It had always been the rhythms of my father’s life that most mystified me. There had been no predicting whether he’d turn left or right. You didn’t know where he was headed because he hadn’t told you, and he hadn’t told you because he thought you knew, or should have known, or could have figured it out if you’d been paying attention. But now, evenings with my father and Wussy and whoever else we managed to pull into our loose circle made perfect sense, and when we all headed out Greenie’s front door at eleven I knew whether we’d be turning left for The Glove or right for Mike’s Place. Spookier still, when my father swung around on his barstool and said, “Well?” I knew what he meant, even when he was harkening back to some earlier conversation left unresolved two hours earlier. I can only say that such moments were magic for me and they made me grin at him so stupidly, so drunkenly, so affectionately, that I had all I could do not to tell him that we were becoming simpatico.
“Simpatico,” I told him later that night. We were on our third bar after Mike’s Place. Wussy had left us to go home twice and managed to find us again. We’d run into Tree and Roy Heinz and half a dozen other minions, all of whom had fallen away for the moment—to the men’s room, the pool table, the cigarette machine—leaving my father and me alone together. “That’s what Mom says we are, she and I.”
He shook his head. “Sounds like one of her words all right. She used to come up with shit like that all the while we were married. You should try coming home after a couple years of shooting people on the other side of the world and then have to listen to your mother talk. About a month and you’re ready to go back. Simpatico.”
We discussed simpatico for a while, to my mother’s detriment.
“I never should have done what I did, though,” he said. “She’s wacky. Always was, but I should’ve stuck it out anyhow.”
“Why?” I said.
“Because I should’ve, that’s all. I just made all of it worse. Then you came along and I didn’t care about that either. I couldn’t believe it, for one thing. One day she tells me she’s pregnant and the next day, practically, you’re here. France and Germany were forever and a fuckin’ day, and your mother has you in about a week … that’s what it felt like. All the while she’s saying we gotta settle down.”
He looked at me, bleary-eyed. “I should’ve, too. Nuts as she was, I should’ve stuck it out. I should’ve gone right to the grave with your mother.”
He thought this over for a while, clearly attracted to the idea of such fidelity. “Or Eileen,” he went on. “You may not like her, but she saved my ass more than once.”
“I do like her,” I said, wondering where he’d gotten the idea that I didn’t.
“You should,” he said. “She’s the best. Nothing against your mother. But Eileen’s the best. I should go right to the grave with Eileen. That’s what I would do, too, if I was any fucking good. Which I’m not.”
We looked at each other, and I realized that after sobering up some when he stopped with the whiskey, the quantitative effect of the beer was catching up with him. I was pretty far gone myself, and he had about an eight-hour lead.
“You could contradict me once, if you felt like it,” he said.
“You don’t want me to,” I said. “You’re feeling sorry for yourself.”
“Right,” he said. “This is no life. Believe me. Don’t get caught up in this shit. I got nothing. And when I die, that’s what you’ll inherit. It’d been better all around if I’d got mine in France.”
“Thanks,” I said.
He shrugged, not catching my meaning, or not acknowledging it. “Everybody would have been proud of me. They’d have argued about how great I’d have turned out if I hadn’t got shot.”
“You can still do what you want,” I said. “You’re what, forty-five?”
“Forty-seven. And anything I was going to do, I did already.”
“That’s bullshit,” I said cheerfully.
“What’m I gonna do now?”
“How do I know?” I said. “I don’t know what I’m going to do.”
“You won’t either,” he said. “You’ll just wake up one day and it’ll all be done. All fuckin’ done.”
His eyes looked past me then, and they suddenly became so focused and narrow that the bloodshot whites disappeared altogether, leaving just the gray iris and black pupils. I turned around to see what had focused him. At first I thought it was the pool game, where a little guy in a thin t-shirt was lining up the eight. Everybody else was watching to see if it would drop and you could tell from the interest that there was a lot of side action. Except for my father and me, the only other person in the place who didn’t seem to care what happened to the eight ball was Drew Littler, who’d slipped into a dark booth on the other side of the smoky room. The green felt table and bright light above it were an island of illumination separating him from us. My father was right. He was big as a house.
“I take it back,” I heard my father say. “I might do a good deed yet, if I could get my hands on a shotgun.”
The skinny kid in the thin t-shirt dropped the eight, and Wussy, who had been his opponent, handed him a five-dollar bill before coming back over to where we were sitting.
“I’m getting old, Sam’s Kid,” he said. “Another year or two and I’ll be as over the hill as the rockhead.”
A guy I didn’t know came over and handed my father two fives.
Wussy shook his head. “I’m glad to see somebody’s making a profit on my misfortune.”
“It’s a living,” my father said. “It’d be a good one if I could find people who’d bet on you more regular.”
“You see your buddy over there?”
“Yup.”
“Good. Let’s go someplace else. So far this ain’t been your day. There’s no reason to invite total annihilation.”
“Too late,” my father said. “Here he comes.”
“I wisht I’d kept that pool cue,” Wussy said.
