Nothing but a Smile (27 page)

“Maybe I'll pick out an Uncle Moneybags for myself,” Reenie announced. “Some sweet, sweet sugar-daddy who'll put me through art school.”

She was clowning around, but the Uncle Moneybags comment kind of stung. Sal told her it was nothing like that, that yes, Mort had taken her for a nice dinner, but mostly, she was just trying to get out there and give it a try again while keeping it very casual, taking “baby steps.” She explained that he was a camera bug and belonged to several clubs that went on bimonthly photography excursions, and that was more the type of thing she'd been doing with him. “Like this evening,” she said, “we're going to tour an applesauce factory.”

Reenie eyed her blankly. “You're putting me on. Is that some kind of slang for something?”

“Like
banana oil?”
Sal had to laugh. “No, it's an actual factory that makes applesauce. We'll be taking pictures.”

“Brother …,” Reenie said.

“I'd rather you didn't say anything to Wink. Or anybody, I mean. I'm not sure yet how I—”

Reenie rolled her eyes. “Don't worry, I won't! I'm not sure I could keep a straight face.”

Sal left it at that and didn't tell her the rest, though Reenie's comment about keeping a straight face reminded her of it—she'd
felt almost that same pressure to compose herself at the end of their last date. It was the first time since the tenth grade that she'd kissed anyone other than Chesty—excluding, of course, that strange run-in with Wink the night of her anniversary, the nature of which she still couldn't quite catalog. That had felt more like a drunken fumble, like a fuzzy dream. With Mort, it had incontrovertibly been a kiss, not so much because she felt more than she had with that blurry slipup with Wink—she didn't, actually—but because this time, she'd known it was coming and allowed it. Mort had asked, “May I kiss you, please?” and she'd nodded, which was assent enough, and she hadn't moved away—though of course she didn't exactly step into it— and it was all she could do to keep from trembling.

He woke to a metallic rapping downstairs, like someone knocking on the front door with a cane.

Wink was on the floor. Reenie was there, in the narrow bed. She'd spent the night, but as far as he could tell, she'd only done so in order to kick him to the floor. They hadn't fooled around— an activity that had become more and more infrequent, as of late.

“What the good Lord …” she said.

Pulling on his pants, he lurched out into the hall, ready to step down the stairs for a peek, but Sal was already up and standing out there, listening. She pulled him into her apartment, handing him a cup of coffee and leading him over to the front window. Kneeling on the big steamer trunk that served as a window seat, and that he'd always thought of as Sal's hope chest, he
unlatched the window and got a blast of brisk autumn morning and a glimpse of a solid man, bird's-eye view, stationed at the front door.

Wink called down to him: “It's Sunday, friend. Day of rest, you know?”

The guy looked up at him, and he realized he'd studied that sad face for hours. It was the maimed vet from his photo. The metallic rapping had come from his prosthetic hand.

“Day of rest,” the guy repeated. “Not a problem. I was just looking to rest my boot in your ass.”

He rapped on the glass again, only this time, lining it up, Wink had a good hunch he was actually pointing to the clipping of the photo he'd had in the
Tribune
back in May—his depth-of-field “assignment.” Sal had pasted it up there months ago, with a hand-lettered note that read:

“Someone told me they saw this here. You this Dutton character? The guy took my picture without my say-so?”

Wink started to say he was very far away, meaning when he shot the photo—not sure himself how that made any difference, legally or morally—but the guy was taking it another way.

“Then come down and talk to me man to man, you can't hear so well up there …”

It was hard to judge if he meant that sincerely—if the guy would wait and hear him out before getting to the part where he would rest his boot in his ass. He sounded more and more reasonable, but the metal hook he had for a hand still looked awfully steely.

Wink was already feeling some relief that this was what it was apparently about—that it wasn't yet another cop or mysterious government man or lurking threat in the shadows—though he wondered if this confrontation hadn't somehow been triggered by the recent beach bust. Possibly, they'd brought more attention on themselves because of that—folks starting to know who they were and talk about them, especially around the neighborhood. He wasn't sure he liked that, the public connecting their work to the shop, to where they lived.

