Tough Guys Don't Dance (5 page)

My humor broke like a rotten egg. Patty Lareine had also seen this tattoo. Last night! Abruptly I had the clearest vision of her. She was shrieking at me in our living room. “Laurel? Are you daring to inflict Laurel on me again?”

Yes, but how much of this had actually happened? It was obvious to me that I could conceive of conversations as easily as I could live them. Was I not a writer, after all? Patty Lareine disappeared twenty-five days ago with a black stud of her choice, a tall, sullen, beautifully put together dude who had been hanging around
through the summer, ready to capitalize on that carnal affinity toward black men which lives in the hearts of certain blondes like lightning and thunder. Or, for all I know, smolders in the heart like oily rags behind a barn door. Whatever she felt, there was no mistaking the results. Once a year, give a season or two, she would have a fling with Mr. Black. Some big black. He could be heavy, or he could be as quick as a basketball player, but he was always big. The size put them out of my physical reach—I think it delighted her contempt for me that I was not man enough under such circumstances to load my pistol and do a down-home chase-off. “Just like your dad would in North Carolina?” I asked. “You bet!” she'd reply with all the sassy, spiteful, untrammeled mouth of an eighteen-year-old in cutoffs at some Dr Pepper gas station. God, she was unafraid of me. I was terrified I would indeed get my gun, but never to chase Mr. Black. He was just appropriating what I, too, would grab if I could fill his jockstrap and sweat properly in his black logic. No, I was afraid I would get my pistol and never leave the house before emptying a magazine into her all-superior fuck-you face.

Still! Why had I chosen to inflict the name Laurel on my wife? I knew she was the one lady Patty would never forgive. I was with Laurel, after all, when I met Patty, except that her name was Madeleine Falco. It was Patty who had insisted on calling her Laurel the day they met. I learned later that “Laurel” was short for Lorelei
—Patty did not like Madeleine Falco. Had I chosen the tattoo to punish Patty? Had she truly been in the house? Or was I living with some fragment of last night's dream?

It occurred to me that if my wife had indeed come to visit, and then departed, some evidence must remain. Patty Lareine usually left half-consumed objects behind her. Her lipstick must be on our glasses. It was enough to get me dressed and down the stairs, but in the living room there were no traces of her. The ashtrays were clean. Why, then, was I now twice certain our conversation had taken place? Of what benefit were clues if one's mind was stimulated to believe the opposite of the evidence? It came upon me then that the only true test of the strength, the veritable muscle tone, so to speak, of one's sanity, was the ability to bear question upon question with not an answer in sight.

It is good I had such a perception, for I soon needed it. In the kitchen, during the night, the dog had been ill. The treasures of his belly befouled the linoleum. Worse, the jacket I had been wearing last night was hanging on a chair, crusted with blood. I felt of my nostrils. I suffered from nosebleeds. Yet the passages seemed clear. Now the dread with which I had awakened took a turn. A whistle of fear stirred in my lungs when I inhaled.

How could I ever clean the kitchen? I turned around, went back through the house and out the door. It was not until I reached the street and
felt the damp air of November pass through my shirt that I realized I was still in my slippers. No great matter. I took five strides across Commercial Street and peered into the windows of my Porsche. (Her Porsche.) The passenger seat was covered with blood.

What a curious logic to these matters! I had a startling lack of reaction. But then, the worst hangovers are always like that—they are simply full of the most unaccountable spaces. So I did not feel frightened any longer but exhilarated as if none of this had anything to do with me. The rush from the tattoo came back.

I was also feeling very cold. I returned inside and brewed myself a cup of coffee. The dog, ashamed of the mess he had made, blundered about in every danger of compounding it until I let him out.

