Goldilocks

by Andrew Coburn

  “What did she tell you about me, sir?”

  “She said you were looking for work.”

  “I guess you and her are old friends.”

  “Yes, that’s right.” Cole drew a yellow legal-size pad close to him and produced a pen. “What kind of work do you do?”

  “Anything with my hands, long as it’s honest and proper. I’m into clean living. I like a few beers now and then, but I stay away from dope, don’t want to ruin my head, and I don’t fool with trashy women, don’t want to worry about AIDS. I care about myself.”

  Cole scribbled on the pad, nothing legible. “How old are you?”

  “Thirty-five. I won’t lie, Mr. Cole, I’ve been around. Had my ups and downs.”

  “Ever been in jail?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Where are you from? Originally?”

  “Chicopee.” He said it fast, making it sound like a birdcall. An apparent smile of innocence followed. “Polack capital of New England. I’m proud of my heritage.”

  “Have you ever done construction work?”

  “Yes, sir. Plenty of it.”

  Cole tucked away the pen and spoke with his face forward. “I’ll ask around, Henry, do what I can, but I can’t promise anything. You understand that?”

  “I’m staying at the Y, sir. Temporarily. You can call me there. How soon d’you think that’ll be?”

  “I just told you, no promises.”

  There was the smallest suggestion of a nod, then a slow lift of the jaw that was a shade challenging. “Were you in the army, sir?”

  “Everybody was somewhere,” Cole said, always alert to the unsaid.

  “Nam?”

  “No.”

  “Where?”

  “I was in the reserve.”

  “Officer?”

  “Yes.”

  “I was one of the last ones out of Saigon.”

  “You must’ve been pretty young.”

  “Sixteen when I joined. Big Polack kid, they were glad to take me. I had a phony birth certificate, wasn’t hard to get. My girlfriend’s mother worked in city hall and fixed one up for me. She was glad to do it, wanted me out of Chicopee, away from her daughter. Seems someone’s always wanting me out of somewhere.”

  Cole found himself listening more to the voice than to the words, the tone suggesting a man who kept records of wrongs, real or otherwise, perpetrated against him. The telephone, which rested just out of reach, shrilled once and went silent — Marge’s signal that she had seated Mrs. Goss in his office. Henry went on as if he had heard nothing.

  “ ‘Fore I went to Nam, my mother threw a party for me at Rutna’s Bar & Grill, place where she worked. Never seen her looking so happy. She was thinking of the insurance.” He lopped his arms over the sides of his chair. “You know who my best buddies were in Nam? Black guys.”

  Cole glanced at the scribbles he had made and then tore the sheet from the pad. He shifted his feet, ready to rise.

  “You don’t say much, Mr. Cole.”

  “I don’t have to. I’m not the one looking for a job.”

  “No, but you owe me something,” he said, his eyes cast implacably on Cole’s face.’

  “What makes you think that, Henry?”

  “I figure I did your fighting for you — me and the niggers.”

  • • •

  He apologized to Mrs. Goss for keeping her waiting, though he knew she never would have complained. Intensely shy and self-conscious, emotionally rootless since the death of her husband, she sat rigid and prim in the red leather chair, like a schoolgirl waiting to be called upon to recite in front of the class. She was fifty-nine, demurely dressed and inviolably proper. Her careful hair held the cinnamon tones of its original color, and her round face, smooth and childlike, resembled that of a plaster doll retrieved from an attic.

  “I hope I’m doing the right thing,” she said with a small catch.

  She was in the throes of selling her house in Lawrence and acquiring a condo in Andover, with Cole handling the legalities. The house, where she and her husband had lived most of their childless marriage, was in the city’s Mount Vernon section, always vulnerable to random burglaries but in recent months afflicted with a rash of them, both in the nighttime and in broad daylight, horror stories attached to some. A woman whose frail mobility depended on a walker was pummeled by scruffy youths and hospitalized for a week. A family returning from vacation found their home looted, vandalized, and befouled.

  “Nothing’s cast in stone yet,” Cole said. “There are always ways to get out of things.”

