Tough Guys Don't Dance (6 page)

He grinned like a Medal of Honor winner being commemoratorially kissed by Elizabeth Taylor.

“How did you ever get a name like Alvin Luther in Massachusetts? That's a Minnesota name,” she said.

“Well,” he said, “my paternal grandfather is from Minnesota.”

“What did I tell you? Don't argue with Patty Lareine.” She promptly invited him to the party we would be giving the following night. He came after duty. At the end, he told me at the door that he had had a fine time.

We started a conversation. He said he still kept his house in Barnstable and (Barnstable being fifty miles away) I asked if he didn't feel a bit out of place working here in all the melee of the summer frenzy. (Provincetown is the only town I know where you can ask such a question of the police.)

“No,” he said, “I asked for this job. I wanted it.”

“Why?” I asked. I'd heard rumors he was a narc.

He cut that off. “Well, they call Provincetown the Wild West of the East,” he said, and gave his whinny.

After that, when we had a party, he'd drop in for a few minutes. If it continued from one night through to the next, we'd see him again. If it was after duty, he would have a drink, talk quietly to a couple of people, and leave. Just once did he give a clue—it was only after Labor Day—that he had taken on some booze. At the door he kissed Patty Lareine and shook hands formally with me. Then he said, “I worry about you.”

“Why?” I did not like his eyes. He had the kind of warmth, when liking you, that reminds one most certainly of granite after it has been
heated by the sun—the warmth is truly there, the rock likes you—but the eyes were two steel bolts drilled into the rock. “People have told me,” he said, “that you have a great deal of potential.”

Nobody would phrase things that way in Provincetown. “Yes, I fuck up with the best,” I told him.

“I get the feeling,” he remarked, “that you can stand up when the trouble is brightest.”

“Brightest?”

“When it all slows down.” Now his eyes at last showed light.

“Right,” I said.

“Right. You know what I'm talking about. Damn right I'm right.” And he walked out. If he had been the kind to weave, I would have seen it then.

He was more together when drinking at the VFW bar. I even saw him get into an arm-wrestling match with Barrels Costa, who got his name by flipping barrels of fish up from the hold to the deck, and at low tide, from the deck up to the wharf. When it came to arm wrestling, Barrels could defeat every fisherman in town, but Regency, to stake a claim, took Barrels on one night and was respected for not hiding behind his uniform. Barrels won, but had to work long enough to get a taste of the bitterness of old age, and Regency smoldered. I guess he wasn't in the habit of losing. “Madden, you are a fuckup,” he told me that night. “You are a damn waste.”

The next morning, however, as I was going
down the street to get the newspaper, he stopped his squad car and said, “I hope I wasn't out of line last night.”

“Forget it.” He irritated me. I was beginning to fear the end result: a big-breasted mother with an enormous phallus.

Now, in his office, I said to him, “If the only reason you invited me here was to say you saw Patty Lareine, I wish you had told me on the phone.”

“I want to talk to you.”

“I'm not good at taking advice.”

“Maybe
I
need some.” He said the next with pride he could not conceal, as if the true heft of a man, the brand mark itself, was in the strength it took to maintain this sort of ignorance: “I don't know women very well.”

“If you are coming to me for pointers, it is obvious you don't.”

“Mac, let's get drunk one night soon.”

“Sure.”

“Whether you know it or not, you and me are the only philosophers in town.”

“Alvin, that makes you the sole thinker the right wing has produced in years.”

“Hey, let's not get testy before the bullets are fired.” He started to show me to the door. “Come on,” he said, “I'll walk you to your car.”

“I didn't bring it.”

“Were you afraid I'd impound your heap?” That gave him the sanction to guffaw all the way down the corridor and out to the street.

There, just before we parted, he said, “Do you still have that marijuana patch in Truro?”

“How do you know about it?”

He looked disgusted. “Man, what's the secret? Everybody talks about your home-grown. I sampled some myself. Why, Patty Lareine dropped a couple of rolled ones in my pocket. Your stuff is about as good as I used to get in Nam.” He nodded. “See, I don't care whether you're a Left-Winger or a Right-Winger, I don't care what kind of fucking wing you fly. I love pot. And I will tell you. Conservatives aren't right in every last item of the inventory. They miss the point here. They think marijuana destroys souls, but I don't believe that—I believe the Lord gets in and wrestles the Devil.”

