Tough Guys Don't Dance (12 page)

That Pete the Polack was here today could only mean Nissen had bet a lot on the Patriots. It was disquieting. Nissen might be unsentimental enough to piss on his slave woman, but he'd lick the shoelaces of any athlete godlike enough to play for the Pats. His paraplegic detective might be able to penetrate CIA computers and roll up friend or foe with equal panache, but Nissen was so metaphysical about his allegiance that Pete could make the team a six-point favorite on a day when I only had to give three in Boston. How many times the Spider had been trapped in the
middle! I assumed the bet today was so large that Pete was here to collect if he won, and after five minutes knew I was right; the Spider soon began to shout at the set. Before long I was convinced he must have bet at least the value of his motorcycle on the game, and Pete was here to wheel it away if Nissen lost.

It is also worth stating about Pete that he was perfectly capable of letting Spider run up his losses in return for promises—“Carry me another week and I'll take you out to where Madden keeps his product.” The stash had to be worth a couple of thousand dollars and Nissen knew it: he would not be above offering it as collateral.

The other man in the room I hardly knew. You would have cast him for a greaser. He had tattoos of eagles and mermaids all over his arms, and straight black hair, a low brow, a dented nose, a mustache and a couple of missing teeth. Everybody called him Stoodie because he used, when an adolescent, to steal nothing but Studebakers all up and down the Cape. That was the legend, and it was untrue—he stole all kinds of cars—but they called him Stoodie because it was a Studebaker he had been busted on. Now he collected on losing bets for Pete, and, as I had heard, was a machinist and metalworker (all learned in the pen at Walpole) good enough to change the serial numbers on the engine blocks of cars other people had stolen. However, he, I assumed, would not know of my small part of the Truro woods.

I mention this because like John Foster Dulles, who—whatever his sins—gave us the phrase, I was going through an agonizing reappraisal. I liked to look upon myself as a writer searching for a somewhat larger view of man. It did not please me to reduce everyone I encountered to the ranks of those who knew and those who did not know where Timothy Madden might keep his stash.

Now, however, my mind was nothing but this list. Nissen knew, and by extension, Beth knew. Patty knew. Mr. Black knew. For all I knew, I had taken Jessica and Mr. Pangborn there. Regency seemed to have a clear notion. I could think of others. I could even add my father. He had made unsuccessful attempts over the years to cut out drinking by the substitution of marijuana. Once, over a year ago, on the last visit to Patty and me, I had taken him out to my clearing and tried to get him interested in the crop. I figured if he saw the plants, he might respect them as much as hops. So, yes, add my father to the list.

But that was like urinating on Beth. Abruptly, I recognized the monstrousness of my new mental preoccupation. Everybody came out as items on a computer list. Was I becoming a cerebrate? So much had this activity taken over my head that I felt like a computer trembling on its foundations. I kept kicking my father's name on and off the list. Give me, in preference, a storm at sea.

I watched the football game for as long as I could. At last, on a time-out in the beginning of the second quarter, Nissen went to the refrigerator for beers. I followed.

There was only one way to treat him and that was with no ceremony. Since he could show his wife and himself in a confetti of electronic dots, or ask you in the middle of biting a sandwich if you were constipated, I had no compunctions about injuring him with a quick question. Therefore I said, “Spider, remember the séance?”

“You forget it, man,” he said. “I can't.”

“It was weird.”

“It was pure horrendous.” He sloshed his beer around a missing molar in his mouth, gulped the fluid and added, “You and your wife can go for that shit. I won't. It's too disruptive.”

“What did you see?”

“Same thing your wife saw.”

“Well, I'm asking you.”

“Hey, don't lay it on me. Everything's all right, right?”

“Couldn't be better.”

“Sure,” he said.

“So why don't you tell me?”

“I don't want to get into that place again.”

“Listen,” I said, “you got to keep yourself pure today. You have a big bet.”

“So?”

“I'm asking a favor. Keep yourself pure with your buddies. Your team will cover the bet.”

