I should have known it wasn’t going to end well when Sheila switched from strawberry wine coolers to boilermakers. But, I’ll admit it, I was sort of enjoying the dent she was putting in Greeley’s cocktail party, the brittle smiles and edgy eyes on the faces of his guests, a cross-section of stuffed shirts from Albany’s upper crust. There were corporate bigwigs, a state senator, a few deputy commissioners from this state agency or that. Greeley was a well-connected man. When Sheila commandeered the record player, put on Fleetwood Mac and cranked it up—Don’t! Stop! Thinking about tomorrow!—Greeley sat up and took notice. When she grabbed my hand and pulled me up to dance—no one else was dancing—Greeley shot a warning glance across my bow. When she danced her way over and began vigorously shaking her ass in the face of the venerable Judge Breslin, sitting peacefully on the sofa beside his ancient wife, Greeley was moved to action. The judge’s face went redder than raw meat.
Greeley turned down the music with a grim smile. “Sheila, sweetie,” he said, “I think you could use a cup of coffee.”
She threw an arm around his neck. “And you could use a Guinness!” she cried, hoisting her glass high. “Drink Guinness Stout! It keeps your pecker up!”
Even though she was quoting the old Guinness ad framed on Greeley’s office wall (as he explained it, pecker is Irish slang for energy), he was not amused. He was a tall, beefy man, scarcely budged by her tugging. She tried running her fingers through his mess of black curls, where I noticed a little infiltration of gray—had I not noticed it before, or had she just put it there?
Taking her arm from his shoulder, he handed it to me. “Sheila, you’re acting exactly like an alley cat in heat.”
She was fiery from the start, with red hair that became more unruly the more unruly she became, freckles on her cheeks that bunched up and flared, eyes that could flash at will. Or, in this case, at Greeley. She turned toward me with a sharp little sway, a poor man’s pirouette.
“Kevin, let’s make like sheep and get the fuck out of here.”
“That might not be a bad idea,” I said, with carefully balanced tones and glances, crafted to assure Sheila that I couldn’t agree more about the outrageous way she was being treated, while at the same time telling Greeley what a huge favor I was doing him removing this drunken embarrassment from his delightful soirée.
Anything for a friend was my motto.
We went way back, Greeley and I. First time I saw him, twenty years ago, he was behind the registration tables at Hartwick College chatting with the dean as I waited in a herd of other incoming freshmen milling around the gym floor. Too young to be an absent-minded professor, I nevertheless concluded by his rumpled suit and crooked collar that he was an absent-minded something or other. Grad student maybe? Turned out he was a freshman like me. We discovered we were both from Albany, started commuting together and, for some reason, opposites attracting I suppose, became friends. It became a kind of weird symbiotic relationship; he provided me with guidance, stability, reason, while I provided him with—God knows what. Comic relief? Vicarious irresponsibility? A cautionary example?
I’d wondered just how far a relationship like ours could stretch. The tether seemed to be getting a bit more frayed every day. He hadn’t been exactly thrilled when I’d told him I was bringing Sheila to his party in the first place, but I’d been growing more and more uncomfortable at his get-togethers, always at a loss as to exactly what a low-level state worker like me has to say to a county executive. (It was my chance to network, Greeley told me, to make connections, make something of myself.) I figured Sheila might spice things up a bit.
Mission accomplished.
Another frayed thread in the tether probably snapped when I called him from the Lamppost Tavern four or five hours later for a ride home. I was way too wasted to drive. I was, in fact, too wasted to walk, talk or think straight. Sheila was still going strong. I watched her—I can still see her, in smokey dark flashes—gyrating on the crowded little dance floor by the pool table, dancing with two or three tattooed dudes wearing leather caps and vests with brass studs, and another couple of guys with stringy hair and long-sleeved turtlenecks. I can’t be sure how many guys she was actually dancing with. I was seeing two of her too.
Little did I know. That would be the last two of her I’d ever see alive.
Next morning the hangover was a classic. I woke up on my bedroom floor. The bed hadn’t been slept in. Not that it was made, but it was the same unmade mess it had been the day before. Shards of last night whirled around with the dust motes: the angry flash in Greeley’s eyes, sweaty animal sex with Sheila in a phone booth, calling Greeley, dancing, sweating, throwing up, more sweating, a cold blast of winter air. Greeley’s car, hot air blowing like dragon breath. Puking again. I couldn’t grab onto any one shard to examine. They all kept spinning away. Closed my eyes again, but the room kept whirling.
