by Peter Meinke
“Wouldn’t what?” asked Colson.
“Wouldn’t smuggle out the dishes. Are you listening, cretin?”
The next few days jumped by nervously. To our surprise, we had found with little trouble the murderer of our friend’s father. Now it was up to Curtis. On Thursday he said, “Tomorrow let’s find out where he lives, trace him from Thornton’s to his house.”
Old Woodbridge Road ran just outside the city. The Thornton Company was a small factory specializing in plastic dishes for diners and schools. Only one light was burning there, in a small room near the main entrance. We arrived around four in the morning, parked by the side of the road, and sat smoking in silence in Colson’s new Pontiac. A fingernail moon hung over the factory smokestack, balancing for a while like a Steinberg cartoon; below it, shining in the soft light, an old-model Chevy stood alone in the parking lot.
A little before six, other cars began to arrive and by the time the old Chevy started up the parking lot was fairly crowded, so much so that from our vantage point none of us saw the driver get in. Letting the Chevy get a little lead, Colson swung his car in a U-turn and followed about a hundred yards behind. It was still dark, we couldn’t see each other’s faces, and somehow this kept us quiet.
“He’s going to the Red Dragon, all right.” Bluestein broke the silence.
The Red Dragon was an all-night diner, near the railroad tracks and familiar to all of us. From 11:00 P.M. to 2:00 A.M. it was a combination college and gay hangout, but by breakfast time it was filled with the early risers—factory workers, secretaries, sleepy policemen stirring their coffee. We decided that Bluestein and I would go into the diner with McGinnis, leaving Curtis and Colson in the car to make sure we wouldn’t lose him.
The eastward stars were winking out as we followed McGinnis’s huddled figure into the Red Dragon. He sat at the counter and we took a table behind and to the right of him. The first thing we noticed was his white hair. He was an old man! We hadn’t thought about that. Of course, he must be almost seventy by now! We watched him eat. He was small, wiry, unkempt, hunched over his breakfast in a ragged corduroy windbreaker, shoveling in the food, eyes fixed on the plate so it was hard for us to see his face, except that he wore glasses.
“Christ, he wears glasses,” said Bluestein, as if that changed something. “He looks like that crazy scientist in Captain Marvel.”
“Or like Einstein.”
“It’s the same thing. Hey, let’s go.” McGinnis had gone to the cashier, and we stood behind him to pay for our coffee. He was even smaller than I had thought. I could have put my hand on his shoulder; in fact, I had a terrible urge to do so. I would say, “Al, baby, you don’t know us, but we have a friend outside who is the son of the man you shot through the nose. He’s going to make you pay for that, old man.”
While this was whirling through my brain McGinnis collected his change, turned, and looked directly at me. His light blue eyes were bloodshot, his old face pale and unhealthy-looking. Though he looked at me just for a moment and without expression, my stomach lurched and I felt my face flushing furiously, then draining equally fast.
We hurried out to the car.
“He’s an old son-of-a-bitch,” said Bluestein, as Colson began following the Chevy once more. Curtis was silent, staring ahead as McGinnis wound through the less prosperous neighborhoods of Schenectady until we arrived, in a brief time, at one of those trailer parks that blot our landscape: not a tree, not a curved line, to soften the effect of three hundred more or less permanent hunks of tin lined up like so many cans of cat food in the A & P.
McGinnis lived toward the back of the park, the last one in the second row, and parked his car in the field behind it. We watched from a distance as he shuffled into his trailer, which looked like a miniature Red Dragon diner; then we turned around and headed back to Monroe. It’s hard to say what we were thinking. We weren’t thinking. We were waiting for Curtis to do something.
Sunday afternoon he came into the room I shared with Colson. “Lock the door,” he told me. After I locked it, he looked at us for a minute, then pulled a small pistol from his pocket and placed it on my desk. “It’s my father’s. Tonight’s the night, fellow assassins,” he said.
Colson and I stared at the gun. It was black and snubnosed; it took over the desk like a tank in the desert. “Jesus,” said Colson. “You don’t need that. The old fart is going to die of old age next week.”
