Crumbtown

by Joe Connelly

  She kept her eyes ahead of her as she walked, a straight line down the middle of the sidewalk. People could get out of her way. They should because she wasn’t getting out of theirs. That’s the kind of day it was going to be. And she wasn’t saying excuse me. Today, they could say it.

  She left Odessa in ’92. The revolution had begun, that’s what the TV was saying, that in Moscow the government was falling, the poets had taken over the city. Victor didn’t care about Moscow. No one in Odessa did. A revolution was going on and he just wanted to sit in his little apartment all day drinking wine and listening to his records. The things she could remember so clearly now, the German Charlie Parker poster, the lines on his arm. She was going to design clothes, pants and jackets made out of flags. She wanted him to go. She’d marry one of the poets, she said, if he didn’t come with her. A big poet king.

  She walked into Gloria’s bar and looked at the cloth on the walls, the office equipment scattered around the tables by the window. A young woman now sitting behind the desk in the corner, talking on the rack of phones. Rita brought two beers over to Joe Far and his friend Han. One of the phones rang. The girl at the desk punched a button. “Rob Landetta’s office.”

  Rita looked out the window. It wasn’t fair. She could remember the actor’s features so clearly. And she hadn’t seen that face in years. But Victor could be anyone. She could walk by him in the street and not know it. He was so sick when she left him, he always said he would die, the doctors there were so bad. She wanted that man to be Victor, it made her ashamed to think of it. Rita grabbed a glass and threw it on the floor. Serving drinks in somebody’s office.

  25

  Detective Harry Hammamann showed him the buttons on the phone. “You push this one to talk, this one to turn it off, this gets your messages, this for the sports scores and this for the weather. How much cash did they give you?”

  “One hundred,” Don searched over the detective’s shoulder, the red sweater on Lemmings, still walking, six blocks ahead, maybe seven.

  “You give me fifty. The rest I’ll take out of your first check, which will be next Friday. I’ll forget the missed calls but I got to take out for losing the phone, fifty more. On Friday.”

  “Okay,” Don pushed the bills into Harry’s palm. “Okay?” He looked up the street, she was eight blocks away at least. No one could walk that fast. Hammamann grabbed his elbow. “Where are you going?”

  The sweater was gone. “I’m going to the hotel. Going to lie down and watch TV.” He started up Lemmings, Hammamann staying with him, “No you’re not. I know. You’re going to Gloria’s bar.” Don walked faster, Harry right behind him. “Your two old friends are probably there right now, Tim and Tom, or they’ll be coming in soon, four at the latest. You’ll get yourself into trouble, Don. Don’t go.” Don started to run, Hammamann running alongside, then slowing, stopping, yelling after. “They ran on you I know, and they’re still laughing about it, Don, but you have to forget that, you’ve got your whole life left to live with this.”

  Harry waited in the street, eating cashews out of his pocket until Don was out of sight. He had to be careful here, not to push too hard; the best police work was often the most hands off. It was twelve years since Harry moved down from Loudon, a bubble-nosed kid of twenty-six, a seller of vending whose only dream was to get divorced from his wife. In that time he’d learned a few things about police work, the value of remaining in your vehicle, of knowing your limitations every time you get out. Most crimes here were reported before they happened, and it was the officer’s primary duty to decide who could be arrested and who couldn’t. Unfortunately for Harry, Tim Dwight could never be arrested, not without a significant wave or gesture or nod of the head from Tim’s uncle, Mayor Maury, the man who was paying Harry’s salary.

  He turned the car around, checking the schedule on the dashboard, a left on Sodden, right on Van Brunt, all the way to the water, the China Sub Restaurant. He walked through the alley to the back door, past the steaming limbs of dishwashers, the line of aprons on fire, a blackened archway at the end, Harry peering in to see Loretta at her table, always the same order, her Beef Everything, extra hot. Forty years old and she looked thirty-three, tireless with her hair, the makeup, the knife and fork she worked like a duchess. A real lady, a real estate agent.