When next I opened them, the sun through a tear in the blind was dazzling the rug, my eyes inches from a macrocosm of red and blue fibers, hairs, dirt, dust—dead skin, a generation or two’s worth. A tarnished paperclip half-buried, an ancient plastic particle the color of a rotten tooth, other minute artifacts. A stench crawling out of the closet. Had I pissed in it again? Once, nearly as wasted, I’d dreamed I was in the bathroom. I wasn’t.
Wobbled to my knees, climbed to my feet. Swaying in the Sunday morning silence. Pulled out the blind: A brilliant sky of blue nearly blinded me, drops of water falling in front of the window—snow melt, yesterday’s first snow of the year. I stared down across the long lawn at the evergreen boughs on the streetlamps along Broadway. Merry Christmas. My car, a gray Sentra, was not in the lot. It wouldn’t be. It would still be at the Lamppost.
If it hadn’t been towed. It had probably been towed. How could I get there? Or back? I was still too drunk to drive. Sheila. She lived in the apartment next door—she could give me a ride. Her car, a new VW bug, yellow as the sun, was in the lot, an inch of snow melting off of it. Was she home? I didn’t remember her coming home with me and Greeley. How had she gotten home? Had she gotten home?
I put my ear to the bedroom wall. No sound. I went out to the hallway and knocked on her door. Nothing.
Upstairs a door squawked open and I scurried back into my place. Then I wondered why. Other than dried puke on my shirt, what was no doubt a piss stain on my pants, and a questionable aroma, I was perfectly presentable.
Where was Sheila? Passed out on her own floor? Still raising hell at the Lamppost? Chugging Bloody Mary’s and playing foosball at Popeye’s? In someone else’s bed, a dancing dude with a leather vest perhaps? None of the above?
The first time I saw her name, Sheila Cyr, on our mailbox a few months ago, my ears perked up. I saw her in the foyer a little while later, carrying a box, red curls peeking out around the bandana she’d used to tie her hair up, like a cleaning lady. A young, sexy cleaning lady.
“Hi,” I said. “I’m Kevin Gilligan. You must be my new neighbor, Sheila—”
“Sheila Cyr,” she said, freckles forging a smile.
Cyr, as in sear. As in sizzling. I should have guessed. “Ahh—Cyr. I was wondering if your ‘c’ was hard or soft.”
“Funny,” she said. “I was wondering if yours was hard or soft too.”
I didn’t think I faltered, though she claimed later that my eyes glazed and my jowls rippled a bit. “Hard,” I said. “Gilligan, not Jilligan,”
We started hanging out. She had no job. She claimed to be looking for one, though I never saw any evidence of it. She’d dropped out of Siena College. Her father paid her rent, and then some. He was loaded, a corporate lawyer, lived with her mother in a Loudonville mansion. Despite his largesse, she seemed to pretty much despise him. I never asked why, though a hint surfaced now and then; once she said she’d earned every penny of it.
She threw bread crusts out for the squirrels, loved Mick Jagger, thought Paul McCartney was gay, volunteered at Whiskers, a local cat shelter, scrubbing litter boxes. She loved the sun that made her freckles sprout, and she seemed to have a keen disregard for the concept of tomorrow. She was 24. We hung out, her place or mine, the occasional jaunt to the mall, to Popeye’s or Charlie Weaver’s on Broadway, drinking, playing foosball, eating wings. We soon hooked up. No big deal, at least not to her, as casual as a cup of coffee. She and I were different generations. She just liked sex. I did too. No guilt, no baggage, just fun. Not exclusive. Sometimes in the evening, if I turned my TV down low enough, I heard groans and squeals and thumps next door. But we were just friends, after all, friends with privileges as they call it, and I felt stupid feeling jealous. She also liked back rubs, foot tickles, spicy wings, pistachio ice cream, and getting high—booze, weed, whatever. If it felt good, why not do it?
Greeley met her when he stopped by one evening. As President of the Hartwick College Alumni Association, he’d roped me into helping him send out a batch of alumni appeal letters.
Sheila didn’t exactly endear herself to him when she picked up one of the letters, read it, pulled a face, and said, “God, who wrote this?”
“I did,” said Greeley, “why?”
“Oh. No reason. It’s actually pretty good,” a compliment she undermined when she folded the letter into a paper airplane and sent it sailing. “Air mail,” she said.
