Mink Eyes

by Dan Flanigan

  “Funny, huh? That made me hungry as hell,” she said.

  “When I tell Harrigan about your adventure today, you’ll enter his hall of fame.”

  She shrugged and said, “Who cares?”

  “You don’t like him?”

  “I keep looking for something to like.”

  “What’s wrong with him?”

  “Well, let’s start with his rudeness. You can’t even get a ‘good morning’ out of him. ‘Slam bam, thank you ma’am’ all the way. Then we’ll move right along to his arrogance. Then . . .”

  “Okay!” he interrupted. “I shouldn’t have asked.”

  He took a long thoughtful drink from his Moosehead.

  “It’s funny though,” he said. “That’s not him. Or at least, it didn’t used to be him. When he was a kid, even in high school, he was the most sensitive of us all. He’d cry at the drop of a hat. He worried about everybody, tried to take care of everybody. He was our class poet. But then, when he got into the law business, he adopted this pose. Maybe he did it to disguise his fear. Nothing in his childhood got him ready for what he was trying to be. So he got tough to overcome the fear. And then, at some point, the man became the pose.”

  “How come when he snaps, you jump?”

  “For old, old time’s sake. We weren’t just friends. We were blood brothers. The real thing. Slit our fingers when we were eight years old and pressed them together. Harrigan and O’Keefe. Knights of the Grail.”

  “Knights of the Grail?” she said, with a questioning, skeptical smile.

  He finished his Moosehead and waved at the waitress to bring him another. “A legend. King Arthur’s knights set out in search of the Holy Grail. I forget what it really was. Some kind of vessel. Our Lord’s chalice or something. Harrigan and I thought it meant truth, the meaning of life, perfect love, the ultimate, the best of everything.”

  “I never heard of it.”

  “Read Le Morte D’Arthur,” he said, pronouncing the French awkwardly. “It’s all in there.”

  She had a funny look on her face, a puzzled half-smile. He noticed and asked her what she was thinking.

  “That fits so well, that ‘quest for the Grail’ stuff. I wonder if either one of you ever really grew up.”

  O’Keefe shrugged, thinking how puerile it all must seem, but then, there it was: it hadn’t gone away, nothing to be done about it.

  “Apparently we did,” he said.

  He fell into a brief reverie, having lost his train of thought.

  “Go on,” she said. “You were blood brothers, Knights of the Grail . . .”

  “Yeah, we were inseparable. Until college. We started out there together too. We were both English majors. But then I started drifting away. Into booze and drugs and just not caring about anything. And all of a sudden I was drafted. Not just drafted. Drafted into the damned, Jarhead United States Marine Corps if you can believe it. They were so desperate back then, even the Marines were drafting people. But I showed up and did my duty, horrible as it was. ‘The Universal Soldier,’ you know. And meanwhile, Harrigan scores a ridiculously high draft lottery number and just goes on and sails along out of college and into law school like he really knew what he was doing. And when I came back from Vietnam, I got into rage and drugs and just screwing my life up any way I could, and Harrigan sort of picked me up off the street, and so I drifted along with him until it started sticking to me, and here I am. Harrigan’s the one who got me started in this business. I didn’t know my ass from third base. Neither did he really. He was just a semi-poor young hustler then, a blue-collar Irish kid trying to make good. He hardly knew a corporation from a cow patty back then. And we kind of grew up in the business together. From the divorces and the car wrecks to the banks and the conglomerates. We’ve always been sort of a team. And we became the best at what we did—getting the result, grabbing the assets. I guess I don’t even need his business now, but he’ll always be first priority with me. Without him I’d just be a splash of dried puke on the street right now.”

  “And so who are you now? Harrigan’s monster? You don’t seem to enjoy your work very much.”

  “That’s because I don’t.”

  “Why don’t you?”

  “Look at who I hang around with all the time. Guys like Preston. Actually a few of the guys I work for are just like him. If your environment stinks, you start to smell too. Look what’s happened to Harrigan.”

