by Howard Owen
Old friends and acquaintances appear out of every doorway.
A woman Jack dated his junior year in high school is sitting in a wing chair in the judge’s study. She seems to be drunk already; she is trying to thump cocktail peanuts through a goalpost some man Jack’s never met is making with his index fingers and thumbs.
He sees Milo Wainwright across the livingroom, talking to a man who he recognizes, finally, as Carly Hamner’s father. Jack didn’t know his former father-in-law was still alive, thought he still lived in Fredericksburg and wonders how he might avoid speaking with him.
Out of nowhere, around a blind corner, comes Ricky Coles, arm-in-arm with the judge who once tried to use his power to keep Speakeasy’s schools segregated. Jack hasn’t talked to his old high school classmate and teammate in at least two years. Ricky Coles has long graduated from having to help his own crews pick up garbage, although Jack knows half the town will always think of him that way, no matter how rich he gets. He and Judge Edmonds seem to have just shared an extremely funny joke.
“Well, Jack. There you are,” the judge says, his words slurred already. Jack remembers one such party when the judge threw up on a Persian rug early in the third quarter. “We’ll have the whole damn blackfield, I mean, backfield, here soon.”
Jack supposes that Ricky Coles has had to deal with worse. Other than Cully Dane, Ricky probably is the wealthiest member of the class of ’70, which Jack hopes makes the day-to-day indignities go down a little more smoothly. He lives in a one-street development just north of town where every affluent African-American in greater Speakeasy has built.
“So,” Jack says after the judge totters away, “where have you been? I mean, I don’t see you much around here anymore. Missed you at the reunion.”
“Oh, I’m here,” Ricky Coles says. His smile reveals a couple of gold teeth. “But we spend a lot of time at our place down at the beach. We bought a cottage at Sandbridge abut five years ago, although I’m probably going to lose the damn thing.”
Ricky is getting divorced. He says it with a shrug, like it happens to everyone, which is just about the truth among their old classmates.
“It’s funny,” he says. “Loretta and me, we made it through 18-hour workdays, raising four kids and hauling garbage. Hell, she used to drive the truck for me. We just couldn’t handle prosperity.”
Just then, Susan Edmonds comes up behind Jack and grabs him on the butt. “Well, here you are,” she says when he jumps. “Two of my favorite men.”
And, the way she moves alongside Ricky and massages his shoulder with her right hand, he knows that Ricky is the special guest she mentioned when they talked on the phone the week before. He wonders about the judge, a man who may or may not have belonged to the Klan 40 years earlier. By now, though, Jack doesn’t see very much that surprises him. The human race—or at least the part of it with which he is experienced—seems more adaptable to change than he might once have thought.
Jack wanders off again as Susan pulls Ricky into the half-bath. He watches the first quarter and half of the second while sitting on a beanbag chair that coexists uneasily with heirlooms in the upstairs parlor. He only sees approximately every third play, though, because the two younger women next to him—both married to siblings of people with whom he went to school—keep asking him questions. Over a half-hour period, he explains first downs, two-point conversions and illegal procedure. When a commercial featuring a car stuck in a tree distracts them, he pulls himself out of the chair and wanders off.
He encounters Mack McLamb and Cully Dane in the Florida room, which is serviced by one black-and-white 13-inch TV set but offers a respite from what Mack calls the annuals, who won’t watch another football game until next January.
Mack and Cully aren’t really watching much football either, Jack realizes. They’re discussing the thing that seems to consume most of their competitive and creative juices—money.
They are talking low and conspiratorially when Jack comes in. They are friendly enough and appear happy to see him, but they seem reluctant to really draw him into the specifics of their conversation. Jack senses that his failure to rise above the level to which they all were born, or even to aspire to do so, makes his old friends uneasy sometimes, as if downward mobility might be catching. Mack might be in more desperate straits than Jack now, but he’s already scrambling to stay in whatever game they’re supposed to be playing. He’s getting his real-estate license, Jack has heard, and might be going to work for Cully.
