Goldilocks

by Andrew Coburn

  “It’s all right,” he said. “I’m visiting.”

  She did not understand. “You a reporter? You come to write about us?”

  “I’m not a reporter.”

  “You come to look at us?”

  “No, no, I belong here,” he said, and toiled up concrete stairs. Out of breath, he paused on the second-floor landing and with a flush of pleasure gazed up at the door ahead of him. At any moment he expected it to fly open and one of his sisters to pop out. He could almost hear the fragments of their voices. What he did not hear was the footfall behind him. The man wore beads, bangles, a scarlet undershirt, black pants. A Zapata mustache sprang out of his small muscular face. The force of his voice was chilling.

  “Give me your wallet.”

  Daisy obliged without thought, without fear. Pictures of his children fluttered to the floor.

  “You got no money.” The man could not believe his eyes. “You got no credit cards.”

  Daisy said, “I got a quarter in my pocket.”

  “Empty ‘em.”

  Daisy obliged, and the quarter tinkled onto the concrete and rolled down the stairs.

  “You got to have something. Maybe you hiding a hundred-dollar bill up your ass. Take off your clothes.”

  Daisy knew men who could look strong simply by standing still, and he tried to be one. “I won’t do that,” he said.

  “I cut your belly, you don’t.” A knife appeared in the man’s hand. A Bic lighter was in the other. A flame shot high. “Then I burn you up.”

  Daisy closed his eyes and in his mind already felt the kiss of the blade, which relieved him of the anticipation.

  “You want to die, that what you want?”

  “No, I want to live,” Daisy said. “I want to see grandchildren. I want to see my wife with white hair. I’d like very much to see the year 2000.”

  The man shivered with anger, then opened his pants. “Get on your knees.”

  Daisy opened his eyes. “No, I won’t do that either.”

  The man looked injured and deceived, as if he had been stripped of his weapons, robbed of his worth, what little it was. “Give me something!”

  Daisy wet a thumb and anointed the man. Pretending it was Latin, he whispered, “No es cosa.”

  • • •

  Barney Cole had climbed out of his car and was walking toward his house when a green-and-white Plymouth pulled into the drive. As soon as the driver hopped out, Cole recognized the yellow hair and blue eyes but not the solid gray suit. The necktie was maroon, the shirt white. Henry Witlo approached with a loose gait.

  “You like my car, Mr. Cole? It’s not new, but it’s nice. I try to trade up.” He shot a look at Cole’s automobile. “You’re the only guy I know trades down. What happened to that nice new Cutlass Supreme?”

  “That was a lend,” Cole said.

  “You should’ve kept it. People rate you by your wheels, also what you wear. Like my suit?”

  “You in the chips, Henry?”

  “Just bettering myself,” Henry said with nonchalance. “Man’s got a duty to do that, else he’s garbage.”

  “Why am I never sure of your meaning? Where have you been?”

  “Staying out of your hair. That’s what you wanted, isn’t it?”

  The dustheads of dandelions glinted on the lawn, as if the dying sun were singling out coins. A mockingbird was busy in the hedgerose. A curtain twitched from a front window of the house, and Cole knew that Kit Fletcher had peeked out.

  Henry said, “I’ve got a position now, so I don’t need your help anymore. But I appreciate what you did do. That’s what I come to tell you.”

  “What’s the position?”

  “Kind of a caretaker. Guess I can do anything, I put my mind to it.”

  “Something I want to ask you,” Cole said mildly. “It has to do with a fellow named Pothier. Do you know him?”

  Henry knitted his brow. “Pothier. French guy, huh? No, never heard of him. Should I of?”

  “Somebody beat him up bad enough to cost him an eye. It happened at the Y, just before you quit staying there.”

  “You’re not accusing me of something, are you, Mr. Cole?”

  “Simply asking.”

  “I don’t mind you asking long as you know the truth when you hear it. I haven’t beat up anybody.”

  Cole suspected a greater depth in those blue eyes than he cared to think about. They would have suited, he was sure, the angelic expression of a child who had just tortured a cat. “Have you read the papers lately?” he asked.

  “No. Why? Something I missed?”