  “Then you ought to do something else. You talk like you don’t have a choice. There’s no cage in this world a guy like you can’t walk right out of. At least if you’re willing to face what’s outside.”

  Abruptly he changed the subject. “Make a note, will you? I have to buy two bicycles before next Saturday. Can you believe it? My kid doesn’t even have a bike. Can’t even ride a bike. She’s got some great parents.”

  “She’s turning out just fine.”

  “I don’t know. She’s getting more like her mother every day. Wanting to control everything. And that makes me sad because it’s gonna cause her nothing but pain.”

  She felt him hesitating, debating whether he should tell her the next thing he had in mind to say.

  “You know,” he said, apparently having decided to say it, “I’ve thought seriously maybe a dozen times about going back and trying it again. But I don’t have the heart for it, even for Kelly. Is that lousy or what?”

  “They say self-condemnation is just another way of refusing to change.”

  Nothing he could say to that. She was not going to help him talk himself off of the hook he was wriggling on. But maybe there really was no hook. “There’s no cage in this world you can’t walk right out of,” she had said. Nice thought. He would have to remember that.

  She finished her glass of wine. He signaled to the waitress to bring them two more.

  “No more for me, Pete. One more, and I’m in trouble, and who knows what happens?”

  He smiled. Why didn’t she think that was a good idea?

  “Let’s take a walk,” he said.

  They walked to the small park near O’Keefe’s apartment. They waded through the fallen leaves. The sky was growing even darker, a warning of rain coming soon. O’Keefe was suffering from the same affliction that had stricken Harrigan earlier in the day, the Saturday-afternoon blues. It was going to be a long time before morning. He hung back and let her walk a step or two in front of him, her hands in the pockets of her windbreaker. A tiny scarlet leaf clung to the dark-brown hair at the back of her head. She was neither thin nor fat, just ample, a promise of softness. He wanted very badly to take this ample woman home with him, wanted her to play with him, very gently, in the dark. But he was afraid, for many reasons, to make any move in that direction.

  They sat on the swing set, side by side, not really swinging, just pushing back and forth with their feet.

  “So” he said, “what’s your wish upon a star?”

  “You mean why am I thirty-something and still alone?”

  “Not necessarily that.”

  “Heading for spinsterhood?”

  “Probably too choosy.”

  “Not really. Not at all. I would just be looking for a place inside someone’s heart. Not even a big space. But a safe one. And I haven’t found that yet.”

  It was her turn to abruptly change the subject. She quickly pushed herself up from the swing.

  “I have to get going. Are you going down to the lakes tomorrow?”

  He nodded his head.

  “Be careful” she said.

  “Always.”

  “Never.”

  He watched her walk away. When she was halfway across the little park, she turned around and looked at him. He thought for a moment she was coming back. But then she just smiled, waved, turned around, and walked on out of the park. He sat on the swing for a while and kept looking at the spot where she had stood and smiled and waved.

  He considered going back to Harvey’s for the evening. There would be yellow light and
brown whiskey there, and cool jazz, and maybe even a long-haired girl. But it didn’t seem worth the effort. Besides, he wanted to rise early, clearheaded, welcoming the new day and the promise of a new adventure down at the lakes, at the mink “farm.” Only the promise of such adventures kept him trudging through the dullness of all the unremarkable days of his life.

  The sky drizzled on him as he trod heavily, like a man carrying a load, across the park, back to his apartment. The telephone was ringing when he let himself in the front door. He did not hurry to answer it, didn’t care if it stopped before he got to it, but it kept ringing.

  “O’Keefe,” he answered.

  “Pete, this is Ernest Anderson. I’m sorry to bother you at home.”

  “No problem.”

  “I just wanted to tell you that Jane, Lenny’s secretary, said that she would be glad to meet with you tomorrow if you wanted to do it then instead of Monday.”

  “That would be great. Tell her I’ll be there late morning or early afternoon.”

  “I will.”

  Anderson hesitated. There was something he was having a hard time trying to say.

