Hope to Die (6 page)

"Right."

"I guess we didn't count, me and Mikey."

I didn't have anything to say to that. And the anger I'd felt before was gone now, stuffed wherever that sort of thing gets stuffed. If I felt anything it was an almighty weariness. I wanted this little talk to be over and I knew it was going to go on forever.

"Why'd you come, anyway?"

"Because your brother called me up and told me about it," I said. "Not Saturday, when he found out about it, and not Sunday when you both got here, but late last night." I turned to Michael. "That was considerate," I said. "That way I didn't have a long period of agonizing before the funeral."

"I just- "

"In fact," I said, "with any luck at all I'd have made plans it would have been too late to cancel, and I wouldn't be here at all. Just your luck I'm a guy who hasn't got too much to do these days."

"I was afraid to call," he said.

"What were you afraid of?"

"I don't know. How you'd take it, what you'd say. That you'd come, that you wouldn't come. I don't know."

"I couldn't not come," I said. "I won't pretend I wanted to be here, but there's no way I could have stayed away. I had to be here for you two, even though you might have been happier if I'd stayed in the city. And I had to be here for her." I took a breath. "She was a good woman, your mother. I couldn't have stayed married to anyone, the kind of man I was. She did the best she could. Jesus, I guess we both did the best we could. That's what everybody does, the best they can, and that's all anybody does."

Andy wiped away tears with his sleeve. He said, "Dad, I'm sorry."

"It's all right."

"I'm sorry as hell. I don't know what got into me."

"Six different kinds of booze," Michael said, "all in one drink. What the hell did you expect?"

What did any of us expect?

"I'm afraid you won't get to see any of them this time around," I told Elaine. "Mike and June fly home tomorrow morning."

"What did June do, leave Melanie with her parents?"

"They brought her along," I said, "but I didn't get to see her. June thought the funeral would be too much for her, so she stayed at the house. I don't know whether they hired a sitter or some family member stayed with her."

"And you didn't get to see her at all?"

"I could have, if I'd wanted to go to the house, but I decided I'd rather come straight home."

"I don't blame you. What about Andy? He has to go straight home toDenver?"

" Tucson."

"Tucsonin the summer? It's like an oven."

"Well, I guess he figures he'll enjoy the winters. If he's still there."

"Your rolling stone."

"Not mine," I said. "Not anymore. They're neither of them mine anymore, honey. I don't know if they ever were."

"You're saying that because of the kind of day you've just had."

"That's only part of it. Oh, I'm still their father, and they're still my sons. Otherwise we wouldn't get on one another's nerves the way we do. We'll get calls and cards at Christmas, and Andy may even keep us up to date on address changes. And they'll call if they happen to be in the city. Maybe not every time they come here, but some of the time. Of course they won't come to the city all that often."

"Baby- "

"And when I drop dead," I said, "they'll fly in for the funeral, and they'll show up wearing suits. They both look good in suits, I have to say that for them. They'll help carry the box, they got in practice for that this afternoon, although they'll have more weight to deal with next time."

"Unless you waste away," she said.

"Aren't you something," I said. "You won't let me get away with a thing, will you?"

"Would you love me more if I did?"

"I don't see how I could. They'll be decent to you, incidentally. They were decent to Gray. That's what they call him, Gray."

"So you said."

"Oh, I mentioned that? Gray. Big, good-looking fellow with one of those open, honest faces. Looked like he might have played football in school. Linebacker, maybe. Put on some weight since then but stayed in pretty good shape."

"You're in pretty good shape yourself."

"For a guy on the verge of wasting away. Right now they resent you some, but right now they resent everybody. When the time comes, they'll stand up."

"That'll be a comfort."

"Incidentally," I said, "just for the record, when the time comes I want a closed casket."

"I'll take care of it," she said. "Unless I go first."

"Don't you dare," I said.