  Cole considered telling him about Louise Baker but instead gazed across the way at slender birch trees that seemed poised to spring out of the ground. “Nothing important,” he murmured.

  “Anyway, Mr. Cole, that’s what I came to tell you. I’m doing OK for myself, and you don’t have to bother about me.” He lifted his shoulders and gave a straightening pull to his necktie. “I won’t keep you standing here. I know you got your woman waiting.”

  Cole watched him turn away, his eye drawn to the jacket of the suit. “You’re ripping a seam.”

  Henry paused and lifted an arm. “That’s funny. It was made for me.”

  • • •

  Daisy Shea entered Wild Bill’s Tavern in the belly of South Union Street and groped through a dimness that suggested purgatory. At the bar he sat with men who salted their beer and peppered their pickled eggs. The pepper came out of a baby-food jar with a punctured cap. The movie on the television above the bar was The Great Escape with Steve McQueen. Everyone seemed to have seen it before, some several times, which perhaps was the reason they were watching it again. No surprises. Everything comforting and reassuring. Daisy cadged a drink from Plug Brown, a retired janitor who looked like a dead man, but later he ran into abuse when he tried to borrow five dollars from Sugar O’Toole, a widower devoted to the memory of his wife and to the quiet violence of his drinking.

  “Get away from me. You’re a deadbeat.”

  “Maybe you think I won’t be around long enough to pay you back,” Daisy said with Christlike calm. “Not to worry one little bit. I’ve been to hell and back. Nothing can touch me now.”

  Sugar sank a shot of rye in a glass of beer. “You got a hole in your brain.”

  The bartender said, “Don’t bother the customers, Daisy.”

  Sugar said, “You want the hard facts, Daisy, you and Plug over there, they’re going to bury you together, put the two of you in the same box.”

  Plug Brown turned a pepless face and gave them the watery stare of a sockeye salmon. The bartender, clinking bottles, said, “Watch the movie, Sugar.”

  “Who asked you?”

  “I don’t have to be asked. It’s my bar.”

  Available, besides pickled eggs, were precooked hamburgers and hot dogs. Daisy had forgotten how hungry he was until he ambled midway down the bar and saw Frank Flanagan bite into the greasy bun of a hamburger and seconds later bring up a brimmer of beer and blow at the foam. Sidling up, Daisy said, “Your mother’s had another kid, huh?”

  Frank Flanagan’s bald head swung turtlelike out of an angular collar. “What the hell you talking about?”

  “I heard the baby cry,” Daisy said.

  “You been on the sauce too long. My mom’s in the old folks’ home.”

  “I know what I know,” Daisy said adamantly.

  “You alive — or you dead and none of us know it yet? Maybe you’re up in heaven somewhere. That the story?”

  “I went back to the project, Frank. I heard.”

  Frank Flanagan pulled a bill from a roomy pocket of his work pants and slapped it on the bar. “Give him a double. He needs it.”

  The bartender said, “Your night, Daisy.”

  Daisy moved away from the bar with a large Cutty on the rocks firmly in his grip and one sock slipping into his shoe. The only woman in the place was returning from the ladies’ room to a chrome-stemmed table in the di
m of a corner. She had a blast of blond hair, snow on fire, and was wearing a tight cream dress, a streak of lightning. “Pearl, can I join you?” he said, and got a look that should have withered him.

  “I’m with somebody,” she said, dropping into a chair, her elbows slamming onto the table, where her mixed drink shimmered next to a bottle of beer and an unused glass. She was the ex-wife of a fireman and had been a classmate of Daisy’s in grade school, where a male teacher had likened her to a sugar cookie and lost his position for acting on his impulses.

  Daisy sat down anyway. “Your friend doesn’t like me, I’ll leave. Where is he?”

  “Little boys’ room.”

  “Who is he?”

  “Don’t know, just met. Daisy, you got some stinking nerve.”

  Her tablemate returned shortly, a younger man than Daisy was expecting, and bigger. The man seemed to be climbing out of his suit, which did not look right at the shoulders. His eyes were blue studs, and at that moment his face was inscrutable, as if some sort of ticket might be needed to enter his privacy. Then he smiled and, rocking the table, plopped down next to Pearl. “This your father?”

