He hasn’t thrown any of it out. He can feel the old
woman his mother became in the things she left behind, a compulsive
order that imposes itself in every room of the house, as if by
imposing order in these few small rooms, she could quiet the disorder
that had driven her here.
And it is this sense of order, as much that as the
ocean, that allows him to sleep.
The telephone is still ringing. He opens his eyes and
looks at the light on the ceiling, a milk-colored antique glass full
of dead moths and dust.
No one has the number.
It is five blocks from this house to the store. He
walks there in the morning for breakfast and the papers. He sees the
same people every day, and speaks to them without knowing their
names. The town itself is an hour from Atlantic City, at the southern
tip of the Jersey shore. The place is settled, though, unlike the
beach towns that lie in between. No one comes through on the way
somewhere else, throwing beer cans from cars. Everyone is here on
purpose.
The phone goes quiet, and Peter sits up. The
bedsprings stretch under his weight, and he looks again at the old
man’s picture in the paper. The city seems a hundred years away,
and he can almost imagine himself sitting on the benches behind the
bulkhead with the old ladies of Cape May, shaking his head at the
front page of the newspaper, asking what kind of people would do
something like that to a retired gentleman in his own basement. He
walks into the bathroom and fills the tub; there is no shower. He
settles into the bath and pictures her in this same place, looking at
the ceiling, thinking of him. She thought of him, he knows. She left
him the house.
He stays in the tub until the water loses its heat,
until in the coolness he separates himself from her and stands up and
reaches for a towel. He leaves the bathroom without draining the tub,
dresses quickly, and walks out of the house with his shirt still
sticking to the moisture on his back.
He locks the front door and heads toward his car in
the driveway.
Once before he gets there,
he stops and looks back at the house where his mother resumed her
life.
* * *
A
man
Peter has never seen before is sitting in the sun on the steps in
front of Michael’s place. He is shirtless, squinting at every car
that passes. He stands up when Peter parks, and then moves to the
sidewalk to meet him as he crosses the street. He puts one of his
hands into the pocket of his pants and cocks his head.
"Michael around?" Peter says.
"Not to you," the man says. He takes his
sunglasses off and holds them at his side.
Peter considers him a moment, the hand in his pocket,
the flat look in his eyes. He is younger without the glasses, almost
a kid. But the kind of kid who would break your legs for a dollar.
A kid who, anyplace but this street, would never meet
your eyes at all.
"Before we do something here," Peter says,
"why don’t you go inside, ask whoever the fuck you work for is
it all right to do it?"
"You got business with Michael," he says,
"tell me, and I tell him. That’s the way it works, pal."
The front door opens, offering the sight of Leonard
Crawley. His nose is taped and his jaw is wired. He is wearing
sunglasses, and beneath them Peter can see the discoloration. The
effect, in this light, is horrifying. It looks as if someone has
burned Leonard’s eyes out of their sockets.
"Leave him come in," he says.
There are perhaps twenty men in the living room,
sitting with beers and cigarettes, most of them kids like the one
outside. A television set is on in the corner, The Jetsons.
Leonard and three men Peter does not recognize are
standing around a small table near the window, watching the street.
They pass a rolled bill, taking turns bending to the table where half
a dozen lines of cocaine are laid out on a mirror.
At the edge of the table is a wet towel, and Peter
watches Leonard press it into his face after he has taken his turn.
He breathes deeply, and when he pulls it away, the towel is spotted
with blood.
Peter walks into the kitchen. Michael is in there
with Jimmy Measles and Monk and half a dozen people who have worked
for him a long time.
"Where you been?" Michael says.
Peter looks over the people in the room; all of them
are roofers, none of them have been on a roof in five years. It comes
to him that quitting hard work once you are used to it ruins you.
That it turns you mean and soft at the same time.
"Pally, you hear what I asked you?" his
cousin says. "We made a move night before last, and I asked you
where you fuckin’ been."
"The shore," he says.
"I been callin’ you six times a day, and
you’re to the fuckin’ shore."
"What the papers said, you didn’t need me."
His cousin knows he wouldn’t have gone into the basement to tie an
old man to a water heater.
He sits on the counter.
Michael says, "You should of been there, it
would have been good for you."
He liked it, Peter sees that he liked it.
"What I wonder sometimes," Michael says,
talking more for the others than to Peter, "what the fuck I need
you for in the first place. I get shot, you’re at the shore. We got
somethin’ to do, you’re at the shore. I come up to Nick’s, you
act like you’re ashamed we’re cousins."
He turns to Jimmy Measles and says, "Get me a
fuckin’ beer." It is quiet in the kitchen then, all the noise
is on the other side of the door. Jimmy Measles gets off his stool
and opens the refrigerator.
Michael Flood stares at his cousin.
"So I’m back from the shore," Peter says.
"You took an old guy into his basement and beat him to death,
and now you got the posse sitting in your living room. You askin’
me what to do next, get them out of here before they burn holes in
the carpet."
Michael shakes his head.
"They did Bobby, we did one of them. Now we’re
going to end this fuckin’ thing, is what’s next."
"The Italians been around a hundred years,"
Peter says.
Michael stares at him, wondering briefly if he has
been with the Italians and not at the shore. Trying to see what he’s
thinking.
"Everything in this fuckin’ city’s been
around a hundred years," he says finally.
There is a noise in the other room, something
falling. "So what are you doing?" Peter says.
Michael smiles and nods toward the living room. "I’m
turning them loose," he says.
