Down By the River Where the Dead Men Go

NINETEEN

Steve Maroulis shouted, “ Ella, Niko!” as LaDuke and I entered his bar.

Maroulis was the tender at May’s, below Tenleytown on Wisconsin, a liquorized pizza parlor and hangout for many of the town’s midlevel bookies. Though quantities of cocaine had moved through the place for a brief time in the eighties, gambling remained the main order of business here, a place where men in cheap sport jackets could talk with equal enthusiasm about Sinatra’s latest tour or the over/under on the game of the night. LaDuke and I had a couple of seats at the bar.

Maroulis lumbered our way, put a smile on the melon that was his face. “Way past last call, Nick. Drinks got to be off the tables in a few minutes.”

“Put four Buds on the bar, will you, Steve? We’ll leave when you say.”

“Right.”

He served them up. I grabbed mine by the neck and tapped LaDuke’s bottle, then both of us drank. Tony Bennett moved into Sam and Dave on the house system, a typical May’s mix of fifties pop and sixties frat. I shook a cigarette out of my pack, struck a match, and put the flame to the tobacco.

“How’d you think it went tonight?” LaDuke said.

“We got Roland out of there.”

“You didn’t push it too hard with him.”

“I’ll talk to him again.”

LaDuke motioned to my pack of smokes. “Give me one of those things.”

“You really want one?”

“I guess not. No.”

I dragged on mine, flicked ash off into the tray.

LaDuke said, “Those guys at the warehouse-Sweet and Coley. You think they had anything to do with Calvin’s death?”

“I’m not sure yet. But I’d bet it.”

“Why didn’t you press Coley?”

“Calvin’s dead. Gettin’ another kid killed isn’t going to even anything up. The object was to get Roland the fuck out of there. We did that. It’s only over for tonight. That doesn’t mean it’s done.”

“Why you figure it was Sweet and Coley?”

“It was a black man and a white man killed Calvin.”

“How do you know that?”

I hit my cigarette, watched myself do it in the barroom mirror. “Because I was there.”

LaDuke whistled through his teeth. “That’s not what you told me.”

“I know what I told you. I wasn’t hired by Calvin’s mother. I stumbled right up on that murder, man. I got drunk, real drunk that night, and I ended up down by the river, flat on my back and layin’ in garbage. I heard the voices of a black man and a white man; they were dragging someone to the waterline. I heard them kill him, man, but I couldn’t even raise my head. I was just fucked up, all the way fucked up, understand?” I rubbed at my eyes, then killed the first bottle of beer. I pushed that one away with the back of my hand. “That’s the way this thing started-with me on a drunk.”

I picked up the fresh beer, drank some of it off. LaDuke looked at the bottle in my hand.

“You better be careful with that stuff,” he said. “You fall in love with it too much, there’s no room for anyone else.”

“I know it,” I said, closing my eyes as I thought of Lyla.

“How is she, anyway?” LaDuke said.

“Who?”

“You know who. You haven’t mentioned her much these last few days.”

“It’s over,” I said, hearing the words out loud for the first time. “I’ve just got to work out the details. I’m doing it for her, man. She’s going nowhere fast, hanging out with me.”

“Self-pity, Nick. Another curse of the drinking man.”

“Thanks for the tip, Boy Scout.”

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“Your father raised you?”

“Me and my brother, yeah.”

“Where you from, anyway?”

“Frederick County, not far over the Montgomery line. Place about forty minutes outside of D.C.”

“Your father still alive?”

“Yeah,” LaDuke said, and a shadow seemed to cross his face.

“What’s he do?”

“Country veterinarian. Horse doctor, mostly.” LaDuke swigged at his beer, put it back on the bar. “What are you, writin’ my life story?”

I shook my head. “It would take way too long. You’re a work in progress, LaDuke.” I got off my bar stool, grabbed my beer. “Be right back. I gotta make a call.”

I went back to the pay phone outside the rest rooms. A couple of kitchen guys were working a video game nearby, and someone was puking behind the men’s room door. I sunk a quarter in the slot, dialed Boyle’s number at the station, and left a taped message directing his Vice boys to the warehouse on Potomac and Half.

