Джо Горес - Dead Man

Zimmer was babbling. “See, Vangie, what I did was—”

“In the room, honey.”

“But you have to understand that—”

“In the room.”

It was a room where love and hope would bleed to death, blessedly dark except for street light leaking around the drawn window curtain. Vangie locked the door, Zimmer switched on the single low-watt overhead. Vangie got a flat brown pint of bourbon from the dresser, at the sink poured some of it into the glass from the toothbrush holder, added tap water. She leaned against the sink to face Jimmy with glass in hand.

“Okay, Jimmy,” she said wearily, “hit me.”

“I called Bobby Farnsworth tonight.”

Despair entered her eyes, but somewhere she found a smile to paste on her mouth. “What’d you call him?”

“You know what I mean, Vangie — on the telephone.”

“Okay, what’d you tell him?”

“I didn’t tell him anything. He told me things. What’s the matter with you anyway?” His voice had a febrile hostility; since he’d found in Vangie the strength he could never possess himself, he had to rebel against it. “I got the bonds for us.”

“Yes, Jimmy.” She took a big gulp of her drink, made a face. “You got the bonds for us.”

“Now I’m going to get us the money for the bonds.”

“Or get us killed.”

“Why do you always have to belittle everything I do?” His face was petulant, his voice whiny. “I told Bobby I was out of town with some bearer bonds, and he told me how to convert them. I didn’t even leave him a phone number or anyplace where—”

“We agreed we didn’t touch the bonds for six months, didn’t we, Jimmy?” Vangie set her glass in the sink. “Here it is less than three weeks, you’re calling a broker already.”

“It’s easy for you. I’m stuck in this cockroach palace staring at the walls, while you...” His voice had been rising, suddenly he was shrieking, his face red, veins standing out along the sides of his neck. “While you get your rocks off shaking your titties for a bunch of fucking rednecks!”

Vangie seized her breasts and squeezed them cruelly. “You think having guys do this to you is fun?” she cried.

Then as fast as it had come, her anger was gone. She shivered and poured the rest of her drink down the sink.

“I know it’s hard for you to be cooped up here, honey, but as soon as I’ve gotten us together a traveling stake, we’ll move on, I’ll get a waitressing job—”

“And make extra money on your back in the private room?”

She sighed and went to look out the window, standing with one knee on the edge of the bed, her other foot on the floor. It was an unconscious pose of great grace, a dancer’s pose. Her voice was harsh and strained.

“Why don’t I just split with the bonds and leave you here for Maxton to find? Who the hell needs you?”

“Vangie, don’t talk that way!” He came up behind her, slid his hands under her arms. “Vangie, please, I... I love you. I want...” His hands cupped her breasts as he kissed the nape of her neck. “I need to make love to you, need to know that...”

She shook him off without turning, irritation in her face.

“Jimmy, Jimmy, there’s somebody coming after us and all you want to do is fuck. Can’t you feel him out there?” “All I feel is your rejection of me.”

He used his chastised-child voice. Vangie wasn’t hearing.

“Once I saw a deer some dogs had been running, Jimmy. They lost its scent, he came down to the bayou to drink.” She paused to lay her forehead against the cool window pane. “Usually deer, they just stay on the bank, sort of nuzzle aside the lily pads and duckweed and dead vegetation to drink. But those hounds, they’d run this one pretty hard, he wanted fresh water. So he waded out toward the channel...”

“Vangie, I’m sorry, honey. Please don’t... shut me out.”

“Only the little regular splashes a deer makes walking are different from those a muskrat makes swimming or a raccoon makes wading, and a gator can tell the difference, every time. Up the channel came ol’ gator, underwater. When the deer waded out to the edge of the channel and put his head down to drink... Snap!”

She slapped both hands, fingers splayed, against the glass.

“Ol’ gator had him by the nose.” Her palms left long wet smears on the glass. “He drug that deer into the water and gave a jerkl” — her hands jerked into fists pressed convulsively against her cheeks — “and the deer’s neck was broke.” She gestured down at the empty dawn street. “Out there somewhere is our gator...”

“Vangie, please...”

She turned to transfix Zimmer with a whisper.

“Waiting to break our neck.”

After his 5:30 A.M. workout at World Gym, Dain swung back to Tam Valley to pick up Shenzie. He let himself in through the front door, got the carry case from Albie’s now-deserted bedroom, and went through to the kitchen.

“What?” he exclaimed.

There was a scrabbling of paws as the bandit-faced baby raccoon who was eating Shenzie’s kibble ran to squirm his fat little butt back out through the cat door in a panic. An outraged Shenzie was sitting on the kitchen counter watching the thief eat, his white whiskers standing straight out from the sides of his face like a radical acupuncture treatment gone awry.

Dain, fighting the morning rush across the Golden Gate, laughed at Shenzie all the way into the city. He arrived at Mel’s Drive-in on Lombard just at eight. Mel’s was a deliberate anachronism, an attempt to recapture the fifties feeling of the original Mel’s on south Van Ness, which had been a huge circular barn of a place with roller-skating waitresses.

On the walls of this Mel’s were black-and-white photos — stills from American Graffiti; Marilyn Monroe at the original Mel’s, sucking on a malt; waitresses with beehive hairdos, wearing slacks and IKe jackets, serving hamburgers to grinning boys with duck’s-ass haircuts and packs of Camels rolled up in their sleeves. A lot of the boys would have died in Korea.

Somewhere they had found old booths of cigarette-scarred vinyl with miniature jukebox selectors on the back wall. You could flip through deliberately dated original cuts of Frank Sinatra, the Pretenders, Billy Eckstine, Frankie Laine — pick your tunes, drop your quarters, and the Wurlitzer gleaming in pastel yellow and purple and cherry red up by the cash register would play them for you.

Doug Sherman waved a languid hand around when Dain joined him in one of the booths. “How banal of you, dear boy.”

“Not at all,” said Dain. “Lets you rub elbows with the common man.” He had been finding Sherman extraordinarily smug as of late. “Have you ordered?”

“Just coffee. I figured once you’d had your little joke, we’d go somewhere to get—”

“This is a great breakfast place, Dougie. The four basic food groups — salt, fat, cholesterol, carcinogens. And fourteen Elvis selections on the juke, including ‘Hound Dog’ and ‘Blue Suede Shoes.’ On Tuesdays you can join the fun with carhop waitresses. I think I’ve died and gone to heaven.”

“My, aren’t we antic this morning,” said Sherman snidely.

A waitress bustled up on thick ankles, wearing a rustling black nylon skirt and white cotton men’s-style shirt with miniature black bow tie. She would have been about twenty when the original Mel’s had opened a few years after the war.

“Coffee?” she asked.

“Yes.” Dain decided to do the entire job on Dougiebaby. “And I’m ready to order. Bacon cheeseburger with fries, order of onion rings, a chocolate shake.” He looked over at Sherman’s ashen face. “You ought to get one, Doug — they’re great!”