Somebody's Fool, page 19
And speaking of sorry-ass circumstances, what about Janey’s own? Once again, she allowed herself to reflect upon the injustice of how things had worked out—her daughter inheriting her grandfather’s scrap-heap business, which to everyone’s surprise was worth a small fortune, while Janey got Hattie’s which, even before the recession, had been circling the drain. How was it fair for her daughter to be in financial clover while Janey herself was forced to pick up extra shifts at the Horse and wonder if the tips she earned there would even cover her bar bill? Del had made clear that he couldn’t afford to pay her tab, not as much as she drank, not when he was in the middle of a divorce. The divorce was probably just an excuse, though. The way Del saw it, women were an expense that shouldn’t be allowed to get out of hand. He knew this because he’d allowed it to, not once but twice. Janey could buy her own damn drinks.
At the far end of the bar Janey noticed a guy about her daughter’s age, borderline good-looking, if a bit on the scruffy side. He had the look of a man who’d decided hours earlier to get positively shit-faced and had made excellent progress toward that straightforward goal.
When she arrived at the cop table, everyone scooched closer together so she could sit next to Del, who didn’t even break stride in his story when she set her tequila and beer down on the table and settled in beside him. The lie detector story he was in the middle of was one of his favorites. Nights like tonight, when he had a rapt audience, Del’s stories all stretched out like taffy. In this one Del and his partner have pulled an old Black guy out of the tank and taken him to an interview room. There they explain that they’re hooking him up to a lie detector, though all they’re really doing is attaching a splint, the kind sold in medical supply stores, to his index finger. They tell the dumb mulignan that there’s a microchip embedded in the metal, that the whole thing is wireless. (Del referred to Blacks as mulignans, which, according to him, was the Italian word for eggplant—Ever see a white one? Janey didn’t know how to feel about this. To his credit, Del never came right out and used the N-word, but how much better was this?) He explains to the mulignan that they’re going to ask him a series of questions, and if he lies to them, they’ll know. The guy’s a little suspicious at first—can this be true?—but these are cops he’s talking to and what the fuck does he know? Not much, including the fact that they’ve rigged a buzzer underneath the table.
They begin by asking him questions they already know the answers to. Is your name Lamar Jones? Yes. Are you sixty-one years old? Yes. Do you live at the Prospect Gardens apartment complex? Yes. Do you work at Dunham Financial Group? Yes. Are you the night security officer at their downtown office building? Yes. This is where things get interesting. Del asks Lamar Jones if he’s ever engaged in an illegal activity while performing his duties at Dunham. When he says no, Del activates the buzzer and the mulignan just about jumps out of his fucking skin. Mr. Jones, I think you just lied to us, Del informs the man, who could pass for white now, that’s how fucking pale he’s gone. No, sir, I didn’t, Lamar protests. Maybe, Del suggests, what you did wasn’t illegal, strictly speaking. Maybe it was just something you’d rather your boss didn’t know about. Okay, okay, Mr. Jones gives in. Some nights he buzzes a few friends into the building so they can watch the 76ers on the big flat screen in the back room. He keeps all the other monitors on like he’s supposed to and checks them all, every single one, during the commercials to make sure no unauthorized persons have entered the building, which never happens anyhow.
