A Dark Matter (14 page)

Then you will have to make the choice. How much are you willing to gamble? Let’s say that you have a feeling about which door is the right one, a sort of gut instinct. Can you trust that instinct?

Tough, isn’t it?

But this story ends when you open the door. It doesn’t matter if you managed to guess which room is mine, which door I closed behind me. You put your hand on the door handle, you knock, it’s all over. End of story. By choosing one, you chose the other, too. Do you understand why? Those two consequences are joined at the hip, they’re Siamese twins. Even if you picked the door with the lady behind it—all questions answered, all explanations given, your life solved for you—it’s still true that you gave the tiger permission to jump. You gave your assent to catastrophe, you invited tragedy and horror to walk right in. You got lucky, that’s all
.

Mallon said:

Every secret mission requires a good thief
.

Mallon said:

Trust me. When the tide rises, you shall be at my side
.

Mallon said:

One of you shall inhabit the country of the blind
.

Mallon said:

I think you will rise up singing, you will sail up into the blue. Singing one long, continuous song so beautiful that it will entrance everyone who hears it
.

Mallon said:

Words create freedom, too, dear Hootie, and I think it is words that will save you
.

donald olson

Chicago, Early Summer

S
prawled out in a high-backed stool, Don Olson had commandeered the entire lower half of the long bar at Mike Ditka’s. While his left arm barricaded his drink, his right index finger jabbed the air. He kept his head turned back toward the bartender. The bartender was ignoring him.

“There he is, the guy I was telling you about. You read a book called
The Agents of Darkness
, didn’t you? Eighty-three, right? Year it came out? Cover of
Time
magazine?”

“Good memory,” I said.

Stationed in front of the two men at the far end, the bartender appeared to be engrossed in passing celery sticks through a stream of cold water. This was going to be even more terrible than I had feared. I wished I had never talked to the guy. The people at the tables were shifting their eyes between Olson and myself. The guys at the far end stared straight ahead. They might have been watching television, but what they were watching, with increasing wariness and alarm, was the former Dilly-O.

“I asked you a question, my friend. Does the name Lee Harwell mean anything to you?”

“Sir,” said the bartender, “in 1983, I was eight years old.”

“How fleeting is the bauble, fame,” Olson said. “Come over here and give your daddy some sugar.”

So now this guy was my daddy? The odors of sweat, unwashed flesh, and tobacco intensified as I drew nearer, and I held my breath while I embraced my old friend. Salt-and-pepper stubble covered Olson’s cheeks. The stench was part of the reason everyone else had fled to the other end of the bar. The rest of it would have been whatever he had said or done. Olson gripped me a couple of beats too long before releasing me.

“Let me buy you a drink, man, hey? That sound like a good idea?”

“Good enough,” I said, and asked for a glass of pinot grigio.

“Pinot for my buddy, and another margarita here. Hey, Lee.” A slap on the shoulder. “You gotta know—I really appreciate this.”

He leaned back, grinning. “Should we maybe grab a table?”

“Let’s,” I said, and saw the bartender’s shoulders drop an inch or two.

“Which one you like? That one?” Olson was pointing at one of two empty tables at the back of the room.

I was trying to reconcile the scruffy, hard-used man before me with both his eighteen-year-old self and the man Jason Boatman had once described to me in the lobby of the Pfister. Olson looked exactly like a man who had just walked out of prison. The yardbird bravado made him seem inauthentic, potentially dangerous.

“That one’s fine.” I felt an instinctive need to keep Olson pacified.

The entire room relaxed when we sat down at the back table.

Olson faced the door, keeping a watch out for something that was never going to happen, and the other patrons went back to their conversations, their burgers, their laughter. A small, brown-haired, and extraordinarily good-looking female waiter brought our drinks on a gleaming tray and set them down with a flicker of a glance for me, nothing for Olson. She evoked the memory of forties movie queens like Rita Hayworth and Greer Garson. She also evoked another memory, sharper, more immediate, and charged with feeling.

“This is a great place, right? I thought you’d like it.”

“I like it fine,” I said.

“You’ve been here before, I suppose.”

“I think so.”

“Places like this are so common in your experience, you don’t remember if you were here before?” Olson’s eyes flicked away and for a moment inspected the bar’s entrance. Then his attention snapped back to me.

“I was here once before, Don. About a week after it opened. We came for dinner.”

“They serve good food in this place, right?”

“Their food is dandy. It’s ducky. It’s swell.”

“Okay, I get it. Hey, can I get you anything? An appetizer, maybe?”

