Nebraska (8 page)

Rick said, “That's one of the things that comes with being a traveler. You just assume you're welcome until someone tells you otherwise.”

But how did that square with the uneasiness Rick Bozack felt with his old chum Mickey Hogan? A year ago Mickey had been a high-priced copywriter, but then he had gone out on a limb to take over a smaller house that had been strictly an art and layout jobber, and the gamble had paid off in spades. Mickey turned the firm into a real comer in South Bend, what they call in the trade a “hot shop.”

Of course, Mickey had always been a brain. They had been rugby buddies at Notre Dame, and they used to shoot snooker together and swap tennis shoes and generally pal around like they were in a rowdy television commercial for some brand of light beer. Now Mickey was almost skinny and as handsome as Sergio Franchi, and taking full advantage of it, don't let anybody kid you. They had doubled to the Notre Dame/Army game last season, and Mickey brought along a knockout who kept sneaking her hand under Mickey's blue leg warmer. Rick couldn't keep his eyes off her. Even Jane noticed it. “Boy, I bet she put lead in your pencil,” she said.

So Rick was delighted but amazed when in February Mickey said he'd make the third for a terrific bunch of seats at the Notre Dame/Marquette basketball game. Mickey was even sitting on the snow-shoveled steps of his condominium, like some company president on the skids, when Rick pulled up along the curb. And now Mickey was smoking a black cigarillo as Rick told him how astonished he was these days to see that
everyone he met was about his age; they had all risen to positions of authority, and he was finding they could do him some good. You always thought it was just your father who could throw a name around. Now Rick was doing it himself, and getting results! “I'm really enjoying my thirties,” Rick said, and then smiled. “I've got twenty credit cards in my wallet, and I don't get acne anymore.”

Mickey just looked at him, bored.

“Okay, maybe not twenty credit cards, but my complexion's all cleared up.”

Mickey sighed and looked out the window.

Rick had forgotten how much of a jerk Mickey could be.

Rick kept the engine running and shoved the Captain and Tenille in his tape deck so Mickey could nestle in with some good tunes, then he pressed the door chimes to a house the Herdzinas had just bought: eighty thousand smackers, minimum. A small girl in pink underpants opened the door.

“Hi,” said Rick in his Nice Man voice.

The girl shoved a finger up her nose.

Karen Herdzina hugged him hello. The hugging was a phenomenon that was totally new to South Bend and Rick never felt he handled it well. He lingered a bit too long with women, and with men he was on the lookout for a quick takedown and two points on the scoreboard.

“I'll put some hustle into Walt,” she said. “Tell him to get it in gear.”

Walter came out of the bedroom with a new shirt he was ripping the plastic off of. “Mickey in the car?”

Rick nodded. “But it really belts out the heat.”

Walter unpinned the sleeves and the cardboards and shoved the trash into a paper sack that had the cellophane wrappers of record albums in it.

“Look at that,” he said. “My wife. She goes out spending my hard-earned money on records. The Carpenters. John Denver. I don't know what gets into her sometimes.”

“I kind of enjoy John Denver,” said Rick.

“See?” Karen called.

As they walked to the thrumming Oldsmobile, Walter leaned into Rick, fanning three tickets out like a heart-stopping poker hand. “How about these beauties, Richard?”

“Wow
!
What do I owe ya?”

He frowned and pushed the tickets back into his wallet. “
De nada
,” said Walter. “Buy me a beer.”

As Rick drove, he and Walter talked about their budding families. You could see it was driving Mickey bananas. Here he was a bachelor, giving up a night when he could've probably had some make-out artist in the sack, and all he was hearing was talk about drooling and potties and cutting new teeth. So as he climbed up onto the highway Rick introduced the topic of college basketball, and Walter scrunched forward to talk about the Marquette scoring threat, but Mickey interrupted to ask Walter if he knew that Rick was considering his own distributor-ship.

“Hell,” the banker said, “I'm the one who put the gleam in his eye.” He settled into the backseat and crossed his kid leather gloves in his lap. “I think that's a tremendous opportunity, Rick. Where've you gone with it lately?”

“He's been testing the waters,” said Mickey.

