Honeymooners A Cautionary Tale (16 page)

This Duffy’s was a
high-toned joint, Ralph planned on assuring Alice Ann, if he ever
got that woman on the phone. At Duffy’s you were treated like a
white man, Ralph would assure Alice Ann. Unlike some of these kinds
of joints he had tried out in the past. At Duffy’s they called you
a patient, and a uniformed nurse was on hand. They let you taper
off at Duffy’s. The first day you got a stiff belt every waking
hour, every third hour the second day. They called these
“hummers.” Finally, though, nothing. Finally, you were cast adrift
hummerless, but a fellow probably would not go into convulsions on
a program like this, Ralph would assure Alice Ann. Convulsions were
Ralph’s greatest fear in life. He would lie awake at night,
sweating, gritting his teeth, waiting for the worst. The least
tingle, the slightest twitch in his shoulder, say, or neck, made
him go rigid with regret. What Ralph feared above all else was the
same death as his dad had suffered, his dad, whom Ralph had loved
dearly, a drunken man who drowned in his own vomit.

Nights really were the worst
times there at Duffy’s for Ralph. The shakes and sweats really were
a scream. The willies primitive, uncanny. Doors slammed on purpose.
Rats ran in the walls at night there at Duffy’s, although the staff
swore there were no rats around for miles. There was no television
in your room. No late- night movies to blur your life with as you
changed channels as fast as you humanly could. Worst of all, there
was no phone in your room. No late-night long distance in your
life. You couldn’t even dial a goddamn prayer to keep you company.
If there had been a phone in his room, Ralph knew he would live on
it, dialing Alice Ann at all hours, letting that phone ring off the
wall, half hoping almost anybody, no matter who, even a stranger,
another man even, would answer. Some nights there at Duffy’s the
air conditioner, a noisy, leaky contraption at best, would go on
the blink. You boiled in your own juices like a lobster in a pot.
You could ratde your litde claws against the walls all night for
all the good it got you. You’d throw open a window. Moths would
collect on the screen, their eyes swelling from their small,
powdery faces, black, beady things, locking onto your every
move.

Ralph spent most of that day
he had read Jack London’s John Barleycorn book sitting out in
intense sunlight beside a drained swimming pool. He sat there in a
hot aluminum deck chair as though doing penance. His shirt and
pants stuck to his skin. His feet sweat in his socks and shoes. Not
unlike Jack London, Ralph was one weary human, all right, and he
knew it. He slowly rubbed a wrist over his sweating forehead and
then studied and sniffed at the moisture. He took off his
sunglasses and gazed about hopefully for something, anything, to
look at that might brighten his spirits, that might lift his dark
mood. On the tennis court next to the drained pool two middle-aged
men listlessly lobbed an orange ball back and forth. Both were
bareback and had sort of bewildered looks on their faces, as though
they had both woken up that morning astonished to find themselves
where and who they were. Their jiggling flesh looked feverishly
yellow to Ralph. They were attorneys-at-law, Ralph believed.
Big-time attorneys-at-law. Any number of professional and business
bigwigs were at Duffy’s, including that fellow who claimed he was
the president of a bank and wept at meetings. A Stanford professor
had the cabin next to Ralph’s. You never saw that fellow, though,
just heard his sad, noisome traffic all night. Strange fellows, all
right, the lot of them. Drunks every one of them, true, but not one
real derelict on the premises, a fact which provided Ralph with
some small measure of comfort.

Then this strange fellow sat
down beside Ralph at poolside. Ralph wasn’t on the lookout for any
company. Ralph had his own problems. The fellow had a helmet of
white hair and a meaty red face. He was short and fat, and he
wheezed when he talked. The fellow bummed a cigarette from Ralph as
soon as he flopped down, and then, while he chain-smoked Ralph’s
cigarettes as relentlessly as Ralph, he started right up. I don’t
belong in this godforsaken dump, the fellow told Ralph. He had his
drinking problem in a headlock, he went on, and he didn’t have any
idea why he was buried away here in this Duffy’s place. He couldn’t
really recall how he got there, true. He remembered getting off a
plane and tossing a couple at the airport bar, then bang, the next
thing he knows he’s buried here at Duffy’s. He felt like a man who
had been kidnapped, held against his will. Held for ransom. It was
his wife, the fellow said. She was somehow behind all this. She
wanted to bury him alive.