Ditka’s was on East Chestnut, five blocks south of my house on Cedar Street, not so close that Olson’s arrival felt like an intrusion—apart from all the ways in which it felt precisely like an intrusion.

“Come on, let’s split a shrimp cocktail.” Here he gave another sharp, brief glance at the doorway, but whatever he was dreading or waiting for failed to appear.

“Look, I never got around to having lunch,” I said. “And now it’s almost four. Let’s have a late lunch or an early dinner, does that sound good? On me, please, Don. I know you’ve had some hard luck lately.”

“Today my luck is good. Tell you the truth, though, I could eat a cow.”

“Then you picked the right place.”

He waved to the waitress, and when her blue-gray gaze found him, performed a mime of reading a menu.

She came to our table with two big gull-wing menus, and Don Olson, alas, folded his hand around her wrist. “What’s good here, honey?”

She jerked her hand from his grip.

“What do you think I should order?”

“The Da Pork Chop.”

“Da Pork Chop, that’s like the specialty of the house?”

“Comes with cinnamon apples, green peppercorns, and au juice.”

“That’s the baby for me. Start me off with the Fried Calamari. Extra crispy, can you do that for me?”

I ordered a blue-cheese burger and a second glass of wine.

“Another margarita, too, honey. Corona back. Did you ever read a book called
The Agents of Darkness?”

“I don’t think so.”

“This is the guy who wrote it. Forgive me, I’m Don Olson, and this is my friend Lee Harwell. What’s your name? It has to be as pretty as you are.”

“My name is Ashleigh, sir. Excuse me, but I’m going to punch in your order now.”

“Hold on, please, Ashleigh. I want to ask you an important question. Think it over, then give me your honest response.”

“You have thirty seconds,” she said.

Olson checked the entrance, lifted his chin, and closed his eyes. He raised his right hand and pinched his thumb against his index finger. It was a parody of careful discrimination, and it was awful to behold.

“Does a person have the right to turn his friends’ lives into entertainment, for money?” He opened his eyes, his hand still raised in that snuff taker’s position.

“You don’t need permission to write a novel.”

“Get outta here,” Olson said.

Ashleigh twirled away.

“Ten years ago, that little slut would have gone home with me. Now she won’t look at me twice. At least she didn’t want to look at you, either.”

“Don,” I said, “your heart isn’t in this. You checked out the door maybe five or six times since we sat down. Is there someone you’re afraid will come in? Is someone following you? Obviously, you’re on the lookout.”

“Okay—when you’re in the slammer, you learn to keep an eye on the door. You get a little jumpy, a little paranoid. Couple of weeks, I’ll be back to normal.”

He made another quick check of the entrance.

“When did you get out, anyhow?”

“I took a bus up here this morning. Know how much money’s in my pocket? Twenty-two bucks.”

“Don, I don’t owe you anything. Let’s be clear about that.”

“Harwell, I don’t
think
you owe me anything, could we be clear about
that?
I just figured, maybe you’d be willing to help me out a little, you and your wife. She was always great, you were always a good guy, and you’re about a million times better off than anyone else I know.”

“Leave my wife out of this.”

“Oh man, that’s harsh,” Olson said. “I loved the Eel.”

“So did everybody else. What do you mean, help you out a little?”

“Let’s save the business for after lunch, all right? I’m thinkin’ about when we were all on top of the world, our little bunch. And you and the Eel were ‘the Twins.’ Because you sure did look a lot alike, you gotta give me that.”

“I wish you’d stop calling her ‘the Eel,’” I said.

It was as though he had not heard. “Man, she must have been one of the great tomboys of all time.” For the first time since we had taken the table, Olson seemed able to step aside from his obsession with the door and fully inhabit his half of the conversation.

I remembered something that dampened my sudden flare of anger. “In the old days, when I wanted to piss her off, I called her Scout.”

Olson’s face creased into a smile. “She was like the girl in, you know, that movie …”

I found that I remembered nothing about a movie I had held perfectly in mind a moment before. Lately, these mental vacancies and erasures seemed to be happening with an increasing frequency. “The one with that actor …”

“Yeah, and he was a lawyer …”

“And Scout was his daughter …”

“Damn,” said Olson. “At least you can’t remember, either.”

“I know it, but I don’t know it,” I said, frustrated but no longer in a bad temper. Our shared failing had put us on a common footing; and this evidence of Olson’s aging had served, however paradoxically, to evoke the forthright and appealing young man Dill had been. Full of sweetness, the past bloomed before me.

