Peter sits down on the floor next to him. "The
hell, Jimmy," he says, "you didn’t say you were over
there when they did it."
Jimmy Measles gets slowly to his hands and knees and
crawls back to the edge of the bed. He has scraped the skin off his
elbows, and one of them is beginning to bleed.
"They wouldn’t let me get the dogs," he
says, pulling himself up. He crawls onto the bed and then,
unsteadily, he stands.
"I said to them, ‘I don’t care what you do,
let me get my dogs out of here first.’ "
He
dives again, and this time Peter thinks he has knocked himself out.
Jimmy Measles lies dead still half a minute, his nose pressed into
the carpet, and when he looks up again there are rug burns on his
chin and his forehead.
"You turn yourself into a human scab, you keep
this up," Peter says.
Jimmy drops his face back onto the floor, and his
words still seem to be inside his body, something Peter overhears. "I
asked him, the guy at the door, could I please have the dogs. He
wouldn’t answer. I can hear them in the back, barking at the one in
the basement, but the guy at the door wouldn’t let me in."
His face comes up off the rug, and he is fighting for
his breath. The atomizer is on the floor near the night table, and
Peter reaches it and hands it to him. Jimmy Measles puts it in his
mouth and pumps the trigger with every breath he takes for half a
minute, until it seems to settle him down.
"I said to them, ‘It isn’t my business what
you’re doing, just lemme get my dogs out of your way.’ "
The room is quiet while Jimmy Measles remembers it.
"He wouldn’t answer," he says. "I didn’t want to
go in. If I walk in there, I’m dead, and it’s not even my
business."
He pushes himself up again and takes as deep a breath
as he can. His chest and stomach rise and fall, his face looks
sunburned. "The one at the door said to go back across the
street and call Michael, tell him what’s happening to his place,"
he says. "I told him it’s my place, it isn’t Michael’s.
But he just says I better go back across the street."
Peter sits still and Jimmy begins working in the
direction of the bed.
"I called Michael," he says, "but
Leonard says he’s asleep. And then, while I’m still on the phone,
I hear a noise, it sounds like somebody blowing out a candle, and it
shakes the house. And when I looked out the window, the inside of the
place is already orange."
It is quiet again, he is remembering the dogs.
Remembering that he walked across the street and left them.
Peter thinks of something Nick said once about dying.
That the nuns had it wrong, you have to be grateful. Peter knows that
means something here, but it is just out of his reach.
"A fire like that, they were dead in five
seconds," he says finally.
Peter sits still and Jimmy Measles lowers his face
until it is resting again on the floor. He has tried to call Michael,
he’s beaten up a parking meter and thrown himself off the bed; and
none of it has made any difference.
He goes to sleep.
Peter takes the blanket
off the bed and covers him, but before he leaves the room, Jimmy
kicks it off and curls toward the far wall, away from the light.
* * *
E
arly in the morning,
Michael comes about the money.
He and Leonard Crawley duck under the police barrier
across the front of the club, Peter following a few steps behind, and
they walk into the burned—out doorway, stopping when Michael is
hidden in the shadows.
He sends Leonard across the street to knock on the
door. Monk has parked the car and is walking slowly in the direction
of the club, checking the parked cars and doorways for the Italians.
Michael stands still, dripping sweat inside his silk
shirt, but it is not the old men in the raincoats he is afraid to
see.
He watches Leonard push the bell, half a dozen times.
The door opens a few inches, and he sees half her face, her hair
falling over the shoulder of her robe as she hugs the door to listen
to what he says.
She shifts her eyes and searches the building Michael
is standing in. Michael backs deeper inside and her eyes do not fix
on the movement.
Peter goes into the cooler and finds himself a warm
Coke. Half a minute later, Leonard makes his way back through the
bar, kicking pieces of burned furniture, breaking glass. Peter
watches him come.
His cousin stands in a puddle of black water under
the chandelier in the restaurant, still staring at the house across
the street. He trembles, wanting to hurt her.
"He’s comin’," Leonard says. "His
old lady said he’s in bed, she’ll get him up."
Leonard notices a chair that the fire has missed. He
picks it up, brushing off the dust, and sets it behind Michael. "Take
a load off," he says. "He ain’t here in three minutes,
I’ll go back and get him out the fuckin’ bed myself."
Michael sits down and crosses his legs, and a few
minutes later Jimmy Measles walks into the club. Monk comes in behind
him, looks at Michael and shrugs.
Jimmy Measles moves through the place slowly, looking
everywhere at once, as if this were the first time he’d seen the
damage. His eyes are red, he has not shaved in two days and there is
a vague peppermint shading to the smell of alcohol he is giving off.
There are scabs on his forehead and chin.
"You’re shit-faced, right?" Michael says.
Jimmy Measles smiles, looking at the room. Michael
looks only at Jimmy Measles.
"Lenny said you called the night before last."
"When they killed my dogs."
Michael nods, as if he understands. "I heard
that. Pally told me that. Told me I ought to come over, see what I
could do. He’s been tellin’ me what to do all the time lately,
did you notice that?"
Peter feels Leonard Crawley’s eyes settle on him.
Jimmy Measles reaches into his pocket for the
atomizer, and uses it twice. He has tucked his pajama tops into his
pants and a corner is stuck in his zipper. He is still wearing his
slippers.
"What is that fuckin’ thing, anyway?"
Michael says.
"It’s so I can breathe, when I got asthma."
Michael takes a deep breath of his own, lets it go.
He shrugs. "So," he says, "what’re we gonna do, keep
you breathin’?"
Jimmy Measles cannot bring himself to meet Michael’s
eyes.