Peter looks in that direction. "The only way you
turn people like that loose," he says, "you tell them
exactly what to do and promise to cut off their hands they do one
thing different than what you say, and that way they only jam you up
maybe half the time."
"We ain’t jammed up," Michael says.
Jimmy Measles puts the beer in front of him and
settles back into his stool.
"You put them on the street looking for old
guys," Peter says, "I’m going to Hawaii."
Michael is quiet a minute,
thinking. Then he gives in.
"You
go somewhere, Pally," he says finally, "you let me know
before you leave, all right?"
* * *
I
t comes to Peter later
that Jimmy Measles is borrowing Michael’s money. He sees him
running errands for him, picking up his cigarettes or pizza or
laundry, opening doors.
Michael doesn’t thank him.
"You know," he says one night at the club,
"there’s nothing written down that you got to ride Otto the
chef right to the last spin down the toilet."
Jimmy Measles just smiles. He puts himself into
Peter’s life and draws him into his, but he isn’t asking him to
carry his problems.
He doesn’t complain about his business, he doesn’t
complain about his disease. He puts the atomizer on the table next to
his cigarette, and takes one and then the other, barely able to
breathe, and never says a word about it.
And Peter likes him for that, no matter what kind of
mess he is making, putting himself in places he doesn’t belong.
Peter sits at the table now and watches one of the bartenders take
four twenties out of the cash register, and then disappear into the
bathroom with one of the kids from the art college.
"You turning this place into a commune or what?"
he says.
Jimmy Measles takes a drink and lights a cigarette.
His wife is sitting by herself under the stained glass, looking
bored.
Peter is suddenly furious, he doesn’t know why.
Jimmy does that to him. "Let me ask you something," he
says. "How deep you into Michael?"
Jimmy Measles looks around his place, all the stained
glass and fresh paint and new furniture. Two waiters are sitting in
the new stuffed leather chairs in his restaurant, half asleep, no one
to wait on. The bar is slow too. "You know where I was this
afternoon?" he says.
Peter waits.
"The proctologist. My doctor sent me to have a
proctologist examination. They got an inverted chair that tilts up,
gives them a better look at your ass. And while l’m sitting there
looking at this thing, a nurse comes in, all sweet and pressed, and
starts laying out all these shiny instruments on the table, two at a
time.
It takes her six, seven trips. She’s checking them
too, kind of holds it up to the light the way you pick out a pool cue
. . ."
"Jimmy, I’m trying to get to something here."
Jimmy holds up his hand, as if he is coming back to
that. "And then she takes a tube of lubricant out of her uniform
pocket," he says, "like she carries lubricant around with
her, squeezes it on her linger to make sure it’s coming out, and
then she lays that on the table next to the instruments, and then she
hands me a gown. She says, ‘If you would just slip out of your
trousers and underwear, sir, the doctor will be with you in a
moment.’ "
Peter stares at him, wondering where this is going.
Jimmy Measles takes a drink and uses the atomizer.
"I came," he says.
"You whacked off in a doctor’s office?"
Which is the thing about Jimmy’s stories; at some point they bring
you in. Which, he realizes, is also the thing about Jimmy. "What
if that girl forgets to lay out one of the instruments and walks back
in?"
Jimmy shrugs. "It wouldn’t be the first time."
Peter squints through the smoke and considers him.
"You did that before?"
He gives Peter a smile, an awful smile, and Peter
imagines for a moment that he is his brother, sitting in this chair
trying to break him of his habit of whacking off at the doctor’s.
He shakes his head, trying to get rid of the thought.
"If I remember," he says, "all this
started, I asked how deep you were into Michael."
Jimmy calls the bartender and points to their
glasses. All of Jimmy’s bartenders wear white shirts and black bow
ties—real ties, no clip-ons. The bartender’s tie is perfect, and
there is a little white streak in the crease at the side of his
nostril. He pours the drinks, waits a respectful time to see if there
is anything else he can do, and then returns to his station. He puts
the bottle back on the shelf and walks to the other end of the bar.
"I got to hire another bartender like him,"
Jimmy Measles says. "Only a girl. Real young-looking, named Sam
or something, some boy’s name. Nothing looks as good as a bow tie
on a girl."
"You get another one like him, they’ll be
robbing the bricks out the walls."
Jimmy shakes his head, looking into Peter’s eyes.
He says, "I always know when a bartender’s stea1ing."
He glances at his wife, who crosses her legs. Her
heel slides out of her shoe, and she reaches under the table to fix
it, touching things she cannot see. Jimmy Measles smiles again at
Peter, that same awful way.
"That girl at the doctor’s office," he
said. "I could bring her in here, maybe put her in pigtails, you
know?"
Peter puts his hand on Jimmy Measles’s arm, just
above the elbow. His arm is soft and thinner than it looks. Peter can
feel the bone. "You borrowed money from Michael," he says.
"Don’t sit around here thinking it takes care of itself. It
isn’t a friendly thing."
Jimmy Measles begins to say something, make one of
his jokes, Peter squeezes the arm, cutting him off. "You eat
together, make him laugh at your stories, everybody acting friendly,
that doesn’t make you friends," he says.
"Let me tell you what happened. He tells you,
‘Jimmy, you ever got a problem, you let me know,’ right? And then
one day you’re suddenly having a hard time keeping your wife clear
with Nan Duskin, plus the car, plus the business expenses—one of
which, by the way, is Otto the chef that couldn’t open dog food—and
you borrow a few thousand from Michael. He hands it right over,
doesn’t even seem to know how much he gave you, right?"
Peter leans closer; Jimmy tries to pull his arm away.