by Jim Powell
‘There’s one thing, I suppose. It’s not much.’
‘What is it?’
‘A shopping list fell out of her purse a few weeks ago. From the look of it, I’d say it had been there a while. She’d torn off part of an envelope and written the list on the back. The envelope had an address in this town.’
‘Street?’
‘Pine.’
‘Number?’
‘7.’
‘Do you know who lives there?’
‘Of course I do. I checked. A woman called Mrs Riessen.’
‘And what is she to Arlene?’
‘I’ve no idea,’ said Davy. ‘I ought to add that the address was in Arlene’s own handwriting. Just because it was written on an envelope, I don’t think you can assume it had been used as an envelope. Since this happened, I’ve driven up Pine a few times. I’ve never seen Arlene there, and I’ve never seen her car.’
‘So it doesn’t tell us anything.’
‘It tells us something. We just don’t know what.’
That should have been Arlene’s epitaph. I expect it will get carved on her tombstone one day.
12
When Davy and Arlene finally split up, it was Arlene who did the leaving. There are the leavers and the left in these situations, and Arlene was a leaver. It is assumed that they are the stronger ones. In my opinion, most leavers take the initiative because they are petrified of being abandoned.
Davy and Arlene left the bar together one Saturday evening. ‘We’re going up to Deadman’s Wood tomorrow,’ one of them said.
‘Enjoy yourselves, then,’ I said.
Hardly an inspired piece of dialogue. I wouldn’t be mentioning it but for what happened next. They went to the wood separately, in their own cars, and spent an hour or two there. Then they kissed goodbye and Davy got back to his car and found the note on his seat.
‘I don’t know how she managed to put it there,’ he said in the bar the next evening. ‘Anyhow, she’s not coming back.’
‘You don’t know that,’ I said. ‘She hasn’t found Jack yet.’
‘I have this image of her in Deadman’s Wood,’ said Davy. ‘She went running off to catch falling leaves. She said it would bring us luck. I hadn’t heard that superstition before. It hasn’t brought us much luck, has it? Maybe it’s brought Arlene some luck. Or maybe she never caught any leaves.’
I can’t say I was surprised. Women like Arlene always leave. That’s what they do. Hang around for a while and then blow away. Her life seemed to come in segments, like an orange. A membrane separated the parts, and one segment had no connection with the next. The continuity lady went missing when Arlene was born.
After such an event, the world likes to pontificate about why it happened, and when it began to happen, and how the pontificators noticed it before anyone else, although they didn’t get round to mentioning it at the time. The slice of the world that inhabited my bar room expressed their opinions, and the gist of them was this. Some held that Davy changed toward Arlene from the moment that Mary-Jane tracked him down. The more devious believed that Davy had engineered this scenario to make Mary-Jane jealous and win her back. Others held that Arlene changed toward Davy from the moment that Franky first pitched up, a long while earlier. They were united in thinking that Arlene fancied Franky.
The aftermath was the reverse of what had happened the first time. Then there was melodrama, Davy metaphorically clutching his head and crying, ‘Woe is me.’ It didn’t have the ring of truth, perhaps because it turned out not to be true. This time, the split had an air of finality, and there was no melodrama. You got the impression that Davy wasn’t much bothered, and Arlene had spared him from having to do the leaving himself. Anyway, whether through stoicism or indifference, Davy didn’t sit at home and mope. He was in the bar every evening, cheerful as you like.
Not long after, Mary-Jane showed up again. It was clear that she had met up with Davy in the meantime, goodness knows where or when.
Davy loved Mary-Jane, and Mary-Jane loved Davy. You can mystify things how you want and be as clever as you like, but sometimes it comes down to a thing that simple. Mary-Jane thought she couldn’t forgive Davy for busting up the family, then found she had to because she loved him. Davy thought he couldn’t forgive himself, then found he had to because he loved Mary-Jane, and she wanted him back. You can go to college and become a professor, but, however smart you are, the smartest you can be is when you stop looking for complicated explanations for simple things.
