Little Easter

LITTLE EASTER

by Reed Farrel Coleman

Copyright
© 1993 by Reed Farrel Coleman

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or parts thereof, in any form, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Coleman, Reed Farrel, 1956–

Little Easter / Reed Farrel Coleman.

p.      cm.

ISBN 1-877946-23-0 : $21.95

eISBN: 1-57962-296-8

I. Title.

PS3553.047445L55 1993

813′ .54—dc20

92-34305

CIP

Manufactured in the United States of America

THE PERMANENT PRESS

Noyac Road

Sag Harbor, NY 11963

For Rosanne and Kaitlin and Dylan Tayor

I would like to thank Tom McDonald for his inspiration and technical advice.

Out of the ash
I rise with my red hair
And I eat men like air.

—Sylvia Plath from “Lady Lazarus”

Johnny Blue

The new TV talked to no one but me. Its virginal speakers babbled to an empty bar, a rapidly decomposing dartboard and a pay-for-pool table at which no one was paying and no one was playing. Taxidermied fishes, with sawdust for souls and glass buttons for eyes, turned deaf ears to the moot squawking, choosing instead to spy threatening harpoons, crossed like dueling foils against the red brick and mortar of the opposing wall. Yes, the new TV talked, but I barely listened. I was too busy blowing imaginary dust out of clean pony glasses and watching the weather.

Sound Hill was wedding dress white, Bing Crosby white, “White Christmas” white. After five fingers worth of years in this town, you’d think I’d be comfortable with the notion of snow keeping its cream for more than a few nods and a wink. I wasn’t. Where I come from in Brooklyn, snow falls dirty. At least I remember it that way. Back there the only white snow you see is spray-painted onto shop windows around the holidays. I guess I’m exaggerating, but not much, really. The air’s pretty dirty over Brooklyn.

How far was the city; sixty, seventy miles west of here? Yet, for a goodly part of the time, Brooklyn seemed like a distant planet or a place where I came from in someone else’s life. I don’t know. I talked about it sometimes with my fellow Brooklyn emigré, John Francis MacClough. He didn’t know either and cared even less. Like most retired city detectives he’d cracked too many skulls and touched too many corpses to dwell on the metaphysical.

Funny thing about MacClough was that he never much reminded me of that someone else’s life or the home planet. No, it took things like white snow to stick its finger down my throat and pull out the past. It took things that kept me off balance, things I’d never adjusted to. Things, I imagine, I hadn’t wanted to adjust to. Things that were sort of an escape hatch in case I wanted to travel back and remember. Why I wanted to remember just now, I couldn’t say.

Tonight I was in charge of MacClough’s lifeless Rusty Scupper, alone with his stiff little fishes and my less than sober thoughts. It was Christmas Eve and I was as comfortable as Moses munching on communion wafers. Forget their protestations to the contrary, all Jews are eternally ill at ease with the whole Christmas ordeal. Hanuka is a nice holiday, but eight colored candles and a four-sided top are no match for the son of God—not even with the points.

When I was a kid, Catholic girlfriends were my remedy for Christmas discomfort. A little turkey, a little midnight mass, a few green and red and white gift-wrapped baubles do wonders for teen-age, Jewish discomfort. Now girlfriends, Catholic or otherwise, were less of a distraction and considerably harder to come by. Since my move to Sound Hill I’d done the volunteer routine, subbing for MacClough on Christmas Eve. It was, after all, the Christian thing to do. Besides, Johnny figured I couldn’t do much damage in a predictably empty bar. He’d have never left the Scupper in my hands in July. Twenty years as a beat cop and detective had taught John Francis how to pick his spots.

You see, when the flocks moved east, they moved east in summer. And by no means was the Lord their shepherd. Absolut and orange juice and walk-to beaches with weedy sand dunes like sirens pulled them here. Or was it just the city that pushed them away? It’s hard to know for certain, even having lived on both sides of the migration.

Summers in Sound Hill are lovely magnets, but it’s spring and winter and fall that make people stay. Things are more real here then. With the passing of Labor Day, life takes on a sort of self-imposed timelessness. The Star Spangled Deli is relieved of its obligation to carry three sizes of French bottled water, six shapes of Japanese rice bran pasta and two brands of Panamanian beer. Over at the service station, Stan Long deflates gas and labor prices back down to a level even people without titles can afford. And the farm stand girls turn in their gingham gowns for cold, early mornings of dirty work and school buses. And . . .

I stopped watching the snow. White weather and alcohol and loneliness are a bad combination, makes a man’s mind wonder where maybe it shouldn’t. I dug some quarters out of the register, poured myself another Black and Tan and strolled to the pool table for a game of Eight Ball, solitaire style. I set my pint glass down on the edge of the worn and pitted table. I chose the least curved cue from the four sad offerings stuck in the wall rack. Twirling and swooshing the stick with my unskilled hands, I was Cyrano, a samurai, a majorette. One thrust at the elevated TV and the background babbling ended, a powder blue chalkmark on the “Power” switch indicating my success. God, the bar was so awfully quiet now. The cue sliding thru the insides of my fingers was the only sound the world had to offer.

“Is Johnny Blue here?” her emphatic whisper broke the silent spell.

I turned too quickly to the door, carelessly swinging the curved stick and launching the nearly full pint glass into space. Gravity pulled it toward the center of the earth.

“How long have you been standing there?” I knelt in the puddle of ale, stout and glass, more concerned with whether she’d seen my Zorro and baton routine than the presence or absence of one Johnny Blue. Thirty-six-year-old men are vain like that.

