Night passage

The memory of the interview embarrassed him. He had been drinking scotch in the bar downstairs and his memory was the embarrassing memory of all drunks, he thought, the struggle to seem sober undercut by the half-suppressed knowledge that you were slurring your words. What bothered him even more was that he had needed to drink even though he knew it would jeopardize the job. His face felt hot at the memory. But they hadn’t noticed. The two interviewers, Hathaway, the selectman, and a Paradise police captain named Burke, seemed oblivious of the times when he couldn’t stop slushing the s’s in Los Angeles. It was late afternoon. Maybe they’d had a couple before the interview themselves. They’d talked in a one-bedroom suite that Hathaway was in. The police captain had a single room down the hall. Jesse remembered the room being too hot. And he remembered that Burke hardly spoke at all, and that Hathaway didn’t seem to be asking the right questions. He’d had to excuse himself twice to go to the bathroom, and each time he had splashed cold water on his face from the sink. But drunk is drunk, as he well knew, and cold water didn’t change anything. Hathaway had sat in front of the window eleven stories above the loop with a manila folder in his lap, to which he occasionally referred. Hathaway asked about his education, his experience, his marital status.

“Divorced,” Jesse said.

He didn’t like saying it. It still seemed to him somehow a shameful thing to admit. It made him feel less.

Hathaway, if he thought it shameful, made no sign. Burke was silent in the shadow near the window to Hathaway’s left.

“What do you think, Jesse,” Hathaway said, about fifteen minutes into the interview, “about the right to keep and bear arms?”

“Constitution’s clear on that, I think.” Jesse had trouble with all the t’s in constitution.

“Yes,” Hathaway said, “I think so too.”

They talked a bit about Jesse’s life in the minor leagues and how it was too bad that he couldn’t make the throw anymore. They talked of how many cases he had cleared in L.A.

“Nobody clears them all,” Jesse said with a smile, trying to enlist Burke, who remained silent, his arms folded. Clears came out clearth.

“We talked with your Captain Cronjager,” Hathaway said, referring to his folder.

Jesse waited. Cronjager was a decent enough guy, but he believed in police work and he might not recommend a cop who drank on duty.

“He speaks very well of you, though he said you might have been developing a drinking problem when you left.”

Jesse made a minimizing gesture with his right hand.

“I probably went off the deep end there for a bit during the time my marriage was breaking up,” Jesse said. “But I’m fine now.”

He had started to say I am, and then wasn’t sure he could transit between the two vowels, and changed it to I’m. Did they hear the stutter?

“All of us like a drink,” Hathaway said. “And in times of personal anguish, many of us need one. When one sees a man with your record applying for a job like this one, questions occur. I think I can speak for Lou when I say it is a relief really to hear that you maybe drank a little too much at a time when most of us would. I don’t have a problem, do you, Lou?”

Burke’s heavy voice came from the shadow where he sat.

“No problem, Hasty.”

And that had been it. They had hired him on the spot and brought out a bottle and had drinks to seal the bargain. It had worked out fine. But I shouldn’t have been drinking, Jesse thought as he went down the circular ramp off the bridge. Especially I shouldn’t have needed to be drinking.

Jesse turned north along the Henry Hudson Parkway. He drove over the Harlem River Bridge and through the Bronx, where the city was already begi

“What an asshole,” he said.

His voice seemed so loud in the quiet room that he wondered if someone next door could hear him talking to himself. When you start talking to yourself . . . He smiled and sipped his scotch. He could see himself in the full-length mirror on the wall beside the bed. He raised the glass at himself. Get a grip, Jesse. Then he leaned back in the chair, holding the whiskey in both hands, and closed his eyes and thought about the next day. Maybe three drinks a day.

Chapter 10

Jo Jo Genest was always alert when he went to the South End. There were a lot of fags down there and he was ready to retaliate if one of them was flirtatious. Jo Jo could bench-press five hundred pounds. At six feet, he weighed 283 and, under the pressure of his latissimus dorsi, his arms stuck out as he walked. He crossed with the light at Clarendon Street near the Cyclorama, and went a half block west on Tremont, and went down three stairs to a basement-level storefront in one of the old brownstones. In black letters on the big glass window of the store was written Development Associates of Boston. He opened the door and went in. A good-looking young man with dark curly hair and a diamond earring sat at the reception desk, sorting mail. He looked up when Jo Jo entered.

“Is it Tarzan or one of the apes,” the young man said.

The young man was always saying stuff like that to him, and he never liked it. If he didn’t have business to do here, he’d slap the little faggot upside the head. Maybe someday.

“Gino back there?” he said.

“Sure.”

Jo Jo nodded and went past the young man through the open archway into the back room. Gino Fish was sitting at a round antique table, in a high-backed antique chair. He was tall and thin with gray hair. Along the right-hand wall, a little behind Fish, sat Vi

“How’s it going, Gino,” Jo Jo said.

“Fine,” Fish said.

“Vi

Vi