I turned to my left and pushed through a wooden door that hid a gloomy stairway reeking of cigarettes. At the top of the stairs, I heard the faint din of the Clash on a speaker that must have had a torn woofer, then the dull crack of a rack of pool balls being broken, then the voice of a man saying, “Get in there, sweetness.”
I squinted through the haze, thicker even than at Enright’s. Behind the balls rolling to a stop on the table, Joanie McCarthy leaned against a paneled wall, a pool stick propped in one hand. Her face was obscured in the smoky radiance of the two bare lightbulbs hanging over the table, but I could tell it was her by the way her wide hips swung to one side over her crossed legs.
I caught her eye. She smiled. I was transported back to the Pilot newsroom, two years before, when she had sat where Whistler now sat, daring me to run the stories she wrote that she knew would upset the old fogies who would rather sit around Audrey’s bitching about how the politicians were pissing away their tax dollars than have to stomach reading about it in the Pilot. On the rare occasion back then when Joanie smiled without sarcasm, I don’t know exactly why, but I would feel better about myself, and about her.
Her smile across the pool table now did the same, for a heartbeat. Joanie turned to the guy who had broken the rack. “That’s all you got?”
“Loose rack,” said the guy.
“Loose? You love loose,” Joanie said, allowing herself a quick look at me, almost as if for approval. Now she came off the wall and leaned over the table, scanning the scattered balls. “One off the four,” she said. “Four might go, too.”
“The queen of slop,” the guy said.
His voice was oddly familiar.
Joanie grinned and bent and stroked the cue ball into the one ball. The one glanced off of the four and dropped cleanly into a corner pocket. The four edged toward a side pocket and hung on the lip. Joanie bounced sideways to her left, pointed her stick at the table again. “Two down there, and I’ll back up the cue and knock the four in this time,” she said.
“Sure you will,” the guy said.
The three of us seemed to be the only ones in the place. The floor was covered in shag carpet the color of zucchini and flecked with cigarette burns and stains I didn’t want to know the origin of. The walls were bare but for coats hung on nails and a single black-and-white photograph of a woman in an apron, Aggie herself, hugging the Stanley Cup.
The guy playing against Joanie plucked a cell phone off of his belt and punched the keys with a thumb while glaring at me. I looked away, wondering who the hell made phone calls at this time of night?
Joanie kept sinking balls. After each shot, she gave me a fleeting glance, gauging my expression. She knew she was not the Joanie McCarthy I had known, the baby-fat grad-school kid with the bush of flaming auburn hair and gigantic backpack who had spent an eventful year as my junior reporter at the Pilot. This Joanie shooting nine ball in an after-hours joint wasn’t quite slinky, but she had lost enough pounds to wear her Dearborn Music T-shirt knotted over her bare belly.
Her hair was cropped short and straightened, which made her green eyes seem bigger and brighter. She had never lacked for confidence, at least not around me, but watching her move around the pool table, weighing her options, calling her shots, leveling her stick, I thought she seemed more like a woman, even at just twenty-five, than the impatient girl who had left Starvation for bigger and better, first in Chicago, now in Detroit.
She missed a seven-nine combo that would have ended the game.
“Oh, crap,” she said.
I stepped into the light. The piss-yellow felt on the table was threadbare along the rails. “You mean, ‘Oh, fuck’?”
She turned to me, brushing reddish bangs from her eyes. “I don’t think so.”
“It’s not a pool stick,” I said, mimicking the complaint I had heard from her about obscene words. “It’s a fucking pool stick.”
She laughed as she came over and surprised me first with a two-armed hug, the tip of her pool stick poking me between the shoulder blades, then a light kiss on the neck that made me shiver a little.
“It’s so good to see you,” she said.
“You, too.” Up close I saw a scar I had never noticed before, an upside-down smile etched between her chin and lower lip. I pointed at it. “Bar fight?”
“Not quite. How was your trip?”
“OK,” I said, thinking of the lockbox. “No traffic.”
“Excuse me.”
It was the guy with Joanie. He was moving around the table. I wasn’t in his way, but he wanted me to think I was. I took a step back. He gave me a look, gave a different one to Joanie, who didn’t seem to notice. The guy was big. Not athletic big, just lumbering cumbersome big, like a washing machine. He was wearing his olive drab winter coat open. A striped wool scarf dangled from his neck. He snapped the tip of his stick on the table’s edge, grabbed the chalk.
“Game over,” he said.
Again the voice sounded familiar, but I couldn’t place it.
“Good luck,” Joanie said. “Hey-meet my friend Gus from up north. Gus, this is Albert Gaudreault.”
I started to offer a hand across the table but the guy was already lining up his shot. He jabbed at the cue ball. It struck the seven, which bumped the nine into a corner. He spread his arms and looked at Joanie. “Like I said.” He pointed the stick at me then and waggled it.
“Frenchy,” he said.
“Pardon?” I said.
“Call me Frenchy.”
In my head I repeated the name I had heard: GAW-droh. It, too, sounded familiar, though again not familiar enough that I knew what it meant to me. Frenchy didn’t speak with even a hint of a French accent, as did some of the French-Canadians I’d encountered in hockey rinks. If anything, he sounded like he might have come from downriver. Maybe River Rouge, or Woodhaven.
“Gus,” I said.
“Yeah.” As if he knew me.
Somehow the Clash became Three Dog Night.
“Buy you a beer?” I said.
He looked at Joanie. He had the sad face of a basset hound, but the attitude was more Doberman. He mouthed the words, “This is the guy?”
Joanie stepped over, flattened a hand on the slight curve of his belly, leaned up and kissed him, quickly, on the lips. The hair on the back of her neck parted, revealing the whiteness of the nape.
Frenchy looked past Joanie to me. “No, thanks,” he said. “I’m going.” Then to Joanie, “Careful now, sweetness.”
She laughed as she pushed him toward the stairway. He glanced at me over his shoulder before he disappeared. Then Joanie grabbed me by my belt and pulled me toward the bar.
“Nightcap,” she said.
“That your boyfriend?”
Joanie and I half sat, half stood on the rickety stools at the bar, a rectangular box of plywood and two-by- fours hung with a torn Kid Rock poster. The guy I’d seen cleaning up the puke appeared from a back room. His mood had not improved. Blue Ribbon wasn’t on the menu, so I ordered a longneck Bud, Joanie a Jack Daniel’s, neat.
She shook her head no to my question.
“You know him?” she said. “You know everybody.”
I peered at the doorway to the stairs, as if that might tell me. Frenchy was at least ten years older than Joanie, probably older than me. “He looks… I don’t know.”
Joanie shook her head. She obviously liked the guy, but I couldn’t tell if there was more than that. In my experience, the only thing that got Joanie going was scoops.
“Poor Frenchy,” she said.
“He’s not your boyfriend?”
