“Well,” Lucille said, “then maybe you’ll let me know when I’ve got your permission, O Lord of Lords.”
“I’m serious, Lucille.”
I dropped the mannequin and kicked it. “Now you’re serious. It takes Stuyvesant getting like this for you to get serious.”
“That supposed to mean something?”
“Unbelievable,” I said.
“What, like you’ve been telling me something?” Basil said. He flung his hand toward Dinky. “I mean, look at the bastard.”
Hickory’s face had become a mask, not so much of sadness or despair, though these were plain, too, in a tired sort of way, but more of simple disgust. “Someone get me a towel,” she said. “And another pillow.”
We heard Lucille in the kitchen rifling through cupboards and drawers. From another room a door skreeked open, and Lucille returned with a rag and icky pillow.
“The situation’s evident,” I said. “But if we stay here much longer we might not be able to leave.”
“Anyone can see he’s sick, dork,” Basil said. “A fucking bat in a goddamned fucking cave could see that.”
“Dinky’s sick, he must die — Lord, have mercy on us!”
Hickory took the rag from the bowl and passed it over Dinky’s head. She caressed him with easy words.
“Anyone,” I said, “could’ve seen the guy was sick a-way back when, squeeze. But no one here gave a goddamn till the shit was in their face.”
“Who cares?” Lucille said. “The point is we give a damn now. At least I do.” She looked like she’d just been indicted for some heinous crime. Her eyes leapt from face to face. “I do care,” she said.
“Not enough,” I said, “to’ve ever been straight with him. Not when you had the chance.”
“I know you’re not talking about what I think you’re talking about.”
“Just how many were there before the Gladden brothers, Lucy? How many after?”
“That’s not fair, AJ.”
“Or what about telling us all why you didn’t care for Dinky enough to confess the fun you were having that summer he was away? Or any other time you couldn’t shrug off your seven-month itch.”
I was getting to her all right. She was crumbling. “That’s not fair,” she said.
“You think he doesn’t know all about your games?”
“You don’t know the half of it, you bastard,” she said. “I had my reasons.”
“You did,” I said. “And I know the hole they crawled out of.”
“That’s not fair. It’s not fair.”
“It’s a little hard to cry wolf when you’re one of them.”
“None of that stuff had anything to do with how I feel about Dinky. How would you know what he means to me?”
“I wouldn’t, Lucy. That’s my point. I can’t see you give a stinking straw for the son of a bitch.”
“You bastard.”
I ignored her and went on. “Is that what you told Basil last summer, fucking him under that Mexican moon? I know how you are, Lucy. Hang the cost! Shit. You care so much for Dinky you just sent him into a hurricane for a bag of ice.”
Basil rose. “I should cave your skull in right fucking now.”
My hands flipped up to frame my face with a set of waggling fingers. Somewhere in my heart I’d hoped to look like Munch’s screaming man. “I’m sooooo fwightened,” I said. And then I snarled. “You cock head. If you had anything in your skull to make it worthwhile, I’d have done you a lifetime back.”
Basil stood there in his suit of mud. He still had that blackface, and the hat besides, perched on his head like an ugly bird.
“I’m your boss,” he said. “Remember that? In fact, now that I think about it, I’m your former boss.”
“I never worked for you.”
“I suppose I’m not the one who’s been signing your checks these last eight years then.”
“You jerk. Everyone here knows your grandma owns the buildings. That she got from your grandpa no less. All of which makes you nothing but a trust-fund piece of crap with insurance and fancy clothes.”
My friend was fazed, I could see, but that didn’t keep him from shooting back. “It’s a hell of a lot better than being a talent-lacking toilet-scrubber,” he said.
“Dinky’s sick, he must die — Lord, have mercy on us!”
Hickory had stayed by Dinky throughout, hand-in-hand, passing the rag along his brow. Now she turned our way with liquid eyes.
“Please, you guys,” she said. “Stop.”
“Dinky’s sick, he must die—”
“Shut up!” Basil said.
“Dinky,” Lucille said, “we’re going to get you out of here.”
“After Pac Bell comes in to fix the phone we might,” I said.
“Dinky’s sick, he must—”
“Dinky,” Lucille said.
“He must die — Lord, have mercy on us!”
“He doesn’t even know what he’s saying anymore,” Hickory said.
“Maybe Super’s still around,” I said.
“What?” said Lucille.
“Fuck that guy,” said Basil.
“No,” I said. “I mean, if he’s around, so’s his truck. He had to get here somehow, didn’t he?”
“If we can find him,” Hickory said.
“Maybe we can. Me and Basil, I mean. At least we can try.”
“The hell I am. After what he did to me?”
“What he did to you?” said Lucille. “I thought you said he was just some old nut.”
“But you don’t know. The guy’s a freak, as in for real. It’s like he’s the actual devil or something.”
“That doesn’t mean he won’t help us,” I said.
“I’m not going anywhere.”
Another fit had settled over Dinky, the coughing again, the same spewing again of blood and phlegm. I smoothed his blanket and dabbed his mouth. Hickory told me to kill my smoke, so I got up and took about fourteen slugs of bourbon. Then I went into the storm, hollering out for some wild old man, with his wasted monkey and bed of dolls and dog standing quietly by. An emptiness had opened up inside me. The night was wet and black and empty and cold, and I was scared, more so than I’d ever been. Maybe this is it, I thought, maybe this is where I’ll see the face no one but the dead have ever seen. But maybe I won’t be dead, just almost-dead, just passed out kind of in a forest of mud, curled up like some little bald worm in the mud.
THERE ARE TIMES YOU SEE THE ROT YOU’VE always been. My days were a trail of liquor-store bumblings and sunrise guilt, and every penny I’d earned these years had come to rest in a dirty glass. I’d ceased caring for others, and definitely for myself. The only things that mattered were booze and books. Scrubbing toilets — the very ones I’d puked into so many times — that was what I knew. The hurly burly of solitude that took me come each day’s midnight had stripped any cool I might still have owned a long time back. Night after night, in the chill of an empty school, my ambitions fell away like leaves from boughs in autumn. And wandering those halls, moving from bin to toilet to bin, the few kind trophies of memory that did remain floated by as evil nymphs — evil because angelic, angelic because there in the corridors of my past those trophies were safe from deeper ruin. And like angels they were accessible in only the cruelest of ways. What was the good in having something you could never hold?
Dozing behind the desks in that collegiate gloom, the times of my youth would tiptoe up with a sort of wary glee, now days of drowsing in my grandfather’s swing, now lightning in a field. Grape juice popsicles melted in my hand, beneath the shade of a swaying oak. My young mother would come to play in the wading pool. And rustling leaves, and tinkling ice, and the buzzing of bees, and pie…