  She wanted the best chance for them. She’d been hurt too many times. Love was not a gift, she said, that you open and throw away, not like a fishing vacation or a video you rent or a song in your head. It was a sacrifice, and every time he saw her, Harry knew he could pass the test, if it ever came to that. Though how much better for everyone if Don took care of Tim, while Harry was at lunch, or getting his hair cut, far from any killing, that way he could help Loretta with the grieving, start their new life together immediately.

  When Chuck the waiter came into the kitchen Harry held up a five-dollar bill and took the bag of fortune cookies from his pocket, last of the batch from his freezer, the funny little fortunes Harry had cooked up: YOU WILL FIND EVERLASTING HAPPINESS WITH A TALL DARK-HAIRED DETECTIVE. He helped Chuck arrange them on the plate and, after a flurry of nods and winks, watched him bring it to Loretta, her thin hands pulling out the paper, reading each, then carefully tearing them into pieces, mashing them with her fork, into her beef. She ate the cookies and raised her hand for the check. Harry walked out the back, praying that Don would take care of Tim, quickly.

  26

  Don ran as far as he could, about six blocks, until he was standing on a corner, his hands on his sides, searching all directions. The red sweater had disappeared. He stepped back, against a store window, still breathing too fast, glass bending in his ribs.

  “Hey buddy,” a man said, one of two guys standing in front of him, dressed like painters. “Hey buddy,” he said again, pointing at something in the window, “look what you did.” Don turned around, the white letters rubbed over the glass, Sheckles Bar, or Shovels or Steel wool, he couldn’t tell. He pulled off his coat, white paint dripping off the back. He dropped it on the ground and remembered the guns and pulled the real one out of the pocket, then the phone, shoving them into his suit jacket, looking for an opening to put the fake gun in.

  “Don’t shoot me,” the painter said, backing off the sidewalk. Don waved the gun as they ran up the street, “It’s not real.” He turned around, seeing himself in the glass. Gloria’s bar, a gun in his hand. Like it was all written down. With only one thing missing, two things. He leaned into the window, pressing his hand over his eyes, squinting at the shadows inside. The office equipment was still there, and now a woman was sitting at a desk near the door, talking on the phone. But the bar was open; he could see two men drinking in the far back. Too far to make out their faces. One short, the other tall. It had to be them.

  “Okay,” he said, still breathing too fast. “Okay.” He looked up at the sky, the clouds caught in the web of power lines, lines that were never buried because of the constant flooding. His father used to say the wires were there to keep the buildings from falling back, but to Don they always appeared to be pulling them forward, on top of him. He breathed in deep, he counted to three. “Okay.”

  The smell he knew immediately, impossible to forget, wet cigarettes and warm beer and something else, too, impossible to remember unless you were in it. He walked past the girl at the desk, his eyes widening to the dark, the bartender with her back to him, blocking his view of the men. He pulled at the gun, first the fake, then the real. The bartender moved to the side, enough for Don to see the two men were Chinese, and definitely not twins. She turned around, three of them staring now. Her face, the girl from the corner.

  “Well,” Rita said, “the handyman is here.” She’d changed her red sweater for a tight white shirt, tied up like a noose in her navel. “I did not call the handyman.” She stood in front of him, in a foreign accent that seemed to stress every word. “What do you want?” she said, like asking why he’d been born.

  Don leaned forward, his re
sponse waiting for him somewhere above the bar. From a man who usually found coincidence an affliction, there were times when its beauty left him speechless. She placed the beer in front of him. “Mercy,” he said.

  “Merci,” she replied, and walked down the bar.

