Losing Joe's Place (5 page)

Just before nine, Rootbeer declared the time was right. I followed him, my empty stomach rumbling ominously, as though it knew that my next meal was going to be served at Chez Penitentiary, on a tin plate.

We got into the car, and Rootbeer drove at a hundred miles an hour to an area of town even seedier than Pitt Street, if such a thing was possible. We parked in front of an old building that was in the process of either being torn down or collapsing, and Rootbeer started rummaging through the pile of debris, coming up with a long rotted two-by-four. This he carried over his shoulder, like a soldier with an eight-foot rifle, to a dumpy establishment on the corner with a neon sign that just read
Bar
.

“Wait here,” he told me, and disappeared inside.

About five seconds later, a booming voice bellowed,
“Twenty bucks says you can't hurt me with a shot in the stomach with this two-by-four!”

I almost died. There was a roar of enthusiasm from the bar, and out onto the street poured eighteen people, Rootbeer in the lead. He collected twenty dollars each from the participants, who were in a spirited argument over who would get to swing the heavy piece of lumber.

He handed the money to me. “Hold this.”

“For God's sake, Rootbeer,” I quavered, “you can't go through with this! You'll get killed! Not to mention if we lose, we can't pay off five cents of that money!”

“Not so loud!” whispered Rootbeer. “People don't like to bet when they know there's no money to pay them. They get mad.”

By this time, the eighteen were taking practice swings with the two-by-four. The whistle of the board through the air was making me queasy, and I watched in a daze as the group elected some guy who had once tried out for the Yankees to take the home run swing.

There are times in your life when you see something so totally amazing you forget how scared you are and try to make the moment last, because you know you'll never see anything quite like it again. Whenever I think back to that night, I always see it in super slo-mo, although it was really over in a flash. Rootbeer stood there like a mighty redwood, feet planted, stomach tense under his poncho. The almost-Yankee swung for the upper deck. The board slammed into Rootbeer's abdomen with a thump that echoed through the streets. The wood splintered. I felt the sidewalk lurch, but Rootbeer didn't move. He didn't even flinch.

He started to whistle, and glanced around the circle of shocked faces. “Nice meeting everybody. We'd better get going. 'Bye.”

The three of us, me, Rootbeer, and the money, climbed back into the Camaro. Rootbeer indicated that I should drive, and I was overjoyed to take off out of there. Neither of us spoke, so I figured I had to break the ice.

“Rootbeer, that was amazing —”

“Aaaahhh!!!”
he shrieked in a bone-chilling voice that nearly put me up a telephone pole. “Are you okay?”

“
Aaaahhh!!!
”

Now I knew why he'd needed one of us to go with him. Somebody had to do the driving while he screamed.

“
Aaaahhh!!!
”

He indicated by sign language that I should pull in at a grocery store, and sent me in to shop while he remained in the car, howling. Even in the frozen food section, over the Muzak, I could hear the echoes from the parking lot. About ten minutes later, Rootbeer joined me, cheerful as ever, as though he hadn't been in the throes of agony thirty seconds ago. We bought $150 worth of groceries — enough to last even Rootbeer until Friday.

“What happened?” asked Don when we got back.

A five-hour explanation formed in my head. “Nothing,” I said. They wouldn't have believed me, anyway.

* * *

The next morning we awoke to find Rootbeer Racinette lying dead on the floor.

We didn't even know at first, because he always flopped down to sleep wherever he happened to be standing. So we tiptoed around, careful not to wake him up as we showered and dressed.

“At least he isn't snoring,” whispered Don. “Did you hear him last night? I thought the building was going to come down. The Phantom was knocking on the wall.”

The Peach bent over Rootbeer. “The reason he isn't snoring,” he said, his face pale, “is because he isn't breathing.”

We freaked out. The three of us crawled all over Rootbeer, poking, and prodding, and feeling for a heartbeat that wasn't there. He was dead as a mackerel.