“I wish you had too. Why don’t you go back and get it.”
“If I thought you could hold your own for thirty seconds, I would.”
“Hold his own what,” Drew Littler said, coming in on the last part of the conversation. “Hell, Sammy’s an expert on holding his own.”
He nodded at me, offered a big paw, which I shook. Christ, he had gotten big. He wasn’t so good-looking anymore though, and it occurred to me that maybe he never had been. I’d just been impressed. He looked like he’d given up on the weights, his once hard, muscular body had gone to flesh now, though it still looked enormously powerful. His hair was long, almost shoulder length, and darker now, blond only near the ends. It covered his forehead completely, and I couldn’t see whether the big blue vein that used to writhe angrily when he lifted was still there.
“I hear you went to college,” he said to me. “How’d that turn out?”
“Pretty good for a while,” I said. “And then badly.”
“It’s all different around here, huh?”
I tried to imagine what he might be thinking of. I couldn’t think of a single thing that had changed in Mohawk. “It sure is,” I agreed.
“Look at us,” he said, supplying the example I was missing.
“Zero just got out of college too,” my father said.
“Right,” Drew Littler said. “I got a degree in whaddycallit … rehabilitation.”
“So what’s the first thing he does when he gets home? He goes to visit his mother’s dresser drawer.”
“You suppose we could stop this, girls,” Wussy said, “before it starts?”
“Stop what?” my father said.
“I just came over to say hello to Ned and buy him a beer,” Drew Littler said. “Not mouth with you.”
“Buy us all a beer,” my father suggested. “You got about two hundred bucks, right?”
“I spent some of it,” Drew Littler said, meeting my father’s gaze squarely.
“Naturally,” my father said.
“What I??
?ve been trying to figure out for twenty years,” Drew Littler said, “is why it’s any of your fucking business.”
“Well,” my father said slowly, “Zero, I’m not the smartest guy that ever was. But if I thought about something that simple for twenty years and still came up empty I’d be ashamed to admit it. Of course that’s just me. You could be different. In fact, you are different.”
Just then somebody across the room called my father’s name, and when he didn’t answer a chorus went up. “Your goddamn quarter, Sammy. You want to play or not?”
“It’s not my quarter,” my father said, reluctant to break away from his grinning and staring contest with Drew Littler.
“Bullshit,” Wussy called. “You put yours down same time I did. Go play.”
“Come on over,” Drew Littler nodded toward the dark booth across the room. “I’ll introduce you to this girl I’m with.”
For a terrible moment I imagined that when I arrived I’d find that it was Tria with him. “Good,” I said. “I’ll be right there.”
I watched all three of them cross the room, Drew Littler to a booth, my father and Wussy to the pool table. Then I went into the men’s room and sat on the closed toilet seat inside the single stall. Somebody in ankle-high work boots followed me in, saw the stall was occupied and walked out again. Before the door closed I heard the billiard balls crack and my father bellow, outraged at the idea that the kid in the T-shirt had made two balls off the break. Normally my father never bet more than a drink, at least on himself, when it came to pool. But this was a sure-lose situation, the kind that would tempt him. The skinny kid in the thin T-shirt would say something that would rub my father the wrong way and he’d decide to teach the kid a lesson. He had the fresh ten he’d just won off Wussy’s game and it would be on the table before he even thought about it. With luck, losing it would engross him for a few minutes.
You couldn’t do him any real good, of course. Wussy, who played my father like a drum, knew that. You could slow him down some, but you couldn’t change his direction for long. My return to Mohawk had slowed him a pace or two, and by appearing tonight I had postponed, perhaps, the savage bender he would still go on tomorrow or next week or next month. If I played all my cards right, went over and talked friendly with Drew Littler, I might even prevent hostilities between them tonight. But not forever. Probably not even for very long. The strange part was that my sympathies were, for the most part, with Drew. After all, whatever happened at the Littler house was none of Sam Hall’s business. For as long as I could remember my father had caused trouble over there, sticking his nose where it didn’t belong, offering advice when none was called for, giving orders where he had no authority. For twenty years he’d called Drew Littler “Zero” and half a dozen other derisive nicknames. If the boy had had enough, who could blame him?
But when push came to shove, as it had more than once and would again, I would side with my father. Not because he was right about Drew Littler. Not because Drew had always been lazy, sullen, stupid, and untrustworthy. I would side with my father because I too wanted Drew Littler brought down. Though we never discussed it, I’d often suspected that my father felt the same physical loathing that came over me in waves whenever the boy was around. Even that first afternoon when I had ridden on the back of his motorcycle up on the winding tree-lined drive and we two had gazed at the Wards’ white jewel house, I had felt it. An intense loathing that went far beyond rationality. The moment Drew Littler admitted me into his dream by telling me that the white jewel house would be his one day, said it with such dull, dogged conviction that he almost made me believe it, I would have annihilated him right there to prevent the long odds, had it been in my power. Surely it was this same animal loathing that gripped my father so powerfully, made him homicidal whenever he had to eat a meal at the same table as Drew Littler, or listen to his sullen, irrational insistence—“What’s mine is mine.” The boy had nothing save that dogged insistence, but even that was too much to allow him.
