Scum (3 page)

“I can't leave her outside,” my father says. “It's not safe.”

The heavyset man crosses his arms over his chest. He is settling in now, a permanent roadblock.

“Please,” my father says. “We just want to go inside for a few minutes. We just want to talk to some people.”

I peek past the man into the gloomy interior of the bar. I see a cavernous room. There is a bar along one side. A man stands behind it, pouring drinks and
putting them on a tray for a server, a young woman in tight pants and a tight T-shirt. I look at the rest of the room. At first I have trouble seeing if there is anyone else in there, it's that dark. Then I begin to make out shapes—people huddled around tables. Men, mostly, but with a scattering of women. I wonder if Danny was a regular in this dismal place. I wonder if he came here for business or for pleasure.

The bartender looks over at me. He sets one last drink onto the server's tray. As the server walks away from the bar, the bartender comes toward us. He is almost as tall as the bouncer. He is wearing black jeans and a black T-shirt. A giant snake tattoo coils around his left arm all the way from his wrist and disappears under the sleeve of his T-shirt. He glances at my father and me. Then he says to the bouncer, “Problem?”

“They want to come in,” the bouncer says. “She's underage.”

The bartender looks at my father and shakes his head.

“I let a kid in here who's underage, I can lose my licence,” he says to my father. He sounds more reasonable than the bouncer.

“You're the owner?” my father says.

The bartender nods.

My father looks relieved. Finally, someone he can talk to, someone who will understand.

“The young man who was killed here, that was my son,” my father says.

The bartender looks surprised. My father is tall, but he's thin and balding. He wears glasses. He doesn't look anything like Danny, who is...was...strong and tough and confident—overconfident. He doesn't look anything like the father of a guy who would get himself shot in a bar at three in the morning.

“I just want to talk to your customers,” my father says. “Please. My wife won't even get out of bed. I just want to talk to your customers and see if anyone can help us.”

I can't tell what the bartender is thinking. I can't tell if he feels sorry for my father or if he thinks my father is pathetic. But he finally nods. The bouncer steps aside. As I start to follow my father into the gloomy cavern, the bartender says, “I don't think anybody saw anything.” My father turns to him, and the bartender says, “I was here myself that night, and I didn't see anything.”

I look at the bartender's face. I peer into his eyes. I am sure he's lying to my father. I'm also sure he knows what I'm thinking but he doesn't care.

I follow my father around the place. He is polite to everyone. At every table he approaches, he begins by saying, “I'm sorry to disturb you.” Then he introduces himself. If he notices that nobody seems to care who he is, he doesn't let it show. He asks everyone at every table if they were in the bar when Danny was shot. Everybody says the same thing: No. Not only did nobody see anything, but nobody was there.
Some of them barely glance at my father. Some of them don't look at him at all. They are all rough people. They're not like the people who live in my neighborhood.

Again I wonder what Danny was doing in this place and how often he came here. No one expresses any sympathy for my father. But my father doesn't stop until he has spoken to every single person at every single table.

When he has finished, he goes to the bar, where there are several men sitting on stools, drinking in silence. A couple of them watch the tv, which has the sound turned down low. I hang back. The truth: I am embarrassed for my father. He is talking so politely to everyone. He is practically begging for their help. But no one will help him.

The bartender listens to my father ask his questions. I see him shake his head. He knows my father will get nowhere. He knew it when he let my father into the bar.

I step forward now. I think if I stay close to my father, I can protect him somehow. I can stop him from noticing how everyone in the bar sees him.

That's when I notice that there is someone besides the bartender behind the bar. A kid. He doesn't look much older than me. He is wearing an apron, and he is stacking dirty glasses and plates in a big plastic tub. He glances at me as he hoists the tub and starts to carry it toward the back of the huge room. He glances at me, and I see something in his eyes that I haven't seen in any other eyes in this place.

I tug my father's arm. I point at the kid.

