Empire Falls (63 page)

“Florida,” Max said, as if everybody knew that much. “You should come down. Good place for a single guy.”

“Where’s Father Tom?”

“Down the other end of the bar. He won second place in a Hemingway look-alike contest. He’s got a beard now. Came in all white.”

“How could you do it, Dad?”

“Let him grow a beard? Why shouldn’t he?”

“You know what I mean. How could you take money from a senile priest and run off to Florida and drink it all up?”

“I never took a dime.”

“No, you just let him pay for everything, right?”

Max didn’t deny this.

Miles rubbed his temples. That these two geezers had made it all that way was truly astonishing. How had they managed to avoid being spotted by the troopers of every state from here to Key West, all of whom had been put on the lookout for a purple Crown Victoria driven by two old men who looked like escapees from a mental hospital? “Is the car still in one piece?”

“Should be. We left it at the public landing.”

“What public landing?”

“In Camden.”

“Congratulations. Now you’ve lost me.”

“We come down here on the
Lila Day
. Me and Tom crewed.”

“Wait a minute. You want me to believe you and Father Tom crewed a
schooner
all the way from Camden, Maine, to the Florida Keys?”

“Not just the two of us, you dummy. Cap’n Jack and four other guys. I’m an old salt, you know.”

You’re an old something, all right, Miles thought.

“Tom fell overboard once, but we went back for him. After that he was more careful.”

Miles tried to imagine the old priest, trussed up in a life jacket, bobbing on the rough water, cold and uncomprehending. He could even appreciate the justice of it, given that the old man had been heartless enough to send Grace on that walk across the Iron Bridge. So why wasn’t he able to take much pleasure from it? “Dad,” he said, “do you have any idea what’ll happen to you if Father Tom gets hurt?”

“Yep,” his father said, confident he knew the answer to this question better than the man who’d asked it. “Not a goddamn thing.”

Okay, he was probably right.

“Why shouldn’t he have a little fun?” was what Max wanted to know, since they were asking questions. “Old men like to have fun too, you know. Down here, people
like
old men.”

“Why?”

“They don’t say,” Max admitted. “Tom hears confessions every afternoon at the end of the bar. You should see it.”

“That’s terrible, Dad.”

“Why? Think about it.”

“It’s sacrilegious.”

“Your mother really messed you up, you know that?”

And that was all it took, just the one mention of Grace, and suddenly the question was out before Miles could consider the wisdom of asking it. “How come you never told me about Mom and Charlie Whiting, Dad?”

Max reacted as if he’d been expecting the question for years. “How come you never told
me
, son?”

CHAPTER 24

“S
O WHAT
are we
doing
here?” Justin Dibble whined, causing Zack Minty to regret, for about the tenth time in the last half hour, inviting him along. Inviting him by promising to kick his ass if he didn’t come. Zack had his reasons for wanting company, but damned if he could remember them, and now here was Double Dibble wanting to know the exact thing Zack couldn’t really explain.

“Waiting for it to get dark,” Zack told him. Which was true. He’d parked the Camaro on the shoulder of the old landfill road in the gathering dusk. The house the Voss kid lived in with his grandmother was just visible through the trees, though. You couldn’t see the car from the house unless you were looking for it.

“You’re just pissed off ’cause he showed you up,” Justin said, rolling down his window to toss out an empty Cheetos bag.

“That’s a two-hundred-dollar fine,” Zack pointed out. One of the good things about being a cop’s son was that over time you learned what all the consequences were. That didn’t mean you wouldn’t take a chance anyway, but at least you knew how big a rod they’d stick up your ass if you got caught. To Zack’s way of thinking, some crimes were worth the risk, but it was hard to imagine anybody dumb enough to risk a two-hundred-dollar fine over a sixty-cent bag of Cheetos.

“How would anybody know it was me?” Justin said, licking his orange fingers.

“You wipe your hands on my dad’s upholstery, he’ll fuck you up good.”

Double Dibble kept on licking, the clean fingers glistening, the others still Cheeto-orange. “Nah, your dad likes me.”

“Not as much as he likes this car,” Zack reminded him. “Not even close.”

Just one orange finger, the middle one, was extended now. Justin sucked on it provocatively.

“John Voss showed me up when, dipshit?”

“Playing the game.”

Zack knew this was coming, of course. He’d put off responding to the remark so it would seem like it didn’t mean shit to him. “How the fuck do you figure that? I’m the one that taught him.”

“Yeah, but he’s better at it. You flinch.”

“The fuck I do.”

“You flinch, every time.”

“Right. Like you’d know. You’re too chicken to play, even.”

Justin shrugged, wiping his fingers on his pants.

Zack would have liked to drop the subject, but couldn’t. “The reason he doesn’t
flinch
is he doesn’t have a
brain
. He’s too stupid to be scared.”

“You’re the one who’s always saying there’s nothing to be scared of,” Justin reminded him, examining the orange streaks on his baggy chinos with mild regret. “That’s why we’re all supposed to play, right?”

“It’s a rush, okay? What I’m saying is, he’s so fucking stupid he doesn’t even get the rush.” Justin didn’t look convinced. “Anyway, fuck you. You don’t play, you don’t get to criticize.”

“I played once. It’s a dumb game.”

“A dumb game that made you piss your pants,” Zack snorted.

