Bomber's Law (39 page)

“And by Jesus, I can tell you: if the fuckin' tiles don't do it, then the price we paid for them and what these guys're costing us for not working very much could make a ten-foot-two cement-cast gargoyle weep, and then have to go lie down. And if he lay down in that kitchen while those two guys're still here, they'd tile him up, too, just like they've been doing the floor, and the walls, and the countertops, like they learned as apprentices to the legendary Mick Angelo—bet you didn't know until now that he was actually Irish, in addition to being as queer as Tiberius, at least on every third Thursday—helpin' him do the Pope's chapel ceiling. They came here just soon as they finished that job, been workin' those same four speeds for us here ever since; slow; really slow; even slower than that; and infuckin-credibly slow—no discernible motion at all.

“There've been days when I would've sworn that both of those fine Italian craftsmen were dead, that they'd both expired near the sink, or over there, next to the stove. But every time—‘Oh no, you're not rid of us that easy.'—they started movin' again. Before I'd had time enough to get someone in, have them hauled away in a rough wooden cart, and dumped in a potter's field somewhere. So they're still out there in the kitchen, stretchin' out this lifetime job even longer, to keep their American work-visas. Those cherished green cards that so many vie for, and guess who hadda go through all the rigamarole for those permits, so those two odious, freeloadin' bozos could come into this Great Republic and move right in with us, live here for the rest of our lives. I'm afraid they're becoming our wards. When they finally get through, if they ever do, they'll head off in their fifties for college and their eventual doctorates in comparative transfixed immobility states, otherwise known as static inertia, and we'll have to pay for that too.

“And you know how Tory sucked me into hiring them inna first place, and then getting them those fucking visas? She tells me that what she's gonna do's use that kitchen as a tax-deductible showroom, the whole house's gonna become one, a goddamned display, and that will mean we'll end up selling the damned thing for much more'n we'd ever get without all the tile and stuff. She says. And she also says: in the meantime she'll be selling boatloads of those tiles to her
clients, who when they see it'll all be instantly overcome by frenzies of covetousness, and that when she then takes her lavish commissions, plus what we'll get for the house itself, we'll be filthy rich. Read: when we die we'll have plenty of dough. Which, I start to think—but only after I went for it, naturally; the craftsmen've taken up residence so I've now seen them in total inaction—is about how long it looks like they're gonna take here, most of the rest of our natural lives, but I think now I have it figured out.

“It's gonna be
years
before she gets this atrocity finished, in any kind of shape to put on the market. And that's only
if
,—emphasis: if—, that
is
what she does plan to do, and I'm not livin' here because I got duped in a scam she cooked up with her voice-hearing mother; which, yes, could've happened, it could've; I might not've been paying sufficient attention, had my mind on something else unimportant, putting down a prison riot or something, and they blew one right by me back there. I haven't entirely ruled that one out, either. But if it isn't that, and she does plan to sell it, well, okay, so the two of them didn't bamboozle me, and my pride isn't bruised after all, but still, even then, we're not gonna get rich until we're old. And until we get rich, and get the fuck outta here, we're gonna live in a showroom. I'm not sure I like that idea. I never aspired to be a new car, not even a new luxury car. I like them, I'll own one if I ever can, but for some reason I don't wanna
become
one, any kind of durable goods where things get reversed from their natural order so I become he who works for the building, not him whom the damn building works for.

“And then here's this other thing, too, since I'm finally thinking about it. Now what I got to wonder is: who is it, really cares, if you are rich when you're dead? Which is, like I say, what I think we're gonna be pretty close to bein', when-as-and-if all the fine imported craftsmen finish up. Besides the tax man, I mean, and all of your mean grasping relatives, who, of course, since they knew you were rich, most likely did as much as they dared to, helping to nudge you along on your way—‘Can we fetch you a fresh fluffy pillow, Uncle Brian, for over your nose and your mouth?' Meaning: ‘Can we fetch
you
, with a pillow? Come on, hurry up, you scrimy old bastard, for Christ sake get it over with, willya? Die and leave us the money.' What the hell good does rich do you then, when you are finally dead—have they got a funeral deluxe you can buy now, get lugged
off in a six-tired, limo-style hearse, pool with sauna out in the trunk, wet-bar and TV at your feet?

