Rhode Island Red

by Charlotte Carter

It was my mother, checking on my mood. She wanted to show sympathy but didn’t want me brooding too much over Walter’s death.

  Mom didn’t know anything like the truth about Walter’s death. The cops had managed to keep it out of the papers. And in the version I’d given her, Walter had been an unfortunate bystander in an attempted liquor store hold-up.

  After five minutes or so of consolation, she moved on to lighter topics. Guess who she’d run into at the Grand Union, for instance.

  I couldn’t possibly.

  Paula Stratton’s mother, of all people.

  I gave up, finally, and she had to tell me who Paula Stratton was.

  “Paula,” she insisted. “Your old friend from high school.”

  “Oh, right,” I said. “Paula.”

  Who hardly qualified as an “old friend.” It was only that Paula, who was white—as most of the kids were at the high school I attended—had been an unfortunate fat girl, not the same kind of outsider as I but with some little sparks of admirable weirdness over and above the poundage. Our bonding during freshman and sophomore years had been more defensive than instinctual. We went to plays and concerts and movies together, spent a semester abroad together, because no men were interested in taking us out. By the time Paula and I were seniors, however, she had a marvelous little figure and had lost interest in just about every arcane pursuit the two of us had ever shared.

  “Do you want her number?”

  “Whose number?”

  “Paula’s number,” Mom repeated patiently. “Her mother says Paula had a pretty bad time of it with that husband of hers, but now she’s single again and going to law school and—”

  “What’s the number?” I made believe I was writing it down.

  I interrupted her again a few minutes later. “Mom, I’m going to be away for a while.”

  “Away where, Nanette?”

  “I think I’ll go visit a friend in—on Cape Cod. I need to get away from here. I’ll call you when I get back.”

  So that was the one millionth and first lie I’d told her in my life.

  I went in to the kitchen and refilled my coffee cup, glancing once more at the ugly weapon on the table and returned to the other room.

  I put pencil to paper.

  This, I thought, will be my landmark poem.

  The first line was a snap.

  LEAVING NEW YORK! MUST SACRIFICE.

  The second line was even easier.

  FOR SALE!

  And in a minute the rest of it just fell into place:

  HIGH-END STEREO EQUIPMENT: LIKE-NEW AIWA COMPONENTS SOLID MAPLE CABINETS

  And then the wow finish:

  ALSO FOR SALE—78S, LPS. ECLECTIC. RARE STUDIO AND BOOTLEG HOROWITZ, PRICE, LENYA, DIZZY, BIRD, MILES.

  And the coda:

  CALL 000–0000. LEAVE NAME AND PARTICULARS. SPECIFY YOUR INTEREST. WILL SEND POSTCARD WITH PRICES, DETAILS.

  I sat back and stared at my handiwork.

  Was I or wasn’t I the Rimbaud of the fire sale?

  Now, what phone number could I use? Not mine. Valokus would recognize it. Not Aubrey’s. Not anyone’s who knew me.

  No. It would have to be an old-fashioned answering service. That was easy. I looked in the Yellow Pages and found one, taking care to see that they didn’t even have the same exchange as my own number. I called them and was quoted a modest fee for the service. That’s all I needed. I said I’d drop by and pay them in person in a few hours.

  Then I took another piece of paper and rewrote the message in larger, bolder lettering.

  What next? What next? Xerox it. How many would I need? How many laundromats and supermarkets were there between Thirty-fourth and Seventy-second Street—between Second and Ninth Avenue—that have accessible community bulletin boards? Hard to know. A hundred and fifty copies would be safe.

  I rushed downstairs and made the copies. The moment I entered my apartment again, the phone started ringing.

  This time I didn’t answer. It rang eleven times and was silent. It could have been my mother again. It could have been Aubrey or the cops. It could have been danger. I pulled the plug out of the wall.

  I had more work to do: placing ads that read exactly the same as my notice in every giveaway neighborhood newspaper I could think of and in the Village Voice.

  I wouldn’t be going to Cape Cod. But I had decided it would be best to get away from my apartment for the duration of the gig.

  I got together my toothbrush and some assorted cassettes, my Walkman, my sax and packed my Afghani carpetbag. I wrapped the gun and ammunition carefully and added them to the bag.

