often than not I save receipts and keep track of my expenses, just like everybody else.
And Elaine and I give away a tenth of our income. Mine comes from detective work, of course, and hers is primarily from her real estate investments, although her shop is beginning to turn a small profit. She keeps the books—thank God—and writes the checks, and our few dollars find their way to the dozen or so charities and cultural institutions on our list. It is, to be sure, a more regimented way of doing things. I feel more like a solid citizen and less like a free spirit, and I do not always prefer it this way. But neither do I spend much time chafing at the collar.
The church I went into on this occasion was on a side street in the west forties. I didn't notice the name of it, and couldn't tell you if I'd ever dropped in there before.
I was lucky to find it open. While my own use of churches has diminished in recent years, so too has their accessibility. It seems to me that the Catholic churches, at least, used to be open the whole day long, from early in the morning until well into the evening. Now their sanctuaries are often locked up between services. I suppose that's a response to crime or homelessness or both. I suppose an unlocked church is an invitation, not only to the occasional citizen looking for a moment's peace, but to all of those who'd curl up and nap in the pews or steal the candlesticks from the altar.
This church was open and seemingly unattended, and it was a throwback in another way as well. The candles at the little side altars were real ones, actual wax candles that burned with an open flame. Lots of churches have switched over to electrified altars. You drop your quarter in the slot and a flame-shaped bulb goes on and stays on for your quarter's worth of time. It's like a parking meter, and if you stay too long they tow away your soul.
It's not my church, so I can't see that I've got any rights in the matter, but when did that sort of logic ever keep an alcoholic from nursing a resentment? I'm sure the electric candles are cost-efficient, and I don't imagine they're any harder for God to overlook than the real thing. And maybe I'm just a spiritual Luddite, hating change for its own sake, resisting an improvement in the candle-lighting dodge even as I resisted TJ's arguments for a computer. If I'd been alive at the time, I probably would have been every bit as pissed off when they switched from oil lamps to candles. 'Nothing's the same anymore,' you'd have heard me grumbling. 'What kind of results can you expect from melting wax?'
* * *
I wouldn't have wasted a quarter on an electric flame. But this church had the real thing, with three or four little candles lit. I looked at them, and my mind summoned up an image of Adrian Whitfield. I couldn't think what good it could do him to burn a candle on his behalf, but I found myself recalling Elaine's words. What could it hoit? So I slipped a dollar bill in the slot, lit one candle from the flame of another, and let myself think about the man.
I got a funny montage of images.
First I was seeing Adrian Whitfield at his apartment a few hours after he'd learned about Will's letter. He was pouring a drink even as he proclaimed himself a nondrinker, then explaining, talking about the drinks he'd had already that day.
Then I saw him sprawled on the carpet with Kevin Dahlgren hunkered down beside him, picking up the glass he'd dropped, sniffing at it. I hadn't been there to see it, had only heard Dahlgren's account of the moment, but the image came to me as clearly as if I'd witnessed it myself. I could even smell what Dahlgren had smelled, the odor of bitter almonds superimposed upon the aroma of good malt whiskey.
I'd never smelled that combination in my life, but my imagination was inventive enough to furnish it quite vividly.
The next flash I got was of Marty McGraw. He was sitting in the topless joint where I'd met him, a shot
glass clutched in one hand, a beer glass in the other. There was a belligerent expression on his face, and he was saying something but I couldn't make it out. The reek of cheap whiskey trailed up at me from the shot glass, the reek of stale beer from the other, and the two were united on his breath.
Adrian again, talking into a telephone. 'I'm going to let the genie out,' he said. 'First one today.'
Mick Ballou at Grogan's, on our most recent night together. It was what he thought of as a sober night, in that he was passing up the whiskey and staying with beer. The beer in this instance was Guinness, and I could see his big fist wrapped around a pint of the black stuff. The smell of it came to me, dark and rich and grainy.
I got all of this in a rush, one image after another, and each overlaid heavily with scents, singly or in combination. Smell, they say, is the oldest and most primal sense, the sure trigger for memory. It bypasses the thought process and goes straight to the most primitive part of the brain. It doesn't pass Go, it doesn't collect its thoughts.
I stood there, letting it all come at me, taking in what I could of it. I don't want to make too much of this.
I was not Saul of Tarsus, knocked off his horse en route to Damascus, nor was I AA's founder wrapped up in his famous white-light experience. All I did was remember—or imagine, or both—a whole slew of things one right after the other.
It couldn't have taken much time. Seconds, I would think. Dreams are like that, I understand, extending over far less of the sleeper's time than it would require to recount them. At the end there was just the candle—the soft glow of it, the smell of the burning wax and wick.
I had to sit down again and think about what I'd just experienced.
Then I had to walk around for a while, going over every frame in my memory like an assassination buff poring over the Zapruder film.
I couldn't blink it away or shrug it off. I knew something I hadn't known before.
11
'The first night I went to Whitfield's place,' I told Elaine. 'TJ was over for dinner, we were watching the fights together—'
'In Spanish. I remember.'
'—and Whitfield called. And I went over there and talked with him.'
'And?'
