Mohawk (16 page)

“Dan came by the hospital last night,” he ventured.

“Did he,” she said as if she hadn’t really heard.

“He said he and Di are getting hitched next month.”

“Yes.”

“I guess I was the first one he told.”

“Yes. Di told me this morning.”

“I wish I didn’t look so beat up. Otherwise, I’d ask you.”

She studied him, then—a little sadly, it seemed, and
not at all surprised, but with more affection than he had seen for some time. She took out a tissue, wet the corner with her tongue and touched it on one of his swollen eyes. “I wouldn’t make you happy,” she said. “Besides, I promised my father I’d give him one semester at school.”

He shrugged happily, having anticipated a much more forceful objection. “How about January? I can wait.”

She smiled. “People don’t get married in January.”

“They do in Austria.”

“You mean Australia?”

Well, he had meant Australia. “I mean I love you.”

His room overlooked Main Street, and from where they sat it was possible to see all the way up past the hospital into Myrtle Park, which overlooked the entire county. Only when Dallas finally noticed that she was crying did he realize how much she must love him, and he vowed from that moment to be worthy of her.

But it hadn’t worked out. He did not blame her for ending the marriage when she did. She deserved better, and he couldn’t see how there was much advantage to starting up again. He’d make all sorts of vows and end up breaking every one. He knew himself now, and he knew he could live without her.

“All right, Harry,” he said. “Give me some of that turkey before you start crying. And don’t be a cheapskate with the gravy, either.”

Dallas Younger was Harry’s last real customer at the Mohawk Grill, which meant there would be a special on turkey-and-dressing over the holiday weekend. Dallas lingered until late in the afternoon when he heard feet tromping up the stairs on the other side of the wall. Then he borrowed fifty from Harry and joined the game upstairs. The other players were family men who’d seen enough of their families and grown depressed by the sight of the turkey carcass.

Harry was cleaning the grill and preparing to close when Officer Gaffney came in. He was looking a little sheepish since Harry had read him the riot act. For two days he had obeyed the injunction not to show his face in the Mohawk Grill. But lacking a convenient place to drink coffee was beginning to wear on him, and he looked haggard.

“No,” Harry said when the policeman straddled his favorite stool.

Officer Gaffney did not dare sit, though his rump hovered mere inches from the round stooltop, his legs bowed like a cowboy’s. “Hell, Harry,” he complained. “You can’t refuse to serve me—”

“I can do anything I want. This is my place, paid for by me, run by me, according to my rules.”

“Hell, Harry.”

“Anyhow, I wasn’t refusing to serve you. I was answering the question you’ll get around to asking when you’re through pissing and moaning. No, I didn’t see Billy. No, I don’t have no idea where he is. No, he’s not downstairs hiding in the basement or the storeroom. And no, you can’t just look around to make sure. No.”

Gaffney squirmed, still astraddle the stool and unsure if he had permission to sit. “It ain’t like we don’t trust you, Harry. Everybody admires the hell out of Harry Saunders, and nobody’s been better to that boy than you. We just need to talk to that boy for his own good.”

“No,” Harry said.

The officer lowered himself subtle fractions until he felt the stool. “Hell, Harry, I understand. Why wouldn’t I understand? We’re friends for God’s sake. It’s just I can’t help being what I am. I got to enforce the law. A policeman’s just got to.”

Harry stopped working on the grill and turned. “We aren’t friends, Gaff. Don’t say so, because it ain’t true. And don’t talk about the law, because that’s not it. If you’re all worked up about the law, there’s a game upstairs right now. Gambling’s still against the law, so you can start right here where it’s convenient. And when you’re finished, there’s some other things. I can tell you about who’s stealing leather over to the Tucker Tannery, and who’s cutting and selling it, too. Unless maybe you already know. And then you can go after Old Man Tucker himself and jail his ass for all that shit in the crick that’s making the whole county sick. You could clean up the whole town, Gaff. Be a
regular
goddamn hero instead of chasing around the goddamn
county after unfortunate retards like Billy that nobody cares nothing about until there’s trouble.”

