Empire Falls (48 page)

Jimmy thought all this figuring had to be pretty complicated. It would require a lot of organization, and making everything come out right couldn’t be easy. You’d have to depend on a lot of the same people his father complained couldn’t manage to get you your unemployment checks on time, wouldn’t you? He suggested as much to his father.

“Yeah? Well, don’t you worry,” his father assured him. “If you don’t believe me, watch this know-it-all tell you how it is every night for about twenty years, then see if you don’t think they’ve got it all figured.”

From where Jimmy sat in the living room he was able to see the Roby house across the driveway. Many evenings Miles’s mother would pass behind their living room window, sometimes stopping to pull the curtains shut. At nine years old, Jimmy had thought Mrs. Roby the prettiest woman he’d ever seen, including girls, and he wondered what it would be like to live in the same house as her. He guessed maybe it’d be different if she was your own mother, but he couldn’t imagine not having the hots for Mrs. Roby, no matter whose mother she was. He’d caught his father looking across the way a couple times, too. Jimmy had even made the mistake of telling Miles how lucky he was having her for a mother, all to himself, most of the time, Mr. Roby being gone as much as he was home. He’d also asked Miles if he’d ever seen his mother naked, hoping for a description, and Miles hadn’t spoken a word to him for a week, until he apologized, which Jimmy was quick to do, because he was afraid Miles would tell his mother that he was a dirty boy.

So Jimmy thought about what his father was telling him about Walter Cronkite and the rest having it all figured out, and he hoped his father was wrong. He didn’t like the idea of having somebody else decide who he’d marry. That was a choice he’d hoped to make himself, and he intended to marry someone who looked as much as possible like Mrs. Roby. Or maybe Mrs. Roby herself—later, when he was old enough, if her husband died or disappeared completely. “Nobody can figure out everything,” Jimmy ventured hopefully.

“No?” his father said, watching Cronkite carefully, so the other man wouldn’t be able to put anything over on him. “Well, maybe not everything. But they got the main things covered, that’s for goddamn sure. And don’t you ever doubt it, neither.”

In a nutshell, his father’s philosophy about how to deal with these people was not to appear ambitious. Don’t call attention to yourself, was his advice. Keep your eyes open for opportunities, but don’t get greedy. Steal small. Make sure if you’re caught, they don’t catch you with much. Remember “the bother principle,” as he called it. “They won’t bother you over little things,” was the way his father explained his own thefts. Couple loins of venison turn up in your freezer down in the cellar? Who’s going to bother you? Two or three big freezers full of hijacked deer? Too much. In fact, the bother principle could gauge the risks of just about any situation. You happen to find a key that opens the lock to somebody’s storeroom? Lucky you. You lift the occasional bottle of cheap rye? Who’s going to bother you over that? Chances are they don’t even count the bottles of the cheap stuff, or if they do and one goes missing, maybe they miscounted. The brand-name booze and case lots? Those they counted. Those they looked for. Better to steal the cheap one. When it’s gone, steal another. You got the key, you keep the key. You tell exactly no one. If you don’t get greedy, that key stays useful. You steal big, they change the lock, and now you don’t have a key anymore. Keys were one of William Minty’s hobbies. He made them down in the basement on a machine he’d got for a song when Olerud’s Hardware went bankrupt.

Jimmy bolted upright when an old Volvo pulled up alongside the cruiser and proceeded to parallel park in the space behind it. He watched the driver get out, go around and open the door for the woman in the passenger seat. She was nicely dressed, but nothing much to look at. The man was dressed in chinos and a tweed sport coat over a light-blue shirt with a button-down collar, and he was carrying something in a brown paper bag. Jimmy Minty disliked him immediately, probably even before he’d gotten out of the car. Not many men would parallel park if they had to start out next to a cop car. Whoever this asshole was—a professor by the look of him—he was pretty fucking sure of himself. He and his plain-Jane woman crossed Empire Avenue without so much as a glance in his direction, and when they disappeared inside the Empire Grill Jimmy turned in his seat so he could see the inspection sticker displayed on the windshield. Valid, unfortunately.

