“Wish I could say the same,” I said, but he didn’t hear me through the laughter. Then an odd thing happened: I almost liked the little bastard, even after all the trouble. Of course, it had been at least ten years since we had tangled, but those times didn’t count the nights when he had been drunk enough to argue with me about who to arrest but sober enough to remember that I had fifty pounds and a badge on him. When he stopped laughing, I said, “You know it’s a goddamned sorry day when I can’t even pick a fight with you, Jonas.”
That made him laugh so hard that he blew beer foam all over the bar and his dark face. As he wiped his face, he said fondly, “Goddamn, we usta have some dandy times, didn’t we. Seems like ever other night you’d come in here and put knots on my head a goddamned goat couldn’t climb. Hey, you still got that little flat sap?”
“Yeah, I think so,” I said, trying to remember where it had gone to. “No, I think the police have it. Hell, I don’t know.”
“I tell you, Milo, that thing was mean,” he said, as if that was the nicest compliment he knew. “Goddamn, those were some times. Shit, somma the boys up on the reservation are still ’bout half afraid of you. You see that ol’ boy take off when you come in?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, that was his older brother knocked you cold that time and drove you down to the jailhouse. Half-brother, I think it was. Anyway, he ain’t near as mean. That’s why he took off when you come in.”
“That was a long time ago, Jonas.”
“You tellin’ me—shit, we’re too old for rough and tumble, Milo, and hell, you already sewed up and taped together like a busted watermelon. Hell, you look so bad a fella’d be afraid to give you a good shot. Might kill you,” he said, and as if to prove his point, he thumped me in the ribs with a short, affectionate punch that nearly knocked me down.
“Not in the ribs, Jonas,” I grunted, trying to breathe.
“Sorry ’bout that. Heard you took a hell of a beatin’. Got that one son of a bitch, huh? Blew his fuckin’ head right off, huh. That’ll teach them goddamned hippies not to mess around with home folks, huh.”
“He was a construction worker, Jonas,” I explained, knowing it wouldn’t make any difference.
“Yeah, whatever, he ain’t gonna mess with nobody no more, right?” he said, lifting a new shot.
“Right.”
He waited for me to lift my shot, but I didn’t know if it would stay down behind the memories, the new and bitter knowledge of the morning. It did but it didn’t want to.
“So how’s business?” Jonas asked, thumping me again.
“Not so good,” I said. “Say, were you in here the night the kid OD’d in your john? About a month ago?”
“Don’t remind me of it, Milo. The goddamn Liquor Control Board tried to take my license, but hell, that’s nothing new,” he said, then laughed again. “Why?”
“That’s what I’m working on now.”
“Who for?” he asked, his eyes squinting with suspicion.
“The family. They weren’t too happy with the sheriff’s investigation.”
“What investigation? That old bastard can’t find his ass with either hand. Hell, there wasn’t anything to investigate anyway.”
“They just wanted to know what happened.”
“Nothing happened, Milo. The kid comes in, orders a drink, then goes into the john. A couple hours later somebody complains that they can’t take a crap because the stall door is locked, so I climb over and find him dead, sittin’ there like he’s passed out, but when I seen that needle in his arm I figured he was dead. That’s funny, he didn’t look the type.”
“Had he ever been in before that night?”
“Hell, Milo, they come and go. I don’t know. But probably not. He was such a clean-cut-lookin’ kid, not like that bunch a mangy goddamned hippies in town, that I’d probably remember. He didn’t look the type to be on that dope.”
“That’s what I hear,” I said. “Did he come in with anybody?”
“Well, Milo, I was busier than a one-legged man at an ass-kicking contest and I was a hair drunk, so I don’t know.”
“What was he drinking?”
“A draw,” Jonas answered quickly. He had a bartender’s memory for faces and drinks. “And there wasn’t nobody with him, ‘cause that’s all I got was the one beer.”
“Where did he sit?”
“All the way down at the end of the bar.”
“Anybody sitting next to him?”
“Shit, Milo, I don’t know,” he answered, sorry that he couldn’t help.