  Seven

  SCENE 27

  Don watched her walk to the sunlit front, taking dirty glasses off the bar, pushing them through the sink, the light through her hands through the water. She looked up and caught his eyes and he stayed there a moment, not smiling, not saying anything there. He turned back to the bottle she’d left him, a Mohrbeer, and pulled up a stool underneath. Slowly he raised his hands forward, his arms circling the bottle, trapping it, for several seconds watching it breathe, then finally and at once he wrapped his hands to the glass, his fingers around the neck, lifting it up, drinking half.

  A phone rang, the girl at the desk at the window, another desk in front of hers, computers and fax machines. Don guessed it was election time again. They had elections for everything in Crumbtown, lottery aldermen, tobacco inspectors, sanitation chancellors, elections for blackjack dealers and oyster fishermen. Every few months Maury Threetoes would set up a desk in Gloria’s, with flags and pictures all over, whatever Democrats were going to win. He even had Don elected once, in 1989, for highway advocate. Don didn’t know he was running until he saw his picture in the bar’s window: “Don Reedy for a Smooth City.” They threw a party in his new office on Washington Street. He never went back.

  Don took another drink, even better than the first, washing out the morning with it. He drank again, the beer going all the way to the floor, like losing twenty pounds. That’s what the dark bars were for. It didn’t matter what you’d done outside. When you walked into Gloria’s, you left it behind, a hero’s welcome just for closing the door.

  He looked around the bar, no election posters now, no names and flags to let you know, just a lot of yellow fabric on the walls, like a parachute had landed there, covering everything except the mirror behind the bottles, and the old painting in the center, that he’d seen in prison dreams, of low hills washed up on a brown beach.

  He leaned forward, watching the bartender at the window, her hands on her hips, the sun through her skirt, the outline of her legs, perfect legs, he thought, except where one was longer than the other. Then he realized, the legs weren’t crooked, it was her skirt, higher on the right like it had been cut that way. Funny he hadn’t noticed that. All the women were probably wearing crooked skirts now, and nooses in their shirts, and speaking in thick Slavic accents.

  He leaned over further, waiting for her to look up. She was waiting too, something in the window, someone she knew. The light shifted, a cloud coming through, he caught her face in the glass, a few seconds, seeing herself. He raised his empty bottle, “Hello.” She didn’t look over. He waved the bottle louder, “Hello.”

  “What do you want?” she said.

  “Mohrbeer.”

  She dropped a glass and turned around. “I give you beer.” She started toward him. “You want more?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  Standing in front of him now, “You are following me?” she threw her towel on the floor. “Yes?”

  “Okay.”

  “First outside, then you come in. Yes?”

  He looked out the other window, the desks by the door. The painters scraping new paint off the glass. “Yes,” he said.

  “Why?”

  “I wanted to tell you,” he pointed below the bar, “your skirt.”

  “What?” She looked down, smoothing the sides. “What?”

  “It’s crooked.”

  “It is design,” she grabbed his bottle, breaking it with the others.

  “It’s nice.”

  “You may go.” She pointed at the painters. “I am not in the mood.”

  Don stood. “Okay.” He stepped back. This bartender was not from Crumbtown, that was obvious, but she was Crumbtown. He looked out the window. He didn’t want to leave. “Look, I didn’t know you worked here.”

  “And you wear this suit,” she said. “You follow me with this suit.”

  He pulled his jacket straight, “What?”

  “You make yourself, yes?”

  “Lady, this is a thousand-dollar suit.”

  She took a beer from the cooler and set it in front. He couldn’t tell if it was for him, or her. “It is very nice,” she said.

  He checked himself in the mirror, behind the tequilas, his jacket so wrinkled, like the bark on a tree, open holes in the elbow, other holes patched with dirt. He appeared to have been run over by dozens of cars. His hair was soaring, cheeks pocked with stubble, a lunatic’s face. “Fifteen years ago,” he said, adjusting his tie, three times. He gave up and pulled it crooked, laughing at the picture, laughing like a lunatic. “I’m Don,” he said, “Don Reedy.”

  “Really?”

  “Reedy.”

  “The Don Reedy that is in prison.”

