Bryan Gruley - The Hanging Tree

I started to stand but Mich raised a hand that said don’t bother.

“Thanks,” I said. “Let’s stay in better touch.”

“Tell Ray Price.”

I finished my toast while checking my two phone messages. One was from Philo, who told me Kerasopoulos was not happy that I’d skipped out of our meeting, but I should call anyway for some other information. Darlene’s message was merely, “‘Apparent suicide’? What happened, Gus?”

I left two dollars on the table and walked to the cash register. One side of the register was covered with school photos of smiling little girls in plaid jumpers, white bows in their hair, front teeth missing.

“Those your grandkids?” I said

“Yes, sir,” Fred said. He craned his head around to admire the pictures as if he’d never seen them before. He smiled. “Four of them, sir. I am very proud.”

He popped the register drawer open, slipped my bills in, handed me my change. “It is very good to see you again.”

“You too, Fred.”

I was stepping through the door when he called after me.

“Sir,” he said. “Excuse me for-I couldn’t help but hear.”

“Yes?”

“Please, sir. Be very careful.”

I pointed my truck down Michigan Avenue toward Melvindale. I thought of the scar on the neck of the man at the motel. I thought of the blood coursing from the other man’s nose. I wondered what the hell I was doing.

The one time Gracie and I had seen each other in Detroit, I was in my third year at the Detroit Times. We had set several dates previously for drinks or dinner, and each time Gracie had canceled or failed to show. My mother kept pushing me to invite her out, telling me my second cousin was struggling with life just like me.

“Just like me?” I said. “Mother, I’m working sixty-five hours a week. I’m paying rent. I bought a car. They’re thinking of sending me to Japan for some stories. I’m doing just fine. I got some school loans to pay off but-oh, right, Gracie doesn’t have those because she got a freebie.”

“All the more reason, honey. She needs a big brother.”

“I’m not her brother. She ought to talk to whoever dragged her down here in the first place.”

Still, I promised to try again.

This time I was late. My computer had crashed-ten minutes before deadline, of course-and I had to redo an entire story about Chrysler threatening to shut an assembly plant in Wisconsin. The Red Devil, a beer-and-pizza joint on the west side, was almost empty on a Monday night. But there was Gracie filing her nails at one of the Formica-topped tables near the bar. Melting ice cubes and a cherry impaled on a plastic spear sat at the bottom of a glass. I could just barely hear “Sweet Child O’ Mine” playing on the jukebox.

“Sorry I’m late,” I said. “Computers.”

“I wouldn’t know,” she said, without looking up. “Don’t have one.”

“Did you order?”

She dropped the nail file in her purse. Her perfume wafted across the table, cutting through the garlic and oregano on the air. She looked at me. Her eyes seemed to have trouble focusing. They were on me, then looking behind me, then on me again, then on the table, rolling around like marbles in a bowl. I wondered if the empty glass was only her first drink.

“No,” she said. “I was waiting for you.”

I signaled for the waiter.

“This place,” she said. “It’s so… so you, Gus.”

“What does that mean?”

“Oh, you know. Low lights, but not romantic. Peeling vinyl seats. The whole fake unpretentious shtick.” She looked at me and giggled.

“You must frequent much classier places.”

“Maybe I do,” she said. “It’s charming. And it would be even more charming if…” She whipped her head around toward the bar. “Hey,” she shouted, “is my drink ready yet? I’m not used to being ignored.”

“He’s coming,” I said.

“He better fucking hurry.” She picked up her glass, shook the ice around. “Sorry. Don’t want to cause any trouble. How’s Bea?”

“Fine. I haven’t talked to her in a week, the job’s been so busy.”

“The job, the job, the job,” Gracie said. “You need to get your priorities straight, boy. Call Bea.”

“When’s the last time you called her?”

“I’m calling her tomorrow.”

I grinned. “Do you even have a job, Gracie? Or priorities?”

She gave me a dreamy smile. “I have my priorities. I just don’t happen to have them all in order.” Then she laughed, a little too loud.

A spindly young man in a white button-down shirt, shiny black slacks, a skinny black tie, and an apron smeared with spaghetti sauce shambled over to our table. The plastic name tag pinned to his shirt said he was Randy. He set a full glass in front of Gracie. Her usual gin and Squirt.

“Can I get you something to drink?” he said to me.

I ordered a Blue Ribbon. Gracie glanced up at Randy, then took the menu out from between the parmesan and pepper flake shakers. I watched her eyes as she pretended to look at it. One lid drooped. She dropped the menu on the table and looked up at the waiter. Her eyes seemed to brighten.

“So,” she said. “You’re Randy.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said.

“Ha,” Gracie said. “I’m not ‘ma’am.’ I could be your little sister.”

Randy smiled nervously. “What would you like?”

“Gracie,” I said, wishing the computer had crashed a second time.

“Don’t have a fucking-” She stopped and closed her eyes momentarily. “Don’t have a fucking cow, all right?”

“Calm down.”

“Hold your horses,” she said. “Randy’s not in any hurry, are you, Randy?” She gave him a smile I had seen her use on a hundred unsuspecting boys.

“I’m fine,” he said.

Now Gracie swiveled around in her seat to face the young waiter. “I’ll say,” she said. “Tell me-tell the truth now-will you tell me the truth?”

“Uh, sure,” he said.

Gracie must have seen me start to interrupt, because she raised a hand to stop me. Then she used the same hand to pick up her drink, lift it unsteadily to her lips, and drink it down in one determined gulp. She dropped the glass on the table and it tipped over, spilling the ice cubes and cherry across the red-and-white checked tablecloth.

“Gracie!” I said.

“OK,” she said, ignoring me. “Tell me-are you a randy man? Huh?”

“Gracie, come on. Just tell him what you want.”

“I’m about to.”

She stood and stepped into the boy, almost knocking him over. He tried to back away but she grabbed him by his tie and pulled him into her. “Ma’am,” Randy said, looking helplessly over his shoulder toward the bar. No one was there. I leapt out of my chair too late. She pulled harder on Randy’s tie and got up on her toes to plant a kiss on his mouth, getting mostly chin. Then her arms and legs went limp and she collapsed in a heap at Randy’s feet.

“Oh, my God,” he said, jumping back. “I didn’t do it. It wasn’t me.”

I crouched on the floor and turned Gracie over, cradling her head in one arm. Blood trickled from the corner of her mouth. She had bitten her tongue. “Gracie, Gracie,” I said. “What the hell happened to you?”

As she’d fallen, she had bumped her purse off the table and some of its contents had spilled across the red carpet. I looked to see a change purse, a tube of K-Y Jelly, three tubes of lipstick. And my old blue hairbrush- the brush. I put it all back in her purse, brush first.

It took me fifteen minutes and a twenty-dollar bill to keep Randy and the chef, a sweating stump of a woman named Rhonda, from calling the police. Gracie looked drunk to them, but I suspected she’d taken something that didn’t mix well with booze. I wouldn’t have minded her going to jail-it might have done her some good-but I would have had to answer to my mother for the rest of my life.