Somebody's Fool, page 20
“There now,” Charice said when it was just the three of them. The other diners had mostly returned to their food and their own conversations. “Isn’t this better?”
If Jerome had an opinion, he declined to share it. Instead, he pulled the cardboard box toward him, opened it and peered inside. “They’re all yours if you want them,” Charice told him.
Hesitating, he looked over at Raymer, who said, “Knock yourself out.”
When Jerome continued to stare at the wings without making a move to take one, Raymer intuited the problem and slid back out of the booth. From a nearby table he filched a plate and a silverware roll-up. When he set these down in front of Jerome, the other man removed the cutlery and tucked the paper napkin into his shirt collar. Raymer considered grabbing another roll-up so Jerome would have a second napkin for his sticky fingers, but then remembered what Charice had told him earlier. Despite having been prepared for what came next, he was still amazed to see Jerome go at the wings with a knife and fork.
What on earth had he been thinking? Raymer asked himself. The last thing he needed was a roommate, especially this one. So why, why, why? Love, he supposed. What else? Charice needed him to do this and so he would. For a whole month she and her brother had been cooped up together and they both needed a break. Charice was clearly at her wit’s end. And yet, watching Jerome saw away at those chicken wings with a knife and fork was truly terrifying, and Raymer, feeling his resolve buckle, wondered if it was too late to renege. If he did, Charice would understand, wouldn’t she? Because she was right. It was completely unfair of her to expect this of him. He opened his mouth to tell her so, but saw that she was tucking into her burger with genuine appetite. To Raymer, she had the look of someone who’d been carrying a piano and had just set it down. He’s yours now, she seemed to be saying. Bring him back when he’s fixed.
Raymer sighed and took a bite of his burger, which somehow, despite bacon, cheese, ketchup and several thick slices of pickled jalapeño, tasted of ash.
* * *
“WHAT YOU’VE GOT in this place,” said Jerome, not bothering to look up from his laptop, “is some seriously antediluvian Wi-Fi.”
Raymer, puzzled, scratched his stomach. “How did you manage to log on?” He hadn’t written down the log-in info anywhere.
“It took me all of three tries to guess your password, Dawg,” Jerome replied.
When had he started calling guys “Dawg”? Raymer wondered. Or was he purposely mispronouncing Raymer’s first name?
“I hope your credit cards are better protected.”
“Card,” Raymer corrected. “I only have the one.”
“And your bank accounts,” Jerome added.
“Same deal,” Raymer admitted. “Just the one.”
Jerome still hadn’t looked up from the screen. “Checking or savings?”
“Checking.”
“Where?”
“What do you mean, where?”
“By where I mean what people usually mean by that word. As regards a particular place or location. Which bank, is what I’m asking.”
“Why do you want to know?”
“I bet I could hack your account.”
“Then I’m definitely not telling you.”
“Give me a day or two and I bet I could steal your whole identity. I could become you, Dawg.”
“Why would you want to become a guy with antediluvian Wi-Fi?” Though, for the time being at least, that’s exactly what he was.
“I could use the money in your bank account to make improvements. You need to get yourself a good French press, for example. Nobody drips coffee anymore. Only drips drink drip coffee.”
“Then I guess I’m a drip,” Raymer said.
He’d awakened this morning, as he did most mornings, with an urgent need to pee. Grabbing his cell phone off the kitchen counter, he went into the bathroom, shutting the door behind him. He’d promised to call Charice when he woke up, so as soon as he’d relieved himself, he did. She answered on the first ring. “How is he?”
“I’m fine, thanks,” he said, taking a seat on the commode, and reminding himself to flush as soon as he hung up. “How are you?”
“I’m sorry,” she sighed. “How are you?”
“Too early to tell. You don’t sound great.”
“Just woke up with an upset stomach, is all. How is Jerome?”
“Chatty. He insulted my Wi-Fi.”
“That’s good.”
“How, exactly?”
“He’s talking.”
