Mr. Bones (33 page)

“Melba.” The woman's smile set one of her eyes twitching. “But anyway, how about you? Feel like a party? What about your friend there?”

Beanie said, “You should do yourself a favor and get an intervention.”

“You got his features,” the woman said, as though trying to make a friend.

“I'm intervening,” Sarge said. He crumbled a pill in his palm. “This here's for you. You can snort it or use it the other way, as an innuendo.”

Leon said, “She's wasting our time.”

“Give her a break,” Beanie said.

But Sarge said, “Hop in, Suzie.” And to Leon, “Regular cash flow. She's sitting on a gold mine.” And when the skinny woman hesitated, and Sarge snatched her wrist hard, it was Beanie who let out a cry.

In the back seat, moved by the infant depicted on the box next to her, the woman said, “I used to have one of them baby monitors.” Her eyes brimmed with tears.

That week they worked out of a motel, Beanie bringing men, one at a time, from the bars in town and turning them over to her. With the woman in a stupor they drove to the coast and set up in a condo near the harbor, Beanie managing the johns, saying to Leon and Sarge, “This is women's work. Keep off.”

At the condo, Beanie said to the man she'd brought, “I want to introduce you to my sister,” and unlocked the too-warm and dimly lit back bedroom. “And no rough stuff.” Sarge, and sometimes Leon, listened for trouble, and stepped into the hallway to collect the money afterward from the startled man.

Sarge said, “Ever think—a guy will crawl across broken glass to get a woman for sex. But when it's over he won't spend five minutes with her for a burger. Do women know that?”

“It's why we say maybe,” Beanie said.

Still listening, Sarge shook his head. He was looking out the window.

“They got boat rides here,” he said. “Harbor cruises.”

Leon said softly, “If Beanie's not coming, count me out.”

“You look pretty buoyant to me.” Sarge was smiling, not at what he said but at what he heard on the baby monitor. “But swimming was always your Achilles tendon. Hey, you could have been a Ranger too.”

“As if it mattered over there,” Leon said. “Because nothing mattered.”

“Wrong,” Sarge said. “It's when you get home that nothing matters.” His head was still tilted toward the monitor. “No one's listening.”

“Which one of them is your husband?” the skinny woman asked Beanie one morning over coffee.

Beanie frowned at her. “Neither one.”

“Because both of them hit on me all the time.”

The afternoon the john said to the woman, “If this is a financial transaction, then I have to inform you you're breaking the law and that you're under arrest,” the three others hearing it on the monitor hurried downstairs.

“Suzie's nothing to cry about,” Sarge said to Beanie.

“Melba,” she said, and put her face in her hands.

 

“No more risks,” Sarge said. “We've got enough money to get us anywhere—like California, maybe.”

Beanie said, “I want to go back. I feel like something bad's going to happen to us away from home.”

“That's old-fashioned,” Sarge said. “It's what I always liked about you.”

Leon stared, his eyes locked on him and going darker.

“Wish we still had that great car,” Beanie said.

“You don't win by hunkering down. You win by moving. But that car was conspicuous trouble. And I'm never going back.”

A safe car was the secret, he said. And clean plates. And not speeding, not getting stopped by the law, staying among transients in RV parks, one or two nights, then roll.

They picked up a young man hitchhiking, to tease him. Sarge reached for Beanie's blouse, saying, “Like these, kid?” and Leon, “Where's your job?” When the student said, “There's no jobs anymore,” Leon stopped the car and screamed, “Get a job, loser!” Sarge got out, panting. He dragged the boy onto the road. “Drop and give me fifty!”

At a small town, they asked directions at the local police station, one of Sarge's dares. Leon whispered “Look” at the posted mug shots,
Level 2 Sex Offenders,
with details of their offenses and their home addresses.

Leon said, “A hajji.”

They visited the man—Leon's idea, and he was the one who knocked. “Police,” Leon said, the heel of his hand on his holstered gun. “We have a serious complaint,” and stepped inside while the others waited in the car.

