by Jim Nisbet
He decided to have a look at them.
That’s all it took. One look at the owner of the first name sent him to the second. Guy No. 1: a thirty-three year-old research economist at a bank. He wore a suit with suspenders five days a week, worked out at a health club three times a week, drove a brand new Saab Turbo convertible, owned his own home in the upper Haight, windsurfed at Crissy Field three evenings a week, and rented a garage off Capra Way in the Marina to store the windsurfing gear and a Harley Sportster he never rode anymore, but whose mere ownership kept him in touch with his inner fool. He had season tickets to the opera, cultivated five or six girlfriends all of whom earned as much or more money than he did; he wore a two-hundred-and-fifty-dollar pair of gold-rimmed eyeglasses when he read The Wall Street Journal, Barron’s, Fortune, and a $ 1500-per-annum investor’s newsletter called Red Smith’s Guide, as well as everything published in hardback on the subject of personal growth as measured by money. He was never late. When at home for the weekend he wore the same pair of jeans he’d been able to get into for nine years, which gave Stanley pause for a thoughtful pat on the paunch, but the guy was never home on the weekends because he divided his leisure time between heli-skiing in the Canadian Rockies, alumni meetings at Stanford, and various girlfriend-owned time-share condos at Maui, Cabo San Lucas, and Stinson Beach.
And the man never, ever went to a bar unless there was a business deal in it, in which case he drank a bottled water he always carried with him.
One look at him was enough. Early the morning after staying up all night pondering Fong’s data, Stanley parked the pickup in a bus zone across Frederick Street from Guy No. 1’s address and waited. At 7:45 the guy and a blonde, both in business suits, with briefcases and wet hair, tripped briskly down the steep, fog-dampened steps of the guy’s recently-painted Victorian. She opened the door of a year-old BMW nuzzled up behind the Saab, and sat into the safety harness. She started the engine, closed the door, powered down the driver’s window, and leaned out to administer an adios with her lips. Before the kiss could become anything other than a technicality, the Beamer’s telephone wheedled. From thirty yards up the street Stanley heard her say she had to go, even as she answered the phone. She backed out of the driveway, aimed the machine toward the financial district, and floored it. The BMW launched down Frederick Street and took the corner at Shrader without regard for the stop sign, its phone propped on its driver’s shoulder even as she checked her makeup in the mirror on the back of the sun-visor.
Guy No. 1 stood in the driveway and watched her go, the front panels of his linen jacket drawn back under his forearms, the chamois forks of his duck galluses showing, his hands in the front pockets of his pressed linen pants, looking exactly like a man thinking about nuclear physics while waiting for his golden retriever to take a shit.
Guy No. 1 walked back up his driveway, pausing to pick up a cigarette-end someone had thrown there, and continued past his car to drop the butt into a trash can. As Guy No. 1 drove the Saab away—also aimed at the financial district, though his phone hadn’t yet begun to ring—Stanley was already laying in the coordinates for Guy No. 2.
The second address was over a dry cleaner on Cortland in Bernal Heights. At 4:30 that same afternoon, Stanley was waiting for the 24 Divisadero to finish dispensing people so he could park in the bus zone when he saw a guy coming home from work. Guy No. 2 this guy had to be. He wore a blue and black checked flannel shirt with a black quilted insulated lining and gum-soled tan work boots. There would be white athletic socks inside the work boots and an ardent case of athlete’s foot inside the socks. He carried a red and white insulated lunch tote with a tattered brown sweater, splotched white with dried joint compound, draped through its handle. His worn tee shirt was powdered white with sheetrock dust. So were his jeans. Their left rear pocket was ripped at the upper left-hand corner from clipping and unclipping a measuring tape all day long, eight hours a day, five days a week, 2,000 hours a year or for the life of the jeans or their wearer, whichever came first. He hadn’t shaved in several days, and he was too old to be hanging sheetrock. Younger guys who hadn’t hurt their backs yet would be giving him a run for his money. He’d already had a couple of drinks and anybody who hung sheetrock for a living, so far as Stanley was concerned, deserved theirs. Despite the drinks Guy No. 2 was walking gingerly His work troubled his back, stiffened his hands, numbed his mind; but he worked hard so he could live alone, peaceful and unmolested, upstairs over a dry cleaner. Even from across the street Stanley could see that the man’s cheeks were puffy from insomnia and drink. His nose was a little bulbous, his hair hadn’t been cut lately, he was pushing forty, and that paunch straining the tee shirt would only be getting bigger, ultimately aggravating his back problem.