There was a winding down of affairs after that. Mary-Jane showed up a couple of times more. We chatted, and I liked her as I had the first time. I dropped into one of our conversations that she must have hired a good guy to track Davy down.
‘That’s a long story,’ she said.
‘Want to tell it?’
‘Not especially. The important thing is that it’s worked out well for everyone.’
And that’s as much as she would say. She left for home soon after.
Davy was due to follow her to Cincinnati shortly. He’d terminated the lease on his apartment. I imagine the fumigation didn’t come cheap. He’d given in his notice at the warehouse. He hadn’t found a new position back in Ohio, but wasn’t concerned about that. It’s all in how you look at things. At another time, the lack of an income would have spooked Davy, as it does most people. Now, he had Mary-Jane back and he had his kids back and he had his home back, and nothing else mattered.
Davy was soaring. Sometime back, on Coney Island, when I’d asked Arlene what she and Davy talked about, she’d said they imagined what birds they’d be, if they were birds. Strange, since Arlene had no interest in birds. She said that Davy imagined himself as a phoenix, ready to rise from the fire. Not what I would have thought at the time. There must a brown, fidgety bird somewhere that flies into unprovoked rages. That would have been Davy then. Now he was soaring. Davy would shortly be taking flight. All passengers should proceed to the departure lounge. Good luck to him.
Nelson had departed; now Davy was gone too. No bar room in or near Cincinnati would get his custom: the fact is that solid family life is the sworn enemy of bar takings. We hadn’t seen Arlene since the split with Davy. The rota of the absent was lengthening by the week, and before long it seemed to have claimed another name. I heard the news in town and rushed back to tell Marcie, even though it was the middle of the lunch hour.
‘Guess what?’ I said. I left a pause for dramatic effect. ‘It looks like Franky’s leaving town.’
‘What makes you think that?’
‘They told me down the gas station when I was filling the tank. He was with a blonde he met at the bowling alley. They told me that too. The guy said she was barely legal.’
‘I should think “barely” is the right word for it.’
‘He’s got himself a new car. He’s got white-walled wheels and a white-walled blonde. She was all over Franky, apparently. The guy said she was doing unmentionable things to him as they drove off.’
‘I expect he mentioned them to you,’ said Marcie.
‘In passing,’ I said. ‘Lucky old Franky.’
‘I wouldn’t say so. The wheels will come off before long.’
‘Off the car, or the blonde?’
‘Both,’ said Marcie. ‘You can’t go on Franky’s way for ever. There’s a limit to the number of dumb blondes in the world.’
‘I’m not sure about that,’ I said. ‘And he hasn’t yet started on the brunettes.’ I shot Marcie a glance.
Marcie considered the news for a while. ‘I expect we financed the new car,’ she said eventually. ‘And the blonde as well.’
‘Not for long. Blondes aren’t cheap.’
‘Franky’s will be.’
‘I don’t pretend to understand it,’ I said. ‘All that time he’s spent doing up Mr Hammond’s place. Why would he want to leave town now?’
‘He wouldn’t. And he hasn’t. This is just a fling until Arlene comes back. Those two have unfi
nished business. The blonde might expect it to last. Franky won’t. He’ll be back before long.’
All this has a kind of elegiac tone, as if there was a grand clear-out of the clientele. In a way there was, but it was nothing new. It had happened before. The cast of regulars had been reduced to one by early October, and boy, did Mike rejoice in the role. It was one monologue after another from him, and he’d been the quiet one. New regulars would arrive soon. There’d been life before Nelson and Davy: Jack Nightingale for a start. Arlene and Franky had monopolized thoughts and conversations, but they’d been around no more than six or eight months. The planets had appeared fixed in their heaven. That was an illusion. No one had pressed the pause button. Everything had kept churning. There had been new configurations, new triangulations, all the while. And Marcie and I were not the same people either.
It was a case of goodbye, hello, and on we go. The way it always has been.
