The Bone Polisher

22 ~ Calligraphy

The door opened four inches and snagged on the inside chain, and Robert peered out, looking grim. When he saw me his face cleared.

“It’s your detective,” he called over his shoulder. Then he closed the door and slipped the chain, and when it opened again I saw Alan a foot behind him. Alan had a gun in his hand. It looked heavy and incongruous.

“Hi to you, too,” I said.

Alan glanced down at the gun and his mouth twisted wryly. “It’s been quite a morning,” he said. “Come in. Have some coffee?”

It was just past eleven, and the caffeine from Eleanor’s special brew was still rampaging through my bloodstream. Too much coffee can elevate you unnaturally, scramble your judgment, create a kind of false euphoria. “Sure,” I said.

“It’s fresh.” He stepped aside to make room for me. “God knows we need it.”

Close up, I could see a swelling under Robert’s left eye. Alan had a fat lower lip. “What happened?”

“Thugs,” Alan said. “Swine. Swine run in herds, don’t they?”

“I don’t think swine run at all,” Robert said. “I think that’s the point of being swine.”

“ These swine drove,” Alan said, tucking the gun into the belt holding up his Ivy League chinos. “Six of them, all scraped bald like medieval executioners. They got us outside the bank.”

“The two of you?” I asked.

“And Christy,” Robert said. He looked at Alan’s face and shook his head, and his ponytail did a little hula. “I’ll get the coffee.”

“Christy’s in the den,” Alan said, turning away from the Early American living room as though to guide me.

“Did they hurt him?”

“They would have,” Alan said. “We were in the parking lot when they came around the end of the row and drove toward us, as though they meant to run us over. You know, you see things like that in the movies, and the hero always jumps free at the last minute, but of course he knows it’s coming, he’s rehearsed it a hundred times and there are probably mattresses everywhere to catch him when he lands-” He broke off, listening to himself, and put three fingers over his mouth and then drew a deep breath. “Anyway, they stopped in time, and got out of the car. The driver was screaming, ‘Look where you’re going, faggot,’ and I saw that two of them had baseball bats in their hands.”

“Jesus.”

“Well Christy just jumped into the middle of them. He poked his fingers straight into one man’s eyes and banged his head into another one’s face, and then one of them lifted his bat and I got to him somehow and grabbed the end and kept pulling it around behind him, and he fell down. And then I had the bat, by the fat end, you know? and someone punched me and I hit him with the bat on the forehead and it started bleeding, and then all of a sudden the Sheriffs were there. Three of them, two men and a woman. One of them hit Robert, by mistake, I think.”

Spurrier, never far from center stage in my imagination, pirouetted into the spotlight in his yellow tweed sport coat. “Had the Sheriffs been watching Christy?”

“No.” He smiled and immediately regretted it. A knuckle touched the swollen lip. “They were staking out the bank. They had a tip it was going to be robbed.”

“So this is it? Your lip and Robert’s eye? No other damage?”

“Our confidence has a few wrinkles in it. On the other hand, our self-esteem is absolutely flowering. Six skinheads and three of us, and we walked away. Of course, they claimed we’d started it. Claimed I’d commented on their haircuts, if you can believe that.”

“Did the deputies?”

“No. These guys have been around for a while. They beat up a friend of ours a week ago behind Pavilions, you know, the market on Santa Monica?”

“Are the clowns in jail?”

“If they’re not out already. One phone call to Mommy or Thug Central and they’ll skate.”

“Are you still out here?” Robert asked, emerging from the kitchen with a tray full of coffee things. “Is there an invisible barrier blocking the door to the den?”

“Christy came out of this thing okay?” I asked again. “No trauma or anything?”

“Christy?” Alan sounded surprised. “Right now I’d say Christy is the least traumatized person I know.”

“Simeon doesn’t know about it,” Robert said. A look passed between them.

I watched them look at each other. “Know about what?”

“We’ll let Christy tell you,” Robert said. “He could have told you hours ago if Alan hadn’t lulled you to sleep in the hall.”

Neither of them gave any indication of being ready to move. “Well, let’s go give Christy his chance,” I said.

“Take your coffee,” Robert said, holding out the tray. “We’ll be in the living room.”

I chose a cup from Robert’s tray, grabbed two sugar cookies to go with it, and then stood stymied in front of the closed door, coffee in one hand and cookies in the other. Alan reached around me and turned the knob, looking vindicated.

“What would people do without lawyers?” Robert asked behind me.

The den was still crowded with throw rugs, lap robes, pillows, and plants. In the middle of the clutter, behind a card table littered with Alan’s yellow legal pads, Christy looked up at me. He had a pencil in one hand and another behind his ear, and he looked five years younger than he had when I’d seen him last.

“Simeon. Perfect,” he said, standing. He caught his knees on the underside of the table and it began to tilt foward, the pads sliding over its surface toward me. I stood there, juggling coffee and cookies, but Christy leaned forward nimbly and caught the table in both hands. I’d never seen him move so fast.

“What do you think?” he asked, picking up one of the pads and holding it out. Penciled on the top page, in large, dark letters I read: TO THE MAX. He lifted the page and folded it back, and on the page underneath I saw the words,

THE MAX GROVER FOUNDATION FOR RECLAIMING LIVES.

“Sounds great. What is it?”

He dropped the pad to the table and ran both hands through his hair, pressing down as though he was trying to keep the top of his head from floating away. “It’s what I’m going to do. For Max, for everybody. You were dead right, you know. I haven’t done anything that was really mine. I’ve sort of floated along behind other people, like, do you know what slipstreaming is?”

“Getting behind a truck or something,” I said, “using its drag to pull you along. It’s always sounded like a dangerous way to save gas.”

