A ruthless hiss that echoes. I look up. Above me five combat jets in a V indite white lines across the sky like a trail of poisoned bait. Time to go. Definitely time to go. Back to my machine, to paving and noise and ice.
At least the violins are gone.
17
CULVER TUBBS HAD EIGHT professional fights and lost them all. Now he’s a happy, lumbering heavyweight in the Golconda kitchen and a deacon of the Assembly of God church up the road in Organpipe. His fire-and-brimstone pork chops jab at my stomach, unpacified by the Jose Cuervo I’ve been pouring over them. Opatowski and I are alone in his bar. He looks out the one small, high window and shakes his neat head.
“The wide open West. How about it. Never missed a Saturday matinee when they had Hoot Gibson or Bronco Billy. It all looked so good from a shitty little Pennsylvania mill town. I said, ‘Won’t eat soot all my life. Gonna go where the skies are not cloudy all day.’ Only took me about fifty years to do it.”
And only because they told his wife to go ahead and write up her will. Opatowski didn’t bother with questions. (All doctors are liars, he says.) They sold everything but their clothes, drove off for air that was light and warm, bought this place at a sheriff’s auction for cheap.
“The one good thing about her sickness is it scared us into being brave.”
I’ve seen him with a rip chisel in his hand, chasing obstreperous drunks into the parking lot and growling like a badger. I’ve seen Mrs. O. heading out on a rock hunt with collecting bag and slender hammers, pushing along a green oxygen bottle on the rack her husband has specially customized for the rough terrain.
“Hard or easy, you have to keep on learning,” Opatowski says. “What did I know before about portion control or scaled rentals? Zero. But out here, with that feeling of being pitted, man against the elements, you really want to apply yourself.”
He sucks at crushed ice drizzled with bourbon, chips away at the pressed pulp of an Olympia coaster. There is comfort in this hard-lit space, both of us supposedly preoccupied, no apprehensiveness of the empty public room, but instead the happy tedium of a family dinette. His left hand, the one with four and a half fingers, lies on the friction-smooth black table as if it’s died there. His small, neat head makes one of its slow angles, eyes wide without really taking anything in.
“Slow and steady wins the race,” he says, as though the phrase, after long deliberation, has just now come to him. “One foot in front of the other.”
My glass is empty, but I have a little salt anyway, replaying the night Opatowski came to my (his) room and confronted me over Heidi. The tracery around his eyeballs told me he’d had a few belts first, but he was steady as magnetic north.
“You just better know what you’re doing.” He sidestepped, blocking my view of the television. “She’s probably more curious than someone her age has any business being, and maybe not so strong as she ought to be. But so far strong enough. That Wade she’s got is a pretty good man, worked eight shifts a week when they were saving up for the baby….”
I interrupted to say I had no ambition for home-wrecking, that my attention span was too short. This did not reassure.
“Fuck ’em and forget ’em, is that it?”
“Look, this is as much her idea as it is mine,” I said, and it was close enough to the truth.
Opatowski grimaced with impatience. Two zebras nuzzled on the screen behind him.
“What if it is?” he said.
Not actually suspecting him, but irritated, I said, “Are you protective or just jealous?”
His voice was even, calm, potent. “I’m putting you on notice, that’s all. An inkling, one false rumor that you haven’t treated her right, and you’re out on your ass without so much as a razor blade.”
He folded his arms with the gravity of an Arapaho elder, and then, in another few seconds, had fallen puffing and pale into the other chair. Then he fell for several minutes into wheezing sleep, his legs thrown out stiff and straight like a little boy’s in a pew. He woke up nostalgic, helping me shell and eat a sack of peanuts while describing his two years of ceaselessly headphoned Signal Corps service in Wales.
“Well, hey. That sweet old hound,” Heidi said when I told her about the cautionary visit. “And I was even thinking he might can me when he found out.”
She brought him a chess pie the following day.
Opatowski looks over lemon and lime wedges that are drying out in their Tupperware bowls. He nudges fanned-out cocktail napkins, cups his palm over the goblet of red stir straws.
“Might as well clear out,” he says.
“But it’s only quarter of eight.”
“You want to wait for the nobody that’s coming, it’ll have to be by yourself.” The neat head rolls resignedly backward. “I’m gong back to the apartment and listen to my Ezio Pinza records.”
He reaches behind a trellis of plastic grapes and flicks a breaker switch that kills everything but the refrigeration. I follow him out into the thin blue chill. The stars are too bright, like bulbs around a makeup mirror.
“Vacancy, goddammit,” he shouts at a passing Camaro.
Motor chuffing, lights beaming into featureless outback, a provisions truck has parked by the kitchen entrance. Tubbs, in an apron with Appaloosa markings of old grease, is helping the driver unload.
“Supposed to have been here a couple hours ago,” Opatowski says without annoyance. “Got lost probably. It happens all the time.”
I lend a hand while the slow-and-steady seigneur gives instructions that no one hears. Frozen blocks of hash browns, rime-coated cartons of breaded veal from a plant in Wyoming, enough to lay the footings for a small patio. Portion control?
“Got an uncle moved down from Wisconsin, carves duck decoys,” chummy Tubbs is saying. “Not a lot of call for them around here.”
“I’m a quail man myself.” The driver has turquoise bracelets on each wrist, a trim vice-squad mustache. “Even though there’s not much on ’em but the breast.”
“I like something big enough to stuff. Then you wrap it in bacon and bake it nice and slow to keep the juices in.”
“What part of Wisconsin?”
“Fond du Lac.”
Opatowski grabs a bag of fish fingers and we walk back to his place. I can use the company as much as he can. We tip quietly through darkness to the living room with its sunburst carpet and mounted horse skull. Mrs. O. is asleep, Pinza’s “Some Enchanted Evening” barely audible. Opatowski peers into the shoebox bedroom, recloses the door. We whisper, both of us, moving with the soft and wary foot placements of burglary. Parchment-colored light seems not to flow from the little gooseneck lamp but to escape. I take out my cigarettes, but Opatowski shakes his head. He slumps, the Jim Beam bottle braced on one knee, hand wrapped around the neck like it’s some kind of control lever.