  “I’ve never made a decision like this before. I depended on Harold for everything.” Her voice was hollow, as stark as Cole had ever heard it. “I feel so helpless. I’ve never even learned to drive a car.”

  “Perhaps you need more time to think.”

  “I miss him so much, Mr. Cole.”

  Her husband, a disciplined and puritanical sort, with a stale look of thrift about him, had died at his desk the month he was due to retire from the Public Works Department, City of Lawrence. That was last January, burial delayed until the ground thawed. Cole had met the man a dozen years ago when he came in with a supportive collar around his neck, an apparent victim of whiplash from a minor auto accident. He was pleased when Cole finagled an unexpectedly generous settlement but resentful when a third of it was deducted for the fee. To placate him, Cole undercharged him for drawing up a will.

  Mrs. Goss said, “It’s so lonesome with him gone. I try to think of people to talk to on the phone, but I never had many friends. Mildred Murphy was a good neighbor, but she moved to Florida when her husband died.”

  “Have you considered that?” Cole asked gently. “Moving to Florida?”

  “I couldn’t do that, Mr. Cole. My memories are here.”

  “It was just a thought,” he said, wishing he had not offered it, for it seemed to have drawn a shudder, as if he had suggested an even deeper separation from her husband than death had brought. He straightened the papers on the pending sale of her house and returned them to the manila folder bearing her name in small block letters from Marge’s neat hand.

  “Please, Mr. Cole, what do you advise?”

  He answered slowly, for he did not want to influence a decision he felt should be entirely hers, nor did he want to sound too much like her husband. “I think you’d feel safer in Andover,” he said, aware her nights were often sleepless. Increased police checks of the neighborhood had not comforted her, and neither had the alarm system installed after her husband’s passing. She feared that a burglar might circumvent it or that a squirrel or some other rodent might render it useless. “But you may not be happy there,” he added.

  “Yes,” she said in a trance of wistfulness, “that’s the hitch.”

  “You have to weigh advantages against disadvantages. In the condo, you’d have no maintenance worries. You’d be in walking distance of downtown. You’d have an opportunity to meet new people, make friends.”

  “Yes, I want to make friends, but I don’t know how. I’m a private person, Mr. Cole. I wish it were otherwise, but it’s not.” Then she flushed suddenly and deeply, into the modest neck of her dress, as if she felt she were revealing too much about herself and, worse, taking up too much of his time. “I don’t mean to be a nuisance.”

  “You’re not.”

  “Thank you for being patient,” she said, rising from the chair, her legs jelly.

  He said, “It’s not easy making a decision about a house you’ve lived in for so long.” He lifted himself from his desk and edged around it. She seemed to stand in a daze of fatigue and uncertainty.

  “So much of my world is gone, Mr. Cole.”

  With a hand under her elbow, his touch both friendly and formal, he escorted her out of his office and said, “Marge, would you please call a taxi for Mrs. Goss?” He opened the outer door, his name on the frosted glass, and together they made the journey down the dull corridor. Her steps were deliberate and ca
utious, as if inequalities existed in the floor, which had been washed many hours earlier but still smelled of the mop. At the elevator, he said, “You asked what I advise, I think we reach a point when what we want most from life is to be free from harm. Everything else is a gift.”

  The elevator door wheezed open, and he gripped the edge to keep it from closing too soon. A messenger boy with a bad complexion stepped out, followed by a young secretary with an unopened can of Pepsi in her hand. Mrs. Goss did not move. Tears stood in her eyes.

  “But Mr. Cole, I don’t want to leave my home.”

  • • •

  Cole saw two more clients, rather quickly, and at a few minutes after four quit for the day, surprising Marge. “I have to drop my car off,” he explained. “The starter’s going.” At the newsstand in the lobby he bought a roll of Lifesavers, a habit since he had stopped smoking, and scanned the front page of the Eagle-Tribune. On his way out, he gave a wave to the shoeshine man.

