And now Sandy was giving him a long look, as though he were sizing
him
up, which was ridiculous due to the disparity in their intellects. “I wish I could help, Roger, but we’ve got nothing for someone of your level.”
That was a lie. Roger knew they were looking or he wouldn’t have set this up. But too tactless to say; Roger substituted: “You know how many times I’ve heard that?” His orange juice spilled, perhaps because of a convulsive jerk of his forearm; he wasn’t sure.
After the waiter was done mopping, Sandy said, “None of my business, Roger, and please don’t take this the wrong way, but have you ever considered early retirement? I know that Thorvald gave—that Thorvald usually does the right thing with their packages, and with Francie doing so well, maybe—”
“What’s she got to do with this?”
“I just thought—”
“Do you know how much she grossed last year? Fifty grand. Barely enough to cover her hairdresser. Besides, I’m too young—”
“We’re the same age, Roger. I stopped thinking of myself as young quite some time ago. The promising stage can’t last forever, by definition.”
Roger felt his face go hot, as though reddening, although surely no change was visible. He composed himself and said, “I wasn’t aware that stage had occurred at all, in your case.”
Sandy called for the check soon after. Roger snatched it from the waiter’s hand and paid himself. Sandy met someone he knew on the way down the stairs, stopped to talk. Roger went out alone. On the street, he realized he had forgotten to leave a tip. So what? He had the feeling—strange, since he had been going there since boyhood—that he would never eat at the Ritz again.
Roger bought a bottle of Scotch in a shop where they called him
sir
, although not today—there was a new clerk who could barely speak English—and took a taxi home. The driver had the radio on.
“What’s on tap, Ned?”
“Thanks, Ron. Male infertility is the topic today on
Intimately Yours.
In the studio we’ll have one of the foremost—”
“Mind turning that off?” Roger said.
“Pliss?” said the driver.
“Radio,” said Roger. “Off.”
The driver turned it off.
In his basement office, Roger drank Scotch on the rocks and played Jeopardy! on his computer. The first European to reach the site of what is now Montreal. The economic unit of Senegal. The largest moon of Neptune. Who was Cartier, what is the C. F. A. franc, what is Triton? All too easy. He tried to get into his old computer at Thorvald but couldn’t pass the firewall.
He refilled his glass, had another look at his résumé. Too bad, he thought, that IQs weren’t standard CV material. Why shouldn’t they be? What better measure? He rose, opened a file drawer, dug through press clippings, photographs, ribbons, trophies, down to a yellowed envelope at the bottom, addressed to Mr. and Mrs. Cullingwood. He read the letter inside.
Enclosed please find the results of your son Roger’s Stanford-Binet test, administered last month. Roger’s intelligence quotient, or IQ, as measured by the test, was 181. This places him in the 99th percentile of all those taking the test. It may interest you to know that there are several schools in our area with first-grade programs for gifted children which may be appropriate for Roger. Please do not hesitate to contact us for further information.
Roger read the letter again, and once more, before putting it away. He topped off his glass, logged on to the Puzzle Club. The
Times of London
crossword hadn’t appeared yet, but there were others, including
Le Monde
. That one took him almost an hour—his French was rusty. When he had finished all the puzzles, he gazed at the on-line discussion that had been scrolling by the whole time.
>
MODERATOR: How did we get onto capital punishment????
>
BOOBOO: The Sheppard Case. What they based the fugitive on
.
>
RIMSKY: Yeah, yeah. But how about it when it works the other way
=
coldblooded killers on parole?
>
MODERATOR: I don’t think that happens very often, do you????
>
RIMSKY: Let me tell you something I’m a corrections officer down here in Fla
.
>
BOOBOO: So?
>
RIMSKY: So I know what I’m talking about when it
comes to coldblooded k’s.
>
BOOBOO: : )
>
RIMSKY: : ) yourself. Ever heard of Whitey Truax, for example?
>
MODERATOR: ????
>
FAUSTO: What’s this got to do with the $ of apples?
>
MODERATOR: Let Rimsky tell his story. Rimsky
=
what’s w/Whitey Truax?
Roger followed the discussion until footsteps overhead made him take his eyes from the screen. Francie. He was surprised to see night beyond the little window high in the basement wall.
