I sat back down. I almost (almost) wanted to give Natasha a big hug. These weren’t prostitutes! They were drug skanks. I nearly slapped my forehead. I hadn’t smoked pot in years but I knew a bowl when I saw one. I wanted to explain the whole thing with a laugh to my new friends here at Foxwood Chase. I could even (maybe one day) tell Annie the whole story. She’d get a kick out of it: Representative Walker took me to his dealer’s house to smoke a little weed and I got all freaked out thinking he’d dragged me to a brothel. Shit, I probably could have used a puff after I’d gotten myself worked up into such a lather.
“You want to throw a cloud?” Squeak asked me.
“No. Thank you,” I said. Squeak looked at me as though I were a narc but loaded the pipe nonetheless. I’d never heard “throw a cloud” as slang but didn’t think too much of it—I wasn’t exactly in the scene—nor did I attach any particular significance to the butane torch Squeak pulled out, or the gentle tinkling noise as he packed the bowl.
No, it wasn’t until he blazed the damn thing up and a sickly sweet vapor reminiscent of bathroom-cleaning chemicals wrinkled up my nose that I realized we weren’t dealing with good old “a little bit in college” American ganja.
I didn’t want to set off Squeak, especially now that he had two lungs full of whatever that drug was, so I tried to inquire casually.
“Oh, is that…”
“Tina,” Walker said.
“Tina, right.”
“Ice,” Squeak added unhelpfully.
Crack? Was it crack? Was I in a fucking crack house?
“Oh, right,” I said. “Coke.”
“No, Tina. Crystal.”
Natasha giggled at my language troubles, which I thought was pretty rich. So…crystal meth! Aha. I felt like I’d just won at Clue and infinitesimally better knowing that my new friends weren’t smoking actual crack.
Here’s what I did know about meth (from the navy, where a not-negligible number of snipes, the bilge-rat engine workers, were or had been tweakers). It makes your dick shrink as surely as a dip in the North Atlantic, and it makes you impossibly horny, a situation rife with paradox that leads to all types of trouble I certainly didn’t want to find myself in the middle of.
Natasha let out a big puff of meth smoke and ran her eyes over me like I was a buffet dinner. Squeak, Kitty, and Walker beat it out of there (though I noticed both gents took some kind of pill first), leaving me alone with my Soviet love, who did a head feint and then successfully, finally, broke through my defenses for a proper grope. I managed to pull her hand away without her taking any important parts of my anatomy along with it.
She looked heartbroken, to be honest, but she was still almost shaking with energy from the drugs.
“Listen. I’m sorry. You’re very nice. But I’m not this kind of guy. I’ve got to go.” I stood up.
And then, bless her heart, Natasha leaned back and gave me a sweet, saintly look.
“I understand you.”
“Good. Yes, it’s nothing personal. I just need to go.”
“Yes. You are faggot. No problem. I fix.”
“No no no no,” I said.
She said something to the kid in the kitchen in a language that sounded more Polish than Russian, then shouted it a second time to get his attention. He looked put out, then sulked upstairs. I should have pegged that sketchball for a speed freak the minute I set eyes on him.
I checked my phone. From Annie: Heavy lids, sweetie. G’night. Give me a hug when you come in.
I’d been feeling like I was betraying her before, but that twisted the knife. I walked into the foyer, near the stairs. “I just need to tell Eric I have to go,” I yelled up to the kid.
I waited there for a minute, rocking on my heels and occasionally, like an idiot, giving Natasha a nervous smile.
Finally the kid appeared at the top of the stairs and waved me up. The second-floor hallway was even more spare than the ground floor. He led me down a long corridor and into a small room with sliding doors on both sides, like the kind that separate hotel suites.
“Wait here,” he said, then disappeared.
One minute passed, then two. I thought of bolting, but to keep Marcus happy—he’d told me expressly to stick with Walker—I figured I had to at least tell the rep I was heading out. Finally Squeak, the baby-faced monster, came out in a bathrobe, his cheeks looking rather rosy. “I just need to talk to Eric, or maybe you could tell him—”
Squeak gestured to the sliding doors with a flick of his head, then spread the doors wide.
