On the Ropes: A Duffy Dombrowski Mystery (3 page)
I got home just
after six; I was exhausted and had picked up a cup of coffee on my way home. I live in a 1968, twenty-seven-foot Airstream Overlander trailer on some land out on Route 9R that belongs to Doctor Rudy. There’s nothing on 9R in either direction from my place, it is just a series of stretches of land east of the industrial section of Crawford. The area’s environmentalists insist that the fields on 9R are polluted from SGG Industries, a multinational corporation that used to be headquartered in Crawford. SGG made those hockey-puck-shaped disinfectant things that go in urinals and other plastics up until the mid-seventies when they moved to Bolivia. For twenty-five years, their sewage emptied into Cramer’s Creek, which runs about 250 yards from my trailer. I’ve lived on 9R for the last six years, and I still don’t glow in the dark and I haven’t grown a third ear in the middle of my back or anything. My environmentalist social worker friends insist something like that is coming real soon.
Airstreams are those shiny, silver, bullet-shaped trailers you still occasionally see on the highway, usually attached to pickup trucks and driven by senior citizens. My Airstream is named “The Moody Blue” after the last song Elvis had a hit with, at least while he was alive. Mine hadn’t been pulled behind a senior citizen in a long time. Rudy’s uncle died and left him the Airstream in his will and Rudy, a wealthy doctor, didn’t have much use for it.
The thing is a marvel of efficiency. Everything you could imagine is in it and most of it is bolted to the floor. I’ve actually built an addition onto it so both the living room and the bedroom would be bigger. I also stuffed an air conditioner into one of the small windows, though I had to plug a lot of insulation around it and use about three rolls of duct tape to jerry-rig the thing in there. Around the middle of August every year, in the middle of a heat spell, it usually falls out.
I was curious to see how my new Muslim brother had spent the day in his new digs. As I approached the door to the Blue, I listened and heard nothing, which I took as a good sign. I came in the door, flicked on the light, and there was Al, spiritedly chewing on the foam rubber that made up the inside of my couch cushions. The reason he was chewing on the foam rubber was because he had already chewed through the velour cover, which was now shredded and on the ground underneath him.
Al had eaten about a quarter of the way through the foam rubber when my entrance got his attention. He cocked his head at me, took a dramatic pause, and sprang to his feet. Sprang may be a bit of an overstatement, considering his legs are about three and a half inches long and his belly only allowed for about a half inch of ground clearance.
Seeing me, he clearly got excited, started barking his baritone, and sprinted to meet me at the door. When Al got within three feet of me, the excitement got the better of him and he hurled himself like some sort of long-eared, heat-seeking missile in my direction. I watched in amazement as this overweight canine went airborne and transformed himself into a black, brown, and white fur-covered projectile.
My amazement quickly changed into horror when Al’s front paws, which, by the way, looked liked he bought them used off a mastiff, came crashing in full flight on my nuts. My knees buckled, the coffee in my hand blew across my face and chest, and I fell back on my ass, hitting the back of my head against the door. As I tried to reach over to console and comfort my poor nuts, Al head-butted me as he walked the remaining length of my torso to lick my face.
Ahh … it was good to be home.
I forgot about the coffee and figured it was time to forget about this day being productive in any way. I went to the fridge and cracked open an ice-cold Schlitz. Al followed on my heels wherever I went throughout the Blue and it got on my nerves. I sat down on the good side of my couch, took a hit of the Schlitz, and hit the button on my message machine. There were a few messages for me.
The first was from Smitty, who ran the gym inside the old Crawford YMCA. Anyone could use the boxing gym in the Y, but there was sort of a Darwinian law at work that kept the place from getting too crowded. Fighters are generally suspicious people, and it takes awhile to warm up to them. Most people who think it would be neat fun to learn how to box usually rethink it after someone punches them in the head. People come and people go and there’s no point in making friends with guys until they earn their stripes.