Afterward, trembling in the back seat, he said, “Beanie, while I was in there, did he touch you?” and held his raw swollen hands against his thighs.

Beanie pressed her lips together and faced him with widened eyes.

“I couldn't help myself.” Leon's pale face showed pink-blotched cheeks. His wet hands had blackened the cloth of his jeans.

“Me, that's my problem too,” Sarge said. “Thrill up my leg. I used to wonder why fat people are always hungry. I guess I know now.”

At the RV park that night, Leon said, “Beanie and I need to talk. We'll be right back.”

“Hurry up. Three whole days here,” Sarge said. “This isn't the safest of places.”

 

After their months of absence, Beanie and Leon resumed living in the family house. Whenever Sarge's name came up, Beanie said, “It was all his fault. We should never have hooked up with him.”

Leon said, “He was my buddy over there.”

“Big buddy.”

Leon shrugged. “One of those vets that keeps his gun.”

But Beanie showed Leon that she had the gun. Soon afterward she got rid of it, threw it overboard from the boat at Hollins Pond.

“Why did you do that?”

“If you want it so bad you can swim for it.”

Leon winced. Instead of replying, he gripped the sides of the boat and steadied himself.

“But I don't need a gun where you're concerned. I know what you did.”

“Cut it out.”

He said it again. He knocked and repeated it that night at her bedroom door.

When Leon drowned in the boating accident, Beanie alerted the police. The pond was dragged, but Leon's body was not found until a week later, swollen, buoyant, bumping the bars of the spillway where the river began.

The local newspaper reporting his death wrote that they could not describe Leon without describing Beanie. They were both twenty-two, graduates of the high school, and lived with their grandparents, who rarely visited the school, even when Leon and Beanie were performing.

In school, Leon and Beanie Turner were known as the dancers, and seeing them dance put the audience in mind of one person and a shadow, smooth and symmetrical their moves, the way they glided and swayed, old-fashioned, back and forth. They practiced all the time in the basement.

Leon had proudly served his country, and after his discharge had returned home.

They spoke of turning professional, calling themselves the Turner Twins.

The death of Leon utterly changed Beanie. She was still grieving, people said. She vanished, then reappeared months later with a newborn infant—not a surprise. But after the blood tests on the baby and the subsequent questions, there was a knock on her door.

When Beanie answered, she saw two policemen.

“I knew it.”

M
Y FATHER WAS
a suspicious man—and, as a widower, wounded, too. My mother died when I was ten, and he was overly concerned about my welfare. He showed it in the following way: he would take my chin and use it to lift my head and smell it, as though examining a melon for ripeness. He was checking for cigarette smoke, a girl's perfume, the reek of the poolroom or a back alley, for the odor of disobedience. There was never anything. Even so, to test me, he'd say, “Where?” meaning, “Where have you been?”

He was thrifty in all ways, with money, with time; he always tore a stick of chewing gum in half and put the other half in his pocket for later. And he was thrifty in using the fewest possible words. If he wanted me to move out of the way he said, “Shift,” or if I asked for a favor he said, “Never.” He hated explanations.

Gruff with me but talkative with customers, he seemed to me to be two people. That did not surprise me. I was also two people, the obedient son stacking shoes at the foot of the stairs and, out of my father's sight, someone else, I was not sure who, but certainly not the person he was used to.

All through high school I worked for him at the shoe store, hating every minute of it, like confinement. He claimed he needed me, but business was slow (“Slack”). I knew he had me there, tidying the store, sorting shoe sizes, to keep me out of trouble. His letterhead was printed
Louis Lecomte and Son,
which looked important, but the reality was my father dozing in one of the customers' chairs upstairs and me in the basement stacking boxes.

My father's worry about me made me think I was dangerous. I could hear the tremor in his voice when he called out, “Albert,” and if I didn't reply, he'd call again, “Al!” then “Bertie!” with growing alarm—where was I?—until at last I said, “Yuh?” and he was calmed. Cruel of me to delay like that, but I was trapped. I missed all the school football games. I never joined a team myself because I couldn't take time off to practice. My friends hung around Brigham's after school, looking for action.

