Mohawk

by Richard Russo

  Officer Gaffney blanched under Harry’s onslaught and would have retreated a step or two if he hadn’t settled onto the seat. The gleaming spatula Harry was using for emphasis was fluttering in front of his nose like a demented metal bird. It didn’t seem right that anybody would talk to a peace officer in that tone, but Gaffney couldn’t decide what to do about it in this particular case. Here he had come in to patch things up with Harry, and was worse off than ever. He was misunderstood, and that’s all there was to it.

  “The law … bullshit, the law,” Harry fumed, though calmer now, having said his piece. He set the spatula down and returned to the brick. “Bill’s nothing but a goddamn monthly check for your shit-heel brother. When was the last time he ate a bowl of soup under his old man’s roof? When was the last time Rory gave him a pair of socks? It’d be a hell of an idea if somebody called them state people and asked them if they knew what happened to the money they sent every month.” Harry was slowly working himself back into a fit. Chunks of the lava brick were crumbling onto the grill, whose surface shone angrily through the black ash. “The law—”

  “I never meant for you to get all worked up on Thanksgiving,” the policeman said. “I just come in for a cup of coffee and company.”

  “I hope you enjoyed the company, cause you ain’t getting no coffee,” Harry said without turning around.

  Defeated, Officer Gaffney slid off the stool and left.

  When Harry finished with the grill and refrigerated the perishables, he locked the front door and stuck the CLOSED sign on the window before turning off the lights. Then he peered outside between the blinds. On the other side of Main Street a cigarette briefly glowed red in the doorway of the drugstore. Two men stood in the shadows. One would be Officer Gaffney, and Harry had a pretty good guess who the second, larger man would be. They were positioned to see both the front entrance to the grill and the rear door on the alley. Harry smiled and watched as the cigarette glowed bright, then faded, then dropped to the pavement where it was extinguished. Finally, the larger man came out of the doorway and headed up Main in the direction of the firehouse.

  The wind, which had been whistling all day, now howled up the corridor between the buildings that formed it. In the doorway of the Scallese Drugstore, Officer Gaffney turned up his coat collar. Inside the Mohawk Grill, Harry Saunders was warm.

  20

  “This is the last time you’re going to be expected to climb these stairs,” Mrs. Grouse said when she and her husband reached the landing. Not quite out of earshot, she and Mather Grouse had just finished Thanksgiving dinner upstairs in their daughter’s flat. Anne had insisted on cooking the holiday meal, and of course the whole thing was a botch. Dallas had somehow gotten himself invited and then not shown up, which was typical, though they had waited for him until everything was ruined. Holding meals for people who were not punctual was something Mrs. Grouse herself did not approve of. Even when her husband was working, he knew what time dinner was served and knew better than to be late. He got off work at five, and dinner was on the table at five-fifteen, not five-twenty, because the walk home took fifteen minutes, not twenty. Occasionally Mrs. Grouse would stretch a point for the boy, but Dallas was a grown man, and there was no excuse for him. She would’ve said so, too, except that it wasn’t her place and, besides, her daughter was really to blame for inviting him in the first place, knowing full well what was likely to happen.

  “I’m fine,” said Mather Grouse. He, too, was irritable, though for a different reason. “Take your hand off my elbow, for pity’s sake.”

  “The idea of expecting you to climb these stairs and then wait around hours for your dinner. You must’ve been starved.”

  “I ate almonds. I ate walnuts. I ate deviled eggs. I ate grapes.”

  “That’s not dinner.”

  “She went to a lot of trouble.”

  “I never said—”

  They were at the bottom of the stairs now and entering their own kitchen, Mather Grouse holding the door for his wife. “Then stop being snippy. You’re just bent out of shape because somebody cooked a dinner besides you.”

  “Who ever heard of leg of lamb for Thanksgiving?”

  “I like it. I like lamb. I never get any.”