His watch read six-thirty. Jimmy had figured Roby would be back at the restaurant by now. It didn’t take that long to drive across the Iron Bridge, deposit Cindy back at the Whiting house and return. Unless ol’ Miles managed to get himself invited inside. Though the possibility was not entirely pleasant, Jimmy had to smile. Mrs. Whiting was in Boston, he happened to know, so maybe Miles and her daughter were going at it on the sofa right now, Roby slipping it to her.
That
experience he was welcome to.

A pickup truck, its horn honking, careened around the corner onto Empire Avenue. Four high school kids were wedged into the cab—no way more than two of ’em could be belted—and three more were standing up in the bed, the tallest blowing one of those long plastic horns. The driver, spotting the cruiser at the last second, stood on the brakes hard enough to cause the boys in the back of the cab to hang on for dear life, and the horn soared out over the side and rattled up the street after them, coming to rest under Jimmy’s car. He considered going after them, reading the damn-fool driver the riot act, maybe even issue a ticket, but then decided against it. They were just kids, full of piss and vinegar after the big game. They’d gotten a good scare when they saw him and lost their horn to boot. They’d probably go slow now, at least for a while. Besides, if he chased after them, he’d lose his parking space for sure.

As if to confirm this fear, another car pulled up next to the curb on the other side of the street, and yet another man in a tweed coat got out. Why did they all have to wear a uniform, these college professors? The woman with this guy was a dead ringer for the first one; if they had a plain-looking-woman contest, these two would tie for seventh place, unless there was a swimsuit competition, and then they’d tie for ninth. His father had been right about that part, of course. You didn’t get to marry the one you wanted. You married the best of whatever was left. Tweed married tweed, flannel got flannel. As to whether ambition killed you every time, Jimmy Minty had his doubts.

Professors. Maybe that was why he’d recollected Billy Barnes. After high school, Billy had gone off to the University of Maine on his hockey scholarship. He joined a frat house and invited Jimmy up to Orono one weekend for a party, so he could see for himself what he was missing out on. It turned out to be one hell of a party, all right, and it was already in full swing by the time Jimmy Minty got there. Actually he’d arrived earlier in the evening, but then drove around, trying to work up enough nerve to knock on the frat house door. In fact, he’d finished a six-pack before deciding what the hell. When he finally rang the bell, the door was answered by a big guy who had a sixteen-ouncer in his left hand and a passed-out, bare-assed girl slung over his right shoulder, her long dark hair hanging straight down, almost to the big kid’s knees, her blue jeans and panties bunched around her ankles. Jimmy, trying to pretend that this wasn’t such an unusual sight, explained that he was a friend of Billy Barnes, and the big kid said, “Like I give a shit. Grab yourself a brew. You want a sniff?”

“What?” Jimmy said, feeling angry and confused.

“Dollar a sniff,” he explained, and then another guy came over and stuffed a wrinkled bill into his frat brother’s shirt pocket, which Jimmy now noticed was full of them. This new kid asked Jimmy to step out of the way, then grabbed and lifted the girl’s ankles so her knees rested on his shoulders. Then he leaned forward, inhaling deeply. “That,” he said when he’d finished and let the girl’s legs drop, “is one sweet pussy.”

“So,” the big frat kid said to Jimmy Minty, who hadn’t moved. “You want a sniff, or are you just going to stand there staring?”

“I was looking for Billy Barnes,” Jimmy Minty reminded him.

The kid nodded in drunken comprehension. “Nice ripe pussy and you’re looking for Billy Barnes.” He shrugged. “To each his own.”

Well, it was a pretty wild party. Jimmy drank a beer from one of three identical kegs, wondering if that was all he’d be allowed, not being a member of the fraternity. It was hard to imagine you’d get more than one freebie by dropping Billy Barnes’s name, but apparently he was wrong. When he went back to the kegs, one of the frat boys tripped the spigot, without ever looking at him, as if it were the proximity of the empty cup he was acknowledging and not the person holding it. The beer flowed through the tap slowly, and the boy kept talking to a girl (this one fully clothed) without feeling the need to check on Jimmy’s cup. When he interrupted their conversation to ask if he’d seen Billy Barnes, the frat kid frowned and said, “Who?”