I’m not a drunk, the fellow
told Ralph. To call a man a drunk is a serious charge. That kind of
talk could hurt a good man’s prospects. He was an important man who
traveled to the four corners of the world on big business, he told
Ralph. It was nothing for him to hop a jet to European capitals
or, say, the Middle East, to meet somebody important on big
business. He knew important people everywhere. Real earthshakers.
He had bent elbows with the great and the near-great. Just who do
you know, anyway? the fellow had suddenly asked Ralph out of the
blue.

Who do you know big in
London, Paris, Berlin, for that matter? Who do you know in Egypt?
Ralph admitted he didn’t know a soul in Egypt.

2

That hot day by the drained
pool, after the strange fellow had shoved off, the sad pock sounds
of the tennis ball made Ralph uneasy. He could feel his heart
racing, and there was a twitch in his neck. He thought something
was about to go wrong and he wanted to head it off. He wanted to
escape it. Just close his eyes and pray it would pass by, maybe
happen instead to one of those big-time attorneys. Or to them both.
What did he care? Why not them instead of him? How old was Jack
London, anyway, when he kicked the bucket? A chill passed over
Ralph and he shuddered.

Ralph pushed himself up from
the deck chair and shambled over to the edge of the drained pool.
Shading his eyes like a salute, Ralph peered intently at the dry
bottom. On a scorcher like today a fellow could sure use a little
dip, Ralph thought. There was no serious drought this year. The
hills weren’t even baked brown yet. Here at Duffy’s they let you
flush your toilet to your little heart’s content. So where was the
swimming pool’s water, then? That was one big mystery here at
Duffy’s. You had to imagine the worst. You had to imagine some poor
devil, some so-called patient, found one morning floating
facedown.

I am a patient, Ralph
thought. He was a drunk now and then, too, but there at Duffy’s
Ralph was a patient with a little drinking problem, that’s all.
There was even an airline pilot at Duffy’s as a patient. A fellow
who flew those big babies, those 747s, all over the world. Now,
that was something. That made you stop and consider. So Jack London
claimed he could do the work of five men even when he was drunk. So
Jack London could navigate a vessel through the reefs and shoals
and passages and unlighted coasts of the coral seas. Dose and
doctor, pull teeth, pull some poor Polynesian sailor back from
death’s door. One thousand words a day. Heave up anchor from forty
fathoms. One thousand words a day rain or shine, even when he was
drunk, was what Jack London claimed. But when it came to dosing and
doctoring himself, when it came to pulling himself back from
death’s door, Jack London had come up short. In the
saving-of-his-own-life department, Jack London had turned out to
be nothing but chopped liver.

Ralph flicked his
half-smoked Camel into the drained pool. When Ralph was a boy, he
could hold his breath underwater longer than anybody he ever knew.
He would swim underwater, close to the bottom, for hours, it
seemed. He would hold his breath and dead-man-float for so long
people would panic. Ralph could remember his dad shouting and
shouting to him once from a lakeshore. He remembered his dad, half
drunk from an afternoon of beer drinking in the sun, splashing
frantically toward deep water to save his son.

3

Brew a liquor from molasses
and sugarcane and put pots of it out in the jungle where the wild
monkeys can find it. They get so drunk they can't jump. Catch those
drunk monkeys and dress them up in red suits, then anchor them with
small chains to posts in the garden. Their antics out there
frighten all the other wild monkeys away. That is how the farmers
of Paraguay make scarecrows.

That night the air
conditioner went on the blink, and in moments Ralph felt like a
monkey in a red suit chained in some foreign garden. Ralph paced
his room, smoking like a stove. Sleep was a goddamn bad joke. Ralph
felt nervous, irritable, less moral by the minute. Thank God, Ralph
had a little something stashed in his cabin for snakebite. The
quart of Four Roses was hidden in the toilet tank.

