I surveyed the Scupper. It had pretty much emptied out. This wasn’t the crime scene, after all. And they’d pretty much finished with me.
“The cops,” Barnum started up again. “Just because they’re pretty sure you didn’t kill the stiff, doesn’t mean they believed you. Cops work slowly, but don’t mistake that for stupidity. They can afford to come back tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.”
I knew she was right, but I only needed one tomorrow. I was stalling for a ten-minute chat with MacClough.
“You asked for the story,” I put on an angry mask. “You got the story. Life’s weird sometimes. Sometimes things don’t hang together. Like promising careers, for instance.”
I might just as well have stabbed her for the pain on her face. No, I don’t think a knife would’ve hurt quite so much. But she refused to take up the mask of anger. In fact, she didn’t do anything but shrink.
“Can I buy a drink?” she wanted to know, tensely biting down on her bottom lip. The interview was over. “Bourbon?”
“Sure,” I got up off the stool and made my way behind the bar.
The last of the occupying armada “Merry Christmased” their way out the door. One or two of the detectives suggested I not do any interstate visiting any time soon. I explained that I hated holiday travel anyway.
“Wild Turkey or Maker’s Mark?” I refocused on the thirsty reporter.
“Haven’t you got anything cheaper?” she wondered, throwing some balls of crumpled currency onto the bar top.
“Don’t sweat it,” I flicked the crushed bills back to her. “Tonight it’s on the house. You can pay for the speed rack bourbon next trip.”
If I’d been expecting any proud protests, they weren’t forthcoming.
“Maker’s Mark,” was all she had to say.
“On the rocks or-”
“-straight,” Barnum stole the second option from my throat. “Straight. Neat. A double. And now,” she rattled off like some throwaway character of Hemingway’s.
She didn’t bother trying to coax me into joining her. Kate Barnum no longer cared about drinking alone. Three double bourbons’ worth of watching showed me she’d gotten over that hump some time ago. I poured her a fourth before putting the long-necked bottle dressed in fake, drippy-red wax back on the shelf over my shoulder.
“I smell a good story here, Klein,” she tried that bit of triteness on for size.
“That’s your breath you’re smellin’, Ms. Barnum. Now why don’t you go home and write it up like I explained?”
“Because your telling stinks worse than my breath,” she slammed the evacuated tumbler onto the pitted counter and lit up a filterless Chesterfield. A few drinks and the first drag on her cigarette seemed to put some wind back in her sails. “You don’t fool me, Klein. I’m going to get this story. It wants me to get it.”
“There’s no story to get.”
“You’re right,” she agreed too easily. “When a middle-aged woman dressed in Salvation Army mink and made up like an orange day-glo hooker gets her brains rearranged and a canary stuffed in her dead mouth in this town, that’s not a story. That’s legend, my friend.”
With that pronouncement, she swept her collection of crushed dollar bills off the bar and into a hip pocket. She threw on a ski parka that’d probably never seen the slopes nor the insides of a dry cleaners. The beige coat was so worn and soiled you could divine the outlines of where the tape recorder was usually carried. And that’s the pocket she put it in.
“Save your Merry Christmases for someone who’ll listen,” the thoroughly braced reporter preempted, waving her right palm at me like a poor man’s Diana Ross. Kate Barnum was a veteran drinker. The straight, stumble-free line she made out of the bar proved as much. She didn’t have to tell me I’d be seeing her again. I knew I would. Parts of me looked forward to it. Still others smelled trouble in the wake of her perfume. I finally locked the Scupper’s front doors. Some of me wanted to collapse into sleep, but that was for books and movies and my three wishes. I tended to wear insomnia like a second skin. I shut the bar lights, settled down with the stuffed fishes and let the new TV babble once again.
Jacob Marley, wrapped in chains and moaning-sort of like my brother Josh getting his cavities drilled by Great Uncle “Who Needs Novacaine” Ziggy, in Brighton Beach in 1963-was busily laying guilt at the feet of old Scrooge. Ebenezer wasn’t having any, yet. He had three ghosts to go. I dangled the orphaned heart in the TV glare and wondered how many ghosts might be waiting to visit the likes of one John Francis MacClough.
Diary of Wasted Days
My right arm was warmly numb underneath her. The smooth inside of my left forearm could feel the soft ridges of branching blue veins buried just beneath the cloudy white skin of her breasts. Curling my left wrist with eager pain, I captured a bullet-hard nipple between the tips of my thumb and forefinger. I pinched the pink bullet and she shook. Suddenly, something else stiffened, something resting between the pillow of her buttocks and the moist opening of her soul.
She released her nipple from my grip and guided my fingers south along her abdomen, over the lightly downed skin below her waist and into a wet tangle of hair and hunger. My fintertip chased and caught an elusive button hidden under the coarse weave and slippery skin. I dipped my finger fully into her and brought the moisture to my mouth.
God, she was different. My finger smelled of patchouli and she tasted like bourbon and cigarettes on my tongue. I could feel my thighs tighten as a drop of me rolled onto her somewhere. She grabbed my hand and licked it, too.
“You don’t fool me, Klein,” her throaty whisper faded into the black.
I rolled her over to kiss her, to cut my tongue on her teeth. My hands cupped her cheeks and I pressed down on her. I never reached her lips.
Feathers and brittle claws!
We lay together on the train platform. Her eyes still vacantly searching the arc-lighted sky. There was blood, again, on the end of my finger, on my lips and rolling onto the snow from the tip of my penis.
I tried running, but my naked feet were tractionless against the frozen concrete and ice. I slid every second step, peeling my skin away in sheets. There was no pain nor much blood.
At the edge of the station, a dark form pulled me up. It was bound and shackled and wore a diamond heart at the end of a stethoscope.
“Your hands.” It grabbed them. “I want your hands. They want me to get them.”
The shadow man squeezed my hands. I could feel that more clearly, now, and the sweat consuming what was left of my unpeeled skin.
“Hey, Klein!” he shook my shoulders. “Klein!” a rough hand slapped my cheeks. “For chrissakes!”
My shoulders were free. A chair crashed. So did I.
“I thought a fall on that flat Jewish ass might wake you up.” Johnny MacClough stood over me shaking his head in mock disgust. “Must’ve been a helluva dream.”
“That,” I yawned, cracking my stiff neck, “was no dream.”
The cloud-filtered morning light seemed to bend around MacClough on its journey to my crusty eyes. I rubbed them to no good end and began scratching at the ever-increasing gray of my beard. Why was it, I wondered, that gray hair looked so distinguished on everyone else. On me it looked like a diary of wasted days. On me it was a constant reminder of knees that stayed sore too long and breath that just grew shorter. It’s funny what you wonder about.
Johnny MacClough had no beard nor any gray hair in his full blond waves. Though a good ten years my senior, he’d always introduce me to people as his father. As yet, no one was quite blind enough to believe it, but sometimes, just sometimes, strangers hesitated a bit too long before laughing.
“Merry Christmas!” I threw my right hand out for a shake and a pull up.
“Bar looks like shit,” he observed accusingly, but yanked me up just the same.
“You heard?” I rolled my shoulders and stretched.