The Lay of the Land (26 page)

“Where’s the fuckin’ Mafia when you need them bastards?” Lester’s growling up at the tube. He makes a pistol out of his thumb and index finger and assassinates the man I voted for with a soft pop of his lizard lips. “Ain’t he havin’ the time of his fuckin’ life with this election bullshit. He loves it.” Lester swivels around to his patrons, his mouth sour and mean. “Country on its fuckin’ knees.”

“Easier to give blow jobs,” one of the regulars says, and thumbs his glass for a fill-up.

“And you’d know about that,” Lester says, and grins evilly.

The couple in the back booth, who’ve been doing whatever away from everybody’s notice, unexpectedly stands up, moving their banquette table noisily out of the way, as if they thought a fight was about to erupt or their sexual shenanigans required more leg room. All five of us, plus an older woman at the bar, have a gander at these two getting their coats on and shuffling out through the tables. Happily, I don’t know them. The woman’s young and thin and watery-blond and pretty in a sharp-featured way. He’s a short-armed, gangsterish meatpie with dark curly hair, stuffed into a three-piece suit. His trousers are unzipped and part of his shirttail’s poked guiltily through the fly.

“What’s your hurry there, folks?” Lester yaps, and leers as the couple heads for the red
EXIT
lozenge and up to the street.

The noisy drinker down the bar leans forward and smirks at me. “So whadda
you
think?” He is Bob Butts, owner (once) of Butts Floral on Spring Street, since replaced by the Virtual Profusion and going great guns. Bob is red-skinned, fattish and embittered. His mother, Lana, ran the shop after Bob’s dad died in Korea. This was prehistoric Haddam, when it was a sleepy-eyed, undiscovered jewel. When Lana moved to Coral Gables and remarried, Bob took over the shop and ran it in the ground, gambling his brains out in Tropworld, which was new in Atlantic City. Bob’s a first-rate dickhead.

The two men beyond him, I don’t know, but are shady, small-time Haddam cheezers I’ve seen six hundred times—in Cox’s News or in the now-departed Pietroinferno’s. I have an idea they’re involved with delivering the
Trenton Times
and possibly less obvious merchandise. The hatchet-faced, thin-haired woman, wearing a blowsy black dress suitable for a funeral, I’ve never seen, though she’s apparently Bob’s companion. It would be easy to say these four are members of a Haddam demimonde, but in fact they’re only regular citizens holding out in defiance, rather than making the move to Bordentown or East Windsor.

“What do I think about what?” I lean forward and look straight at Bob Butts, raising my warming martini to my lips. President Clinton has disappeared off the screen. Though I wonder what he’s doing in real time—having a stiff belt himself, possibly. His last two years haven’t been much to brag about. Like Clarissa, I wish he was running again. He’d do better than these current two monkeys.

“All this election bullshit.” Bob Butts cranes forward, then back, to get a better look at me. Lester’s pouring him another 7&7. Bob’s haggard lady friend gives me an unfocused, boozy stare, as if she knows all about me. The two
Trenton Times
guys muse at their shot glasses (root beer schnapps, my bet). “Some guy got blown up over at the hospital today. Bunch of pink confetti. This shit’s gone too far. The Democrats are stealin’ it.” Bob’s wet, bloodshot eyes clamp onto me, signaling he knows who I am now—a nigger-lovin’, tax-and-spend, pro-health-care, abortion-rights, gay-rights, consumer-rights, tree-hugging liberal (all true). Plus, I sold my house and left the door open to a bunch of shit Koreans, and probably even had something to do with him losing the flower shop (also true).

Bob Butts is wearing a disreputably dirty brown shawl-collar car coat made of a polymer-based material worn by Michigan frosh in the early sixties but not since, and looks like hell warmed over. He has on chinos like mine and white Keds with no socks. He’s been in need of a shave for several days. His thin, lank hair is long and dirty and he could do with a bath. Obviously, Bob’s experiencing a downward loop, having once been handsome, clever, gaunt to the point of febrile Laurence Harvey effeminance. Like Calderon, he cut a wide swath through the female population, who he used to woogle in his back room, right on the stem-strewn metal arranging table. That’s maybe all you can hope for if you’re a florist.

“I don’t really see what the Democrats have to do with whoever got blown up at the hospital,” I say. I half-turn and take a casual, calculated look back at the Appleseed mural, brightly lit by a row of tiny silver spotlights attached to the low ceiling. By looking at goofball Johnny, I’m essentially addressing nut-case Bob. This is the message I want subliminally delivered. I also don’t want Bob to think I give half a shit about anything he says, since I don’t. I’m ready right now for Mike to show up. But then I can’t resist adding, “And I don’t see where the Democrats are stealing anything, unless getting more votes could be said to be a form of theft. Maybe
you
do. Maybe it’s why you’re not in the flower business anymore.”

