“Good for her,” I said.
“Queenie had talent to burn. She wasn’t queen of the magpies only because of her fast hands.”
“Ah,” I said.
Toby showed his discolored teeth. “Say you’re in the kitchen, talking about this and that, and Queenie’s next to the table. You go to the fridge, get some ice. When you look back, she fell through a trap door. You go out of the kitchen and yell, ‘Queenie?’ The bedroom door opens up, and out she comes, holding a feather duster. ‘What the hell?’ you say. She says, ‘There’s a spiderweb over the kitchen window and, for your information, we keep the duster in the bedroom closet.’ You get in the mood for a new TV set and figure you shouldn’t have to pay for it, a thing like that is one hell of an advantage.”
“The girls inherited their father’s talents.”
Toby refilled both glasses. “Queenie most of all, then Joy and Nettie. But May got her share.” His eyes drifted over the collage of naked women. “When May was about thirteen, she was going down Wagon Road—that’s Cordwainer Avenue now—in Howard’s rumble seat. What Queenie told me, May saw two girls pointing at her from another car. You know, laughing at her. I always had the feeling it took more than that, because Howard’s family couldn’t go anywhere without attracting notice. Once I asked May straight out, but she went into her vague act. Anyhow, whatever the hell she saw made her so mad she put on a fireworks display. Smashed windshields all up and down Wagon Road, blew out tires. Snapped the telephone lines. Everything went crazy.”
Joy’s papery voice rustled in my ear:
And my sister May created havoc on Wagon Road by setting off thunderations, even though to hear my daddy talk she was hardly a Dunstan at all, which was a nasty, untrue insult to my sister.
Because when we were young women, a gentleman came along who showed a liking for May. Unfortunately, the gentleman did not like her in the proper way and attempted to force her to his will. Rape is what that man had in mind. May took care of that fellow through what the French would call force majeure. She came home in great agitation and told me, Joy, my young gentleman attempted to take advantage of me. I was so frightened, I found in me the power to rise up and demolish my young gentleman. After I demolished him, my young gentleman was only a stinky little green puddle I cannot bear to remember.
I don’t know how you can be more Dunstan than that.
“There was some business about a boy who tried to rape her,” I said.
“Good old Joy,” Toby said. “Leave no rock without first you roll it over.”
I asked if he knew anything about Star’s father.
“Queenie said Star’s father was a jazz drummer, but she didn’t tell me his name. That’s where Star’s musical ability came from, she said. I had the idea he might have been sort of like a Dunstan himself, the drummer. Truth is, I always thought Ethel Bridges, the New Orleans woman who married Sylvan after Omar got killed, was another one like that.” He grinned at me. “Didn’t you get pretty good on the guitar, up there in Naperville?”
Star had boasted about my guitar playing to Toby.
“I tried,” I said.
“A couple of times, customers came in with big band photographs, like Duke Ellington or Benny Goodman, where the musicians signed their names. I used to look at the drummers in those pictures and think, If you’re the one, you had a daughter you never knew about, but you would have been proud of her.”
“That’s lovely,” I said, struck by his tenderness. “I guess people have the wrong idea about pawnbrokers.”
“You know what we are? Protection for people who need protection. Or we used to be, before the banks started handing out credit cards right and left.”
I felt the clarity of a long-overdue understanding. “Oh, boy.” My skin was tingling. “I just got it. My mother had me put into foster care to protect me from her family.”
“Well, yeah,” Toby said, as if I had said that having a lot of money and living in a mansion was more agreeable than scraping by on food stamps in a tenement.
“When I did come home, she must have ordered everyone to watch what they said. I wasn’t supposed to know about the Dunstans.”
“She wanted you to have a regular life.”
“And her aunts didn’t like that. They didn’t see the point.”
Toby rested his forearms on the cluttered desk. The egglike eyes were perfectly clear. “All the time you were a little kid, my wife and her sisters hoped you were going to show you had some Dunstan in you. When you got older, and Star put her foot down, it set up like a barrier.”