We went to bed around eleven-thirty, and it didn't take long for me to realize I wasn't going to be able to sleep. I tried to slip out of bed without waking her but she sat up and asked me where I was going.

"I'm wired," I said. "I can catch the midnight meeting, most of it, anyway."

"That's probably not a bad idea."

I got dressed. At the doorway I paused and said, "I might be late."

"Say hello to Mick for me."

"I'll do that," I said.

When I first got sober there was a midnight meeting every night at the Moravian church onLexington Avenue. They lost the meeting place years ago, but AA meetings are like hydra's heads, and two sprang up in its place, one downtown on Houston Street in what used to be a fairly notorious after-hours, and the other, my destination tonight, at Alanon House, an AA clubhouse on West Forty-eighth. Ordinarily I'd have walked, but I was late as it was; a cab pulled up just as I hit the sidewalk, and I held out a hand and flagged it.

They were reading the Preamble when I got there. I took one of the few empty seats and realized this was my second meeting in as many days. I had the thought that I might go every day for a while, and my next thought was that I probably wouldn't go to another meeting for a week. I didn't know what the hell I was going to do, and that, when you came right down to it, was why I was in that room listening to a skinny little girl with sharp features and blotchy skin tell how she'd started raiding her parents' liquor cabinet at eleven, how she was a crack whore at seventeen, and how now, at the ripe old age of twenty-three, she had high hopes, eight months of sobriety, and HIV.

You get a slightly different crowd at the midnight meetings. In the old days at the Moravian church it wasn't all that rare for an active drunk to start throwing chairs until a couple of members teamed up to throw him out. You see a lot of tattoos at the midnight meetings, a lot of leather, a lot of body piercings. On average, the people who show up at that hour are younger and more newly sober, squeezing in one last meeting to keep from picking up a drink. By the time it's over, all the liquor stores will have closed. Of course the bars can stay open until four, and delis sell beer around the clock, but by one in the morning there's a chance you can go to bed sober and actually get to sleep.

Along with the new and the desperate, the late meetings draw the people whom temperament or circumstance has made creatures of the night. And there are those, some long sober, who prefer a meeting with more of an edge to it, one where you might see someone pull a knife, or throw a chair, or have a petit mal seizure.

I sat there with all my years, sixty-two of them, eighteen of them sober, feeling different from the younger, newer, wilder people around me.

But not that different.

When the meeting ended I thanked the speaker, helped with the chairs, and went out into the night. The air was thick and heavy as wet wool. I walked through it, west and then north, and wound up at the southeast corner of Fiftieth and Tenth and went into Grogan's Open House.

Mick Ballou owns Grogan's, although his name can't be found on the lease or the ownership papers. In the same unofficial way he owns some other businesses around town. He used to own a farm in the Catskills, where he fattened a few pigs and kept chickens for eggs, but when the farmhouse burned down he walked away from it. The owner of record died that night, along with his wife and a lot of other people, and I suppose the nominal owner's son wound up with what was left of the farm. Mick, I know, hasn't been back to see. He won't go anywhere near the place.

The farm was never designed to turn a profit, but he probably makes money at Grogan's, and with his other businesses. They could lose money, though, and it wouldn't matter much, as his real money comes from criminal activity of one sort or another. He robs drug dealers, and hijacks legal and illegal shipments, and lends money to people whose arms and legs are their only collateral. I'm an ex-cop, a once-licensed private detective, and this career criminal is my closest friend, and I have long since given up trying to explain it.

Past lives, Elaine says. We were brothers once. And that's a better explanation than any I can offer.

The bartender gave me a nod. I knew his name was Leeky, but I didn't know how he spelled it, two e's or e-a, for the vegetable or a plumbing problem or some Gaelic word unknown to me. He was fairly new, one of those close-mouthed lads who turn up at Grogan's fresh off the plane from Belfast. Ireland has more people entering than leaving these days, the result of the economic turnaround they like to call the Celtic Tiger. But Mick's visitors don't get to ride the tiger. They've got jail sentences hanging over them, or men looking to kill them, so they get the hell out and wind up dodging the INS, living in the Bronx or Woodside, and working, behind the stick or on the street, for Mick Ballou.