  Essex Street was cleaner and quieter than in the old days. No bustle. No defiance. No mad rush of shoppers. Little stores had failed first, then big ones. The Lawrence Redevelopment Authority, which had gutted much of downtown in the sixties, sterilized all of it in the seventies. Young trees, planted with federal funds, grew from neat circles on sidewalks widened to oblige crowds that had long vanished. Essex Street was made one-way for heavy traffic that, with hisses and fumes, was merely passing through. The biggest buildings now, stark in design, one no less formidable than another, were banks and insurance companies.

  Once this mattered much to Cole, and now it seemed to matter not at all.

  He ambled up Common Street, which ran parallel with Essex, and passed through the gates of Snelling’s Car Park, where he got a greeting from the raised window of the brightly painted attendant’s shack. Pausing, he smiled back at a slight young man with a corrupt little baby face and dumpling cheeks. “How are you, Snooks?”

  “Fine, Mr. Cole. Tip-top. Keeping my nose clean like you told me.”

  Cole had defended him on charges of shoplifting in the big Sears store in the Methuen Mall and of assault and battery on the floorwalker who had seized his arm. Snooks was a scrapper. Cole stepped closer to the window. “I wonder if you might know who’s been hitting on all those houses on Mount Vernon.”

  “Jeez, Mr. Cole, what are you doing now, working for the cops?”

  “No, Snooks, but I though you might’ve heard something.”

  “Not me. I don’t hang around the bad element anymore, but you want my opinion, it’s gotta be spics. They do all the crime in the city.”

  “They do some of it,” Cole said with less of a smile. “Not all of it.”

  His car was three rows away, a copper-colored Cutlass worn thin at the edges from long use, everything working well except for the starter, which fluttered and whined before triggering the motor. The sun was in his eyes, and he donned dark glasses as he maneuvered out of the lot. When Snooks came out of the shack and called after him, he braked sharply and shot his head out the window.

  “If it’s not the spics, Mr. Cole, it’s gotta be the gooks.”

  The traffic on Common Street was heavy, and he took a right at the first set of lights, a rear tire grazing the curb. Everything in the city seemed squeezed together, but he knew where the cracks were, the shortcuts into Andover, North Andover, Methuen, spacious towns girding and dwarfing Lawrence, a hodgepodge of brick and wood, compressed tenement blocks, massive housing projects, commanding churches, dinosaurian mill buildings. Men and women who had worked in the mills claimed they could still hear the din. It was a city of immigrants but never a melting pot, always a mosaic, a patchwork of ethnic neighborhoods. It was a town before it was a city, and from the start, 1843, it was a business proposition for Yankees who hired cheap labor to dam the Merrimack, dig canals, and turn the tide for textiles. The British, mostly from Yorkshire, got the choice jobs in the mills, supervisory positions, and the Irish, Italians, and others took whatever was offered. Cole’s grandfather, Scotch-Irish, survived the strike of 1912 but not the lint in his lungs. Cole’s father entered Lawrence politics and made some serious money, much of which he was afraid to spend.

  Cole wheeled the Cutlass down a short street and then up a long one once famous for its speakeasies, “hidden tigers,” they were called, situated in rear rooms of drugstores and ice-cream parlors. Cole had heard the stories. An alderman named Galvin had controlled the beer flow into the city, and those guzzling it had called it “Galvinized beer.”

  He stopped abruptly for a red light at the corner of a construction site where a building for the elderly was rising up, a murky slab seemingly inspired by some stone in a graveyard. He was on the Spicket River side of the city, and anyone born there was called a “Spicket Indian,” which was not derogatory, merely informational. Cole was a Spicket Indian, and so was Edith Shea. And so, for that matter, was Louise Leone Baker.

  The light flashed green as a young woman with an infant in her arms passed by the Cutlass — a dark madonna, Puerto Rican or possibly Dominican or Salvadoran. She and her child were the city’s new blood, running rich through neighborhoods marked by arson and landlord neglect. With a horn tooting behind him, Cole watched her head toward a tenement house near the Spicket, little more than a crooked stream and a dumping site for abandoned supermarket carriages, bald tires, and, occasionally, human bodies that eventually flushed into the Merrimack.

