The Mentor (21 page)

“Why don’t
you ask him, then?  Why ya bothering me?”

Looking at
Pavan, I nodded.  Pavan said, “We looked up the records on the van and it
says that you sold the van to Dexter.”

“So?”

“That means
the guy you sold it to,” I said, “he’s not listed, then.  He could have
used your vehicle in a crime or something.  Better we come knocking rather
than the police, I would think.”

Smokey
looked to me, then to Pavan.  Then he looked past my friend and frowned.
 

“You,
what’s your name, again?”

“Pavan,
sir.”

“Pavan?
 What kind of name is Pavan?”

“It’s, uh,
it's a first name, sir.”

“What?” he
said.  “Okay, Pavan.  Put your fist up for me.”

“Okay.”
 He did.

“Take your
middle finger and point it to the sky, for me.”

“Okay.”

I turned
and saw just beyond Pavan that the woman gardening tossed her trowel down,
stood, brushed off her knees and stormed into the house.

“We better
go inside and talk about this,” Smokey said.  “She’s probably calling the
police.”

“Police?”
Pavan said looking over his shoulder.

“Yeah, I’m
not supposed to talk with her.  Court order.  Can’t even wave.”

“Wait.  Did
that look like I just flipped a nice, little old lady off?” Pavan said
following me and Smokey into the house.

“Yeah,"
the old man said.  "You don’t got a court order.”

Smokey
reached the door and hit the doorbell button; the bulldozer motor firing up
again and it grew darker by the second as the door came down.

“What’s the
musket there for, Smokey?” I asked.

“This?” he
said and tapped the rifle with an open palm.  “For snakes in the back
yard.”

“No
snake-eating spiders back there?”

The door
came down, turning the garage pitch dark.  Smokey sighed and said, “Not no
more, no.”

Chapter
Eleven

Smokey
crossed the kitchen, tugging the shade open to let some light slip through the
window.  Every corner of his home was packed tight with something:
furniture, knickknacks, dishes, fixtures… I don’t normally get very
claustrophobic—frankly, I prefer tight spaces— but this guy’s home was making
it a little tough to breathe.

He handed a
pickle jar to Pavan.

“What
flavor is it?”

“Cherry,”
Smokey said in a raspy voice.  “Heckfire, there’s a cherry floatin’ in,
for gosh sakes, boy.”

Pavan
tipped the jar of clear liquid toward his mouth and sipped tentatively.
 Then he shivered like a dog trying to dry off after falling into the
pool.

“Bah-DAMN,”
he said.  “Fuck a duck.”

“Now, I don’t
tolerate no swearing in my house, now.”

“No, no,” I
said.  “It’s Swedish.  He said he wanted another drink.”

“Don’t look
Swedish.  You Swedish?” He asked Pavan, but I don’t think my friend could
hear temporarily.

“Nah, he’s
got this disc… one-hundred sixty-two languages.  How to ask for a drink
and where the john is.”

Pavan
finally said, his voice crackling at its edges: “That’s right, sir.  No
mean to offend.”

“Well,”
Smokey said, smiling.  “You finish that up, there’s more where that comes
from.  I have a brother that’s got a still.  Lives about ninety
minutes from here, but I stop by and grab a box of jars every month or so.”

“Moonshine,”
I said as he handed me a jar.  “It’s like we’re living in the thirties or
something.”

“You should
be so lucky,” he said.

Pavan said
to me, a little shaky: “Look at my face.  My lips still there?  I
can’t feel my lips, man.”

Smokey
looked at me, squinting, as he noticed my earbud to the CD player.
 “What’s that wire coming out of your ear?  You deaf?”

“No, sir.
 Listening to the races at Belmont.  I’ve got a fin on a Chestnut in
the ninth.”

“Oh?
 What’s the name?”

“Name,
sir?”

“What’s the
horse’s name?”

“Uh,
Barely
Legal
, sir.”

“Hmm,” he
said and eased himself into a chair.  “That does sound like a bit of a
gamble.”

We were
sitting at the old man’s kitchen table.  Even with the shades up, the
clutter made the place feel wrapped up like a tomb.  

I put the
jar he’d handed me down on the table, tapped it toward Pavan.  He looked at it
and gave me a painful expression.  

“Can you
tell me about the guy who bought the van from you?”

Smokey
tossed about a quarter of his jar back like he was cooling off a glass of sweet
tea.

“Newspaper
printed it,” he said, shrugging, “and they put it up on the Interwebs, they
said.”

“Internet,”
I said.  “Sure.”

“This guy
calls me and sight unseen, he buys it,” Smokey said and drummed the table with
his thick fingers.  “Didn’t even haggle on the price.”

