by Chuck Logan
Choose left or right.
Two helmets on one line moved the play to a jousting tournament.
Three swords in a row summoned the test of Excalibur and the stone.
Blackjack was cold sober business. You had to count. You had to mind the rules. But this game, with its colorful marquee of castles and armor, took him back to the realm of childhood wishes. He stepped up to a machine like a knight errant confronting a squat Sphinx.
Am I worthy. Judge me. If he pulled the sword from the stone on his first pass Caren Angland would call him up. He would write the biggest story of his life, and they’d have to take him back on general assignment.
He would only use the money he had in his pocket.
Promise.
But soon the two twenties he’d slipped from Barb’s wallet were gone. Then all of his pocket change. He had to amend the rules. Just this once.
At the check-cashing booth, he slapped down his last piece of plastic, a MasterCard to which he’d transferred all his other balances; 5.9 percent APR, no finance charge for twelve months.
The circuits rejected $100.
“Fifty,” he told the bored clerk. Fifty also drew a pass.
Probably the clip of the service charge exceeded his credit limit.
“Forty.” Forty went through.
With two more twenties he returned to his machine, fed an Andy Jackson into the slot. Eighty credits electronically clicked up on the screen. Coolly, after toying with him, the machine gulped down the eighty. His hand shook, sweaty, as he tendered the second bill into the electronic maw.
An ascending stream of chimes erupted in back of him.
Big winner. Coins steadily clinked, little silver hammers striking base metal. Other people were winning.
My turn, dammit.
Like mockery, from across the vast room a PA voice com-plimented Tony Lofas of Grand Forks, who had won twenty-three hundred dollars on Dollar Double Diamond.
The drum in front of him cocked and spun and cocked and spun and nothing matched up. Change the pattern. He cashed in his few remaining credits so he could feed the coins manually into the slot on every play. Soon his stake had shrunk to a pile he could hold in the palm of his hand.
More slowly, the quarters dropped down the cool steel gullet.
Grimly, he plugged in three of his dwindling quarters, selected the center line and spun the drum.
The clamor, the cheap electronic champagne bubbles, the needy human press all around, receded. Tom was alone, locked in the slot.
Three swords in a row.
A trumpet fanfare. A new display magically swam up from the electronic alchemy. A forest grotto. Two princes stood on either side of a sword plunged to the hilt in a huge rock.
The prince on the right was short and dark, with a sinister, spaded black beard and red and black livery. Tom favored the younger man on the left, who was blond, broad-shouldered, and clean-shaven. Like he might look if he got in shape. Tom even had a lucky nickname for Mr. Left. The pillow talk nickname Ida whispered in the dark.
“C’mon, Danny,” he chanted under his breath as he keyed the left button.
The blond prince reached forward, and for a beat, his hand paused on the hilt. Then, effortlessly, with a smooth confident kingly sweep of his arm, he drew the sword from the stone and held it triumphantly over his head to a cloudburst of special effects.
Thunder pealed, lightning bolts electrified the display. The boulder pulsed red as a living heart. A crown appeared on the winner’s head. A regal purple robe draped his shoulders.
Sparkles of anointing energy closed the circuit between Tom’s rapt face and the screen.
A scroll above the stone announced You WIN 1000.
Only quarters, not dollars. But it was a jackpot. Someday he’d have this feeling in Las Vegas or Atlantic City. And it would be thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars.
“Yes!” affirmed Tom James. He punched the cash-out button and listened to the abundant shower of falling silver.
8
All of his adult life, Broker despised and avoided working routines. Most of his sixteen years as a cop he’d spent undercover, preferring the solitary risks over paperwork and a predictable schedule.
Lone wolf, they called him. Misfit.
As he removed gobs of clean baby clothes from the drier and stuffed them into a plastic hamper, he mused that his life resembled the baby socks he held in his hand: turned inside out.
