Empire Falls (37 page)

“You can put those on the drainboard,” Miles told him, setting the boy in motion again, his battery not quite dead after all.

When the door swung shut behind him, the moment seemed to have passed for Miles to say anything further to Tick, though he couldn’t help feeling that the boy’s intrusion had stolen some chance—he had no idea what—they might never have again. Miles himself had felt on the verge of telling her something straight from the heart, about not to end up getting herself trapped, though there must’ve been more to it than that. Whatever it had been, it was gone now.

When he consulted his watch, he saw that it was nearly nine and that the only wisdom he was confident of imparting to her concerned the Hobart. “Run these glasses through again without soap,” he suggested, since that would finish unclogging the lower jets. “Then you can clean up and go, okay? They said they’d stop back on the way to the movie.”

Her eyes brightened a little. “Are you sure? Isn’t it still pretty busy?”

“Nothing your grandfather and I can’t handle,” he assured her. “Go and have a good time.”

But he must not have completely banished from his consciousness the sight of the Voss boy standing there motionless in the doorway, because he heard himself say something that surprised him. “You want me to let John off too, so he can go with you?”

She answered almost before he finished asking. “No,” she said, her expression urgent, fearful.

“Okay,” he said, almost as quickly, surprised at how instinctively he understood that he’d just offered up a really bad idea.

D
AVID WAS LEANING
up against the refrigerator drinking a diet cola and surveying the dining room floor when Miles, tying an apron on over his T-shirt, joined him behind the counter. It was still hot by the eight-burner stove, and David wiped his forehead with the shirtsleeve on his bad arm.

“Hell of a night,” Miles told his brother appreciatively. Every table was still occupied, though no one was waiting to be seated and everyone had been served.

“It was,” his brother agreed, though not with the enthusiasm Miles might have predicted, causing him to wonder if David was tiring of all this just when it was about to pay off. That would be entirely in character, of course. Even as a boy David had quickly become bored with things as soon as he’d mastered them. “Good thing you showed up when you did. I don’t know what we would’ve done.”

“Bad planning on my part,” Miles admitted, though part of his plan
had
been for him to show up in case they got a rush. “I’ll hire a replacement for Buster this week, I promise, but it looks like we’re also going to need more regular help on weekends from now on. Unless tonight was a freak.”

“Could be even bigger tomorrow night after the game,” David said. “Did I hear you’re closing early?”

Miles nodded. “I thought I’d do breakfast, close around eleven, then open again at six for dinner.”

“Sounds okay.” David nodded. “I might catch the first half of the game myself.”

“Where’d Dad go?” Miles thought to ask, since Max was nowhere in evidence.

“Out having a smoke. I told him he could leave at nine. That okay?”

“Perfect,” Miles said. Nothing could be more like the old man than to take his cigarette break ten minutes before he was getting off. On the other hand, his father had helped out.
That
was out of character. “He behave out here?”

“Far as I know. Charlene didn’t hurt him, so I guess everything went okay.”

Miles nodded. “I’m going to let Tick go, too. She and her friends are going to a movie.”

“The Minty boy?”

“I know,” Miles said. “I’m not thrilled about it either.”

“I didn’t say anything.”

“You didn’t need to.”

Right on cue, Tick emerged from the back, pulling a sweater on over her head, the picture of resilient young womanhood. Five minutes before, bedraggled after five hours in the steam, she’d been nearly in tears over the boy from Martha’s Vineyard. Now she was not only recovered but indeed radiant and, to Miles’s way of thinking, heartbreakingly beautiful. “Can I have some money?” She winced.

Apparently Miles wasn’t the kid’s only heartbroken admirer, because David magically had a ten-dollar bill in his hand. Miles told him to put it away. “There’s a twenty in my shirt pocket,” he told his daughter. “Hanging on the peg by the back door.” But even as he spoke, he had a bad feeling.

In a minute she was back, wincing again. “There’s nothing in your shirt, Daddy.”

Which meant that Max, standing innocently outside, had foxed him again, even though Miles had seen it coming back in the car. Telling his father he wasn’t going to get the twenty, of course, had been exactly the wrong thing to do. Of course, it wasn’t much more than Max had earned, so that wasn’t the issue. It was that once again, the old man had gotten his way. Not only was he helping paint the church after Miles had told him he couldn’t, but now, in effect, Miles had paid him under the table for working at the restaurant.

This time when David offered the ten, Miles let Tick take it.

“Do you suppose he has any conscience at all?” he asked after his daughter was gone.

“Sure he does,” David said, turning his empty soda glass upside down in the nearest tray. Then, after a thoughtful beat: “No slave to it, though, is he?”

CHAPTER 13

“W
HY ON EARTH
did you want to go and hire that comatose boy?” was what Charlene wanted to know when Miles slid in beside her. It had been Miles’s idea that the three of them—he and David and Charlene—celebrate over a drink. When he’d rung out the register in the restaurant, he was stunned by how well they’d done.

There was a half full glass of seltzer-with-lemon sitting next to Charlene’s scotch, so Miles supposed his brother was around somewhere. Also, unless he was mistaken, that was Horace Weymouth anchoring the far end of the bar. It had taken until nearly eleven-thirty to close the restaurant, and the Lamplighter was one of the few places still open in Dexter County where they could be reasonably sure they wouldn’t run into Max. Unless Miles missed his guess, that probably explained Horace’s presence as well.