LaDuke was finishing his beer when I returned to the bar. Maroulis had brought the white lights up, and he had put on “Mustang Sally,” the traditional “clear out” song for May’s. Most of the regulars had beat it. I ordered a six to go, and Steve arranged them in a cardboard carrier. I left thirty on eighteen, and LaDuke and I headed out the door.

We drove southeast, all four windows down and the radio off. The streets were empty, the air damp and nearly cool. I lit a cigarette, dangled the hand that held it out the window, drank off some of my beer. The speed had given me wide eyes and a big, bottomless thirst; I could have gone all night.

I had LaDuke stop at an after-hours club downtown, but even that had closed down. We sat on the steps of it, drank a round. Then we got back into the Ford and headed over to the Spot. LaDuke urinated in the alley two doors down while I negotiated the lock and got past the alarm. He joined me inside and I locked the door behind him. The neon Schlitz logo burned solo and blue. I notched up the rheostat, the conicals throwing dim columns of light onto the bar. My watch read half past three.

LaDuke had a seat at the bar and I went behind it. I iced a half dozen bottles of beer and put two on the mahogany, along with the bottle of Grand-Dad from the second row of call. I placed a couple of shot glasses next to that, an ashtray, and my deck of smokes.

“You with me?” I said, my hand around the bottle of bourbon.

“Maybe one,” said LaDuke.

I poured a couple, lifted my first whiskey of the night. It was hot to the taste and bit going down. My buzz went to velvet, as it always did with the first sip. I moved sihe Forddown to the deck and put on some Specials. Then I came back and LaDuke and I had our drinks. We chased them with beer and listened to the tape for its duration without saying much of consequence. I stayed in the ska groove and dropped a Fishbone mix into the deck. Walking back, I noticed that my watch read 4:15. I poured LaDuke another shot, then one for me. LaDuke sipped at it, followed it with beer.

I took the stickup money from my pockets, dumped it all on the bar. LaDuke didn’t comment, and neither did I. I lit a cigarette, gave it a hard drag, looked at the long night melting into LaDuke’s face.

“You’re hangin’ pretty good for a rookie,” I said.

“I’m no rookie,” LaDuke said. “I just haven’t done anything like this for a while, that’s all.”

“You gave it all up, huh?”

“Something like that. The funny thing is, after all that time off it, I don’t even feel that fucked up. I could drink whatever you put on this bar tonight, I swear to God. And I could keep drinking it.”

“The speed,” I said. “You’ll feel it in the morning, though, boy. You can believe that shit.”

“I guess that’s what got me going back there, too.”

“You blew the fuck out of that camera, LaDuke. I could have done without that.”

“I wanted to break something.”

“I know.”

“Anyway, it’s not like I don’t know how to handle this stuff. You rib me all the time, Stevonus, ‘Boy Scout’ this and ‘Boy Scout’ that. Shit, I was like any teenager growing up when I did-I tried everything, man. The difference between you and me is, I grew out of it, that’s all.”

“So when’d you stop?”

LaDuke said, “When my brother got killed.” He pointed his chin at the pack of smokes on the bar. “Give me one of those, will ya?”

“Sure.”

I rustled the deck, shook one out. LaDuke took it and I gave him a light. He dragged on it, held the smoke in, kept it there without a cough. He knew how to do that, too.

I put one foot up on the ice chest, leaned forward. “What happened?”

“My brother and I, we were both up at Frostburg State. I was in my senior year and he was a sophomore. It was Halloween night; there were a lot of parties goin’ on and shit, everybody dressed up in costume. I was at this one party; all of us had eaten mushrooms, and the psilocybin was really kicking in. Just about then, a couple of cops came to the door, and of course everybody there thought they had come to bust the shit up. But they had come to get me, man. To tell me that my brother had been killed. He had been at this grain party, up over the Pennsylvania line. Driving back, he lost it on a curve, hit a fuckin’ tree. Broke his neck.”