And the bottle almost empty, although he was sober, completely. Sandy’s worst moment had been his salivating over Francie. There had been lust in his eyes, beyond a doubt. What a complete—what did the Jews say? Putz. That was it. He didn’t even want to work for—with—a putz like Sandy.
But something about that lustful look, Francie, Jews, and the word
putz
itself—a lubricious mix—gave Roger a sudden urge to sleep upstairs tonight, something he hadn’t done since . . . he couldn’t remember. Donning his crimson robe, he poured what remained of the Scotch into his glass and a second one, and carried them upstairs. “
Francie?” he called. “Is that you, dear?”
3
H
is first day in the halfway house, Whitey Truax went looking for whores. This was nothing he had planned: no one planning would have considered it, since the job they’d found Whitey—spearing trash on the I-95 median—ended at five, and he had to sign back in at six.
Just before dawn, the DPW pickup began dropping off the crew one at a time, stringing them out a few miles apart. Whitey was last. Riding alone in the back, he saw the sun coming up between two high-rises, and started trembling. He’d been facing west for seventeen years, or maybe it was just the morning chill.
The pickup pulled over on the north side of exit 42, Delray Beach, and Whitey climbed down. Then it drove away, and there he was on dewy green grass, a free and unsupervised man. He shrugged on his reflective vest, stuffed the tightly folded orange trash bags in his pocket, stabbed a Mars bar wrapper with his steel-tipped pole.
Stab, stab, stab: Whitey was full of energy. By four, he had filled a dozen bags, all they’d given him, and worked his way almost down to exit 41. With nothing more to do, he stood leaning on his pole, sweat slowly drying, and watched the cars go by, most of the models unfamiliar. Was this a bad way to make a living? Too hot—he’d never liked the heat—but otherwise not bad at all. No watching your back, no taking shit: cake.
Rush hour now, and traffic was stop-and-go. A woman in a convertible looked at him, not twenty feet away. She had a ponytail, damp at the end, and wore a bikini top—must be coming from the beach, thought Whitey; but he wasn’t really thinking, just staring at her tits, heavy, round, mesmerizing. The combination of visual overload and complete tactile deprivation made him start trembling again, just a little. He opened his mouth to say something to her, but the only word he could think of was
fuck
, and he knew that wouldn’t work. Traffic lurched ahead and she was gone, leaving him with the memory of those big tits. Her shoulders had been heavy, too; in retrospect, it was possible she was fat, even grossly so, but this realization barely surfaced in Whitey’s mind. Retrospection wasn’t one of his strengths.
Instead his mind wandered, not very far, to those sounds women made when they got excited. He’d heard them in movies. No X-rated stuff allowed inside, of course, but even in normal movies women made those sounds. Melanie Griffith, and who was that other one he liked? Whitey could see her face clearly, mouth open, but he was still fishing for the name when he felt something stir against his ankle. He jumped back—he was very quick—thought
snake
, thrust the steel tip at the reptilian head, right through, pinning it wriggling to the ground. Hadn’t lost his quick, not one little bit.
As it turned out, the creature was not a snake, not a reptile at all, but a bullfrog. Too late to do anything about that. Whitey watched it die, blood trickling into a crown pattern over its eyes, wriggling becoming sporadic, those pop eyes growing dim. Whitey felt bad, but not too bad: the frog’s own damn fault, after all, for making him panic. Whitey panicked sometimes, especially if he was surprised. That was simply the way he was—didn’t make him weak or anything. But the syndrome—word he remembered from the testimony, so long ago—combined with his quickness, could lead to trouble, as he knew well.
Which was why he had to stay calm. He took a few deep breaths to settle down, placed his foot on the bullfrog’s back, withdrew the steel tip. The bullfrog hopped up on its hind legs.
“Jesus fucking Christ,” Whitey said, and let him have it again. The frog lay still after that, facedown, legs spread flat on the ground. That was when the possibility of whores arose in Whitey’s mind, whores that very day.
A DPW truck picked him up a few minutes later, left him outside the depot at five.
“Hey, you.”
Whitey, walking off, stopped and turned.
“Where you think you’re goin’with that?”
Whitey thought fast. “No place.”
“No place is right. Equipment stays here.”
Whitey came forward, tossed the steel-tipped pole onto the truck bed. “No harm intended.”
The guy just looked at him.
