A change of gravity

by George V. Higgins

  "So I asked Mister Carnes how I was to treat you, and quick as a flash, Mister Carnes came right back at me, and he said to me: "Why, the same as anyone else. You treat my young friend Daniel just the same way as you'd treat any other tenant prospect. Show him what we've got available that you think might meet his needs and give him the best price we can. The same one we always charge everyone in our buildings: the fairest and lowest price possible."

  "That answers my question, I guess," Hilliard said.

  "And he went on to say," the agent said, with delight, 'if you don't mind me saying this, also, that the Carnes family's already made quite a few large contributions to the various campaigns you've run. And to tell you he's got no intention throwing in the rent on top of that. He said: "Tell him we said wed support him. We never said wed adopt him."

  Hilliard looked at Merrion. Merrion shrugged. "Hey," he said, 'always said there's no harm in asking. And besides, since I'm gonna be the one in there most of the time, the more people those stairs keep from coming up to bother me, the more I like no elevator."

  The agent mentioned the amplitude of free parking on the steeply sloping lot out back: "That's what makes it so well-drained, when it rains," he said.

  Merrion said: "It's also what makes it so slippery it's useless half the year." The agent looked perplexed. "You tellin' us you never heard inna wintertime cars go sliding down it backwards, end up crashing into the ones parked onna street? Even with their brakes on and the transmissions in gear. Mountain goats'd slide down that hill, they're on it, we get ice. Which's most likely why you got those iron posts on both sides of the curb-cut, you pull in the lot. Anna chain there you can hitch across it, block the entrance inna winter anytime we got a storm. So people like you who don't know about ice, never dream a thing like that could happen, can't drive their cars in there and park them, and end up where they cause a lotta damage. Which the Carnes family might then wind up getting' sued for, which is why there's no cars in it when we're gonna have a storm.

  "Which is why it's most likely useless half of the year, when there's any chance of ice and that's the fifty percent that you really need it, there's no place to park onna street. A selling point that back lot is not. In fact what it is is a drawback."

  The agent looked incredulous. "Really?" he said. "I never heard that before."

  "Then you must've never worked inna car dealership here where they had their own body shop," Merrion said. "I did. You'd've been the guy who ordered trim parts and glass and mirrors for cars that got hit, and the taillight lenses and chrome; and then you hadda sit there and take it when the parts didn't come and the car-owners didn't like it, and blamed you when it happened; then you would know that it prolly did happen. Any number of times."

  The agent looked chastened and said: "Well, I stand corrected." He called to Hilliard's attention the fact that the space was served by its own two separate restrooms. "So your people who work here wouldn't have to share these with anybody else. The way that all people in the other offices in the halls here on this floor have to do."

  "Would have to," Merrion said, 'if there was anyone in those offices, now. Which there hasn't been any since the S-and-H Green Stamp people moved all their operation here down to Springfield."

  "And I'll bet you a quarter," Hilliard said, 'that if I go in what used to be the boy's room sixteen years or so ago when I was one of the poor boys Miss Jocelyn was making their lives miserable for here, I would find that the toilet nearest the door still doesn't flush all the way unless you hold the handle on the chain down and then it sprays you so you look like you pissed your pants and that it's still got the same old wooden seat it had then; never been replaced."

  "Mister Hilliard," the agent said, "I really don't know, I'm just the guy who does the rentals. I don't handle repairs or do maintenance, anything like that. They give me a list of the premises vacant. I rent them as best I can. You know more about toilets than I do.

  "Now I have a question: How much're you willing to pay? "Cause I know you've decided and you wont budge, and you know what Mister Cannes told me: I don't have much latitude either."

  "A buck anna half," Merrion said.

  "Your original two," the agent said.

  "We split the difference," Hilliard said.

  The agent looked sour. "Good," he said grimly, 'that was fun. Glad it's over." He looked at his watch. "I may even get lunch today."

