Summer Accommodations: A Novel (10 page)

“Shit! You don't quit. Okay! Let's just get it over with.”

“Whoa big fella, what kind of an attitude is that for fun? Relax. This is a small adventure, so treat it like one.”

We cut through the weeds separating the back of the waiters' bunk house from the shed where the dishwashers and handymen were billeted. The warm, mid-afternoon air smelled of cheap muscatel and beer. A radio was playing “Sixteen Tons” but the music was being crowded by the boozy snores and grumbles of the dozing dishwashers, bums who had been lured into pick-up trucks with fifths of cheap whiskey and half gallons of muscatel and Thunderbird wine and then driven from the Bowery to the country. Like the sailors of another age these men had been hijacked and impressed into service. Their port of call was to be one of the Catskill resort hotels not some distant continent or exotic island and as long as they had a reliable supply of cigarettes and cheap wine, a cot to lie on and three meals a day they didn't cause trouble beyond the walls of their own quarters. But to me, they were derelicts, bums and drunkards, dangerous, unpredictable, embodiments of chaos and violence. There were always stories about their fights and their brutality and at least once a week someone would turn up in the kitchen with a black eye, a swollen nose or a split lip. They rarely talked to the waiters and busboys but they eyed us mistrustfully and swaggered around us as we loaded and unloaded our trays, occasionally leaning in too close as if to speak, and then withdrawing. I was more intimidated by this behavior than the others seemed to be and mistaking their bravado for menace, never made eye contact with them, behaving like I was riding the subway in New York City.

“Lenny?” Ron called out. “Come out here Lenny.” With a shaking hand I pulled a Kent king size from its box and beat a tattoo on my lip with its filter trying to get it into my mouth.

“I thought you smoked L&M regulars, what are those?”

“Just wanted to try them.” I'd left my Zippo lighter back in the room and had stashed a pack of matches in the cigarette hard pack. I pulled a match forward and closed the flap behind it. Then, bending the match into an arc so that the head was over the strike board on the back of the cover, and grasping the matchbook in my palm so that my thumb was over the match head, I pushed the head down and quickly across the black gritty surface. I cupped my other hand over the flame and brought my head down to light the cigarette. This one-handed light was meant to convey a tough and rugged persona and though it was at odds with my actual mien I nonetheless relied on it to daunt anyone watching me.

“LENNY! Hey, don't be nervous Mel,” Ron said, watching the cigarette flutter in my mouth like a flag on a windy day, “they're harmless. It's all they can do to stand up at this time of day, relax.” I grinned, but felt ashamed of the fear that accompanied me whenever I ventured out of the security of my safe and comfortable world.

“Hi ya Ron, how ya doin'?” Lenny came through the door in a sleeveless undershirt and torn, dirty, gray work pants. Looking into Lenny's face was looking into the face of chaos, evidence that God could make mistakes. His features were askew, the left side of his face shifted up almost an inch higher than the right, not quite Picassoesque, just misshapen, like a piece of wax left too close to a fire so that one side had partly melted. His lips were thicker and fuller on the right side, his cheek rounder, and his right eye, buried in a thick cushion of fat, wandered and searched around in its socket as if trying to make sense of these derangements. Ron cocked his head when he spoke to Lenny as if to align the features, and I was unsure if this was done unconsciously or deliberately to evoke laughter from me.

“Hi Lenny, you know Mel here,” he said nodding in my direction and then he asked about the judge.

“Yeah, like I told you it was around this time of year, I don't remember exactly when but it was summer, very hot and muggy like now.” He scanned our faces measuring our attention, his eyes pointing in different directions so that it was hard to know which one was looking at you. “He was wearing a brown suit and a white shirt. Very natty. He'd come to gamble like he always did. This used to be a roadhouse where people came to drink and gamble. It was very big during prohibition, before your time,” he said proudly, owning something the two of us could not. “There was a fight. Fights broke out all the time because the liquor was very strong. Somebody accused the judge of cheating and he stood up and pushed the table over …”

“Who pushed the table, the judge?” Ron asked.