Raymer supposed this was probably true. He’d said next to nothing during dinner last night, even when he himself was the subject of their conversation, how this new living arrangement would work. Later, after they’d arrived at Raymer’s flat and he’d showed Jerome the spare bedroom that would be his for as long as he stayed, Jerome had gone in and shut the door behind him, leaving his suitcases in the entryway as if they contained nothing he was likely to need, and leaving his sister and Raymer alone in the living room. Charice, staring at the closed door, said, “This is going to be even worse than I feared.”
“We’ll make out somehow,” he assured her.
“No,” she said, “you won’t. It’s going to be a shitshow.” In fact, she told him, if they managed not to kill each other, they’d likely both emerge from this experiment profoundly damaged, maybe even requiring some sort of institution that served meals and had extensive grounds with high fences where, on sunny days, the two of them could take long, medicated walks.
“He says it took him only three tries to guess my password,” Raymer told her.
“Not happy?” she said. “I’m surprised it took him that many. The underscore must’ve thrown him off.”
This, of course, was what came of taking advice from your therapist. He’d chosen not_happy because Dr. Qadry had suggested he own the famous we’re-not-happy-until-you’re-not-happy business card. Also, it was easy to remember (this was true of humiliation generally). In fact, he used not_happy for just about everything that required a password. “So, you guessed it too?”
“Chief?” Charice said. She mostly called him by his first name these days, but every now and then she’d revert, especially when she had something particularly derisive to say. “Anybody who’s ever seen your high-school-yearbook photo could guess it.”
“That’s just plain mean,” he told her. Also, where had she seen his yearbook photo? Not wanting to be reminded of high school, he’d thrown his own copy away. Were such things online now?
“You could probably guess my password, if you thought about it,” she said.
“Why would I even want to know your password?”
“So you could check up on me? Find out all my secrets?”
“I respect your privacy,” he said. What secrets?
“That’s very sweet,” she said, “though I’m not sure it’s the best profile for a cop.”
She was probably right. Despite Dr. Qadry’s attempts to probe his mind for hidden motivations and Dougie’s cynical attempts to make him more suspicious of his fellow man, Raymer did tend to believe what people told him, even when their stories didn’t track. “He also says I need a French press.”
“I’ll bring ours over later. It was the first thing he made me buy when he moved in. He says only—”
“—drips drink drip coffee. I know. His suitcases are still sitting by the front door.”
“It’s going to take him a while to settle in.”
“He’s still in the same clothes he was wearing last night. That sweater looks familiar.”
“He found it in the back of your closet.”
Lord, Raymer thought. What if Jerome really did intend to become him? “I don’t think he’s even used the bathroom.”
“He doesn’t like to share facilities.”
“He expects his own bathroom?”
“It’s just going to take him some time to wrap his mind around things.”
What about my mind? “Does he think he can hold it?”
“That’s exactly what he thinks.”
“And when does that change?”
“When he can’t. Try not to overthink this. By the way,” she said, “what’s with that sign out front?”
“What sign?”
“There’s a FOR SALE sign on the lawn. I noticed it on the way out.”
Raymer had forgotten all about it. The sign had appeared the week before, after his downstairs neighbors moved out. Since the recession, half a dozen houses on Upper Main had come on the market. “People put those there when they want to sell their property,” he told her.
“You should consider buying it,” Charice suggested.
I don’t want to own a house of my own, Charice, he thought. I want to move back in with you. Instead, he said, “I no longer have a job, remember?”
“Yes, you do. You work for me. You’re going to find out who killed himself at the Sans Souci. You’re also on Jerome duty. That’s two jobs.”
“Which reminds me. We haven’t discussed salary for either position.”
“Let’s see how things go,” she suggested. “What are your plans for the day?”
“I thought we’d go get some breakfast, then see if I can find a charger for that BlackBerry.”
“I doubt he’ll leave your apartment.”
“There’s nothing to eat here.”
“He’s very stubborn.”
“Which will occur to him first, do you think? That he has to eat or take a shit.”
“Jerome doesn’t shit,” she reminded him. “He defecates.”
There was a knock on the door. “I can hear every word you’re saying in there” came Jerome’s voice from just a few inches away.
“Okay,” Raymer said. “Thanks for telling me.”
“I need to get in there, Dawg,” he said. “Really, really bad.”