I hit my cigarette, looked away. The tape had stopped a few minutes earlier. I wished it hadn’t stopped.

“So anyway,” LaDuke said, “they took me to identify the body. So I was in the waiting room, and there was this big mirror on one wall. And I looked in the mirror, and there I was: I had dressed up like some kind of bum that night, for the party, like. I had bought all this stupid-lookin’ shit down at the Salvation Army store, man. None of it matched, and goddamn if I didn’t look like some kind of failed clown. I looked at myself, thinkin’ about my brother lying on a slab in the other room, and all I could do was laugh. And trippin’ like I was, I couldn’t stop laughing. Eventually, they came and put me in another room. This room had quilted blankets on the walls-the kind moving guys use to cover furniture-and a table with a pack of Marlboro Lights in the middle of it, next to an ashtray. And no mirrors. So that was the night, you know? The night I decided, It’s time to stop being some kind of clown.”

I stabbed my cigarette out in the ashtray, lit another right behind it.

“That’s rough, Jack,” I said, because I could think of nothing else to say.

“Sure,” he said. “It was rough.” He rubbed at the tight curls on top of his head, looking down all the while. I drew two beers from the ice, put them on the bar.

“How’d your father handle it?” I said.

“My father,” LaDuke muttered, savagely twisting the cap off the neck of the bottle.

I watched him tilt his head back and drink.

“What’s wrong with you, man?” I said.

LaDuke tried to focus his eyes on mine. I could see how drunk he was then, and I knew that he was going to tell it.

“My father was sick,” LaDuke said. “ Is sick, I guess. I haven’t seen him for a long time. Not since my brother’s funeral.”

“Sick with what?”

“His problem.”

“Which is?”

LaDuke breathed out slowly. “He likes little boys.”

“Shit, Jack.”

“Yeah.”

“You tellin’ me you were abused?”

LaDuke drank some more beer, put the bottle softly on the bar. “I was young… but yeah. When I finally figured it out-when I figured out that what he was doing, when he was coming into my room at night, handling me that way-when I figured out that it was wrong, I asked him about it. Not a confrontation, just a question. And it stopped. We never even talked about it again. I spent the rest of my childhood, and then my teenage years, making sure the old man stayed away from my little brother. When my brother died, man, my life was finished there. I got through college and then I booked.”

“Booked where?”

“I went south. I never liked the cold. Still don’t. Lived in Atlanta for a while, Miami after that. I had a degree in criminol ogy, so I picked up work for some of the security agencies. But, you know, you tend just to come back. I’ve been looking for answers, and I thought I might find out more about myself the closer I got to home.”

“You’ve talked to your father?”

“No.” LaDuke took in some smoke, crushed the cherry in the ashtray. “I guess you think I ought to hate him. But the truth is, I only hate what he did. He’s still my old man. And he did raise me and my brother, and it couldn’t have been easy. So, no, I don’t hate him. The thing is now, how do I fix my own self?”

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t believe in this victimized-society crap. All these people pointing fingers, never pointing at themselves. So people get abused as kids, then spend the rest of their lives blaming their own deficient personalities on something that happened in their childhoods. It’s bullshit, you know it? I mean, everybody’s carrying some kind of baggage, right? I know I was scarred, and maybe I was scarred real deep. But knowing that doesn’t straighten anything out for me.” LaDuke looked away. “Sometimes, Nick, I don’t even know if I’m good for a woman.”

“Oh, for Chrissakes, Jack.”

“I mean it. I don’t know what the fuck I am. What happened to me, I guess it made me doubt my own sexuality. I look at a man, and I don’t have any desire there, and I look at a woman, and sometimes, sexually, I don’t know if it’s a woman I want, either. I’m tellin’ you, I don’t know what I want.”

“Come on.”

“Look here,” LaDuke said. “Let me tell you just how bad it is with me. I go to the movies, man. I’m sitting there watching the man and the woman makin’ love. If it’s really hot, you know, I’ll find myself getting a bone. And then I start thinking, Am I getting hard because I wish I was him, or am I getting hard because I wish I was her?”

“Are you serious, man?”

