Hush Hush (8 page)

We wandered around the casino for about four hours, playing table games, sitting in one of the clubs where the band was actually pretty good, hitting on the girls who looked like teenagers, without a lot of luck. By about three in the morning, Richie had found himself this blonde girl in a tiny gray
dress that looked like it was made out of microfiber dust cloths. I had thought she was a professional, but what do I know? I was at a blackjack table with Hylo and two other people, some drunk asshole in a leather jacket and a Vietnamese woman, who were exchanging looks when we played, complaining when Hylo hit a 12 against a dealer’s 2, a standard by-the-book draw. “Took her bust card,” the asshole would say, and the woman would agree almost imperceptibly. Hylo didn’t react, it was like he didn’t even hear.

Richie came up behind us holding the blonde, bent over to me. “I got a room.” He pointed toward the ceiling. “In the hotel,” he said, and glanced at the girl.

“No, Jesus, don’t leave me with this guy,” I said, as quietly as I knew how. “C’mon, Rich.” But he was already walking away with her, her wispy dress swinging back and forth.

The drunk guy in the leather jacket was looking at me. “You gonna bet, champ?”

I shoved a couple of greens onto my spot.

After me, Hylo put out ten dollars, two reds.

“High roller,” the drunk guy said. “Be a man, man.” He was betting a hundred a hand, winning most of them. The rest of us were above water, but that’s all.

•  •  •

I was driving the car and Hylo had the asshole in the backseat and was instructing him in etiquette with a razor. I didn’t want him in my car, but they must have come in Richie’s. Richie and the blonde girl were long gone. I could see the attraction. I wouldn’t have been in the car with Freddy, in fact I never
would have been anywhere with Freddy if I could’ve avoided it, but I hadn’t been able to get out of it when he asked me to drive. He was not really asking, exactly.

“Pull it over,” he said.

“You want a Whataburger?”

“Yeah, I want a Whataburger. You want a Whataburger, champ?” he said to his companion in the backseat. The guy, who had been giving us shit at a blackjack table, had disappeared and then later, when we stopped in the last men’s room before the parking garage, he had walked into the men’s room and said something to Freddy about the long coat he had on, something suggesting Freddy was a flasher. Freddy said, “You’re some kind of expert in that area?” and then out came the razor, and here we are now, behind the Whataburger, dazzlingly bright lights around the restaurant, some kind of service road in front of us, a strip center, dark, behind us.

The parking lot was empty, but I parked to the side and toward the back and got out of the Citroen and turned toward the Whataburger. We were beside what looked in the dark like five thousand dollars’ worth of pointless landscaping, a Japanese garden with sand and pebbles, stone and sago palms. There was nobody in the place, near as I could see. “Open 24 Hours” was painted on the window, in orange and white. Everything was orange and white. It was four in the morning.

“Hey,” Freddy said, standing on the other side of the car.

“Where you goin’?”

“Hamburger,” I said. “Right?”

Freddy shook his head. “Stay here. Keep an eye out.”

“Freddy, let the asshole go. Let’s eat.”

He gave me a look. “Wouldn’t be right,” he said.

At that point the other guy took a half hearted swing at him and Freddy turned and knocked him backward about
three feet, handed me the razor, and then hit him three or four more times, very fast, with his fists and his elbow, and the guy went down. On the ground, the guy was whimpering. All the fight gone out of him in two seconds—it was bizarre. Freddy had his hair in his hand, and with his other arm reached out toward me. “Give me the knife,” he said.

I looked at him. My hands were shaking. “Fuck no, what’re you, crazy? Let him go.”

“Give me the knife.”

I handed it to him.

I thought, Oh, fuck, and looked quickly into the restaurant and then up and down the street. There was nobody. When I turned back around, Freddy was shoving a flat piece of sandstone from the landscaping into the guy’s mouth, and then he raised his boot way up and brought it down on the guy’s head. Teeth or something scattered around Freddy’s feet. I stood staring at the pristine, almost fastidious little garden with its squat palms inside a perfect rim and then the blood on the concrete and blood all around the guy’s mouth. Freddy flipped the razor open and whacked a hunk of the guy’s hair off, looked at it and stretched, slipped it into his pants pocket. This seemed to satisfy him and he let the guy’s head hit the pavement and looked at me.

