Straight Pool

by JJ Partridge

  Oaky bellowed, “Freddie!” from halfway across the tavern.

  All of them turned to us, open mouthed, except Freddie Jones who responded in a voice dripping with contempt, “Hey. Stop everything! The Great Sachem has arrived!” The cue stick dropped to the table and his arms flew back into the chests of two allies in mock dismay. “Careful, boys,” he sniggered, “you don’t want to offend him!” His hair was loose over his shoulders and his expression was beyond mean. He saw Flanaghan and me behind Oaky, “Who these suckers?”

  “None of your goddamn business.”

  “Look like a couple of white suckers to me.” His buddies laughed nervously.

  Oaky moved a step closer to the pool table that separated him from Jones, his hands firmly gripping the barrel of the bat, his head lowered so as to be seen by Jones beneath a metal fluorescent light fixture hanging from thin wires above the table. “If you got a problem, you deal with it at the Council. Not here.”

  “Hey,” Jones addressed Flanaghan and me, “you tourists. You down here to see the natives?” A smirk grew, showing a mouthful of bad teeth. “Welcome to the reservation,” and he bowed dramatically. “You wanna play some pool? ‘Indian’ pool? C’mon over here. C’mon, I’ll buy you a couple of beers and tell you what’s goin’ on. Petey,” he said dismissively to the mound of rippling muscles still flipping the sap, “get the tourists some beer.” Peter glowered and the sap hit his palm harder but everyone else’s eyes, even Oaky’s, were on Flanaghan and me. Nobody had expected the challenge. Flanaghan grabbed my elbow but I shook him off.

  You never know when ego will take over. Look what happened at Jimmy’s only two nights ago! It lurks there and when you feel put on, it wants you to do something about it. A cue stick lay on the table next to Oaky. I picked it up, looked down its less than perfect shaft, and the group around the table parted to let me through.

  “Hey, o-kay! C’mon, sucker, I’m gonna give you a lesson.” He stumbled toward me drunk, or close to. As I chalked my cue stick, his face came within six inches from mine; his breath was a sewer.

  The table was beat up, the cloth worn and ash stained, and had picked up the tavern’s humidity; the cushions looked hard, cigarettes had burned into the wood rails. At one time, it had been coin operated but now the pockets held plastic cups to catch the balls. The light fixture over the table had one fluorescent tube providing a bluish light. The balls were racked for nine ball and Jones decided he had the right to break. As he drew back his stick, he eyed me. “Do you know who I am?”

  “Freddie Jones.”

  He jerked up, his face contorted by rage. “Don’t call me that! That’s a slave name. Call me Magua!”

  “Okay…, Magua.”

  He broke the rack with a rifle shot and had the luck of two balls being pocketed, which produced a wider smirk, his favorite, maybe only, expression. His stance, arm arc, and follow through showed fundamental weaknesses and I knew I would beat him. He wobbled in an easy shot on the six ball but left the cue ball in an awkward position for his next shot which he missed. “Shit,” he complained and whacked the table with his cue stick. “Ever hear of Magua?” he snorted as I checked my shot.

  “Yes.” I straightened and faced him.

  “What?”

  “Magua fought off a bunch of drunks aiming to burn out the Quonnies. A … warrior,” I said, trying to pick the right word for a rogue and a robber and a brave man.

  Jones’ face scrunched up to let me know I was stupid. “More than that! He was a rebel! Protected his people, could have taken all of this land back ….”

  I didn’t reply and quickly took out four balls and realized my next shot was a double bank and with these bounceless cushions, difficult. I had been working quickly and precisely, beginning to get the feel of the table and there was even some drawn-in breaths from those watching when the balls dropped. But my audience, I knew, were almost characters of themselves, alcoholic, petulant, waiting for the next act, whatever it was. I bent over for my shot and when he moved closer to me, I smelled a body that hadn’t been untouched by soap. “Magua took what he wanted. Didn’t care nuthin’ about nobody. Angry, very angry. Like me,” he said and straightened up. “I got his blood. I hear him in me. I feel it.” His face raised to the plank ceiling, his whole body shuddered, and he screamed what had to be his version of a chant. His two buddies started banging their hands in a rhythm on the other table.

  Nobody, not me, nor the Gardiners nor Flanaghan, nor any of the others moved. I said to myself, ‘Watch out, white man!’ and used the moment to purposefully miss my shot.

  Jones’ writhing stopped. Suddenly, he became calm and managed to get in two balls before he awkwardly flubbed his next shot. I purposefully missed a long table shot and the game went back to him. Somebody gave Jones a bottle of Bud but neglected me.

