Men of the Mean Streets

by Greg Herren

  “A friend in New York helped me out.”

  “You’ve got good friends, Mr. Laughlin.”

  Conor shrugged. “I guess. So how do I get out of here?”

  “Which direction?”

  “West.”

  Luke pointed. “Go down here and make a left on Route 6, then when you get near Sterling you’ll see signs for 76. Can’t miss it.”

  “Thanks,” said Conor, and he began to walk to his car.

  He had his key out and was about to unlock the door when a sheriff’s cruiser pulled into the lot and drove up to him.

  “Mind if I ask you a couple of questions?” asked the deputy, still sitting behind the wheel.

  Conor frowned. “I really need to get on the road. Late for an appointment.”

  “This will only take a few minutes.”

  “It doesn’t sound like I have a choice.”

  “You don’t.”

  Play it cool, he told himself, and he walked back to the garage. The deputy angled his car behind Conor’s and followed, nodding at Luke as he passed, telling him he needed to borrow the office.

  The cluttered room smelled of motor oil. Last year’s Miss April winked at them from the calendar on the wall. Conor took a seat and the deputy leaned against Luke’s desk.

  “Checked out of Klein’s in a hurry, didn’t you?”

  “Like I said, I wanted to get on the road.”

  “What’s the matter, Mr. Laughlin? You don’t like Patience?”

  “It’s a lovely town.”

  “Okay then. Just checking.” The deputy chuckled. “So where you headed?”

  “Out west. San Francisco.”

  “Oh. Fancy city.”

  “Not necessarily.”

  “It’s just that we don’t get many visitors in Patience. Makes you stand out.”

  Luke walked into the office from the garage, wiping his greasy hands on a towel. “So what’s going on, Tom?”

  “Got ourselves a little situation over at the bowling alley, and I’d like to know if this fella knows anything about it.” He turned back to Conor and asked, “Did you happen to meet a man named Pat Thursby while you were in town?”

  Conor held back a shiver. “I met him. Why?”

  “Something happen to Pat?” asked Luke.

  “Sorry, Luke. I know you were close, but Pat’s dead. We found his body on the side of the tracks about a half hour ago.”

  “That’s too bad,” said Conor as Luke shook his head sadly. “He seemed like a decent guy. But he was pretty drunk when I saw him last night.”

  “Pat did like his drink,” Luke agreed.

  Conor asked hopefully, “So…tracks? Was he hit by a train?”

  The deputy raised an eyebrow and said, “I highly doubt that, Mr. Laughlin. See, the railroad only runs one train a week down those tracks nowadays.”

  It took a moment for those words to register in Conor’s brain. “Are you sure? I mean, I’m sure I heard a train last night.”

  “I don’t know what you heard, sir, but it wasn’t a train. Not last night, at least. And anyway, no train broke into the bowling alley and smashed open Thursby’s cashbox.”

  Conor couldn’t speak, but Luke could. “Someone robbed the place?”

  “Looks like they robbed him, hit him in the head with a bowling ball, and dumped the body by the tracks.”

  Everything was wrong. Tay told him there was a train. Tay said he’d clean up.

  But there was no train. No cleanup. Which meant…

  “Klein at the motel said you were running short on cash. Is that true, Mr. Laughlin?”

  “That’s true,” said Luke, answering for him and eyeing Conor with a look that bypassed suspicion and went straight to unquestionable guilt. “I’ve been holding his car while he raised the money for new tires. Didn’t have three-fifty yesterday…but this morning he does.”

  “And I suppose he paid in cash?”

  “Yeah.”

  “The morning after this robbery and murder?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Mr. Laughlin, I think you’d better come with me.”

  *

  Months had passed, but the time had finally come, and so the lawyer welcomed the young man into his office.

  “I know you’ve waited a long time—too long a time—but now that the legal issues have been finalized…”

  “I didn’t mind the wait,” said Tay, taking a seat in a slightly uncomfortable leather chair and pulling it close to the lawyer’s desk.

