by Tim Cockey
“What are you up to,” I asked Darryl, “corrupting the morals of all my adult friends?”
“Huh?”
I turned to Munger. “Pete, why don’t you go inside and make yourself useful? Darryl and I are going down to the Oyster to hoist a few.”
“I don’t drink,” Darryl said. “It’s bad for you.”
“You think you’re puffing on oxygen there?” I asked him.
“Leave the kid alone,” Pete said.
“Hey, he’s my future business partner,” I said. “I want to make sure he lives that long.”
Darryl squinted up at me. “Cigarettes only kill adults.”
Pete and I shared a look. I said it. “Interesting perspective.”
I noticed a duffel bag on the sidewalk.
“Somebody doing laundry?”
“Susan asked that I vacate the premises,” Pete answered.
“I don’t suppose she’s bombing for termites?”
“I told her about Lee.”
“I see.”
Darryl piped up. “She sounds cool.”
“Who does?” I asked.
“Lee. She sounds cool.”
“Pete, are you spilling your guts to this runt?”
“I’m not a runt,” Darryl said.
Pete shrugged. “Kid gave me a cigarette. I was all out.”
Pete needed a place to stay. He said he could have called on some of his other friends, but he felt uncomfortable doing so, most of them also being acquaintances of his wife.
“Besides, this is all your fault anyway,” he said.
“My fault?”
“If I don’t know you I don’t know Lee.”
“Right. So then what you’ve got is a miserable marriage without even a glimmer of hope out there for a different life. There are some who would be giving me credit, not blame.”
“Maybe if he didn’t like Lee so much he could figure out his stupid marriage,” Darryl said.
The boy had a square head and a single eyebrow. He was built like a box. His shorts came down past his knees. I cocked my head at him.
“Does your mother know you talk this way?”
He snorted and flicked his cigarette into the street.
“You can sleep on my couch if you want,” I said to Pete. “Or you can have my old room here. I’m sure Billie wouldn’t mind.”
“It’s only a couple of days,” Pete said, looking everywhere but at me.
“Does Lee know?”
“No.”
“Are you going to tell her?”
Pete jerked a thumb at Darryl. “He thinks I shouldn’t.”
I took a beat. A siren sounded in the distance. Darryl gave me his ugly smile.
“Pete. He’s twelve.”
I had been hoping to pop down to Annapolis that night and catch the tail end of Lee’s show and then the tail end of Faith. But with a mopey Munger on my hands it didn’t seem like such a good idea. I phoned Faith at the inn and told her I was a good-for-nothing thus-and-so. She said she’d find a way to get over it.
Pete had determined to swear off drinking until he had straightened out his life. That seemed to me like a sensible equation. He picked up his duffel bag and followed me down the street to my place. I offered to whip up a plate of hot dog supreme but for some reason the idea didn’t appeal to him. Pete roamed my living room floor like a dog in a pen. We couldn’t stay in, that was clear. I put a call in to Julia.
“I was just about to call you,” she said.
“Don’t trouble your pretty little fingers. Look, Jules, I’ve got Pete over here. Long story, but he’s going to climb my walls if we don’t get out and do something. I thought I’d see what you’re up to.”
“Nick and I are going out to Chubby Checkers,” she said.
I called out to Pete. “You feel like putting on your twisting shoes?” His grunt didn’t indicate a swell of enthusiasm. “I think we’re going to pass,” I said into the phone.
“I’ve got an idea for you. It’s the reason I was about to call. How would you and Pete like to go see The Bells of Titan?”
“Isn’t that the movie Nick told us to run from as fast as we could?”
“Yes. There’s a special screening at the Senator tonight. I thought you might be interested. It’s a fund-raiser for one of your favorite organizations.”
“The League of Single Young Undertakers?”
“The Alliance for Reason and Kindness. Nick has a couple of passes. He says he wants to see that movie again about as much as he wants to jump off the Washington Monument.”
“Ours or the one in D.C.?”
“Either one, I think.”
