Mohawk (32 page)

Dallas had never been there either. And though he thought he knew everybody in Mohawk, the place was mobbed with strangers. John had beat them out there and, dancing with some woman who wasn’t his wife, waved at Dallas and Benny D.

“How much you want to bet he never even buys us a drink,” asked Benny D.

“He’s tight,” Dallas said, “as a rabbit’s ass.”

“How much you figure he took us for tonight?”

“He’s going to pay tomorrow. His luck’s already changed and he doesn’t know it.”

“That doesn’t help me,” Benny D. said sadly. He ordered scotches for himself and Dallas and sent a round over to John and his bimbo.

“I hope you won’t try to shame him,” Dallas said. “He’s a lawyer and we only got fifty bucks.”

“What good is he?”

Dallas explained how John had helped him beat a DWI a few months ago, but Benny D. wasn’t listening. A young waitress had come up to the cocktail station and was emptying lime sections and maraschino cherry stems and soaked cocktail napkins into the small trash bucket on the floor. She was working without a brassiere, and every time she bent over, Benny D. did too. Not that he really needed to. Dallas could see everything perfectly from two stools down. He let his story trail off. When the girl walked away, Benny D. turned to him. “Who’s she?”

“Somebody’s daughter.”

“Mmmm. And all growed up. Save my seat. I got to pee.”

When the band stopped, John came over and bought a drink. “Remind me to take you shopping sometime,” he said, running his index finger under Dallas’s shirt collar. “What’s with you and Benny D.?”

“What do you mean?”

“Nothing,” John said.

“No
what
?”

John shrugged. “He comes up with a lot of winners is all.”

“He knows horses.”

“Nobody knows horses,” John said.

“You don’t,” Dallas admitted. “I save your ass three or four times a week. I’m getting sick and tired, now that I think about it.”

John held up his hand. “Don’t get sore. It’s funny how your pal wins all the time is all.”

“I don’t want to hear it.”

“If he stays lucky, I’m going to have to cut you loose.”

“I’m gone.”

“Don’t get sore, we’re just talking here.”

“Fuck you.”

Benny D. came back from the men’s room and eyed the bar. “Don’t tell me this stiff actually bought a drink,” he said.

“I don’t like you, Benny,” the lawyer said.

“Well, break my fuckin’ heart,” Benny D. said. “That sure is a nice shirt. Won’t it stay buttoned?”

“Unload the guy,” John said to Dallas. “Don’t hang around with him.”

“Thanks for the drink,” Dallas said. “You seen my sister-in-law around?”

“Not lately,” John said. “Her kid’s sick or something.”

“I’ll have another drink,” Benny D. told the bartender. “On this gentleman, the one with the hairy chest and the fish hooks in his pockets.”

“I don’t like you, Benny,” John said.

“What’s wrong with the kid?”

“I don’t know. Leukemia or something.”

When the lawyer raised his glass, Dallas hit him, and suddenly John looked like somebody had swabbed him with a brush full of red paint. One large piece of glass lodged in his upper lip just beneath his nose. He wobbled, but instead of falling down brushed Dallas aside so he could look at his face in the mirror above the bar. Only a few people had seen what happened.

“Jesus,” John said reverently, touching the piece of glass in his lip, lifting his chin to better see the blood running down his neck and into his open necked shirt.

“Allow me,” Benny D. said, pulling the glass fragment out of the upper lip.

“Ahhh!” John gasped.

“All better?” Benny handed him a swatch of cocktail napkins.

The bartender was now looking in horror at John.

“You’re a witness,” John said. Several other people nearby had already turned their backs.

“Sure,” the man said. “What happened?”

“We better git,” Benny D. said when John disappeared into the men’s room. “There’s a phone in there.”

“I got to go see somebody anyway,” Dallas said. He wished he’d waited until John put the glass down before hitting him, not that he could do anything about it now.

“You can’t go over there at three in the morning,” Benny D. said once they were out in the parking lot.

“Drive by,” Dallas said.

They did, but the house was dark and Loraine’s car wasn’t in the drive.

“You better stay with me tonight,” Benny D. suggested. “You’re liable to have visitors.”

“Who cares?”

“You will. In the morning.”

“He had it coming.”