“Good
thing.”

“Well, I
raised it about three hundred dollars more than it was worth expecting a bit of
haggling,” he said and tipped another dose back.  “Nope.  Paid full
price.”

“Awful nice
of him.”

Smokey
stepped forward.  It was like watching a production of old clockworkings,
wobbly arms and legs working through worn-grooved patterns. 

He walked
toward the sink, then lifted the glass jar he'd been drinking from and poured a
little of the clear liquid into the black dirt of a small green, leafy plant.
 Under his breath, it sounded like he'd said something sweet to it. 

“He had to
come by at exactly one that next day to get it,” he finally said, turning
toward me and leaning on the sink.  “Exactly.  I remember that very
clearly.  Not noon, not two.  Exactly at one.”

Pavan said,
“I don’t think I feel very good.”

Smokey
leaned over and tipped the remainder of his glass into Pavan’s.  “You’re
just thirsty is all.  That’ll do ya.”

I urged him
back on track: “So, meeting's at one.”

“Yeah, but
I had an emergency doctor’s appointment the next day.  One o’clock.”

“What was
wrong with you, Smokey?”

A shrug.
 “Didn’t know at the time.  I’m old so I got bits falling off of me
all the time.  But, I was supposed to head in the next day… blood tests or
something.  I was a bit toasted when they called.  But,” he said and
walked to the fridge, tapping a couple sheets of curled paper held down by a
collection of state welcome-center magnets.  “Right here I wrote it down:
one o’clock.  Doctor Haverson’s.  Wrote it down.”

“Okay.”

“So, this
guy he says he can’t budge on the time.  But I can't miss the doctor's
visit.  So, if I want my price, I just sign the slip over to him, and he’ll
take it down to the DMV to process it.  Wants me to leave it in the glove
box.  Keys on the front right tire.”

“I see,” I
said.  

Smokey
turned from the fridge.  “I came home, and the van was gone.”

Pavan
looked a little green but, heroically, he took a sip from the glass in front of
him.  He shook again but not as violent as before.

“How’d he
pay you?  This mystery guy?”

Smokey
coughed and it rattled in his chest like a tympani dropped down a flight of
metal stairs.  He said, “That’s the funny part.  I agreed to the one
o’clock drop and he says ‘fine, take a looksee in your mailbox.’”

I asked:
“He said ‘looksee’, Smokey?”

“I’m
paraphrasing.  Trying to keep the story short, get to the payoff.
 You don’t want the set up to be too long, son.”

“I see.”

“Used to do
a little performance in my day,” Smokey said, leaned back and popped a crumpled
pack of smokes from his pocket.  “Had a little fellah that would set on my
lap, I stick my hand up his behind and make him talk without moving my lips.”

“You’re a
ventriloquist?” Pavan squeaked, face reddened.

“Nope,”
Smokey answered quickly, flicked a cig up to his lips.  “Midget named
Andre.  French guy about three and a half feet tall.”

“Sir?”

“He quit because
I wouldn’t trim my fingernails, so we broke the act up, and I joined the army.”

I stared at
Smokey, who was straight faced, and my smile grew.  He looked back but
didn’t blink once.  Finally he said, “That was a joke, boys.”

“Wow,”
Pavan said and spit out a cherry pit, which hit a groove in the table and,
amazingly, jumped right back at him and into his hair.  “I’m not following
any of this.”

I stood up
and went to the man’s fridge, which was just as cluttered as his house.  A
lot of fresh fruit, surprisingly.  Probably for the moonshine.  I saw
a can of Coke in the door and nabbed it.

Smokey
watched me and a smile pulled to his lips as he hit lit a hand rolled
cigarette.  I stood near the screen window above of the sink—not a big fan
of smoke, unless I’m the one dragging it in.  As a kid, my father used to
smoke cigars.  In the summer, I’m not kidding, he’d smoke in the car and
since the A/C was running, we weren’t allowed to roll our windows down.
 Parts of my summer childhood vaguely resembled ten minutes after last
call at a country bar.  And not in any of the good ways.

“So you go
looksee at the mailbox—“

“And right
there, in the mailbox, is an envelope of cash,” Smokey says and blows out a
tower of haze.  “Exactly the amount I’d asked for.”

I watched
Smokey for a moment as he eyeballed Pavan, who was swaying a little.  My
friend didn’t look terribly unhappy, mind you.  It just looked like some
of the operational staff on his upper floors had simply made an early day of
it.  I’d seen that look a hundred times but rarely at ten o’clock in the
morning.  Noon maybe.

“Makes you
sorta wonder,” I said, testing the waters.

