Authors: Richard Russo
“It wasn’t very nice what you did,” I told him. “Breaking that bottle on Mr. Beverly’s car. He never did anything to you.”
“How you know what he did and didn’t do?”
He had a point, but I wasn’t about to concede the moral high ground. “Okay,” I said. “What did he ever do to you?”
He didn’t reply at first, but finally he said, “Nothin’. Man never done nothin’ to me. Truth is I’m ashame of myself, acting like God’s own fool. Woman right, she don’t want nothin’ to do with me. Right to warn the boy against me, too. My own damn fault, the whole mess. There, you happy now, Lou Lynch Junior? Got it all straight now? Know up from down now, case somebody ask you?”
I wasn’t happy, and I think he knew it. It was the first argument I’d ever won with Gabriel Mock, and it was worse than losing. It was true; I hadn’t liked him saying I was my mother’s son, even though he meant it, so far as I could tell, as a compliment. And when he’d called me Lou Lynch Junior I hadn’t liked that either, sensing an insult. One or the other, it seemed, should’ve given me pleasure, but neither did, and in the end, pedaling away from Whitcombe Park, all I’d felt was guilty. Which didn’t make any sense either. I wasn’t the one who’d gotten drunk and smashed a bottle on somebody else’s Cadillac. It wasn’t me sitting on the ground with a hangover, oozing blood from a torn eyebrow, the embodiment of my own foolishness. He could be sarcastic all he wanted, but it
was
all his fault, just as he said.
Still, the closer I got to building an airtight case against my friend, the worse I felt and the more convinced that I
was
a slow, stubborn learner. Maybe I
didn’t
know up from down.
I
N
T
HOMASTON,
then as now, the only taxi service was Hudson Cab. Their ad in the Yellow Pages referred to a “fleet” of taxis, all clean and spacious, with courteous, punctual drivers—proof, my mother said, that you could claim just about anything and get away with it. Hudson Cab favored big rusted-out station wagons with torn vinyl upholstery and tailgates fused permanently shut by rear-end collisions. It wasn’t unusual to hear one of these, its dangling exhaust system sparking along the pavement, before you saw it, and all the drivers looked as if they’d just that morning come off a four-month bender. Courtesy was hardly an issue for these men, who seemed incapable of any utterance at all.
It was just such a cab and driver that pulled up in front of Ikey Lubin’s one day about a month after Karen and her mother moved into the flat above our store. The way the vehicle sat there, its motionless driver staring straight ahead, caused my father and me both to wonder if he’d in fact died at our curb, and the angle was such that we couldn’t see whether there was a passenger in the rear seat. My father, who’d been about to go home for supper, was reluctant to leave until he knew what this was about, so he remained behind the register. Finally, there was a lurching movement in the rear seat, as of a man awakening from a dream so dreadful that the sour backseat of a Hudson cab represented a distinct improvement. Whoever it was went into a series of contortions, apparently searching for the fare. In vain, it seemed, because the driver’s head rotated around on his thick neck so he could memorize what his passenger had looked like when he was still alive. From the rear seat a hand pointed vehemently at the store, and an unkempt, pear-shaped man got out. He was still going through his pockets as he came inside. I couldn’t take my eyes off his hair. The man had the most amazing cowlick I’d ever seen, and my father, most days, sported a pretty fine one himself.
“Hey, big fella,” he said to my father. “Lemme take a five-spot to get rid of this asshole driver. I’ll pay you right back, I swear.”
“How about watching your language,” my father suggested, indicating me.
“Oh fuck…yeah, sorry,” he said. Then he stood there, waiting, as if this apology had surely removed the last possible obstacle to a stranger loaning him money.
“What’s wrong with that in your shirt pocket?” my father asked, since the corner of a bill was sticking out of it.
The man looked vindicated when he pulled it out. “
There
you are, you cock—” He stopped, remembering me.
And with this he turned on his heel and strode out to the cab, handing the bill in through the passenger-side window. Without further ceremony, the driver pulled away from the curb, deaf to the imprecations of the pear-shaped man, who clearly felt he had change coming.
