The Hanging Tree

fourteen

The one time Gracie and I had seen each other in Detroit, I was in my third year at the Detroit Times. We had set several dates previously for drinks or dinner, and each time Gracie had canceled or failed to show. My mother kept pushing me to invite her out, telling me my second cousin was struggling with life just like me.

“Just like me?” I said. “Mother, I’m working sixty-five hours a week. I’m paying rent. I bought a car. They’re thinking of sending me to Japan for some stories. I’m doing just fine. I got some school loans to pay off but-oh, right, Gracie doesn’t have those because she got a freebie.”

“All the more reason, honey. She needs a big brother.”

“I’m not her brother. She ought to talk to whoever dragged her down here in the first place.”

Still, I promised to try again.

This time I was late. My computer had crashed-ten minutes before deadline, of course-and I had to redo an entire story about Chrysler threatening to shut an assembly plant in Wisconsin. The Red Devil, a beer-and-pizza joint on the west side, was almost empty on a Monday night. But there was Gracie filing her nails at one of the Formica-topped tables near the bar. Melting ice cubes and a cherry impaled on a plastic spear sat at the bottom of a glass. I could just barely hear “Sweet Child O’ Mine” playing on the jukebox.

“Sorry I’m late,” I said. “Computers.”

“I wouldn’t know,” she said, without looking up. “Don’t have one.”

“Did you order?”

She dropped the nail file in her purse. Her perfume wafted across the table, cutting through the garlic and oregano on the air. She looked at me. Her eyes seemed to have trouble focusing. They were on me, then looking behind me, then on me again, then on the table, rolling around like marbles in a bowl. I wondered if the empty glass was only her first drink.

“No,” she said. “I was waiting for you.”

I signaled for the waiter.

“This place,” she said. “It’s so… so you, Gus.”

“What does that mean?”

“Oh, you know. Low lights, but not romantic. Peeling vinyl seats. The whole fake unpretentious shtick.” She looked at me and giggled.

“You must frequent much classier places.”

“Maybe I do,” she said. “It’s charming. And it would be even more charming if…” She whipped her head around toward the bar. “Hey,” she shouted, “is my drink ready yet? I’m not used to being ignored.”

“He’s coming,” I said.

“He better fucking hurry.” She picked up her glass, shook the ice around. “Sorry. Don’t want to cause any trouble. How’s Bea?”

“Fine. I haven’t talked to her in a week, the job’s been so busy.”

“The job, the job, the job,” Gracie said. “You need to get your priorities straight, boy. Call Bea.”

“When’s the last time you called her?”

“I’m calling her tomorrow.”

I grinned. “Do you even have a job, Gracie? Or priorities?”

She gave me a dreamy smile. “I have my priorities. I just don’t happen to have them all in order.” Then she laughed, a little too loud.

A spindly young man in a white button-down shirt, shiny black slacks, a skinny black tie, and an apron smeared with spaghetti sauce shambled over to our table. The plastic name tag pinned to his shirt said he was Randy. He set a full glass in front of Gracie. Her usual gin and Squirt.

“Can I get you something to drink?” he said to me.

I ordered a Blue Ribbon. Gracie glanced up at Randy, then took the menu out from between the parmesan and pepper flake shakers. I watched her eyes as she pretended to look at it. One lid drooped. She dropped the menu on the table and looked up at the waiter. Her eyes seemed to brighten.

“So,” she said. “You’re Randy.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said.

“Ha,” Gracie said. “I’m not ‘ma’am.’ I could be your little sister.”

Randy smiled nervously. “What would you like?”

“Gracie,” I said, wishing the computer had crashed a second time.

“Don’t have a fucking-” She stopped and closed her eyes momentarily. “Don’t have a fucking cow, all right?”

“Calm down.”

“Hold your horses,” she said. “Randy’s not in any hurry, are you, Randy?” She gave him a smile I had seen her use on a hundred unsuspecting boys.

“I’m fine,” he said.

Now Gracie swiveled around in her seat to face the young waiter. “I’ll say,” she said. “Tell me-tell the truth now-will you tell me the truth?”

“Uh, sure,” he said.

Gracie must have seen me start to interrupt, because she raised a hand to stop me. Then she used the same hand to pick up her drink, lift it unsteadily to her lips, and drink it down in one determined gulp. She dropped the glass on the table and it tipped over, spilling the ice cubes and cherry across the red-and-white checked tablecloth.

