by Peter Rabe
He came back with the bottle and looked at me before tilting it.
“Come to think of it, you wouldn’t be speaking his language anyways. You don’t talk like a Texan anyways.”
“Thank you,” I said and picked up the drink.
“How come you don’t talk like a Texan?”
“Because I went to college,” I said.
He hadn’t gone to college either, I noticed. His face pinched up a little, the same as when I had said ‘neck of the woods.’ I was doing everything wrong.
I bought cigarettes and offered him one. He didn’t smoke. I asked him if I might buy him a drink, and he said he could get them for nothing. I laughed about that. I made it good and hearty, hoping to drag him into the spirit. He smiled a little but without paying attention to it.
“Tell me,” I asked him, “you run this place all by yourself?”
“No. I’m helping my father.”
“Fancy that,” I said. “The way you handle this thing, I would never have thought — you know — ”
This time he smiled good.
“When he’s on vacation, I run it all by myself.”
“Fancy that. Yessir. Is he on vacation now?”
“No. Why? You a salesman? Because I do the buying when it comes to items like chips, pretzels …”
“No, no. I wouldn’t have asked for your father at all, in that case.”
“Why did you?”
Why did I. To hear that I was safe from his father whose name was Eddy and from whom I used to buy beer seven years ago.
“Because of the weather. You know.”
“Oh. Naw. He’s sitting home.”
“Ah. Watching TV. That’s good.”
He looked at the clock on the wall and looked doubtful.
“Almost done now,” he said.
I didn’t listen to that because I had finally found my in. We would now talk real estate.
“You live in that development out there?”
“No. We been here longer than that. We live in that farmhouse next door.”
I got nervous for no other reason than the thought that Eddy was sitting next door.
“I noticed that nice old house. How come the development didn’t swallow that up?”
“Dad wouldn’t sell, is all.”
“I like that I like that kind of attitude,” I told him. “But there must have been plenty of houses around here, old ones that got torn down.”
“Some.”
“Where?”
Maybe I had sounded too eager because he looked at me for a moment, but then it turned out to be something else. “I was just thinking, you got the time?”
I looked up at the clock on the wall, but he said, “No, I mean do you have the time. That one’s off, lately.”
The clock was fifteen minutes off.
“I better call before he blows his stack. Twelve sharp I should call him, he said.”
“That’s customer service,” I said, because anything for a little joke now to keep the good feeling between us and so we wouldn’t get interrupted. I found out in a second bow much I needed a little joke.
“Customer hell,” he said. “The old man wants me to call him. He’s got to do books yet.”
He pointed to the books next to the register and then he went to the phone.
“Wait a minute!”
He looked at me, he waited — which was what I had asked — and I caved and could think only of running.
I drank my drink while he called his father and I sat there because I didn’t want to run.
He came back and said, “He’ll be right over. Another one for you?”
“No.”
I don’t know where the strength comes from sometimes; because it has nothing to do with thinking. I said no to the drink, got off the stool, and said, “Got to go. Too bad about all those old houses they tore down.”
“I don’t think so,” he said. “I think the new ones are prettier. When I get married …”
“Think of the view they had. Those new, little flat ones can’t even look over the rise.”
“They didn’t have any view. They were over that way, where the high school is now.”
“Oh. Nothing torn down around here, huh?”
He shook his head and looked at the door. So did I. A man came in with a wool cap down on his forehead and he went to the stove. He nodded at everybody and warmed himself. He wasn’t Eddy. When he unbuttoned his overcoat I could see the uniform jacket and the badge on one side. Village cop.
“When they don’t tear ‘em down they build ‘em up,” I heard myself say. The voice was strange and only the effort behind it was really mine. “Like when they put up that garage next to your place. Shame how that cut off your view.”
“What makes you think that?” said the kid. He was tapping beer for the constable.
“It looks newer.”
The kid looked at the door again and this time the man who came in was wearing a wool cap, too, but nothing else for the street, just a suit and a sweater under his jacket. He was in house shoes.
Eddy had gotten fat, but I recognized him.
“No,” said the kid to me. “That garage was here before we built the bar.”
I didn’t listen to all of it. I was trying to count money out on the bar and I tried not to show my face.
I put the money down on the bar and when I stepped back Eddy was looking at me.
“Hi, there,” he said. He had a nice, friendly smile.
“Hi, there.”
He nodded and I nodded and then I went to the door. Eddy picked up his books behind the bar and I left. I didn’t start to shake ‘til I was out, but then it stayed with me all the way back to town.
CHAPTER 20
There never had been a house with a view, and there never had been a view from the backroom at the bar.
I told the taxi to stop, I would walk the rest of the way. I could see the boarding house in the middle of the block because the car which was parked there made it easy to spot. A white cloud of exhaust was rolling out of the tail pipe. The man was keeping warm, at any rate. Perhaps he was even asleep. There would be another one at the back of the house, and there should have been one at this end of the street.
