed with money.

  “Staying the night?” Steve asked as they returned to his apartment.

  “Not in your shithole.” They laughed. “No, I think I’ll start back to Tampa. Maybe I’ll stop somewhere on 95 past New York. How’s this cop shit going for you?”

  “I’m not the most popular guy on the force. It’s a regular thugocracy—tough to compete.”

  “You gotta watch out for yourself. No one else will.” Tommy shook his head and took a small bottle of white powder from his pants. He did two quick snorts with a small spoon.