My father had succeeded. Sometimes I felt very young, other times like an old man; no action for me.

As a menial (no pay, just pocket money), I dusted the shoes on display, helped take inventory, or polished the Brannock Device, which was a metal clamp-like contraption for measuring feet—the width and length. I also ran errands.

I was on one today; the errands were the only freedom I had. But it was always the same trip—picking up a pair of shoes, sometimes two, from a warehouse in Boston, near South Station, on Atlantic Avenue.

Before I left, my father raised his hand and said, “No Eddie,” meaning, “Don't associate with Eddie Springer,” whom he considered a bad influence. What I liked about Eddie was his saying, “I'm a wicked-bad influence.”

I took the electric car to Sullivan Square, climbing the stairs, waited on the platform in front of
Spitting Is Forbidden,
then rode the subway to South Station, and repeated the shoe size to the man at the warehouse counter. He did not greet me or even comment. He made out an invoice by hand, measured a length of string, and tied the box while I leaned on the counter.

A woman at a desk behind him smiled at me. “You look just like your father.”

I didn't know what to say. My father was more than fifty years old. I could smell her perfume, like strong soap, and I imagined that her blond hair, too, had a fragrance. Seated, she seemed small, doll-like, but sure of herself.

The man said, “Ask your father why he only buys one pair at a time.”

The woman winked at me. She said, “His father only sells one pair at a time.”

“And when is he going to pay me what he owes me?”

“I'll ask him.” The suggestion that my father might be tricky did not dismay me; it reassured me in my own weakness and made me admire him.

As I left, holding the box with a clip-on handle, a wooden cylinder with wire hooked through it, the woman said, “Don't listen to Grumpy. Your father's a great guy. Tell him Vie was asking for him. Violet.”

Maybe that was his other side, a ladies' man and a traveler, a man of the world now down on his luck as a widower and the father of a sulky teenager. But if so, that did not make him forgiving. It made him more suspicious. He knew what a boy was capable of, and was overprotective. He was puritanical and hated any kind of foolery—loud music and loud talk, mentions of girls, of sunny frivolous places like California or Florida, any sort of indiscipline.

But that woman Vie knew something about my father that I didn't, and this idea that he was concealing a part of his life made me dawdle in the errand, in my own concealment.

I cut through South Station and bought a jelly donut. The woman at the counter wearing a white apron and white cap lifted the donut with tongs from the tray and dropped it into a small bag.

“Ten cents,” she said, and I gave her the dime. As I stepped away, a man with a mean face leaned over and said, “Give me that.” He looked like a gargoyle, and his smell and his ugliness made him seem violent.

Handing over the bag, I held on to the shoebox and hurried out of the station as though I'd done something wrong. I went up State Street, walking fast, until I got to Milk Street. I had the sense that the man might be following me. I went into Goodspeed's bookstore. The old woman at the desk said, “You can't bring any parcels in here.”

Near the corner of Milk and Washington I stopped at a shop that sold knives and cameras. I knew the shop. There was always someone, usually two or three men, looking at the window display of knives—all sorts of hunting knives, wide blades, jagged blades, shiny, bone handles, bowie knives, Buck knives, Swiss Army knives—and in the adjoining window the cameras were set out, all sizes.

A grinning man in a long coat and glasses said, “Hey, look at that camera, how small it is. That one down there.”

Like a toy, a tiny camera, propped on a small box with a tiny red roll of film.

“You could get some swell pictures with that. Fit in the palm of your hand,” the man said. “Take it anywhere.”

I said, “I guess so. It's really small. Maybe German.”

He put his face near mine as the man had done in South Station, demanding my donut. “I took some pictures of my roommate when he was bollocky.” The man was smiling horribly and making a face, and he dislodged his glasses. He pushed them back into place with his dirty thumb.

But I was backing away. I said, “That's okay.”

“I could take a picture of you bollocky,” he said. “Wanna let me?”