Looking for Rachel Wallace

20

Susan went to work in the bright, new-snow suburban morning just before eight. I stayed and cleaned up last night’s dishes and made the bed and took a shower. There was no point banging heads with commuter traffic.

At eleven minutes after ten I walked into the arcade of the Park Square Building to talk with Manfred Roy. He wasn’t there. The head man at the barber shop told me that Manfred had called in sick and was probably home in bed.

I said, “He still living down on Commonwealth Avenue?”

The barber said, “I don’t know where he lives.”

I said, “Probably does. I’ll stop by and see how he is.”

The barber shrugged and went back to trimming a neat semi-circle around some guy’s ear. I went out and strolled down Berkeley Street two blocks to Commonwealth. When we had first put the arm on Manfred, he was living on the river side, near the corner of Dartmouth Street. I walked up the mall toward the address. The snow on the mall was still clean and fresh from the recent fall. The mall walkway had been cleared and people were walking their dogs along it. Three kids were playing Frisbee and drinking Miller’s beer out of clear glass bottles. A woman with a bull terrier walked by. The terrier had on a plaid doggie sweater and was straining at his leash. I thought his little piggie eyes looked very embarrassed, but that was probably anthropomorphism.

At the corner of Dartmouth Street I stopped and waited for the light. Across the street in front of Manfred’s apartment four men were sitting in a two-tone blue Pontiac Bonneville. One of them rolled down the window and yelled across the street, “Your name Spenser?”

“Yeah,” I said, “S-p-e-n-s-e-r, like the English poet.”

“We want to talk with you,” he said.

“Jesus,” I said, “I wish I’d thought of saying that.”

They piled out of the car. The guy that talked was tall and full of sharp corners, like he’d been assembled from Lego blocks. He had on a navy watch cap and a plaid lumberman’s jacket and brown pants that didn’t get to the tops of his black shoes. His coat sleeves were too short and his knobby wrists stuck out. His hands were very large with angular knuckles. His jaw moved steadily on something, and as he crossed the street he spat tobacco juice.

The other three were all heavy and looked like men who’d done heavy labor for a long time. The shortest of them had slightly bowed legs, and there was scar tissue thick around his eyes. His nose was thicker than it should have been. I had some of those symptoms myself, and I knew where he got them. Either he hadn’t quit as soon as I had or he’d lost more fights. His face looked like a catcher’s mitt.

The four of them gathered in front of me on the mall. “What are you doing around here?” the tall one said.

“I’m taking a species count on maggots,” I said. “With you four and Manfred I got five right off.”

The bow-legged pug said, “He’s a smart guy, George. Lemme straighten him out.”

George shook his head. He said to me, “You’re looking for trouble, you’re going to get it. We don’t want you bothering Manfred.”

“You in the Klan, too?” I said.

“We ain’t here to talk, pal,” George said.

“You must be in the Klan,” I said. “You’re a smooth talker and a slick dresser. Where’s Manfred—his mom won’t let him come out?”

The pug put his right hand flat on my chest and shoved me about two steps backwards. “Get out of here or we’ll stomp the shit out of you,” he said. He was slow. I hit him two left jabs and a right hook before he even got his hands up. He sat down in the snow.

“No wonder your face got marked up so bad,” I said to him. “You got no reflexes.”

There was a small smear of blood at the base of the pug’s nostrils. He wiped the back of his hand across and climbed to his feet.

“You gonna get it now,” he said.

George made a grab at me, and I hit him in the throat. He rocked back. The other two jumped, and the three of us went down in the snow. Someone hit me on the side of the head. I got the heel of my hand under someone’s nose and rammed upward. The owner of the nose cried out in pain. George kicked me in the ribs with his steel-toed work shoes. I rolled away, stuck my fingers in someone’s eyes, and rolled up onto my feet. The pug hit me a good combination as I was moving past. If I’d been moving toward him, it would have put me down. One of them jumped on my back. I reached up, got hold of his hair, doubled over, and pulled with his momentum. He went over my shoulder and landed on his back on a park bench. The pug hit me on the side of the jaw and I stumbled. He hit me again, and I rolled away from it and lunged against George. He wrapped his arms around me and tried to hold me. I brought both fists up to the level of his ears and pounded them together with his head in between. He grunted and his grip relaxed. I broke free of him and someone hit me with something larger than a fist and the inside of my head got loud and red and I went down.

When I opened my eyes there were granules of snow on the lashes; they looked like magnified salt crystals. There was no sound and no movement. Then there was a snuffing sound. I rolled my eyes to the left, and over the small rim of snow I could see a black nose with slight pink outlinings. It snuffed at me. I shifted my head slightly and said, “Uff.” The nose pulled back. It was on one end of a dog, an apprehensive young Dalmatian that stood with its front legs stiffened and its hindquarters raised and its tail making uncertain wags.

Lifting my head was too hard. I put it back in the snow. The dog moved closer and snuffed at me again. I heard someone yell, “Digger!” The dog shuffled his feet uncertainly.

Someone yelled, “Digger!” again, and the dog moved away. I took a deep breath. It hurt my ribcage. I exhaled, inhaled again, inched my arms under me, and pushed myself up onto my hands and knees. My head swam. I felt my stomach tighten, and I threw up, which hurt the ribs some more. I stayed that way for a bit, on my hands and knees with my head hanging, like a winded horse. My eyes focused a little better. I could see the snow and the dog’s footprints, beyond them the legs of a park bench. I crawled over, got hold of it, and slowly got myself upright. Everything blurred for a minute, then came back into focus again. I inhaled some more and felt a little steadier. I looked around. The mall was empty. The Dalmatian was a long way down the mall now, walking with a man and woman. The snow where I stood was trampled and churned. There was a lot of blood spattered on the snow. Across the street in front of Manfred’s apartment the Pontiac was gone. I felt my mouth with my left hand. It was swollen, but no teeth were loose. My nose seemed okay, too.

I let go of the bench and took a step. My ribs were stiff and sore. My head ached. I had to wait for a moment while dizziness came and went. I touched the back of my head. It was swollen and wet with blood. I took a handful of snow from the bench seat and held it against the swollen part. Then I took another step, and another. I was under way. My apartment was three blocks away—one block to Marlborough Street, two blocks down toward the Public Garden. I figured I’d make it by sundown.

Actually I made it before sundown. It wasn’t quite noon when I let myself in and locked the door behind me. I took two aspirin with a glass of milk, made some black coffee, added a large shot of Irish whiskey and a teaspoon of sugar, and sipped it while I got undressed. I examined myself in the bathroom mirror. One eye was swollen and my lower lip was puffy. There was a seeping lump on the back of my head and a developing bruise that was going to be a lulu on my right side. But the ribs didn’t appear to be broken, and in fact there seemed to be nothing but surface damage. I took a long hot shower and put on clean clothes and had some more coffee and whiskey, and cooked myself two lambchops for lunch. I ate the lambchops with black bread, drank some more coffee with whiskey, and cleaned up the kitchen. I felt lousy but alive, and my fourth cup of whiskeyed coffee made me feel less lousy.

I looked into the bedroom at my bed and thought about lying down for a minute and decided not to. I took out my gun and spun the cylinder, made sure everything worked smoothly, put the gun back in my hip holster again, and went back out of my apartment.

I walked the three blocks back to Manfred’s place a lot faster than I had walked from Manfred’s two hours earlier. I was not sprightly, but I was moving steadily along.