“Well, that’s what I’ve been doing. Telling myself I didn’t have any gas, poor deprived little me, shortchanged at God’s filling station. Get into someone’s orbit, Max’s for example-I’m mixing metaphors-and use their velocity, their life force to sort of slip through the world. Trailing behind them like icebreakers.”

“Reflecting their light,” I said, “as long as we’re mixing metaphors.”

“Sit down,” he said, clearing papers from the couch. One of them was a stapled bundle on white bond covered from edge to edge with angular black handwriting. He laid it on the table and dropped the others to the floor with a thwack.

“Here’s the idea,” he said, plopping back down as I sat. “We’ll institutionalize what Max did, but on a bigger scale. We’ll get kids off the street, gay, straight, I don’t care, and we’ll put them up in apartments and fill their refrigerators with food, on one condition: They go to school. It can be college or night school or vocational school, whatever they want, but they have to keep going. If they drop out once, we arrange counseling. If they drop out twice, they get a warning. Third time, boot ’em, use the money on someone else.”

“This is your idea?” I asked, sipping Robert’s coffee.

“Of course not,” he said. “It’s Max’s idea. Oh, I mean, the details are mine, and I thought of the name-do you like the name?” He looked away, suddenly uncertain.

“I think it’s a great name.”

“ Isn’t it?” He balled his hand into a fist and slugged me on the thigh, hard enough to leave a dent. “Old Max. All his life he did this, one kid at a time. Now we’re going to be able to open it up. Ten, fifteen at a time. Get them warm, get them clean, get them educated, get them jobs. Then they become our… our examples. They can come in and talk to kids who think they’re staring at a wall, they can show them there’s a ladder over the wall. Maybe, as they begin to make money, they’ll even kick some in, do you think they might?”

“You’re giving back,” I said. “Why wouldn’t they?”

“I am, aren’t I?” Christy’s color was high. “ Goddamn, I feel good.”

“You look good, too.”

His eyes went down to his shirt, and he straightened a button that was already straight. “So Alan says. Did you know that Alan’s been HIV positive for eight years? He says it makes him use every minute like it’s precious. Did you guys talk?”

“About you? No.”

“He sounds like you, I thought maybe-’Do something for somebody,’ he said, ‘and you’ll do something for yourself.’ You know, I could just kick myself black and blue. I had Max right there, right in front of me, all that time, and I never figured it out. Max was the best-looking, happiest old man in the world. It wasn’t anything magical, nothing he brought back from India or anything like that. He was just-he just knew why he was doing what he was doing. He knew it every minute of the day, and there I was, with not too much time left, just stumbling my way through it, furious half the time and fretting about poor little Christy and actually getting jealous whenever Max gave somebody a hand. What a wuss. All that time, I could have been helping him, I could have been-”

“You could have been Mother Teresa, too,” I said. “You’re not. Most of us aren’t. Most of us are just like you. Or a lot worse.”

“Well,” he said, taking one of my sugar cookies, “you’re not.”

“Christy. I go to bed so I can get up. I get up so I can get tired enough to go to bed again. I drink too much so I can stop wondering what the hell I’m supposed to be doing between the times I’m in bed. You met me in detective mode, which is the only mode I’m even remotely effective in. If you followed me around in my private life, you’d be deeply disillusioned.”

“You don’t know yourself,” he said.

I changed the subject. “Is Max’s house worth enough to pay for all this?” I waved a hand over the table full of pads.

“Oh, my God,” he said. The cookie snapped in half in his hand, sending up a sparkling geyser of sugar. “I haven’t told you, have I?”

“You haven’t.”

“And they didn’t? Of course they didn’t. You wouldn’t be asking if they had, would you, Max put money in the bank all the time he was in that show. When he quit, he had more than three hundred thousand dollars. He just left it there. From 1959 until now. It’s more than two and a half million, now, and it’s all mine. Add the three hundred fifty thousand dollars Alan says the house is worth, and even after taxes-’

“Hold it. How do you know all this?”

“The will,” he said, blinking. “We got the will. That’s why we were at the bank today.”

“You went into the safe-deposit box.”

“Sure. That’s what I’m telling you. Alan did his lawyer thing-”

“Was anything else in it?”

“Nothing that matters. A bequest to his sister and some little stuff, family pictures and some old contracts from the show. If there’d been anything important, anything that might have told you anything, I would have called you. In fact, I did call you, twice, but you weren’t-

“No,” I said. “I wasn’t. May I see it?”

“Sure.” He reached over and picked up the stapled document he’d taken from the couch. “Here.”

I looked it over, feeling something heavy and hard growing in my gut. It was written with a calligraphy pen with bold, disciplined vertical strokes, semi-Spencerian, like an invitation to a White House dinner. The old-fashioned approach extended to the numbers; Max had crossed his sevens and supplied little horizontal bases for his ones to stand on.

“Is this his handwriting?”

“He was proud of it,” Christy said. “Beautiful, isn’t it?”

“What?” I hadn’t heard a word.

“I said it’s beautiful.” He was looking at me as though I had a smear of jam on my face.

“It’s gorgeous,” I said, getting up.

“Where are you going? Are you okay?”

“I’m peachy,” I said. “Keep working on the foundation, Christy. Max would have loved it.”

He nodded and put out a hand for the will, still peering at me. “You’re sure you’re okay?”

“Too much coffee. I’ll see you tonight.” I stood there, irresolute, looking down at the will. “That’s really great.”

On the way out, I saw Alan and Robert sitting on the living-room couch. Alan was icing his lip. I waved to them and went outside and stood on the doorstep, wondering where to go. For the first time, I didn’t think the Farm Boy would be at the wake.