“How’s your game?”
“Shit. I thought I’d be better by now. But that’s the lie that everyone believes. They go through life getting worse at everything but they think golf is different. They think, play more, score lower. But after ten years of retirement I still slice like a butcher.”
I walked out of the grill room with him, shook his hand, watched as he wheeled his pull cart around the clubhouse toward the flat practice green between the clubhouse and the street. I tried to see in him the massive and stern Buck Greeley of Eddie Dean’s story, but all I saw was an old man crushed small by the disappointments of his life. Except something didn’t seem right. I couldn’t put my finger on it just yet, but something didn’t seem quite right.
I crossed my arms, leaned against the side of the clubhouse, watched as Mr. Greeley sent his practice balls skittering across the green with derisive swats of his putter. He was always one for slipping out of trouble he had said of his son. He was here and then he wasn’t. Pfft. And there was that strange greeting when I first mentioned Tommy Greeley’s name. Did they find him? Him. Not his body, not his bones—him.
Maybe I was overreaching, maybe I was trying to force fit what I was seeing to the new possibility that had opened in my consciousness the night before while I sat beside my dying father, but still, these things Mr. Greeley said seemed to add up to something.
And then there were those bottles of gin in Mrs. Greeley’s china hutch. Something about them was simply wrong. She was a drinker, Eddie Dean had said she was and Jimmy Sullivan had said she was, pickled was the term he used, and I could see it in her face. But then what was it with those bottles? I remember the bottles I found scattered in the drawers of my mother’s sewing table, the table she never sewed upon. Open the drawer and there they were, bottles and bottles, empty bottles, until she got it together enough to throw them out, and start collecting the empty bottles once again. And that was it right there. When I found my mother’s bottles they were always empty. She could never keep them full for long. So how was it that Mrs. Greeley had all those bottles still untouched. Apparently of differing ages, some there for years, decades even, and all of them full. As if kept for some reason other than the alcohol.
It wouldn’t have come to me, it couldn’t have come to me except that I had been feeling strangely connected to the doomed Tommy Greeley. He had been a poor kid fighting to make good, a tall lanky irreverent kid trying to charm and wile his way to success, the only child of alcohol and bitterness seeking to transcend the limitations of his parents’ failures, and with all of that I could identify. And Chelsea had said we were so alike. And then there was the way Mrs. Greeley made my scalp itch, like only my mother could.
I never understood the first thing about my mother. Bear with me here, this has relevance here. I never understood the roots of my mother’s toxic bitterness, never understood how she ended up married to my father, how she found herself in the sad fading suburb of Hollywood, Pennsylvania, with a husband she didn’t love and a son who wouldn’t stop crying. I never understood what my mother was trying so desperately to drown with her drinking. In fact, the only thing about her life that I could possibly understand was that she left it. I couldn’t help but believe that my failure to understand my mother constituted a sucking wound, a whirlpool of ignorance that devoured much of the possibility from my life. How could I not trace my financial and romantic failures, both of them legion, to this primal failure? And how could I not therefore turn the bitterness I contracted from my mother like a disease back at her with a horrifying intensity?
I was engaged once for a short time until my fiancée ended it just before the wedding—not much to say, there was a urologist involved, which pretty much says it all—and for the longest time thereafter I drifted through life as if a spineless jellyfish adrift in a sea of bitterness. It was coming upon my mother’s birthday. I was shopping for a suitable present. The usual places. Strawbridge’s. Wanamaker’s. The State Store on Chestnut Street. I found myself holding a bottle of vodka, my mother’s spirit of choice. Nothing fancy. White Tower Vodka, I think it was, a house brand if ever there was one. And I weighed it in my hand with all its awful implications. It was what she always wanted, it was the only thing she really needed, it meant more to her than I ever could. White Tower Vodka. And I couldn’t deny the pleasure I felt as I pictured her face when she opened the gift, part greedy delight, part horror. Yes, Mom, that much I do understand about you. Drink up.
