Kem Nunn - Chance

“And how did she respond?” Chance asked.

The old man was a moment in thought. “She took me by the hand,” he said softly, his eyes tearing. “ ‘I never had anyone like you,’ she said to me.” He paused and looked at Chance. “She meant it, too. I can tell you that. She wanted us to get married. Still does. Can you believe it? In case there are ever problems, financially speaking, she says.” Billy slapped his leg with the flat of his hand. “We fell in love with each other,” he said. “And yeah, I know there’s probably some ulterior fucking motus. I’m ninety-two years old, for Christ’s sake. She’s fifty-three. But this other… that’s the long and the short of it. If she’s not the real deal, the real deal does not exist, not in this life.”

By “this other” Chance had taken him to mean the part about falling in love, upon which subject and about half drunk, Doc the Younger was inclined to wax philosophical:

The philosopher Nietzsche asserted that “In the end, one loves one’s desire and not the desired object.” Viewed in this somewhat detached framework, one might say that by virtue of his relationship with Lorena, William felt safe, protected, and valued. He also experienced for the first time the euphoria of being in love. To his great credit, he is able to acknowledge that at some level he knows, and has known, that he has been manipulated. Nevertheless, he comes back ultimately to the question, “What value is money without love?”

Chance polished off yet another bottle of wine as he worked, attempting to conclude his assessment of Doc Billy, with whom he had been just that day another four and a half hours in the small saunalike apartment. He sat now in his own, depressingly similar to Billy’s save for the heat. Billy had been in his for fifty-five years, alone and unloved. Little wonder he’d fallen for the wondrous Lorena, short and chunky notwithstanding. “While acknowledging that there appears to be compelling evidence of elder abuse in this case…” Chance went on, casting about, ever more desperately, it would seem, for some favorable comment on which to end, anything really that might stave off such humiliations as time, the world, and the Oregonian relatives were almost certain to inflict, “…one needs to be open to the possibility that at some level William Fry recruited Lorena for his own purposes, that he retained her, as it were, to subject himself to undue influence, that is, he wanted to experience the combined feelings of love, safety, and pleasure in her companionship. I believe that William, in fact, remembers somewhat more than he admits to knowing. In essence, he has been a partner in a cover-up, a co-conspirator who now wishes to protect Lorena from the legal consequences of her actions…” Feeling that this was somehow unsatisfactory, he paused and tried again. “Still, and in spite of his evident physical limitations… and rather obvious need for the appointment of a financial watchdog… Dr. Fry retains considerable dignity, awareness, and insight into his predicament…”

In the end, he sighed and put the thing aside. There was, after all, only so much that a man in his position might be expected to do. What would be would be and the best he supposed that one might hope for would be that the old boy at least find some way to go out with his boots on, some doomed yet heroic last stand… all but bedridden at ninety-two, oxygen tank in tow, at long last at one with his brothers, a fool for love.

When he tried to imagine what the doc’s last stand might look like, however, he found that he could not, and his thoughts turned, as they so often did of late, to Jaclyn Blackstone. In fact, she was in danger of replacing Mariella as the object of the season’s obsession. Was she, too, for perhaps darker and more twisted reasons than Doc Billy’s, the partner in a cover-up, a co-conspirator now wishing to protect her former lover from the legal consequences of his actions? He had no sooner put the question to himself than he thought less of himself for doing so. He thought of the driver Big D had stared down in the street. The fact was, he could not escape the feeling he had been made a cunt of there in the hospital, impotent in the face of Jaclyn’s tormentor. What, he wondered, would Big D have done with that, knowing what Chance knew, and allowed himself the rather lengthy indulgence of a variety of school yard fantasies. The fantasies were remarkable for their clarity and sheer amount of bloodletting. This Blackstone did not just drive away. He did not get off with any benign stare down. He was alternately beaten toothless, disemboweled, garroted, emasculated, and murdered outright. Chance went to inquire after his furniture at noon on the following day.

As on all other visits, he found the front door open, the building dark and void of customers. Finding no sign of Carl, he moved directly to the back of the building. The light was on in D’s workroom but the big man did not answer his call. Bending to look through the narrow window by which he and D had first been introduced, he could see that a rear door had been left open to the alley, a slant of yellow light spilling in. Chance took the liberty of letting himself into D’s space and making for the light. Along the way he noted his furniture, piled rather unceremoniously, it seemed to him, in a corner of the big room. If D was at work on the trim and general restoration, it was not yet in evidence.

He found the big man outside in the alley, seated on an overturned crate, a bag from some local fast food joint at his side, a large Diet Coke in one hand and a copy of The Grapes of Wrath in the other. He looked up as Chance moved to join him. “I’ll be all around in the dark,” D said by way of greeting. He did not consult the book. “Wherever there’s a cop beatin’ up a guy, I’ll be there. I’ll be in the way guys yell when they’re mad. I’ll be in the way kids laugh when they’re hungry an’ they know supper’s ready. An’ when the people are eatin’ the stuff they raise, and livin’ in the houses they built… I’ll be there too.” He paused. “I may have left out a couple,” he said. He looked at the book.

“That’s about the way I remember it,” Chance said. “That’s very good.”

“Somebody mentions something I don’t know, a book or something… sounds interesting, I’ll track it down, try to see what it is.”

“An admirable trait,” Chance said. He seated himself on a concrete step near D’s crate.

D closed the book and looked at him. “Sup, Big Dog?” he asked. “You got more furniture to move?”

“Hardly. But I can think of a few more assholes you might give the treatment to, like that guy in the street.” It flattered Chance to believe this was something they had shared, a kind of male bonding, as it were. As for the myriad fantasies the incident had inspired… he’d keep that to himself. The joke about a few more assholes was about as far as he would permit himself to go but D was all over it. “Who?” he asked, and Chance did not get the feeling that D was joking around. He came this close to saying something about Jaclyn Blackstone and her predatory husband, the bad cop, before sound judgment got the better of him. The guy was an Oakland homicide detective, for Christ’s sake. He had an expensive suit, a gun, and a badge. He was, as Chance saw it, a man at home in the world, a man who knew how things worked, and how they didn’t. He would crush a person like D, not physically perhaps, not in a fight, but he would crush him all the same, and Chance along with him, grind them both beneath his shoe and never break stride. “Half the city,” Chance said finally, making light. “How’s it with the brass?”