All he’d been trying to do was shake her, get her to admit that she was just playing to her audience...
The nightmare feeling again.
Almost dreamlike, this whole thing. Here he was, pretty drunk, standing here in the middle of the floor with this underage girl, and everybody thinking he’d tried to strangle her.
Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, how had he ever gotten himself into a situation like this.
Way beyond his control. Way beyond. He could feel his entire life collapsing around him.
By morning, the story would be all over town.
You hear about Richie McGuire? This teenage chick comes into the bar where he’s drinking and tells him right in front of everybody that maybe she’s pregnant and it’s obviously his kid and everything — and you know what the son of a bitch does? Tries to strangle her. No, I’m not shittin’ you. Tries to strangle her and right in front of everybody, too. Right, Richie McGuire. Man, that son of a bitch’s been a loose cannon ever since he got dumped by the Bears.
“I’ll walk you out to your car,” the bartender said, taking her gently by the shoulder.
She had one last dramatic moment in her.
She walked over to Richie, everybody positively bedazzled by every moment of this wonderful soap opera, and stood on her tiptoes and kissed Richie on the cheek and said, “I’ll always love you, Richie.”
And then, because she was at an angle where nobody except Richie could see her face, she grinned at him, letting him know for sure that this was all a joke, and that she was embarrassing him as a way of punishing him for “dumping” her.
Then one more time: “I’ll always love you, Richie. I mean it.”
She started crying again.
The bartender led her gently away, leaving Richie to stand in the middle of the bar, right underneath the Bud Tiffany-style lamp, to be scowled at and scorned by everybody in the place.
“You don’t check IDs anymore, huh, Richie?” somebody said. And everybody laughed.
“I’d sure like a crack at changing her diapers,” somebody else said, followed by more laughter.
“She’s got some nice pom-poms,” said a third wag. “She must be a cheerleader.”
Richie walked numbly back to the bar. There was a half-finished drink there. It wasn’t even his. He didn’t care. He hoisted it up and threw it back and then he reached behind the bar and picked up a bottle of J & B scotch that the bartender had been using.
Richie poured his own. Generously.
The place was quiet. At least the jokes had stopped.
Richie gunned half the drink in a single gulp.
He was trying to convince himself that it had all really happened. He’d just stopped in here for a few quiet drinks, convinced that his little flirtation with Darcy was going to end quietly and quickly.
And now this.
The bartender was back. “You buy this place or something while I was gone, Richie? That why you’re pouring your own?”
“I’ll pay for it.”
“That means you’ll put it on that fucking tab you haven’t paid anything on for a year?”
The jukebox was still silent. Everybody was hearing this discussion.
“You know I’ll pay it off.”
“Oh, right, Richie. Just like I know the sun’ll come up in the north tomorrow.”
Then: “She’s a nice young girl, Richie, whether you think so or not.”
Richie looked at him and smiled He couldn’t help it. This guy was so fucking stupid. He’d bought her act completely. No questions asked.
“What’s so funny, Richie?”
“You. That’s what’s so funny.”
“Oh, yeah?”
“Yeah. Because you believed her. This was all for your benefit, all of you.”
He looked around at the bar patrons. Nobody was smiling. Nobody even looked halfway friendly.
“God, I can’t believe this. You really bought that bullshit act she was putting on?”
Silence.
“I really need another drink,” he said to the bartender.
“You’re cut off, Richie. You and your tab.”
“Hey, I—”
“You tried to strangle her, Richie. Maybe you’re so drunk you can’t even appreciate what you did. But you tried to strangle her. Can you understand that?”
He wasn’t yelling. He wasn’t angry. In fact, he sounded a little sad about it all.
Up until a few minutes ago, Richie had been somebody he liked having around his place. Maybe Richie hadn’t made it in the pros but he’d made All-Big Ten three years running, and how many guys ever did that?
No more.
The Richie days were over. At least in this place.
“Tell you what,” the bartender said. “I’m going to buy you your last drink in this place and then I want you to haul ass out of here.”
Richie started to protest but the bartender said: “I could’ve called the cops, Richie, you jumping on her that way. Underage kid and all.”
He shook his head.
Poured out a drink, a stingy little drink, and pushed it across to Richie.
“Drink up and get out,” he said. “I got a daughter her same age and when I think of her gettin’ involved with some older guy like you — just drink up, Richie, and get the fuck out.”
Richie glanced around at the other patrons.
They were just watching him. Stony-faced. She’d finished him with that pregnancy bit. Absolutely finished him.
He looked at the bartender and pushed the drink back at him, “I don’t take charity.”
“Yeah,” the bartender said. “You got a lot of pride. Pushing fifteen-year-old girls around.”
Richie stepped away from the bar.
His legs were wobbly, both from drinking and from the anxiety of the past twenty minutes. He felt weak, ready to collapse. And he could still not quite convince himself that his world had all come tumbling down so fast.
Couldn’t this be a nightmare?
The crowd parted for him. Nobody said anything. They just watched him walk too carefully — the way a drunk does when he fears his walk will give him away — straight to the entrance and then out into the night.
He stood out there in the parking lot listening to the big trucks on the nearby interstate and smelling the smoky scent of autumn.
And started crying. Couldn’t help it. Rarely cried. But that’s what he did now. Silent tears streaking down his cheeks, and his lower lip trembled like a little kid’s.
It had all gone so wrong, so fucking wrong.
So wrong.
Still crying, he staggered to his car, inserted the key into the ignition, and pulled out of the parking lot.
5
This was the third time Jimmy had come down the hill to leave the bread off with Richie. He lived on the hill right above Richie’s place. It only took him a few minutes to get down there.
Now it was raining.
He could have, of course, left the bread off the first or second time he’d come down here. But that way he wouldn’t have been able to go into Richie’s house and see all his neat trophies and the framed photographs of Richie in his football uniform.
Someday Jimmy wanted to be just like Richie, walk around town and have people smile at him, have people think he was real neat, the big cool brother that every boy wanted to have.
Richie’s place was more like a cottage than a house, a little one-story place with a shake roof and leaded windows and vines that crawled like hungry snakes over all four walls.
In the rain, the place was dark. And frightening. Darkened houses scared Jimmy. On TV, people were always finding dead bodies in darkened houses, and Jimmy was afraid that someday the same thing would happen to him.
The rain didn’t bother him. For one thing, he was wearing his black slicker with matching rubber boots and rain cap. Amy had given him the whole outfit last Christmas. He loved Christmas and he loved Amy. He could tell that other people ran out of patience with him. Not Amy. Amy never ran out of patience. He was going to give her pieces of quartz that beamed in the sun. He figured that if he gave her enough pieces of quartz, she would marry him. Then he would live in her house and she would make him dinner all the time, and sometimes they would kiss. And other things. Sometimes when he saw Amy, his groin got hot and almost painful. Then he’d sneak off and do the dirty thing by himself. But someday he’d put his dirty thing inside Amy... the way that man and woman did in the pictures some boys had shown him once.