Jack is a different matter. He has lost most of what Mack calls his “net worth” through his friend’s investments. He seems to be on the verge of losing the house Cully built and sold him due to an unwillingness to earn enough to make the monthly payments. Money sits in the little room with them like an invisible but embarrassing guest.
Jack doesn’t speak about Lovelady these days unless spoken to. He senses that his oldest buddies also are a little disoriented by what Cully calls “this book business.” His besuited friends were more comfortable with him when he was a truck driver, he believes. He was something exotic to them, a maverick, a cowboy, in some ways the truest to their high school instincts and desires. He’d tried to do what seemed right, and when he screwed up, he took it like a man.
Now, though, with foreclosure closing in, conversations seem to have odd pauses they didn’t used to have. No one talks about the Code now unless he’s drunk, but Jack wonders if he hasn’t somehow broken it, at least in the eyes of his old friends.
The three of them talk in general terms about the market and new homes, or at least Cully and Mack do. Jack mostly listens. They turn to the small TV whenever the noise level in the next room rises. They are able to see all they need to see by watching the replays.
Milo stumbles in at halftime, looking for a fresh beer. He seems surprised to see them all there, and it seems to Jack that he would just as soon have been in some other room, some other house.
Milo being Milo, though, he recovers quickly enough and has everyone howling over a joke involving killer bees and the Crucifixion. He has always served this purpose. He was always in charge of keeping everyone loose, sometimes paying the price for his shenanigans. They all understood that any pies in the face Milo incurred for being Milo were his dues to whatever club they all belonged to.
“So,” he says to Mack, grinning, “you think I can get in the wayback machine and dial up last September so I can sell my dot-com stocks?”
There is a short, uneasy silence. Even Milo can go too far sometimes. But then Mack shakes his head and laughs, and everyone else joins in.
“If you can, I’d like you to squeeze me in there, too, so I can keep making payments on that damn Lexus Sarah talked me into getting,” he says. “And if people don’t stop dumping Cisco, you might see me on one of those little scooters like I bought my kid for Christmas.”
Milo puts his arm around Mack.
“You know what I’ve always told you: I don’t care if I’m eating cat food, as long as everybody else in the world is eating cat food, too. It ain’t all that bad, you know? Cats seem to like it.”
“Well,” Mack says, “you’ve probably got enough stock left to buy about a year’s supply.”
“Meow.”
Cully turns to Jack, his tongue loosened now that the subject of money is more or less on the table.
“Well,” he says, “I guess we’re all going to be in the market for some Kibbles N’ Bits pretty soon. I hear you and the mortgage company have been going round and round.”
Jack shrugs.
“It’s going to get better soon,” he says. He stares straight ahead, not wanting to say more.
“Yeah, Gina said the insurance money was coming any day now, for your momma’s house,” Milo says. “That ought to buy you some time.”
“Yeah,” Jack says. He’s probably the only person here not drinking, but he feels a little light-headed, and something in their conversation doesn’t quite compute.
�
�And the book,” Cully says.
“Yeah,” Mack says, too quickly. “The book. What do you hear from ol’ Jerry Prince these days?”
Jack tells them that he’s supposed to call on Tuesday, that this should be the end of it.
“They gonna make a movie out of it?” Cully asks. “Got any parts for a well-hung hunk who doesn’t look a day over 29?”
“Let me know if you know anybody like that,” Jack says, and they fall into the kind of insults that have been their way of expressing friendship for as long as Jack can remember.
When the third quarter starts, Jack slips away again. Some tiny grain of foreign substance keeps nagging at him. He wishes he could find Gina and go home now. He’s pretty sure he already knows who’s going to win anyway. One of the things he always liked about football was the inevitability of speed and strength winning out. It had always worked to his advantage. The game is long enough for quality and hard work to outweigh a few trick plays and unlucky breaks.