I admit it. I burst into tears, blubbering out the whole story of last night. “It's all my fault!” I wailed. “If I'd stopped him, he'd be alive now! Joe would have stopped him! But I let him do it! And now he's dead, because of internal injuries or something! What are we going to do?”

Ferguson shook his head. “Call the police, of course.”

“No police!” came a howl through the ventilation duct. This was followed by pounding footsteps on the stairs, and then Plotnick burst onto the scene, red-faced and wild-eyed.

He took in the situation with a horrified gasp. “Oy! How could this happen to me?”

“To
you?!”
I shrieked. “To
you?!
A guy is
dead!”

“Okay, okay,” said Plotnick. “We're in this together. We need to be reasonable. Let me think.” His brow furrowed, and unfurrowed. “All right. Take him out, throw him in a field, and to hell with him, God rest his soul!”

I was horrified. “We can't do that!”

“Yes we can. I don't want hassles over this. First police, then the coroner, then the reporters — no. Not in my building.”

“Look, Mr. Plotnick,” I argued, “if we throw the body in a field, the police will suspect foul play. When they trace it, they won't just hassle us. They'll toss us in jail!”

“I'm an old man,” Plotnick shrugged. “Maybe by the time they trace it, I'll be dead.”

But by then, the Peach had already dialed 911, and the police were on their way.

The next hour was a nightmare. I must have told the story about the two-by-four twenty times, first to the police, then to the reporters, then to our fellow tenants. Plotnick went to lie down, and the officers, seeing an elderly man obviously overcome by emotion, were brief and kind. They assumed that he was upset over the untimely death, never guessing that his collapse was due to their own presence.

I was destroyed as I watched the uniformed attendants carry Rootbeer's body on two stretchers out to the ambulance. Don, Ferguson, and I followed like an honor guard. God's Grandmother sobbed uncontrollably, and Wayne Gretzky's Sister dabbed at her eyes with a napkin. The Assassin removed his hat respectfully. Even Plotnick joined us, coming out of hiding, since the law was gone. The back doors of the ambulance swallowed Rootbeer up, and the vehicle pulled away slowly. There was no siren, no rush. This was Rootbeer's last ride.

The ambulance got as far as the corner. Then the white reverse lights came on, and it backed up, coming to a stop in front of the deli. The doors swung wide, and out stepped Rootbeer Racinette, fresh as a daisy.

“He's alive!” cried Don.

The three of us made a run at Rootbeer, catching him in a joyful embrace, blubbering incoherently. Plotnick launched into a tantrum because the police had come to his building for nothing. Our neighbors cheered, and the two attendants craned their necks out the ambulance windows to stare at the man they had pronounced dead just a few minutes earlier.

Rootbear stretched expansively. “What's everybody so excited about?”

I couldn't believe it. “You were
dead
, Rootbeer! No heartbeat or anything! And I figured because of that hit you took last night …” My voice trailed off.

The ex-corpse looked mystified for a second, then laughed airily. “I'm into Manchurian Bush Meditation. I learned it from a guru in Buffalo. Your heart slows down to five or six beats a minute, which is probably what fooled you guys. It was an honest mistake.”

“I'll give you an honest mistake, you degenerate!” raged Plotnick. “If they put you in the ground before you wake up —
that's
an honest mistake!”

Rootbeer shrugged. “No hard feelings.”

The ambulance attendants had hard feelings. They left a lot of rubber on Pitt Street before squealing away onto Bathurst. Plotnick had hard feelings. He stormed back into the deli and sulked behind the counter, sharpening his meat fork. The three of us had hard feelings, too, but to the bizarre giant in the poncho, we didn't dare say anything.

The envelope was postmarked Biarritz, and contained a photograph of my brother frolicking on the beach with a fabulous brunette.
Me and Yvette on the French Riviera. P.S. I forgot to tell you that Rootbeer might be dropping by. He sometimes does this thing where it looks like he's dead, but it's really okay.