  “You can have leg of lamb any time you want. All you have to do is say.”

  “I’ve been wanting one for twenty years. How many have you cooked?”

  “A greasy mess.”

  “Mmmm.”

  “The house smells for days,” Mrs. Grouse said throwing wide open one of the windows, despite the bitter cold outside. “You can smell it all the way down here.”

  “Good,” Mather Grouse said, inhaling deeply. “I like the smell. Until the leftovers are gone, I’m going to eat upstairs. Go help your daughter with the dishes. I’ll be fine.”

  “Dirty lamb dishes. They’ll never be clean.”

  Worn out by the discussion and the long afternoon in somebody else’s home, Mather Grouse retreated to the living room and his favorite armchair, stopping only to turn on the football game. He was still angry with Dallas Younger, angrier than he could ever remember being with his ex-son-in-law, and that was saying something. Mather Grouse had no use for physical violence, but for some reason he always felt like thrashing Dallas—a strange urge, because he liked a good many men less than Dallas and had little desire to thrash them. Dallas wasn’t a bad fellow, actually. In fact, Mather Grouse could think of no one more genuinely harmless than Dallas Younger. And now that he thought about it, that was probably why he wanted to thrash him. With truly bad people even a horsewhipping did no good, but one might be just what Dallas needed, if only to make him pay attention.

  If he turned up now, there was a good chance he would get one, and not by Mather Grouse. Anne was furious, he knew, and he couldn’t blame her. It would’ve been nice to tell her so, but he couldn’t. Since the afternoon she had recalled him from the dead, he’d wanted many times to tell her how much he missed the closeness they had shared when she was a girl. He knew he was to blame, but knowing and knowing what to do about it were two different things. He also knew she had concluded that the cause of their separation was his disapproval, and he had never corrected her misunderstanding. There was no way that he could make her see that starting from the time she began to change from a girl into a woman, she had simply frightened him. This wasn’t just the matter of her womanhood. More than anything, it was the fact that she had inherited every significant feature of her personality from himself, except restraint, and not one thing from her mother. He began to suspect that only circumstance could keep her in check, her very virtues bordering on vice. She was too proud, too loyal, too ambitious, perhaps too beautiful. And she was too vulnerable, though Mather Grouse alone saw that side of her.

  Mrs. Grouse joined him in the living room and looked at the television disapprovingly. “Are you going to sit there and watch, knowing how it upsets you?”

  “Football does not upset me. I don’t particularly enjoy it. Baseball upsets me. And it doesn’t upset me; it excites me.”

  “You aren’t supposed to get excited.”

  “I seldom do, thank you very much.”

  One of the more disagreeable features of Mather Grouse’s existence was the never-ending debate over what upset him. Of late, Mrs. Grouse had come to see virtually everything he enjoyed as a potential source of upset. She seemed intent on making his remaining years one long Lenten season. When he objected, she reminded him that objections were upsetting. “Send the boy down, if he wants,” Mather Grouse called after his wife.

  Mrs. Grouse was at the kitchen door when the bell rang. She frowned at the clock on the wall. “Who could that be?” she said before she could think. Then it occurred to her that the doorbell at such a late hour on Thanksgiving might portend something about her sister, and she scurried back into the living room. “Who is it,” she asked her husband, who had not budged from his chair.

  “We won’t know until you open the do
or. Whoever it is, tell them to go away.” Actually, he was curious. The porch steps usually groaned under a visitor’s weight, and he hadn’t heard them groan.

  Mrs. Grouse tugged the front door open and peered into the dark. She was about to conclude that it was all a prank, when a large man stepped forward out of the shadows. Mather Grouse couldn’t see who it was from where he sat, but he recognized immediately the deep, soothing voice.

  “Mrs. Mather, I presume,” said Rory Gaffney.

