A Firing Offense (14 page)

I walked towards them. When it was clear that they weren’t going to move, I walked around them. I felt an inexplicable humiliation, like a child who later regrets walking away from a certain ass-kicking at the hands of the schoolyard bully.

I heard them chuckle behind me, and I turned. The dark one with the pushbroom blew me a kiss. Then they both laughed.

I walked out of the warehouse. In the parking lot I noticed that my fists were balled and shoved deeply in my pockets. Climbing behind the wheel of my car, I felt weak and very small.

JOE DANE LIVED IN
old Silver Spring, on a street where the houses were built very close to the curb and had large, open porches and deep backyards. I parked my heap in front of his place and was up on his porch in six short steps.

I knocked on the door, behind which I could hear children laughing and playing and falling harmlessly to the floor. After that came a woman’s voice, raised halfheartedly to attempt sternness, then footsteps.

The door opened and Sarah Dane stood in the frame, wiping her hands dry with a dishrag. The lines around her eyes deepened as she smiled up at my face.

“Hi, Nick.”

“Sarah.” I leaned in and kissed her on the cheek.

Her baggy pants were frumpy and her sweatshirt featured a circular medallion of vomit centered between her breasts. Four kids and the raising of them had widened her hips and prematurely aged her face. But she had the relaxed beauty of contentment.

“Is Joe around?” I asked.

“He’s in the backyard,” she said, tugging gently on my jacket and pulling me through the doorway. “Come on in.”

I followed her into the living room as she made a path through the toys scattered on the throwrug. The arms of the sofa had been shredded by cats. As we walked, she touched the heads of two children orbiting her legs.

We moved into the warm kitchen where a cat was haunched down, its face buried in a small yellow dish. Water boiled in a tall pot on the gas stove. Next to it sat an open box of pasta.

I looked through the screen of the dark back porch. Joe Dane was walking slowly through their garden, his hands in his pockets. Sarah folded her arms and leaned against the refrigerator.

“You look good, Nick,” she said, focusing on the fading purplish area below my eye. “But I see you’re not really staying out of trouble.”

“I don’t go looking for it,” I said. “You look good too, Sarah.”

“Don’t bullshit me, Nicky. I look like hell.” She grabbed some hair off her face and wound it behind an ear. It was fairly useless to tell her that I was being sincere.

“What have you all been up to?” I asked.

A small towhead, wearing fatigues and carrying a plastic machine gun, ran by. I tapped him on the shoulder. He ran back, socked me on the knee, and disappeared into another room.

“You’re looking at it,” she said, without a trace of regret.

“You’re awfully lucky to have all this.”

“All this,” she laughed. “The funny thing is, I do feel lucky. This is what I want.”

“How about him?” I asked, jerking my head in the direction of the backyard.

“Joe’s the worrier of the family. Of course, he’s out in the world every day, he sees other people with more than we’ve got. More money, that is. And this town can influence you, make you feel like if you’re not wearing the four hundred dollar suit or driving the right import, you’re lower than dirt. I’m insulated from all that crap, here with the kids.” She looked me over. “How about you? You seeing anyone?”

“Not really.”

“Talk to Karen?”

“No.” The four of us had spent many evenings together in the early days of our marriages.

“Here,” she said, handing me two cans of beer from the refrigerator. “Go talk to him. He could use it.”

“Thanks, Sarah.”

I stepped out onto the porch, which creaked beneath my feet, and pushed open the screen door. As I walked across the yard, I noticed the kids’ Big Wheels had worn a semicircular track in the grass.

Joe Dane was a broad, bearlike guy whose gut had begun to creep unapologetically over his belt. Though he was only a few years my senior, his graying beard made him look much older. There was a look nearing relief on his creased face as I approached.

We had befriended each other early on at Nathan’s. He came to me for advice on record purchases, and I to him on the latest films to catch. My opinions on music were solely based on taste, but his movie knowledge came from advanced studies and a Master’s in Film Theory, a degree he had earned but never used professionally.

