Empire Falls (22 page)

“I’m always afraid it’ll explode when I’m talking to you,” Max said, draining half of his beer in one sudden motion. It hadn’t been Max’s intention to gulp so much, but he’d been perched there on his barstool, dry, for a hell of a while. A bar could become a desert when you were broke, its beer spigots a mirage. When you finally arrived at the oasis you could tell yourself not to drink too deeply, but a body parched so long by the desert sand has its own needs, its own devices, and Max was just glad his body hadn’t demanded the whole glass Horace had bought him. The idea now was to be patient and adjust himself to the pace of the man he hoped to continue drinking with. If he tried to push Horace by draining his own glass too quickly, the other man would feel pressured and leave, then Max would be smack-dab in the middle of the desert again. Horace had a car and, if so motivated, could just get up and walk out and drive to the Lamplighter, a place where Max wasn’t welcome—even if he had a way to get there, which he didn’t, unless he walked or hitched. The first he refused to do, the second he never had much luck at, owing, if his son Miles was to be believed, to his personal appearance.

This lack of transportation was beginning to get Max down. They’d taken away his license three years ago when he ran over the mayor’s daughter’s dog, strengthening his conviction that a man’s prospects in life were determined by luck and politics. In a town overrun by mangy curs, it was a damned unlucky man who ran over a purebred fox terrier owned by the mayor’s eight-year-old brat. Any other victim wouldn’t have had the political wherewithal to pull Max’s records and get him declared a public menace. A luckier fellow would’ve run over a stray mutt and been proclaimed a public benefactor—they’d have probably given him a job at the humane society, where they allowed animals a week, two at the outside, to get claimed, after which they got the needle.

No, Max knew all about luck. He knew, for instance, what bad luck was always followed by. Worse luck. Not a month after losing his license, he’d left Callahan’s around closing time one night and, nodding off at the wheel, had driven into a ditch, where the car’s frame snapped in half, leaving him no choice but to walk back to Callahan’s and report the vehicle stolen. Also leaving him in the condition in which he now found himself—a man not only without a license, which was inconvenience enough, but also without a car, which made it a full-blown dilemma. An old man without wheels was a pitiful thing. People could get up and leave and you couldn’t follow them, and they knew you couldn’t, which meant they were more likely to do just that. Winter was just around the corner, too. High time he got himself down to Key West, where you didn’t freeze your ass off and you didn’t need a car, since the bars were all lined up one right after another, and almost everybody either walked or rode bicycles.

Max sighed, staring at his now empty glass, considering the unfairness of it all. “What would it cost you to have it removed?” he wondered out loud, touching his forehead where his own cyst, if he’d had one, would have been located. Horace was sitting there nursing his beer, which made Max even more resentful. “A couple hundred bucks?”

Horace shrugged, exchanging a glance with Bea, who was getting ready to give Max the boot, he could tell. “Hard to say.”

Max stifled a bitter laugh. “Why? You never looked into it?”

“Never did.”

“I sure would’ve,” Max said. “That son of a bitch was growing out of the middle of
my
forehead, I’d have looked into it pronto.”

“I think it might be the source of my intelligence,” Horace told him, winking at Bea. “What if I let somebody cut it off and then discovered it was responsible for all my best ideas?”

“That’s something Max wouldn’t have to worry about,” Bea said. “Not having a brain.”

Max treated this insult the way he treated all insults, by pushing his glass forward for a refill. In his experience, after insulting you, people generally felt guilty. It occurred to them that maybe they were selling you short. They wondered if they could do something to make it up to you. This impulse never lasted long, though, so you had to take advantage swiftly. Max had been offering Bea opportunities to insult him all night long, but until this very moment she’d resisted, which meant she hadn’t owed him anything and his glass had remained dry. Now she had no choice but to fill it and grudgingly slide it back in front of him. This time he drained off only a third, which put him in stride with Horace, right where he wanted to be.

“You ever been to Florida?” Max asked.

“Once,” Horace admitted. “Back when I was married.”

“Before that thing started growing out of your forehead, I bet,” Max said, abruptly scooting off his stool. “I gotta pee.”