  Sixty minutes later I was lying on a queen size bed in a lovely room in the Gramercy Park Hotel. My windows looked out on the stately, deserted park with its high iron fences.

  I had for years, one season flowing into the next, walked past the pristine hedges of that park, its empty benches calling to me. But Gramercy Park was private. You couldn’t enjoy it unless you were one of the lucky and well-heeled residents of the immaculately kept townhouses ringing the park. The elitism of it had always bitten my butt, but now, for as long as I lived in the hotel, I was one of the haves, one of those fortunate few entitled to sit or stroll there any time I wanted. All I had to do was ask the hotel doorman to unlock the gate.

  Maybe, I thought, I will play my sax there, treat the neighbors to a free concert. It made me laugh. Somebody would lean out of their french windows and see a big, short-haired Negress mangling Ellington favorites on a beaten up sax. I’d see how fast the police responded to that one. I decided to forget about the park for the present.

  By three in the afternoon I was on the road, so to speak. Nervous about leaving the weapon back in my room, I was toting it. Strapped, as they say. I wondered briefly, giddily, madly, whether today would be the day I would happen upon a crime in progress, let alone be the victim of one. I was just demented enough to play avenging angel. You talkin’ to me?

  My route was simple. Walk to Ninth Avenue. Then go north on Ninth following it uptown when it turned into Amsterdam, around Lincoln Center, up to Seventy-second Street, posting my notices as I went. Then turn around, cross the street, and go south on Ninth to Fortieth.

  My aim was to place a “For Sale” notice in each laundromat and supermarket and friendly looking small shop that would accept it. After Ninth, I would walk up Eighth Avenue, then Broadway, then Seventh Avenue—and every other avenue east to Second. I figured it would take the rest of the afternoon and early evening and the next couple of days. Of course, a great swath of streets in midtown had virtually no markets or residential service stores of any kind.

  On the way to my kick-off point I used Walt’s bank card to get another five hundred dollars; I purchased a large box of pushpins and two scotch tape dispensers, and paid the telephone service.

  It was wearying work. About two out of every three laundromats had an open bulletin board, and about one of every three supermarkets. Many of the notice boards were chock full of babysitting, catsitting, and word processing offers. I had to rearrange subtly and then tack or tape, or both.

  In a small supermarket on Madison and Sixty-eighth Street I ran into a slight problem.

  There was a non-busy bulletin board just inside the entrance. No one was by the board so I started to tack up the notice, just as I had in dozens of other spots.

  “Just hold on a minute!”

  I turned. A tall, hunched white man, a real Silas Marner type, was standing about two feet away. He was wearing a shirt and tie and one of those old-fashioned blue grocer’s smocks. His breast tag read: Manager.

  “What are you doing?” he whinnied at me.

  “I’m placing a notice on the bulletin board,” I said as if speaking to a two year old. “See? This is a sheet of paper and there’s writing and everything on it.”

  “You can’t just come in here off the street and do something like that. I’ve never even seen you in the store before. Do you shop here?”

  Fat ch
ance.

  I didn’t answer.

  “I don’t suppose you live in our neighborhood?”

  I didn’t answer.

  “You’re probably working some kind of confidence game. Here! Let me see what you’ve written.”

  He grabbed the notice out of my hand and began to read it.

  Without saying another word, I opened my purse and shoved my hand in. My fingers went slinking around the grip of the .22.

  Then I released the weapon and pulled my hand out fast. I really was slipping over the line. There was a pretty serious law against what I was about to do. I was flirting with a mandatory one year jail term just for carrying this fucking thing. A concealed weapon. What was I doing? Jeopardizing everything to teach a racist creep a lesson.

  I turned on my heel and walked out. Mister Manager was still holding my notice. He could do with it as he pleased.

  Two mornings later I concluded my rounds. By way of celebration, I went into one of those fancy bookstores with an espresso bar attached and bought a new biography of Proust, a coffee table type volume about the great jazz vocalists, a guide to North America’s wild flowers, and what was being touted in the papers lately as a new wave murder mystery. I took them all back to my room and hit the bed reading.