Patiently, he hauled the basket into the kitchen, wiped down the table and began to fold the clothes. His muscular hands were thick-veined, knuckle prominent, turned on a lathe of heavy labor. Of physical shock. They dipped into the laundry basket like the jaws of a steam shovel, extracted a tiny white Onesie undergarment and gently smoothed it on the table.
Old habits from the army; get out the wrinkles, make uniform folds. Precise little stacks. Socks, sleepers, Onesies, miniature pastel T-shirts: all lined up like a toy vision of peace.
Friends urged him to take on a housekeeper/nanny when his folks went on vacation. But he insisted on doing all the cooking and cleaning himself. After two weeks solo in babyland he was amazed at the sheer volume of work his sixty-five-year-old mother had put into taking care of Kit.
Going on week four, he began to accumulate low-grade resentments. Every itty-bitty sock he turned into its mate was another tiny contention against Nina, who had left him alone with a child.
Because she insisted on pursuing her career.
Soon he’d have to build a whole new wall of shelves to house his hoarded arguments. Petty. Broker caught himself.
Like his curiosity about Caren’s odd phone message. Keith was in trouble. Well-good.
He did not take malicious pleasure in others’ troubles; but Broker was not surprised that Keith Angland had stepped into it. News traveled the cop grapevine.
Keith’s famous control-freak thermostat went haywire after he was passed over for the second time on the promotion exam for captain. His sour grapes took the form of racial slurs hurled at the new police chief.
So Broker could imagine the depth of Caren’s agony; Keith had become a loose cannon. Probably the mayor had ex-punged them from his Christmas party short list.
Still, he was curious. And she had sounded overwrought on the phone message. Too embarrassed, maybe, to talk to her circle of friends, most of whom were police wives.
So call good-old, regular baby-changing Broker in his new life up in the north woods. Broker, never a womanizer, was too steady and old to draw any romantic inferences from the call. She probably wanted him to lobby old colleagues on Keith’s behalf.
Of course, he decided not to pursue it-but-if she called again and actually spoke to him, he would give a good listen.
It was just that he had trouble taking Caren seriously after she married an ambition-driven bastard like Angland.
He folded a pink T-shirt with Pooh Bear on it and placed it on top of the T-shirt stack. With his palms, he plumped the edges of the shirts so they made an even line.
As he reached for a Polarfleece jumper, he did admit to a small amount of satisfaction that Caren would turn to him.
Vindication, maybe.
In the middle of this thought, the phone rang. He reached over, plucked it off the wall mount, and when no one said anything for the first few seconds, he thought, uh-huh, her again, working up the spit to finally make actual contact.
And he said, “Is that you, Caren?”
The silence stretched out a few more seconds and then a clear chiseled voice, pitched between surprise, pique and command assurance, stated with great emphasis: “What?”
The connection from Tuzla was like right next door.
“Jesus, Nina?” he blurted.
“Check me if I’m wrong, but you did say Caren-as in wife number one?”
Broker’s explanation sounded lame. All true, honest, but lame. “That’s right. She called and left a message on the machine. I thought you were her callin
g again.”
“Hmmm,” observed Nina eloquently.
“Yes, I agree,” said Broker. Then he waited to see if she would take it further. When she didn’t, he asked, “How are you?”
“Fair. How’s baby?”
“Every day she looks more and more like Winston Churchill.”
“I miss that fat little kid, I really do.”
“I know you do.”
“Okay, look, it’s five in the morning here. I’ve been on patrol for six days and I’m beat. Thing is, I weaseled a leave over Christmas. I’m attending a conference stateside…”
“What kind of conference?”
“Sorry.”
He understood. Not a secure line. The meeting proba THE BIG LAW/41
bly dealt with NATO ratcheting up the pressure on nabbing war criminals. It had been in the news.
“How long can you get away?” he asked.
“I’ll come in Christmas Eve and leave on the twenty-eighth.
Best I can do.”
“Sounds great.”
“Broker, you spent a mint on that house and we still don’t have a computer. E-mail would be a lot easier for me here than finding telephone time.”