  Mrs. Grouse instinctively stepped back and looked questioningly at her husband, whose expression had darkened. Her single backward step was enough for the man to insinuate himself into the doorway, which he pretty well filled. What Mrs. Grouse noticed most was the man’s huge hands, which predisposed her against him. Her husband’s hands were small, almost like a woman’s, and they were one of the things she had always liked best about him. The world was full of men with swollen fingers and knuckles. The other hateful thing about their visitor was his eyebrows, black and unruly, and he used one of his paws to smooth them.

  Rory Gaffney smiled and nodded as he carefully surveyed the living room and, like an auctioneer brought in for an appraisal, every object it contained. “It is exactly as I expected,” he said. “Mather Grouse would provide just such a home for his family. Your husband was always a family man, Mrs. Mather. Never once got into the baseball pool or played a daily double. Never once in all those years. Some of the fellows at the shop didn’t like it, but they weren’t family men, Mrs. Mather, that’s the thing. They had families, all right, some larger than they knew, but for the likes of these men there’s always fifty cents for the number, a dollar for the pool. There was always a little fun at the shop, you see. But not for Mather Grouse. Not for a family man.”

  Though flustered by the man’s presence, Mrs. Grouse was too polite to interrupt, so he kept talking. What she found most odd about the situation was that the man was talking to her and somehow not really talking to her at all. He was looking right at her and certainly seemed to be speaking to her. But though he had his back to her husband, Mrs. Grouse felt it was Mather Grouse he was talking to, and that if she were to disappear from the face of the earth, the man might not even notice.

  “No, some of the men didn’t like it, Mrs. Mather. Some said Mather Grouse thought he was too good, but I always said it was because he was better than those fellows, and he had a right to think so if he wanted. That’s what I always said, and that’s God’s own truth.”

  Mather Grouse had not stood up, and when their visitor finally turned to face him and offer one of his paws, Mather Grouse shook it reluctantly.

  “A good handshake,” Rory Gaffney said, not letting go when the other man tried to break it off. “One of the few pleasures left to old men like us.” Having turned his back on Mrs. Grouse, he appeared to have forgotten her completely, and she then felt self-conscious about being in her own living room, much of which was blocked out by the broad expanse of the man’s leather-coated back. When she announced that if no one minded she would go upstairs and help with the dishes, neither man seemed to hear.

  She didn’t go directly upstairs, though. Without knowing why, she went into the bathroom and lingered there. She washed her hands in cold water and dried them carefully, trying to understand her reluctance to leave her husband alone with this man who, now that she thought about it, hadn’t even introduced himself. Despite the beautiful leather coat and his otherwise respectable appearance, the man was somehow unclean. When she finished at the sink, she turned out the bathroom light and stood quietly beneath the darkened door frame, hoping to overhear something of the conversation taking place two rooms away. With both the kitchen and the bathroom lights off, she decided it would be safe to sneak a peek into the living room. When she did, however, she received a jolt. The angle was wrong to see her husband, but the other man, who had seated himself on the sofa where Mrs. Grouse herself usually sat, was staring across the dark expanse of dining room at the doorway so that when Mrs. Grouse’s head appeared, their eyes met in the split second before Mrs. Grouse withdrew as if from a flame. Getting caught flustered her. She was by no means an inexperienced spy, though sneaking up on Mather Grouse required no extraordinary talent. Their visitor, however, was apparently a different sort of man. He had met her only five minutes before, yet had predicted her behavior, something Mather Grouse seldom did after forty-some years of marriage.

  The more she thought about it, the more Mrs. Grouse doubted the evidence of her own senses. In all probability the man had not seen her at all. With the lights out in the dining room, kitchen and bathroom, he couldn’t have seen her; he just happened to be gazing in her general direction.

