Fifty Contemporary Writers

by Bradford Morrow

  “How the hell should I know?” It is clearly a touchy subject. Not much prospect of a second beer. Bonali has got his sulk back and is giving him a look like he wishes he were dead. Georgie glances at his wrist as if he had a watch there. “Well, shit, I better get the car back. I’ll drop back and see you again soon, Vince.”

  “If you do, bring your own beer.”

  “Well, lookit what fell down the fuckin shaft,” says Cheese Johnson when Georgie walks in.

  Georgie has made the usual rounds, but it’s midweek and raining, turning cold and windy again, it’s doornail-dead all over town, and still too early for the roadhouses. He has never seen streets so empty. Like some kind of nightmare movie. Even the bowling alley and the Legion Hall, where he’d found two of these guys last night, were all but deserted. A few lonely old farts watching TV. Or more like the TV was watching them. The Eagles Social Club was his last shot. “I was wondering where all the action was.”

  “That you, Georgie? You musta forgot your hair somewheres. What drug you back to town?”

  “Too much tail up in the city, Stevie, it was making an old man outa me. Had to come back for a rest cure.”

  “Well, y’come to the right place. Sure won’t find no tail up here.”

  “I’m disappointed, Coke. I figured you’d be amenable.”

  “Listen at the nasty fella with his city ways!”

  “You turned up just in time, Giorgio. I could use that five bucks I staked you Sunday.”

  “Lemme see if I can win it back, cugino. What’s the game?”

  “Dealer’s choice, stud or draw, nothing wild. Cap’s three raises, limited to a quarter each.”

  “A quarter!”

  “If that’s too high we can lower it.”

  “This ain’t the big town, Georgie.”

  “OK, high rollers. Deal me in.”

  He’s keeping up a brave front, but Georgie’s earlier euphoria has drained away. Visiting Bonali was a real bummer, and the betrayed promise of spring weather hasn’t helped. A new front has moved in like a kind of sudden sickness of the air and there’s talk even of snow. April fool. What little he’s eaten (there’s an empty pizza delivery box on the next table, still giving off a spicy aroma, reminding him how hungry he probably is) hasn’t set well, nor has the hip flask of cheap rye he has polished off; he should have picked up some antacids in the supermarket yesterday when he was in there. Worst of all, he has come to the sodden realization that he’ll never get enough money together to pay for Ruby, cheap date as she is. Certainly not up here. Even if he took all these guys’ money, there’s probably not enough between them for a pair of windshield wipers. Which he has discovered is among the old girl’s many urgent needs. Had to drive her with his head out the window in the worst of it. For all his bravura, he does wish he was back in the city. He misses the action, even if it’s an action from which he is mostly excluded for lack of the wherewithal. All he has here that he didn’t always have up there is a room to sleep in out of the weather, and the price for that is his old lady’s ceaseless scorn and fury. Which can get worse. He can only hope she has not looked under the mattress yet.

  “All I’m saying is that for the mine company fat cats the disaster wasn’t nothing more than one bad hand,” says Bert Martini. He only has one arm, having lost the other in the mine accident, so even in draw he leaves his cards facedown on the table, tipping up their edges briefly to read them, then tossing his quarters into the pot with the one hand he has left in life. These guys are all survivors of the explosion that blew out Number Nine’s innards and closed it down, and they’re still grousing about it five years later. And using the same lines. It’s like time’s stood still here. His life has been shit in the city, but not this bad. He borrows a fag from Bert and lights up with Cokie’s lighter. “They pocketed their winnings, quit the game, and went home, or wherever they go to get their fucking done, and left the workers holding an empty kitty.”

  “We’re halfway through our fucking lives and whatta we got?” Georgie says, repeating Guido’s line.

  “Well, the clap,” says Cokie Duncan. “Hemorrhoids … .”

  “At least you got your disability pension, Bert,” Steve Lawson says. Like Georgie’s cousin Carlo Juliano, Steve lost a brother in the explosion. Steve sees Bert’s quarter and raises.

  “That makes me the lucky one, hunh?” says Bert, waving his stump.

  “Put that thing back in your pants, Bert,” says Cheese, meeting the bet and asking for a pair, “and stop showin off.”