“Yeah,”
Smokey said and shot me a look.  “If he had the time to drop off the
money, why didn’t he just go ahead and sign a copy of the title for me?"

He nodded.
 “You didn’t bother asking.”

“I had an
envelope of cash, son.  And I needed it, that’s why I was selling her.
 You see that’s an empty garage now.  I don’t have no car now… but at
the time, I was coming up short quite a bit.”

Pavan said,
“I think I’m hallucinating a little… I think.”  He closed his eyes.

“He may
have had a little much,” Smokey said.  “How much does he weigh?”

“How would
I know?”

“Dunno,
these days.  Thought you guys might be ‘partners’ or something.” Smokey
did the air quotes with his bony fingers, the cigarette in his right hand
bobbing like a conductor’s baton.

“He’ll be
fine,” I said.  On cue, Pavan fell face first onto the table, his brow
hitting a plate full of little metal shavings, most of which flew in the air a
short distance and landed in my friend’s hair.

“Aw, heck,”
Smokey said as he, and I lifted Pavan back into the sitting position.
 “Those were my loose staples.  Trying to glue them back together so
they’d fit in my stapler.”

“You have a
couch not covered in anything weird?” I asked.  Smokey thought about it
for a second.  He then said, “Not really.”

UP A SKINNY
STAIRCASE— made skinnier by tiny, black-and-white photos and shelves cluttered
with thimbles and novelty salt shakers and junk lining every inch—Smokey and I
carried Pavan to the end of a long corridor.  

At the very
end of the hall, the door was open to a storage area: an exercise bike turned
clothes hanger, broken furniture, a couple of cabinets, and an ancient Philco
radio.  

We slipped
into a small bedroom on the second floor.  It was a little dusty, but not
bad.  As we plopped Pavan down, I looked around and took it in.

“You not
really into the latest trends, huh Smokey?”

He held his
cigarette out the door of the room, at the end of an extended arm.  His
eyes darted from item to item, and he smiled.

“Son’s
room,” he said and in its condition, it was likely the same way the son had
left it.  I was a little surprised he didn’t mind a passed-out, mop-topped
stranger in the bed.

“He ever
come around?”

Smokey was
in profile to me and his pupils went to the corner of his eye, looking my way.

“M.I.A.
during the war,” he said, letting a sad fondness soften his face.  The
vintage sorrow had grown into some sort of warm memory that the man stored in this
room.  “He went in as infantry, crazy bastard.”  He motioned with his
head to leave the room.  “That’s logs on the fire, that is.  
Infantry
? 
Crazy son-of-a-gun.”

We went
into the room at the end of the hall with all the junk and he settled on a
couch covered in winter coats.  I found an ottoman (I think it was an
ottoman under all the sheets) and plopped down.

The room as
dark and cool.  Smokey must have had the mother of all duct systems
because I expected to be choking with dust but wasn’t.  I guess a guy in
his house all day might keep it sort of neat.  Not me, mind you, but other
guys.

My eyes
caught a series of shirts and blazers hanging across a bar, just behind
Smokey’s head.

“You sure
got a lotta stuff in here, man,” I said.  He looked over his shoulder.
 

“Ah, that’s
my boy Zachary’s stuff.”  He took a drag from his cigarette and put it out
in his leathery hands, then stuffed the butt into his shirt pocket.  I
waited for his chest to catch fire, but the shirt was made from heavy material,
like burlap or wood chips or something, and whatever spark the butt might have
had left didn’t have a chance.

“You
waitin’ for him to come home?”

“Ha,” he
said.  “You think I’m a bit crazy.  Well… I probably am, a little.
 But the years’ll do that to you.”

I said,
“Headed that way myself, sir.”

Smokey
laughed.  “No use in throwing the stuff away.  I’ve outlived my
oldest boy and my wife.  My daughter doesn’t phone anymore ‘causin’ we had
a falling out some years ago.  She’s got a family now, better off without
me.”  He stopped and looked at me.  “Usually that’s the part where
you’re supposed to say, ‘no, no you should call her, Smokey’.”

“Not my
place.”

“You think
she’s better off without me, then?”

I rubbed my
face, feeling fatigue work its way up into my bones.  “I dunno, sir.
 Within ten minutes of my friend being in your house, he’s passed out in a
dead man’s room with a pile of staples in his hair, guaranteed that when he
wakes up, he’ll find his brain’s been traded out with a busted piñata,” I said.
 “If your daughter’s got kids, it’s probably better that they don’t pop by
grandpa’s for afternoon lemonade.”

Smokey
laughed again and held both hands up in the air, together.  “Ha, she’s got
two kids.  And they’re both spoiled little assholes.”