“Hey, Eric,” I said as I recognized the congressman. Then speech failed me. He was tangled up in an orgy so elaborate it resembled a cheerleading pyramid. I looked away instantly, only to get a glimpse into another room where an older guy, who I didn’t even know was in the house, was in a clinch with two ladies.
I stared at the wall next to me, momentarily paralyzed, summoning the muscular control required to book it the fuck out of there, when I heard Walker say, “Mike! Come on in.”
Squeak shed his robe. Whatever pill he had taken more than made up for the side effects of the meth. “Natasha said you wanted me,” he said.
I lunged for the door that would lead me away from all this. Squeak stepped between me and it.
“What’s your problem?” he asked. I stared at the ceiling and gave him a wide berth as I sidestepped toward the exit. “I mean, Eric already paid for everything.”
Squeak moved closer to me, as relentless as a zombie army. I hate to miss a party or a good deal, but by that point I started running as fast as I had ever run. For those of you keeping score at home, I was wrong when I thought it was just any old cathouse, and also when I thought it was some pot emporium. No, ladies and gentlemen, we had hit all the numbers: I was in a meth-fueled full-service bordello with the good gentleman from Mississippi.
I was in shock, trying to erase it all from my mind as I raced down the stairs, taking them three at a time, then stumbled on the landing and stood up to find that the cops had arrived.
For a half a second, I was almost glad. The cavalry would save me from the bad bad people and Squeak’s giant dong. But as the cuffs closed around my wrists, I began to understand the enormity of the clusterfuck I now found myself in. This was no easy-to-beat trespassing rap, which was the worst thing that could have happened after I sneaked into the Met Club. Now I was looking at two or three felonies, and Virginia is packed with hanging judges.
But the only thing I could think about was my dad. The old bastard had told me so.
CHAPTER SEVEN
A THIRTY-FOOT-TALL clown is the kind of thing you remember. This particular one, on a ratty stretch of Virginia highway, smiled maniacally in front of an abandoned store that had been called Circus Liquors. It gave me déjà vu and a serious sense of the creeps, but I couldn’t remember exactly where I’d seen it before.
It’s where my dad had told me to turn. His place was about a mile down the road. It was a gas station: two pumps, a garage, and a tiny box of a convenience store. I poked my head into one of the garage bays and found him working with a hog sander on the fender of a 1970s Cutlass, throwing out sparks. The garage was too cluttered for me to get into his field of vision, so I stepped a little closer and hoped he’d notice me. Nothing. Finally, I waited for him to pull the sander back and then gave him a little tap on the shoulder.
He flinched and turned, holding the sander up like he was about to take my head off with it. It took him a second to relax.
“Oh Jesus Christ, Mike.” He put it down, and gave me a hug. “Might still be a little jumpy.”
Lesson: don’t sneak up on someone who’s been watching his ass for sixteen years.
It was March, ten months in at Davies Group, and a month before the cops picked me up at Representative Walker’s meth house fiasco. My dad had been out of prison for about six weeks. I’d spent some time with him since, of course, but it was all welcome-home dinners and BBQs, the kind of thing where everybody puts his
best face on and drinks too much and gushes and promises to keep in touch.
This was the first time it was just me and him, one-on-one, no celebrations, just the rut of the everyday. I could tell he was trying to get me back, fix up our father-son thing the way he’d Bondoed that Cutlass. I had been avoiding him.