When I asked her to Greeley’s party, she wasn’t thrilled. She thought he was a stuffed shirt with no sense of humor. I told her what to expect by way of his guest list, which probably didn’t help.
“We can network,” I said. I was being ironical, though she had no way of knowing that. “Make some connections. Make something of ourselves.”
“I’m gonna have to get really drunk first,” she said. “At the first sign of a string quartet, I’m outta there.”
Greeley was less thrilled. But then I caught him at a bad time. When Una, his wife, opened the door, I heard him upstairs shouting at the kids. Una looked embarrassed. “Filthy little animals!” he yelled. “You’re like disgusting little slugs leaving trails of slime!”
“Tom!” Una called up. “Kevin’s here!”
More harsh words, though not as distinguishable. He rumbled down the stairs, shaking his head, frowning. “Kids,” he said. “Can’t live with ’em, can’t leave ’em by the curb. What’s up, Bubby?”
We went into his little office off the living room. “Filthy little slugs?” I said. “Your little darlings?” He sat at his desk, a hulking, scarred old piece, and put his feet up. I sat in the easy chair by the window admiring how the streetlight gleamed off the tangled mass of twigs outside in the hedge along the driveway, a black, petrified web.
“Believe me. Wait’ll you have your own.”
“They’ll be strapping on the ice skates in hell before that happens.”
He looked at me evenly, down his nose which was a little too small for his face. There was the whole heaven-hell thing: He believed, I didn’t. The whole propagating-the-species thing: He believed, I didn’t. He was a good Catholic. I wasn’t. He might have been known for his charity, but he had nothing on me. I loved people way too much to ever intentionally bring one into this world.
There was a time when he’d have wanted to reason with me, discuss it, debate it. Persuade me. Not this time. “What’s up, Bubby?” he said.
“I stopped by to warn you. I’m bringing a date Saturday.”
“Oh? Anybody I know?”
“Yeah. My neighbor. Sheila Cyr.”
He took on the look of a man who hears a mosquito buzzing around his ear. “You think she’ll fit in?”
“You think I fit in?”
“Kevin,” he said. “Does the word trollop mean anything to you?”
“I thought you looked for the best in people. Don’t you want to bring out the best in her?”
“I’m not ready for another project.”
Another project? Who was the other? His kids? Me? I didn’t ask.
His cocktail party was to celebrate not only the Christmas season, but the Berlin Wall coming down, apartheid coming to an end in South Africa, justice for the recently released Guildford Four in England. Freedom was an ideal to him, not just a word. I had to marvel at how, at 38, Greeley still managed to cling to his youthful idealism. By that age, most people had long since shed it, like hair from a receding hairline. I never had to worry about losing mine—I’d never been infected with the stuff in the first place.
I managed some toast, made sure I wasn’t going to throw up again, then stood in the shower till the hot water ran out—which doesn’t take long in the luxurious Fairlawn Apartments. Caught a downtown bus to the Lamppost. My Sentra was still there. Big rush of relief. So big in fact that I figured as long as I was there and as long as they were selling beer I might as well celebrate. A little hair of the dog.
No sign of Sheila. She wasn’t asleep in a booth or passed out under a table. I had my hair of the dog, then another, then a few more hairs. On a big screen, I watched the Steelers kick sand in the face of my pathetic Jets.
When I drove home, it was dark. It was December. It was always dark.
Sheila’s place was dark, her car untouched.
I opened a can of Dinty Moore Beef Stew, heated it, poured in a load of ketchup, and sat in front of the television to dine in style. My appetite was back. “Murder, She Wrote” was a repeat. I couldn’t concentrate anyhow. I kept thinking about Sheila. My head told me not to worry, she was a big girl, she could take care of herself. She was probably back home making life miserable for Daddy Warbucks, or maybe shacked up with the bartender from the Lamppost, doing her thing.
Still. Couldn’t hurt to call Greeley, get his take.
I could always turn to him. Had for years. Greeley would lay out a groundwork of reason, offer a sober, sensible perspective, reassure me.
Una answered the phone. “Just a minute, Kevin,” she said. A minute later she was back. “He’s not here.” I heard her catch her breath. “He must have stepped out when I was upstairs putting Colleen in. I’ll tell him you called.”
Jessica Fletcher and Sheriff Tupper were having a good laugh. I stared at the phone. Thinking that might have been the first time I’d ever heard Una tell a lie.
