by Lewis Shiner
The band didn’t let being tight interfere with an easy, swinging groove. The giant had a relaxed baritone when he sang and a slick patter between numbers. They did Hank Williams and Bob Wills, and then they lit into Fletcher Henderson’s “Shoeshine Boy,” which Cole remembered from his father’s records. He polished off the rest of his beer. “Fish,” he said out loud, “or cut bait.”
Jimmy looked at him curiously as he stood up. Cole nodded, stiff with nerves, and made his way around the barrier to the dance floor. An older woman with flagrantly dyed blonde hair stood on the sidelines. Cole had seen her dancing, good but not great, likely to be forgiving. He leaned toward her ear and said, “I haven’t done this in ten years. Would you—”
“Oh hell yes,” she said, and they were off. It took him a couple of seconds to find his place in the music, during which he nearly got run into a couple of times, and he started to panic. But everybody was smiling and he took a breath and started off and it didn’t go too badly. At the end the woman introduced herself and said, “Not bad for ten years,” which made him think of Corrina again. He smiled and thanked her and grabbed another partner.
By the time he made it back to the table, two dances later, Jimmy had acquired two women and another round of beer. Cole was hyped-up and pleased with himself and he needed a second or two to realize what was wrong with this picture. The woman sitting very close to Jimmy had red hair and electric green eyes and looked like she was about to burst out of her clothes. The other woman was on Cole’s side of the table with her back to him, and he saw long dark hair, a battered straw cowboy hat, tight jeans.
“Where’d you learn to do that?” Jimmy said, with genuine admiration. “You surprised the hell out of me.”
Cole flicked a glance at the redhead. “I guess that’s two of us surprised.”
“Cole, this is Sharon,” Jimmy said, and the redhead nodded. “That’s Charlene.”
Charlene turned sideways in her chair. She looked to be a couple of years older than Cole, with a prominent nose and lots of eye makeup. “How do,” she said. “Like to dance? Unless you’re tired.”
“I don’t get tired,” Cole said.
She stood up. “I like the sound of that.”
On the floor she admitted she didn’t really know what she was doing. She laughed when she said it, and Cole didn’t mind anyway. In her cowboy boots she was eye to eye with Cole and she didn’t look away except when she was turning. Cole figured out quickly to mouth the count to her as she came around. When the song finished, the girl singer in the band stepped up to sing a slow one and Cole said, “You want to try another?”
Charlene kept a discrete distance at first. By halfway through the song she had nestled her head on his shoulder and he felt the weight and warmth of her breasts against his chest. His right leg was between both of hers, and their thighs touched and separated and touched again as they turned in a slow circle. She had on a musky, dark-smelling perfume that stopped Cole’s brain in its tracks. She had stopped laughing. When they finally let go of each other she fanned herself and said, “Whooeee. I think we better cool down a bit.”
The more she drank, the more giggly she got, which didn’t bother Cole. She worked at a nail salon called Your Nailed, a patch of grammatical quicksand that Cole opted not to poke at. Sharon was a secretary at an architect’s office, “hired for my boobs, but I needed the bread.” Charlene had been doing Sharon’s nails for a year or so.
Around 11 Jimmy said, “Shall we?” and they all stood up. Apparently everything had been decided by means that Cole was not privy to. Charlene dug in her purse and held out her car keys. “Are you okay to drive?” she asked Cole. “I might be a little drunkie.” She giggled.
Charlene’s car turned out to be a dark red ’66 Mustang with a 289 V8. Cole was halfway tempted to pop the hood and see if she had the four-barrel carb, but knew this was not the time. He got Charlene poured into the passenger bucket seat about the time that Jimmy pulled up in his bmw. When Cole cranked the engine, koke-fm blasted out of the dashboard speakers, playing Jerry Jeff’s version of “London Homesick Blues,” better known as “I Want to Go Home with the Armadillo.” Cole turned it down and followed Jimmy up Lamar, noting that the Mustang needed a tune-up and the Cruise-O-Matic transmission was sluggish.
“If your hair was lighter and there was less of it and you didn’t have a beard, you’d look just like Steve McQueen in Bullitt,” Charlene said.
