Life Between Wars

by Robert Patton

  Ollie asked Del, “How can a cop wear an earring?”

  “Same reason he can buy you a drink. It’s a casual town.”

  Del’s eyes alighted on Ollie skittishly, like a bird afraid to land. Fantasies of seduction, rejected as soon as they occurred to him, imprinted his mind like a film negative, dark where they should have been light.

  Ollie was studying Lois’s butt. “I could handle that,” he told Del. “I’m horny, what can I say?”

  “It’s no crime.”

  Ollie sipped his drink and wondered how he might finagle another.

  Lois thought Del was getting moony and obvious, leering over the boy like a bag lady over a nickel. The vodka in her blood had flushed her. She undid a button and blew cool air under her blouse, catching a billowy view that filled her with cockeyed smugness, as if, in a fix, she’d found a weapon she’d forgotten she had. Her eyes flicked to Anna’s and her smugness crashlanded. She had unfinished duties here as hostess and sibling — though not as wife, it should be said, for her marriage now seemed an artifact of some other life that for tonight was, except for time wasted, a thing that never had happened.

  It was this convenient erasure of Robby that struck Anna, observing from behind a glass of warm wine, as too easy and thus unacceptable. As the Catholic Church demands of its patrons who wish to divorce, Anna wanted from Lois an accounting of failure, of misbegotten vows whose annulment must be ratified by experts in meaningful love, by priests in the Church’s case and by Anna in her sister’s. She’d been seeking a theme to this last visit with Lois and now perhaps had found it. Anna carried her piety like a bud grafted to bark; it was, paradoxically, the softer part of herself, the groping, unfurling flower stem that, never cut, remained uncallused by harsh exposures. “We should go, Lois,” she said. “I mean, this is pretty unseemly.” Her sister, however, had withdrawn inside herself, to her turf, her rules, her game.

  When Del Locke excused himself for a moment, Lois leaned over the bar and told Ollie Del was gay. Overhearing this, Anna winced like someone awaiting a practical joke to go off.

  Ollie’s jaw dropped. “How do you know?”

  “One night he and I got talking, sharing secrets. Grownups do that sometimes.” Her breasts spilled over her folded arms. “That’s his.”

  “What’s yours?”

  “Hah!” Then liltingly, “Here he co-omes.”

  “Help me!”

  “There’s room at the end of the bar.”

  “Lois,” Anna began, but her sister had followed Ollie several seats down, where Anna saw her pour two vodka shots. She realized this was all for her benefit, a deliberate show on Lois’s part of strength or weakness. Anna rose to get her coat.

  Del returned, saw the empty seat beside his, saw Lois and Ollie together, and understood at once. Fury swept through him — and acquiescence. In a trance he put on his jacket. Lois came over. “Six bucks you owe.”

  “What did you say to him?”

  “I thought he should know.”

  “He’s a kid! And not just any kid!”

  “Exactly. You should’ve seen yourself.”

  He almost laughed. “You’re wrong, you know.” His glance back at Anna spooked her like a sudden spotlight. “This is a blow in the battle between you, I take it.”

  “Don’t be catty, Del,” Lois said.

  Anna already was leaving.

  Del threw down the money. On his way out he passed Ollie hunched over the bar. Each man was to the other a blip on a radar screen, nearing then receding. Ollie felt flattered that someone, anyone, actually wanted sex with him. Disliking the feeling in this case, he hated Del all the more. Del, in retreat, seemed to concur.

  “So,” Ollie said to Lois, “when do you get off work?” She studied her hands spread flat on the bar as if awaiting them to flex and rise, to grab somebody’s throat. “I’m serious,” he pressed. “You know that incident this morning, the skin-diver who got run over? I was there.”

  “I know all about it.”

  “I rescued him.”

  “I thought he was killed.”

  “Okay, the body. I rescued the body. Tim’s body.” Tentatively now, taking that step onto ice, “I guess you knew him somehow? The guy who ran my friend over? Because I saw you at the police station. Is he, like, your boyfriend?”

  “You got ID?”

