Memory (Hard Case Crime) (8 page)

When he looked at his wrist, after putting the pen and pad away, he had a sudden feeling of dread, because his watch was gone. It was a dread for more than the loss of the watch; he could lose everything, be reduced to nothingness, and he was helpless.

But then the memory of Artie Bellman came back, and he remembered that Bellman had the watch, and he felt so relieved he had to sit down on the bed again for a while. He sat there with his head bowed and his hands dangling between his knees, and after a while he shook his head. Speaking aloud, he said, “What a sad war. What a slow sad war.”

When he thought it was approaching four o’clock, he left the room and went to work.

The way they got their pay, they lined up in front of the office cubicle, in alphabetical order, and Joe Lampek handed each man his pay envelope, and then each man in turn signed his name to the sheet of paper on Joe Lampek’s clipboard.

Cole had watched them get their pay last Friday, and had felt a biting kind of envy. Because his memory didn’t tell him as surely as it should about the past, he had a more pronounced feeling than did most people about the slowness of time; his stay in this town was exaggerated by his perception of time. He felt now, eleven days after arriving here, that he had been in this place, worked in this building, for years, for decades, for a lifetime. And yet, because he kept forgetting the names of his co-workers and the names of the streets and the name of the town itself, he was still a stranger; and wanted, here, to be nothing else.

Now he was watching the second shuffling payline, but this time he was a member of it, standing near the front of the line, behind Artie Bellman. Artie Bellman got his pay envelope, and signed his name, and then it was Cole’s turn. Joe Lampek smiled fatly at him, and pointed to where he was supposed to sign, and then he had his own pay envelope. He stepped off to the side and opened it, and shook out into his palm a small folded wad of bills, and some change, and a long ribbon of white paper all folded up. He counted the money, and he had twenty-three dollars and nine cents.

That wasn’t right. He was supposed to have
thirty-two
dollars. He turned to Joe Lampek, who was smiling at somebody else now, giving somebody else a brown pay envelope, and he said, “This isn’t right.”

“What’s that?” Joe wasn’t mad or irritated, he was alert and curious.

“This isn’t right. I’m supposed to have thirty-two dollars, and I’ve got twenty-three. Somebody made a mistake.” He was holding his two hands out toward Joe Lampek, the pay envelope and its contents in his palms.

Joe laughed, and shook his head. “Thirty-two before deductions,” he said. “Take a look at your pay slip. That white paper there. Thirty-two before deductions.”

With the frightened feeling that somehow he had been tricked, and now he was going to find out about it, he opened the ribbon of white paper. It had printed boxes across it, with printed information above the boxes, and typed information inside the boxes. About half the boxes had typed information inside, all numbers.

The first box was titled
Gross Pay
, and the number inside was $32.00.

The second box was titled
Withholding
, and the number was $4.05.

The fourth box was titled
Social Security Withholding
, and the number was $1.51.

The fifth box was titled
Group Health Insurance
, and the number was $1.35.

The seventh box was titled
Union Dues
, and the number was $2.00.

The last box was titled
Net Pay
, and the number was $23.09.

Joe Lampek said, “Right? You got it now?”

“Yes,” said Cole. He was terrified. His week at the Belvedere had been up on Tuesday, and they were letting it ride until tonight because they knew he was employed at the tannery. He had a dollar and some change left; after he paid his room bill he’d only have around seven dollars to last him till next Friday. And next Tuesday his rent would come due again.

How was he going to save money? How was he going to get back to New York?

He turned away, and Artie Bellman was there, smiling. “Hi, there, champ,” he said.

“Hello.”

Cole started on by, but Artie held his arm, and his smile faded. “Hey, champ,” he said. “Aren’t you forgetting something?”

Cole was made terrified by the words. Yes, he was forgetting something. But what? He clutched his money tight in his hands, afraid of everything in the world, and said, “What is it? What?”

“You owe me ten bucks, champ. Remember? Ten a payday, four paydays.”

Very dimly, he remembered. It had something to do with a watch. He looked at the money crumpled in his fist, and slowly opened his fingers. But he couldn’t give Bellman ten dollars; he only had seven dollars over his rent. He said, “I can’t give you any money. I didn’t get enough.”