Officer Gaffney blanched under Harry’s onslaught and would have retreated a step or two if he hadn’t settled onto the seat. The gleaming spatula Harry was using for emphasis was fluttering in front of his nose like a demented metal bird. It didn’t seem right that anybody would talk to a peace officer in that tone, but Gaffney couldn’t decide what to do about it in this particular case. Here he had come in to patch things up with Harry, and was worse off than ever. He was misunderstood, and that’s all there was to it.

“The law … bullshit, the law,” Harry fumed, though calmer now, having said his piece. He set the spatula down and returned to the brick. “Bill’s nothing but a goddamn monthly check for your shit-heel brother. When was the last time he ate a bowl of soup under his old man’s roof? When was the last time Rory gave him a pair of socks? It’d be a hell of an idea if somebody called them state people and asked them if they knew what happened to the money they sent every month.” Harry was slowly working himself back into a fit. Chunks of the lava brick were crumbling onto the grill, whose surface shone angrily through the black ash. “The law—”

“I never meant for you to get all worked up on Thanksgiving,” the policeman said. “I just come in for a cup of coffee and company.”

“I hope you enjoyed the company, cause you ain’t getting no coffee,” Harry said without turning around.

Defeated, Officer Gaffney slid off the stool and left.

When Harry finished with the grill and refrigerated the perishables, he locked the front door and stuck the
CLOSED
sign on the window before turning off the
lights. Then he peered outside between the blinds. On the other side of Main Street a cigarette briefly glowed red in the doorway of the drugstore. Two men stood in the shadows. One would be Officer Gaffney, and Harry had a pretty good guess who the second, larger man would be. They were positioned to see both the front entrance to the grill and the rear door on the alley. Harry smiled and watched as the cigarette glowed bright, then faded, then dropped to the pavement where it was extinguished. Finally, the larger man came out of the doorway and headed up Main in the direction of the firehouse.

The wind, which had been whistling all day, now howled up the corridor between the buildings that formed it. In the doorway of the Scallese Drugstore, Officer Gaffney turned up his coat collar. Inside the Mohawk Grill, Harry Saunders was warm.

“This is the
last
time you’re going to be expected to climb these stairs,” Mrs. Grouse said when she and her husband reached the landing. Not quite out of earshot, she and Mather Grouse had just finished Thanksgiving dinner upstairs in their daughter’s flat. Anne had insisted on cooking the holiday meal, and of course the whole thing was a botch. Dallas had somehow gotten himself invited and then not shown up, which was typical, though they had waited for him until everything was ruined. Holding meals for people who were not punctual was something Mrs. Grouse herself did not approve of. Even when her husband was working, he knew what time dinner was served and knew better than to be late. He got off work at five, and dinner was on the table at five-fifteen, not five-twenty, because the walk home took fifteen minutes, not twenty. Occasionally Mrs. Grouse would stretch a point for the boy, but Dallas was a grown man, and there was no excuse for him. She would’ve said so, too, except that it wasn’t her place and, besides, her daughter was really to blame for inviting him in the first place, knowing full well what was likely to happen.

“I’m fine,” said Mather Grouse. He, too, was irritable,
though for a different reason. “Take your hand off my elbow, for pity’s sake.”

“The idea of expecting you to climb these stairs and then wait around hours for your dinner. You must’ve been starved.”

“I ate almonds. I ate walnuts. I ate deviled eggs. I ate grapes.”

“That’s not dinner.”

“She went to a lot of trouble.”

“I never said—”

They were at the bottom of the stairs now and entering their own kitchen, Mather Grouse holding the door for his wife. “Then stop being snippy. You’re just bent out of shape because somebody cooked a dinner besides you.”

“Who ever heard of leg of lamb for Thanksgiving?”

“I like it. I like lamb. I never get any.”

“You can have leg of lamb any time you want. All you have to do is say.”

“I’ve been wanting one for twenty years. How many have you cooked?”

“A greasy mess.”

“Mmmm.”

“The house smells for days,” Mrs. Grouse said throwing wide open one of the windows, despite the bitter cold outside. “You can smell it all the way down here.”

“Good,” Mather Grouse said, inhaling deeply. “I like the smell. Until the leftovers are gone, I’m going to eat upstairs. Go help your daughter with the dishes. I’ll be fine.”

“Dirty lamb dishes. They’ll never be clean.”

