“How much you think altogether?”
“Why you asking? Besides, you'll have plenty of time to count it at home. But there's twenty in it for you and Boo, ten apiece and okay, for you another five, just for doing this for me.”
“What're you afraid of, cops on the take?”
“A little, yes. They've done it with other barowners. They slip in the place because of some minor infraction nobody's followed for fifty years or an anonymous phone complaint maybe made by them in a disguised voice, and while one's questioning the bartender, boom, half the register money's suddenly gone. Where'd it go? âOh, I don't know,' they say, âyou accusing us?' getting tough.'You yelling corrupt?' Ah. Maybe, probably the ones who come to close will be clean and great but I can't take chances, though forget the bottles they might cart away before they return my keys, and the steaks.”
“How am I to tell Boo you only want me to hold the money? He's big and already a bit tanked and mean from all the booze he drank.”
“I told you guys only free beer.”
“Not me, him, but you also told us you'd be right back.”
“Okay, wait, let me think. After the police come take the money straight to Kelly's Bar instead and give it to Kelly to hold.”
“What're you now, all of a sudden don't trust me?”
“I trust you but Kelly's always been all right with me and he knows where to hide money, you might not.”
“I got a floorboard in my place for stashing away stuff. And now I told you that you know something about me that nobody else does.”
“I'd still rather have Kelly.”
“You know, being so all right with people isn't what I learned about him. Why I don't go in there and others is he gives change for five dollars too many times when you give him a ten. And how you know he'll be there?”
“Call him. If he's not, call me at the 15th Precinct right back. But just take the money if he is which he will be, he's like me, he never leaves and he'll be honest with me or else he knows he won't get favors back. I'll try and call you later tonight or the morning and you'll have put down by then how much you gave Kelly, okay?”
“Okay, but I still don't like that you don't trust me or what Boo might do.”
“I do trust you, I do, and when I get back you have a home at the bar for free food and booze for a couple of days, Boo too. Now put him on.”
“Yeh,” Boo says.
“Boo, this is Shaney.”
“Yeh, I know, Hector said, so?”
“So Boo, I don't care, I'm not normally like this as you know and don't give me that tough âso' stuff too, but big as you are and sober and mean as you might be that day, if you give Hector any flack about the job I just gave him to do I'll beat your ass black and blue with my billy, I swear, and much worse than that I'll ban you forever from my bar, you got?”
“Yeh. I'll keep myself straight.”
“Good man and thanks.”
I give the police my bar keys and two of them leave to lock up. I ask the sergeant if he could put a guard on the bar tonight for I'm almost sure Stovin's men will try and firebomb the place or smash in all the plate glass. He says “We're short-handed as it is. And I can't see why your bar rates a special guard when you're the person being held and charged for maybe clobbering to death one of the group you accuse of harassing you.”
“You'll put that down in writing for my bar's insurance company?”
“I'll put your face down in writing if you don't smarten up.” “And threaten me again and I'll have whoever it is supposed to know about police threats know about you.”
“Quick, someoneâAngelo, get over here,” he yells to a policeman, “and get this asshole out of my sight before I lose my cool altogether and level him and then you guys will lose your protective sergeant for another few weeks.”
Angelo sits me down, gets me coffee and tells me to lay off the sergeant. “He's been called down before for busting a suspect's jaw and we can't afford to have him kicked off the force.” Later he checks with the sergeant and tells me that the court which will talk about bail and my appointed lawyer for my assault and possible manslaughter case doesn't open till tomorrow at ten and I'll have to spend the night in a detaining cell upstairs.
I'm given a blanket, towel and toothbrush and taken to the cell. Three other men share it. I want to call Hector but the guard tells me “As a first-nighter you already made your limitation of one call.” I eat and while the guards and other prisoners watch TV in the common room shared by an entire floor of cells, I lie on my upper-bunk cot and think and think about my situation and end up thinking there's nothing to think about how to end the situation and there's no way I can stop and my only hope's that Stovin's will think or say they've had enough of me and our situation and let it drop.
