Dancing Aztecs (23 page)

Angela was trying to make a particularly tricky no-trump bid, and barely looked up. “Again?”

“He sounds
weird.”

“What's he want this time?”

“I think you better talk to him, Angela. I'll play the hand.”

Angela tried a finesse from dummy in diamonds, but Barbara was too stupid to be finessed. Down came her ace. “Shit,” Angela said, got to her feet, and handed the cards to Teresa. “Sorry, partner, we're down one.”

“We'll do what we can,” Teresa said.

Angela went into the living room and spoke into the phone. “Now what?”

“What took you so long?”
The shrill rapid whisper was only barely recognizable as Mel's voice.

Angela was in no mood for a lot of crap. “What's the matter, Mel?”

“I'm captured!”

“Where? Back in Haddam's Ear?”

“On Long Island. Some huge black football player's got me!”

“Mel, I don't know what to do with you tonight.”

“Send the guys out to Wylie Cheshire's house, 58 Ridge Road, Deer Park! Hurry!”

“There's no guys here. You're the only one ever calls.”

“Listen, Angela, this is a phone in the bathroom! They won't let me stay in here much longer! They're waiting for a guy I sold a car to, years ago! Once he gets here and identifies me, I don't know
WHAT
they'll do!”

“I'll come out myself,” Angela decided. Anything was better than more of that bridge game. “Give me the address again.”

“These are big mean guys, honey!”

“I'm a big mean girl. What's the address?”

“Wylie Cheshire, 58 Ridge Road, Deer Park!”

“Be right there,” Angela said.

BEFORE LONG …

Greater New York is in some ways like a house. Manhattan is the living room, with the TV and the stereo and the good furniture, where guests are entertained. Brooklyn and Queens are the bedrooms where the family sleeps, and the Bronx is the attic, full of inflammable crap that nobody has any use for. Staten Island is the backyard, and Long Island is the detached garage, so filled up with paint cans, workbenches, and a motorboat that yon can't get the car in it any more. Hudson County over in New Jersey is the basement, with the furnace and the freezer and the stacks of old newspapers, and the Jersey swamps are the toilet. Westchester is the den, with paneling and a fake kerosene lamp, and Connecticut is the guest room, with starched curtains and landscape prints. The kitchen is way up in Albany, which means the food is always cold by the time it gets to the table, and the formal dining room was torn down by William Zeckendorf and friends back in the early fifties.

Jerry Manelli had spent most of his life in just one corner of this house, and he was only now beginning to realize it. The last twenty-four hours had been frustrating, but they'd also been interesting, catching his attention as nothing had done for years. While he'd been moving in the small circle of the family and Inter-Air Forwarding and a succession of Myrnas, the world all around him had been full of strange neighborhoods and even stranger citizens, and if they weren't people you'd want to be around every day of your life, so what? They were new experiences, and it had been a long while since Jerry had had any new experiences.

The problem was Inter-Air Forwarding. The damn thing was
too
successful. It had started out to be a hustle, and bit by bit it had turned into a job. A job. He could get arrested for it, but that didn't make it anything different; it was still a job.

Thirty years from now he could steal himself a gold watch, and retire with the old man, looking for hobbies.

It had been the faggots' incomprehensible living room that had set him off, for some damn reason, that and the comedy scene they'd played out, each of them believing the other one had brought Jerry home. That would make a good story, except the living room put a twist on it that confused things. And you had to see them in
that
living room to get the point. Jerry could maybe tell the story to the other guys so they'd laugh, but they wouldn't actually get it, because they wouldn't understand about the living room. Not even Mel, who was the family intellectual. (Jews couldn't help themselves that way. Your Jew was the only kind of guy that could be an egghead—read books, listen to classical music on the car radio—and still be an all right guy.)

But other things had added to Jerry's present weird mood, his new view of himself as someone who'd suddenly found he was in a six-foot-deep rut when all along he'd thought of himself as sailing. There was Harlem, and the drunken black man. There was the stoned naked man in the closet; in some sort of oddball way, he'd been fun to talk to.

