“Sure.” Again the response was overly loud. “Everybody says so. Even he says so.”
“What’s the joke, Tom? Come on, tell me.”
After a long pause, Tom Bradley said, “My father’s dead. He’s worse than dead. You know?”
“No. I don’t know. What’s worse than dead?”
“He killed himself.” Tom made the motion of sticking a knife into his stomach and rooting it around there.
“I see. He’d tried suicide before, hadn’t he?”
Tom looked warily into the space beside Fletch’s head.
“Tom, where did he die?”
“Southworth in the Spring. Vienna.”
“France?”
“No. Not France.”
“Switzerland?”
“Yeah. That’s it. He died in Switzerland. Of blood cancer. Many, many operations.”
“Okay, Tom. Why do you blame him for his death?”
Tom’s eyes went around the small bathroom very, very slowly. “He didn’t like.”
Fletch waited until Tom’s eyes settled back to the left of Fletch’s head. “He didn’t like what?”
Tom Bradley’s eyes closed. “No. He didn’t.” Tom muttered, “That’s the surprising thing, you see? Where does that leave me?”
“Where does that leave you?”
Tom’s eyes opened, seemed to focus on the faucet between his legs, and closed again. He answered, “In the bathtub.”
“Tom. One more question.”
“I haven’t heard any questions.” With his eyes closed, Tom spoke more quickly.
“Where was your father born?”
“He wasn’t. I guess he wasn’t born. People only thought he was born.”
“Where was he brought up?”
“In purgatory, he says. You know the word, purgatory?”
“Yeah.”
“That’s where he was brought up.”
“In what town. What town is your father from, Tom?”
“Let me think.”
Fletch waited until he believed Tom Bradley was gone into space again, and then stood up.
“Dallas, Texas,” Tom Bradley then said.
For a moment, Fletch stood over him. Then he said, “Tom? Can you hear me?”
“No.”
“Tom, I’m gonna try to help you. You don’t need this thing—whatever it is. It might not look like I’m helping you. And it may even hurt. But I’m gonna try to help you.”
After a while, Tom Bradley, Junior said, “Good bye.”
“Later, Tom.”
18
“D R I N K? B E E R? J O I N T?”
Alston Chambers, law clerk in the District Attorney’s office, took the five steps necessary to cross his livingroom and turned off the television set.
“Sunday afternoon,” Fletch said. “Caught you sitting in front of the T.V. watching baseball and guzzling beer. Who’d ever think he’d live to see the day? Why aren’t you out working around the palace? Painting, scraping, mowing and hoeing?”
Alston gave him a sardonic sideways glance. “Crappy little house. Who cares about it?”
“It’s your mortgage, bud.”
In the hot, dark livingroom an imitation early American divan, imitation Morris chair, pine wood coffee table, single standing lamp and ancient Zenith television left almost no place to stand. There was a bedroom in the house, and a kitchen-dinette. Houses each side were only a meter or so away, and there was a back yard big enough for the rubbish barrels.
“That’s what it’s all about,” Alston said. “You don’t buy a house. You buy a mortgage. I hate this house. I need the tax deduction. I need to establish credit. Everybody our age does. You, too, buddy. Wait till you get started. We’re all waiting till you get started. Join the human race.”
Clearly, Alston Chambers had joined the human race and clearly he was paying his dues. On a Spring Sunday afternoon he was dressed in long trousers and moccasins and in his mid-twenties a beer belly made his dress shirt protrude and he was indoors drinking beer and looking at baseball on television. And since getting his law degree, he had been working nine-to-five as a clerk in the District Attorney’s office.
Fletch and he had gone through Marine Corps basic training, and a great deal more, together.
“I would join the human race, Alston, honest, but something keeps going wrong. Everytime I apply, something happens. Some doggoned thing.”
“You paying Linda her alimony like the judge told you to? Like a good boy?”
“No, sir.”
Alston said, “I wouldn’t expect anything else from you.”
“Every month I sit down to write her a check, Alston, honest, but after the rent, the car payment, the utilities, the groceries …”
“There’s nothing left. I know. I couldn’t afford to pay alimony right now, either. You at least keeping up with your credit card payments?”
“I don’t have any credit cards. I had one the office gave me for, you know, expenses, but I lost that Thursday.”
“What do you mean you lost it?”
“Well, it’s more accurate to say I lost the use of it.”
Alston looked at him incredulously. “You mean lost your job?”
“Or you could say I regained my freedom.”
Alston chuckled. He turned around in the doorway and called his wife. “Audrey! Fletch is here.”
“I’m just putting on a dress,” she said through the wall. She sounded like she was in the room with them.
“Don’t need to put on a dress for me, Audrey,” Fletch said. “Wish you wouldn’t.”
“I know that, Fletch,” she said, coming into the room and putting her arms around his neck. “But Alston’s home, and we don’t want to embarrass him, right?” She kissed him on the mouth.
“Right.”
“Right,” Alston said. “Now would you like a drink?”
He had picked up his pewter beer stein from the top of the television. Alston had bought the Austrian-style beer stein in Tokyo, Japan, when he and Fletch had been there on Rest and Recuperation.
“No, thanks.” Audrey had sat on the divan. Fletch flopped into the single chair. “Moxie’s got me going to this cocktail party at her theater tonight.”
“Moxie?” Alston smiled down at him. “Is Moxie back on the scene?”
“Yeah. I guess so. Come to think of it, she is. Bumped into her ata hot dog stand the other day. She’s doing her thing—pretending that was the first time we ever met.”
“That’s Moxie,” Alston said.
“That’s Moxie.”
“Did you say she’s pretending you two just met for the first time, the other day?” Audrey laughed.
“Yeah. Come to think of it, she is.”
“Moxie, Moxie,” Alston said into his beer.
“Maybe it is the first time we ever met,” Fletch said. “Moxie is a lot of different people, you know.”