“Listen, chickenshits, that’s not your worry. Anyway, we won’t use it tonight. Tonight we just begin the operation.”
We were chickenshits all right, but we weren’t about to back out. Curtis had energy and moral force, which may be the same thing, on his side: what should you do when you meet your father’s murderer? We were ready. We had read Electra.
And so, shortly before midnight on a star-studded Sunday night we set out for the trailer park and McGinnis. We wore sneakers and old clothes; we almost blacked our faces but decided against it: we weren’t fucking commandos, after all. Parking just off the main road, we skirted around the park on foot, turning the corner just below McGinnis’s trailer. The old Chevy was there, meaning he wasn’t at work; and his home, if that’s the right word for those tin boxes, was one of the very few with lights on. The car was hidden from the trailer by a thick stand of punk trees whose papery bark glowed ghostlike in the night air.
“That’s good,” said Curtis. “That’s just right. Now we can see in but he can’t see out. First, we take the car.” We left Colson as a lookout at the comer of the first row, and the three of us padded up to the Chevy. It was a two-door coupe, very neat and carefully polished.
Each of us had brought a knife. For a few moments we stood motionless by the car; then Curtis knelt down and plunged his knife into the right front tire. The hiss of air seemed terrible in the darkness.
“C’mon, let’s go,” he whispered. The car wasn’t locked and I opened the door and leaned in. The worn, cheap material gave off a faint glimmer in the starlight. Methodically I cut the seat apart, slicing first the backrest, then the seat itself, until it all hung in shreds. I threw the batting over the dashboard and into the rear of the car; then I reached over the seat and began ripping up the back, but the car squeaked and I quickly backed out. Bluestein and Curtis had slashed the rest of the tires, and the old Chevy sat on its rims. I imagined I could hear it sighing, and a phrase came to me from our reading: And it gave up the ghost.
Curtis motioned. “Now the house.” We followed him to the trailer and flattened ourselves against the metal siding by the front window where the light was pouring out on the bare hard dirt of the park.
“Suppose he sees us?” Bluestein’s face was chalk white.
Curtis looked at him and patted the bulging pocket of his pea jacket: he had brought the pistol. There was nothing to say, not now.
Running beneath the long front window was a homemade window box painted green, maybe four feet long. In it were growing ten or twelve young geranium plants, a pathetic attempt to bring something living and natural into that metallic graveyard. Curtis ducked under it and ran to the other side of the window; he began pulling out the geraniums, ripping them apart as he did so. Bluestein and I followed suit, crouching below the box, reaching up and tearing the flowers out.
Only when the window box was empty did we look inside, into the living room. Sitting in a wheelchair, profile to us, an old woman was watching TV. She was heavy, but not unattractive, like a German grandma. There was something wrong with one of her legs, which was enormous. So McGinnis had a wife, or a woman at any rate. Who would have thought? We watched her, as hypnotized by her presence as she was by the TV.
After a while McGinnis came in behind her. She didn’t see him; he didn’t see us. He stood there behind her chair, a little old man in pajamas. Then he put both hands on her shoulders. She didn’t turn around, but lay her head to the side on one of his hands; the other he slipped inside her bathrobe and rested on her breast. They stayed there, wit
hout speaking, for a long time, his white head motionless above hers, both watching television. We watched, too, frozen by a scene beyond our experience.
“FREEZE! DON’T MOVE!”
My heart slammed like a fist as a white light hit us and we were looking at a very large policeman with his hand on his holster. “Don’t move, don’t one of you move!” He came closer, peering over the flashlight.
“All right, what’re you boys up to? Peeping Toms or what? What’s all this?” His flashlight picked up the pile of shredded geraniums.
“We’re from the college, sir,” I said, barely able to breathe. “We were just fooling around. I don’t know why we did it.”
The front door opened. McGinnis stood in the doorway, squinting toward the disturbance. He began walking toward us.
“Sorry, Mr. McGinnis,” said the policeman. “These boys were looking in your window. They say they’re from the college, and it looks like they’ve been doing some damage.”