“Hey,” I said, “if you ever stop talking, we might have a conversation.”

“One night soon. Let's get drunk.”

“All right,” I said.

“In the meantime, if I had placed my stash in a patch in Truro …” He paused.

“I don't keep a stash there,” I said.

“I'm not saying you do. I don't want to know. I'm just saying if I did leave something there, I would contemplate getting it out.”

“Why?”

“I can't tell you everything.”

“Just want to tickle my stick?”

He took a good pause before he replied. “Look,” he said, “I've been a State Trooper. You know that. And I know them. Most of those guys are
all right. They're not high on humor and they never would be your kind, but they're all right.”

I nodded. I waited. I thought he would go on. When he didn't, I said, “They are not nice about marijuana.”

“They hate it,” he said. “Keep your nose clean.” He gave me a whale of a buffet on the back and disappeared down into the basement offices of Town Hall.

I found it hard to believe that our State Troopers, who considered it part of their job description to be lazy in fall, winter and spring so that they would be gung ho for a prodigious three months of suffering through summer traffic and its associated madness on Cape Cod, were now, in November, going to come pouring out of South Yarmouth Barracks in order to search Down-Cape through every petty field of marijuana in Orleans, Eastham, Wellfleet, and Truro. Still, they might be bored. They might also know about my plot. Sometimes I thought there were as many narcs as dopeheads on the Cape. Certainly in Provincetown the trade in dope information, disinformation, deals and double-crosses had to be the fourth largest industry right behind the polyester day tourists, the commercial fishing, and the congeries of gay enterprise.

If the State Troopers knew about my field—and maybe the proper question was, How could they not?—should I assume they were also well-disposed toward my wife and myself? One could doubt that. Our summer parties were too famous.
Patty Lareine had large vices—madness of the heart and serious disloyalty being two I could name on the instant—but she also had the nice virtue of not being a snob. It might be said that she could hardly afford to be, given her redneck commencements, but who did that ever inhibit? If, after the trial, she had stayed in Tampa or made a daring move to Palm Beach, she would have had to play by the tactics that ambitious predecessors had perfected: slice, snip, soft-claw, and tenderize her way into marrying even higher respectability than Wardley—that was the only game with high stakes for the ego that a rich and notorious divorcée could play on the Gold Coast. An interesting life, if those are your talents.

Of course, I never pretended to understand Patty. She may even have been in love with me. It is hard to find a clearer explanation. I am a great believer in Occam's Razor, which states that the simplest explanation accounting for the facts is bound to be the correct explanation. Since I was no more than her chauffeur in the year before we got married, and since I had “crapped out” (those were her words) for deciding I did not care to murder her husband; since I was also an ex-con who could certainly assist her up no marble stairways in no mansions in Palm Beach, it was never comprehensible to me why she should desire my medium-attractive presence in marriage unless she did feel a salubrious melting in her heart. I don't know. We had something in bed for a while, but that can be taken for granted. Why else would
a woman marry down? Later, when it all got bad, I began to wonder if her true passion was to reveal the abyss beneath my vanity. Devil's work.

No matter. Once we got to Provincetown, my only point is that she proved no snob. You couldn't move to Provincetown if you were a snob, not if social advancement was your goal. Some year I would like a sociologist to crack his teeth on the unique class system of our local society. The town, as I would probably have enjoyed explaining to Jessica Pond if I had had the chance, was once, a hundred and fifty years ago, a port for whalers. Cape Cod Yankee captains made up our establishment then, and they brought in Portuguese from the Azores to man the boats. Then the Yankees and Portuguese intermarried (just as the Scotch-Irish and Indians, Carolina cavaliers and slave women, Jews and Protestants were wont to do). By now, half the Portuguese had Yankee names like Cook and Snow, and by whatever name, owned the town. In winter the Portuguese dominated just about all of it, fishing fleet, Board of Selectmen, St. Peter's Church, the lower ranks of the police force, and most of the teachers and students in the grade school and high school. In summer the Portuguese also presided over nine tenths of the rooming houses and more than half of the bars and cabarets. Yet they were a down-in-the-grease up-to-the-elbows gearbox of an establishment. They kept to themselves, and enjoyed no high houses on any hills. The richest Portugee in town might, for all you knew, be
living next to one of the poorest, and but for the new coat of paint, you could not tell the houses apart. No Portuguese son I heard of went to any great university. Maybe they were all too respectful of the wrath of the sea.

