She’s trying to keep any emotion off her face. “Please, G.T.,” she says through a tiny mouth, “I have to do this.”
“Do what?” he yells, his voice elevated to the borders of a child’s tantrum. “I took care of you,” his arm actually extended and pointing a finger at Hazel. He yells the words separately, as if they were written on cue cards that aren’t being manipulated quickly enough.
“Ja-Ja-G.T.,” Gabe begins, but Flynn waves him away with his spare hand.
“Look,” Hazel says, her own volume increasing to match him, “I know everything you did for me. And that doesn’t change anything. We’re out, G.T. We’re already gone. This isn’t a game to us anymore.”
He takes a few shaky steps toward her, puts his hands on her shoulders. Eddie steps up from the background and Hazel snaps, “Take it easy, Ed.”
“This is crazy, Hazel,” Flynn says, trying to bring his voice down. “What do you do now? You start throwing rocks? You start buying weapons? This is ridiculous. What are you telling us here? You’re terrorists now? Against who?”
Hazel actually smiles, a slight, weak turning of her mouth. “Against the liars,” she says.
Flynn lets his hands fall from her shoulders. “We’re all fucking liars, Hazel.”
She shakes her head at him, a small tail of braided hair swings out and drops to her chest. She steps around Flynn and looks out at the old guard.
“The divorce is official, tell the dwarf for me.”
Billy J stands up, folds his arms across his chest and says, “If what you do sprays back at us, you’ll regret it.”
“You just remember, Bilbo, my friend Eddie would love a chance to see how far he could throw you.”
Flynn leans his butt against the television chassis. “So that’s it,” he says to Hazel’s whole group. “No meeting. No mediation. All bonds are severed. Good luck and the next time we hear about any of you it’s in the Spy. ‘QSG Studio Firebombed in Early Morning Attack.’”
Hazel shrugs.
“I could rat you out,” Flynn says, looking down to his feet, his voice on the edge of a slur.
“No you can’t,” Hazel says quietly, embarrassed for him. “And no you won’t.”
There’s a calmness and certainty in her voice that preclude a rebuttal. So, Flynn pushes his hands into his pockets and says, in a lower voice, without thinking, “What did I do wrong?”
“I’ll see you around, Flynn,” Hazel says, and doesn’t wait for a response. She turns and heads for the door and the others follow her out in a tight-knit formation, a little cluster of whispering leather. The last to squeeze out the exit is Eddie the meat-boy. Flynn notices a small old-fashioned vacuum tube hung from a belt loop of his jeans by a lancet. It bounces off his ass as he walks.
Then they’re all gone and Flynn is left with Gabe and the old guard. He wobbles to the front of them, and all he can think to say is, “Go home.”
Billy J moves to his side and takes over, saying, “I’ll call you all tomorrow. We’ll talk to Wallace. C’mon. It’ll be okay.”
They all climb off their fruit crates and folding chairs, but they move slowly, they linger a bit. It’s clear they want some explanation and assurance, a few words that things will be all right, that by morning Flynn will be sober and rational. That by afternoon he’ll start picking up the pieces.
But Gabe knows Flynn can’t give them that.
“Go ahead,” Billy says, “I promise. Wallace’ll call you all tomorrow. Everything will be fine.”
Billy leads them out of the museum and when the door bangs shut, Gabe sits down on the floor next to Flynn. The room seems enormous around them.
“Let’s ga-ga-get out of here,” Gabe says.
Flynn doesn’t move for a while. Then he brings his damaged hand up near his face and turns it from side to side slowly, inspecting the palm and then the knuckles. He lets out a low, rumbling belch, looks up at Gabe with squinted eyes, and says, “The thing is, I thought I could really hold it together. You know? I thought I had some, you know, hold over them, over all of you. The son who made good or something. Like my presence would have been enough. Like I was some kind of fucking symbol.”
“Ca-c’mon, Fa-Fa-Flyrm.”
“I thought it would just go on and on. For some reason. It seemed … I thought, like, Wallace brought me in, and I brought Hazel in, and Hazel brought you in—”
“Let’s go. La-lemme help you up.”
Gabe stands and puts a hand under Flynn’s arm and Flynn gets up, seemingly unaware his body’s moving, lost in thought, wetting his lips.
“Jesus,” he mutters. “When you’re this wrong …”
Gabe fishes through Flynn’s suitcoat pockets and comes out with the keys to the museum. “I na-know, G.T.,” he says.
They start a sloppy waltz toward the exit, Flynn letting himself lean down onto Gabe’s shoulder, Gabe struggling under the weight in a stuttering shuffle.
“About everything,” Flynn says.
Gabe nods as he pulls forward. “We’ll go da-downstairs and pa-pa-pour some drinks,” he says. “We’ll ta-ta-talk all night.”
38
The only things left in the apartment’s mini-refrigerator are half a mug of day-old instant coffee and his last three hits of crank. Speer mixes them together and tosses them down the gullet with a hard, awkward swallow. Then he sets himself up on the stool, opens his notebook, uncaps his writing pen, and turns on the Kenwood. He rolls the band indicator up to the desired frequency, then very gingerly begins to up the volume.
The room slowly fills with the sound of barking dogs, high-pitched yaps, like puppies, small-boned breeds — dachshunds, Chihuahuas, toy poodles. The broadcast seems to alternate between miking the whole dissonant chorus of barks and howls, and then spotlighting a single star, a brokenhearted crooner of untranslatable canine woes.
Speer’s head pounds. He feels like his temples have taken on a rubbery, elastic quality, that cold air is being pumped into his cranium from some unseen port. And no one’s aware of or concerned about the skull cavity’s maximum capacity of air volume. He feels like explosion is imminent. Like he could break the strongest sphygmomanometer without flexing his biceps.
But he forces himself to turn to a blank sheet of paper and write. He’s afraid the letters will blur before his eyes, but when he prints Margie, it’s completely legible.
Dear Margie,
I’ve kept my word now, haven’t I? Have you been molested? Have I tracked down your address and telephone line? Taped your conversations and photographed your comings and goings? Have men in second-rate gray suits come to your door, looked through your suitcase, asked questions about the men you see?
I don’t understand you. If you could see what you’ve done to me, if you could see how I’ve deteriorated, the thoughts that come to me now. You know what I’m capable of. Why do you want to bring this on yourself?
I’ve been patient. I’ve allowed you time. Each night I’ve returned to this apartment to find it empty. Can you possibly imagine the silence of this room when it’s four a.m. and the radio is off and I can no longer even hear myself breathe and start to think that I’ve gone deaf?
I could snap the pen I hold in two. I could picture it as your long, sleek neck and I could grope for the long line of the jugular and the rear rope of the spinal cord.
I know that when all is said and done, the papers will attempt to distort the truth in their inimitable way. I am prepared for this. There may be mentions of Oswald and Ray, Sirhan and Ali Agca. But we both know I am nothing like these pawns. I know who holds my strings. I know their purposes and so, for the moment, I allow us to use one another. But I always hold the scissors. I am more than myself now, my love. Remember how I once told you that I loved holding my weapon because it made my hand feel better than it was?