stores in the morning, diagraming them and taking notes just after his visits. As usual, his memory had been dead on, his stay brief and uneventful. Afterward he had driven out to Laurel for the one o’clock post, settled in his spot in the grandstand, and quickly surveyed the form. For the first race he laid a win bet at the five-dollar window on the four horse, Arturo. Arturo was to be ridden by Prado, the hot and hotheaded Peruvian. Weiner gave equal weight to the jockeys as he did to the horses, and Prado had been his man since Desormeaux had hightailed it for Del Mar. Arturo went off at eight to two and won the six-furlong contest; Prado had pushed him to a roll at the rail.
In the second race Weiner played the seven-two combination and hit the exacta for six hundred twenty-six dollars and twenty cents, his biggest payday in months. He would have stuck around for another race-his friend Kligman pleaded with Weiner to “parlay it,” the favorite strategy of track losers-but he had to make the two-thirty meeting. He felt relieved, really, driving to the jewelry store at Laurel Mall, that the money he had won still rested, for a change, in his pocket. He’d pick up the ring, drive out to Grimes’s house, and lay out the whole deal.
As for the twenty grand that Grimes would give him to strategize the job, that would pay off old debts. And of course there was his debt to Grimes, for keeping the shylock’s muscle from crippling him that one time, two years back. He owed Grimes for that one still, and he supposed he would always owe him. Everyone owed Grimes something.
The thought of it made him feel hollow, but only for a minute, when the clerk returned from the back room with the ring and placed it, beautifully wrapped, in his hand. He gave her the three hundred and asked for a receipt. Walking out the door, Weiner could only imagine the look on Nita’s face when she would unwrap the paper, and open the box. Maybe then she’d let him get next to it. Maybe then, he decided, she’d let him touch it.
Valdez stared out the window of his room, stroking the long whiskers of his black mustache. His room was small, with a perpetually unmade bed and an unvarnished nightstand and bureau, and a color television on an unvarnished stand set in the corner. His. 45 sat on the nightstand, under a naked-bulb lamp, next to the bed.
Valdez didn’t mind the room. After a while he really didn’t notice the size of it or the furnishings. When he used the room, it was only to watch television or to sleep. It had been generous of Mr. Grimes to let him live there, in the back of the house, though at night he could often hear Gorman coughing into his shitty handkerchief in the next room, forcing up and then hocking phlegm. That would annoy him, the way a bug might annoy him, but Valdez would just turn up the sound on the television, and that would be that.
Anyway, the room in this house in the country seemed a million miles from where he had been. First Mexico, then Los Angeles as a kid, then back down to Mexico, the border towns where everything-reefer, coke, pills, and women-could be bought, and everything of value needed protection. Valdez used muscle and a major set of balls there to earn his rep-he killed his first man at eighteen, one bullet to the head-until he became as valuable as that which he had been hired to protect. In Miami, in the early eighties, it had spun out of control; the ones he went up against had crazy, speed-stoked eyes. The retribution kills piled up and got bloodier-near the end, Valdez macheted a man in a dirt-floored warehouse, hacked at his shoulders and neck while the man cried out for his “mamacita”- until finally he gave up on it and drifted north, where an old contact put him on to Mr. Grimes. His decision to move on had nothing to do with fear. Valdez didn’t know fear, not like most men know fear. But he figured that the odds would catch up with him soon. And Valdez had no particular wish to die.
Compared to his days as an enforcer, working for Mr. Grimes had been a blessing, a fat slice of angel food cake. Every year or so there would be a job, something to keep Mr. Grimes interested, though from where Valdez sat Mr. Grimes didn’t need the risk, what with all the pretty things he already owned, the horses and the blonde and the cars. But everyone had a kick, and the kick for Mr. Grimes was moving the men around the playing field, and the reasons for that did not interest Valdez. Unlike the others who had to stay, the ones who owed Mr. Grimes, Valdez stayed because he liked the life. In that way, he supposed, he owed Mr. Grimes too.
Today, at two-thirty, Valdez would put on his black jacket and go to the meeting, and he would listen and not ask too many questions, because in the end you just shut your mouth and did the job and got out. The new one, the one with the long black hair, he bothered Valdez a little, maybe because he couldn’t read what was in the man’s eyes. And the old man-Valdez watched him now through the window, limping along the edge of the woods, smoking a cigarette-he would have to be dealt with this time. But what bothered him most today was the timing of the meeting-it would run over and cut into his show, “A Lifetime of Love.” He’d missed it yesterday, and now he was going to miss it again today. And he’d been waiting all month for Taurus, the international spy, to nail the brunette.