I didn’t think I’d ever seen anything more hapless looking than the man now standing on the sidewalk, though at that young age I didn’t fully appreciate how hapless anybody looks when trying to summon a cab that has no intention of stopping. Especially when you’re aware of being watched, your circumstance enjoyed. The man didn’t turn around right away, and when he did he bent backward at the waist and gazed up at the Salvatore flat as if to commit its every unremarkable detail to memory. He seemed to wish there were some alternative, which there wasn’t, you could tell. So he finally poked his head back inside and said, “How the fuck do you get up there?” Then, noting my father’s expression, “How do you get up there?”
My father told him the entrance was around the side of the store.
“All right then,” he said, this strange placement apparently agreeable to him, provided he was kept fully apprised of its location in the future. Glancing at our fruit bins, he said, “You sell flowers here?” Fruit and flowers being practically the same thing.
My father said we didn’t.
The man nodded, as if used to disappointment, then again looked up at the apartment, considering. “Beer?”
My father indicated the cooler along the back wall.
Still the man remained where he was, standing in the doorway.
“You run tabs?”
“If you live in the neighborhood,” my father said. “If I know you.”
The man, cheered by this, came inside and let the door swing shut behind him. “Buddy Nurt,” he said, offering to shake my father’s hand, then bouncing from one foot to the other. What he seemed to be waiting for was confirmation that such a straightforward introduction had rendered him tab worthy. “I’ll be living…” His head bobbed up at the ceiling. “Can’t get much more in the neighborhood than that.”
“With Nancy?” my father said, clearly displeased.
Buddy Nurt nodded like a man not unaccustomed to provoking displeasure.
“I’ll have to get the okay from her first,” my father said, and I could see how conflicted he was. On the one hand, he loathed trusting someone about whom he’d already heard so many unflattering things. On the other, he hated getting off on the wrong foot with a new customer. He glanced across the street at our house, as if my mother’s advice would be radiating from it.
Buddy was eyeing the beer cooler with genuine longing. “She won’t mind,” he said, trying to sound casual. “Her and me, we…” He glanced at me and let his voice trail off, confident his coded message had been received.
Had it been me, I wouldn’t have given Buddy so much as a stick of gum. His eyes were small and close together and darted from one object to another, refusing to settle anywhere. It made me tired just watching them. When my father shrugged a reluctant acquiescence, Buddy made for the case at a dead run, and he had two six-packs under one arm and was reaching for a third when my father called over that he was only good for one until things had been cleared with Nancy. So Buddy, clearly disappointed, put all three back and selected another, more expensive brand.
“Kinda steep,” he remarked when my father rang it up. “Your prices.”
“The kind you had before was cheaper,” my father acknowledged.
Buddy shrugged. “What the fuck, right?” He grinned at me, clearly hoping he’d found someone who shared his personal philosophy, and then he recalled my father’s injunction. “What the heck, right?” he corrected himself, pleased to have erased the bad word so completely.
“You gotta sign,” my father said when he started out the door with the six-pack.
Buddy Nurt cautiously signed his name on the slip my father provided, as if this were the part that might trail unpleasant repercussions. “Got a…?” he said, making a bottle-opener gesture.
My father handed him one from underneath the counter and he popped the cap off deftly, noticing that the opener was on a string only when he tried to slip it into his pocket. “Whoops,” he said, putting it back on the counter. Then he drained off half the bottle right there in front of us, and this seemed to provide the courage necessary to brave the climb upstairs. We listened to his slow, heavy steps up to the apartment, heard him tap on the door and call, “Hey, babe?”
It was now safe, my father decided, to go eat his supper, but he hadn’t even made it to the door, when we heard rapidly descending footsteps, and Nancy Salvatore burst inside and slammed the six-pack—well, the five-pack now—down on the counter. “Buddy Nurt doesn’t sign for anything on my ticket, Mr. Lynch,” she said, looking first at him and then at me, as if she suspected I might be the one who’d have to enforce this rule. “Not ever. He’s the reason I had to leave all my friends and move here. He’s why my life’s a crock of shit.”