McGinnis stared down at the geraniums and then at us. “What d’you want to do that for?” he asked in a quavering voice. “My wife was crazy about them flowers. She ain’t got nothing she loves like them flowers. That’s all she had in this dump to make her happy.”
“I don’t know why we did it, sir,” I repeated. “We’re really sorry. It was just crazy.” I looked at Bluestein and Curtis. Bluestein could hardly stand up; Curtis leaned stiffly against the side of the trailer. The bulge in his side pocket looked huge.
“Do you want to press charges, Mr. McGinnis? I’d just as soon throw the book at these punks.”
McGinnis came almost nose to nose with us. He didn’t have his glasses on. He looked at each one of us for a long time, expressionless, and I couldn’t tell if he remembered me from the Red Dragon or not. He looked at Curtis last.
“What’s your name, young man?”
Curtis hesitated. “Murray,” he said. Murray was his middle name, his father’s name.
“Ah,” said McGinnis. He looked broken all of a sudden, his energy gone, a worn-out old man. “No, no, what good would that do? I don’t want to press charges. I just want some peace, please go away.” He walked toward the front door. “But I don’t know how I’ll tell my wife about them geraniums.” And he was gone.
“How’d you guys get here?” the policeman asked.
“We have a car down the road.”
“All right, get the hell out of here. And if I catch you around here again I’ll run you in for sure, you get that?”
“Yes sir,” I said, “we’re sorry.” The three of us hurried away.
Colson was waiting in the car. He had seen the whole thing, but was unable to get ahead of the policeman to warn us. We got in and drove off toward the college.
“Jesus,” Colson said, “wait’ll he finds out about the car. You better get rid of that gun.”
All this time Curtis hadn’t said a word. When he finally spoke, it was in a soft voice we were not familiar with. “Did you see the way the fucker grabbed her tit? At his age!”
As we neared the college the motor began to cough: we were out of gas. We had to walk up the hill in the dark, single file, and we were grateful for that.
Even Crazy Old Barmaids Need Love
It takes about six months to make a decent bar. When Phil Masters bought The Grouper he threw out the new jukebox with its rock songs and put in the old one of his father’s with its mixture of golden oldies and country. He put in more lights and took out some tables. He kept the stuffed fish above the bar—an immense fat grouper with an expression of open-mouthed wild-eyed surprise—but got rid of all the little black-and-white photos of the previous owner and his cronies holding up various fish between them. He brought along a reasonably honest bartender named Harry Kee and he kept the old barmaid, a tough-talking lady named Agnes Prokop who had been there for six years and knew what was what.
Phil needed Agnes because The Grouper was a tough bar in downtown St. Petersburg. This is not very tough, because St. Pete is a gentle town where old folks sit behind the polished counters dissolving their Social Security checks and trying to figure out what hit them. But there are bikers and hookers, as in any self-respecting city, and these had been breaking furniture for about two years in The Grouper, which is why Phil could buy it so cheaply. This wasn’t his first tough bar and he knew what to do.
The bikers came in in ones and twos, and at the first sound they made Phil and Harry had them by the elbows and were carrying them out. Between them, Phil and Harry weighed almost five hundred pounds and Harry in particular had a smile that would make a dog faint. “You come back here, friend, and I’ll be on you like white on rice,” he’d say, smiling, bumping the biker against the doorjamb with his belly. Harry’s belly was a boulder not to be brushed aside lightly. Harry was about forty years old and a casebook example of grizzled. He never looked shaved and never grew a beard, but was somehow able to keep a steady four-day stubble: he looked like he had just emerged from some dark alley and was daring you to ask what he had been doing there. No one asked.
