Slow Burn (6 page)

"You
know."

"Who told
you?" I asked.

"Everybody
knows."

"Everybody
who?"

"Mallreen
told me."

If my cousin Mallreen
knew Rebecca and I were moving in together, then it was a good bet the news had
spread as far as mainland China. I gritted my teeth, renewed my promise to show
up at the wedding and broke the connection.

The grating of
a key in the lock pulled my head around. Hector and I stood open-mouthed,
staring at each other. "Oh ... Leo ... I taught jew was ..." he
began. "I was just ..."

Hector
Gutierrez was both, the superintendent of my apartment building and a much
valued friend. He managed a small smile. We stood among the dust and boxes,
silenced by the mutual recognition of what would surely come next. I'm not good
with silence. It makes me nervous, like there's something going on all around
me and yet I'm not a part of it. Silence is to be filled.

As I opened my
mouth to speak, Hector lost his grip on the great wad of keys in his hand. With
a rush, the cable snapped them up to the little spring-loaded gizmo on his
belt, taking whatever it was I thought I had to say with them. The quiet was
broken only by the muted electronic wheezing of my ancient dock-radio on the table.

After a certain
age, the realities of lives diverging can no longer be softened by even the
best intentions. Our memories are filled with the hundreds of people who have
walked through our lives, touched us in some way and then seemingly disappeared
from the face of the earth. Time erodes our willingness to promise once again
to keep in touch, and, without willing it so, the Kleenex promises of youth
give way to the carefully chosen holiday cards of adulthood.

Hector got his
shit together first.

"Jew look
like somebody shot your focking dog."

I looked around
the place. It looked like a calltionary advertisement in favor of using
professional movers.

"I've been
here a long time," my voice said.

Hector strode
over and stood directly in front of me. His thick mustache was begirLning to
gray. He'd missed a spot on the left side of his chin when he'd shaved this
morning. Most of the remaining bristles were white. He poked me in the chest.

"Jew
movin' into a palacio dat you don't got to pay for, wid a beautiful woooman who
love you. What jew got to be sad about?"

It sounded good
when he said it, but somehow it failed to warm the cold spot at my center.

"I've been
alone a long time," I said.

"Oh
yeah." He spread his arms and looked around. "Must be tough to gibe
up all dis."

Hector was
right. The end of my noble isolation was no great loss. What had once been a
statement had quietly become a question. What had begun, after my divorce, as
an exercise in self-reliance had eroded into little more than a holding action
against the inevitable, a pathetic rear guard massacre of years, whose graves
were marked by only the profusion of chips in the dishes and the build-up of
paint on the familiar walls. He brought his hands down onto my shoulders and
then we embraced. When holding one another became too embarrassing, we stepped
apart and put ourselves back together.

"I guess
maybe I'm not sure I deserve her," I said.

He grinned.
"Daf s easy, Leo. Jew shoulda tol me. I can help jew wid dat. Jew
ready?"

I nodded. He
was still smiling.

"Okay den,
here eet is. Eef s seemple. Jew right. Jew don't deserve her. No focking way.
Not even close. Mees Duvall eees a great lady, Leo. I doan gotta tell jew
dat." He tapped his temple. "Smart. A doktor." He looked at me
sadly and shrugged. "Jew ... a private deek ..." Thinking about my
career seemed to rob him of words. "She way too good for jew ees what she
ees. Jew just count your blessings ees what jew do."

"Gee, I
feel better now."

He clapped me
on the back and headed for the door.

"Oh, doan
worry, jew not de only one. Nobody really feel like dey deserve what dey got.
Dey spend their whole fock-ing lives waiting for somebody to come and take eet
all back, like eet was all a beeg mistake."

He stopped at
the door and turned back my way.

"Jew come
round. We have a beer down at the Red Door."

"We'll
keep in touch," I said.

"Jew
bet."

After he closed
the door, I stood for a moment, listening to my own breath, as if expecting my
door to open again. It didn't.

I snatched the
phone from the table and punched in Rebecca's number at the medical examiner's
office. No go. She'd left for the day.

Both pager and
cell phone set to voice mail. I left her the basics of where I was going to be
and headed for the bedroom. With most of my clothes packed away, I was already
living out of a suitcase and a shaving kit. All I had to do was zip them up.

Much like
salmon, professional drunks follow predictable evolutionary and migratory
patterns. Early on, they stay close to the familiar gravel of their home
waters. They limit themselves to cozy fern bars near the office. Some place
they can hit right after work for a bit of shop talk and some serious stress
relief, among cohorts who can be trusted to impound their car keys, call their
wives and stuff them into cabs. Nice places like that.

Later, when
both wives and car keys are things of the past; when the last of their loved
ones has finally had enough and even the occasional truth is met with stony
silence; when the next step involves sharing an apartment with a telephone pole
and imagining a steady drizzle to be an integral part of any fine dining
experience, then . . . then they're ready for The Zoo.

I stood in the
doorway and waited for my eyes to adjust to the near darkness. An ornately
carved stand-up bar, complete with brass foot rail, ran the full length of the
room and down around the corner, where the only four stools in the joint looked
back at the door. Stand-up bars keep a guy on his toes. If s no trick for
anybody to drink himself into a stupor with one cheek perched on a padded
stool. Standing up was a whole other matter. A guy had to maintain some shred
of dignity or risk falling among the cigar butts, the peanut shells and the
slick bronchial emissions composting underfoot.

