“A little. I used to play a little.”
“Then you know what I’m talking about.”
They passed into Lancaster County, and a few minutes later turned off the highway onto a road so faded that there was hardly a road left. Weeds were growing in the lane markers. They saw an Amish pulled to the side who had broken an axle on his buggy. He was up front, calming the horse; a woman was nursing a baby in the shadows of the back seat.
“I hear Titleist is coming out with a new ball, twenty extra yards off the tee,” Eisner said.
Whittemore saw the dirt road that he’d picked earlier and began slowing for the turn. The old man’s voice was shaking so badly, he could hardly get this out: “Myself,” he said, “I wouldn’t mind trying it. You get up in years like me, you can use the extra distance.”
And that was as close as he came to asking for anything.
Whittemore pulled the car to the side of the road and sat still a minute, thinking it over. “What if you had to go away?”
“Me?” Eisner said. “Where am I going to go?”
“Someplace else,” Whittemore said. “The other side of the world.”
The old man took a minute putting it together. “You mean like the Poconos?” he said.
Whittemore went to Seventh Street that same afternoon to return the five thousand in person. That was the only chance he saw, to talk to them in person. Something like this — but not exactly this — had happened once before and been negotiated. That was the word the people in the middle used, negotiated. It meant they waited three or four months, gave you enough time to think maybe they’d forgotten, and then a couple of guys who laughed at everything came around with their softball bats and their twenty-pound biceps and pimples on their shoulders and brought you back into the world of hospitals and medical science. He couldn’t remember now exactly what it had been like. This time, though, unless he could head it off, things would have to be explained, which was a more serious word to the people in the middle.
The jewelers took him upstairs to their office — they seemed to be in a hurry to get him off the showroom floor — and while one of them closed the door, the other one took off his coat, dropped into the chair behind his desk, hung his health-club arms over the sides — the kid wanted him to notice his arms — and stared at him as if he were trying to make up his mind. He was the one who did the talking.
“So?” the kid said.
Right away, he saw for himself what the old man meant.
“We put the five thousand up front, right? I told your people, you’re late, you forfeit the back end. That simple.”
Whittemore looked from one of them to the other. Identical, but he could already tell who was who.
“No comprendé?” the kid said.
He began to tell them that the back end didn’t matter, that he hadn’t done it anyway, but he stopped himself, waiting to see where this would go. “The deal was ten,” he said. “Five in front, five after it’s done. That was the agreement.”
The kid shook his head, and then he and his brother glanced at each other again. “It’s like I told your people. Time constraints have been violated. The agreement’s changed.”
Whittemore sat dead still, looking from one of the twins to the other.
“I know what you’re thinking,” the kid said. “I know everything you’re thinking, and it’s like I told your people, my brother and I have left instructions with our lawyers, sealed instructions to be opened in the event anything unfortunate happens. That occurs, the lawyers open an envelope, which spells out all the details of the whole situation. Names, dates, times, everything. If we so much as slip in the shower.”
They waited for him a moment, then smiled as the message settled. One of them, then the other.
“You two shower together?”
“Just a hypothesis, something to consider,” the kid said.
Whittemore considered their jewelry: Rolex watches half an inch thick, diamond rings, gold bracelets and neck chains. The one at the bookcase was wearing cuff links. He wondered if it was part of the jewelry business that you had to look like a Gypsy coming out a hotel window, or if these two just liked to twinkle when they moved, separate themselves from the world at large.
The kid in the chair looked at his brother, who had walked over to the window. The little glances reminded him of the way lovers reach out to touch hands without even knowing they’re doing it. “I mean, look at yourself,” the one in the chair said, “coming in here like this...”
Whittemore nodded at him, but the kid misunderstood. But then, he misunderstood everything. “It’s a Mexican standoff, man,” he said. “Now get your ass out of here before I call the police.”
He shot the one at the window first and then turned slowly to the one who did the talking, giving him a moment to reflect on his Mexican standoff.
Afterward, he stayed in the room a little longer than he should have, the cordite stinging his nose, studying the posture of the bodies, down to the exact position of the fingers when everything had stopped moving. He sat down behind the desk in the kid’s chair, taking the weight off his knees.
The one at the window had been a nail biter.
He thought of the old man and wondered how long it would be before he got homesick and showed up at the restaurant. His hands had shaken, but that was all. No crying, no regrets. There in the front seat, Whittemore had suddenly remembered how he’d let the guys who laughed at everything position his legs across the kitchen chairs just so and that one of his knees — he wasn’t sure even then which one — hadn’t dislocated the first time they came down on it, or the second, or the third.
He’d taken Eisner to a bus stop anyway.
Eisner got out and was around the car at Whittemore’s window in what seemed like the same instant, tapping at the window, brimming tears, and Whittemore rolled it down to see what he wanted, and he came in like death itself, glistening tears and snot, right through the window, his hands, his head, his shoulders, and shit the sheets if Whittemore didn’t just sit there and let the old man hug him.
Tyler Dilts
Thug: Signification and the (De) Construction of Self
From Puerto del Sol
I thug.
That’s not a grammatical error. I fully intended to use the word “thug” as a verb. I realize, of course, that for you, unless you happen to have some knowledge of hip-hop music and culture or hard-boiled noir fiction, you’re probably not familiar with this particular usage. But as I said, I actually meant to use the word “thug” as a verb, rather than in its much more common and familiar usage as a noun. The reasons for this are twofold:
1) I have, of late, been giving a great deal of thought as to how we define both ourselves and each other by what we do.[1] I am fascinated by the subtle yet significant differences between the phrases “I thug” and “I am a thug.” The play in signification here seems never to exhaust its ability to keep my intellect bouncing back and forth, questioning the point at which I cease to be the sum of my actions and become the thing itself (i.e., at what point do I cease thugging and simply become thug?).
2) I find this type of nontraditional and playful usage of language to be quite stimulating and more than a little amusing. And I have always imagined it to be exactly the type of intellectual exercise with which my friends and I would ceaselessly amuse ourselves, over postmeal cocktails and cappuccinos at, say, Mum’s or Cha Cha Cha, had I, of course, any friends.
1
I use the first person plural here to refer to not only the personal “we,” but also to the culture at large.