But whatever level of bitterness I had fallen into, even in that bleak year, it hadn’t been deep enough. I sent a scarf that year, nothing the next: better silence than what I had been considering. Yet I had held the bottle in my hand, I had felt its weight, I had thought it would make a jimmy of a gift. I was close.
I watched Mr. Greeley chase the chimera of a holed putt across the flat practice green at Dee Dubs for a long time as I tried to put it together, tried to figure it out. Then I pushed myself off the wall and headed toward him to ask one question more.
A line of cars was stopped at a traffic light close to the green. A kid in one of the cars yelled out “Fore.” Someone on the practice green yelled back “Five.” Mr. Greeley shook his head before standing up straight and watching me approach. He eyes narrowed when he saw my face.
“I thought we were done,” he barked.
“Just one more question.”
“I’m putting here.”
“Is that what you call it? Just tell me this, Mr. Greeley. When do they come? I’m talking of the bottles of gin, the ones your wife keeps in the china hutch. Her birthday? Her anniversary? When?”
He stared at me and then stared over my shoulder and then glanced around as if he was under an intense surveillance.
“Get the hell out of here,” he said lowly.
“Twenty years worth of gifts, twenty bottles of gin. When do they come?”
“What do you know about anything, you little bastard?”
“I know enough to stir things up. I know enough to ask everyone here if they knew what your successful son was up to before he disappeared. I could ask the neighbors too. I could spend days and days asking questions.”
“This is none of your damn business.”
“When do they come, Mr. Greeley?”
He stared at me for a long moment and I could see just then, beneath the old man’s veneer, the ferocious Buck Greeley of Eddie Dean’s story. He would have scared me then, thirty years ago, but it wasn’t thirty years ago and he didn’t scare me a whit and, when he saw that, something went out of him.
“Christmas, all right?” he said, softly.
“Okay,” I said.
He glanced around once more. “Now get the hell out of here and leave us alone.”
I felt bad about the whole thing, about the wound I had opened, so I did as he said and started walking away, and then I thought of something else. I stopped and turned around.
“Mr. Greeley,” I said. The old man stared at me with a fierce hatred. “Was your son allergic to peanuts?”
“No,” he said, a glint of triumph in his eye.
“You sure?”
“Sure I’m sure. Check the records. He wasn’t allergic to nothing.”
“Okay.”
“Nothing but fish.”
It was a warm day, the sun was shining, yet as I walked away from the putting green and then across the eighteenth fairway toward the parking lot, I couldn’t suppress a shiver. It wasn’t proof, there was nothing substantial I could take to Slocum or McDeiss, but, son of a bitch, just then I felt for a moment as if I were in the middle an old George Romero movie, where the dead had come ravenously to life.
It scared the hell out of me, all of it, yes it did, and that was still a few hours before the big silver gun was pointed straight at my chest.
Chapter
54
“WE JUST WANT to talk, Sully,” I said in the kitchen of his apartment, the bottom floor of a shabby three-decker in a part of Brockton call
ed the Lithuanian Village, my hands raised, standing between Kimberly Blue and the revolver James Sullivan held in his right hand and aimed at my heart.
I wasn’t standing between Kimberly and the gun out of any chivalric impulse, she was just better at ducking behind me than I was at ducking behind her. For a moment, as we jockeyed for position away from the gun, we were like a pair of vaudevillians trying to get the other to go first through the booby-trapped door. After you, no, after you, no, I insist, no, age before beauty, no, pearls before swine, no. We jockeyed and jostled as Jimmy Sullivan looked on with confusion, until our positions settled with me in front. “We just have a few more questions,” I said after my last attempt to gain some cover was parried by the surprisingly quick Kimberly Blue.
It was what she had found at the library, on the microfilm machine, reviewing past issues of the Brockton Enterprise, that had sent us back to Sullivan. “He was a basketball star at Cardinal Spellman,” she told me. “There’s dozens of articles about him from junior high on. He broke all his school’s scoring records, was the top prospect in the whole area. The headlines were all, SULLY LEADS SPELLMAN OVER FATHER RYAN, or SULLIVAN HITS 37 AS SPELLMAN ROLLS. There were articles talking about his being heavily recruited at U. Mass and some of the big-ten schools. Iowa. Illinois. All the I states. But that was before.”