“That’s okay,” I said, “it’s not really important.” Then I thought about the guy with long black hair and a beard. “Hey, there didn’t happen to be a hippie in here that night, a guy with black hair and a beard?”
“I’ll be damned. There sure was. Sittin’ right next to the kid. I remember ’cause they ain’t welcome here and they figure that out real quick, so we don’t get many. Yeah, and ’cause he was a little old to be runnin’ around like a goddamned hairy ape. He had on sunglasses too, but hell, I could tell he wasn’t no kid.”
“You remember what he was wearing?”
“Milo, I could shut my eyes right now,” Jonas said, “and I wouldn’t be able to tell you what you was wearing.”
“What was he drinking?” I asked, sipping at my beer.
“Brandy and soda, no ice,” he answered quick as a shot, then motioned for another round.
Bingo. Goddammit, how could I be so dumb? Goddamned Nickie. Jesus.
“Help?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” I said, forcing the thoughts and feelings out of me, retreating to hide the fear. “Lots of people drink brandy and soda.”
“Yeah,” he said as he raised his glass. “Sorry I don’t remember more.”
“Thanks anyway, Jonas. Next time you’re in town, stop by. The drinks are on me,” I said, then had a sip of beer and started to leave, but Jonas grabbed my arm.
“Wanna do me a favor, Milo?” he asked in a conspiratorial whisper so I would know it was an illegal favor. I shrugged, and Jonas took that as an affirmative answer. “You seen Muffin lately? I got this friend on the other side of the mountains, and he’s buildin’ this motel. One big son of a bitch, two hundred units. But he’s kinda strapped for capital right now, goddamned inflation, and he ain’t got the bread for the color TV’s and he can’t come up with no credit he can afford. You know what I mean?”
“I’ll act like I don’t, Jonas. Muffin’s out of business anyway.”
“That’s too bad. There’s a pretty penny in this deal, Milo. How ’bout puttin’ me in touch with somebody else?”
“I don’t know anybody, sorry.”
“Don’t shit me, Milo,” he said, grinning like a small animal.
I wanted to grin back, but couldn’t. Just like I wanted to rub my tired, hot face. Jonas was mean and crooked and slightly dumb, but the face he turned toward me was warm with affection. That has to count for something.
“Okay,” I said.
“How big a piece you want?”
“Nothing. I owe you, Jonas.”
“What?”
“Hell, I don’t know. Maybe all those lumps on your head. I don’t know.”
He grinned again, his tiny yellowed teeth nearly as dark as his Indian face, and started to poke me in the ribs. But he remembered not to.
“That don’t matter none, Milo, not at all. Those were good times. Hell, you never tried to shake me down or run me in for some petty shit. You were fair, Milo, and I could count on you,” he said. “Hey, by God, next time I’m in town, let’s you an’ me just get drunker than pigs in shit, then go down to them hippie bars and just kick the shit outa somebody. Anybody messes with us, we’ll blow their fuckin’ heads off. How ’bout it? Be like the old days, ’cept we’ll be on the same side.”
“We’ve probably been on the same side all along and just didn’t know it, Jonas, but I damn sure don’t want to kill anybody…”
“Hey, you all right?” he asked as I headed for the john to heave it all up.
—
All drunks have theories, endlessly tedious arguments, both vocal and silent, with which to justify their drinking. They drink to forget or remember, to see more clearly or discover blindness, they drink out of fear of success or failure, drink to find a home and love or drink to get away. Their lives revolve around drink. Some of the theories may well be true, but because drunks lie so much, it’s difficult to divide the sharp perceptions from the sorry rationalizations. Once, my father talked to me about drinking and drunks, and in my memory it sounds not at all sorry. Just sad.
I was a boy, but old enough to have already realized that even the simpliest life was too complex, that my parents lived together without very much love, that I was both curse and prize in their battles; old enough to love my father without thinking that I had anything for which to forgive him. It was then, when I was old enough to be sad, that one afternoon my father and I had gone fishing. As it usually happened, we lodged in a country bar to wet our whistles before we wet our lines, and as usual, we stayed in the bar, letting the trout, as my father said, grow one more day. “Tomorrow, son,” he’d say, “they’ll be just the right size.” Tomorrow. And every time we caught a trout, he’d hold it up and tell me, “See, son, just right.”
