“Morris Dunkirk, mysterious welfare client — it would have been months before anyone at the welfare office put it all together and came up with me. Ten thousand dollars, free and clear. I could have invested, started a business, got that clean slate Margo was continually torturing me to make.”
“But you didn’t go through with your scheme,” I said.
“Tony, do I look to you like a hunted man? A haunted man, yes, but not a hunted one. No, the combination of all that risk and my lack of nerve made me back off. But it was a wonderful notion to have, if only for a brief madness.”
A week later, we played again. I was beginning to place more distance between our meetings. Postal supervisors with their woefully low five-figure incomes couldn’t afford to be high rollers, and reeling him in with such ease wasn’t setting all that well with me. Hustlers, when they get too close to their marks, never fare well. And I was beginning to like Dunkirk, starting to sympathize with him in his failing marriage and his missed opportunities.
“Lately my wife has acquired the perverse pleasure of inviting her relatives to stay with us so she can design events to embarrass me. Bridge, backgammon, paddleball, badminton — she knows I’m poor at games and sports. Physical coordination is not one of my strong points. Her brother was an oarsman in college, her oldest sister a tennis player — on the men’s team! After I’m thoroughly humiliated by losing every game, Margo will turn to career success. The brother is a physician, the sister is the first woman port commissioner in the state of Massachusetts. I endure it as long as I can and then I go out to my garden for a little peace.
“I have a beautiful garden, Tony, with zebra plants, Rex begonias, aralia plants that grow seven feet high, autumn crocuses whose colors take your breath away. Sometimes when I spend time there I wish I never had to rejoin the real world. One day Margo will push too far, embarrass me once too often, devise one more game I can’t play...”
There was no finish to the sentence, simply a shrug of the shoulders to indicate an impasse, a woeful want of an instinct for retaliation he knew didn’t exist within him.
We played three games of rotation, after which Dunkirk handed over forty dollars, thanked me for the games and conversation, and left McGuire’s without a backward glance. They were games I hated to win. His technique was becoming so much better, his selection of shots almost professional in their gradation. And yet there was this terrible lack in his game of finishing off the opponent when the opportunity came.
We were, I knew, coming to the end of our games together because Morris Dunkirk was becoming a friend. At pool I didn’t know how to compensate for that. I couldn’t make adjustments in my play, friend or enemy, and I knew I would begin to feel bad about taking his money. The loss of income caused me no concern. There was always plenty of fresh meat at Packy’s and the Palladium and Kosko’s, foolish punks who would get caught too far downtown for their own good. Pickings for a pool hustler are never slim.
For the next couple of weeks, my schedule didn’t permit me to stop at McGuire’s. Two naval training ships had docked in the bay that curled north of town, and there seemed no end to young sailors in crisp dress-whites with base-exchange pool cues tucked under their arms and fat wallets folded into their beltlines. Every so often I thought of Morris Dunkirk, waging his little war and trying to resurrect his deadened instincts. I also gave serious thought to going out to California for a while. Spending too much time in one place always unnerves me.
One morning after the training ships had moved out of port, I stopped in at McGuire’s again, merely out of a craving for a pepper sandwich. I took a seat at the counter. Greta looked up from slicing green peppers and her face seemed suddenly to fill with an odd combination of grief and confusion. She bent to a shelf below the grill where some bread loaves were stacked and took out her purse, pulling a scrap of paper from it.
“Tony, I got something here I cut out of the paper I think you oughta see. Just in case the cops come to visit you out of the fact you been seen playing pool with him.”
It was a local news story dated a week earlier, a single-column story beneath a photograph of Morris Dunkirk, and a two-line headline that read LOCAL MAN, WIFE VANISH.
The article related a tale of disappearance that police, friends, and relatives were at a loss to explain. Neither Morris nor Margo Dunkirk had shown up for work at their respective jobs and their stone rambler on Grandview Street remained vacant. Margo Dunkirk’s late-model Vega station wagon was parked and locked in the double garage, but Dunkirk’s four-year-old light-green sedan was missing from its accustomed spot next to the Vega.
“They’ve been murdered, that’s what,” said Greta in a voice filled with foreboding. “The police will find the two of them dead in that other car someplace, shot to death or worse.”
To calm her, I told her things less heinous were possible and that she shouldn’t leap to hasty conclusions. I handed back the clipping and ordered a sandwich and a cream soda. Greta turned back to the grill.
It was then that he came into McGuire’s, all wild-eyed and unshaven, his pool cue under his arm. He wore tinted glasses and a dark moustache was gaining good growth on his upper lip.
He slipped onto the stool next to me and ordered a Heineken. Greta didn’t recognize him.
When she served him and left, I said to Dunkirk, “Do you know the police are looking for you? Have you seen the article in the paper?”
“Seen it.” There was a new forcefulness to his tone, a recklessness. But he didn’t appear drunk or crazy.
“Where have you been, Morris?”
“Here, there, and everywhere. On vacation. I’ve been playing poker, shooting pool, keeping company with midnight women. I spent two days in Las Vegas — just bought a plane ticket and climbed aboard! I played blackjack, saw some shows. That Buddy Hackett can really make me laugh, you know?”
And then Dunkirk was up and out of his stool, heading for the pool tables, and I followed him. He put his cue together with lightning speed, throwing its cloth covering aside with the dash of a medieval warrior hurling down a gauntlet. He took some bills from his wallet and slapped them down on the apron of the table, then racked the balls, chalked his stick, and pulled a quarter from his pocket.
“Call it for break.”
“Heads,” I said, still flabbergasted at his manner.
The coin fell tails. “We’ll play YMCA to sixty points, two bucks a point,” Dunkirk announced and then broke the rack of balls viciously, sending them scattering like fifteen beads of water in a hot frying pan. The five-ball fell. He ran six more to bring him to a tricky cross-corner on the fourteen-ball for a 61-point total. He chalked once, took a reading on the shot, stepped up to it, and calmly put it down.
“That’s $122, Tony. Rack ’em and let’s play this damn game!”
He had the instinct now; at long last and a little late in life, but he had it. Morris Dunkirk was haunted no longer. Now, he was only hunted, even as he was hunting me. And as we continued to play, I pondered the proper time to ask Morris Dunkirk where he had buried his wife.
Inspector Saito’s Small Satori
by Seiko Legru
By becoming less, the monks believed, one became more...
Inspector Saito felt a bit better when the constable had switched off the Datsun’s siren, but just a trifle better for his headache throbbed on. Once more he felt sorry about having visited the Willow Quarter the night before, and about the sixth jug of sake. He should have remembered his limit was five jugs. But it had been a good bar and there had been good people in the bar. And the difference between six jugs and five jugs is only one jug, one small jug. But the headache, which had now lasted nearly sixteen hours, showed no sign of abating.