The Lay of the Land (27 page)

I’d like to utter something toxic enough to get through even Lester’s soul-deep nullity. The least spark of anger might earn me the pleasure of kicking his ass, too. Only I don’t know what to say. The two
Trenton Times
delivery goons are frowning at me with small, curious menace. Possibly I have morphed into something not so good in their view, someone different from who they thought I was. No longer the invisible, ignorable, pathetic drip, but a rude intruder threatening to take too much attention away from their interests and crap on their evening. They might have to “deal” with me just for convenience sake.

Bob Butts and his harridan lady friend are exiting the bar by way of the stairs up to Hulfish Street. “
Naaaa,
leave off, you asshole,” I hear the old blondie growl.

“This fuckin’ stinks,” Bob growls back.

“
You
stink is what,” she says, continuing with difficulty, one leaning on the other, up toward the cold outdoors, the heavy door going
click
shut behind them.

I stare a moment, transfixed by the bright apple-tinted Disneyish mural of clodhopper Johnny, straddling his plug bass-ackwards, saucepan on top, dribbling his seed across Ohio. These bars are probably a chain, the mural computer-generated. Another one just like this one may exist in Dayton.

I unexpectedly feel a gravity-less melancholy in the bar, in spite of victory over Bob Butts. In the ponderous quiet, with the Sanyo showing leather-fleshed Floridians at long tables, examining punch-card ballots as if they were chest X rays, Lester looks like a pallid old ex-contract killer considering a comeback. His two customers may be associates—silent down-staters handy with chain saws, butcher’s utensils and Sakrete. It’s still New Jersey here. These people call it home. It might be time to wait for Mike outside.

“Ain’t you Bascombe somethin’?” One of the toughs frowns down the bar at me. It’s the farther away one, seated next to the shot-glass rack, a round, barrel-chested, ham-armed smudge pot with a smaller than standard hat size. His face has a close-clipped beard, but his cranium is shaved shiny. He looks Russian and is therefore almost certainly Italian. He produces a short unfiltered cigarette (which Boro regulations profoundly forbid the smoking of), lights it with a little yellow Bic and exhales smoke in the direction of Lester, who’s rummaging through the cash drawer. I would willingly forswear all knowledge of any Bascombe; be instead Parker B. Farnsworth, retired out of the Bureau—Organized Crime Division—but still on call for undercover duties where an operative needs to look like a real estate agent. However, I’ve blown my cover over Lester’s mother’s house. I feel endangered, but see no way free except to fake going insane and run up the stairs screaming.

So what I reluctantly say is, “Yeah.” I expect the smudge pot to snort a cruel laugh and say something low and accusing—a widowed relative or orphan nephew I gave the mid-winter heave-ho to so I could peddle their house to some noisy Jews from Bedminster. I’ve never done that, but it doesn’t stop people from thinking I have. Someone in my old realty firm for sure did it, which makes me a party.

“My kid went to school with your kid.” The bald guy taps his smoke with his finger, inserts it in the left corner of his small mouth and blows more smoke out the front in little squirts. He lets his eyes wander away from me.

“My son Paul?” I am unexpectedly smiling.

“I don’t know. Maybe. Yeah.”

“And what was your son’s name? I mean, what’s his name?”

“Teddy.” He is wearing a tight black nylon windbreaker open onto what looks like an aqua tee-shirt that exhibits his hard basketball-size belly. His clothes are skimpy for this weather, but it’s part of his look.

“And where’s
he
now?” Likely the Marines or a good trade school, or plying Lake Superior as an able seaman gaining grainy life experience on an ore boat before coming home to settle into life as a plumber. Possibilities are plentiful and good. He’s probably
not
authoring wiseacre greeting cards and throwing shit fits because he feels underappreciated.

“He ain’t.” The big guy elevates his rounded chin to let cigarette smoke go past his eyes. His drinking buddy, a bony, curly-headed weight-lifter type with a giant flared nose and dusky skin—also wearing a nylon windbreaker—produces a Vicks inhaler, gives it a stiff snort and points his nose at the ceiling as if the experience was transporting.

I get a noseful clear over here. It makes the room suddenly wintry and momentarily happy again. “You mean he stayed home?”

“No, no, no,” Teddy’s father says, facing the backbar.

“So, where is he?” This is, of course, 100 percent none of my business, and I already detect the answer won’t be good. Prison. Disappeared. Disavowed. The standard things that happen to your children.