“We should feed him,” Sal whispered, pressing on his back, trying to see around him. “It's the
least.
And maybe he'll be more reasonable, after a full meal.”

He heard Reenie sneering back there behind him, “Your cupboard is bare, Mother Hubbard. Unless you just want to give him the last of that coffee and some toast. Plus, you don't want that mug up here. Looks a little nervous-in-the-service, you ask me. Very well could be a shell shock, go wild man on us.”

She said she had an idea. Wink turned to see she'd just about finished pulling on her street clothes and her jacket and was heading for the stairs. He said nothing. If he'd learned anything about these two gals in the last two and some years, it was that he knew nothing. There would be little point in trying to guess what Reenie was about to do, let alone stop her. And then there was the sound of the back door downstairs, Reenie slipping out into the alley, gone.

So they watched, leaving the window cracked, peering down on the steamed marine.

Every now and then he'd squint back up at them and scowl, but it felt to Wink like the guy was losing just a little of his steam, as if each scowl felt a little more forced, each second a little more awkward.

Wink was starting to consider the idea that Reenie's plan was
possibly to ditch them, just tear out the back, every man for herself, as it were. He hadn't exactly been her favorite person these days, even if she had commandeered his bed last night. He even wondered if Sal had confessed to her about the night she got drunk and weepy over her wedding anniversary and kissed him— or rather, to be more accurate, jammed her mouth against his and breathed until she sobbed. Fun stuff to be sure, and nothing he had any say in, really, but maybe Reenie would have felt territorial about it even though she seemed to have moved on from such feelings and didn't, mostly, give a hang. Still, one never knew.

“There she is,” Sal said.

Wink spotted her, too, turning the corner at the end of the block. She'd come around the long way and was heading in their direction, swinging her pocketbook as if out for a Sunday stroll, not even looking straight ahead at the one-handed marine taking up sidewalk.

When she bumped into him, Wink saw the look on her face and guessed at the general direction this was going to go: she was going to do her best acting routine.

Sal cracked the window a hair more so they could hear.

“Cheese and crackers!” she said, practically gulping with the wide-eyed ingenue bit and touching his chest where she'd just plowed into him. “I'm
so
sorry. But say! Don't I know you?”

They were looking down at basically the top of his head, but they didn't need to be able to see his face any better to know the guy was thrown.

“Hold on a sec! You're
him.
You're the handsome marine from the paper.” Now she was the one rapping on the glass, pointing to the clipping in the window. “Sure! Why, I've stared at that photograph so many times!”

The guy appeared to be having some trouble forming words.

“I swear I have! Almost
too
many times, really.”

Wink exchanged a sideways glance with Sal. That crack had been for him, he was sure. Which wasn't fair—he'd never really bothered her with his work, anything other than the girlies.

“Say,” she said again, digging through her pocketbook like a rabid squirrel. “Would you mind terribly giving me your autograph? My friends will never believe I met an honest-to-goodness cultural icon!”

The marine was speaking up now, finally forming words. “Lady, I don't know what you just called me, but—”

“That's how I heard it described, just the other day. Someone describing that photograph of you. A cultural icon, they said.”

It was nice to know she was still reading the art critics, trying to improve her understanding, though he was pretty certain whoever used the term wasn't talking about his photo in the
Trib.

“Please,” she said, handing him an envelope and what looked like maybe an eyebrow pencil. “Please just sign your name. You don't need to write it out personal or anything. I'd
really
appreciate it.”

Oh Christ,
Wink thought.
What if he's a lefty?

But he wasn't. He took the envelope and eyebrow pencil in his good hand and, as Reenie turned to offer her back as a writing surface, winking up at them, the marine pinned the envelope in place with his prosthetic and wrote with his right.

He must have scribbled it, though, because when he handed it back to Reenie she squinted at it disapprovingly and said, “I can't even read what this says … Gee, you must still be learning how to use that thing, huh?”

