At End of Day

by George V. Higgins

  “Ten of your fifteen dollars was the interest, five percent per week of the two-hundred-dollar whole amount, no matter how much you’d already paid back. Jakie put two dollars in his own pocket for his trouble and gave eight bucks to Brian, because the two hundred bucks you got from Jake to pay Tom was Brian’s return on his investment with Jake.

  “In the event you didn’t pay Jake, and Jakie couldn’t reason with you, well then, Jakie would tell Brian, and Brian’d send a guy around to see you. He would either make you pay, make you bleed, or make you lame. Sometimes when you couldn’t pay he’d make you choose what you did instead. For some reason this did not make it hurt less. Sometime in the late fifties, early sixties, McKeach became that guy. So, after Brian G. got things organized to his satisfaction, it all still looked the same—you still bought the same things from the same people. But the profits went to Brian.

  “McKeach’s nowhere near as smart as Brian was. He was just cute enough to see that Brian had a weakness. Brian drew the line at certain things, such as shooting a cop or ambushing a prosecutor. Double-crossing your godfather or your rabbi or your friend, unless he did something to you first. Deadly force Brian would use only on someone who gave him no choice. A competitor who wouldn’t back off? A friend who decided to go into business for himself on Brian’s turf? He became a competitor. And even then, Brian didn’t like to do it. He would’ve looked at you funny, if you’d asked him why he didn’t want to scrag anyone but a competitor—and that was how he would’ve put it—that he didn’t want to. Not that he wouldn’t. ‘Well, if I have to,’ he would’ve said. ‘If the guy gives me no choice. But it’s noisy. Bad for business.’ He was smart enough to know if people thought you’d stop at nothing, do anything, they wouldn’t be as likely to try something out on you you probably wouldn’t like.

  “Put that same question to McKeach, you wouldn’t get an explanation. McKeach’s never ruled out any tactic absolutely. Brian thought he could rule by being smart. McKeach’s nowhere near as smart, but he spotted something Brian G.’d overlooked. If you would do something to a friend and mentor that your friend’d only do to a mortal enemy, you could take your friend’s place. And his money. Ruthless beats smart. That’s why we’ve never gotten McKeach.”

  The waitress approached with the tray carrying their meals.

  Naughton said, “The problem now is that we don’t know the new kids, the blacks anna spics, dealing dope. And we still haven’t nailed the old gunmen.”

  6

  TIM SEXTON’S HOUSE AT 68 CHICKADEE Circle was a low-slung lima green vinyl-sided six-room ranch house with an attached two-car garage in a development of thirty-eight low-slung six- and eight-room ranches with attached two-car garages built on one-third-acre plots parceled out of what had been the fourteen-acre Peaceful Breeze Dairy pasture overlooking Route 138 in Canton, first offered for sale at $27,500 and $32,500 in 1958. Sexton was nine and his sister Patricia was seven when their parents, Jay and Lorraine, became the first owners.

  Trish relinquished it as her home address in 1972 when she graduated from Simmons with a degree in physical therapy and moved to Burlington, Vermont, for a job in the University of Vermont Athletic Department. Tim, having retained it during his two hitches with the First Cavalry Division, Airmobile, in Vietnam, and his six years of restorative surgery, convalescence, occupational therapy and training in VA hospitals to equip him for life as a paraplegic, in 1976 saw no reason to go elsewhere when he was at last discharged at twenty-seven to begin life on his own.

  So on the cold grey March afternoon in 1998 Rascob gloomily pulled the old Lincoln into the driveway in front of the garage that had become Tim’s broadcast studio and office. It remained the only permanent residential address he had ever had.

  “I would’ve had enough on my mind then anyway, finally going out on my own, without trying to do it somewhere else,” a reporter from the Quincy Patriot Ledger quoted him as saying in a Veterans Day profile and interview published nine years after he came home. “Dad was 62. He and Mother both wanted early retirement; they could move to Arizona and get started playing golf—while they could still walk the courses. Made a lot of sense for all of us, I took this place off their hands.