  “His name’s Daisy. Daisy, this is Henry.”

  “Daisy?”

  “He was a kid, he used to pick ‘em. Give ‘em to the girls. G’bye, Daisy.”

  “Let him stay.”

  Henry’s attention, along with a strong swallow of Cutty, warmed his heart and pushed his face to a higher shade under the white waves of his hair. He took another swallow, which stabbed his throat and burned his chest, and let his mind reach back to his single stellar performance on the football field when Jesus Christ Almighty clamped a hand to the seat of his pants and gave him nowhere to go but forward. He remembered the first time he saw Edith wearing a chemise over no underwear, and he remembered the day his oldest daughter graduated from St. Mary’s High, third in her class, braces still on her teeth. He turned to Henry and said with a surfeit of feeling, “This is decent of you.”

  “I do what I can for people, way I’m made.”

  He started to reply, but a pain bent him in two, which gave Pearl a start. Her nylons hissed as she uncrossed her legs.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Fixing my sock,” he wheezed, and then came up in his chair sweating, his face heated, his hands cold. Tension gripped his chest. “You look lousy,” she said, and frowned at Henry. “He’s sick, you know. They took his stomach out. Christ, don’t drop on us!”

  “He’s all right, aren’t you, buddy?” Henry picked up money from the table. “Here, get yourself another drink.”

  He rose too fast to his feet and saw double. He stood stiff and heavy, ill in a frozen way except for his eyes, slits of fire. He took a tentative step, and Pearl said, “He’s not going to make it.”

  “Yes, I am.”

  He hobbled to the bar as if he had a pebble in his shoe and a bit of a load in his pants. Steve McQueen’s tight-lipped face burned bright on the television. Sugar O’Toole looked away from the screen and with a yawn showed a cavern of a mouth and a flab of a tongue. Plug Brown was eating an egg, sharing the pepper with the man next to him. The bartender leaned toward Daisy and said in a confidential tone, “Why don’t you let Pearl and the guy alone? She’s looking to get laid.”

  “I’m not stopping her.” He dropped money down. “The fella’s buying me a drink. They want me there.”

  “You got enough here for another double. That what you want?”

  “Yes.”

  He returned to the table with slightly less of a hobble and smiled at the two of them as if he held the key to their happiness. As he sat down, his necktie got in the way of his hand. He sloshed Cutty and licked his fingers. Pearl said to Henry, “You win. He made it.”

  Henry drank beer from the bottle. “There was never any doubt. Right, champ?”

  Daisy answered with a smile. “Someone’s looking over me. I know that now for a fact. Do you believe in God, Henry?”

  “Let’s not get into that crap,” Pearl said.

  Henry said, “I was six years old, a priest and I went into the woods looking for God and ended up taking a leak together.”

  “So you’ve never seen him?”

  “Sure I have, in Nam. He was wearing a V.C. uniform. He shot at me point-blank and missed. You see, he knew it wasn’t my time and jerked the trigger.”

  Daisy’s chest billowed like a pigeon’s. “Do you believe that, Henry?”

  “For Christ’s sake, Daisy, he’s putting you on.”

  “She’s right,” Henry said. “What I told you was bullshit. It was me fired point-blank and missed. That’s how jittery I was. See, I didn’t dope up that day. My black buddies told me to, but I didn’t listen. They knew something I didn’t. Know what that was?”

  Daisy shook his busy head.

  “The army didn’t give a shit about us, white or black, no difference. Painted us all orange.”

  “You got sprayed?”

  “How do I know I didn’t? Think the army’s going to tell me? I wake up at night, feel something funny in my gut, maybe I got cancer. I could be dying this minute and don’t know it.”

  “I’m sorry for you, Henry.”

  “For the love of God,” said Pearl, “I came in here looking for a happy conversation, not two guys dying.”

  Henry stretched an arm around her. “You want happiness, I’ll give you happiness.”

  “He’s a saint,” Daisy said. “Second one I’ve met today.”

  “He’s a saint, I’m the fucking Queen Mum.”

  Daisy lifted his glass. “They come in strange packages, Pearl. You have to have the eyes to see them. First one I met had a mustache and was bilingual.”