But the capper was the missing wife, Bobbi Harwood. What an exit! Throw all his shit out the window, pack your bags, and
gone
. Gone where? Into the billion comers and crevices of New York City, out into a world of such endless possibility that the mind couldn't even grasp it. It seemed to Jerry that Bobbi Harwood must also have found herself in that six-foot-deep rut, and she'd done the only sensible thing there was to do:
leap!
Get out of that rut, and go someplace else.

But where? Thinking about Bobbi Harwood, trying to figure out where and how to find her, had made Jerry more and more aware of just how easy
he
was to find.

How can you tell the Tuesdays from the Thursdays? You can't.

Thinking things over, Jerry drove down from Harlem almost all the way to the Midtown Tunnel before he stopped at a phone booth to call the Bernstein house. But then it wasn't his sister Angela who answered but his brother-in-law Frank's sister-in-law Barbara, who said, “Nobody's here but me.”

“Where's Angela?”

“Mel called and said he was in some kind of trouble somewhere, so Angela and Teresa and Kathleen went out to rescue him.”

“Angela and Teresa and Kathleen? Where's the
guys?”

“Frank just called about ten minutes ago. He sounded really upset about something, and he said he was on the way back, and he asked me if anybody else had found the right statue, and when I told him no he used curse words.”

“What about Floyd?”

“He's coming with Frank.”

“Well, I'm on my way back, too,” Jerry told her. “I got three of my four statues, but none of them were any good. I'll have to look for the fourth one tomorrow.”

“Will you want a cup of coffee?”

“I'll want a beer,” Jerry said. “Lots of beer.”

“That's funny,” Barbara said. “Frank said the exact same thing.”

LATER …

Angela Bernstein, Teresa McCann, and Kathleen Podenski got out of the station wagon in front of Wylie Cheshire's house, where Mel was being imprisoned. Angela said, “You two go in there and distract them.”

The two women looked blank. Kathleen said, “Distract them?”

“Tell them you're Avon Ladies.”

“We don't have any display things.”

“Tell them you're Avon Lady Avon Ladies, you're here recruiting new Avon Ladies.”

Both women look doubtful. Teresa said, “I'm not sure I—”

“Oh, for God's sake,” Angela said, “use your imagination! Start a Tupperware party, be Welcome Wagon girls, be their local Muscular Dystrophy volunteer, be taking up collections for PONY. Do
something!”

“Well, all right,” Teresa said, but she still looked doubtful. So did Kathleen, but at any rate both women finally started up the neat slate walk through the clipped green lawn toward the brick ranch-style house where Mel was a prisoner.

And Angela went around to the side of the house. This was an expensive Long Island neighborhood, with large house lots, so the nearest neighbors were far away beyond privacy screens of shrubbery. Angela, waiting till Teresa and Kathleen had done their Avon Lady ding-dong at the front door, began to move down the side of the house, looking in windows. In the living room, greeting Teresa and Kathleen, were two black couples; the women were young and personable, one of the men was kind of lanky and loose-jointed, and the other man was a
monster
. “Good Lord,” Angela murmured, “I wouldn't want to go to bed with
that”
And she moved along.

In one bedroom were any number of black children asleep in bunk beds. In another were two black girls asleep in matching youth beds; lace frills skirted
everything
in the room, including the wastepaper basket.

Finally the rear of the house. The back door was unlocked and inside was an extremely neat kitchen. The lady of this house ran a very tight ship, from the look of things.

But where was Mel? Cautiously Angela crossed the kitchen and moved through an empty dining room. Ahead she could hear the murmur of conversation; Teresa's voice, Kathleen's voice, other voices. Angela couldn't make out exactly what was being said, but the tone seemed generally calm and civilized, so she remained unworried.

But where in
hell
was Mel? Not in the master bedroom, and not in the excessively masculine little den, and that was it for the house, except for the basement, so back to the kitchen Angela went, and down the stairs to a family room so cluttered with sports equipment and trophies it looked like Abercrombie & Fitch's window after a bombing.

Mel was in the utility room with the furnace and water heater and washing machine and drier, and he looked just as white as they did. “You made it!” he said, in a shrill whisper, and tried to clutch Angela to him.