  “You know Calibrese?”

  I said, “Met him once. Today….”

  “Oaky’s buddy, ya know,” he said pointing the cue stick at Oaky, causing Peter Gardiner to glower. “Yeah, we had a good thing goin’ until we were sold out. We give up Mouwneit. To fuckin’ Ugo! We give up our rights! We give up our ….”

  Behind me, I could hear the righteous slap of the blackjack begin. Peter Gardiner growled, “Finish the fuckin’ game!”

  Jones, his face full of loathing, muscles in his neck and shoulders tensing, his eyes going hard, clutched the butt of the cue stick and held it upright. “Petey,” he shouted, “the old man buy you that Avalanche outta what he got from Ugo …?”

  Peter Gardiner knocked me into the table in his scramble around the table and I barely missed the arc of the sharp-edged light fixture which Jones swung into Peter Gardiner’s face. The blackjack fell to the floor, Peter Gardiner grabbed his nose and mouth, saw the blood on his hands, and rushed at Jones who brandished his cue stick like a staff, slashed the air, and whacked him on the side of the head. He went down. Two of Peter’s pals lunged toward Jones but one was flipped on the pool table like a stunt man in a Rambo movie and the other got a knee caught in his groin. Again, the cue stick flashed as Peter Gardiner, blood running from his nose, dripping from his chin, swayed against the table and this time, the back of my right hand got in the way. The barrel of the cue stick now was swung across the table and smashed into my upper back with a thwack that went right down into my rib cage, robbing me of breath, knocking my glasses to the floor. Flanaghan grabbed me around the waist, pulling toward the door and….

  Whoom-sh!

  The discharge of a sawed-off shotgun at close range is a combination of earsplitting bang and swoosh. Oaky Gardiner, planted in the open doorway, had fired off one barrel outside, and now pointed a gun with a shortened, tape-covered stock at combatants caught in slow motion as they disentangled themselves. I had no idea where the gun came from! Peter, despite his injury, had the head of one of Jones’ allies in his armpit; he gave his captive a full fist in the face, and dropped him. Three others left a pileup on the table; one held on to half of a broken cue stick. Behind the table, Jones, was brandishing a six inch blade. It was the knife that got my attention.

  Oaky held the door open and shouted, “Get the fuck out of here! Now!”

  Whether directed to Jones and his buddies, or to everyone, it seemed like a good idea. With my diaphragm starting to work again, and Flanaghan at my elbow, I wobbled for the door, my right hand numb, my back ringing with the pain from what could be a bruised rib. But Oaky waved us away with the shotgun which he leveled at Jones with his knife in an outstretched hand. “Put it away. Now.”

  Jones stared for a long moment and then lowered the knife, probably back into his boot which was blocked from our view by the pool table. But he wasn’t a coward. His chin went out in defiance. “How much Oaky? Are you ever goin’ to tell the Council? How much did Calibrese pay you? For our….”

  Oaky took a step forward, the door slammed shut, and he pointed the shotgun at Jones’s head, who laughed manically as he slowly came around the table to w
ithin a few feet of Oaky.

  “You gonna off me in front of them?” He shrugged toward Flanaghan and me. “C’mon, you must be gettin’ old.” Then, he lurched forward to press his chest into the shot gun’s barrels. “Go ahead, old man. I fuckin’ dare ya!”

  I froze. There was a moment when, with the smell of gun powder, the anger in Oaky Gardiner’s face, and Peter Gardiner’s shouts, I was afraid Jones might have challenged the wrong man. Instead, Peter Gardiner, his lips bloody and puffing up, got behind Jones, put him in an arm lock and pushed him forward. Oaky hit the push bar of the door and Peter Gardiner wrestled Jones down the steps into the parking lot. I found my glasses, the rims twisted, and bent them into shape, and followed Flanaghan outside to the stoop as a thrashing Jones was thrown inside the cab of the pickup. Two others, one bleeding from a cut above the eye and the other holding his stomach, mounted motorcycles under Oaky’s watchful eyes; seconds later, their engines roared, tires screeched, and in a spray of dirt, they headed out of the parking lot. Flanaghan and I turned to go back inside, when the solid crunch of metal into metal stopped us. Peter Gardiner screamed and ran toward the Avalanche as Jones’ high wheeled pickup came off its rear deck and smashed into the trunk of Flanaghan’s Cadillac and careened out of the lot. Peter Gardiner ran back to the stoop and grabbed for the shotgun but his father held him off. Flanaghan ran to his car, swearing, his fists clenched and shaking at the disappearing pickup. I was lucky that Jones didn’t have time for the Range Rover.

