“For your birthday,” she said, handing me a small box tied with a white ribbon. There was quite a gale blowing off the ocean that day and her hair buffeted about her head. With her free hand she drew a long garland of it, fine as corn silk, away from her mouth and melancholy eyes. It was a gesture of absolute purity. Penny was a youthful twenty-one, and I an aged nineteen.
I must have looked surprised, because she said, “You look like you forgot.”
She followed me into the office, where we could get out of the wind. All the smugly privileged faces in Gallagher’s nostalgic gallery had been long since removed from the walls and sent off to his surviving relatives, who, not wanting much to bother with their inheritance of a slowly deteriorating putt-putt golf park, allowed me to continue in my capacity as Bayside steward and manager. Like their deceased uncle — a childless bachelor whose sole concern had been this fanciful (let me admit) dump — they thought I was far older than nineteen. The lawyer who settled his estate looked into the records, saw on my filed application that I was in my mid-twenties, and further saw that Gallagher wanted me to continue there as long as it was my wish, and thus and so. A modest check went out each month to the estate, the balance going to moderate upkeep and my equally moderate salary. What did I care? My needs were few. I spent warm nights down here in my castle, or the windmill, and was always welcome at home, where the food was free. And now, as if in a dream, here was my Penny, bearing a gift.
I undid the ribbon and tore away the paper. It was a snow globe with a hula dancer whose hips gyrated in the sparkling blizzard after I gave it a good shake.
“How did you know?” I asked, smiling at her smiling face.
“You like it?”
“I love it.”
“Molly told me this was your new thing.”
“Kind of stupid, I guess. But they’re like little worlds you can disappear into if you stare at them long enough.”
“I don’t think it’s stupid.”
“Yours goes in the place of honor,” I said, taking the gift over to my shelves lined with dozens of others, where I installed the hula girl at the very heart of the collection.
Penny peered up and down the rows, her face as luminous as I’ve ever seen it, beaming like a child. She plucked one down and held it to the light. “Can I?” she asked. I told her sure and watched as she shook the globe and the white flakes flew round and round in the glassed-in world. She gazed at the scene within while I gazed at her. One of those moments which touch on perfection.
“Very cool,” she whispered, as if in a reverie. “But isn’t it a shame that it’s always winter?”
“I don’t really see them as snowflakes,” I said.
“What, then?”
Penny turned to me and must have glimpsed something different in the way I was looking at her, since she glanced away and commented that no one was playing today. The wind, I told her. Sand gets in your eyes and makes the synthetic carpet too rough to play on. In fact, there wasn’t much reason to keep the place open, I continued, and asked her if she’d let me drive her up to Santa Barbara for the afternoon, wander State Street together, get something to eat. I was not that astonished when she agreed. Cognizant or not, she’d been witness to the character, the nature, the spirit of my gaze, had the opportunity to reject what it meant. By accepting my invitation she was in a fell stroke accepting me.
“You can have it if you want,” I offered, taking her free hand and nodding at the snow globe.
“No, it belongs with the others.” She stared out the window while a fresh gale whipped up off the ocean, making the panes shiver and chatter as grains of sand swirled around us. I looked past her silhouette and remarked that the park looked like a great snow globe out there. How perverse it was of me to want to ask her, just then, if she missed Tom sometimes. Instead, I told her we ought to get going, but not before I turned her chin toward me with trembling fingers and gently kissed her.
As we drove north along the highway, the sky cleared, admitting a sudden warm sun into its blue. “Aren’t you going to tell me?” she asked, as if out of that blue, and for a brief, ghastly moment I thought I’d been found out and was being asked to confess. Seeing my bewilderment, Penny clarified, “What the snowflakes are, if they’re not snowflakes?”
I shifted my focus from the road edged by flowering hedges and eucalyptus over to Penny, and back again, suddenly wanting to tell her everything, pour my heart out to her. I wanted to tell her how I had read somewhere that in some cultures people refuse to have their photographs taken, believing the camera steals their souls. Wanted to tell her that when Tom demolished my collection of adoring images of her, not only did he seal his own fate, but engendered hers. I wished I could tell her how, struggling with him in waves speckled with swirling photographs, I was reminded of a snow globe. And I did want to answer her question, to say that the flakes seemed to me like captive souls floating around hopelessly in their little glass cages, circling some frivolous god, but I would never admit such nonsense. Instead, I told her she must have misunderstood and, glancing at her face bathed in stormy light, knew in my heart that later this afternoon, maybe during the night, I would be compelled to finish the destructive work my foolish brother had begun.
<
* * * *
2007
LORENZO CARCATERRA
* * *
MISSING THE MORNING BUS
Lorenzo Carcaterra (1954-) was born in the Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood of New York City. He began his career as a journalist for the New York Daily News in 1976, first as a copy boy, finally as entertainment reporter, before moving to Time, Inc. as a writer for TV-Cable Week and People, moving on to write for numerous other magazines both as a staff writer and a freelancer, including Family Circle, the New York Times Magazine, and Twilight Zone.