My good mood (which I treasured for its rarity the way a patient in a terminal illness is grateful for an hour without pain) lasted all the while I was cleaning up after the hound. With my hangover, there was gagging aplenty, but also the most thoroughgoing and satisfying expiation for the sins of my drinking. I might be only half-Catholic, and that all but untutored, since Big Mac never went near a church, and Julia, my mother (half-Protestant, half-Jewish—which is one reason I did not like anti-Semitic jokes) was prone to steer me to so many different cathedrals, synagogues, Quaker meeting houses and lectures at Ethical Culture that she was never much of a
religious guide. I couldn't claim, therefore, to see myself as a Catholic. Yet I did. Give me a hangover, put me on my knees cleaning dog poop, and I would feel virtuous. (Indeed, I almost managed to forget how much blood had been spilled over the right seat of the car.) Then the phone rang. It was Regency, Alvin Luther Regency, our Acting Chief of Police, or rather, his secretary, asking me to wait until he came on the line, long enough to strip me of much good mood.

“Hello, Tim,” he said, “you okay?”

“I'm fine. I'm hung-over, but I'm fine.”

“That's nice. That's good. I woke up this morning feeling concerned about you.” He was going to be a modern police chief, that was for certain.

“No,” I told him, “I'm all right.”

He paused. “Tim, would you drop in this afternoon?”

My father always told me that when in doubt, assume a confrontation is brewing. Next, get to it quickly. So I said, “Why don't I come over this morning?”

“It's lunchtime now,” he said reprovingly.

“Well, lunch,” I said. “That's all right.”

“I'm having a cup of java with one of the Selectmen. Make it after.”

“Fine.”

“Tim?”

“Yeah.”

“Are you okay?”

“I think I am.”

“Will you clean your car?”

“Oh, Christ, I had a terrible nosebleed last night.”

“Yes, well, some of your neighbors ought to belong to the Good Snoopers' Society. The way they phoned it in, I figured you lopped somebody's arm off.”

“I resent that. Why don't you come over and get a sample? You can check my blood type.”

“Hey, give me a break.” He laughed. He had a real cop's laugh. A high-pitched soprano whinny that had nothing to do with the rest of him. His face, I can tell you, might as well have been made of granite.

“All right,” I said, “it's funny. But how would you like to be a grown man with nosebleeds?”

“Oh,” he said, “I would take good care of myself. After ten shots of bourbon, I would be punctilious about drinking a glass of water.”
Punctilious
had just made his lunch hour. He gave a big whinny and signed off.

I cleaned the inside of my car. That did not feel nearly so unhazardous as the dog poop. Nor was my stomach taking the coffee well. I did not know whether to be agitated at the effrontery and/or paranoia of my neighbors—which ones?—or to live with the possibility that I had gotten sufficiently unhinged to break one or another blonde lady's nose. Or worse. How did you lop off an arm?

The difficulty is that my sardonic side, which had been designed, presumably, to carry me
through most of a bad day, was, when all is said, not a true side, but only a facet—one stop on the roulette wheel. There are thirty-seven others. Nor was anything put to rest by my increasing conviction that the blood on this seat did not come from anyone's nose. It was much too abundant. So I was soon revolted by the task. Blood, like any force of nature, insists on speaking. It is always with the same message. “All that lives,” I now heard, “clamors to live again.”

I will spare you such details as the rinsing of the cloth and the trips with pails of water. I had friendly conversations about nosebleeds with two neighbors who passed while I was on the task, and by then I had decided to walk to the Police Station. Truth, if I brought the vehicle, Regency might be tempted to impound it.

There had been times over the three years I was in prison when I used to wake up in the middle of the night with no sense of where I was. That would not be unusual but for the fact that of course I knew exactly where I was, down to my cellblock and cell number, yet I would not accept it. The given was not permitted to be given. I would lie in bed and make plans to take a girl to lunch or decide to rent a catboat for a sail. It did no good to tell myself that I was not at home but within a cell in a medium-security prison in Florida. I saw such facts as part of the dream, and thereby at quite a remove from me. I could get off on my plans for the day if only the dream that I was in prison would not persist—“Man,”
I would say to myself, “shake these cobwebs.” Sometimes it would take all of a morning for me to get back into the real day. Only then could I recognize that I would not be able to take the girl to lunch.