Turned out, though, that Marcie was right about Franky and Arlene. In mid-October, a couple of weeks after Davy had left, I caught the sound of ‘Theme from Dixie’ coming from a car horn in the parking lot. Must once have been a Southern car. I looked out of the window and saw a Mustang with white-walled tyres. Franky was back in town. A woman was with him. She was not blonde, and was way too old for jailbait. I walked back to the counter and mixed a vodka Martini.
Franky walked in the way he usually did, like everyone in the world was his best friend and, if they weren’t, he’d make them best friends by force of personality. Like he owned the place. Arlene walked in the way she usually didn’t, like she was now the co-owner. She came close to a swagger. It crossed my mind that Franky had given her some drug, of the sort that alters your personality. She waltzed around the bar room, high-fiving everyone she knew, while Franky stood with thumbs in belt loops like the Fonz. Come on, Arlene, you’ve only been gone five minutes.
‘You’ve got to hand it to Franky,’ I said to Marcie later that night. ‘He knows how to make a woman feel good about herself.’
‘Nobody does it better. For the first five minutes.’
‘It’s funny,’ I said, ‘that Franky’s parents didn’t have more than one kid. How many Catholic families do you know with one kid?’
‘Franky’s parents didn’t have any kids,’ said Marcie. ‘Franky was adopted.’
‘What? I never knew that. You never told me that. That’s why Franky’s afraid of you. He thinks you know his secret, and you do.’
‘No, no,’ said Marcie. ‘That’s not a secret. Everybody knows it.’
‘I don’t.’
‘Everybody except you. Believe me, it’s not a secret. I’d have mentioned it ages ago, if I’d thought you didn’t know.’
‘How come he was adopted?’
‘I don’t know. Perhaps Mr and Mrs Albertino couldn’t have kids.’
‘Who were Franky’s real parents? Does Franky know who they were?’
‘No idea on either count,’ said Marcie.
I don’t like it when things get confused, because then I get confused, like I was now. Marcie embraces confusion. She thinks life is an endless battle between order and chaos. I agree with her there, but I’m not neutral in the fight, like she is. I’d beat chaos to a pulp if I could. I’m rooting for order. In this situation, there wasn’t any.
I’d been debating things with myself since Franky had moved in next door and taken up his new role as Mr Hammond junior. Marcie couldn’t see anything peculiar in it. To her, it was another of Franky’s scams, another part of the chaos theory. To me, there had to be more behind it. I felt that Mr Hammond senior fitted into the picture somehow, and that he fitted into the same frame as Franky. Until now, I hadn’t been able to see the connection. When Marcie mentioned that Franky was adopted, everything seemed to fall into place.
‘Maybe Franky found his father,’ I said.
‘Who are you suggesting for the part?’
‘Mr Hammond.’
‘Why?’
‘No specific reason,’ I said. ‘But something made Franky come back to town, and what was it otherwise? He hasn’t come to see anyone in particular, as far as we can tell. He’s not working, so far as we know. The one definite thing he’s done since he came back is to occupy Mr Hammond’s house. And change his name to Hammond. I’d say that’s suggestive.’
‘Or he’d fallen on hard times,’ said Marcie, ‘and he came back to his home town in the hope that one or two people would remember him kindly. Make that one person. He got lucky with an abandoned property, and changed his name to make the paperwork easier. I know you like neat packages, honey. I know you want the loose ends tied up. Life’s a muddle. People do and say things for no good reason. Very little adds up. Give me the messy answer every time.’
‘Sometimes things do add up,’ I said. ‘Otherwise the world wouldn’t have got this far.’
‘How far is that?’
We danced around the issue for a few days. I reckoned I’d got the answer; Marcie didn’t think there was a question. As I saw it, Franky knew what he was doing when he first came back to town. He’d come back to claim his inheritance. When he changed his name to Hammond, he was taking his father’s name, as you would, or at least as you might. Open-and-shut case, if you ask me.
Marcie wasn’t impressed.
‘It’s like it was with Nelson and the money,’ she said. ‘You start with a preconception for which there’s no evidence, and then you add this assumption and that assumption, till it sounds like the most reasonable proposition in the world. You can be as logical as you like, but if your starting point is screwed, so is the rest of it.’
