Feelers (9 page)

“And we took the five dollars down to the candy shop. We were going to buy . . .”

“Candy dots. We couldn’t seem to eat enough of them.”

Clara laughed softly. “Candy dots, on the long rolls of paper. And then those boys tried to take our five dollars. They were
older. But you punched the one right in the nose and they all ran off, the one tripping and falling into that puddle that was always by the alley. We laughed ourselves sick. Remember?”

“Thank you for your time.” Danny got up and went into the kitchen. “I won’t bother you anymore.”

Behind him he heard: “Danny, I’m sorry, but . . .” and she began to sob.

Jonathon looked up at Danny. “Done?”

“Done.”

Scooting out his chair, Jonathon got to his feet and dug into his pocket. “Need money?”

“I could use a little, yeah.”

His brother-in-law passed him a wad of twenties. “It’s all I got on me.”

They left the kids with their SpaghettiOs and went out to the driveway. A monstrous white SUV was parked there, and they got in.

On the way to the station, Danny reflected on his visit to the house on Vanderhoosen Drive. Even as Mary had said, the lock was stuck, and Danny more or less forced his way in, knocking out a piece of the doorjamb.

Utterly empty, except for the dust shadows on the wallpaper of where pictures used to be on the walls of long-dead relatives. You could not tell where the furniture had been, but Danny remembered where the couch once was—at a right angle to the front windows. There was a dust shadow opposite where you could trace where the huge old TV had been.

On his hands and knees, he slid an ice pick between the floor-boards, working to loosen one of them. There was so much accumulated dirt and dust that he had to work at it a while until he lifted one edge. Danny stabbed the pick into the wood and lifted.

He remembered the night he and Joey paid off the Atlas armored car driver and put the remaining money under the floor. It was the night before the horrible day when the others were all shot up on the boardwalk, while Danny was trying to nurse Jimmy’s oozing skin back at the safe house. Danny thought Joey meant to kill him the night they hid the money. In fact, he was sure Joey was at least considering it—then only Joey would know where the treasure was—but Danny never showed Joey his back as they slipped into Uncle Cuddy’s house with the tools. Uncle Cuddy was in Florida at the time. Danny knew there was a space under the floor because he had helped his father fix the place after the boiler exploded, and remembered thinking at the time how much space there was between the floor and the ceiling of the finished basement, that you could put things there. But there almost was not enough room for those millions of dollars. That much money takes up a lot of space, and they really had to pack it in. Most of the night was required to get the floor back together. They even waxed it to make it look completely uniform, to fill in the cracks between the boards.

Fifteen years later, Danny stared into the same cavity in the floor.

His eyes now had a fine lace of wrinkles around them, and the crescent under each eye was now dark. A little gray had come into his hair at the temples, and there was a slight scar on his upper lip from a fight in the Sing Sing laundry—he’d been sliced by a razor blade.

His breath came hard, eyes blinking. He loosed a little moan of frustration, like that of a dog wanting to go outside.

The floor was empty.

“You OK?” Jonathon had stopped the SUV in front of the station.

“What?” Danny realized that he might have made that dog sound, that groaning whimper.

“Again, Danny, I’m sorry. But you understand.”

Danny felt around the door looking for the handle. Could they at least have kept door handles in cars in the same place? “Thank you for the money, Jonathon. I’ll pay you back.”

“No, you won’t. You won’t be back.”

They locked eyes.

“Maybe once I get settled . . .”

Jonathon was shaking his head. “Have you looked in a mirror?”

“A mirror?”

“I remember Danny Kessel as a good kid who was going to Yale. Who are you now? And what happens to those people?”

Danny absently felt the scar on his lip. “I think it all depends.”

“There’s a chance, but a small one. You know it, I know it. I’ve hired my share of ex-cons, and it almost never goes well for them. It’s just the way it is. You’ll have to turn it around, Danny. And the five million won’t make that happen. It’ll only get you killed.”