“Nick,” he said tiredly. “What brings you out here to ‘Pottersville’?”

I let that slide and said, “Just wanted to say hi. Your kid sick?”

“No, I just bugged out a little early.”

I cracked both beers and handed him one. He winked and had a long swallow. I pulled on his shirtsleeve and brought him out of the garden to two ripped beach chairs that faced back towards the house. A calico cat slunk across the yard, brushed my shins, and settled into a ball beneath my chair.

“So, what’s happening in music?” he asked, though he appeared uninterested. “I’ve been out of touch.”

“You haven’t missed much. This year it’s the neo-folk movement, though there’s nothing ‘neo’ about it. Tracy Chapman comes out doing the same shit Joan Armatrading was doing ten years ago, only Tracy’s younger and has a funkier haircut, and she walks away with all the press and the awards.”

“It’s the same in film,” he said. “There’s very little in the way of originality right now. The film schools are cranking out mimics and technicians, but there isn’t any soul.”

“What about your boys, Scorsese and De Palma?”

“Scorsese’s still a true visionary, a genius.
Goodfellas,
man, that was a piece of work. The first time I ever
saw
a cocaine high, visualized, up on the screen. And the violence was real, not stylized. Real. But De Palma?” Dane snorted and dismissed the director with a wave of his hand. “De Palma used to have that crippling Hitchcock fixation, and the critics hated him. I got a kick out of him, though. I mean, I had the sense, when I was watching his films, that I was witnessing the work of a madman. Then he does
The Untouchables,
and the critics love it. But it was pretty much just a straight narrative thing, don’t you think? And the centerpiece of the film, the shootout at the train station—he managed to rip off both Eisenstein’s Odessa steps sequence and himself at the same time.”

“Rip-off?” I said. “You used to call that ‘homage.’”

“Whatever. De Palma used that one hundred percent slow motion sequence once before, in
The Fury,
a much better film in my opinion, what with its theme of patricide and its dark humor. Godard called that the most honest use of slow motion he had
ever seen on film.” Dane rubbed his forehead and swallowed more beer, then said, “It’s all bullshit anyway.”

With that remark we sat in silence for several minutes. The calico emerged from under my seat, and with a low crawl slowly crept up on a group of sparrows that had lit in the middle of the yard. I watched as they scattered and flew away.

“I heard Jimmy Broda got it while I was on vacation,” I said, a careful indifference in my voice.

“Yeah,” he said, closing his eyes as he killed his beer.

“It surprised me, the fact that he was a gonif.”

“Well, he was.”

“You have to fire him yourself?”

“Yeah.”

“You got a soft heart, Joe.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

I finished my beer and crushed the can. “I talked to our lady in personnel. She has his reason for termination down as ‘job abandonment.’ You told her that, so theft wouldn’t be on the kid’s record. Am I right?”

His face tightened. “Sure. He was clean, up until the time he tried to boost that box. No reason to have that on his permanent record.”

A strong, stocky little boy ran from the side of the house and slowed to a walk as he neared us. He had his old man’s pug nose and his mother’s round eyes. Dane turned him around and locked him gently between his knees. He rubbed the kid’s shoulders with his big hands.

“There’s one thing I can’t figure out about that whole deal,” I said. “The kid’s grandfather phoned me after the boy was fired. So I went to their apartment, and the grandfather shows me this VCR that the kid had bought for him.”

“So?”

“So why would a kid lift an eighty dollar piece, then turn around and pay for a VCR worth two bills? Why not steal the more expensive item, if you’re going to steal?”

Dane brought his child up into his arms and hugged him rather roughly. His eyes were closed and I wondered if he’d heard me. Then he opened his eyes and spoke.

“You’re talking about a nineteen-year-old kid, Nick, and you expect him to do something rational.” He put down his child. “You think too damn much.”

