Mohawk (41 page)

Benny D. wondered what else Dallas had heard, and decided he’d better assert his manhood. “Took the boys for a bundle last night. Your buddy John had it the worst.”

“Good,” Dallas said. “I could use a hundred, since you got it.”

Benny D. peeled off some bills and passed them to him.

“You ever paint a house?” Dallas said.

“Not recently.”

“You got brushes and stuff? A ladder?”

Benny D. shrugged. “I guess. You can come over and check in the cellar.”

“All right.”

A car pulled up outside and Mrs. Benny got out. When her husband saw her through the bay doors, he shoved the rest of the money he won into Dallas’s back pocket. “Put it someplace for me. Someplace safe.”

Mrs. Benny walked directly into the office, then noticed the two men in the garage. “See you found him,” she said, approaching carefully.

“Of course I found him,” Benny D. said.

“Look at you,” Dallas leered appreciatively.

“Nevermind, Dallas Younger.”

“Tell her to go away and come back again. Leaving does her good.”

“I’m the one doing the telling,” she said before closing the office door.

“So I heard,” Dallas said.

Benny D. reddened. “So where the hell were you last night?”

“Home.”

“Bullshit. I was by there half a dozen times.”

Dallas got into Mrs. Schwartz’s Bonneville and gunned the engine. No knocks or pings. Perfect timing.

Benny D. looked at him slyly. “Wouldn’t be your brother’s house that needs painting?”

“You should see the place.”

Benny D. shook his head. “No time of year to start painting.”

“I was thinking about spring.”

Dallas turned off the engine and handed Benny D. the key.

“You don’t suppose we’re going to end up pussy-whipped, do you?” Benny D. said.

“Nah,” Dallas grinned. “Not me, anyway.”

A car was backing out of the Woods’ driveway when Anne Grouse turned onto Kings Road. She recognized the driver as Dan’s nephew, who’d been a bearer at her father’s funeral six years before. Though they hadn’t seen each other since, he smiled and rolled down his window. “Hi. Going in to see Uncle Dan?”

Anne nodded. “How is he feeling?”

“All right,” he said. “A little down. I think he wanted to say his goodbyes to the place alone.”

“Maybe I shouldn’t bother him. Tell me, is he drinking?”

“A little.” The boy reddened. “He’s okay though. I never saw anybody that can drink like him.” At this his voice sounded happier. “I’d be in a coma.”

For some reason Anne was irritated and in no mood for small talk. “I’ll just go in and say hi.”

“Sure, that’d be great. You want me to hang around?”

“No need, I don’t think.”

“We could go out for coffee later.”

“What for?” But his hurt was immediately obvious, and she apologized. She also noted that she was forty.

“Oh,” he said seriously. “I didn’t think.”

Dan was padlocking the pool shed when she swung the gate shut with a clang. The back door of the house
was open and all its rooms empty and hollow, most of the furniture sold at auction the week before, the rest put in storage. She’d seen little of him since the funeral, and they hadn’t been alone at all. Nor was Anne sure how seeing him now would work out. The length of the swimming pool was between them, a distance that seemed greater than it was. “You just missed Michael,” he said.

“Actually, we passed the baton in the drive,” she said. “He asked me out. Pretty funny, I thought.”

“So what did you say?”

“You can be a very nasty person.”

“I don’t mean to be,” he said. “How’s tricks at Forest Lawn?”

“It’s not Forest Lawn, as you well know. It’s Forest Towers.”

She had dropped in on her mother and aunt that morning. They had moved into the small, fourth-floor apartment the previous week. There was an elevator, cable TV, a supermarket and drugstore next door. The OTB was across the street, and Milly, to her sister’s horror, had actually hobbled in, elbowing her way to the counter where she extracted two musty dollar bills from her fat coin pouch, asked for and ignored advice from a man with a tattoo, then played her own daily double. She lost her money, but not her enthusiasm. “I like that gambling,” she told Anne. “All those years I lived with that son-in-law of mine, I never had a minute’s fun.”

“How are things,” Anne asked her mother once Milly was out of earshot.

“Fine,” Mrs. Grouse said. “Just fine.”

