Lawrence Block - A Dance at the Slaughterhouse

"That's a good way to put it."

"Well, bullshit and poetry, that's the Irish stock in trade. But let me tell you something. Do you know what's the best thing about drinking?"

"Nights like this."

"Nights like this, but it's not just the booze makes nights like this. It's one of us drinking and one of us not, and something else I couldn't lay my finger on." He leaned forward and put his elbows on the table. "No," he said, "the best thing about drinking is a certain kind of moment that only happens once in a while. I don't know that it happens for everyone, either.

"It happens for me on nights when I'm sitting up alone with a glass and a bottle. I'll be drunk but not too drunk, you know, and I'll be looking off into the distance, thinking but not thinking- do you know what I mean?"

"Yes."

"And there'll be a moment when it all comes clear, a moment when I can just about see the whole of it. My mind reaches out and wraps itself around all of creation, and I'm this close to having hold of it. And then"- he snapped his fingers- "it's gone. Do you know what I mean?"

"Yes."

"When you drank, did you-"

"Yes," I said. "Once in a while. But do you want to know something? I've had the same thing happen sober."

"Have you now!"

"Yes. Not often, and not at all the first two years or so. But every now and then I'll be sitting in my hotel room with a book, reading a few pages and then looking out the window and thinking about what I've just read, or of something else, or of nothing at all."

"Ah."

"And then I'll have that experience just about as you described it. It's a kind of knowing, isn't it?"

"It is."

"But knowing what? I can't explain it. I always took it for granted it was the booze that allowed it to happen, but then it happened sober and I realized it couldn't be that."

"Now you've given me something to think about. I never thought for a moment it could happen sober."

"It can, though. And it's just as you described it. But I'll tell you something, Mick. When it happens to you sober, and you're seeing it without that piece of smoked glass-"

"Ah."

"- and you have it, you just about have it, and then it's gone." I looked into his eyes. "It can break your heart."

"It will do that," he said. "Drunk or sober, it will break your heart."

IT was light out when he looked at his watch and got to his feet. He went into his office and came back wearing his butcher's apron. It was white cotton, frayed here and there from years of laundering, and it covered him from the neck to below the knees. Bloodstains the color of rust patterned it like an abstract canvas. Some had faded almost to invisibility. Others looked fresh.

"Come on," he said. "It's time."

We hadn't discussed it once throughout the long night but I knew where we were going and had no objections. We walked to the garage where he kept his car and rode down Ninth Avenue to Fourteenth Street. We turned left, and partway down the block he left the big car in a no-parking zone in front of a funeral parlor. The proprietor, Twomey, knew him and knew the car. It wouldn't be towed or ticketed.

St. Bernard's stood just east of Twomey's. I followed Mick up the steps and down the left-hand aisle. There is a seven o'clock mass weekdays in the main sanctuary, which he had missed, but there is a smaller mass an hour later in a small chamber to the left of the altar, generally attended by a handful of nuns and various others who stopped in on their way to work. Mick's father had done so virtually every day, and there were always butchers in attendance, though I don't know if anyone else called it the butchers' mass.

Mick attended sporadically, coming every day for a week or two, then staying away for a month. I had joined him a handful of times since I'd come to know him. I wasn't sure why he went, and I certainly didn't know why I sometimes tagged along.

This occasion was like all the others. I followed the service in the book and picked up my cues from the others, standing when they stood, kneeling when they knelt, mouthing the appropriate responses. When the young priest handed out the Communion wafers Mick and I stayed where we were. As far as I could tell, everybody else approached the altar and received the Host.

Outside again Mick said, "Will you look at that?"

It was snowing. Big soft flakes floated slowly down. It must have started just after we entered the old church. There was already a light dusting of snow on the church steps, and on the sidewalk.

"Come on," he said. "I'll run you home."

I woke up around two after five hours of a restless, dream-ridden sleep, most of it suspended just a degree or two below the horizon of consciousness. All that coffee may have had something to do with it, much of it on a stomach unsupplied with food since the spinach pie at Tiffany's.

I rang downstairs and told the desk clerk he could put through my calls again. The phone rang while I was in the shower. I called down again to see who it was, and the clerk said there was no message. "You had a few calls during the morning," he said, "but no messages."

I shaved and dressed and went out for breakfast. The snow had stopped falling but it was still fresh and white where human and vehicular traffic hadn't yet turned it to slush. I bought a paper and carried it back to the room. I read the paper and looked out the window at the snow on rooftops and window ledges. We'd had about three inches of it, enough to muffle some of the noise of the city. It was something pretty to look at while I waited for the phone to ring.

The first to get through was Elaine, and I asked her if she'd tried earlier. She hadn't. I asked her how she was feeling.

"Not great," she said. "I'm a little feverish and I've got diarrhea, which is just the body trying to get rid of everything it doesn't need. That seems to include everything but bones and blood vessels."

"Do you think you ought to see a doctor?"

"What for? He'll tell me I've got this crud that's going around, and I already know that. 'Keep warm, drink lots of fluids.' Right. The thing is, see, I'm reading this book by Borges, he's this Argentinian writer who's blind. He's also dead, but-"

"But he wasn't when he wrote it."

"Right. And his work is kind of surreal and spacy, and I don't know where the writing leaves off and the fever starts, if you know what I mean. Part of the time it seems to me that this is not the best condition to be in while I read this stuff, and other times I think it's the only way to do it."

I filled her in on some of what happened since our last conversation. I told her about the run-in with Thurman at Paris Green, and that I'd spent a long night with Mick Ballou.

"Oh, well," she said. "Boys will be boys."

I went back to the paper. There were two stories that particularly struck me. One reported that a jury had acquitted an alleged mob boss charged with ordering an assault on a union official. The acquittal had been expected, especially in view of the fact that the victim, shot several times in both legs, had seen fit to testify for the defense, and there was a photo of the dapper defendant surrounded by well-wishers and fans on his way out of the courthouse. This was the third time he'd been brought to trial in the past four years, and the third time he'd skated. He was, the reporter said, something of a folk hero.

The other story concerned a workingman who'd been leaving the subway station with his four-year-old daughter when a homeless person, apparently deranged, attacked the pair and spat at them. In the course of defending himself the father pounded the lunatic's head against the ground, and when it was over the homeless man was dead. A spokesman for the DA's office had announced the decision to prosecute the father for manslaughter. They ran a photo of him, looking confused and besieged. He wasn't dapper, and seemed an unlikely folk hero.