  There was a not bad jazz club a few blocks away, on Third Avenue, where I’d gone for a drink my second night in the hotel. After I napped, bathed and changed, I headed over there.

  I wore a gray knit dress, tight and clinging. Nazi bitch high heels. Two black guys and three white hit on me. I was spending money like water. After all, whose money was it? The little girls in Bayshore? It was nobody’s, really. Walter had stolen it from Inge. Inge had gotten it from me as a gift. I had received it from Sig. Sig had stolen it from the NYPD, who’d gotten it from criminals, or from the taxpayers, perhaps: Hey, maybe it was my money after all.

  For the next couple of days I read and waited and went to movies and bars, either the club on Third or the funky place down on Houston, or the lounge in the hotel, where a Johnny Hartman wannabe warbled throughout the night. I contacted no one. I did not return to my apartment.

  On the third day after that I showed up at the offices of my telephone service. I was handed eighteen messages, responses to my notice and ads.

  Three asked for descriptions and prices for everything.

  Eight asked me to send descriptions and prices for the stereo equipment only.

  Four wanted the records alone.

  Two asked only about the Horowitz recordings.

  And one caller wanted only the Charlie Parker stuff.

  My hands shook as I held the pink message slip. It could have been anyone, this caller. Any one of a million Parker buffs. But oh, I knew it was Valokus. I knew it.

  How did I know? The caller gave his name as Rodney Dameron. An obvious phony that combined the name of the white trumpeter in Bird’s quintet—Red Rodney—with the name of the elegant pianist Bird had worked with in his early days—Tadd Dameron.

  Maybe Henry was every bit as dumb as Justin Thom had claimed.

  Mr. “Dameron’s” address was on West Fifty-seventh Street. Judging from the numbers, it was between Eighth and Ninth avenues. He gave his apartment number as 810.

  I got into a taxi.

  The Daisy Chain Inn was part of a nationwide franchise of motels that seemed to run the gamut from family getaway to nightmare crack house, depending on whether the inn was located in Orlando or Watts. This one was medium grimy. Maybe a little hooking going on, but nothing too heavy.

  I sat there in the cab, across the street from the dirty blue canopy, for fifteen minutes or so, thinking that, maybe, a miracle would occur and I’d see Henry going in or out.

  That didn’t happen, of course.

  I told the driver to take me to the Gramercy Park Hotel.

  Once in my room, I dialed Information and got the number of the Daisy Chain Inn. I called. I told the operator I wished to speak with one of his guests: Rodney Dameron. “He’s in room 810, I think.”

  “Just let me check,” I was told. He put me on hold for a few seconds and then came back on the line. “Yes, that’s right. I’ll ring him.”

  “No, don’t bother,” I said quickly. “There’s my other line. I’ll call back.”

  I took my gun out of my bag and rubbed it along the quilt in a kind of burnishing stroke. I’d gone over Larry’s instructions a hundred times, wondering if I’d ever understand the lure of these cold and weighty enigmas called guns.

  Mine was unloaded now; the clip was in the bureau drawer. But I’d logged a number of hours over the past few days standing in front of the vanity mirror and studying myself as I slid the weapon in slow motion from my purse; as I aimed it and pouted like Faye Dunaway in Bonnie and Clyde; as I held it at my hip and pretended to be Wyatt Earp; as I ran from one end of the room to the other spraying imaginary bullets and grotesquely mouthing the word “muthafuckaaah” like a drug dealer in one of those death-in-the-ghetto movies.

  I lay down on the bed, the Proust book open on my stomach. Damn, what I wouldn’t give for a warm madeleine just about now. And a cup of china black from that piss-elegant tea shop on the rue Christine.

  My mind drifted back to the afternoon Henry and I had spent making love, drinking a shamelessly overpriced bottle of wine from the Loire and looking at a book of photographs of Paris in the 1950s. What if we’d met then? I’d asked him, being whimsical. Perhaps, I’d speculated, he’d be a soldier of fortune and I an emigré beatnik. We’d spend our days drinking bitter coffee and collaborating on books, and our nights listening to Juliette Greco in the darkest café in town.

  This is why I love you, Henry had said when my flight of fantasy was exhausted. Your imagination. I wish you could have met my grandmother.

