“Strange like what?” Stop it! he thought, let go!
Beside him the woman shrugged. “Nothing I can point at. Why don’t we forget it?”
O’Farrell opened his mouth and then closed it again, taking her advice. Damn the stupidity of buying the booze. She was right; who needed it?
Ellen had a ground-floor apartment on the Evanston side of Chicago, not quite close enough to the lake to be cripplingly expensive but not far enough away to be reasonable, either. She and Billy must have been watching through the window, because they both came running out before O’Farrell and Jill got completely from the car. There were kisses and hugs, and Billy kept thrusting an electric toy into O’Farrell’s face until he paid attention. Closer, O’Farrell saw it was a spacecraft that worked off batteries, and that it could be manipulated to turn into a space figure as well. Billy said there was an entire fleet of different designs.
Inside the apartment, O’Farrell offered his daughter the plastic bag and announced, “Supplies!”
Ellen accepted it without any surprise and said, “Great!” and O’Farrell was relieved.
Ellen had moved the boy into her room. O’Farrell hung up his garment bag and stored Jill’s small case where Billy slept, a bedroom festooned with posters and with toys neatly in a box, a catcher’s mitt uppermost. There was a plastic cover over the video machine and its game-playing keyboard. O’Farrell guessed Ellen had tidied up the room before their arrival.
Outside Billy was on the living-room floor, squatting with his legs splayed beneath him but actually sitting, the way kids his age were able to do. Jill and Ellen were in the kitchen, talking soft-voiced by the coffeemaker. As O’Farrell entered, he heard Ellen say, “Mother, I’ve told you: you’re panicking about nothing!”
“I don’t regard it as nothing!” Jill said.
‘There’ve been incidents and so there was a precautionary meeting, that’s all!” said Ellen. “The school has behaved very responsibly and I’m grateful.”
O’Farrell stood without intruding into the conversation, comparing the two women. They were very similar, unquestionably mother and daughter. And Jill stood up to the comparison very well, O’Farrell judged, proudly. Maybe just a little thicker around the hips but still pert-breasted, as firm as her daughter. Stomach was as flat, too: she worked out at the clinic, he knew, practicing the fitness exercises with which she treated others. Certainly as clear-skinned and practically as facially unlined as Ellen, and only he knew that Jill needed a hairdresser’s help now to keep her hair matchingly blond. Very beautiful; very beautiful indeed. He felt a positive jump of emotion, a stomach churn: he loved her so much.
“What are the police doing about it?” Jill persisted, setting out the cups.
“The best they can.”
“What’s that?” O’Farrell came in.
Ellen gave her father a sad smile, wishing he had not asked. “Just that,” she conceded lamely. “One of the drug officers talked at the meeting. Said it was easy enough to pick off the street pushers—which they do, of course—but that they’re replaced the following day. It’s like a pyramid, he said: if they get lucky, they might catch the guy from whom the street dealer gets his supplies, but rarely the one above him. And hardly ever the real organizers, the guys who are making millions … billions.”
“You know what I think!” Jill said with sudden vehemence. “I think they ought to kill the bastards! Make it a capital offense and execute them; no appeal, no excuse, nothing. Dead!”
“They do in some parts of the world, apparently,” said the younger woman.
O’Farrell supposed it was easy for Jill to feel as she did. He said, “Is there anything we can do?”
Ellen smiled at him again, gratefully this time. “Nothing, in a practical sense. Just knowing you’re around always helps.”
“We’re always around,” O’Farrell said sincerely.
Ellen said she still hadn’t done any grocery shopping, but Billy protested he didn’t want to do something as boring as that, so the two women went off in the rented car, with Jill driving, and O’Farrell used Ellen’s car, another Toyota, to take Billy to the theme park nearer into town. He chose Lake Shore Drive because it was a more attractive route than remaining inland, and at the traffic light at its commencement he had to snatch up the emergency brake as well as pump the footbrake to get it to stop. He gasped, frightened, only inches from the car in front. When the lights changed, he set off carefully, taking the inside lane and testing the footbrake again when he was clear enough of following traffic. The only way to stop satisfactorily was to start pumping a long way from where he wanted to halt. He pulled over into a bus stop and got out, able without lifting the hood to hear the whine and shuddering unevenness of the engine.
Back in the car he said to the boy, “Things don’t seem too good with the car.”
“Mom says she’s going to get it fixed,” said Billy.
“When?”
“Soon.”
O’Farrell drove very slowly, ignoring the horn blasts of protest, and found a service station just at the beginning of the high-rise area. The manager insisted the work would be impossible to do at such short notice, and O’Farrell said it was an emergency and that he guessed it would involve overtime working on the weekend, and after thirty minutes of persuasion the man agreed to take it in. It took another thirty minutes for them to check through the work necessary, the manager clearly impressed with O’Farrell’s knowledge of engines.
“Four hundred is only an estimate, you understand?” the mechanic warned.
“Whatever,” said O’Farrell. It gave them carte blanche to rip him off, but so what? The only consideration was getting the vehicle roadworthy over the weekend.
They took a cab to the theme park and O’Farrell indulged Billy on whatever ride he wanted and then let himself be tugged to a store practically next door to be shown the range of electric space vehicles. He bought one that changed from a vehicle to a warrior, like the one Billy already had.
On the way to the park, O’Farrell had seen a restaurant with an open deck stretching toward the lake, so he took Billy back there to eat. They sat outside, the silver-glinting lake to their left, the upthrust fingers of the Chicago skyscrapers to their right. Billy chose a cheeseburger and fries with a large Coke and insisted his new toy should remain on the table between them. O’Farrell ordered gin and tonic and tuna on rye; by the time the food came his glass was empty, so he ordered another.
“Hear there’s some nasty things going on at school,” O’Farrell said.
“Huh?” The child’s mouth was full of fries.
“Mommy had to come to talk to some people this week?”
“Oh that,” Billy said dismissively.
“What was it about?”
“Drugs,” the boy announced flatly. He moved the toy along the table, toward the Coke container, making a noise like explosions.
“You know what drugs are?”
“Sure,” Billy said, attention still on the spacecraft.
Not yet nine, thought O’Farrell: long-lashed, blue-eyed, red-cheeked with uncombed hair over his forehead and his shirttail poking curiously over his belt, like it always did, and he knew what drugs were. And not yet nine! He said, “What?”
“Stuff that makes you feel funny.”
“Who told you that?”
“Miss James.”
“Your teacher?”
“Uh-huh.” He was biting into his cheeseburger now, ketchup on either side of his mouth.
“What did she say?”
Billy had to swallow before he could reply. “That we were to tell her if anyone said we should try.”
“Would you tell her?”
“Boom, boom, boom,” went Billy, attacking the Coke container. “Guess so,” he said.
“Just guess so!
“Nope. Can I have a vanilla ice cream with chocolate topping now?”
O’Farrell summoned the waitress and added another gin and tonic to the order. “You know anyone who has tried it?”
“Couple of guys in the next grade, I think.”
