The Magician (21 page)

They talked some more, had some more beer, let the plan build, went back to the game, which seemed less interesting now, decided finally to give up their lane, talked some more at the bar between beers, hashing out what they’d need to do the job properly.

When Corrigan said, “Well, we’re not going to write a letter to the paper, right?” they all laughed.

“What are we waiting for?” asked Urek.

The five took off in three cars, headlights on, tailgating each other like a short funeral procession.

The bartender at the alley was on the phone to Thomassy the minute they left. Mike was Thomassy’s favorite stool pigeon. Most people in town who got into trouble were bowlers, not golfers, and if Thomassy had had his tipoff man at the Sleepy Hollow Country Club bar, he wouldn’t have seen any clients out of it. Those people, on the rare occasions when they got into trouble and couldn’t sweep it under the carpet, used multiple-named New York City law firms to stand up for them. On the other hand, the people who bowled produced almost all of the first-, second-, and third-degree assault, manslaughter, and wife-beating cases, their offspring the car thefts and late-night break-ins that brought them to court in handcuffs, Thomassy at their side.

Thomassy tipped Mike the bartender enough to make Mike think of himself as a moonlighting staff member instead of a squealer. Mike had gotten so proficient he no longer reported bar talk that would lead nowhere. He knew the difference between mischief and trouble better than most cops. Thomassy was a good teacher.

“Scarlatti, Eldon, Corrigan, Urek, and Feeney, destination the new rec hall for a paint job,” he reported.

“You sure it was Urek?”

“These fellows is all regulars around here for years.”

“Was the kid with him?”

“No kids.”

“Why the rec hall?”

“A clip from the paper, something about a letter signed by a bunch of kids, make sense?”

“How much they have to drink?”

“They were pretty beery.”

Thomassy glanced at his watch. The kids would still be there. Did the rec hall have a phone? Would, the kids believe him? If Urek’s old man got in trouble with the cops, it’d kill his chances with a jury for the kid. If Ed Japhet got hurt again, it’d tear the case to pieces.

“You still there?” asked Mike.

“They know you know?”

“You know me, I serve drinks and I’m deaf.”

“Okay.”

“Yeah, well, maybe you’ll get a homicide out of it.”

Thomassy hung up on Mike’s chuckle. Within minutes he was speeding toward the rec hall.

*

The five men had to stop at two of their homes before they had enough supplies, a four-inch paintbrush for each of them, two half-full gallon cans of black paint, a steel rake for ripping, a hammer, a crowbar.

Corrigan wanted to add an ax.

“No axes,” said Paul Urek, clearly the leader.

“I got something better than that in back of the car,” said Corrigan, pointing to the five-gallon can of gasoline. “It’s full.”

“You leave that in the car,” said Urek. “The rec hall’s got houses on both sides. A fire would sweep the block. Besides, half the volunteer firemen are still at the alley, and you don’t want them to lose all their business tonight.”

The men laughed. Urek said, “Let’s get moving. They close the place at eleven.”

Thomassy was racing up South Highland, anxious to get to the rec hall as far ahead of the men as he could, when suddenly a yapping brown mongrel darted off the sidewalk. Thomassy couldn’t swerve either left or right because of the oncoming traffic and the parked cars, so he jammed the brake to the floor, glad his seat belt was buckled because his body rose toward the windshield as the car screeched to a stop, rocking forward, and from the plunk and the hideous dog-cry he knew he had hit. No car was behind him. He looked left and right. Was it possible no one had seen?

He reversed the car ten feet till he could see the thrashing animal, which needed a bullet through its brain but Thomassy had no gun and didn’t dare phone the police. He shifted the gear lever and, with tires squealing, drove around the helpless dog and away from his first hit-and-run accident.

Outside the rec hall Thomassy mopped his dripping face with his handkerchief, feeling the sweat all over his back and chest and even inside his pants legs. But maybe he could make up for the hit-run with what he was about to do if God gave him the time.

The kids were startled to see Thomassy come in the front door. Adults rarely visited the place.

Thomassy peered into the throbbing noise of the large room. It was hard to
see. The colored lights had some kind of device in front of them to make the colors seem to whirl and blob in random shapes on the kids dancing and on the postered walls. Thomassy scanned the dancers for a familiar face.

Ed and Lila both recognized him immediately. He saw them about the same time. Since he didn’t know who among the kids was in charge, he threaded through the dancers toward Ed. The rock blast from the corner stereo was deafening. Thomassy said practically into Japhet’s ear, “You’ve got to clear the place out fast.”

“Why?”

“Where’s the phonograph?”

Ed pointed. Thomassy strode over to it, avoiding the dancers. Gently he picked the arm off the record. The dancers gradually stopped, though the colored lights continued to swirl.

“What’s the matter?” said Ed.

“Can I have your attention,” said Thomassy into the left-over babble. “There’s very little time. A group of men who are high on beer are overreacting to the letter in the paper today. They’re on the way over here right now, looking for trouble.”

A red-headed boy clenched his fists.

“Now, we don’t want any trouble,” said Thomassy.

“We can take care of ourselves,” said the red-headed boy.

“I know some of these men,” said Thomassy. “You can tell the police if you want, or you can clear out of here.”

He noticed that some of the girls were heading for the door. “That’s good,” he said. “There’s been enough trouble in this town.”

Thomassy took the red-headed kid by the arm, figuring that if he could get him moving, the rest would go too. He whispered something in the kid’s ear.

“Gasoline?”

“Maybe.”

One girl said, “It’s crazy. Why would they do anything?”

“Shut up,” said her frightened escort. There was a general move toward the back door.