But this afternoon we stayed in the bar, and sometime during the long hours of drinking, he disappeared into the john and stayed much longer than usual. I was a child among strangers, a youth to be regaled with the hopes they no longer possessed because I had a future and they had only pasts. Slightly frightened by all this weight, I went to look for my father.
He was kneeling at the toilet, his eyes fearfully shot with blood from the efforts of his retching. A long string of glutinous spittle looped heavily from his trembling lips to the stained toilet bowl.
He spit and asked how I was doing; knowing I was frightened, he was calm. “Don’t worry about me, son,” he said, “I’m all right. I been bellied up to this trough a time or two before. You go on out and wait for me, okay? I’ll be out in a minute.” As I went out the door, I tried not to hear the convulsive, heaving rasp, tried not to be disgusted by the only person in the world I loved.
But I heard and was disgusted. I went all the way outside the bar to the porch, where I watched the afternoon steal across green hayfields and pastures, the shadows of the mountain ridges reaping light, sowing darkness. After the dank, torpid air inside the bar, air more like smoke, the air outside seemed as fresh and clean as spring water, and I filled my lungs with gasp after gasp, sucking down the sobs, vowing as seriously as only a frightened child can that I would grow up and never drink, ignoring the fact that I already sipped from my father’s glass whenever I pleased. I vowed, promised in innocence already lost.
He came out behind me, a huge dark man smiling tiredly, a glass of neat whiskey in his large hand. With the first swallow, he rinsed out his mouth, then spit off the porch into the dust that rimmed the parking lot. The second, he drank, emptying the glass. Then he patted me on the head, perhaps sensing what I felt. Even at his drunkest, he was kind and perceptive, at least around me. As he held my head in his great hand, I was warm in the lingering sunset chill.
“Son,” he said without preamble, “never trust a man who doesn’t drink because he’s probably a self-righteous sort, a man who thinks he knows right from wrong all the time. Some of them are good men, but in the name of goodness, they cause most of the suffering in the world. They’re the judges, the meddlers. And, son, never trust a man who drinks but refuses to get drunk. They’re usually afraid of something down deep inside, either that they’re a coward or a fool or mean and violent. You can’t trust a man who’s afraid of himself. But sometimes, son, you can trust a man who occasionally kneels before a toilet. The chances are that he is learning something about humility and his natural human foolishness, about how to survive himself. It’s damned hard for a man to take himself too seriously when he’s heaving his guts into a dirty toilet bowl.”
Then he paused for a long minute and added, “And, son, never trust a drunk except when he’s on his knees.”
When I glanced up, he was smiling an oddly distant smile, like a man who can see his own future and accepts it without complaint.
If he had left it at that, I might not have understood, but he raised his empty glass and pointed at the vista. The fields, a lush, verdant green, grew dark with shadows, nearly as dark as the pine-thick ridges, but the sky above still glowed a bright, daylight blue. A single streak of clouds, like a long trail of smoke, angled away from the horizon, flaming a violent crimson at the far end as if it had been dipped in blood. But the middle was light pink, and the end nearest us was an ashen gray.
“A lovely view, isn’t it, son?”
“Yes, sir.”
“But it’s not enough,” he said, smiling, then he walked back into the bar, laughing and shouting for whiskey, love and laughter, leaving me suspended in the pellucid air.
—
Vomiting into the toilet of the Willomot Bar, not from the drink but from the knowledge and the dying, I felt my father’s hand holding my head. He had left me this legacy of humility, and I accepted it. Where her little brother lost his life, I found mine, and understood that I wasn’t going to kill anybody, except myself, and not myself for a long time yet. I remembered Simon telling me to slow down, not to drink myself to death before I had time to enjoy it. When I finished puking, I went back into the bar to wash out my mouth with whiskey.
