Call Me a Cab

33

It’s hard to pub-crawl in western Kansas and eastern Colorado, particularly if you’re trying to limit yourself to speakeasies, but the Chasens managed it surprisingly well. Most of the joints we hit were legal bars, if the truth be known, but they all at least looked disreputable, and as the afternoon wore on into evening they began to fill up with a clientele to match. In a place called the Polka Bar, with pale green concrete block walls, one burly monster in a leather jacket offered to punch Boyd out for some obscure reason of his own, but Laura laughed so gaily, and fluttered her hands so uncaringly, and said so many ineffable words so fast that the lout found himself somehow dancing with the wife rather than fighting with the husband; Boyd’s only voiced reaction, watching them swirl away across the crowded dance floor, was, “What low taste that woman has. How she wound up with me I will never know.” Within a minute she was back, flushed and buoyant, kissing Boyd on the cheek and saying, “Such fun places you bring me to! Where shall we go next?”

Somewhere in through there we had dinner, in a ramshackle restaurant completely covered with shingles, inside and out. It was like eating in a lumberyard, an image encouraged by the chef’s apparent use of sawdust as a thickener in the sauces. This chef, Tony, a squat gnarled villainous older man with two missing fingers and a lot of aggressive tattoos, came out to talk voluble Italian with Boyd, who seemed to handle himself moderately well in the language; at least he made Tony laugh a lot, while Laura explained to us that they’d known Tony for years, since before he’d quit the sea: “He was chef on several yachts. Why he came to this dry place, with nary a squid nor a shrimp in sight, is one of life’s most baffling mysteries.” My coq au vin wasn’t very good, but Tony had proudly presented us with two bottles of bardolino — his treat — which turned out to be the softest and gentlest Italian wine I’d ever tasted, so I couldn’t call the meal a total loss.

Around midnight, Katharine and I started making noises about going home, but our hosts wouldn’t hear of it. We were just barely moving into the realms of the after-hours joint, a more modern and therefore more plentiful sort of speakeasy. And so the gay round continued; we’d drive for ten or twenty minutes, we’d pull in at some half-full gravel parking lot next to some unprepossessing roadhouse, we’d enter to a flurry of greetings — the Chasens were known everywhere we went — and we would then drink or eat or both on the Chasens’ tab. Several times I tried reaching for a check, but Boyd and the waiters maintained a conspiracy against me. Once I quit being guilty and embarrassed about such behavior, I rather enjoyed it.

We had left a place called the Tick Tock, and were entering the Rolls under the harsh glare of a parking lot floodlight, when Boyd made a strangling sound, stiffened, and fell face down across the front seat, absolutely rigid, legs sticking out of the car behind him. Awful rasping noises came from his throat, and his fingers scratched like little dying insects against the leather of the seat, but otherwise he was a block of wood. Laura, about to enter the car on the other side and finding Boyd’s head there on the seat, clucked and said, “Now, isn’t that just like a man. Boyd, I can’t think where you get this taste for melodrama. Tom, would you be a darling and turn poor Boyd over?” During all of which speech she was briskly opening the glove compartment, removing from it a smallish zippered leather bag, and opening the zipper to reveal a compartmented interior filled with tubes and bottles and a hypodermic syringe.

I ran around to the driver’s side, grabbed Boyd by the thighs and found his flesh quivering beneath my hands; more like a machine vibrating than a person. I wrestled him onto his back, while Laura prattled on in her careless way, little comments about Boyd thinking of no one but himself, plus interpolated directions to me: “Just loosen his tie, Tom. Oh, I suppose you might as well unbutton the collar, too.”

Boyd’s face was gray-blue in that glaring light, and his eyes bulged from their sockets. Instructing Katharine to push up Boyd’s left sleeve, Laura reached down with those feathery fingers of hers — but now they seemed fingers of thin steel — forced Boyd’s rigid jaws apart, inserted a wooden ice cream stick between his blue-black lips, commenting, “If you swallow that tongue, my darling, you won’t like it at all, and don’t say I never warned you.”

