by T. F. Torrey
He shrugged. “It was fun,” he said simply.
We crossed Indian School and headed up 18th Avenue. My place was right around the corner now.
“It wouldn’t have been so much fun,” John said contemplatively, “if they had pulled out a gun.”
That struck me as odd. Then I thought about it and it seemed even odder. “Hey,” I said. Then I said it again. “Hey! Why didn’t you just pull out your gun?”
“I didn’t want to shoot it,” he said.
“You wouldn’t have had to,” I insisted. “You could have just waved it around and scared them while we got away with the girl.”
He shook his head. “Nah,” he said. “This gun’s too little to scare big guys like that. They would have just laughed, and then I would have had to pull the trigger.”
“What do you mean?”
He patted his pocket where the gun was. “This gun’s little. They’d look at it and think it was too little to hurt them, like some kind of BB gun or something.”
“But it would still take them out if you shot them.”
“Sure, bullets are mean things. But I didn’t want to shoot it. You wave around a big gun if you don’t want to shoot. You wave around a little gun, and you just might have to.”
I nodded thoughtfully. “Still,” I said, “they come at you. You shoot them. Self defense. I’m your witness.”
He was shaking his head and smiling. “No, I couldn’t have shot them.”
I was confused. This master of survival couldn’t shoot someone to defend himself? “What do you mean, you couldn’t have shot them?” I asked. “All that talk about the attacker making the choice to deal with the results ….”
He was smiling broadly. “Jack,” he said, “it’s only got blanks in it.”
I was dumbfounded.
All that. All that worrying about the bullets coming down in the city. All that worrying about the police tracking me down as an accomplice to homicide. All that—for nothing.
“Sure was fun, though, wasn’t it?” he asked, grinning like a lunatic.
We were back at my place.
Chapter 6
It hadn’t taken long for something to come up. It had been Tuesday when Macy and Sharon first came to Gridlock. Based on previous experiences and current trends, I hadn’t expected to see Macy again for several weeks. I was quite surprised when he dropped back into Gridlock on what would have otherwise been a dull Friday night that same week.
I was immediately suspicious. Few people dropped into Gridlock at twelve-thirty on any day of the week, and none of them looked particularly well-rested. Macy was both. His step was quick and light as he practically pranced over to the bar and hopped up onto the stool. If he hadn’t been so cheerful, I would have suspected that Sharon had narked. Instead, I suspected she hadn’t. The night had just become interesting.
“Hey, hey, Jack!” he said.
“Macy!” I returned. “Can I get you a beer?”
“Love one.”
Again Macy and I were practically alone in the bar. Five people sat at two tables in the back. No one sat at the bar. I had been watching an old Perry Mason episode on TV when he came in. Now I turned my attention to Macy.
“What’s going on tonight?” I asked as he put down his glass.
He tried hard to look surprised. “What makes you think something’s going on?”
“Are you saying that nothing’s going on tonight?”
“No,” he said, smiling, “I’m just wondering what makes you think so.”
I leaned forward and rested my elbows on the bar, counting off the points on my left hand. “First,” I said, extending my index finger, “it’s almost closing time, and nobody but a hardcore drunk looking for one last drink comes in this close to closing. Second, you look like you’ve taken a nap, perhaps resting up for something. And third, you don’t want to talk about it.”
His grin grew wide while I made my case. “Damn, Jack,” he said. “You always were pretty sharp.” He took another sip of beer, then glanced suspiciously over his shoulder at the other patrons. The regulars there were all staff from the Veteran’s Hospital, and they sat completely absorbed in the clink and chatter of their separate conversations. Satisfied, Macy turned back to me, leaning forward with his elbows on the bar. “Tonight,” he said, “we’re going to have some fun. What are you planning on doing after you close up here?”
For a moment I thought of lying to him, of saying that I was meeting someone or something. Many times since, I’ve wondered if I made the right choice in deciding to go with Macy that night.