When Del asks him if alcohol is ever involved, Mr. Jones says, “No, sir,” and Del can tell just by looking at him that he’s fucking lying. Bzzzt! Off goes the buzzer. Again Mr. Jones startles at the sound, but not like before. He’s expecting it this time, lying sack of shit that he is. Okay, okay, Mr. Jones admits. Some beer, but no hard stuff. How about drugs, Mr. Jones? Del asks him, and this time—Bzzzt!—he activates the buzzer before the no is even out of the mulignan’s mouth. Fucking guy comes unglued right there. Ima lose my job, ain’t I? Lamar Jones begins to cry uncontrollably. At this point Del and his partner usually come clean and admit to the hopeless mamaluke (more Italian, Janey has learned) that he’s the victim of a joke. They never just come right out and tell the guy, though, because where’s the fun in that? Instead, they ask him a question that’s simple, clear and straightforward, something there’d be no reason for the guy to lie about, and when they hit the buzzer on the guy’s truthful response it finally dawns on him that he’s being fucked with, that the thing on his finger is just a drugstore splint and that no, you dimwit, you’re not going to lose your job. So this is what Del is expecting. “One last question, Mr. Jones,” he says, and it’s all he can do not to bust out laughing. “Have you ever had sex with a man?” The mulignan is so outraged that he flies out of the chair and pounds his fist on the table. “No!” he screams. “Never!” Bzzzt! Bzzzt! Bzzzt! The buzzer screams back at him. For a long moment Del and the moulignan are nose to nose, until finally Lamar Jones collapses back into his chair, his head in his hands. “Okay,” he admits. “Once.”
And now, though Del’s audience has known all along that this punch line was coming, the whole cop table erupted in laughter.
The story had a moral, too, and Del never skipped it: “Can you believe we let these fuckwads vote?”
Only after delivering it did he turn and acknowledge Janey. “Hey, babe,” he said, “what the fuck kept you?”
* * *
—
From this point the evening unspooled in predictable Copworld fashion. More war stories. More drinking. Lots of rowdy, boisterous laughter. Around closing time, or what would’ve been closing time in any other Schuyler bar, somebody shouted “Ramblin’, gamblin’!” and Bob Seger thundered onto the sound system. Tables got pushed back to create a dance floor. Del never danced, nor did most of the other cops, though a couple female officers enjoyed cutting loose, along with some of the spouses and dates. Normally Janey did, too, but not tonight. Despite the tequila and her determination to have some fun, her thoughts kept drifting back to her daughter and, yes, her mother, especially that last hateful thing Janey had said. Ruth wasn’t going to be around forever, a fact that Janey knew but couldn’t seem to remember when she was angry, which was nearly always. Still, she couldn’t help noticing how played-out her mother looked these days. She hadn’t been the same, really, since Sully’s death, a fact that made Janey both angry and, yes, jealous, too. Aside from the fact that he’d wrecked her parents’ marriage, she didn’t have anything against the man. What baffled her was that her mother couldn’t seem to get over him. Experience had taught Janey that men were mostly interchangeable. Sure, you needed one, but did it really matter which? If Ruth was right and Tina was carrying a torch for a boy she’d never even dated, well, that was beyond pitiful. Unless, of course, Janey had it backward. Maybe not knowing the person you were in love with was what made such devotion possible. After all, wasn’t it getting to know the men in her life that had taught Janey how interchangeable they were?
Fucking tequila, she thought. It was the sneakiest booze ever, no question. When her spirits were already high, tequila elevated them further, beckoning her to climb up on top of that table and dance and howl. When they were low, like tonight, it turned her inward, made her morose. She’d tried her best not to let it show, but finally Del said, “The fuck’s wrong with you tonight?”
“Nothing,” Janey told him, not wanting to go into it. “Don’t you ever get blue?”
He snorted. “The fuck is blue? What does that even mean?”
“I don’t know, Del. Ask a blues singer. I worked two shifts today. I’m tired.”
“Yeah, but remember earlier? How I told you not to come out here whining about how tired you were.”
“No, Del, that’s not what you said. What you told me was to come here no matter how fucking tired I was, and here I am. And don’t tell me it’s Saturday night. I know what fucking night it is.”
Okay, maybe men were not completely interchangeable. If it had been Roy she’d just said that to, she’d be sitting on the floor now, tasting blood. She glanced at Del’s hands to see if they were balled up into fists, like Roy’s always were a split second before he punched her, but they were flat on the table. Still, she was surprised when he said, not without tenderness, “Hey, now. Don’t be like that.” Which—fucking tequila!—pissed her off even more, because it reminded her of her father, how he used to plead with Ruth when she was angry at him. Come on, now. Don’t be like that. And Janey wanting to scream at him, What’s point of saying, Don’t be like that, when that was clearly how she was and always had been and always would be? Was that how Sully had been different? Had he accepted her mother for who she was? Was that what she herself was looking for and never finding? A man who wouldn’t say, Don’t be like that, which was, after all, the same as saying, Don’t be you?
