Hard Case Crime: Dutch Uncle (28 page)

Harry did not think this was bad news. Just the opposite. He was thrilled.

Although Aggie had been wanting to have a baby, she didn’t know if she was ready for it. She didn’t know if this was the right time.

Fair enough. Who was ready to be a parent? But if everybody thought that way, they might as well give the world back to the monkeys.

His attitude was good, but his attitude alone didn’t do enough to reassure Aggie.

“Think of it as having nothing to do with me,” she said.

“That’s stupid,” Harry said. “It has everything to do with you.”

“Then think of it as an independent event. Think about being a father. Think about me being dead, and you having sole responsibility for this child. How’s that look?”

Harry despised hypothetical problems. They were a waste of time. He’d rather deal with the reality of a situation, and the reality of this one was, there was going to be a third tiny existence in the apartment that was going to need to be fed and burped and have shoes bought for it.

“Statistically,” he said, “I’ll be around for another thirty-five years, minus a few on the back end if I don’t quit smoking soon. What’re you now, twenty-nine?”

“Twenty-nine,” she said.

“Odds are you make it to seventy-eight. Not a bad run, all things considered. That’s almost fifty years. You’re going to be tied to me for thirty-five of those fifty years.”

There. Right back at her. “Which is like what, seventy percent of the rest of your life? Think about it.”

“I have thought about it, only you make it sound like you’re selling insurance.”

“Gambling is what I had in mind,” Harry said, “but insurance is good. It’s like taking a stake in the future. I’m not saying I have any confidence in the future, but it’s going to get here regardless. I say we have the kid.”

Lying in bed a couple nights later, imagining a son, Harry thought about playing catch with his boy. It was the fear most often mouthed by guys who were scared they were too old for children. The fear of catch. As if this were the single, defining experience of fatherhood. But how taxing was tossing a baseball? And when did his old man ever play catch with him?

They were both awake. Aggie said, “Do you really think you’re going to be tied to me for the rest of your life?”

Harry said, “Mmmmmm,” since there was no point in pretending he was asleep.

“After we have the baby?”

Harry said, “Does this mean it’s been decided?” All the guys living in mortal fear of being too old for catch, it wasn’t like they’d been out there throwing baseballs at their fathers, either.

“Answer me,” she said.

“If we’re going to be any kind of parents, the answer is yes.”

“Doesn’t that scare you?”

“Nothing scares me,” Harry said, though that wasn’t true. The prospect of being mangled in a car wreck, now that he was driving all the time, on point against motorists in their seventies and eighties, that scared the shit right out of him.

“Your life is going to change,” Aggie said, and she rolled onto her side, facing away from him. “In a hurry.”

It already had. Not long ago, he was hustling blow and holding his breath until Jimmy De Steffano wired up their next heist, doing bouncer gigs for Frankie Yin. Now he liked to be asleep by midnight, so he could be up at seven for his maintenance man job.

She was right. Life changed in a hurry. Like if you were sailing through an intersection without a care in the world, and some half-blind octogenarian came ripping into your ass, your life could change in a second.

Connor Merrill turned out to be worth every penny Arthur paid him. Harry had to serve out the rest of his minimum, ninety days, but after that he was back on his parole deal. Florida broke his balls on the terms: Three years, with five more of probation thrown on top. Any fuck-ups during that time, he was going back in, two years, no questions, no nothing. It was as harsh as they could make it. But the bottom line was, for now he was out, and he had Merrill to thank for that.

Aggie hooked him up with the job. She knew somebody in the company that managed the apartment complex, and they were looking for a guy. Harry was responsible for cleaning the pool, a cinch if you did it regularly, for cutting the grass, and for vacuuming the carpets in the hallways. He had to fix little shit that broke, a door, a window, but if there was a major problem with plumbing or electricity, Harry called in the plumber or the electrician. Maintenance man was not a spectacular career, but it beat the hell out of being in jail.

For his latest challenge, management had decided it was time to paint, so Harry was in charge of hiring and supervising the painting crew. Painting was easy. You had to make sure the new color covered the old color, and you had to be neat, or else you wound up with paint all over the fucking place, and that was about it.

