Polk put his weight on his good foot and stood up straight. He brushed gravel and dust off his windbreaker and Wranglers and walked back toward Valdez without emotion. Through all of it the skinny man had not moved, and neither he nor Valdez had looked directly at Constantine.
“You can keep pushing me,” Polk said, “but I’m going to see Grimes. He owes me money.”
Valdez laughed shortly as he flicked some loose skin off the bridge of his blunt nose. “You were right, Pops. I lied. And Mr. Grimes told me you wouldn’t go away. So he said for you to come back early tomorrow. We’ll have a big meeting, talk about your money and maybe a lot more. Ten o’clock. Okay?”
Polk said, “Tell him to have the twenty grand ready, ten A.M.”
Polk turned and limped back toward the Dodge. Constantine followed, heading for the passenger side.
Valdez spoke to their backs: “By the way, who’s your sidekick?”
Polk answered, kept walking. “My friend’s name is Constantine.”
The skinny man said, “Some friend.”
Constantine slid into the car, their laughter trailing him like a dead leg. Polk got in and fired the engine, reversing the Dodge onto the two-lane without a word. He threw it in drive and headed down the road.
Valdez and the skinny man, who was called Gorman, watched the Dodge take the curve and disappear. They walked to the Caddy and got in, Gorman closing the gate with a touch to the gadget clipped onto the visor. He turned the car around without going off the asphalt and drove slowly back toward the house.
Valdez said, “Step on it, man. I want to catch the end of ‘A Lifetime of Love.’ I swear to Christ, I been waiting all month for Taurus to nail that brunette. Fuckin’ Polk.”
Gorman gave the Cadillac some gas. “What’s with the twenty grand?”
“Ancient history,” Valdez said. “A job we did six years ago. The old man, he’s a hard dick, he comes by every coupla years for this money he says Grimes owes him. We always send him on his way.”
“What about tomorrow?”
“Grimes wants to put him on the Uptown job. He’s a gimp, but he’s a good gun.”
“What if he don’t wanna go out on the Uptown job?”
“I don’t know,” Valdez said. “Grimes is getting tired of him. I think maybe this time, the old man pushes it too far, Grimes is gonna have me kill him.”
Gorman yawned, then rubbed his cheek. “His friend’s got weird eyes, like he don’t give two shits about nothin’. You notice?”
Valdez said, “I noticed.”
“What are you gonna do about him?” Gorman said.
Valdez shrugged. “If he makes me,” he said, “I guess I kill him too.”
POLK returned to Route 4 and headed northwest. Constantine glanced at the old man, who was grinning now, humming something through his teeth, as if he had not been threatened, as if fifteen minutes earlier he had not been pushed down into the dirt.
“Listen, Polk, about that back there—”
“Don’t sweat it,” Polk said. “That was acting. We’re all a bunch of actors, understand? Anyway, you played it right.”
Constantine watched the signs as they approached 301. He could take that south across the Potomac River Bridge into Virginia, maybe down into the Carolinas, maybe back to Murrel’s Inlet. He could do that and get away from this, right now.
“I’ll get out up ahead,” he said.
Polk smiled. “Don’t give up on me yet, Connie. We’ll swing back and pick up that money tomorrow morning, then shoot south. In the meantime, we’ll just head on into D.C. for the night. I’ve got a girlfriend we can stay with, a swell girl by the name of Charlotte.” Polk turned his head and winked at Constantine “She’s got girlfriends, too.”
Constantine drummed his fingers on the dash as they passed across 301. The traffic had thickened, and the air had lost its green smell. “Washington—I don’t think so, Polk.”
Polk looked at Constantine’s dour expression, his slightly pale face. “What the hell’s wrong with you, son? We drive into town, we spend the night, we’re gone in the morning. You can count on it.”
“It’s no big deal,” Constantine said without conviction.
“So what’s the problem?”
“There isn’t any, I guess. It’s just”—Constantine cleared his throat—“I was raised in D.C., understand? And I haven’t been back in seventeen years.”
Polk and Constantine drove in silence for the next few miles. Finally Polk looked across the bench. “We don’t have to go in,” Polk said. “Not if you don’t want.”