  The best card in Georgie’s rainbow hand is a ten of diamonds, but after Cokie Duncan drops his two bits in, he raises a quarter, pretending to want to throw in all he’s showing, and it is not so much a bluff as an act of frustration, wanting desperately for something to happen, any goddamned thing, even a fight. Betwise, not smart. After drawing blanks, he tosses, and Carlo wins the little pile of coins with low triplets, Georgie’s dwindling roadhouse reserve now diminished by his contribution to it.

  When it’s his deal, to do Bert a favor he calls seven-card stud. “I seen Guido today. He’s not a happy man,” he says, passing out the hole cards.

  “Well, he up and married the Sicano girl, the one who was never quite right in the head, and one a their kids has a medical problem. Some sympdrome or other. So he’s sorta lost his sense a humor.”

  “Sicano? The one we all banged in here on the pool table one night?”

  “The same.”

  “Oh man. Well buttered buns. What’d he go and do that for?”

  “Il Nasone never had many options amongst the ladies.”

  “He says Lem has turned out to be a hard man to work for.”

  “Who ain’t? He should try that tightwad cocksucker Suggs for a spell.”

  Cokie and Steve, he learns, have got on part-time at one of the strip mines, but when he asks, he’s told don’t even bother, old man Suggs is not partial to Italians. “He only likes to abuse his own kind.” Cheese got hired and fired out there and is now doing nonunion contract work in one of the last deep-shaft mines still operating in the area. Next thing to being a scab, but the strips are nonunion too, so no one is saying much. Cokie once had a wife, but she ran off during a stretch on the night shift so long ago no one around here remembers her anymore, Duncan included. Cokie was assistant faceboss in Bonali’s crew and on the night of the disaster was left in charge when Bonali went looking for a phone. Georgie was sure Bonali was not planning to come back and they were all going to die if they just stood there in that smoky pitch-black furnace, so he and Wally Brevnik took off on their own. It was Georgie’s intention to claw his way out by his fingernails if he had to. They went through some rough stuff, but Wally had a cool head and they eventually reached the top and already had a cup of spiked coffee in their hands by the time the rest of the section came up. All but Pooch and Lee.

  Several of them have been out to the hospital to see Big Pete Chigi who has black lung and is breathing his last through respirator nose plugs, and he hears about Ezra Gray who was in Red Baxter’s section and got out of Deepwater OK, but then went down in another mine a state over and got crippled in a fall that killed three other guys.

  “Yeah, I seen him—broke his fuckin back. He’s on rubber wheels for the duration. Ez was workin nonunion, so no comp or insurance. A hotshot lawyer talked him inta filin suit agin the owner, but the owner jist faded away like he never was. Like he disappeared inta the paperwork or sumthin.”

  “Same as what happened here. The ruthless dickheads. C’mon, Georgie, cheer me up. Goddamn make me sumthin. Send me down sixth street singin.”

  “Ez is completely off his nut now. Rantin about the end a the world’n all that. He travels some with Red Baxter, I heerd tell, out preachin that Brunist shit.”

  “How you hear all this, Steve?”

  “From my sister-in-law. Tess keeps in touch with Ez’s wife.”

  “Is old Ez here? Is he out there to the camp?”

  “N
o,” says Steve. “I never seen him and he’d be hard to miss.”

  At first Georgie thinks Steve might have got mixed up with those crackpots somehow, but it turns out Suggs has been helping the cult rebuild the camp, using his own workers for some of the heavy jobs, so both Steve and Cokie have been putting in time out there. It’s not clear what Suggs is getting out of the deal, but they’re pulling their normal wages, so no complaints. “So what’s going on out there in the woods?” Georgie wants to know. “Are they wearing any clothes?”

  “Oh yeah. Leastways by day. We don’t stay past quittin time, so I don’t know whatall they git up to then, but it’s purty fuckin chilly to go round bareass even if you’re rollin round a lot. From what I could see, they’re mostly jist workin their balls off, fixin the place up. Genrally I didn’t reckanize no one nother than Ben—you remember ole Ben Wosznik—and Ely’s widder. They kinda run things, y’know. And also Willie Hall’s out there, Willie and big Mabel.”

  “That’d be a cute pair, butt-nekkid.”

  “And Lee Cravens’s skinny little widder with all her brats, she’s there too.”

  “Wanda?” Georgie glances up and catches Johnson’s wink and gap-toothed grin.

  “She’s shacked up with some dumb bigass hulk. I mean, really big. They call him Hunk and he’s carryin around a whole heap a excess mollycules. But he can move. I seen him dancin round on the open beams a the old lodge roof like a man who don’t know what fear is.”