  Despite everything, Oaky was a reservoir of calm. He said to me, “Jones is crazy. Drunk, he’s worse. You better go. And be careful. He’s got everything all twisted. Thinks he’s a born again Magua…! And a long time ago, the real Magua took out some white boys on the very same trail.”

  “I heard the story.”

  “Believe it,” he said and took me by the elbow to where Flanaghan was inspecting the Cadillac’s damaged trunk, his face sweaty and furious. “It’s hit and run and I’ll get the bastard on that. Where does he live nowadays?”

  Oaky paused. “Don’t know.”

  Flanaghan glared at Oaky, realizing that Oaky, despite everything, would protect a Quonnie. I heard Oaky Gardiner hiss, “I gotta get’em under control.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  The sawed-off shotgun jolted me awake. Oaky Gardiner had it aimed at me and some fine sense of nerve, some faculty of perception, warned me to awake.

  “Oh-h-h!” A turn to my left side produced a stab of pain where the cue stick had connected with my ribs; the fingers of my right hand stung as if caught in the closing of a door. I needed Nadie next to me, sympathetic, loving. But could I tell her what happened without taking heat for being in a bar fight?

  Then, I remembered that last night, while prone on the sofa and stuffed with Advil, I had given myself today off. Not just because of my aches and bruises, but because after a Commencement Week that included Puppy Dog and the Arts Quad, Sonny Russo and the Faculty Club, hapless Charlie Fessenden and the membership meeting, Mistah Toad of Watch Hill and a brawl at Oaky’s Tavern, I deserved a day of blessed idleness. Who would care if the University Counsel played hooky?

  I hunched up on a pillow and saw sunlight invading the spaces between the window shades and frames, creating slivers of vertical brightness across the loft to the shelves of mysteries and thrillers that lined the wall from the entertainment center to the bed. Slowly, still fuddled by painkillers, I levered off the bed, slipped on a cotton robe, and my hand went to a line of Lauren Estelman’s shoot ‘em up, Detroit crime novels. What about Down River, a breezy Amos Walker yarn with a couple of slick murders, imaginable bad guys, assorted sleazes, and women out of a bad dream. As my hand went to the book, my eyes went to the shelf above and a two-volume anthology of Sherlock Holmes adventures. Hm,m,m. I pulled out Volume II and opened to Hound of the Baskervilles. I read:

  ‘October 16th. A dull and foggy day with a drizzle of rain. The house is banked in with rolling clouds, which rise now and then to show the dreary curves of the moor, with thin, silver veins upon the sides of the hills, and the distant boulders gleaming where the light strikes upon their wet faces. It is melancholy outside and in. The baronet is in a black reaction after the excitements of the night. I am conscious myself of a weight at my heart and a feeling of impending danger—ever present danger, which is the more terrible because I am unable to define it.’

  Ah, perfect! A Victorian classic thriller with well-placed clues, the bone chilling atmosphere of the Dorset moors, and a direct and understandable mystery along with mayhem and murder. After two more Advil, I took the book to the recliner, snapped on the reading light, managed to find a comfortable position, and began that more famous than read story. Time went by quickly and I should have ignored the insistent buzz from my BlackBerry that began during Chapter Four. By the time I found the device in trousers that didn’t make it into the laundry chute last night, the caller had gotten my recorded message. The call back phone number wasn’t familiar to me but a three-two-two was a South County call and therefore likely to be either Flanaghan or Fessenden. It was neither; my caller was Chief Richard Grace of the Greenwick Police Department.

  “I got a complaint here. Tom Flanaghan says you’re a witness to a hit and run by Freddie Jones. Said that you were at Oaky’s Tavern in Low Town and a fight broke out. Freddie deliberately crashed into Flanaghan’s car and took off. That right?”

  “Yes.”

  “What the hell were you guys doing at Oaky’s?”

  After a second of hesitation, thinking the Chief already had Flanaghan’s statement, I said, truthfully, “Research on the Quonochontaugs.” No response. I continued, “One minute everything’s fine and the next thing I know, we’re in the middle of a bar fight and ….”

  “Everybody walks away? Then, Jones takes it out on Flanaghan’s car?”

  “Something like that.”