I cupped the phone. “What do you think, Pete? You want to see a flick?”
He was standing in front of my music collection.
“Is this the crap you listen to?”
“We’ll take them,” I said to Julia. She said she’d leave the passes with Chinese Sue.
“Don’t forget, it’s a fund-raiser. No jeans and T-shirts, big boy.”
I hung up the phone. “Have you got any good clothes in that bag?” I asked Pete.
“What do you mean ‘good’?”
“Suit. Tie. Nice shirt?”
“What’re you planning to do, bury me?”
I snapped my fingers. “Perfect.”
It’s an old saw that dead men can’t tell tales, so there wasn’t much chance that Lenny the butcher would tattle on us for borrowing his suit. He didn’t need it until his wake, so as long as Pete was careful not to spill anything on it, what did it really matter? It fit Pete perfectly.
Pete looked at himself in the mirror. “I feel creepy.”
“You look fine.”
“Yes, but I feel creepy.”
“You’ll get over it.”
Pete took a couple of swats at his hair.
“I can give you a dead man’s trim,” I volunteered.
“What’s that?”
“The front only.”
Pete found me in the mirror. “I’ll pass.”
The Senator Theater looked fine, too. It always does, with its huge wraparound marquee and its deco façade of illuminated glass bricks, red and green and yellow. The threat of destruction hangs over the old movie palace year in and year out. It is on the list of endangered landmarks. Grand as the theater is, it’s hard for the place to turn a nickel against the eminently more flexible multiplexes.
The wide sidewalk outside the theater was packed when Pete and I arrived. Julia was correct. No jeans, no T-shirts. We handed over our passes and shuffle-stepped inside and found halfway decent seats midway down and off to the left.
Pete wanted popcorn and headed off to fetch it. While he was gone a woman with top-heavy hair stepped up to a microphone located to the side of the screen and welcomed us all there, thanked us for coming and proceeded to rattle off a list of names of “very special people” who she said were responsible for tonight’s event. I perked up at the very last name.
“. . . and of course Crawford Larue, who so much wanted to be with us tonight to thank you personally for all your support. Unfortunately Mr. Larue has been called away on urgent business.”
I can’t quite report a collective groan coming from the crowd. It appeared they would survive their disappointment. The woman continued.
“In Mr. Larue’s place, however, we are honored to have the executive director of the ARK with us tonight, who would like . . .”
A man in a tuxedo seated near the front stood up and made his way toward the aisle. I recognized him from Larue’s party.
“. . . Mr. Russell Jenks.”
Jenks stepped up to the microphone. He tapped it, then stood by as a techie darted over to adjust it to his height. Jenks balled his hands behind his back and leaned into the microphone. He thanked the woman who had introduced him and he thanked Go
d. In that order. Pete was coming back with his popcorn. He squeezed his way past a sea of knees and dropped down next to me.
“What’d I miss?”
“Same thing we all did. Crawford Larue was supposed to be here tonight. You’d have had a chance to see the egg himself.”
Pete sunk his fist into his popcorn. “My dumb luck.”
Jenks kept his comments brief. He tossed up the word “redemption” a few times and batted it lightly around the room. Easy pop flies. He had a smooth delivery and he concluded with a solemn Amen and a broad smile. The audience applauded politely as Jenks headed back to his seat. I spotted another face I recognized. The lights were beginning to dim. I jabbed Pete with my elbow and pointed.
“There’s Sugar Jenks.”
“Where?”
“Right over—” Too late. I was pointing at blackness. “Forget it,” I said. “Just sit back. Relax. Enjoy the show.”