When the guy in the work boots came in a second time and left again, I flushed the john for show and scrubbed my hands in the dirty sink before returning to the bar. My father was still hanging on, though the skinny kid had just one stripe and the eight left. My father had five solids on the table, four of them more or less blocking separate pockets, leaving his opponent only two clear ones to shoot at. The kid looked like he didn’t know whether to shit or go blind.
I had the bartender send a round over to the booth where Drew Littler was talking to a girl who, even from the rear, looked vaguely familiar. When she turned and smiled, I saw it was Marion from the Big Bend Hunting Lodge.
“You the one done this?” she said in reference to the fresh Seven and Seven.
I stole a chair and planted it at the end of the booth so I wouldn’t get trapped on the bench with either of them.
“You’re from around here too, I suppose,” the girl said. “Everybody around here’s from around here.”
I couldn’t tell whether she didn’t remember me or just wasn’t letting on.
“Originally,” I admitted, “but not lately.”
“Old Drew here’s from around here,” she said. “I bet you were buddies when you was kids.”
“He was a couple years older,” I said. “He gave me rides on the back of his motorcycle.”
“You had a bike?” she said, pronouncing it “baak.”
“Till I totaled it,” Drew Littler said.
“Lucky it wadn’t you that was totaled,” the girl said. “My little brother had one and they had to spry him off the road with a far hose.”
A roar went up behind us, and I turned in time to see the skinny kid whistle the cue he was using across the room where it hit a post and shattered. “That’s dirty fuckin’ pool,” the kid said to my father. “You never even tried to win. I’d rather fuckin’ lose than win that fuckin’ way.”
“Good,” my father said. “I’d rather have you.”
“What happened?” Marion wanted to know.
“Sammy just got the little shit to scratch off the eight ball,” Drew explained to her. When he said my father’s name there was something of the old respect and awe in his voice. “That means the end of the game.”
“I don’t thank it’s very nice to throw the stick like that. Coulda put a eye out.”
“It’s a local tradition,” I said. “At the end of the game the loser is supposed to throw his cue.”
“How come the guy before this one didn’t do that?” Marion wanted to know.
“He was black,” I explained seriously. “Black people aren’t allowed to throw things.”
“That don’t seem fair,” Marion frowned. “I thank you’re pulling my laig.”
“Maybe a little,” I said. “Actually, the black guy was supposed to throw his cue too.”
“Well I should thank so,” she said, clearly relieved. “This is America, after all.”
During my entire conversation with Marion, I was aware of Drew Littler studying me through narrowed eyes, as if, despite the physical resemblance, he couldn’t quite believe that I was the kid he’d known. “I hear you’re tending bar down to Mike’s,” he said, rather pointedly putting an end to our banter. “How come you got that job?”
I shrugged, unsure whether he was asking why I’d taken it or how I’d got so lucky to be offered. I decided maybe it was the latter. “Things just worked out,” I said.
“Sammy got it for you, I bet.”
“He and Mike are friends,” I admitted. “Why? You looking for work?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe. Right kind of job comes along.…”
“I’ll keep an eye out,” I said, vaguely wondering what Drew Littler would consider the right job.
Nobody said anything for a minute. My father broke a new rack of balls. The skinny kid had disappeared before it occurred to anybody to ask him to pay for the broken cue. As far as I could tell, my father hadn’t so much as glanced in our directi
on since I’d joined Drew and Marion.
“Don’t you want to know what I do?” Drew said finally.
“Sure,” I said.
He drained his beer, watching me all the while, traces of a smirk playing around the corners of his mouth. Marion looked from Drew to me, then back again, probably wondering how she’d managed to disappear so completely when she’d been in the center of things a few seconds earlier.
“No you don’t,” Drew Littler said. “You don’t need to ask me what I’m looking for because you don’t plan to put in no good word anyhow. Hell, you’d warn ’em about me.”
“I think I’m gonna go find the little girl’s room,” Marion said.
“You do that,” Drew Littler said, without bothering to look at her.
I pushed my chair out of the way so Marion could slide out of the booth. Then Drew and I both watched her angle through the crowded bar, a few of the men turning to watch her with mild interest and losing most of it when they saw her wide hips straining against the fabric of her jeans.
“She’s a whore,” Drew said matter-of-factly when the door to the rest room swung shut behind her.
I didn’t say anything. He was right. Unkind, but right. Marion was a whore. Right too that I wouldn’t be recommending him for any jobs. And he was right about why I hadn’t asked him what he was looking for.
“We need us another beer,” he said, suddenly friendly again.
“Listen,” I said. “I gotta go.”
“One more,” he said, putting a big hand on my shoulder in case I was of a mind to stand up. “Be right back.”
My father came over when he was at the bar. “How you doing?” he wanted to know.