Ernest winked at him. “You don’t help me out, I’ll be sober when I see my wife.”
The bartender took a shot glass and filled it to the line with bourbon. “Champ, drink this up and then go home. OK?” He rapped twice on the bar with his knuckles. “Good luck. But then that’s it. Gabeesh?”
Ernest’s eyes filled with tears. A guinea bartender felt bad for him. A guinea bartender bought him a drink. A guinea bartender laughed at the expense of his nonexistent wife. For a moment he felt the familiarity of competing impulses, an admixture in this case of sentimental gratitude and murderous violence toward someone who dared condescend to him. For a moment he felt confusion. He hefted the shot glass, unsure whether he was going to throw the whiskey at the man or drink it down. In the end he drank it. No need to prove anything to this wop. He’d been cut off by better bartenders in better bars. He walked out. In a gesture of cavalier magnanimity, he left the change, three or four dollars, on the bar.
He thought maybe he ought to go see Lily. She would be up now, washing her hair to get the smoke out of it, listening to music or watching the late late show. The thought of her, of her little apartment with coffee perking in an old Silex maker on the kitchen table, made him happy. But when he pulled up across from Lily’s apartment building, no lights showed in her windows. He sat in the car for a few minutes, waiting, and then got out, taking a scrap of rag with him. In the front door was centered a small window of scuffed and scratched Plexiglas. Ernest wrapped the rag around his fist, double, and then punched out the little square of plastic, which clattered on the tiled vestibule floor. He reached through and let himself inside. The postman had tossed the day’s mail on the floor, and Ernest stooped and went through it. Nothing of note. He walked into the hallway and up two flights of stairs and then approached the door of her rear apartment, pausing there. The building was silent, except for the buzz of the overhead fluorescent and the hiss of steam pipes. He leaned his face against the door and pressed his ear to it, listening intently. Nothing. He knocked softly, then louder, then pressed his ear to the door again. No noise escaped the apartment. He wished he’d thought of phoning, but a surprise seemed like such a nice idea. So who got a surprise?
Live alone. Die alone. And, incidentally, wait around for a broad alone.
He went and sat at the head of the stairs and lit a cigarette. Who the fuck was this bitch anyway? He considered this lucidly. He knew he ought to feel tired, but instead he felt buoyant. He felt like talking. He felt like fucking Lily. He felt like drinking some more and driving around and then sitting in some brightly lit place eating his eggs at four in the a.m. He felt like going out to the cemetery and lying across the graves, pretending to be dead. He felt like throwing rocks through the windows of an abandoned warehouse. He felt like emptying a few clips at the range. He felt like going to a playground and flipping the swings, so that they wound themselves on their chains around the top of the swing set. He felt like standing on a rooftop, sailing 45 rpm singles away into the night, one after another. His knuckles began to ache. He reached between the banister rails and dropped the cigarette, hearing the infinitesimal sound it made as it landed in the ground-floor hallway. Then he lit another one.
It was murder being between jobs.
Suddenly he was in his car, his lights carving a tunnel into the darkness surrounding him. The impulse to leave, to stop waiting had come so abruptly that he’d nearly lost his balance lurching downstairs. His knee hurt from banging it on the door frame on the way out, and he squeezed it with his aching knuckles. Eventually everything starts to hurt. But the thing was that in the course of his solitary meditation on loneliness and rejection at the top of the stairwell, back when only his knuckles had been killing him, he’d suddenly drawn up an archetypal memory: of himself, at ten, sitting alone, forgotten, in the backseat of the car, driving home from some excursion, while Guy snuggled between his parents in front. As they entered the outskirts of Scranton, his mother had had the nerve, the horse-faced old bitch, to turn around and compliment him on his behavior during the ride, praise with which his pussy-whipped father murmured his agreement. And then Baby Guy had raised his head to gaze back at him, a look of arrogant self-satisfaction on his tiny buglike face. Ernest acted swiftly and decisively. Before him there’d been a jumbo ashtray, filled to the brim with butts and ashes. He pulled it out of its housing and shook it, emptying its contents, over the occupants in front. In the slipstream of air coursing through the car from the cracked wing window, the ashes scattered and flew, a blizzard of rank gray fallout that made his father swerve and nearly lose control of the car and his mother sputter with rage and confusion. And Guy? He’d cried and cried, his precious little eyes full of the gritty stuff. Ha-ha — bug-faced son of a bitch! His mother had waited patiently until they arrived home, then had removed Ernest from the car and taken him by the hand, leading him upstairs to his parents’ bedroom, where she laid him across the flowered spread and hammered his bare ass, beating him hard and with single-minded dedication, while he inhaled all the perfumy smells of her side of the bed. It was like fucking her.
Now, as periodically came to pass, it was time for Guy to get his. It seemed to Ernest that whenever he bothered to look up, not that he did all that often anymore, there was Guy, still nestled between their parents, still drawing far more than his due. Little bastard! Dragging them into this stupid plot of his, exposing them. And they ate it up, as usual. Whatever little Guy-Guy wanted. Well, enough of that. He happened to know a captain on the Scranton PD, Earl Fry. Always meant to look him up when he was in town, and what better time than this, when the security of the nation was at stake.
Police HQ was a forbidding old building, part citadel, part prison, part bankrupt public institution. Ernest responded to its looming presence uneasily, on some hindbrain level. A ramp led down from a gated archway beyond which the motor pool lay, but public parking was found in the court out front, deserted now except for a sheriff’s vehicle, probably there to transfer a prisoner to the county jail. He pulled up behind the sheriff’s car and got out, looked the place over. He felt good about the idea. It felt right. Bring the whole thing home where it belonged. Earl Fry. Old high school pal. Knew Ernest, and he knew Guy too. Ernest could imagine Fry rising from his desk to greet him, What a surprise, and then his jaw dropping as Ernest dumped the gift-wrapped news in his lap.
All there was, though, was a cop, with corporal’s stripes, behind a desk, leaning toward a sheet of paper half rolled out of the typewriter in front of him and daubing at it with Liquid Paper. The cop did a really professional job of ignoring Ernest until he’d finished his daubing, blown on the page to dry it, and then rolled it back into the platen.
“Help you?”
“Let me speak to Captain Fry. Please.”
“Off duty.”
“Who’s on duty?”
“There’s me. There’s Sergeant Durkin. There’s Lieutenant Bricca.” He did not say this in a friendly way, but as if he were reviewing an obvious set of data for the benefit of an idiot.
“Let me talk to Bricca.”
“He’s Code Seven.”
“What’s that? On the shitter?”
The cop studied him for a moment. “Dinner,” he said, finally.
“When’s he back?”
“What do you have?”
“I’ll tell him.”
“Suit yourself,” said the cop, indicating a bench.
“When did you say he was back?”
“I didn’t,” said the cop. “He’s the lieutenant. You know?”