Cells are locked up right after the late evening news, we're given a doughnut and apple juice snack, our light's turned off though there's still the glow from the common room lamps and TV the guards continue to watch, the men in the cell talk in the dark about the movie they'd just seen.
“I liked it because it was real.”
“Real how? When you shoot someone there's supposed to be holes and blood.”
“Maybe there was but on the small screen compared to a theater's you couldn't see them and also the color was bad.”
“What makes you say the movie wasn't especially made for TV?”
“Excuse me, fellas,” I say.
“Because I saw it in its uncut version a year ago.”
“I don't believe you.”
“And I don't believe you don't believe me.”
“Listen, you weasel.”
“Excuse me. I don't mean to cut into your conversation, so anyone wants to tell me to shut up, go ahead. But as long as I'm here, and you want to know anything more about me I'm a barowner of a cheap place called Mitchell's on East 5th Street, but any of you know anything about a garbage company called Stovin's on D and Sand?”
“No.”
“No.”
“No, why?” the man below me says.
“You know them?”
“No, what I got with garbage? I'm curious and just talking like the other twoâwhat else we to do?”
I make it brief about what's happened to me the last few weeks and ask if they've heard of anything like that happening downtown and they all say no and then just generally in town and they say no and then what any of them would do if he was me.
“Seems like two dudes just hustling you and your apartment fire wasn't connected or they overfanned it to a mistake,” one of the men across from me says. “Don't bother them again and they'll go away.”
“Never give someone advice that could cost him his life,” the man above him says.
“Why, he'll come back to haunt me?”
“His brothers might, weasel.”
“What I'd do,” the man below me says, “is lease for a cheap fee your bar for a year and take a southern vacation but tell your friends you went north, because you'll get yourself killed resisting back to them like that.”
“But you never heard of them or the two men, Turner or Pete? Just by your voice you sounded like you might. And it's all right if you did, as I won't mention where I met you or your name. I just want to know what they think they have to do to me before they stop.”
“I said no, go to sleep.”
“Goodnight,” the other two say.
“Night, fellas.” I fall asleep and am dreaming of getting into our old car in the neighborhood I lived in with my folks years ago. They're what they look like and in the same clothes as in my photos I lost of them in the fire and I'm the same size, age and face I'm now but act much younger, so I guess I'm supposed to be in this dream about eleven or twelve which is when we had that car, when all four doors slam closed and my head flashes white, car my father puts the ignition key in explodes, dream suddenly ends and I feel tremendous pain in my brains and hands and legs, white breaks apart into stars and dashes and dots like a universe starting up and then I have to puke, I'm screaming and awake and want to bawl like a kid the pain in my head's so great, but I just go out and next when I'm awake the cell's lit and someone's sticking needles in my arm and another's sucking out something from my mouth and nose with a hose and next when I'm awake I'm on a stretcher zipping through an empty hall except for some police and a couple of rough-looking men in cuffs and I first think it's another dream because my head and sight's so indistinct and then I see and think it clear. I'm wet with sweat all over it feels, pissed or shit in my pants because something like that stinks and seems to be me and my lips are sticky and I got blood on my stretcher and chest.
“No problem, you'll be okay,” someone says, man walking next to me it is with his clipboard clapping the wall and I say yes.
“You can hear?”
“Hear, yes.”
“Guy's got great recovery,” the bearer in front of us says and I say yes. “Good pair of ears too.”
I reach up to feel where it is that still hurts so much in the head but the man next to me says “Put it down, don't touch, I'm warning you, Fleet. That's a clean dressing the doc put on and I'm responsible, so I'll slap your hand right off your wrist.”
I drop my hand if I ever got it up and again go out.
“You can't have me anymore, Mr. Fleet,” a woman says.
“Wha?”