I didn’t know what to do. He waved toward the restaurant, asking, then turned back around and kicked the moaning guy on the concrete again.

“I’m not hungry,” I said. “Let’s go.”

“No, I’m hungry.” He stared at me. Behind him, the guy got up and sort of half ran, half crawled away toward the dark shops of the strip center. Hylo laughed.

•  •  •

Everything in the place was weird orange and white stripes. I kept waiting for cops to show up but they never did. Freddy was eating onion rings. He had asked for two orders of them, but the black kid who brought the food to the table brought three. The kid stood, with an orange plastic tray on a strap around his neck, like a cigarette girl, approving. When he put the stuff down in front of us, he said, “These are so good … I just really love these onion rings.”

“They’re good all right,” Freddy said.

The kid was maybe seventeen and there was about him this huge, terrible sweetness and you looked at him and thought, This poor kid is just gonna get crushed. He took his tray and walked back to the counter, behind it, and disappeared.

Now Hylo was talking to me. “What did you learn tonight?” He smiled.

“Don’t be an asshole?”

“Exactly,” he said, smiled, looked around. “You don’t like me much, do you?”

I just caught what he said. I was shaking, my whole body trembling, just a little. “This can’t be,” I said. “It’s not. It can’t be. I heard this story twenty-five years ago, when I was twelve. The stone in the guy’s mouth, the whole thing. The reason I know it can’t be is that—In the story, the guy’s name was Hylo.”

He was eating. He didn’t seem to hear me, but then he shrugged. “When you heard that story, who did you imagine yourself to be?”

“What do you mean?”

“Did you imagine yourself to be the guy smashing the
other guy’s teeth, or did you imagine yourself to be the guy getting a limestone sandwich?”

I looked at him. I had the car keys in my hand.

“That’s really all there is,” he said. He was looking out the big plate glass windows, in a weary sort of way, at the bright, clean parking lot. The restaurant was new, looked sort of like Alphaville. “You go on. I’ll get a cab.”

I looked around the place for someone else, but there was nobody anywhere, just, out there, the empty 4 a.m. streets and the lights and a stupid stoplight pointlessly changing colors, red to green. Outside I got into the car and glanced back through the restaurant windows half expecting Hylo to be gone, turned to vapor. But he was still in there.

It’ll be like this. The phone will ring, at some wrong time, some time the phone never rings, six o’clock in the evening or four a.m., or noon. It’s Ben, my brother. Ben always knows everything first, makes it his business to know things, so it’ll be him. How is he going to sound? Cool? Weeping? That high-serious voice he gets whenever something terrible happens? No, that voice isn’t for truly terrible things, but for those things we treat as terrible, talisman to protect us from the really terrible. The phone rings, it’s Ben. “Tommy,” he says, “I just got a call from Baltimore. It’s Pop—”

No, that’s not it. It’ll be a message on the answering machine, the rectangular red light blinking when I go into the kitchen in the morning, and I’ll see it and I’ll think it’s something else, someone I want to hear from, something maybe I want to hear, something that I’ve been waiting for, something good. It’ll be Ben, of course, leaving a message. The message will say, “Pop died this morning at—” and then there’ll be some time, he’ll say “5:55 a.m.” the way people do, as if it made any difference. It’ll be some picturesque time, like 5:55 a.m., some time which stays in your brain forever after, not a time you can forget.

Then the message will continue, Ben sounding like a cop. “Call me. I’m flying over there this afternoon, and if I haven’t heard from you, I’ll call you when I get there. Mom is okay, just crazy. Laura is taking care of her, she’s at Laura’s house.
That number is—well, you have Laura’s number …” Then the message will change, his voice will change, he’ll say, “I didn’t know this was going to be this way, I didn’t know …” and he won’t be able to finish the thought. “Call me,” he’ll say.

I am standing in the kitchen, listening to my brother on the answering machine. I’m half awake. I don’t feel anything. I have to wait for some place where I’m safe enough to feel something. I have been waiting for this message for twenty-five years, since my father was about sixty. This is what it’ll be like. Twenty-five years of waiting wasted. This is it. What is it like? Standing in my kitchen. I will punch the rewind and play the message again. “… at 5:55 a.m.,” my brother says. “I didn’t know this was going to be this way,” he says. It’s over, I will think. As a child, when my mother wasn’t home, I used to listen to sirens, stand looking out the big windows of the front room, looking into the empty carport, waiting for her car to be back in its place, and it always came back.