“Don't give me that mystical sauce. It went out with LSD. I don't have to fucking keep myself pure by telling you what you want to hear. That's desperate betting, man, that's degenerate. I pick the Patriots on their merits.”

“You need my help today,” I said, looking into his eyes as if I wouldn't relent.

“You're crazy,” he said. “How many hundred thousand people betting on this game, two million probably, and I got to get myself pure with you—that puts the result where I want it? Madden, every one of you potheads is tipped. Cut yourself a little coke.” He slammed the refrigerator door. He was ready to go back to the game.

“You're wrong,” I said. “You and me can help them cover if I am able to put my mind right alongside of yours.”

“I get no input whatsoever from you.”

“Well,” I said, “I hate to bring it up. But you and me have this one thing in common that two million other bettors don't have.”

“All right.”

“We've been one special place together.”

As I said this, the most peculiar phenomenon occurred. I had never told it to anyone, not even quite to myself, but in that hour I was trapped beneath the overhang, the most terrible odor oozed out to me from—I do not know if it was the rocks or my own sweat—but a dreadful odor of corruption came up nonetheless, the way perhaps a battlefield of many dead would smell, or was it—and this was my fear—the nearness of the Devil
waiting to receive me? It was, in all events, so terrible a smell that once I was down on the ground it remained the worst fear in days to come until I told myself, and for all I knew, this is true also, that I was sniffing no more than some old guano of the gulls magnified by my own terror into the stench of a satanic beast. But now, even as I said what should have remained unsaid, “We've been one special place together,” so did a whiff of that incredible odor come off of Nissen, and I think we both knew that the experience had been equal for both of us.

“What did you see,” I asked again, “at the séance?”

I could feel how he was on the edge of telling me, and had the good sense not to push further. I could feel the truth coming forth even as his tongue picked at his lips.

During the séance we had been six of us about a round oak table, our hands flattened out on the surface, our right thumb touching our left thumb, and the little finger of each hand in contact with the little finger of each person to left or right. We were trying to get the table to tap. Let me not even speak now of our purpose, but in that darkened room by the back shore (for we were all at a rich acquaintance's home in Truro and the ocean waves were tolling on the back shore not two hundred yards away) it seemed to me that with each question asked, the table was actually coming closer to some small quiver when, right then, our communal senses were shattered by Nissen's
fearful scream. Having brought this much back for myself, I must have returned the memory to him as well, for now he said, “I saw her dead. I saw your wife dead and with her head cut off. The next fucking moment, she saw it too. We were looking at it together.”

In this instant the smell that came off him was overpowering, and I could feel a reverberation of my fear beneath the overhang. So I knew that no matter how I might like to banish the impulse, I had no choice: I must go back to the tree on the sandy ridge and discover whose head was in the burrow below.

Yet in this moment a look of incredible spite came into Nissen's face and he reached over and squeezed my right arm beneath the shoulder with fingers that dug in like five spikes.

As I winced he laughed. “Yeah,” he said, “you got a tattoo. Harpo told the truth.”

“How does Harpo know?”

“How does he know? Man, you are so fucking spaced out that you need your wife. She better come back.” He snorted as if some grains of coke were leaking out of his nose. “Hey,” he said, “yeah,” he said, “I'm pure. Now, you get yourself pure.”

“How does Harpo know?” I repeated. Harpo was a friend of Nissen's and raced motorcycles with him.

“Well, mate,” said Spider, “he gave you the fucking tattoo.”

Sven “Harpo” Veriakis. He was a short blond
Greek-Norwegian on his father's side, Portuguese by his mother, and built like a fireplug. He had been the third shortest man ever to play in the NFL (even if he only lasted for a season). Now, Harpo had moved to Wellfleet, and one didn't see him often, but he had conducted our séance, that I recalled. “What did he say?” I asked.

“Who knows,” said Nissen. “I never can figure out what he's saying. He's a space cadet like you.”

Cries came out of the living room then, and imprecations. The Patriots had just scored again. Spider whooped and led me back.