“I've sort've put it on the back burner until Jane and the kids get a better lay of the land,” said Rick. “I think it might be a pretty good setup, though. Almost no time on the road and very little selling. I'll see what it's like to stay around the house and carry those canvas money bags up to the teller's window.”

Walter grew thoughtful. “I read somewhere that every per-
son who starts a new business makes at least one horrible mistake. Something really staggering. If you get through that and you don't get kayoed, I guess you got it made.”

They were quiet then for several minutes, as if in mourning for all those bankrupts who had been walloped in the past. The tape player clicked onto the second side. Mickey tapped one of his black cigarillos on his wrist.

“You really like those things?” Rick asked.

Mickey lit it with the car lighter. “Yep,” Mickey said. “I like them a lot.”

Rick turned into the Notre Dame parking lot. “Since I gave up smoking, I notice it all the time. This health kick's really made a difference. I'm down two notches on my belt, my clothes don't fit, and I want to screw all the time now.” He switched off the ignition. “How's that for a side benefit?”

Mickey said, “You smile a lot, you know that?”

It was just an okay game, nothing spectacular as far as Rick was concerned. In fact, if you conked him on the head, he might even have said it was boring. Where was the teamwork? Where was the give-and-take? A couple of black guys were out there throwing up junk shots, making the white guys look like clowns, propelling themselves up toward the hoop like they were taking stairs three at a time. It went back and forth like that all night, and except for the spine-tingling Note Dame songs, except for the perky cheerleaders and the silver flask of brandy Mickey passed up and down the row, Rick caught himself wishing he was in a motel room somewhere eating cheese slices on crackers.

At the final buzzer the three guys filed out with the crowd, giving the nod to other old buddies and asking them how tricks were. The Oldsmobile engine turned slowly with cold before it caught, and as Rick eyed the oil pressure gauge Mickey removed the Captain and Tenille from the tape deck. Mr. Sophisticated.

Rick took the crosstown and shoved in a tape of Tony Orlando. Walter was paging through one of the catalogs for Doctor's Service Supply Company, Indianapolis, when he noticed a pizza parlor was still open, how did that sound? Rick admitted it didn't blow the top of his head off, but he guessed he could give it a whirl. Mickey just sat there like wax.

Rick swerved in next to a souped-up Ford with big rear wheels and an air scoop on the hood,
SECRET STORM
was printed in maroon on the fender. As the three walked up to the pizza parlor's entrance, Rick saw them mirrored by the big windows, in blue shirts and rep ties and cashmere topcoats, with scowls in their eyes and gray threads in their hair and gruesome mortgages on their houses, and not one of them yet living up to his full potential.

Walter stood with Rick at the counter as he ordered a twelve-inch combination pizza. An overhead blower gave them pompadours. “Hey,” said Rick, “that was fun.”

Walter showed three fingers to a girl at the beer taps. He said, “My wife encourages me to go out with you boys. She thinks it'll keep me from chasing tail.”

Rick wished he had been somewhere else when Walter said that. It said everything about the guy.

Mickey walked to the cigarette machine and pressed every button, then, deep in his private
Weltschmerz
,
he wandered past a sign that read,
THIS SECTION CLOSED.
Rick backed away from the counter with the beers, sloshing some on his coat, and made his way to the dark and forbidden tables where Mickey was moodily sitting.

Mickey frowned. “How long are we going to dawdle here?”

“You got something you wanted to do?”

“There's
always
something to do, Rick.”

A girl in a chef's hat seated an elderly couple in the adjoin-
ing area. She had pizza menus that she crushed to her breast as she sidestepped around benches toward the drinking buddies, bumping the sign that read
THIS SECTION CLOSED,
schoolmarm disapproval in her eyes.

Mickey rocked back in his chair. “Can I just sit here for a while? Would it ruin your day if I just sat here?”

The girl stopped and threw everything she had into the question and then shrugged and walked back to the cash register.

Rick almost smacked his forehead, he was that impressed. Mickey could get away with stuff that would land Rick in jail or small-claims court.

Soon he and Walter tore into a combination pizza, achieving at once a glossy burn on the roofs of their mouths. Mickey must not have wanted any. He seemed to have lost the power of speech. After a while Walter asked if either of them had read a magazine article about a recent psychological study of stress.