  “The resettlement lump sum for my disability was supposed to set me up—I could live as much like everybody else as you can when you’ll never walk again. Just about enough for a down payment to take this house off their hands, and get it fixed up the way I needed. And it was a place I knew, familiar. If you spend as many years as I did, one strange place after another, you get so that word ‘home’ means an awful lot to you. It gets so just about all you can think about is going back there, home, someplace that you know. So that’s what I did. They moved to Arizona. He still hasn’t broken a hundred and five. Every time she comes back here, Mother says she misses the seasons. So I guess I’m the only one who came out of the deal completely satisfied. But I did—I’m real glad of it. It made a real nice fit.

  “Probably had a lot to do with the success I’ve had in business, too, my coming home like this. Things’re a lot easier in life, people recognize your name.”

  The reporter noted Sexton had been a Boston Globe Division Three All Scholastic two years as a running back in football and once in his senior year as a guard in basketball, while his sister had made the Girls’ All Scholastic in girls’ basketball for three years.

  “There’s something people want, or need, or simply got to have, they’d rather buy it from someone that they know. Keep the money close to home. And if they know you served your country, well, there were times when I wasn’t sure that that’d be a plus, all the protests going on, but as the years’ve gone by, some of the old wounds’ve healed, I’d have to say it has been.”

  The workmen who’d converted the garage had removed the overhead doors and walled in the entries. In the left portal they installed a triple-glazed picture window with a planter underneath; the previous summer’s petunias drooped brown and dry over the front edge. Where the right garage portal had been there was a twelve-pane window with a window box below it crowded with brown dead geraniums, and an aluminum combination door beside it. The carpenters finished the job with an improved grade of lima green vinyl that still hadn’t faded quite enough to match the original siding around it, and a wheelchair ramp made of marine plywood, now delaminating, that led up to the door from the driveway. Rascob parked beside the custom-stock metallic-blue Dodge Ram Maxivan with flag-crested red, white and blue Massachusetts Disabled Veteran plates. When he crossed between the front of the Lincoln and the studio he could see Tim back to in his wheelchair at his light grey Formica control desk, black padded earphones on over his brownish grey hair gathered with a rubber band into a ponytail, hunching toward the microphone on the boom rising from the panel top.

  Inside, the small black speaker cube on the reading table in the reception area broadcast a raspy male voice Rascob didn’t recognize. “Hell the Indians, ’s what I say—bleedin’ hearts moanin’ and groanin’, we stole this country from ’em. Did no such thing. That was four hundred years ago, almost. Never mind what happened then—we weren’t the ones that did it.

  “Now’s what we should be concerned with, and the crying need in this state now’s for better education. And, as we now know, quickest way to fix it’s with charter schools. Need more of them, better funding for the ones we’ve got. And the way to get it’s not to sit back, twiddle our thumbs; let the Indians start up casinos here, like they got Connecticut and so forth—and keep all the money. It’s to do the same’s Nevada does—license private-run casinos. Only we do it right, here, and really screen the people who apply, so the Mafia stays out. Which you can’t do in Nevada because the mob owns the place—didn’t exist before they got there.

  “And then really soak ’em, everyone comes to gamble. Get the money for ourselves. And our needs, for a change. We’re the ones who pay for ev’thin’.”

  Through the double-glazed big window set into the maple-ve
neer sheet-paneled wall between the reception area and the studio, Rascob could see Sexton in right profile, his right hand at his throat and the microphone aimed at it, the ponytail swishing back and forth across his shoulders as he moved his head. His reddish muttonchop sideburns and goatee looked freshly trimmed. Over the padded door next to the big window a red bulb encased in a cage made of thick grey wire burned over a white sign with red letters: “SILENCE PLEASE—ON AIR.”

  Tim’s wife, Theresa, was at her desk talking on the phone. “Two to four,” she said. “Then we cut away for Mutual News, weather forecast, Today in Sports, Market Reports and Outlook, so forth, ’til seven. Then Musical Selections for the Dinner Hour, which we buy all on tape, no local announcing except station breaks. Then we come back on again live with Nashville Sounds, which we do right out of here, eight ’til ten. Then Evening Wrap-up, national anthem, and sign off at ten-thirty. Back onnie air at five-thirty A.M.”