Cole didn’t have a ready response, so he said, “How long have you known Jimmy?”
“I just met him tonight. Sharon met him last fall. He calls her up sometimes, tells her to meet him somewhere.”
Cole glanced over at her. She was slumped in the seat, hat pulled low over her face. Cole checked the road, looked again, and she had the hat pushed up with one finger and one eye open. “She knows he’s got a regular girlfriend.”
“She’s okay with that?”
“He’s got money, he’s great looking, he treats her sweet… hell no, she’s not okay with it. She takes what she can get in this world, like the rest of us.”
“You guys drove together?”
“Yeah, she called me up and told me Jimmy was bringing a friend. I said, ‘I’ll drive, but you tell Jimmy I am not going home with some stranger.’” She giggled. “‘Unless I like him.’”
Cole worried that she might pass out as soon as she got into bed, but she continued to be drowsily amused throughout. She did fall asleep quickly afterward, leaving Cole with a mild case of post-coital remorse. He’d never shared that bed with anyone but Madelyn, though that thought didn’t occur to him until Charlene was lightly snoring with her back to him. Nor did his regrets keep him from responding when she came back from the bathroom before dawn, feeling playful, or again when they woke up for good late on Sunday morning and sex proved easier than conversation.
“In case I never see you again,” Charlene whispered.
“You’ll see me,” Cole said, from a mix of guilt and lust.
Eventually, dressed in the previous night’s smoke-saturated clothes, they made their way downstairs. Cole felt drained and raw, but he had thought to get Charlene’s business card, with her home number scrawled on the back. “I live with my mama,” she said, “so watch what you say on the phone.”
Sharon was already at one end of the dining room table, drinking coffee and looking at her watch. Chip, the middle roommate, sat at the other end, eating Trix and reading the sports section of the Statesman. He looked up long enough to give Charlene a slow, head-to-foot checkout. Jimmy was nowhere to be seen.
“We got to boogie,” Sharon said.
Cole walked them out to the Mustang and gave Charlene her keys and a kiss. She tapped him on the chest with one long, shining fingernail and said, “Thanks for the ride.” The first drops of a bitter cold rain fell as Cole sprinted up the walk.
Cole’s bed smelled of smoke and beer and sweat as much as it did of sex and Charlene’s musky perfume. He thumbtacked her card to the bulletin board above his desk and showered and put his sheets and clothes in the wash. In his robe and wet hair he cooked up a mess of factory farm eggs and instant grits and Mrs. Baird’s whole wheat toast and drank some frozen orange juice. It was one in the afternoon and Chip had a basketball game blaring in the living room, squealing sneakers and referee whistles and crowd noise. Cole moved his clothes over to the dryer and picked up the Strat and tried a country shuffle on for size. It didn’t fit.
Between Charlene and the tasteless eggs and living in the Castle again, Cole was in a mood, and the name of the mood was Settling for What You Can Get, which was not a happy one. It did, however, remind him of Tupelo Joe’s lyrics, which were also about not getting what you wanted, and it sent him up two flights of stairs to his bedroom, where he got dressed and sat down with La Pelirroja and Joe’s piece of paper and took 45 minutes to turn it into a fully fleshed-out song. Though he’d tinkered with the words a bit and added a bridge, it was recognizably Joe’s work. And i
t added up to something worth singing, Cole thought.
After the basketball game, Cole called Joe from the downstairs phone and played it for him, remembering high school and sitting in the hall closet to play “Laura Lee” for Alex.
“Sounds country,” was Joe’s reaction.
“I was two-stepping last night,” Cole said. “Is that a bad thing?”
“I don’t know. I guess I hadn’t really pictured it that way.”
“How did you picture it?”
“I don’t know. Like Creedence, maybe.”
“Well, that’s my best shot. I won’t play it if you don’t like it.”
“I didn’t say I didn’t like it.”
“You didn’t say you did.”
“Are you going to put it on an album or something?”
“Not any time soon. I might sing it in public.”
“Don’t say my name if you do. You can say you wrote it with a friend, but don’t say who.”