“That’s right, you didn’t work a full week. All right, champ, I tell you what I’ll do. You pay me the ten, and then I loan you eight, same basis, so you still owe me the ten, and we don’t have to renegotiate a new paper. See what I mean? You just give me two bucks, and it’s squared away, and you can start paying off next week.”

“Two dollars?”

Bellman repeated the arrangement, and this time Cole understood. He gave Bellman the two dollars, and put the rest away carefully in his wallet. He put the white ribbon of paper in his wallet, too, and the nine cents in his side pocket. A few minutes later pay time was finished, and they went to work. At seven-thirty, he ate the two sandwiches he’d brought with him, one baloney and one cheese, and drank some water. Then he went back to work, and at midnight he punched the time clock and walked back to the hotel.

The clerk’s name was Ray. Cole had written it down, up in the room, and it helped to have things written down. He found he could visualize the paper sometimes, and see the name he wanted written on it.

He went over to Ray and said, “I’ve got the money.”

“Fine.” There wasn’t anything wrong with Ray; he was all right. Not overly friendly, but all right.

Cole counted out seventeen dollars and fifty cents, and Ray gave him a receipt. Then Cole said, “I’m going to need to wait next week, too. I didn’t get enough money this week, because I didn’t work all of last week.”

“That’s okay,” Ray told him. “Just bring it in after work on Friday.”

“I will.”

Cole went upstairs and counted his money, and he had five dollars and twenty-three cents. He couldn’t even start saving for the bus ticket. He put the money away and went over to the dresser and picked up his pad and opened it and started reading the names he’d written.

The first name he saw was:

NICK ↔ CARICATURE

It meant nothing to him.

Nick? Nick? Maybe an artist, somebody who’d made a caricature drawing of Cole one time, or who drew caricatures for a living. Or maybe somebody who’d had his caricature drawn by somebody else.

While he was trying to think of it, trying to make the two words turn something over in his memory, other memories suddenly opened uninvited, and he remembered now that he had borrowed thirty-two dollars from Artie Bellman a week and a half ago, and that he’d given Bellman his watch for security, and that he’d had two or three dollars besides, and that the bus ticket to New York was thirty-three dollars and forty-two cents.

He could have left then. He would have had to leave his watch behind, but what did that matter? Nothing. He could have gotten on the bus and gone straight to New York. Instead, he’d paid rent and bought food and now he didn’t have any money at all. He would pay Artie Bellman two dollars a week, and never owe him less than forty dollars. He was in quicksand, already in it up to his waist, and he was noticing it for the first time.

He remembered something else. Somebody—he couldn’t put a name or a face or a voice or a time to it—but somebody had said to him once, in a conversation or somewhere, that whatever you lose, you need what you lost in order to find it. If you wear glasses and you lose your glasses, you need your glasses so you can see to look for your glasses. This somebody said he’d had his bike stolen once when he was a kid, and he needed his bike so he could get quickly around the neighborhood and look for his bike.

This was the same situation, the exact same situation. He’d lost a part of his memory, and he needed that part of his memory so he could get quickly back to New York City and find that part of his memory.

He felt such terrible frustration then, he shook his head back and forth and pounded his fists against his knees and made high nasal whining noises that were not exactly crying but were more like the sounds a raccoon makes when a hind leg is in the iron trap.

He saw the pad, lying beside him on the bed, still open and with those two words heading the list. He had three or four pages now, all written in, lines and lines of names and brief notes and isolated facts, all headed by the two words
Nick
and
caricature
, two words which in combination were meaningless now and had been meaningless from the beginning of time and would be meaningless always. He pressed his palm down on the pad, and drew his fingers in like a spider closing on a dead fly, and half a dozen pages crumpled into his fist, ripping loose across the top from the pad. He lifted his hand, the papers crushed and twisted, and threw them at the wastebasket, and they fluttered to the floor.

He got up and went out of the room, leaving the light on.

It was the first time he’d left the hotel except to eat or go to work. He had no money for unnecessary amusements. He stood uncertainly on the sidewalk now, having lost the impetus that had brought him this far. Then he began to walk.