Sheila still wasn’t there when I got home from work the next day. The snow melting off her bug had frozen again, locking it in ice, a pristine shell glittering in the lights of the parking lot. I’d tried not to think about it all day, shunting it to the back of my mind, fussing over nursing home cost reports as though that was really a worthwhile use of my time. Hoping that when I got home I’d see her apartment lights on. Imagining the laugh we’d have over how blitzed we’d gotten, the looks on the faces of Greeley and his guests, our drunken, daring escapade in the phone booth. Seeing her car frozen, her place black and deserted, was like missing a step in the dark.
I just stood there. What to do? Sheila was only my neighbor, nothing more, and she hadn’t been that for long. She wasn’t related to me, not a significant other, not even really my girlfriend. I never met her family, her friends, didn’t know anyone who might know where she was. I didn’t know what to do next. Call the police? Call her father? Try Greeley again? He’d made it clear he’d washed his hands of Sheila and me. I was on my own.
This was when it dawned on me that I was lying to myself. There was no symbiosis in our relationship, mine and Greeley’s. It was strictly one-sided. It was me who depended on him, who relied on him, who turned to him as an anchor, as the only solid, high ground in my life. If he wanted, he could shoo me away like a pesky fly without a second thought.
I needed to look him in the eye. I could—not apologize exactly, explain, tell him about the Sheila he didn’t know, the wild child, the lost child, make him know her a little better. Make him feel her need. Make him feel my need. The way he used to, but had somehow gotten over.
We could talk it through, Greeley and I. The way we used to.
I pulled into his driveway, behind his station wagon. Stood for a moment in the cold night air. Yellow light poured from the windows, reflecting off the black web of twigs in the hedges along the driveway.
Walking by his car, I thought of the dragon breath, the hot air spewing at me Saturday night—Sunday morning—the wooziness, the spinning. The nausea. The vomiting. Then I remembered: I’d thrown up in his car. No wonder he was pissed. I opened the passenger door. Too dark to see. Too dank to smell, though I thought I detected a sour scent. Of course, it would have been cleaned by now, he’d probably had one of his kids do it. They would probably hate me too.
I went back and grabbed my flashlight from the glove compartment. Shined it into Greeley’s car. The mat looked freshly scrubbed. Had they missed any? Kids always do a lousy job, that’s why they call them kids. I stooped for a better look, angling the beam under the passenger seat.
Something winked at me. I squeezed my arm in and picked it up, pulled it out, shined the light on it: an earring, burnished brass, shaped like a leaf.
I stared it down. It was the earring Sheila was wearing on Saturday night.
I switched off the flashlight and stood sweating like a stevedore in the cold winter air, the earring burning a hole in my hand. What did it mean? Sheila had never been in his car. She’d refused to leave with us Saturday night—Sunday morning. A car passed slowly down Manning Boulevard, on the prowl, white headlights glaring.
I flashed the light back on. How could I be sure? I couldn’t be sure. Of course. It was similar to Sheila’s, no doubt about that, but hadn’t I seen Una wearing a pair like it?
Una must have lost an earring that looked a lot like Sheila’s.
Of course.
I started up the porch steps, imagining the laugh we’d have, the relief on Una’s face when we showed it to her—so that’s where it was! I’ve been looking all over for it!
Greeley answered the door, his face expressionless. “Kevin,” he said. “Bubby.”
“First of all, did I thank you? For pulling me out of the fire Saturday night? And I should probably apologize too.”
“Probably.”
“For throwing up in your car.”
He nodded. He hadn’t backed away from the door. He was still wearing the rumpled blue slacks and white shirt he’d worn to work—they were probably rumpled when he put them on—and an inexplicable blue kimono-looking thing over it, what he called his smoking jacket. He didn’t smoke. “Apology accepted,” he said.
“I was checking to make sure it got cleaned up okay. Look what I found.” I opened my fist, held out the earring.
He looked down at it then back at me. This was where he was supposed to say, So that’s where it was, call Una, show her the earring, have a laugh, get on with life. “Where was it?”
“In your car. Under the passenger seat. Did Una lose it?”
“Una hasn’t worn earrings in years,” he said, “not since her holes closed.” I immediately stifled a naughty rejoinder. He led me into his office. He sat, nearly missing the chair, easing himself down as though sitting on eggshells. “Let me see it.”
He stared at the earring, then looked up. His face was white as the prowling headlights on the boulevard. He took a deep breath. “I swear to Christ,” he said. “It was an accident.”