If he survived his forthcoming kidney operation, that is.
His name was Ted.
Ted Nichols crossed the street, went into a grocery on the corner next to the bus zone, and emerged from the grocery a few minutes later with a brown paper bag. The paper bag had the familiar rectilinear bulge at its bottom and the familiar red and yellow plastic sack protruding from its mouth: two six-packs topped by a family-sized bag of potato chips. Salt and alcohol, hops and starch; it’s surprising how much of the nutrition that a guy like No. 2 needs to survive is contained in these two products. Hops and alcohol relax the back muscles. The mind as well. A man who sweats all day wants salt and carbohydrates. A man who works all day likes to hear the crisp crepitations of the humidity-free bag, the demolishing crunches of the three mouthfuls he stuffs the moment he has entered his apartment, before doing anything else, even before turning on the television, standing over the opened bag in his kitchenette, a familiar grammar damply punctuated by the pleasurable little explosion of the top torn off the first cold can of beer.
Was Stanley intimately familiar with the genus containing the species of Guy No. 2, or what?
Stanley could presume Ted wouldn’t be going out tonight. It was early in the week, and Ted had his two six-packs, his chips, his television. Once his shoes came off he’d be lucky to desert the chair long enough even to bathe. If Ted planned carefully, he’d only have to get out of the chair to piss, the first time at beer 1.5, and once subsequently for each additional can. He might grab a quick shower on the way to bed, but equally, he might pass out in the chair. If Ted made it to bed in time to saw off a straight eight—less two for insomnia—it was because he hadn’t passed out in his chair with a beer in his hand, the television on, his shoes and the light off, the flickering room slowly filling with the reek of his feet, the dank odor of beer, and crescendos of snoring and canned laughter. His blood-sugar, or a headache, or a particularly prolonged broadcast scream, would drag him awake in the wee hours, and maybe then he’d curl up in the quilt his mother bought off a Winnebago Indian in Wisconsin in 1946. But if the routine went like that he wouldn’t bathe. Only if he went to bed at nine or nine-thirty would he turn off the set and take the shower. Between the sheets at that last moment of consciousness, and at only that moment, he always wished to be clean.
Ted Nichols wouldn’t be going anywhere tonight, Stanley thought, watching the flickering blue corner window above the storefront laundry. But the next time Ted heads for a bar, I’ll be right behind him.
Friday night, most likely.
Stanley blinked twice and looked down the street. The 24 bus was laboring up the hill from Bayshore, loaded with people coming home from work. A woman pushed a stroller toward him along the sidewalk. An old man in a limp fedora sat in a plastic chair in a doorway, his palms on his knees and his eyes shut against the evening light.
Stanley watched the side mirror. In it, two young men talked animatedly. Beyond them a car parallel-parked, beyond the car a guy locked the door of an appliance store. The woman pushed her baby carriage out of one side of the mirror’s frame and into the other.
Who were they? What did they look like?
They were here. One or more of these people worked for t
hem. Could he spot them? They looked just like anybody else, right? Regular people? They were motivated just like everybody else— right? They stole kidneys because they wanted a bigger television? Because the rent went up? Because their guns required pricey silver bullets? Because they wanted to continue to breathe the perpetually fresh, blue, salttanged, increasingly expensive air of San Francisco instead of the stale, brown, tangibly thick, if cheaper, effluent that passed for air in most of the rest of the world?
Oh, well. That’s understandable.
These renal bandits are people, just like me, thought Stanley. When he found them, they would prove to be just plain folks.