The thing about Duffy’s was,
if a fellow backslid on the premises, got caught taking a nip, just
one, that fellow was cast out on his own, cast out from Duffy’s
forever. Ralph turned off the light and pulled a chair to the open
window. He pinched aside the curtains and peered into the dreadful
night. He could hear crickets and the traffic from a distant
highway. Fireflies blinked from the hot dark like the cigarette
embers of a posse.

Ralph splashed a finger of
whiskey into a water glass and drank it down in a manful gulp. He
poured another finger, then placed the bottle on the floor between
his feet. Ralph wondered if there was a steady stream of traffic at
his home in Menlo Park. Men coming and going. Truck drivers,
bikers, sailors, marauders, hairy arms thick with tattoos holding
his slender blond wife, monstrous acts of love. Ralph heard a door
slam and his heart thumped. He clutched his chest. Somehow Duffy
knew. The jig was up.

The toilet tank had been
dumb. That’s the first place an old ex-drunk like Duffy would look.
Ralph sniffed at the water glass, then hurried to the bathroom. He
held the glass under water hot enough to scorch his hand. He
sniffed the glass again, dried it, put his toothbrush in it, and
placed it carefully on the sink. Back at the window Ralph held his
breath, listening and staring into the night for the least sign.
Ralph picked up the bottle, tiptoed to the door, pressed his ear to
it.

The deck furniture around
the pool had been put up for the night, so Ralph sat cross-legged
on the warm concrete. He took a pull of Four Roses, then placed the
botde before him. What he wouldn’t give for a smoke. He wiped a
hand over his sweating forehead, dabbed at his stinging eyes with
his shirttail. What he wouldn’t give for a little dip, some cool
relief. If that goddamn pool had a quart of water in it, Ralph
would take the plunge, clothes and all, what did he care, the heat
was that intense. Ralph imagined himself swimming laps, up and
back, on his way to nowhere, for hours, all night, until at last
his old heart just caved in.

Ralph saw the glowing
cigarette ember before he heard the footfalls in the road’s gravel.
He flattened onto his stomach on the warm concrete. The person
approaching was humming softly, humming a tune of some kind, like a
little ditty, it sounded to Ralph. Sailors hum ditties, Ralph
thought suddenly. Seamen. Duffy had been a merchant seaman in his
youth. Ralph’s first thought was to sail the bottle of Four Roses
out into the darkness behind him, letting it take its chances,
hoping it would land softly on grass without a sound. But it
wouldn’t. Not in a million years. That bottle would smash on the
only rock in that dark field, an explosion that would wake the
dead. Clutching the bottle before him, Ralph crawled to the pool’s
edge. He stared down into that black abyss. The humming seaman
approached. Ralph swung a leg over the pool’s edge; his foot found
the ladder. The humming seaman approached. Grasping the bottle neck
with one hand, Ralph descended, vanishing without a
trace.

Ralph crouched with his back
pressed into a corner of the drained swimming pool that desperate
night at Duffy’s. Ralph watched the mysterious seaman who stood
almost directly above him at the pool’s edge smoking, a black
silhouette against the dark sky. Coastal storm clouds covered the
stars, and Ralph could hear the wind stir in the trees along the
gravel road. Ralph felt a drop of rain. He felt another. The
mysterious seaman looked up at the sky and held his hand out palm
up. The seaman flicked his cigarette into the pool, where it
splattered in sparks near Ralph’s feet. Ralph gasped and slapped at
an ember on his sock. Ralph shut his eyes. He held his breath and
pressed even more painfully into the concrete corner. Moments
passed. Minutes? Who could tell? Ralph opened his eyes and peered
once again at the seaman’s dark silhouette. Ralph took a long,
burning drink from his bottle of Four Roses and clasped a hand over
his mouth when he about gagged. The seaman turned slightly, seeming
to peer back toward the road and cabins, then he turned toward the
pool. Then the seaman took a drink. He did! Honest to God! He took
a goddamn belt from a small bottle, or maybe flask, whatever, but
he put it to his lips and threw his head back and drank like there
was no tomorrow. Ralph could hear the gulps. So Ralph took a drink,
too, in astonishment. Then the seaman fired up another cigarette,
and in the lighter’s flare Ralph saw his face. It wasn’t Duffy at
all. It was the fat, big-time businessman who knew important people
as far away as Egypt.