the crowd, flushed and grinning. She put her hand on his shoulder and he put his to the back of her head, just to feel the heavy silk. It was, he understood, why he’d called her over in the first place.
“You know my buddy here?” Michael asked her because he had momentarily forgotten the kid’s name.
But she shifted her hips a little and dropped her eyes for just a second before she said, “Hi, Terry.”
And Terry looked casually away from her, sipping his beer all nonchalant to say, “How’s it going?”
The crowd pushed her closer and Michael took the opportunity to slip his arm beneath her parka and around her slim waist. “How do you know this lowlife?” he said.
Terry was still looking straight ahead, his right leg jiggling.
“High school,” Caroline said. “We went to Valley Stream Central together.” She smiled at his averted face. There was something regal about her although she was not tall. She shook her hair, brushed some stray electrostatic strands of it off her cheek. The gray fake fur that edged her hood could have been ermine. “We ran into each other his first week here,” she said primly. “When he was thinking about going back home, he was so lonely.” She pouted a little, imitating his loneliness. “I tried to make him feel better,” intimating with her smile a certain benevolence bestowed, back when he was so lonely.
Terry glanced at her from over his shoulder, his color restored.
“Fuck you,” he said.
“Nice mouth,” Michael told him even as Caroline sighed and slowly shook her head. “He does it even quicker than he says it,” she said. A few people around them laughed. Charlie Hegi, who was reaching for the bag of Hershey bars, said, “Zing.”
Now Ralph was in front of them, a bottle of tequila in one hand and four shot glasses in the other. “Play nice, children,” he said. Terry swung off the bar stool and immediately someone else took his place. A big guy, made bigger by his long doughboy coat. Bad skin and short arms and a ponytail that smelled unwashed. Bean was what they called him. He seemed to expand to fit whatever space was left for him, bellying up. “Hey, Ralph,” he said, with that false belligerence guys like Bean substituted for wit. “Where the fuck are your decorations? It’s Halloween, man.”
Ralph shook his head. “Don’t need them,” he said. He lifted Bean’s cup out of his hand, refilled it. Handing it back, he added, “They don’t make decorations as ugly as some of you assholes.” And then, leaning forward, “You know what this place used to be, man?” He bared his teeth, a kind of smile. “This place used to be a fucking funeral parlor, man.”
Bean took this in for a second, narrowing his small eyes, and then said, “Bullshit.”
“The trapdoor in the garage is casket-size,” Ralph went on. “Go look.” He gestured toward the center of the room, toward the jukebox and the bulk of the crowd. “From the turn of the century to the forties,” he said. “One dead body after the other laid out right here. This place has so many ghosts I can’t sleep at night. You want me to put up decorations?”
“Yeah, man,” Bean said, none of it sinking in. “It’s Halloween.” But the chubby girl who had edged in beside him, Debbie, held out her empty plastic cup and said, “You told me this used to be a speakeasy.”
Ralph took her cup and filled it, shaking his head like he was the weary professor and she some dumb-ass student who hadn’t done the reading. “My grandfather was the undertaker,” he said patiently, “but my father was the bootlegger.” He handed her the cup, took her dollar. His earring caught some light. “During Prohibition,” he said, and then looked at Bean. “You know what Prohibition is?” and Bean said, “Shit, yeah. I’m a fucking history major.”
“Yeah, well,” Ralph said. He slapped the dollar into the register. “During Prohibition,” he said, “my father had something going with some Mafia guys to ship booze from Canada-in coffins. Most of it went downstate but my dad kept enough of it to get a little side business going with a speakeasy-you know what that is, Bean?” And Bean, who had a mouthful of beer, swallowed it before he nodded. “They served the stuff right next to the stiffs,” Ralph said. “I kid you not. My grandfather would stuff ‘em and truss ‘em and then as soon as the last mourner left, my father would bring in his customers and get them stiff, too. His biggest challenge, he said, was keeping the cigarette butts out of the coffins. One time he came down here in the morning, just as the dead guy’s family was coming in to close him up for good, and, holy shit, he sees the corpse has a shot glass on his forehead.”