“Anyway, no,” Dennison said, “sad to relate, for us today the kitchen is out, just as the library is. And we're not gonna have our little chat in the master-bedroom, which's the only other warm room. You're a nice guy and I respect the hell out of you, Harry, but I've never thought of you in that way. And besides, even if I did, we don't wanna start any loose talk. But you can see better now, I bet, why I say we're stuck with this house? Fuckin' thing doesn't work for shit, and it costs all outdoors to maintain. But as long as the real-estate market stays down like it's been, we're stuck in it, that's what we are. Payin' a mortgage we can't afford—Lucy and 'Ginia's shares of the overhead, both of them, but only Virginia's Lottery check—and making repairs we can't afford either, improving a place that we don't even like and probably oughta blow up, all of it so that
maybe
some day we can sell the damned thing at a profit of obscene proportions. Which we'll promptly have to turn over to a luxurious resthome. The only enjoyment we'll ever get from it'll be from squattin' our hams eight times a day on polished-maroon, Chinese-lacquered Du Pont bedpans rimmed in eighteen-carat gold, and wondering where we misplaced our lives.

“And then, like a revelation from the heavens radiant, like the angel finally got around to opening the seventh seal, it'll come to us:
‘Bomber's Law,'
we will think ruefully. ‘Bomber's fucking Law's why we dumb-ass masochists went and self-inflicted all that crazy shit upon ourselves. We did it for the
fucking money, just like Bomber predicted.
Yes, we got it, got the money, and the money says we're rich, but it's also proof we're assholes, well-to-do fuckin' assholes who pissed half our lives away, butt-sucking a goddamned house, all to get lots of money. Bomber's Law triumphed again. Woe and more woe, woe on top of that, truly, we is a woebegone pair.'

“So then, you wanna go out to some cheap low-rent bar where at least they got heat someplace, maybe?”

“That's a thought, isn't it,” Dell'Appa said.

“Yeah, but not a very good one,” Dennison said. “Tell me about this kid here, the one that you tortured most of the day before you came over here to rattle my cage. Get me all excited. Tell me one of the people I got working for me actually did something worthwhile
today. I'm easy. That's all it takes. You can do that, I'll buy you a drink. Whatever you like, long's it's beer. You get anything out of this punk?”

“That's a good question,” Dell'Appa said, crossing his legs and hugging himself. “You think Admiral Scott, or Roald Amundsen, maybe one of them's got an opinion? They must be around here some place. They'd feel right at home in this joint.”

“Quit griping and talk to me, my son,” Dennison said. “What'd he say after alleging your dear paternal grandmother'd barked and probably died chasing a car?”

“Started whining about how he wanted his lunch again,” Dell'Appa said. “I took that as a good sign, of course; hungry men're much better informers and sources. Empty bellies sharpen up memories, fine-tune the focus control. Oh: also said he hadda pee.”

“Good, good,” Dennison said, nodding. “It's an inconvenience, I know, we're no longer permitted to converse with our little friends in that cramped-but-soundproof room in the cellar, the one with the naked lightbulb hanging from brass socket, had a beaded chain, at the end of the frayed cord in the ceiling, where so many in the past were persuaded by severe beatings to assist us police with our inquiries, as our English friends so charmingly put it. But times change and we have to change with them. A growling stomach and extreme bladder-discomfort may not seem like an adequate substitute, I know, but to this pampered generation that we're forced to deal with now, well, I tell you, it's damned near enough to make those chaps wonder if Amnesty International shouldn't be advised, if it's true that the crack State Police're treating helpless prisoners this way.”