Bea sighed when the men’s room door swung shut behind him. “You want me to run his sorry ass?” The only reason she hadn’t eighty-sixed the old fart before now was out of affection for his son Miles, who was about the nicest, saddest man in all of Empire Falls, a man so good-natured that not even being married to her daughter, Janine, had ruined him. What Janine was thinking in trading in a man like Miles for a little banty rooster like Walt Comeau defied imagination. Or at least Bea’s imagination. True, Miles wasn’t sexy and never had been—unless you considered kindness sexy, which Bea always had. Granted, there were men you wanted to sleep with, some men because they got you all hot and bothered, but others, like Miles, you just kind of wanted to do something nice for because they were decent and deserved it and you knew they’d be appreciative and wouldn’t hold it against you for maybe not being so damn beautiful yourself. Bea had tried to explain this to her daughter once, but it had come out all wrong and Janine had misunderstood completely. “That’s mercy-fucking,” she’d said, and Bea hadn’t bothered to argue because her daughter, lately, considered herself an authority on all matters sexual. In fact, she’d grown tiresome on the subject, especially since Bea was just as happy to have that part of her life safely behind her. Saying good-bye to sex was like waking up from a delirium, a tropical fever, into a world of cool, Canadian breezes. Good riddance.

Miles, though, was the sort of man you could love without completely losing your self-respect, which couldn’t be said for most of them, and certainly not for Walt Comeau.

“Nah, leave him be,” Horace said. “Max just says what he thinks whenever he thinks it. It’s the people who always pause to consider that I worry about.”

“He’s an asshole, is what he is.”

“Well, yeah, there is that,” Horace admitted, as the men’s room door swung open to announce Max’s return. That a man could relieve himself so quickly didn’t seem possible, and both Horace and Bea regarded him curiously as he slid nimbly back onto his stool. The front of his trousers bore traces of urinary haste.

“Jesus,” Bea said, shaking her head in disgust. “You’re a foul, vulgar old man. When you’re done, give it a shake at least.”

“You ever been to the Keys?” Max asked Horace, ignoring Bea entirely.

“Never.”

“Where were you in Florida?”

“Orlando.”

“You’d like Key West,” Max assured him. “Hemingway lived there.”

Horace took a swig of beer and watched Max do the same. The Hemingway tidbit was interesting coming from this particular old man.

“Hemingway.”

“Right,” Max said, glad to see he’d set the hook properly. Horace, he knew, wrote for the newspaper and might be drawn to another writer the way a normal person might be drawn to beer and warm weather. “Hell of a guy.”

“You met him?”

“Everything’s named after him down there. Hemingway this, Papa that. His pals called him Papa, you know.”

“What I asked was, did you ever meet him?”

“Who knows?”

Horace couldn’t help but chuckle. “What do you mean?”

“I mean, who the hell knows? I drank a lot of beer down there over the years. He could’ve been sitting on the next stool one of those nights. How would I know?”

“I bet there was at least one stool between you,” Bea said.

“When did you start going down there?” Horace asked.

“Winter of ’sixty-nine.”

“Then you didn’t sit next to Hemingway,” Horace said. “He killed himself in ’sixty-one.”

Max tried to remember if he’d heard this. He was pretty sure he already knew Hemingway was dead. He’d snuck into the writer’s house with a group of tourists—what, twenty years ago?—and he seemed to recall there’d been some mention of Hemingway being dead. He wasn’t home, at any rate. What had impressed Max most about the house was all those cats, most of which had an extra digit that looked like a thumb on their front paws. He didn’t think a thumb was all that attractive on a cat, though these old toms looked like they could pick up a glass of beer just like a human being did, the way that damn thumb curled around. According to the tour guide, the great writer’s cats were much revered; at any rate, they sure had the run of the place. That was what Max liked about the Keys, that pretty damn near everything was tolerated, including Max himself, whose decrepit state, much derided up North, was considered down there the natural, indeed, the inevitable, state of man. In Key West Max was often taken for a local, the ones they called Conchs, and such misguided tourists would happily buy him drinks. Hemingway, being famous, probably never had to buy his own drinks. Which raised an interesting question.

“Killed himself? Why would he do that?”

“Probably just woke up one morning and felt the futility of the whole thing,” Horace guessed.

“What futility?”

