“I like ‘The Wanderer.’”
This made Lou laugh. “You got good taste, kid. Maybe I’ll get you instead of Dion.”
He stopped talking and kept playing for a long time. It seemed like it would go on this way forever. Then he started singing: “Love has gone away, and there’s no one here now . . .”
He repeated these lines over and over. I’d never heard his voice sound that way before. It was a delicate, fragile, wounded voice and it echoed off the thick white of the walls. Then he added: “Took the rings off my fingers . . .”
The last phrase broke him. He kept strumming but stopped singing. He didn’t cry or sob audibly but the tears fell on his hands and strings.
I reached for his cigarettes without asking. It was both deliberate and unconscious and I had never done it before. He caught me out of the corner of his eye but didn’t question my being so bold. I think it pleased him, though his face was so full of misery I can’t say for sure. The fight and ferocity had left him. So had the cruelty and viciousness he could access in an instant. The child was in his eyes; I felt like his older brother.
The three silver rings he wore on his fingers were gone. And so was Rachel. I didn’t have to ask. The song was proof beyond a reasonable doubt. She was gone and he would be too. I couldn’t imagine him remaining in the home they shared. I don’t think he liked being alone yet there weren’t many people he liked being with. Knowing this made me feel special.
He changed the rhythm of the song; the pace quickened and he started singing again. There was a new tension in his voice as he repeated the phrases about his lost love.
After several refrains he began to chant: “Come on and slip away . . .”
I wasn’t sure what that meant. Did it mean to die? Did it mean to withdraw from the world and all its heartbreak and violence? Did it mean to get as high, as numb, as anesthetized as possible?
He stopped his song. It was abrupt like the needle being yanked off a record. His hands and arms went slack over the guitar like he was cradling it. Like he was shielding it from all the evil in the world.
He lifted his head, the tears stopped. I had a strong desire to talk to him about Veronica but I knew I couldn’t. Not because this was a bad time, I just felt in my bones that it wasn’t in the cards and I’d never be able to bring it up with him.
But just as soon as this thought dissolved into the air of the room, Lou turned to me and said: “Why didn’t you tell me your girlfriend’s pregnant?”
Bang.
* * *
I will never know for sure if Veronica was pregnant at that exact moment he mentioned it, but it was a possibility, one that I hadn’t entertained, though certainly possible . . . So why did he say that? . . . Did he know something I didn’t? And if so, how? . . . Did he tap into some strange clairvoyant energy that became accessible to him because of the deep despair that swallowed his mind, cracking open some kind of psychic window? Or was it not true at all? . . . Just some out-of-the-blue random statement, a spurt out of a brain soaked with Scotch, speed, and sorrow? I will never know . . . and I didn’t know how to answer.
“What?” was all I could handle saying to him.
“Why didn’t you tell me your girlfriend’s pregnant?” He repeated it without breaking his gaze.
“That’s not possible,” I lied.
“Did something happen?”
“No. Nothing happened at all.” Another lie. What he was saying scared me.
“I’m sorry, Tim. I don’t know why I would say such a thing. I’m in a bad way, my friend.”
“It’s okay.”
“I think I need to sleep.”
I took that as my cue and stood.
“You can stay. I’m going inside to lie down. You can stay in here. We got a TV.”
I hadn’t noticed it before but there was a brand-new RCA color set in the corner of the room.
“Make yourself at home.” He got up and walked to the bedroom.
I turned on the TV. It came on quick and loud. I felt the noise was inappropriate so I turned the volume all the way down. On the screen was an old black-and-white movie. A bunch of hobos were sitting by a fire near the railroad tracks. One of them was cooking something in a big cauldron, the others passed a bottle of wine. The cook had big, sad eyes and was either singing or praying as he stirred the pot.
Lou was watching from the corridor. “Oh, that’s a good one. What’s his name? That actor? I love him.”
“I don’t know.”
“You can put the sound up, it won’t bother me.” Then he reached in his pocket and tossed me a key chained to a rabbit’s foot that had been dyed blue. “If you need to go, lock up and leave the key downstairs.”
I put the sound up. The bum was singing a church song, a gospel song about the heaven that waits and the god who forgives.
Lou was still watching. “Mulligan stew,” he said.
“What?”
“That’s what he’s cooking. Mulligan stew. The hobos put whatever they can find into the pot and the mulligan mixer makes it into a stew. It’s gotta have some kind of meat or chicken parts, though, or at least an organ, to be a mulligan. Without meat it’s just called beggar’s stew. I had some mulligan once, just outside of Pittsburgh. I was skeptical but it was delicious as fuck.