The ice picks on Danny’s forearms felt cold. He guessed under the circumstances stabbing him in the eye with one of them would only serve to prove Jonathon’s point.

“You don’t know that. Nobody knows that.”

“God knows.”

“God?” Danny suppressed a smirk. So Jonathon wanted to play the God card. “What does he know about the boy who was going to Yale? Where was he when it all went wrong? Where has he been since then?”

Jonathon tapped his chest. “God’s either in here or he isn’t.
You have to put him there. You used to go to mass on Sundays, you know.”

Danny had to smile at that one. “Jonathon, you do fifteen years in Sing Sing and tell me where to find God between the cells and razor blades and shivs and needles and the gangs and the bugger boys . . . you live out here with all these white people and all these white SUVs filling your garages and your hearts with God and your heads with electronics. What do you know about God where I’ve been? Well, I’ll tell you something:
He’s not there
. Why? Because God doesn’t live in hell. But somebody else does.”

The train back to Hoboken had a different crowd, and, of course, it was after rush hour so there were fewer passengers. People going to night jobs. Security guards with stripes on their pants. A group of Guatemalan cleaning women headed to some office complex. Various people with white shoes, nurses and orderlies headed to hospitals and old folks’ homes for the graveyard shift.

The sun was setting, and the low light flashed orange through the train window and on the giant Donna Karan sunglasses on Danny’s face.

God should have been under those floorboards.

FATHER GOMEZ, FORGIVE ME FOR
the previous observations about how Danny felt about God. But you see, I do not think Danny believed in God at all. I felt compelled to wonder how a model Catholic could become a ruthless monster with no regard for human life.

Anyway, when I got to my apartment, the gum wrapper was on the floor in the hallway. The wrapper I had put in the doorjamb. I saw this done in a movie once, as a way to see if someone had entered your apartment when you were away. Or as a way to know if someone might be in your apartment when you got home. So I entered carefully. The door was locked, but I could see paint scratched next to the doorknob, where someone may have used a pry bar or screwdriver to get in.

The door swung wide, but I stayed in the hall, listening. I put my head around the corner, my ears throbbing. Still nothing. So I stepped in.

Fortunately, the Balkan Boys had not wrecked anything. They were careful in their search. I could see that my bed looked a little more mussed than it should have, and the mismatched imprints on the rug told me they had moved the couch. Did they
really think I would put the tight ones under the couch? I had to laugh. I could also see streaks on the kitchen floor where they had moved the refrigerator, and my sock drawer looked like a tossed salad. As if all that money would fit in a sock drawer.

You might think I would feel angry, or violated, but it was relief that I felt. Why? Because I had been able to predict their actions so well. This meant that I would probably be able to stay one step ahead of them. Also, it meant that they’d already come and gone and would not be back. Why would they return? Would they think I would move the money back to my apartment?

For a moment I thought that might be a clever idea. I concluded that it would be too cute. Too cute ideas have a way of backfiring.

I am sure they wondered why all my belongings were on the floor. My impression is that the Balkan Boys are not that bright, just muscle. If Pete were with them, though, he would no doubt understand that I had needed to flatten the money. He has found tight ones and knows what a pain in the ass it is to unroll the money that has been tightly wound for decades, through the wet humid heat of summer and the broiling dry radiator heat of winter.

It would have been best had I not left those on the floor. But what was I to do? Forgo Fanny, not wave the red flag when the bull entered the ring? Besides, they already knew I had the money, or at least the absence of it would not dissuade the Prick from thinking I had it.

Now, what would their next move be? If anything, they might shadow me, try to follow the leprechaun to his pot of gold. So all I would do is not go to the money for a few weeks. I was sure they did not have an interest in shadowing me for months, 24/7, much less the time to do so.

I almost began to straighten up my apartment when I remembered that Fanny was looking forward to doing that together, the nutty girl. Sweet Fanny. Women’s minds work on so many levels at once.

Fanny had a late hair appointment and would be over at eight. I had two hours to prepare. How to spend it?

