“What the hell are you guys doing?”
“Just calm down, Papa Bear,” Mike said. That’s his name for me whenever he wants to convey to people that I’m kind of this old fuddy-duddy. It so happens that Mike is two years older than I am and it also happens that I’m not a fuddy-duddy. Jan has assured me of that, and she’s completely impartial.
“Knock off the Papa Bear bullshit. Did you call the cops?”
“Not yet,” Neil said. “Just calm down a little, all right?”
“You haven’t called the cops. You’ve got some guy tied up and gagged in my basement. You haven’t even asked how Bob is. And you want me to calm down.”
Mike came up to me, then. He still had that air of pit-bull craziness about him, frantic, uncontrollable, alien.
“We’re going to do what the cops can’t do, man,” he said. “We’re going to sweat this son of a bitch. We’re going to make him tell us who he was with tonight, and then we’re going to make him give us every single name of every single bad guy who works this neighborhood. And then we’ll turn all the names over to the cops.”
“It’s just an extension of the Patrol,” Neil said. “Just keeping our neighborhood safe is all.”
“You guys are nuts,” I said, and turned back toward the steps. “I’m going up and calling the cops.”
That’s when I realized just how crazed Mike was. “You aren’t going anywhere, man. You’re going to stay here and help us break this bastard down. You’re going to do your goddamned neighborhood duty.”
He’d grabbed my sleeve so hard that he’d torn it at the shoulder. We both discovered this at the same time.
I expected him to look sorry. He didn’t. In fact, he was smirking at me. “Don’t be such a wimp, Aaron,” he said.
ii
Mike led the charge getting the kitchen cleaned up. I think he was feeling guilty about calling me a wimp with such angry exuberance. Now I understood how lynch mobs got formed. One guy like Mike stirring people up by alternately insulting them and urging them on.
After the kitchen was put back in order, and after I’d taken inventory to find that nothing had been stolen, I went to the refrigerator and got beers for everybody. Bob had drifted back to the kitchen, too.
“All right,” I said, “now that we’ve all calmed down, I want to walk over to that yellow kitchen wall phone there and call the police. Any objections?”
“I think blue would look better in here than yellow,” Neil said.
“Funny,” I said.
They looked themselves now, no feral madness on the faces of Mike or Neil, no winces on Bob’s.
I started across the floor to the phone.
Neil grabbed my arm. Not with the same insulting force Mike had used on me. But enough to get the job done.
“I think Mike’s right,” Neil said. “I think we should grill that bastard a little bit.”
I shook my head, politely removed his hand from my forearm, and proceeded to the phone.
“This isn’t just your decision alone,” Mike said.
He’d finally had his way. He’d succeeded in making me angry. I turned around and looked at him. “This is my house, Mike. If you don’t like my decisions, then I’d suggest you leave.”
We both took steps toward each other. Mike would no doubt win any battle we had but I’d at least be able to inflict a little damage and right now that’s all I was thinking about.
Neil got between us.
“Hey,” he said. “For God’s sake you two, c’mon. We’re friends, remember?”
“This is my house,” I said, my words childish in my ears.
“Yeah, but we live in the same neighborhood, Aaron,” Mike said, “which makes this ‘our’ problem.”
“He’s right, Aaron,” Bob said from the breakfast nook. There’s a window there where I sometimes sit to watch all the animals on sunny days. I saw a mother raccoon and four baby raccoons one day, marching single file across the grass. My grandparents were the last generation to live on the farm. My father came to town here and ended up working at a ball bearing company. Raccoons are a lot more pleasant to gaze upon than people.
“He’s not right,” I said to Bob. “He’s wrong. We’re not cops, we’re not bounty hunters, we’re not trackers. We’re a bunch of goddamned guys who peddle stocks and bonds. Mike and Neil shouldn’t have tied him up downstairs — that happens to be illegal, at least the way they went about it — and now I’m going to call the cops.”
“Yes, that poor thing,” Mike said, “aren’t we just picking on him, though? Tell you what, why don’t we make him something to eat?”
“Just make sure we have the right wine to go with it,” Neil said. “Properly chilled, of course.”
“Maybe we could get him a chick,” Bob said.
“With bombers out to here,” Mike said, indicating with his hands where “here” was.
I couldn’t help it. I smiled. They were all being ridiculous. A kind of fever had caught them.
“You really want to go down there and question him?” I said to Neil.
“Yes. We can ask him things the cops can’t.”
“Scare the bastard a little,” Mike said. “So he’ll tell us who was with him tonight, and who else works this neighborhood.” He came over and put his hand out. “God, man, you’re one of my best friends. I don’t want you mad at me.”
Then he hugged me, which is something I’ve never been comfortable with men doing, but to the extent I could, I hugged him back.
“Friends?” he said.
“Friends,” I said. “But I still want to call the cops.”
“And spoil our fun?” Neil said.
“And spoil your fun.”
“I say we take it to a vote,” Bob said.
“This isn’t a democracy,” I said. “It’s my house and I’m the king, I don’t want to have a vote.”
“Can we ask him one question?” Bob said.
I sighed. They weren’t going to let go. “One question?”
“The name of the guy he was with tonight.”
“And that’s it?”
“That’s it. That way we get him and one other guy off the street.”
“And then I call the cops?”
“Then,” Mike said, “you call the cops.”
“One question,” Neil said.
While we finished our beers, we argued a little more, but they had a lot more spirit left than I did. I was tired now and missing Jan and the kids and feeling lonely. These three guys had become strangers to me tonight. Very old boys eager to play at boy games once again.
“One question,” I said. “Then I call the cops.”
I led the way down, sneezing as I did so.
There’s always enough dust floating around in the basement to play hell with my sinuses.
The guy was his same sullen self, glaring at us as we descended the stairs and then walked over to him. He smelled of heat and sweat and city grime. The long bare arms sticking out of his filthy T-shirt told tattoo tales of writhing snakes and leaping panthers. The arms were joined in the back with rope. His jaw still flexed, trying to accommodate the intrusion of the gag.
“Maybe we should castrate him,” Mike said, walking up close to the guy. “You like that, scumbag? If we castrated you?”
If the guy felt any fear, it wasn’t evident in his eyes. All you could see there was the usual contempt.
“I’ll bet this is the jerk who broke into the Donaldsons’ house a couple weeks ago,” Neil said.
Now he walked up to the guy. But he was more ambitious than Mike had been. Neil spat in the guy’s face.
“Hey,” I said, “cool it.”
Neil glared at me. “Yeah, I wouldn’t want to hurt his feelings, would I?”