Hawk Moon (25 page)

She shook her head. "Anyway, it felt good. Your hand on my shoulder."

"Felt good to me, too." Then, "Have you talked to Claire Heston today?"

"Yes. Why?"

"How about Perry?"

"I'm not following you."

"Is he missing, too?"

"Sure. They're in it together, whatever it is. So are some of the other boys — all the ‘stars’ as they like to think of themselves. The thing is, Bryce and Perry are the ones with the most to lose. The most money, the most prestige."

"You really don't have any idea what's going on?"

"Not really."

"Mommy."

This time it was a little boy on the front steps, Derek, presumably. He looked to be a few years younger than his sister. He wore a short-sleeved white shirt and blue trousers and a festive red bow tie. Remnants of a birthday party, no doubt.

"Yes, honey?"

"Stacy says I have to share the crayons with her."

"That's right, honey, you do."

"But it's my birthday."

"Even on your birthday, honey."

"That's not fair, Mommy. What're birthdays for, anyway?"

She glanced at me and smiled with a maternal admixture of pride and exasperation.

"Maybe I'd better go inside."

"I appreciate your time. I'd like to give you my answering service number."

"I'll be glad to take it."

"If I can help . . ."

Sad smile. "I think I'm beyond help right now, Mr. Payne. And so is my husband, I'm afraid."

She went inside.

G
ilhooley smiled and said, "This won't take long."

She was an unlikely-looking pool hustler. She came through the door tall and imposing in a gray pin-striped business suit, carrying an expensive leather briefcase in her right hand and a disassembled pool cue in her left. She had short red hair that framed her freckled pretty face perfectly, and a grin almost as merry as her green eyes.

"You want to break or you want me to?" she said, after telling us her name was Kristin.

"You're a lawyer, huh?" Gilhooley said.

She smiled. "Yeah, they told me you hated lawyers."

"And bus drivers," I said.

"And mailmen," Gilhooley said.

"And advertizing people," I said.

"And veterinarians," Gilhooley said.

"Veterinarians?" I said. "When did that start?"

"I put 'em on the list last week. I'll tell you about it sometime."

"I've never met anybody who hated whole categories of people like that," Kristin said. "That's really weird."

Then she put her cue together and got down to business. She took two twenties from a tiny pocket in her suit jacket and laid them on the edge of the table.

It was right then, I think, that Gilhooley sensed that he'd profoundly underestimated sweet-looking Kristin here. She'd be great in court, with that disarmingly guileless face and those innocently merry eyes.

Forty dollars she'd put down.

Gilhooley looked at the two twenties then at me. "Could you loan me twenty?"

I should have figured that. I've probably loaned Gilhooley somewhere in the vicinity of a thousand dollars over the past four years, ten and twenty at a time, and always within the confines of an ancient smoky pool-hall like this one — you know, where the biker gangs sit around deciding which civilian to give a little grief to. None of them were around this afternoon. They must have gone over to the car wash and walked through the wash part. I hear they do that once a month whether they need to or not.

"So — do you want to break?" Kristin said. "Or shall I?"

"Ladies first."

I think that was the wrong thing to say. For one thing, inherent in it was the kind of patronizing tone that makes most modern women crazy. For another, it probably wasn't a real great idea to piss her off right at the top. The way she'd laid down her two twenties, she seemed to know what she was doing.

"Cute," she said, grinding her teeth and bending over to break the balls.

"There's a consolation prize for losing today," Gilhooley said. "The loser gets to sleep with me."

The merry eyes had never looked merrier. "Then I guess you're going to be sleeping alone as usual, Gilhooley, because I don't intend to lose."

She broke the balls.

She put two spots in different pockets.

"Shit," Gilhooley said.

"Probably beginner's luck," I said.

She then put two more spots in two more different pockets. "Maybe you shouldn't have said ‘Ladies first’ Gilhooley," I said.

"Yeah? Just wait till I get my turn," Gilhooley said.

It's sort of painful to watch the male ego crumble that way. So I didn't watch. I walked around the pool-hall. Eight tables, couple Pepsi machines, a john with a mosaic of dirty words on the walls, a wobbly table and chairs that served as a poker set-up, and a radio that was playing one of those totally incomprehensible rap songs that probably had something to do with shooting white guys about my age.

When I got back to the table, Gilhooley said, "You were
right. Beginner's luck. I need forty."

"I finally figured out why he hates all those categories of people," Kristin said to me.

"Oh? Why?"

"They probably beat him at pool."

Forlorn as Gilhooley looked, I had to laugh. She was Gilhooley's superior in every respect worth noting.

"Watch me this time," Gilhooley said after I put down two twenties for him. And to Kristin: "Why don't you break again?" He was determined to do his macho-stud routine right up to the end.

"Ladies first?" she said sweetly.

"Yeah," Gilhooley smiled. "Exactly"

This time she didn't even let him have one shot.

He was about to ask me for more money — which I was about to refuse him, my not exactly being independently wealthy — when she checked the watch on her slender shapely wrist and said, "I've got to get back to court. But it was fun."