She was about to say that maybe she’d just head on home when there came, from somewhere behind her, a loud bang, followed by a woman’s scream. Perhaps because the room was full of cops, Janey’s first thought was that the bang must’ve been a gunshot, and when she turned to look, sure enough, someone was stretched out on the floor, not moving, at the end of the bar. It took her a moment to realize it was the guy she’d noticed when she entered. Coming out from behind the bar, the bartender knelt down beside the man and slapped him gently on the cheek. “Come on now, fella,” he said. “Wake up.”
“That’s the damnedest thing I ever saw,” said the woman who’d screamed. “The dude leaned back on his stool and just kept going.”
“Passed out,” the bartender said.
“Should we call an ambulance?” the woman said. “He hit the back of his head awful hard.”
“No ambulance,” the bartender said. No need to explain why. The Hand was supposed to have closed an hour ago. “He’s not bleeding. He’ll come to in a minute.”
“Drunks don’t generally hurt themselves when they fall,” Del agreed. He and the other cops had formed a circle around the fallen man. “It’s their superpower.”
“I should’ve seen it coming,” the bartender admitted. “He’s been downing shots all night.”
“And you kept serving him?”
“How was I supposed to know how drunk he was? He didn’t say two words to me all night. Just pointed at his shot glass.”
“Well,” said Bobby, Del’s partner, “we can’t just let him lie there.”
“Hey!” the bartender shouted, slapping the man’s cheek harder now. “Wake up!”
Del shook his head. “Nah,” he said. “He’s out cold. Tell you what. The station’s on my way home anyhow. I’ll drop him off there and he can sleep it off in one of the empty cells.”
Nobody else seemed to have a better idea, so Del and three other cops each grabbed a limb and together lugged the comatose stranger outside.
“Back seat?” said Bobby.
“Fuck, no,” Del told him, popping open the trunk. “You think I want him hurling on my back seat?”
“It’s okay if he hurls in your trunk?” Bobby said.
“Not really, but I’m willing to risk it.”
Back inside, people finished their drinks and called for their checks. By Hand standards it was still relatively early, but after all the excitement, everybody seemed ready to call it a night. The other cops all wanted to say good night to Del before leaving. “Don’t forget that asshole’s in your trunk and drive home,” one of the female officers warned. “You come out in the morning and find him frozen to death in there and you’ll be even farther up Shit Crick than you are now.”
“She’s right,” one of the other cops agreed. “Char-Easy would do the happy dance.”
“Fuck Char-Easy,” Del said, and something about the way it came out made Janey wonder if his hatred of the woman might be more complicated than he let on. Had he in his head made the same exception for Charice Bond that he’d made for Halle Berry?
“What the hell’s got into you?” she said, when they were at the door, struggling into their heavy coats. In addition to paying his own tab he’d grabbed hers and paid it, too.
“Beats me,” he admitted. “Just don’t think I’m going to every time, ’cause I’m not.”
Outside, Janey told him she was fine to drive, but he said no, she’d been drinking tequila. She could ride with him and they’d retrieve her car in the morning.
“Should we check on him?” she said, meaning the man in the trunk.
“What? You mean to see if he’s still in there?”
“No, to see if he’s still breathing. What if he chokes to death on his own vomit?”
“You worry too much,” he said, unlocking the sedan’s driver’s side and then hers. She supposed he was right. She’d done nothing but worry all night and for what?
The only other vehicle in the lot besides Del’s and hers and Gary the bartender’s was a huge, bright yellow Caddy that had to be twenty-five years old. Janey figured it must belong to the guy in the trunk. When they swung by, Del’s headlights illuminated the vehicle’s West Virginia plate. “Huh,” Del said. “He’s a long way from home.”
