Closing Time

by Fusilli, Jim;

  “Stand up,” I said.

  “Fuck you.”

  “Stand up, Montana,” I shouted. I reached out and smacked his hands and they banged against his nose.

  And he stood, slowly.

  “You’re not even bleeding,” I said. “Wuss.”

  He looked up at me with disdain.

  Meanwhile, blood was running down my neck, spreading on my t-shirt, my black sweatshirt.

  “I ought to slice you up, you little shit.”

  He turned his head slightly, so I could get a clear view of his scar. “You think I’m afraid to be cut, man? Go ahead, I won’t even fuckin’ move.”

  He was wearing the same clothes he’d had on when I first saw him at Henderson’s: red stocking cap atop his dreadlocks, black down coat, baggy jeans, stylish black high-top basketball shoes.

  I pressed the heel of my hand against the wound. “Your name is Andre Turner. Your father is in prison, doing time for killing your mother. You were a student at Hurston Elementary, a good one, before he started abusing you.”

  He tried to remain composed, but his eyes revealed his surprise.

  “See, I know you, worm.” My hand was dripping blood.

  “You don’t know nothing,” he replied calmly. “What you said is what was.”

  I wiped my hand on my jeans. “I came here to talk to you and you cut me. Damn it.”

  “Talk to me?” he repeated. “What for? I don’t jeopardize.”

  “I want to know what happened to Aubrey Brown.” I put my back against the red buttress of an old firebox.

  “I don’t know no—”

  I cut him off. “Let’s not fuck around here. You saw Brown get killed. Either you saw it or you did it.”

  He rolled his eyes and gave me an exaggerated wave.

  “But you wouldn’t risk coming to the funeral home if you killed him. So that means you only saw it,” I said.

  “You don’t know shit.”

  “I got enough to have the cops bring you in.”

  “I been in jail before,” he boasted. “It don’t chill me.”

  “Not for manslaughter. You won’t go to juvie.”

  He snorted in disdain as he inched toward the wobbling fence. “And what? Am I supposed to be shittin’?”

  “Or maybe it’ll be Family Court. You and your father, back in front of a judge.”

  He didn’t like the idea of seeing his father or finding himself back in the system. For an instant, his bravado wavered.

  “I can see it: You, your new foster family, upstate in some cracker town, milking the cows—”

  He said sharply, “I didn’t kill nobody. So I got nothing to worry about.” He shoved his hands into the pockets of his down jacket. “Nothing.”

  “Except me.”

  “I can shake you any time I want,” he said.

  “No, I’ll find you again. Montana.”

  He thought about that and he glanced at his switchblade, which I held awkwardly, loosely, with the blade pointed at his chest.

  “Help me put it together and get yourself out of this mess.”

  “I didn’t take the wallet. I didn’t go near the car.”

  “Not enough.”

  “What?” He shook his head stubbornly, insistently, snapping his long, twisted locks. “That’s all I got.”

  “You saw it.”

  “If I did, there ain’t nothin’ I can do about it.”

  “Give him up,” I insisted.

  “Who? Give up who?”

  I said, “Amaral.”

  And he registered genuine surprise on his scarred, feline face. He slumped, as if exposed.

  “Whatever it is you owe him—”

  “Yo,” he charged, stiffening again, “I ain’t no punk.”

  “You’re bright enough to know about conspiracy after the fact,” I said.

  “Aw, get off with that.” He waved the back of his hand at me.

  “Not that I give a fuck,” I said as I looked at my bloody fingers. “Your problems are your own, little man.”

  “I can take care of myself,” he said. “Just give me my blade.”

  “Fuck that.”

  He paused. He wiped blood from his face with the side of his thumb. But he stayed quiet.

  I turned and went north. The pretty boy was behind me, at the fence, calculating his move, but there was nothing he could do.

  I kept moving, my hand under my chin.

  “Wait,” he shouted.

  As I turned and started backpedaling, he came toward me. He reached up and grabbed at his cap. “I need that motherfuckin’ blade.”

  “Trade,” I offered.

  He came closer. “What’ve I got to trade?”