  A few minutes later he deposited his car behind the sturdy fences of West Street Motors, where the manager, hoping he would buy it, lent him a brand-new Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme with all the extras. “It’ll do everything for you,” the manager said, an easy smile slung across his face, a man much at home with himself. “It’ll talk to you and purr when you park it.” He handed over the keys. “Drive it with love.”

  Instead, he drove it with slight recklessness through the smell, blight, and racket of a bad neighborhood that carried a pervasive air of danger. He cut across downtown traffic by wedging in where he should not have, and when traffic snarled on South Broadway he weaved in the direction of South Union Street. Minutes later the tepid breath of the Merrimack blew against his cheek while the virgin tires of the car sang over the hard honeycomb surface of Duck Bridge, named after a mill that once made sails for America’s Cup defenders. The street sloped into South Lawrence, past the ghost of Gilligan’s, where Irishmen once stood at the bar, plotted politics, and grew old and sick but never seemed to die. Except Gilligan did, a massive coronary, and the club changed, faded, lost members, and fell to foreign hands.

  Andover lay ahead. Always Cole approached the boundary with a feeling of escape and looked forward to the sudden welcome of trees, the lazy intervals of sun and shade, the muscular displays of rhododendron. Always he crossed the line with a soft surge of relief and sense of safety.

  His house, shared with a woman named Kit, though lately he had seen little of her, nothing at all in the past week, lay across town. It was a split-level in the Wildwood section, snuggled in by flourishes of lilac, a spruce in front, apple trees in the rear, and blueberry bushes flanking the garage. He pulled into the drive, saw a car parked near one of the garage doors, and for a split second felt joy, for he thought the car was Kit’s. Then he realized it looked nothing like hers. A man stepped out of bushes where he had just taken a leak, his gut sucked in as he closed the zipper of his jeans.

  Cole stiffened and hollered, “What the hell are you doing here, Henry?”

  THREE

  “THAT YOUR car, Mr. Cole? It’s a beauty.” Henry Witlo ran his large hand over the hood, metallic-gray, his face reflected in the shine. “I like the color, suits a lawyer.”

  Cole stood with his feet planted unevenly on the hard surface of the drive, his dark glasses removed. His stare was severe. “I want to know what you’re doing here.”

  “I came to apologize. I had no right saying what I did, no right at all. Hell, Mr. Cole, you don’t owe me anything.”

 
“I figured that out for myself. How did you know where I live?”

  “I turned pages. You’re in the book. A guy in Andover Square told me where Wildwood was. That’s a nice house, Mr. Cole. You got a wife, kids, all that stuff?”

  “No, none of that stuff,” Cole said tightly, and continued to stare at him. “I don’t get you, Henry.”

  “Lots of times I don’t get myself, sir. I’m carrying too much around in my head. Not all of it’s Nam, some’s just me, the way I am. I guess I come off cocky, but inside I’m all chewed up.”

  “You sound like a country-western tune.”

  “In Chicopee we call ‘em cryin’ and hurtin’ songs.” He smiled lopsidedly as if straining to be understood. Tiny blackflies hovered near his head in a jittery formation. He batted the air. “I need someone like you, sir, to put me straight.”

  “That’s not my business.”

  “You’re a lawyer, aren’t you?”

  “If you have a legal problem I can give you advice. Anything else is out of my line.”

  Henry swiped at the air again. “That mean you’re not going to help me get a job?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  Insects thrummed from a tall tangle of hedgerose that bordered the lot line. From the thickest of the bramble a bird suddenly blossomed into flight and vanished over the house. Henry shoved his hands into the back pockets of his jeans. “Christ, it’s pretty here,” he said with a sigh. “I get depressed just looking at it. I’m thirty-five years old, Mr. Cole, and I got nothing. I’ve never owned a new car in my life, always somebody else’s piece of junk, and I’ll never have a house like yours.” Through his teeth, cleanly and neatly, he spat on the grass. “I’m not blaming anybody, only myself. I try to face facts.”

  “You could’ve fooled me on that point.”

  “You don’t trust me, do you, Mr. Cole? It’s OK, trust has to be earned. I learned that in combat.”