"That’s what I called you for," he says,
looking at a section of collapsed flooring, "to see what we
could do."
"You insured?"
Jimmy Measles smiles. "I wouldn’t call you the
middle of the night about insurance, I called on account of the dogs
.... "
"The money don’t matter to you, is that what
you’re tellin’ me?"
"It’s complicated," Jimmy Measles says.
"The insurance likes to make it complicated."
Michael shakes his head. "What’s complicated,
Jimmy, you owe me fifty-five thousand."
It is quiet a moment and then a sparrow flies onto
one of the window ledges, and then into the room. Leonard picks up a
piece of burnt floor and begins to follow it.
Michael says, "Let me ask you again, you insured
or what?"
"I got insurance," Jimmy Measles says, "but
the insurance guys, they’re going to try to say I did my own place.
It can take a long time."
The bird lands and then moves as Leonard gets close.
He corners it in a pile of soaked carpet near the kitchen, and swings
as it flies over his head. The wood falls apart in his hands, the
heavy end crosses the room spinning and hits the wall.
Michael is talking to Jimmy again. "If what
you’re tryin’ to tell me here, that it can take a long time to
get paid, I got to tell you that a long time don’t do me no fuckin’
good, Jimmy. Just so there’s no confusion on that, a long time
ain’t good for anybody."
Jimmy Measles says, "I thought maybe, you know,
because it was part of your problems with the Italians that I got
burned down . . ."
"My problems are my problems," he says,
coming out of the chair, "your problems are yours .... "
Jimmy Measles opens his mouth to say something,
Michael stops him. ". . . and the only problem we got together
is the fifty-five thousand."
Leonard Crawley wanders the room, picking up pieces
of things that fall apart in his hands. He finds a scorched beer
bottle and tosses it through a small window, one that the fire
department missed.
"What the fuck you doin’ in there?"
Michael says.
Leonard comes back into the restaurant, crosses his
arms and leans against the wall.
Michael stands over Jimmy Measles. "You want
some help," he says, "I understand that. I’m comin’ to
you like a friend, and I’m tellin’ you to get the fifty-five
thousand. You fight some insurance prick a year to get your money, by
the time he pays, you owe it all anyway, a point a week—I’m
talkin’ about business here—plus, you got the whole year to worry
about it. So as a friend, I’d tell the insurance prick let’s do
something here gets us both off the hook."
He looks at his cousin. "Am I right, Pally?"
Peter stands completely still.
"All of a sudden, he quits telling me what to
do," Michael says. He turns back to Jimmy Measles. "Maybe
your wife’s got something she could let you have."
Jimmy Measles shakes his head and Michael shakes his
head with him, imitating the motion.
"It was me, I’d shake her till the change
falls out her pussy. This ain’t a game, Jimmy. What’s happened,
she ought to appreciate you’re in a spot."
Jimmy Measles shakes his head but he is thinking it
over. "You could ask her," Michael says. "What harm
does it do to ask?"
Leonard nods, agreeing with that. The wires holding
his jaw in place shine in the wet cave behind his lips. Peter watches
him, thinking of the old man tied to his water heater in the
basement.
"See what you do," Michael is saying, "you
take care of the fifty-five, I’ll get you a couple new dogs."
Jimmy Measles lights a
cigarette, then puts his hands in his pockets, ashamed at their
shaking. He walks past Leonard Crawley on the way out, and then,
before he leaves the room, he looks quickly at Peter, and smiles.
* * *
J
immy Measles is sitting
on the bed in his underwear. He is holding a drink in one hand, a
cigarette in the other. His atomizer is on the night table.
His wife is packing her clothes. There are four full
suitcases already crowded near the door, as if they were waiting in
line to get out, and her closet looks as full to him as when she
started.
She is doing shoes now, a suitcase full of shoes. She
takes them out of the closet two pairs at a time and holds them a
moment, making calculations he doesn’t understand. Some she puts in
the suitcase, some she throws into the corner.
Watching from the bed, Jimmy Measles can’t see much
difference between what she keeps and what she tosses out, but he
knows that once she decides, she isn’t going to go back through the
pile for another look.
There are sweaters in the corner too, and half a
dozen dresses of the wrong length to be in fashion. Fashion. One day
he notices more of her legs under her skirt, and by the end of the
week every woman he sees in the street is wading the same depth. It
has occurred to him that she controls it.
He finishes the drink in his hand and reaches for the
bottle on the floor. Vodka. He loses his balance but catches himself
just as he begins to fall off the bed.
He sits up and pours. He fills the glass, covering a
tiny, festive umbrella on the bottom that floats slowly up and then
hangs suspended halfway to the top. All the ice is gone, it is half
an hour since he had ice. He hates the taste of warm liquor, but he
cannot bring himself to leave the room, even for the two minutes it
would take to go to the kitchen.
He has a vague feeling of holding on to her now, and
that leaving the room he would be letting go. He puts the glass
against his lips, and then, without drinking, trades it for the
cigarette.
An ash falls onto his chest, rolls half a foot down
and is caught in the folds of his lime-colored shorts. All of Jimmy
Measles’s underwear is the color of fruit.
She was working on her eyes when he asked her.
"Listen, I don’t like to mention it, but we got a problem with
the club.
Her hair was still wet from the shower, he’d made
himself a gimlet in the kitchen.
She watched him in the mirror, still holding the
mascara pencil in her hand. Still scared from the fire.
"The thing is, there’s some loans I took to do
the remodeling, they got to be paid back."
"Your friend Michael," she said.
"I was thinking maybe your father could help us
out, maybe put us together with an attorney that sues insurance
companies or something, dig us out of the hole on the loan, and then
we pay it back when we get the insurance."