taking it over. As though in stop-time, suddenly the table was awash with empty bottles and glasses, cigarette packets, purses, ashtrays.
On TV, wrestlers Sputnik Malone and Billy Daniels took elaborate turns throwing one another about the ring. Memphis wrestling had been big for years and still drew huge crowds. It was televised locally; during the week, stars like Malone and Daniels toured the mid-South, wrestling in high-school gymnasiums, American Legion posts and Catholic clubs.
Sitting there, I noticed that while good paneling sheathed the walls and carpets shrouded floors, such refinements ended at the bar itself, undeveloped country with bare floors behind, sketchy shelves, squares of wood nailed to cabinets and drawers for pull handles. Bare wires hung from holes in the ceiling.
A basket of cheese cubes, cut-up pickles and bologna, all of them speared with toothpicks, appeared before us. I glanced over at the office workers’ table. Three baskets there. Another half-dozen set out. Remains of the limb of a sizeable tree here in the room with us. Slivered. Julienned.
“Gentlemen?” the bartender asked.
Randy doubled him: “One for the road?”
I glanced at my watch-just as though I had somewhere to go.
“Sure.”
For a time then, silently, we worked at the new drinks. Wrestling gave way to a local talent show, all but one of the contestants female and a fair divide among singers, baton twirlers and those offering dramatic recitations. The male tap-danced.
“You don’t trust me,” Randy said.
Falling back on the facile and hating myself for it: “I’m not sure you trust yourself.”
“Two different things, though, aren’t they?” His eyes found my face in the mirror behind the bar. “I love you, man. You know that.”
I nodded.
I took that thought home with me and, half an hour later, soaking in a tub of hot water, nodded again. Country music drifted in softly from the bedroom, voices from next door came to visit through thin walls, and from the street through open windows, traffic swooshed and hooted beyond. In silent toast I held up my glass and watched the bathroom’s light turn gold. I drank then, eyes shut, eyes behind which, perhaps in their own quiet way growing impatient, dreams waited.
Grace be with us all, who are so alone and lost.
Chapter Twenty-one
Grace is tough game to bring down. Sputnik Malone or Plato, either would be hard put to pin it. Most of us are lucky if we so much as catch a glimpse of the thing our whole lives-its back, maybe, as it hurries away through the crowd. I remembered the prodigy Raymond Radiguet. In three days’ time I will be shot to death by the soldiers of God.
Val had brought Carl Hazelwood’s notebook back to us two days before. Nothing much of forensic interest, she said. Techs had what they needed, manufacturer, item, batch numbers, all that, they’d be following up. Our own files contained photocopies of notebook pages, and I’d been through them a dozen times at least. We all had. But something about having in my hands the actual, much-abused, saddle-worn artifact drew me to it, and I sank in again. Not that anything had changed. Not that I had new information, new understanding or insight. Or the paltriest clue as to what might be going on.
It was one of those huge five-subject notebooks, sections divided by heavy inserts, doubled coils of wire at the spine. Two lines of obsessively neat script ran right up to page edge on either side betwreen scored blue lines. A thousand words per page, at least. Most early entries had faded away, now only blurred cuneiform, ranks of diminutive Rorschachs, make of it what you will or can. Elsewhere ink had given up the ghost entirely, dissolving into pools of wash, like watercolor.
Dad told me the stew was good. I had it waiting when he got home. We talked a little bit afterward, then It Came from Outer Space was on TV. When dad came in I was wiping up spills off the floor with one of his shirts. It was dirty already so I don’t understand why he got so mad. Maybe I ought to put more celery in next time. He looks like my uncle, sure he does, but he’s not. That’s from the movie.
I was sitting outside this morning and a cat came up to me, orange all over, even its eyes. It came up and rubbed against the step where I was, kind of half falling down, but every time I tried to touch it it ran off. Then a minute or two later it’d come back. I pinched off a piece of bologna and held it out. Mr. Cat liked that. He’d dodge in and grab hold, then go off under some bushes to eat. Mr. Cat ate most of a sandwich that way Finished off the bread myself.
Found a cache of magazines in the basement in a box under some empty suitcases. Since the top of the box was filled with old newspapers I almost didn’t look any further, but there they were underneath. A stack of Popular Mechanics, two years of Scientific Americans, a bunch of Astoundings and Fantastics crumbling at the bottom. Guess bugs must like those. One of the Popular Mechanics had a piece on building your own electric car, diagrams, specs, the whole works, even where you could order parts. Read most of a story by Fredric Brown, but the last two pages were missing.
Wrote a long letter to Sydney. I really miss her. I’d copy it down here, but my hand hurts. Anyway, it’s already in the mail and gone. I looked up Minnesota in the encyclopedia. They put electric blankets inside their car hoods. There are lakes everywhere. Cissie says she checked and where Sydney went is a good place. They’ll take good care of her there, Cissie says. Someone will read your letter to her. I hope she remembers me. It’s been a long time. You do understand, don’t you, Cissie said. She just got so she needed more taking care of than her mom and dad and her family could handle. Sure I did. I watched it happen. I even remember wondering if that could happen to me, if maybe someday I’d get like that, get lost the way Sydney did and have to go away.
Oatmeal for breakfast. Bacon, lettuce and tomato with lots of mayonnaise for lunch. The rest of the meat loaf, turnip greens, roasted sweet potatoes and ice tea for dinner. A good day. I even got a letter! From a pen pal in Finland. I found his name and address in the back of an old magazine. He was fourteen when he placed the ad, he wrote, and he’s amazed that any letter found him. It had been forwarded through three addresses. Now he’s a history professor at a university, has a wife and two daughters. Finland sounds a lot like Minnesota.
The social worker we’d been waiting for came this morning, just like in A Thousand Clowns. There was white stuff all over the front of her blue sweater and long hairs on the back, her own and a cat’s I think, and she smelled like sour milk. Afterwards she and Dad talked out in the kitchen. I got the door for her and watched as she hobbled off down the hall, thinking how much she looked like Piper Laurie in The Hustler, right up to the limp. The limp’s a kind of badge, I guess. Maybe they even teach it in social worker school. I’M ONE OF YOU.
Jack Finney’s book was a disappointment after Invasion of the Body Snatchers. On the other hand, Evan Hunter’s novel of Blackboard Jungle was much better – no contest, really. Right next to it on the shelf was Streets of Gold, so I picked that one up too, and it’s my new favorite. I’ve read it half a dozen times by now. The writer publishes as Hunter and as Ed McBain, neither of which is his real name, which is Salvatore Lombino. He also wrote the screenplay for The Birds. I could’t make much more sense out of O’Hara’s novel of Butterfield 8 than I did the movie.
Whole pages were filled with pasted-in receipts for magazines and paperbacks, lunches at McDonald’s, Good Eats cafeteria and Poncho’s, city bus transfers, cash tickets listing writing tablets, athletic socks, hard candy and breakfast cereals, verses and scrawled signatures scissored from greeting cards, ragged entries torn from TV Guides.
“Come across something there?” Don Lee asked, dredging me back, salvaged. I’d been quite literally out of this world, feet planted squarely in Carl Hazelwood’s, a world that made a lot more sense than our own. I was a visitor there, of course, a tourist, nothing more. Rare enough for any of us to be able to manage even that. But I’d become an old hand at looking through others’ windows from inside. In a way that’s how I survived prison. More to the point, it’s what made me effective as a therapist. And why I’d stopped.
I got up, dumped last night’s leftovers from the coffeemaker, scrubbed cone and carafe, found a filter, put on a fresh pot.
