this big mirror on one wall. And I looked in the mirror, and there I was: I had dressed up like some kind of bum that night, for the party, like. I had bought all this stupid-lookin’ shit down at the Salvation Army store, man. None of it matched, and goddamn if I didn’t look like some kind of failed clown. I looked at myself, thinkin’ about my brother lying on a slab in the other room, and all I could do was laugh. And trippin’ like I was, I couldn’t stop laughing. Eventually, they came and put me in another room. This room had quilted blankets on the walls-the kind moving guys use to cover furniture-and a table with a pack of Marlboro Lights in the middle of it, next to an ashtray. And no mirrors. So that was the night, you know? The night I decided, It’s time to stop being some kind of clown.”
I stabbed my cigarette out in the ashtray, lit another right behind it.
“That’s rough, Jack,” I said, because I could think of nothing else to say.
“Sure,” he said. “It was rough.” He rubbed at the tight curls on top of his head, looking down all the while. I drew two beers from the ice, put them on the bar.
“How’d your father handle it?” I said.
“My father,” LaDuke muttered, savagely twisting the cap off the neck of the bottle.
I watched him tilt his head back and drink.
“What’s wrong with you, man?” I said.
LaDuke tried to focus his eyes on mine. I could see how drunk he was then, and I knew that he was going to tell it.
“My father was sick,” LaDuke said. “ Is sick, I guess. I haven’t seen him for a long time. Not since my brother’s funeral.”
“Sick with what?”
“His problem.”
“Which is?”
LaDuke breathed out slowly. “He likes little boys.”
“Shit, Jack.”
“Yeah.”
“You tellin’ me you were abused?”
LaDuke drank some more beer, put the bottle softly on the bar. “I was young… but yeah. When I finally figured it out-when I figured out that what he was doing, when he was coming into my room at night, handling me that way-when I figured out that it was wrong, I asked him about it. Not a confrontation, just a question. And it stopped. We never even talked about it again. I spent the rest of my childhood, and then my teenage years, making sure the old man stayed away from my little brother. When my brother died, man, my life was finished there. I got through college and then I booked.”
“Booked where?”
“I went south. I never liked the cold. Still don’t. Lived in Atlanta for a while, Miami after that. I had a degree in criminol ogy, so I picked up work for some of the security agencies. But, you know, you tend just to come back. I’ve been looking for answers, and I thought I might find out more about myself the closer I got to home.”
“You’ve talked to your father?”
“No.” LaDuke took in some smoke, crushed the cherry in the ashtray. “I guess you think I ought to hate him. But the truth is, I only hate what he did. He’s still my old man. And he did raise me and my brother, and it couldn’t have been easy. So, no, I don’t hate him. The thing is now, how do I fix my own self?”
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t believe in this victimized-society crap. All these people pointing fingers, never pointing at themselves. So people get abused as kids, then spend the rest of their lives blaming their own deficient personalities on something that happened in their childhoods. It’s bullshit, you know it? I mean, everybody’s carrying some kind of baggage, right? I know I was scarred, and maybe I was scarred real deep. But knowing that doesn’t straighten anything out for me.” LaDuke looked away. “Sometimes, Nick, I don’t even know if I’m good for a woman.”
“Oh, for Chrissakes, Jack.”
“I mean it. I don’t know what the fuck I am. What happened to me, I guess it made me doubt my own sexuality. I look at a man, and I don’t have any desire there, and I look at a woman, and sometimes, sexually, I don’t know if it’s a woman I want, either. I’m tellin’ you, I don’t know what I want.”
“Come on.”
“Look here,” LaDuke said. “Let me tell you just how bad it is with me. I go to the movies, man. I’m sitting there watching the man and the woman makin’ love. If it’s really hot, you know, I’ll find myself getting a bone. And then I start thinking, Am I getting hard because I wish I was him, or am I getting hard because I wish I was her?”
“Are you serious, man?”
“I’m not joking.”
“Because if you’re serious, LaDuke, then you are one fucked-up motherfucker.”
“That’s what I’m trying to tell you!” he said. “I am one seriously fucked-up motherfucker.”
Both of us had to laugh a little then, because we needed to, and because we were drunk. LaDuke’s eyes clouded over, though, and the laughter didn’t last. I didn’t know what to do for him, or what to say; there was too much twisting around inside him, twisting slowly and way too tight. I poured him another shot of bourbon, and one for myself, and I shook him out another smoke. We sat there drinking, with our own thoughts arranging themselves inside our heads, and the time passed like that. I looked through the transom above the front door and saw the sky had turned to gray.
“You ze=ooked thrknow, Jack,” I said, “you were right about everybody having some kind of baggage. I never knew my mother or father; they sent me over from Greece when I was an infant. I got raised by my grandfather. He was a good man-hell, he was my father-and then he died, and my marriage fell apart, and I thought I was always gonna be alone. And now I’m fixing to blow the best thing that’s ever come my way. But, you know, I’ve got my work, and I’ve got this place and the people in it, and I know I can always come here. There’s always someplace you can go. There’s a whole lotta ways to make a family.”
“So, what, you’re sayin’ this place is like your home?”
“I guess so, yeah.”
“But it’s a shithole, Nick.”
I looked around the bar. “You know somethin’? It is a shithole.” I smiled. “Thanks for pointing that out to me.”
LaDuke smiled back. “Yeah, you gave it a good try.”
We had some more to drink, and after awhile his eyes made their way over to the money heaped on the bar. I watched him think things over.
“It’s a lot of cash,” I said, “you know it?”
“Uh-huh. What are we gonna do with it?”
“I don’t know. You want it?”
“No.” LaDuke shook his head. “It’s dirty.”
“It’s only dirty if you know it’s dirty.”
“What’s your point?”
“I was thinkin’… why not just take this money, put it in an envelope, and mail it off to Calvin’s mother. I’ve been to her place, man, and she sure could use it. There’s a couple of babies there-”
“What, just put it in the mail?”
“I’ve got an envelope around here somewhere.”
LaDuke shrugged. “All right.”
I found a large manila envelope in Darnell’s kitchen. There was a roll of stamps back there, too, in a file cabinet next to Phil Saylor’s logbook. I ripped off a line of stamps and took them and the envelope back to the bar. Then I grabbed a D.C. directory that was wedged between the cooler and the wall and put that on the bar, as well. I looked through the Jeter listings while LaDuke stuffed the money into the envelope.
“There’s a shitload of Jeters,” I said.
“You know the street?”
“I think so.”
“You think so? We’re gonna mail out ten grand on an ‘I think so’?”
“Here it is,” I said. “Gimme the envelope.”
