The Last Good Day

by Peter Blauner

  She hesitated, not realizing this would all happen so quickly. “Does that give anyone enough time to prepare?”

  “That’s not for me to say.” He stood up, signaling this meeting was just about over. “So, what’s it going to be, Lynn? It’s not too late to jump off.”

  She looked up at him, realizing that the days when he would casually refer to her as a friend might be passing right before her eyes. She already felt the loss in her bones.

  “I’m sorry,” she said quietly. “This isn’t just about me anymore, Harold. Mike pulled Barry off the road and put the handcuffs on him.”

  “I understand.” The chief nodded, as if he’d known she would say this all along. “So I’ll pass both of your statements on to the board and the prosecuting attorney.”

  “I guess that’s the way it has to be.” She stood and offered her hand. “I wish I wasn’t the one making your life more complicated.”

  “Believe me”—he smiled in spite of himself—“you’re not the only one.”

  33

  “DADDY, WHO’S THE scariest monster in the world?”

  “I have absolutely no idea.”

  Mike sat at the kitchen table, mobile phone and pile of papers at one elbow, SpongeBob glass half-filled with bourbon at the other. He tried to studiously ignore his youngest son, Timmy, in the doorway and the plucky merengue music blaring from the house across the street as he read the charges against him one more time.

  Michael tried to put his hand down the back of my pants …

  “Who do you think would win in a fight between Voldemort and Spawn?”

  “What?”

  He looked up and saw Timmy in rumpled cowboy pajamas, staring at him saucer-eyed, a ragged old comic hanging limply from his hand, the splayed toes of one bare foot awkwardly massaging the instep of the other.

  “Cheryl says no one can defeat Voldemort but …”

  “Timmy, gimme a minute, willya?”

  At that point, I asked the lieutenant to leave my studio …

  He picked up the phone and dialed his union rep, Frank Murray, pretending not to hear the wild shriek and rumpus of his older children arguing over what video to watch upstairs. Almost eight o’clock on a school night. Shouldn’t these kids be doing their homework and getting ready for bed? Jesus, maybe they all needed to be on Ritalin. Fucking Marie. Working late again and throwing him to the wolves. Somebody’s got to bring the money in, she kept saying.

  By the end of next week, his vacation time would be all used up, and Harold would have the option of officially suspending him without pay. Another piece breaking off the eggshell they lived on.

  Of course, she said she was staying with him for the time being. It only took half a night of him carefully explaining that the charges against him were obviously horseshit, that everyone was freaking out because of this sicko murder, and that Lynn was taking advantage of all the rampant paranoia to exaggerate a few things he’d said to her so her sleazebag husband could sue the town for harassment. The oldest scam in the book, he told her. And Harold’s just knuckling under because he wants to keep his job.

  But three days later, the thought still nagged at him that he could’ve maybe given her a little more of a heads-up. Not a full weepy confession or anything. Just a few strategically placed mumbles and grunts to soften up the ground a bit and make sure he didn’t get dragged away in the backwash. The last thing he needed was his wife publicly abandoning him on the eve of a hearing.

  The dull burr of the phone ringing vibrated the little bones deep in his ear canal.

  “Dad …”

  “Just gimme another second, Timmy.” One finger extended, begging for indulgence.

  He’d been desperately trying to make amends since that night Paco and Harold came by. Even before he’d had kids, he’d sworn he’d never lose control and start screaming the way his parents did. But they wear you down; they really do. A hundred little fights a day over things that couldn’t matter less. A thousand little questions posed at the exact wrong moment.

  “Daddy, Cheryl says Voldemort could beat Spawn …”

  Obviously, the kid just wanted to hang out with him. They’d had a nice talk the other day in the car about monster movies—the first time in months, really, they’d connected. Just two guys going to the hardware store in the middle of the afternoon, sharing a black-cherry soda on the porch afterward. You couldn’t blame the boy for wanting to stay in that little pocket of time. But now the line was clicking, and Frank’s answering machine was coming on.