“He ain’t on the earth,” the big guy says. “Now, I mean.” He removes his cigarette and appraises its red tip.

No way I’m heading down
this
bad old road. Not after having had my own dead son flashed like a muleta by my wife I’m no longer married to. Since Ralph Bascombe’s been absent from the planet, I haven’t gone around yakking about it in bars with strangers.

I stand up straight in my now-soiled barracuda—sore kneed, neck burning, knuckles aching—and look expressionlessly at this short, cylindrical fireplug of a man who’s suffered (I know exactly, or close enough) and has had to get used to it. Alone.

The big guy swivels to peer past his friend’s face at me. His dark, flat eyes don’t glow or burn or teem, but are imploring and not the eyes of an assassin, but of a pilgrim seeking small progress. “Where’s
your
kid?” he says, cigarette backward in his fingers, French-style.

“He’s in Kansas City.”

“What’s he do? He a lawyer? Accountant?”

“No,” I say. “He’s a kind of writer, I guess. I’m not really sure.”

“Okay.”

“What happened to your son?”

Why? Why can’t I just do what I say I will? Is it so hard? Is it age? Illness? Bad character? Fear I’ll miss something? What this man’s about to say fairly fills the bar with dread, bounces off the period trappings, taps the drumheads, jingles the harnesses, swirls around Johnny Appleseed like a Halloween ghost.

“He took his own life,” the palooka says without a blink.

“Do you know why?” I ask, full-in-now, with nothing to offer back, nothing to make a man feel better in this season when all seek it.

“Look at those fucks,” Lester snarls. Candidate Gore and his undernourished running mate have commandeered the TV screen in their shirt sleeves, walled in behind stalks of microphones in front of an enormous oak tree, looking grave and silly at once. Gore, the stiff, is spieling on soundlessly, as if he’s admonishing a seventh grader, his body doughy, perplexing, crying out to put on more weight and be old. “Haw!” Lester brays at them. “Whadda country. Jeez-o fuck.” If I had a pistol I’d gladly shoot Lester with it.

“No. I don’t.” The big Trentonian bolts his drink and has a last drag on his smoke. He doesn’t like this now, is sorry he started it. Just an idle question that led the old familiar wrong way. “What I owe you?” he says to Lester, who’s still gawking at Gore and Lieberman gabbling like geese.

“A blow job,” Lester says without looking around. “It’s happy hour. Make me happy.”

The skint-headed guy stubs his smoke in his shot glass, lays two bills on the bar but doesn’t rise to the bait. I get another hot whiff of Vicks as the two men shift around to depart. Off the stool, the big guy’s actually small and compact, and moves with a nice, comfortable, swivel-shouldered Fiorello La Guardia rolling gait, like a credible middleweight.

“Good talking to ya,” he says. His taller, more threatening friend looks straight at me as he steps past, but then seems embarrassed and diverts his eyes.

“Remember what we talked about,” Lester shouts as they head toward the stairs.

“You’re already on the list,” the bald guy’s stairwell voice says as the metal door clanks open and their footfalls and muttering voices grow soft, leaving me alone with Lester.

Mike hasn’t arrived. I stare at Lester’s satchel-ass behind the bar as if it foretold a mystery. He glances around at me (I’m still queasy after my Bob Butts set-to). He has put on tortoiseshell-framed glasses and his practically chinless face is hostile, as if he’s just before invoking his right to refuse to serve anyone. I could use the pisser. Once it was by the exit, but the old smoothed brass
MEN
plaque is gone and the wall’s been bricked up. The gents must be upstairs in the inn.

“Who’dju waste your vote on?” Lester says. I transfer my stare from trousers seat to the plastic Christmas tree on the backbar. I’m unwilling to leave till Mike gets here.

“I voted for Gore.” The sound of these four words makes me almost want to burst out laughing. Except I feel so shitty.

Lester bellies up to the bar in front of me. His frayed gray-white shirt bears tiny dark specks of tomato juice on its front. His black bartender trousers could use fumigating. He lays his big left hand, the one with the Haddam HS ring on it, palm-down on the eurathaned compass of the bar. The ring’s
H
crest is bracketed by two tiny rearing stallions on either side, with the numeral 19 below one stallion, and 48 the other. I peer at Lester’s fingers, which promise prophesy. He uses his other index finger to point toward his long left thumb. “Let me show you something,” he says, sinister, matter-of-fact, staring down at his own fingers. “This is your Russian. This next one’s your spic. This one’s your African. This last one’s your Arab or your sand nigger—whichever. You got your choice.” Lester raises his eyes to me coldly, smiling as if he was passing a terrible sentence.

