Songs in Ordinary Time Page 24

  It was hot in the bedroom, and the vase of red gladioli on Mrs. Stoner’s nightstand kept making Alice sneeze. She wiped her nose and watched the suntan lotion ad that was on television. It showed a girl strolling down a beach past three guys, who jumped up from their blankets and followed her. She envied Mary Agnes, who must be having so much fun at the lake. She should’ve gone, should’ve done what she wanted instead of what everyone else wanted. Good little Alice, who always did what her mother said. Poor little Alice, afraid to say yes, afraid to say no. She felt like everyone’s wailing wall. If the Klubocks’ dog dumped under the clothesline and her mother stepped in it, it was Alice’s fault because if she hadn’t been “lazy-assing out in the backyard all the day, the goddamn dog wouldn’t have come over in the first place.” Even the reasons for Omar Duvall’s continued absence had become so convoluted in her mother’s reasoning that she was to blame. Because so much money was needed to send Alice to college, her mother was being deprived of the opportunity of a lifetime. She made little sense lately. It was getting so bad that Alice had almost begun to prefer being the butt of Anthology Carper’s sick jokes to spending a night at home.

  “Want some more?” Lester whispered, passing her the popcorn bowl.

  She shook her head and tried to see what time it was. Lester caught her looking at the clock, and he checked his mother to see if she had fallen asleep yet. Her eyes were closed, and her breathing verged on snoring. With a nod toward the door, he started out of the chair. Before Alice could get the tissue to her nose, she sneezed.

  Mrs. Stoner’s eyes opened wide. “Bless you,” came her drugged, gluey voice. “You’re catching cold.”

  Lester made a face as if she’d sneezed on purpose. He stared at the television, annoyed that his mother was awake.

  “I think I am,” Alice said, getting up. “Maybe I’d better go, Les. I’ll call you when—”

  “It’s these damn flowers!” he said, yanking the vase from the bureau.

  “Aunt Eunice brought them over.” Mrs. Stoner sighed as Les swept past, taking the flowers downstairs. “Poor Eunice, all she did was cry. Do I look that bad?” Mrs. Stoner laughed. The wig dipped over her left temple like a rakish beret, exposing miserly patches of her own hair, which had once been as soft and wavy as Les’s.

  “You look fine,” Alice said, shredding the tissue in her lap.

  The tumor in Mrs. Stoner’s belly swelled against the sheets. There was nothing the doctors could do; nothing anyone could do, but wait. Wait. Wait for death. It was coming. Coming. No, it was here. There, rising and falling with her every breath.

  Les had come back into the room. He bent over his mother and, all in a motion, plumped her pillows, adjusted her wig, and kissed her dry cheek so tenderly that Alice felt her eyes swell with tears. Poor Les. And now as he scooped the tissue bits from Alice’s lap and laid a new one there, his hand lingered on her thigh and she smiled weakly at him.

  All the way down to the rec room, she reasoned it out. They were both lonely, so why not see each other once in a while. Only this time, they’d just be friends. This time, she’d be strong.

  “See,” he was saying as he showed her the cord tacked along the stair molding. “I wired the police radio up to my room. I leave it on all night.”

  “Doesn’t Mrs. Miller come anymore, Les?” she asked. It hurt to think of him in the dark listening to police calls all night long.

  “That bitch!” he said. “I fired her. Now I’m the only nurse.”

  When they got downstairs, he didn’t even turn on the light. “Oh Alice,” he moaned, lying against her on the couch. “I’ve missed you so much….” He kissed her frantically, murmuring against her lips, “I’ve been going crazy here. I’d write you a poem…and then you wouldn’t call me back and I’d burn it…here, here,” he moaned, pressing her open hand against his bulging fly. “See? See? See how much I’ve missed you….”

  “No, Les,” she whispered, trying to pull away, but he held it there. “Let’s just be friends,” she whispered as he slid his hand inside her shorts. She moaned and lay back, her eyes wide in the darkness. The couch creaked and Lester was moaning.

  “No! No!” she said, pushing him away. “No, Les!” She sat up. “It’s the same as before!” she said. “What you said that time…I was hurt when you said that, but it’s true in a way. Things seem all tangled, you know what I mean? Now you’re having problems and we’re all mixed up in each other’s problems. You see what I mean?” she asked. She turned on the light then and forced a smile. “Do you?” she asked hopefully.