  She smiled when she looked up at Rascob and he grinned at her, mouthing Terry, and pantomiming a kiss. She shook her head, pretending to blush, and fluttered the fingers of her right hand, the long nails painted chrome green. “Well, why don’t I just send you a list then, what’s available, and you can look it over and make your own decision. If I could just have your address again. I know you’ve given it to me before and I must have it someplace here, but just to be on the safe side, make sure I get it right.…”

  Rascob sat down on the molded green plastic-and-chrome chair next to the reading table in front of her desk and watched her write, saying “mmm huh” twice into the phone, wondering again what magic Sexton had used to attract and capture her. She was in her midthirties, too young to have been the high school sweetheart who’d been proud of her man in uniform and pledged eternal love when he went away to fight for his country—and then’d bravely, and stupidly, stayed loyal and devoted when he came back, long afterward, doomed to a diminished life. With her assets she should not have been obliged to settle for a hopeless cripple; her face was ordinary enough, but she was tall, 5’ 9” or so, and had an excellent body.

  To Rascob the tight jeans and knitted tank tops she wore, and the way she moved, suggested at least a normal sexual appetite. Assuming that her husband satisfied her, and not daring to ask how they managed, each time he came to Canton he imagined her doing the same thing with him that he thought she must do with Tim—naked, straddling his erection and, once coupled, moving up and down on it, flexing and relaxing her leg muscles, her tits bobbing in rhythm. As usual Rascob found the image cause for arousal as well as envy, and had to adjust his position.

  The speaker broadcast a different voice, initially disturbing; metallic, distant and echoing. “Well, yeah, the idea is appealing. But keep in mind that was the whole argument years ago, behind the state lottery we’ve got now. Most successful in the country, what we hear is true. Hard to remember now but it was supposed to go to finance public education—solve all of our problems. A bonanza it’d be.

  “Well, I guess it has been, if you don’t count all the damage, ruined families and heartache that it’s caused. Problem gamblers it’s created, working men and women who’ve lost everything they had. The revenue’s regularly diverted to just about every other boondoggle our crafty politicians’ve been able to dream up—and our schools’re still in crisis.

  “Far as I can see, the only people it’s turned out to be a real bonanza for’re the ones who run it, run the lottery, and the people who run the ad agencies they hire to promote it. So we might want to think twice, ’fore we did something like that.”

  “Well, I’d want to think twice about doing that,” Theresa said happily into the phone, not seeming to notice that she’d echoed her husband. “We’re just a little station. Only five thousand watts, and the people who listen to us don’t move around a lot. They stay home all day, have us on in their kitchens. Not the ones you’re thinking of, people who commute back and forth to Boston. Our tower’s down by Ninety-five, so our broadcast area’s Holbrook on the east to Sharon onna west; Avon anna West Side of Brockton to the south. If they tried to listen to us when they’re driving into Boston, well, they couldn’t do it—they’d lose our signal, soon’s they got the other side of the Blue Hills.

  “And anyway, people don’t think about doing inside painting when they’re in their cars. They think about doin’ that when they’re home, with all those dingy-greasy painted walls in front of them. So with what you’ve got to offer, I’d think you’d be much better off promoting your Radio Paint Sale during the first hour, two to three. That’s the time of day I think people who’re thinking about painting, sprucing up the inside of their homes, mean so much to them and all, most money most of them’re ever gonna spend on any one thing their whole lives, that’s when they’ll be thinkin’, kind of paint they ought to get.” She listened for a while and then said, “Well, yes, why don’t you do that. Think it over, and then call me, and we’ll see what we can set up.”

  She hung up the phone. “Mister Roth,” she said, “True Value Store over Cobb’s Corner. Calls every week or two, ’ever things get slow. Always the same set of questions. And I give him the same answers, pretty nearly, like I know what I’m talking about. Which I know I do with pret’ nearly all the people who own stores and stuff that call in here about askin’ about doin’ ads—sound like I know more about their businesses’n they do. But with most of them I only have to do it once—must be Mister Roth doesn’t write down what I say. Or else he just gets lonesome.”