  “Hey, Frankie! Mike Fallon again,” he said once the outgoing message had played. “I just got the file from the chief, and it’s time to stop screwing around. They really lowered the boom on me, buddy.”

  Timmy stayed in the doorway, paralyzed, as if he understood exactly what was being discussed. Mike waved for him to go sit in the living room.

  “I already talked to Duffy Springer, and he’s just not going to cut the mustard this time,” he said. “I need a real lawyer.”

  Sure, Duff was a grand old fixer when it came to wheedling auto insurance and medical coverage for the family, but for the love of God this was his life they were talking about. As soon as Mike mentioned the words disciplinary hearing and homicide investigation in the same sentence, Duff started sputtering and pulling all the wrong law books down off his shelf. This was not a man capable of cutting the miracle deal Mike needed at this point.

  The next time I saw the lieutenant was when I came down to the station to post bond for my husband. He asked me if I’d ever really cared about him …

  His insides squirmed. No, this had already gone too far. He had to find somebody to help him put a stop to it. He put the phone down, took another sip of bourbon from the SpongeBob glass, and then reached for the address book to get Frank’s cell phone number.

  “Daddy, why do you need a lawyer?” asked Timmy.

  “Why are you listening in on my phone calls?”

  “I’m waiting for you. I thought we could play checkers.”

  “Isn’t it time for you to be in bed?” Mike raised his eyes to the ceiling, hearing the other children sounding as if they were running from bulls on the second floor. “What are they doing up there anyway? Are they in their pajamas?”

  “I dunno.” The boy shrugged innocently.

  He looked at the clock on the stove, praying for Marie to get home soon. Weird thing. As soon as he realized that there was a chance of losing her for good this time, he found himself wanting more attention from her. He’d started doing a few of the old chores again, so she’d notice. Regrouting the bathtub, fixing the cupboard doors she was always bitching about. Little things she hadn’t gotten to herself. Just to remind her it was useful to have a man around the house sometimes.

  “I gotta make another call,” he said, dialing the cell phone number quickly.

  His eyes fell on Lynn’s statement again as the phone began to ring. The lieutenant seemed upset when the chief ordered my husband to be released, … Gradually, reluctantly, he was beginning to understand how hard it must have been for his father to maintain control. Brrrrrp. The noise from the cell block still ringing in his ears when he came home at night. Brrp. The fights in the commissary lines, the turds tossed out between bars, the razors taped to the ends of toothbrushes. Brrp. The need to win every fight, no matter how small. The cold fact that you could never let them see you weak or wavering.

  Brrp. The wife nattering at him because the only vacation they could afford was a crappy cabin without proper toilets or heat in New Hampshire. Brrp. His sons refusing to stop grab-assing in the backseat. Brrp.

  Didn’t you hear me when I said to keep your fucking hands to yourself? What part of that didn’t you understand?

  Johnny sassing, How can your hands be fucking?

  Mom asking, You let him talk to his parents like that? The car suddenly veering into a Howard Johnson’s parking lot off I-95, late on a Friday night, and Dad ordering everyone out of the car, maki
ng his sons stand side by side as though they were inmates in the exercise yard. Johnny refusing to back down. Mom telling Dad to make the boy mind his manners. Wanting to see the mick beaten out of him. The stumpy digger’s fingers and the surly sandhog squint. The parts she was ashamed of. For the love of God, give it to ’im, Pat. Teach ’im he can’t talk to his parents that way. Johnny raising his chin and grinning. Yeah, show me who’s the boss in this house, Dad. Let me know who’s really wearing the pants. Dad slapping him across the face even as Mike pleaded for his brother to stop. Come on, Johnny, you’re just making him madder. Johnny defiantly wiping his nose on his sleeve and smiling right in Mom’s face. Jaysus, izzat the best ya can do, Dad? Gimme another. Mike wincing and looking away as Dad finally lost it once and for all and broke his big brother’s collarbone.

  Brrp. He gave up on Frank and dialed the number at the station.

  “Riverside Police,” Larry Quinn’s old-time soft-shoe-and-sarsaparilla voice came after two rings.

