He reaches Table One, seats Olga, then lingers for a moment behind his own chair, an arm stretched upward to recognize someone supposedly toward the rear of the room. Then he settles in at the table with a greeting for each of his dinner companions.
“So, Al,” he says, “will we be having some fun tonight?”
“Don’t we always, Wallace,” Al says. “I just hope you and the missus cleared some room in the trunk for all the metal you’ll be hauling out of here tonight.”
The table laughs its agreement and approval and Wallace nods and says, “I put on the lucky shoes. The feet have no excuse.”
There’s a second chorus of laughter and Wallace feels a hand on his shoulder. Before he can turn to greet his visitor, he sees the fright on Olga’s face and knows it’s Billy J. These younger kids have no sense of timing or manners. He was just getting the table off the ground.
Wallace pushes his chair back and says, “Excuse me for just a sec. Kitchen problem, I’m sure.”
Billy J works as a busboy at the Baron. He’s dressed in a double-breasted white cotton busing jacket decorated with fading gravy stains. Wallace takes Billy J by the elbow, gives a squeeze that he hopes will leave a bruise in the morning, and moves the youngest member of his inner circle over near the bandstand where they can talk privately.
“You’ve got all the polish of a carnival act, you little putz.”
Billy J puts on the hurt eyes and swallows down the last of his drink.
“I’ve been trying to call you all day,” he says.
“Olga and I were practicing. We never take calls when we’re practicing.”
“Jeez, Fred and Ginger here—”
“Okay, Mr. Smart Mouth, what’s the big emergency that you have to pull me away from dinner?”
“I was down Wireless last night—”
“Something new?”
“Hazel was in. We got talking—”
“A regular miracle.”
“Hey, you want to know?”
“Come on, come on.”
“You want to know?”
“Yes, Billy, I want to know.”
“Hazel says, and I told you this would happen, you go back two months, I told you this. She says, they’re going to break, they’re going to splinter off. They want nothing to do with us, Wallace.”
Wallace looks down at his shoes, custom-made in the Philippines, just now at that perfect holding pattern between broken in and wearing out. He shakes his head slightly, lets just enough of a smile spread over his lips so that it looks like an unsuccessful attempt to suppress his amusement.
“What,” Billy says, “this is funny to you?”
“First of all,” Wallace says in a lowered voice, “this is not the time nor the place and you should know that by now. More importantly, and once again, you speak without thinking. You open your mouth and dump everything out, without bothering to think. I don’t know why I make an effort with you—”
Billy is stunned and his face shows it. “I don’t get it,” he says. “This doesn’t bother you? This news doesn’t upset you?”
He cups Billy around the back of the neck. “I pray that someday before I die, just once, you’ll learn to look for a bigger picture. You think that’ll ever happen?”
“I just don’t get it.”
“Think now, Billy. What are we at heart? You and I?”
Billy’s terrified of a wrong answer and his fear makes it difficult to concentrate. He decides he has to go with the obvious and says, “Dwarfs.”
Wallace gives him a sharp, open-palmed slap to the cheek, so fast he hopes that even if any of the guests witnessed it, they’ll spend the night questioning their vision.
“You infuriate me, you little bastard.”
Billy cowers, hangs his head, wishes the band would start playing.
“We’re anarchists, you schmuck. Remember that word, Billy? Did you read even one of the books I bought for you?”
Billy prays he’s not required to answer.
“Anarchists don’t wear uniforms, Billy. Anarchists can’t worry about splinter groups. We are a splinter group, for Christ sake. We’re antiunity, we’re antiregulatory. We’re goddamn anarchists.”
“Listen,” Billy says, avoiding eye contact. “There are more strangers down Wireless every week. Everybody’s getting nervous. Nobody knows who could be what, okay? The Spy says the FCC’s all pissed off. You think we need a bunch of people all hot to blow things up? You think we need them out there bringing heat down on us?”
“Now, you lower your voice right now, mister. There’re a lot of friends here who would not think too much of our little hobby. Now, I will deal with Hazel and her people. That’s not your problem. I will square Hazel and company away. But I want you to burn this into your memory, Billy: don’t you ever, ever, never again, approach me at an affair like this to discuss anything to do with jamming. Do you understand me, Billy?”
Olga’s concerned. She’s half-turned in her chair, head-motioning for Wallace to return. But surprisingly, Billy’s a little stubborn. He says, “I just think we got some problems starting up here.”
Wallace leans in toward him and says, “Son, you wouldn’t know a problem if it pulled out a sword and sliced off your ear.”
8
Flynn heads for the rear of Wireless, beyond the pool tables. He realizes the best course of action is a logical one, something planned and systematic — divide the room into geometric blocks and eliminate them one by one, a steady pace, a thorough search. All he’d have to hear would be hello; even get lost could confirm or deny. His ears could play polygraph. He’d know the truth the second the sound penetrated down the canal, impacted on the drum, one syllable, even in the midst of this bar din, the brain could tell him— Veronica.
But, as always, his body won’t cooperate. It insists on being erratic, patternless. His eyes spot possible women by their likely age, but they won’t stay focused on the subject long enough for his intuition to react one way or another. He ends up randomly moving in big sweeping circles, only occasionally singling someone out, pumping them for a response, a word, a way to know. He hears Fuck off, Hello again, Flynn, Excuse me, and I’m with someone. He starts coming up from behind, placing his hand on shoulders and the backs of necks. Mostly, he gets glares or confused looks. He turns down a single offer to dance.
He’s about to head back to the bar, grill Most for any piece of information — eye color, length of hair, height — but he’s stopped by the voice as he passes his antique barber chair against the wall.
She says, “You look lost.”
What he’s hit with is something very close to fear. He looks down to his feet for a second, suddenly not sure he wants to know what she looks like. The classic pilgrim, willing to search for years, but terrified to end the pilgrimage.
Like leaping into ice water, he makes himself do it without thinking. He brings his head up, stares directly at her face. It’s hard to say that she’s just what he’s imagined, since he’s imagined a wide variety of possibilities. But she is beautiful. That part of the projection isn’t compromised at all. Her hair is shorter than he’d expected, darker. She’s a bit smallerboned than her voice indicates, but not delicate. Her eyes are deep blue — he’d pictured them brown or green. Her skin is as pale as he’d thought. He’s always imagined her inside, artificially lit, and though he’s never thought about this before, he knows now, in this instant, this is because he often hears the voice late at night, at home, enclosed himself, wrapped up under a blanket in the dentist’s chair.