Bomber's Law (6 page)

“Isn't what you mean,” Dell'Appa said, “that he died retired? Not that he was unemployed? He must've been well into his mid-seventies by then. They must've had pensions, the retirement plans and all.”

“Oh, sure,” Brennan said, “they had those. They had the pensions. Nothing like Fat City, no, but they were union men. So, yeah, they had their retirement pay, and their Social Security. It wasn't like he and Ma were destitute or anything. House was all paid off. There were six of us kids, but only four of us in school. Rest of us all were working. Still living at home, sure, we all were. Either 'til we got
drafted, the boys, or made up our minds to enlist. And the two girls out fishin' for marriage proposals, even though they were both still in school, but still working part time after school and on weekends. We were all paying our way. Dad and Ma had no reason to worry. They were all right as far as the money, as far as that was concerned.

“So: No,” Brennan said, “it wasn't that. It was the job itself. It was not having the job. Dad'd always had one of those, ever since the Japs surrendered, he got discharged and came home. When he got laid off, it was like he'd been beaten himself, worse'n the Japs ever were. By his own people, people he fought to protect. That's what he couldn't get over: Americans did this to him.

“When he still had the job, which he did until we were mostly all grown up, like I said, he was a different kind of man. He was proud of himself. Oh, sure, he was always griping that he should've had more money. Or some big promotion with a nice raise that some young college boy'd gotten should by rights've gone to him. But just the same, he knew what he was then. And whether you and I now'd look at what he did back then and say: ‘Well, it wasn't all that much, throwin' cabbages around,' well, that doesn't really matter now. And it wouldn't've mattered then, either. At least not to him. Right or wrong, he was proud of what he did, proud of the job he had, and that he did it well.

“And so he was also proud of the money that he earned, and that was the end of horse questions. Those were honorable wages he brought home. Dollars that he worked for so he could take care of his family. As he'd promised he would do, and as a man did anyway, if he was a man. So how those dollars got spent, what they got spent for, that was also important. They couldn't be wasted. What they went for had to be something just as honorable and important as his work that'd earned them. Because if it wasn't, well then, he was a fool to be taking the whole thing so seriously and working so hard to bring those dollars home. So, when he figured out that for working that same hour that one of us would spend riding the horse, half of what he made would've gone to pay that horse, Dad got good and mad. He hit the roof. ‘I will be damned,' he said, when the question came up that once—I think it was my sister Amy was the one that brought it up—‘I will be damned if I will work half of every hour, or half of any goddamned hour, just throw away thirty goddamned minutes out of
my damned life that I will never see again, to pay a stupid goddamned
horse
to work for only twice as long.' And that was the end of it. Never come up again in our house, least that I ever heard.

“But Doug, like I say, he's done real good, and this is a different generation. So his kids're now gonna learn how to ride. The horse could be making as much as, oh, one of us is, even one of those so-called major-league ballplayers you got now—two-million-a-year, two-thirty-two banjo-hitter who lets the easy grounders go right through his legs, and when he does catch one, throws it over the first baseman's head into the dugout, and then shoots off his mouth to the press about how it wasn't his fault. It wouldn't matter to Doug. Those kids, to Doug: it's like they're, you know, the British royal family there, fuckin' dummies they are. But, something along that line, right? Prolly grow up chasin' foxes and stuff, screwin' everyone but their own husbands and wives, the ones they're supposed to be screwin'.”

“I still don't see anything wrong with it,” Dell'Appa said. “The horses, I mean. Maybe not with the Royal Family either. I woke up every day, had to look at one of those dames over my newspaper and my morning coffee, I think I might run around. And considering how I look, how I am most mornings, I dunno as I could really blame a dame who got so bored she couldn't stand it, and then fooled around on me.

