Fields Where They Lay, page 11
The sixth time a shop owner told me she didn’t know whether she could survive this holiday season, I went out near the railing—I was on the third level at the time—put a finger in my free ear to block “Here Comes Santa Claus” and called Louie.
“Hey,” he said, “so you liked our girl last night, huh?”
“Your girl,” I said, feeling a body slam of guilt, “not my girl.”
“Ooooookayyy,” he said. “I ain’t gonna doubt you.”
“Good.”
“Or her, either, for that matter.”
“Well, thanks for digging her up,” I said. “She was a big help.”
He said nothing.
“What?” I said.
“Whadya mean, what? Nothing, nothing. Hey, you seen that Japanese movie?”
“Yes,” I said, “and it has no bearing on—”
“You don’t even know which movie—”
“Rashomon,” I said, “and I know what you’re—”
“Damnedest thing,” he said. “Everybody’s got a different version of what—”
“I said I’ve seen it.”
“—happened, it’s like you ask a bunch of crooks which one of them took something, and from the answers they give you, you’d think they was all in different states.”
“Finished?”
“Hell of a movie.”
“Finished?”
“I was beginning to wonder who you’d be bringing over on Christmas—”
“Finished?”
“Jeez. Nice girl, though, isn’t she?”
“An outstanding member of the global sisterhood. Listen, about the partners in Edgerton—”
“Same Japanese movie,” Louie said. “Everybody you talk to’s got a different story. And they’re all nervous. Fact is, I was going to call you, because I need a little—”
“How much?”
“Seventy-five hundred for the guy in the slammer, plus a promise I’ll never say his name until he’s dead and I am, too. And now that I’ve asked around, I need hazard pay for me. So the same for me. Figure fifteen, total.”
“Thousand.”
“Whadya think we’re talking about, pecans?”
“You think your source actually knows something?”
“He was there,” Louie said. “And he’s scared enough.”
“Where is he now?”
“US pen in Victorville. Got an appeal coming up and needs a little grease for his lawyer.”
“That’s not much grease, seventy-five hundred bucks.”
“When he’s out, he’s got, like, the master key to Tiffany’s, so the lawyer can get it on the come. But he’s not letting anybody else open it up.”
“I’ll get it to you tonight.”
“I can come get it. You’re over at Edgerton, right?”
“I am.”
“I can pick up the money—wait, you got it on you?”
“I do.”
“Doing pretty good, aren’t you? Okay, I can buy something for Alice when I’m there. What time?”
“I have to meet somebody for lunch,” I said. “How about one-thirty?”
“Where at?”
“There’s a big red throne at the south end of the building,” I said. “I’ll be coming down with Santa.”
14
A Little Elevation of My Body Temperature
I said, “How long have you been married?”
“Forty-eight years.” He was still wearing the padding under his red suit because he had only forty-five minutes for lunch. Sweat was trickling down his forehead.
“Does she work?”
“What is this, a job application? A therapy session?”
“No. Well, maybe yes, but if it is, I’m the patient.”
“She did work,” Shlomo said. “She was a pharmacist. We lived on my salary and saved hers. And we’ve both got pensions, so at least we don’t lie awake worrying about money.”
“And you were—”
“Teacher,” he said. “Eighth grade.”
“My daughter’s in eighth grade. Kind of a difficult period.”
He nodded. “I always thought of it as one of the last years you could catch them. They’re still in the corral then, but they’ve become aware of the fence. The things adults build around them are protections until kids get to be about that age, and then they turn into fences, to be jumped over or crashed through or, if you’re lucky, outgrown. You know what I mean; there are right and wrong ways to open the gates.”
“For example?”
“Well, on the most basic level I suppose you can open them to go toward something or to run away from something. And even then, it depends on what they’re running away from or toward. There are a lot of bad paths. Anyway, eighth grade, I figured you could still catch a few of them at that point. Before they did something they might not recover from. So that’s the level I taught.”
“You have kids?”
A heavyset guy in an apron came through one of the doors with a tray and set it in front of Shlomo. “Here you go, Shlo,” he said. “Burger medium with pepper jack, fries burned.”
“Hot sauce?”
“Oooy,” the guy in the apron said. “Be right back.”
“So,” Shlomo said, poking the fries with his finger, “you asked me what?”
“Whether you’ve got kids.”
“This is what you call sitting on my lap? You asking me about my problems?”
“Your kids are problems?”
Shlomo just stared at me.
“Okay, yeah, I’m stalling. I’ve done something, the kind of thing women would immediately talk to their friends about, but I’m, you know, a man.”
Shlomo lowered his eyes to his plate. “Something that makes you, what, uneasy?”
“That’s a good word.”
“Then you were wrong,” Shlomo said.
“Hell, I know that. If it was that easy—”
“But you don’t know how wrong it was.”
“Something like that.”
