suddenly nobody needed detectives but TV The new watchword? 'Security.' Nobody had it, everybody wanted it. Clients didn't need you to watch their wives anymore, just their property-understand bub? Overnight, seemingly overnight, private investigators became security experts. Or sometimes security guards, which after a suitable amount of downward mobility following the respectable fifteen-year run of the Three Eyes Detective Agency, is what happened to William. Five night shifts a week guarding a tin shack filled with fan belts, radiator hoses, and every kind of spark plug known to man. A lopsided bridge chair, a discarded Daily News, and a very nice teal uniform, thank you very much-until that one particular day: a long shift, a spring morning you could die for, and two who did, one a small girl, dead. And the warehouse owner who drove in from Long Island in a spanking-white Cadillac and said, looking at William being carried off with a bullet in his shoulder, Old men, why do they send me old men?
And so William, old man, was retired to a hospital bed and then to his room, and times became just a little lean…
'William… William…?'
Someone was calling him; for just a moment William thought it sounded like, could swear it sounded like… but no, no… it was only Mr. Brickman, his good neighbor Brickman searching for a friend.
SIX
William?' He'd opened the door now; he stood half in and half out of the room, his shadow spread before him like a stain.
'Hello, Mr. Brickman,' William said, raising his glass, toasting his entrance, except that Mr. Brickman hadn't entered, not exactly, and thinking that this wasn't like Mr. Brickman, standing half in and half out, that something had made him cautious.
'William. You drinking…?'
'No.' William took another swallow of bourbon; he'd already reached that point where his good friend Jack had stopped feeling like liquid fire and started feeling like solid fire. 'What makes you think I'm drinking?' He was annoyed, annoyed at having company when he hadn't asked for it, annoyed too at the way Mr. Brickman was standing there, as if something was wrong, as if all of a sudden Mr. Brickman was going to begin making apologies and stop knocking on doors.
'What's the matter, Mr. Brickman?'
Mr. Brickman shuffled his feet, as if not quite sure where to put them.
'Eddie,' he said. 'Eddie was mugged today. There were two of them-they broke his ribs and punctured a lung. They don't think he's going to make it.'
Eddie. Eddie Wilson-Mr. Wilson, who lived downstairs and was probably the oldest man in the apartment house, Mr. Wilson, who smoked a pipe and read Harlequin Romances, devoutly, as if trying to discover the secret of love. No more.
So, William thought. Mr. Wilson lies halfway gone and so does Mr. Brickman, half in and half out.
'Come in,' William said, as solemnly as he could on three bourbons. Four… 'Come in and sit down.'
So he did. On the only other chair in the room, a bridge chair the landlord had given William when he'd first moved in, figuring even he'd have to have a visitor eventually, even if it was only Mr. Brickman.
'Drink?' William offered.
But Mr. Brickman declined.
'Where did it happen?'
'In the park. In the park, with me. You didn't want to go, so I took Eddie.'
Had Mr. Brickman asked him to the park? Well maybe he had. William felt a stab of guilt at having refused him; that, and a palpable relief that he had. After all, Mr. Brick- man would simply be in Eddie's room now, making Mr. Wilson put down The Countess from Cordoba so he could hear every word about William's bad luck, about the terrible beating, the punctured lung, and so on…
'We were almost ready to leave,' Mr. Brickman continued, 'when they came up to us, two of them, and asked us for money. Eddie said no. So they began to hit him…'
Eddie said no. Eddie said no because Eddie had no. Money. Maybe a silver dollar or two snuck away in a cardboard box. The Social Security checks he banked.
'What did you do, Mr. Brickman?'
'I went for help,' saying it in a tone that suggested he hadn't found any. 'I think something's happened, William, honest to God.'
'Something…?' not exactly understanding what Mr. Brickman was talking about, due to either the three bourbons, okay four, or the fact that Mr. Brickman himself didn't know what he was talking about, being, of course, not the old aggressive and gregarious Mr. Brickman, but the new cautious and possibly traumatized Mr. Brickman.
'Something's happened. I'm scared. They say it's a jungle out there, fine, only they don't tell you, they do not tell you you're the goddamn herd. You understand, that's who we are. The herd. You stay in the herd and maybe you're okay. Maybe. But you go off by yourself, you get caught alone, and then, they get you. Who? The carnivores- that's who. They wait for you and then they get you.'
Okay, maybe Mr. Brickman did know what he was talking about, sort of. There was every possibility that he did. William was nodding his head at him on the chance that he was being entirely lucid, but it seemed to take a monumental effort to get it to move. He sensed that Mr. Brickman was expecting him to say something; he sensed this because Mr. Brickman had stopped talking and was looking at him with an expression that could only be termed hopeful. But William had nothing to offer him, nothing but the landlord's chair and a chorus of one. 'You have to stick together now, Will,' Mr Brickman finally said. 'There's safety in numbers…' 'Yes,' William echoed, 'safety in numbers,' continuing to provide the refrain for a sermon he didn't quite grasp. But the truth was, he did. Even dead drunk, he did. Mr. Brickman, annoyingly gung ho, irritatingly life- affirming, was learning old: that when you dragged yourself to a scorched brown park in the middle of July someone else might have to drag you back. Mr. Brick- man had become one of them, another terminal case, and it made William sad, sadder suddenly than he had any reason to feel. 'Maybe Mr. Wilson will make it,' he said now, but he didn't sound very convincing, even to himself, on a scale of one to ten, somewhere south of two. Mr. Brickman looked up then, as if he'd suddenly been reminded of something important. 'I'm sorry,' he said. So, William thought, apologizing after all. 'What for, Mr. Brickman?' 'You went to a funeral today, didn't you? You've had enough for one day.' 'No.' William finished his drink. 'Not yet.' A little drinking humor. 'Was it an old friend, Will?' 'Who?'
'The person who died?'
'He was old, but I don't think he was a friend.'
'What does that mean?' Mr. Brickman sounded almost mad at him now, as if he found his tone disrespectful in respect to the dead, which, to be honest, was the very tone William was going for.
'That means I don't know if he was a friend or if he wasn't. I can't remember.'
'You remembered,' Mr. Brickman said, 'enough to go.'
'Right,' William said. 'I guess that's all you can hope for, isn't it?' pouring himself just one more, which is what he'd poured himself the last time and the time before that. 'That people remember you enough to go.' Interesting, he thought. Four drinks, five, and he became positively reflective. He was trying to remember Mr. Brickman's first name. He called him Mr. Brickman, all these years that's what he'd called him. Of course, that's the way he'd addressed his clients, always Mr. and Mrs., never by their first names; perhaps Mr. Brickman was just one more client, another parishioner, another person in need of comfort, carnivores and things. But then, he had no clients anymore, he hadn't had any in a long time.
'What's that?' Mr. Brickman was pointing at the box, Jean's box, with a slightly quivering finger; or at least that's the way it looked to William's slightly quivering brain.
'Junk,' William said. What had Rodriguez told him? It's junk to me-but to you? But Rodriguez was wrong. It was junk to both of them. He'd dumped the box by the front door on the way in, dumped it on its side, so that it looked now like a package the day after Christmas, almost like that, as if the wrapping had been ripped off and then the gift found wanting, so that now it was waiting to be returned to the store where it came from.