Bonnie, one of the
owners, was behind the bar. I pointed at her and made a face. She pointed at
her lower back and made her own face. Terry's back was out again. Bonnie was
stuck tending bar. I gave her a two-fingered salute and moved down the
left-hand wall, past the six brown leatherette booths, toward the familiar
noise at the back of the room. Three beer glasses and three empty shot glasses
rested on the far end of the bar. The tops of the stools were covered with an
array of coats, sweaters, vests, ponchos and plastic bags. The Boys were
playing snooker. As I stood at the corner of the bar and watched, it occurred
to me that these old guys were, at this point in my life, my only tangible
bequest from my father. Funny that they were the only ones who'd actually known
him, and yet they were the only ones who never tried to trade on his name.

George Paris
saw me first. Sometime back in the early seventies, George's banking career had
fallen victim to both merger mania and his own unquenchable thirst for single
malt scotch. His finely chiseled features and slicked-back white hair made him
look like a ring announcer. If you didn't look into his filigreed eyes or down
at his mismatched shoes, you could easily mistake George for a functioning
member of the global village.

"The
prodigal returns," he said.

I waved three
fingers at Bonnie. "Wine for my friends."

The wine was,
of course, purely metaphorical. I mean, they'd sure as hell drink wine if That’s
all there was. Hell, they'd drink cleaning products if that's all there was,
but not if somebody else was buying. No, no. I checked my watch:
eleven-fifteen. By now they were well into the shank of their drinking day.

"Leo,"
shouted Ralph Batista. He stumbled over my way, the butt of his pool cue
clattering across the boards, threw an arm around my shoulder and planted a wet
kiss on my cheek. He smelled of diesel fuel and dry vomit. Ralph used to be a
well-known port official. In his younger days, he mustered the longshoremen's
vote for the old man. The extra folds of skin on his face, combined with a pallcity
of functioning brain cells, gave him the benign countenance of a cabbage. Inner
peace by default.

"Hey,
Harry, old boy. Look who's here," he shouted.

Harold Green
had sold men's shoes at The Bon and been active in the Retailers Union. He used
to be taller. He was one of those drunks who just keeps getting skinnier and
skinnier, each lost ounce further emphasizing his baseball-sized Adam's apple
and cab-door ears.

Harold was up
on one foot, leaning over the table, sizing up a tricky three-rail shot. When
he heard the unmistakable sound of boilermakers fatting the bar, he left the
cue rolling on the table and hustled over.

"Howdy,
kid," he said as-he squeezed by me.

Other than an
unquenchable thirst, these three had one other thing in common. Each had
managed to hang in there long enough to have garnered a meager monthly stipend
from his respective employer. Not a full pension, not enough to make it alone,
but, with careful management, enough to collectively keep them in liquor and
even, sometimes, out of the rain. Simplify. Simplify. That was their motto.

With the
precision of a drill team, the twisted trio downed their shots, slapped the
glasses back on the bar and chased it with the beer.

"Ah,"
said Ralph. "The pallse that refreshes."

"Ambrosia,"
confirmed Harold.

George agreed.
"Nectar of the gods," he said, wiping his mouth with his sleeve.

"Could you
guys use a little work?" I asked. "You got something for us?"
Ralph asked. "No, you idiot, he's taking a survey," snarled George.
"One hundred bucks a day. Each," I added.

"No
shit," said Ralph.

"We're
going to need a bunch more people, too."'

"How
many?" George asked.

"I figure
nine more, plus you three."

"Well,"
George said, "there's Norman, for one."

"Where is Norman, anyway?"

"He's
sleeping in."

Harold
explained. "He got overserved last night at the Six-Eleven. Barkeep's got
no sense at all. Oughta call the city on him."

"Okay,"
I said. "Norman for four. Big Frank, Judy, Mary and Earlene, Billy Bob
Fung, and Flounder for ten. Who else? I need two more. What about Waldo?"

"In the
can," George said. "Got some twenty days left."

"Red
Lopez?"

"I can
find Red," said Ralph. "One more."

George started
to open his mouth. I beat him to it.

"Not the
Speaker and not Slalom, so don't even say it. When I tell you what we're gonna
be doing, you'll understand why."

He took me at
my word.

"What
about Dickie or Don?" I asked.

"Denny's
doing the long limbo," said Harold.

"Trollin'
for topsoil trout," George added.

Ralph sensed my
confusion. "He fell off the viaduct, Leo. Busted his neck. Dickie took it
real hard. Ain't nobody seen him since."

We finally
settled on Hot Shot Scott.

"What's
the job?" George asked.

As I began to
speak, George found a small spiral-bound notebook in the pocket of one of his
coats and started to take notes. When I'd finished, he asked, "What about
inside? What are we gonna do about that?"

"I was
thinking I'd fix up Frank and Judy."

"Gonna
take a lot of fixin'."

"You let
me worry about that. That way we've got Harold, Ralph and Norman to run the
crews and you to keep the whole thing working. "Any questions?"

"Who's
gonna look for the cow?"

"It's a
bull, and I am."

"When do
we start?"

"Tomorrow
morning. But I want to see everybody at four this afternoon."
"Where?"

"Third Avenue. In front of the Rainier Club." George wrote it down and looked up. I
headed to the far end of the bar and had a few words with Bonnie. Bonnie wasn't
real enthused, but she said okay.

He had the
James Dean slouching-in-a-doorway thing down. He wore a tight pair of jeans, a
belt with a rodeo buckle and a white cowboy shirt with pearl buttons and the
sleeves cut off. If I had arms like that, I'd cut my shirtsleeves off, too.
Hell, if I had arms like that, I'd cut the sleeves off my sport coats.

"Why don't
ya just take a minute and have you a good look," he said. "That way
we won't be spendin' our quality time together with you sneakin' peaks at me,
okay, podna?" I thought his finishing grimace might have been a smile. It
was hard to tell.