“What was an accident?”
“I didn’t mean for it to happen. I still don’t know what happened.”
“You’re—” I could feel the heat, searing heat, on my face, I could hear the crackling and snapping and growling, the roaring flames, but I couldn’t look directly into the fire. “You’re not making any sense.”
He looked up, a sheen of moisture on his face.
“I couldn’t leave her there, all by herself with that drunken crowd, with no car, no way home, especially not after I saw the condition you were in. I went back to give her a ride, make sure she was safe.”
“Sheila,” I said.
“It was a good thing I did. At least that’s what I thought at first. She was outside, in the alley, throwing up. Like you did. It was freezing. She’d been thrown out of the bar. She’d been dancing on the pool table.”
“She…she told you this.”
“We were driving through Washington Park—same way I took you home—and she decided she wanted to thank me. For riding to her rescue. Sir Galahad, she called me, then Sir Peckerhead—oh, she got a kick out of that. She asked me if I’d drank my Guinness Stout, if I was keeping my pecker up. She started grabbing for my lap.”
“Wait.” I looked at the Guinness ad hanging on his wall in the shadows among the framed diplomas, honorary citations, pictures of Greeley with dignitaries. “Go on,” I said.
“I pulled over. Just to get her under control. It was right by the lake, right by the little cove where that big oak tree got hit by lightning last year. I just wanted to calm her down, you know, reassure her. Tell her it was all right, no one was judging her, that it was perfectly normal at her age to want to act out, rebel against her daddy and all that. I know who her father is, Howard Cyr, a shyster with Key Bank—he’s a real bastard. I wanted to tell her that…”
“That what?”
“I don’t know. I never got a chance.” He slumped back in the chair, rolled a few inches back from the desk. “I don’t know what happened. She was so quick, she—”
“And you…”
“I don’t know. She was there, she wasn’t there, she was laughing. At me. Laughing at me. I knew I shouldn’t. I don’t know what happened. I’m better than that, but just for a minute there, just for a second, everything went black. Just for a second.”
He went quiet. I closed my eyes. Shook my head, shivered, as if I could shake the words out of my ears. If I kept my eyes closed long enough maybe I could open them again to the moment before I found the earring. I opened them. Greeley hadn’t moved. Slumped back, arms dangling, blue kimono drooping. “What did you do?”
He lifted his chin, hardly moving. “What could I do? I thought about it for the longest time. I—”
“No,” I said. “Don’t tell me. I’ll tell you what you didn’t do. You didn’t go to the police. The Tom Greeley I know would have gone to the police, reported it. Right away. He would have done the right thing. But you didn’t do that, did you?”
At that, he rolled up to the desk, planted his elbows on it. “Kevin. Listen to me. You’re my oldest friend. I have four kids. A wife. I’m a good man. I am a good man. You know that. I made one mistake, one mistake, a split-second lapse. One mistake. I’m only human.
“I’m a moral person, Kevin. I’m a good person. I go to Mass. I’ve made my confession to God. I can’t turn myself in. I thought about it. Believe me, I’ve agonized over it. Turning myself in would be throwing away my life, my wife’s life, my kids’, it would be wasting all the good I’ve done, all the good I can do for however many more years God gives me. Turning myself in would be like suicide—and suicide is a mortal sin.”
“You…” I said. The words killed Sheila wouldn’t come.
“I can do good. I can atone.” His voice was gaining strength. “I’ve done a lot already. I’ll do more. I cannot trade my life, all the good things I can do, for one split-second lapse.”
“But what about… Where is she?”
“Still in the park. By the cove. If they haven’t found her yet, they will soon.” He stood, gripping the back of the chair as though he were about to pick it up, blue kimono swaying.
Our eyes simultaneously fell to the tarnished brass earring sitting on the desk like a relic from a long-ago war, unearthed from a distant battlefield.
He came around the desk, pale, beads of sweat on his face, beads in the corners of his eyes so well disguised they might have been tears. He grasped my shoulders, pulled me in.
“Kevin.” A hoarse whisper. “It could happen to anyone.”
I tore myself away. Stumbled out in a stupor. I don’t remember leaving. I don’t remember driving away. I needed to think. I needed a drink.