  Mrs. Grouse was tempted to verify this second theory by peeking in again, but she did not dare. What if she were caught a second time? Instead of risking it, she turned and flushed the toilet to account for her presence in the bathroom and hurried out into the dark kitchen without even glancing into the living room. On the way upstairs she thought of, for some reason, the afternoon when she had been immobilized while her daughter had worked purposefully over Mather Grouse. Why she should have suddenly remembered that vexing scene was beyond her. Still, it might not be a bad idea to have her daughter go downstairs just to make sure. Though Mrs. Grouse was sure that everything was fine.

  It was the boy who came down, though, all too happy to surrender the dish towel to his grandmother and curious as well about his grandfather’s guest. Randall immediately recognized the man he had seen a month earlier in the park. He had waited then, because the two men appeared so confidential, returning to the bandshell only when he saw the large man shuffling away and his grandfather slumping on the bench. This man was again leaning forward confidentially, speaking quietly. “He has no money,” the man was saying, “unless someone gave him some.”

  “I have not seen him in fifteen years,” Mather Grouse said. He was not looking at the other man but seemingly at a random spot on the wall above the television.

  “I thought he might’ve started up in the old way again—”

  “I have not seen him in fifteen years,” Mather Grouse repeated.

  At this point the large man noticed Randall standing in the doorway and straightened, at the same time waving him in, as if he, not Mather Grouse, were the master of the house. “Grandma says not to tire yourself out,” Randall said, which was neither true nor untrue. She hadn’t said it just then, but she said it all the time and he felt sure she’d meant to say it.

  Rory Gaffney rose, towering over Randall. “The grandson!” he said enthusiastically and extended his big hand. Randall shook briefly, withdrawing his hand before the man could get a grip. “I know your father, a good man, but you look more like your grandfather. A small Mather Grouse, if ever there was one. A fine, principled young man, I’ll wager.”

  Mather Grouse had stiffened perceptibly at their handshake. “He’s a good boy.”

  “Of course. A young Mather Grouse. I have a granddaughter. Do you like girls?”

  “Not much,” Randall said, certain he would not like the girl in question.

  “No,” the man agreed. “But the day will come. And when it does, I hope you’ll pay us a visit. It would be fine to know that my little one had young Mather for a friend.”

  “His name is Randall,” Mather Grouse said.

  “I will remember,” Rory Gaffney said. “And you, Mather. I know you will remember. You will let me know—”

  “Yes,” said Mather Grouse, not an accomplished liar. His grandfather’s real intention was so clear to Randall that he couldn’t understand why the other man, now buttoning his coat to leave, was apparently satisfied with their arrangement. When Randall pushed the door shut behind him, Mather Grouse started to get up, then thought better of it. The inhaler was on the end table, and he used it, his grandson looking on. “You all right, Gramp?”

  Mather Grouse nodded, closing his eyes.

  “Want me to get Mom?”

 
; “No!” his grandfather said emphatically. “Just look out the window and tell me where he is.”

  The boy did as he was told. “Gone.”

  “Look down both sides of the street.”

  “He’s gone.”

  Mather Grouse shook his head. “Go to the back bedroom. Leave the light off.”

  “Okay. Sure,” Randall agreed, excited by the adventure of it. When he returned a few minutes later, his eyes were wide. His grandfather nodded knowingly when the boy told him that the man had not gone away. Instead, he was on his hands and knees along the side of the house, trying to peer through the small, smoky window into the pitch darkness of Mather Grouse’s cellar.

  21

  The policeman wasn’t visible when Harry locked the front door of the grill and backed into the street, the pie tin full of turkey and dressing warm and snug under his coat. His car was parked half a block up the street. He took his usual route home, checking the rearview until he was sure no one was following, then circled back and parked on Hospital Hill on the opposite side of the street from the old Nathan Littler. Except for the emergency unit, the whole building was black and the broken glass crunched beneath his feet as he puffed up the incline and around the rear of the building, all the while trying to think of some plausible explanation if he were caught sneaking into an abandoned wing of a soon-to-be-demolished building at ten o’clock on Thanksgiving night. By the time he had climbed to the third floor, he was completely winded.