SUNDAY
Roomies
WHEN RAYMER WOKE on Sunday morning, he was surprised to find his new roommate seated at the kitchen table, dressed in the same clothes he had on the day before and squinting at the screen of a laptop. His two suitcases still sat near the front door, right where he’d set them down the night before. Raymer tried his best to make some kind of sense of this. The laptop had to have been in one of the two suitcases, which meant that at some point Jerome had removed it. Why would he have closed the suitcase up again and set it back by the door instead of bringing it and its companion into the spare bedroom where he’d be staying? Was he trying to convey to Raymer that he was playing this whole match under protest? That he could change his mind at any moment and leave? The last thing Charice had warned Raymer about before leaving the two of them together was that his world was about to change and not for the better. Very little of what was in store for him with Jerome was going to make much sense. Best to just roll with it.
The night before, when Jerome arrived at the Horse with those same two suitcases, his stated intention had been to have Charice drive him to the airport. From there he would fly back home to North Carolina. He seemed to regard the luggage as evidence of this intent. In Charice’s view, contravening evidence—Jerome’s well-documented flare for melodrama, together with the fact that evening flights out of Albany’s regional airport were nonexistent on the weekend—had been more compelling. “I’m sorry I yelled at you on the phone,” she told him. “But this”—here she indicated the suitcases—“is crazy.”
At the time the three of them were standing in the middle of the dining room. Everyone else in both the restaurant and bar was watching, a few pretending not to, but most not bothering.
“We’ve discussed this,” Charice reminded her brother. “You can’t go back home till you’re right. I hope you’re not going to stand there and tell me you’re right, because we both know you’re not.”
Raymer had expected Jerome to dispute this, but he didn’t. Instead, he just stood there with the two suitcases, looking like Willy Loman. “How did you even get here?” Charice wanted to know.
“I summoned a taxi.”
Raymer couldn’t help smiling at this. Other people called taxis. Only Jerome would summon one.
“Well, you wasted your money,” she said. This whole time Jerome had still not acknowledged Raymer’s presence. “Aren’t you going to say hello to Doug?”
Jerome shrugged. “He hasn’t said hello to me.”
“Hi, Jerome,” Raymer said.
“He hates me,” he told his sister, as if Raymer had not spoken.
“I don’t hate you, Jerome.”
“He does,” Jerome insisted, again to Charice.
“Nope.”
This time the other man looked down at his shoes. “Really?”
“Really. I don’t hate you.”
At last Jerome ventured a quick glance at Raymer, who put on what he hoped was a sincere-looking smile.
“See?” Charice said. “What did I tell you? This is all in your head.”
Jerome shrugged, as if to concede that in fact there was a fair amount about the contents of his head that he didn’t understand.
“We’ve got burgers coming,” Charice said. “Do you want to sit down and have dinner with us or do you want to just stand there looking like a crazy person?”
“I’ve already enjoyed a small repast.”
“That doesn’t mean you can’t join us. There’s plenty of room in the booth. See?”
Jerome glanced over at the booth in question, which was, as advertised, large enough for three.
“Join us,” Raymer said. “Please.”
At this, Jerome finally set down the suitcases, went over to the booth and slid in, stopping in the middle, a deft maneuver, Raymer realized. Now Charice would have to sit on one side of him and Raymer on the other, a geometric shape that, unless Raymer was mistaken, probably reflected a new reality. Or, if odious Dougie was to be believed, an old one that Raymer refused to acknowledge. Charice slid in next to her brother and patted him on the knee. Which left Raymer in the center of the room with Jerome’s suitcases. He lifted these—they were surprisingly heavy—and set them down out of the way, before joining them in the booth. A moment later their burgers arrived. The waitress also brought an extra beer glass, which Raymer filled from the pitcher for Jerome.
“And I boxed these up for you,” she said, setting the wings Charice hadn’t eaten in the center of the table.