In 1988 he became creative consultant for the TV series Cop Talk: Behind the Shield, leading to a managing editor position for the CBS-TV series Top Cop, which ran for four years. Among much other television work, he has written several unproduced pilots, and in 2003 and 2004 was a writer and producer on Law and Order.
After his first book, A Safe Place: The True Story of a Father, a Son, a Murder (1993), which has sold some 200,000 copies, he wrote the highly controversial Sleepers (1995), a semiautobiographical work about child abuse in a state juvenile facility. With nearly 1.5 million copies sold, the number one bestseller was filmed in 1996 with Brad Pitt, Robert De Niro, Dustin Hoffman, Kevin Bacon, and Minnie Driver. Carcaterra was the coproducer of the Barry Levinson-directed film, which has seen worldwide earnings of $500 million. His subsequent novels have regularly made the bestseller list, including Apaches (1998), Gangster (2001), Street Boys (2002), Paradise City (2004), and Chasers (2007).
“Missing the Morning Bus” was first published in the anthology Dead Man’s Hand: Crime Fiction at the Poker Table (New York: Harcourt, 2007).
~ * ~
I
lifted the Lid on my hold cards and smiled. I leaned back against three shaky slats of an old worn chair, wood legs mangled by the gnawing of a tired collie now asleep in a corner of the stuffy room, and stared over at the six faces huddled around the long dining-room table, thick mahogany wood shining under the glare of an overhead chandelier, each player studying his hand, deciding on his play, mentally considering his odds of success, in what was now the fifth year of a weekly Thursday-night ritual. I stared at the face of each of the men I had known for the better part of a decade and paused to wonder which of these friends would be the one. I was curious as to which of the six I would be forced to confront before this night, unlike any other, would come to its end.
I wanted so desperately to know who it was sitting around that table responsible for the death of the woman I loved. And I would want that answer before the last draw of the evening was called.
I tried to read their faces much the same as they would the cards in their hand. There was Jerry McReynolds, wide smile as always plastered
across his face, a forty-year-old straight and single man free of the weight of day-to-day worries, a millionaire many times over due to a $5,000 investment in a small computer start-up outfit working out of a city he had never heard of, let alone visited. Jerry never missed a Thursday-night game, boasting of his streak as if he were a ballplayer about to make a move on Cal Ripken Jr.’s long-standing record of consecutive games played. He came outfitted in the same casual manner in which he approached the cards dealt his way, catalog-ordered shirts and jeans, nothing fancy, nothing wild. I could count on him to come in with two high-end bottles of Italian reds and quickly ease into the steady flow of cards and chatter that filled our weekly five-hour sessions. Jerry was the guardian of the chips and kept a small pad and a pen by his side, starting off the game with a $50 feed and dispensing out whites and blues to any player running low or chasing empty. Jerry kept his cards close, doing a quick fold if he felt his hand weak, playing the table as he did his life, on the up and up and without a hint of bluff. In five years of play, I could never recall a time when Jerry left the room with less in his pockets than he had at the start.
I sat back, rubbed the stiffness from the nape of my neck, and tried to recall how I came to know Jerry in the first place and couldn’t quite place it, my cloudy memory confining it to one of the holiday receptions my wife used to host on a semiregular basis back in the days when our marriage still had the scent of salvation. God, how I hated every one of those parties, forced to make small talk in a room packed mostly with her friends since the few I had were seldom invited or welcomed into her cloistered world. I took a long gulp from a glass of scotch and looked back on those long and tedious nights and did a quick flash of Jerry being dragged by the hand in my direction, a glass of white wine in one hand, my wife’s in the other. “You two will be good friends in no time at all,” she said as she made a quick U-turn back into party traffic, her short and tight black skirt giving strong hints of the curvy body that rested beneath, long red hair hanging just off the edge of her shoulders. She was about forty-two then, give or take, and looked at least ten years younger, the quick smile and easy laugh a sweet antidote to the onslaught of age. I wasn’t quite sure how Dottie and Jerry came to know one another and I never did bother to ask, but there was always more to their friendship than they were willing to let on. There was that look between them. You know the kind I mean? As if someone was in front of them telling a joke and they were the only two in on the punch line.
“Five-card draw, jacks or better to open,” Steve said, giving the deck one more shuffle before the deal, waiting for us all to ante.