Jeffords was a small lumpy humped-together town, built at a place where the Swift River twisted and corkscrewed and doubled back on itself, so that all over town there were small bridges, and all over town people had the Swift River in their back yards. It was narrow and deep and cold and black, but polluted by the tannery, and fenced or walled-in everywhere it went within the town limits.

The tannery was at the eastern end of town, and the gray stone pile of the Methodist church was at the western end. Between the two crouched the town, with pockmarked streets and grimy houses and squat black fireplugs. Most of the sidewalks away from downtown were squares of slate, jutting up at crazy angles, pushed up by gnarled tree roots from underneath. Some of the sidewalks looked like something in a carnival Fun House, but without the bright paint they would have worn in the carnival.

Cole walked along, wondering how girls could roller skate in this place. He was going nowhere in particular, just walking, having forgotten the emotion that had sent him out here in the first place. He looked at the old cars parked by the high curbs, and the house porches bunched together in rows, and the dirty-looking trees that partially shielded all the streetlights, and he walked up and down over the uneven sidewalks, and from time to time through a living room window he would see somebody asleep in front of the television set. It was around one o’clock; the television would only be showing blue snow.

At one corner he looked to his right and saw the dim glow of red neon. He went that way because he’d seen nothing but houses for blocks, and at the next corner there was a bar called Cole’s Tavern. Cole looked at the name on the window, surrounded by the red neon spelling out beer names, and he felt terrified. He clutched his left wrist with his right hand, feeling where the watch had been. Looking at the name of the tavern, he felt such a terrible loneliness and loss that for a minute he was rooted there, unable to move, and the flesh of his face seemed to shrink, drawing his face into a grimace like an Oriental ogre mask.

He turned away, seeking darkness away from the soft red glare, and behind him a voice called out, “Hey! Paul, hey!”

He looked over his shoulder, thinking nevertheless it must be some other Paul they meant, though the street was deserted—but he didn’t know anyone here—and then feeling a sudden urge of hope, that by some miracle it was one of the people he knew from New York, for some incomprehensible reason present in Jeffords—and then he saw it was Little Jack Flynn, leaning out from the doorway of the tavern and waving at him.

“Hey! Come on in.”

Cole turned all the way around and started back, mumbling something about how late it was. Little Jack Flynn said, “I saw you through the window, why didn’t you come in? Come on in.” When Cole got to the doorway, Little Jack clapped him on the shoulder. “Have a beer, Paul. Come on.”

Little Jack Flynn was the smallest man on the crew, with a hard and wiry body, and a cheerful ugly face. His forehead was low, his ears large, and his black hair a thick unruly mess. He told dirty jokes constantly during work, and kept up a perpetual mock battle with Black Jack Flynn, his homonym, the crew’s biggest man. They would spar together during break, Little Jack ducking and weaving and jabbing and calling out bloodthirsty threats while Black Jack shuffled like a bear, grinning and holding him off with big hands.

Cole allowed Little Jack to bring him into the tavern, and he immediately recognized, among the half dozen or so faces at the bar, two other members of the crew, Buddy and Ralph, neither of whose last names he knew or could remember. Little Jack was shouting, “Look who’s here!” and Buddy and Ralph were smiling at him in a friendly way, and he found himself smiling back.

The tavern was a large square room, with the bar across the rear wall. There were dim leatherette-and-formica booths on the left wall, and the other walls were lined by machinery; a shuffleboard along the front, below the window, and to the right a bowling machine, a cigarette machine, and a jukebox. Practically all of the light in the room seemed to come from these bright machines, and the mechanical beer and liquor signs on the backbar.

“Another round!” called Little Jack, and Cole found himself pressed against the bar, Little Jack on his left, Buddy and Ralph on his right. The bartender was a huge bullnecked man with only one arm; Cole watched him with fascination as he drew the beers. He brought them over two at a time, thick fingers entwined between the glasses. The jukebox was playing loudly, an instrumental with a simple repetitive melody over a beat as solid and predictable as the rungs of a ladder, and when they started talking they had to shout over it.