“Surprised you recognized me,” I said, “after all these decades.”
“You're a million years older and uglier now, but you look like the same jerkoff you were back then. I wish I woulda whacked you.”
“Me too,” I said.
“I'm serious; it woulda been better for everyone, especially me right now.”
“Your secret,” I said solemnly, “is safe with me. If you want to whack me now, it's fine with me. Back then I had reason to care; now I don't. Let's go get a drink and talk it over.”
“Let's go get a drink and not talk over a fucking thing,” he
said. There was no heat behind his words. He seemed almost glad to see a familiar face. Judging by the contents of his grocery basket, there was no dumpy little missus cooking his supper at home, wherever that home may have been; I pictured a rented upstairs room in an old row house in some depressed river town. He had that look we all get when we've gone too long without a woman, the pinched shlumpiness of the un-fucked middle-aged man. “I don't want to hear any grousing from you. You got away, be glad you're alive—same way I'm glad I got away without concrete ankles. You and me, we were both caught in the same fucked-up shit.”
“Well,” I said, “but I was innocent.”
“Sure you were,” he said, “fucking around on my fat, pathetic cousin, dipping your little pecker where you shouldn'ta.”
“Those were the days,” I sighed.
“I tried to have a poke at that Swede cupcake myself,” Shlomo said with equal wistfulness. “She shut me good.”
“Why, I oughta,” I said without any heat myself.
A matched pair of defanged old snakes, we went, as fate would have it, to Rex's, where the drooling retard of a bartender set us up with shots and beers after scratching his head puzzling out the logic of it all: Four glasses, two customers? It didn't add up, is what it didn't. But he managed to pull it all together while my new best pal Shlomo visibly cast about for topics that didn't include organized crime, witness protection, or the question of why I wasn't dead.
“So how long after you were supposed to kill me did you get out of the mob and into the witness-protection program?” I asked pleasantly as he took his first nip of whiskey.
He coughed, as I had intended him to do. “Shut the fuck up,” he said with some of his old malevolence.
“Just wondering,” I said with a chuckle.
We settled in the way you do at a bar, our elbows rocking a little on the bartop to find the best angle for resting, our butts
gently, gradually coming to a comfortable stop that balanced us on the butterfly wingtips of our pelvic bones. Neither of us has much of a rump, so this was a delicate, precise, but largely unconscious process.
“A hit man,” I said musingly. “What a thing to be.”
“What do you do?” he asked wearily.
“Not much,” I said. “Nothing at all. I find myself deeply engrossed in this and that, but not in any lucrative or sustained way.”
“No job?” he asked, peering at me.
“No job,” I said back.
“At least I had a calling,” he said.
“But don't you feel them all flocking around you in the middle of the night, looking at you accusingly with their empty eye sockets?”
“Who?”
I stared at him as if I were one of them so he'd get the picture.
“Oh, them,” he said. He looked around the bar. The bartender was wiping beer glasses at the other end. At the various tables sat a faintly transparent crowd of no-goodnik kikes and sinister guidos, affectless slitty-eyed thugs, invented by me out of noir-film whole cloth.
“None of your fucking business, of course,” said Shlomo. “But, no, they don't. There's no ghosts in my life at all.”
“There might be ghosts in your life and you choose to ignore them, or there might be no ghosts at all because ghosts don't exist. I ask only out of curiosity about how you live with being a serial murderer after the fact. What I'm asking is, are you haunted by conscience—you got away with it, sure, but you know you're somehow still guilty?”
“Listen,” he said. “There's different ways to die. The long, slow, sad death, from cancer or whatever, someone's beloved wife, their dear old mother, their brother-in-law who fixed the
roof, their bowling buddy—that's the kind where you get ghosts. When there are people who want you to stick around, you linger after you croak because the living are keeping you alive. Trust me on this, a gun to the head, bullet goes in, shit-head don't even know what hit him—that's different.”
I threw back my whiskey and said, “Oh, barkeep.”
The bartender ignored me: the word “barkeep” was not in his vocabulary, and, like many a youth raised in these parts, he had learned that he was best off ignoring whatever he didn't understand; otherwise it might bite him.
“Hey, you,” I barked. “Another whiskey, please.”