He glimpses her a couple of times, across rooms, but someone else from his past comes up both times and pulls him in another direction. Gina likes to keep moving at parties. She prides herself on talking to everyone there for at least a minute or two. At the doctors’ offices, they think she’s wonderful, a real people person. Occasionally at events like this, she will subtly shoo him in one direction while she goes in another.
“We can talk to each other all night long, most any night you want,” she told him once. “Get out there and mingle.”
And now, with all that’s befallen them, at least in Gina’s eyes, he supposes she is less interested than ever in his company.
The game is almost over when Jack runs into Susan Edmonds in the upstairs hallway. He looks into a half-open bedroom door and sees the judge’s feet pointing toward the ceiling. His daughter seems to be holding herself up by leaning against the wall with one hand.
He hears a noise inside the room, and Ricky Coles comes walking out.
“Your daddy ought to either lose some weight,” he tells Susan, “or quit drinking.”
“I think the diet is more likely,” Susan says. She is sipping on what looks like straight bourbon. “Rick, could you leave Jack and me alone for just a minute, sweetie? I promise you I won’t give him a blow job or anything nasty like that. But I’ve got to talk to him about something.”
Ricky Coles pats Jack on the shoulder as he walks by him. Jack has the impression that, whatever Susan is about to tell him, Ricky already knows.
“Come in here,” she says, drawing him into the bedroom where the judge is snoring peacefully. With his red bow tie and suspenders, his London suit and wingtips, Jack can see the way he’ll look in the near future at Kinnock’s Funeral Home.
“I didn’t want to have to tell you this,” she says. They’re leaning against the inside wall with the door ajar. “I thought you’d figure it out on your own, but somebody’s got to tell you.”
“Tell me what?”
And so she tells him.
“Gina and who?”
He has never ruled out the possibility that Gina might be unfaithful, although he hasn’t thought about it for a while. He’s not flawless himself. He once spent a couple of long afternoons in a motel outside Ashland with an old girlfriend who liked him married better than she had single, when he was still not readjusted to the concept of fidelity. He has always counted himself very lucky that Gina never found out, and he knew that, however good confession might be for the soul, only grief would come of his telling her about it.
“Are you sure?” he says, and she shushes him.
He repeats it in a whisper. She nods.
“The human mind is an amazing thing,” Susan says. “It is capable of seeing what isn’t there, or making something else out of what is there.”
“Are you sure?” he asks a third time, as if she might give him a more palatable answer this time.
She nods her head again.
“And if you hadn’t slipped into some kind of book coma lately, if you’d come up for air once in a while, you’d know it too.”
Susan, it turns out, is friends with one of the doctors where Gina works. They drink together sometimes. In the course of a long, wet evening, the doctor said more than he’d meant to.
“He let it slip,” Susan says, “that Gina is, uh, letting it slip.”
According to Susan, Gina has been working an hour and a half less than she’s been telling Jack, several days a week. She gets off work at 4, not 5:30. Then, according to the doctor, who says everyone at the medical center is on to her, she walks out the back door and through the alleyway bisecting Third and then Fourth streets, which brings her to the back door of Wainwright and Son Insurance Agency.
“Good God,” Jack says, sitting on the edge of the bed. “Milo.”
“Well, they have known each other a long time.”
“Milo,” he says again, staring down at his feet.
He remembers the slight edge to their friendship after he began dating Gina, not really stealing her from Milo but still … he’d thought that was over years ago.
“Milo’s bald and fat,” he says, still trying to deny it.
“Well, he’s overweight,” Susan says, “but he’s not really fat. And he does have a little bit of hair, enough for a comb-over.”
“You’re a comfort to me.”
“I’m sorry.” She puts her arm around his shoulder. “But half the assholes here know about this. OK, maybe only a quarter. And nobody’s telling you. And you’re just so clueless and all.”