Thomassy didn’t like the way the Japhet kid was looking at him. He could get into real trouble if Urek and his friends found out who warned the kids.

“Please,” said Thomassy, “trust me,” not knowing why they should trust him.

But they did.

He made sure they locked the front door before they left through the back. He turned the lights off himself, after someone had pointed to the switch box, which was around the corner near the small kitchen. He had to hurry one boy along who was slow about putting his records back into their jackets. When he was sure they were all out, he closed the back door.

His heart still pounding, Thomassy found his way in the darkness around the side of the rec hall toward the front where he had left his car. He was about to cross the sidewalk to it when the three-car procession came around the corner almost directly at him. He stepped back into the shadows, hoping the men had not seen him.

Chapter 22

Behind the bushes, uncomfortable on haunches, Thomassy watched the cortege of cars stop, five doors swing open to let five men out, the distinctive, different slams of the car doors, the momentary huddle at the lead car as they looked at the darkened building, and then Paul Urek motioning them along.

“What do they do in the dark?” said Scarlatti.

“It’s usually lit up,” said Eldon.

Paul Urek knocked on the door.

It was Feeney, brave in company, who kicked in the small window. The sound of glass was music. The other four laughed, and it took only a second before they were battering the door, and the hinge gave.

Urek lifted the bolt on the second hinge, and they were in.

He flipped the light switch, expecting to see a mob of scared kids backing against the walls.

The fucking place was empty.

Thomassy, unused to squatting, was glad to stand. He edged around the bush. Something caught his left shoe, and he went forward, breaking his fall on both hands. He brushed away the dirt he could not see and careful not to trip again, found his way to the side window.

The five faces, frozen in anger, at that moment broke their surprise. The men went into action, ripping down posters, spinning records like thin discuses across the room to split and shatter when the edges hit the far wall. Paint cans opened, they dipped and smeared LOVE AMERICA across the wall. Each streaked obscenities of his own devising, except Paul Urek, who waited till they had exhausted themselves, and wrote, neater than the others, across the wall facing the window through which Thomassy peered: KIDS ARE SHIT.

As they closed their paint cans and assembled their things near the front door, Thomassy saw Eldon wipe his brush on the floor in the unmistakable shape of a swastika. Scarlatti and Eldon laughed. Then they were gone through the rectangle from which the front door swung.

Three sets of sealed beams went on, the third car lighting the second, the second the first, and the first the road, as they drove off.

Inside the building, Thomassy stepped over the torn posters on the floor to study the mess on the walls. He took the white, neatly folded handkerchief from his breast pocket and, knowing it would never be usable again, smeared the still-wet drawing on the floor in the hope of making it indecipherable.

Chapter 23

Lila answered the door, a finger to her lips, and motioned Ed toward the living room where the meeting was already under way. He sat down on the floor next to some of the other kids.

The Motherwells had a hopeless proposition. They wanted to hit every door in town for a donation for redoing the new rec hall. It was dismissed on the grounds that it would take too long and that most people wouldn’t give anyway.

Morey Ruff, who turned up a minute after Ed, jumped in with an offer of five bucks if ten of the other kids would match it. “We could buy the paint and do it ourselves in a weekend.”

Frankel protested. Why should some pay and others not, when they all used the rec hall. He suggested a dollar each, but compulsory.

Liz Crowell asked what about the kids who couldn’t afford it.

“Everybody can afford a dollar,” said Frankel.

“It’ll take too long,” said Morey Ruff.

Ed didn’t know where the idea came from, but it came into his head while the others were talking, and his first instinct was to leave, to just excuse himself, say he wasn’t feeling well or something, and go. He listened some more. He hated committees. Nobody was taking the lead. There were now more proposals than people. The conversation was getting heated, and then Liz said, “Ed, you’re the only one who hasn’t spoken up. Do you have any ideas?”

He wished Lila wasn’t in the room. “Well, I don’t know if you’ll like my idea.”

“Can’t tell until you say it,” said Fred Frankel.

Ed got up. You couldn’t speak sitting on the floor. He had an impulse to pace. He felt nervous, which was ridiculous. He put his hands on the back of Pat Toombs’s chair. “I think we ought to leave the rec hall as it is,” he said.

There were half a dozen questions all at once, like how do you dance in a wreck like that, rain would come in the broken window, and so on.

Pat Toombs turned around in her chair and said, “Why?”

“Look,” said Ed, “I haven’t worked out all the details, but I think we ought to keep it as a museum.”

They were all looking at him.

“It’ll help us remember. Listen, they kept some of the Nazi camps as museums, but they cleaned them up first, which was a mistake. Don’t you think they ought to have roped off the grass at Kent State and put four dummies on the grass where the students fell? How else do people remember, unless you leave reminders.”

He looked at their faces as his idea sank in.

“I mean,” he said, “you can put a plastic sheet outside where the window’s broken to keep the rain out, but keep the broken glass as it is inside. Leave the torn posters hanging. Keep ‘Kids are shit.’”

“Where’ll we dance?” asked Pat Toombs, looking up at him from the chair.

“I don’t know. We’ll have to fix up another place, I guess.”

There was another silence in which people avoided each other’s eyes, and then Kevin Mooney, who hadn’t spoken before said, “Wow, a museum.”

“My father won’t like the idea,” said Ed, “but I’ll bet anything it’ll have an effect on him.”

Perhaps that was the conclusive argument because in their entire lexicon of teen-age strategies, the most difficult was to come up with something their parents couldn’t argue down.

“I think it’s looking for trouble,” Lila said.

“We’ve had the trouble,” said Ed. “This may be a way of avoiding trouble like that in the future.”

There wasn’t much discussion. Lila voted against the proposal. Everyone else voted in favor.