by Steve Almond
“Charlie’s Angel,” Aura said.
“Sure. A beauty with a gun. That’s all I mean.”
Peck called me over to scowl. “Never,” he said. “Not in a trillion years.”
But The Don showed no signs of letting up. He murmured along, rueful, humbled, refusing to examine her décolletage. And, as happened on those nights when the Don was on, Aura stayed with him, reeled in by his belief. There was no thought of the Romanians, not with Aura scooted to his side of the table, running her nail along his lifeline, leaning into his arm.
Until they appeared, the same two, stationed on each side of The Don, like ill angels. “If you’ll excuse,” The Don said. “These gentlemen appear to want a word.”
I crouched in the doorway to the alley while the two of them shouted at The Don, who waved his delicate hands and fed them a series of whispered answers. This made me wonder if The Don knew Romanian, might even be Romanian, a fact he vaguely denied whenever Peck called him Gypsy Moth.
Whatever he said didn’t sway his antagonists. One held and the other punched, a brisk blow over the left eye. The sound was awful, a soft buckling of flesh. Then one of them said: “Next time, the nose.”
Off they went and in flew The Don, breathing heavily, waving me off, weaving through the dim back room and back to the table, where Aura sat in pretty confusion. “My apologies,” he said. His cape dangled, sodden at the hem.
“Oh! Oh my gracious!” Aura stared at the blood trickling down the Don’s cheek.
“Nothing,” he said. He dabbed with a cocktail napkin. “Nothing.”
“Are you in some kind of trouble?” Aura said.
“Don’t be silly,” The Don said. “You’re being silly.”
By the end of July he was staring backwards into his drinks. “Remember Lucinda Durban?” he’d say. “Remember Gloria Apodoca?”
Gloria Apodoca, Gloria with her buttery skin and coconut breath, her crisp bouffant and tapered waist. Gloria on a one-day layover from a million miles away, an heiress of Filipino extraction, pleasantly soused and dreaming dreams of simpler oceans. The Don wooed her with his every fiber, with everything he hoped to be and knew he wasn’t, regaling her with his inadequacies, arguing against excessive drink, teasing out (then nestling into) her exorbitant loneliness. By one they were dancing a sweet, sloppy tango, The Don cooing into her ear, wearing her arms like a loose sweater, their feet drifting across the scabby pine until Peck grunted, switched off the lights, left the key on the bar.
The Don asked me if I remembered, and I remembered.
Gloria and everything besides, the sickly green stench of the pickled eggs next to the register, so like the reek of low tide that knifed in from the breakers as we were setting up, dusk flared across the gritty sand and slaps of light on the Atlantic, silvercaps of fallen sun, the soft rumble of surf, vendors under striped umbrellas, the aroma of hot dog and cinnamon bun sizzling out, kids dizzy from the Big Dipper and Tilt-a-Whirl, thumping along the walk in new pink skin, mothers pushing strollers in plump embarrassment, old couples bent like pigeons over crusts of gossip. I saw myself growing old in this place, a regular amid its cunning hopes. And The Don was at the center of all that, a first and final hope of seduction. It never occurred to me that he might be on sabbatical from his own appointed end. He seemed to be making it up as he went along.
In the lone surviving photo of those months—an era my parents still refer to as “that unfortunate summer”—one views The Don in a crowd scene, along the route of some forgotten parade. His fingers are tweezing the billfold of the stout German in front of him. An expression of surprised mirth lights the lower half of his face: Look what I found.
As the mulch of August set in, departure haunted the awnings. The clientele sagged in prestige. The gift shops threw up sales. And The Don grew brazen. He howled over dull Pennsylvanians, pledged his love to teenage drink pimps from the Shore, spilled rum on a couple from Ithaca, staggering now in the glitter of unintended slapstick.
“A fool,” Peck said. “A fool’s fool.”
I didn’t argue, though something in his futility cheered me. He tried. He was still trying.