  Silence followed until he said, “Not a place to spend a Sunday afternoon. Especially with a guy like Freddie Jones. Delusional, know what I mean, should’ve been locked up a long time ago. A beer short of a six pack. The hair, the outfit, …. Crazy!”

  A police radio interrupted and he responded before getting back to me. “Freddie’s been out of the Army for maybe … two years. Since then, I’ve had him in here a half dozen times for fighting, drunk and disorderly. Oaky, as tribal leader, always bails him out, even though Jones gives Oaky and his son Peter a lotta noise. Just as well ‘cause Freddie’s not somebody for a twelve by nine cell. Ripped out the cot once, another time the sink. Have to listen to how I got ‘no jurisdiction,’ he’s a ‘free’ man, mouthing off about some Quonnie hero named Magua. Sometimes, he thinks he is Magua. And these cockamamie war chants…? He knows that I’m going to get him for the fires up there in the swamp. Ever since he came back, anything vacant in or around the swamp has been popping off, unless it belongs to a Quonnie.”

  A coin dropped.

  “Well, Mr. Temple, here is my advice. Stay away from Oaky’s. In fact, stay out of Indian Swamp. You never know when Freddie or one of his gang will decide your invading Indian country. Remember that.”

  I would. “Yes, sir,” I said and added “and thank you.”

  I put away my BlackBerry. My adrenaline was pumping, my mind racing. Holmes and Watson and murder on the Dorset moors; Freddy ‘Magua’ Jones and fires in Indian Swamp, a delusional psychopath, and hero-in-his-own-mind Quonnie, an Emperor Jones consumed with destruction of enemies. Crazy enough to burn down the clubhouse on the ‘signal hill’ occupied by a despised enemy?

  The grandfather clock in the hall downstairs began its clangs to eight o’clock. Marcie, an early arrival at College Hall, would be at her desk. I used my BlackBerry to tell her that I wasn’t coming in, to give me a call if anything important occurred, otherwise I’d see her in the morning; if the office got too quiet, she should put a suitable message on the answering machine and close the office after lunch. Then, I called Flanaghan.

  “
I filed a complaint last night,” he said, “and this morning Dick Grace called. Told me the same story about Jones. I checked with Benno. Says he’s looked at State Police and Fire Marshal records as well as police reports in Westerly, Charlestown, Richmond, and Greenwick. Over the past eighteen months, there’s been a slew of fires in and around Indian Swamp. Cops think that anything worth saving was taken before the places were torched. Here’s the angle. About a month ago, a fire was reported near the Charlestown-Greenwick line, with cops from both towns converging on the site. The Charlestown cops stopped Randall’s pickup on a back road not two miles from the fire. The driver was our friend Mr. Jones. Had Ollie Randall with him who was shitfaced. In a field sobriety test, Jones seemed to be okay. According to the report, the pickup had a dirt bike in the back, registered to Jones, and a gas can, which a swamp buggy in the boonies, is no surprise. Both claimed they had been at Oaky’s; the cop checked it out later and was told they had been there drinking, causing a ruckus, until a few minutes before they got stopped by the cops.” He paused. “No surprise there. Not sure what it all means but Benno’s still digging.”

  * * *

  Why was I compelled, despite aches and pains, to visit the ruins at Haversham Golf Club? Was it that Sherlock Holmesian thing about the ‘scene of the crime’? What did Rumpole of the Bailey say about the necessity of defense attorneys visiting the locus in quo to get the staging and the scent?

  Ninety minutes later, I was in my gleaming black Charger heading into Westerly on Route 1. The spring morning, infused with the shiny green vibrancy that suddenly pervades South County in June, raised my spirits, just as ibuprofen, Ben Gay, frequent changes in position, and flexes of my right hand—now a pretty purple just above the knuckles—mitigated the effects of yesterday’s pummeling. I took the winding private drive past the parking lot and bag drop to where, only days ago, white pillars marked the clubhouse entrance, and found them gone, replaced by a yellow, truck-mounted crane hoisting blackened girders into waiting dump trucks. I left my car not far from a front-end loader shoveling what appeared to be the last of the debris from within the foundation, and walked toward the first tee. Since my previous visit, rolls of turf had been laid on what had been the burnt-out embankment, and impatiens, looking incongruous in their pinks and whites, were in beds smelling of compost; flowering rhododendrons, lilacs, and forsythias shielded double rows of hay bales that ringed the knoll. On the tee, yardage markers and benches had been installed; from a nearby green, mowers made sounds like swarms of angry wasps and fairways stretching to the north were bathed in a light from the noon sun that eliminated shadows and turned the ponds into glass.