But he couldn’t keep any painters. Seven dollars an hour was not a lot of money, and Harry understood that, but the guys who answered his classified would work a day, demand their pay, and that’d be the end of them. One clown came back when he was short of wine money, to cadge a five-dollar “advance.”

For a while it looked like Harry’s permanent crew would consist of himself, Cedric Baker, and a Seminole Indian named Pat Mule Deer, but Pat went and got blasted on schnaaps, busted up a bar, and took on the Sheriffs when they arrived, in an eerily familiar scenario. He left Harry a message on the office answering machine, asking Harry to bail him out, and that was the last Harry heard of Pat Mule Deer.

Cedric Baker appeared on a Tuesday, with a metal lunch pail and work boots spattered mostly white. He was from some podunk in South Carolina that was so small it got absorbed by a neighboring town. Compared to picking strawberries, as far as Cedric was concerned, painting was genteel employment. And he painted with pride. He had a delicate touch with a two-inch brush, deftly cutting trim, no running, no dripping, before Harry went in after him and whacked the walls with his roller, or when they could get away with it, the Power Painter.

Cedric had to take two buses to get there, but he was on time every morning with the lunch bucket and a thermos of what Cedric said was iced tea. Harry knew it was spiked, and Cedric knew that Harry knew, but whatever it was, it didn’t slow Cedric down.

Harry bumped him up to eight bucks an hour, then started paying him for his half-hour lunches and two fifteen-minute breaks. They finally settled on three-fifty for the week. Harry pulled his ad from Aggie’s newspaper, hoping to go the rest of the way, just Cedric and him.

Cedric had caramel-colored skin and hair that was turning silver. His Adam’s apple jutted from his throat, and his shoulders were stooped from a lifetime of bad posture, but he was quite a hit with the ladies. He lived with a woman he called the missus, though they weren’t married. Cedric had yet to divorce his third wife, the last in a series of joyous unions that yielded six children, flung all over the East Coast. One of the exes operated a beauty parlor in Queens. Cedric spent five years with her, five of the most miserable years, he reckoned, of his whole up-and-down life.

“We stayed in an apartment over the shop,” Cedric recollected, “out there by the ballpark. Between the trains and the traffic and the airplanes screaming over your head, you never heard so much noise. And that’s just outside the house. The woman never shut up. Run her mouth all day with them hens, come up the house, start running in on me. I got so I couldn’t take no more of her, and one day I up and left. Headed back for Carolina.”

Left her on her own with two of his kids. Didn’t Cedric think that was kind of shitty?

“She weren’t depending on me for nothing. She was making herself a good living.” Cedric swabbed his brush in a puddle of eggshell white, and straightening, cut in a right angle over a window, back and forth, back and forth. “Had herself another man, too.”

Ah-ha.

“Long before I was out of the picture.”

This was later on in the day, when his thermos was empty, that Cedric did all this talking. He spoke slowly, and when he talked for any length of time, like now, his voice lost power.

He graduated from the can’t-live-with-’em-can’t-live without-’em school, and Harry thought, after his third time, no charm, Cedric ought to know what he was talking about. Harry had his own dim views on marriage, but he kept them to himself. After a while, he just stopped listening.

Aggie was washing the dishes before she put them into the dishwasher, and Harry watched her, her belly bulging against the denim of her Levi’s. Her boobs were swelling, too. Complaining that they hurt, she wore a specially designed bra, even when she was at home.

Her doctor told her she could tend bar into her third trimester, or until she got too uncomfortable being on her feet. Aggie hadn’t breathed a word of her pregnancy to Bryce or anybody else at Sailor Randy’s, but she liked the idea of pulling in sympathy tips once she started to show.

Harry hated it. Bartending was a rotten job for a pregnant woman, and she could’ve quit without a problem. They’d have been all right for money. The newspaper was covering her obstetrical bills.

But it didn’t have to do with money. The job represented independence. They’d had two or three arguments about Sailor Randy’s before Harry figured this out, but when he did, he dropped the opposition. Let her work there if she wanted to. Pretty soon, she wouldn’t want to.