So if you wanted to look for some little splash of money, you waited for summer when enclaves of psychoanalysts and art-oriented well-to-do members of the liberal establishment came up from New York to be flanked by a wide panorama of gay society plus the narcs and dope dealers, and half of Greenwich Village and SoHo. Painters, presumptive painters, motorcycle gangs, fuckups, hippies, beatniks and all their children came in, plus tens of thousands of tourists a day driving in from every state of the Union to see for a few hours what Provincetown looked like, because there it was—on the extremity of the map. People have a tropism for the end of the road.

In such a stew, where the townsfolk were the only establishment we had, and the grandest summer houses (with one or two exceptions) were beach cottages,
medium
beach cottages; in a resort where there were no mansions (but one), no fine hotels, no boulevards!—Provincetown owned only two
long
streets (the rest were hardly more than connecting alleys)—in a bay village where our greatest avenue was a pier, and no pleasure yacht with deep draft could come in free of agitation at low tide; in a place where the measure of your dress was the logo on your T-shirt, how
could you advance yourself socially? So you didn't give large parties to strike a note. You gave them, if you were Patty Lareine, because one hundred interesting-looking—that is to say, bizarre—strangers in her summer living room were the minimum she needed to offset the biles and jamborees of her heart. Patty Lareine may have read ten books in her life, but one of them was
The Great Gatsby
. Guess how she saw herself! Just as bewitching as Gatsby. When the parties went on long enough, she would, if the moon was late and full, get out her old cheerleader's bugle and there in the night blow a Retreat to the moon—don't try to tell her it was the wrong hour for Retreat.

No, the State Troopers would not like us. They were as stingy as airline pilots, and never was so much spent on parties where so little was accomplished. Such waste would irritate State Troopers. Besides—for the last two summers—cocaine was sitting on our table in an open bowl, and Patty Lareine, who liked to work the door, hand on hip, next to whoever was serving as bouncer (almost always some local lad built like two) was never the lady not to take a chance on a new face. Everybody crashed our portal. Narcs sniffed as much of our coke as any other inflamed septum.

I can't pretend, however, that I was privately cool about that open bowl. Patty Lareine and I fought over putting it on display. Patty, I decided, had hooked into cocaine more than she recognized, and I now hated the stuff. One of the worst years of my life had been spent buying and selling
snow—I took my trip to the penitentiary for a cocaine bust.

No, State Troopers would not like me much. Yet to think of them arrayed in spiritual vengeance against my little marijuana plot was hard to believe this cold November afternoon. In the frenzy of summer, yes. The summer before this, in all the frantic August madness of a tip that a raid was near, I ran out to Truro in the heat of the day (when it's considered gross to harvest your crop—spiritually disruptive to the plant) and chopped it down, and spent an irrational night (what with having to explain my absence from a number of parties) wrapping the fresh-fallen stalks in newspaper and storing them. It was none of it done well, and so I didn't trust Regency's warm regard for the quality of that year-old product (maybe Patty Lareine had slipped him a couple of Thai nicely rolled and told him they were home-grown). All the same, my next crop, harvested just this last September, did have a flavor, call it a psychic distinction. Although it smelled a hint rank from the Truro woods and bogs, still I believe it offered something of the mist endemic to our shore. You can smoke a thousand sticks and never know what I'm talking about, but I did grow marijuana with a fine edge. If one wished to entertain the illusion that one could commune with the dead, or at least put up with the possibility that they were whispering to you, then my pot was fine. It was as spooky as any stuff I ever smoked. That I attribute to many factors, not
least of which is that the Truro forests are haunted. Years ago—it is now more than a decade—a young Portugee in Provincetown killed four girls, dismembered their bodies, and buried them in several graves in these low woods. I was always immensely aware of the dead girls and their numb, mutilated, accusing presence. I remember that when I harvested my crop this year—and again I was in a great hurry, for a hurricane (which later wandered out to sea) was expected to strike us, indeed, the gusts were gale-force—on a hot, overcast, wind-inflamed mid-September day while a fearful surf was smashing on our bulkhead back in Provincetown, and townspeople were racing around to nail up storm windows, I was sweating like a swamp rat among the near-hysteria of the bugs in the Truro woods eight miles away. What an air of vengeance was about!