  “I know this has been hard on you, Taylor. First murder in Patience in twenty-seven years. It’s been hard on all of us, but especially you.’

  “Thank you. I’m trying to get past it.”

  “Well…” The lawyer shuffled through some forms, found the ones he wanted, and carefully arranged them on his desk in front of Tay. “If it’s any consolation, Patrick Thursby was very generous to you in his will.”

  Tay looked to the floor. “He was always generous to me. Like a father. And after Flo died, I was as close to family as he had.”

  The lawyer sighed. “First Flo, then Pat. Just tragic all the way around. He never really got over her death, did he?”

  Tay shook his head sadly. “Neither of us did. You think you’re prepared after months of illness, but…”

  The lawyer shook his head. “So sad.”

  They sat in awkward silence for a moment until the lawyer got back to business.

  “He left you the bowling alley, you know,” he said, pointing at one piece of paper. Tay didn’t follow his finger. “Along with the life insurance and his savings. And, of course, whatever he’d inherited from Flo’s estate. Although I suspect you just want to get out of Patience at this point, so you can probably sell the building for another fifty thousand or so. If you can afford to wait.”

  Tay finally looked the lawyer in the eye. “I can wait. But you’re right, I need to leave. You can handle the sale for me?”

  “I’ll take care of it.” He looked at Tay, not unsympathetically. “When that Laughlin fella tried to implicate you in the crime…” Tay sighed and looked at the floor. “I know, I know, he was trying to save his own skin. And hardly anyone believed him. But still, well…”

  “Yeah, the gay thing. I guess it was sort of an open secret, but now it’s just plain open, which is why I really need to get out of here.”

  “God bless you,” said the lawyer. “And I hope someday you find the Lord.” When Tay didn’t respond, he uncomfortably added, “So where will you be going?”

  Tay stood and brushed a trace of lint off one sleeve before answering.

  “San Francisco. I hear it’s a lovely city.”

  *

  The following day Taylor Harkness filled the trunk of the car with what amounted to his worldly possessions and began driving. Once—and not too long ago—he’d dreamed of leaving with maybe a thousand dollars. Now he had hundreds of thousands of dollars in the bank.

  Patience, Colorado, had treated him well. As he sped west toward a new life, he blew a kiss as he passed a familiar sign:

  LEAVING PATIENCE

  It’s a Virtue

  Mouse

  Jeffrey Round

  Not everyone has the luxury of throwing his life away, Colin reflected, reaching gingerly through the broken window and tripping the latch. He pushed the screen door open and stepped into darkness. He could just barely see Jon’s crumpled form in the shadows.

  “Hello, Mouse,” he said, stepping closer.

  Jon stirred and looked up from the armchair. He seemed to be trying to make out Colin’s face, to place him in some internal landscape—that part of him that still recognized people. His expression darkened. “Don’t call me that,” he said, at last recognizing his brother. “I told you never to call me that.”

  “Okay, Mouse,” Colin replied. “But you really need to let some light in here.”

  Jon watched warily as Colin went around the room lifting the blinds one by one. He brought a shaky h
and up to shade his eyes as the room took on contour.

  “Jesus! You’d think you were a bloody vampire,” Colin said.

  Jon sank deeper into the armchair, almost disappearing into it. The fabric was worn, the stuffing springing out at the seams.

  Colin looked around. The place was even worse than the last time he’d been here. Flyers and junk mail lay scattered across a bare wooden table. Socks and T-shirts were draped across the back of a sofa. An empty pizza box had slid off the sofa cushion and come to rest, cover open, on the floor beside it. At least his brother remembered to eat now and then.

  “How’d you get in?” Jon asked suspiciously, running a hand through his uncombed hair.

  “I reached through the broken window and lifted the latch—same as always.”

  Jon nodded. The wary look receded. “Landlord still hasn’t fixed it. I called him a while ago.”

  “You haven’t had a phone for months. At least that’s what you said the last time I was here. Are you hallucinating conversations now?”