“I said I'm afraid you can't have me anymore. Want me to speak louder? You see, to put it in plain layman's language, the criminal court, in the person of the judge of such, appointed me as your lawyer because of your own inexplicit and, to me personally, rather witless self-destructive reasons why you didn't need one, but now I have to unappoint myself because there's no longer a criminal case. We just received corroboration from the D.A. that the man you beat up dropped charges against youâForgive me, but we were talking about this before, don't you remember?”
“Huh?”
“You certain you're even conscious now?”
“Let me see.”
Eyes open all the way. Light from the outside's in the room. Cages on the windows padlocked. Smell of public school cafeteria food. I'm asleep under white sheets in a men's ward or was. Now I'm up. My mind sort of, not my neck or back. And it's snowing again or never stopped. And birds, I hear birds, but it's this whistler in the next bed like a whole flock of them and most of the pain's gone in my head.
“I don't want to disturb you if you still want to doze.”
“No, I want to stay up. Why my here?”
“I already told you.”
“Why my here?”
“Well, your face is more alert. Has to be a good sign, particularly with all the painkiller they put in. You're healthy and perky again or thereaboutsâcongrats. I'm Janie Pershcolt, remember? We just had a long involved conversation about your life and bad breaks of late, but all the time you weren't even awake? How can that be? Anyway, I'm your court-appointed etcetera, not that I'm available to you now, etceteraâand you won't flake out on me again?”
“Try not to.”
“Hungry? Want food, Mr. Fleet? Mr. Fleet, are you there? Food. Pudding. Potatoes, munch munch, and buttered bread. You should be starved after two days of just tubes. They're giving out the trays now and before you said you didn't.”
“Still don't. Stomach.”
“You're not nauseous. If you are, be a friend as I've been to you and forewarn so I can step aside? Anyway, as I told you previously, the reason you're here is you were hit on the head with a pipe two nights ago or with some comparably solid instrument and possibly thrown off your bed, remember that?”
“Not talking about or happening it.”
“Why would, assuming he did, and looks like to me, one of your fellow cellmates do that or any combination of the three? In your sleep conversation you said you only dreamed getting bonked.”
“Looks like to me? Combination three?”
“Forgive me, but are you accusing all three prisoners of participating in the attack?”
“The guard?”
“The guard too or alone? Which, if either, and what's your basis for stating that?” “Let me think.”
“That's a pretty wild charge, Mr. Fleet. Earthshaking anytime the lawbreaker's the law. I'm not a prosecuting attorney or your lawyer anymore, but because my field is criminal jurisprudence and the penal system and so forth, I would like to know.”
“Let me think.”
“I hope there's no permanent brain damage. I mean I know there's none permanent or otherwise because the doctor told me there's not, so don't let me worry you, but I hope there isn't.”
“I don't feel it. Please, Ginny, let me think.”
“Janie, JanieâSo how are you today?” she says to the next bed.
“Fine and dandy, ma'am, and you?”
“I'm hardly the one in the hospital plus incarcerated, but I feel terrific today. I adore snow.” And suddenly to me “Quick, Shaney, what's your name?”
“My what?”
“Name, quick, your name.”
“Shaney Elborn Fleet.”
“Quick, what do you do and where and all that?”
“Own a bar. Barowner. Ten to one. Tend one too. I do. One twenty-three East 5th Street, postal code forgot. Mitchell's Bar and G. B and Grill. Bar and Grest, Rest, pleaseâthese questions hurt my head. And will you please stop whistling?” I say to the next bed. “It's a nice tune and you whistle well but it's killing me.”
“Ever you say, pal.”
“No, you're all right,” she says. “Quick response, natural verbal confusion, though what you said made sense. But your three ex-cellmates say they didn't touch you. That while they slept you must have rolled off your bunk to the floor because you weren't familiar with upstairs sleeping, and no one could find the pipe or comparable solid instrument.”