“Here’s the first thing. Don’t do any more of it.”
I said, “Well . . . ”
“That’s not a healthy reaction, but if that’s what you need to talk about, I’ll give you some time to work up to it. We’ve got three kids. Kids, I call them, they’re older now than I was when I met their mother. And I’ll tell you if this is a truth session, there are times when—” He sat back in his chair, eyes on a spot in the air that looked pretty much like the rest of the air to me, his lower lip pushing out and then retreating, After a couple of those, he said, “What kind of bird is it, leaves its eggs in other birds’ nests?”
“Cuckoos, I think. And cowbirds. They call them brood parasites—”
“More than enough information, thanks. Our daughter, she’s her mom all the way, but our sons, I hardly knew them even when they were babies, and I know them less every year. Like they got dropped down the wrong chimney.” His hot sauce had arrived, but he didn’t seem to notice. “Is this your way of getting to that other thing we were talking about, the dog tags?”
“No,” I said. “Interesting you took it there, though.”
“It’s what I think about,” he said. “Last week or two, it’s what I think about.”
“So how are they so different? Your sons, I mean.”
“How do I put this? Their mom has a hobby, okay? She does ceramics. She and I, we’re good solid clay all the way through. Not mud, clay, and good strong clay. Fired the slow way. We don’t need much, we’re happy living on our pensions and our nest egg. It gets a little smaller every year, the nest egg, but so does the time we’ve got left to spend it. We’ve lived in the same house for forty years. It’s not much, but we like it. We earned it ourselves, we were happy there, mostly, and we can find our way through it with blindfolds on without tripping and breaking a hip. You’ll be thinking about your hips, too, soon enough, just wait. So we’re not fancy, okay? Good clay, fired right. Not glamorous but it looks all right. Lasts a long time.”
He put up a hand to tell me he wasn’t through and picked up the packet of hot sauce in his other hand. He ripped off a corner between his teeth and said, “Ooh, that’s hot,” took the bun off his burger, and squeezed the sauce onto it.
“But my sons?” he said to the plate. “It’s like the first thing they decided to do when they figured out who they were was to get themselves gold-plated. Whatever we had, it wasn’t good enough. Everything was about how things looked, and things had to look shiny and expensive. They drive cars they can’t afford, they live in houses they can’t afford. One of them has a wife he can’t afford. Got more clothes than Bergdorf Goodman. Her idea of a vacation is plastic surgery, can’t have a good time without an anesthetic. Half the time when she comes over my wife has to tell me who she is. Your wife got any of these problems?”
“No,” I said. “I was most of the problem.”
“Divorced?”
“Yes.”
“Hard on the kid.”
“She’s an amazing kid.” The room was filling up around us, and I scooted my chair a little closer so we could hear each other without shouting.
“Fourteen,” he said. “You need to be around when she starts going for the fences.”
“We have a good relationship, my ex-wife and me. At least, in that area. We’re both there for her.”
“That’s better than nothing. Got anything to do with what you’re feeling guilty about?”
“Not really.”
“That’s a lawyer’s answer.”
“Well, it’s accurate.”
“That’s what I mean. One of my sons is a lawyer, the other’s a real estate salesman. What they say is usually accurate, too. Problem is, they leave out the things that matter.” He picked up some french fries and said around them, “You’re not eating?”
“I couldn’t eat if you put a gun to my head. But what’s the problem? Your kids are grown up, out on their own. Suppose they have themselves dipped in platinum the first of every month, who cares at this point? They’re not standing on street corners, selling heroin to schoolgirls.”
Shlomo was dragging the empty sauce packet in circles on top of the patty, smoothing sauce that didn’t need to be any smoother. He’d spilled some of the sauce on the table.
“Are they?” I said.
“’Course not. But there’s a right way and a wrong way to live. My boys are on the take. It’s all legal, but legal, my ass. Look at Congress. Those guys do scuzz all the time, sell out their supporters every day of their lives, but it’s all legal. They get to wear their power ties and have their suits tailored to hide the fat around their middles. Hell, declaring war is legal.”
“Do you really think one or both of your sons stole those tags from you?”
“They would in a minute,” he said, “if they were worth anything to anybody else.” He picked up the burger, glared at it, took a bite as though he hoped it would hurt, and chewed. Then he put it down and said, “Okay, you think you got problems? I think one of them stole the tags, maybe to pressure me into selling my house. Hell, maybe both of them, they’re maybe in it together.”
“Why do they care if you sell your house?”
“Cora and I have lived there, I already said this, for more than forty years. The kids grew up there. They learned to walk there. They learned to swim in the pool. I built them a tree house. There was a time when we were all happy there. You know what they call it?”
“No.”
“A teardown,” he said. “The house where these little gonifs were conceived. A teardown.”
“It’s a different world,” I said.
“Our daughter, Shelley, she loves it, so don’t give me that ‘different world’ shit.”