  I shrugged. “Suit yourself, little man.”

  I turned and kept going, kicking an overturned trash can. Crumpled fast-food sacks and cigarette butts lay on the wet concrete.

  He shouted. “Go fuck yourself.” It echoed off the abandoned buildings, the tattered cobblestones.

  When I reached Horatio, I closed the blade and dropped it into a puddle in the gutter.

  I could hear him scramble up the dark street to retrieve it.

  I found the aluminum-and-glass tower at the center of 14th, between Ninth and Tenth. In the lobby there were potted plants, two soft chairs in teal with a cherry-stained coffee table between them and a big, circular cherry-stained security desk with video monitors. The middle-aged guard was reading a paperback novel through hornrims. A tall paper cup from Starbucks rested at his elbow.

  The blood had stopped trickling and I dabbed at my neck with my sleeve, hoping to pat away red streaks. As I leaned over to examine my wound in a mirror on the side of a black Mustang parked across from Amaral’s building, I heard a short bleat from a car horn. I looked up and saw a yellow cab at the curb. Jimmy Mango waved at me from behind the wheel.

  I went toward Ninth to meet him. He had the cab parked at a hydrant. In the front passenger’s seat was a young woman with close-cropped hair, a black top under an unbuttoned white shirt, a short black skirt. She wore black hose and had her shoes off. Her feet were in Mango’s lap. She had a 40-ounce bottle of Colt 45 between her knees.

  “Alice, Terry,” Mango said.

  “Alice,” I said.

  She nodded.

  “We seen nothin’,” Mango said. He pointed. “You got a hole in you.”

  Alice giggled.

  I crouched down. “Cut the dome light,” I said.

  Mango reached up and killed the light.

  “Jimmy, what’s the deal here?” I gestured toward Alice.

  He tugged at his dark turtleneck. “I need relief, you know what I mean, Saturday night. I been here since noon.”

  “Amaral,” I said.

  Mango shifted toward me, resting his elbow on the steering wheel. Alice pouted as she withdrew her feet.

  “He went to the dry cleaner’s. He bought a newspaper. Went to the deli. Nothing else.”

  “He see anybody?”

  “Not out here.”

  “You sure you’re on the right guy?” I asked.

  “Definitely.” He nodded. “By the way, you’re out two hundred bucks with the day guard. Fuckin’ thief. The night guard, that fuckin’ librarian over there, he’s a cheap date. Twenty-five bucks.”

  “Anybody go in?”

  He shook his head. “The guards’ll tip me if he gets a visitor.”

  As I stood, I saw a pizza box in the backseat. “Where’d you get that?”

  “Alice is an angel,” he replied and tapped her knee. She smiled curtly.

  “Jimmy,” I said, “you’ve got to be alert now. This is the guy.”

  “I figured.”

  “You got a phone?”

  He pointed toward the glove compartment. “But fuck the phone. Let’s take him down now.”

  I said no. “Not tonight.”

  “Whatever. I’m on the clock. Better for me.”

  “Amaral moves, you call me. A kid with a long s
car on his face comes to see him, you call me.”

  “No prob.”

  “You can’t reach me, you call Tommy.”

  Mango smiled darkly. “Tommy don’t give a shit, Four, about some spook driver. You oughta know that.”

  That sounded right. But it was after 2 A.M., my chin throbbed and I was freezing on the shadowy side street. It wasn’t worth considering an alternative. “You can’t reach me, call your brother. All right?”

  Reluctantly, he agreed.

  I tapped him on the arm and nodded good-night to Alice, who tiredly rolled her eyes up toward a heavy layer of mascara.

  I started toward Ninth, then stopped and went back. Mango was taking a pull at the 40-ounce.

  “Where’d you get the cab, Jimmy?” I asked.

  He wiped his damp lips with his sleeve. “Aw, Four, you don’t wanna know that.”

  Alice was giggling as I left.