  “There’s something else.”

  “What would that be, sir?”

  “I couldn’t be completely forthright with Mr. Lufkin there today. As you heard, he’s very down on Lenny right now. He’s very irrational about it. But I know Lenny well, believe me, and the Lenny I know would not do what he seems to have done. Something terrible must have happened.”

  “What makes you think you know him so well, Mr. Anderson?”

  “He’s my son-in-law. My daughter’s husband.”

  O’Keefe squinted as he tried to evaluate this disclosure.

  “Have you asked her what’s wrong with him?”

  “I’m afraid my daughter and I don’t communicate very well.”

  “You don’t talk?”

  “Sadly, not very much.”

  Something serious must have gone down between those two, O’Keefe thought.

  “I don’t even know,” Anderson went on, “whether or not she went off with Lenny. And I hope you’ll check on her when you’re down there. Make sure she’s coping with all this somehow. She’s an incredible girl. Extraordinary in every way.”

  “I’ll look in on her if she’s there. And if she’ll see me.” But he hoped she would not be the one or do the other, because he could not believe that the daughter of this man could be “extraordinary in every way,” or in any way at all.

  Anderson seemed to be stifling a sob. “Please give her my love.” His voice almost broke, but he recovered himself. “But really,” he continued, “ I just wanted to tell you that the Lenny Parker I know would not do these things, would not even dream of doing these things. Something terrible must have happened.”

  After he hung up on Anderson, O’Keefe tossed a salad, baked a potato, and barbecued chicken on the grill on his patio. He sat at the patio table in the darkness, his windbreaker hood up to protect him from the drizzling mist, hoping it would not rain any harder, at least until the chicken was done. After dinner, he sipped Wild Turkey on the rocks while he took a hot shower. He put an old Ravi Shankar album on the stereo, got into bed, turned the lights off, and continued to wonder until he fell off to sleep how any daughter of a man like Ernest Anderson could be an “incredible girl, extraordinary in every way.”

  CHAPTER 6

  IT WAS STILL drizzling early the next morning as O’Keefe’s van sliced through the almost empty streets of the fog-drenched city. He felt like the lone survivor of some deadly sickness that had seeped into the town and sucked away its life. He drove through miles of suburbs that seemed to grow daily of their own accord and out of control, gobbling up the countryside.

  The mink farm was in the lake and hill country, a five- or six-hour drive to the south and east. He had visited the area many times from boyhood on. City dwellers rushed there on summer weekends, pulling their motorboats behind them. The city side of the lakes area was built-up and crowded. The mink farm was on the far side of the lakes, where the resort culture had not yet triumphed completely.

  By seven o’clock O’Keefe had left the city and its grasping suburbs behind him. He steered with one hand and poured a cup of coffee from his thermos with the other. Bach played on the tape deck, C.P.E. Bach this time, his Magnificat. It seemed like the van itself could soar aloft, lifted by the perfection of the music. A moment of wholeness, all too fleeting. And, indeed, that moment soon did flee; that brief respite of utter serenity soon gave way to the other, stronger emotions that stirred within him now, the queasy excitement of a new adventure.

  A couple of hours away from the city, the ground began to rise, and the cleared fields gave way to forests of hickory, oak, and short-leaf pine. These were mountains he was ascending, but the locals called them “hills,” perhaps in deference to the big mountains out west, the real mountains, the ones you could ski on. He drove along a ridgeline, above him towering bare bluffs, below him canyons and valleys full of trees shedding their leaves, spreading before him a palette of exquisite colors. His human words could not describe these colors. Red, yellow, yellow-gold, orange, burnt-orange, russet, scarlet, crimson—words wholly inadequate to describe the scene. These colors below him were of some other spectrum. The word “ineffable” came to mind. New words needed to be invented to describe the true colors of these leaves. But it was not the words alone that were inadequate, he thought; his mind, his understanding itself was faulty, always seeming to miss the mark. Here, below him, was another process, another essence entirely, one he could never grasp but could only behold in alienated wonder.