  Jon shrugged. “Maybe. What do you want?”

  “I came to see if you were still alive.”

  “And…?”

  “The verdict’s not in yet, even though I hear you talking.”

  Jon’s skin was gray, a lighter version of the color of the room before Colin lifted the blinds. A syringe and rubber tourniquet lay on the table beside the sofa. Jon made no effort to conceal them. Obviously, he’d forgot Colin was coming. Or maybe he was past all pretense.

  Colin felt sickened by the sight, but he’d long since given up preaching or trying to make Jon change. There was nothing he could say that would alter Jon’s need, nothing he could do to quell his urge to destroy himself or make him become again the gentle boy he’d once been. That Jon was gone forever.

  Jon had once been pretty, but now he looked worn, the skin stretched taut over his features like something wrapped up too tightly. His head was large for his body, but his skull was beautifully formed, especially in profile, so that the effect was that of a boy with a man’s head, both young and old at the same time. As he grew older, the boyishness remained, as if he had willed his body to stay young and childlike. As though he’d lost something and was trying to age back to whatever he had lost.

  “Want to go for a walk?” Colin asked, hoping to escape the mess.

  Jon turned his head to the window. He seemed to be contemplating the question. “What? Outside?”

  “Yeah, outside. Trees. Grass. Sky. That would be the one.”

  Jon slowly shook his head. “Not in daylight, Colin—please.”

  “It’s late afternoon. I could wait a couple of hours. Get a cup of coffee down the road.”

  Jon shrugged. He seemed to be trying to focus. “Maybe,” he said, then seemed to drift again. He struggled for a moment. “When were you last here?”

  “Thursday week, same day as today,” Colin replied.

  Jon nodded, as though coming to some conclusion about this. “I thought you would have given up on me by now.”

  “Actually, I have,” Colin said. “I have given up on you. You’re a self-pitying waste of a human being. I just come around because it gives me something to do.”

  Jon laughed a sudden, raucous laugh that turned to a rasping cough before it died.

  “Mom and Dad send their love,” Colin said, wielding the words like a knife.

  “They would, wouldn’t they?”

  Colin shook his head. “Do you need to be so bitter?”

  *

  Jon had been a sunny child, bright and eager to please, while Colin had been the sullen one, drawn to the dark excesses of rock music, sporting the long hair and outrageous fashions of the day. “Antisocial behavior,” their mother called it, as she watched him mimic the rages against the established norms of the time. But he’d outgrown it, while Jon had slunk deeper into the shadows.

  Despite their different temperaments, the boys had been close. Colin was popular at school and that made things easier for Jon, who, being small, would otherwise have been picked on. Whenever any of the older boys bothered him, Jon would say, “My big brother is Colin Timmerman. He’s my best friend in all the world. You better watch out for him.” That usually stopped anything bad from happening.

  Jon loved his older brother, but never stopped to ask if he, Jon, was lovable in return. The question never occurred to him. Such things just seemed a fundamental quality of loyalty: You are my brother, therefore I love you and you love me.

  By the time Jon was twenty-four, he’d been through three different substance abuse programs. His parents, Lucille and Roger, had never given up encouraging him, taking him to enroll each time. In return, they’d had their hearts broken over and over again, as Jon promised to do better and eventually fell through the cracks once more. It seemed there was no hope.

  Meanwhile, Colin married and brought two beautiful girls into the world. He, not Jon, became the apple of his parents’ eye, though they took pains not to show favoritism in front of the boys. As far as Lucille and Roger were concerned, they loved both sons equally, no matter what cross one or the other had to bear.

  “Colin just met the right girl, is all,” Lucille would say on the few occasions she talked about the course their lives had taken. Colin was lucky, it seemed, while Jon got caught up in the drug scene. There was no telling what made people do the things they did—they just did them.

