by Thomas Cobb
At home, Clint Eastwood is on the late movie, a Union soldier, wounded, tended by the teachers and students at a girls’ school. Bad has seen this one three or four times now. At the end, the girls, mad with jealousy, will poison him with mushrooms. He watches it anyway, with the ads for discount furniture and apartment complexes where “you can find the lifestyle you have always dreamed of.” Bad is into his fourth drink. Clint Eastwood has found the lifestyle he always dreamed of. Women and girls lie awake all night in the school building, waiting for him to drag his wounded leg to their beds. And what of it? In thirty minutes he will die, screaming and farting.
He is heading for the kitchen, ready for more ice, when the phone rings.
“God,” he says, “I’m glad it’s you, honey. It’s been a hell of a night. It looks like I’m going to lose Terry. I just break in a new bass and I have to start looking for a new rhythm guitar. Sometimes this business is the shits. How are you?”
“I guess I’m all right. I’m sorry about your guitar player.”
“Aw hell, that’s all right. You can’t throw a rock anymore without hitting one. Take it from one who is one, guitar players are cheap and available.”
“I’m sorry anyway.”
“It’s O.K. Everything will be O.K. in a couple of days. I’ve been missing you real bad. I’m going around tomorrow to see about those interviews.”
“Bad, I’m not sure.”
“About what? What’s the matter?”
“I just can’t. This isn’t right. I mean, it’s not working out.”
“You mean because I asked you to marry me? Hell, I just said that. I didn’t mean it. I didn’t mean to make you feel bad about it. Just forget it.”
“You did mean it. And that’s part of the problem. I’m not ready for this.”
“You don’t have to be ready for anything. Nothing’s changed. It’s not any different than it was last week.”
“Yes. Yes, I think it is.”
“Come on, darlin’, I was feelin’ out of sorts. I got all jumped thinking about you comin’ here. I just blurted that out. It was liquor talkin’, that’s all, liquor and being happy. That’s the only damned thing it was.”
“Oh God, Bad. I don’t know. I like you, I really do. But I don’t want this to get out of hand.”
“Nothing’s out of hand. We have a good time, you and me and ol’ Buddy. I’m just anxious to see you two. I’ve been looking forward to it like you don’t know how. Me and Buddy’re going to rip and snort. Me and you will figure something to do, too.”
“Maybe I overreacted a little. I don’t know. I guess I want to see you, too.”
“There you go, darlin’, there you go.”
Along the concourse, he lurches like a truck on ice, trying to move faster than his crutches allow. Still, all around him, people are moving faster than he can, pushing past him, pulling up behind him, struggling into step behind him, then darting out and around him with sighs of exasperation. A man in a tan cotton suit rams him full from behind, sending him into the wall and almost knocking him down. “Come back here, you son-of-a-bitch,” he yells. “I may look crippled, but I can still kick your ass down this hall, horseshit.”
At gate twenty-three, there are no seats left. He stands away from the chairs, across the concourse against the wall, smoking cigarettes. The plane, due in ten minutes, is running twenty minutes late. He is able to brace himself against the wall, leaning on his crutches, his bad foot resting on the wall. He smokes and he tips his black hat to people who pass. Celebrity fades, but its obligations don’t.
After ten minutes, the crutches have begun to dig into his armpits. He can’t find a position that doesn’t hurt. He moves across the concourse to the seating area. There still aren’t any empty chairs. He finds a man in a blue seersucker suit, reading a newspaper. “Howdy,” Bad says. The man looks up, blinks, and goes back to his newspaper, reading it like a child sounding out the words. Bad lights a Pall Mall and blows the smoke over the man’s head. After several seconds of this, the man looks up again, blankly. “Ashtray’s on the other side of you, old buddy.” The man looks over at the ashtray, back to Bad and then to his paper. “I’m a cripple, for Christ sake,” Bad barks. The man scowls and moves off. Bad slides gratefully into the seat, crushes out his cigarette, and realizes he wants a drink.