Rick asked, “How do you find time to
read?
”

“I can't,” Walter said. “Karen gets piles of magazines in the mail, though, and she gives me digests of them at dinner.”

Mickey looked elsewhere as Walter explained that this particular study showed that whenever a person shifted the furniture of his life in any significant way at all, he or she was increasing the chances of serious illness. Change for the better? Change for the worse? Doesn't matter. If your spouse dies, you get a hundred points against you. You get fired, that's fifty. You accomplish something outstanding, really excellent, still you get something in the neighborhood of thirty points tacked on to your score. The list went on and on. Mortgages counted, salary bonuses, shifts in eating habits. “You collect more than three hundred of these puppies in a year,” Walter said, “and it's time to consult a shrink.”

Neither Walter nor Rick could finish the pizza, so Rick asked the kitchen help for a sack to take the remains home in. Then the three men walked out into the night, gripping their collars at their necks, their ears crimped by the cold. It was getting close to zero. Rick could hear it in the snow.

There were three boys in Secret Storm, each dangling pizza over his mouth and getting cheese on his chin.

Rick opened the car door on his side and bumped the trim on the souped-up Ford. He smiled and shrugged his shoulders at the kid on the passenger's side.

The kid called him a son of a bitch.

Mickey immediately walked around the car. “What'd he call you?”

“Nothing, Mickey. He was kidding.”

But Mickey was already thumping the kid's car door with his knee. “I want to hear what you called him!”

The door bolted open against Mickey's cashmere coat, soiling it, and a kid bent out, unsnapping a Catholic high school letterman's jacket. Before he had the last snap undone, Mickey punched him in the neck. The kid grabbed his throat and coughed. Mickey held his fists like cocktail glasses.

Walter stood in the cold with his gloved hands over his ears as Rick tried to pull Mickey away from the fracas. The kid hooked a fist into Rick's ear and knocked him against the car. Mickey tackled the kid and smacked him against the pavement. Dry snow fluffed up and blew. Rick covered his sore ear and Mickey tried to pin the kid's arms with his knees, but the other boys were out of the Ford by then and urging their friend to give Mickey a shellacking. And at once it was obvious to Rick that the boys weren't aware they were dealing with three strapping men in the prime of their lives, men who had played rugby at Notre Dame when it was just a maiden sport.

Rick and Walter managed to untangle Mickey and grapple him inside the car. Rick spun his wheels on the ice as he gunned the Oldsmobile out of the parking lot. One of the kids kicked his bumper, and another pitched a snowball that
whumped
into the trunk.

Rick said, “I don't believe you, Mickey.”

Mickey was just getting his wind back. “You don't believe what?” Mickey said.

“You're thirty-five years old, Mick! You don't go banging high-school kids around.”

Walter wiped the rear window with his glove. “Oh, no,” he groaned.

Mickey turned around. “Are they following us?”

“Maybe their home's in the same direction,” said Rick.

Mickey jerked open the door. Cold air flapped through the catalogs of Doctor's Service Supply Company, Indianapolis. “Let me out,” Mickey said.

“Are you kidding?” Rick gave him a look that spoke of his resolute position on the question while communicating his willingness to compromise on issues of lesser gravity.

And yet Mickey repeated, “Let me out.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Shut up and let me out of this car.”

Walter said, “I think those are
Catholic
kids, Michael.”

Rick made a right-hand turn, and so did the souped-up Ford. They were on a potholed residential street of ivied brick homes and one-car garages.

Mickey pushed the door open and scraped off the top of a snow pile. He leaned out toward the curb like a sick drunk about to lose it until Rick skidded slantwise on the ice pack and stopped. Then Mickey hopped out and slipped on the ice and sprawled against the right front door of the Ford.

The boy who'd called Rick a son of a bitch cracked his
skull on the door frame trying to get out, and he sat back down pretty hard, with pain in his eyes and both hands rubbing his stocking cap.

“All right, you bastard,” the driver, a big bruiser, said, and lurched out, tearing off
his
letterman's jacket. The kid in the backseat squeezed out through the passenger door as if they were only stopping for gas. He stripped a stick of gum and folded it into his mouth, then put his hands in his jeans pockets. Rick walked over to him and the kid's eyes slid. “Bob's going to make mincemeat out of your friend, man.”