Raymer stood. “Ooops,” he told Charice. “Gotta run.”
“Go,” she said, hanging up.
When he opened the bathroom door, a panicked Jerome burst past him.
Out in the hallway, Raymer allowed himself to smile, but a split second later there was a shriek from inside the bathroom. He had forgotten, Raymer realized, to flush.
Me again, Little Bro—
Remember that pact we made when we were little, me and you? After Mom took up with Dickweed? How we swore never to lie to each other? How we sealed our oath with blood? I’d wanted to do it like in a movie, where you’d use a knife on your palm, but you were too little and after that fight I got into with Will—the one over the stopwatch—blood freaked you out, so we decided on a pin instead. We used the stove burner to sterilize it, remember? And you still got scared and wanted to back out when the pin glowed red, but I said I’d go first to show you how easy it was. So, I jabbed the pin into the tip of my index finger and when the tiny bead of blood formed, I handed it to you and told you to do like that. Except you wouldn’t stick yourself hard enough to draw blood. You said we should just swear the oath. We didn’t really need the blood part. But I said, No, you can’t have a blood oath without it. Remember? So, finally, I went, okay, fine, just forget it, and I held out my hand for the pin so I could put it back in Mom’s pin cushion. But as soon as you gave it to me, I quick grabbed your hand and stuck your finger with it, and right away a nice bead of blood formed and we put our fingers together and smeared my blood into yours, you crying the whole time, right? But afterward you were as proud as me. You told everybody what we’d done and you had this big smile on your face. You even told Dickweed, and he called us morons.
Back then I don’t think it occurred to me that our swearing to always tell each other the truth started out with a lie—me promising to put that pin back in the cushion and sticking you with it instead. But here’s the funny part. We never did lie to each other after that. We were serious about our oath. I mean, we sure couldn’t trust either Mom or Dickweed to tell us the truth about anything, but me and you played it straight. At least I did. If you ever lied to me, I don’t want to know about it.
So I’m not going to lie to you now, Little Bro. I fucked up last night. After telling you I planned to make an early night of it? Well, I didn’t. I don’t really count that as a lie, because at the time I meant what I said, no bullshit. I know I don’t have to explain how that works. How you can really mean something and then, an hour later, it’s like you aren’t the same person who made the promise? I mean, you are, but you also aren’t. To most people that wouldn’t make sense, but I know you understand. It’s kind of like those dreams where you can fly? You’re soaring above the clouds and looking down at the earth and you think to yourself, This is so cool! How did I forget that I could do this? Why have I been walking everywhere? So in your sleep you just fly and fly and it seems so real, and then you wake up and you know it was just a dumb dream and you can’t fly at all, and that’s when you kind of give up, partly because you can’t fly but more because why would you, of all people, be able to do something that cool? If they were handing out wings, would you be one of the lucky ones to get a pair? Fuck, no. Our brother Will, maybe, but not me and you.
I think now that it must’ve been seeing Pop again that did a number on me, made me want to drink the well dry. Him inviting me to hang out for a few days. Not for the rest of my life or anything, just a couple days. Like maybe he could stand having me around that long. And the worst part, me kind of wanting to, I’m ashamed to admit. I don’t know. Maybe I’m just making excuses. Anyhow, I drove around this Schuyler Springs place, looking for the right spot, somewhere I wouldn’t stand out, but the joints on the main drag all looked expensive and you just knew they’d be full of assholes. And I don’t have to tell you how I get when I’m around certain kinds of people and listening to how they talk and it doesn’t even matter what they’re saying, I just want to punch their freakin’ lights out. What I had in mind was to just drink and not talk to anybody. Maybe listen to some country music. The good kind, you know? Hank. Waylon. Merle. Not this new shit. Anyhow, I get off the main drag and I see this place called the Green Hand and I can tell from the vehicles in the parking lot that it won’t be full of rich assholes, so in I go.