“… I was gonna tell you. No, it was the guy from Chicago. I don't remember his name but Mr. Braverman, Ben, not one of his boys that you work for, he told me to make sure that the man from Chicago's ashtray was always empty and his glass was always full. He was a big guy. He pushed the table over and grabbed the judge by his tie and pulled him right up against himself. See, even though it was so hot and muggy the judge never took off his tie. He was a very natty guy. He really liked to dress up.”

“So what happened then?” Ron was getting impatient and afraid that Lenny might wander off into the weed patch of his non sequiturs and be lost for the rest of the day.

“Somebody yelled ‘Get Lenny out of here!' and I was dragged outside by the bartender. Then there were the shots. Three of them. Bang! Bang-Bang! Curly, that was the bartender, pulled me up to him and said ‘I didn't here anything just then and you didn't neither.' I said no, that's not true there was gunshots, but he said you made a mistake, those was cicadas, they make a big racket and that's what you heard. Then, later that night they told me they needed me to work on the well, that it had gone dry from all the heat and they were going to fill it with stones to press the water down so it could come out from the new well they were going to dig. I never heard of anything like that before but I knew not to ask any questions because Curly told me don't ask anything, just do what they tell you. Besides, it had been the hottest summer I remembered so maybe that was why the well was dried up. While I was loading up stones in that field over there,” he said, pointing to the field bordering his shack, “Ben came up to me and asked me if I'd heard any strange noises tonight after I left the casino and I said yeah, very loud cicadas.” Ron and Lenny both laughed but I just smiled weakly. “Cicadas,” Ron repeated, slapping his thigh and bowing with laughter, “Holy shit! Cicadas!” He and Lenny laughed some more and then Ron said, “So Crater's in the old well, is that what you think Len?”

“Gee Ron, I never said that. All I heard was cicadas,” and then he slapped his thigh and doubled over with demonic laughter. I'd had enough and turned to leave but Ron grabbed my arm.

“Wait up. Let's at least see the well.”

Not ready to relinquish his hold on us, Lenny said, “I can show you the well Mel,—Hey! I'm a poet and I don't know it! It's right near here, I can show you.”

“C'mon,” Ron said, “we've got nothing else to do right now anyway. Let's just see it.” And then, gratuitously, he added, “Lenny won't push you in, will you Lenny?”

“I couldn't anyway because it's all filled up with rocks and dead cicadas,” and Lenny fell to his knees, his body wracked by his diabolical laughter making me feel uncomfortably closer to the bottom of that well.

Lenny led us back towards the waiters' quarters and then to the dense thicket of fir trees that had been planted in the space separating the dining room staff from the housing for the band and the social staff, the tummler, the tennis pro, the life guards and the camp counselors. Behind their building was the one where the chambermaids and cooks lived. We all had assumed this thicket had been placed there to keep us from peeping on the girl staffers while they changed their clothes, but Lenny said that this was where the old well had been.

“Look over here,” he said, parting some weeds in the middle of the thicket, “see the stones?” Ron and I pushed the weeds apart and leaned over the ground where some stones could be seen breaking through the dirt. It was here that I had stumbled and fallen the night Ron took me to meet Rosie Moldar. We swept the top layer of soil aside with our hands to reveal a circle of stones measuring about five feet in diameter. Weeds and vines were tangled across the site whose dimensions I would have missed had I not been searching for it. Ron knelt down at the periphery, separated the turf from the stones and smiled.

“Mortar,” he said, holding up some pieces of cement. “This damn sure was probably a well.” He stood up and came to me with a smile on his face. “Want to meet judge Crater Melvin?”

When we were changing for dinner I said to Ron, “That still doesn't prove anything. Okay, so there was another well once but that doesn't mean Crater's in it, for godsakes. And even if Lenny is telling the truth are you expecting me to dig up the well with you?”

“No, Melvin, I expect you to do it by yourself,” he said sarcastically. “Actually Lenny was accurate about the location of the well and maybe the judge is inside it after all, who knows.” “How come he chose to tell you of all people Ron, have you asked yourself that? How come for twenty five years he doesn't say a thing to anyone and all of a sudden today, of all the waiters and busboys and social staff that have passed through Braverman's, he decides to tell Ron Alter.” Ron shrugged, looked away, put his hands in his pockets, took them out again and sighed.