“And you brood too much,” I said, rising from my chair. “Why don’t you go on inside. I’ve got to get going.”

“Don’t tell me not to brood. The hole is just getting deeper and deeper around here.”

I looked at his beautiful kid, then at him, and said, “You’re right. A single guy like me just can’t understand your ‘problems.’ ” I shook his hand. “So long, Joe. Thanks for the beer.”

I walked across the yard and looked through the screen door. Sarah was stirring the pot of pasta, the child in the fatigues sitting at her feet. I went around the side of their house and to my car without saying good-bye.

WHEN I ENTERED MY APARTMENT
, the top light was blinking on my answering machine. I pushed the bar. The tape rewound, then the unit made several noises that sounded like locks being turned.

The message began: “Mr. DeGarcey, this is Maureen Shultz. I reached John Heidel. He’s not sure exactly where Eddie and his friends went, only he knows they went south…. He did give me some more information on the girl. Her parents are from Elizabeth City, in North Carolina… anyway, that’s where she grew up. That’s all I got out of John, I hope it helps…. If you talk to Eddie, tell him his father and me… tell him we said hello.”

T
HE DAY AFTER
Maureen Shultz left a message on my machine was the last Saturday I worked for Nutty Nathan’s.

I woke that morning after a troubled night of sleep, a night in which I rose several times to wander around my apartment, sitting in different chairs and on my couch for long stretches at a time.

Sometime around dawn I lay awake in bed and watched my room begin to lighten, and the jagged, irregular lines of rainwater slide down my bedroom window. My cat stayed on top of the radiator, staring at the wall and listening to the rain.

At eight I got up, made coffee, and sat on the couch to read the
Post.
Two more people had been killed, execution style, in Northeast. The mayor denied allegations that he was a drug user, charged his accusers with racism, and said that all of this negative publicity was interfering with his “agenda” for running the city. There was a lengthy feature in Style on the outspoken
and rather cartoonish wife of a freshman Southern senator (didn’t they all come to town vowing to turn “buttoned-down” Washington on its ear?), and the main head in Sports dealt with the upcoming Skins–Giants clash, complete with the media-generated quarterback controversy.

When I was finished devouring the last section, I showered, shaved, and dressed. I put on light wool, faintly patterned teal slacks, a cream cotton oxford, a blue and beige Italian silk tie, and my twenty dollar sports jacket. I changed the litter box and filled the food and water dishes. My cat blinked at me from the radiator as I walked out the door.

THE DEEP GRAY SKY
heightened the slowly emerging October oranges of Rock Creek Park as I drove west on Military Road. I was listening to Billy Bragg’s “Talking with the Taxman about Poetry” on the box, and I turned the volume up enough to overtake the sound of my fraying wipers as they dragged themselves across the windshield.

When I entered the store and knocked the rain off my shoulders, the crew was in and standing around the front counter. They were drinking coffee from 7-Eleven go-cups and picking from a box of doughnuts iced in peculiarly unnatural colors.

McGinnes leaned against the counter with his arms crossed. Malone lounged beside him, coffee in one hand, Newport in the other. Lloyd was holding a doughnut up near his face, examining it as he chewed in slow, exaggerated chomps. Louie was spreading out newspaper ads on the counter.

“Black?” Lee asked, handing me a cup.

“You wish,” I said, and took the coffee.

“All right, everybody,” Louie ordered, “listen up,” and we moved around him in a semicircle. McGinnes nudged me and pointed at the folds of fat at the back of Louie’s head, which seemed to be fused onto his thick shoulders.

“Did you lose your neck, boss?” McGinnes asked.

“Shut up and look here, McGinnes.” Louie pointed to the ads he had torn from the paper and spread on the counter. “Electric Town is running with the top-rated Sharp CD player for one nineteen. You boys know that that model has been discontinued—we don’t have it and we can’t get it. But they have a very sharp price on that Sharp.” Louie looked back at us for recognition of his pun.