The second weekend in August, the Romanians appeared again and collared him in the middle of the bar. “Bashed his fucking head,” Peck said. “With a fucking, like, one of those walking sticks, those carved numbers with a silver tip. He went down like potatoes, this girl he’s working going off like a siren and the Romas screaming gumbah this and gumbah that.” Peck shook his rag. “I called the pigs and you know what that crazy fucking thief does? Splits out the back door.”
I couldn’t help feeling that my absence had allowed this. I would have been able to protect The Don, I was sure, to screen the Romas long enough for him to escape. It would have been a thrilling, dangerous thing, a chase down the purring neon, the knobbled wood.
Instead, I’d been up in Connecticut, skulking around my parents’ house, swinging my father’s golf clubs sort of close to lamps, fishing Merits from my mom’s purse. I fantasized about upending the dinner table, or slipping my father’s wallet from the back pocket of his trousers. But nothing ever happened. I passed the lamb, he passed the peas. We conducted our small transactions under a cloud of disappointment.
“No lie,” Peck told me. “He better get right with those psychos. I will not have this kind of shit ruining our good name.”
When The Don appeared the next night, the regulars shook their heads and moved away. But this was his place. This was where he came, where his public self resided, and even Peck, burrowed in his loamy hate, even Peck understood this.
“You okay?” I said.
The Don had arranged his bandage like a beret, though it had bled through a bit. “Listen up. Yonder sits my Minerva alone, you see? A G & T girl, dollars to donuts. When she gets oiled up, even her snatch smells like gin. Deliver this drink, Pancho, with my compliments. Don’t give me that look. Excessive responsibility will ruin the lines of your face. Go.” He held the drink out.
“Amazing,” Peck said, watching him depart. “Disgusting. Those Romas are going to bust his head like a melon.”
Only it wasn’t the Romas who got him. Not the ones we expected, anyway.
Labor Day weekend came at last, and steam rose from the water at dawn, a chill rolling in on the salty back of night, signaling the end of summer. The Don had spent the previous week in jail, having plucked a gold locket from a friend of a friend of a local deputy, then made matters worse by fencing into the hands of the new district narc. He’d gotten greedy as he sensed the tourists drifting away, back to their staplers and particle board. During the year, Peck said, The Don worked as a hotel clerk.
So on this Sunday he was restless for a taste, a last fresh face, restless even after he settled in with a young summer waitress, washed-out, muddy-eyed, full of talk about her departure, bored and boring and easy. The Don jolted her drinks with nips from the flasks that lined his cape in velvet loops. He made no indication of noticing when the second girl—the little Romanian, that is—settled into the doorway.
She was very real in her grief and even slightly beautiful without her hat. A thin glow rose from her shoulders. The hair braided down her back swayed like black rope.
The Don ignored her. Determinedly, at great expense to his élan, he ignored her. The other patrons, the regulars even, those serious about the business of killing themselves with drink, began to look upon her with pity. Part of it was how cold she looked, in just her white gown. You wanted to throw a shawl on her.
“Pregnant as diapers,” Peck scoffed. “Look at that gut. What did I tell you?” Peck had been telling me this for some weeks, though I had chosen not to believe him, attributing his speculation to envy. Now there was no denying: the swell of her belly shone under the streetlamp. Her eyes were somber and she looked steadily at The Don, from ten feet away.
“Do you, like, know that girl?” the waitress said finally.
“Nonsense,” The Don said. “You�
��re the girl I know.”
“I think you better settle this, Romeo,” said the waitress.
The Don seized her hand and in this seizure his composure dissolved. He swiveled around and drew his lips back, as if to growl at the little Romanian, and she stepped away from the light, looking terribly young and sad and unsurprised in her sadness.
I had seen, over the three months of our acquaintance, The Don perform a number of disreputable actions, had even assisted him in lesser transgressions. But I’m not sure I’d seen him do anything dishonorable. This action, I mean, struck me immediately as a betrayal.
The waitress, to her credit, shoved off.
Now The Don did a quick sweep of the bar, his glance settling on me for a moment—not even a moment, a flickering—before he looked away and moved to the door and spoke to the girl in low hurried tones. We could see them in the halo of the storefront, him looming over her, all shrugs and footwork, running his line, her nodding, seeming to want to lean against him.
