When Teo laughs, it’s the mask itself that seems to be laughing, the mask that chugs down a bottle of Hamm’s.
“Why’s Goldblatt’s got you disguised in a dress when they could have a goddamn superhero patrolling the aisles? You’re wasting your talent. You could be a rent-a-wrestler, make up business cards. Headlocks for Hire, Half nelsons fifty percent off. I need an autographed picture for the wall. Hey, I could sponsor you, advertise on your jersey.”
“Have a Nip at the Inn of Zip,” Teo says.
“You’re a poet!” Zip sets them up with two more cold ones and rings up another of the quarters Teo has balanced on the bar. “Can the Kohlrabi still kick ass?” Zip asks.
“Fight again?” Teo asks. Even wearing the blue tank top and the mask, even after the first good night’s sleep in a long time, even with the sunlight streaming through the door and whiskey through his veins, on a Friday afternoon, and nowhere to be but here, drinking cold beer and joking with his new friend, Teo knows that’s impossible.
“What if there was no choice?” Zip asks. “If it was him or you? Say you catch somebody stealing and he pulls a knife? Could you do whatever it took? Is it worth it? Purely theoretical, what if somebody hired you to watch their back in a situation like that?”
The undisguised undercurrent of desperation in these questions makes Teo recall the message from the Spanish pigeon: “Asesino.” Murder. The slip of paper is still in Teo’s pocket. There’s an eerie feeling of premonition about it. He’d been thinking maybe of showing it to Zip to see what he made of it, but not now. “Purely theoretical, you keep protection back there?” Teo asks.
“Funny you should ask, I was just looking through my purely theoretical ordnance last night,” Zip says. “Swiss Army knife, USMC forty-five missing the clip. Ever seen one of these?” Zip reaches beneath the bar and sets a short, gleaming sword in front of Teo.
Teo runs his finger along the Oriental lettering engraved on the blade.
“Careful, it’s razor sharp,” Zip says. “Never found out what the letters mean, probably something about honor that gets young men killed. Guys said the Japs used to sharpen these with silk. I don’t know if that’s true, but all the dead Jap soldiers had silk flags their families gave them when they went to war. Made good souvenirs. GI’s took everything you could imagine for souvenirs. Bloody flags, weapons, gold teeth, polished skulls until there was an order against those. Wonder what happened to all that shit? Probably stuffed away forgotten in boxes in basements and attics all over the country. Only thing I took was this. It’s a samurai knife used for hari-kari. They’d sneak in at night and cut your throat, so we slept two in a foxhole, me and Domino Morales, one dozing, the other doing sentry. You’d close your eyes dead tired knowing your life depended on your buddy staying awake.” Zip weighs the sword in his hand, then sets it back under the bar and lifts a length of sawed-off hickory bat handle that dangles by a rawhide loop from a hook beside the cash register. “This used to be enough,” he says, “but the way things are these days you gotta get serious if you want to defend yourself. Whoa!” Zip exclaims, gesturing with the bat at the TV screen. “Banks got all of that one.”
On the TV, Jack Brickhouse is into his home-run calclass="underline" “Back she goes … way back … back! … back! Hey! Hey!”
“Hey! Hey!” Joe Ditto says. He stands in the emblazoned doorway in his sunglasses and factory steel-toes, his powder-blue sport coat looking lopsided and pouchy where the gun weighs down his right pocket. He’s wearing the sport coat over a wrinkled gym top, and in his left hand he holds a gym bag. He’s sweating as if he’s just come from a workout. “Didn’t mean to startle you, Mr. Zip. I thought you were going to brain your customer here. This masked marauder didn’t pay his bar tab? You want I should speak to him?”
Zip hangs the bat back on its hook, and Joe sets the gym bag down and straddles a stool beside Teo. No introductions are made. On the right side of Joe’s face, beneath a four-day growth of beard, there’s a hot-looking handprint. “What’s so interesting?” Joe asks, when he catches Zip staring. “You don’t like the new look from the other side of Western?” He tucks in his Champs tank top as if it’s his gym shirt-sport coat combination that Zip was staring at. “Fucken hot out there,” Joe says. “I need a cold one. You need an air conditioner in here, Mr. Zip.”
“They’re too noisy,” Zip says. “You can’t hear the ball game.”
“Hey, I’m not trying to sell you one,” Joe says. He drains his beer in three gulps and slams down the bottle. Teo’s remaining two quarters teeter onto their sides. “Hit me again, Mr. Zip. And a shot of whatever you’re drinking. What’s score?”
“Cubs down two to one. Banks just hit one.”
“Drabowsky still pitching? You know where he’s from?”
“Ozanna, Poland,” Zip says like it’s a stupid question. “He’s throwing good.”
“You bet on him?” Joe asks. When he raises the shot glass, his hand is so shaky that he has to bring his mouth to the glass.
“I don’t bet on baseball,” Zip says.
“Hit me again, Mr. Zip. And one for yourself.” From a roll of bills, Joe peels a twenty onto the bar. “What are you drinking, Masked Marvel? Zip, give Zorro here a Hamm’s-the-beer-refreshing.”
Zip sets them up, and the three men sit in silence, looking from their drinks to the ball game as if waiting for some signal to down their whiskeys. Their dark reflections in the long mirror behind the bar wait, too. Teo glances at the mirror, where a man in a blue Hummingbird mask glances back. He knows the guy in the sunglasses beside him is mob, and can’t help noticing that Zip has gone tensely quiet, unfriendlier than he’s ever seen him. It makes him aware of how Zip set the samurai sword within reach, and of the message from the Spanish pigeon.
On the TV, Jack Brickhouse says, “Oh, brother, looks like a fan fell out of the bleachers,” and his fellow sportscaster, Vince Lloyd, adds, “Or jumped down, Jack.” Brickhouse, as if doing play-by-play, announces, “Now, folks, he’s running around the outfield!” and Vince Lloyd adds, “Jack, I think he’s trying to hand Willie Mays a beer!”
“That’s Lefty!” Teo exclaims.
“Lefty? Lefty Antic?” Zip asks. “You sure?”
“The sax player. He’s my neighbor.”
“Here come the Andy Frain ushers out on the field,” Brickhouse announces. “They’ll get things back under control.”
“Look at him run!” Teo says.
“Go, Lefty!” Zip yells. “He ain’t going down easy.”
Without warning, the TV blinks into a commerciaclass="underline" “From the land of sky blue waters …”
“Shit!” Joe says, “that was better than the fucking game. Guy had some moves.”
“You know Lefty, the sax player?” Teo asks Zip.
“Hell, I got him on the wall,” Zip says, and from among the photo gallery of softball teams with ZipIn lettered on their jerseys he lifts down a picture of a young boxer with eight-ounce gloves cocked. The boxer doesn’t have a mustache, but it’s easy to recognize the sax player. “He made it to the Golden Glove Nationals,” Zip says. “Got robbed on a decision.”
“That southpaw welterweight from Gonzo’s Gym. I remember him from when I was growing up,” Joe Ditto says. “Kid had fast hands.” He raises his shot glass, and they all drink as if to something.
“Well, back to baseball, thank goodness,” Jack Brickhouse says. “Vince, it’s unfortunate, but a few bad apples just don’t belong with the wonderful fans in the friendly confines of beautiful Wrigley field.”
“Best fans in the game, Jack,” Vince says.
“They didn’t want to show him beating the piss out of the Andy Frains,” Joe says.