“He wasn't helpless, boss,” Dell'Appa said. “He could've gotten relief. I told him he could piss his pants then and there if he wanted. Didn't matter one bit to me. I wasn't plannin' to sit in 'em with him while all that nice warm piss got colder on his ass'n the rain washin' down the window behind him there—which of course made him listen to that, too, the rain, and that made him want to go even worse. I also told him I'd clocked him at eighty-eight seconds of sulking in silence before he stated his urge to take a piss, which made me think that if he really hadda go that bad then he'd been keeping his legs crossed for almost a minute and a half more'n he'd had to. So until he told me he was ready to talk turkey and Mossi and Rollins, in a
forthright and meaningful manner, the best he was gonna be able to hope for was that I'd agree to let him open the drawer in the table we're sitting at there, and see if maybe someone'd left an elastic band behind he could twist like a tourniquet around his poor shrinkin' little pecker there, help him at the cost of some additional discomfort—maybe some small risk of gangrene, too—keep his skivvies dry a little longer.

“As for his lunch, I'd already told him they'd save lunch for him, and I meant that. What I'd left out, but what I also meant, and what he either hadn't noticed or just hadn't bothered to ask me about when I told him, which was why I was tellin' him then, was when I'd decide to tell my friend Stanley it was okay with me if they
gave
that lunch to him. ‘Because no matter how long they may've been
savin'
a lunch for you, it's gonna be pretty hard for you to actually
eat
it, until they
give
it to you. Which they're not gonna do here today 'til I tell 'em to, that it's okay with me if you eat.' And also: which since he'd pouted for eighty-eight seconds, when I did get around to tellin' 'em it was okay it was obviously going to be almost a minute and a half later than it needed to've been, when I did finally decide to do it.”

“And?” Dennison said.

“And then he said ‘mothermucker,' ” Dell'Appa said. “Put real feeling into it, too, and when he said it he was looking right at me.”

“So you think that this time when he said a bad name,” Dennison said, “he was in fact calling you by it. You did have that feeling. That it was you that he meant. To whom he had reference to.”

“That was the impression that I did have at that time, yes sir, yeah,” Dell'Appa said. “I did have that definite impression. But naturally I wanted to be absolutely one-hundred-percent sure, before I did anything rash, and so I said politely to the subject: ‘Listen, you cocksucker, and listen up good: I'm layin' the truth on you here. If you even think,
even think
, you're gonna either wheedle me here,
or
you can get me mad enough, to trick me into bangin' on that deadbolt door behind me and tellin' that guard to let you go take a piss, and then eat lunch, so you can figure out some way to con him into lettin' you get in touch with Ev Rollins, so he can start purging his files and destroyin' stuff I want and I know he's got,
before I get what I came here to get
, you're gonna find out what it feels like when your teeth're really afloat and your fillings start washin' away, and
also what all the starvin' Africans felt like, before we sent famine relief in. Your know what your situation is today, asshole? Your situation is hopeless; your ass is the grass, and what you see bearin' down on you, head-on, is the big power mower from Hell.' ”

“And that was what did it, then?” Dennison said. “That was what made him tell you?”

“I don't think it was, actually,” Dell'Appa said. “Gayle knows a lot more about the dynamics that go into this interrogating shit'n I do, and she says what she knows about the whole business, that is most likely shit too. Because nobody really does know. The hardest part of her job, she tells me, is persuadin' the patient: stop lying. But with Gayle this's someone who's
paying her
, paying money to talk to her. And then that person lies to her too. You tell me how that can make sense. But, anyway, she says is that what has to happen first is, first you have to resolve dominance. The issue of who's gonna dominate whom, which chicken's gonna be doin' the peckin'; which one is gonna get pecked. Have to get that all out of the way. Because it's a formality, no more'n that, but both animals need to resolve it, have to, really, before there's ever gonna be any hope at all of them being able to sit down and have a real beak-to-beak talk. And the one who goes into it expecting that he's gonna be the peck
ee?
This kinda surprised me, I admit: he's even more anxious than the one that's gonna be the peck-
er
is, to get it out of the way. And
isn't
upset when it comes out that way, that he's the one gettin' pecked-on, because that's what he thought all along. What he expected would happen.