Constantine squirmed in his seat, pushed hair away from his face. “Fuck it, Polk,” he said. “Just drive.”
Polk grinned. “No big deal, right Connie? We pick up the money in the morning, and then we drift south, That okay by you?”
“Sure,” said Constantine. “Long as we keep drifting.”
Chapter
3
LONG as we keep drifting.
That had been Constantine’s sole conviction for the past seventeen years.
He had left home at eighteen, a summer graduate of a military high school academy, enlisting immediately for a four-year stint in me Marine Corps. He loathed both the order and the ridiculous concept of uniformed teenagers that marked his high school years, and had in fact possessed both the grades and the SAT scores for entrance into a moderately respectable liberal arts college. But he had enlisted in the corps partly because it was a free, stringless ticket out of the neighborhood, and specifically because it was against his father’s wishes.
His father had said, in a rare display of emotion, that “only trash go into the service these days,” and Constantine had said, “Is that all you’ve got to say about it? How about ‘good luck’?” His father’s only reply was, “You disgust me.”
On the last night before he shipped out, Constantine stayed with his girlfriend Katherine, whom he had met at the Catholic sister school dance the previous fall. They smoked from a bag of Colombian, drank cherry wine, and made love throughout the night on the hill that led to the woods bordering the neighborhood’s elementary school. At dawn, Katherine promised to write every week. Constantine kissed her one last time and walked back to his house to get his gear.
His father was up in his own bedroom dressing for work. Constantine retrieved his duffel bag and sat in the dark stillness of the living room, waiting for his father to come downstairs and say good-bye. But his father did not come down the stairs, and after a while Constantine put the strap of the duffel bag across his shoulder and walked out into the street.
Later that day, his friends Mai and Gary, a couple of spent-heads, drove him to the airport in Mal’s ‘68 Firebird, in part because Constantine said they could finish the rest of his weed before he got on the plane. This they did, and in what was to become an informal pattern, Constantine would desensitize himself with drugs and alcohol before departing for new pastures.
At the airport that day, Constantine bought a magazine from the newsstand. It was the month of October in 1975, and Constantine could always peg the date of his matriculation into boot camp, as at the time he was a mild Springsteen fan (“Kitty’s Back” was his and Katherine’s song), and Bruce was on the cover of both Time and Newsweek on the rack. Mal and Gary were Bachman-Turner Overdrive freaks, and they teased Constantine about “waxing off” on Bruce’s photo in the plane’s head. That was their way of saying good-bye, along with a weak promise to write. Of course, they did not write. As for Katherine, she wrote twice, and that was that.
Boot camp was Parris Island. Constantine felt mentally prepared for it—the sterility, the regimentation, even the waxen, brush-cut DIs—and the whole business was a bit of a relief from the morguish, airless atmosphere that had dominated his father’s house. Vietnam had “ended” the previous April, so there was little danger of seeing any action, lending an unspoken element of relaxation to the proceedings.
The truth was, Constantine enjoyed that time. H
e learned to handle firearms and found he was something of a natural marksman. The drills made him hard and lean, and there was seldom time for thought. His relative contentment was not universal—often he would be awakened in the barracks by young men who talked achingly in their sleep, mostly to their mothers. But Constantine’s mother had died long ago, and he neither thought nor dreamed of her. In fact, he never dreamed of anything at all.
For the most part, Constantine kept to himself, both at Parris Island and then at Camp LeJeune in North Carolina. He was not disliked, though at first his rather laconic presence was interpreted as snobbery by his fellow marines. Later, when Constantine began to box (a personal challenge for him that held no reward beyond the challenge itself), his quiet and sometimes terse demeanor would be seen as a kind of post-Beat cool. This newfound respect reached its apex when Constantine fought a young man named Montoya, a reputed middleweight with a steel forehead and a steel jaw. The fight was bet heavily on base, particularly by officers, and Constantine was later surprised to find that the bets were split fairly evenly. In the ring, the bout was active and bloody, and the stories about it circulated for months. He lost to Montoya (that steel forehead), bat went the distance; it was his last fight in the service.