The Don looked up and saw us, our panting tongues and red eyeballs. He scuttled her away, down the sidewalk.
“The last of the red-hot lovers,” Scoonie said.
“Maybe the Romas put her up to it,” I said.
“Damn straight they put her up to it,” Peck said. “Those guys are her brothers, you little fucknut. They’re family.” Peck tapped his wedding band on a faux brass accent. He had a wife and a fat little kid stashed away somewhere. He’d shown me the photos one time. “I gotta get out of this place,” Peck said. “I gotta grow the fuck up.”
We figured The Don might go AWOL after this business with the girl, but a few hours later he was back. I was alone, stacking chairs, running water for the mop. Peck had recently granted me the duties of closing: dumping garbage in the bacterial Dumpster, fingering wet butts from the drink drains, dragging the gray mop across the gray floor. This was authority.
The Don hovered out front in his cape, like a tattered raven. I wondered how long he’d been there. “Let’s do a nightcap,” he said. “A whiskey. Neat.” He showed me his teeth; I couldn’t tell if he was grinning or wincing.
“I’ve got to close,” I told him.
“Don’t be, you’re being silly.” He pushed past me. “Come on, Panch.”
“Seriously,” I said. “Peck’s counting on me.”
He cocked his head. “You really take this stuff serious, don’t you?”
“What stuff?”
“The whole routine. Okay. You work. I can wait.”
I took a few swipes with the mop and listened to him hum one of his melancholy songs, a song like you might hear at the end of an opera, after the big deathbed scene. I laid the mop against the counter. “What happened with that girl?” I said.
The Don shook his head. “Can’t a man get a drink around here? Is that still possible? Come on, now. I’m buying.”
I set out a tumbler for him. Peck would have made him lay his money down, kept him honest. But I didn’t have that kind of heart. And, the truth is, though I felt a great anger toward The Don, I also felt flattered. He was here, after all. I imagined he’d run from somewhere far away to seek my counsel.
I poured him his whiskey, neat, and The Don took a gulp. “What it is,” he said. “People try to hem you in, okay? That’s a lot of what life is about, that process. A guy like me, let’s face it: I’m not the best-looking guy. I got the Potapenko complexion, brown as old onions, these ratty eyes. And my earnings capacity, I mean, I’m not about to franchise. But these are just things to overcome, okay? Because when I’m on my game, when I’m on, Pancho, they don’t stand a chance. I see a woman and love her so purely, the motions of her face and her body, that shyness and that bravery underneath, the length of her calf, that flesh where tit meets rib. And that love, it’s like a kind of leverage. When I start to love a woman, in that first second or two, instantly I mean, I become what I want to be. I amaze myself.” The Don smiled. Loose skin bracketed his mouth.
“Sure,” I said.
Outside, a drizzle had started in, and the gulls shrieked. The Don slapped at the plastic banner over the bar, a buy-one-get-one-free Labor Day humdinger. He was back to looking debonair, dragging his fingers through his hair. “You never know who’s watching,” he said. And it was true. You never did know. When The Don was on, when he was humming, when even the chintzy lights of the strip agreed to illuminate him, there was always somebody watching, some girl, some possibility. It was only a matter of recognizing this possibility and seizing it. That’s what I wanted: to be a part of the play; to be, someday, the star.
“What are you going to do, Pancho?” The Don said.
“I’m going to stay. Peck says they’ll give me a shot at bartender before long.”
“Peck says.” The Don snorted softly. “How old are you?”
“Almost twenty.”
“So what—you’re going to make a life in the alcoholic arts?”
I had not, to this point, conceived of my life as a totality, a thing, a process that, in the long term, might be determined by short-term decisions.
“For now,” I told him. “You’re the one who said it; about being who you want and all. My folks, this whole plan they have for me. It’s not real. It’s phony.” I took a swig of whiskey and swallowed a cough.
“Don’t be a dumbass,” The Don said sharply. “Those are your people. That’s where you come from.”
“It’s not where I have to end up.”
The Don squinted. “Make your own way in the world, that it?”