I decided there was one way of finding out, and that was to ask Franky. Marcie didn’t think that would work. She said Franky would deny it, and we wouldn’t know whether he was lying or not. I decided to ask anyway, but wasn’t sure when I’d get the chance. Since he’d occupied Mr Hammond’s house, and since Arlene had occupied him, he was in the bar less often. But, as it happened, he dropped in for a meal one lunchtime, and I was there. We waited till his knife was about to plunge into his burger. Then I accosted him.
‘When did you discover that Mr Hammond was your dad?’
‘Huh?’
‘Well, he was, wasn’t he? That’s why you came back to town, Franky. That’s why you’re living in his house. That’s why you’ve taken his name.’
Franky looked at me, then at Marcie, then at me again and shook his head. ‘What are you on about?’ he said. ‘You know who my parents were.’ He looked at Marcie again. ‘You put him up to this, didn’t you?’
‘No, I did not,’ said Marcie.
‘Just because . . .’ said Franky. ‘Just because of – well, you know perfectly well what because of, Marcie – you think you can invent things about me.’
‘I’m not inventing anything about you, Franky,’ said Marcie. ‘And I haven’t said Mr Hammond was your father.’
Franky looked at me. ‘So why should you think he was? Since when have you started having your own opinions?’ That was below the belt.
‘Mr Hammond left you the house in his will, didn’t he?’ I was winging it now.
‘I’m not going there,’ said Franky.
‘Going where?’
‘Anywhere you’re going.’ We looked at him, and he looked at us, and nobody said anything. Franky addressed his lunch. ‘Look,’ he said, one mouthful into his burger, ‘all sorts of stuff’s happened at one time or another. Before I left. After I’d left. Since I’ve been back. And to you too, I’m sure. And to everyone. It’s gone, done and finished. I’m making it sound like a big deal. It’s not a big deal, and it’s not a little deal. It’s . . . well, it’s what it is. Anyhow, it’s done. We’re not starting from there. We’re starting from here.’
‘I’ve no idea what you’re talking about,’ I said.
‘Good,’ said Franky. ‘I’ll be getting on with my meal, then.’
When the last customer had left, and the dishes and glasses had bee
n cleared, Marcie joined me in the living room. We put our feet on the table.
‘Well?’ she asked.
‘A draw, I reckon. What do you think?’
‘I’m not sure. Perhaps you were right. I didn’t expect him to be so defensive.’
I paused for a moment. ‘What are you supposed to know, Marcie?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘When Franky turned to you and said, “You know perfectly well,” what was he referring to?’
‘I’ve no idea,’ said Marcie. ‘Are you sure he said that?’
‘Oh, come on, you must have heard him.’
‘Let’s give it a rest, honey. I think we’re both getting too wound up.’
That’s the trouble with situations like this. The more you know, the less you know. You learn something, and you think, oh that’s good, that’s going to make things clearer, and it does no such thing. Maybe, with Franky, I was on the wrong track. As for what Marcie knew, she must have heard what Franky said. What was she hiding from me?
Until this point, Marcie and I had not seen the improvements that Franky had made to his new residence. The house had been occupied with our collusion, yet Franky hadn’t invited us to look over the place. Now, a few days after our conversation in the bar, he asked me round to look at ‘my house’, as he’d taken to calling it. He invited me for one lunchtime, which must have been deliberate, so Marcie couldn’t come.
Franky had continued to leave his car in our lot, around the corner, hidden from the road by our building. He still didn’t want anyone to know where he was living, if it could be avoided, and we remained conspirators in the secret, although we’d said we didn’t want to be. To anyone who passed the property on the road, with its big iron gates, the estate looked as derelict as ever. I walked in through the hole in the wire that I had first created, and which Franky had now expanded.
Considering it was little more than two months since Franky and Davy and I had clambered through the fence, the transformation to the house was amazing. What had been spent on it was time more than money, but it looked pretty darned good. Franky was a fine handyman, no question of it. We sat in the front room, on chairs he’d reclaimed from somewhere or other, with bottles of beer in our hands.