“Later,” Angela said, disengaging herself. “Come on, let's get out of here before something goes wrong upstairs.”

Upstairs, things weren't precisely going wrong, but they were going just a bit agley. Teresa and Kathleen had entered the house without discussing what exact cover story they would use, and so Teresa had gotten herself rather thoroughly entwined in a presentation of herself as a spokesperson for the League of Women Voters before she realized that Kathleen appeared to be collecting for cystic fibrosis. The glaze slowly spreading over the eyes of Wylie Cheshire, Georgia Cheshire, Deke Finburdy, and Faith Finburdy was not diminished when both women simultaneously switched horses in midstream. Were these women asking them to
vote
for cystic fibrosis?

Meantime, Angela was trying to hurry Mel upstairs, but Mel was whispering, “Wait a minute, will you? Let's get what we came after.”

“Well,
hurry
.”

Mel hurried. He crossed the family room, plucked the Dancing Aztec Priest from its place amid the trophies, and finally joined the jittering Angela on the stairs. Up they went, and out the back door, and around to the front of the house, where a wiry black man who'd just clambered out of a thoroughly disreputable old Buick took one look at Mel and shouted at the top of his voice,
“You!
You
are
the son bitch sold me that car!
Hey, Wyyy-lieee!”

“Oh, no,” said Mel.

“You shut up,” Angela said to the black man. “Just shut up, that's all.”

And at that instant Wally Hintzlebel leaped out of nowhere, grabbed the Dancing Aztec Priest out of Mel's astonished hand, spun away, and ran pell-mell into Angela, so that the two of them went sprawling together onto the lawn.

“The statue!” Mel shouted, and the aggrieved black man punched him in the eye. “Ow,” said Mel, and punched him back. The house door opened, and a
lot
of people came running out.

Angela and Wally sat up and stared at one another. “You!” said Angela. “What the hell are
you
doing here?”

“Grab the statue!” Mel shouted at his wife. He was scuffling with the black man, who had grabbed him around the waist and was trying to give him a bear hug.

Wylie Cheshire came chugging across the lawn, plucked Mel and the wiry black man apart, and said to Mel, “Who let
you
out, goddam it?”

“Wylie!” yelled the black man. “That's him, that
is
him!”

“Shut up, Willy,” said Wylie. He shook Mel a little. “Who let you out, huh? Just tell me that much.”

Mel, however, was paying insufficient attention to Wylie, since he was watching instead the byplay on the lawn between Angela and Wally. Angela and Wally were sitting facing one another, and Angela was saying, “You listened in that closet, didn't you? You
dirty
bastard.”

“I got just as much right as any of
you
people,” Wally said.

“
Give
me that statue,” Angela snapped, and tried to grab it out of Wally's hand. The two of them rolled on the lawn.

Meanwhile, Willy was shouting, “Wylie, he sold me that Willys!”

“Shut
up
, Willy, like I told you before! You listen to me, you! How'd you get outa that—”

“Oh, leave me alone,” Mel said, and pushed Wylie away as though he were a flea. Wylie gaped at him in utter amazement, and Mel went over to say to Angela, “And what's all
this?”

Angela, having kneed Wally a good one, was struggling to her feet with the statue in her possession. “Come on,” she said.

“You better answer me, Angela,” Mel said. (In the background, Willy was now explaining to Deke Finburdy that it was indeed Mel who had long ago sold him that Willys, while Georgia Cheshire was asking Teresa for more information about the League of Women Voters, and both Faith Finburdy and Kathleen were standing around with their mouths open.) And Mel repeated, “You better answer me.”

“Oh, don't be stupid,” Angela said, and made as if to march away.

Wylie Cheshire stopped her by standing in front of her and saying, “That's
my
statue, lady.”

“Oh, it is, is it? Then
here”
And, in total exasperation, Angela whammed him over the head with it.

Fortunately for Wylie, it wasn't the right one. It broke, and Wylie staggered back, and Angela gave everybody the same disgusted glare—Mel and Wylie and Wally and Willy and Deke and Kathleen and Teresa and Faith and Georgia—and marched away to the station wagon. Enough was enough.