“We’ll call my lawyer in the morning.”

“Nah.”

“Nah, your ass. You’re in trouble.”

“Who cares?”

At Benny D.’s place, Dallas took the couch. Benny D. strayed in, wearing his boxers and scratching himself. “How ’bout you come back and work for me? I’ll stay out of the garage.”

“Sure,” Dallas said. “Why not.”

“Mather Grouse,” the voice in the dark had said, and for a moment, Randall Younger was breathless. There was only a quarter moon, no real light, and the voice was so near, so tangible, that Randall at first thought he himself had spoken, not the man sitting on the tire a few feet away. But then a cigarette tip glowed red and faded like a light from a faraway locomotive.

“No,” Randall said.

“I know,” the big man said. “I know your name, Randall Younger. And I also know who you
are
. A young Mather Grouse, that’s who.”

“You told me that once before,” Randall said. He dropped the roach and screwed it into the moist earth with his shoe. Rory Gaffney waved his cigarette, leaving a trail, a red-white smear in the air.

“A young Mather Grouse.”

“He was afraid of you,” Randall said suddenly, surprising himself.

“He didn’t have no need,” Rory Gaffney said. “No need for friends to fear one another.”

That sounded too much like a question to be true. And yet, Randall knew, it couldn’t be entirely false either. He got to his feet. “My grandfather wasn’t your friend.”

“No,” Rory Gaffney admitted, as if there were no contradiction. “Mather Grouses can’t have no friends. Can’t fight, can’t talk, can’t fuck. Not really.”

No, Randall thought, but not because we don’t want to. It’s because our minds keep drifting from the fighting and the fucking, always back to the me—what about me, is this a me I can live with, that I can suffer people to see, that I can suffer myself to see. His grandfather had felt all of this, surely. All Mather Grouses felt it; the same perverse self-consciousness that had driven Randall into the old hospital that day. Concern for Wild Bill Gaffney had come later, after everyone had told him why he had done it and he had believed them. He had been fearless, selfless, they said, never suspecting that what had pushed him forward through the falling debris was in fact fear. Fear that someone would witness him standing there and know he had done nothing.

He smiled at his self-consciousness now, but at the time it had seemed as if the whole scene had been staged as a test for one Randall Younger. The rest of humanity amounted to little more than a realistic backdrop. No one else had any obligation to enter the crumbling building, the hundreds of people girding it were not on trial. Randall scarcely cared about these props, but would conceal from them at any cost that he was part of their cowardly brotherhood. Of all the people in the world, he had thought, his grandfather would’ve suspected the truth, and when he didn’t, Randall had doubted his own conclusions. Maybe it hadn’t been fear. Maybe what the people said was true. He entertained this possibility for years, until the voice said “Mather Grouse” and the cigarette glowed red in the dark.

He could see clearly now, his eyes had adjusted. There was a fifth of whiskey nestled in the other man’s groin. “He didn’t have no reason to be afraid, though.”

“Then why was he?”

The cigarette inscribed a long arc into the trees, and Rory Gaffney took a swig from the bottle.

“You and my granddaughter hitting it off pretty good?”

“That’s a change of subject.”

“Young girls today don’t never say no,” Rory Gaffney mused. “Your granddad, he’d of worried about it. He was that sort. The same with the leather we took. He figured it was stealing. We never could get him over the worrying.”

Randall took in what the other man was saying, but slowly. This is what I have come back to learn, he thought mechanically, outside himself, watching himself learn. His stomach churned suddenly, and he tasted something vile on the back of his tongue. Remember this taste, he told himself, learn it. “No,” he heard himself say. “My grandfather was no thief. He’d have starved first.”

Rory Gaffney nodded. “Starved is
just
what he would of done. It’s what we all would of done if a skin hadn’t got itself misplaced now and then. And not just us, either. Wives and kids along with us. What the hell were we but family men? What was your granddad?”

Randall swallowed hard as an alternative to spitting into the dirt at their feet, but the taste didn’t go away.

“No man was more a family man than Mather Grouse. Nobody in Mohawk was good enough for that mother of yours. My poor boy was sweet on her, like all the rest.”

There was an edge to the man’s voice, and Randall guessed that Rory Gaffney, too, was tasting something
nasty when he dredged up the yellow past. “Ask your mother about my poor boy some day.”