Who was at his usual table with a pitcher of water and a bottle of the twelve-year-old Jameson he favors. His face lit up at the sight of me, which put him very much in the minority that day. I stopped at the bar for a cup of coffee, then went over to where he was sitting and took the chair opposite his.

"A fine night," he said, "and thank God for air conditioning. Have you been out? But of course you have or you wouldn't be here. Is it any better?"

"It's cooled off some," I said, "but the air's pretty bad."

"You don't know whether to breathe it or eat it with a spoon. But you've things on your mind heavier than the air."

"You never met my first wife, did you?"

"I never knew you then."

"I buried her this afternoon," I said, but that sounded wrong. It never sounds entirely right, unless the speaker wielded the shovel himself, but in this case it struck me as particularly inappropriate. "Other people buried her," I said. "I sat in my car and watched them do it."

"Ah, Jaysus," he said, and took a drink, and I sipped my coffee, and we talked.

We talked for a couple of hours, and I don't remember what we said, but it was easy conversation, with long speeches and long silences. I know we talked about the Hollanders, and of the two men who'd murdered them, and who'd outlived them by mere days.

"Good job they're dead," he said of the killers.

Sometimes we make a full night of it, staying on after closing hour, with all the lights out but the one shaded bulb over our table. Sometimes we're still at it when the sun comes up, and Mick puts on the butcher's apron that's all he has left of his father, and we go down to Fourteenth Street for the butchers' mass at St. Bernard's. Sometimes we have breakfast afterward in a diner on West Street, or at Florent on Gansevoort.

But this time either we didn't need to do all that or we lacked the energy for it. The last customer staggered out around three-thirty, and Leeky locked the door and shut down the bar. He was half through with putting the chairs up on the tables, prepping for the man who would sweep it out first thing in the morning, when I got him to let me out.

I walked home. The air seemed clearer now, but that may have been my imagination.

Late Saturday morning I was drinking a second cup of coffee and looking at the TV listings, planning my day, trying to decide between the third round of a golf tournament on ESPN or the Mets game on Fox. The evening was set, there was a welterweight bout scheduled on HBO, but I still had the afternoon to take care of.

The phone rang, and it was T J. "Time you get off the phone and out the door," he said. "I be at the Morning Star, waiting to have breakfast with you."

"I already had breakfast," I said.

"That case, come sit across the table an' keep me company. It be good for your heart."

"How's that?"

"Elaine always says it does her heart good to watch me eat. Don't figure it can hurt you none."

"You're probably right," I said, and poured the rest of my coffee in the sink. Ten minutes later I was across the street at the Morning Star with a fresh cup of coffee that wasn't half as good as the one I'd discarded. Although I'd talked to him a couple of times on the phone, it had been a week since I'd seen T J, and I hadn't realized how much I missed him.

"Sorry 'bout your wife," he said. "Ex-wife, I mean."

"Elaine told you?"

He nodded. "Said you went out to the funeral. I ain't been to many."

"The longer you live," I said, "the more you get to go to."

"Something to look forward to," he said. He had a plate of eggs and sausages and home fries in front of him, and he ate as he talked. I don't know that it did my heart good to watch him, but I can't say it did it any harm.

He put down his fork, took a long drink of orange juice, and wiped his mouth with his napkin. "Girl I'd like you to meet," he said. "Real nice, real pretty, real smart."

"She sounds terrific," I said, "but what would Elaine say?"

He rolled his eyes. "Might be a little young for you," he said. "Goes to Columbia."

"That's where you know her from."

"Uh-huh. Been going to this history class she's taking, but that's not her major. She be majoring in English."

"That case, she probably be speaking well."

"Wants to be a writer," he said. "Like her aunt."