“If you’re embarrassed by it…”
“I’m not embarrassed. It’s just, if I do more of this, I want it to be separate. You know. From the other thing.”
“From your political career.”
“Yeah.”
“Is there more?”
“There might be.”
“Well, frankly, after the excitement and flood of gratitude that this one provoked, I’m not sure I’d feel like working on any more.”
“Give me a break. It’s kind of a shock to have something all of a sudden grow legs and start walking around on its own, you know? Play it again.”
As he sang, Cole pictured himself as John Fogerty in flannel shirt and Beatle haircut, and at the end Joe said, “That’s pretty good. Did I really write that?”
“Most of it,” Cole said, still feeling snippy.
“Thank you,” Joe said at last. “Thank you for making it into a song. I wish I had it on a record so I could hear it again.”
“Maybe someday you’ll get your wish,” Cole said.
After he hung up he checked the refrigerator. The last of his beer was gone, as usual, and nobody had replaced it. The tragedy of the commons, Sugarfoot had called it. The refrigerator belonged to everyone, so no one had stewardship. The nearest 7-Eleven was a long walk away in the pouring rain.
Cole took La Pelirroja upstairs and played a few random chords. One of them sounded like “Time Is on My Side,” and he started to play it, then he thought, this is bullshit. Time is not remotely on my side. Time is just a greedy kid who takes and takes and takes and never gives back in return.
He stopped and said the line again in his mind, and this time he heard a guitar behind it. He didn’t have another piece of paper, so he turned Tupelo Joe’s song over and started writing on the back. “The road ahead holds nothing,” he wrote, “but more bridges to be burned.”
And away we go, he thought.
*
On his father’s instructions, Alex dressed nicely but not formally—pressed, pleated khaki pants, black tasseled loafers, a blue checked button-down dress shirt with no tie, his St. Mark’s blazer. His father wore slacks and a white shirt and a brown cardigan. Callie was in the den watching All in the Family, and she wolf-whistled when Alex came in to kiss her goodbye. “Take ’em to the cleaners,” she whispered.
“Not tonight,” Alex said.
His father drove the Cadillac. The night was cold and damp and the late February wind whipped the bare trees around. “Nervous?” his father asked.
“Not too much. You said you’re staking me.”
“And I expect you to lose a couple of hundred. That would be about right. They’ll look forward to having you back, but they’ll see you know how to conduct yourself.”
“And if I win?” Alex said.
His father smiled. “I’m not too worried about that.”
Alex had been on the job a month and a half. He had one of six desks in the Accounting bullpen and he spent his days reconciling job tickets from the delivery trucks with orders and inventory from the warehouse. For the sake of his sanity, he’d started taking notes, tracking patterns, defining categories, looking for a way to automate his job out of existence.
For all his boredom, the memory of the Loisaida tenement was still pungent. He could put up with a lot for the sake of a clean and spacious house, abundant food, the warmth of his father’s happiness as they rode downtown together, the ability to send money to Frederica every month, the contentment of sharing a bed with Callie every night.
The week before the wedding, they would close on a place of their own near Northpark. It was ten years old, on a cul-de-sac, with four bedrooms and a two-car garage. Alex would never have imagined buying a house like that for himself, but Callie had led the search, with Alex’s mother patiently taking her around in the afternoons. Alex’s father had offered the down payment as their wedding present, and with the generous salary Alex was making, the payments were affordable—at least in theory. He was still getting used to the woman of easy privilege that had emerged from Callie’s hard bohemian chrysalis.
The first cracks had appeared in New York in November. They’d been in bed, talking about their childhoods, and she had finally agreed to tell him her real name. “You have to swear on everything that’s sacred to you that you will never tell anyone, ever.”
“I swear.”
“If you ever use this against me when we’re having a fight, we are over. This is the hydrogen bomb, the ultimate doomsday weapon. Is that completely understood?”
“I understand.”
“My parents named me Gladys.”