  Before I knew it, I was asleep.

  I swallowed my ethics and went into the park that night. I sat quietly on a bench, switched on my Walkman and listened to a tape I’d patched together months ago—Bud playing Parisian Thoroughfare, Lady’s exquisitely rethought These Foolish Things, Coltrane’s version of Violets for Your Fur, you know, the old goodies. I allowed myself to get thoroughly chilled, so that coming inside again would be all the sweeter.

  I had a beautiful, if lonely, dinner: a little liver-onion-tomato turnover and a tandoori chicken to die for, and to all intents and purposes the entire bottle of the creamiest white Châteauneuf du Pape I’d ever pulled from a vintner’s shelf.

  I walked back slowly to the hotel and went directly to the elevator bank, across from the piano bar. I pressed the up button.

  Just as the elevator doors opened, a song flew out of the darkened lounge and stabbed me in the back of the neck.

  Lord, why do good pianists use Funny Valentine like a weapon, like Cupid’s arrow dipped in grief?

  I thought at that moment—well, I was thinking many things at that moment. Please God, make it all not true. Make Walter alive again. Let me be at home drinking coffee from that big yellow cup I love. Please God, let me turn around this minute and see Henry standing there, healthy, grinning, explaining, arms out to hold me against the heady, oaken scent of his soft blue overcoat. Please God, if you can’t let me forget him or forgive him, then let it feel good when I blow his damn kneecaps off tomorrow. Please God, if I don’t find somebody to talk to—be with—tonight, I’m going to pass away from loneliness.

  Help me, Ernestine. Tell me what to do.

  “You like jazz, Mr. Thorn?” I asked.

  “Take it or leave it,” he said. “Who is this?”

  “I met you a few days ago. You know, the smash-up in love with the asshole from Rhode Island.”

  “Aubrey’s friend! What’s happening, Nanny?”

  But before I could tell him, he went on: “I’m usually better than that with voices, being an old bartender. But my trick was to put a face with the voice. You don’t sound black on the phone. No offense, but, know what I mean?”

  “Yeah. Hoover said the same
thing when I called to warn him about the Panthers.”

  “What do you need tonight?” he asked after an appreciative chuckle. “The answers to tomorrow’s mafia quiz?”

  I didn’t speak for a minute.

  “Hello?” Thorn called into the receiver.

  “Yeah, I’m here, I’m here.”

  “Where’s ‘here,’ Nanny?”

  “A bar. At the Gramercy Park Hotel.”

  “You didn’t find asshole there, did you?”

  Again, I fell silent.

  “Hey, smash-up, you still there?”

  “Yes. No, asshole’s not here. I’m calling you for—to thank you for your time. How about a drink?”

  “At that old folks home?”

  “Sure. There’s a little brown boy singer goes on soon. His feet haven’t touched the ground in fifteen years and he’s real cute.”

  “I didn’t think you knew any of my people, girlfriend.”

  “Oh, Mr. Thorn, you’re the one from Indiana, remember? Not I.”

  I had time to fix my make-up and walk around the block a couple of times before Justin’s cab pulled up at the door of the hotel.

  I reached into the taxi window and paid the fare before he had a chance to.

  “Nobody has paid me to do anything in a long time,” he said as we went through the revolving door of the lobby. “You made my fucking night.”

  “No problem. I’m flush.”

  “Sold your story to the Enquired?”

  “No. I’ve turned to crime—like everybody else. The bar’s this way.”

  We settled in with our drinks—Dewars with a water back for Justin, Grand Marnier for me.

  I had called Justin Thorn out of some weird survival instinct. Somehow I knew it was him I needed to talk with tonight, not Aubrey. Justin, though he baited and patronized me, had become a confidant. But with a twist: there was only so much I could tell him. I had to hold certain things back, in a word, lie. The miraculous thing was, he knew that, and yet here he was.

  “How bad a bad guy are you, Justin?” I asked after a few minutes of small talk.

  “What do you mean, sweetums? Sex or the job?”

  “The job. You know, you work with some pretty persuasive people. You kind of have to do what they tell you, right? I mean, what I’m asking is have you ever—”