“But, your brother's young kids learning horseback riding? Sounds just great to me. All this screaming bullshit about the yuppies and their kids: the ballet lessons; private schools; the gymnastics, vacations, and music lessons; blah blah blah: ‘These kids're growin' up spoiled.' Well, so what if they are? I wish when I was growing up, my parents'd had that kind of money, spoil the ass off of me. Buy me computer games and stuff, take me to Disney World. But okay, so they didn't. Shame on them and shame on me. I still've done all right, I think, even with my dee-prived childhood. I checked my head this morning, I got out of bed, and it's still screwed on nice and straight. But, would I've liked it better, if my folks'd had the money so that they could buy me everything my little heart desired, and so that was what they did? Go to Boston, or New York, even, every Saturday, and wall-to-wall FAO Schwarz? Leavin' nothin' but the shelves and my orders for next week? You bet your ass I would've. I
would've gone apeshit for that, if I'd grown up that way. So, you can afford it? Fine. If you can, and if you want to, then by all means do it. If you got the money, and your kids appreciate it—because not all of 'em will; some of them're little shits, just like some grown-ups are—but if they can have a good time and then still be nice kids afterwards, well, take 'em to Saint Louie, Louie, take 'em to the fair.”

“That isn't what I'm sayin',” Brennan said with weariness. “If you'd ever give me a chance to finish, you'd know it isn't. The swimming lessons and the riding lessons, all the other stuff: I'm all for that, all right? I agree with you. What I'm trying to tell you is that when Doug and Laura's kids go swimming, go to learn to swim, Laura goes swimming too. When the kids're gonna go onna pony rides, and so they're putting on their black
jackets
, and their special tan
pants
, and their hundred-dollar fancy
boots
, and their special little
black hats
that look like the derbies there, but they're really hard hats you could wear on a construction site and have a whole bucket of hot rivets drop on your head from thirty stories up, without gettin' a hair outta place, guess who's also putting on the whole damned horsie uniform? Laura is, is who. By the time Dougie's little family's all ready to go down the Blue Hills Reservation there and ride the little ponies, they've got on enough horse-clothes that cost a whole shitload of money that if you put it all together and used it to buy a horse instead, you could buy at least one of them that maybe wasn't quite fast enough to beat the other horsies in the tenth, the dogfood race, onna card at Upsan Downs, but still can walk and eat and shit, and then you'd have your own. Your own living, breathing horse. You could ride him any time, in your own old clothes and your big brother's hockey helmet. Any time you liked.

“And that is what I mean, that's the sort of thing I mean. That's what Laura does, that's the kind of thing she does and she did on Hallowe'en. And then ten days later, the same thing. It didn't make no sense the first time, made no sense at all, so naturally, first chance she got, the first excuse she had, she did it all again. The woman isn't right. She gets all excited and so forth about something new that she's going to do with the kids, and how great it's gonna be for them, that pretty soon she's completely forgotten what it really is that they're gonna do, and why it was gonna be so great for the kids. And then all she can think about is all the new things she's gonna need to
do this, and how many of them. And that's what they always end up doing: getting dressed up in new outfits, messing around with a bunch of new gadgets, and making no sense at all. And she did it again, Hallowe'en.”

“What: ‘she did'?” Dell'Appa said.

“With the toilet paper,” Brennan said. “Doug goes off to work this particular morning, just before Hallowe'en, and I guess it seemed safe enough. Laura's acting normal, right? Normal as she ever does. She's making breakfast for the kids, and they're all excited, like little kids always get 'fore Hallowe'en, about what they're gonna be, what they're gonna go as, how they're gonna be dressed up when they go out Hallowe'en—nothing wrong with that. So Doug goes out, gets in his car, and he goes off to his office. And he puts in his regular day's work, prolly makes thirty grand, maybe forty; goes from there to the gym, works out an hour. Then he showers, gets dressed, and goes home. Where he gets a little surprise. The big red maples, both sides of the driveway, the shrubs and the dogwoods, all that stuff? Every single
tree
, every single
shrub
, every single anything that's in that goddamned yard and's got a branch on it that isn't right down on the ground: every goddamned one of them is draped with toilet paper.”

“Toilet paper,” Dell'Appa said, “hanging from the trees and stuff?”