“Why shouldn’t I make my own way in the world? Shit. Isn’t that what you’re doing? One day at a time. Find what you love. Don’t I have the right to do that?” It was his look that bothered me, as if I was the fool, as if I were the one screwing up.
“Okay, Pancho. Settle down.”
I rose to my full height and looked down on the The Don, his lousy fading widow’s peak. “Don’t tell me to settle down. Fuck. You sound like my fucking dad.” The Don said nothing. He stared into his drink. “Say something,” I said. “Say one fucking thing. Jesus. What a phony. You’re the one who got that girl pregnant. You’re the one who, who should be thinking about his responsibilities. I’m still young. I can dream whatever I want.”
The Don was quiet now. He reached across the bar and poured himself another; the whiskey rippled under the lights. He took a sip and stared at me for a long moment and I still loved him in that moment, though I didn’t want to.
“It’s one thing to have dreams,” he said slowly. “And another to chase them down. Listen to me, Pancho. I know some things. Go back to where you belong.” The play had gone out of his voice. There was something even hard there, a kind of contempt I’d not heard before.
I wasn’t crying exactly but my breathing was wet and my throat hurt. I tried to make a funny face, like he was just a clown yakking away. But The Don held his stare. “You ever been in this place in February? Have you, Pancho? It’s like a fucking morgue, okay? Not a movie set. A fucking morgue. Where the dead stay. You hear me?”
I took another sip, to dull my throat. “What happened with that girl?” I said. “Peck says you knocked her up.”
The Don looked away. “Knocked her up. Some bartender you’ll make. Is that the kind of language your parents taught you? Is it?”
“What happened?”
“It’s a complex situation,” he said softly.
“What’s so complex? Is she pregnant or not?”
The Don’s jaw clenched and unclenched. “Oh for Chrissake!” he snarled. “What business is this of yours, anyway? You’re not my father, or my fucking kid. You’re just some rich brat slumming for a summer. What gives you the right?” He looked off toward the ocean, as if waiting for something to transpire above the black waves.
I could see now that The Don wanted me out of his life; wanted an escape from the expectations I heaped upon him. “Listen,” he said finally, “you’re my main man, okay? You’re my guy, Pancho. If I’
d gotten that girl—Jesus—don’t you think I’d tell you? You’re the first guy I’d tell. You listen to me, all right? I know some things.” He drained his drink and smiled. “Let’s just lock this dump up, okay?”
I began frisking my pockets for the keys. “Shit,” I said. I looked down the bar, checked beside the register, twice, and all along the sideboards. I rooted around behind the bar on my hands and knees. My first week closing solo and I’d managed to fuck up.
Somewhere above me I could hear The Don’s laughter, sawing away. “Looking for these?” he said. From his cape he drew my key ring, chunky with dutiful silver, and swirled the loop around his fingers, one to the next, like a gymnast on the rings.
“Thanks, asshole,” I said. Outside the sky spattered on, the hotels shuttered, the strip shut down, drained of its spruce, the amusement park a failing endeavor already, the arms and legs of the rides frozen in the dark. Past the piers, the lighthouse stood on a bluff, facing the ocean like a prop.
“You should go home,” The Don said. He hesitated a moment, then tossed me the keys and took up the whiskey bottle. With great care, he filled his flasks and placed them in their velvet belt loops. Then he picked up his tumbler and hurled it at the pickled-egg jar, missing badly. “I’ve always hated those things,” he said. “They stink like the ocean,” he said. “I’ll sweep that up. Sorry.”
We heard a lot of things about The Don later. That he’d been killed by the Romas, his skull dashed on the breakers. That he’d been forced to marry the girl, held at gunpoint during the ceremony, and moved with her to Cleveland. That he’d nicked a diamond from Big Marek, one of the Russians, and wound up in Sing Sing.
This was the apocrypha of Don Viktor, stories told to fill the long pauses of autumn. However it went, he knew the time had come for him to return to who he was. It took me a bit longer, plunging, as I was, through youth’s dizzy cycles of ignorance and want. Who could have known, then, that I couldn’t be anything I imagined?