None of that made much of an impression. I was tired, because it was two o’clock. I was tired, because I was back now without knowing a thing.
I lit a cigarette and walked to the boarding house. I looked at the car on the other side of the street and the driver was there, sleeping. There were two others in the back seat They were sleeping too. That simple, and that tired.
I went upstairs and found my room. The light was on. Rand was in one of the chairs and he watched me come in.
“Where you been?”
I dragged on my cigarette and then I closed the door.
“For a walk.”
I exhaled and Rand’s eyes followed the smoke. Then he looked back at me.
“Are you out of your mind?”
“I’m tired.”
He got up and went to the connecting door. Before he left he stopped there and said, “Gallivan. Don’t do that again.”
Then he left.
• • •
The change was clear enough the next morning. Rand watched me just by being around. He talked less than usual but he was not a blank. He was always there. He woke me up and said it was time to go. Then he left the door open between his room and mine and while I got dressed he sat in his chair, smoking. When I came back from the toilet he was out in the hall. He had a tray with some breakfast things and we had them in his room. Then we went downstairs. Tooley’s car was in the drive, pulled back so it was out of sight from the street. Tooley was behind the wheel. The air was cold and the sun was coming up.
“Sleep good?” said Tooley.
Rand said nothing and I said yes, it had been a fine night.
“Rand don’t look like he slept good,” said Tooley.
“You sit next to Tooley,” said Rand, “
and I’ll be in back.” But when he opened the door Tooley turned around.
“I got a call for you,” he said. “You should call back.”
“Who?”
“Mishkin. And pretty important, he said.”
“But he didn’t say what?”
“To keep in touch, he said. You should call early.”
“To hell with Mishkin,” and Rand sat down in the back.
“But he said …”
“Did it sound important?” Rand was ill-tempered.
“Well, he didn’t say anything. He just said what I said and …”
“Drive,” said Rand. “Bowline Lake. And I’m going along.”
It sounded like a threat to me, though that could all have been nerves. But he sat behind me — he’d never done that before, either — and I could feel his eyes on the back of my neck all the time.
When we got out to the country the sun was up and the cold air clear and brilliant. Tooley said how nice it was out here and, “Leave it to my brother — when he was alive, I mean — to pick the nicest spot.”
I didn’t take that up because there was nothing to say. The dead Tooley had never lived out here and if I should tell them so, that would be that The farce of going out to that high school now, to count prospective customers for the trade, it wasn’t even ghoulish any more but just plain nonsense. And if I didn’t play it, I’d be dead.
“Recognize the place?” said Rand.
I couldn’t see him behind me, but I could feel him. For him, there was no more nonsense now.
“Yeah,” I said. “There’s the lake. I recognize it.”
“Good enough to find your way around?”
“Sure. It’s all very familiar. Over there, in the reeds, used to be the best fishing.”
It sounded smart aleck, but I didn’t feel that way. I was getting depressed.
“What parts out here are new?” Rand wanted to know. Then he would know where not to look for Tooley’s old place. I knew the reasoning. I’d gone through it myself the night before.
“The development’s new back that way. Here, by the lake road, it’s old.”
“By old you mean it was here when you were around?”
When Tooley was around, he meant. He was getting pretty direct.
“Yeah. For instance, right around that bar there.”
We all looked at the bar. It wasn’t open yet.
“Didn’t you tell me,” said Rand, “that you and Tooley had sort of the same view, you from your cottage and he from his place?”
“Yes,” I said. “I think so.”
And I knew that it didn’t make a damn bit of difference. I even wished I could tell Rand where the dead Tooley used to hole up, tell him in the same zig-zag way in which he put his questions, but plain enough to tell him what he wanted to know, and to leave me out of it. I would have been done then. They might even have let me go.
But the landmarks didn’t match. I didn’t know enough. We went by the bar and all I knew was that the right view would have to be out of the back window, if the garage weren’t in the way. If Tooley could have looked through the garage, or over the garage, then everything might Christ — he could look over the garage!
The bar had a second story. Blind windows, one broken, but all of them high enough to look at the lake, at the big elms by the lake, right across the roof of the garage, and that must have been the place, that had to be the place.
We passed and I swiveled around to look at the bar with the second story. Why in hell hadn’t I thought of that before, last night, just a few hours earlier, when I had been in the bar? That had been the right time to ask the right questions.
“What you looking at, Gallivan?”
“Oh. The bar, Rand.”
“You know that bar?”
“I used to buy beer there. What I mean, a good place to stay away from, now. Maybe they could recognize — ”
I didn’t bother to finish, because Rand wasn’t listening. He turned to look out the back window. He moved his head back and forth so that I could tell what he was doing. He was looking at the windows of the second story and then he looked to see which way they faced, what a man sitting behind one of those windows might see.