“Where is Johnny Blue?” it was less of a whisper this time.

“Look, lady,” I came out of my crouch, “that’s three questions—two for you and one for me—and we’re not gettin’ anywhere.”

She didn’t like that, not that she said so. It was more the way she stiffened under her tattered mink. Her shape was pleasant enough, accented by the soft fur belt pulled in at the waist, but she was no teen-ager. Her overly made-up features were sadly grotesque in that once they must have been neither sad nor grotesque. You could count the mileage in her sleepy, pink-shadowed lids and measure the wear and tear by counting the cracks in her almost orange face powder. I couldn’t tell much about what color her hair had been. It’d probably been a lot of colors. Now it was mostly gray and straight and lifeless. Its ends were buried somewhere beneath the half-upturned collar of that once proud coat. Unlike the shattered pint glass, more than carelessness and gravity had contributed to her fall. I could see that even from where I stood.

“Do you mean, MacClough, Johnny MacClough?” I evened up the questions at two apiece, feeling less embarrassed for myself.

“I shouldn’t have come,” she said to herself, but loud enough for me to catch. Her drained green eyes didn’t seem to notice me. “I shouldn’t have come.”

I started to make my way around the back of the bar. “Sit down a minute and have a—”

“God,” she cut my offer of an Irish Coffee short, “I should never have come.” And with that she turned on the spikes of her inappropriate black shoes, exiting as quietly as she’d entered.

“Yeah,” I said to her fresh memory, “and a merry Christmas to you too!”

That was that. I gave last call. No one objected. No one was there to object. The TV was off, the fishes were dead and my visitor had just departed for parts unknown. I clanged the tip bell a few times for the exercise and came around front of the bar to officially close the Scupper.

“Christ!” I screamed while slipping on the forgotten glass of the cue stick casualty. Unless some wacky guy came in and announced that he was the real Johnny Blue and asked did I know where his mink-coated, orange-faced middle-aged girlfriend had got to, I’d be able to clean up the broken glass in no time. But stepping to the front door, I slipped again. This time I found clear crystals under my shoe that seemed to bear little relation to a broken beer glass.

I dangled the expensive banana peel high above the bar ledge in the soft light of an overhanging globe. The necklace of little cut stones seemed to amplify the dull bar light, breaking it into distinctive sparkling rays. Held close to my amateur’s eye, the white gold and diamond confection was alluring and impressive. I counted twenty-four multifaceted gems aligned like stars in the shape of a heart. Each gem rested in the petrified palm and fingers of petite, but well defined, white gold hands: Twenty-four diamonds, twenty-four little hands. The hands were attached to the heavy heart-shaped body of the setting at the wrists. The orphaned heart appeared unscathed by my clumsy misstep. Its chain, however, would require a new clasp and some skilled untangling. My best guess was that the heart belonged to Johnny Blue’s one-woman fan club.

I threw MacClough’s golf sweater on and stepped out into the darkness. If she hadn’t come by car, I figured I still had a chance to catch her. Those high spikes of hers would leave a nice easy trail in the snow. Even a former insurance investigator like me could follow footprints like those. At least I told myself I could.

I looked for tire tracks out in front of the Scupper. The surprisingly bitter cold and bitting wind contributed to my disappointment when I didn’t find any. My newly revived conscience made me keep on. Her stiletto pumps left a series of triangles and dots in the snow leading toward the Long Island Railroad station. That simplified things a bit. I could check out Carney’s Cabs on my way over.

Old man Carney was head back, slack-jawed and dead to the world. His ancient charred lungs silently sucked in huge gulps of chilled air, exhaling the waste gasses with much noisy pomp and circumstance. He held a burning cigarette—now mostly cigarette-shaped ashes—between two yellow fingers resting on the edge of his desk. The tip of the ashen snake lay in a cheap foil ashtray. The smooth split ends of smoke drifted with the currents caused by the old man’s wheezing. Orange face wasn’t here.

There weren’t any more footprints to follow. The sidewalks are shoveled and the streets are plowed this close to the railroad station. Yes, even in Sound Hill. I scanned the passenger platform from the taxi stand’s doorway. Both eastbound and westbound looked as empty as MacClough’s place, but I decided to walk both sides of the tracks anyway to satisfy a growing curiosity. My very visible breath reminded me that it was pretty damned cold for someone in a bar apron and spring sweater to be playing hide and go seek. Curiosity makes for poor decisions.

The darkness and shadows made it tough to see detail, but I spotted a shaggy tail of dyed mink showing itself from between the clapboard ticketbooth on the westbound platform and a row of four newspaper vending machines which stood shoulder to shoulder against the kiosk’s front wall. An icy raw chill shook me; a chill that had nothing to do with cold fronts or Arctic air masses.

I smelled death from across the tracks. The ragged collection of pelts flapped in the wind, but nothing else was moving over there. I stood, arms folded, and stared, waiting for her to fool me. Waiting for her to leap up and come to me demanding the orphaned heart’s return and the whereabouts of Johnny Blue. Sweat poured over my back, the frigid air trying to freeze the falling drops between my skin and shirt. The night started closing in, but a distant train horn stopped my swoon. I took small, quick steps across the tracks.

No, she would not fool me nor would she fool anyone ever again. Even before I got to the body, I noticed her leaking blood had stained a patch of slush crimson red. I couldn’t help thinking it looked like a fallen cherry snow cone. I was just old enough to remember real snow cones shaved from huge blocks of ice by bald Italian men under the “el” on 86th Street. The only real snow cones you could get in Brooklyn now were in the Black and Puerto Rican neighborhoods.