I nodded. “I think you’re right.” I motioned to the waitress. “Give this man a drink,” I said, and handed her two bucks.
Next day, two or three times, I was on the verge of calling Margaret and telling her what I’d deduced. It could change your whole life, I told myself. But I couldn’t. Not yet. I wanted to nail it down.
That night I went to the synagogue. They were all there—the radicals, the scholars, Tilsen, the finger-man, the old gent with the skull cap. I took a wine and got right to the point with Rothman.
“You’d have liked to see Lloyd B. Jensen become president, wouldn’t you?”
He knew something was up. He didn’t take off the specs, just gave me a flat stare and nodded yes.
“Was he what the times called for? Was he historically necessary?”
“That’s a complicated question, McDonough. What makes you ask? Thinking of joining the Party?”
“No.” I stepped in closer to make sure he heard. “I’m thinking of telling Margaret Thornton who was behind her husband’s murder.”
He rubbed his beard and took that in. “Let me show you something,” he said.
He took me by the arm and guided me into the thick of things. The air was blue with eye-stinging smoke, and there were so many people talking at once—gesturing, shouting, laughing, cursing—that nothing they said was intelligible. The word that came to mind was babble, but Rothman had another term, which he imparted by shouting in my ear.
“These are the masses,” he said. “Every kind of person with every experience you can imagine is here. Hard workers, lazy bastards, money grubbers, thinkers, doers, devout men, unbelievers, gentlemen, killers. Somebody says something, somebody else hears, passes it on inadvertently or on purpose, pure or changed to suit his own self-interest, and sooner or later, who knows why, somebody does something that matters. Somebody acts.”
“And then it’s history.”
“That’s right,” he agreed. “History is its own imperative. Anything can happen until something does. Then nothing else was ever possible. What are you going to tell Margaret?”
“I don’t know,” I replied, and I turned and walked out. I had goose bumps all the way to the bucket, wondering if someone was going to shoot me in the back.
I mulled it over for a while the next day, and then called Margaret on the phone. I didn’t want to behold her disillusionment, which she made no attempt to disguise. “I don’t know who was behind the killing of your husband,” I told her, “but it wasn’t Ford.”
“There’ll be no charge,” I added, to break the silence.
She didn’t thank me. “I thought you were infallible, Mr. McDonough,” she said, in reference to my lost reputation.
To this day I wonder why I acted as I did. It had little to do with Rothman’s denial, if indeed it was a denial. Maybe the look on her face when they were together did it, the way she kissed him on the cheek. When I told Slap, he couldn’t believe it. “That was your last best chance for a decent marriage,” he said.
It wasn’t Margaret’s, though. She and Rothman married. They have children now, three last I heard. Maggie Quinn moved in with me for a bit, but that didn’t work. We brought out the worst in each other. I actually hit her once, which so mortified me that I decided it was time to end it, and she agreed.
I can’t say that Margaret’s face haunts my dreams. Hoochers don’t dream, but we do have fantasies. Catholic school girls are mine. I’ve shortened their skirts and dirtied up their knee socks a bit over the years. They’re still walking away, but now one of them is looking back over her shoulder, at me.
NOIR NEIGE
by K.J. Erickson
Near North (Minneapolis)
You could spend a lot of time trying to figure out how three guys as different as Tom Leigh, Earl Dethaug, and Jorge Mendez ended up working together at the Minneapolis Impound Lot. What it came down to was that each of them, in his own male-impaired way, loved the other. But it took a lot of time and bad luck for them to figure that out. And like a lot of love stories, it ends as a tale of revenge.
The only snow Tom Leigh had seen before moving to Minnesota was snow that melted as it hit the ground. So he wasn’t prepared when he woke on an early November morning at his girlfriend’s apartment. Hung over. No idea that seventeen inches of snow had fallen since his last conscious moment. Or that the city of Minneapolis had something called Snow Emergency Rules. Rules so complicated they took three pages of closely printed type to explain.
His girlfriend got up first, took one look out the window, and said, “Shit.”
Tom rose on one elbow, eyes clenched shut to avoid light.
“Where’d you park last night?” Carla said.
Tom leaned forward slowly. A faster motion would have been disastrous for his gastrointestinal tract. Not to mention Carla’s bedding.
“Where’d I park?”
“There’s serious snow out there, and the tow trucks just hit my block. If you parked on the street…”
“Tow trucks?” Tom said, still not hearing anything that warranted opening his eyes.
“It’s a snow emergency, numb nuts. You park on the wrong side of the street, wrong day, wrong time—during a snow emergency—and your car gets towed. And from where I stand, it looks like my side of the street just hit the snow emergency trifecta. They’ve already loaded a bunch of cars…”
A surge of bile hit the back of Tom’s throat. He dropped back on the pillow. He was pretty sure he’d parked directly in front of Carla’s apartment, but he was also pretty sure he didn’t much care.
“So they tow my car. They’ve got to bring it back after they plow, right?”
Carla was still at the window when she said, “There it goes. That is definitely your car. A pile of snow fell off when they loaded it on the flatbed. And no. They don’t bring it back. You have to go get it. Which is going to be a problem. Buses probably aren’t running and there’s no way you’re going to get a taxi in this weather. With tow fees and fines, it’s going to cost you, like, two hundred dollars to get your car back. And impound fees, if you don’t get down to the impound lot to pick it up…”
Tom was out of the bed, naked and farting, running toward the door. He grabbed his jacket off the couch and made it down to the front door in seconds.
Then he hit the snow. It would take a shovel and fifteen minutes to get him from where he was to the street. All he could do was stand there, watching the tow truck turn the corner, heading toward downtown, Tom’s car on the flatbed.
It was then he felt the cold. It was then he realized he wasn’t wearing his jacket. He was wearing Carla’s jacket, which stopped about seven inches north of his cold-withered dick. And it was then that his beleaguered gut gave way, leaving Tom no choice but to drop his butt down in the snow and let loose. Standing up, he made the mistake of looking back at the darkened snow where he’d sat. His reaction to what he saw was reflexive, born out of years spent as a floundering French major. Noir neige. Black snow. Who said being a French major had no practical application?
The city impound lot is located under the I-394 overpass at the western edge of downtown Minneapolis, shadowed by tons of concrete. A couple dozen columns, each maybe six feet in diameter, support the nonstop vibration of cars crossing the overpass. It’s a forbidding sight. But what was really depressing was the line of people snaking toward a concrete block building at one end of the lot. There must have been two hundred of them. Miserable-looking people. Cold. Unkempt. Mad. Every one of them looked mad.