“Where are you?”
“Tarzana, about a mile south of Ventura.”
“Oh,” I said.
“Yeah, oh. Used to be a nice little street. Trees, you know? Eucalyptus, orange, lemon. Lots of nice lawns. Now they’re gone, either cut down or hidden behind high walls so the people who live there can pretend they’re celebrities. Big empty houses with walls around them. Nobody knows anybody anymore because they’re all pretending to be something else. They wear sunglasses when they go out to get the paper. House across the street sold for two and a half million last year.”
“How much did you pay?”
“Seventy-three thousand.”
“And you owe?”
An impatient shake of the head. “What do you think? Nothing.”
“Right,” I said. “What do your sons say you could get for the place?”
“More than a million six. It’s a double lot.” He finally took another bite of the burger. “I don’t need a million six. I need to live in the house I love. I need to be left alone.” He chewed for a few moments and said, “These kids here, they get up onto my lap and I find myself wondering who they’ll turn into. Right now everything is wide eyes and bright lights and Mom and Dad, but sooner or later it’ll be bucks, square feet, and a corner office.”
“Not all of them. Look at your daughter.”
“Yeah,” he said, and his back got a little less rigid.
“And anyway, it’s kind of nice that they want you to have all that money.”
“I’m an old guy,” he said. “Cora’s old. What’re we going to do, take a cruise? Buy cars when we don’t like to drive anymore? You ever heard of inheritance?” He exhaled heavily, then glanced at his watch and broke off a piece of the burger with his fingers, popped it into his mouth. “Haven’t got forever,” he said with his mouth full. “I mean for lunch, though you can take it the other way, too. There’s a lot of kids down there. I don’t want to drive them all to Dwayne.”
“Will you tell me the story behind the dog tags?”
“Sure, but not now. If I decide to take you up on your offer to, uhh, solve my case, I will. Jeez, get something to eat, would you? Or, if you’d rather, tell me what’s nipping at your conscience.”
I rubbed my face with both hands. It felt good, like it had needed rubbing for ages and I’d ignored it. “It’s complicated.”
“Here’s a trick,” Shlomo said. “Imagine you’re with somebody who’s got to get back to work real quick and has a bunch of kids waiting for him.”
“Okay, okay. I’m in love with someone.”
“Not your wife.”
“Ex-wife. No, someone else, but she’s met my ex. They like each other.”
“Says a lot for your wife.” He tore off a piece of the bun and mopped up the hot sauce he’d spilled on the table, took a quick look around, and put it in his mouth. “So far I don’t hear a problem.”
“I have a lot of secrets,” I said. “It goes with the way I live. This woman I’m in love with, I mean, I’m not always easy to get to know, but after a while I began to open up to her. I know how Huffington Post that sounds, I began to open up to her, but I mean, I told her pretty much everything. More than anybody ever, including some things that could put me in jail until the sun stops rising.”
“Good for you. For telling, I mean.”
“And she’s told me nothing. Zero. I don’t know anything about her past, I don’t know where she was born or what she’s done, except that she’s got some pretty serious crook chops, so it wasn’t all selling Girl Scout cookies.”
“And this feeling is just now coming up? It never troubled you before?”
“No. It bothers me in waves, you know what I mean? Things are fine for a while, and then they’re not and this big, cold wave of doubt washes over me. I keep coming up against the question, If she loves me, why doesn’t she trust me?”
“The answer might say more about you than her. Are you someone people can trust?”
It stopped me cold. Ronnie had said pretty much the same thing not so long ago and I’d erased it from my mind. I had to think before I could find a sentence that was completely true. “I’ve never betrayed anyone I care about. Until maybe yesterday.”
“The nub,” he said, “and in the nick of time, too.”
“I, um, I met someone last night. She may have saved my life. So I took her to dinner—it’s not the way it sounds, I hadn’t laid eyes on her when I led her to the restaurant—but when we were together, at the table, it felt—you know—it felt like that.”
“Like what?”
“Like I was with someone I wanted to know much better. Like there was maybe a little elevation of my body temperature. Maybe the room seemed a little brighter.”
He didn’t respond, but I had all his attention, and that made the silence awkward. “Like I wanted to know her differently.”
“That was all?”
“I almost kissed her on the nose.”
He looked past me and then back at me. “So you’re telling me you met somebody who woke your glands up, and you’re using your current girlfriend’s failure to tell you her secrets as a rationalization for feeling that way, and you’re telling me it ended with an almost-kiss on the nose?”
“It did.”
“It did not. Did you tell this woman you were taken?”
“No.” I rubbed my face again.
“Did you tell your girlfriend about this woman?”
“No.”
“Then it didn’t end with an almost-kiss on the nose, did it?”
“Jesus,” I said. “Are you this tough on the kids who sit in your lap?”
“I don’t have to be,” Shlomo said. “They know what they want.”