  And it came to him that it was death itself, the death he had seen so much of in the back of the helicopters, the death he had feared then and feared now, that spread so magnificently before him. “We’re dying,” the leaves seemed to be saying. “We must pass on, make way for others. Only the tree goes on.” He watched, and he meditated, but he suspected he would never really understand any of it, not even the slightest thing.

  He had brought his hiking boots, sleeping bag, and camping equipment, and he would try to make time on this trip for a hike in the deep woods, among the streams and meadows, the glades and springs, crushing the fallen leaves as he trudged along. If it did not rain, he would spend a night in his sleeping bag. Just before crawling into the bag for the night, he would douse his campfire and stand watching a sky full of stars.

  He had found a route that would take him to the mink farm without passing through the resort side of the lakes. That side of the lakes always wilted his spirit. But the small rural towns were depressing in their way too. Few things could darken the soul more than a certain kind of small town, where form so perfectly follows function, where everything is marginal, bare, cheap.

  This was the Bible Belt, churches everywhere. The people would stand outside, being neighborly after the service, big men in eyeglasses and inexpensive suits, string ties, and cowboy boots, the women almost as big as the men, looking weary and drained out in their knee-length dresses and cloth coats. Assembly of God, Church of Christ, Pentecostal, Free Will Baptist, First Baptist, all proclaiming the certainty of salvation and immortality. Yet the churches themselves (often they were only tiny houses made into churches) and the towns they ministered to seemed like nothing if not monuments to the futility of hope.

  A few miles outside of one of these towns, on an obscure and bumpy country road, he passed a sign that said, “Prosperity Farms. One Mile Ahead.” Another sign directed him off the road onto an asphalt driveway with huge oak trees on both sides that shrouded the driveway in perpetual dimness. The farm was tucked into a small valley of its own, a few acres of flat ground surrounded by hills. Far to his left, as he drove out of the trees and into a small parking area, stood a grand old barn, huge holes in its roof, its wooden frame weather-bleached almost white.

  The farmhouse loomed up to his right, smaller and more modern than he had expected it to be—white with a bright-
red trim freshly painted not very long ago. Despite the hopeful colors, the house cowered under a huge oak tree that shadowed it in gloom. Something about it made him feel queasy.

  The driveway extended past the parking area along the side of the house, turned a corner at the back, and disappeared from view. He could see behind the house a path that meandered into a stand of trees that hid whatever lay beyond it. They keep the minks back there. In the parking area there was an old Ford Mustang and an ancient, battered pickup truck that looked undrivable. The truck sported a brand-new bumper sticker that said, “When Guns Are Outlawed, Only Outlaws Will Have Guns.”

  Someone had painted in red directly onto the front door “COME IN!” but, when he tried the door, he found it was locked. There was no doorbell and no answer to his knocking. He walked around the side of the house along the driveway. At the back of the house, the driveway plunged steeply down into a basement garage.

  A high, concrete, stoop-like stairway led up to a back door to the house. He climbed the stairway and knocked on the back door. He looked inside the back-door window at a large kitchen. No sign of life and again no answer to his knocking. He descended the stairs and stood in the backyard wondering what to do. The secretary was supposed to be expecting him. The two vehicles in the parking lot indicated that someone was there. Maybe she—or they—were wherever the minks were, perhaps down beyond the stand of trees. He walked back to the driveway and looked down at the basement garage. The doors to the garage were the old-fashioned wooden kind that had to be swung or dragged back and forth when opened and closed. One of the doors stood slightly ajar, beyond that only darkness.

  The garage door scraped harshly across the concrete floor when he pushed it open, and he thought of a fingernail scratching across a blackboard. He stood in the garage, letting his eyes become accustomed to the darkness, listening for human sounds within. The garage was empty except for a few soggy-looking cardboard boxes and miscellaneous junk—paintbrushes, a dented hubcap, a tire iron, rusty old chains. An archway at the other end of the garage appeared to lead into some other part of the basement.