Madman on a Drum (8 page)

“So, business isn't off.”

“Tips, McKenzie. Tips. The man nearly always leaves a tip that covers the cost of his meal and beverages. Do you know what that means to the waitstaff, especially considering how poorly their employer pays them?”

“I hadn't given it that much thought.”

“You didn't honestly believe Jenness and the others were extra nice just to suck up to me, did you?”

“And they say money can't buy love.”

“Besides, I distinctly remember you telling me this morning that you were dropping by.”

“I meant to. Something came up.”

“Oh, really? Another one of your crusades? Pity you couldn't be bothered to tell me about it.”

“Nina…”

“McKenzie, you can be so inconsiderate sometimes.”

“Nina, don't say any more,” I said. “You'll only feel worse later when I explain everything.”

Nina paused before asking, “What is it?”

“I'm on the road. I really can't talk about it now.”

“Is it serious?”

“As serious as it gets.”

She paused again. “Shelby and the girls,” she said.

“What makes you say that?”

“If it's that serious, it has to be someone you love. Who do you love besides Shelby and the girls? And Bobby?”

“You.”

“Well, it's not me and it's not Rickie. That leaves Shelby and the girls. Should I call? Should I go over there?”

“No, no, it's… it's still… Later, maybe. Later would be better.”

“Can you tell me what's going on?”

“Not now.”

“You will tell me.”

“Of course.”

“Promise?”

“I'll call first chance I get.”

“Thank you.”

I deactivated the phone. We were already on I-94 and heading toward the East Side of St. Paul when Karen said, “Was that your wife?”

“I'm not married.”

“Girlfriend?”

“Yes.”

“What's her name?”

“Nina Truhler.”

“Do you love her?”

“She'll do until the real thing comes along,” I said. It was a pat and stupid remark, but I didn't want to discuss Nina with a stranger.

“You called her sweetie,” Karen said.

“Stop asking so many questions and I'll call you sweetie.”

For decades, when you thought about the blue-collar East Side of St. Paul, you thought about the Payne Reliever, an infamous rock 'n' roll club and strip joint located on Payne Avenue. With its catchy name and wicked reputation, the Payne Reliever pretty much defined the rough-and-tumble neighborhood to the outside world, so much so that once when I told a guy in Florida where I lived, he asked if that was anywhere near the club. And did I go there? And how many shootings and knife fights had I seen? It's gone now, just like the Faust and Flick adult theaters, replaced, I swear, by an Embers family restaurant. Yet the reputation for mayhem it embodied persists. As a result, people seldom go to the East Side unless they actually live there, and many of those are cagey about it, telling outsiders they reside in Hazel Park, Prosperity Heights, or Lake Phalen. Still, most East Siders are fiercely loyal to their neighborhood. I played hockey with one guy, you could insult him, insult his politics, his religion, even his mother, but say something nasty about the East Side and he'd drop his gloves. Boom.

Mrs. Thomforde was loyal like that. Her husband might have moved her to Merriam Park, yet once a month she'd faithfully return to gossip with her East Side friends. As kids we used to think that she was tremendously courageous—or just plain crazy.

Usually the friends would gather at the Silver Bucket, located not too far from where the Payne Reliever once stood. The Silver Bucket is a family joint that's been thriving since the turn of the last century, when they actually served beer in small buckets. It had been built long before people decided it was okay to put windows in bars, and as a consequence it always looked like the inside of an old movie theater. There was no smoking—the result of a recent City of St. Paul ordinance—yet the odor of a million cigarettes could be smelled in the carpet, booths, and chairs.

There were at least one hundred people in the Silver Bucket when we arrived, and by the way they cheered you would have thought it was a sports bar and the Vikings had just put six on the board. Instead, a middle-aged woman dressed in a business suit was collecting her prize of a combo pack of chicken breasts and cheesy hash browns. Like a running back following a touchdown, she accepted about a dozen high-fives as she gamboled her way back to her table. Meanwhile, the manager held a plastic-wrapped package high above his head and called for order.

“Next up, a five-pound package of pork-chops-on-a-stick,” he announced. That brought more cheers. “Don't forget, all proceeds go to the Johnson High School Hockey Association,” he added as two waitresses fanned out through the bar, each carrying a round tray. On the tray were little tents of paper, a number written on each, the tents arranged in a circle along the edge of the tray. People dropped dollar bills into the middle of the tray and snatched paper tents at random, or according to some secret betting system.

“Should we buy a chance?” I asked Karen. “Pork-chops-on-a-stick. I love pork chops.”

“Do you see Mrs. Thomforde?”

“We'll have a barbecue. The last barbecue of the season.”

“Is that her?”