  “Quinnman! Quinnasaurus! What’s shaking, buddy?”

  There was a pause so long you could almost feel the chill leaking through the receiver holes. “Oh, hey, Mike …”

  “How’re things going there?”

  “Fine, Mike.” His name said a bit too loud, as if someone else in the room was being alerted that he was on the line.

  He plowed ahead anyway. “So, what’s the good word? I feel like I’m on a desert island. You hearing anything from upstairs?”

  This pause was just a little longer. “No. Not much.”

  “You guys haven’t forgotten me, have ya?”

  “No. No one’s forgetting.”

  “So how’s our friend from south of the border doing?”

  “Who? Paco?”

  “We got any other imports?”

  “Come on, Mike,” the sergeant muttered.

  “Come on what? We’re just talking here.”

  “Yeah, I know. But you know I can’t talk to you about this.”

  “Why the hell not? I help you; you help me. The river flows both ways. Am I right? We all want the same thing.”

  “Can’t do it, Mike.”

  “Sarge, don’t cut me off. I mean it. I’m just looking to do right by that poor girl. Two kids left alone in the house with that miserable fuck…”

  He heard a joist-shaking thump upstairs and Cheryl starting to cry, a high piercing feminine keen that made those tiny bones in his head tremble once again.

  “Can’t do it, Hoss,” said Larry. “It’s not that I don’t want to.”

  “Sure you don’t.” Mike sighed, a billiard ball falling through his chest.

  “Tell you something for nothing, though. That other girl that knew her was in with the chief yesterday …”

  “Who? Lynn Stock … Schulman?”

  He heard a burst of Lord of the Dance fiddle music and Harold’s dour tones in the background. “Mike, I seriously gotta go.”

  “Lar?”

  But the line was already dead. He put down the phone and spread his hands out on the table before him, trying to get a grip.

  “Dad …”

  “Just give me another minute, Timmy.” He took a deep breath. “Please. I need another minute.”

  He started to reach over for the blue book of bylaws, wanting to make sure the union would pay for his lawyer and all the expenses of mounting a defense. But his left arm suddenly shot out straight, and his fist banged the table.

  The sound startled him, and from the corner of his eye, he saw Timmy, cross-legged on the floor, lower the comic book he’d been reading. For a fraction of a second, he felt a kind of relief, as if he’d coughed and cleared his throat. But then the tension spasmed up in his gut again, and he hit the table hard enough so that the phone jumped. He closed his eyes and opened his fist, trying to settle himself.

  “Dad?” the boy asked him cautiously.

  “What?”

  “Who do you think is the scariest monster in the world?”

  He squeezed his lids. “You really want to know?”

  “Yyy-yeah.”

  Okay, Timmy, you wanna know who the scariest monster is? He saw himself swiping his arm across the table and flinging the glass and papers across the kitchen floor in scalding fury. You really wanna know? It’s the Shit Monster! That’s right! The SHIT MONSTER! You try to hold him in for as long as you can, but he wants to come out. Yes, he does! He comes rushing out of a long dark tube and gets all over everything. He covers you in brown runny turds so no one wants to get near you. And once he’s on you, you can never get him off because he’s full of disgusting germs and worms and invisible bacteria. He infects you for life, and you can never wash him away. Okay? You get the idea?

  He looked over at his son and realized that his own eyes had started to tear up from the effort of keeping all this inside. You spend your whole life telling yourself you won’t end up like your old man, and then one day you look in the mirror and there he is. Biology’s mean little private joke. It’s worse than awful. It kills you a little. Because it means nothing you’ve ever tried to do changes anything.

  “Dad? Why’re you looking at me like that?”

  The boy’s head tilted to the side a little, as if he was seeing the open space around his father for the first time. This is where it begins, Mike thought. This is where you start thinking you might actually be able to run away.

  “The Wolfman.” He gathered up his papers. “He’s the scariest.”

  “Why?”

  “Because he knows what’s going on, but he can’t make it stop.”