“I lent Lenny money that's why. He said he had a sure thing in a horse race somewhere, I don't know where, but it was a long shot that was supposed to be a fix. He was so excited. The bookie in Monticello has been taking his money for years and if that horse were to come in it would be fantastic for him.”

“How could you lend him money? I don't understand why you would do such a … reckless thing,” I said, catching myself before I said “stupid thing”.

“Lenny is a harmless guy. Look hard at him and maybe you can learn to be grateful for what you've got, a normal mind and a normal body. I have a cousin like Lenny, retarded, deformed. I used to be embarrassed to be seen with him. Now I'm embarrassed by the way other people behave when they're around him. It's probably no different for Lenny. Twenty bucks for him is a small fortune. When the horse came in it became a large fortune, a thousand dollars, a fifty to one winner. I took back my $20 but I wouldn't accept any more than that. This story about Judge Crater is his way of saying thanks. It's his way to take a risk for me.” This was an aspect of Ron that took me by surprise. There had been no display of sensitivity or compassion to anyone other than himself in the entire month I'd known him, yet there was no disputing that Lenny had aroused tender feelings in him.

“So you think that makes his story more believable?” I ventured.

“It's certainly possible and that's what counts. What we do with it I don't know but I'll think of something. And don't go telling anybody about this. I probably shouldn't have told you either but it's too late to change that.”

“Don't worry, I'll keep it just between us,” I said, wondering if my first call would be to Malcolm or to one of my brothers. After all, there are always those others whom we rely upon to keep our confidences. The thought of telling Harlan tempted me but he was so angry with Ron I didn't think I could trust him to keep his knowledge of the secret from him. I'd never seen Harlan do anything to deliberately provoke another person but his dislike of Ron had become obvious. In the beginning of the summer when Ron began displaying his critical and rejecting attitude Harlan had remained cordial and polite, but lately Ron had worn through the veneer of civility and now they moved around each other silently and warily, like stray dogs in a vacant lot. I would have liked to repair their rift but knew it was well beyond my capacity for mediation and rather than make it worse than it already was I opted to keep the judge from Harlan for the time being. And the more I thought about what Lenny had said the more plausible it seemed, plausible though not likely. But why not? Strange things do occur; life resists our efforts to organize the world and all its pieces; life conforms only to nature's laws. So why was I obliged to conform to Ron's laws? I decided to submit to the impulse to call Malcolm and tell him about the judge.

“What??! Judge Crater? That's impossible! He was never in the mountains. He went to the clubs in the city or he went to … I don't know where he went, but not the Catskills.”

“Just because you didn't know, it doesn't mean it didn't happen.”

“I can't believe you'd be so naive, Mel, I can't imagine anyone buying such bullshit. Anyone but you I guess.”

“That's really nice of you, Malcolm, thanks. I thought you were my friend.”

“I
am
your friend that's why I won't lie to you. Come on, Mel, you know who you are, I'm not telling you anything that'd surprise you, you're a sitting duck for every scam artist there is.”

“This guy Lenny is no scam artist, believe me, he's too dumb to try anything like that. I think he may have the true story on Crater.” I was standing in a phone booth inside the canteen trying not to be too loud, but Malcolm's skepticism frustrated me and caused me to raise my voice. I looked around to see if anyone was watching. Harlan was buying a pack of Luckys at the counter and several guests were looking at the New York City newspapers but no one seemed to take notice of me. Lowering my voice I continued. “Why not, Mal, why not here. This was a gambling den hidden in the woods, a perfect place to be private and safe. The big hotels weren't even built then.”

“Yeah, but has anybody ever said he was in the Catskills? I don't know the details but I've heard things like Yonkers or Chicago but never upstate. So how are you doing for ass?” He was finished with the judge.

“Aw, not very well what about you?” There was a rap on the glass door of the phone booth. Harlan waved at me on his way out of the canteen and was gone before I could stop him. Although Malcolm was my best friend I would have hung up on him to spend time with Harlan, that's how taken I was with him; my feelings bordered on hero worship. There might come a time when telling Harlan about the judge would be possible, if only just for a good laugh. At that time I had no idea how much Harlan and judge Crater would become involved in the course of the rest of my summer.