He said, “The Catholics are going to give you a hard time about baptizing this kid, if you’re not married.”

She measured a scoop of powdered soap. “Spending a lot of late nights with your Catechism?”

“I’m just saying, you know.”

“Let me ask you a question, Saint Ignatius, when was the last time you were even in a church?”

“Not counting weddings and funerals?”

“No, throw them in, too.”

“I can’t remember. Two years ago?”

“Why are you so hot on making this kid a Catholic,” Aggie said, “when you don’t pay attention to it yourself?”

“I think we’ve got two separate issues here.”

“And they are?”

“One, us getting married,” Harry said, “and two, bringing up the baby in the Church.”

“Who said anything about us getting married?”

“I think I just did.”

It took her a while, but she said, “I don’t know how I feel about that.”

“I don’t know how I feel about it either, but I’m leaning toward considering it might not be a bad idea.”

“In an ideal world,” she said, “a child would be brought up by a mother and a father who were married, providing a stable home environment.” She was drying her hands on a dishtowel. “But we’re light years away from an ideal world.”

Aggie was good at re-routing a discussion out of the specific and into the general, in order to make some larger, philosophical point. In a minute she was going to be citing some obscure sociological statistic she read in the newspaper of hers, not talking about whether it was a good idea for them to get married. She’d get back around to that when she was ready, those impulses surfacing at the worst times, like when he was getting ready for work. They wouldn’t have time to finish what they were talking about, and he’d have this conflict with Aggie hanging over his head. Or she’d get all wordy when he was trying to sleep. Harry sensed a middle-of-the-night conversation looming.

Harry extended Cedric’s work for a week, retouching spotty patches, pitching in with the final clean-up, but by that Friday, there was nothing left to do. They finished at noon and killed time, Cedric squeezing hot drags from the generic cigarettes he bought on the Reservation. He could afford the real kind, but stuck to the raspy, no-name ones. That was brand loyalty for you.

They started drinking in the bar Pat Mule Deer made famous, a storefront joint that poured beer in plastic cups. Pick-ups and panel trucks crowded the parking lot. Drinkers, sunburnt and pale in shirts with name patches over their pockets, refigured dreams of late-life laziness as a few after-work belts in some strip-mall dive.

The barmaid had a big, girdled ass she stuffed into black stretch pants, and wore a blouse that allowed peeks into her bra every time she bent to get something. Her hair, blown into a bouffant, was bleached a starchy white. Late-forties, she wasn’t lacking a certain molting charm.

Cedric ordered a Genny Cream Ale. Harry was surprised the stuff still existed, but it was popular with the old men, at seventy-five cents a glass. It went down better than Harry remembered, frosty cold, thick, sweet aftertaste.

When it was time for their third round, Harry switched to Dewar’s White Label, served in a one-and-a-half ounce jigger. For his next one, he asked for a double, and the barmaid tipped two brimming measures into a plastic tumbler.

Cedric had started talking by then, his face pointing forward, glancing out of the corners of his eyes. He was theorizing about money, his second-favorite subject, where it came from, where it went. Money, he said, was like electricity. It was generated at a source and conducted until it found a ground, say the stock market or the auto repair shop.

“You might not have it anymore, but it has not disappeared.”

Coming from Cedric, this kind of thinking bore the weight of an advanced mathematical equation. High-concept. Abstract, even.

“This bar right here, now this is a good example of what I’m talking about. You see all these men?”

He wasn’t trying to trip Harry up. This was a sincere question, and Cedric was waiting for an answer. Harry said, “Yeah?”

“These men been working all week, making money. Some of it got to go to the house rent, the groceries, make the car note, you follow me?”

Harry was going to say something, but Cedric said, “Hold off. That money had to come from somewhere first. This man here,” he said, making an arbitrary gesture at nobody in particular, “is a plumber. He unstopped somebody’s sink today. Earned himself two hundred dollars for the job.”

“Fucking plumbers are expensive,” Harry said.

“That two hundred gonna stay in the plumber’s pocket?”

“He’s got his own bills,” Harry said, speeding up the story, trying to get the barmaid’s attention.