  ELEVEN

  I fumbled with the security code in the dull, tinted light outside my house, and silently swore at myself as I stood on the wet steps and punched the buttons again. I wanted to catch my breath, sneak in, slip into the half-bath off the kitchen and clean up before rousing Diddio, who’d be nodding in front of VH1, or accidentally waking up Bella and giving her a fright. In the morning, I’d lie to her: It’d be better than telling her I was cut by a boy who, had he been hard enough, would’ve raked the blade across my throat and left me gasping and bubbling in the rain as he watched me die. Another lesson learned, and a slice on the chin was a small price to pay.

  I got the right four-digit combination, slid a key into the second dead bolt, quietly eased the knob around and stepped inside.

  Bella and Diddio were at the kitchen table, drinking hot cocoa, toying with a multicolored Fisher-Price xylophone.

  “She heard the door close when you went out, man,” Diddio said immediately. “I didn’t wake her up. I didn’t.”

  Bella asked, “What happened to you?”

  “I fell.”

  “On your chin?”

  “I fell on my chin.”

  She shook her head, calmly, as if I were her child, exasperating her once again. I knew her: It was a preemptive strike.

  “You are very lucky that you didn’t get hit by a car,” she said. “Why would you go out running at night wearing black?”

  I looked at her, sitting there in her ankle-length cotton nightgown, her bare feet in her untied bowling shoes, jean jacket over her shoulders, a paper clip on her earlobe.

  “I think it’s time for a ‘young lady’ speech,” I said.

  “Uh, Terry,” Diddio interrupted, “maybe you ought to do something about that hole in your face first.” I noticed that Bella’s fedora was perched precariously on his head.

  I went into the bathroom to dry off and work on the cut, shutting the door behind me, twisting the faucet all the way open to get the water hot enough to soothe. On the other side of the door: tentative music, plink-plink. Outside, the rain continued unabated and I could hear it against the small window above the sink.

  I studied myself in the mirror, under a bare bulb: streaks of blood caked on my neck below a ragged scab that had begun to form on my chin. I looked in my eyes. If I’d learned anything tonight, there was no evidence of it there. I saw the same eyes I’d looked into when I was adrift as a boy; a feckless, self-doubting teenager; a young man. The same eyes I’d seen when the world had blown apart.

  My hair was wet and unruly, and rivulets of rainwater and sweat ran down my cheeks. I needed a shave.

  “Dad, hurry up,” Bella shouted. “I want to show you something.”

  “Give me a minute,” I said, over the rushing water.

  I grabbed a towel from the bar behind me and ran it around my head. The peroxide was under the sink. Cotton balls? There, as well, near the Band-Aids. I set out to fix myself.

  I came downstairs in a clean t-shirt and running shorts and found a cup of steaming hot cocoa in front of my seat at the table.

  “Bella,” I said as I sat to join them, “do you have any idea what time it is?”

  “Sure. There’s a clock on the wall over the sink, and one in the stove.”

  “Perhaps I should be more direct.”

  “Listen to this,” she instructed. She picked up the plastic mallets and began to pluck out a familiar riff on the toy xylophone.

  “Name that tune,” Diddio said, as Bella continued.

  ‘“Sunshine of Your Love,”’ I offered.

  “Right,” Bella said. “Now, this one.”

  I waited. I recognized it, but couldn’t come up with the name.

  Diddio began to sing along. “‘In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida, baby …’” He cleared his throat. “We’re working on ‘Voodoo Chile.’”

  “Christ, Bella, those songs were old when I was a kid.”

  “Dennis says they’re classics.”

  “She’s a prodigy, Terry, I’m telling you. A regular Mozart. Or Steve Winwood.”

  “All right, enough creativity,” I announced. “It’s time for bed.” I looked at Diddio. “No sense in you going out in the rain. You take my room.”

  His eyes brightened. “A bed. Wow, I haven’t slept in a bed in months.”

  Diddio had a futon, a purple thing. It was as comfortable as wet sand.

  As she stood, Bella said, “I’m teaching Dennis to play chess.” She withdrew two bills from her jacket. “I’m up six bucks.”

  She headed up the stairs, but not before giving Diddio a peck on the cheek, and not before she took back her frayed fedora, exchanging it for the paper-clip earring. I followed, watching her shoelaces flap.