Horace studied his companion. “People have been known to come to that conclusion about their existence, you know. Hell, not all that long ago, the richest man in central Maine blew his brains out right here in Empire Falls.”

C. B. Whiting, he meant. Charles Beaumont. Charlie. “Twenty-three years ago March,” Max said, aware as soon as the words were out of his mouth that both Horace and Bea were staring at him.

“How in the world would you know that?” Bea said.

Max shrugged, as if to suggest that people had a right to know anything they wanted to, this being a free country. Anyway, C. B. Whiting’s killing himself wasn’t even the weird part, to Max’s way of thinking, and he’d thought about it plenty during the past two-plus decades. No, the weird part was that Whiting had taken the time and trouble to come all the way back to Empire Falls when he could have just shot himself in Mexico, where he was living at the time. On the other hand, Max allowed, draining the rest of his beer, a man who’d decided to shoot himself in the head probably wasn’t thinking too clearly in the first place.

His glass empty again, Max looked over at Horace’s, which was still half full. Max supposed he could try pushing his glass at Bea again, but he knew it wouldn’t do any good. You only got one insult-beer per night with Bea, who afterward could insult you for free. Talk about futility.

“You and I should go down there someday,” he suggested to Horace. “The women all walk around half naked. They don’t mind if you look, either. There’s this one bar down there where the girls take off their bras and panties and nail ’em to the ceiling. You should see it. I’m free, anytime you want to go.”

“I don’t think so,” Horace said, pushing the twenty toward Bea and signaling to Max Roby his intention to make this a one-draft night. “I might get depressed. Shoot myself in the head.”

Max saw the gesture and was gravely disappointed. Miffed, too. “Try to miss that thing on your forehead,” he advised. “What a hell of a mess
that
would make.”

A
FTER
H
ORACE LEFT
, Max downed the last swallow of beer in the other man’s glass and then, annoyed with himself for indulging morbid thoughts, gave himself over to the problem of whom he might entice to accompany him southward. The ideal candidate would own a car and not expect much in the way of gas money from Max. Once in Florida, things would be easier. Once he found a place to stay, he’d get somebody at the Empire Towers to send him his government check at the first of each month. It worried Max a little, the way money evaporated in the Keys. Sun, Max supposed—shining all the while, making you sweat, and it was the sweating made you thirsty. Beer was more expensive down in Florida, but Max much preferred how they served it, with a fresh slice of lime wedged right into the mouth of the sweating bottle. If a man wasn’t careful, he could drink the bottom right out of a Social Security check by mid-month, and then he’d have to scam like mad till the first.

What Max needed was an honest-to-God live one—somebody with a little dough who was looking to have a good time and didn’t know how. Horace, whom Max had initially cast in this role, wasn’t right, the more he thought about it. Just as well he hadn’t warmed to the idea. He couldn’t imagine trying to explain that damned knot on the man’s forehead everywhere they went. Women, especially, would want to know the story of that purple veiny son of a bitch, at least enough to be reassured it wasn’t contagious.

Ten years ago there were any number of people Max might’ve talked into making the trip, but the years had taken a heavy toll. Many of Max’s favorites were dead, others were in nursing homes, still others had just gotten too damned old in spirit, which Max flatly couldn’t understand; he’d just turned seventy, he felt about fifteen, and had all his life.

A woman might make an interesting traveling companion, and here again, ten years ago he wouldn’t have had to go looking very far. In a town like Empire Falls, somebody’s wife was always ready and willing to fly the coop if approached in the right way, and Max found himself wondering what in hell had happened to all the good women. Most of the old ones had got religion, and the younger ones could do better than Max Roby and let him know as much, in case he had any doubts. Which was also probably just as well. Women, generally speaking, had a lot of needs. They needed to stay in nice places, and needed to pee every time you turned around, and needed to keep you abreast of what they were thinking pretty much constantly. But they didn’t understand money needs at all. Like when you ran out. Then there was the philosophical issue of why you’d even want to bring one someplace when there’d be plenty of women already there when you arrived. Coals to Newcastle, if you thought about it. Max liked the women in the Keys. Life seemed to have made them realists, not dreamers. Also, they seemed to grasp instinctively how men like Max ended up men like Max, and not to hold it against them.