Rootbeer was already gone by the time we woke up that morning. None of us had heard him leave, which seemed kind of strange. Not noticing Rootbeer was like not noticing Europe. There was no note, but wherever he was, at least he'd left the car this time. It was parked in front of the deli.

“Maybe he's gone for good,” said the Peach.

“Shhh!” admonished Don. “We don't want to jinx ourselves.”

I threw down the Employment section in disgust. “Well, Don, it looks like we blew our chance at having important jobs when we got canned making bubble wands.”

We'd just bundled the Peach off to dumb Plastics Unlimited with a sarcastic “Have a nice day at work, Honey.” The two of us had gotten up early to prepare him a brown bag lunch consisting of the tidbits we could find in the trash dumpster outside, but he mentioned something about lunch meetings, and left us our garbage, which was starting to smell as we pored over the paper.

“If he's going to keep making us look like idiots, the least he can do is fall for our jokes,” was Don's opinion.

“All the good summer jobs are taken,” I complained. “We're too late for anything decent. I wish your uncle had warned us he only needed feeders for five days.”

“How was he supposed to know the great Doctor of Fuzzology was going to stick his nose into everything? Hey, can I type eighty words a minute?”

I had to laugh. “You'd be lucky to do eighty words a month.” Don typed with his right index finger:
click
 …
click
 …
click
 …

Don was undaunted. “Wow! This is a fantastic job! Your own office, a secretary, great money, short hours — we should call these guys.”

I looked over his shoulder to his pointing finger. “That's for ‘Brain Surgeon.'”

“Oh. Nah, too gucky.” But he stuck to the job search, and by ten-thirty, he was gainfully employed. True, he was a delivery boy for the local supermarket, but it was more than I'd been able to come up with. Still, when he rode up in front of 1 Pitt Street on the supermarket bicycle, I just couldn't stop laughing. For starters, it was one of those old-style bikes, and it was huge — Don was on tiptoe when each pedal reached its lowest point. There was a giant pink basket in front of the handlebars, and another one behind the seat. And a bell, great big, shiny, and silver. Here was Mr. Big City Cool, riding around on a bike he wouldn't be caught dead on in Owen Sound.

“What's the bell for?” I called from the stoop. “Just in case you get stuck behind a Maserati and you have to alert the driver to let you pass?”

“Go ahead and laugh!” snarled Don. “I absolutely refuse to have Peachfuzz paying my bills!”

It was the first
really
sweltering day of the summer, and the air was heavy and humid. I felt sorry for Don, who would probably be half dead by dinnertime in all that heat. As soon as he had pedaled out of sight, I escaped back up to the air conditioning. Just inside the door, I paused, looking distastefully at the Employment section, lying open on the beanbag chair. Even thinking about the tiny black print made my eyes bug out. My hands were filthy with ink from the newsprint.

Looking for a job was harder than working. I scanned the first couple of ads.
Experience required, Experience required
. How are you supposed to get experience if no one'll hire you because you don't have experience?

When you really hate what you're doing, you notice stuff you normally wouldn't pick up on. For the first time, I realized what total slobs Ferguson and Don were. Our sleeping arrangements consisted of the bed, the couch, and the beanbag chair, with Rootbeer taking the floor directly over where he happened to be standing the instant he declared himself officially tired. The Peach had left the bed unmade, and Mr. Wonderful's couch looked like a bomb site — sheets and pillows all over the place, wadded-up sweat socks and underwear. This was the guy who thought a few wrinkles in a shirt was a disaster. Apparently his nattiness only extended to those articles of clothing that went on the
outside
, visible to the casual observer.

A few minutes of tidying up wouldn't kill the job search. And who wanted to live in a pigsty?

Pigsty. That was my mother's word. It referred, usually, to my room. I pulled up short in some alarm. In the great summer of independence, here I was doing
voluntarily
what I could usually get out of at home. Oh, no!

Well, at least at home, when the debris piled up above my nostrils, I could always hang out in another room. Here one room was it. It was only common sense to keep it neat.