  “You’ve always had a twisted way of looking at things, Alice,” he said with a sneer. “If someone’s nice to you, you wonder what they want.”

  “I have to go now,” she said, getting up. She would not play this game.

  He chuckled. “I remember how all through school, you’d just sit there in the back of the room, hoping nobody’d talk to you. Until I started going out with you, you sat in the lunchroom like such a creep, alone every day for four years!” He laughed. “So now you think you’re a big deal? Now you’ve got Mary Agnes and her shitty friends, so you don’t need me, do you? What do you do, go over to the lake all the time…. Oh, Alice!” he cried, trying to pull her back down.

  “You let me go! You make me sick. You’re so damn mean. You’re the meanest person I’ve ever known.”

  “And you’re the coldest person I’ve ever known!” he growled, clenching her wrist.

  “Stop it, Lester! You let me go, damn it, or you’ll be sorry!” She couldn’t wrench her hand free.

  He laughed and she froze. “What’re you going to do, Alice? Start screaming, Help! Help! Lester’s finally gone off the deep end! He’s crazy! Crazy! Crazycrazycrazy crazy…” Tears bubbled down his cheeks.

  Her hand was numb in his hold. If she moved, something would break, would smash into infinitesimal splinters.

  “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry! Please stay! Please!” he panted, nuzzling his wet cheek against hers. He ran his hands up and down her back as if to resuscitate her.

  Her eyes were on the stairwell. Someone was walking overhead, and now the door at the top of the stairs creaked open.

  “You down there, Les?” Mr. Stoner called. “Les?”

  “What is it?” Les called back. His eyes darted between her and the stairs.

  “Got a little surprise up here. Alice there, too?” Mr. Stoner said self-consciously, as if he thought he’d caught them making out.

  “I’m down here!” she hollered, yanking her wrist from the cuff of Lester’s fist. His head trembled and his shoulder twitched as if with a seizure.

  “C’mon up, kids!” Mr. Stoner called with forced heartiness. “We’ll have a party! I’ll go see if your mother’s…”

  She ran up the stairs, where Mr. Stoner stood smiling with two pizza boxes in his arms. “That’s what I call hungry…Alice!” He took a step as she flew past. “What’s wrong? Alice!”

  She didn’t even close the door behind her.

  “Lester! Lester!” Mr. Stoner’s voice clung to her all the way home like the mist of the damp night air.

  Eunice Bonifante was in the bathroom when the telephone rang. She took another slug of beer and continued rubbing eye shadow from her left eyelid. The phone kept ringing through the empty house. Ten o’clock, too early for the breather, and if it was Sonny, he could wait, just like the shriveled pork in the oven had waited. The ringing stopped, then started again, seconds later. She grabbed her beer can from the toilet tank and scuffed into the living room.

  “Mrs. Bonifante! This is Carl at the station! Something just happened!”

  “What, Carl?” Eunice groaned. Carl was easily rattled at night.

  “Mooney was just here. Blue Mooney, him and his whole gang!”

  “Christ! What happened?” Damn Sonny and his soft heart, thinking all Mooney needed was a break for once.

  “Well, there was a lot of looking around, you know, checking things out, and—�
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  “How many were there?” she interrupted.

  “Uh, three. Yah, three.”

  “Three! Three what? Carloads?”

  “Three guys.”

  “What’d they do?”

  “They got gas.”

  “Okay, Carl. Let’s see now, it’s ten o’clock and you wake me up from a sound sleep to tell me three guys just bought gas.” She waited. “Did I get that straight?”

  “Well, I just thought you should know,” he said sulkily. “In case anything happens.”

  “Nothing’s going to happen.” She belched softly. “Believe me.”

  “I hope you’re right.”

  “I’ll tell you what, Carl. Why don’t you close up now and…”

  “Thanks, Mrs. Bonifante!” he said, hanging up while she was still talking.

  “…go home…you little asshole.”