My father calls out, “Excuse me.” He starts to move toward the kid, who is still walking toward the back of the bar. At first I think that he hasn't heard my father. Then I realize: He doesn't know that my father's polite
excuse me
is directed at him.

The bartender comes out from behind the bar and grabs my father's arm, forcing him to a halt.

“But I just want to ask—” my father begins.

“He wasn't here that night,” the bartender says.

The kid glances back over his shoulder, and I see something else in his eyes. He starts to shake his head.

“You've got a job to do,” the bartender says sharply to the kid. “Or maybe you don't need a job anymore.”

The kid hurries to the kitchen, carrying the tub full of dirty glasses and plates.

“He wasn't here that night,” the bartender says again. “You've talked to everyone. You should go home.”

My father looks around the gloomy bar. A few people look back at him. He says, “Come on, Meggie. It's late, and you have school tomorrow.”

We drive home in silence. Later, when I am in bed, I hear my father in the spare room beside my room. He is weeping.
Another week goes by. Now it is three weeks since Danny died. I come home from school to a big surprise. For once, my mother isn't in her room. She's in the kitchen. She is cooking. She doesn't exactly smile at me, but she does look at me. She says, “I called work today. I'm going back on Monday.”

I say the only thing I can think of: “That's great, Mom.”

My father gets home at his regular time. I am on my way upstairs when he comes through the front door. He pauses and sniffs the air. He looks at me, a puzzled expression on his face.

“Are you making supper tonight?” he says. “It smells good.”

“It's Mom,” I say. “She's cooking. She's in the kitchen.”

My father looks surprised. He smiles. I realize it's the first time I've seen him smile since the police came to the door three weeks ago.

My mother calls me to set the table. My father follows me through to the kitchen. He kisses my mother on the
cheek. She doesn't exactly smile at him, but she doesn't pull away, either. She says, “Supper is almost ready.”

“I have to make a call,” my father says. He picks up the phone and carries it through to the family room. I know who he's calling. He calls the same person every night—Detective Rossetti. I hear him apologize for phoning again. I imagine Detective Rossetti's voice the way it was that time I called.

My mother looks through to the family room. She watches my father as he listens to whatever Detective Rossetti is saying. She hears him say, “Well, thank you for your time.”

When he carries the phone back into the kitchen, she says, “Who was that?”

“That detective,” my father says.

A shadow crosses my mother's face.

“And?” she says.

My father sighs. “And nothing,” he says. “There's still been no progress.”

I am afraid my mother will fall apart. I am afraid she will start to cry again.
I am afraid she will go back upstairs to her room. But she doesn't do any of these things. Instead she nods, and she says, “Dinner is on the table.”

When I wake up on Monday morning, it's like everything has gone back to the way it used to be. My mother is dressed in a business suit and is bustling out the door with her briefcase when I come down the stairs. She tosses a good-bye over her shoulder at me.

My father is stuffing papers into his briefcase when I go into the kitchen. Without looking up from what he is doing, he tells me he has an important meeting this afternoon and that he will be home late. He also tells me that my mother has a lot of catching up to do and that she will probably be late too. He asks me if I'll be okay on my own.

When I don't answer right away, he pauses to look at me. “Meggie?” he says. “You'll be okay, right?”

I tell him, “Sure.” I even smile at him when he kisses me on the cheek before dashing out the door.

When he is gone, I think, Did the last three weeks happen or did I dream them? I think, How can a person die, and three weeks later, everything seems like it's back to normal? It takes me most of the day before I realize that I am wrong. Nothing is back to normal.

That afternoon, English class. We're reading a play. Shakespeare.
Hamlet
. And Hamlet, the lead guy, is talking to a gravedigger.

Which makes me, just like that, think about Danny's funeral and the guy who called me Margaret instead of Megan, and no one corrected him. Then he said all those things about Danny that maybe once upon a time were true, but they weren't true recently. And the next thing you know, I'm crying.