Worn out by the discussion and the long afternoon
in somebody else’s home, Mather Grouse retreated to the living room and his favorite armchair, stopping only to turn on the football game. He was still angry with Dallas Younger, angrier than he could ever remember being with his ex-son-in-law, and that was saying something. Mather Grouse had no use for physical violence, but for some reason he always felt like thrashing Dallas—a strange urge, because he liked a good many men less than Dallas and had little desire to thrash them. Dallas wasn’t a bad fellow, actually. In fact, Mather Grouse could think of no one more genuinely harmless than Dallas Younger. And now that he thought about it, that was probably why he wanted to thrash him. With truly bad people even a horsewhipping did no good, but one might be just what Dallas needed, if only to make him pay attention.

If he turned up now, there was a good chance he
would
get one, and not by Mather Grouse. Anne was furious, he knew, and he couldn’t blame her. It would’ve been nice to tell her so, but he couldn’t. Since the afternoon she had recalled him from the dead, he’d wanted many times to tell her how much he missed the closeness they had shared when she was a girl. He knew he was to blame, but knowing and knowing what to do about it were two different things. He also knew she had concluded that the cause of their separation was his disapproval, and he had never corrected her misunderstanding. There was no way that he could make her see that starting from the time she began to change from a girl into a woman, she had simply frightened him. This wasn’t just the matter of her womanhood. More than anything, it was the fact that she had inherited every significant feature of her personality
from himself, except restraint, and not one thing from her mother. He began to suspect that only circumstance could keep her in check, her very virtues bordering on vice. She was too proud, too loyal, too ambitious, perhaps too beautiful. And she was too vulnerable, though Mather Grouse alone saw that side of her.

Mrs. Grouse joined him in the living room and looked at the television disapprovingly. “Are you going to sit there and watch, knowing how it upsets you?”

“Football does not upset me. I don’t particularly enjoy it. Baseball upsets me. And it doesn’t upset me; it excites me.”

“You aren’t supposed to get excited.”

“I seldom do, thank you very much.”

One of the more disagreeable features of Mather Grouse’s existence was the never-ending debate over what upset him. Of late, Mrs. Grouse had come to see virtually everything he enjoyed as a potential source of upset. She seemed intent on making his remaining years one long Lenten season. When he objected, she reminded him that objections were upsetting. “Send the boy down, if he wants,” Mather Grouse called after his wife.

Mrs. Grouse was at the kitchen door when the bell rang. She frowned at the clock on the wall. “Who could that be?” she said before she could think. Then it occurred to her that the doorbell at such a late hour on Thanksgiving might portend something about her sister, and she scurried back into the living room. “Who is it,” she asked her husband, who had not budged from his chair.

“We won’t know until you open the door. Whoever
it is, tell them to go away.” Actually, he was curious. The porch steps usually groaned under a visitor’s weight, and he hadn’t heard them groan.

Mrs. Grouse tugged the front door open and peered into the dark. She was about to conclude that it was all a prank, when a large man stepped forward out of the shadows. Mather Grouse couldn’t see who it was from where he sat, but he recognized immediately the deep, soothing voice.

“Mrs. Mather, I presume,” said Rory Gaffney.

Mrs. Grouse instinctively stepped back and looked questioningly at her husband, whose expression had darkened. Her single backward step was enough for the man to insinuate himself into the doorway, which he pretty well filled. What Mrs. Grouse noticed most was the man’s huge hands, which predisposed her against him. Her husband’s hands were small, almost like a woman’s, and they were one of the things she had always liked best about him. The world was full of men with swollen fingers and knuckles. The other hateful thing about their visitor was his eyebrows, black and unruly, and he used one of his paws to smooth them.

Rory Gaffney smiled and nodded as he carefully surveyed the living room and, like an auctioneer brought in for an appraisal, every object it contained. “It is exactly as I expected,” he said. “Mather Grouse would provide just such a home for his family. Your husband was always a family man, Mrs. Mather. Never once got into the baseball pool or played a daily double. Never once in all those years. Some of the fellows at the shop didn’t like it, but they weren’t family men, Mrs. Mather, that’s the thing. They had families, all right, some larger than they knew, but for the likes of these men there’s always fifty cents for the number, a dollar for the pool.
There was always a little fun at the shop, you see. But not for Mather Grouse. Not for a family man.”