“Make that two,” said Shlomo, and threw back his own shot. “So, anyway, the thing is, let's say we're sitting here, you and me. And that dumbfuck bartender comes over and shoots you in the head. Boom. First, there's no pain receptors in the brain. Dying that way don't hurt a bit, and since you don't even know what's coming, there's no fear or sadness or nothing, it's just over, kaput, just like that. Best way to go in the universe. I figure I was doing them a favor. Most of these guys were real lowlife pieces of shit, you know what I'm saying?”
“You were meant to kill me, you may recall,” I said. “And I was many things, but I wasn't old enough yet to be a lowlife or a piece of shit. I was just a gigolo, as the song goes, trying to keep my head above water.”
He looked me over. “Yeah, well, you were clearly a piece-of-shit-to-be. No, you weren't my usual clientele, it's true, but that was a favor to my cousin, and she and I went way back, and our parents went way back, and our grandparents before that, et cetera, back to Noah, most likely. Jesus, was she pissed off. Pissed. She wanted you blown to bits so bad she was smoking out of her ears.”
“She was a very fat and strange woman,” I said. “She was altogether too attached to me.”
“You were a fucking sponge. Poor Tovah. She peed herself
up on the bima at her bat mitzvah. Thirteen years old and she wets herself. No one could tell, but afterward she told me, that's how close we were. I felt like someone had to take care of her, and it had to be me, because she had no brothers and our fathers were brothers who came through the camps together.”
It strikes me as somewhat interesting that Shlomo, whether discussing murder, his tragically unattractive and obese cousin, concentration camps, or his interest in another whiskey, uses the same nasal monotone, has the same flat expression, as if there were nothing whatsoever behind his words, as if in fact he had become his groceries and his brain had turned into Swiss Miss pudding, his heart into a lump of some sort of dense, unappetizing luncheon meat, like olive loaf. He talks like a man who's merely biding time in his own psyche and physique until the time comes to vacate them. He wears himself very loosely, as if he didn't care one way or another when that time might be. We have a thing or two in common.
“Answer me this,” I said suddenly, shifting gears to obliterate the image just forced upon me of my erstwhile keeper and mistress at thirteen, plump and terrified and pissing herself, which was causing my stomach to convulse. “Would you say dying in the camps was worse than being bumped off by a hit man?”
“What kind of question is that?” he whined in his monotone.
“Surely you've thought about it.”
“Dying in the camps,” he shot back as if he'd just been waiting for his cue, “dying in the camps is worse, I would have to say, than getting bumped off as you walk freely down the street with your head in the clouds or sit stuffing your face at your uncle's restaurant. You jackass. You ignoramus dipshit goy Dying in the camps means being in the camps. Know what I'm saying? That's the difference.”
I thought it wiser not to say anything. I waited for him to go on.
And he did. “Listen, I never thought killing was wrong per se. To me it depends. I'm raised Orthodox, I know what the Torah and Talmud say, yadda yadda, the commandment, thou shalt not. But some people are asking for it. Those scumbag shitwads. It's like mountain climbing, those putzes who go up Everest. You choose that way of life, odds are pretty good you're gonna bite it at some point. And it's a living—I wouldn't say I got rich, but I was comfortable for a time. I just brought about the inevitable. I brought them to their natural end.”
“That's a nice story to tell yourself at bedtime,” I said. “But according to your sources, killing a human being is wrong, no matter what, end of argument, although you can flap on and on about varying degrees and shitwads and anything else you want all night—I'm not going anywhere that I know of, and I can hold a lot more whiskey than this. By the way, I happen to think the only person you're allowed to kill is yourself.”
“Not according to the Talmud,” said Shlomo with a faint gleam of relief that he wasn't the only reprobate here.
“I'm not Jewish,” I pointed out without inflection. “And although you could say that certain aspects of Jewish Law would also apply to me insofar as I was a Christian, I'm not a Christian, so that's moot. I see nothing wrong with suicide, and I don't care about what anyone else thinks, even God. I don't believe in God, by which I mean I don't think about God.”
“Everyone thinks about God,” said Shlomo flatly.
“I don't,” I said, and had a nice pull on my beer glass.
“You can't not think about God. God is like air or water or sleep or beer… or maybe the point is, not thinking about God is a negative action, like fasting, holding your breath, going on the wagon. You still gotta have air and food and beer even so.”
