“Don’t they play that game with the sticks?” Abe asks me.
“Hurling,” I say.
“Do you play it?” Abe asks.
“No.”
“Charles was the lacrosse champ at Bright,” Abe says. “Kind of a similar game, no?”
Amber and Charles look briefly at each other.
“What’s Bright?” I ask.
“You ever read A Separate Peace, Catcher in the Rye, any one of those?” Abe asks.
“No.”
“Well, it’s a bit like their school, Colorado version, Charles and Robert both went there. Very snooty, play cricket and everything,” Abe says. Clearly, he’s trying to get under Charles’s skin, wind him up a bit, tease him, but he’s overstepped the line somehow. Amber scolds him with a look that stops him in midsentence.
“Alexander, do you have any hobbies or anything like that?” Amber asks, questioning me with those big glacial eyes.
“No, not really,” I say. “I go to football matches, soccer matches, I mean, sometimes, I’m not very athletic or anything.”
Mercifully, the pizza finally comes.
I don’t eat any. Instead, I find myself staring at Amber Mulholland as she spills Coke on her white blouse. I hand her a napkin and she thanks me with a beautiful smile. Something about that smile, though. Beautiful like a sun-drenched cornfield above a missile silo.
How much does she know about what happened to Victoria? Would she even care if her husband or brother-in-law was a murderer? I examine her closely. Maybe I’m wrong. There’s something vulnerable about her too. A touch of the Marilyn or the Lady Di.
We drive back to Denver. I’m freezing, but no one else is. I try to get warmth from a cup of coffee. Charles is talking, but I’m not listening, ticking off the seconds till I can get home. We’re all exhausted. Amber, in a whisper, asks Charles how the filming went. He says it went great and gives her a kiss. The kiss makes me wince.
They drop me on Colfax Avenue.
A few hookers, a few gypsy cabs, their lemony headlights distorting in the rain.
I stand under the overhang at Kitty’s East Porno store. Still a few blocks to our apartment, but I’m so tired. Junkie tired. Drizzling still. The last rain for weeks to come.
From now on a continuation of the drought. Drought until August, when freezing rain would fall in Fort Morgan. And I would beg it to come down, invoking Vishnu, Storm Bringer, Lord of Night, begging him to cover me up as I lay there in the graveyard with gunshot wounds, wondering if it was too late then, to live, to survive, to avenge yet another horrible murder in this sorry, sorry excuse for a case.
8: AIR, WATER, EARTH, FIRE
Patrick and I are both irritated. It’s hot, dry, we have the fan way at the other end of the room so the cards don’t get blown over and John and Areea are not taking the game seriously at all. John has his hand on her lap, Areea has her hand at the back of his shorts.
I look at Patrick and shake my head in disgust.
“The one thing, John, that I can’t stand is people not taking poker seriously when there’s money in the pot.”
“It’s only two dollars,” John says, and winks at Areea.
Areea giggles for no reason at all.
“It’s the principle of the thing,” I say.
I can tell Patrick feels the same way. For him in particular, whose weeks remaining on planet Earth can be counted in the few dozen, minutes are precious, seconds are bloody precious.
“Are you calling or not?” I say.
“No, then,” John says impatiently, throwing down his cards.
“Your hand, Patrick,” I say, annoyed.
He picks up his winnings.
“I think maybe we’ll take a martini break,” he says.
“Good idea,” I say, looking significantly at John, who has started snogging Areea on the lobe of her ear. It’s been two hours since I shot up and another rule I have is that ketch and spirits don’t mix, but what the hell, anything to get away from those two, who have been carrying on like this for the last few days.
I follow Patrick all the way along the corridor and into his apartment, which is minimally decorated with a few photographs of friends and a bookcase filled with art books. CD player and CDs of all descriptions but mostly classical. He puts on a piece by Stravinsky, which does nothing to soothe my mood.
It’s July 10. I’ve been going to CAW for more than a week now, making about a hundred and fifty bucks a night, commuting downtown, buying the groceries, and also attempting to look discreetly into the Victoria Patawasti murder. John, by contrast, has been hanging out on the fire escape smoking pot, eating potato chips, drinking beer, and making out with Areea when she’s off her shift. It’s starting to get on my nerves.
“It’s starting to get on my nerves,” I tell Pat.
“Me, too. You know, I was bluffing that hand, I had nothing,” Pat says.
“I know.”
This is one of Pat’s good days, in fact since we showed up, he says he’s been doing much better. He was perishing through loneliness: the lawsuit’s pissed off most of his old pals in the DFD, and his only family lives in Wyoming.
Stravinsky’s violins start screeching at one another and Pat puts ice into the martini shaker. Pat makes a dry martini, a very dry martini. He informs the Bombay Sapphire gin about the existence of a substance called vermouth before he pours it in the shaker. He takes two glasses from the freezer, adds an olive to each, and asks me to do the shaking, which I do.
We retire to the fire escape.
“She’s very pretty, isn’t she?” Pat says.
“She is, Pat, gorgeous face, great legs, honestly, I don’t know what she sees in that big ganch.”
“Well, it’ll all end in tears,” Pat predicts, as we lean forward to watch two men attempt to beat each other senseless at a brown, grassless park on the corner.
“John and Areea?” I ask, unsure if we’re still on the same subject.
“Yes,” he says.
“Because of her parents?”
“She says she’s eighteen, but I think she’s much younger,” Pat says.
“Really?”
“Yeah, really,” he says.
We sip our martinis.
“What about you, is there a special someone in your life?” Pat asks, the vowel sounds making his cheeks hollow sickeningly.
“Nope. There isn’t.”
“Back home, I mean.”
“Answer’s still no. I can’t seem to hold on to a steady relationship.”
“You leave them or they leave you?”
“They leave me, Pat.”
“You think maybe the smack doesn’t help?” Pat asks.
“I’m sure it doesn’t. I’m sure it does not,” I say.
Pat looks at me. He’s not going to lecture me or give me grief. He’s just pointing out the obvious. And it’s that question yet again. And the answer. I must release it from me. Let it go. I don’t have to do heroin now, I don’t have to. So why am I doing it?
“We all need something, Pat,” I say lamely.
“Yeah, we do,” Pat agrees.
“And what about you, Patrick, is there someone in your life you’ve been hiding away?”
“Well, actually, I was in a long-term relationship until last year. Of course, he left me when I started to get sick.”
“Shit.”
“Shit is right,” Pat says with disgust.
The sun is making its way across Colfax and the street is yawning, waking up, putting on its usual show. Guys appearing on the street corners, women walking hand in hand with little kids, other kids playing basketball. Old men talking. Big old cars playing N.W.A. and Public Enemy, bigger, newer cars blaring Tupac and Notorious B.I.G.
And as always the professional dealers, easy and unobtrusive, and the rookie dealers looking around a million times to see how much attention they can bring to themselves.