When he woke up the next morning, Jimmy’s head ached so bad that for a long time he just lay still, not even daring to open his eyes. He was vaguely aware of having spent a restless night, chased from one nightmarish dream to another. When he finally opened his eyes, he was in a strange room. Staring at the ceiling was about all he could manage, because even the slightest movement resulted in wave after wave of rolling nausea and pain. It was quiet, though, and from this he deduced that he was alone. Relieved, he closed his eyes and must’ve gone back to sleep, at least for a while, because when he opened them again the headache, while still nauseating, didn’t seem quite as intense.

What worried him was that whoever this room belonged to was likely to show up at any time and demand to know what Jimmy was doing in here. He wouldn’t even know who Jimmy was unless by chance this happened to be Billy Barnes’s room, and what were the odds on that? He couldn’t remember much of what happened the night before, but he did recall asking after his old friend over and over and getting the distinct impression that Billy wasn’t held in particularly high esteem by his frat brothers. Not that this surprised him all that much, since Billy didn’t have many friends in high school either, except on the hockey team, and that was only because he could skate circles around just about anybody in Dexter County.

At any event, if this wasn’t Billy’s bed, Jimmy thought he’d better vacate it as soon as possible, so he closed his eyes one last time, counted to three, sat up, and swung his legs onto the floor. Then he closed his eyes again and waited for the crashing waves of pain in his head to subside. When they did, he immediately saw two things in the dim early-morning light. The first was that he was naked, which put him in mind of the bare-assed girl everybody had been paying to sniff the night before, and in a wild intuitive leap he wondered if something of the sort might’ve happened to him after he passed out. Had he been removed to this bedroom and stripped naked and offered up as a male specimen to curious female partygoers? No doubt he’d have lost the contents of his stomach right then if he hadn’t noticed the second thing, which substituted cold fear for nausea. The dingy white sheet he’d been sleeping on was splotched wetly pink all the way up to the pillow, and when close examination revealed the sticky wetness to be exactly what he feared—blood—he vaulted quickly to his feet and backed away from the bed until he bumped into the far wall. This caused another terrific wave of pain in his head, this one so intense that he slid down the wall into a sitting position, where he remained, his knees drawn up to his chest, his hands clasped around his ankles, his forehead resting against his knees. Again he closed his eyes and considered the blessing of darkness, the marvelous way it could subtract the whole world.

T
HERE WAS A KNOCK
on the side window of the cruiser, and when he looked up, Zack had materialized on the other side of the glass. Jimmy rolled down the window and grinned. Lord, the boy was getting big.

He offered his hand. “Hell of a game, son.”

They shook awkwardly. “Too bad we run out of time,” said the younger Minty. They’d come back in the second half, tying Fairhaven on a field goal late in the fourth quarter. “We would’ve scored again if we got the damn ball back.”

“That’s for sure,” Jimmy agreed. “And they were all done scoring on you.”

“That they were,” the boy said proudly.

“Where you off to now?”

Across the street Jimmy Minty’s own Camaro idled throatily, double-parked next to the second professor’s car, and behind the Camaro sat the pickup that had screeched around the corner earlier. There was no one riding in the back now, and only three in the cab. For show, no doubt. The other kids were probably waiting around the corner to get picked up again.

“Thought we’d drive to Fairhaven for some pizza.”

“We got pizza right here in Empire Falls, you know.”

“I know,” Zack said. “But is it okay?”

“I guess. Who you got with you?” He peered around his son to see who was in the car, but the windows were rolled up, the Camaro’s glass tinted.

“Justin. Tick Roby. Girl named Candy Burke.”

His father nodded, waiting. There were
four
people in the car. He could see that much, even through the tinted windows. “That’s three,” he said.

His son seemed reluctant to ’fess up to the last rider. “Some kid named John.”

“John who?”

“Voss, I think.”

Jimmy nodded, trying to conjure up what he knew about that name. The kid had got caught shoplifting at the supermarket back in July. Jimmy had let him off with a warning. Not worth the bother. Weird kid, he remembered. Not the sort he would’ve figured his own boy would be hanging around with.
“You
ever get caught shoplifting, I’ll kick your ass, you know.”

“I won’t,” the boy promised, ambiguously.

“I still can, you know.”

“Maybe.” Now the boy was grinning.

“Maybe, my ass,” Jimmy grinned back. “You might be able to knock me down, but I wouldn’t be like that kid you whacked today. I’d get back up.”