“That’s why I never came back to Edgerton after I was twelve. She didn’t trust Nettie and May.”
Toby poured out the last of the Johnnie Walker Black, mostly into his own glass. “About time we wrapped this up. Before you go to bed, maybe take a couple aspirins.” He smiled at me. “Was there anything else you wanted to talk about?”
“Just one more thing,” I said.
“Shoot.”
“Right before we left the hospital, Star managed to get out a few words. They were about my father.”
Toby’s head drifted up.
“She said his name was Edward Rinehart.”
The window shades went down and up again behind the thick lenses.
“Your in-laws want me to forget the whole thing. They know something, but they’re not talking.”
“What makes you so sure?”
“Star lived with the guy before she married him. Nettie would know his name.”
“You’d think,” he said.
“You know it, too, Toby.”
He smiled. “I deal with hundreds of people, day in, day out. Names go in and out of my mind.”
“You can do better than that,” I said.
He pushed himself back and walked around the desk to stand in front of a picture of a black-haired woman proffering breasts like slightly deflated beachballs on the palms of her hands. “I am not a schlub who spent his whole life behind a counter. In 1946, the year after I got out of the army, I had a white Cadillac convertible and seven thousand bucks in the bank. Important people invited me to their houses, treated me like family. I killed a man once when he didn’t give me a choice, and I did six months at Greenhaven for a deal where basically I stood up for someone else. Toby Kraft is not Clark Rutledge.”
“And somewhere along the line, you met Edward Rinehart.”
He peered at me through the thick lenses. “Star gave you that name?”
“Definally.” I tried again. “Def-in-at-ly.” I discovered that my glass contained only half an inch of whiskey.
“I maybe remember something.” We experienced a meaningful pause. “After the funeral, suppose you work here for a week or so. Hundred bucks a day, cash.”
“What’s this, a trade-off?”
“An offer.”
“It’s still a trade-off, but all right,” I said.
Toby pretended to search his memory. “I never met this Rinehart, but he got around, was my impression. From the little bit that sticks in my mind, he got into different places. A certain guy might be able to help you.” He marched behind his desk, sat down, and searched through the rubble for a pen and a pad of notepaper. He leveled an index finger at me. “I didn’t give you this name.”
“Right,” I said.
He scribbled, tore the top sheet off the pad, folded it in half, and passed it to me. “Put it in your pocket. Look at it tomorrow and decide what to do. You want to let bygones be bygones, that’s okay, too.”
The office swayed like the deck of a ship.
“Hasta la vista,” Toby said, shrinking again as he stood up.
35
I was okay until I heard the blare of the jukebox. The more I walked, the better I got at it. Then I moved, not too unsteadily, into the noise of Whitney Houston howling about everlasting love, and the combination of alcohol and night air struck my nervous system. As I drifted across the sidewalk, a lamp post swung toward me, and I grabbed it
with both arms before it could get away.
I held on until the sidewalk stopped moving and passed through the crowd outside the bar, assisted by a gentleman who seized my arm and propelled me southward. Women young and old regarded me in great solemnity from their stoops. At last I reached Merchants Park and stumbled to a bench. I dropped into its embrace and fell asleep.
I awakened with a pounding head and an ache in my gut. Lamplight illuminated the words carved into the slab over the entrance of the first building in the terrace across the street. THE CORDWAINER BUILDING. I gathered my feet under me, and the pain in my belly took solid form and flew upward. I expelled a quart of watery, red-brown stew onto the asphalt.
It was 11:35. I had been passed out on the bench for at least an hour and a half. Nettie and Clark were not yet so soundly asleep that I could get to my room unheard, and I was nothing like presentable enough to pass inspection. I needed to rinse my mouth and drink a lot of water. At the far end of the park stood a good-sized drinking fountain.
