Max Collins - Quarry's deal

“Is that Roger?” I asked Tree. Quietly.

“That’s Roger,” Tree said.

And Roger was currently shuffling over toward us like the Frankenstein monster coming to shake his creator’s hand.

Which is exactly what he had in mind: shaking our hands. He shook Tree’s first, as he seemed to recognize him, and made a sound that didn’t resemble any word I know of. When he shook my hand, he made no sound, not even that of bones breaking. Truth is, while he had a hand like a catcher’s mitt, Roger’s grip was anything but powerful. Limp is the word.

But limp or not, he held on, longer than any sane handshake should, and I had to pull free, grinning back at him as I did, my grin every bit as mindless and shit-eating as his, not wanting to make an enemy of anybody seven feet tall, even if he did shake hands like a dress designer.

“Roger,” Tree said, very friendly, “I’d like to talk to Frank Jr. alone now, please.”

Roger thought about that a while. He narrowed his eyes, which were wide-set and an eerily beautiful shade of green, in a face with otherwise large, irregular features that seemed to have exploded into being, like a kernel of popped corn. Despite that, it was a young face. Roger couldn’t have been older than twenty.

And right now he was pointing a thick finger at me, and looking at Tree, puzzled, saying, “Ah low?”

Alone.

“This is a friend of mine,” Tree said. “I’d like him to stay and talk to Frank Jr. with me.”

And Roger nodded his head, his shaggy black hair flapping like a cheap wig, and shambled off.

“Retarded, of course,” Tree explained.

“I didn’t think this place was designed for that kind of thing.”

“He’s a special case. He gets violent.”

“Terrific.”

“They have him sedated, now. He’s gentle as a kitten.”

“Yeah, but does he know that?”

“There’s one person he’d never hurt, in any circumstance, and that’s Frank Jr. It’s pathetic, really, the way he’s taken to Frank.”

I’d almost forgotten about Frank Jr., who was still sitting silently at the desk, staring out the window.

“Roger is Frank Jr.’s protector,” Tree said, in a tone that mixed melancholy and irony. “Doesn’t let Frank out of his sight. Always stands nearby, watching him, guarding him.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. I’ve asked Dr. Cash and he doesn’t understand it, either. Maybe it has something to do with Roger feeling sorry for Frank Jr.”

That didn’t make much sense to me, but I didn’t ask him to explain. I was getting uneasy, talking about Frank Jr. like somebody who wasn’t around. The fucker was a few feet away from us, sitting at a desk, listening to everything we said, even reacting a little, if I was reading my body language right.

Tree took a tentative step toward the boy.

“Son?” he said.

The boy was silent.

“Dr. Cash tells me you joined the exercise group this week. He says you’re hanging right in there. I can’t… can’t tell you how happy that makes me.”

The boy turned and smiled, almost imperceptibly, and turned back toward the window.

“Looks like you’re putting on some weight. That starchy hospital food, I suppose. Good thing you’re taking up that exercise thing.”

The boy was silent.

“It’ll be getting warm soon. Maybe we could get out and play some tennis together. Dr. Cash says there’re some courts near here, and we could use one, if you like, when it warms up.”

And it went on like that, for fifteen minutes, Tree struggling painfully to maintain the one-sided, small-talk conversation, while his son sat staring, reacting occasionally, usually with that small smile, but nothing more.

“Well,” Tree said, finally, with reluctance, in relief, “gotta go now. See you next Monday. I… I love you, son.”

The boy turned and nodded and turned away. Roger waved to us in the hall as we left. He was on his way back to Frank Jr.’s side.

I didn’t ask Tree anything till we were out of there, iron doors shut behind us, in the cool outer corridor of the hospital.

“He never says anything?” I asked. “He just sits there and looks out the window and smiles now and then?”

Tree’s eyes were glazed. “You don’t know how much those smiles mean to me. It’s taken him four months to get that far.”

Half an hour later, in a bar in downtown Iowa City, Tree told me the story.

The only time business is slow in a college-town bar like the Airliner is when it’s closed, but this was mid-afternoon and a quieter time than most, so it didn’t make a bad place to talk. We bought drinks at the bar, a double Scotch straight up for Tree and a Coke on ice for me, and carried them to a booth at the rear.

Tree had a lot of lines in his face, which gave him a rough-hewn, Marlboro man quality capable of luring at least an occasional younger woman for a bounce on his water bed. At the moment, however, in the shadowy, flickering reflection of the candle in glass that lit the booth, those lines seemed simply a sign of age.

And his sigh said he felt even older than he looked.

“I didn’t raise him,” he said. “His mother did. I met her in Reno, in ’56 or 7. I was drifting back and forth between Vegas and Reno, working for casinos sometimes, sometimes for myself. I already knew what I wanted… my own place, why settle for less? I ran some joints for the DiPreta boys, in Des Moines, after the war. Learned everything there is about managing a club, any kind of a club. But there was no place to climb, there were enough DiPreta brothers to fill all the top slots in the Des Moines action, so I left. I liked to gamble and I was good at it. I started hitting poker games in little towns and big ones and everything between. Ended up on the Reno and Vegas circuit, of course. She was a cocktail waitress at Harold’s. Nineteen and already divorced once, but no kids. I was dealing blackjack. Knocked her up, married her. I don’t know why, except I always had it in the back of my head to have a kid, and she was a looker and I thought I loved her, the cunt. She had blond hair everywhere and tits that wouldn’t stop and I’d fuck her today if I could and hate her while I was doing it.”

He stopped for a moment, embarrassed. Scratched his head. Dandruff seemed his only grooming problem. He looked down at his drink. Drank it, got up and got another and drank half of that before going on.

“You know the first couple years weren’t so bad. She loved Frank Jr. She was a good mother, no shit. And she was good to me. That was while I was out hustling my ass, making my goddamn fortune. Maybe that’s why she put up such a good front, those first couple years. She must’ve known I had it in me to make it, and figured to stick with me till I did. We weren’t married three years before I had my place on the river, across from Burlington, and it made money from day one, right away they were calling it Little Las Vegas, that little town we took over. I owned my own place and a piece of everybody else’s on the street. The only help I had was the DiPretas. My old bosses backed me, at the start, but they stayed out of my way. You want another drink?”

“No.”

He did.

This was hard for him and the lubrication was a must. Still, he seemed to feel the need to tell me all this, and not just because someone wanted him dead and to stop it I needed background. That was part of it, but important too was his need to tell somebody, to purge himself of memories too personal to tell anyone except a stranger.

He came back with a third double, drank it, and went on.

“She waited,” he said, “waited till things were going real good for me, and then she filed the papers. She socked me for a ton of alimony, let me tell you, and child support, only that I didn’t mind so much, the bitch. She took my kid and drained the fuck out of me, and my opinion of marriage ever since went down a little, you know? Never again. Anyway, she raised the kid, or her sister did. She was screwing a lot of guys, never did get married again, but then that’d stop the money, right? I’ll never figure out why she was such a good mother at first and then just turned the kid over to that senile sister of hers. The only thing I can say for the twat is she let me see the kid, couple of weeks in the summer, Christmas, some other holiday, usually. I’d take him camping, ball game, things like that. I was a good father to him, good as I could be, considering what little chance I got. And he looked up to me. He really did. That made me feel good, and I’m not ashamed to say it. Another drink?”