“Where was she? Where was she, you ask? I asked myself the same thing. I began to get a little dark in my mind, boss, I confess it. I went by her building. I went over there just to see if I could catch her coming or going. I wanted to see her face, I wanted her to look me in the eye, that was all.” A cheerless smile crept into his lips. “Well,” he said. “You can guess where this is going. I’m standing there across the street one night and this black Caddy pulls up and sits there idling for five minutes, twenty minutes, I don’t know, until finally the dome light comes on and out she pops, smiling back at the man in the car, wiggling her fingers at him. Mia. My Mia. Jesus.”
He hunched over his drink, raised it to his lips and drank and then returned it to its wet ring on the table.
The boy wanted a cigarette. He looked in vain for a clock.
Lester watched him from under his eyebrows. “The thing is, I knew that car, boss. And I knew the old bald head that lit up when the dome light came on. It was the writer. The famous writer the college had rented for the year.”
The boy waited for the name of the writer, but Lester only lifted his glass again and swallowed and winced.
“About two nights after that first night, I see that black Caddy parked outside a certain bar, this certain local craphole where the old professors go to run their hands up the skirts of their students in the back booths. So in I walk and there they are. Having the conversation of their lives. Just about knocking their goddam heads over the table and him with his old claw on her wrist and the next thing I know I’m walking on back there. I’m walking back there and they both look up and at the sight of me Mia’s smile falls away, just falls away.”
He stared into some remote place, some sector of vision beyond the boy’s right shoulder, turning his glass slowly in his hands.
“I stand at the booth and the great writer looks at me. With his bald head and his goatee. He looks at Mia, and he looks at me again and he says: ‘The jealous boyfriend, I presume?’ And I look at him and I say, ‘It’s an honor to meet you, sir, I’m a great admirer of your work,’ and he nods and says, ‘That’s very kind,’ and I say, ‘How do you like fucking my girlfriend?’ ”
Lester lifted his drink, sipped at it, set it down.
“Mia says something but I don’t hear it. It’s just me and the writer now, and we’re just staring at each other. ‘Young man,’ he says finally, very quiet. Very serene. And I remember every word, boss. ‘Young man,’ he says, ‘I can only assume by such a comment that you have made the assumption, based perhaps on my age, perhaps on my demeanor, perhaps on God knows what, that I will not stand up from this booth and knock you on your insolent ass. That is a poor assumption. On the other hand, it is absolutely true that I would prefer to stay seated as I am. Why don’t you sit down and allow me to buy you a drink?’ To which I replied: ‘I read one of your books once, you old cocksucker, and I would sooner have another one force-fed up my ass than have to read it.’
“Well,” said Lester. “The great writer turned to Mia and excused himself, as if he was going to the head, and he got out of the booth and turned and took this funny, old-school jab at my gut, but he caught me on the wrist and I heard some of his bones go and before he got his hand up I came around with the left and sat him back down in the booth with the blood pouring from his nose, just gushing from it, all over his nice shirt and his sport coat and all over Mia’s hands when she came around and tried to sop it up with cocktail napkins. Jesus, she looked like a nurse trying to stop a gut wound with those little goddam napkins.”
He lifted his glass for the watery dregs.
The boy looked away, his eyes drawn to the electric tiki torches at the bar. An erratic simulated guttering that, when watched, was not erratic at all but cyclical and predictable.
“So then what,” he said, turning back.
“Then what what.”
“What happened?”
Lester regarded him dully. “I’m sitting here with you, aren’t I?” He tipped his empty glass and crushed some ice in his backteeth. “I got hauled up before the dean, and do you know what he says? Says I can get the hell offa his campus by five p.m. or go directly to jail, my choice. I told him I didn’t take the first swing and he says that’s not what the great writer says, and I said that that bar was full of witnesses and he says that’s not what a single one of them says. I said there’s one who didn’t say that and the dean says which one is that and I say Mia, the girl who was sitting there through the whole thing. And he shook his head at me, the dean, and said, son, there was no girl sitting there.”
The boy got up to have a smoke. He walked past the bathrooms and he saw the pay phone he hadn’t seen coming in, and he thought about the time of night and he thought about the last time he’d called—a few days after she’d gotten out of the hospital, and although she was upbeat, although she said she was happy to hear his voice, all he could hear in hers was that place: the hall walkers, the mutterers, the TV gazers, the weeping, the forgotten, the broken.
He stepped through the metal door and into the cold and sleeting night.
A man stood smoking under the yellow light, his back to the wall, one leg cocked and the heel of his cowboy boot set to the bricks. The sleet blew over the scant eve and fell at an angle to a place just a few inches in front of the toe of his other boot. He touched the bill of his cap and said, “It ain’t much but it’s dry.”
The boy put up his collar and got a cigarette in his lips and the man produced a lighter and lit him.
“Pretty night,” said the man. His face was deeply lined, the stubble on his jaw half gone to silver, his eyes in shadow under the cap bill. “You all got far to go?”
“Not too far.”
“That’s good. I believe this will turn to snow, and snow on top of ice, that’s about as fun as it gets.”
The boy nodded. He smoked. “You going far?”
“Not as far as I come. But it’s those last miles, ain’t it? Especially when you got something worth getting to.” He turned and caught the boy’s eye and the boy half smiled and looked away.
The man gestured at the trucks in the lot. “I’m guessing that one there. That Chevy.”
“Sorry?” said the boy.
“I’m saying that’s your Chevy there, the blue one.”
The boy stared blankly at the truck. He could see the man watching him in the corner of his eye. “What makes you say that?”
“Well. From the look on your face when you stepped out here I took you for a man who has not had the pleasure of this particular smoker’s lounge before. And I see them Wisconsin plates. And I see what looks like a fair amount of gear in the cab there, like a man on the road.”
The boy drew on his cigarette. “Which one’s yours?” He was scanning the lot for an off-duty cruiser, or a detective’s car.
“Black Ford over there with the topper,” said the man.
The boy looked. In the rear window of the topper was an American flag decal and on the bumper below was a sticker with the words SMITH &
WESSON and nothing more.
“I guess you could sleep in there if you wanted to,” said the boy.
“You could, it weren’t packed so tight a mouse can’t lick his nuts.”
They smoked and looked out on the foreshortened night. The patter of the sleet on the roofs and hoods of the trucks. The boy’s head felt clearer for the cold air.
“Coming here I found a dog by the side of the road,” he said. “A German shepherd. Had a collar and tags.” He shifted his weight and didn’t look at the man.
“Dead?”
“No.”
“Somebody hit him?”
“Yes.”
“What’d you do?”
“There wasn’t anything to do.”
“So what’d you do?”
“I finished him. Then I set him under a tarp by the fence. There’s a phone number on the tags.”
The man looked at the boy and looked out at the storm. “My daddy shot a dog once. Old Jim-Jim.” He smoked and shook his head. “I can still hear that rifleshot like it was yesterday.”
Out on the frontage road a police cruiser crept slowly by, the dash-lit face of the officer turning to take them in, filing their images away.
“Whoever hit that shepherd didn’t even slow down,” said the boy.
“Does that surprise you?”
The boy studied his cigarette. “Maybe they didn’t know they hit it.”
The man looked at him. “You always think so well of people?”
“No, not always.”
The man took a last pull and held the butt before him as if it were some strange new thing. “Used to be a man could chase a good meal with a good smoke and never get up from his table. You remember that?” He tossed the butt into a pothole brimming with slush and pushed off from the brick and touched the bill of his cap. “You take it easy now.”
“You too.”
“Stay out of trouble.”