George Higgins - A change of gravity

Got to ask yourself: Is this guy content? Was this really what he wanted out of life? Maybe; wouldn't've been my choice.

"I think about that. People who catch my attention for some reason, I begin to wonder how they feel about the way their lives turned out. If they think they made the right decisions. How the bad ones hurt them.

How far they've come; how far they could've gotten if they'd been a little smarter, had a little better luck. Are they happy now; or are they disappointed? How I'll feel some day when I'm their age and now I'm the one who's looking back and seeing how my decisions all turned out."

"Well, he's made himself a bunch of money, hasn't he?" Merrion said.

"Didn't you also tell me Chassy plays the market like Chuck Berry plays guitar? That oughta happy him some."

"Oh shit, yes," Hilliard said. "My father's the Spring family dentist.

Taken care of their teeth for years. Made a good many of them in fact;

Spring family's got very weak teeth. They've all needed bridgework and plates. He used to talk, they came in. He knew for a fact that Chassy'd made a huge amount of money, stocks and bonds and so forth.

That didn't bother my father; what did was that the judge never gave him a hot tip."

"Bastard," Merrion said.

"You'd think that, wouldn't you," Hilliard said. "Least the cocksucker could do, knows what stock is going up, is tell the people that he knows, so they could make some money too. Not everybody, no, just people that he sees around a lot like my father, for example, for his teeth. Not advising them, so you'd expect him to be calling them up every day or so and saying: "Psst, buy GM; sell Coca-Cola," anything like that. No, just that he'd at least have the common decency, he knows he's going to see them, like an appointment with my father, let them in on whatever he thinks might be looking especially good.

"Dad said it to him once when he had him in the chair. Said: "Tell me, Chassy, aren't you just the tiniest bit afraid now? Doesn't it make you nervous to be sitting helplessly here in the chair with a bib on, and me standing over you with this high-speed electric drill I'm about to shove into your mouth? I could hurt you with this thing, if I'm not careful. I should think you'd want to do everything within your power to make sure you're in my good graces so I'm going to do my best not to hurt you."

"Dad and Chassy were in high school together. Most of my father's patients're like that: people he's known all his life. So it's okay for him to talk to them that way, and they can talk that way to him.

"The judge opens his eyes he's like most people, my father says, closes his eyes so he can't see the drill or the needle sits up straight in the chair and he asks my father what the hell he's got on his mind. And Dad puts it to him: "People say you make a lot of money in the market.

I believe them. Mind telling me how come you never see your way clear to letting me in on the deal?"

"Judge sits back and closes his eyes again. "Don't mind at all," he says. "I've made some money in the market, as have many. I've also lost some money in the market, as many others have as well. All of my profits have come from investing my own money well, mine and Delia's.

I've risked it to increase it. When my risks have paid off, I've had profits, been happy. And when they haven't, I've had losses. Then I've been unhappy. I always try to buy stocks that are going to go up;

I can't claim I always succeed.

"If I recommend you buy a certain stock, and you do it and make money, you'll be happy. You may even call me up and thank me. But you'll expect to keep the profit as you should; it was your money that you risked. If you lose money, though, as you very well might, then you'll be unhappy. And even though of course I know you wont expect me to make good your loss, you certainly wont call me up and thank me. In fact you'll probably secretly blame me for your loss, because if I hadn't put it into your head to buy that stock, you wouldn't've lost your money.

"So, when I come in here for a filling after that, what you'll remember wont be that you solicited the recommendation that caused you to lose money it will be that you lost your money because you did something that I told you to do. And therefore you might decide that instead of trying very hard not to hurt me, or hurt me as little as possible, you wouldn't mind hurting me at all, because I made you lose your money. So it would probably be best for me if I found another dentist.

"I don't want to do that. You've been a good dentist. I've been coming to you for years. I've got you all trained. I'm too old now to break in a new one. I think much too highly of your dental skills to risk having to do that, by giving you market advice that makes it so I don't dare to come in here anymore.

"Now having said that I must warn you: If you hurt me now, and I decide you did it on purpose because I refused to make you rich, I'll have to have you arrested and put in jail for battery."

"My father told Chassy he thought his explanation sounded reasonable and he'd do his best not to hurt him with the drill. He said what he should've said at that point was that if Chassy didn't start paying his bills on time instead of making him wait ninety days, he'd have him arrested, judge or not, and thrown in jail as a deadbeat. Spring family always took their sweet time paying their dental bills. But he didn't. Basically my father likes Chassy all right; just doesn't like having to wait to get paid for fixing his teeth."

"Okay then," Merrion said, "Spring hasn't got a horse in this race.

Judge Cavanaugh: Has he got a family? I don't know."

"The Boy Judge," Hilliard said, chuckling. "Fuckin' Freddie Dillinger? That's what he called Lennie Cavanaugh, his appointment was first announced ever since then, too, every time he's been in the news.

It's really a wonder, nobody's ever horsewhipped Fred; just beat the old-fashioned shit out of him, some of the things he's put in that column Nineteen-fifty-nine that was, when Lennie got that job; remember because that was the year Mercy and I got married. He was pretty young, though not even thirty, I recall. So that'd make him now, what, thirty-five, thirty-six? Nah, no kid of his'd be old enough. Might have a relative out there someplace, though, who's had trouble dressing and feeding himself. We wouldn't know."

"Yeah, he could," Merrion said. "He could also have trouble digesting fried fatty foods and we wouldn't know that either. Look, I don't want to sit around with you and do our damnedest to dream up a hundred good reasons why I can't get this job. What I want to do is figure out how we can do the same thing for me that the two of us've done for so many other people, nowhere as deserving as I am: figure out some way so that I can get this job that's what I want to do."

"I'm sorry," Hilliard said. "I'm so used to doing what we do when we get a job-hunter in here, I guess I must've forgotten who I was talking to."

"Yeah," Merrion said. "Well, this one time I'll overlook it. I did what you said, got some background on Lane. Since according to you he seems to be the chief hurdle standing 'tween me and the job. He's got a whole bunch of kids, eight of them. But only two of them don't already have jobs, and both of them're married daughters that don't even live around here. One of them lives in Japan or some other place nobody ever heard of. Her husband's with the State Department. The other one's married to some guy who works for a paint company. All the others've got jobs."

"How'd you get this?" Hilliard said.

"Turns out my mother knows him," Merrion said. "His wife I guess isn't a very good cook. He gets all their pies and cookies from Slade's Bakery. You know the one I mean. Used to also be a cafeteria, back when we still had the trains coming through. Ma says he's a regular bear for the cookies, oatmeal raisin, chocolate chip. Goes through couple dozen a week, half a dozen or so at a time. Monday nights, Wednesday nights, then a dozen he comes in on Friday. Plus a loaf of the brown bread, for Saturday night I guess him and the wife have baked beans. He's never in a very big hurry, Ma says, always got plenty of time to chat. He calls her "Polly," like all her friends do, and she calls him "Mister Lane." Now."