  “What?”

  “I said, You got ID?”

  “I told you before — ”

  “Brian,” Lois called to the one of the other bartenders. “This boy is underage.” Her voice was thick with power. “Throw him out.”

  Ollie stood unhurriedly. Booze boiled in him and something besides. He’d seen and touched death today — all that lacked was to get laid and vote. He shook off the bartender’s hand, turned on a heel and stomped through the door, directly into the ladies room. In a moment he emerged, quite suave considering, just as the pay phone outside the john rang. He picked it up and listened a moment while glaring straight at Lois’s tits.

  “Whales, you say?” he said into the receiver. “Five of them, where? You know what,” Ollie mused, as if the caller might care, “I believe I met them this morning.”

  Twelve

  The gravel lot outside The Cave was jammed with pickup trucks and motorbikes. The band tonight was a loose aggregation of local players billed as the Doug Douglas Baby Blues. Doug Douglas, bank manager and father of three, played bass. Amos Clearwater, First Selectman of Penscot and owner of the bar, played piano. Until last summer Jerome Cochran had sometimes contributed mouthharp. But unlike Doug and Amos and others, Jerome was unable to delete just the bad habits within certain associations. For him it was all or nothing.

  He and Matthew Priam ordered soft drinks at the bar. Matthew wiped clean the rim of his glass before sipping from it. “We don’t belong here,” he muttered. Jerome asked the bartender if he’d passed the word as requested. “What’s going on!” Matthew demanded.

  “I’m dealin’ again.”

  “Goodbye.”

  “Hey! I want my friends to think I’m dealin’ again. I want ’em to get up some bucks and find me.”

  “They’re scum. They’re not your friends.”

  “They owe me money, a lot of ’em.” Matthew emptied his wallet on the bar, a five and a twenty. “Take more’n that,” Jerome said.

  “For what?”

  “The fuck d’you think? For my brother!”

  “No! It’s kicks for you, don’t pretend it’s anything better.” Jerome lit a Camel and started a cough it hurt to hear. “You smoke too much,” Matthew said.

  In retort Jerome ordered a double bourbon and downed it with a shiver. His grin at Matthew dribbled eloquently as he turned and left Matthew alone — and Matthew alone, especially tonight, was a man on a barren isle. He liked to think of himself as Jerome’s own angel. His demands on Jerome he intended as therapy, his affection he meant as a challenge. Unasked always had been, Should Matthew ever need an angel, would Jerome return the favor? Matthew had an answer now.

  Jerome went outside with a young fisherman named Michael Burks. The air was fresh after the rain. Under a floodlight Michael talked a mile a minute, interrupting himself jaggedly, “Did I tell you my wife’s gonna have twins, doctor said. Stomach out to here, man, and she’s talkin now about quittin’ work.”

  “May they be sons, Michael.” Jerome nudged the conversation to Michael’s recent trip on a commercial dragger. “I heard you hit yellowtail. You made some money?”

  “Some for the cookie jar, some for the wife, with the rest I party. We party.”

  Gently Jerome said, “I got nothin’ to sell you, Michael. But I been an easy touch for you for years, you know it’s true. I want my money now.” Michael retreated. Jerome dropped his cigarette to the gravel. “I wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t important.” He seized his fri
end’s throat and rooted Michael’s wallet out of his pants. Passersby paused to watch before proceeding inside. “I’m takin’ two hundred, leavin’ fifty.” Jerome returned the wallet. “We’ll call it square.”

  “Gimme a cigarette.”

  “Can I buy you a drink?”

  “I’ll drink elsewhere.” Michael mounted his motorcycle. He said to Jerome, “Wanna hear somethin’ funny? One reason I’m here wasn’t to score. I was gonna ask you to be godfather to the twins when they come. My wife’s idea. It just means if I fuck up or die, you get the headaches.”

  “Get ridda the bike and I’ll take the odds.”

  “Fuck that.” Michael roared onto the road, casting Jerome a basically friendly finger.