  They shook hands. "I'll have the lease ready this afternoon. Otherwise tomorrow is fine. Just give me a call. Oh, and bring in the deposit and the first month's rent, too. That'll come to a total of three-twenty-eighty-two. We'll need to have that 'fore you get the keys."

  "I'll give it to you right now," Hilliard said. He reached into the right inside pocket of his jacket and brought out a folding checkbook.

  He opened it and tore out the first check. Merrion positioned himself so that Hilliard could use the checkbook as a pad and Merrion's left shoulder as a desk. Hilliard made the check out to the Carnes Company for $320.82. On the back he wrote: "First month's rent and security deposit High St. dist. off."

  The agent took it and gazed at him. "Can I put this in the bank on my way back to the office?" he said.

  Hilliard shrugged. "Sure," he said, "Roy knows it's good."

  It was a bleak, painfully resonant room with varnished matched-board oak floors and oak wainscoating. Hilliard walked over to the left along the inside wall, passing the doors opened into the toilets and grabbed the ballet-practice bar still in place there. He tried to shake it. It was firm. "Handy," he said to Merrion. His voice boomed in the emptiness. "We used to put our coats here in the winter. Fold 'em over it."

  Down below the front door slammed. Hilliard went to the window in the middle of the front wall. "There… goes… Brian," he said.

  "First a stop at the bank and then off to enjoy his well-earned lunch.

  Brian's an unhappy man. He thinks he has a hard life." He turned and looked at Merrion, still standing in the doorway. He grinned and said:

  "Our first home, dear," he said. "Are you as excited as I am?"

  Merrion laughed. "I might say that to you," he said. "I don't think I'd say it to Brian."

  "You think Brian's a little light in his loafers?" Hilliard said. "He did mention he has a wife."

  "He was careful to mention he had a wife," Merrion said. "He might even actually have one. Who's a woman, I mean I understand some of them do. Wife is a perfect disguise."

  "Ever think about getting one for yourself?" Hilliard said, putting an arm around his shoulder as they left the big room. "Not that I'm saying you need camouflage. Just a matter of: Wouldn't you like to?

  Maximum of temptation with a maximum of opportunity?"

  Merrion shrugged. "I brought it up a couple times with Sunny. The last time she was home, in fact. She told me she'd think about it.

  Said that the time before, too. I don't think she thinks she's ready.

  Maybe just not ready for me. I'm only twenny-three. Don't think I hafta worry that much yet."

  Hilliard followed Merrion down the stairs, their footfalls echoing.

  Three steps above the landing he paused and said: "That stuff about cars sliding down the back lot did all of that actually happen?"

  Merrion stopped on the landing and turned around. "You didn't believe me?"

  Hilliard paused two steps up from the landing. "No," he said, "I didn't mean that. It's just that I've lived in this town all my life, and I never heard that'd happened. I'd've thought I would've."

  Merrion turned back down the stairs. "I would've too," he said.

  "Well, did it?" Hilliard said, crossing the landing and starting down the second flight behind Merrion.

  "I dunno," Merrion said. "It could have."

  "You said it did," Hilliard said.

  At the foot of the stairs Merrion stood on the black-and-white tiled floor and smiled at Hilliard. "Not exactly," he said. "You told me to go find out about this building, who built it
and so forth, and why.

  Well, it turned out there wasn't much to find out. A guy named Reynolds built it, along with seven others, almost just like it, between Eighteen-seventy-nine and Nineteen-oh-one. Office space, for the people who managed the mills. And just like Brian told me, the dancing school was originally the Foresters' Hall. But I didn't find out anything, really, that would've helped us to drive down the rent.

  "Therefore I asked him about ice. I don't think I ever actually said there was any. Or that any cars slid down the hill. All I said was I was surprised he hadn't heard about it. And I said I guessed he never worked in a car dealership ordering parts, because if he had've done that, then he might've heard about it. Then he'd know the reason for the two posts and the chain across.

  "The chain and the posts're definitely there. I'm completely sure of that." '"But ice could be the reason," Hilliard said on the ground floor, laughing. He clapped Merrion on the back. "What do you think's going to happen, when he tells Roy and asks him how come he never heard about the ice, and Roy tells him he never did, either?"

