Cedric had caramel-colored skin and hair that was turning silver. His Adam’s apple jutted from his throat, and his shoulders were stooped from a lifetime of bad posture, but he was quite a hit with the ladies. He lived with a woman he called the missus, though they weren’t married. Cedric had yet to divorce his third wife, the last in a series of joyous unions that yielded six children, flung all over the East Coast. One of the exes operated a beauty parlor in Queens. Cedric spent five years with her, five of the most miserable years, he reckoned, of his whole up- and-down life.
“We stayed in an apartment over the shop,” Cedric recollected, “out there by the ballpark. Between the trains and the traffic and the airplanes screaming over your head, you never heard so much noise. And that’s just outside the house. The woman never shut up. Run her mouth all day with them hens, come up the house, start running in on me. I got so I couldn’t take no more of her, and one day I up and left. Headed back for Carolina.”
Left her on her own with two of his kids. Didn’t Cedric think that was kind of shitty?
“She weren’t depending on me for nothing. She was making herself a good living.” Cedric swabbed his brush in a puddle of eggshell white, and straightening, cut in a right angle over a window, back and forth, back and forth. “Had herself another man, too.”
Ah-ha.
“Long before I was out of the picture.”
This was later on in the day, when his thermos was empty, that Cedric did all this talking. He spoke slowly, and when he talked for any length of time, like now, his voice lost power.
He graduated from the can’t-live-with-’em-can’t-live without-’em school, and Harry thought, after his third time, no charm, Cedric ought to know what he was talking about. Harry had his own dim views on marriage, but he kept them to himself. After a while, he just stopped listening.
Aggie was washing the dishes before she put them into the dishwasher, and Harry watched her, her belly bulging against the denim of her Levi’s. Her boobs were swelling, too. Complaining that they hurt, she wore a specially designed bra, even when she was at home.
Her doctor told her she could tend bar into her third trimester, or until she got too uncomfortable being on her feet. Aggie hadn’t breathed a word of her pregnancy to Bryce or anybody else at Sailor Randy’s, but she liked the idea of pulling in sympathy tips once she started to show.
Harry hated it. Bartending was a rotten job for a pregnant woman, and she could’ve quit without a problem. They’d have been all right for money. The newspaper was covering her obstetrical bills.
But it didn’t have to do with money. The job represented independence. They’d had two or three arguments about Sailor Randy’s before Harry figured this out, but when he did, he dropped the opposition. Let her work there if she wanted to. Pretty soon, she wouldn’t want to.
He said, “The Catholics are going to give you a hard time about baptizing this kid, if you’re not married.”
She measured a scoop of powdered soap. “Spending a lot of late nights with your Catechism?”
“I’m just saying, you know.”
“Let me ask you a question, Saint Ignatius, when was the last time you were even in a church?”
“Not counting weddings and funerals?”
“No, throw them in, too.”
“I can’t remember. Two years ago?”
“Why are you so hot on making this kid a Catholic,” Aggie said, “when you don’t pay attention to it yourself?”
“I think we’ve got two separate issues here.”
“And they are?”
“One, us getting married,” Harry said, “and two, bringing up the baby in the Church.”
“Who said anything about us getting married?”
“I think I just did.”
It took her a while, but she said, “I don’t know how I feel about that.”
“I don’t know how I feel about it either, but I’m leaning toward considering it might not be a bad idea.”
“In an ideal world,” she said, “a child would be brought up by a mother and a father who were married, providing a stable home environment.” She was drying her hands on a dishtowel. “But we’re light years away from an ideal world.”
Aggie was good at re-routing a discussion out of the specific and into the general, in order to make some larger, philosophical point. In a minute she was going to be citing some obscure sociological statistic she read in the newspaper of hers, not talking about whether it was a good idea for them to get married. She’d get back around to that when she was ready, those impulses surfacing at the worst times, like when he was getting ready for work. They wouldn’t have time to finish what they were talking about, and he’d have this conflict with Aggie hanging over his head. Or she’d get all wordy when he was trying to sleep. Harry sensed a middle-of-the-night conversation looming.
Harry extended Cedric’s work for a week, retouching spotty patches, pitching in with the final clean-up, but by that Friday, there was nothing left to do. They finished at noon and killed time, Cedric squeezing hot drags from the generic cigarettes he bought on the Reservation. He could afford the real kind, but stuck to the raspy, no-name ones. That was brand loyalty for you.
They started drinking in the bar Pat Mule Deer made famous, a storefront joint that poured beer in plastic cups. Pick-ups and panel trucks crowded the parking lot. Drinkers, sunburnt and pale in shirts with name patches over their pockets, refigured dreams of late-life laziness as a few after-work belts in some strip-mall dive.
The barmaid had a big, girdled ass she stuffed into black stretch pants, and wore a blouse that allowed peeks into her bra every time she bent to get something. Her hair, blown into a bouffant, was bleached a starchy white. Late-forties, she wasn’t lacking a certain molting charm.
Cedric ordered a Genny Cream Ale. Harry was surprised the stuff still existed, but it was popular with the old men, at seventy-five cents a glass. It went down better than Harry remembered, frosty cold, thick, sweet aftertaste.
When it was time for their third round, Harry switched to Dewar’s White Label, served in a one-and-a-half ounce jigger. For his next one, he asked for a double, and the barmaid tipped two brimming measures into a plastic tumbler.
Cedric had started talking by then, his face pointing forward, glancing out of the corners of his eyes. He was theorizing about money, his second-favorite subject, where it came from, where it went. Money, he said, was like electricity. It was generated at a source and conducted until it found a ground, say the stock market or the auto repair shop.
“You might not have it anymore, but it has not disappeared.”
Coming from Cedric, this kind of thinking bore the weight of an advanced mathematical equation. High- concept. Abstract, even.
“This bar right here, now this is a good example of what I’m talking about. You see all these men?”
He wasn’t trying to trip Harry up. This was a sincere question, and Cedric was waiting for an answer. Harry said, “Yeah?”
“These men been working all week, making money. Some of it got to go to the house rent, the groceries, make the car note, you follow me?”
Harry was going to say something, but Cedric said, “Hold off. That money had to come from somewhere first. This man here,” he said, making an arbitrary gesture at nobody in particular, “is a plumber. He unstopped somebody’s sink today. Earned himself two hundred dollars for the job.”
“Fucking plumbers are expensive,” Harry said.
“That two hundred gonna stay in the plumber’s pocket?”
“He’s got his own bills,” Harry said, speeding up the story, trying to get the barmaid’s attention.
“As we know. But some of that income, you see what I’m saying, is what you call disposable. That mean he’s gonna feed it down the sink, get it all ground up?”
“No, he’s gonna blow a chunk of it over the bar,” Harry said. “Get some new overalls he doesn’t really need because he’s sick of the ones he’s wearing.”
Cedric held up his hand. “Okay. That money he used to pay for the drinks, what is it, ten dollars, twenty dollars?”
“At these prices, he’d be hammered.”