  “Hey J.C.,” said a voice. “Whyn’t you pick on someone your own size?” The taxi driver Mr. Wertz had just pulled up, his passenger shadowed in the car’s back seat. A battery of surf rods was clamped to the roof. “Seen Charlie inside? We’re supposed to go fishing.” Charlie was Mr. Wertz’s son.

  “He’s there,” Jerome said.

  “In bad shape, is he? Well, you tell him I was here and he wasn’t. Tell him I’ll be back in an hour if he needs a ride. I’d rather fish alone anyway. You wanna come?” Jerome said no thanks. “Blues’re around but I’m after stripers. Guy caught a thirty pounder off The Finger yesterday. Course he used seaworms, and as you know, I won’t use seaworms, won’t nigger fish. Nothing racist. It’s worms I hate. Worms and eels.”

  “I’ll give Charlie the message.”

  “And tell him he disgusts me. His mother too.”

  “Roger.”

  When Jerome went into The Cave, Willoughby Claire climbed out of Mr. Wertz’s taxi.

  A gorilla named Mac Donner accosted Jerome. “Been many moons, Jerry. Why now?”

  “I miss my friends.”

  “Anybody I know?” Donner’s teeth gleamed. “Let’s talk.”

  The men’s room smelled of piss and bleach. Donner leaned on the door, with a cluck popped out his upper dental plate and held it in his hand, pink, white, wet. He grinned. His teeth gleamed. “This is new,” Jerome said.

  “Thtorebought. Real oneth rotted.” From a vial Donner sifted cocaine into the plate’s pink horseshoe, which he then refitted in his mouth. “Handy, eh?”

  “That’s gonna eat your skull out.”

  “Yeah, but when?” Jerome had slumped to the wall between two urinals. He felt queasy from the booze and the rest. Donner said, “Here it is, Jer. Summer, I can take the competition. Labor Day was great, kids couldn’t get enough. Except summer’s over now.”

  “Make your point.”

  “Sell somewhere else.” Donner cleared his throat, spat in a urinal. “I carry heat, y’know.”

  “Mac. It’s me — ”

  “I’m tryin’ to explain the level we’re at. My connections, they’re bad people. Pressure. On me. On you.”

  “We’re punks. They don’t care about us.”

  “Used to be! Now it’s another combine. Could be cars, vacuum cleaners — I’m a tradesman, I work on commission. Every gram I sell is gold around some spic’s neck. Me, I survive.”

  “So quit.”

  “What quit? The only way out’s the way in. And I cannot have you crowdin’ me. For this I’m sorry. But hey,” Donner said, “I heard about Robby. A shame. I sold him some crank last night, on the cuff. Tell him forget about it.”

  “You’re a pal, Mac.”

  “And remember, Jer. Pressure.”

  Jerome leaned back and thumped his head on the wall. He and Donner had been redneck druggies, the last ones in, the last ones out. Jerome was fashionable now — a father, a taxpayer, striving to die more slowly. He shouldn’t be here half-loaded in a roadhouse toilet. He should be home with his son and a wife. Anyone’s.

  Mr. Wertz drove his taxi east on Southshore Road, heading toward Oceanside Point and the lighthouse called The Finger. He turned onto an off-road trail. Wet grass rushed under his chassis like seawater under a keel. The trail crossed a rolling moor. His highbeams created shadows, flicks of movement at light’s edge. He locked his doors apprehensively.

  Houses out this way were few. Those along the public beach were shuttered for the winter. To Mr. Wertz’s left the mansions on Oceanside Road also were darkened, save one at the end whose lighted windows mocked his solitude. He wished Jerome had come with him, or his son Charlie. Charlie didn’t disgust him really; it was just the way he skulked through life, hiding behind diagnoses of delayed stress and related night terrors. “Look at Cochran,” he’d hound his son. “There’s a vet doin’ great!”