“I'm not,” I said, wiping my upper lip on the back of my hand, “going to listen to a theology lecture from a hit man.”
“I'm not a hit man any more,” he pointed out. “And I was raised Orthodox, I believe I mentioned.”
“Two more whiskeys, barkeep,” I trumpeted.
Barkeep now recognized his appellation on its second repetition, nodded, sucked up some drool, and got busy.
“Let's just say, for the sake of argument, that I was planning, for reasons of my own, to kill myself,” I said. “And then you come along with your cockeyed idea about how it's better to whack someone than kill yourself.”
“Not so cockeyed,” he said. “Taking your own life is a sin. Taking the life of a scumbag who's asking for it is just social hygiene.”
“Right, you go ahead and keep telling yourself that, that's very comforting, I'm sure. Now, here's my question. Would you then stop me from killing myself by whacking me with a bullet to the head?”
“Why?” said Shlomo. “What the fuck do I care? Who are you to me? No one. Go ahead and rot in hell, I don't care. Unless,” he added with a crafty little crocodile expression, “I was hired to whack you. Then everything would come into focus.”
“That's a form of suicide, it seems to me.”
“Not if you hire me by pretending to be someone else. Then I don't know what I'm doing, I just know I'm hired to whack a guy and some other guy is paying me.”
I rolled my eyes around to look at him without turning my head. “I thought you weren't a hit man any more.”
“I'm not,” he said, sitting up a little straighter.
As the evening wore on, we eventually fell into a half-drunk blue-tinged silence. I stared at the double image in the plate-glass window to the right of the bar: reflections of two pale, morose sad sacks, shoulder to shoulder, slumped at the bar, superimposed over the brightly lit stream rushing by below on its eternal, busy way to somewhere else.
“Hackneyed,” I said aloud. “Yet symbolic.”
Shlomo said, “It's fucking moronic, is what it is.” He got up,
put on his coat, and clapped me on the shoulder. “See ya round, fuckface.”
And my new best friend mooched his way out of Rex's Roadhouse and went home to heat up a can of ravioli on his hot plate.
As for me, I headed back to Waverley It was almost nine o'clock, and I was just drunk enough to feel that I was an exceptionally brilliant driver. At my advanced age I have learned that in the grip of such alcohol-fueled delusions it's probably good to be especially careful, but I threw caution to the winds and took the elderly, crooked, narrow highway at a dizzying forty miles per hour, flying along, screeching around the bends. I made it home in one piece, more or less, parked at a jaunty angle on the lawn by the house, and heaved myself out of the truck. Then, for some reason, I stood there in the chill wind and for a moment stared up at the dark, hulking curiosity of a house I lived in, blinking in consternation: why did the place have to be so big? Had it sprouted new gables and turrets since the last time I'd seen it? It looked gothically deformed, way out of proportion to the rest of the world, like a freakish mutant house in some hypothetical horror movie that grew and grew until it either collapsed from its own weight or took over the planet. I stumbled up to the porch and into the maw of this frightening apparition and sloped along to the kitchen, where my beloved, closely knit family were sitting cozily around the table, playing cards in the lamplight, the remnants of some sort of supper permeating the air and cluttering the counters and stove. Hamburgers, white rice, and boiled peas, from the uninspiring looks of things. It had Sonia written all over it.
“Hello, my chickadees,” I called in a warbling falsetto; for reasons unknown to me, I was impersonating a robin-breasted society matron from a
New Yorker
cartoon, circa 1953, with a lorgnette and little lapdog. Bellatrix flashed me a shy smile and
ducked her head. Sonia scowled at my obvious inebriation, clearly not approving in any way, and Dennis ignored me, since it was evidently his turn to discard, and he takes his gin rummy very seriously, the way he takes everything.
I poured myself some more whiskey and straddled an empty chair backward and glared at my brother, glass raised with inquiring accusation. “Have you been adding more gables and eaves to the house?” I asked him.
Dennis laid the two of spades on the table and said with a little furrow in his brow, “Why would I do that?”
“I don't know why you would do it. Why do you do anything you do? All I want to know is whether you did, and the answer is yes, judging by the looks of things out there.”