Simultaneously, we said, “
To Kill a Mockingbird.”
We burst out laughing.

“I have to ask,” I said. “What were you charged with?”

For a second, Olson glanced up at the ceiling, exposing a skinny, wrinkled neck that looked like some inedible organic vegetable in a health food store. “I was charged with and convicted of committing crimes of gross indecency with a young woman. The alleged victim was eighteen years old and engaged in an informal program of study with me. For a couple of years, I’d been working with the erotic occult. I started out with a group of ten or twelve, it shrank to maybe six, you know how that goes, and in the end it was just me and Melissa. It got so we could prolong the act like to
infinity
. Unfortunately, she mentioned this feat to her mother, who went completely nuts and got the university involved, which wound up with the Bloomington vice squad hauling me out of my sweet no-rent sublet and dragging me off to the station.”

At this point, Olson’s eyes again moved from my face to the doorway.

“Indiana turns out to be the most self-righteous state in the Union.”

Don Olson once again returned to me, his old friend, and the conversation, this time without the effect of bringing a lost era back to life.

“You were in an Indiana state prison?”

“I started out in Terre Haute, then I was sent to Lewisberg, PA. After six months, they sent me here, to Illinois. Pekin. They like to keep you off balance. But I can do my work in prison the same as anywhere else.”

The calamari arrived. We began spearing pieces of fried squid and popping them into our mouths. Don Olson leaned back in his chair and groaned with pleasure. “God, real food again. You have no idea.”

I agreed: I had no idea. “What did you mean, your work? What could you do in jail?”

“Talk to other prisoners. Show them another way to think about what they had done and where they were.” Olson resumed eating, but did not let it interfere with his explanations. Bits of fried squid and batter occasionally sprayed from his mouth. His glances at the entrance punctuated his sentences. “It was like social work, actually.”

“Social work.”

“Plus the old hoodoo mojo,” Olson said, rippling his fingers before him. “Without you got the sizzle, you can’t sell the steak.”

Ashleigh returned and picked up Olson’s plate without getting near enough to be reeled in. Returning with a small but heavily laden tray, she slid our plates before us with the finesse of a croupier.

Olson cut into the massive pork chop and brought a glistening nugget to his mouth. “Whoa,” he said, and chewed for a bit. “Man, these guys know how to cook a pig, uh huh.”

He stopped grinning long enough to swallow. “When we all fell in love with Spencer Mallon, the Eel was right there, alongside Hootie and Boats and me. Why
you
weren’t, I never understood. You stayed away, but you must have heard all about it.”

“Not really,” I said. “But that’s part of the reason I asked you to come here.”

Olson waved at the waitress for more drinks and took the opportunity to check out the doorway again. “Way I look at it, you kept yourself out back then. In fact, way I remember it, you were sort of pissy about what we were doing.”

“I didn’t see the point of pretending to be a college student. Especially for Hootie, for God’s sake! And your ‘guru’ smelled like bullshit to me.” For a second or two, I watched Olson eat. Then I cut the giant burger down the middle and took a bite from the dripping half-moon in front of me.

“Mallon put a curse on all of you, my wife included.”

Olson’s wandering eyes snapped back to my face, and there he was again, fully present. It was like turning on a big battery, like watching a statue come suddenly to life.

“Jesus, you’re still weird about this. It still puts a hair up your ass.” He shook his head, smiling. “And do you really think there’s any difference between a blessing and a curse? I’d be amazed if you did.”

“Come on,” I said, a little taken aback by his sudden intensity. “Don’t give me that Mallon horse shit.”

“Call it what you like,” Olson said, concentrating now on his new margarita. “But I’d say the same principle applies to me. And to the Eel.”

“Her name is still Lee Truax.”

“Whatever.”

I took a moment to work on the giant burger while keeping an eye on Don Olson. I tried to work out how far he was willing to go.

“I suppose Mallon’s blessing is the reason you went to jail.”

“Spencer’s blessing allowed me to do exactly what I wanted for the past forty years, not counting jail time.”

Something struck me. “Pekin’s a federal prison. How does a sex offender wind up there?”

“He probably doesn’t.” Olson smiled an off-center smile. Another glance over my shoulder. “Come to think of it, probably wasn’t Melissa Hopgood got me sent away. Let’s call it a financial miscalculation.”

“The IRS?” Tax fraud sounded too boring for the man who had once been the heroic Dill.

Olson made a big deal of savoring his mouthful of pork. I saw him come to a conclusion a moment before he swallowed. “The error was, the mechanism we used to create extra money was pretty fuckin’ dubious.”