  He parked on a bluff overlooking the beach. Offshore, The Finger swept its beam around the sky and swept away Mr. Wertz’s unease. The moon shone through broken clouds, its silver train bright on the water. He took two rods from the rack and with a fat man’s grace slid down a dune to the beach, his tread throwing fluff on the sand’s rainbitten crust. He returned for his tackle box and a cardboard container suggestive of Chinese takeout and which indeed held seaweed, also a dozen seaworms. He impaled several on a weighted hook and cast the mess beyond the breakers. He set a light drag and planted the rod in the sand. With the other rod he began casting a shiny surface lure to the cut between the shore and The Finger. He hoped to hook a striped bass with his lure rather than with worms, just as a preacher would rather catch converts with oratory than with a patent miracle, for therein lies the sport. But if a trophy fish hit the worms, Mr. Wertz would never confess it. He was out here alone. Who’d know any different?

  In fact he wasn’t alone. He was fishing the south shore of Oceanside Point. The north shore was a private beach owned by John and Carolyn Winston, their estate’s main house high on a central bluff, ocean views on three sides. From the widow’s walk an old man in a bathrobe, one eye pressed to a spyglass like a rest home Captain Kidd, was scanning the public beach intently. Should Mr. Wertz trespass one step on his property, the old man would set the dogs on him.

  And there was more, for unseen beneath the water a pod of small whales was lazing in the trough between The Finger and the shore. The whales were heavy with mackerel and butterfish. Their clicks and whistles sounded about them like sounds received from space, audible signs of life issuing from where life shouldn’t be. The tide was rapidly ebbing and the whales, for reasons unknown, had let themselves be trapped.

  The cash in Jerome’s pocket was pittance, four or five hundred extorted from four or five losers. Esteemwise it hadn’t come cheap; he was left with that old feeling of having done a vicious job well. Amos Clearwater — pianist, owner of The Cave, Penscot’s first-ever black selectman — came up mopping his face with a towel. “Bring your harp, boy?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Seen you workin’ the crowd pretty good. Don’t give me cause. I’ll bust you.”

  “It’s fair.”

  “And about your brother — ”

  “I don’t wanna hear it.”

  “Hear this. All day long people’s been sayin’ poor Robby. I say poor’s the boy he laid out.”

  “Nobody knew him. One less thief.”

  “Now I know you’re lyin’. You got a bigger heart’n that.”

  “Gotta cover my own. That’s my one rule.” He looked at Amos. “It was an accident. Robby’s no killer.”

  “I believe it.” Amos seized Jerome’s chin and gazed hard into his face. “And so better you.”

  A bottle of bourbon was waiting at the bar. “From a secret admirer,” the bartender told Jerome, who sloshed three fingers into his glass. Matthew appeared beside him. Jerome quaffed the liquor. “You’re drunk,” Matthew said.

  “I’m drunk. I’m drunk because my heart is big and my head is bad.” Jerome giggled at this. “And because I got no friend.”

  “Listen to yourself.”

  “And fuck yo
u too.”

  “Why this? What have I done?”

  “Not a thing. Just bein’ your saintly self.”

  “You’re treating me as if you hate me.”

  “If the shoe fits — ” at which Matthew walked away. He pushed coins into the Starkiller video game against the wall. Blue light bathed his face as he joylessly exploded worlds. He was dying. Dying. Let it come.

  The band resumed. Soon the room was rolling to Freddy King’s “Hideaway.” Charlie Wertz wove sloppily through the crowd into Jerome. Jerome’s Camel burned down as he lent his friend an ear. For forty days in 1971 Charlie had been a prisoner of the Viet Cong. Starved to a skeleton, he’d squeezed through the bars of his bamboo cage, killing the guard with a U.S. entrenching tool. He’d eaten without moderation ever since and now was pasty and fat, a bum who lived with his parents and stole from their wallets and change jars. But at thirty-eight he had a plan: He was running away from home. Would Jerome do him the favor of a few bucks to get started, for old time’s sake? Jerome removed the wad of bills from his pocket and stuffed it in Charlie’s hand. “Go far, buddy.”

  “Th-thanks,” Charlie said, and stumbled out of sight.

  “Talk.” Jerome was leaning against the Starkiller game.

  Matthew gazed into the screen and fired. “You depress me.”