An old black woman walked behind him pulling a two-wheeled cart filled with groceries. He saw her steal a nervous glance at him, and then hurry on.
I look pretty strange out here, he realized. Standing outside the bar. Looking in.
So this is where you ended up, Jim Kiff …
And Will walked to the door and went in.
* * *
No one looked up when Will walked in.
This is the waiting room for hell. he thought. Pick a stool. sit down, and wait for the next express to Gehenna.
The bartender was leaning toward a customer, his foot rakishly resting on a shelf below the bar. His white apron, stretched by a full-sized gut, was speckled with the scars of too many weeks between washings.
Will walked up to the bar.
The bartender looked at him, raised his eyebrows, but still made no move to come over. Will waited politely, looking at him while he finished delivering whatever pearls of wisdom he was dropping in his customer’s ears.
Two men next to Will were carrying on a form of conversation, an inchoate, disorganized babble. Will listened while the bartender — slowly — disengaged from his high-level confab..
“Shit, wha’ ya gonna do? There’s not enough fuckin’ cops in the city.” The philosopher to his left took a slug of beer. “Too many fuckin’ murderers, not enough cops.”
His companion nodded, sipping at a shot glass. Then, with the authority of an imprimatur, he said, “Too fuckin’ right, Johnny.”
“And the judges! Real scum bags, I tell you.”
The bartender looked over again, his eyebrow arching even higher this time as if he had just noticed Will, just saw him — on time delay — wander in to violate the intimate social circle of his establishment.
He walked over to Will.
Put down a Bud Light coaster.
“What’ll it be?” he said.
Will had entered the joint with the idea that he’d just ask where Kiff was. Get his missionary work over. Pay his debt, offer some advice, and escape from Brooklyn. But the gloomy, suspicious air of the place made him feel that he should — at the least — order a beer.
“A beer,” Will said. “A light beer.”
The bartender nodded. He grabbed a glass that — unless Will was mistaken — still bore the soapy sheen of a cursory washing. The bartender put it under a spigot and pulled back, the glass expertly tilted, cutting the head to a neat one-quarter inch.
A professional at work.
Will put down a dollar. The bartender scooped it up and slapped back a quarter.
Will took the beer and sipped it, cool but not cold. He looked at the TV. ESPN was on with a motorcycle race held in some Martian-like desert terrain dotted with sagebrush and cactus. With the baseball play-offs in full swing, afternoon baseball was over .
.
. and there was no joy in this particular Mudville.
Will took another sip of the beer, a big one, and then he craned around, looking at the bar. There was a scattering of tables, idle, as if awaiting a flurry of guests. And some booths, bathed in a stygian darkness. Anything could be happening over there and no one would see.
Anything.
He saw two rest rooms — Ladies and Gents — lit by two naked bulbs. Will bet that if he inhaled deeply, another odor would join the pungent smell of beer and whiskey.
He turned back to the bar. .
The bartender was back with his customer, but he was also watching Will. His suspicious eyes met Will’s and then he stood up straight. He rubbed his hands against his apron.
Will responded by taking another slug of his beer. Then the man ambled over. “Get you another?” he said.
Will smiled. He shook his head. “No. I don’t think so.”
The man prepared to withdraw.
“Say,” Will said. “I’m looking for an old friend of mine.”
He waited, letting the bartender draw closer.
“Yeah .
.
.” the bartender said.
“He’s supposed to be working here, living near here.” The bartender squinted. “His name is Jim Kiff.”
The bartender rubbed his hands on his apron again. “You’re his friend?”
“Yeah,” Will said, smiling. “We went to school together.”
The bartender’s face turned grim, nasty, and Will guessed that Jimmie — if that’s who this was — probably had a pretty interesting history himself. “A friend,” the bartender said again. “You wouldn’t be jerking me around?”
Will imagined that they got their share of process servers and back-rent collectors haunting the denizens of Jimmie’s.
Will smiled. “Scout’s honor. I just — I want to see Jim Kiff.”
The bartender nodded. He walked to the end of the bar, and for a moment Will thought that the bartender was going to go over to one of those black stalls and kick something hiding in the darkness. Force it to come awake.
Instead the beefy man, with a bald spot not really covered by a thin veneer of carefully combed hair, walked to the back of his establishment, near the rest rooms. He opened a door. Will saw light, steps.
“Kiff!” the bartender said. Then louder, “Kiff, you got some company.”
The bartender backed away from the entrance.
And he smiled, as if a neatly placed trap were about to be sprung.
“You can go on up,” the bartender said, grinning, then arching his eyebrows. “He lives up there.”
The bartender waited.
And Will slowly slid off the stool and walked toward the door, the light, the stairs .
.
. to his reunion with Jim Kiff.
“Will, I can’t believe it.”
Kiff met him at the top of the narrow stairs, holding open a door to what unknown wonders Will could only guess. When he had spoken to Kiff on the phone, it had been brief. The phones aren’t safe, Kiff had said. Right, Will said, already regretting his call. He gave the address, the name of the bar off Church Avenue.
And now here was Kiff.
He looked skeletal.
Even before Will stood next to him, just the way Kiff looked scared him. His skin was tight against his face, molded to his jaw and cheekbones, collapsing in on itself. Will feared the way Kiff’s hand would feel when he reached out to shake hands.
