Stuart Kaminsky - He Done Her Wrong

He hung up. I needed someone to feel sorry for me, so I wandered into Shelly’s office where he was humming “The Carioca” and patting the mouth of the soldier with a gray towel as if he were a baby who had dribbled a mouthful of banana mush.

“Don’t bite on that for a week or two,” Shelly paused in his humming to say.

The kid nodded and looked at the door.

“That filling and stuff will hold all right,” Shelly went on as he chomped on his cigar, “but it’s not made to be abused. You’re going to have to be careful chewing on that side from now on. Your new life motto is ‘Eat Carefully and Chew on the Right.’”

The kid nodded again, got up, dug out a wallet, and counted out bills, which he handed to Shelly, who removed his cigar. Shelly always removed his cigar to count money. Satisfied, he beamed at the kid, who beat it into the dangerous halls of the Farraday Building.

“Shel,” I said softly. “Anne’s getting married Sunday.”

Shelly looked at me and blinked behind his bottle-bottom glasses.

“Too bad,” he said shaking his head. “Say, did you have any money down with Arnie on the Sugar Ray Robinson fight? Knocked out Banner in the second. I made twenty bucks.”

“Anne’s getting married,” I repeated as he stuffed the money into his wallet.

“Anne?”

“My former wife,” I explained.

“That airlines guy you were talking about? Ralph?” he said, pushing his glasses back and reaching for a dental journal.

“That’s the one,” I admitted.

Shelly sat in his own chair, magazine in his lap, and looked at me with sympathy.

“Mildred and I want to visit her brother in Cleveland,” he said. “You think Anne could get this guy to give us a break on tickets?”

“I’ll ask him, Shel. Thanks for listening.”

“What are friends for,” he said with a knowing smile and settled down with his journal.

The phone call came an hour later. I had spent the hour trying to think about something else. A client once tried to teach me meditation as payment for finding his runaway sister. I got the idea down all right, but I couldn’t put it into practice. My thoughts, my back, the damn city, and my dreams kicked me in my flat nose every time I tried. The guy had assured me that if I just kept at it I’d make a breakthrough one day. I had almost given up on that ever happening, but I gave it a try every so often. The problem was that I had chosen the bronze Alcatraz paperweight as the focus of my attention during meditation and it was resting somewhere inside my Buick.

“Forty-six Buena Suerte in Plaza Del Lago,” came Phil’s voice over the phone.

“Got it,” I said.

“You going to the wedding?”

“Sure,” I said. “Wouldn’t miss it for a dozen tacos and all the Pepsi in Ventura.”

The Graysons had a phone, but there was no answer. It took me five minutes to find Plaza Del Lago on the Mobil Oil map I kept in my bottom drawer. After two more minutes I decided that the map was just too old, that Plaza Del Lago was one of the hundreds of new towns that had sprung up in the last decade, a period my map didn’t cover.

I found it at about the point where I was going to give up, climb in my Buick, and make what would probably be my final fruitless attempt to pull a teardrop of affection from Anne. Plaza Del Lago wasn’t on the coast where I had been looking. It was inland, beyond Palmdale, almost touching the Mojave Desert, maybe sixty miles from Hollywood off of State Highway 138.

Shelly was absorbed in his dental journal when I walked out. I don’t think he heard me say that I’d be gone till Monday. It didn’t matter; I wasn’t expecting any calls.

The damage to the Buick wasn’t too bad: a dent in the roof that cut through four or five layers of paint and a broken window. I fished out fragments of glass, placed Alcatraz gently on the front seat, and drove to No-Neck Arnie’s. He was working on a recent Caddy.

“Arn, this is an emergency,” I said, getting out.

He sighed, the sigh of the put-upon mechanic, a sigh that Alexander the Great probably got from his blacksmith when he came in with a battle-battered chariot.

“I see,” he said, touching the dent. “Bombed by an eagle with kidney stones.”

“No,” I answered. “Alcatraz fell from the sky.”

Arnie didn’t care whether I was joking or not. He fixed cars, took a few bets on the side, and went through life without a sense of humor, which is probably located somewhere in the neck.

“Forget about the dent,” he said. “Live with it. There’s a war on. This car ain’t going to make it through it. I’ll fix the window or give it a patch, some clear, thick see-through stuff. If I fix the window, it stays here two, three days. I can put the patch on in five minutes for five bucks. You want my advice?”

“No,” I said. Five bucks was a hell of a lot for some tape and see-through stuff.

He decided to give me the advice anyway, but he looked around to be sure no one was listening. To do this, Arnie had to turn his entire tub of a body.

“Let me junk the parts on this carroodi and you can subtract it from the cost of that ’38 Ford we were talking about the other day. It would only run you two hundred and twenty bucks.”

“The other day you said I could have the Ford for two hundred with no junk parts. No questions.” I reminded him.

“There have been other bidders,” he confided, looking down at his grease-black hands and rubbing the tips of his fingers together.

“I’ll keep the carroodi for a few days and think about it,” I said. “Meanwhile, try to keep the price on that Ford from hitting three hundred.”

“I’ll try,” he said laying a hand on my shoulder and doing something with his mouth that resembled a smile.

I had never considered Arnie a friend, and he wasn’t bringing us any closer together, and I could give lopsided smiles with the best of them. We could have stood there grinning like baboons in Griffith Park for an hour or so, but I had no time for such jollity.

“Put the stuff on the back window, and here’s five before the price goes up.”

Ten minutes later I was on my way to Plaza Del Lago after Arnie told me that I still had time to put a few bucks on the Kentucky Derby, which was scheduled to start in an hour.

“Put two bucks on Shutout,” he confided, leaning into my window.

“Next year,” I said, glancing back through the blue thickness of my double-layered rear window.

I drove for an hour, listening to the radio. A big battle was going on at the gates of Mandalay. I tried not singing “The Road to Mandalay,” but it came out anyway. The sports news came on around one and I was told that Willard Marshall was expected to be a big gun for Mel Ott’s Giants. I remembered seeing Ott a couple of times in exhibition games, that bottle of a bat and that foot up in the air when he moved into the ball. Next weekend I’d get my nephews Dave and Nat and take them to a ball game somewhere, if my sister-in-law Ruth would let me. She didn’t really trust me with them since the last time I had taken the boys out, promising to take them to see Dumbo , and dropping them instead at a triple horror show that gave Davie nightmares for a week. When the announcer told me that Shutout had won the Derby, I turned the radio off.

The land went flat about two minutes past Dot’s Dixie Gas Station, just inside Antelope Valley, where I had stopped to fill the tank and buy a candy bar.

Antelope Valley was named for the herds that roamed there a few hundred years earlier at the edge of the Mojave. Low hills, the Lovejoy Buttes, separate the valley from the desert. The twenty-five-hundred-square-mile valley is supplied with water from a giant natural reservoir underground and runoff from the mountains.