Inside the trailer, the baby cried just once, then both men listened to the crickets.

“I understood your granddad. A man gets a little crazy over his own, especially when she’s a girl and prettier than anybody ever saw. Who wouldn’t a wanted her for hisself?”

Randall started to speak, but couldn’t.

“Anyways, I went along. I always tried to be Mather Grouses’s friend, even though he never wanted none. They were tough times, but we all made out somehow.”

Randall continued to hear the fundamental insincerity of the man, but also knew that the most effective lies were those liberally laced with truth. The lie could be ninety-nine parts truth to one part falsehood, the one tarnished part mingling with the pure until it was all tainted, more false than pure fabrication.

“You’re the same,” the man concluded. “A young Mather Grouse.” With effort Rory Gaffney lifted himself from the truck tire he had been sitting on. He was half a head taller than Randall and seemed aware of the fact, though the boy had to admit that maybe it was he himself who was.

“No,” Randall said, unsure of exactly what he was denying.

Gaffney raised the bottle. “To your granddad,” he said, “and youth.”

When the man offered him the bottle, Randall took it and drank without wiping the lip. The whiskey tasted only slightly better than what it washed down. Then, as the rancid liquid tracked downward toward his bowels, a strange notion occurred to Randall.
I could go to war
, he thought to himself.
I could kill a man
.

On Saturday night after the bars close, the only spot hotter than The Velvet Pussycat is the new Mohawk Medical Services Center, though most generally concede that the new hospital lacks the ambience of the old, whose crowded vestibule encouraged a desperate camaraderie of the bleeding. If you’d tiptoed home six hours late and your wife hit you in the face with a chair, chances were pretty good you’d be standing in line next to someone with a remarkably similar set of circumstances or, at least, an equally interesting story. That was the cozy kind of place the old hospital had been. You could compare wounds and feel either fortunate or proud.

The new hospital has a reception area like a large modern hotel, and the carpet sucked sound. You overheard no intimate revelations as the staff scurried about stuffing patients into the sterile, private cubicles that ringed the lobby, as if the institution was ashamed of its patients. In the hospital’s planning stages, someone had come to the entirely erroneous conclusion that people preferred to hurt in private. From the beginning no one liked the new facility. They didn’t mind particularly that the building came in over budget, nor that the lights dimmed and flickered during thunderstorms.
In fact, the place was altogether too bright. The walls were bright, the furniture bright, the paintings vivid. People were yanked out of sight before you could figure out what was wrong with them, what folly they had succumbed to. Several of the denizens of the beloved old ivy-encircled Nathan Littler Hospital let it be known that they preferred to bleed to death than be stitched up in a place like the new hospital. One citizen was good to his word, dying in the arms of his wife of thirty years, off and on, and whose agency in the matter was later examined in public proceedings.

Nor is there any challenge in the new hospital. The old, perched at the top of Hospital Hill, had required mettle. In bad weather, negotiating the incline was a test of commitment and, sometimes, manhood. People still talked about the year Homer Wells tried several runs at the incline and nearly made it, too. People watched him, fascinated, from their living room windows. He bent forward as if into a headwind and churned upward methodically, undeterred by treacherous patches of ice. The hill that day was impossible to ascend by automobile. It may have been Homer’s sense of accomplishment at reaching the summit that caused him momentarily to lose his concentration and his balance on an icy patch. By the time he reached the bottom of the hill, he had built up such a head of steam that he flew cleanly over the snowbank into the street. Here he encountered the Bronson Dairy truck, whose driver later remarked that seeing old Homer on his hood was the surprise of his life, for he owed Homer money and the first thought that crossed his mind when he saw his friend’s nose pressed urgently against the windshield was that Homer had come to collect. Ironically, it was this very event that had provided the impetus for
the new hospital drive. It was the last thing Homer would’ve wanted.

Tonight, business at the Mohawk Medical Services Center is brisk, though it lacks the appearance of being so. An enormous man looms over the registration desk, flanked by two equally formidable women. He admits to having contracted a dose of the clap, and he wants to know where it came from, his wife or his girl friend. “It better be one of us, dumb fuck,” the larger of the two women warns.