“Gracie!” I said.

“OK,” she said, ignoring me. “Tell me-are you a randy man? Huh?”

“Gracie, come on. Just tell him what you want.”

“I’m about to.”

She stood and stepped into the boy, almost knocking him over. He tried to back away but she grabbed him by his tie and pulled him into her. “Ma’am,” Randy said, looking helplessly over his shoulder toward the bar. No one was there. I leapt out of my chair too late. She pulled harder on Randy’s tie and got up on her toes to plant a kiss on his mouth, getting mostly chin. Then her arms and legs went limp and she collapsed in a heap at Randy’s feet.

“Oh, my God,” he said, jumping back. “I didn’t do it. It wasn’t me.”

I crouched on the floor and turned Gracie over, cradling her head in one arm. Blood trickled from the corner of her mouth. She had bitten her tongue. “Gracie, Gracie,” I said. “What the hell happened to you?”

As she’d fallen, she had bumped her purse off the table and some of its contents had spilled across the red carpet. I looked to see a change purse, a tube of K-Y Jelly, three tubes of lipstick. And my old blue hairbrush- the brush. I put it all back in her purse, brush first.

It took me fifteen minutes and a twenty-dollar bill to keep Randy and the chef, a sweating stump of a woman named Rhonda, from calling the police. Gracie looked drunk to them, but I suspected she’d taken something that didn’t mix well with booze. I wouldn’t have minded her going to jail-it might have done her some good-but I would have had to answer to my mother for the rest of my life.

From a story I had done on car crashes, I happened to know an emergency doctor at, of all places, Grace Hospital. I wrapped Gracie in a Maple Leafs jersey I had in my trunk, laid her on my backseat, and took her to the hospital. The doctors pumped her stomach. Out came Dilaudid, Quaaludes, cocaine, some alcohol. My doctor acquaintance explained that this was a dangerous mix, especially for someone who had been driving. He asked if Gracie might be willing to seek counseling. I told him I doubted it.

I slept on and off on a chair in the ER waiting room. The doctor nudged me awake around six the next morning and told me Gracie would be OK. I left thirty bucks at the reception desk for a cab. I had to get to work.

For the next two weeks, I called Gracie almost every day, trying to get her to see me, foolishly, vainly thinking that I could talk her into getting some help. She didn’t return my messages, unless you count the registered letter a lawyer sent on her behalf to the publisher of the Detroit Times.

The one-page letter said I had made “persistent and inappropriate advances” on one Grace McBride. It said that if I did not cease and desist immediately, “further action” would be taken, including a court order barring me from any future contact with my second cousin.

The publisher gave the letter to my boss at the time, a guy named Virgil Ropolletti. Rope sat me down in his glassed-in office in the newsroom, put his unlaced Hush Puppies up on his desk, and lit a Camel. He’d won a Pulitzer as a young man for stories on a state lawmaker who had created a secret stash of taxpayer cash he doled out to buddies. He was on his fourth wife-all from circulation or ad sales-and was now obsessed with finding the body of Jimmy Hoffa.

“Well, sweetie,” he said, “what do I do with this?”

I told him what had happened at the Red Devil. Rope knew the place, knew the owner, the barmaids, everybody. He could check it out if he wanted. But he wouldn’t bother. He knew me, too.

“This chick hot?” he said.

“Jesus, Rope. She’s my cousin.”

“Sorry.”

“Frankly, I don’t know how the hell she can afford a lawyer.”

“Hot-shit firm, too,” he said. He dropped his half-smoked cigarette in a Coke can. “Sounds like my second wife. Families are all fucking crazy, if you ask me.”

I thought of Mom, decided there was no need to tell her any of this.

“Yep.”

“So what are you going to do?”

“What she wants me to do. Nothing.”

“The old man,” he said, pointing up at the fifth floor where the publisher’s office was, “he’s a little worked up over this. He’s worried it’s going to show up in the Free Press.”

“Nope,” I said, knowing I’d be calling Michele Higgins as soon as I left Rope. “Won’t happen.”

“OK. But why don’t you make yourself scarce, take a couple days off?”

I didn’t see Gracie again until she moved back to Starvation Lake-except, if it really was her, at that Red Wings playoff game, sauntering down to the rinkside seats with the dapper man in the turtleneck.