The bar at the Lamppost was crowded—Monday Night Football—but the tables and booths were mostly empty. The same bartender as Saturday night, a short guy wearing a gold vest and a white shirt, a mangy mustache, and dark brown hair that looked as though it had been combed with a rake. Tracks on it like furrows. Sheila and I had laughed about it. I ordered a Guinness and the bartender glanced at me for only a second or two, trying to remember if he remembered me. Saturday night had been packed. I sat in a booth. The game was on the big TV above the bar. The Rams were leading the 49ers, 17-3, almost halftime.
The last place I’d seen Sheila. Maybe that was why my Sentra had brought me there. Maybe there Sheila would help me decide what to do. The Rams were on the 49ers’ 4-yard-line, threatening to score again.
I took a sip of Guinness. Cool, smooth, black. I thought about the ad—Drink Guinness Stout! It Keeps Your Pecker Up!—about Sheila teasing Greeley, the sour look on his face. It used to be impossible to get good draft Guinness in America—Greeley had told me this—something about the motion of the ocean waves. Then it got better. Something about nitrogen. I couldn’t remember what he’d told me. I’d been drunk at the time. Wasn’t I always? Since I’d known him? Every conversation I could ever recall with him—until tonight—seemed in my memory to have been slanted: sober down to drunk, serious down to silly, mentor down to student. Big brother down to little brother. And yet he hadn’t given up on me. What did I owe him for that? What did it mean? Friendship. Loyalty. How much did they weigh?
The Rams tried a fake field goal, but it backfired. The runner was tackled inches short of the goal line, and the 49ers took over. I looked around. All eyes were on the game. No one was playing pool. In the dim reaches beyond the pool table was the phone booth. It keeps your pecker up! So open and empty tonight, it was hard to imagine Sheila seated in the booth, me in the doorway, back to the crowded barroom, pants unzipped, Sheila hungrily feeding on my reckless erection. Sheila, Sheila, Sheila, hot, warm. Alive. She had a hangnail on her thumb that was driving her nuts. All evening she kept trying to gnaw it off.
The 49ers were inside their own ten. Montana dropped back to throw. Everyone was on their feet, cheering deliriously. But the outcome of the play was to remain a mystery.
The broadcast was interrupted by a news bulletin.
Not much of it could be heard over the cascade of boos, but the graphics told the story: A body had been found in Washington Park. A picture of Sheila Cyr’s license filled the screen.
I stood up for a better look. The bartender was squinting at the screen too. Then he looked out through the crowd, trying to find me, trying to catch me. I put on my coat and slunk away.
Heading north on 787 toward my place in Menands, the wipers streaked road spray across the windshield—I kept forgetting to refill the windshield washer. Oncoming headlights were white blinding blurs. I hunched over, trying to see. Watching for flashing red lights in my mirror.
Charlie Weaver’s was an elegant old tavern a few blocks down from my place. From Sheila’s place. We’d been there a couple of times. It was almost empty, a couple of couples at tables, two old men at the bar, a mismatched set: one had an unruly gray beard and a bald head, the other was clean-shaven with a mess of unruly gray hair. A long, ornate, polished bar, a big, gleaming mirror engraved with CW, soft lights and low music. The bartender was a harsh-looking lady with red cheeks and lips, and hair dyed black in a pixie cut that looked silly. I’d never seen her before. Sheila and I had been there only in daytime. She brought my scotch, looked me over, ignored my money on the bar. “I’ll start you a tab, honey,” she said. Must have intuited I might be there for a while.
Maybe so, maybe no. I’d been the last person she’d been seen alive with. It occurred to me that I should go to the cops first, before they came to me. Show them I had nothing to hide. There was a phone on the back wall between the restrooms. I’d used it before. I glanced around; the couple in the farthest dim corner were kissing. Not just a quick peck, but a long, slow kiss. It didn’t look like they were coming up for air. On the wall just behind them was a painting of a lighthouse. I waited for the beam to come on, throw some light on the subject.
Fleetwood Mac wouldn’t let me think. Don’t Stop kept running roughshod through my brain, Sheila—alive!—shaking her ass so earnestly in the face of Judge Breslin, the red outrage on his face.
“My, that was fast,” the bartender said. “Would you like another?”
“You bet,” I said. “I’m so thirsty I could drink a horse.”
Her smile was not without doubt.
I stood up, teetered, looked around. The couple was still kissing. The other couple was staring across the room at them in disbelief. I made my way to the men’s room. Lingered urinating as long as I could, delaying having to go back to my horny dilemma. When I finished, I washed my hands and looked at my face in the mirror. My eyes were glassy. I turned my head but my eyes stayed centered, anchored as my face swayed around them. The eyes of an innocent bystander.
