I knew there was only one hope for salvation. I needed to be working again. I took out the piece of phone book I had ripped off at Elliot’s place. The one with the name “Eve” on it.
Eve seemed to have some central connection with the death of Stephen Elliot and Jackie the hooker. Not to mention Larry.
I went back to the pay phone, slugged in some coins, and got a surprising response.
The line was busy.
I’d been expecting the number to be no longer in service. The busy signal buoyed me. I felt some forward progress.
Kenny Rogers and then Willie Nelson stirred the beery air. Malley used to be a stone rock ‘n’ roll freak. I couldn’t believe what he’d done to his jukebox. Country music was not my favorite type of music.
Throughout this mini concert I kept trying the number again. Busy. I went over to the bar and got four quarters for a dollar. I’m at least as superstitious as your average Druid. I figured maybe new coins would unbusy the line. Right.
“You know what you need, Dwyer? A girl from St. Michael’s,” Malley said. “Find somebody from our old class — shit, man, they’re all divorced now — find one of those babes and start plugging her and get married. Find somebody who cooks good and likes to give head. You make things too complicated.”
He shook his head at me as I walked away. As if I were the numero uno dumb shit. Crude as he was, and God, was he — to the point of embarrassment most of the time — maybe he had a point after all. Maybe I should find a woman from my own background. Maybe that was my trouble. But I kept remembering the last such date I’d had. How she’d kept telling me dirty jokes all night and how she got wine-sappy over Eddie Rabbit records. Despite Thomas Wolfe, you can go home again: it’s just that there are very few people there you want to see.
“I beg your pardon?”
He sounded like a bad dinner-theater actor imitating British gentry.
“Eve,” I repeated. “I’d like to speak to Eve.”
It had taken me half an hour of changing between dimes and quarters — and half an hour of a regular Grand Ole Opry tribute on the jukebox — but finally the line had cleared, and I asked for Eve.
Only I got this guy. With his accent. With his ice.
“I’m afraid you have the wrong number,” he said. “Sir.” He added the last after a two-beat pause, and the way he said it was a masterpiece of subtle venom.
Then he hung up.
I tried to put the phone somewhere deep within the wall on which it hung.
Malley must have been watching me, because when I got back to the bar he said, “Believe it or not, Dwyer, Ma Bell makes me pay for shit my customers break.”
“Sorry.”
He waved his bar rag at me. “You won’t fucking listen, man. Won’t fucking listen.”
He slid a brew toward me.
“I know,” I said. “Good eats and good head. Right?”
He gave me a WW II thumbs-up sign. He didn’t look a damn thing like Harrison Ford. Which is fortunate for Harrison.
Somebody named Lee Greenwood came on the jukebox. It was getting to be time to leave.
“I got somebody you should meet,” Malley said.
“Let me think about it.”
“Don’t forget your origins, man, that’s what it comes down to.” Yeah, I thought, I want to live in a housing development with fake-brick walls in the basement “rec” room and “naughty” paintings in the bathroom, which is a fair description of Malley’s place.
Then I felt like a jerk and a snob and I wanted to confess to Malley that I was both those things and that I was sorry and that he should pay no fucking attention to me, drunk or sober, whatsoever.
But I didn’t.
I just kind of nodded good-bye, pushed through the smoke, and found the back door. I’d parked in the rear because there was usually a slot there. Tonight that proved to be a mistake.
I stood for maybe two or three minutes finishing my cigarette. Then, not wanting to go back inside and have another conversation, I decided to relieve myself next to the dumpster.
They were there all along, of course. Only I had no way of knowing that.
Steam rose off my work and I rocked on my heels, my head still spinning, and the cold was like being reborn into a terrible gray world from which there was no escape—
And that was when they appeared.
They emerged from the blackness like shadows. They wore dime-store Halloween masks, one a Frankenstein, the other a Dracula. One carried a crowbar. The other wielded a long piece of pipe. Nothing fancy, which meant they were street types. Which scared me. Pros rarely take pleasure in what they do. Street types sometimes get carried away.
I was just getting my pants zipped when one of them, Dracula, swung the piece of pipe.
It made a whooshing sound as I ducked under it.
I had found my balance, all right. The problem was that Frankenstein had worked his way to my left. Now he was coming up from behind.
I was already sweaty. Nerves. And a tic worked my right eyelid. Nerves. I started to yell for help and that’s when Dracula, who was much better at this than I was, made his move. He came straight for me, and I had no choice but to answer him.
I brought my right foot up and caught him in the groin, but he grinned despite his pain.
Frankenstein came from behind — a crunch of gravel, a muttered curse in Spanish — and brought oblivion with him, swinging the crowbar exactly against the middle of the back of my head.
I went out. Absolutely out.
22
In Malley’s that night I became a celebrity. Everybody had to come up and look me over. There was a couple in square-dancing clothes and a couple in polka clothes and a couple in evening clothes of the sort Lawrence Welk probably had wet dreams about. There were racists — “You can bet they was fuckin’ niggers”; philosophers — “Hey, man, you’re alive, thank God for that”; vigilantes — “I say we get goddamn grenade launchers and go after those sonsabitches.” There were ladies who wanted to commiserate — “Malley tells me your old lady dumped you, huh? I ain’t doin’ nothin’ tonight”; and ladies who didn’t seem to want much of anything at all — “My ex-husband, he spilled his motorcycle, he hurt his head just like that, yeah.”
That was how I spent the next four hours of my somewhat dubious life, propped up in a corner under a TV set while ESPN reran an Ali fight from 1971 and the announcers had to pretend to get excited all over again.
Every few minutes Malley came by and said, “I still think I should call the cops.”
“I appreciate the offer, but I’m all right. I don’t feel like sitting in a station and filling out forms.”
He alternated between wanting to call the cops and wanting to call an ambulance. According to him, he knew the signs of concussion, so several times he shined this searchlight-size flashlight into my face and started mumbling doctor-like things to himself. The square dancers and the polka folks and the evening-outers all crowded around and kibitzed on my condition.
He was halfway through his fourth such number with me when the phone rang and he had to reluctantly put down the light to answer it.
He shoved a finger in an ear so he could hear and then surprise parted his lips and he pushed the phone at me.
“It’s for you,” he said.
Moving still hurt so I took my time. Right after waking up in Malley’s alley, I’d figured the mugging for a coincidence. Then slowly, as my senses returned, I knew better. By now I was half expecting this call.
I took it. Put my own finger in my own ear. Dolly Parton was singing now.