  Damn him, she thought. Damn Al for leaving her alone like this. Damn Sonny. Damn all men. She went to the refrigerator and took out another can of Sonny’s favorite beer. She went into the living room and flopped onto the sofa to watch television. Fifteen minutes later she went in for another can. “The hell with it,” she muttered as she stretched over the arm of the couch and dialed. Grinning when she heard Sonny’s voice, she began to pant into the mouthpiece.

  “Hello? Hello? Who’s there?” Sonny demanded.

  “It’s me,” she giggled.

  “What is it?”

  “I need you. I need you so bad.”

  “I see.”

  “You can’t talk!”

  “That’s right.”

  “Oh!” she said, closing her eyes. “You’re in Carol’s room. Oh God.”

  “No,” Sonny hedged.

  “Then Lester’s there.”

  “That’s right,” he said.

  “I miss you, Sonny.” She sniffed and her eyes filled with tears. “I had everything ready. I’ve been waiting….”

  “Oh. Well…why don’t you call me in the morning, then. There’s not much I can do right now, not without my folder on the case,” he added, clearing his throat.

  “I wish you were here, Sonny. I’m so lonesome.”

  “For police business, you really should call the station, sir.”

  “It is police business, goddamn it! As a matter of fact, Carl just called here all shook up about a carload of creeps that were just at the station. Mooney and his buddies.”

  “Mooney? Not him again.”

  “Yah, him again.” She laughed. “Now, maybe you should come up here and get all the details while they’re still fresh in my mind.”

  “Is that so?” Sonny cleared his throat again. “Anything happen?”

  “Not yet, baby. But it will when you get here.”

  “Well,” Sonny sighed. “In that case, maybe I better check it out, then.”

  “Oh yah, you better!”

  “Okay. Very good, that’s what I’ll do.”

  “Pull in the garage and come up through the cellar.”

  “Will do,” Sonny said.

  “Roger!” she laughed and hung up.

  Sonny hung up at his end. And then, up in her bedroom, so did Carol Stoner. She slipped her hand under the mattress to check her stockpile. She could hear Sonny at the bottom of the stairs. “Probably nothing,” he said to Lester. “But I wouldn’t feel right if I didn’t check it out.” After he left, Lester went into his bedroom, and then for the rest of the night all she could hear was the sputtering static of the police radio. Her husband and her son needed their freedom, but she still didn’t have enough pills.

  Dressed completely in black, Robert Haddad waited in his unlit office, eyes trained on the window of Hammie’s Bar and Grill. At midnight the last patron, an old man with suspenders over his white undershirt, lingered in the doorway talking animatedly as, little by little, Hammie inched the door shut. Haddad stood up now so he could see Hammie, who was behind the bar washing and drying glasses while he smiled up at the television.

  With all the lights on, Hammie looked younger and happier in the empty glare, and richer. His unvaried routine never exceeded twenty-three minutes. After he set all the chairs on the tables, he would sweep the floor and then he would remove his register drawer and carry it down to the basement, where he’d sit on a wooden Poland Spring box and count his receipts on a round metal garden table. Some of the cash went into a green night deposit bag, which he dropped off at the bank on his way home, but most of it, Haddad knew, was hidden in a padlocked steel box Hammie kept in the base of an unused, capped chimney. This he had learned after many patient nights crouched in the swelter of the dark alley, observing the cranky barkeeper through the mesh-covered cellar window.

  Last Saturday night, Haddad had been ready to execute his plan when Vic Crowley, the cop, hurried into the alley. Haddad had ducked into the wedge of the darkness behind the trash cans. When he heard the zip, then the long, steady drumroll of urine against the cans, he scrambled out and ran, leaving Crowley trapped midstream, calling helplessly over his shoulder, “Halt! I said halt!”

  Tonight, Haddad was ready. He watched the last light go out. He watched Hammie back his red Buick carefully out of the alley, then drive off. Still Haddad waited. Tonight, there would be no rush. This was the beginning of a brand-new life. He was going to straighten it all out. And from this night forward there would be no more falling behind. No more foolishness. From now on, if he and Astrid didn’t have the money, they’d go without. He’d cover the unpaid premiums and set things straight, tonight, with this one act.