In the intermission at half time, Stoodie began to talk. I had never heard him say as much before.

“I like to lie awake at night and listen to the sounds in the street,” he said to Beth. “There's a lot of significance then. You must provide yourself with the proper framing of mind, and that makes it all pregnant with space. Pregnant with grace,” he amended, and nodded, and nipped on his beer. I was remembering something I had heard about Stoodie. He used to tie his wife by her ankles to hooks he had put in a ceiling beam. Then he would caress her. In his fashion.

“I admire the natural situation of the Cape,” he now said to Beth. “I will take an Indian summer over all. Strolling among our dunes, I have had the privilege of seeing another someone, a male or female person on another dune as much as half a mile away, but the glow of the sun is on them. They are feeling just as full of love for all this golden goodness as we are in our own
feelings. That's God's blessing right there. No escaping it. Beauty inexorable.” He took a breath. “I mean beauty exalted.”

It was here I made the decision to add Stoodie to my list.

I
did not learn that afternoon who won the game, for I left Nissen's house at half-time (the Patriots were ahead) and drove the fifteen miles to Wellfleet to see Harpo, who lived in a loft over a dry-goods store on one of the off-roads. I say “off-road,” but then, no street in Wellfleet ever seemed to bear relation to any other, as if on founding day some two hundred and more years ago five sailors, each swigging his own keg of rum, had meandered out from the bay shore along the streams and around the bogs, and people followed to mark each road by the vagaries of each sailor's promenade. As a result, no one I knew in Provincetown could ever find anyone in Wellfleet, and indeed we did not often try. Wellfleet was by now a proper town, and none of us ever saw a Yankee there who did not
have a nose long enough to serve as a rifle barrel siting you in his mean nostrils' cross hairs. Some of us, therefore, used to ask Harpo how he could ever have left Provincetown for Wellfleet and he replied, “I didn't like the warp. The warp was getting to me. I had to move.”

So a few began to call him Warpo. Since he had, however, a tangle of curly blond hair over a face as rubbery as the great comedian (albeit considerably more scarred: after pro football, he played semipro without a helmet) Harpo it remained.

In any event, he was named for the harpoon, not Harpo Marx. Harpo Veriakis was famous for saying, “That's a beautiful girl over there. I wish I was man enough to harpoon her.” So, some called him Poon for poon tang, some still called him Harpoon. I mention this as a way of indicating how hard it was to locate his place. On the Cape in winter, nothing ever came right to the point.

Well, I found his turning, and he was in, which made two surprises, but I still did not believe he had pricked the tattoo into me since I did not even know he practiced such an art, and besides, I could not understand how I would ever have found his place in the dark while drunk, but once I climbed the outside stairs to his loft, my doubts were gone. He looked up from feeding his cats (he lived with five such pets in lieu of one beautiful girl) and the first thing he said was “Is your arm infected?”

“It's itching.”

He didn't say another word to me while spooning out the rest of the can, although he did speak to a couple of the creatures who were rubbing around his ankles like connubial little fur pieces, but as soon as he was done with that, he washed his hands, removed my bandage, got out a plastic bottle of some disinfectant and laved it over my upper bicep. “It don't look infected too much,” he said, “and that's good. I was worried. I don't like to use the needles when the atmosphere is screwing me up.”

“Was something wrong?” I asked.

“You were shit-face.”

“All right. I drink and get shit-face. What's new about that?”

“Mac, you wanted to pick a fight with me.”

“I must have been crazy.” (He was strong enough to lift a car by its rear end.) “I didn't really try to pick a fight with you?” I asked.

“Well, you were showing off.”

“Did I have a woman with me?”

“I don't know. She might have been downstairs in the car. You kept yelling out the window.”

“What did I say?”

“You kept yelling out the window, ‘You're going to lose your bet.' ”

“Did you hear anyone answer?”

One of the virtues of the people I live among is that none of us is ever surprised by a friend's inability to remember a vivid hour.