Karen pointed at a woman with white hair cut short sitting at a large table with seven other women. I had known Mrs. Thomforde for nearly three decades. During those years, along with the usual wear and tear of life, she had lost a husband just as he reached retirement age and had seen her favorite child sent to prison—more than once. Yet somehow her face had managed to retain a youthful contempt for the passing of time, for mortality itself. Looking at her, I decided that the old aphorism was true:
That which does not destroy us only makes us stronger.

I came up from behind her and set a hand on her shoulder. She turned toward me. Curiosity, then recognition flashed across her face. She did not even say my name, simply stood and hugged me and said, “Oh, my, I haven't seen you since your father's funeral.” She hadn't actually been a friend of my father's, but she came from that generation that went to funerals when someone in the neighborhood died.

Mrs. Thomforde touched my face and said, “You turned out so handsome.” She turned to her friends sitting around the table. There was at least a case of longneck beer bottles, most of them empty, scattered in front of them, as well as the remains of several appetizer platters. “Isn't McKenzie handsome, girls?”

The girls agreed with Mrs. Thomforde. The one called Ruth thought I was handsome enough to take home and lock in the basement.

“You're just being polite,” I told her.

“Are you kidding?” said a friend. “Compared to the ground chuck she's been chopping, you're Grade A sirloin.”

Instead of being offended, Ruth said, “A body needs a nice fillet every once in a while, if you know what I mean.”

The women all laughed like they knew exactly what she meant and I was reminded of yet another aphorism, this one more recent:
Girls just wanna have fun.

Mrs. Thomforde pulled out an empty chair and said, “So what brings a nice boy like you to the East Side?”

“Isn't this where all the good-looking women hang out?”

The girls liked that answer, and it occurred to me that if I were into sexagenarian romance, I could have made out like a bandit.

I sat in the chair and asked, “So, did anybody win any meat?”

Turned out that Ruth won a five-pound package of New York strips that she expected her husband to ruin. “He's awful. Burns everything. I say, ‘Let me cook the steaks.' Oh, no, grilling's a
man's
job. He'll turn these steaks into charcoal, wait and see.”

The girls all nodded in understanding. They had known each other for decades, knew each other's families as well as they knew their own. The general consensus was that Ruth's husband could screw up a ham sandwich.

While they were telling me this, Mrs. Thomforde rested a hand on my forearm. “You brought a friend,” she said.

“Actually, she brought me.”

“Good evening, Mrs. Thomforde,” Karen said.

“What do you want?” Mrs. Thomforde asked. I noticed she didn't offer Karen a chair.

“I'm looking for your son.”

“Why? Is he lost?”

The girls all thought that was a pretty witty reply until Karen said, “Yes, he's lost, and if I don't find him soon, he's going back to prison.”

“Oh, Jeezus,” said Ruth.

“May we speak privately?” Karen asked.

“What is it?” Mrs. Thomforde gestured at the other women. “You can speak in front of my friends.”

Karen said, “Scottie is late reporting back to the halfway house. Several hours late.”

“You're going to send him back to prison for that? Scottie is a good boy.”

“Mrs. Thomforde, everyone in a halfway house program is treated as if they're incarcerated in jail. If they're not where they're supposed to be when they're supposed to be there—”

“You saying that Scottie broke out of jail? That he's a fugitive?”

“If I don't find him soon, he'll be treated that way.”

“Why can't you people just leave him alone?”

It was the same question Joley had asked, and it made me angry. I tried not to let it show.

“Mrs. Thomforde,” said Karen. “The way the system works—”

“The system, the system. I hate the system. The system put a seventeen-year-old child in prison for a crime he didn't even commit. He didn't shoot that cop. That other boy shot him. The cop wasn't even hurt that bad. Only they punished Scottie for it, and see what's happened? Do you see? His life was ruined, that's what happened. The system—”

“Mrs. Thomforde,” said Karen.

“—is terrible. The system doesn't work. Now you say that Scottie's run away—”

“I didn't say that.”

“Wouldn't you run away, too, from such a system?” Mrs. Thomforde glared at Karen; her mouth was twisted with fury. “He wouldn't be running away if he was living at my house. None of this would happen if you let him stay with me. I thought you were going to let him stay with me?”

“That's what I thought, too,” Ruth said. The girls were listening intently.

“I don't see how that's going to happen now,” Karen said. Her frustration was palpable; whatever empathy she felt for Mrs. Thomforde had been left at the curb. “After this incident…” Karen shook a finger at the older woman. “When he was furloughed to your home the last time, he didn't stay there the entire weekend like he was supposed to. Did he?”

“He certainly did. He was in the house the whole time.” I noticed that Mrs. Thomforde was looking upward and to her left when she spoke. “He helped me do some chores around the house, helped me move furniture and clean. He played the drums. He's such a fine musician.”