Whether he could spot them or not, Stanley wasn’t the only person on this street waiting for Ted Nichols to drink one too many in the wrong bar at the wrong time. Somebody else was waiting for Ted.
And Stanley was waiting for them.
He looked forward again, through the windshield. He had one advantage over whomever else waited for Ted. Even though “they” presumably knew what they were doing, and even though Stanley certainly had no idea what he was doing, “they” didn’t know yet that, while “they” were waiting for Ted, Stanley was waiting for them.
He might get to observe their whole operation, unnoticed.
He swallowed one of the medicinal pills, of the type he might have to take every night for the rest of his life.
He watched Ted’s flickering blue window.
This had to be the guy.
That night, Stanley almost quit drinking.
Chapter Thirteen
IT TOOK A MONTH.
Camp Kill-Care looked like any of the bars Ted Nichols preferred.
As usual Stanley let Ted get his nozzle in, gave him a half hour to get started.
So long as Stanley could see the entry doors there was no particular reason to crowd the man.
Let him enjoy his last few weeks of renal tranquility.
The door into a bar is there for one of three reasons: It is convenient to people who want to drink; it is convenient to people who need to drink; it is convenient to people who have to drink.
Sometimes the crowds get a little mixed up, and you’ll find a stone drunk with wet pants sitting in the catbird seat in a nice fern bar. To the catbird’s advantage, some of the nicer clientele will be hobnobbing with him to prove they’re congenial enough to countenance anybody. Then, when it gets to be ten o’clock, having had their two or three drinks, these latter types will leave a matrix of complimentary screwdrivers ranged in front of the guy with wet pants and go home. After all, these latter types have to go to work in the morning.
The guy in wet pants is already at work.
This is a lonely scene for the guy in wet pants, who is lonely anyway. But after he’s mopped up the screwdrivers if he can still walk he’ll go drink where drinkers more of his ilk drink. It’s just natural to drink with people who drink like you do. Natural and less painful. It’s part of the downward spiral.
Ted hadn’t hit the wet pants stage yet. But, like Stanley, he had hit the phase where he liked to drink alone. Unlike Stanley, who wandered from bar to bar with no particular allegiance, Ted had it down to three or four bars in which he was a regular. If Ted went into a bar and saw somebody who might try to talk to him, he’d go right back out the door and straight to the next bar on his route. He hit these bars in the same order, and they were all peas in a pod, taxonomically speaking.
Camp Kill-Care was half full. Something passing for country-western music brayed from the jukebox, anthemic and hickly. Play it anthemic, Clint-I-forget-your-other-two-names, which means loud. Then modulate real stupid, like an S-curve in a gun barrel, and call it country. A huge, maybe priceless stained glass window was suspended by wires behind the bar. It always amazed Stanley that such a thing could hang in any kind of bar unmolested. It also bespoke the gentility of the premises, if tacitly and suspensefully. It seemed to him that, surely, sooner if not later, somebody would become annoyed with the placidity of this window—if only because it was there, let alone that it depicted a dove flying between Adam and Eve with an olive branch in its beak—and throw a chair through it. But nobody yet had.
Maybe tonight’s the night, Stanley was thinking. There’s always hope.
Then he saw her.
For just a moment Stanley had wanted a drink. Every night he followed Ted, it happened once or twice.
But the sight of her both stimulated and then almost cured his thirst.
She was sitting at the corner of the bar nearest the door with her back to it. Stanley was halfway down the bar, turning to take a seat, when he saw her.
Brunette hair, low-cut canvas sneakers, faded jeans clean and snug, a yoked cowgirl blouse with a couple of buttons open at the neck and nothing underneath. Light makeup and hoop earrings, the hair caught behind her ears by a tortoise-shell headband.
The eyes were just like he remembered them.
Favoring the healing incision in his back had taught him to limp, but now it was more a habit than anything else. As he changed course along the row of stools against the bar he realized that he liked his limp. It gave him a lot of time to study things while he was getting around.