Agnes pointed out the hookers for them, at least the aggressive ones, and they too were firmly though gently escorted out. Some of the quieter ones she didn’t identify. Hookers need a beer now and then like anybody else. This interest in cleaning up The Grouper was not moral but financial: a decent family bar was easier and more profitable than a white-knuckle dive. It took half a year and a lot of energy to do it. The turning point came after about two months and was, oddly enough, one of their easiest times. The bikers came back in a group; outside The Grouper their bikes revved and coughed as they gathered—a sound that should have attracted all of the town’s policemen, but instead seemed to disperse them—and after a while they banged the door open and came in. Phil didn’t even wait for them to get near the bar. He fired his shotgun in front of them with a blast that made several people think they were dead. For a few minutes afterwards the remaining fish pictures swung on their hooks, glass fragments dripping like icicles in the silence. As the bikers hustled back to their bikes, Harry admired the holes in the wall. “Nice pattern,” he said. They were going to panel the wall anyway.
So fishermen came there, some reporters from the Times, college kids from the local branch of USF. Agnes made good sandwiches. A new theater opened nearby and brought them a lot of business: the theatergoers would come in before the play, and the actors would come in after it, starving for corned beef on rye and a cold pitcher of beer.
One of the regulars was a middle-aged actor named Daryl Dana, a melancholy man with a deep voice and a face like a deserted battlefield, mined with smallpox scars and three long gashes above his eyebrows. When drinking he would talk of how he had been driving with his fiancée, the only girl he had ever known who could look at him without pity or worse. He was a crazy driver, he said, and missed a turn from too much speed: they slammed through some small trees, crashed down a gully, up an embankment, and came to rest on railroad tracks parallel to the road. Both Daryl and his girl had smashed the windshield as their heads snapped back and forth, but the girl was in worse shape, cuts all over her face, blood running down her neck. They got out of the car, heard a train in the distance, and Daryl panicked. “Push the car!” he screamed. “Goddamnit, help me push the car!” The girl had sat down by the bank, and now rolled over on her side. Daryl ran to her in a frenzy, yanked her up, and dragged her to the car, where she just fell on her knees behind the rear bumper as the train rounded the bend.
“She never forgave me for that,” he’d say, staring into his beer. “The train stopped in plenty of time, and suddenly there were policemen and everything around. I was pretty lucky. I was still in uniform then and the cop in charge was a patriotic bastard and didn’t press charges. And my girl could have sued me to death—her face was really a mess—but she just said, ‘Go away, Daryl, don’t come near me anymore.’ She couldn’t forgive me for trying to make her push my stupid car.”
His favorite audience for this morose
tale was Agnes, who would listen with great concentration while he talked, as if she had trouble understanding the language. Agnes was a good-sized woman in her mid-forties, a little thick at the waist, but slim-ankled and large-bosomed. She wore her black hair in a neat bun, and her dresses were always dark, long, and severe. She often wore a green sweater pushed up to her elbows as she polished the bar or made sandwiches.
No one knew much about Agnes. Her face was unlined, but dark circles beneath her large brown eyes gave her a tragic appearance that the actors kidded her about. Charlie Robertson, the director, was always after her to join the theater group. “Come play Lady Macbeth for us! You’d be perfect!”
“I am no lady,” she’d say. “I am a barmaid.” Agnes had virtually no accent despite having grown up in Poland, outside of Krakow, but she somehow never learned to speak informally, in contractions. “This is The Grouper Bar speaking,” she would say, answering the telephone, clearly enunciating the ing. Everyone else just barked, “Grouper.”
What she seemed to have in common with Daryl was the fact that neither of them ever smiled. Even after she went home with him—to his room in the elegantly run-down Michigan Hotel—they were as serious as ever the next day. Everyone was curious: there are few secrets in a bar-and-acting community. Rick Seifer, one of the young leading actors who also lived at the Michigan, claimed to have heard enthusiastic cries in a foreign language, but he was not a reliable witness: he would say anything to upstage anybody.
It would not be right to call these two veterans derelicts—they both had steady jobs, after all, and bothered no one—but their companionship struck chords of compassion in various hard-nosed people. Harry posted a placard on the mirror: EVEN CRAZY OLD BARMAIDS NEED LOVE. And Phil would mutter as the crowd thinned in the early morning, “Better go sit with Creepo, I’ll watch the bar.” Which was as romantic as those large gentlemen ever got.