Coming back out, I stopped by the phone. Call 9-1-1. Do it! Now! Tell them I saw the news, tell them I was with Sheila on Saturday night. Then what? What else would I tell them? That I was with her, we got drunk, Greeley took me home, Sheila stayed, I never saw her again?
And what about the rest? What about the truth?
Overruled. I wambled back to my barstool by the wide, dark, front window where the bartender had already poured me another. I drained it standing up, nudged the glass. “Thank you,” I said. Miss Pixie looked up—she was talking to the old men. All three stared me down, the mismatched men with matching frowns. “May I please have another?”
“My, my, my.” She cocked her head, gave me a quizzical look.
“Nine or ten more and I’m outta here,” I said.
“We close at two.”
It was 11:30. “Well if I can’t decide in two and a half hours, I’ll eat your petunias.” She looked at me more warily this time.
My image in the mirror was in shadows. I couldn’t see my eyes. What I saw instead were tulips, rows and rows of them, beds and beds, purple and pink, red and blue, flinching under the raindrops. Fifteen years ago. Greeley and I driving through Washington Park on a wet Sunday morning, raindrops pocking the pond, bouncing off the fresh, green leaves of the trees and the clean, wet bricks of the streets. We’d just learned that a friend of ours, a girl named Greta Moon, had been murdered, her skeletal remains found in a drainage culvert up by the Empire State Plaza. She’d been gone a couple of years, but we’d figured she was just communing somewhere out near San Francisco. She was a hippie. When the rain got too heavy, Greeley pulled over, stopped the car and we sat for a while without talking. The thrumming of the rain on the roof served to drown out any thoughts but those of Greta.
“A psychopath,” I said. “Had to be a fucking psychopath.” Whoever had killed her had pulled all the teeth out of her head.
Greeley’s knuckles were white gripping the wheel. “Maybe,” he said. “But there’s a fine line between a psychopath and everyone else, Kevin. It doesn’t take a lot. Any one of us is capable of savagery given the right circumstances.”
“Whoever it was,” I said, “I’d like to show him the meaning of true savagery.”
“Kevin, Bubby—look at me.” I’d been watching a homeless man with a broken umbrella being savagely punished by the downpour. I looked at Greeley. The rain clouds had made the morning dark, but his eyes were gleaming. “Forgive,” was all he said.
Now, sitting at the bar in Charlie Weaver’s, I could still feel his hands gripping my shoulders, the warmth. The hope. Could I turn my best friend in? He was not a killer. Not really. You could almost call it an accident. It had been a lapse, an anomaly, a one-off that certainly would never happen again. He was a good, decent, intelligent, moral man who had lost it in a blind, heated moment. Did he deserve to go to prison, to have his life and the lives of his family shattered? Did the truth have to come out?
And what about forgiveness? Where did that come in?
There was only one thing I could do. I drained my glass. I signaled to Miss Pixie. “Once more with feeling, please.”
She smiled. The lipstick smear on her tooth looked like blood on a fang.
Next morning I woke up on the threadbare sofa—I hadn’t made it to the bedroom again. I’d thrown up again. A festering mess on the sofa, on the rug. On me. Again. I sat up, the room whirling. It was on my shirt and pants, on my arm and cheek.
My old army blanket tangled at my knees. I hadn’t put it there. Greeley. How many times had he covered me with that blanket after I’d passed out?
I lifted my head. The whirling was worse. The fog too thick to think through.
Around and around it whirled, spiraling down, homing in on something that began to flash and glitter, finally coming into focus: the earring. I could see it. The burnished brass earring sitting on Greeley’s desk like a holy relic.
What had become of it? What had he done with it?
A brilliant insight came out of the fog then, blinding me like the light on a locomotive hurtling toward me in a tunnel.
Jolted, I got up, stumbled outside. Call it a hunch. A premonition. Or was it just dread, pure and simple? The cold was bitter, biting. I could barely see through the clouds of my own frozen breath. Made my way to my Sentra.
Opened the passenger door. Got down on my knees on the frozen rubble and groped beneath the passenger seat, and there it was. At hand, easy to find: Sheila’s earring.
I heard sirens, growing louder, drawing near.
Or was it all in my imagination?
I couldn’t move. I closed my eyes and fell across the passenger seat as if in prayer, the earring a cold nugget in my fist. I could feel the ice moving up from my knees, infiltrating every fiber of my body.