A Long Line of Dead Men

"Bang bang."

"I told them to call me if anything out of the ordinary happens. They'll keep in touch with each other, too. It's fu

"What is?"

"The way it's got them relating to one another. In one way they're closer. Remember, these are fellows who've shared a very intimate association for over thirty years- but only one night a year. They're united by deep and longstanding bonds of brotherhood, but they don't really know each other."

"And?"

"And now things have changed, and nothing brings you together like the need to defend yourselves against a common enemy. But at the same time, the enemy might be one of them."

"Didn't Pogo have something to say about that?"

" 'We have met the enemy and he is us.' The thing is we haven't met the enemy, not head-on. He may be one of us and he may not. So-"

"So they're closely bonded but a little uneasy about it."

"Something like that. For the first time ever they have to maintain contact with one another. And, also for the first time, they don't dare trust each other. It's like Ca

"I don't think it's very realistic."

"For God's sake," I said, "it's not supposed to be realistic. It's a logic problem."

"Well, I'm a Jewish girl," she said. "Ca

"Not you, evidently."

"Not me," she agreed. "You know what I say? Goyim is goyim. That's what I say."

We had di

"God, he must get sick of hearing that."

"If he doesn't get sick of pointing at the wall and talking about warm fronts and cold fronts, he probably doesn't ever get sick of anything. When you see him pointing at a map or a chart, he's not really, you know."

"Somebody else is pointing for him?"

"He's pointing at nothing," she said, "and the image of him pointing is superimposed on another image of a map or chart. So it comes out looking right, but he's got to stand there and point at a blank wall. That's probably the hardest part of his whole job, remembering what part of the wall is Wyoming."

We fought over the check. She wanted to pay it because she'd sold one of the paint-by-number paintings for approximately a hundred times what she'd paid for it. I pointed out that that was still only a couple of hundred dollars, while I'd just scooped up a nine-thousand-dollar retainer.

"You still have to buckle down and earn it," she said. "The painting, on the other hand, is out of my hands and out of the store. The transaction is completed. Done, finis, finito."

"Too bad," I said. "This one's on me."

Back home, I checked the answering machine. Jim Shorter hadn't called, and I'd expected that he would. I tried him and he didn't answer. Then I tried my own number across the street, to see if I'd forgotten to engage Call Forwarding, but I got a busy signal, which indicated that I'd remembered.

I tried Alan Watson's widow in Forest Hills. No answer.

"You're restless," Elaine said. "Do you feel like a movie? Or do you think you ought to go to a meeting?"

I said, "I was thinking of taking a cab up to Yorkville."

"What's there?"

"A meeting."

"St. Paul's is handier. Why go all the way up there? You want to check up on your new sponsee, is that it?"

"He's not my sponsee."

"Your unofficial sponsee. He didn't call and you're worried about him."

"I suppose so. What would your friends in Al-Anon say about that?"

"They'd tell me it's none of my business how you work your program."

"That's not what I meant."

"I know. You meant what would they tell you to do, and if you want to know that you'll have to ask them yourself."

"I should leave him alone," I said.

"Think so, huh?"

"I should go to meetings for myself, not for anybody else, and if he gets sober that's fine, and if he goes out and drinks again that's fine, too."

"So?"

"So I'm afraid he'll drink," I said, "and I'm afraid it'll be my fault. But it won't be my fault if he drinks, and it won't be my doing if he stays sober, and anyway he's got his own Higher Power. Right?"

"Everything you say is right, master."

"Oh, boy."

"So what are you going to do? Grab a cab uptown?"

"Nah, fuck him," I said. "Let's go to a movie."

The movie we saw starred Don Johnson as a homicidal gigolo and Rebecca De Mornay as his attorney. As we left the theater, Elaine said, "I ca

"Hillary Clinton," she said. "Who else? And De Mornay looked enough like her to fool the president himself. You didn't notice? I can't believe it. Where were you, anyway?"

"Lost in space, I guess. Regretting the past, dreading the future."

"Business as usual. Just to keep you abreast of things, Don Johnson was the bad guy."

"I got that much," I said.

"Well, how much more do you really need to know? I think it's finally going to rain. I just felt a drop, unless it dripped from somebody's air conditioner."

"No, I felt it, too."

"Dueling air conditioners? Unlikely, I'd say. What do you want to do now?"

"I don't know. Go home, I guess."

"Sit around and stare out the window? Make a few phone calls to people who aren't home? Pace the floor?"

"Something like that."

"I've got a better idea," she said. "Walk me home and then go see if Mick wants to make a night of it. Get blitzed on coffee and Perrier. Watch the sun come up. Go to mass, take Holy Reunion."

"Communion."

"Whatever."

"Goyim is goyim, huh?"

"You said it."

In front of the Parc Vendôme she said, "It's definitely raining. You want to come upstairs and get an umbrella?"

"It's not raining that hard."

"Want to see if anybody called? Want to catch the weather report and see what color bow tie your friend Gerry Billings is wearing? Naw, you don't need a weatherman to tell which way the rain is falling."

"No."

"Of course not. You just want to get to Grogan's. Give Mick my love, will you? And enjoy yourself."

22

"You just missed him," Burke said. "He stepped out not fifteen minutes ago. But he'll be along. He said you might be in."

"He did?"

"And that you should wait for him as he'll not be long. There's fresh coffee made, if you'll have a cup."

He poured coffee for me and I carried it to the table where Mick and I usually wound up sitting, over on the side beneath the mirror advertising Tullamore Dew. Someone had left a copy of the Post on a nearby table, and I opened it to the sports section to see what the columnists had to say. I wasn't much better at tracking their sentences than I'd been at following the movie. After a while I set the paper aside and thought about trying Jim Shorter again. Was it too late to call him? I was considering the point when the door opened and Mick Ballou entered.

He stood just inside the door, his hair pressed flat against his skull by the rain, his clothes sodden. When he caught sight of me his face lit up. "By God," he said, "didn't I say you'd be in tonight? But what a fucking night you picked for it."

"It wasn't much more than a fine mist when I came here."

"I know, for was I not out in it myself? A soft day, the Irish call it. A fucking downpour is what it's turned into." He rubbed his hands together, stamped his feet on the old tile floor. "Let me get out of these wet clothes. Catch a cold this time of the year and the fucker's with you till Christmas."