As a child, I got to play chess with him. He would lie on his elbow on the kingsize bed and I would sit on a low stool, the wooden chessboard on another stool between us. Sometimes he was in pajamas. Maybe he was letting me win, those times I won. Now, middle-aged, I remember things he said, advice, some of it. He did not say, It’s bad and then it gets worse. Once he took one of his records, with “Unbreakable” printed on the label, and bent the record in half until it broke. “Not unbreakable,” he said, and then he laughed. What kind of person would do that? I think. I like to think that twenty-five years anticipating has immunized me against emptiness, but it isn’t so.

I wanted my father to be all the things that an ideal man is supposed to be, a hero. He wasn’t far off the mark, really. He got worse as I got older, but my idea of what a hero was
incorporated worse things, too. And it kept things orderly for him to be a hero. He has been a stranger to me since I was about twenty-five, twenty years.

The telephone will ring, it’ll be the message, this is how it will feel, I can imagine it. I will feel like an animal standing at the margin of a field beside a fence, head high as if catching a new, totally unknown scent, afraid but not terrified, confused but not bewildered, hurts to swallow, feeling all the muscles in my jaw, in my arms, unable to run, not wanting to run, hearing my heartbeat. I will do what I’m supposed to, walk, talk, a suit. I can imagine it.

For two years or so I had enjoyed thinking of myself as a great friend to Brewster until the day I understood that I was not, a day shortly before he moved out of the apartment complex we both lived in. I had managed to forget that day until yesterday morning when his daughter called—he’d mentioned a daughter somewhere in the east—and told me Brewster had died the day before. I was shaken, it couldn’t be. But of course it was.

She was in town, from Connecticut, for a few more days. She had been with him when he died. He’d left me some money. I was to take one of his cats, too, she said, he said you’d know which one. Could I come over to the house? Did I know where it was? She gave me the address, and I agreed to drop by later in the day. She said, “I don’t know what to do with the other cats; there’re so many.” I knew which one; we had had a stupid quarrel over it once, but that had gotten straightened out. Still, I didn’t bother going over there, the afternoon passed and I had dinner and watched something on HBO and by that time it seemed awful late. I didn’t need a cat to take care of, anyway.

I hadn’t seen Brewster since he moved, about five months ago. It was eerie, imagining him speaking—about me—yesterday or the day before and now not speaking anymore. He was twice my age, but a bond had been fashioned out of necessity, because he was old and alone, because my life had turned up all zeroes—all I had was a job and this apartment. It hasn’t
gotten any better since he moved. It seems sort of strange, but the time I knew him had become in my memory an oddly contented and happy time, one of those periods of one’s life during which one bitches and complains incessantly which later in retrospect becomes a life sorely missed. There wasn’t anything extraordinary about those months: we had shared a lot of evenings, eaten together, played card games, talked a lot, did some drinking, awaited and then watched favorite TV shows every week, rituals of a friendship. He had lent me money and then forgiven the debts; I had helped him out sometimes. He said his son was in California, maybe Washington state. He never heard from him. I had had a father who was easy to disappoint, and after I disappointed him I took poor care of him, which maybe explains the Brewster thing.

For the two years we were friends I did everything that Brewster needed done, so much so that I got into the habit of knocking on his door when I got home from work in case there was some errand or muscle work he needed, so I could get it done before I settled in to watch the news and have dinner, so that I wouldn’t be interrupted; it was a practical matter. I would walk up an extra flight of the steel and concrete stairs at the apartments, past mine on the second level, up to his on the third, knock and wait until he came to the door, say Hi, as if I were checking on him.

Often he didn’t have anything for me to do. But sometimes he’d have some job he’d saved all day until I got home, hold this, drill this, cut this, move these over there and those where these were, do you know where I can find a good this, maybe you could accompany me there. He had been an engineer but his father had done millwork and fine carpentry, worked a lathe, skills Brewster had learned as a boy and used to make tables and shelving, cabinets, and small cases for things,
beautifully crafted boxes made from wood and covered in fabric, although now at seventy-something his hands were unsteady and his eyes were shot.