Macy declined to tell me exactly what he had in mind, but his intensity and excitement intrigued me. After I’d closed up the bar we rode in his truck to my apartment. On the way there Macy told me that John Lupo would be meeting us at my apartment.
I was slightly offended, feeling somewhat taken for granted. “That was pretty self-confident of you, wasn’t it?”
“What?”
“To assume that I would go along with your plan, and make arrangements for people I don’t even know to meet me at my own apartment after work?”
“Well,” Macy said, “I just figured you’d be interested in some fun, that’s all.”
“But what if I wasn’t?”
“Then I’d go talk to John and he wouldn’t show up.”
I decided to let it ride. “Where’s John now?” I asked.
Macy almost made a sour face. “He’s over at his girlfriend’s apartment.”
“Is this the girlfriend with the baby born out in the desert?”
“No, that was his wife.”
“So he’s married and he has a girlfriend?”
“No, he’s divorced and he has a girlfriend.”
“What happened to his wife?”
“Is this your place?” Macy asked, beginning to pull into a driveway a block away from mine.
“No, mine’s up there on the left. Brick building.”
He adjusted his course and continued the story. “His wife? Well, see, he was working in New Mexico—”
“I though you said he worked with you.”
“No, he was doing a job in New Mexico, but that was years ago. Actually, he didn’t even live here at the time. He grew up on the Navajo reservation up north. His father is full-blooded Indian.” He paused.
“I take it his mother isn’t.”
“That’s right,” he said. “He wound up moving to Winslow and got a job doing roofing there, and that’s where he was when he was married.”
“I see,” I said.
“So anyway, he was doing a job in Albuquerque, and they finish the job up a day early and come back, so he figures he’ll drop in and give his wife a bit of a surprise.” He stopped talking while he parked his truck in the driveway I was pointing to.
“So was she surprised?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said, killing the lights and the engine, “boy were she and her new boyfriend ever surprised.”
“Wow,” I said as we climbed out of Macy’s truck. “So how many pieces did he leave them in?”
“What?”
“Did he beat them up bad or what?”
Macy frowned and shook his head. “Nothing like that at all. He just walked away.” He waved his hand off to the side when he said it, like he was turning down spinach jello or something. “He told me that if the bitch wanted to screw around on him, she wasn’t worth keeping—or fighting over.”
I knew there had to be more to the story, a secret girlfriend of his own or something. Nobody just walks away without revenge of some kind unless he has a guilty conscience of his own. I also knew, however, that it really wasn’t Macy’s business to go around telling every detail, so I let it slide. “So all this happened before you knew him?” I asked.
“Yep, a couple years ago.”
“Where’s his wife now? Still in standing on a corner in Winslow, Arizona?”
“Yep. And she got the kids, too.”
“Wow.” I tho
ught about this for a moment. “He must be a lot older than we are.”
“Yeah,” Macy said. “He’s thirty-two.”
“Wow,” I said again. At the time, that sounded insanely old to me. I unlocked the door and we went inside.
“This is a pretty nice place,” Macy said.
My apartment on West Devonshire was a large studio, all one room except for the bathroom, but I had it laid out so that there was a distinct kitchen area and a separate bed area and a space by the front window not unlike a living room, kind of fenced in by a pair of couches in an L-shape. I offered Macy a beer and got one for myself as well, and we settled onto the couches. I kicked off my shoes and put my feet up on the coffee table, but Macy sat on the edge of the couch with his feet squarely on the floor, resting his elbows on his knees, kind of leaning into the conversation, which I continued.
“Yeah,” I said. “It’s small, but I like it. So, John’s over at his girlfriend’s place?”
“Yep.”
“Is he going to leave there this late to come here for whatever you have planned?”
“Yep. He wouldn’t miss it for anything.”
“So are you going to tell me what this is all about or what?”
“Not yet. I’ll wait till John gets here.”
