Stuart Dybek - Paper Lantern - Love Stories

Don’t give him more percentage than the tax woulda been. He didn’t do nothing to win that money, Frank. Suppose he’s already told someone and they’re setting you up. It ain’t worth risking your life out there at this hour.

You let me worry about that, Rosebush. I wasn’t born fucking yesterday.

He loads the gun he stole off a freight shipment. Handguns were the most prized thing people at the railroad yard stole. You could always sell them, but this one’s a six-shooter, a cowboy pistol, and when he brought it home, Frank said it was to keep under the bar at the Four Deuces. Of course we didn’t own the Four Deuces yet, but Frank was planning for the future.

A night to remember, huh, Rosebush? Frank says, and he’s out the door.

I got a bad feeling about this. I fall into bed thinking I won’t sleep mercifully, too many thoughts, and lay there watching lightning, knowing I should turn off the window fan because a downpour’s coming to break the heat, but I can’t move and don’t hear the rain or thunder or nothing until that tink a Frank’s belt wakes me. He’s undressing. The window fan’s off.

What happened? I ask.

Got the money, Frank says, and now I gotta get some sleep. Never been more tired, Rosebush.

How much you have to end up giving him, Frank?

So very very fucking tired, Rosie. And he falls into bed half dressed and he’s out, rasping in his sleep like having nightmares, like not just his voice but his breath got hoarse at Sportsman’s. I cover him with the bedspread and watch him while it gets light, wondering what he’s dreaming.

When he wakes up it’s afternoon and we go together to see Verman, and put money down and shake on the deal for the bar. Then me and Frank have a drink, sitting right where you are, Rafael, and Frank says, Look around, Rosebud, it’s all ours now. We clink glasses and I see the two of us, Frank that sumnabitch and me, staring back smiling from the foggy mirror behind the bar, framed by dusty Christmas lights.

Never went to the track again. Frank was convinced the IRS was waiting for him there.

The cowboy six-shooter? No, I don’t keep a loaded gun under the bar. I asked Frank about it once after we bought the Deuces, during an epidemic of robberies in the neighborhood, and he says he couldn’t apply for a permit for no stolen piece, so he sold it, and don’t mention it again. That was the first time I wondered if Frank had some hiding place, you know, a strongbox or a safe, where he stashed the stuff he stole—the gun, the perfume and jewelry he’d give me on birthdays as if he’d bought them. He always had some deal going. He did the books for the bar, and there was all kinds of unreported income he hid from the IRS.

The Deuces was doing all right. We were our own bosses like Frank predicted. And our own flunkies, like he didn’t—bars are work. He put in a kitchen and I cooked—potato soup, goulash, kielbasa, chili—like that, and we’d get a lunch crowd from the train yards and factories along Rockwell.

I’ll tell you when that gun came back to mind—five years later, after my miscarriage. I carried that baby nearly to term, working the kitchen the whole time. Was going to be Frank, Jr., if it was a boy, but I told Frank, I knew she was a girl. Frank wanted to name her Bunny after our good luck, and I said, No way, Playboy ruined that name, but how about Harriet?

That’s good, Rosebud, Frank says, laughing, Harriet, very clever, I love it.

So that was the name we put on the gravestone.

There a special Angel of Death who comes just for the little ones? God should at least make it less scary for them—send something gentle like a butterfly, so beautiful you don’t think it’s taking you away forever. As they were lowering the casket in the ground I made them stop and spilled water from the flowers on it to baptize her.

Guess I went a little crazy after that. Nearly died myself of sepsis and when I said I wished I had, they put me on meds and I couldn’t get outta bed. Frank closed the kitchen and worked the bar alone. I spent a year in a stupor, and woke up fat and faded, with gray in my hair, and one afternoon I put on a dress, the only one that still fit, and went downstairs and started cooking again.

Maybe I had an intuition, because my first Saturday night back in the kitchen, the Widow comes in. For all I know she’d been coming for nightcaps the whole time I was upstairs zonked. She sat where you’re sitting—silky black dress, black nylons, dark movie-star glasses, like maybe her eyes were puffy from tears a grief. Believe that and I got a bridge to sell you. Heels, dyed hair braided with a black ribbon, manicured nails same red as her lips. Perfume you could smell through the cigar smoke. Frank waits on her and she orders Chopin neat, tells Frank he got a sexy voice, asks, Do you sing? And when he answers, Not lately, she sashays to the jukebox and plays “Strangers in the Night,” and gets him to sing along with her on the do-be-do-be-do part. See, I’m why there’s Sinatra to play. I swear if she’d of played “Wild Horses,” I’d of come outta the kitchen and unplugged the jukebox. Soon as the music starts, Frank that sumnabitch turns off the ball game on the TV, something we never do, but none of the regulars complained. They were all like bewitched, do-be-do-be-do -ing. With the jukebox playing, I couldn’t hear from the kitchen whatever else she and Frank was talking about, but I see him buy her the next round on the house. She takes a cigarette from a silver case and Frank lights her and takes one hisself when she offers. They touch glasses and none too ladylike she belts it down, exhales like blowing a kiss, and leaves a ten-spot tip. Never seen her in the Deuces again even though she lived just across the alley.

Our new neighbor, Frank tells me. Nice of her to come in and introduce herself. She’s Polish. Moved here from Springfield after her politician husband passed away. Said his real estate company owned half the block, including Pani Bozak’s old house. Must of left her well off.

If she got money, why in the hell’d she move here? I ask. Why’s she living in a house that sat all boarded up? I thought that place was condemned. Did you tell her how Pani Bozak was found dead with her eyes pecked out?

Frank goes, That’s just superstition, dumbass like the kids around here who used to torment that old ba-ba for being a witch. Fixing that place up will be good for property values. She said after living downstate she was homesick for where people speak Polish and still remember what Solidarno meant.

Solidarno ! Yo, Frank, try Viva Zapata! You said yourself Twenty-second looks like Tijuana. You never noticed how a native-born Pole thinks American Polacks are ignorant? Maybe she needed a neighborhood where she can look down on people, and by the way, when’d you start smoking again?

Just being friendly, Frank says. Friendly’s good business.

And who comes into a neighborhood dump like the Deuces dressed like it’s the goddamn Copacabana?

Ain’t no dump, Rosie, Frank says.

I have to tell you, Frank, it’s got to looking uncared-for.

I done the best I could on my own, Rosie, while you was upstairs.

There’s a two-bedroom flat upstairs. One of the bedrooms, Frank’s so-called office, was going to be for Harriet. Frank had it piled with magazines and paperbacks— Forbes , Bartender , Wild West , Railway Collector , his Best Loved Poems of the American People , old opera LPs he wouldn’t pitch. He was a pack rat. He called it being a collector. Boxes of greasy, old-smelling junk—flares, padlocks, warning flags, signs, bells, timetables, engineer caps, kerosene lanterns. Toward the end of his career as a railroad dick he went on a spree. If it wasn’t nailed down Frank collected it. Hell, if it was nailed down the sumnabitch stole the nails—spikes, wooden ties, switches. Claimed there were people who’d pay for railroad memorabilia. So he moves his junk out onto the enclosed back porch along with his desk, file cabinet, La-Z-Boy, and a kerosene space heater from Sears, which I never trusted—every winter in the neighborhood there’s fires from those things and carbon monoxide. Frank insisted they burn odorless, but I can smell it. We fixed up Harriet’s room real nice. He never moved back.