Easier said than done. Nick Fallon was right. The Bells of Titan was a derivative tedium. The movie told the story of an independent coffee-bean grower in Bolivia who fights off a multinational corporation intent on buying him out. The point man for the multinational corporation turns out to be involved in running drugs and weapons and is angling to use the coffee plantation as a platform for his operations. The coffee-bean grower figures this out, nearly gets killed a half dozen times in his efforts to thwart the scheme, and in the end emerges victorious. Along the way—added bonus—he inspires the bad guy’s bottle-blonde girlfriend to ditch the guy and join in with him, even to the point of taking a sexy shower with him during the movie’s big hit song, “Touch Don’t Look.” There is a subplot about the man’s sister, a nun in the village, and her efforts to involve the townspeople in a production of Man of La Mancha. Munger told me afterward that he wished the nun had been the one to take the sexy shower. I chastised him for his blasphemy, but I had to agree he had a point. The same actress who played the nun had popped up in one of the previews, playing an uptight-but-beautiful nuclear scientist with a secret passion for cha-cha.
After the film was over there was a grapes-and-cheese-ball reception in the lobby. It was difficult to get a sense of what the crowd thought of the movie. I loaded up on cheese balls and took a ginger ale as a chaser. I spotted Sugar Jenks again. She was standing next to a display window that held a vintage poster from How Green Was My Valley. That’s a black-and-white movie about a coal-mining town. If you ask me, the title poses a damn good question.
Pete had gone outside to smoke a cigarette. I made my way over to the vintage poster and the young woman standing in front of it.
“Hi.” You might have thought I’d nipped her with a cattle prod; she practically jumped out of her skin. “It’s me again. Hitchcock Sewell.” She looked at me as if I had just spoken in olde Welsh. “What did you think of the movie?”
“I thought . . . the movie was good.”
“It has a redemptive quality, doesn’t it?” I said, smiling broadly.
She returned roughly a quarter of my smile. “It does. It has a redemptive quality.”
“I thought the nun was good.”
“Yes . . . the nun was good.”
I never attended dental school, there’s only so much teeth pulling I’m capable of doing. We went on in this excruciating fashion for a few more exchanges. Sugar looked like she’d gladly dive into the nearest hole if one would only open up. The girl was rescued—I was rescued—by Russell Jenks, who materialized next to her. He took hold of her elbow and spoke softly to her.
“Sugar, there are some people I think you should meet.” He looked at me. “I hope you don’t mind if I—” He cut himself off. “We’ve met.”
Sugar spoke up. “Russell, this is Mr. Sewell.”
“I was at the party the other day,” I said.
“Of course. I remember.”
“Bang-up movie,” I lied. “I was just saying to your wife. Redemptive, no? It’s too bad Mr. Larue couldn’t make it tonight.”
Jenks smiled pleasantly. “What we need are four or five Crawfords. Maybe that way we could meet all the demands that are on his plate.”
“Four or five Crawfords.” I nodded gallantly at Sugar. “If four or five Crawfords yielded four or five Miss Larues, how fortunate for us all.”
Not to disparage the young woman, but I know a line of hooey when I hear one . . . especially when I’m the one saying it. Sugar blushed. If I’m not mistaken, I blushed as well. Sugar Jenks was wearing a silk shawl over her bare shoulders. She clutched it tightly and winced a smile at me. It seemed to require all the energy she could muster.
“Thank you for coming,” Jenks said again, and he steered Crawford’s daughter off into the crowd. I went outside and found Pete on the sidewalk looking up at the moon.
“Looks full,” I said.
“It is,” he said. “I’m not. Let’s go get something to eat.”
We grabbed a couple of cheese-steak subs at Maria’s just north of Coldspring, then made our way down to the Inner Harbor. A street performer who looked like he had just stepped off the stage of a Godspell production was wowing a small crowd of onlookers with his juggling and banter. The night was uncommonly warm, and the Harborplace promenade was brimming with humanity in all its assorted shapes and sizes. We moseyed to a bench and had a seat.
“I remember when this area was nothing but derelicts,” Pete said. “None of this stuff was here. Not even the Constellation. It was half sunk and pretty much forgotten in one of those piers over there.” He jerked his thumb to the east. “This area was nothing but a big patch of grass and dirt. It was bums and drug pushers. The idea of coming down to the harbor didn’t even exist. People steered clear of it altogether. Now look at it. It’s like Disneyland.”