My father looked scared, the way he always did around angry women. “Okay. It’s just that he said—”
“Don’t listen to him,” she said, again fixing the two of us to make sure we understood. “He’s a liar. You believe a word that man says, you deserve what you get.” This statement seemed derived from experience both deep and profound. “Even if I change my mind later and tell you it’s okay? It’s not okay. It’s not
ever
okay. I’m gonna hold you to that, Mr. Lynch.”
My father nodded, confused but agreeable.
“How much for the one beer?”
When he told her, she took the coins from her purse and handed them over.
“My advice would be don’t even let him in the store,” she added. “On top of being a liar he’s also a thief.” I thought about pointing out that he’d already tried to pocket our bottle opener, but held my tongue. “In fact, have as little to do with Buddy Nurt as humanly possible.”
“Okay,” my father agreed. And when she looked over at me, I said okay, too.
She now calmed down a little. “I ought to have my damn head examined,” she said, massaging her brow. “I don’t know what comes over me with him. He’s up there now, looking all hangdog. By tonight I’ll be feeding him, by tomorrow I’ll be loaning him money, and by tomorrow night….” She studied me thoughtfully and apparently decided not to say what she’d be doing for Buddy Nurt then. “I had any sense, I’d shoot him. In ten years, I’d be out of prison, a free woman. Whereas now I’m looking at life with Buddy Nurt, no chance of parole.”
More tramping down the stairs now. Nancy massaged her forehead even more ferociously, though it was already red from her previous exertions. “Here comes the other light of my life.”
And sure enough, Karen came in and slammed the door shut so hard the glass rattled. You could see how furious she was, but I was still surprised when she pointed an index finger at Nancy and screamed, “This is
bullshit,
Ma!” I don’t think I’d ever heard anyone my age yell at a grownup before, certainly not in front of other people. In Karen’s defense, I’m not sure she even knew we were there. That’s how beside herself she was. Mother and daughter stood facing each other, a few feet apart, and Ikey Lubin’s might as well have been a stage set. Karen’s hands were clenched tightly into fists. Her mother’s shoulders had slumped, most of her previous energy having leaked away, leaving her unequal to the task of waging this particular battle. “You
promised,
Ma!” Karen screamed. “You
said
never again. Don’t pretend you didn’t.”
“Quit shouting at me, Karen,” she said. “You make my head hurt. He only turned up this minute. I haven’t made my mind up what to do yet.”
“Then make it up now,” Karen said.
“Karen—”
“Right
now,
Ma. I’m not going to wonder every time I take a bath if that shithead’s on his knees outside the door with his beady little eye to the keyhole.”
“Buddy wouldn’t do that,” Nancy said weakly, more to us than to her daughter.
“Don’t
lie,
you stupid bitch! You caught him yourself. And what about that night I woke up and he was standing next to my bed?”
“He sleepwalks, Karen.”
“Right. With that thing in his hand, straight into my bedroom.”
“Karen—”
“Him or me, Ma.”
This ultimatum stiffened her. “Where you gonna go, Karen?”
The question hit her daughter hard, I could tell, implying as it did that the decision had already been made.
“Who’d put up with you, besides me?”
Karen’s eyes were suddenly full, but she refused to cry. “Besides you and Buddy, you mean?”
And just that quickly it was her mother sobbing. “I need
something
in my goddamn life, Karen. I’m sorry, but I do. Even if it’s only Buddy Nurt. You’ll understand that one day. Soon, probably, the way you’re going.”
“Fuck you, Ma,” Karen said, a whisper almost. And then she was gone, this time leaving the door wide open. Her mother didn’t move for a long time, while my father and I studied our shoes.
“Guess I’ll take those other five beers after all,” she said finally. When my father handed them to her, she studied me sadly. “Don’t grow up,” she muttered, then left.