  “Doesn’t have Tim’s show on in the store?” Rascob said.

  “Not so I can hear it when he calls here,” she said. “Of course maybe he does—I never go in his store. When I need something from the hardware store, I go the Home Depot in Avon. He could have it on out in front or something. Where the people who’re shopping can hear it. We always suggest that, and then stress it to new sponsors when we’re selling air time. How many of our advertisers tell us they keep us on all day, in their places of business. How much it helps.”

  She frowned. “I don’t know’s it actually does help that much, though—people actually pay attention to it. I never listen the radio, it’s on in someplace where I’m shopping. Besides, if it is on when you’re already in there shopping, and you hear it, how’s it do them any good? Doesn’t get you in there, which I think is what they want when they advertise. You’re already in there, knew what they had to offer, if you hear us in their store—that’s why you’re there.”

  The speaker broadcast a male voice loudly praising a Subaru dealership in Sharon. “I hate that ad,” she said, and shuddered. “He’s the guy that owns the place. Sounds just like that in person, too. Not too many of our advertisers do, but he does. ‘The personal touch.’ That’s what he calls it. Thinks if he hollers enough at you, and laughs all the time, you’ll like him and do what he says.” She paused and frowned again, then looked at the watch on her left wrist and folded her hands on the blotter. “Tim’s almost through,” she said. “Off in less’n two minutes.”

  “You’re both doing okay?” Rascob said.

  “Oh … yeah,” she said. “I guess so. It’s … you know how it is. Same-old same-old, one day after another. You think, ‘Jeez, I wish something’d happen.’ And then something does, to someone you know, like their kid gets diagnosed with multiple sclerosis or something. Then you think, ‘Jeez, if that happened to us …’ So yeah, I guess we’re doin’ okay.”

  She smiled sadly. “Still not makin’ any kinda living this thing here though, that’s what you’re gettin’ at,” she said. “Not that I’m knockin’ it or anything—it’s a godsend to him, this thing. His handle on the world; how he makes himself matter. He goes around and gives his talks, school auditoriums, church basements, and he says his life’s the support group, Missing Cords Bind Tighter. That makes everybody feel real good, that they’re doing good, and when you’re facing every day the kind of stuff folks in their position hafta, morale is darn important.

  “But
what he tells them isn’t true. MCBT’s important to him, but WCTN—this station’s what keeps him alive and sane. Don’t know where he’d be, what on earth he’d do without it.”

  Tim’s resonating artificial voice came through the speaker, over the sound of Scott Joplin’s “The Entertainer” building in the background. “And that’s it for today, boys and girls, here around Tim’s Cracker Barrel. Tune in tomorrow … talk about … what’s goin’ on … what ought to be … and … what really … shouldn’t. Stay with us right here now for the—Mutual—News—of the Day.” In the background the concluding bars of the piano music swelled up and died out.

  “But that don’t mean it’s started bringing in enough to pay the rent,” she said. “What it costs to run it—don’t believe it ever will. Wasn’t for that check from the VA every month, I don’t know what we’d do. Wouldn’t party—that’s for sure.” The speaker went dead. She pursed her lips and twisted the fingers of her left hand with her right, studying them. She shook her head once. “ ’s why,” she said, “ ’s why I always feel as though I should be glad to see you.” She looked up. “Even though I’m really not.” The red light went off. She stared at him sadly. “Not that it’s anything to do with you,” she said. “Just the reason, you know?”

  He raised his eyebrows and shrugged.

  “Yeah, I know,” she said, “any more’n you’re really glad to see me. Just means that you hadda come here again. You wouldn’t if you didn’t hafta.” She pushed her chair back from the desk. “You can go in now,” she said, getting up. “I’m going in the house, get him something to drink. Can I bring you something? Iced tea or Diet Coke? Lou was over last night but I think we may still have some beer.”