I wasn’t quite ready to equate Harborplace with the Magic Kingdom, but I understood his point.
Pete was frowning.
“What’s wrong?” I asked. “Do you miss the bums and drug pushers?”
Pete didn’t answer right away. He was watching a teenaged couple feeding pizza to each other. Several feet away from the couple, a middle-aged couple with impressive middle-age spread were working on a pair of ice cream cones. A shirtless skateboarder came slicing by, his cap on backward and his large pants fluttering like flags.
“Susan got mugged down here once,” Pete said. His voice was flat. His eyes held steady toward the water. “Broad daylight. The McCormick Spice factory used to be over there, where that brick crap is now.”
I remembered. The air used to smell like a combination of cinammon and pepper. It used to make my mother sneeze.
Pete went on. “Susan was a schoolteacher back then. Fresh out of college. Same year that we got married. A couple of the classes were on a field trip and the McCormick Spice factory was one of their stops. I think they also went over to the Holsum Bakery and the Lexington Market.”
I asked, “Was it a field trip or a shopping run?”
Pete ignored me. “Everyone was on the bus and one of the kids said that she’d left a sweater behind. Susan went back for it. They jumped her right outside the building. They smacked her around. It was three of them. She got a black eye out of it.”
A rueful grin came to Pete’s face.
“Damn fool woman fought back. One of them had her purse and she was playing tug-of-war with him. Another one knocked her down and they kicked her a couple times. The girl was one big bruise when she got home. But you know what? They didn’t get her purse. She put a death grip on the damn thing and Charlie Atlas couldn’t have pried it loose. The muggers finally left. Susan went on to McCormick’s and fetched the sweater then went back to the bus. The kids didn’t really get it. They thought the muggers had wanted the sweater. They thought that Susan had gotten beaten up because she refused to hand it over. She was a real hero.”
Pete fell silent. He peered out over the black water. After a minute he said, “No, I do
n’t miss the damn bums and pushers. I say bulldoze the whole damn place.”
A bull moose stormed into my office the next day. I had been busying myself putting papers into neat stacks. I like neat stacks and I find that if I leave them unattended for too long, they get un-neat all on their own. Either that or Billie sneaks into my office and musses them. By the time the bull moose showed up I had actually finished with my paperwork and was on the phone with Pete, who was camped out on the couch back at my place. I was reading to him from one of my trade journals, about a fellow mortician in the town of Blue Nose, Canada—that’s in the Saskatchewan province—and the frenzy of activity he has each spring burying the folks who have been held in cold storage through the long bitter winter when the ground is simply too frozen for digging graves. The article was titled “Spring Planting.” Pete was finding it somewhat less amusing than I was.
“Hang on,” I said, glancing out the window. “I’ve got company.” I hit the speaker-phone button and dropped the receiver back onto the cradle. The bull moose stormed in.
“Where the hell do you get off interfering with my personal life?”
You’ll know the bull moose by his more familiar name. Mike Gellman. Mike looked to me as if he hadn’t gotten a terribly good night’s sleep. Sometimes all that’s required is that you flip the mattress, though I don’t believe in Mike’s case his bleary eyes and disgruntled demeanor were stemming from that sort of comfort issue. He planted his hands on my desk and bellowed at me like . . . well, in fact, like a bull moose.
“I want you off my back, Sewell! You have no fucking idea what you’re screwing around with!”
I was tempted to reply that I had a very precise idea what he was . . . but why wave a red flag?
“Would you like a nice cup of tea, Mike?” I asked.
He grumbled, “Are you listening to me?”
“I’m sure as hell hearing you. And so is half the block, I’d imagine. Why don’t you put it in reverse, Mike. Take a seat. Count to ten.”
I have a novelty pen and pencil set on my desk. One of my sales reps gave it to me a few years back. The pen and pencil are shaped like two femur bones and they sit inside a little tin casket. Mike swept his hand across my desk. He sent the little metal casket flying across the room. It sailed right out the open window.