Constantine experienced the Beat the first time while stationed at LeJeune. He had gotten a weekend pass, and taken it with a friend named Stewart to Morehead City on the Carolina coast. The two of them had a mutual interest in cars—Stewart was a motorhead and a cracker, and looked the part of both—and that interest had brought them together. Once in Morehead, they found themselves drunk and womanless. Even in civilian clothes, they looked like soldiers, in a time when being a soldier was the least hip thing to be.
Somehow the two of them wound up walking in a residential district at three o’clock in the morning. Stewart had modestly walked to the side of a split-level house to urinate, and then they were both in the backyard of the house looking up at the lit second-story bedroom window, and minutes later one of them had turned the knob on the unlocked back door, and finally they were standing in the pitch-black basement of the house. Later, neither of them could explain or admit why they had walked into a random occupied house in a strange town and stood for fifteen minutes, without attempting to steal one thing, in its basement.
It was in the dark of that basement that Constantine felt what he would call the Beat. At first it had been a weakness of the knees, and then it had been the conscious counter-effort to control the adrenaline that told him to run. Stewart had succumbed to that part of it, tugging at Constantine’s shirt, whispering urgently as they both heard the muffled voices above, the tentative steps of the home’s residents padding toward their phone. But Constantine stayed in the house well after Stewart had left, and the adrenaline turned into a warm calm, a wash of power, and a distinct awareness of his sex. The Beat was knowing he was into something wrong, and the fear of it, and the point when the fear was no longer there. It was a hot buzz; it was in his jeans and his chest, and it was white hot in his head.
Constantine left the house calmly, walked down the street, and met Stewart at the corner. The cop cars came soon after that, sirenless and without cherries, but Constantine and Stewart were out of sight by then, lying beneath parked cars. Constantine felt the Beat once more as a searchlight passed across his folded arms, and then the cops were gone, and so was the Beat.
That was the most memorable night of Constantine’s stay in the service. He had enlisted as an act of rebellion against the old man, and after four years he had learned to use a gun and he had learned to fight with his hands. Those were the very elements that defined manhood to his father; at the time, the irony eluded Constantine.
He stayed in the South, taking advantage of his Marine Corps benefits, and enrolled in an arm of the University of South Carolina called Coastal Carolina, in Conway, just outside of Myrtle Beach. Constantine studied French because the sound of the language intrigued him, and because the prettiest coeds hung out at the Foreign Languages building, though he had no intention of turning the knowledge or the degree into a career. He was not interested then, nor would he ever be, in a career of any kind.
Occasionally Constantine would split a joint with one of those coeds after class, and once or twice the joint led to something sweaty and momentarily satisfying at his place, a trailer he rented on the cheap at Murrells Inlet. The trailer came with a fourteen-foot Boston Whaler, and when the tide was up on hot, slow afternoons Constantine could take the Whaler and a cooler filled with Pabst Blue Ribbon through the wetlands to Garden City. Sometimes he would fish the black waters of the Waccamaw River, and he would bring the fish back, clean it, and pan-fry it as the sun went down behind his place.
To pay the bills, Constantine worked as a line cook and expediter at a Tex-Mex joint in Myrtle Beach. At twenty-seven he was the grand old man of the mostly college-age staff, and he was afforded the accompanying respect. The waitresses were uniformly blond and brown-skinned, in full bloom, and Constantine partook when the opportunities arose. After the dinner rush he would take his Marlboros and a cold pitcher of draft beer and sit on a log in the back of the restaurant, and he would smoke and drink as he looked up at the stars, and he would smell the pleasant summer green of South Carolina. He liked working at the restaurant and living in Murrells Inlet as much as anything he had ever done.