  Merrion laughed. "Well," he said, 'nothing, as far's we're concerned.

  Brian's putting the check in the bank. Once he's done that, he can't back out. The deal's been cut."

  By the end of the next week the room was spaciously furnished, leaving plenty of standing-and-arguing room among four old wooden desks and a scuffed-up oaken conference table long and sturdy enough to accommodate ten telephone desk sets on election nights and eight strong oak armchairs large enough for Hilliard and Merrion and six other robust adult males. Four of them came from the district and worked in it. The two who lived outside it were interested in doing business with the state.

  They strenuously and passionately shared the purpose of making Hilliard look good, so that they would prosper along with him. But they didn't always agree on what ought to be done to achieve that. When they did agree they were often united in profane displeasure at some opponent's action or remark. So when they gathered at the table Friday evenings during off-years; daily and nightly during election years they often wound up shouting 'stupid bastard' and 'dumb fucking asshole' either at each other or in reference to rivals and opponents, pounding their fists as their faces grew red from exertion and anger.

  At night the space that had been gently burnished in the evenings by the soft light from six floor lamps with golden-fringed red shades, when the lady with the brassy hair had held her Friday and Saturday evening waltz and fox-trot lessons for polite young girls and sullen little boys 'one-two-three, sfy-ud; one-two-three, sfy-ud; yay-uss' was now starkly lit by eight one-hundred-fifty-watt bulbs overhead, enclosed in white-frosted glass globes suspended from green-tarnished brass chains plaited with silk-covered power cords descending from white-spattered green-tarnished-brass ceiling fixtures. The fixtures were mounted flush against the chalky, white-washed, tobacco-browned, stamped-tin false ceiling, ornament ally filigreed at the corners with has-relief representations of palm fronds.

  It was a good location. High Street was busy then and the new office, three doors north of the Transcript office at its center, was close to the Sportsman's Cafe where the newspapermen went to pie their own type after work, filled with inside stuff they couldn't print but liked to trade with those they trusted. So a politician facing a late night in the office and a makeshift supper at nine, aware that his best asset is curiosity and a relaxed mind works better, could take a short break around five-thirty and run down to the cafe without coat or umbrella through a light rain for a couple quick beers without getting his clothes very wet, 'just to find out what's going on." In the Sportsman's several of the men who sometimes shouted at each other and belabored the oak table in the second-floor office often met on better terms to drink Hampden Beer, CC or Dewar's and water, and denounced other men and each other in similar rough terms and the newspapermen laughed with them, feeling fortunate to be alive and important in exciting events, and to have such splendid tough friends.

  Late that Saturday morning in the spring of '66, after the week's slate of routine but persisting annoyances had been discussed and new plans made to deal with them, perhaps even effectively 'this fuckin' time,"

  Hilliard had cleared his throat and asked Merrion what it was he wanted.

  "Because whatever it is that you want, my friend," Hilliard'd said, meaning every word of it, 'you'll have it. If I can get it for you, it's gonna be yours. You've earned it. If it's within my power, I'll do it, you know. I'll move heaven and earth if I have to. This you know's a true fact."

  EIGHT

  "Oh Danny, up yours, for Christ sake," Merrion said, discomforted and faintly embarrassed. He had cultivated the consensus about Hilliard:

  "When Dan Hilliard says you're getting' a pony, a pony's what you're gonna get. You can go out and get yourself a red-leather saddle; you're not getting' a room full of shit."

  Merrion hadn't asked for anything because he'd been being practical.

  That was his policy. "That is how we do things, me and Danny. He has all the great ideas. I'm in charge of making sure they really are great; wont cost more'n they're worth or get us two into trouble.

  "Dan and I've always understood each other, right from the very first day. As long as we talk it over before anything gets promised, chances are what we say will get done. We've always dealt in the same line of goods: only in possible things."