“Could be said.” Bob Butts grins idiotically. “Could be said you’re an asshole. That could be said.”

“It’s already been said,” I say. I don’t want to fan this disagreement beyond the boundary of impolite bar argument. I’m not sure what would wait out past that frontier at my age and state of health and with a big drink already under my belt. And yet the same irresistible urge makes me unable not to add, still facing the Appleseed mural, “It’s actually been said by even bigger shit-heels than you are, Bob. So don’t worry too much about surprising me.” I shift around on my bar stool and entertain the rich thought of a second chilled Boodles. Only, I hear scuffling and wood being scraped. The hatchet-faced woman says, “Oh, Jesus Christ, Bob!” Then a bar stool like the one I’m sitting on hits the floor. And suddenly there’s a fishy odor in my nostrils and mouth, and Bob Butts’ small, rough hands go right around my neck, his whiskery chin jamming into my ear, his throat making a gurgling noise both mechanical, like a car with a bad starter, and also simian—
grrrrr
—into my ear canal—“
Grrrrr, grrrrr, grrrrr”
—so that I tip over off my bar stool, which tumbles sideways, and Bob and I go sprawling toward the pine floor. I’m trying to grab a fistful of his reeking car coat and haul it in the direction I’m falling so he’ll hit the floor first and me on top—which bluntly happens. Though the bar stool next to mine—heavy as an anvil—topples down onto me with a clunk in my rear rib cage that doesn’t knock the breath out of me but hurts like shit and makes me expel a not-voluntary “oooof.”

“Cocksucker, you cocksucker.” Bob Butts is gurgling in my ear and stinking.
“Grrrr, errrr, grrrr.”
These are noises (I for some reason find myself
thinking
) Bob probably learned as a child, and that were funny once, but now come into play in a serious effort to murder me. Bob’s grip isn’t exactly around my windpipe, only my neck, but he’s squeezing the crap out of me and digging his grimed fingernails into my skin. My flesh is stinging, but I don’t feel shocked or in any jeopardy, except possibly from the fall.

No one else in the bar does anything to help. Not Lester, not the two
Trenton Times
palookas, not the witchy, balding woman in widow’s weeds who’s invoked Jesus Christ. They simply ignore Bob and me wrestling on the floor, as if a new bar customer, in for a Fuzzy Navel, might think it was great to see two middle-aged guys muggling around on the damp boards, trying to accomplish nobody’s too sure what-in-the-fuck.

All of this begins to seem like an annoyance more than a fight, like having someone’s pet monkey hanging on your neck, though we’re down on the floor and the stool’s on top of me and Bob’s going “
Grrrr, errrr, grrrr
” and squeezing my neck, his breath and hair reeking like week-old haddock. Suddenly, I lose all my wind and have to buck the bar stool off my back to breathe, and in doing so I get my knee in between Bob’s own squirming, jimmering knees and my right elbow into his sternum, just below where I could interrupt
his
windpipe. I lean on Bob’s hard breast bone, stare down into his bulging, blood-splurged eyes, which register that this event may be almost over. “Bob,” I half-shout at him. His eyes widen, he bares his long yellow teeth, refastens a fisted grip on my neck tendons and croaks, “Cocksucker.” And with no further prelude, I go ahead and jackhammer my kneecap straight up into Bob’s nuttal pouch pretty much as hard as I can—given my weakened state, given my lack of inclination and the fact that I’ve had a martini and had hoped the evening would turn out to be pleasant, since so much of the day hadn’t.

Bob Butts erupts instantly in a bulbous-eyed, Gildersleevian
“Oooomph,”
his cheek and lips exploding. His eyes squeeze melodramatically shut. He lets go of my neck and goes as flaccid as a lifesaving dummy. Instead of more
“Grrrr, errr, grrr,”
he groans a deep, agonizing and, I’ll admit, satisfying
“Eeeeeuh-uh-oh.”

“You fuckin’ scrogged ’im, you cheap-ass son of a bitch,” the hatchet-faced woman shouts from up on her bar stool above us, frowning down at Bob and me as if we were insects she’d been interested in. “Fight fair, fucker.” She decides to toss her drink at me and does. The glass, which has gin in it, hits my shoulder, but most of its contents hit Bob, who’s grimacing, with my elbow point—excruciatingly, I hope—nailed into his sternum.