Something kin to this was being perpetrated on me now. I had a tattoo I could not account for, a good dog who was frightened of me, a car interior just washed of its blood, a missing wife whom I might or might not have seen late last night, and an ongoing, nicely simmering tumescence for a middle-aged blonde real estate lady from California, yet all I could think of as I took my walk to the center of town was that Alvin Luther Regency ought to have a reasonably serious purpose for interrupting a writer's working hours.

Now, the fact that I had done no writing in twenty-five days was not something I bothered to take into account. Rather, like those mornings in prison when I could not enter my day, so was I now like an empty pocket pulled out, and as much without myself as an actor who leaves his wife, his children, his debts, his mistakes, and even his ego in order to step into a role.

In fact, I was observing the new personality that walked into Regency's office in the basement of Town Hall, for I stepped through the door like a reporter, that is, I did my best to give an impression that the Police Chief's clothes, expression, office furniture, and words were all of equal import to me, as equal as the phrases that would
go into a feature story of eight good paragraphs of approximately equal length. I entered, as I say, in the full concentration of such a role, and thereby noted like a good journalist that he was not accustomed to his new office. Not yet. His personal photographs, framed testimonials, professional licenses, paperweights and memorabilia might all be laid out or tacked to the walls, two file cabinets could flank his desk like posts at the gates of an ancient temple, and he might sit erect in his chair, like the military man he used to be, his close-to-the-scalp crew cut marking him as an old Green Beret, but still it stood out: he was not at home in his office. But then, which office would be at home with him? He had features that would ask a sculptor to use a jackhammer on the stone, all promontories, ledges and overhangs. In town, his nicknames abounded—Rock-face, Target Shoot, Glint-eye—or, leave it to the old Portuguese fishermen: Twinkletoes. The townspeople were obviously not ready to buy him yet. He may have been Acting Chief of Police for six months, but the shadows of his predecessor hung over the office. The last Chief, around for ten years, had been a local Portuguese who studied law at night and moved up to the Attorney General's Office of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Memories of the last Chief—considering it was Provincetown, an unsentimental place—were now well-spoken.

I didn't know Regency well. In the old days, if he had come to my bar, I would have been
certain, doubtless, that I could read him on the spot. He was large enough to play professional football, and there was no mistaking the competitive gleam in his eye: God, the spirit of competition, and crazy mayhem had come together. Regency looked like one Christian athlete who hated to lose.

I offer this much of a portrait because, in truth, I could not figure him out. Just as I didn't always say hello to my day, so Regency didn't always fit into the personality one knew him by. I will provide some details by and by.

Now he pushed his chair straight back with military rectitude and came out from behind his desk to draw up a chair near me. Then he stared thoughtfully into my eyes. Like a General. He would have seemed a total prick if somewhere along the way he had not been implanted with the idea that compassion also belonged to the working police officer's kit. The first thing he said, for instance, was “How is Patty Lareine? Have you heard from her?”

“No,” I said. Of course, by this one small remark he wiped out my hard-held stance as a journalist.

“I wouldn't get into it,” he said, “but I swear I saw her last night.”

“Where?”

“At the West End. Near the breakwater.”

That was not far from The Widow's Walk. “It's interesting,” I said, “to hear she's back in
town, but I know nothing of that.” I lit a cigarette. My pulse had gone off on a race.

“It was just a glimpse of a blonde at the end range of my high beams. Three hundred yards, probably. I could be wrong.” His manner said he was right.

Now he took out a cheroot and lit it, exhaling the smoke with panache enough for an old macho commercial.

“Your wife,” he said, “is one attractive lady.”

“Thank you.”

On one of our drunken evenings this August past, in a week when we had in-the-water-at-dawn parties every night (Mr. Black already casing my home) we had made the acquaintance of Regency. Via a complaint about the noise. Alvin responded personally. I am sure he had heard of our parties.

Patty charmed him to the puttees. She told everyone—drunks, freaks, male and female models, half-nudes and premature Halloween types in costume—that she was turning down the stereo in Chief Regency's honor. Then she jibed at the sense of duty that restrained his hand from taking a glass. “Alvin Luther Regency,” she said. “That's a hell of a name. You got to live up to it, boy.”