Katharine, beside me as she struggled with the sleeves of Boyd’s jacket and shirt, was wide-eyed with shock; her breath rasped in her throat almost as badly as Boyd’s himself. I continued to hold Boyd’s legs, uselessly, and watched as Laura filled the syringe from one of the small bottles, found the vein in Boyd’s arm, and gave him a brisk injection. And chatted away all the time: “You might as well have done this at the table, much more convenient and I never did like that place anyway. Come to think of it, I’ve always had something against ginmills called Tick Tock. All that hurry hurry hurry, clock watching, efficiency experts. What was that song in Pajama Game? Oh, Boyd, you remember, Mimi sang it that time when Sammy played the piano. Tempus fugit? Oh, I suppose it’s just as well my memory’s so bad, or that’s what you’d say.”

Meantime, Boyd was indeed trying to say something. The injection had had an immediate effect, relaxing his rigid muscles, making it possible for him to breathe again, in great gulping raspy painful-sounding gasps, through which — with that wooden stick in his mouth — he was trying to speak. Vague thoughts of last words floated in my mind as I leaned forward over his supine body, saying, “What? Boyd?”

“Somebody—” Breath rattled in his chest, his eyes still bulged, it was obviously a terrible strain to speak at all. His hand very shakily crawled up over his chest to his face, and clumsily removed the wooden stick. “Somebody,” he told me, showing me the stick, “stole my Popsicle.”

“Oh, Boyd,” Laura said, in the amused long-suffering tone of the indulgent mother, “you just never take anything seriously at all. I just don’t know what to do with you.” She was efficiently repacking the medicine kit, having shaken two white capsules from one of the little bottles into her palm. “Here,” she said, extending these capsules negligently toward him. “Sit up like a good boy and take your pills. Wash them down with some martini.”

He was so weak, so filled with pain, that great hobnails of perspiration stood out on his forehead and a rank odor of sick sweat rose up from his body, but he struggled with utter determination to sit up. I helped him, and he got into a normal seated position, propping himself with both forearms on the steering wheel. “Depraved woman,” he gasped, blinking straight ahead. “Capsules with martini? Have you no white wine?”

“You’ll just have to rough it, my dear.”

“I might have married Theodora Lind,” he said. “She was soft.”

“Mostly in the head, sweetheart. Here, take your pills, we have bars to go before we sleep.”

“For mercy’s sake, don’t repeat it.”

“Bars to go before we sleep,” she said, with a wicked smile, and watched him fondly as he swallowed the two white capsules with a long swig from the silver flask.

Katharine, the tremor in her voice belying her attempt at casualness, said, “As a matter of fact, I don’t think Tom and I do have bars to go before we sleep. Are we anywhere near the Holiday Inn?”

Boyd looked at us, eyes glazed and face puffy but expression benign. “Oh, don’t be quitters,” he said. “The night’s a pup.”

“Then I’m a fire hydrant,” I said. “It’s been a wonderful evening, but Katharine and I are both pretty worn out by now, and we have a lot of driving to do tomorrow.”

“Miles to go after we sleep,” Katharine said.

Boyd looked at her in mock horror. “Are you going to repeat that?”

“Are you going to take us home?”

“I tell you what,” Laura said. “There’s a lovely hoochery right on our way. We’ll just stop there for a quick good night drink, and then it’s off to the Holiday Inn. All right?”

That was the best deal we were going to get. “Fine,” I said. “Thank you.” Then I frowned at Boyd. “Are you all right to drive?”

He reared up with comic dignity; most of the effects of the attack had worn off by now, though he was till sweaty and shaky. “Do you mean to suggest,” he demanded, “that I might be a bit the worse for drink?”

That had not been at all what I’d meant to suggest, and he knew it as well as I did. “You know best,” I said, and held the door for Katharine to re-enter the car.