“That’s not so bad. A little old fashioned—”
“Gladys Glück. With an umlaut.” She poked him in the chest with two fingers. “Of course the kids pronounced it to rhyme with ‘duck.’ In fact, one of the many, many names they called me was Donald Duck. What kind of parents would name a child Gladys Glück?”
“Maybe it was like ‘A Boy Named Sue,’ maybe your whole artistic career is due to your childhood struggle.”
“Some career. When I get married, I’m taking my husband’s name so fast his head will spin. And I’m giving my kids names that nobody will make fun of.”
“I didn’t figure you for a marriage and kids.”
“You figured wrong. I want a big house, too, in the burbs, with a big car that when you roll up the electric windows you can’t hear anything at all. I want to go to Junior League meetings in tie-dyed coveralls and be so rich that no one will dare complain. I want two kids, a boy and a girl, and I want them to grow up knowing who Schoenberg is, and Kerouac, and Lenny Bruce. Smart, confident kids who’ll turn the world upside down by its ankles and shake everything they want out of its pockets.” She turned onto her side and faced him. “Am I scaring you yet?”
“I’m not afraid of you,” Alex lied.
“Prove it.”
He reached for her waist and she slapped his hand. “Not that way.”
“What, you want me to propose?”
She rolled away onto her back again. “No, not now. Too late. You missed your shot.”
“So if I proposed now, you’d turn me down.”
“That’s right.”
“Marry me, Callie.”
“Okay.”
“Are you serious?”
“Are you?”
Alex wasn’t sure when exactly he’d lost control of the conversation. “Yeah,” he said. “I’m serious. Let’s get married.”
“I don’t know. Maybe. I’ll think about it.” She kissed him on the forehead and turned her back to him. “It’s late, let’s go to sleep.”
Holy shit, he thought. He’d nearly committed himself to something life-shattering without thinking twice.
He didn’t know whether he was relieved or disappointed.
It turned into a running joke. One or the other of them would start a sentence with, “When we get married…” Then Alex bought a handful of toy diamond rings at FAO Schwartz and would periodically sneak one i
nto her dessert. It might never have progressed beyond that had they not found, at a thrift store, a 1920s deco wedding dress, embroidered with white-on-white dragonflies. Alex went into the dressing room with her, and when she saw how perfectly it fit, she said, “Fuck. Now we have to do it for real.”
*
Alex’s father had briefed him on the other players during the drive. Bob, in his forties, was a Korean War veteran, tanned and handsome, and was high up at Pepsico. Wade, in his fifties, was in oil. He had a thick East Texas accent, a starched white shirt, a sun-crinkled face, and a stained straw cowboy hat that he claimed was the source of his luck. Donny, also in his fifties, was heir to a major regional department store, heavy-set, with a gold medallion conspicuously nesting in the chest hair exposed by his floral-print double-knit shirt. He also owned the far-north Dallas house where they were playing. The last to arrive was Julie Greene, the gentle, balding banker who had put up the money for “Laura Lee,” wearing a forest green polo shirt and plaid sport coat.
When Alex shook his hand, Julie said, “I’m so sorry the way things turned out with your record.”
“I should apologize to you,” Alex said. “It was your money.”
“You can start making up for that tonight,” Julie said, with a wink.
They moved into the game room. Alex was not sure he’d ever been in a house where the games had their own room. The table was eight feet in diameter, dark cherry, with a green felt surface. Each place had a side table for drinks, ashtray, and snacks. On the table itself sat six stacks of chips, each worth $500.
Alex’s mouth had gone dry. He admitted to himself that he was intimidated. The net worth of the four non-Montoyas was somewhere north of a billion dollars and the air of self-confidence and privilege around them was palpable. These men had no interest in impressing anyone. They took what they wanted and had their people come around afterward to clean up the mess.
An elderly black man in a white jacket took their drink orders, and when Donny introduced Alex to him, the man, whose name was Jedediah, stood far enough away that Alex understood he was not to offer his hand. Bob ordered Glenlivet, Wade a Coors, Donny Wild Turkey, and Julie a brandy. Alex’s father asked for a Bohemia. When Alex said, “Just a Coke, please,” he felt like a kid in sockfoot pajamas sitting at the grownup table for the first time.