"If I didn't have this sore throat, I would've been a lot better."

Well," Kristin said demurely, "I was off my game a little, too. I was abducted by aliens last night and they didn't bring me back until nearly dawn. I just didn't get much sleep."

And then she was gone.

"You know the worst thing?" Gilhooley said, after it was safe to speak again.

"No, what?"

"I think I'm falling in love with her."

Wife number four may just have walked on stage.

A
Kiowa Chief once told me that when young Indians were sent off to prison, some among the tribal council pronounced them dead — for even if they did not die physically in prison, they would certainly die spiritually.

Professor David Cromwell's Indian Journal

November 28, 1903

A
nna got the deathbed call the night before Hanukkah. She was downstairs helping Mrs. Goldman collect things to be set out in the parlor — Sabbath candlesticks, Kiddush cup, Hanukkah menorah, Bible, prayer book and several heirlooms — when the telephone bell brayed through the silence.

Anna took the call.

"Anna Tolan?"

"Yes."

"My name is Mrs. Washburn."

"Oh?"

"I'm Mr. Hvacek's landlady."

"Oh. Yes."

"He's dying."

"What happened?"

"He insisted he knew how to ride this horse of my uncle's and — well, he got thrown. Very bad head injuries. He slips in and out of consciousness. He wants to talk to you."

"Where is he?"

"Mercy Hospital. Room 204."

"I can be there in ten minutes."

"Fine. I'd appreciate it."

D
arkened hospital room.

Nuns like great white birds flitting about outside the door.

Hvacek looking old and frail in his deathbed.

"I just want to do right by the Lord, Miss Tolan."

"I understand."

"The young Indian girl."

"Yes?"

"You were right. She was out at Gray House for many years, as soon as Mrs. Shipman moved into town."

"Many years? You mean she was a little girl when they brought her there?"

"Yes."

A nun came in. "Please, Miss Tolan, you'll have to leave now."

But Hvacek grasped Anna's hand tightly. "Please, Sister, give us one more minute. Alone."

The nun did not look happy but she retreated back to the hallway.

Hvacek looked Anna in the eye. "The girl was going to tell everybody about how she'd been brought there when she was very little and what they did to her. It would've destroyed Shipman. He had to kill her."

And then Hvacek's head lolled to the right and he was unconscious again.

G
ilhooley found a place for lunch that served grease not only with its burgers and its fries, but with its fountain Cokes, too. Who says Americans aren't as creative as they used to be?

Over the course of three burgers (two his, one mine; after all, I was paying), Gilhooley told me the following story.

In the 1880s, the streets of working-class London were as filthy and murderous as any outside of Bombay or Calcutta. As with San Francisco's Barbary Coast, policemen tended to travel in packs for their own protection. And there were places where they sometimes simply refused to go. White-chapel, where Jack the Ripper plied his trade, was one such place. It was one reason he went undiscovered, too. No bobbies wanted to spend time in that part of the East End at night.

The living conditions for the working class were appalling. Fathers and mothers worked for pennies a day at various labors and their children ran completely wild. At night, as many as twenty people slept in the same room — in-laws, family friends, children and adults. There was no sanitation, of course, nor was there anything approaching the Victorian model of proper behavior. Sex, for example, was practiced by people of every age. Indeed, some of the more enterprising parents had taken to selling their children as prostitutes (girls and boys alike) at young ages, and sometimes staged "shows" in alleys for the Victorian gentlemen who enjoyed a night of slumming. One of the great pleasures for these eminent representatives of the upper classes was to watch little children have sex with each other.

As one might imagine, the rate of illegitimate births was astonishing. Girls as young as eleven and twelve bore children. But the infant mortality rate was the great leveler for many of these girls. If the filth of the slums didn't kill the infants, then the girls themselves did. Infanticide was not only condoned, it was frequently encouraged.

Abortion and infanticide were common not only to slum girls but to servant girls as well. The latter were frequently wooed and/or raped by every male member of the upper-class Victorian household. Not only did the master have his way with the girls but so did the son and any friend of father or son. Many of these girls ended up pregnant, of course, and if attempts at abortion failed, they "took a leave" and had their babies at the foundling homes that grew so popular during this era.

While the Victorian age was officially religious, proper and moral, its wealthy and more powerful males indulged in all the license to be found in the reeking shadows of the slums.

You had to understand how these men saw women. Good women, that is to say, their own wives and fiancées, were to reflect and embody all the virtues of the time . . . to be pure, unwise in the ways of sex, "good" in all respects. God help the upper-class woman who did not embody these virtues. We know now that when a husband suspected a wife of being unfaithful — or even of wanting to be unfaithful — he often sent her to the family doctor who was instructed to sexually mutilate the woman so she could no longer enjoy sex. The doctor, of course, had strong "medical" reasons for this kind of butchery, and nobody questioned his right to do this, especially since he was acting on the word of the husband. While this was not what you'd call a frequent practice, it happened perhaps hundreds of times in that period . . .