Caitlin notices it first. She sits right beside me. Then, I can't help it, I sniffle, and another girl looks at me. Then that
girl pokes the girl in front of her, and she turns around. Pretty soon there are enough people looking at me that it makes the teacher stop what she's saying. She peers at me. She says, “Megan, are you all right?”

I start to nod because that's what you're supposed to do, right? You're supposed to say, yeah, you're fine. But I don't feel fine. I feel sad. So I stop nodding, and I shake my head instead. I can't stand all those people looking at me. I can't stand what they're probably thinking. Poor Megan, did you hear what happened to her brother? Do you know what her brother was into? And that's it. I get up and I run out of the classroom. I don't stop running until I am down the stairs and out of the school, even though Mr. Tesco sees me fly past and he calls my name. I don't care.

I run and I run until I am up at the highway. Cars are rushing by me, and I think how easy it would be to dance into the path of one. Then I think about my father and how sad he has been and the phone
calls he makes every day. I think about who he will talk to if anything happens to me. I think about whether he would be able to stop himself from telling my mother everything. Then I see a bus in the distance. It's coming toward me. I fumble in my backpack for my wallet, and I count out exact change. When the bus pulls over to where I am standing, I get on.

An hour later, I am standing across the street from the bar where my brother died. It's daytime, and I can see now how rundown the place is, what a dive it is. I try to picture Danny in a place like that at three in the morning. I try to picture what he was doing in there. I try to picture someone walking up to him and saying something to him—probably something angry—and then shooting him.

Then I think of it another way. I think of someone walking up to Danny and maybe asking him something, and Danny doing what he does best, giving the guy some smartass answer, making some sarcastic response. It wouldn't surprise me.
Danny thinks...thought...he was smarter than anyone else. Danny had an answer for everything, and if it was an answer that could get him a laugh, even better. I picture Danny being a smartass, only he's picked the wrong guy or the wrong day, and the next thing you know, someone is calling 911.

I'm standing there, thinking all of this, when I see someone come around the corner and walk to the front door of the bar. I see his hand reach out to open the door. I see that hand pause, and the person who is about to go into the bar turns and looks at me instead. Then he comes across the street toward me.

It's the same kid who was carrying the tub of dirty glasses and plates the night my father and I went to the bar so that my father could talk to the customers. Now that he's up close to me, I see that he is scrawny, with eyes that look too big for his face, and soft lips like a girl's. His hair is long and wavy. He keeps raking it out of his eyes with one hand. He says, “Hey.”

“Hey,” I say.

“You're the girl who was here last week,” he says. “With that man.”

“That was my dad,” I say.

The kid looks around. “You here alone now?”

I nod.

“You're not going back in there, are you?” he says, frowning.

“My brother was killed in there,” I say.

There is a long pause before he says, “I heard about that.”

“The cops say there were a lot of people in the bar when he was killed. But they say they haven't been able to find out anything. They haven't even been able to get a description of the guy who did it.”

“Well, it's pretty dark in there,” the kid says. “And the people who go in there, they're the kind of people who mind their own business.”

“You work there, right?” I say. He nods. “Did you know my brother?”

“I know who he is,” he says. “I've seen him around.” He looks me over and shakes his head. “It's hard to believe he was your brother.”

“Why do you say that?”

“You know,” he says with a shrug.

I tell him I don't know. I tell him I have no idea what he's talking about. His cheeks turn pink.

“I mean, you seem so nice,” he says. “Your dad too, the way he went around talking to everyone, saying please and thank you. He seems real nice.”

“So what are you saying?” I ask. “Are you saying that Danny wasn't nice?” I know Danny. I know how he could be. But it's one thing for me to think he could be a real jerk sometimes. It's one thing for me to even say it out loud. But for someone else to think that about Danny, about
my
brother, especially now that he's dead—that's another thing altogether.