“I don’t think so.”
My landlord had wedged my mail in the screen door of my apartment. The cat nudged my calf as I carried in the letters and sorted them out.
There was a phone bill, which I kept, and a credit card offer, which I tossed. The last item in the stack was from the D.C. government. My application for a private investigator’s licence had been accepted. The notice instructed me where and when to pick it up.
I fed the cat, brewed some coffee, and took a mug of it and a pack of smokes out to the living room. I settled on the couch to read the Monday Post.
Andre Malone’s two little paragraphs were buried in the back of Metro, under a group head called “Around the Region.” He was “an unidentified N.W. man.” He died of “gunshot wounds to the chest and lower abdomen.” Police believed the killing, the article said, to be “drug related.”
One week later, McGinnes phoned.
“Nick?”
“Yeah?”
“Johnny.”
“Hey, Johnny. Where you at, man?”
“The Sleep Senter,” he said.
“That the place that spells Center with an S?”
“The same.”
“Uh-huh,” I said.
“The way they explained it to me, it has a double meaning. The sleep sent-her, get it? Like this place really sends her, it’s some kind of out-of-body experience.”
“Clever.” at, Yeah,” he said. “This place is okay. They got a bunch of schmoes on the floor, but they’re an all right bunch of guys. And dig this-they put a fifty dollar pop on the reconditioned mattresses. Fifty big ones, man, for something that’s recession proof. Everybody’s gotta sleep, right, Jim? Anyway, mattresses, electronics, what the hell’s the difference? I could sell my mother if they’d tack a dollar bill on her.”
“When did you make the move?”
“Today’s my first day. The last day I saw you, I kinda fell into a black hole. When I crawled out the next day, I quit my job at Nathan’s. Good thing I did. I talked to Fisher-they had some serious shake-ups after I left.”
“Such as?”
“Rosen resigned on Wednesday, effective that day.”
“Who’s running the show?”
“They booted Ric Brandon up to general manager. You believe that shit?”
“The cream always rises to the top,” I said.
“Yeah.” He laughed briefly, then coughed into the phone. “Listen, Nick, I gotta go take an up. I don’t want these putzes to think I’m weak. Talk to you later, hear?”
“All right, Johnny. Talk to you later.”
The next morning I was folding my clothes from the laundromat when some shells and stones fell from the pockets of my swimtrunks. An hour later I was driving south on 95, headed for the Outer Banks and Ocracoke Island.
The ferry was nearly empty that early November day, as was the island campground. I pitched my tent on a spot near the showers and, wearing a sweatshirt beneath my jean jacket, unfolded a chair on the beach.
I spent the first day reading the rather seedy biography of a relentlessly hedonistic musician, a story I lost interest in long before the inevitable overdose. Later I wrote a long letter to Karen that took two hours to compose and only a few seconds to shred. In between those activities I walked on the beach and stopped occasionally to talk with fishermen who were wading in the surf. In the evening I cooked hot dogs and ate a can of beans, and then crawled into my sleeping bag as soon as it was dark, as there was little else to do.
By the middle of the second day, I realized once again that being away from home clarifies nothing. Despite romantic notions, that’s been the case in every instance that I’ve left town to “think about things.”
An approaching northeaster shook me out of my stupor late in the afternoon. I broke camp as the slate sky blew in, and was packed and in my car when the rain came down, suddenly and quite violently, from the clouds.
I started my Dodge and drove through the storm to the gray house on pilings with the small gray sign. Running through the rain and up the wooden stairs, I entered Jacko’s Grille.
The door slammed behind me when I entme when ered and most of the heads in the place turned my way. There was a group of older locals in plaid flannel shirts and dirty baseball caps, all sitting at a couple of picnic tables that they had pushed together. Empty cans of beer dotted the tables. Full ones were in the men’s hands. Water dripped down through holes in the roof into more than a few spots in the room, though no one was taking much notice. The sound of the rain competed with the country music coming from the jukebox.
I nodded to the men and pushed wet hair back off my forehead. A couple of them nodded back. One of them smiled and said, in a startling island accent more northern European than American South, “Wet enough for ya?” I said it was and stepped up to the bar, where I ordered a burger and a beer.
I took the beer out to the screened-in deck and drank it while I watched the h ard rain dimple the wetlands as it blew across the sound. The beer was cold but warmed me going down, and I ordered another when I picked up my burger.
I ate the burger and drank the beer out on the deck. When I was finished, the first, beautiful verse of “Me and Bobby McGee” came from the juke, and the men inside began to sing. I listened as their drunken voices welled up on the achingly true chorus. When I went to the counter for another beer, one of them waved me over and I joined them.
I bought what was the first of many rounds. The water was coming in now all around the bar, and someone had turned up the jukebox to its maximum volume. One of the men produced a fifth of whiskey and some glasses, and we started in on that.
The corners of the room bled into the walls. There was laughter and it was warm and I was away from my world, and everything was cleaner and more clear.
With time came darkness, and the rain continued to fall outside and into the barroom. My friends told jokes and sang, then joined me in a toast, to a Greek immigrant everyone had called Big Nick. For a moment I wondered what he would think, seeing me now, so twisted and so far from home; that moment burned away with my next taste of whiskey, stronger than reason, stronger than love.