“Before what?”
“Before the accident,” she said, handing me a photostat.
And that was what we had come to Jimmy Sullivan’s house to ask about, the accident. But he wasn’t happy to talk to us, not happy at all. Maybe what cued me to that was the fierce fear in his herky-jerky eyes when he saw us at the door of his apartment. Or maybe it was the way his mouth twitched when he asked what the hell we wanted, or the jut of his jaw as we told him. Maybe it was all those subtle signs, but what cinched it was the not so subtle sight of the gun.
“I don’t have what you’re looking for,” said Sully.
“Then why are you pulling a gun on two unarmed strangers?” I said. “Why do your eyes wheel with terror whenever the name of an old friend, twenty years gone, gets mentioned.”
“I told you to go on home.”
“We’re not here to hurt you. Whatever you’re afraid of, it is not us.”
“I got enough troubles without the ones you’re bringing.”
“We only want to hear about Tommy.”
“I’m done talking.”
“People are dying in Philadelphia over this story.”
“Shut up.”
“Three deaths already, three people somehow connected to Tommy Greeley. In just the last few weeks.”
“You’re bullshitting.”
“See this scrape on my head. I was there when the last one was killed. His building blew up with him inside. I almost caught it too. And I wasn’t part of what went down twenty years ago.” I stopped, watched as the fear flooded his eyes. “But you were, weren’t you?”
“Shut up.”
“It’s coming to a head, Jimmy. Whatever has been festering beneath the surface for twenty years has erupted. And it’s not going to stop at the Philly city limits.”
“What do you want from me?”
“Just the truth, Jimmy. About you and Tommy.”
“Get the hell out of here,” he said. “Please,” but as he made that final plea he backed away from us and the gun dropped to his side. I heard Kimberly release a breath from behind me.
“Put it away, Sully,” I said. “We’re not the ones you’re afraid of. Put the gun away and we’ll go out and have ourselves a couple of beers and we’ll talk. And you might be surprised, whatever has got you so spooked, I think we can help.”
He ended up taking us to a jauntily named joint called Café Lithuanian Village, a boxy place with opaque glass blocks for windows and a handwritten sign outside that said all you needed to know about the place. DOORS WILL BE LOCKED AT 1:00 AM. YOU MUST BE IN BY THEN. NO EXCEPTIONS. Whatever the law said about closing time, drinking at the Lit was an all-night affair. The place had a pool table, shuffle bowling, a little Budweiser fixture where the Clydesdales went round and round, and its very own weather system. Cloudy today, cloudy tomorrow, one hundred percent chance of clouds for years on end. Everything in the place had marinated in nicotine for decades.
“So what do you think of the Lit?” Sullivan said when we were finally seated, three abreast, at the U-shaped bar.
“It’s brown,” I said.
“It is that.”
A squat man behind the bar, in a black LIT MOB T-shirt, gave Kimberly a long look and a martini, gave Jimmy and me each a bottle of Bud. I put a twenty on the bar. He took my money, dropped a pile of lesser bills in front of me. I took a long pull.
“We used to come to this place as kids,” said Jimmy, looking down at his beer as he spoke, his voice flat. “Fifteen we were getting served. Six-ouncers for twenty cents. The Lit. Just down the bar there’d be a cop in uniform getting his belts in. We’d nod to each other. I won’t bust you if you don’t bust me. Brockton, man. What a place to be from. You’re way too pretty for this place.”
“Thank you,” I said.
“Not you.”
“Me?” said Kimberly. “Don’t you think my eyes are too close together?”
Without raising his head or looking at her he said, “No.”
“And my mouth’s a little too small?”
“Too small for what?”
“I don’t know. Just too small.”
“No, it’s not too small. You’re goddamn perfect.”
“I didn’t think you noticed me at all.”
“I’ve got a pulse, don’t I? If there was any traffic in the place you’d stop it.”
“That’s so sweet,” said Kimberly, beaming. “You are so sweet. Didn’t I tell you he was sweet, Victor?”