The problem with straightening up was that I noticed other things about the apartment. Not only was it messy, but it was also pretty dirty and dusty. Joe's vacuum cleaner was our old one from Owen Sound, and it was incredibly loud — I was eight years old before I finally figured out it wasn't a monster come to eat the family. Plotnick was banging on the pipes and screaming for me to turn it off, but I forged on until I'd covered every square inch except the hallowed ground on which sat Rootbeer's paper bag of underwear. I didn't want to fool with
that
no matter how bad the dust got.

I noticed that I'd already used up a complete hour of job-hunting time.

Then came the mopping stage. I doubted Joe had ever mopped in his life, but, just in case, I checked in the broom closet for cleaner. I opened the door and gawked.

There, in the dim red glow of a safe-light, squatted Rootbeer Racinette, developing photographic prints in various trays of chemicals. I slammed the door so fast that, a second later, it seemed that the whole thing had been merely a hallucination. When the beating of my heart slowed down a little, I steeled myself and knocked politely. “Uh — Rootbeer?”

“Yeah?” came the voice from within.

“What're you doing?”

“Making some prints.”

“You're a photographer?”

“A guy needs distraction from all the pressures, you know,” came the voice. “People are dropping like flies from executive burnout.”

I stared at the closet door. “You're not an executive.”

“That makes it even riskier,” Rootbeer replied. “If you've got a job, you know what to do every day. But me — no sooner do I get up than the decisions start. I could feel the stress eating away at me.”

“But all that stuff in there must have cost hundreds!” I protested.

“Worrying about money is the number-one cause of burnout,” said Rootbeer. “So I spent it all. And I feel great! Hey, you can look at my first picture.”

Watching Rootbeer crawl out of a cramped closet is like when someone opens a suitcase and out comes a full-grown bull elephant. In his hand, he clutched a gleaming wet 8 x 10 glossy and proudly held it out before me.

“It's white!” I blurted out.

Rootbeer examined the blank photograph. “Hmmm. I guess you exposed it when you opened the door.”

Oh, no! I'd ruined Rootbeer Racinette's picture. It was as though I'd walked up and infected him with executive burnout. “Sorry,” I quavered.

“Oh, don't worry,” said Rootbeer. “I gotta have a hobby, but nobody says I gotta be any good at it.” He held his picture between his thumb and forefinger and began to blow on it softly.

His whole roll came out exactly like that, but this first picture was his favorite, so up it went on the wall, right over the stereo. Rootbeer signed it with a green crayon that appeared out of the poncho.

“It looks great,” I said.

“And see how relaxed and happy I am,” added Rootbeer, and he fell into Manchurian Bush Meditation on the spot.

I mopped as best I could, working around Rootbeer, and by the time I'd taken out the garbage and mailed a couple of letters, it was four-ten, time to go back to the job search. I paused. Four-ten was almost four-fifteen, which was just a quarter hour before four-thirty. Most people are winding down their day by then — some even knock off half an hour early, especially those important enough to be responsible for hiring new guys. In other words, not only would I be wasting my time in applying for anything now, but I'd actually be
hurting my chances
by pestering people so late.

I should have been disappointed; I felt great. And after all, it wasn't as though I'd
wasted
the day. The apartment was spotless (another of my mother's words — watch it, Cardone).

Speak of the devil — the phone rang. My mother.

“What are you doing home? I knew it! You're sick!”

I managed a high-pitched giggle. “I'm not sick. It's my day off.” Every day was my day off.

“Well, I was just going to leave a message on your machine to let you know that your father and I will be at the Murphys' tonight in case you need us.”

The meaning was clear. If I happened to decide that I wanted to go home during the two hours that they'd be out, I could call them at the Murphys' for instant rescue.

“I won't need you,” I assured her. I glanced at the dead rhinoceros lying on our floor. “Everything's fine. 'Bye.”

It was unnerving to be with Rootbeer when he was meditating. Sure, I knew he wasn't dead, but it was scary to be in the same room with somebody lying there not breathing. So I went for a walk. You can't spend all day cooped up anyway. It isn't healthy.