“You got it,” Brennan said. “Seems that after Doug left for work, Laura and the kids got so interested, talking about the costumes that she's making for the three of them, just the kids, now for Hallowe'en—so far as I heard, I don't
think
Laura's planning to go out with them wearin' a tall, pointy black hat and a long pointy nose, ridin' on a carpet-sweeper or something, although I could be wrong on that—that they lose all track of time and the kids miss the school bus. Well, two of them miss the school bus and the other one misses the kindergarten minivan. So Laura has to take them. In her new BMW wagon.”

“
Hey
,” Dell'Appa said, “nice, but
nice.
That's a pretty pricey item.”

“I'm here to tell you,” Brennan said, “it lists for over forty grand there, and by the time you get through adding on the sales tax and the luxury and all that other crap, you're gettin' a lot closer to fifty'n
I'd feel comfortable being. Where the cars're concerned, well, it isn't like it is with the boats, with Dougie; where cars're involved, Doug doesn't stint.

“But it's really kind of funny, you know? How often those kids of theirs're missing buses alla time now, since Doug bought it. When Laura had the Audi sedan, the kids never had this trouble. The buses came at the same times—nothing's changed on that. And Laura back then always had the kids all ready, waiting for their rides. No big deal. But since the Bimmer comes her way, well, nobody can get started now in time to catch their bus. My own suspicion is—I don't mind telling you this; I would not say it to Doug—that once they really did miss the buses; the first time, they actually did. So that time it was legit. Laura really hadda do it; she didn't have a choice. But then, she did it that time, my guess is that she happened to spot someone that she really doesn't like, looking that new car over and getting the old slow-burn on. I mean: really jealous. Eating their belly out. And that's where this all comes from.

“I don't mean that it's just Laura,” Brennan said. “That's not what I'm saying to you here. It's all women. Women in general. Women're really mean like that, much worse'n we are, about those kinds of things. They're much quicker to notice it when something that they're doing, that they've got a perfect right to do; something that nobody's got any right to stop them from doing; but just the same there really isn't any need for them to be doing that particular thing right then, and that particular thing at that particular point in time—putting makeup on, but doing it right at the table in the restaurant, maybe, instead of going to the ladies' room—is really getting on someone's nerves? It's really getting their goat. Well, a woman'll notice that, always. And the minute, hell,
the second
, that she does, bang, that's it. She's gonna do it some more. A lot more. Even if she's finished, and doesn't need to, do it any more. If it's the lipstick-and-makeup thing, she's gonna put on so much of it, and screw around with it so long, that if you timed her without seeing what it really was that she was doing, you would think that she was grooming a big old poodle for a dog-show on TV from Madison Square Garden. Or maybe a whole horse, for a horse-show.”

Brennan paused and reflected. “I think it's because when a woman deliberately does things that she knows'll really get on somebody
else's nerves, really yank their chain for them, there is usually not the slightest chance that the person that she's pissing off like that is gonna say to her, like they would to you and me, and sincerely mean it: ‘
Oh
-kay, that creases it. If you do that once more, I'm gonna get out of this chair, which I don't wanna do because I got my feet up and I'm all nice and comfortable, and I'm gonna haul off and hit you so hard inna mouth that when your first grandchildren start getting born, they'll all need Polident too.'

“I'm not talkin' about the Buddies of this world here now, the Buddies that whack their women around for no reason. Or the hookers that fight worse'n men do, the street-whores protecting their corner. They got nothing to do with this here. What I'm talking about with respectable women like Laura, an' it doesn't matter if they're black or white, is … I'm not saying they should get bopped when they deliberately piss other people off. What I'm saying to you here is that they don't even ever get warned, you know,
threatened
, with a good shot upside the head, if they don't cut it out and start behaving themselves. Not that either one of us'd ever do it, go ahead and actually
do
it or anything, hit a woman like that, I mean, but still, the way things are it's not even something that they even have to even, you know, even
think
about. So as far as they're concerned there isn't any reason to behave themselves if they're having any fun at all when they're
mis
-behaving. See?”