With all this secrecy, I would have suspected some people of trying to entice me with some kind of herbal intoxicant. Not Macy, though. He let his language get carried away, but Macy had always been the type who followed the straight and narrow. His words frequently ran foul, but his actions rarely did. When we were in high school he went to church every Sunday—religiously, I guess you could say. And Macy was no quitter. I would have been surprised if he’d adopted any behavior pattern including drug abuse. But I was confused about why John Lupo was leaving his girlfriend to come to my apartment for—whatever.
“So,” I said, “did John bring his girlfriend with him from Winslow?”
“No, not even close.” Macy’s eyes were alight with this talk of John Lupo. “After he divorced his wife there, he quit his job and came here and he lived right out in the desert for a whole year.”
“No.”
“Yeah! Can you believe that, man? A whole year out there, just fishing and hunting.”
“Where did he sleep?”
“He built a little hut—a hooch, he called it.”
“Didn’t he bathe?”
“Of course he bathed. He washed himself off in the river, I think.”
“And he just ate fish?”
“Yeah, well, fish, rabbits, whatever he could catch.”
“Where—where did he get water?”
“From the river, dude. Or from cactuses and things.”
“Wow,” I said. I mulled this over for a bit. “Whatever made him go off and do something like that?”
Macy shrugged. “He says he was just doing some soul searching. Thinking about life and marriage and kids and all and what’s the point.” He shrugged again.
“What does he do now?” I asked, developing an interest in the man myself.
“He’s my boss,” Macy said.
“Doing what?”
“Oh, we work for a contractor, laying tile roofs on houses. Right now we’re doing a bunch of new places going up in Cave Creek.”
Another difficult point crossed my mind. “How did he get into that? I mean, he couldn’t just walk in all scuzzy and ragged out of the desert and ask for a job.”
Macy thoughtfully sipped his beer. “No,” he said. “He’s got a brother somewhere around here. I think he put John up for a while until he got his own place and stuff.”
I sipped my own beer and thought for a second. It was almost one-thirty. Usually I went to bed just before dawn, so it was no big deal to me, but I wondered if John was as enthusiastic as Macy about coming to my place for God-knows-what on a Friday night. “Who’s this girlfriend of John’s?” I asked.
Macy acted slightly irritated, rolling his eyes a little. “She’s a nurse over at the VA hospital,” he explained. “He stopped some clown from stealing her purse a few months ago down at the store, so she invited him to dinner, and they’ve been seeing each other ever since.”
“Do you think it’s serious?” I asked.
He kind of rolled his eyes again and shrugged. “I don’t know. This is the first girl he’s trusted enough to go out with since he left his wife. And today he was talking about moving in with her.”
“What do you think of her?”
“She’s a nice person,” he said. “Great body.” He sipped again at his beer. “But she acts all fragile out in the desert.”
“Fragile?”
“Yeah, like some kind of actress, or something. She’s got her wide straw hat and her suntan lotion. Me, I just let it burn me. I figure I’ll get used to it, working on roofs all day and going to the desert every weekend.”
I doubted that, but I didn’t say so. “I take it John doesn’t use any suntan lotion?”
“Nah. He’s got dark skin anyway, so the sun doesn’t bother him too much. He’s half Indian. His father was Navajo, and it sure shows in John.”
At that moment another truck rumbled into the driveway and parked alongside Macy’s. For a second the headlights glared in through the front window, then they and the engine cut out simultaneously.
“That’s John now,” Macy said, rising out of his seat. I stood, too, and opened the door for this interesting newcomer. As John got out of his truck and walked to my door I sized him up. His flannel shirt, jeans, moccasins, and that suede leather outback hat combined to give him a rough, rugged look. Though he was fairly short, even if you included the hat, he had some mysterious air of control around him.
“Hey, hey, John!” Macy said, stepping into the doorway.
“Hey, I was afraid you guys might start without me,” John returned.
Macy and I stepped back as John walked through the door into my apartment. “No, of course not, John, we couldn’t go without you,” Macy said.