  34

  LYNN HESITATED AS SHE stood facing the vast deserted garden supplies aisle at the back of Home Depot.

  Where did everybody go? At the front of the store, there were long lines of burly contractors, nervous women in flannel shirts, and excitable Hasidim from upstate with carts full of building materials. But back here, by the chicken wire and fifty-pound bags of fertilizer, the place was as quiet and forbidding as a mausoleum, save for the occasional nerve-shearing whine of a buzz saw a few aisles away.

  What was the matter with her? She used to be so brave and heedless. Back at the Daily News, she wouldn’t think twice about walking into a crack house with her expensive cameras. But ever since Sandi’s funeral the other day, she’d been on edge, flinching even when Barry came up from behind to put his arms around her.

  Slowly, she pushed her cart forward, its hard rubber wheels wobbling over the concrete floor. Her eyes searched the shelves for mesh to hold the rosebushes down and deer-repellent spray. It was late in the season, she knew, but she hoped she could at least protect the tender shoots for the spring thaw. Coyote urine was good, Jeanine said. Nothing scares them away like the scent of a fiercer animal.

  Another cart clattering nearby, its stainless-steel lattice rattling loudly. She looked up and down the aisle but saw no one. Again, she wished she’d made a date to go shopping with one of her friends. These in-between moments of solitude had an ominous gravity lately. She pushed on, past the bags of ammonium nitrate. Wasn’t that what terrorists sometimes used to build bombs? God, paranoia was really getting the best of her.

  The metal shiver of the other cart grew louder. She found herself picking up speed, noticing the sound was coming from nearby, as if she was being shadowed from the next aisle and watched through spaces in the shelves.

  The buzz-saw whine filled her ears, reminding her of Sandi again. She started pushing her cart toward the end of the aisle, trying to remember if she’d recharged the cell phone battery this morning. Why didn’t she listen to Barry? The tremor of the other cart’s cage was so close she could feel it in her molars. She realized that she’d gone the wrong way and was headed right into his path. He was about to turn the corner and cut her off at the end of the aisle. Her wheels skittered as she tried to turn.

  But then dapper old Clark De Cavalcante appeared before her in his spats and three-piece suit, a ghost from 1948 with a wolf’s-head cane dangling off
the end of his empty shopping cart.

  “Good afternoon, madam.” He made a gentlemanly show of tipping his fedora to her.

  “Good afternoon, Mr. De Cavalcante.” She nodded, allowing herself a small sigh of relief.

  “You’re looking very erotic today.”

  “How … kind of you.” She demurred, wondering how far the prerogatives of old age really extended.

  “Might I ask you to accompany me back to my studio?” He smiled, displaying a row of Indian-corn teeth.

  “No, not today, thank you.”

  “Ah, well.” He shrugged as if his proposal had already been turned aside a half-dozen times today. “I suppose I’ll just have to try my luck in the kitchenware section.”

  “I suppose you will.”

  “Adieu, my dear.”

  She watched him shuffle off and then turned to find herself face to face with Michael Fallon.

  “Let me ask you something,” he said. “Are you proud of yourself?”

  His voice was like a chest defibrillator, shocking her back a step. He must have been following her around the store, waiting to get her alone.

  “Did you hear what I said?” The frame of his face tightened. “I asked you if you’re proud of yourself.”

  She was still trying to recover from having him sneak up on her like this. “Hello, Michael.”

  His lip curled. “I saw that piece of shit you handed the chief. Your statement.”

  He looked older and perhaps a little heavier since the day of the funeral. Three deep lines creased his forehead, and five-o’clock shadow darkened his jowls. His upper lip seemed wider, as if it was strained from the effort of holding back his words. His work shirt smelled of fresh-cut lumber. Beside him was an orange pallet carrying a pile of two-by-fours and a couple of fence posts with sharp points on their ends.

  “Michael, I really don’t think it’s appropriate for me to talk to you like this …”

  “Oh, you don’t think it’s appropriate? Well, fuck me then. Do you think it’s appropriate for you to have got me suspended when I have a wife and three children to support? Do you?”