Kiff still had red hair. It was thinner, standing up like lonely shafts of wheat blown apart by a twister.
Will got to the top of the stairs.
Kiff stuck out his hand. It shook in the air, almost blurring, wavering back and forth. Out of control.
Then Kiff’s hand closed on his. It was cold and bony. But it held on with incredible strength, not letting go. Desperate was the word that occurred to Will, and he squeezed back, hoping Kiff would release him.
“Hi, Jim,” Will said.
Kiff pulled him into his apartment, still holding on to him. The first thing that struck Will was the smell, the stench that filled the place. All the bar smells were here, but there was more. There was the odor of food gone real bad, and the ferric sting of urine, from a toilet that had been abandoned to a rainbow of discolorations.
Will felt the beer churning around in his stomach.
He tried to pull his hand back. .
“Oh, sorry. I — hey, Will, I’m real glad you came. Real glad. You look good, Will … real good.” Kiff’s face fell as if reminded that Will could no way in hell return the compliment. “Whalen told me that you’re a lawyer. That’s great .
.
. real great.” Kiff paused. Then, hurrying, breathlessly, “And you got a family.”
Will smiled. “A wife. Two girls.”
Kiff didn’t smile back.
“Yeah. Right. Hey, I told Whalen, I told him that I didn’t think there was a lot of time.” Kiff turned to the wall.
He’s crazy, Will thought. Whatever was left of Jim Kiff was probably still back in what was now called the Nam.
He’s a wreck.
Only one question, Will thought.
One crucial question .
.
.
Is he dangerous?
Will glanced at the bookshelves, the pictures taped to the walls. The drawings of crucifixes, and strange symbols, Egyptian squiggles, and fragments in Latin, in Greek.
“He tried to tell me to calm down,” Kiff went on talking, but he was looking over at his shelves. He turned to Will. “Oh, sit. Here .
.
.” Kiff gestured at a ratty chair near a table. The table was dotted with the explosive remnants of food.
Kiff stopped.
The social amenities momentarily forgotten.
“Oh, sorry. Would you like a drink? I mean, something to drink. I have —”
Kiff left his shelves.
“No, Jim. I don’t —”
But Kiff walked over to a sink. He picked up a bottle of Seagram’s.
A full bottle. Kiff picked up two glasses with his other hand. He put them on the table.
‘‘I’m a little jittery,” Kiff said. “This whole thing has got me —” Kiff unscrewed the bottle and poured two drinks, one into a Fred Flintstone jelly jar, the other into a Sau-Sea shrimp cocktail glass.
Kiff took the larger glass. Drank half of it in one shot.
He grinned at Will. His teeth were brown. Will imagined that he could smell Kiff, smell his breath wafting across the table consuming him.
“Yeah, er, Jim, Whalen said that you were upset about something. That it had to do with us .
.
. with Mike Narrio.” Will hesitated about bringing up the thing that had him really on edge. He laughed nervously. “And something about the murders in New York.
.
.” Will dared mention it. “That they have something to do with us .
.
.”
And Will found himself looking around for a weapon. I don’t want this guy to grab a steak knife and play slasher film with me.
Will paused. And now he couldn’t imagine whatever made him come here.
Kiff is crazy. Completely alcoholic. That was clear. And what the hell is it with all these crucifixes?
Five minutes, Will thought. That’s all I’ll give him.
Then I’ll consider my debt repaid.
Kiff licked his lips. They were thin, shrunken to thin. emaciated strands of muscle. Cracked.
His tongue looked pretty gnarly too.
“Okay,” Kiff said as much to himself as Will. “Okay. You see. I got to tell you what happened. I got to try to explain.” Kiff spun around and pointed at the books. “It’s all in here .
.
.” He grinned. “But you don’t have the time, of course. None of us has the time.” Kiff made another crazy grin.
Shit .
.
.
Kiff finished his drink. Poured another. A few seconds that stretched for an eternity.
Then he began his story .
.
.
“It started after I came back,” Kiff said, almost casually, “after Vietnam. I was — I guess I was a bit fucked.”
He left it to Will to imagine the horrors and weirdness. “I — I started reading about the occult. About black magic. About the spirit world. I got into Castenada, Crowley. You know them?”
Will nodded politely.
“And I began to think — a lot-about what happened to us that night .
.
. what happened to Narrio. And I was in Arizona living with Indians, real Indians, Will, who still had their ceremonies. And this magic man, this
brujo
, told me that he could see it. And it wasn’t no accident. He could see it, in my face.” Kiff took another sip. “It was no accident .
.
.”
Will squinted. Four minutes left, and I’m out of here.
“What do you mean, ‘no accident’? We were stupid, Jim. We shouldn’t have gone into Steeplechase. Narrio died because we were just
stupid
. And you got screwed for it, Kiff. You took it for us, but —”
Kiff stood up, shaking his head angrily. “No, that’s just it. If something had happened to us there, on the beach, something we could have seen, then we might have known what was going on. But we were tricked. We were drunk .
.
. and when it happened later .
.
.”
“
What
happened later?”
Kiff’s eyes went wide — at least as wide as they could. His bony hands cut through the air, seeking the convincing gesture .
.
. the confident stance.