Elmore Leonard - The Big Bounce

“What have you got?” Ryan asked. “Cabins?”

“Cabins? The Bay Vista out on the Shore Road.” Like, what’s the matter with you? Cabins. “We got fourteen cabana units with two bedrooms, bath, living room and kitchenette, all with a screen porch, and seven motel units. We also got a swimming pool, shuffleboard, and play area for the kids.”

“So what’d you do about Camacho?”

“Well, the girl, she’s nervous as a whore in church and says something to him and they leave. But walking away, he turns and sticks his finger up in the air, you know, like this is what you can do, buddy. I almost took after him.”

“He was begging for it,” Ryan said. “If it wasn’t me, it would’ve been somebody else.”

“That’s what I thought,” Mr. Majestyk said. “You got time for another?”

“I guess so.”

“How about at a table? We can stretch out more.”

Ryan went along. It was nice here. There was a smell of beer in the place, but it was not a small-town tavern or a shot and a beer kind of bar. It was a beach bar, a marina bar, with a fishnet and life preservers and brass fixtures on white walls and a good view of the boat docks. It was quiet but not too quiet. There was record music and people were talking, having a good time, nobody dressed up: people who’d been out in their boats and stopped off for a couple. It was a nice place. He had spotted the waitress right away and that was nice too: blond ponytail and tight red pants. She had passed close to him going to the service section of the bar, where there were curved chrome handles like the top of a swimming pool ladder.

Then at the table with a pitcher of Michelob and a couple of bags of Fritos and some beer nuts: Mr. Majestyk asking questions about Camacho and what kind of a crew leader he was-saying spig for spik and hid for hit, like “when you hid the son of a bitch”-talking easily but talking a lot.

Then he didn’t say anything for maybe a minute. Ryan looked around and sipped his beer and finally Mr. Majestyk said, “Listen, do you want me to tell you something?”

“Go ahead.”

“Sitting at the bar, I wasn’t going to say anything to you. And then I figured what the hell.”

“Yeah?”

“Do you know they got a movie of you belting the guy?”

“I heard about it.”

“I saw it the other day. Three times.”

Ryan was looking at him now. “What’d they show it to you for?”

“Well, if they hadn’t dropped the charge and you came to trial? It would’ve been in my court.” Mr. Majestyk paused. “I’m the J.P. here, justice of the peace.”

Ryan kept his eyes on him.

“I’m telling you why I saw the movies, that’s all.”

“What’s the beer for?”

“I’m on the Chamber of Commerce.”

Ryan didn’t smile. “I got to get going.”

“Buddy, if you’re nervous about it, maybe you’d better.”

“I’m not nervous about anything.” Ryan sipped his beer.

“But they told you you had to leave.” Mr. Majestyk waited, letting him relax a little. “There’s no charge against you. How can they make you leave if you want to stay?”

“They phony something up. Vagrancy or something.”

“You got money?”

Ryan looked at him. “Enough.”

“So how can you be arrested for vagrancy? You ever been picked up for that?”

“No.”

“They said something about you were arrested a couple of times. Car theft?”

“Joyriding. Suspended.”

“What about this resisting arrest?”

“A guy was giving me a hard time. I hit him.”

“The cop?”

“No, before.”

“With what?”

“I hit him with a beer bottle.”

“Broken one?”

“No, this guy tried to pull something. I didn’t get arrested for hitting him. It was after, when the cop told me to drop the bottle.”

“You didn’t drop it quick enough.”

Ryan was looking at the waitress. She had the masked look a lot of waitresses put on, telling nothing, letting you know you weren’t anything special. Probably a stuck-up broad who was dumb and didn’t know it. Broads like that burned him up. She looked nice, though: starched ruffled blouse and the tight red pants, like a swordfighter outfit. She came over with another pitcher of beer. He watched Mr. Majestyk give her tail a little pat and she didn’t seem to mind.

“What’s your name, honey?” His big hand resting gently on her red hip.

“Mary Jane.”

“Mary Jane, I want you to meet Jack Ryan.”

“I’ve seen him before,” she said, looking at Ryan as she placed the pitcher on the table. He saw her eyes and it gave him a funny feeling. She had seen him before. She knew about him. She had decided things about him. He watched her turn to the bar again, the nice tight shape of the red pants.

“Some guys I’d like to have taken and used a beer bottle on,” Mr. Majestyk said. “I had a tavern in Detroit-oh, fifteen years ago now. These guys would come off the shift from Dodge Main. They come in, every one of them, a shot and a beer. Set them right down the bar, every stool, then go back and pour another shot right down the bar again.”

Ryan’s gaze followed the waitress. A nice little black ribbon tied around the ponytail. Nice, the black with the blond hair.

“Then go back,” Mr. Majestyk said, “boom boom boom, pick up the dough. The third time just hit the guys that want another. This guy I don’t know is there one time and he says, ‘God damn , how do you remember what everybody’s drinking?’ Amazed. I just shrug like it’s nothing. Every Polack in the place is drinking Seven Crown and Strohs. Sixty-five cents.”

Ryan left his canvas bag at the bar and they went to a restaurant over on the main street for dinner, Estelle’s: a counter and booths with Formica tops and place mats that illustrated Michigan as “The Water-Winter Wonderland.” They ordered steaks with American fries after Ryan bet they wouldn’t have boiled potatoes and they didn’t.

Mr. Majestyk stared at him, hunched over with his arms on the table edge. “You like boiled potatoes?”

“Boiled potatoes, just plain or with some parsley,” Ryan said. “It’s like a real potato. I mean it’s got the most potato taste.”

“Right!” Mr. Majestyk said, with a tone that said it was the correct answer.

“When I was at home,” Ryan said, “on Sunday my mother would have veal roast or pork roast and boiled potatoes. Not mashed or fried or anything. Boiled. You’d take two or three potatoes and cut them up so they covered about half the plate? Then pour gravy all over it. But try and get a boiled potato in a restaurant.”

“Where did you live in Detroit?”

“Highland Park. Just north of where Ford Tractor was. Up by Sears.”

“I know where it is. Your father work at Ford’s?”

“He worked for the DSR, but he’s dead now. He died when I was thirteen.”

“I had some friends worked for the DSR. Hell, they started when they still had streetcars. All retired now or doing something else.”

“I don’t think my dad ever ran a streetcar. What I remember, he drove a Woodward bus. It’d say RIVER going downtown, you know? And FAIRGROUNDS coming back.”

“Sure, I’ve ridden it.”

They didn’t talk much eating the steaks and fries. Ryan pictured the Sunday dinners again in the dining room that was also his bedroom: his mother and his two older sisters and most of the time one or the other’s boyfriend; his dad not always there, not if he had to work Sunday. It was a two-bedroom apartment on the fourth floor, the top floor, of an old building; his mother and dad in one bedroom, the two sisters in the other one, which was always messed up with clothes and magazines and curlers and crap. He slept in the dining room on a studio couch with maple arms and kept his shirts, socks, and underwear in the bottom drawer of the secretary in the living room. He’d be sitting there at the dining room table doing his homework hearing the television in the living room, and his dad would come in carrying his changer, his blue-gray DSR hat on the side of his head and crushed in like a World War II fighter pilot’s hat. If he had stopped for a drink, just a couple, you could tell it. On his day off his dad would sit at the dining room table with a clean sport shirt on, his hair combed and his shoes shined, and play solitaire. He would play it most of the day, with a cigarette in the corner of his mouth, his head raised and his eyes looking down half closed. In the afternoon he would drink beer and read the paper. The paper was the only thing he read.