Valdez sighed, stroked his mustache. He didn’t know why he got so worked up over it. Christ, the way they worked it on that show, Taurus and the brunette, they’d be in bed together for the whole goddamn month.
Polk dragged hard on his cigarette, felt the burn as the paper touched the cork of the filter. He dropped the butt and crushed it in the grass beneath his right shoe. He exhaled the last of it, then spit into the woods. He looked at his left foot as he limped along the tree line, and cursed softly. This time of year die air was always cool and damp, and with the dampness came the pain.
He had been a gimp for forty years, since Korea, so he had been this way for most of his adult life. He no longer thought about it, except on days like this, when the dull ache traveled up his leg, reminded him with the nagging insistence of a cold touch on his shoulder. Of course, it could have ended there, on a frozen reservoir in Korea. It could have ended, if not for Grimes.
But that had been two young men, and now the men had grown old and into something else. He didn’t owe Grimes a thing, not after what Grimes had done. Not after Grimes had done the very worst thing that a man could do.
Polk thought of Delia-she had become a truly fine-looking woman-and of Constantine, and of the look that had passed between them in the office of Grimes. Standing under the branches of a pine, thinking of Constantine, Polk had a brief but cutting rush of guilt. It wasn’t that Polk had a particular fondness for him. In the end, Constantine was no better or worse than any man, and in his drives and desires he was certainly as predictable. But he supposed that it came down to priorities. And he believed that it was still possible, perhaps for the last time, to fix what he had done, and not done, so many years ago. So he would keep pushing Constantine, and he would not think about the bad things that could happen to the young man with the long black hair.
Polk pulled some needles from the branch that hung over his head. He rubbed the needles on his fingers, then put the fingers under his nose. He smelled the bite of green pine against the blackness of nicotine. He turned, and limped back toward the house.
The way Gorman saw it, the time of day didn’t matter much when a man wanted to get high. The meeting would be coming up soon, and he’d go to it, and he’d listen. A standard knockover, that’s what it was, you go in with a hard look and a drawn gun, maybe rap the barrel to someone’s head, let them feel the weight, and then you book. He’d done it enough to know the routine, and there wasn’t one good reason why he couldn’t listen to Weiner run it down without a little buzz in his head. No good reason at all. Gorman sat on the edge of his unmade bed and squeezed a line of clear glue out of the orange-and-white tube, moving the tube around in a circular motion to spread the glue into the opening of the brown paper bag. He quickly put the bag, bunched at the opening, to his face, letting the bag seal his mouth and nose. He closed his eyes and took long, deep breaths.
When Gorman felt the rush in his head, a pleasurable pounding that seemed to levitate his skull, he took the bag away from his face and let himself drift back, until his head rested on the bed’s pillows. He opened his eyes, watched the room glide, closed his eyes again, and dropped the paper bag to the floor.
He smiled. A poor man, living like a rich man in a country estate. A long way from the west side of Viers Mill Road in Wheaton, where he had grown up in a cramped GI-bill house, in a neighborhood of tradesmen. The old man, gaunt and chronically unemployed, had tried to raise him and his two brothers, but soon after the old lady died the boys went wild, and the old man gave up, crawling into a bottle of St. George’s scotch until his death. His older brother died too, soon after that. He had been fucking off on a construction site after dark, cooked on Schlitz and paint fumes, and trying to impress some heifer. He got his head tore off by a crane.
Gorman joined a gang in the early sixties, a loosely knit group of greasers brought together by their distrust of foreigners and spades. They played only Motown at their parties, low-lit basement affairs where the girls wore sleeveless Banlons and heavy black eyeliner. Gorman and his boys wore baggy work pants called “Macs” from Montgomery Ward, Banlon pullovers, black high-top Chucks, and three-button black leathers. They hung out at the Cue Club in Glenmont-it was in that pool hall’s bathroom where Gorman first huffed glue-and the bowling alley at Wheaton Triangle, where they shook down junior high school kids for spare change. They always hung together.