He slid onto a stool at the far end of the bar, where he could watch her. The stool had a padded back, and he pressed his incision against it. Maybe if he held it there his guts wouldn’t spill out. The incision no longer pained him much, but it still itched when he was trying to sleep. The firm lumbar pressure of the stool-back reassured him. Maybe if he held it there the scar would finish healing. Maybe if he held it there the scar would go away.
So, he thought. Her certainty of Ted’s habitude allowed her, too, to lay for him at his first stop.
Around him various people chirped. He heard a whirring sound and, though he’d seen it before, looked up. A model train was making its way along the top of the back bar. He watched it. A red caboose disappeared behind the frame of the stained glass window just as a steam locomotive appeared from behind the opposite edge, emitting pusillanimous whistles. The engine began an oval curve in the track that would encircle the entire barroom, passing above the entrance door and below a large color television chained to the ceiling, over the tinted window to the street, over the video game in the corner, over the entrances to the rest rooms, over Stanley’s head, over the bottles behind the bar, behind the stained glass again, over the jukebox and back to the TV, right after it passed…
He leveled his gaze.
…Over her. In between the jukebox and the TV.
He lowered his gaze to an ashtray on the bar in front of him.
What now, big shot?
He looked around. Nobody was paying any attention to the train. Nobody was paying any attention to him.
That included the bartender. This was a blonde woman wearing cutoff denim shorts and a cowgirl blouse tied in a knot over her ribcage. Her navel pouted outwards, a semaphore of great sexual prowess, to some. At least one of the men sitting near Stanley was drinking at this bar solely because this navel was to be studied here.
Just as Stanley was considering such a bartender as likely to be more concerned with the effect she was having on the customers than with setting a drink in front of them, she asked him was he thirsty.
“I was beginning to wonder whether anybody worked here,” he said.
“Depends on what you call work,” she said.
“You look terrific.”
She drew the tips of both sets of fingers across her exposed abdomen. “Two hours a day at the gym. Every day. Year in, year out. Then I’ll get a few wrinkles anyway and they’ll fire me. Hopefully before that happens some fat real estate genius will come in here and slip a rock on my finger, tell the chauffeur to limo us up to his penthouse on Nob Hill.” She rapped her knuckles on the bartop, twice. “For luck. And I do mean soon.”
The man to Stanley’s right stood uncertainly off his bar stool. “Thanks, Cindy,” he said, throwing a ten onto the bar.
She looke
d Stanley straight in the eye. “You bet, Caesar.” She turned to sweep the ten and the man’s empty glass with its coaster off the bar. “See you tomorrow.”
Stanley watched the man weave toward the front of the bar and shoulder his way through the door into the street.
“He sounds regular,” said Stanley.
“Every night.” She dropped the empty glass into a sink full of soap suds.
“Likes to drink, I guess.”
“No,” she said. “Not particularly. He’s the father of my son.”
Stanley stared at her.
“It hurts him deep to hear me talk about marrying somebody else.”
Stanley blinked as he watched the street door close itself.
“I don’t know why I told you that,” the woman said. “I’m not that mean.”
“I’m sure you’re not.”
“Look. You want a drink? You were doing all the complaining a minute ago.”
Stanley paused. Then he said, “Bushmills. Over.”
She got a glass and dragged it through a tub of ice beneath the bar.
“Throw out about half that,” he said.
She did.
“They tell you to do that?”
She nodded. “Yes. But they don’t water the booze.” She placed the glass on a coaster in front of him and filled it with whiskey.
“Thanks.” Stanley took a sip.
“Taste like whiskey?”
“Tastes like whiskey.”
Since it was his first drink in a month, it tasted unfamiliar—a taste he would not have expected, a taste that did not coincide with the nostalgic succulence in his memory, wherein it resided in a file labeled uisce beatha, Gaelic for breath of life.
Cindy smiled a little smile and shelved the bottle.
Instead of going away she pulled a cigarette out of a pack that lived under the bar and showed it to him. “Mind?”
He plucked a folder of matches out of the ashtray and lit the cigarette for her. She inhaled deeply and leaned back into the corner of the bar, where it turned into the wall. Her first exhale sounded like a long sigh. They watched the room. The little train passed overhead.