He keeps his seat for a good twenty minutes. He leans over and asks the woman next to him the time. The plane should be landing now. He heaves himself out of the low seat and to the window. Around the terminal, men are lounging in baggage carts. There are no screens that give arrival times, only departures. At the podium, one attendant is checking in passengers. “Darlin’,” he asks, “where’s the plane from New Mexico?” She stares at him blankly. “There is no plane from New Mexico.”
A wave of fear passes through him. “What the hell?” he asks. Then he remembers the note in his shirt pocket. “Flight four twenty-one,” he says.
“Denver,” she says. “Flight four twenty-one is from Denver.”
“But where the hell is it?”
She stares the same blank stare. “I don’t know,” she says. “It’s running late.”
How late? he begins to ask, and then gives up and starts back the concourse to the screens in the lobby, which give arrival times. The bastards have lost the fucking airplane.
The arrival time has been pushed back another half hour. He heads for the bar.
He leans against the bar, orders a double Jack Daniel’s, and while he waits, the guy on the stool next to him gets up and offers it. Drinkers are the last decent people on earth. He gets another double before he has to work his way down the concourse again.
They are there waiting, looking for him. Jean is wearing a yellow dress he has never seen before. He has expected to see her in blue jeans and shirt and he is disappointed, though she looks good, younger and prettier than he remembers. Buddy is holding her hand, staring wide-eyed. Jean sees him and smiles and pokes Buddy, pointing to Bad as he swings toward them. Buddy grins hard, then goes serious.
The feel of her pressed against him is better than he remembers, better than his expectation. He doesn’t want to let go. When he looks down, Buddy has retreated behind her, holding her skirt. “Hey,” Bad says, “old Buddy.” Buddy looks down and blushes.
“He’s pretty excited,” Jean says. “He hasn’t talked about anything else for a week. We’ll have to take it a little easy.”
To get to the baggage claim they have to take the escalator. He still can’t find the rhythm to match it with his crutches. Jean helps both of them onto the moving steps.
“I don’t know why they make airports into goddamned obstacle courses,” he complains. “These bastards don’t give a damn about anything. Everything is a goddamned mess. They lost your damn plane.”
“We had to wait out a storm in Denver.”
“I don’t know why the hell you went to Denver in the first place. Denver’s way the hell north, Houston’s south. Should have gone to Albuquerque or someplace. Why the hell can’t they fly straight lines?”
“For God’s sake,” she says. “I wasn’t flying the plane, you know.”
He stops, looks at her, and then grabs and hugs her in the middle of the baggage claim, where people are jostling and rushing to get their bags. “I was just so anxious for you to get here,” he says. He thinks he might cry.
On the way into town it hits him that the city is ugly and looks cheap. He wants something better. As they near the North Main exit, they can see the skyline jutting out of the late afternoon haze. “My Lord,” Jean says.
“I’ll show it to you at night. It’s a lot prettier than this. It really is. It isn’t like this at night. You’ve got to see it.”
He wakes mired and struggling to get free. Fully awake, he finds Jean snuggled into his back, Buddy up from the sofa and curled on the bed against Bad’s legs. Cramped and sweating, Bad cannot remember the last time he woke like this—completely happy.
“Y
ou like them rocket ships, ol’ Buddy?” Bad asks. Platters of oysters and shrimp on ice keep appearing on the table. Bad can’t convince Buddy that letting cold oysters slide down your throat is eating, but Buddy keeps eating shrimp, alternating them with pieces of fried chicken.
“I’ve never seen him eat like this,” Jean says. “We have to slow him down before he makes himself sick.”
“Let him go, hon. I’ve always believed folks could live a real good life with nothing but shrimp, bourbon and ice. The boy’s learning stuff that can keep him happy the rest of his life. He’ll always know that old Bad taught him the finer things.”
“That building there, the one with the star on top. That’s where Sam Houston and his boys beat Santa Anna and his Mexicans. Texas got its start right there. If it wasn’t for that spot, we’d be speaking Mexican right now. You know any Mexican, Buddy?”
Buddy doesn’t, but he wants to stop and see the battlefield, and Bad obliges, wheeling the van off the road. He is tired and aching from walking miles through the Johnson Space Center in the morning, twisting and turning to get his crippled bulk through the narrow passages of the space shuttle mockup, but he is catching Buddy’s enthusiasm.