Broker frowned. “I hate computers. Bad enough I have the TV. Besides, I like hearing your voice.”
“Gawd. I married an analog cavefish. Caren, huh?” she needled.
“Knock it off,” he protested.
“Kiss Winston for me. See you. Love.”
The connection ended. Broker hung up the phone and sat down in the chair next to the table. He leaned forward, rested his elbows among the mounds of infant clothing. Mild rebuke knocked the idle kinks out of his thoughts. Foolish, daydream-ing about Caren Angland and her social turmoil when Nina had been soldiering in the snow.
He carried the folded clothes to Kit’s room, crept in and piled them on her dresser. On the way out, he checked her, bathed in the soft night-light. Definitely Churchill, painted by Rubens. Carefully, he pulled the door shut behind him.
9
Tom had not been given a house key. Ida showed him where she kept one hidden for emergencies, under a flowerpot to the side of the house, next to the garage. But he thought it best to knock. The door of her bungalow in the quiet neighborhood of Highland Park swung open. She wore a long-sleeved pearl sweater that buttoned to the throat. A long, slim gray wool skirt reached down over leather boots.
Her naturally wavy shoulder-length auburn hair was rep-licated in her thick arched eyebrows. The eyebrows framed intelligent brown eyes set wide over smooth cheekbones. A narrow slightly crooked nose. And then-the generous lips teed up on that chin she got from the Wicked Witch of the West in The Wizard of Oz.
With a firm grasp on the curious power of her physical presence, Ida Rain disdained wearing all but the barest touches of makeup on her unlined face.
How long could she go on like this. Renouncing age. One more brutal Minnesota winter. Two. Eventually she’d crash on the far side of forty, snowflakes would stick to the corners of her eyes and crack into crow’s-feet. She’d shed smiles and store hurt between the pages of her heart like pressed nettles.
But tonight her husky voice, like her hair, was gorgeous.
An editor to the core, she cut straight to the nut graph: “You didn’t really have battery trouble today.”
Tom grinned and spread his hands.
“You’re on to something, aren’t you?” She reached over and lifted his left hand and inspected it with a cool thumb and forefinger. “And you went out to celebrate.” She rubbed the tips of his fingers and came away with a light gray metal talc. She dropped his hand. It was her way of letting him know she’d suspected, and had now confirmed, that he’d been to the casino. The residue of the coin tray. He resented her knowing smile and cocked eyebrow. He’d forgotten to wash his hands.
“Sally, in the library, told me you snuck a file out of the building. Keith Angland. The bigmouthed cop. I talked to Wanger, and he said you were asking questions about him.
This has something to do with the federal building, doesn’t it?”
“What makes you think that?” he toyed.
“The timing.”
News was their inky Spanish fly. Curiosity itched in her voice. “You’re off your beat,” she probed.
“Just checking something out,” he said tightly.
She waited for more, and when she saw that it wasn’t forthcoming, said, “You’ll tell me first.”
“Of course.”
She nodded and with a brief knowing smile allowed a be-guiling tease to swing in her voice. “Just watch your step, Danny.”
They laughed at the same time, which they took as a good omen.
“I won. Get your coat. We’re going out to eat tonight. I’m buying,” said Tom.
Danny.
Going down for the third time, Tom had felt someone firmly take his hand. Ida. Quietly, they dated. Ida suggested that he try writing fiction to diffuse his funk about being transferred down to the burbs. Writing a novel was every reporter’s daydream, so he dusted his off and put a few more hours into two chapters about a private eye who had been a reporter. He gave his PI the name Danny Storey. Ida liked the character’s name but critiqued his story line as improbable and convo-luted. After a few discussions the two rough chapters disappeared into the desk drawer in her study in the four-season porch off the living room and were forgotten.
Except in her bedroom in the dark.