“He was seen in a bar, Mrs. Thomforde. That's a terrible violation of the terms of his parole.”

“I don't know where you're getting your information, but you better go back and get some more. Anyone saying Scottie wasn't at my house is lying. Scottie wasn't anywhere else but at my house for the entire weekend. We had a family reunion. The entire family came over and we had dinner together. Scottie played the drums for us.”

“Mrs. Thomforde—”

“Are you saying she's a liar?” one of the East Siders asked. “We don't lie.”

I liked the collective “We,” but didn't say so.

“What's important is where Scottie is now,” Karen said. “Do you know, Mrs. Thomforde?”

“No, I don't. You're the one who's supposed to be watching him.”

Karen was this close to losing it. She clenched her fists and stepped forward. Something was about to come out of her mouth, and my inner voice warned,
It ain't gonna be pretty.

“Miss.” I spoke loudly and gestured. Both women turned toward me, as I had hoped they would. I purposely looked past them. “Miss,” I called again. A waitress pivoted and stepped between Karen and Mrs. Thomforde to reach my chair. “How many tickets do you have left?”

She did a quick count of the remaining tents on her tray and said, “Ten.”

“I'll buy them all.” I dipped into my pocket for cash. “Ladies, pick a ticket, my treat.” I dropped a ten on the tray and leaned back while each woman made a selection. Ruth said that I certainly knew the way to a girl's heart. Her friends suggested that Ruth was a cheap date.

“Take a ticket,” I told Mrs. Thomforde. “You, too, Karen. Pork chops, yum.”

Mrs. Thomforde selected hers, and Karen followed, leaving one ticket on the tray for me. I pulled a four. Victoria's number. Suddenly I wasn't having any fun. Suddenly I was angry again. I kept it to myself.

The waitress thanked us, scooped up the cash, and made her way to the front of the bar where the manager stood next to a spinning wheel. They both scanned the crowd for the other waitress, catching her eye. The waitress held up four fingers.

“Four tickets left for a chance at winning five pounds of pork-chops-on-a-stick,” the manager announced.

“You and Scottie talk a lot, don't you, Mrs. Thomforde?” I said.

“Of course we do,” she said. “I'm his mother. He calls me all the time. He's a good boy.”

“Did he ever mention any friends to you? People he spends time with?”

“You mean from prison?” She was looking at Karen when she said, “He doesn't spend time with that trash.”

“Did he ever mention anyone called T-Man, for instance? Mr. T?”

Mrs. Thomforde looked up and to her right. “I don't think so,” she said. “No. No, I'm sure he hasn't. Why are you doing this, McKenzie?” She flung a look at Karen. “Why are you helping her?”

I patted Mrs. Thomforde's hand. “I'm not,” I said. “I'm trying to help Scottie. When I found out Karen was looking for him—I was looking for him because I was hoping he might know some people who can help me out with something, but then she told me”—I flicked a thumb in Karen's direction—“that Scottie was missing…”

“Yes, yes,” Mrs. Thomforde said. “You were always a good friend to Scottie. I remember what you did that one time. I won't ever forget it.” She sighed dramatically. “Back when you were kids—everything seemed simple back when you were kids. Scottie was so full of fun and love and…” She was looking up to her right again. “If only…”

The manager spoke loudly from the front of the bar. “Here we go, ladies and gentlemen. For five pounds of pork-chops-on-a-stick.” He spun the wheel. It completed several revolutions before slowing and eventually settling on number sixteen. The woman who had won the chicken and hash browns gave out a squeal from a table behind us.

“Did she win again?” asked Ruth.

“It's so unfair,” said Mrs. Thomforde.

 

I thanked Mrs. Thomforde for her time and said good-bye to the girls and led Karen out of the bar. I stopped her just outside the door and studied my watch, counting the seconds as they ticked by.

“What are you doing?” Karen asked.

“I think Mrs. Thomforde was lying about knowing where Scottie is,” I said.

“What makes you say that?”

“Did you notice that while she was speaking to you she was looking upward to her left, but when she was speaking to me, she was looking upward to the right?”

“No, I didn't. What difference does it make?”

“Right brain, left brain. When you glance up to the right, you're pulling your thoughts from your memory. If you glance up to the left, you're pulling thoughts from your creative side. Often, that means the person is lying. When Mrs. Thomforde told us she didn't know where Scottie was, she was looking to her left.”

“That doesn't tell me what you're doing.”

“I'm giving Mrs. Thomforde a ninety-second head start.”

“To do what?”

At ninety seconds, I opened the bar door and both Karen and I stepped inside, standing close to the entrance. From where we stood we were able to see Mrs. Thomforde's back. She was speaking on a cell phone.