Where are the dead Mexicans? Buddy wants to know. Behind all of his enthusiasm is disappointment. The rockets at the space center did not move, and the battlefield is a green and grassy park which suggests picnics and Frisbees and not death and gunpowder. Maybe you just had to be there, Bad guesses.
“I know this fellow down at the Post. He’s O.K. He does music, but he’s been there forever, I reckon he knows everyone he’d need to know. I told him you were coming.”
They are tired and happy from lovemaking, moving and talking slow. Jean raises up on an elbow, pulling a sweated lock of her hair that has stuck to Bad’s chest. “I’m really not sure about this, Bad.”
“Hell, it’s career stuff. I know that. But you’re good, hon. You got to work with that. You wrote better about me than anyone else ever has, even when you told the truth.”
“Well, I guess I know you better than any other reporter, right?”
When he doesn’t respond, she repeats the question, curling some of his chest hair around her finger and pulling gently but firmly. “Right?”
“Maybe,” he says, “you know me better than it’s good for you to know. But what I got to tell you is that this is career stuff. I understand. If you came here, that would be nice. We could have more times like this. You’d like that, wouldn’t you? I sure as hell would. But there wouldn’t be any hold on you. I ain’t trying to trick you into something. You ain’t got nothing to worry about as far as I’m concerned.”
She moves up and closer, so her breath is warm and loud in his ear. “More times like this would be nice,” she whispers.
I ain’t so bad, he thinks. I’m going to make me some money. I got steady work, I could cut back on the drinking. I could even quit if I really put myself to it. He goes to sleep thinking, I wouldn’t be so bad, really.
“The Post wants you to come by around ten-thirty,” he says, coming back to the breakfast table. Jean is dressed in a white blouse and beige skirt, a matching jacket over the back of her chair. She is reading the position papers Martin Wilks left. Buddy is in the chair next to hers. Bad, unsure what Buddy would eat for breakfast, has bought boxes of Froot Loops, Count Chocula, Smurfs and Captain Crunch. Buddy has opened all of them and is busy mixing them together in a bowl.
“You need some pickles to go with that, old Bud?”
“Jesus, Bad, tell me you aren’t going to work for this guy.”
“Hell, I don’t know. It seems like a good deal. Lots of publicity. I like a lot of things the guy says.”
“Of course,” she says. “Because he only says things he thinks people want to hear. These aren’t position papers, they’re just a collection of the worst clichés of the Bible-Belt right.”
“Well, he’s a Christian. I respect that. I mean, I ain’t done real well with it, but I was brought up to believe it.”
“No, Bad, it’s not even that. One sentence he’s a right-wing Christian, the next he’s a feminist, the next he’s pro-labor. This doesn’t even make sense; he’s just thrown in a bunch of sappy things he thinks people want to hear. There’s nothing in this.”
Bad pauses and thinks. “Like the Baldwin Boys,” he says. “He’s doing politics the way the Baldwin Boys do music, is that what you’re telling me?”
“What? What are you talking about?”
“The Balds. They don’t do music, they do hooks. It’s all a bunch of hooks. You throw out the hooks, you haven’t got a mosquito fart left. It’s empty. That’s what you’re telling me, isn’t it?”
“God.” She laughs. “I guess. Damned if I know.”
“A fucking Baldwin Boy,” he says. “Goddamn. The bastard shows up around here again, I’ll kick his butt so hard it’ll land across the street two minutes before the rest of him. I hate that shit.”
She gets up from her chair and hugs him from behind, laughing. “I hope to God He didn’t make more than one of you.” Then, “And I’m glad I found the one He did.”
“This is the way we’ll work it,” he tells her. “I drop you off at the Post at ten-thirty, and then you can take a cab downtown to the restaurant and I’ll buy you a good Cajun lunch, then you can head over to the Chronicle after lunch.”
“What about Buddy?” she asks. “What are you going to do?”