“Tooley ever tell you about that bar?” he asked without turning.
“No.”
“Or how you and him might have been sitting in the same place there, drinking beer, and not knowing each other?”
“I don’t think so,” I said. “I never heard him say that.”
And that would have been the time to let it drop that, yes, Tooley knew the place, Tooley lived in the place, Tooley said he had stashed a fortune on that second story — anything like that to give them their clue and to leave me alone.
Except I suddenly couldn’t do it. I’d give it away to them and they wouldn’t need me any more. Once they didn’t need me any more, I was finished.
The way I had thought of it when I first knew what was up, that was the only way. I would have to get there first What kept me alive now was that they didn’t think I knew what they wanted. What might keep me alive for a much longer time was to have what they wanted, whatever was up there, behind the windows.
“I got a place that way,” said Tooley and nodded to the side where the cottages were. “And there.”
I would have to shake them once more. Just once more, and this time knowing where I was going.
“Income property,” Tooley was saying. “Them cottage grounds are a gold mine.”
They were nothing. The good part of the lake was around the bend. But I was sure he had bought land closer by, just as he said, hoping to catch a whiff of his dead brother’s old place.
“Drive through there once,” said Rand. “Gallivan might like that, for old time’s sake.”
“No. I just as soon …”
“Drive through there once,” said Rand. “I want to know where Gallivan used to live.”
Rand was pressed for time, too. He didn’t seem to give a damn any more if I got spotted.
“Turn your collar up, Gallivan.”
We turned towards the lake. It was a dirt road where people in shorts walked around during the summer, where the lake showed through the bushes on one side, where cheap little cottages were all over the place.
“I got me that one,” said Tooley. “And two over there. Good income.”
Chickenfeed for a man peddling dope. But what he owned was all in a pattern. It was the wrong pattern, but they must have thought, buying here, that the dead Tooley might have lived in the oldest part of the summer colony. We drove by under the big elms, the ones the dead Tooley used to see from his window. There was undisturbed snow on all the closed cottages, white in the sun, and with blue shadows.
“Where was your place, Gallivan?”
I pointed that way but it didn’t look promising to Rand and Tooley. It was too far away and in the wrong direction.
“I don’t think my brother ever lived thataway,” said Tooley.
They were getting more and more careless. Even Rand seemed to think so.
“He’s sentimental about his brother,” he said. “He wants to visit the shrine.”
Tooley didn’t like that remark and they had a few words about it, but then Rand cut that short and said we should drive back to the highway. Tooley turned and went slowly. There was more talk, with Rand guiding it, about who used to live there, in that cottage; who used to rent here, while I knew this neighborhood; also, which houses were owned. And then when we crossed into the Bowline development, which streets were already built up seven years ago and which ones were newer. We got very close to the bar again. Somebody was shoveling snow in front.
“They haven’t got as nice a view from here as the people in those cottages,” said Rand.
This being daytime he spotted right away that you couldn’t see the lake from the development.
“Except from the garage,” said Tooley.
“Or that bar. It’s got a second story.”
It had taken Rand no time at all. It had taken me hours.
“I’d live in a cottage,” said Rand. “Like Gallivan did. What was your view, Gallivan, from the cottage?”
“Just the lake. But from the other direction.”
“What do you mean, other direction?”
I was damn glad he was in back of me and not watching anything but my neck.
“I mean,” I told him, “the other direction from this development here.”
Then I turned a little, to catch a glimpse of Rand. He was looking at the bar.
“I think old Tooley and me must have lived pretty close, come to think of it He must have lived on the other side of the lake,” I kept prompting.
“What’s built there,” said Tooley, “is just five years old.”
But Rand didn’t answer. We rolled up towards the highway and were heading for the bar again. I was biting my lip and felt a little hysterical.
“Drive right by,” said Rand. “And don’t look that way.”
“You mean the …”
“Just shut up and drive.”
Then I saw what he meant.
There was a car pulled up next to the bar. The front door of the place had opened and Eddy was there with another man. They didn’t know each other too well because they shook hands and were very polite. The other man shoved a notebook into his pocket and went to his car. Then he went out of view.
“Did you know him?” asked Rand.
I almost answered. I was sure he wanted to know if I knew Eddy and then, when had I seen him last, or something like that But just in time Tooley answered.
“I’m not sure,” said Tooley. “But he did look cop.”
“Did you see his license plate?”
“Just a little. I think the letters checked though. I think he was cop.”
“That’s all we need,” Rand mumbled. “That’s all.”
“It’s a long chance he’d even look at us,” said Tooley. “He’s most likely checking out a complaint about noise or about serving to minors. You guys just outa stir are too nervous, all the time.”
“I didn’t say he was looking for us,” said Rand. He sounded plenty sharp and ill-tempered. “I just spotted him and told you to keep driving.”
“I wasn’t going to stop there for a beer, for chrissake.”