  “He ain’t never been down a mine then.”

  “So what’re you plannin on doin here, Georgie?” Cokie asks as he folds.

  “Well, I just picked up a car. Supposed I might get into the taxi business.”

  The others laugh dryly at that as if he’s just laid a joke, and he grins too, waiting to see what’s funny. What’s funny is the mayor’s new licensing fee, and he gets an earful then about corruption in city hall and themes of like nature, so he decides not to mention his appointment next week at the fire station. “Besides, Georgie, they ain’t no fares to be had anyhow. What kinda fuckin town you think this is?”

  He knows what kind of town it is. He had forgotten, but now he remembers. He was feeling shitty when he walked in here, he’s feeling shittier now. He has dealt himself a second king over a pair of eights, and he risks a couple more quarters, but Johnson beats him with a club flush, so even his luck is bad. He was about to propose a run to the roadhouses with whoever wanted to come along, but Johnson is cackling meanly as he hauls in the pot and the others are grousing in their tedious way and he really doesn’t want to be around them any longer. Bert is back on the mine bosses again, so to change the subject and lighten things up, Georgie elaborates on some of the big city tales he has been inventing during his job hunt, including a new one about a high-price hooker named Ruby, red-hot Ruby, using anatomical details from the centerfold he’s had hung in the car all day and personality quirks based on the old junker’s clunky behavior. “Well, we’re just getting warmed up, you know, really shimmying down the road, burning rubber, when her fucking eyelashes fall off and she gets so hot she starts making these really nasty noises down below … .”

  “Sounds like a real beaut, Georgie,” Carlo says, laughing.

  “No shit, she was. Even posed for one a them centerfolds. She invited me along for the photo session. She said me watching got her hot. Sure got me hot. She was a sight to see. An ass end to die for! I still have a copy somewhere, I’ll show it to you someday.”

  “Hey, speakin a pitchers, show Georgie the ones you got, Cheese!”

  Johnson shrugs, reaches into a paper sack, and tosses out a half dozen well-thumbed black-and-white photographs of two naked people doing a kind of sex manual thing on a leather couch. No hardcore shots, but the guy’s well hung, they’re both good-lookers, and the beaver shot with the guy standing over her like he’s about to belt her one or else swat her with his dick is good enough to make you want to poke her. But they’re a bit blurry and the light’s bad. Could be stills from a cheap stag movie. Then he looks closer. “Wait a minute. Who is that? Is that Tiger Miller?” They’re all grinning. All except Bert Martini, who says, “You shouldn’t ought to be showin them photos around. She was a nice girl. And Tiger was a pal. When I was in the hospital he come by to see me near every day. I figure there’s more here than what meets the eye.” The others laugh at that.

  “And that’s the Bruno kid, right? Marcella. The one who got killed. She was in school with me. These are a little different from what’s in the high school annual. Where’d you get them?”

  “You remember Jonesy, useta work at the newspaper, back when we had a fuckin newspaper. We was playin cards’s gittin blitzed together up to the Legion the night Jonesy split town. I walked him to his train and he give em to me as a see-ya-later present. I plumb forgot about em till them apocaleptics showed up agin.”

  “Sure you did,” Carlo laughs. “You can tell by all the cum spots on them.”

  Something about the photos bothers Georgie. Not just the realization that something was happening back then and he’d missed out. He missed out on plenty. She always had a nice smile, but except for a few friends she kept to herself, he hardly knew her. Her brother was a complete psycho. Everybody avoided him and he supposes some of that rubbed off on Marcella. He doesn’t remember anyone ever dating her. No, it’s something about seeing her so exposed like that. Not so much her naked snatch, he’s seen his share of those, but all the rest of her, so laid open. Georgie has never seen that look on a girl’s face before. Those looks. They change from photo to photo. But she is looking not just with her face but with all her body, her snatch as much a part of her looking as her eyes. Her navel or her toes. Her mouth, half open. So it’s like something terrible is being bared that shouldn’t be seen, something that, once bared, can never be covered up again, and he hates it that these cackling shits are ignorant witnesses to it. And she’s so still. And silent. It’s like she has been spread out to be carved up. Consumed. Well. She’s dead. Must have died right after these pictures were taken. It’s like getting the hots for a corpse. He wants to cover her up. Close her eyes. “Where’s her brother now?” he asks, feeling soberer than he wants to be. “Is he out there at the camp?”