Calling him Danny was her foreplay spoof in bed. For all her powers of observation, she had no idea how deeply the name goaded him or how severely he had come to hate the boundaries of his life. How he resented needing her to keep his job.
Later, after dinner, after they returned to her house, she undressed in the ritual darkness. It was also in this darkness she moved her damn pistol around, like a pea under a shell-from her purse to the bed table drawer, sometimes even under her pillow. He waited and thought: she was the face of realism. Hold on to realism and it will save you from desperation. You will make do.
After you were with Ida awhile you lost your bearings.
Was she extremely beautiful or disfigured? Certainly she was old-fashioned, a Freudian machination straight from a Hitchcock film. Stylishly repressed, precise; the best-dressed woman in the office.
But in the dark…
Like a guerrilla army, she owned the night. Her queen-size bed rustled with satin sheets, the air was moist and humidified, there were lotions, knowing fingers. She’d evoked in Tom something his pallid ex-wife of twelve years could never comprehend. Something called good sex.
Then Tom and Ida had joined hands and skipped over the slim, but unforgettable, margin that separated good sex from great sex.
“Can’t we leave the light on?” he asked.
“Why?”
“I want to see you do things. In the dresser mirror.”
“No lights,” said Ida.
“Never?”
“Not tonight. Sometime, maybe.”
“When?”
“When you tell me what you’ve got going.”
“No. Oh.” Yes. Some light, faint slivers, eked through cracks in doors, glowworms of moonlight noodled between the drapes and windowsills. Just enough to make her out, subtle and expert. Silky smooth white muscle, rising. Tongue out. Red Joker’s grin.
“C’mon, tell me what you’re on to…” she whispered.
They practiced together, keeping up their skills. Grouping the thrills in tidy clusters. Better together in practice than they would be in real life because they were not each other’s first choice.
They took turns pleasing each other. When her turn came round, she sighed:
“Yes, Danny, yes.”
He held on. Shut his eyes. Pretended. She was Caren Angland and he could hit the jackpot and win the Pulitzer and he was someone else-the Danny of their closet rapture.
His orgasm flamed in deep space. Elated and sad and lonely, he held realism in his arms, and in a mome
nt of pure hell, he knew this was as good as it was ever going to get.
10
At 4 A.M. Phil Broker and his daughter slept on the Lake Superior shore, twenty-two miles south of the Ontario border.
Two hundred seventy miles to the south, in Highland Park, Tom James snored in the soothing bondage of Ida’s satin sheets. Twenty miles to the east of Ida’s bed, the black water of the St. Croix River slid between rippled sheets of ice, below the Angland house. On the second floor, behind her locked door, Caren lay on top of a down quilt, rigid as a crusader chiseled on a medieval tomb.
She wove tiny threads of hope in the dark. At the last possible moment Keith would catch himself and pull back from the edge.
The phone rang. Keith’s bed squeaked in the separate bedroom down the hall. He lurched awake. Thump, his feet struck the polished floor.
Slippers slapped down the hallway past her doorway and descended the stairs. Sounds. Light switches. More footsteps.
Ten minutes later, headlights swung through her windows.
Tangled shadows from the oaks spooled across the wall above her headboard. The lights switched off. The antique door knocker on the front door rapped three times.
Downstairs, the door opened. A brief muffled conver sation carried up the stairwell. Women circle and embroider their communication. The two male voices dumped their load of subjects and verbs like bags of sand. The door slammed.
In the crash of the shutting door Caren felt the jolt of his anger gather primal force. He was cold gravel and ice, a fast-moving glacier who took the stairs two at a time. The knob on her latched door rattled. When she didn’t respond, he hit the door with his heavy shoulder.
The door splintered on its hinges. “God, you make me sick,” he hissed as he pushed through the broken door. His breath smelled meaty with whiskey and rage. He wore his old Minnesota Gophers warm-up, with untied Nikes on his feet. Shoelace tips whipped the floor.
He pulled her off the bed, pushed her down the stairs into the kitchen and shoved her in a chair.