“Please,” Jack tells her. “Don’t tell me I’m going to thank you for this someday.”
He looks over and sees that her eyes are wet.
“I just hope you’ll forgive me someday.”
“You’d better get back downstairs,” he tells her, “before Ricky thinks you are giving me a blow job.”
She smiles and kisses him on the cheek.
He thanks her, though he doesn’t feel like it, and sits awhile longer on the edge of the bed, listening to the judge’s snoring and wondering how all this fits into the plan.
Maybe it could work out anyhow, he thinks, and he’s aware that “maybe” has crept into his consciousness. He’s known all along that “things” would work out, that “everything” would be alright, once his book was bought.
He has never, though, imagined it all without Gina.
He’s been a little distant, sure, a little focused, but all that will change, soon. I’ll make it up to you. I’ll forgive you and you’ll forgive me.
But something sly and undermining whispers into his brain:
Maybe.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
He sits by himself at the kitchen table, staring out the window. A last oak leaf is trying to free itself from a stubborn tree that won’t let go despite the cold, sharp gusts that rattle even its largest branches.
Gerald said about 2 o’clock. It’s 2:15 now. Jack swears he won’t call. He won’t.
The last two days have passed in a haze. Jack has found himself looking at his wife more intensely than he has in months, maybe years. A couple of times, she caught him staring and asked him if he was all right.
Last night, he must have lain in bed for two hours, watching her sleep. She seems so wonderful to him when she’s lying on her back, her mouth slightly parted, her face more beautiful without the makeup or the worry creases.
He tries not to believe what Susan told him, but he knows, when he lets reason rule, that it is possible, even probable.
Anything, it seems to him now, is possible, even the unimaginable. He has been so sure of himself, so positive that if he put all his faith in one old stranger and a few inherited pages of cursive script, everything would work out the way it was meant to.
Now, he can’t help but wonder. What if the old man was just a road-induced dream? What if it has all been for nothing? For the hundredth time, he overrides the voice that whispers to him. He can make it stop if he sits still and bre
athes in and out slowly, ten times.
Even Shannon seems different to him now, a little more evasive than he remembers. This morning, he offered to drive her to school and she said that she was going to take the bus, not to bother. She’s staying with a teammate after school, and her parents will meet her at the game tonight if Milo’s through screwing my wife and then go out for pizza. He can understand why she would be a little nervous, a little put off. Everyone thinks the Stones are about to lose their home. He wishes his wife and daughter both had a little more faith, but he forgives them. If he were them, he’d probably be a little nervous, too.
Well, it won’t be long.
He’s checked the mail, finding in their box one final letter from The Octagon Group, marked Urgent. No sense in opening it now. He tosses it in the trash can, where he put the last one.
He’s been thinking about the ending. Pettigrew and Lovelady are in one of those abandoned half-moon motor courts you still see alongside the old U.S. highways, the motels and the roads both made obsolete by the interstates. The detective has tracked Lovelady there, six rather inventive murders later, and found him living in a room that turns out to be two units linked by a jagged hole Lovelady has smashed through the cheap masonry walls.
Jack is sure he has caught the essence of Lovelady’s sadism and general madness—the fingernails chewed to the quick and bleeding, the red contact lenses he took from the medicine cabinet of the third girl, the one he tortured for two days before he killed her. The meticulous way in which he carved the “LL” into his own forehead with a steak knife, the silk panties he’s wearing, which formerly adorned the half-rotted body on the other side of the wall. The stench that combines with floor-vibrating, atonal music to make Pettigrew dizzy and disoriented.
Jack is sure he has staged the final battle between good and evil in such a way as to make a reader throw the book down at the end, repelled and entranced at the same time. At one point, the only time the psychopath and his hunter talk, Lovelady tells him that he has no control over his actions, that he is doing what he was meant to do, what he has been told to do. Jack knows, in a way, how Lovelady feels.