  Therapists asked about Jon’s background and family history; they spoke of nature versus nurture, of the brothers’ relationship. The questions, like the theories, seemed endless. It was all over Lucille’s head, really. All she knew was that she’d cared for both boys equally and treated one just like the other. She wondered if it had been because the family had strayed from the church, though neither she nor Roger had ever been a strict adherent.

  Both she and her husband came from unexceptional backgrounds—Roger was the progeny of three generations of miners working out of northern Ontario’s Nickel Belt, while Lucille had grown up the only child of Dutch immigrants who came over after the war, hoping to make their fortunes in a more peaceful and prosperous land than the one they’d left. It had been a time of new beginnings, despite the shadow of the Cold War, and many had followed the same star across the ocean, hoping both to prosper and forget.

  Roger and Lucille met at a church function. They belonged to the Calvinist Church. While it had seemed a strict fundamentalist sect, socials had been the main reason for their participation. Fund-raisers and bazaars ensured an active association. In time, they married. Before long, Colin was born, followed by Jon four years later.

  “Two is enough,” Roger decided for them both. “We’re not rich.”

  Lucille hadn’t minded. Carrying Jon in the dead of winter in that bleak northern town had been a trial. She’d caught a terrible ’flu and nearly died in the spring a month before he was born. But she recovered and Jon was born on time and it seemed a blessing. Even his sunny temperament had seemed a gift as they struggled to make ends meet.

  By then it was the crazy days of the sixties, when old habits and prejudices seemed to melt away overnight as the world went on a roller-coaster ride of changing values and social orders. It was around this time that Philip came into their lives. No one knew for sure who introduced him to the boys, being older. He lived in a squat bungalow a few houses down from the Timmermans. His parents were never around. Few of the neighbors could recall seeing them.

  Philip’s hair was long, but never shaggy and unkempt like Colin’s. At seventeen, he dropped out of high school and went to work in a grocery store as a stock clerk. Sometimes he would bring his records over after work: the newest Beatles album, or the Rolling Stones. Sometimes there were other voices: the Mamas and the Papas, Joni Mitchell, or Donovan. You never knew what he’d bring next. Once he showed up with an album with blue geometric designs. It was a rock opera, he declared, as though it were the newest thing. And it was.

  While the Timmermans played car
ds, the strains of the Who’s Tommy wafted out into the street. They began to take on the sheen of brave new explorers as Philip’s music grabbed the unsuspecting ears of neighbors who wondered at the strange sounds. The Timmermans had the best stereo in town and Philip had the best records. It was a match made in heaven, even if Philip never played cards.

  “I’m not a gambler,” he’d argue, waving away their protest. “Lucky at cards, unlucky at love. I prefer love.”

  It was the age of the hippie, after all. First had come the Summer of Love, and then Woodstock. It seemed the world was on the verge of new things, a brand-new order. It was a heady time.

  Once, Philip brought over a joint and offered it to both of the older Timmermans, taking care not to do it in front of Colin and Jon. Lucille tried it, but just ended up coughing. Roger shook his head—some things were a bit too much—though he hadn’t been offended by Phillip’s offer and greeted him just as affectionately the next time he came over.

  *

  The first time the boys went over to Philip’s house, Colin looked around in envy at the cozy basement apartment. It was perfectly set apart from Philip’s parents’ living space above. Jon, for his part, became mesmerized by a cage containing a live mouse. Philip took his pet out of the cage and let the small furry creature run over Jon’s hands and up his arms to his shoulder.

  Philip’s world was magical, unlike any other the boys had known. Philip showed them other things: love beads, sticks of incense, and a tie-dyed T-shirt that seemed to be a cloak of many colors, like the one worn by Joseph in the Bible.

  He promised one day to show them the secrets of the universe. The next time they came over, he produced a kaleidoscope, instructing them how to twist and turn it in their hands while peering through its lens, where it dazzled the mind. Another time he amazed them with card tricks, and once he showed how a jar filled with crayons held close to an ordinary lightbulb would bleed in a plethora of colors, the wax melting down its sides, almost in imitation of the kaleidoscope’s magic world.