I find myself a seat at the end of the bar, close to the men’s room, because I’m thinking beer, which I can drink pretty much all night, but then I think again and order a shot of Jack and let me tell you, Little Brother, old Jack never knew what hit him. He slid down my throat like velvet, right into the grave. Slow down, I told myself. Just cool those jets, pardner, or you’re never gonna last the night. Also, I can’t get so carried away that I wind up flat broke. I got just about enough money for one more night in the motel and gas for the trip back after I’ve done what I came to do. I’m pretty sure I know what that is but, like I said before, not every last detail.
So, here I am in this Green Hand joint, getting my bearings, you know? People are talking and laughing and I don’t see anybody I might want to punch out later, which is good, because usually I can kind of tell if there’s going to be trouble just by looking around. There’s this one big, really loud table, mostly guys but a few women, and it turns out they’re all off-duty cops. I kid you not, Little Bro. I’m in a fucking cop bar. But I think, Okay, good. One more reason to behave myself.
Here’s where it gets interesting. Fast-forward a couple hours, maybe three, and four or five more Jacks. It was crowded before but now the place is really hopping. The cop table is getting louder and louder. The door opens and in comes this woman who looks kind of familiar, but how can that be? Then I realize she kind of reminds me of the girl I saw earlier that afternoon over at Pop’s. I told you about her, remember? The one who was driving that flatbed truck that said GRANDPA ZACK’S TREASURES or some such? The one I figured was maybe an old girlfriend of Will’s? Anyhow, like I said, in comes this same girl, and I’m thinking no fuckin’ way. Until I look closer and I see it’s not her. Can’t be. The girl in the flatbed was in her twenties and this woman’s gotta be, like, fortysomething. So, great. I’m not going crazy. But here’s what’s gonna blow your mind, Little Brother. She’s looking around the bar while she waits for her drink, and when she sees me, she’s the one who does a double take, and I’m thinking, Wait. There’s two different women who both recognize me as our brother Will? I’m supposed to believe that shit? But then I see her decide she doesn’t know me after all, the same conclusion I came to about her. Which is still weird, right?
Anyhow, she takes her drink and goes over to the cop table and settles in with them. I haven’t taken a piss yet, so I make a trip to the head, which is decorated with green hands, all the walls and even the damn ceiling. I’m not talking decals, either. It’s like they got all their regulars to dip their hands in buckets of green paint, then print them on the wall. Men’s hands, women’s hands, little kids’ hands, even. So, I’m in there pissing and I notice the little window looks out on the parking lot, so I take a gander. There’s the Yellow Sub, sticking out like a sore thumb. I’m half expecting to see the Grandpa Zack’s Treasures flatbed, but no. Which settles it. Different woman. Doesn’t explain her double take when she saw me, though, which makes me jittery, or maybe it’s just being in that room with all those green hands.
Back at the bar I settle onto my stool and order another Jack and tell myself that everything’s just fine, and there’s no reason to be jumpy. Nothing bad’s going to happen. When things are about to head south, I can usually tell, even when I’m hammered. I look around the bar to make sure there’s nobody I want to punch out, and there isn’t. I still can’t shake the feeling that something’s not right, though, and I wonder again if maybe it’s the woman who looked familiar when she came in. She’s still over at the cop table, so I watch her for a spell, thinking maybe she’ll look over at me, but she doesn’t. After a while I realize she’s forgotten I exist. Whoever she is, she’s nothing to me and I’m nothing to her. I begin to relax a little bit, but then, I don’t know why, I start to wonder: Should I be doing any of this? I know, I know. It was mostly me that wanted to. You tried to talk me out of it. The way I figure it, though, it’s kind of like with the pin. You didn’t want to do that, either, but afterward you were proud. This would be like that. But sitting there in that cop bar I’m thinking maybe that’s what this woman I don’t know and who doesn’t know me is trying to tell me—that I should’ve stayed in West Virginia. Up here, everything’s sort of off. Pop, dressed in clothes that make him look like somebody else. Rub-Not-Rob giving me the evil eye for no good reason. The Grandpa Zack’s Treasures girl. Mostly what I feel is defective. Dickweed’s word, remember? He’d look at us and say, “What’re you, some kind of defective?” Anyhow, that’s sort of how I’m feeling. This whole plan of ours. Back when we were talking about how it would go, it seemed like something I could do, but now I’m not so sure.