  “Giovanni? Nah, they locked the loony away right after the world ended and he never come out.”

  “He’s dead, I think,” says Steve Lawson.

  “Dead?”

  “So I heerd.”

  So, Georgie decides, tossing in another losing hand, is this dump. He feels suffocated by the dead. He looks around the table. Even these guys are dead. The whole fucking town is a town of the walking dead, and he’s going to be one of them unless he moves his ass. Besides, if he wants to score tonight, he should get on the road while he still has coin left to operate with. He glances at his wrist where his watch would be if he had one and announces he has a date waiting for him, gotta go. He had made the mistake of tossing some money on the table when he sat down and, as he gets up to leave, Carlo reaches over and snatches up a couple of loose skins. “Now you owe me three,” he says.

  “Ruby,” he says, leaning his heavy head against her wheel, “Ruby … what I really feel like doing is shooting somebody.” Georgie is sitting in the Blue Moon Motel parking lot waiting for the old girl to warm up. Soft wet snow is falling like a punch line for the stupid joke that is his life. He’s cold, wearing only a shirt and jacket, feeling miserable. The only way morning’s promise is going to be fulfilled is in a Waterton whorehouse, provided they still exist and he can find an old puttana who will take what little money he—he and his mother—have left. Ever hopeful even in deepest despair, he assumes that, on a shit night like this, they’ll take any trade they can get.

  The motel was the last stop on his desperate but futile nightlong quest. For what? Cunt? More than that. Some kind of affirmation is what he was looking for. Some justification. Just a pleasant conversation with someone would have been nice. He is full of sorrow and could hav
e used an arm around his shoulder. The roadhouses weren’t completely empty. Worse. Those few out on the crummy night were all juveniles. Drunken teenage high school kids. Boys pissing themselves with their own confused excitement, a few girls going bad. Well, that was all right. Hey, let’s rock. Georgie felt like one of them—he was one of them. But they didn’t feel like one of him. They called him an old pervert. Baldy, they called him. Dildo. Gramps. One of them they were calling Moron even threatened to take him outside and beat the shit out of him if he didn’t fuck off. He would have welcomed a brawl, but his own team had a membership of one and those red-eyed boys with erections bulging their jeans didn’t look like they would know when to stop.

  By the time he had reached the Blue Moon, he was no longer looking for women, he was happy only to sink into a drunken stupor and let his life end that way. Just as well, for there were no women to be had, unless one of the two couples in the room should have a blowup and leave a partner behind. He had hoped to catch the old girl who used to play a melancholic piano in here, but she had been replaced by one of those twangy hillbilly types, a long loose assembly of bones with some skin on them, wearing a sweaty cowboy hat and a plaid shirt. Boots that looked like they might not have been off his feet since he grew into them. When Georgie took his stool alone at the bar, the hick was singing about dead mommies and daddies, which was a real pickup. There were two older people in a booth back in a dark corner and a young couple on the dance floor sort of melted into each other, mouths together, the guy’s big mitt on the girl’s plump little ass, the other holding her hand and pressed against her boobs. The Georgie Porgie of old might have cut in on the young stud, he could still show the little cunt a trick or two, but he had taken enough knocks for the night. “ … And each night as I wander through the graveyard, darkness hides me where I kneel to pray … ” Holy shit. They’re getting off on lines like that? When they parted mouths long enough to go into deep-gaze mode, Georgie recognized the girl: Bonali’s hotpants daughter. The one at the bank. The boy, who was at least a foot taller, looked familiar, but he couldn’t place him. Everybody around here looked familiar. It was a kind of curse. Even the bartender turned out to be a brat from the neighborhood, a kid who was in grade school when Georgie was in high school. Only he wasn’t a kid anymore either. Beardy. Already developing a gut. “White dove will mourn in sorrow,” the hayseed whined, and Georgie, though suffering a deep grief of his own, decided if there was one more fucking chorus, he was going to trash the place. Gratefully, the song came to an end, though the lovers stayed in their swaying clinch on the dance floor, grinding away softly. The girl spotted Georgie past the boy’s elbow (Georgie winked, she ducked) and whispered something to the boy and they left, and the older couple soon followed them out. The woman was either a whore or somebody’s wife. If he’d come here earlier, he might have made out. It was when everyone was out of the place that, looking around, you realized how filthy it was.