Ralph plucked a few empty cups out of hands and refilled them, collected his money. “This is a fucking funeral parlor,” he said, his arms outspread. “What do I need Halloween decorations for?”
“It’s not anymore,” Bean said, but uncertainly.
Ralph shrugged. He’d grown tired of the subject.
And then he looked at Caroline, who turned on her smile the way you flick on a lamp. Michael had driven home with her once, Thanksgiving vacation, a whole carload of them. She lived in a split-level, the shingled part painted pink. There was a saint in a stone grotto between some bushes, a boat on cinder blocks in the driveway, and her mother already waiting for her behind the aluminum-and-glass storm door. Someone had made a joke about Mom radar.
Ralph touched his crotch, shook his head, and then turned to reach into the cooler for two long-neck bottles of beer. He made his way around the bar just as Caroline moved to meet him. He took her under his arm, the two beer bottles resting just over her shoulder, and had his face in her hair before they’d reached the stairs.
Bean murmured, “Oh man,” as if he were in some mortal pain. Charlie Hegi had bowed his head and was twisting the Hershey wrappers into little bows.
Michael stepped behind the bar, but for a moment no one was ordering.
Then Terry returned. “I’m leaving,” he told Michael, as if he were obliged to. Michael shrugged. He felt sorry for him, in his student-teacher clothes. By the look of his eyes, he’d either been crying somewhere or throwing up.
He put a shot glass on the bar. “Have a drink,” he said. “And take off that fucking tie.”
“The guy’s a creep,” Terry said after he swallowed. “He’s old enough to be my father.”
“He’s old enough to be dead,” Bean said. And then added, “He probably is,” pleased with himself. “Probably sleeps in a coffin.”
Terry said again, “He’s a creep.”
But Charlie Hegi looked up to the ceiling. His teeth were full of chocolate. “He’s a lucky son of a bitch at the moment,” he said.
The place got busy then and Charlie stepped behind the bar to help out. Michael was pouring drinks and shots and slapping the cash register with the flat of his hand and the more time Ralph took with Caroline upstairs, the more the place became his own. What he was thinking of, he found himself telling a girl with a small face and short hair and dark eyebrows that were alternately appealing and weird, was teaching for a year or two and then heading south, maybe Ft. Lauderdale or Daytona, maybe even Key West, to open a bar on the beach-work his tail off over Christmas and spring break and then kick back the rest of the year, go fishing, travel, maybe write. Not for him, he said, polyester pants and short-sleeve dress shirts and the scorn of thirty inbred seventh graders for the next forty years. Not his old man’s Robert Hall suits five days a week, either, and the Long Island Rail Road to the city, the subway to the cubicle. Someone else’s shot glass on your forehead when you’re dead.
The girl was pretty enough, petite. She said something about wanting to be an artist as well as a kindergarten teacher. When Ralph returned, he slapped Michael on the back and said, I owe you, man. The scent of the pot they’d smoked was on him and Caroline took a bar stool in the corner and drank another beer, her hair still mussed in the back and her lips kind of blurred. Her friends seemed to stay away from her, but Ralph walked to that end of the bar every chance he got and leaned there next to her, watching the crowd, playing with her hair, not saying much.
Michael left with the short-haired girl. She was from Commack. In his room they smoked a joint and listened to Pink Floyd and then he showed her some glow-in-the-dark chalk he’d bought for his class. He wasn’t sure what he was going to do with it yet, he told her, he just thought it would get their attention. Later, with all the lights out, she stood naked on his bed and drew all over the wall-pretty good drawings, he thought, some of them fairly obscene. He told her she was going to make one hell of a kindergarten teacher and then pulled her down again and wrapped his legs around her-she couldn’t have weighed a hundred pounds.
When he finally took her home late Saturday afternoon, the sky was slung so low over the rusty city and everything looked so beat up and damp it seemed more like the end of winter, the beginning of mud season, than the height of fall. He went out for subs with some of his housemates and ended up at a Halloween party in one of the Main Street bars. Bean was there and at one point stumbled over to ask if Michael had a shovel in his car. He
