Bruce DeSilva - Cliff Walk

Behind the wheel of her Acura, Yolanda shook her head and laughed, and I felt my breath catch on something.

“MIT and Harvard spell money,” she said. “What did you expect?”

The Cantab Lounge was in the middle of a block that lifted my spirits a little. Although it held one of those ghastly fern-filled restaurants, there was also a pizza joint that sold sloppy slices and a 7-Eleven with ancient hot dogs spinning on hot rollers-cuisine for the tipsy, late-night connoisseur.

We grabbed a parking spot behind the bar, and I walked behind my date, getting a load of the scenery. Yolanda had tucked a man’s blue oxford shirt into faded jeans that looked poured on. On the back right pocket was a familiar logo-True Religion. I don’t consider myself a prayin’ man, but…

“Mulligan, c’mon, the show’s starting soon. What are you doing back there?” I looked up to see Yolanda smirking at me from beneath the brim of a Chicago Cubs hat. She looked so gorgeous that I’d already decided to forgive her for the ball cap.

She’d finally agreed to go with me because she really wanted to hear Patricia read, didn’t want to go alone, and couldn’t find anyone else who gave a shit about poetry. Her usual ground rule applied: We were just going together, not goin ’ together.

We opened the door to the Cantab and were greeted by the smell of cheap whiskey and old fried food, the sound of heartbreak on the jukebox, and dark the way drunks like it. Before my eyes adjusted, I could barely make out the forms of guys who’d probably been glued to their stools since breakfast.

We followed a stream of people down a narrow staircase to the basement, where the poetry reading was set to start in fifteen minutes. The buzz there hinted at an optimism sorely lacking on the first floor. The room was strung with colored lights. The stage was just a small area cleared at the front of the room. A DJ was playing songs that sounded like drums mumbling.

We found stools at the bar, the last seats left. Yolanda requested white wine. The barkeep, a gravelly-voiced gal named Judy, unscrewed the cap on a green bottle and poured liberally into a plastic cup. I wanted beer, but I asked for a club soda.

“I know why this place is called the Cantab,” I said.

“Why?” Yolanda said.

“In England, a resident of Cambridge was called a Cantabrigian. So were students at the University of Cambridge. And here we are in Cambridge, Massachusetts.”

“And just how did you know that?”

“I Googled it this morning while I was looking up ways to impress you.”

The room had grown so crowded that folks were sitting on the floor beside the stage and on the stairs leading to the restrooms. We were approaching fire hazard, and Yolanda already had me a little sweaty. I could feel her thigh against mine.

“So where’s my favorite poet?” I shouted. It was tough to hear.

“How many poets have you actually read?”

“That depends.”

“On what?”

“On whether Dr. Seuss counts.”

Yolanda laughed again, and my thigh quivered a little. “That’s Patricia over there,” she said.

I followed her eyes to a corner near the front of the room where a Hershey-colored woman was signing a slim volume of poetry. I recognized her smile from the back of her books, but I was unprepared for the rest of her, looking good in black slacks and a blue silk blouse with an African print. She looked up just in time to see me staring, came straight for us, and gave Yolanda a hard hug. Seeing the two of them tangled that way sent my mind into all sorts of kinky places.

“I didn’t know you two knew each other,” I said. “I assumed Yolanda only knew you from your work, and she let me think it.”

Patricia looked at me curiously.

“My name is Mulligan. I’m Ms. Mosley-Jones’s boy toy.”

Patricia looked at Yolanda. Then back at me. Then at Yolanda again.

“In his dreams,” Yolanda said, and they both laughed.

Nobody told me that we’d have to suffer through something called an “open mic,” which consisted of folks reading poems about their cats, poems about their orgasms, poems about their cats’ orgasms, and poems that said over and over that the poet was angry, or in love, or horny, or all three. Then it was time for the main event.

Hearing Patricia was more mesmerizing than reading her. The poems, jazzy and full of language play, gave my emotions a workout. I hadn’t been that close to tears since I’d been forced to give away my dog. The dog wasn’t too thrilled about it, either.

When the reading was over, I just wanted to go someplace with Yolanda and talk about what we’d heard. Preferably her place. Preferably in a horizontal position. But first it was burgers at the fern place. I suffered through a waitress named Ariel, shoestring fries, and parsley on the plate. Yolanda and I talked about Patricia’s poetry, and she suggested names of other poets I might like. I promptly forgot them all.

The drive back to Rhode Island took too long, yet not as long as I wanted it to. We listened to Buddy Guy and John Lee Hooker and Koko Taylor and Tommy Castro. We didn’t talk much, but it was a comfortable silence. At least her half of it. I felt sweat trickle under my shirt.

Finally we reached Yolanda’s place, where Secretariat waited like a sentry at the curb across the street. I hoped he’d be waiting there for a while. Maybe until morning.

I walked her to her door. She held my hand part of the way, then broke the connection.

“That was great, Mulligan. I had a good time,” she said. “You wear culture pretty well.” She pulled her keys from her bag and unlocked her front door.

“Yolanda?”

She turned and locked eyes with me.

“I want to kiss you.”

“I know.”

She looked at me as if I were a puppy she had decided not to adopt. Then she stepped inside and closed her door so softly that I didn’t hear the latch click into place.

Next morning I woke up thinking about Yolanda. I needed to stop obsessing about her and get my head back into the job. The cops were nowhere and so was I. Clearly we were missing something, but I had no idea what it was or where to find it.

Not knowing what else to do, I decided to take another look at Sal Maniella. He’d come out of hiding because, as he put it, “something needed my attention.” He’d offered me a job because, according to him, I was “an expert at digging up hard-to-get information.” And what was it I’d overheard him say on the afternoon of the Pawtucket kidnapping? Oh yeah. He’d said: “Sonuvabitch. It’s not over.”

Sal knew more than he was telling, and I had the feeling he was up to something more than making dirty movies.

I ran the possibilities over in my mind while I unloaded my grandfather’s gun. I doubted Sal was involved in the child porn business, but it sounded like he was keeping tabs on it. If his interest wasn’t business, maybe it was personal. I put the gun back in the shadow box and returned it to its place of honor on my wall. Whatever Sal was up to, there was no reason to think it would involve sending Black Shirt and Gray Shirt after me again.

In the newsroom, I spent the morning using every search engine I knew of to research him again online. I didn’t find much, and I learned nothing new. After lunch at the diner, I walked across the Providence River to the red-brick courthouse and looked him up in the card catalog that lists the docket numbers of every criminal case filed in the state in the last fifty years. Nothing. Then I checked the card catalog for civil cases and learned he’d been sued a few times (payroll disputes with three of his employees, an alienation of affections suit, and a slip-and-fall on his front steps) and that he’d sued a few people himself (a manufacturer in a dispute over some faulty video equipment, a contractor who did a shoddy job roofing his house, and a neighbor he accused of poisoning his dog). No help there. To be thorough, I ran the same check on Vanessa and came up empty.