A granite basin flowed into a tall, octagonal pedestal. I located a brass button on the side of the basin and rinsed my mouth, gulped water, splashed my face, and gulped more water. I looked down and noticed the inscription on the base of the pedestal.
DONATED THROUGH THE GENEROSITY OF STEWART HATCH. “BY THE WATERS OF BABYLON SHALL YOU LIE DOWN AND REST.” 1990.
Before me lay an hour of free time, waiting to be filled. I straightened my necktie, buttoned the jacket of my best blue suit, and walked not all that unsteadily out of the park in search of the night-blooming Edgerton.
36
Two streets vivid with neon signs and theater marquees extended eastward from Chester. A fat crimson arrow flashed like a neon finger. The darker red, vertical stripe of HôTE PARIS hung over a smoked glass door. People in groups of three and four, most of them men, meandered down the streets.
Low Street to my left, Word Street to the right. I picked Word because it was closer, and before I had taken two steps noticed a bronze plate designed to look like a curling sheet of parchment. At the top of the scroll were the words OLD TOWN. I moved up to peer at the legend.
Site of the Original Town Center of Edgerton, Illinois, an Important Commercial and Recreational Destination for All Who Journeyed on the Mississippi River. Restorations in Progress Supported Through the Generosity of Mr. Stewart Hatch.
The only signs of restoration I could see on Word Street were the lamp posts, two per block, which had the white glass globes of old Art Deco gas fixtures. The buildings, bars, movie theaters, liquor stores, transient hotels, and tenements had a hangdog look, as if they expected to be ordered off by a policeman. Splashes of neon light lay across dirty brick and flaking timbers. Men in worn-out clothes ducked in and out of the bars. Here and there, better-dressed people cruised up and down the sidewalks. A few residents sat out in lawn chairs, enjoying the night air.
A little way ahead, a couple straight from an advertisement for organically produced soap-free soap detoured around a drunk propped against the front of a bar. A familiar-looking rodent in a goatee and a black leather jacket slid past them and darted across the street.
I watched him slip out of sight into a neon-flickering passage and realized that I had entered what remained of the raffish village Uncle Clark had described. Here was the survival of the Edgerton where crews and passengers from the steamers had disembarked to gamble, visit bordellos, gape at the dancing bears and two-headed goats at the fairground, have their palms read and their purses cut. The town had remained essentially the same, at least if you stood in my great-great-grandfathers’ Edgerton late on a Friday night.
I moved across the street in the direction of the lane and the rodent in the leather jacket.
37
Seconds after entering Dove Lane, I learned that there were two Old Towns, the one comprised of Low and Word streets, and the other, separate Old Town hidden behind them. A maze of twisting lanes sprouted smaller, darker passages as they meandered into postage-stamp squares on their journeys toward dead ends or one of the wider streets. Stewart Hatch’s philanthropy had not extended to the hidden Old Town, and the lamps on byways like Dove were glassed-in bulbs on top of iron columns at least seventy years old. Every third or fourth bulb had been broken, but the district’s neon signs and illuminated windows washed the narrow lanes in light.
At the next corner, Dove continued past dark storefronts and abandoned buildings. I turned right into Leather, where the brightness had lead me to expect strip clubs and massage parlors. Light spilled from a glass-fronted laundromat, where a half dozen tired-looking women idled on benches in front of churning dryers.
From Leather I turned into Fish, then Lavender, Raspberry, Button, Treacle, and Wax. About the time I left Button, I became aware of footsteps behind me. The quiet footsteps continued to follow mine through Treacle and Wax, though I saw no one when I looked back. Wax led into Veal Yard, where light shone upon a dry fountain from the windows of the Brazen Head hotel. I circled into Turnip, walked past a bar called The Nowhere Near and again heard footsteps sounding behind me. I looked over my shoulder and glimpsed a dark, moving shape. My heart missed a beat, and the shape melted away.
I hurried over the slippery cobbles and emerged once again into the bustle of Word Street. What I saw on its other side told me exactly where I was.
