“Martha.”
“Martha,” he says, like he’d forgotten it and needed reminding. “Totally.”
Satisfied, the kid takes an exaggerated step backward to push open the door. “Heya, Rocky,” he calls. A blast of music and warm smells from the darkness within. “A friend of Martha’s.” And then, to me, as I walk past, “Sorry about the hassle. Can’t be too cautious these days, know what I’m saying?”
I nod politely, wondering what he’s got hidden up in the jacket, what means are tucked away to welcome a visitor without the right answers: a switchblade, a crowbar, a snub-nose pistol. Can’t be too cautious these days.
The music playing inside is early rock and roll, tinny but loud; there must be a battery-operated boom box tucked away somewhere, turned up to ten. Rocky’s is just one big room, wide as an airplane hangar, high ceilinged and noisy and echoey. At one end is an open kitchen with a massive wood-burning pizza oven, a couple of cooks back there with rolled-up sleeves and aprons, drinking beers, bustling around, laughing. The dining area has the classic cheap red-and-white checked tablecloths, fat little barrels of red pepper flakes, vinyl records and cardboard cutout guitars displayed along the upper moldings. There’s a sign shaped like a Wurlitzer jukebox advertising specials, all named after girls from classic-rock songs: the Layla, the Hazel, the Sally Simpson, the Julia.
A big man in a stained white apron shambles over from the kitchen, raising a bear paw of a hand in friendly greeting.
“How you doin’?” he says, just like the kid outside, same practiced geniality. Old Saint Nick belly, fading anchor tattoos on his forearms, sauce stains down his front like cartoon blood. “You wanna shoot, or you wanna eat?”
“Shoot?”
He points. Behind me are six bowling alleys that have been repurposed as firing ranges, with rifle stands at one end and paper human targets at the other. As I watch, a young woman in noise-canceling headphones narrows her eyes and squeezes off a round from a paintball gun, blasting a yellow splotch onto the upper arm of the target. She shouts happily and her husband, boyfriend maybe, claps and says “nice.” At the next alley over, a hunched and white-haired man, one of a cluster of seniors, is hobbling slowly up to the rifle stand to take his turn.
I turn back to the big man. “You’re Mr. Milano?”
“Rocky,” he says, the easy relaxed smile freezing and hardening. “Can I help you with something?”
“I hope so.”
He crosses his thick arms, narrows his eyes, and waits. It’s “Ooby Dooby”—the song playing from the boom box—vintage Roy Orbison. Love this song.
“My name is Henry Palace,” I say. “We’ve met, actually.”
“Oh, yeah?” He smiles, pleasant but disinterested: a restaurateur, a man who meets a lot of people.
“I was a kid. I’ve had a growth spurt.”
“Oh, okay.” He looks me up and down. “Looks like you’ve had a couple of those.”
I smile. “Martha has asked me to try and locate your son-in-law.”
“Whoa, whoa,” says Rocky, eyes suddenly sharpening, taking me in more carefully. “What, you’re a cop? She called the cops?”
“No, sir,” I say. “I’m not a policeman. I used to be. Not anymore.”
“Well, whatever you are, let me save you some time,” he says. “That asshole said he’d be with my daughter till boomsday, and then he changed his mind and made a run for it.” He grunts, refolds his arms across his chest. “Any questions?”
“A couple,” I say. Behind us the dull dead thud of the paintball rounds smashing into their targets. This sort of thing is going on all over the city, to varying degrees, people getting “aftermath ready” in various ways. Learning to shoot, learning karate, building water-conservation devices. Last month there was a free class at the public library called “Eat Less and Live.”
Rocky Milano leads me through the restaurant to a small cluttered alcove off the kitchen. There were always rumors about Martha’s dad, silly little-kid rumors, discussed in confidential tones by those of us she babysat for: he was “connected,” he had “done time,” he had a rap sheet a mile long. Once I think I asked my mother, who worked at the police station, if she could run his file for me, a request she treated as dismissively as is appropriate for any such request coming from a ten-year-old.
Now here’s Rocky, apologizing with a good-natured grin as he pushes a pile of paper plates off a chair for me, settling himself behind a battered metal desk. He essentially confirms everything that Martha said. Brett Cavatone married his daughter about six years ago, when still an active-duty state trooper. They didn’t have a ton in common, Brett and Rocky, but they got along just fine. The older man respected his new son-in-law and liked the way he treated his daughter: “Like a princess—like an absolute princess.” When Rocky decided to open this place, Brett left the force to work for him, to be the right-hand man.
“Okay,” I say, nodding, writing it all down. “Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why come work here?”
“Oh, what? You wouldn’t want to come work for me?”
I look up sharply but Rocky’s easy smile is still in place. “I meant, why would he leave the force?”
“Yeah, I know what you meant,” he says, and now the smile widens—broadens, more like, taking up more real estate on his round face. “You’ll have to ask him.”
He’s joking, of course, goofing on me, but I don’t mind. The truth is I’m enjoying the company of Martha’s father. I’m impressed by his ramshackle restaurant and his defiant insistence on keeping it open, providing some measure of normalcy and comfort until “boomsday.”
“Thing about Brett,” says Rocky, comfortable now, leaning back with his hands laced behind his head, “is that the guy was terrific. Hardworking. An ox. He was here more than I was. He built the chair you’re sitting on. He named the house specials, for Pete’s sake.” Rocky chuckles, points absently out at the dining room, where the husband and wife from the target range sit at one of the tables now, sharing a pizza. “That’s a plain they’re enjoying, by the way. This week’s special is called Good Luck Finding Any Fucking Meat.”
He chortles, coughs.
“Anyway, the plan was, we’d get the place going together, then when I died or went soft in the head, he’d take over. Obviously that isn’t happening, thank you very much Mr. Goddamn Asteroid, but when I said I’m staying open till October, Brett said ‘sure thing.’ No sweat. He’s in.”
I nod, okay, I’m writing all of this down: hardworking—built the chairs—open till October. Filling a fresh page of the blue book.
“He promised,” Milano says acidly. “But the kid made a lot of promises. As you’ve heard.”
I lower my pencil, unsure what to ask next, abruptly seized by the absurdity of my mission. As if any amount of information will prepare me to go out in the vast chaotic wilderness that the world has become and bring Martha Milano’s husband back to his promises. In the kitchen, the small cluster of cooks crack up riotously about something and slap each other five. Taped up behind Rocky in the cluttered office is one of the target forms from the bowling alleys, a silhouetted human figure, blue paint splattered all over the face: bull’s-eye.
“What about friends? Did Brett have a lot of friends?”
“Ah, not really,” says Milano. He sniffs, scratches his cheek. “Not that I know of.”
“Hobbies?”
He shrugs. I’m grasping at straws. The real question is not whether he had hobbies but vices, or maybe a new vice he wanted to take for a test drive, now that the world has slipped into countdown mode. A girlfriend, maybe? But these are not the sorts of things a father-in-law is likely to know. The boom box is playing Buddy Holly, “A Man with a Woman on His Mind.” Another great one. I’m not listening to enough music these days—no car radio, no iPod, no stereo. At home I listen to ham radio on a police scanner, jockeying between the federal emergency band and an energetic rumormonger who calls himself Dan Dan the Radio Man.