Certainly it wasn’t the ambience. The Lamplighter’s lounge reminded Miles of a Midwestern Holiday Inn. There was a small woman with a lot of hair noodling something almost recognizable on a piano on the other side of the dark room. From their half-moon booth only the woman’s hair was visible, and her phrasing on the piano suggested that she was determined to get through each song without making a mistake. Was it possible, Miles wondered, that she was related to Doris Roderigue?

He was the last to arrive because he’d given John Voss a lift home. The boy had toiled through a mountain of pots and pans without speaking a word to anyone all evening. His morose silence had thrown Charlene for a loop. To Charlene, a talker, nothing was more unnatural and perverse. Her secret as a waitress was her ability to disarm people, to get them talking no matter who they were: school kids, the girls from the Academy of Hair Design, long-haul truckers, professors from the college. With John Voss, though, she’d made exactly no progress. “The last man that didn’t have any more to say to me than that was the one who tried to rape me in the parking lot, if you recall.”

Miles did recall, in fact, though the incident was now twenty-some years old. For years it had fueled a disturbingly vivid teenage fantasy in which Miles, then a busboy and dishwasher, came out the back door with a bag of trash for the Dumpster, interrupting the attempted rape and heroically driving Charlene’s knife-wielding attacker off into the night. Actually, the real attacker hadn’t wielded any sort of weapon, but Miles had furnished him with one for dramatic purposes. Even at the time he’d known that his fantasy was not entirely innocent, or even decent, despite its moral structure and heroic resolution. His discovery of the struggling pair in the parking lot was always highly precise. He never arrived before Charlene’s assailant had made significant progress, enough, that is, to expose her milky breasts. Had Miles actually come upon such a struggle in back of the Empire Grill, of course, he wouldn’t have been able to see anything in the pitch-dark parking lot, but in his imagination the scene was sufficiently illuminated for his purposes. The first time he indulged the fantasy, he merely glimpsed Charlene’s naked torso, but in each successive reenactment he lingered longer on the sight until, finally, sickened, he gave up the scenario altogether, aware that even though he’d cast himself in the role of hero, he’d in fact come to identify with Charlene’s attacker, sharing his heartsickness at the knowledge that no girl this beautiful would ever come to him voluntarily.

Worse than the new busboy’s failure to say a damn word, Charlene went on, was that he wouldn’t even look at her when
she
was talking. “I swear to God, I could be standing in front of that boy stark naked,” she said, “and all he’d look at would be the floor.”

This was true, no doubt, though Miles again recalled Zack Minty’s overly slick social skills, coming to the same conclusion as he had earlier—that this kid was profoundly untrustworthy. Maybe John Voss had a lot to learn, but the Minty boy had at least as much to
un
learn. Both, it occurred to Miles, were long shots.

“I probably shouldn’t have hired him,” Miles admitted, and he wouldn’t have, but for Tick. According to his daughter, the boy lived alone with his grandmother, and she’d deduced from his ill-fitting, thrift-shop clothes that they were desperately poor. What he was eating for lunch smelled like cat food, and all this week she’d asked Miles to make an extra sandwich for her to take to school. Tonight, the boy had not wanted to accept a ride home, but it was late and Miles had insisted. The ramshackle house the boy directed him to was on the outskirts of town, not far from the old landfill and a good quarter mile from its nearest neighbor. The place had been completely dark when they pulled into the dirt drive, and anyone passing by would’ve concluded, if they’d even noticed the house so far back off the road, that it must be deserted except, maybe, for varmints under the floors and birds in the rafters. No car was in evidence, and the boy said that his grandmother must have gone to bed early and forgot to leave the light on.

“He worked hard, though,” Miles pointed out.

Charlene admitted this was true. “I’ll just have to get him to smoke a doobie with me some afternoon. Loosen him up.”

David then slid into the booth on the other side of Charlene. “I wouldn’t go around corrupting the local youth any more than you absolutely have to, Charlene,” he advised, taking a sip of his seltzer. “Officer Minty’s got his eye on you as it is.”

Charlene snorted. “On you, you mean. Not me.”

Miles studied first his brother, then the woman he’d been more or less in love with for twenty-five years. Their quick, easy exchange suggested he was missing something. It was the same way he often felt on Martha’s Vineyard around Peter and Dawn, who, like most married couples, had developed a kind of verbal shorthand, a system of quick allusions that required no further referencing. This was just one more way, Miles supposed, that his own marriage had fallen short. He and Janine had always had trouble making themselves understood to each other, even when they spoke in complete paragraphs. It was Janine’s position that if they hadn’t fucked that dozen times or so, there would’ve been no reason for them to go through the motions of divorce. They could have just had the marriage annulled, the church’s acknowledgment that in twenty years no intercourse of any significance, sexual or even verbal, had taken place between them.

Settling on his brother, Miles asked, “Why would Jimmy Minty have his eye on either of you?”

“Didn’t you know?” David grinned. “Charlene here is my distributor.”

“I don’t get it,” Miles said. “Why would Jimmy Minty think that?” If true, this wasn’t funny.

“That’s not the half of it,” David continued. “According to Jimmy, I’m a major grower. I’ve cornered the whole damn pot market in central Maine. I caught him tramping around the woods behind my place yesterday trying to find my patch.”

This really wasn’t funny either, though David seemed to think it was. “What’d you do?”