“I’m not joking.”

“Because if you’re serious, LaDuke, then you are one fucked-up motherfucker.”

“That’s what I’m trying to tell you!” he said. “I am one seriously fucked-up motherfucker.”

Both of us had to laugh a little then, because we needed to, and because we were drunk. LaDuke’s eyes clouded over, though, and the laughter didn’t last. I didn’t know what to do for him, or what to say; there was too much twisting around inside him, twisting slowly and way too tight. I poured him another shot of bourbon, and one for myself, and I shook him out another smoke. We sat there drinking, with our own thoughts arranging themselves inside our heads, and the time passed like that. I looked through the transom above the front door and saw the sky had turned to gray.

“You ze=ooked thrknow, Jack,” I said, “you were right about everybody having some kind of baggage. I never knew my mother or father; they sent me over from Greece when I was an infant. I got raised by my grandfather. He was a good man-hell, he was my father-and then he died, and my marriage fell apart, and I thought I was always gonna be alone. And now I’m fixing to blow the best thing that’s ever come my way. But, you know, I’ve got my work, and I’ve got this place and the people in it, and I know I can always come here. There’s always someplace you can go. There’s a whole lotta ways to make a family.”

“So, what, you’re sayin’ this place is like your home?”

“I guess so, yeah.”

“But it’s a shithole, Nick.”

I looked around the bar. “You know somethin’? It is a shithole.” I smiled. “Thanks for pointing that out to me.”

LaDuke smiled back. “Yeah, you gave it a good try.”

We had some more to drink, and after awhile his eyes made their way over to the money heaped on the bar. I watched him think things over.

“It’s a lot of cash,” I said, “you know it?”

“Uh-huh. What are we gonna do with it?”

“I don’t know. You want it?”

“No.” LaDuke shook his head. “It’s dirty.”

“It’s only dirty if you know it’s dirty.”

“What’s your point?”

“I was thinkin’… why not just take this money, put it in an envelope, and mail it off to Calvin’s mother. I’ve been to her place, man, and she sure could use it. There’s a couple of babies there-”

“What, just put it in the mail?”

“I’ve got an envelope around here somewhere.”

LaDuke shrugged. “All right.”

I found a large manila envelope in Darnell’s kitchen. There was a roll of stamps back there, too, in a file cabinet next to Phil Saylor’s logbook. I ripped off a line of stamps and took them and the envelope back to the bar. Then I grabbed a D.C. directory that was wedged between the cooler and the wall and put that on the bar, as well. I looked through the Jeter listings while LaDuke stuffed the money into the envelope.

“There’s a shitload of Jeters,” I said.

“You know the street?”

“I think so.”

“You think so? We’re gonna mail out ten grand on an ‘I think so’?”

“Here it is,” I said. “Gimme the envelope.”

I used a black Magic Marker to address it, then applied the stamps and gave it a seal. LaDuke had a look at my handiwork and laughed.

“It looks like a kid did this,” he said. “Like it’s first grade, and you just learned how to write and shit.”

“What, you could do better?”

“Man, I can barely see it.”

“Come on,” I said. “Let’s go.”

I set the alarm, locked the place up. The two of us walked out the door. Dawn had come, the sun was breaking over the buildings, and the bread men and the icemen were out on the streets.

“Shit,” I said, shaking my head as we moved down the sidewalk.

“What?” LaDuke said.

“I was just thinking of you sittin’ in a movie theater, not knowing if it’s the man or the woman givin’ you a hard-on. I mean, it’s really hard to believe.”

“I guess I shouldn’t have told such a sensitive guy like you. I know you’re never gonna let me forget it. But believe it or not, you’re the first person I ever unloaded this on. And I gotta tell you, just letting it out, I do feel a little better.”

“You’ll get through it, LaDuke.”

“You think so, huh.”

“It’ll pass. Everything does.”

I dropped the envelope in the mailbox on the corner. LaDuke slipped, stepping off the curb. I grabbed him by the elbow and held him up. We crossed the street and headed for the Ford, parked in a patch of clean morning light.