  She rattled ice. “Go buy me another drink.”

  “I’ve lost my wallet.”

  “Hear that, Henry? He’s lost his wallet.”

  “God knows where it’s gone,” Daisy said, and closed his eyes, for the pain that had bent him in half hit him again, deeper down. This time he took it like a soldier. The body protested the pain, the muscles flexed against the outrage. Through fluttering lids he glimpsed Pearl’s hand curling around Henry’s neck and pictured her as a pillow caving in wherever someone’s head might hit. He loosed gas and felt better.

  “You pig,” Pearl said a moment later.

  “Time you went home, champ.”

  He did not want to go home. He did not want to lie wide awake in the dark of the bedroom and pray for dawn. For the sound of a single bird. For the rumble of the first car on the street. For the first sign of life-sustaining routine.

  Pearl said, “You won’t, we will.”

  “Don’t go,” he said, and heard the scrape of their chairs and the scuff of Pearl’s high heels. In another moment he would hate her, so he turned his head.

  “I don’t see you again, champ, you take care, you hear?”

  He nodded, he almost smiled. Their voices clung to the air, Henry’s the hardest, and then faded. A few minutes later he rose uncertainly from the chair with an empty glass in his hand. At the bar Frank Flanagan stuffed relish into a cold roll and shoved in a frank, which he overpainted with mustard. He glanced at Daisy and said, “No more,” His voice rose. “I mean it.”

  Daisy placed his empty glass on the bar. The bartender said, “You’re shut off.”

  He drifted away through layers of cigarette smoke, with a need for relief. For a moment or so he forgot the way to the men’s room, but then he smelled it as if it were some unwashed secret. The light inside, though not bright, hurt his eyes. He stood at the urinal as if he had been about to walk into the wall and had frozen in his tracks. Blinking, emptying his bladder, he enjoyed a moment of unrestrained flatulence, and in the deepest memory part of his brain a trumpet blared. As a boy he had briefly and badly tried to play one, expecting a bolt from above to give him the skill. From the dim of the doorless stall behind him, a voice said, “Sugar says he’s sorry.”

  He turned slowly, zippi
ng up and shaking his head at the shadow on the toilet. “Sugar never said that.”

  “I’m saying it for him.” Plug Brown rose with his trousers in hand. He lifted a leg and hit the flushing lever with his shoe. The roar of the flush — splintered chokings and savage gurglings — sounded as if it came from the depths of Hades. “Enough shit in this world without Sugar adding to it,” he said, stepping out.

  Daisy stood stalwart. “I thank you, Plug.”

  “It’s little enough.”

  “It’s more than you know.”

  “It always is, Daisy. That’s why I do it.” Plug went to the little stainless steel sink and turned on the tap. “I always wash up afterwards. I shake hands with somebody, I don’t want him wondering where mine’s been.”

  “You’ve got good habits, Plug.”

  “We gotta take care of ourselves. That’s prime.”

  Daisy waited, his eyes whiskey-soaked and his nose burning, and then washed his hands too.

  A short time later he stepped out of the side door of the tavern and rubbed his hot face against the night air flowing through the narrow lot. Before slinking away, a dog bared its teeth and growled. Cars glittered as they sped by on South Union Street. He moved toward his car with high floating steps as if someone were reeling him in through unsettled waters. His car was a two-door, the driver’s side ajar, the inside dome light dropping a dull glow. Without surprise, he said, “Where’s Henry?”

  “Gone.”

  “Was it good, Pearl?”

  “It was adequate.” She sat rigidly, her hair somewhat wild, her lipstick smeared, which seemed to relocate her mouth. “Can you give me a ride home?”

  “Can you drive?” He dangled keys. “I’m not sure I can see.”

  “I’m not sure I can move.”

  He opened the door wide. “Maybe I can help.”

  “Don’t touch me.” She struggled, favoring a leg, and squeezed out backwards with her wrinkled dress riding up. Her bottom blossomed through floral underpants like a mushroom springing through leafmold. She stood crookedly. “Get a good look, Daisy?”

  “Nothing I haven’t seen before. Remember the eighth grade, Pearl?”