“Sweet,” I said.
“What is it you guys really want?”
“We just want to hear about you and Tommy,” I said. “Why don’t we start with the accident that gave you your limp.”
He lifted his head. “What do you know about that?”
“Just what we read in the Brockton Enterprise. Prep star arrested at hospital. The only question I have is whose idea was it in the first place, yours or Tommy’s?”
He sat for a moment, took a drink from his beer. “His,” he said finally. “I can truthfully say every bad idea I ever had in my entire life was his.”
Chapter
55
“TOMMY TOLD ME it was easy money. We cased it one night, the next we got high and went out to do it. Drove the van up, snapped the chain, opened the gate, went right in. Stealing those motorcycles was the simplest thing.”
“Why would you put yourselves at such risk?” Kimberly asked. “Tommy was headed to an Ivy League school, you were bound for glory on the basketball court. You guys had everything going for you.”
“That was the point. It wasn’t the first job we ever did, the bike thing, believe me. But everyone wanted something from us. He was his mother’s prince, I was, like, the coach’s dream on the basketball court. But we also smoked pot, screwed all the loose girls we could find, stole stuff. It was a way of keeping a part of ourselves for ourselves. And then we stole the bikes.
“We used a board as a ramp, loaded the van. One bike fell off the ramp, dented the gas tank, made all kinds of racket. Scared me shitless, but Tommy just shrugged and took another one. Three bikes. All loaded up, we replaced the chain and were gone. Done. Except Tommy wanted to test the merchandise.
“We filled up a gas can at a station and drove out to D.W. Field Park, by Cocksucker Cove—named for obvious reasons—and took out two of the bikes. When we kicked them up, God, they were screaming. I showed him how they worked, this is the gearshift, the clutch, the gas, the break. He was still trying to figure it all out when I stomped into first and blasted out. It wasn’t long before Tommy caught up. No helmets, no nothing, we just rode. The wind blasting our teeth. On a lark, we turned off road and star
ted riding on the golf course, across the fairways, tearing up the greens. Nothing felt better then tearing up them greens. Too bad it wasn’t Thorny Lea.
“Next thing I know I see Tommy atop the big hill by the stone observation tower. I rode up after him and right away I knew what he had in mind. This was the sledding hill. He wanted to go down. Hell if I was going to let him go first. I shot past him and then I was flying. The path dived down and I did too. But when I landed I landed wrong. Put down my foot to catch my balance, my knee locked and that—and that was the end of the leg.”
He lifted up his beer, looked into it as if looking for something he had misplaced long ago, took a long drink from the bottle. It was hard to watch, the way he drank, with his eyes closed, as if trying to pull something from the bottle.
“By the time Tommy came up to me I was screaming, the leg was flopping and bleeding. He did what he could, but what could he do? He tried to lift me up so I could walk, but I couldn’t move. Bones were shattered, I was bleeding and in shock. So he took off his jacket and wrapped it around the leg and sped off with his bike.
“It took me about a minute before I realized, with this demented certainty, that he wasn’t coming back. I was still high, and that’s the way you think when you’re high, but it was also Tommy, and I knew Tommy. He’d just leave, I figured, and hope the situation would go away. I screamed for help—nothing. The bugs started coming, crawling on my face and hands, lapping the blood. I tried to drag myself to help, but the bones were moving around in there. I was sure I was going to die, to bleed to death. And then something big and black flew down and settled beside me, its head bobbing like it was ready to tear me to pieces, like I was already dead. I laid back, gave the hell up.
“That’s when Tommy showed up again, that son of a bitch. I was never so happy to see anyone in my life, ever. He showed. With his father, who Tommy hated. They made a stretcher out of something and carried me back along the path to a clearing where a car was parked. They put me in the backseat, still lying down. They drove me to the hospital. And as we’re driving, they’re talking to me about what I ought to do, Tommy and Tommy’s dad. I’m passing out from the pain and they’re talking like two lawyers. I should just say I fell at my house, they told me. I was a big basketball hero, they wouldn’t do anything much to me. There was no reason to get everyone in trouble.”
Past Due Page 35