“I need a refill.” I tossed my one-dollar chip into the center of the table, pushing my chair back and walking over to a crowded countertop, filled with half-empty bottles of scotch, bourbon, gin, and wine. I spun open the top of a Dewar’s bottle and stared over at Steve as he doled out the cards meticulously, eyebrows thick as awnings shading his eyes. I had known Steve since forever started, both of us only children raised in the same Bronx neighborhood and going to the same Catholic schools straight through till college. And even then, while he froze his ass off studying economics and law at Michigan and I was smoking and doping my way through four years of English, a language I already had a leg up on, at Williams, we never drifted very far apart. We saw each other during breaks and vacations, hustling over to the same parties and looking to score with the same girls. I guess if I had to pick one, I’d point to Little Stevie Giraldo as my best friend, the fast-talker with a good line of shit and an innate ability to talk the unwilling to tag along on any outing he thought was worth the time and money. As he got older and life started dealing him a tougher hand of cards, Steve’s youthful edge took a sharp nosedive and by the time he hit his forties, he was a man adrift, moving from one mid-tier job to the next, in debt to credit cards and street lenders, a decade into a loser’s marriage and with two kids who cost him ten for every five he earned. I was the only one in the room who knew he tried to do a final checkout about eighteen months back, but even there his bad luck stayed that way. He chugged enough pills and booze to knock off Walter Hudson — that guy who was so fat they had to bury his ass inside a piano — and all it got him was a long night at a crowded hospital, his stomach pumping out everything he had managed to shove in. I was the one who waited for him, rushing over from a nearby bar where I was nursing a few, soon as I got the word from Mackey, a mutual pal working the wood that night.
Dottie came by at sunup, driving the old Nissan she would never let me sell, and took us both back to our place, where she made some coffee and let him sleep the rest of the OD off in the back bedroom. She didn’t say all that much about it, and I said even less. But I couldn’t help but catch the look of concern on her face, odd since she never much cared for Stevie one way or the other. Made me wonder what kind of look I would have earned if it was me instead of him lying in that bed, one pill removed from the long nap.
“Are you in or not, Ike?” Joe asked. “I mean, you going to pony and play or you just looking to mix drinks all night?”
“I’m in for a dollar,” I said, dropping two cubes into my tumbler and glaring over at Joe, decked out as he always was in a battered New York Yankees baseball cap, Detroit Red Wings sweatshirt, and San Diego Chargers workout pants. A walking billboard of sports franchises. Joe was a trash-talking ballbuster of a work-from-home bond trader who left his Upper West Side apartment only for poker games or sporting events. Other than on those semiregular occasions, he shopped, ordered food, chatted with friends, and read for both leisure and business on his laptop. His two-bedroom condo, bought with the inheritance he scored off the daily-double death of his mother and a great-aunt three days apart in 1995, was a smooth blend of Ikea, sports and movie memorabilia, furniture, and utensils. Dottie disliked Joe with an intensity that bordered on the fanatical, which, if he knew how she felt, he would ironically appreciate, able to compare it to his rabid feelings toward both the Boston Red Sox and the New York Islanders.
I guess I liked him for the same reasons she didn’t. Joe was filled with passion and was never shy to let anyone with ears know how he felt about his teams, his favorite movie or TV show. Hell, he would even get into a beef and a brawl over the athleticism of pro wrestling. Funny though, in all the years I’ve known Joe, and I’ve been doing his taxes now going on ten years this next April, he’s never once asked me what my favorite sport was or which team I liked. For all he knows, I can’t stand the sight of any sport, let alone follow one close enough to dip into my savings for season tickets and wear the team colors to my best friend’s wedding or wake. But Joe did know that Dottie liked basketball and that she never missed a New York Knicks game on television during the season and, on rare occasions, the playoffs. I know that only because he mentioned it once during a poker game, after the Knicks by some miracle had beaten the Miami Heat the night before, how happy Dottie must have been to see that happen. How the hell could he have any idea that she was a fan or was even at home to watch the game?
I was back at my seat looking down at a pair of tens and a queen high, the fresh drink by my side. I glanced to my left and caught Tony’s eye and was given a warm smile as a reward. “Everything good with you?” he asked.
“Good enough,” I said, trying to keep the conversation light and not veer it toward the personal, which is the road Tony always seemed to prefer.
It made sense that he would, of course, what with him being a shrink and all. Tony enjoyed doing hit-and-run probes into the lives of the men around the table, treating the entire night as if it were a casual group session with cards, chips, and money added to the mix. He would keep it all very chatty, never giving the impression he was picking and pawing or even the least bit curious about any one of us but always leaving the table owning a lot more information than he had when he first walked in. When he wasn’t busy jabbing at our collective scabs as casually as he would a platter of potato salad, Tony regaled us with tales of his sexual conquests, mo
st of them arriving courtesy of his practically all-female practice. It was difficult not to envy any man who in a given week would bed as many as five different women, so you can imagine how well his tales traveled around a poker table filled with either those who had gone without for longer than they would dare to remember or the few who felt strangled by double-decades’ worth of marital gloom.
“This is one you won’t believe,” he said, dropping his cards on the table in a fold and sitting back, wide grin flashed across a face that looked far too young for a man one month shy of his fifty-second birthday. “I have this new patient, right? Drop-dead blonde with stallion legs and a killer smile. Only on her second visit, asks if it’s OK for her to call me at home. You know, just to shoot it whenever the urge hits.”
The Best American Noir of the Century Page 84