A bus drove up, number 62. He checked the social worker’s handwritten instructions: his bus; it stopped a block from the halfway house. But Whitey didn’t get on. Instead he set off toward a neon-lit intersection he could see in the distance, the kind of intersection where there might be liquor stores, bars, women. Whitey felt in his pocket. He had thirty bucks, plus four hundred and some in the bank account the social worker had helped him open the night before.
What would thirty bucks buy? A Pepsi, for starters. They hadn’t had Pepsi inside, just Coke, and Pepsi was Whitey’s drink. He went into the first convenience store he saw. “Wow,” he said to himself, or maybe out loud. There was so much stuff. He went to the cooler at the back and found the Pepsi. They’d changed the design on the can. He liked the old one better. Had they fooled around with the taste as well? He remembered hearing something about that.
Whitey took a six-pack, went to the front of the store, laid it on the counter next to a cigar display. “With you in a sec,” said a voice a few aisles away.
Whitey eyed the cigars. Weren’t cigars in these days? He’d never smoked a cigar, not once in his whole goddamned life. Whitey glanced around. There was a video camera, but it hung loose from the ceiling, all askew. Whitey boosted the biggest cigar in the box, slipping it up his sleeve in the familiar motion of a man patting his hair in place.
The clerk appeared. “Anything else?” he said.
“Matches,” said Whitey.
“Matches are free.”
Whitey took two packs. “Thanks a bunch.”
He walked another block toward the neon intersection, stopped, cracked open a Pepsi, tilted it up to his mouth. Christ, it was good, even better than he remembered. He swallowed half of it, then lit the cigar, filling his mouth with a thick ball of hot, wonderful smoke, slowly letting it out, curling through his lips. He was alive. Standing outside an electronics store—a banner on the window read:
ARE YOU READY FOR HIGH DEFINATION
?—Whitey sipped his Pepsi and puffed his cigar. A gorgeous weatherwoman on a big-screen TV was pointing at flashing thunderclaps on a map of some European country, France, maybe, or Germany. European weather: this was the big time. Whitey watched transfixed until he happened to notice the price sticker on the TV. And that was the sale price. He walked away.
Cigar in his mouth, the remaining five cans of Pepsi dangling from the empty plastic ring, Whitey reached the intersection. Liquor stores, yes. Bars, yes. Women, no. He went into Angie’s Alligator Lounge and sat at the empty bar.
“What can I get you?” said the bartender.
Alcohol was out: halfway house rules. “What’ve you got?” said Whitey.
“What have I
got
?”
“Beer,” said Whitey, first word that came to mind. “Narragansett.” That had been his beer.
“Narragansett?”
“Bud, then.”
The bartender served him a Bud. “Buck and a half.”
Whitey gave him two bills, waved away the change, just waved it away with his cigar, very cool.
“I’ll level with you,” Whitey said. He waited for the bartender to say something or change the expression on his face. When none of that happened, he continued, “The truth is I been away for a while.”
The bartender nodded. “Narragansett is kind of a collector’s item.”
“And a little company would be nice, you know?Someone to talk to,” he added, but the bartender had already picked up the phone. He spoke into it quietly for a few moments, not looking at Whitey once, hung up. Less than a minute later, a woman walked through the front door, sat down beside Whitey; the bartender found something to do among the bottles. Whitey laughed, more like a giggle that he modulated at the end.
“What’s funny?” said the woman.
Whitey took a hit off the cigar. “Inside you get shit,” he said. “Out in the world all you got to do is ask.” He turned to her. She was stunning. He could smell her. That was stunning, too. What sounds would she make, coming and coming? His mouth dried up.
She was watching him, squinting just a little, possibly from the cigar smoke, or maybe she’d forgotten her glasses. “You’re the one wanted a date, right?”
Whitey swallowed. “A date,” he said, liking the sound of that. “Yeah.”
“You wanna finish your beer first?”
“Beer’s a no-no.”
She rose. He went with her to the back of the lounge and out a back door. “We’re leaving?” Whitey said.
“Know what a liquor license costs?”
She led him into an alley, around a corner, and into a hotel. The sign said
HOTEL
, but there was no lobby, just a beefy guy behind bulletproof glass, his head on a desk. The woman went by it, up a flight of stairs—oh, following her ass up the stairs, that was something—into a room with a bed and a sink in it and nothing else.
