He smoothed his hair and wiped his hands on his trousers. "How are you doing?"
“I couldn't tell you," I said.
"How about a schnocker?"
"No, I just. . . . Yeah, why not?"
“I'm still busy, but it won't take long." When I looked at the counter, he said, "Your momma sure brightened up the place when she stood back there. Who's getting your business, Spaulding?"
It took me a moment to understand what he meant. "Nettie thinks I spent too much money."
At the back of the shop, Toby waved me into a small, hot room with fluorescent lights. A metal desk heaped with papers faced out from the back wall, and a low bookcase jammed with green ledgers and a metal safe stood against a half partition dividing the office from a darker space containing rows of industrial shelving. Old calendars with pictures of naked, lushly upholstered women plastered the walls. The men I had seen in the alley were carrying boxes into the area beyond the partition. "Kraft?" one of them said.
“It's just my grandson." Toby turned back to me. "Don't let those girls poor-mouth you. They have enough to get by on. When's the funeral?"
"Wednesday morning." I sat down on the folding chair.
Toby sighed. "One second." He went around the gap in the partition and talked to the men. I heard the truck drive away.
“I'm glad Nettie and May have enough to get by on."
He rubbed two fingers together and winked. “I promised you a drink." He took a liter of Johnnie Walker Black and two smudgy glasses from a bottom drawer of his desk. "Sorry about the no ice, but I never got around to putting in a fridge." A pack of unfiltered Camels and a gold lighter came out of his shirt pocket. He poured three inches of whiskey into our glasses. “I wish it was a happier occasion. Here's to Star."
We clinked glasses.
"You getting on okay?"
"Pretty well," I said. “I saw Joy today."
"Been a long time since I did." We drank. When he thrust the bottle toward me, I shook my head. "She and Clarence doing okay, or is that too much to ask?"
"Clarence has Alzheimer's," I said. "She keeps him strapped in a wheelchair and feeds him baby food."
“I don't suppose Clarence is much of a conversationalist anymore."
"Joy did a lot of talking, though," I said.
He tilted back in his chair and smiled. "You're a smart kid, I don't have to tell you which end is up. Joy is a very unhappy person."
I took another swallow of whiskey and thought about what to say. “I don't suppose a lot of Dunstan babies were born with wings and claws, but there must have been something funny about a couple of Howard's brothers and sisters, because Clark mentioned it, too."
Toby propped his head on the back of his chair and stared up at the fluorescent light. A plume of smoke floated toward the ceiling. "First of all . . ." He grabbed the bottle and leaned forward. "Have some more goddamn Scotch. You're making me do all the work." I offered my glass, surprised that it was almost empty. He added more to his own, set down the bottle, and considered me for a moment. This was going to be good.
"First of all, think about Nettie's husband. I say that because being Nettie's husband is Clark Rutledge's full-time job. He's the vice president of Dunstan, Incorporated, and one thing aboutClark, the man loves his work. What's the main thing about work?"
"The salary?"
"Nope. Work gives you a place in the world.Clark is Somebody because he's a Dunstan, and he'll milk that cow until it drops. On top of that, Clark is not on your normal wavelength. One day he's telling you why the Jewish people, one of which is me, brought on Hitler by hoarding all the gold in Germany. The next day, the Jews are a great people because they're the people of the Book."
I smiled at him.
"Okay, that'sClark, first of all. Joy, now, Joy always felt left out. You notice how she talks about her daddy all the time?"
I nodded.
"Howard was a strange guy, but him and Queenie always got along. Joy had a problem with that. Joy was one of those kids, whine, whine, whine. Gimme more, gimme more, and it's never enough, right? Women built like that, they always want more than what they got, because what they got is never enough. It can't be, on account of they got it."
Toby's description seemed surprisingly acute.
"Queenie knew how to handle the old man, but Joy only knew how to get sore. Take what she says with all the salt in the grocery store, and then some."
"Joy weighs about ninety pounds. Clarence is maybe one fifty, pure deadweight. She gives him a bath every night."
"Good trick."
"Joy says she inherited psychic powers from her father, and all that's left of them is enough to pick Clarence out of his wheelchair, lower him into the tub, clean him up, dry him off, and move him back into the chair."
“I'll give her this, her stories are getting better."
"She moved his wheelchair back and forth just by pointing at it. Then lifted her finger and made it float off the ground and swing around in midair. Clarence liked it so much, he drooled like a baby."
Behind the thick glasses, Toby's eyelids rattled down and up twice, like window shades. I reached for the bottle.
"That stupid fuckin' Joy." He heaved himself off his chair and went around the partition. I heard him check the lock on the alley door. The Camels came out of his pocket. He took out a cigarette and examined it for flaws. After he got the cigarette going, he tilted back in his chair and looked at me some more.
• 34
• "This is what you came here to talk about?"
“It's one of the things I came here to talk about."
He ran a pudgy hand over his face. “I don't even know that much to begin with."
"You know more than I do. And everyone else refuses to say anything at all."
"Star didn't want you to know about this business."
"What business is that?"
"What passed down through your family, starting with Omar and Sylvan. You heard about Omar and Sylvan?"
"Oh, yes," I said. "Particularly from Joy."
Joy's frail voice told me,My grandfathers, they were the surviving remnants of pagan gods and could have ruled over earthly Dominions but cared for nothing but wealth and pleasure. To build that house on New Providence Road, Sylvan had the ancestral house in England taken apart stone by stone and brick by brick, and he shipped all those stones and bricks across the sea and put them back together again exactly the way they were in the old days. He might as well have flushed his money down the toilet. My daddy was the same way. C'est dommage.
"She could of had the decency to keep her mouth shut."
"Because my mother didn't want me in on the family secret. Whatever it is."
Toby took another slug of whiskey and pressed the glass against the silver fur spilling out of his shirt. "Your mother wanted to protect you. I'd say she did a pretty good job."
I stared at him without speaking.
Toby raised his left hand and held it palm up, so the smoke curled around his fingers. The gesture said: it's no biggie. "You were normal. There was stuff you were better off not knowing."
“I was normal."
"When Joy was a baby, I guess, if she didn't get fed on time, shit went flying all over the place, windows broke. . . . Where with you, all that happened was, you had those fits. Which ain't that unusual for a person. Hey, does that still happen?"
Recognitions, thoughts of a kind, began to take shape in my mind.