“You making fun or something, sister? It says my name. Keeney Trust me. Now why don't you—”

She must have sensed, as Wink did, that the guy was about to give her the brush-off and reapply his energy to working his angry-villagers-at-the-gate bit, because she moved in on him again, beaming,
all hands, patting him and hooking his arm. “Say! I was just about to collect my friends and get a late breakfast. Are you game?”

The marine shrugged. “Sure. And I can afford to pay my own way, okay? I
do
work, no matter what they're trying to make it look like in this horseshit picture—pardon my French.”

Reenie said, “Great,” and with that she turned and let herself in with the spare Wink gave her long ago and honestly had forgotten about, and the guy looked frozen in place down on the sidewalk, staring at her slipping into the shop, clearly surprised that the friends they'd be joining included the very guy he was yelling up at. But he didn't walk away, and he didn't rampage in after her. He stood his ground, took off his hat, wiped his forehead with his nonhook hand, and squinted up at him, giving him a smirk like,
Well, don't that just about beat all.

They rushed back to confer in the hallway.

“He's a lot of bluster,” Reenie said, when she met them at the top of the stairs. “I think he just wanted to be asked permission first. We should do this.”

So they hopped to, throwing on their shoes and coats, and let her lead on.

Halfway down the stairs, Reenie stopped up short and said, “Listen, you two maybe better act like you're together, and I'll smile and make nice with the one-handed grouch. Don't you think? He seems like putty, if you know what I mean.”

He and Sal exchanged an awkward sideways glance. He wasn't sure which one of them spoke up in agreement first, but, of course, it made sense.

Keeney preferred to just be called Keeney

Sal tried calling him Mr. Keeney and Corporal Keeney a couple times, but it sounded too formal.

Pressed for a first name, the only hint he gave was, “Well, see, I'm half Irish, and I'm half German, on my mother's side, so …”

Wink remembered the photo and the name stenciled on his seabag. “His first initial is
A.”

They sat there for a long moment, he and the girls presumably running through the
A
‘s.

Reenie was the first to put it together.
“Adolf?
Really? Well, I, for one, am not calling you
Adolf !”

Keeney smiled sadly. “Exactly. So it's Keeney.”

They'd secured a booth at the Zim Zam, where the breakfast left room for improvement, but it was served late into the afternoon, and the wide windows faced the sun and felt inviting on a chilly September day like this.

Despite his earlier venting outside the shop, he was surprisingly slow in voicing his complaints about the photo, and Wink took this as a good sign—that he waited to examine the menu and order before launching into any real harangue.

He did make a point again of explaining that he wasn't jobless. He said he worked a corner newsstand, which he thought wouldn't be a bad life, if it continued, but he'd like to eventually
own
his own newsstand, if that was going to be his career, not work it for the owner the way he did now in an arrangement that sounded, to Wink, a little better than a sharecropper's setup and a little worse than that of a cabbie who didn't own his hack. “Either own my own corner stand one day, or at least get inside— one of them slightly bigger, indoor deals—a news
shop.
If I have to work for someone else, I might as well be cozy. Don't feature freezing anything
else
off …”

Wink liked him for making this crack. The guy was brassy about his handicap without coming off too bitter. According to Keeney, it rarely got in the way with his current work. “In fact, a
couple tasks, it actually helps. I can sling a stack of bound newspapers like nothing, cut the twine if I flick it just right.” The metal on his left glinted in the bright sunlight as he demonstrated.

He said he served aboard a North Atlantic sub that was torpedoed, and he was left floating on a crate in the water so long, in and out of consciousness, that his fingers rotted and they had to remove the hand.

“Wink here got himself a Purple Heart, too,” Reenie blurted out, being less than helpful.

“That right?” said Keeney. “Where'd you get it?”

Because the guy didn't seem particularly sarcastic or challenging, Wink decided he must be simply asking where it had occurred.

“Same,” he said, withdrawing his bum hand under the table. “I mean, I was also on a submarine when it happened….” Hopefully, he could avoid the silly details.