  Hilliard used similar terms. "We may not tell you what you'd like to hear, that we'll do what you want us to do. We'll only tell you what we think we can do, and then if you tell us you want us to do that, we'll do our best to get it done." Neither of them mentioned the ballast to anyone else: "Things that we know're possible, because when we say we think we can do them, we've already gotten them done.

  Merrion said he'd been thinking of appointment as an assistant clerk of a district court. "Pretty much ruled out the chairmanship of the Turnpike Authority," he'd said. "Nice job, pay's good; hours're great, but I don't think you can pull that one off. Pope? I'm not really religious, and anyway, I ate meat on Fridays 'fore it was allowed.

  Chief justice? I'm not a lawyer."

  Hilliard was going to be. He'd earned his degree from Suffolk Law School, punishing himself in Boston night after night and days as well in the summers during his first four years in the legislature. Awaiting the results of the winter bar exam, he could admit 'it fuckin' near killed me. If I hadn't been young, it would've." While still in law school he'd advised Merrion to drop his studies in education. "You're not gonna teach school; you're too stupid to teach. I've been a teacher; I know. Go to law school instead. Make my life easy: no matter how bad you screw up, I can always make you a judge. Any asshole can be a judge."

  Merrion ignored him, getting his M.Ed, from Westfield State College. "I got some pride: Never even been inside a goddamned law school. I got other good qualities too.

  "Courts sit in the summer. Judges' robes look hot. I think a nice quiet district-court clerkship's what I'd like; bug no one and no one bugs me. File papers all day and look out the window; have coffee; read the papers, movin' my lips. Talk about sports and politics, right? Basically the same stuff I do here' in Hilliard's Holyoke office, when not working as a substitute teacher, pretending to wait for a job-opening in biology and freshman composition, in a public high school. "If I don't find something pretty soon, I'm gonna hafta get serious about that. But it's not like I really wanna. What I want is something with the state or maybe feds. Pays at least nine grand a year and they can't kick your ass out in the street, next election goes the wrong way."

  Merrion said clerkships met those requirements. "And your court job also pays better but that's not what makes it great — it's that no one's after you all the time like in this job, voters wanting something from you.

  "See, the one thing I've found out from working in this job is that I don't want to spend my life doing it. I'm not knocking it now, understand me. I learned a helluva lot here, and I appreciate it. If it looked like
you're headed for governor or US Senate, I'd have different stuff to do, manage a staff or something, like I do in a campaign planning events, scheduling, bullshittin' the reporters that'd be different. If you had a thing where I could be a chief of staff for you, like Larry O'Brien for JFK, or Leo Diehl for Tip O'Neill, that'd be a whole different thing a ten-strike, right up my alley; I'd love it.

  "But we both know there's no way that's gonna happen. It isn't you're not good enough, or smart enough, or anything like that; it's because you're not rich enough. You don't have the family connections. It's too far for us two to jump. And if I get a new job now, I still want to work with you, run your campaigns. I love doin' that shit, as you know."

  "I was hoping you'd say that," Hilliard said. "I think we're a good team."

  "Well, so do I," Merrion said. "And I'm glad we both understand that.

  Not going overboard here. But I don't want to deal directly with the public anymore, hand-to-hand stuff I do here. Since the civilians found out about we opened this office: people who want things from you now know they got a handy local place to go to, make their fuckin' demands. So they make more of them, save themselves a trip to Boston by buggin' me right here. I'm no good at dealin' with them. I don't like it and I don't like them, having to be polite to them.

  "Sooner or later someone's gonna figure it out, and that'll be bad for you. So I should stop doing it, sooner.

  "I am not the politician in this operation; you are. I am the mechanic. The world is full of assholes. I learned that by being your man in the district. I stay in this job for the rest of my life, I'll always be dealing with assholes. And I'll never get so I like 'em.

  "I also realize no matter what I end up doing, I'm probably not gonna make a million dollars. So also for the rest of my life, while dodging assholes, I hafta think about making a living. Therefore what I have to do is find some kind of job that puts me in a different position.

  Where instead of them controlling me, I'm the one controlling them.