  “I got out this morning. TV parole.”

  “Of course,” she said. “Where is your desk?”

  “What?”

  “Your TV show. This is your office.” She gestured at the computer by the window. “That is where your director sits. You need desk. You have secretary too.”

  “Really?”

  “Reedy. I should blame you.” She walked to the register and took out his six dollars. “For what is bar without desks and phones ringing always.” She filled two glasses with vodka and pushed one in front.

  “What’s this?”

  “We have rule, you get out of prison, drink is free.”

  “You still do that.”

  “It is rule,” she raised her glass. “For getting out.”

  He raised his. “And when do you get out?”

  She picked up the empties, “I do not get out.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Rita,” she said, and turned away, walking the long bar to stand in what was left of the sun.

  28

  She stood at the window watching two women run past, their arms full of cardboard, chasing a bus up Lemmings. Little Angelo stumbled by, the second time today, and stopped and pressed his bent nose against the glass, waiting for Rita to forgive—she’d thrown him out twice last night. Rita shook her head and he continued on, bending after every step, for cigarettes and papers and pieces of glass. Three girls passed in front, going home from school, uniforms like Rita had to wear in Odessa, the first clothes she made herself, the singing workers’ parades, the joys of steel festivals.

  She glanced to the mirror beside her, to the back of the bar, the man drinking his beer, the famous Don Reedy. She’d thought he’d be older, the stories she heard, the old papers on the wall. He was tall and with a good face underneath, she could tell. Maybe men did not age so quickly in prison, only when they get out. He must have been in a long time. The way he was looking at things, her chest, her skirt.

  She turned back to the window; she’d had enough problems with men who were in prison. Just look at her record. Her boyfriend Victor she had met not long after his release, six months for running a music store without a driver’s license, because he couldn’t pay off the police. Misha had been to prison as well, one week for cementing himself in Red Square. The magazine where she worked staged the whole thing, Misha’s arrest, and the party after, their Summer of Loud issue. Misha had the loudest voice, shouting his poems like he was being stabbed. Rita’s picture was there, too, she had the loudest clothes, her shirts of burning flags. The party that night when Misha wouldn’t stop talking, until she kissed him under the overpass, and then every doorway on Gregor Place.

  In that summer, when things happened, you did not try to stop. They were married the next week, by a priest who played in the club. The wedding lasted until October, then one morning it was done, like the magazine, like the whole country. She took a job translating American wire services for a business group. Misha sat in the room, the variety shows and every-hour n
ews from Chechnya. When the war was ended he stopped writing altogether, refused to go out, and hardly bathed. He said she killed his poems. That was when she left him, because she thought America forgot everything, and because of the picture, in the paper, of a woman waiting for a bus in New York, wearing a dress made out of flags, like the dress Rita had made for herself and kept in a box in the closet in her mother’s house.

  She was working in her cousin’s flower shop in Brooklyn, two years when Misha appeared at her door, swearing his love, stealing her purse. Breaking everything else. She’d been running ever since, escaping from her convicts, then escaping from herself. Once that happened it was hard to stop: Iowa, Memphis, Disneyland, and Dodgeport.

  The sun was passing over, down to her feet and going fast. The phone rang. She went to answer it, then remembered the girl at the desk, Rob Landetta’s office. She stood alone in the middle of the bar, debating the long walk to the window, instead sliding the vodka back in line, then rearranging the others, glancing at the mirrors between her, the face of a face of a face, and the man behind that, his beer finished, watching her.

  She’d dated three men since working there. No prisoners. They were in TV, of course. It was easy. They finished their shows and left. Next year, they said. Six months since the last. Three since Misha showed up. The headaches that came every day. She went to her bag and took out the aspirin, eating two. She saw the lipstick at the bottom, holding it a second, letting go. She picked it up again, putting it on in the mirror. So what if he sees her. She grabbed two more beers out of the cooler and held them up to him.