I’d been through this already, with my brother. I hadn’t seen him in years; last I heard he was living in Florida. He didn’t show up for any of my dad’s got-out-of-jail parties. Even though Jack was the one responsible for me nearly getting sent to prison when I was nineteen, I’d always tried to be the nice guy, the one who would call, the one who would turn the other cheek and keep the family together. Even after he left it to me to shoulder all the debts from my mother’s treatments, however much I wanted to, I didn’t shut him out. That was a mistake. He’d blow into my life every few years, resuscitate the good old times and keep me out at the bar until closing. It was always fun, at first—who doesn’t want to hang out with his older brother?—but eventually I’d recognize that the grifter was closing the noose around me, scamming me for cash usually, or just a place for him to hide out with whatever crew of rejects he was currently tangled up with. Con men count on your decency, your kindness. They use it to get close and then use it to hurt you. After he’d done it to me half a dozen times, I cut him out of my life, ignored his calls, the appeals to family and pleas for help he had always used to worm his way back. And once he realized he couldn’t get anything out of me, I never heard from him again.
With my dad, I wasn’t that severe. The way I figured it, I’d more than done right by him by having Henry Davies pull the strings to get his parole. I was having a hard time with all the buddy-buddy shit. I wasn’t going to just let him off the hook for what he had done to the family, but I wasn’t going to torture him about abandoning us either. Think about whatever unpleasant chore you’ve been meaning to take care of but know you never will: cleaning out a basement or an overstuffed closet, throwing out old clothes. That was me and Dad. Mostly I just wanted to avoid the whole thing. But my father kept calling: tenacious but never pushy. Like me, he had will in spades.
“Let me get cleaned up,” he said. He led us out of the garage. In the woods behind the gas station there was a thirty-year-old trailer with a picnic table out front, along with a few camp chairs and a grill: his home.
The guy who owned the gas station, an old friend of my dad’s named George Cartwright, was letting him stay there and manage the place. Since only two or three guys worked there, managing usually meant pumping gas and pulling dents.
The inside of the trailer was so neat it was a little disconcerting: everything stacked at right angles, the bed drum-tight. The desk was covered with accounting textbooks and double-entry ledgers. A dozen ramen packets lay on the counter.
He saw me looking. “George has me doing the books now,” he said. He’d studied accounting in prison, even got a bachelor’s despite every obstacle thrown in his way. Prisoners aren’t allowed money, hardcovers, or the Internet. He’d tracked down a retired finance professor from a Quaker school through God knows how many letters and somehow managed to work his way through the credits. It sounded a little like my story, except a hundred times harder. The more I realized how similar we were, the angrier I got at him for being a fuckup. And at myself, I guess, for being too nice, for giving him a chance to work his way back into my life after all that had happened.
I studied him for a moment in the fluorescent light. He still had his hair the same way, a little long in the back, though not quite a mullet. It was gray now, but he looked healthy. He must have kept himself in shape while locked up. He still had the build of the sprinter he’d been in high school. A jagged scar ran from the corner of his mouth up his cheek. If you asked about it, he always said he cut himself shaving in prison, gave a nervous laugh, and changed the subject. The scratchy Magnum, P.I., mustache I remembered from when I was a kid was still hanging on his lip, and he wore a lot of brightly colored zigzag Cosby sweaters. It looked like he’d just taken a time machine from 1994 to the present day, and for all intents and purposes he had.
Sixteen years is a long time in, and it showed. There was the ramen and the jumpiness. He didn’t like being touched. He’d stand in front of a door for a half a second, then laugh at himself; he was used to having to wait for someone else to open it. And the first time we grabbed food—we went to Wendy’s—he was completely overwhelmed by the menu, all the options. The guy had been told exactly what to eat and when to wake, sleep, walk, shit, and shower for sixteen years. He’d nearly forgotten how to make choices. You could tell he was in serious culture shock from the look on his face when somebody made a Seinfeld reference or told him to Google something or when he heard ringing noises coming from the pockets of people around him. He was usually the first to crack a joke about it, at least, and put everyone at ease.
He’d told me to meet him out here and then we’d go out for dinner, and he was a little cagey when I tried to find out where. I drove. He didn’t have a car, so he was basically trapped at the gas station, though Cartwright had told him if he could get the Cutlass running he could use it.
He directed me along the way. It was about a half-hour drive, and I think I figured out where we were going before I let myself acknowledge it. He was trying to engage me with old stories about Mom. They were classics, but he had picked the absolute worst subject to try to warm me up with.
