In an office tucked away inconspicuously in one of the marble buildings of Washington, D.C., a telephone rang.
Chapter 1
It was a quiet Friday night at Vic’s Old Milwaukee Tavern. At the bar Vic Metzger was arbitrating an emotional discussion between two customers on the strategy employed the night before by the Brewers in losing to the Cleveland Indians. At the pool table two regulars from the garage down the street went through their tired routine of trying to psych each other out.
There were no video games in Vic’s. There was an old-fashioned pinball machine that had not been repaired since Karl Gotch kicked a leg off it. The jukebox was stocked with country-western records and some good oldies. The television set over the bar was tuned to the all-sports cable channel. A soccer game was in progress, which none of the customers bothered to watch.
On his usual stool Hank Stransky sat staring at the half-empty glass of beer and the uneaten bratwurst in front of him. By this time he had usually put away three of four sausages and as many bottles of Miller’s. Miller’s was all he drank since Schlitz moved out of town. The traitors.
That night Hank was having a tough time getting anything down. It was the damn headache. Hank had suffered his share of headaches before, usually in the morning after mixing too much bourbon and beer. Those were nothing compared to this. Little hair of the dog and they’d go away.
This headache was something else. It started the night before while he was watching “Hill Street Blues.” It wasn’t much at first, just a little buzz of pain in back of the eyes. Hank had swallowed some aspirin, had a bottle of Miller’s, and gone to bed. The damn headache stayed with him, and he didn’t sleep for shit. That morning it was worse. Breakfast didn’t help. Pauline’s hot cakes and sausages tasted like garbage. He yelled at her, even though it wasn’t her fault.
That day on the job it got steadily worse. His crew was ripping out a section of street in South Milwaukee. The jack-hammers had never bothered him before, but that day it felt as if they were digging right into his skull.
Hank tried a sip of the beer and almost retched.
“Hey, Vic,” he said, “what the fuck are you pourin’ here, horse piss?”
Vic eased himself out of the baseball debate and came up the bar.
“What’s the problem, Hank?”
“Your fuckin’ beer is the problem. It tastes like piss.”
“Okay,” Vic said, “but whose?”
“I ain’t in the mood for any of your stale jokes,” Hank said.
“Sorry.” Vic cocked his head, the better to see through the smoke of the Camel that grew in the corner of his mouth. “You know, you don’t look so good.”
“Last week I thought I was gettin’ the flu. Now this goddam headache is drivin’ me up the walls.”
“You want an aspirin?”
“I ate aspirin last night like they was peanuts. Didn’t do fuckall. Gimme a fresh beer.”
Vic cleared the bar and wiped it off with a damp towel. He opened a cold Miller’s, poured it into a fresh glass with a professional half-inch head of foam, and put glass and bottle in front of Hank Stransky. Hank kept staring down at the bar with one hand clamped to the back of his head.
“Maybe you ought to see a doctor,” Vic said.
“For a headache? Bullshit.”
Vic shrugged and edged away to rejoin the baseball discussion. He glanced back uneasily from time to time at Hank Stransky.
Hank had never been sick a day in his fucking life. Then last week he had that touch of flu, or whatever it was, but that sure as hell hadn’t kept him off the job. Hell, even when the grader ran over his foot, he didn’t lose any time. He was one tough Polack. Nothing could hurt him. He squeezed his hard, calloused hands together and stared at the scarred knuckles. He hurt, and he didn’t know what the fuck to do.
Vic turned away from the baseball fans and started back up the bar toward Hank Stransky. He didn’t like the kind of noises the guy was making. Vic opened his mouth to ask what was the matter, but then Hank raised his head and looked at him, and the words never got said.
There were plenty of fares out on the streets of Manhattan on Friday night, flapping their arms and whistling for cabs. DuBois Williamson would ordinarily have kept at it another couple of hours until the punks and muggers outnumbered the fares. Not that night. Not with this fucking headache. He slapped his Out of Service sign in the window and swung around to head for the Queensboro Bridge and home.
It hurt DuBois Williamson to pass up the forty or fifty bucks he could make by staying on the streets that night, but his head hurt him even more. He wondered if it could be a migraine. He’d never had one of them, but he heard they hurt like a son of a bitch. Could you get a migraine for the first time when you were over forty? Didn’t seem fair.
At the intersection of Fifty-ninth and Lexington he had to slam on the brakes and hit the horn when some fool of a Jersey driver in a Volkswagen Rabbit stopped ahead of him to let pedestrians cross the street. Shit, didn’t the fool know better than that? An instant later he was blasted from behind by the horn of some asshole in a delivery van.
Williamson leaned out of the window and glared back at the pimple-faced kid driving the van.
“Blow it out your ass, motherfucker!”
He was immediately ashamed of himself. What the hell was wrong with him? DuBois Williamson hadn’t talked that kind of shit since he was in high school back in Chicago. He sure as hell didn’t talk that way around Ruby. “I didn’t marry no dirt-mouth nigger,” she said. “I married me a grown-up man, and if you can’t talk like one, I’ll just start lookin’ around.”
In the rearview mirror DuBois saw the pimple-faced kid flip him the bone. Dumb little fuck. He probably had to count out loud to find the right finger.
The Jersey driver finally moved, and DuBois inched his cab forward with the traffic. Man, he had never had no headache like this. Not even the time the fourteen-year-old hype hit him from behind with the twelve-inch length of pipe. DuBois was doing the kid a favor. Taking him home. Now he had a bulletproof shield behind the driver’s seat. Cost him four hundred bucks, but the way the world was today, you needed it.
But the shield couldn’t do him any good now. He was stone hurtin’. All he wanted to do was get home to Ruby. He’d put his head down between those fine brown tits and let her say those special sweet things that always made him feel good. Man, he’d give a lot to feel good now.
Why didn’t these motherfuckers move faster? DuBois’s head like to explode while they crawled along Fifty-ninth.
He tried to think about something else until he could get home. Something sweet. He thought about the trip him and Ruby just took back to his old hometown. Drove all the way in their almost-new Chrysler LeBaron. Some vacation for a cabdriver. But it was good times. Oh my, yes.
Not the old Chicago neighborhood. That turned out to be full of jive-ass punks dealing dope on the streets and old people who were locked in their rooms, scared shitless. Things change. The neighborhood was tough when DuBois was growing up there. Tough but clean. Now it was plain ugly.
But the country, now, once you got away from all the people crowded together, that was something else. He drove Ruby all the way up through Wisconsin, right to where they ran into Lake Superior.
Ruby had lived all her life in Harlem and now Brooklyn, and the way her eyes got big looking at the neat little towns and the miles and miles of green pastures with cows and silos and water towers and all that country shit just made him feel fine. They didn’t stop too much, because DuBois didn’t want no hassle with prejudiced people, and there always were some, no matter how sweet a little town looked.