  I stood by the door frame as she hung her jacket in her closet and kicked her shoes off to slide them into their proper spot under the bed. She took a moment to stick the two bills into the trunk of her pink Barbie car, then bounced onto her floral down spread.

  “I’m going to try to make it to 3 A.M.,” she told me. “I’ve never been awake at three in the morning.”

  “You’re very ambitious,” I said. “Will I see you before noon?”

  “Did you really fall?”

  I hesitated. “It’s a long story.”

  She pointed. “It seems unlikely that you could fall on that spot,” she said. “Let me see your palms. Any scrapes?”

  “I’ll explain,” I said, “but not at 2:46.”

  “Does it hurt?”

  “Not as bad as cutting myself shaving, but yes, a little.”

  “Come here,” she said. “I’ll kiss you happy.”

  I leaned forward and she gave me a gentle kiss on the point of my chin.

  “Mama used to say that.”

  “I know,” I said. “‘I’ll kiss you happy.’”

  She snuggled under the covers and smiled up at me. “I had a good day, Dad.”

  Somehow, we had succeeded in making it seem like it used to be, like it could have been, if only for a few hours.

  I touched her cheek. Her skin was as soft as when she was a baby. I laid my finger on the tip of her nose, which was no longer the tiny bud it had been, and wished I could be as affectionate as I once was.

  “Don’t give Dennis his six dollars back.”

  I shook my head.

  “More basketball tomorrow,” she instructed.

  “Maybe. We’ve got tickets for a play, remember?”

  She nodded.

  “You got Moose?”

  She reached under the top sheet, rummaged around a bit and came up with the stuffed animal.

  “Good night, Dad.”

  “Good night, little angel.”

  I cut the overhead light and closed the door behind me. As I walked down the hall, I noticed Diddio had already made his way into my bedroom.

  “Thanks, man.” A muffled, though grateful, voice from behind my door.

  I went downstairs, bare feet on creaking wood.

  Prodded by a stiff neck from the short night on the sofa, I woke up earlier than I might have wanted to. The c
omforter I’d pulled from the hall closet was on the floor, as was a cassette bearing Diddio’s scrawl. The band’s name was the Insolent Bastards. I guess they don’t cover “Kumbaya,” I thought, as I stood and felt for the bandage, which had stayed in place under my aching chin.

  I headed toward the bathroom off the kitchen. It was a little after nine, and still raining, though it was back to the weighty mist it had been before turning into a downpour around four, when I’d cut the computer and headed for the couch. Morning light seemed to be struggling to get through. Maybe it would clear; there might be time for basketball, before heading back to the Village and Minetta Lane for Shaw and his Raina and ridiculous Sergius and the ablest man in Bulgaria.

  I brushed my teeth and washed carefully. I decided against shaving for now; I would later, when I was ready to change the bandage and examine the cut. The terrazzo floor felt cold against my feet and I felt a chill on my legs. October revealed the subtle flaws in this 150-year-old brick-and-wood house; I’d forgotten them over the warm summer. I’d have to put in the storm windows sometime next week.

  The phone in the kitchen was a cordless model. As I went to the refrigerator for a bottle of Badoit, I punched in the number I’d gotten last night.

  I decided to let it ring. If I woke her, I’d apologize.

  She got it on the third ring.

  “Hello?”

  “Yes.”

  “Julie, it’s Terry Orr.”

  “Terry, hi.” She seemed pleased. “How did you get—”

  “The Rosemont College alumni directory. You’re on the membership committee.”

  “Right. The Web site.”

  I sat at the kitchen table, pushing the xylophone aside. I hope I didn’t—”

  “No,” she replied. “I was getting ready for church.”

  I imagined Julie Giada in a smart dress and black flats, her moon face solemn, though not enough to mar her bright eyes, her warm smile. Sharon Knight had told me she let Julie query the jurors they wanted to keep. Julie’s smile swung them to the state’s side before the first witness hit the stand. Sharon said, “She’s a good girl. And happy.”

  “Julie, I need a favor.”

  “Sure, Terry.”

  “A tough one on a Sunday morning.”

  “Then I’ll say I’ll try.”

  I could hear her smile.