Smitty acted as my default manager. A promoter from Kentucky had a fight offer for me as a main event on a card he was having in Lexington. Kentucky is famous for lousy boxing and lousy pay, and though it would be cool to be in a main event and actually have a chance to win, I didn’t feel like driving all that way for what would probably amount to seven hundred bucks in my pocket. With gas, tolls, motels along the way, and all the little expenses that get taken up with travel, the two-thousand-dollar purse would be gone in no time. It’s the sort of stuff that Oscar de la Hoya doesn’t have to spend a lot of time thinking about. I wanted to think about it before I made any decisions.
The second call was from Lisa, the woman I had been dating. We’d been seeing each other for about seven months, and for about the last three weeks she’d been acting weird. There were nights when she seemed pretty normal, happy to be with me, and, frankly, interested in the things that people who date are interested in, namely sex. Then there’d be times when she was distant and seemed to take everything I said as an offense. Though I would never say it out loud in front of her or, for that matter, anyone else carrying two X chromosomes, I might think it was PMS. Actually, if it wasn’t PMS, it could be “the time right before” or “right after” or any of a number of those coded expressions women use to explain why they’re being weird. The way I had it figured, women could excuse their mood and behavior about twenty-seven out of every thirty days in the month if they tried hard enough.
This seemed more than that. I’ve stayed unmarried but have had enough relationships of varying lengths to recognize the signs. It hasn’t been a particularly pretty love history for me—my relationships usually follow the same arc. First, the woman gets charmed with the fact that she’s met an adult male who is physically fit and able to speak using words with more than one syllable. During this phase, sex occurs freely and often and googly eyes are made during tender moments in which the woman usually voices her joy of just spending time with me.
That phase, which can last from several hours to almost a month, but seldom more than that, is replaced with the second phase. In the second phase, the object of my affection begins to exhibit tendencies that make me believe that she may not be quite as enamored as I thought she might be. This stage manifests itself in symptomatology such as a tendency to find fault in my hobbies, especially my devotion to boxing, a dislike for my choice of restaurants, and then, most telling, the postponement of any coital activity.
My reaction, which has been tested over more trials than I care to admit, is to deny that such symptomatology exists. Then I try to convince myself that the said object of my affection is just going through a phase.
The third and usually final phase is when my partner returns to the psychotic diagnosis that she somehow had been able to mask during our brief love affair. The psychosis can manifest itself in schizophrenic thinking, rage disorders, or complex paranoia. During this time all sexual activity ceases and the relationship ultimately implodes, followed by the request of the now psychotic partner that the two of us remain friends.
Lisa had begun to enter the second phase or was indeed battling an extended period of pre-, active-, or post-menstrual difficulty. On one of our evenings out having drinks after attending the movies, I made the mistake of asking her if she was “puffy,” my special code for menstrual-cycle-induced dysphoria. That may have been my first mistake, but it certainly wasn’t going to be my last.
“Duffy,” Lisa had addressed me with the tone you might reserve for someone who farted at a tea party, “I’m not sure you’re ready for intimacy at all.”
“I thought I was pretty ready last Saturday night, if I do say so myself,” I said with an exaggerated wink and a loving punch to her upper arm.
“Uh … that’s exactly what I’m talking about,” Lisa rolled her eyes, hunched her shoulders, and sipped her Chardonnay while turning away from me.
It was one of those unanswerable digs that a woman throws out when she wants to righteously make a statement. The fact that the statement makes no sense is beside the point. The point is, I’m an asshole, unfit for the righteous pursuit of intimacy, who has the nerve to want to have fun and enjoy sex once in a while.
She hasn’t returned my phone calls since that date and I’m not sure what happened. I’d like to say that it doesn’t bother me and try to pull off the flip “can’t live with ’em, can’t live without ’em” deal, but I can’t. I like Lisa, I respect her, and I think we could go someplace. I don’t get what I did wrong or what I need to do to make it better. The way she’s been acting, it could be something she just snaps out of, but something inside made me doubt it.