“The world turned fine without me before I got here,” John said. “It’ll turn just fine without me after I’m gone. And I think it will even keep turning if I take a break to see my girlfriend.”
I thought that was a strange thing to say, but then again I’d been expecting an introduction. I got it now.
“Jack Trexlor,” Macy said, “meet John Lupo. John, this is my old friend Jack.” We shook hands. His grip was firm, but not overbearing. Macy added, “Jack’s a painter.”
“Well, not exactly,” I said. “Actually, I’m a bartender. I just paint a little.”
“Go ahead, Jack,” Macy said. “Show him one of your paintings.”
I shot Macy an irritated glare. “I don’t want to bore the guy out the door as soon as he gets here.” To John I said, “Would you care for a beer?”
“Sure,” John said, smiling a bit for Macy.
I went to the refrigerator and brought out three bottles. When I got back with them Macy had led John to the wall by the door to the bathroom, where they were looking at a drawing. Immediately, a lump formed in my stomach. I had several of my paintings and drawings on my walls. Above the end of the couch was a very nice portrait of an orange tabby cat. On the opposite wall, beside the entry door, was a landscape painting of a fiery sunset over jagged mountains, an explosion of color. Many other paintings and drawings were scattered about the place, most of them harmless. Ignoring these, they had stopped in front of one done in crayon and pencil, an uneven, ugly drawing, created when I was in a dark place, and only displayed now to whet my mind for something better.
As I handed them their beers, Macy asked, “You do this one, Jack?”
I sighed. “Yep, sure did. There’s no signature in the corner, but, yep.”
They gazed at it, silent for a moment.
“What is it?” Macy asked.
I sighed again. “This is a woman, smiling, giving birth standing up,” I said, pointing with the mouth of my beer bottle. “This guy’s her husba
nd, also smiling, beating her in the head with a club. And that’s her baby, half-born, already with a club in his hand.” Another silence. We all sipped our beers thoughtfully.
“What’s that?” Macy asked, indicating a long-haired extra in the top left corner of the canvas.
“That’s a saint or a bishop or something, smiling because he thinks this abuse is great.”
Macy was puzzled. “That’s—isn’t that kind of sacrilegious?”
I shrugged. “Maybe. I never said it was good. Or proper. It just seemed like a good idea at the time.” I turned to John. “Now that,” I said, indicating the tattoo on John’s upper left arm. “That’s art.” The tattoo portrayed a bald eagle, wings spread, beak open in a silent scream, talons stretched wide at some unseen prey. The details were crisp and the colors vivid.
“Yeah,” John said. “I got that done a couple years ago.”
“It’s very good,” I said in genuine appreciation.
“Thanks,” John said.
“Why don’t we have a seat,” I said, walking toward the sitting area, “and you can tell me what’s so exciting that’s going on tonight.”
“Okay,” Macy said. He and I resumed our previous sitting positions. John took the chair across the coffee table from Macy, to my right. “Tonight,” Macy said, “we’re going skating.”
“Skating?” I asked.
John was smiling.
“Skating,” Macy said. He was silent, like I might possibly know what he meant.
I didn’t have any idea. “I don’t want to sound stupid, but—what are you talking about?”
John explained. “We go out into some quiet neighborhood and fire a couple of shots—not to hit anything, just so that somebody’ll call the police.”
“Then we duck and dodge the neighbors and the police to get back here,” Macy said.
“We ‘skate’ past the opposition,” John said. “Skating.”
It didn’t sound like fun to me. “Isn’t that illegal?” I asked.
“Of course it is,” John said. “If it wasn’t, it wouldn’t be so much fun.”
“Are you comin’?” Macy asked.
I wound up going.
***
When John and I got back to my apartment, Macy was leaning in the shadows of the doorway. He spotted us and trotted out to walk in with us. “Damn!” he said. “I was getting worried about you guys. What the hell took you so long?”