As I have said, my place is nothing special, but this did not mean there were not things I could do to prepare my lair for her visit. So I dropped by the market and bargain store for a few purchases.

First, one must fix the bathroom, because men simply see this as a place for hygiene. Women do not see it this way. This is a place where they spend more time than we do, and much of that time is taken with making themselves beautiful, so I suspect that a bathroom has much to do with their self-image. This is why I make an effort to make sure the bathroom is clean, and of course to attend to essential details. For example:

The toilet paper must dispense over the top of the roll. This is the way women prefer it, I do not know why, just another small female mystery. I purchased some of the triple-thick variety as well, not the cheapest I could find.

Kleenex—men see no difference between facial tissue and butt tissue. This view is not universal. I sometimes even blow my nose in paper towels. I purchased a big colorful box of the kind with moisturizers in each tissue.

The bowl and all hardware must be clean—but it is not enough to make it clean; there must be evidence that it is clean, so I purchased one of those chemical hockey pucks for the tank, and the water turned a beautiful aquamarine, transforming my toilet into a little blue oasis. If there were a small beach, the Ty-D-Bol Man could lay out a towel and feel as if he were in a tropical paradise.

I do not know how much Fanny had already inspected my medicine cabinet, but it was best to purge it of stray ointments and pills. Even men like to keep certain aspects of their hygiene a mystery, if for no other reason than to keep the illusion that we are never frail or sickly or in any way physically unattractive.

I had purchased a small wicker wastebasket with plastic flowers on it to replace the white plastic one that had Q-tips stuck to the bottom.

The final touch was a fuzzy toilet seat cover, matching black rug, and new shower curtain. How does one clean a shower curtain, after all? I have tried, and it is like trying to wash a dog. It does not seem to want to be cleaned, and when you are done, the whole bathroom is covered in water.

Two other items needed attention. Refreshments, and making myself irresistible, more so than I am naturally, anyway.

Food is always tricky. I knew she liked lobster and champagne, but we did that the night before.

I knew she liked Yago, so I picked up two four-packs and put them in the freezer for a quick chill. The red fruity sticky wine makes my mouth itch, so I bought some vodka for me, the expensive kind with a plastic blue jewel glued to the bottle, very classy. I would mix this with pineapple juice, so I bought a can of the concentrate. I hoped to get her to drink the vodka, of course. I find that these days most women will, and it was essential that she not just sip Yago. Sober women are like throw pillows. Useless. You can put them on the bed, they look attractive, but you cannot sleep with them. So I found my blender and cracked some ice trays. I would make blender drinks. In my bag of purchases were some new wine goblets, ones without chips on the rim.

Early in a relationship, women do not like to be seen gorging themselves, so I do not try to do anything too fancy like chili con
carne or a turkey or anything. Also of course, the food sends a message. Sandwiches would tell her I did not respect her. Oysters would suggest I was anxious to rush her into bed. Which I was, of course, but even as they do not like us to know what they’re thinking, it is never wise to let them know exactly what we are thinking. It had to be something small to eat, bite-sized, so even if they eat a lot, it does not look that way, and, of course, you do not want anything that has any possibility of making them barf. Nothing ruins the prospect of sex like barfing, man or woman. Well, maybe diarrhea, or a heavy period, but you see what I am saying.

I decided on crackers, cheese, and grapes. The crackers, of course, could not be from the cracker aisle. As tasty as they are, a Ritz is not sexy. You have to go to the fancy cracker section, which for some reason is never with the other crackers but on a high shelf, and the boxes are white and look like wedding invitations. I am many things but not a cheese master. There are rules for date cheese, though. It cannot be hard as you do not want them to have to hack away at a block of cheese like they were sculptors working a block of marble, and it must not make the breath bad in any way. Well, a little garlic is OK if you both eat it, cancel each other out. I rely on the French when it comes to cheese, so I bought a couple of the little white packages of soft herbal cheese. The white packages almost matched those of the crackers, which made me think they should sell them matched so men are not left to try to figure these things out on their own.