Ed Gorman - Night Kills

"Yes."

"I think we learn from each relationship. Each one makes us better."

"You and Oprah."

"You're getting serious again."

"Heaven forbid."

So, they danced. They didn't talk. There was nothing to say. Brolan looked around. People were starting to pick up all the dinner jackets and cummerbunds and high heels they'd tossed so carelessly into the shadows. Lights were coming on. Nothing was more depressing than bars at closing time. You got a hard, clean look at the ravages of liquor and age and loneliness. He knew he would look like shit, an ageing man trying to stay young. But she would look beautiful. She always did. Even at dawn, in need of a toothbrush and a hairbrush and a shower, she somehow managed still to look beautiful.

"Could I ask you a question?" he said.

"The other-man question?"

His cheeks grew hot. He felt like a fumbling teenager. "Yeah, the other-man question."

"I've tried to be polite."

"In other words, none of my business."

"In other words, none of your fucking business." And with that she jerked herself from his arms and walked quickly across the dance floor and into the shadows.

But before he could go after her, Foster was there and slapping him on the back. All the house lights were up. You could see the cracks and the water stains in the decor. You could see the age and the alcohol on faces. Everybody looked blown out now and long past the joy of winning the account. There was even a certain sadness, and Brolan felt it especially.

"You're driving, my friend."

"What?" Brolan said, forcing himself to look away from Kathleen, who was turning toward the front of the place, hurrying.

Foster dangled the keys to his Jag in front of Brolan's face. "Walk a line, my friend."

"Oh, shit."

"C'mon. This is serious business."

They went through this every time they drank. Who should be driving. Brolan tended to hold his liquor a little better, so usually he drove. He walked a straight line across the dance floor. He had no problem. Earlier he had felt he was getting drunk. By this time he felt sober in an empty, almost cold way.

He took the keys from Foster, and they started to the door.

The back pats and cheers were considerably slower and more reserved now. "You guys did a great job," somebody from the art department said to Brolan and Foster. Foster drunkenly issued his standard public relations line. "We couldn't have done it without everybody in the agency pitching in."

But Brolan was having a hard time talking at all. He felt he wanted to cry or smash something, or both.

Back in the fifties trips to downtown Minneapolis always meant a movie at the RKO Orpheum on Hennepin or the Radio City Theatre on South Ninth. Afterward you hung around the Rexall Jacobsen Drug Company trying to catch the attention of pretty Swedish girls who couldn't have cared less about your stupid grinning and flirting, and then checked out the latest copies of Mad and Amazing Stories (with those neat Valigurksy covers) or-if you were feeling especially brave-a magazine with pretty girls in it. In those days the tallest downtown building was the Foshay Tower, and the biggest events those involving Senator Hubert Humphrey and his rallies for such causes as old-age benefits and civil rights. Of course in those days the remnants of Minnesota's old Communist party still existed, though its members tended to be hard-headed Norwegians instead of soft-bellied Russians.

Brolan recalled all this as they made their way down Seventh Street to the parking garage. Foster was drunker than he'd thought, stumbling and weaving along, twice bumping into Brolan. In the graffiti-covered elevator taking them to the tenth story of the parking garage, Foster even cupped his mouth as if he were going to vomit.

"We did it, pally," Foster said when he said anything at all. "We did it. We picked up goddamn Down Home."

"Not we, my friend. You. I'm just along for the ride."

"You're the best copywriter round."

Brolan grinned and clapped him on the shoulder. Foster had always been a brother to him, maybe to substitute for the brother he really had. Steve was a physician in Chicago, not only successful but a mass-going Catholic with a Betty Crocker wife and three Leave It to Beaver kids. The time Brolan's eighteen-year-old son, Rick, had been arrested for public intoxication at a Vikings game, Steve had called under the guise of commiserating. But actually Steve had wanted to remind his older brother what a mess he'd made of his personal life and say it was no wonder his eldest was carrying on in the same tradition.

In what he later had to admit was guilt, Brolan had exploded, telling his preening, perfect brother exactly what he thought of him and his Barbie doll family. Then he'd smashed the receiver down so hard, it pulled the wall phone from its moorings.

But with Foster it was different. Foster thought Brolan was crazy, too, but unlike Steve, he had a real affection for Brolan, even for Brolan's excesses. In fact, at a business retreat once, Foster had admitted that he sort of lived vicariously through Brolan. At least sometimes. All those babes.

So, it was easy for Brolan to like Foster. To feel protective of him, grateful for everything. To be always thanking him for the way he held the agency together and made sure they always made payroll (when you had thirty-nine employees, payroll was your cross and payday your Good Friday) and for the fact that each year they showed a better and better profit.

He was thinking all these fond things of his good pal Foster when the shorter man said, "Oh, shit," turned to the corner of the elevator, and let go with a stream of yellowish chunky barf.

"You okay?" brother Brolan said, trying to avoid exactly looking at the mess.

Foster nodded yes and gave him the thumbs-up sign and then started barfing again.

Brolan would sure hate to be the next guy who got on the elevator.

The parking garage smelled of the day's fading heat and car oil. Only a few vehicles sat in the shadows on the slanting floor. The cars, even Brolan's new 300-E Mercedes, looked like tired beasts dozing. The garage's low ceiling always made Brolan nervous. He suffered from mild claustrophobia. He could imagine the roofs caving in and his being buried alive, suffering for hours, gasping and crying out for each breath, pinned in the darkness and dust waiting for death itself.

They went past Foster's copper-coloured Jag. Foster didn't even look at it. Between his excess weight and the slanting floor, he was out of breath. "Son of a bitch," he said. "This is like mountain climbing." Then he added, "I'm so goddamned fat."

Brolan said what he always said, what Foster wanted him always to say. "You're not fat. You just need to lose a few pounds."

It was sort of like telling Brolan that his hair was really brown beneath all that white stuff.

"Sure, pally, sure," Foster said.

As they reached the car, Brolan thought he heard the exit door nearest them squawk shut. For a long, irrational moment there in the deep shadows of the garage, the smell of exhaust harsh in his nostrils, he had the sense that somebody had been watching him as he'd made his way with Foster up the ramp.

Then he thought he heard distant footsteps running down the concrete stairs behind the metal exit door.

But who would have been watching him, and why? He realised suddenly how isolated they were up here; how deep the shadows were; how far away the city seemed, even though they were in its belly.

He might have mentioned all this to Foster but what was the use of talking to somebody as drunk as Foster was?

He walked over to the Mercedes, the passenger side. First get Foster all squared away, all buckled up, then take care of himself.