Michael Collins - Act of Fear

We were on the couch that she bought at a sell-off of old hotel furniture. It is big enough for a giant to stretch out on, if there were any giants any more. I like that couch. I lay at one end, and Marty lay at the other. Our legs touched. I told her about Swede and the Olsens. She frowned.

‘Can you drop it? It has a smell, a stink.’

‘I took the fifty. I’ll go a little longer.’

‘This Jo-Jo has trouble, baby,’ she said. ‘He took his own way out. Maybe he doesn’t need you.’

I said that she changed her name because she wanted a new identity and that I tell stories about my lost arm because I don’t like the real story. Those things are only partly true. She changed her name for a new identity, yes, but also to forget the old identity. She wanted to shut out the past because her past, her childhood and her family, was her trouble. I tell stories about the arm not so much because I’m ashamed of the real way I lost it, but because how I lost it is part of my youth. My youth is one of my troubles. So when I see people stare at my missing arm I tell yarns.

I tell them that I lost it on Normandy Beach with the first wave under that terrible fire. I was in the OSS and lost it trying to assassinate Hitler. I was trapped in a sinking submarine and had to cut the arm off to free myself and reach the surface. I tell it many ways, most of them involved with the war, and, strangely, my listeners usually believe me. I suppose we all really want to believe what we are told, and the war is a long time ago now. My lies are as real now as the true stories, even to the men who were there. All my stories are exciting, even heroic. Why not; people like heroes and excitement even second hand in a tavern. Actually, of course, I never made the war, since the arm was gone by then, except on merchant ships, which is how I started on the sea.

None of that is the point. The point is that Marty understands troubles and the way people use to solve troubles. She understands a man’s way out; she has her own. She does not go around knocking anyone’s way out. She knows that some use whiskey and some use women, that some use junk and some watch TV ten hours a day, that some turn on with pot or acid and some beat their kids, that some chase girls up dark alleys and some chase boys. She knows that most of us use some kind of act, some mask we show the world and usually come to believe is our real face after all. She knows that everyone has a hideout. The hideout can be a saloon or a needle in the vein. It can be a bowling alley twice a week or a bridge club every day or a fraternal club where they wear silk robes and funny hats and give ritual oaths and passwords. It can be the Nazi Party or the Fascist Party, a tree house or just the upstairs back bedroom. She knows that the hideout can be a dream or just a dark place inside a man that comes out alone in bed in the dead of night. She knows her own hideout, and she knows that one of mine is the stories of my arm.

It was the stories that first made her look at me. They intrigued her; she recognized them as a hideout. The first weeks she made me tell her every story I could dream up. Except the real one. She only let me tell her the real yarn a long time later, after I had the key to her apartment. We still lie around in bed and she makes me tell a story. She always acts as if she believed the story. I suppose because she knows that, in a way, I almost believe them myself. Why not? As Marty says, what is true when you come down to it? Especially what is really true that we tell, or know, about ourselves?

‘Jo-Jo has no troubles,’ I said. ‘Not to hear Petey Vitanza tell it, and not that I can find.’

‘A good boy who saves his money, has ambition, and works hard,’ Marty said. She sipped her martini. ‘But he’s run, and his father tries to beat you to stop you finding him.’

‘To stop me from even looking,’ I said. ‘There’s a difference. He wants me to stop looking.’

‘No one knows everything about someone else,’ Marty said. ‘This Jo-Jo is in trouble the Vitanza boy doesn’t know about.’

‘Sure,’ I said, ‘but what?’

‘Look at his dream and his family,’ Marty said. ‘One or the other, and sometimes both. You take me, Dan. Sixteen and a lush for a mother, and the college boys treated me like dirt because I was a town girl and not sorority. I decided to be free and famous. A hundred-to-one it’s the family.’

‘Patrolman Stettin is in it somewhere,’ I said. ‘Maybe.’

‘And you get mixed up in a cop beating for fifty bucks?’

‘Maybe Jo-Jo’s already dead,’ I said. ‘Damn it, Marty, I can’t even buy that. All he had to do was go to the cops. They’d have had a cop mugger so fast no one would have noticed Jo-Jo.’

‘So what are you going to do? You decided to be a private cop.’

‘I decided to eat,’ I said. ‘A private cop was the only experience I had to sell around here. If I went back to sea, who would take care of you?’

‘The way you take care of me you could have picked up coins in the street. But go ahead, worry about who would take care of me. I like you to worry about that.’

‘You sound like you want me to make you honest.’

‘Maybe I’m getting domestic,’ she said. ‘Or just tired.’

‘That’ll do it,’ I said, ‘and don’t scare me.’

‘Would it scare you so much?’

‘No,’ I said, ‘and that’s the part that really scares me. I might even like it.’

‘I wish I could put your arm back,’ Marty said.

She was lying there in the dark of the big room, smiling at me from the far end of the couch. Face to face ten feet apart with our legs touching. I touched her leg with my hand. She sipped her martini.

‘No one can put back what’s missing, but you put me back into the world,’ I said.

‘Is that what I do?’

She does. Sometimes Marty is the only reason I can think of for getting out of bed in the morning. Sometimes even Marty isn’t reason enough. I get out of bed anyway. There is a very big question in that fact somewhere.

‘Let’s go to bed,’ she said.

It takes a one-armed man longer to undress. Marty’s bedroom is large, and the bed is king-sized. There is a radio on the bed table and a TV set for watching when she is alone. A neon sign in the street below blinks red and yellow most of the night. Marty likes the blinking sign below, and she likes the noise of a jukebox that filters up. She is afraid of the dark, of hearing no sounds and no voices. She is afraid of going to sleep. In bed she laughs a lot. She plays games. But when the games are over she holds me tight. I know the feeling. I know the need and the fear that fills our world. And now I found myself wondering what Jo-Jo Olsen needed and where he was. I waited in the bed for Marty and wondered if Jo-Jo, too, was lying in some bed somewhere needing voices, afraid to sleep.

‘Dan.’

Her voice was low. I looked. I expected to see her face close in the dark with the expression that she wanted me. She was not close. She was at the bedroom window looking down at the dark street. I got out of bed and went to her. She held the heavy drapes open a crack.

‘There,’ she said.

At this hour the street was all dark. The neon sign had gone off, the jukebox was quiet. It was the edge of morning, and a faint grey tinged the sky to the east. The street itself was the deep black that precedes the dawn. But I saw them.

‘Yes,’ I said softly.

There were two of them. Shadows hidden in a recessed doorway across the street. I knew them. Not their names and not their faces, but I knew them. If we had been in some other country they could have been secret police or assassins waiting for some leader of men. They could have been the thin and starved rebels in too many countries where tyranny still rules. Here and now, on the Village street, they would be none of those things. They were hoods, gunmen, muscle boys; the soldiers of an underworld that was the shame of the country. And from where they waited they had a clear view of only one building — Marty’s building.