“All right, all right, all right,” Lester says behind the bar, as if he couldn’t really give a shit what the hell’s going on but is bored by it, his spoiled, impassive shoe-salesman’s mug and his green plastic bow tie—relic of some desolate Saint Paddy’s day—just visible to me beyond the bar rail.

“All right
what
?” I’m holding Bob at elbow point. “Are you going to keep this shit bucket from strangling me, or am I going to have to rough him up?” Bob makes another gratifying “
Eeeeeuh-uh-oh,
” whose exhalation is foul enough that I have to get away from him, my heart finally beginning to whump.

“Let ’im get up,” Lester says, as though Bob was his problem now.

Bob’s blond accomplice hauls a big shiny-black purse off the floor beside her. “I’ll get ’im home, the dipshit,” she says. The two other bar-stool occupants look at me and Bob as if we were a show on TV. On the real TV, Bush’s grinning, smirking, depthless face is visible, talking soundlessly, arms held away from his sides as if he was hiding tennis balls in his armpits. Other humans are visible around him, well-dressed, smooth-coifed, shiny-faced young men holding paper plates and eating barbecue, laughing and being amused to death by whatever their candidate’s saying.

Using the bar stool, I raise myself from where I’ve straddled Bob Butts, and feel instantly light-headed, weak-armed, heavy-legged, in peril of falling back over on top of Bob and expiring. I gawk at Lester, who’s taking away my martini glass and scowling at me while Bob’s lady friend pulls him, wallowing, off the floor. She squats beside me, her scrawny knees bowed out, her skirt opened, so that I unmercifully see her thighs encased in black panty hose, and the bright white crotch patch of her undies. I avert my eyes to the floor, and see that my night guard has fallen out of my pocket in the tussle and been crunched in three pieces under the bar rail. It makes me feel helpless, then I scrape the pieces away with my heel. Gone.

Bob is up but bent at the waist, clutching his injured testicles. He’s missing one of his Keds, and his ugly yellow toenails are gripping the floor. His hair’s mussed, his fatty face blotched red and white, his eyes hollowed and mean and full of defeated despisal. He glares at me, though he’s had enough. I’m sure he’d love to spit out one more vicious “Cocksucker,” except he knows I’d kick his cogs again and enjoy doing it. In fact, I’d be glad to. We stand a moment loathing each other, all my parts—hands, thighs, shoulders, scratched neck, ankles, everything but my own nuts—aching as if I’d fallen out a window. Nothing occurs to me as worth saying. Bob Butts was better as a lowlife, floral failure and former back-room lady-killer than as a vanquished enemy, since enemy-hood confers on him a teaspoon of undeserved dignity. It was also better when this was a homey town and a bar I used to dream sweet dreams in. Both also gone. Kaput. On some human plain that doesn’t exist anymore, now would be a perfect moment and place from which to start an unusual friendship of opposites. But all prospects for that are missing.

I turn to Lester, who I hate for no other reason than that I can, and because he takes responsibility for no part of life’s tragedy. “What do I owe you?”

“Five,” he snaps.

I have the bat-hide already in hand, my fingers scuffed and sticky from my busted knuckles. My knees are shimmying, though fortunately no one can see. I give a thought to collecting up my shattered night guard pieces, then forget it.

“Did you used to live here?” Lester says distastefully.

This, atop all else, does shock me. More than that, it disgusts me. Possibly I don’t look exactly as I looked when I busted my ass to flog Lester’s old mama’s duplex in a can’t-miss ’89 seller’s market—a sale that could’ve sprung Lester all the way to Sun City, and into a cute pastel cinder-block, red-awninged match box with a mountain view, plus plenty left over for an Airstream and a decent wardrobe in which to pitch sleazy woo to heat-baked widows. A better life. But I
am
the same, and fuck-face Lester needs to be reminded.

“Yeah, I lived here,” I growl. “I sold your mother’s house. Except you were too much of a mamma’s-boy asshole to part with it. Guess you couldn’t bear leaving your leprechaun tie.”

Lester looks at me in an interested way, as if he’d muted me but my lips are still moving. He rests his cadaver hands on the glass rail, where there’s a moist red rubber drying mat. Lester doesn’t actually look much different from Johnny Appleseed, which may be why the August Inn people (a hospitality consortium based in Cleveland) keep him on. He still wears, I see, his big gold knuckle-buster Haddam HS ring. (My son refused his.) “Whatever,” Lester says, then turns down the pasty corners of his mouth in disdain.