Sixteen
When I woke the next morning, Jonas’s bar resembled the field where the spirits of animals had done wild and lengthy battle with demons and ghosts, and triumphed. At least their eyes seemed glassy with victory, and their teeth bared in sneers of conquest as their heads surveyed the wreckage.
Tables and chairs had been upended, some reduced to splinters and kindling wood. Rags of clothing huddled about, some draped over the inert bodies of the slain. The floor was carpeted with fragments of glass and cigarette butts that didn’t cover the drying whiskey stains. An improbably large brassiere dangled between the antlers of a bull elk, covering his eyes like a pair of cute Hollywood sunglasses. The only body I recognized in the dim morning light was Jonas’s sprawled at the feet of his grizzly bear. I had been sleeping with my face in an ash tray, and when I brushed away the ashes, I wished I hadn’t. My face hadn’t healed during the long night. Fresh blood had dripped from my ear onto the front of my windbreaker, and when I checked it, it felt damn funny, hot and swollen, but intact. I didn’t have any scrapes on my knuckles, so if I had had a fight, I had lost quickly.
I rose carefully, checking my wallet and limbs, found them, then lurched behind the bar for a cold beer, which I drank before moving on, taking one for the road. When I walked outside into a splendid sunrise, even though I hadn’t taken Muffin his money or called Helen to tell her I wasn’t coming home that night, I felt absolutely great. I was still drunk as a lord.
I only hoped I could hang on to it long enough to do something about Nickie.
—
Helen had the front door on the chain, so I had to hammer on the chimes until she came, haggard and perplexed. She opened the door on a bare toe, and as she bent over to comfort it, she hit me in the ribs with her head. We stood around a few minutes, checking our wounds, but she recovered before I did.
“Where in the name of Christ have you been?” she growled, brushing her hair away from her face, blocking the doorway. “Just where in hell have you been?”
“Drunk.”
“How could you do that to me?” she wailed, covering her face with her hands.
“I did it to myself, lady.”
“I think I could learn to hate you,” she said, opening her hands. Her eyes were sparkling green in the shadow. When I didn’t answer, she stomped her foot and grunted, “I could!”
“Lady, I’ve been playing this scene in doorways all my fucking l
ife, and I don’t have the time this morning to—”
But when I cursed, a soft ululation quivered from her throat, and she shoved me out of the way and slammed the door in my face.
“It’s my goddamned house!” I shouted. After a long pause, she opened the door, smiling.
“Nobody’s perfect,” she said, giggling, and we fell into each other’s arms, laughing and crying and kissing, ignoring my face, trying to fill our hopelessly hungry mouths with each other, her green robe open, my pants down, we fell to the carpet like leaves circling in a light wind, leaves falling into water.
—
“See,” I said afterwards as our breath still gushed into the morning air. “I told you it would be all right.”
“Ohhh,” she groaned, sighing and snuggling closer. “Jesus, I don’t—think—it’s ever been—that sudden. My God—I never knew—before—why the Victorian poets—called it dying.”
“You forgive me for staying out all night, huh?”
“Right now—I’ll forgive you—for anything—whewww—if you’ll close—the front door.” Then she giggled happily.
“It’s too late,” I said. “I heard the paper boy fall off his bike.”
“That’ll teach him—to spy on people,” she murmured, then we held each other, crushing our bodies together, as if one couldn’t live without the presence of the other.
“We’re gonna be all right,” I said, and felt her head nodding against my chest.
But we couldn’t lounge on the hall carpet forever. Eventually, I kicked the door shut, pulled up my pants, and we hobbled into the bedroom like two old people to lose the morning in sleep. I meant to know what to do when I awoke, but it didn’t work that way. When I woke, it was in the confusion of a hangover worse than a beating, with a foul mouth and a numbing depression. That old familiar feeling.
After a long hot shower, two hits of speed and two of Amos’s pain pills, and a cold beer, I managed to eat a piece of toast left over from the morning before. Afterwards, I walked out to the rig to get the pistol and the shoulder holster, then went back inside to finish dressing.
The Wrong Case Page 25