“I got that all figured. I’m going to take Buddy downtown and we’re going to see the tunnels. Hey, Bud, you want to see a city underneath the city, with all kinds of tunnels right under the streets and buildings?”
“Tunnels?” Jean asks.
“Yeah, tunnels, all under the city. They’re all air-conditioned, and they have shops and restaurants. Buddy will love it. He’s never seen anything like it. You just go talk to the newspapers and Buddy and I’ll have a good time. At noon, we’ll just rise right up out of the ground and take you to lunch.”
“Yeah,” Buddy says, “right up out of the ground. Like that man on TV.”
“What man?”
“On TV,” Buddy insists.
When they get off the elevator in the parking garage, they are in the tunnel. It is lit with fluorescent light and there is gray carpet that rises halfway up the walls. “Let’s stop and listen,” Bad says. “People are walking right on top of our heads, maybe we can hear them.”
When they have walked for half an hour, moving from the carpeted tunnel into the tiled tunnel, Bad is getting tired and sore. Worse, he is starting to sweat and shake. It is still half an hour until time to meet Jean up on the street. “Hey, sailor,” he says, pulling Buddy up short. “What do you say we go into that place right there and wet our whistles?”
“Double J.D.,” Bad says, “and a ginger ale—double.” He looks down to Buddy. “I want mine rocks, Bud, how ’bout you?”
“Rocks.”
“Kind of slow today,” he says as the bartender brings their drinks.
“Another forty-five minutes, an hour, it’ll pick up.”
The bar is dark and paneled, full of small tables and upholstered chairs on twisted brass legs. While the chairs look comfortable, the tables are small and crowded, designed to keep the clientele moving. It is no bar for relaxing over long drinks. Muzak fills the air. Bad looks around. There is no jukebox.
“That music drive you crazy?”
“Never hear it,” the bartender says, “until I turn it off at night.”
“Here,” Buddy says. He holds a maraschino cherry in the palm of his hand.
“What am I supposed to do with it, Bud?”
“Eat it.”
Bad pops it in his mouth, chews vigorously, then stops, holding his breath and widening his eyes as if it were hot coal in his mouth. Buddy watches in alarm until Bad smiles and pushes the still whole cherry between his lips. Buddy shrieks with laughter.
“He’s a great kid,” Bad tells the bartender.
> “Yeah, kids are O.K.”
“You got any?”
“No. Don’t really plan to.”
Buddy has found the garnishes at the barmaid’s station. He brings Bad cherries, olives, lemon and lime slices. The lemon slices Bad bites with his front teeth, then curls back his lips to show the yellow smile. “Hit that again,” he tells the bartender, pushing his glass forward.
“I had a kid once. I fucked that up. I really did. You ought to have one. He was the best thing in the world. You don’t have a kid, you’re going to regret it someday.”
Buddy is back with pretzel sticks. Bad wedges them into his mouth like the bars of a jail, then breaks them with his tongue. Buddy screams and runs off to find something else.
“I’m serious about this,” Bad says. “I’ve had just about everything a man could want in his life. Hell, I’ve had money, fame, houses, cars, women. Anything I damned wanted, I got. And I lost most of it, too. And if you’re lucky, you realize when you lose the stuff that it didn’t mean that much anyway. But my boy. My God. That means a whole hell of a lot. My boy won’t even talk to me now. That’s a hell of a thing,” he says, paying for another drink.
“Well,” the bartender says, “my wife’s got a good career. She’s with a Big Eight firm. I’m going to night school. It’s hard to have two careers and kids, too. Maybe. Someday. But I don’t think so.”
“A woman can have a career. Hell, there’s nothing wrong with that. That boy’s momma is out interviewing at the Post right now, but she’s one hell of a mom, too.” He looks around for Buddy.
“Buddy, come on back. Finish your ginger ale. We’ve got to be going.”
But Buddy doesn’t come back or answer. Bad looks around the bar. It’s empty. What the hell, he thinks. “Did you see the boy?” he asks.
“No, I wasn’t watching. He might be in the bathroom, though.”
“Sure,” Bad says, “that’s right. He went to the bathroom.” He takes a long sip of his drink.