Outside the glass doors of a two-story bar, the furtive character I had followed into Old Town’s lanes jittered in a hipster shuffle as he explained something to a chunky blond woman wearing a half-unbuttoned denim jacket. She was Cassie Little, Clark Rutledge’s beloved, and the rodent was named Frenchy La Chapelle. I had seen both of them in St. Ann’s ICU. SPEEDWAY LOUNGE blared in pink neon above the doors.
A hand closed on my left elbow, and a well-rubbed voice whispered, “Buddy, I don’t know about brains, but you do got balls.”
The disheveled old man beside me grinned up at my surprise. Dingy gray curls escaping from a flat cap; concave cheeks shiny with gray stubble; layers of unclean clothes; a clear, pervasive smell of alcohol. “Piney Woods,” he said. “Remember me?”
38
“I wasn’t here on Thursday night,” I said. “But I heard about you from my Uncle Clark.”
“Unless you don’t happen to be here now, either, you better slide back into Turnip.” He pointed at four men with rocky faces and shirts open over T-shirted guts who were assembling in front of the Speedway. They had the look of small-town roughnecks who had changed in no essential way since the age of sixteen. Cassie Little had disappeared inside the bar, and the rodent had exercised his talent for evaporation. Three of the men carried baseball bats. I let Piney pull me back into the lane.
“My old poker buddies, I suppose,” I said.
“Staggers and them.” Piney moved to block me from view. “They got some ornery mothers over in Mountry.”
I looked over his shoulder. “Which one is Staggers?”
“Him in the fatigue pants.”
Him in the fatigue pants had the spoiled, seamed face of a man who had never recovered from the disappointment of learning that he did not rule the world, after all. He was smacking his hands together and growling orders and, despite his belly, looked as though he spent his work day pulverizing boulders with a sledgehammer.
“Seems like the boys are getting ready to break up again, take one last look around.”
“I heard someone following me,” I told him.
“Like I said, you’re lucky. You want to stay that way, you should get out of Hatchtown, pronto.”
I hurried back into Veal Yard. On its other side and to the left of Wax, Pitch Lane wound deeper into Hatchtown. I ran down it, hoping that it would lead me to the vicinity of Lanyard Street and Toby Kraft’s pawnshop.
Pitch joined Treacle for the length of a listing ruin exhaling the odors of ammonia and rotting apples. I heard again the click of approaching footsteps. On the other side of the ruin, I dodged into the continuation of Pitch and jogged
down dark twists and turns. The pursuing footsteps rang with a deliberation more frightening than haste. Midden intersected Pitch, but … forget Midden. Use your imagination. When I came to Lavender, I looked to my left. Two ragged boys who appeared to have sprung unaltered from a slum photograph of New York in the 1890s regarded me from the door of an abandoned building. To my right, high-pitched female laughter came through the window of a shoebox called No Regrets. From beyond it, heavy footsteps plodded forward. Whoever the first man might be, this was one of Joe Staggers’s friends.
My two would-be assailants drew nearer, one approaching from behind, the other from my right on Lavender. One of the boys jerked his thumb toward his shoulder and stepped back, and I jumped through the opening into lavender-scented darkness.
Broken bands of light streamed through chinks in the front of the building. Against the rear wall a huddle of boys slept beneath tangled blankets. I prowled down the wall, looking for a gap wide enough to see through. My savior followed me.
“After ya?”
“Thanks for your help.”
“Wheere’s a bit o’money, den?”
I pulled a bill from my pocket, held it before a glimmering quarter-inch crack to expose George Washington’s secretive face, and gave the dollar to the boy.
“Wanna hurt ya?”
I squatted on my heels and put my eye to the crack.
“You kin speer anudder dollar.”
I gave him a second bill.
From the back of the warehouse, someone whispered, “Shove ’im in the Knacker, Nolly.”
The lane before me was still empty, but I could hear the approach of heavy footfalls. From further away came a lighter tap tap tap. The boy lay down and pressed his eye to another crack.