I guess I could have told him as we got closer to the spot, but I didn’t have the heart. I pulled up to a block of red-brick buildings in Old Town, Fairfax.
It was gone: Sal’s. It was a great Italian place. Or it might have been terrible, for all I know. I was ten the last time I went there. The food didn’t really matter; more important, it was where we would go whenever the family had the money for a splurge. When my mother and father began dating, decades ago, they had often gone to Sal’s. They would take me and my brother there when we were young, then get nostalgic for their courting days and stand up and take a dance or two by the bar and embarrass their kids.
Jack and I would plunder the garlic bread and they’d be in their own world, like teenagers, laughing, throwing in the occasional dip or twirl, but mostly just sticking close, my mom resting her head on my dad’s shoulder.
It was our place. Once, anyway. Now it was a dog spa and a Starbucks.
My dad got out of the car and stood in front of where the restaurant had been. I stayed on the sidewalk nearby, and I thought he might break down. Just watching him, I felt a golf ball in my throat. I thought if I didn’t get out of there, I was going to start the waterworks myself.
“You all right, Dad?”
No answer. I was going to put my arm around him, but I didn’t want him to freak out again, so I just waited.
“Dad—”
“I’m fine, Mike.”
“Come on, I’ll take you someplace. There’s a decent steakhouse on Twenty-Nine.”
“No,” he said, his breath short and gravelly. He sounded like somebody had knocked the wind out of him.
“Please, I—”
“I don’t have time, Mike. I’ve got to get back by ten.” He sighed and shook his head, then laughed a little. “To make curfew, if you can believe that. It’s part of the parole. I’ve got to call this computer thing from my home phone.”
“You’ve got to eat, Dad.”
He rubbed his five o’clock shadow for a minute.
“Fuck it,” he said. “You want to go to Costco?”
Two minutes later we found ourselves at a metal table inside a giant floodlit warehouse. I’d thought I’d misheard him at first when he said this was where he wanted to eat, but all he wanted and had time for was a couple Italian sausages with peppers and onions, and a Coke. They were damn good. And there were only four things on the menu, which probably made it a little easier on him.
We took a stroll through the aisles, and I tried to figure out what the hell the old man was up to.
<
br /> “This place…” my father said. He had the face—the awestruck smile—of someone visiting the Grand Canyon for the first time.
It started to make sense. Prison jobs, if you can get a paying one, start at twelve cents an hour. A tube of toothpaste costs five bucks in the commissary, and to get it he’d have to fill out a little form and wait a week for it to come back. To him, Costco, with the glare and the screaming kids and the housewives’ kamikaze carts, was heaven.
We talked a little as we rounded the frozen-foods corner. He’d been working on getting a shot at the CPA exam. He consistently aced the practice tests, but anybody who’d been convicted of fraud was barred. It would take years to provide “evidence of rehabilitation,” and the examiners still might shaft him, but he didn’t care. He was going to claw his way back up. He’d been trying to go to the library to get the phone books he needed to find the addresses and phone numbers of the state accounting boards so he could start sending letters and making calls, but going to a library meant missing a day of work, which was out. The guy’s life was like a pile of pickup sticks, each little thing weighing down another and weighed down by the next, a solutionless mess.
“You can look them up online, Dad.”
He looked at me a little askance.
“With the computer?”
“Yeah. On the Internet.”
“And I attach the Internet to the computer?”
I grimaced. “Kind of.” It was like explaining color to the blind, but I think I eventually got some of the basics across to him. I told him I had an old laptop he could have.
“You need anything else while we’re here?” I asked. “Stock up. Something besides ramen?” I figured that was part of why we came here, but I could see instantly I’d hurt his pride by implying he needed a handout. He swallowed it, though, just looked a little sad.
“No,” he said, “I’m fine. You’ve done more than your share, Mike. But thank you.”
He checked my watch. “I should get back,” he said. “It’s almost lights-out.”
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