“Mind washing off?” said the woman, nodding to the sink. “Can’t be too careful these days.” She was still stunning, despite the harsh strip lighting in the room. Her pimples or whatever they were didn’t bother him at all, and he was used to that kind of lighting.
Whitey washed off. When he turned to her, she was sitting on the bed, yawning. “ ’Scuse me,” she said. “Okay. Suck is twenty-five, fuck is forty, suck and fuck fifty.”
Whitey didn’t know what to say, couldn’t have spoken anyway, his mouth being so dry. He tried some calculations. Suck and fuck was clearly a deal, but fuck alone was what he wanted—to be deep inside her, to make her make those Melanie Griffith sounds—and all he had was thirty dollars, minus what he’d paid for the beer and the Pepsi. Christ! He couldn’t even afford suck.
“But since you look like a nice guy,” she said, breaking the silence, “I could maybe do you a little discount.”
Whitey tried to say something, could not, put all his money, even the change, on the bed. She stared at it. He leaned over her, smoothed out the crumpled bills.
“Oh, hell,” she said, scooping it all into her sparkle-covered purse, “let’s not . . . what’s the word? Starts with
D
.”
Whitey didn’t know. He just knew that he was going to get laid after all. The knowledge turned on a kind of buzzing inside him, a buzzing he hadn’t heard for a long time, not since—but best not to think about that. He put his arms around the woman and pulled her close, knocking her head awkwardly against his belt buckle.
“Easy,” she said. “Take your pants off.”
But Whitey didn’t have time for that; he made do with just pulling them down below his knees. Meanwhile the woman lay back on the bed, hiked up her skirt, pulled off her panties, and he saw that other sex, the lips and hair, all real, right there, as the buzzing grew louder. She stuffed the panties down the side of her boot. Whitey fell on her, shoved himself inside.
Not quite inside, perhaps against her thigh. She reached down between them, took his penis in her hand—“Dicker,” she said, “that’s the word I was looking for”—and guided him in.
“Oh, God,” Whitey said, “oh my God.” He thrust himself in and out, almost drowning in the buzz, about to come any second, when suddenly he remembered Melanie Griffith. Slow down, big guy, slow down, he told himself. He had to hear those female sounds. He slid his hand down her stomach, into the wetness, found her clit, or something, and started thrumming it back and forth, fast as he could.
“Knock it off,” said the woman.
Whitey froze. His hard-on went droopy inside her, just like that. The buzzing stopped. In the silence he heard some little animal behind the wall. The woman made a hitching motion with her hips.
“You stupid bitch,” Whitey said.
“Huh?”
Everything was going sour, like the last time. Where were the smart women? His needs were simple and this one was supposed to be a professional, for God’s sake. It made Whitey so angry, he hit her, not hard, only the back of his hand against her pimply face.
Whitey realized almost right away that he had to make it up to her. “Okay, so we both made mistakes,” he said. “Don’t mean we can’t—” But she writhed around under him and jabbed at a button on the wall that he hadn’t noticed. “What’s that about?” said Whitey. “Look, we were getting along pretty good there for a while. No reason we—”
The door burst open. All fucked up, like the last time, but things that hadn’t happened before were happening now, like this beefy guy coming in with the baseball bat. But the panic inside Whitey was the same: a screaming gusher from deep in his chest, boiling up and spraying red in his brain. It took away visual continuity, leaving Whitey with a few strobe-lit impressions: the beefy guy going down, the bat now in his own hands, blood here and there,
are you ready for high definition?
And then he was out the door and in the street.
Whitey returned to the halfway house at 6:05, signed the clipboard. “Sorry I’m late,” he said. “Got off at the wrong stop.”
“Everyone does, first day,” said the social worker. “But don’t make it a habit.”
“I brought you a Pepsi.”
“That was thoughtful of you, Whitey. I’ve been going through your file. Seems you were quite the stickman up north.”
Silence. “Stickman?”
“Isn’t that the term? Hockey player. I don’t really know the game.”
“That was a long time ago.”
“What I’m getting at, we’re big on recreation here at New Horizons. Physical activity helps to take the edge off, if you know what I mean. Ever considered maybe getting into jogging, for instance?”
“I’ll think about it,” Whitey said.
“That’s all we ask.”