“It’s not going to be easy.”

“I know,” her mother allowed. “But it’s welcome to
be needed. No one’s needed me since your father.”

“I’m sorry,” Anne said, not that Mrs. Grouse meant anything particular by her remark. The present arrangement was perfect. Her sister was probably the only soul Milly wouldn’t torment with bogus complaints and needs. When the sale of Mather Grouse’s house became final, the two old women would have enough to live more than comfortably. Anne planned to be out before Christmas. The new owner had bought the Grouse home for an investment and was chagrined to hear that Anne didn’t intend to stay on. But he quickly rented both flats.

“I’d offer you a chair,” Dan said, “if I had one to offer.”

“How’d you make out?”

“Not bad, actually. The house fetched more than we thought. Than I thought. Break-even territory.”

Anne looked away.

“Of course Di didn’t break even, but she always knew she wouldn’t.”

The swimming pool seemed to stretch even longer. Neither had moved. “If we’re going to part friends, you’re going to have to stop trying to hurt me, Dan.”

At first he didn’t say anything, just looked off past the redwood fence at the sky above the golf course. “I’m not trying to hurt you. Myself, maybe. But not you.”

“But we feel the same things. That’s the really terrible part. We always have. You can’t punish yourself without punishing me. So please stop. I’ve always been the one to push for us, even when I knew there couldn’t really be any us. But I won’t any more. I promise. We’ve lost practically everything there is to lose, haven’t we?”

“I’m not hurting. That’s the strange part. I don’t mind losing the house, or anything in it. I know I should, and I’ll probably feel better when I do, but right now I just feel bored. I’d even feel better if I thought there was some tragic flaw, some error in judgment I could trace everything to. If I could look back and say I’d missed a sign, and that if I hadn’t, things would’ve been different.”

“I’ve taken a job in Phoenix,” she said, suddenly impatient with his abstractions. “When I told them yes, I fully intended to ask you to come with me. I had this idea that we might even make each other happy in the end. I should’ve known better. You’d rather I went out with your dippy nephew.”

“I’d kill you first.”

“Good,” she said. “Then we’re still friends.”

“Let’s get out of here,” Dan suggested, suddenly wheeling toward her. She closed the patio gate behind them. “I’m glad I still have the car,” he admitted. “Don’t help now.”

He swung himself inside behind the wheel, then closed the door and rolled down the window. “Where the hell is Phoenix, Arizona?”

She collapsed the chair and bundled it around to the passenger side. “Consult a map.”

“I bet they don’t even have ramps. It’s just like you to invite me to a place that doesn’t have any goddamn ramps.”

“These days they’re building them everywhere.”

“More trouble than they’re worth, believe me.”

“But they
can
be built.”

“I suppose,” he admitted. “In time.”

At the Mohawk Grill there are many systems for picking winners at the track, and each of the regulars who slips in off the street when Harry opens promptly at six has his own, though as they readily admit no system’s perfect or the players would all live in Florida. So they compose elaborate mathematical formulas, not to determine who the winner
will
be but who the winner
would
be if the track weren’t crooked. These scientific men are not chagrined by their cynical belief that the science of handicapping is seriously compromised by dishonesty and greed. Poring over the charts of workout times and track conditions, analyzing the level of competition—these are pleasurable activities in themselves, especially in the gray morning light that slants through the diner’s front windows and across their racing forms. Even more cynical are those who think the horses more or less irrelevant, and that smart money’s on the trainer with the best pharmacist. This view is not widely held, since there’s no way of telling who has the best pharmacist on any given day; and hence the theory isn’t conducive to wagering.

Harry himself bets only infrequently, though he too has a theory. He has never felt compelled to share it with the seasoned veterans who drink his coffee, losers
all, with impeccable credentials and expertise, and who would mock the naive simplicity of his system. Still, it has worked well enough for Harry, and the afficionados were the first to admit you can’t beat the horses. Or the dogs. Or the dice. Or the cards. All you can do is try.