One thing was for sure. Zack was going to have to sit down and reevaluate his whole friend situation, which was going from bad to worse. It wasn’t that long ago he’d had pretty cool friends. Now he was surrounded on all sides by losers. This was what happened when you didn’t pay attention.

Some of it couldn’t be helped, of course. Zed and Thomas had moved away with their parents, and they’d been the best of the bunch. Then a couple other friends decided they wouldn’t have anything to do with him anymore, though they never said why. Like he couldn’t figure it out when they started hanging out at the country club pool and playing fag sports like tennis and golf. Which left him with pretty slim pickings, like Justin Fucking Double Dibble. He’d actually been pretty cool in junior high, but now it was like he didn’t give a shit anymore. He’d been a pretty decent basketball player, but he wouldn’t even try out for the team, which was fucking stupid because he probably would’ve made it. Anymore all he wanted to do was eat junk food and play video games and whack off to that porn shit he was always downloading off the Net.

Next year would be better. As one of the few sophomores on varsity, Zack had been admired, if not completely accepted or welcomed by the older guys, especially the seniors. At times it almost seemed like they’d heard something about him before they even met him, something that made them suspicious. He’d thought it’d be different after the Fairhaven game, but Coach had fucked him over by giving the starting linebacker job back to Billy Wolff after his ankle healed. Like that was all it took for him to forget who made the hit that turned the whole fucking game around. Coach hadn’t come right out and said it, but Zack was pretty sure he blamed Zack for all the bad publicity. The Fairhaven quarterback hadn’t played since, and in the paper last week it said his parents were taking him to Boston to see if they could find out why his headaches wouldn’t go away. Zack could’ve told them why. The headaches wouldn’t go away because then the pansy would have to play again. One good shot had separated the kid from his desire to play football.

A late hit, they were calling it now, after they’d watched the game film, which didn’t even really show it, since the camera had followed the flight of the ball. Coach got asked about it in an interview and said the tape wasn’t conclusive, but in the locker room before the last game he’d given a speech about wanting all good clean hits, and a lot of the guys had glanced over at Zack, and then down at the floor. Which had pissed him off so much he’d immediately gotten into a shoving match with a kid on the opening kickoff, resulting in offsetting penalties. He’d spent the rest of the game at the very end of the bench. Coach hadn’t even looked his way, except to shake his head. So maybe things would be better next year, and maybe they wouldn’t.

Zack studied the house, now visible in silhouette through the trees. Which was weird, if you thought about it. The Voss kid, who at first hadn’t wanted them to give him a ride home the other night, and then didn’t want them to turn down the dirt drive, claimed his grandmother was sick and shouldn’t be disturbed. But the house had been dark, just like it was now. Was the old woman so fucked up she couldn’t get out of bed to switch on the light, or so completely out of it she didn’t know when it was night?

“So what’s the deal with Tick?” he said, without looking at his passenger. “She got something going with this John Voss?” The reason he wanted Justin along, he now recalled, wasn’t just to have somebody keep watch. He wanted to think this whole situation through one more time. Double Dibble was in art class and sat at the same table with Tick and John Voss—and that fat pig Candace—so maybe he could help Zack out a little.

Justin shrugged. “She just feels sorry for him.”

Zack considered this possibility. True, Tick was like that, big-hearted when it came to losers. She had this idea she was going to be an artist, but unless Zack missed his guess, she’d probably end up opening a home for three-legged dogs. He’d recently seen a story on TV about some shit-for-brains woman in California who took in wounded animals of every description, even big fuckers that ate like fifty pounds of dog food a day, and let them limp and hop around her ranch like an army of spastics. Instead of begging donations to feed them, what she should’ve asked for was enough bullets to put them out of their misery. “So how come she got him a job at her old man’s restaurant?”

Justin shrugged, clearly thinking he’d just answered that question. Getting the kid a job was something you might do if you felt sorry for him. “She’s in love with some kid she met on vacation, is what I heard,” Justin answered instead. “He lives in Indiana or someplace.”

“Or
someplace
? Like, one or the other? If not Indiana, then
someplace
? You sure about that? You sure it’s not, like,
someplace else
?”

“I’m just saying what I heard.”

“Heard from who?”

“Candace.”

“The blow-job queen.”

“Hey,” Justin said, “she wants to give
me
a header, I’ll take it.”

“That’s because you got no standards,” Zack explained.

“You telling me you wouldn’t like to nuzzle those tits?”

“She’s a fat cow, is what I’m telling you.”

“Big tits isn’t the same as fat.” Justin appeared to have strong, confident views on this particular subject. “Fat is stomach and waist and thighs. Big tits is a whole different thing.”

Zack wasn’t terribly interested in this abstract physiology argument, or any of Double Dibble’s other opinions, either. So what if Tick was in love with some faggot from Indiana or Someplace? Like he was supposed to care? Zack was fast coming around to his father’s point of view on the subject of girls, who seemed to inhabit this earth for the sole purpose of fucking with your head. “They’re not happy unless they get under your skin,” was how his father had explained it, back when he was trying to make Zack understand about his mother and all the trouble and why she left. “They never come at you straight,” his father went on, “like a man would. They just nick away at you, a little nick here, a little nick there. At first you don’t even think you’re bleeding, then the next thing you know you’re a quart low, maybe two.” But they had you over a barrel too, his father always added. What could you do, turn into a fag?