Only once in that time did Constantine feel the Beat. He had been dropped off late one night on the highway after a drinking game at a bar in Myrtle, and he had tried to hitchhike back toward the Inlet. Before he could get a ride, he walked by a house where an unlocked Plymouth Duster sat shining under a blue light in the driveway. Constantine hot-wired the ignition, and as it sparked and the lights came on inside the house, he began to feel the Beat. He gunned the Plymouth onto the interstate as the screaming occupants of the house chased him on foot, and the rush inside him faded as they disappeared from the glow of his taillights. He parked the car a block from his trailer and walked to his bed, where he quickly fell to sleep. The next morning he lit a Marlboro as he casually walked by the police, who were dusting the car for prints. He knew that his prints were not on file, and he knew that no one had seen his face behind the wheel of the Plymouth.
The incident was typical, as in those years few bad things touched Constantine. One morning, when he was turning over his boat at the waterline, a moccasin as black and fat as a tire slithered oat across his feet, and early on he caught the clap from an orange-haired waitress at a pool hall and bar called Magasto’s, in South Myrtle. But these were things that affected him only mildly, and if he learned anything at all it was to keep a sharp eye out for snakes and women who used cheap dye to color their hair.
Constantine left South Carolina three years after receiving his degree. He was nearly thirty, and he had ten thousand restaurant dollars rolled in a shoe box beneath his bed. He sold everything he could not fit into a backpack, bought an old ragtop Barracuda, and headed southwest.
He drove slowly through the South, stopping for a few months in Baton Rouge, where he worked briefly in the kitchen of a bar on the Mississippi River. The bar had a wooden floor filmed with sawdust, and the jukebox played Jimmie Rodgers, Big Joe Turner, and Carl Perkins. Willie Hall, the proprietor, was a bald man with a square head and small green eyes, and he took a liking to Constantine. Hall had inherited the bar from a childless uncle, but his real love was horses. He bred them on a small ranch he owned just outside of town. Before Constantine left, Willie Hall told him to look up his brother, Richard Hall, south of Los Angeles, if he was ever in need of work.
For the next few months, Constantine made his way north and then southwest to California. During this time he met few people. The solitude did not feel odd to him, as Constantine felt that he had always been alone.
The Barracuda threw a rod and died in Pismo Beach, one day south of San Francisco. Constantine left the car in the lot of the Sea Gypsy Motel, grabbed his Jansport pack, and hitchhiked down the coas
t to Los Angeles. Once there, he phoned Richard Hall and told him that he needed work. Hall and Constantine agreed to meet.
Hall lived in an airy house in the hills above Newport Beach, overlooking the Pacific. Hall had the same small green eyes as his brother Willie, but the similarity ended there. Richard Hall was solidly built but strangely feminine, with soft, pink hands and smooth, hairless skin. Not gay exactly, but sexless. He wore an open velour robe during the interview and explained to Constantine that he was looking for a driver. Hall owned a high-end Mercedes sedan and a Porsche 911 but he did not drive. He offered Constantine eight hundred a week in under-the-counter dollars and Constantine agreed. Constantine wasn’t keen on Hall but the setup was just too sweet.
He settled into his duties and the southern California life-style quickly. His days were spent as a caretaker of the grounds and as a chauffeur and errand runner for Richard Hall: At night he mostly hung out at the marina bars in Newport, where he became friendly with the wait staff and tenders. He drank moderately and used marijuana infrequently, and cocaine only as a ticket to bed. Time passed like that and Constantine simply grew one year older and acquired a deeper tan.
One autumn night Richard Hall asked Constantine in for a drink. They had hardly spoken, and never about personal issues. Hall appeared to be half in the bag already, but Constantine considered him to be harmless, and admittedly he was a bit curious about this man, who seemed neither to work nor to have hobbies or interests. The two of them sat in Hall’s living room, where a large fire set in a marble hearth gave off the only light.
Richard Hall began to talk about his past. He had made his fortune ten years earlier as a crew chief on a sloop that ferried groups of rich people down to Mexico. On one such trip, a very wealthy woman asked him to hold onto “hundreds of thousands” of dollars, in broad daylight and in full view of several seedy characters, while she went ashore. That night, there was a full blown, machete-wielding assault on their boat. Hall and his partners killed the assailants using the arsenal of automatic weapons they kept on board, and then, without me wealthy woman but with her money, set out to sea. Hall punctuated this section of the story with a toothy grin and a strange, hearty laugh: “Ah-ha … ha, ha!”
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