“My choice for what?”

“For what language you want to learn when you vote for fuckin’ Gore. He’s givin’ the country away, like the other guy, except his dick got in his zipper.” Lester, as he did earlier, nibbles his lip—but as though he might punch me. “You probably respect my opinion, don’t you? That’s what you guys do. You respect everybody’s fuckin’ opinion. Except you can’t respect
everybody’s
opinion.” Lester has made a brawler’s fist out of his prophetic hand and leans on it to draw closer to me over the bar. Vile, minty fixative smell—something he’s been told to use when he meets the public—has been adulterated by an acrid steam of hate. It would make me nauseated if I didn’t think Lester was about to assault me.

“No,” I say. “I don’t respect your opinion.” My voice, even to me, lacks determination. I stand back a step. “I don’t respect your opinion at all.”

“Oh. Okay.” Lester smiles more broadly but keeps on staring hate at me. “I thought you thought everybody was just like everybody else, everybody equal. All of us peas in a fuckin’ pod.”

It
is
what I think, but I won’t be able to explain that now. Precisely at this flash point—and surprisingly—Mike walks out of the stairwell and through the door of the Johnny Appleseed, looking like a happy little middle-manager, in his mustard blazer and Italian tassel-loafers, though he has the spontaneous good sense to halt under the red
EXIT
as if something was about to combust. It may.

“It
is
what I think,” I say, and feel stupid. Lester’s eye shifts contemptuously to Mike, who looks disheartened but is, of course, smiling. “And I think you’re full of shit!” I say this too harshly and somehow begin to lose my balance on the tumbled-over bar stool I haven’t had a chance to put back upright. I am falling yet again.

“Is the midget a friend of yours now?” Lester sneers, but his eyes stay nastily on Mike, object of all he holds loathsome, treacherous and wrong. The element. The thing to be extirpated.

I feel hands on my shoulder and lumbar region. I am now
not
falling (thank God). Mike has moved quickly forward and kept me mostly upright. “He
is
my friend,” I say, and accidentally kick the bar stool against the brass foot rail with a loud clanging.

Lester just grimly watches the two of us teetering around the floor like marionettes. “Get out,” he snarls, “and take your coolie with you.” Lester is an old man, possibly seventy. But meanness and bile have made him feel good, able to take an honest pleasure in the world. Old Huxley was right: stranger than we
can
know.

“I will.” I’m pushing against Mike with my left arm, urging him toward the exit. He has yet to make a noise. What a surprise all this must be. “And I’ll never come in this shithole again,” I say. “I used to like this place. You’d have been a lot better off if you’d sold your mother’s house and moved to Arizona.” Why I say these things—other than that they’re true—I can’t tell you. You rarely get the exit line you deserve.

“Blow it out your ass, you fag,” Lester says. “I hope you get AIDS.” He scowls, as if these weren’t exactly the words he wanted to say, either. Though he’s said them now and ruined his good mood. He turns sideways and looks back up at the TV as we meet the cold air awaiting us in the stairwell. A hockey game is on again, men skating in circles on white ice. The sound comes on, an organ playing a lively carnival air. Lester glances our way to make sure we’re beating it, then turns the volume up louder for a little peace.

U
p on the damp sidewalk bordering the Square, white HPD sawhorses have been established along the Pilgrim Interpretive Center’s wattle fence so that during Pilgrim business hours pedestrians can stand and observe what Pilgrim life was once all about and hear Pilgrims deliver soliloquies. A youngish boy-girl couple in identical clear plastic jackets and rain pants stands peering over into the impoundment, shining a jumbo flashlight across the ghostly farm yard. The young husband’s pointing things out to the young wife in a plummy English voice that knows everything about everything. They’ve let their white Shihtzu, in its little red sweater, go spiriting around inside the mucked-up yard, rooting the ground and pissing on things. “Ser-gei?” the husband says, using his most obliging voice. “Look at him, darling, he thinks this is all brilliant.” “Isn’t he funny? He’s
so
funny,” his young wife says. “Those hungry buggers would probably eat him,” the young man observes. “Probab-lee,” the wife says. “Come along, Ser-gei, it’s 2000, old man, time to go home, time to go home.”