I walked up Bathurst in the direction of where Don said Jessica's place was. If I could accidentally‑on-purpose run into her, I could strike up a conversation, and maybe work in there how Don had tried to take off after the Moontrix head bonk scene. I would portray myself as the strong, silent type — not
too
nice, but with a manly sense of responsibility. Of course, Don was my friend, and you weren't supposed to screw up your friends. But he didn't deserve Jessica anyway. He hadn't even called her yet. And besides, if I somehow managed to steal her away from Mr. Wonderful, he'd have another girlfriend in nothing flat. On the other hand, waiting for someone to go for Cardone could take
years
!

I looked from window to window, up and down the street, half believing it wasn't a waste of time. Did I expect a golden aura to be emanating from the building that housed Jessica and her legs?

Finally I returned to the stoop in front of 1 Pitt Street to wait for Ferguson and Don to get home from work. I was already sweating like crazy. The air was like vaporized oatmeal. I waved at God's Grandmother as she jogged by, energetic, cool, and sweat-free.

I saw the pink baskets first, piled high with bags of groceries, plodding their way through the heavy traffic. Between them pedaled a very hot and tired-looking Don Champion. Suddenly a long, silver, stretch limousine shot out of nowhere and passed Don too close. Mr. Wonderful swerved to avoid it, and put himself out of control. His front wheel touched the curb, and the bicycle dropped out of view. But I could see groceries flying in all directions. Bottles, cans, fruits, and vegetables bounced off the roofs and hoods of other cars. Oblivious to this havoc, the driver of the limo turned onto Pitt Street and pulled up right in front of me. The door opened, and out climbed the Peach.

“Thanks for the ride, Mr. Robb. See you tomorrow.”

Don was on his feet by now, examining a carton of eggs. He saw who it was getting out of the limo just as twelve yolks spilled out of the package onto his shirt.

“PEACHFUZZ!!!”

* * *

Repugnant as the thought of handing money over to Plotnick was, we decided to eat in the deli. There was just so much tuna fish and peanut butter a guy could stomach, and we had enough cash for two corned beef sandwiches between the three of us. The Peach and I waited out front for Don, who had to roll the mangled delivery bicycle back to the supermarket.

“Well, write off one bike and one job,” he told us when he got home. “Guess who just got fired, thanks to the fuzzy skin of a certain fruit I could name? Not to mention that it could have been me bent into a pretzel along with the bike!”

Ferguson shrugged. “It's
your
uncle's car. And besides, if that bicycle had been designed with the center of balance a little farther forward —”

“Didn't you explain that it wasn't your fault?” I asked Don quickly.

“They didn't believe me. They wouldn't even pay me for today because of the bike. That's the only part that bothers me. I was going to quit that bogus slavery anyway.”

“Why?”

Don snorted. “Are you kidding? The pay stinks, and you have to ride around on that idiot bicycle, sweating your guts out while little kids follow you singing, ‘Hey, Mr. Grocery Man!' And you're a target for every dog and psychopath in the neighborhood. This one kid — five years old, tops! — yells, ‘Hey, Mr. Grocery Man, think fast,' and hurls this huge dirt bomb at my face. But that's not the real crusher. Check this out.” He paused for effect. “For lunch I grabbed some Doritos and hung out in the park. So I catch a rap with these two great-looking girls. Everything's going terrific, and they're complaining about how they've got nothing to do this summer, and I'm thinking
we're in
. Just as I'm about to suggest we all get together, they see the bike, and it's game over. They couldn't stop
laughing
long enough for me to ask them out. I mean, I refuse to hold any job that messes with my love life!”

“I guess that rules out the priesthood,” Ferguson commented seriously.

“Wait a second!” That was me. “What about Jessica?”

Don shrugged carelessly. “Do you seriously expect me to spend this whole summer with
one girl
? We're here for freedom, remember?”