Anyway, her message was a simple “Duffy, please call me.” It had a weird feeling to it, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to. I have always talked to Trina at work about my various relationships, and right from the start she didn’t approve of Lisa. Trina made it clear that I put up with way too much goofy shit with Lisa. In fact, Trina almost always thought that the women I got involved with were way too needy and that I should choose more carefully. That always sounded good, but when it came to dating women, it’s not like they do a full disclosure when you first meet them. When I first meet them they’re always attractive, interesting, and engaging, and it usually takes time before the psychotic behavior starts. Then I’m left with trying to figure out if their wackiness is an aberration or if they really are funny-farm certifiable. Inevitably they should be getting their mail delivered to One Funny Farm Circle, Wack-job, USA.
The third call was from Walanda. She was using one of her two weekly calls to contact me from jail. She was not doing well.
“Duffy, get me out of here, they’re goin’ kill me. He has people in here … they’re goin’ kill me. Duffy, you gotta get me out of here!”
She was holding back tears and half shouting in that weird way that people sometimes do on the phone when they’re trying to control the volume of their yells.
Al whimpered when he heard Walanda’s voice.
Before she hung up, she paused and, as an afterthought, said, “Remember, don’t give Allah-King no pork.”
No doubt Walanda felt she was in trouble—the difficult thing was trying to get a handle on whether it was real or brought on by withdrawal from the lack of psychotropics, both legal and illicit, in her system. Whether or not the danger was real or imagined, her anxiety certainly was authentic. One thing I’ve learned over the years of working with people like Walanda is that reality has very little to do with emotion. Right or wrong, true or false—Walanda was hurting and hurting bad.
Her short-legged, overgrown sausage continued to whimper for a few minutes after the phone call. After a minute or two the whimpering must’ve exhausted him, because he laid down on his back with all four paws pointing straight up and went to sleep.
Even though Walanda was nuts, it didn’t necessarily mean she was imagining the danger. Still, she was coming off crack and who knows what else and probably wasn’t taking her antipsychotic medication. It would be a few days before the jail doctor would see her and prescribe her Haldol, and then a few days after that the medication would work again. The stress of being taken out of her environment, losing Al, the situation with her stepdaughter—real or imagined—and being in jail were all sufficient to put her over the edge.
Just the same, I called Kelley to see if he could help. He wasn’t in, but I knew where I could find him. I put Al’s new leash on him and we headed for AJ’s. AJ’s is a grill on the West Side, in the middle of the city’s industrial section. It was a speakeasy during prohibition, and I think that was the last time that any of the AJs had put a dime into the place. The bar has been passed down three generations to its current proprietor, the one and only Andrew Jursczak III. The place reeked of stale beer, cigar smoke, and the poor hygiene of the people who frequented the place. Kelley hung out there a lot when he was off duty.
AJ’s is a dive, which is why I like it. I parked right in front of the entrance, told Al I’d be back, and headed in. As I closed my door and walked around the car, I could hear Al’s protest. I did my best to ignore him, that is, if you can ignore the baritone woofing of a hound fixated on getting your attention.
The place is long and thin with a bar capable of holding maybe eighteen patrons, and there are a half-dozen tables set close to the wall that no one ever sits in. The walls feature old-time beer signs, not because AJ III thought they were trendy, but because AJ’s grandfather got them for free in the forties.
The regulars, or the Fearsome Foursome as I called them, were present. There was TC, a lifetime state worker, sipping a draft of Genny with a back of B&B. TC’s view of the world consisted of figuring the best way to expend the least amount of effort in life and maximize the greatest amount of pleasure. There was Jerry Number One, a contractor, drinking a draft of Bud. Jerry Number One told the filthiest and least funny jokes that you never wanted to hear. Next to him was Jerry Number Two, who didn’t work and took one too many acid trips, drinking his signature Cosmopolitan. Lastly, there was Rocco, a retired construction worker and a WWII vet with a scotch on the rocks in front of him. He had spent the war in Okinawa and often referred to the hand-to-hand combat he learned from the “Japs.” Age hadn’t mellowed Rocco, and at seventy-five he still hated everything and everybody, mostly because things were perfect in his day and now they completely sucked. The Foursome sat in the four seats directly behind the stick, in the same order from left to right every night.