When Harry bets at all he bets jockeys, and while they’re harder to handicap than the horses beneath them, they’re not entirely immune to scientific observation. Harry’s cardinal rule is to never bet an untested jockey; they sometimes win, but mostly find ways to lose on their few good mounts. Some seem born to lose. The top jocks are more or less equally talented, and so the issue, it seems to Harry, is the human spirit: pride and concentration. Desire. These qualities are by no means constant in the human breast, as Harry well knows, and so he watches their ebb and flow until some subtle tuning fork of his own begins to throb and vibrate in sympathy, suggesting for example that Shoemaker will take five winners home in a row. Consequently, Harry will bet the Shoe every time he’s up, never mind the nag, and keep betting until he senses the pride, the desire, the need ascending in another man. It’s a silly theory, Harry knows, but it gives him pleasure and occasionally even works.

This morning, however, Harry has no strong feelings about any given jockey, and feels little in the way of desire himself. Today it wouldn’t surprise him to learn that there were no winners anywhere in America. He says as much and this remark stirs one of the coffee drinkers sufficiently to make him look up from his form. “
Some
body’s got to win, Harry. They can’t
all
lose.”

“All mine can,” another remarks.

The door opens to admit a group of five men, among them John. As if by design, five stools remain at the counter to accommodate them. “Who’s the big loser,” somebody asks.

“You wouldn’t believe it,” says one of the gamblers, “but we played all night and broke even.”

Harry flips sausage patties and smiles, his back to the lot of them. They’ll tell what they want to tell whenever they’re ready, so there’s no need to face them.

The lawyer snorts as he picks up Harry’s copy of the
Republican
. The front page proclaims that two local tannery owners have been fined over a hundred-thousand dollars for polluting Cayuga Creek. According to investigators, carcinogens were routinely dumped into this tributary of the Mohawk for over forty years. The EPA was debating whether evacuations of high-risk neighborhoods were advisable. Industry spokesmen denied all charges and detailed the number of jobs that would be lost if the tanneries were closed. Further penalties and indictments were expected.

“They’ll never shut ’em down,” somebody said.

“Like hell,” John laughed. “They were closing anyway. Why do you think old man Tucker sold out last year? They made all the money that was here to be made thirty years ago.”

“Never happen,” the first man said. “Mohawk
is
leather.”

“Mohawk’s horseshit,” the lawyer said. “Always was.”

“How come you’re still here?”

John didn’t bother answering, but his expression suggested there was an answer just the same.

“You figure the government wants to buy my house,”
another player asked. “It’s only a block from the crick.”

“Might,” John said. “I know some people who’ll testify you’re wacky, and you can claim it’s from drinking the water. Just like Wild Bill.”

Had John looked up from his paper, he would’ve had time to duck. Harry’s shoulders quivered almost imperceptibly before he whirled, his spatula slicing through the newspaper like a knife. Fortunately, the
Republican
offered enough resistance to spin the utensil in Harry’s grasp. With a slap it met John’s cheek flat, leaving a triangle of sausage grease below the right eye. Everyone, including Harry, was speechless with surprise. The grease formed a rivulet that disappeared into the lawyer’s collar. The spatula itself was so flexible that the blow didn’t even leave a tingle.

To everyone but the principals it was obvious that what they’d witnessed was about the funniest thing ever. They laughed so hard that several coffee cups were overturned, and John himself soon joined in. “People sure are touchy around here lately,” he remarked. His mouth still bore the scar of Dallas Younger’s assault, a livid crease in his otherwise pretty mouth. He wiped off his face with one of Harry’s napkins. “Was that your best shot, Harry?” The men howled and spun on their stools, one falling onto the floor, the stool twirling without him.

Suddenly Harry, too, was laughing, or crying. The tears ran down his face and he went down on his knees behind the counter. The men had to lean over to see him on the floor, and The Bulldog soon came downstairs to see what the ruckus was about.

Once the breakfasts were paid for and the men were gone, Untemeyer came in. Harry was restored to himself
by now, though his eyes remained red and puffy.

“What the hell you been up to?” said the old bookie. “Cryin’?”

“Hell,” Harry said. “Laughing.”

“What about?”

“You had to be here.”

“I wish like hell I was. I never once saw you laugh.”

Harry rang
No Sale
on the register and removed some bills. “How many mounts does the Shoe have today?” he said.