With my hand on the bar, I swung off the stool and stood up.
“There a phone here?” I asked above the din as I picked up the change and counted out a tip.
The telephone was in the back, just outside the door to the rest rooms. “It’s me,” I said gruffly into the receiver. My head was leaning against the wall and I was staring straight down at my shoes. They needed a shine. “I’m in a bar. I’ve had too much to drink. You think you could come?”
Fifteen minutes later, Howard Flynn found me at a table in the corner, drinking a cup of black coffee. “Thanks,” I said, somewhat embarrassed. “Order something. I’ll buy dinner.”
He settled into the chair opposite and shook his head. “Hell, I thought you called because you wanted someone to get drunk with.”
I peered at his heavy-jowled, impassive face and tried to smile.
“Tell me something. How long was it before you figured out that AA didn’t stand for ‘anytime, anywhere’?”
“It was one of my life’s bigger disappointments,” he said with a grin. His thick upper arms bulged inside the white dress shirt he was wearing buttoned at the wrists and open at the collar.
“You did good,” he said in his slow, methodical way.
“I did good? Why? Because I came here and started to get drunk?”
“Because you didn’t get drunk. Not all the way. And because you had sense enough to know you couldn’t get home by yourself.” He looked at me through half-closed eyes. “Besides, it isn’t like you went into a liquor store and got yourself a bottle of Thunderbird.”
My head was spinning. I lifted the coffee cup with both hands to make sure I would not spill it.
“How many guys have you seen in the gutter drinking Chivas Regal out of a paper bag?”
“It’s where you end up, not where you start,” I replied.
With a show of impatience, Flynn waved his large, puffy red hand. “You sure you’ve never been in AA? You’ve got all the answers down pat. Listen. I didn’t come down here to hold your goddamn hand. I came down here because you sounded like if you were left alone you might just keep drinking, maybe all night, maybe longer. I’m here to see you don’t. Okay? Now, finish your coffee and let’s get the hell out of here.” His heavy-lidded eyes moved from one end of the teeming bar to the other. “I can’t stand to be around people when they’re having such a good time.”
Flynn pushed back his chair, stood up, and waited for me to come. We shouldered our way through the boisterous crowd, past the bartender with his starched white shirt and black bow tie filling the glasses and emptying the pockets of everyone who lined up for the chance to feel even better than they did already.
Outside, Flynn put his burly arm around my shoulder. “I meant what I said. Don’t get down on yourself. You did good. You knew when to stop.”
Flynn drove me home. He held the bottom of the steering wheel with three fingers of his left hand while his right arm was draped over the back of the seat. Each time the car hit a bump, it vibrated like a hard board plank dropped twenty feet onto a concrete floor. He did not seem to notice as the shocks dissipated in the round folds of muscle around his neck. I was not so fortunate. Each time it happened, I doubled over a little farther and wondered how long the queasy feeling in my stomach would last.
“You know why I drive this car, don’t you?” he asked in the apparent belief that an explanation would make me feel better.
“It isn’t just because I don’t want to spend the money on a new one.”
I knew the reason. I had heard it one time or another from every recovering alcoholic I had known. It was part of the list, the twelve steps to sobriety.
“It’s because it’s good for my humility,” he said, his eyes fixed on the road.
It was just a word, but the sound of it, repeated so often, had become part of a secular scripture, but one that seemed without either context or depth. There was something trancelike about the way it was used, like the mumblings of a catechism in a language no one understood. There was something depressing about it, a reminder of how empty things were when something as simple as this was deemed sufficient. Or was it a form of snobbery, a kind of intellectual condescension on my part? I had called Flynn not only because I knew I should not drive, but because I did not want to be alone. Those supposedly simpleminded for-mulae he followed like they were his personal Ten Commandments had made him into the kind of man who would come out in the middle of the night to help someone else stay out of the bottle that once nearly destroyed his life.
“Of course, humility is kind of relative,” he was saying. “We’ve got a guy in our group who got up at the last meeting and reported that he thought it was pretty humble on his part when he got rid of his Mercedes and got a Lincoln instead. Well, whatever works.”
He drove on, and the spinning inside my head began to slow down, and my eyes became heavier and heavier until I could barely keep them open. We were almost there. The gate at the bottom of the drive loomed out of the darkness.
“It’s too bad about that guy who killed Jeffries,” I heard him say. He said something else, something that made me want to ask a question, but I could not find the words. And then, though I tried to listen, I could not make sense out of anything Flynn was saying. A moment later, I could not hear anything at all, except a voice somewhere inside my own head telling me something was wrong.
Thirteen
With a start, I sat up in bed, peering into the darkness, wondering whether I was really awake, surrounded by a dream that seemed more real than any daytime thought. The smooth, naked body of the girl I had just married, curled around me as she slept, a soft, unworried smile floating on her mouth, the warm breath of life flowing through her like a mysterious gift. I closed my eyes and tried to reach her one last time before she faded into the morbid gray light of dawn.
I lay back down and felt as if I had fallen into the sea. The twisted sheets were drenched with slick cold sweat. Throwing off the covers, I swung my legs over the side of the bed and stood up. My head was throbbing. I put my hand on it to make it stop, but my hair was wringing wet, and I pulled it away. With slow careful steps I moved across the familiar room until I reached the bathroom door. I found the switch on the wall and squinted into a blinding glare. A few minutes later, I plodded back into the bedroom and opened the shutters to let in the late morning light.
After a shower I threw on a white terry cloth robe and wandered downstairs to the kitchen. The smell of fresh-brewed coffee wafted through the air. I tried to remember if I had set the coffeemaker on automatic the night before, but I could not remember that or anything else. My head still hurt and my eyes felt like sandpaper.
Hunched over the kitchen table, reading the morning paper as if he had all the time in the world and no better way to spend it, was Howard Flynn. Without looking up, he extended his arm toward the coffeemaker on the counter. “I made the coffee,” he said, as he turned the page.
I poured myself a cup and sat down on the other side of the table. Through an open window I heard the sound of a wood-pecker hammering its beak against an oak tree in the backyard.
Cradling the cup in both hands, I sipped on the steaming black coffee and tried to figure out what Flynn was doing here.
Folding up the paper, Flynn neatly arranged each sheet in the section until it was exactly the way it had been when he brought it in.
“Anything interesting?” I asked when he finished.
“On page three,” he said, shoving the paper across to me. “They left out most of the details.”
He could tell I did not know what he was talking about. “You all right?” he asked, grinning. “I brought you home, in case you don’t remember.”