  That this might be wrong, criminal, immoral was not a consideration, because it was that first step, that fortuitous foothold all successful businessmen needed. And it would be just this one time. It would be the boost he needed. It was in the nature of things. Often, for shrubbery to thrive, it first had to be hacked to the ground. Besides, the whole system was just too unfair, too lopsided, with him having to be accountable for every penny while Hammie’s cash trade was untraceable and virtually tax-free. Life was a network of inequities that had to be realigned, readjusted, made fair for all men, he thought with a surge of conviction.

  He crossed the street with his new black sneakers springing into the alley. He knelt down and with only a few jabs of his long screwdriver into the rotted wood, pried loose the cellar window and lifted it on its hinges. The dead cellar air seemed to suck him in, so quickly did he find himself dropping down, then scrambling through the dark to the chimney. He needed to turn on his flashlight only once to find the latch on the pitted metal clean-out door. As soon as he had the strongbox out of the chimney, he clicked off the light and unfolded the large grocery bag he’d carried in his pocket. Into it he poured the dollar bills, then returned the strongbox to the chimney, carefully latching the door closed again. It would be twenty-four hours before Hammie discovered his loss.

  Haddad lifted himself easily through the window, closed it, then raced back to his office, where, in the dark, he stuffed the bag of cash into his briefcase. He changed into his suit and tie, then started home. Along open stretches of sidewalk he walked with tight deliberate steps, but whenever he entered the safe shadows of trees, he ran, at times careening into them, throwing his arms around their rough girth, holding himself there, flattened, his cheek to the bark, like a man caught in a windstorm, holding on for dear life, and laughing.

  It had been a week. At four o’clock Marie called the house from work. Alice answered and said Benjy had come home from the pool a while ago and was watching a show.

  “Were there any calls?” Marie interrupted.

  “Just that Father Gannon again. He said he’d call you back.”

  She cleared her throat. “So it’s just the two of you there?” she asked, wincing.

  “Just us,” Alice answered.

  After she hung up she resumed her typing, and the minute Astrid left for the ladies’ room with her new movie magazine and her cigarettes, she dialed the Mayo sisters’ boardinghouse. “Hello, I’d li
ke to rent a room,” she said, pinching her nostrils, her mouth close to the receiver. “Do you have any available?”

  “Well, I don’t know, that is, oh dear, I’m…I’m not sure,” sighed May Mayo’s sweet flutter. “It depends…we might. My sister…well, you see, we have to wait until the week is up…and then we’ll know. I hope.”

  Marie closed her eyes. “So you do have an empty room.”

  “Not really. Well, it’s empty, you see, but the rent’s paid till Sunday.”

  “Has he moved out? I mean, your tenant.”

  “Well, that’s hard to say, dearie. The poor man’s only got the clothes he wears. I offered him some of the—”

  “Thank you,” Marie said and hung up quickly as Astrid teetered back into the office on her gold spike heels. The two women avoided each other’s eyes. Astrid smoothed her skirt over her hips and sat down. Marie’s hands trembled as she rolled a sheet of stationery into the typewriter. He’s gone, she thought. Omar’s gone. She still had six more letters to do. Oh God, he’s gone. She buried her face in her hands and took a deep breath. She felt like screaming.

  “You okay?” Astrid asked, glancing up from her adding machine.

  “Just tired.” She started to type quickly, before any conversation could start. This morning she had turned off Astrid’s radio and asked her to please be quiet, and Astrid, offended, hadn’t spoken since. The icy silence had been a relief. As she typed now she could feel Astrid staring at her.

  “I’m sorry,” Astrid said finally. “I should’ve thought. I mean, here you are struggling at this shitty job, and I come in blabbing about Bobby’s bonus and my new dryer and my new hi-fi.”

  “It wasn’t that,” she said coldly, still typing. “I just need quiet when I work.”

  Today Astrid wore a white satiny dress with a wide gold cinch belt. Even when she didn’t look directly at Astrid, her corner of the cramped little office seemed to glow. Like she’s dressed for a night-club, Marie thought irritably. With Omar gone, everything got on her nerves, especially this mindless, brash woman who didn’t even have to work, whose husband had his own business. Working was just an extension of Astrid’s social life, a chance to show off her new clothes, she thought, banging the carriage so hard on every return that the typewriter jumped and now sat crooked on the table.