Send My Love and a Molotov Cocktail! (32 page)

“You don't look so good.” Her voice startled him, and his bourbon glass twitched, a thin drip rippling over the side. She sat down next to him. Dark-skinned and darker-eyed, looking at him with her head cocked a little.

“I been better,” he said.

“Yeah.” She crossed her arms on the bar and laid her head down on them, looking up at him. She smiled, and there was a wide gap between her front teeth that Derrick stared straight into. “I can see that.”

Derrick laughed his harsh scraped-out laugh. Then he said the only thing he could think of to ask. “What're you drinking?”

Derrick never had any trouble with girls in high school. It was a brooding intensity that broke their hearts, especially when he was sitting the other side of a bonfire with a beer in his hand after a football game. And it was that he never tried to explain his empty spaces. Every other boy in that small Kentucky town, they talked about nothing but their plans for escaping. It was a story that no one, not even themselves, believed. Derrick, though, knew exactly how he'd make his break. But he could no more explain why to those high school girls than he could explain the mind of a canebreak rattlesnake.

His silence intensified in Vietnam. And since he's returned, he has nothing to say to women at all. It's only when he gets so hollowed out and lonely that he has to have some kind of human contact that he makes a run on the local prostitutes. He can feel his ability to talk atrophying, the shutters being drawn on the kind of normal talk that keeps people normal. Like he's pulling them shut on his own version of his father's cabin.

But this woman, Lou was her name, she was so easy to talk to that he just kind of forgot to not know how to talk. Not the senseless pouring out of one's big feelings so beloved by cops, motorcycle gang members, and housewives. Derrick can't tolerate that for more than five minutes in anyone. It's the deeper and lighter freeflow of conversation, by which you can, instead of being told who your conversant is, see them for yourself.

So they drank at the bar until it closed. And there's nothing quite as heartful as walking out of a hopeless bar with someone, the hard lights kicking on full behind you. Then they drove to her apartment in Over-The-Rhine. And she rolled joints, she poured drinks. She had a wicked sense of humor and a soft sidling voice. And the gap in her teeth that Derrick couldn't stop looking at. But every time he made a move in on her, she found somewhere else to be.

And slowly, through the booze and the smoke they'd created together, drifting through the apartment, he started to realize that he'd made a big mistake.

But it was too late. And after that Derrick doesn't remember much of anything.

The kid returns and holds out a hand mirror for Derrick. On it, a pile of cocaine, a razor blade, a straw. Derrick chops the cocaine into two lines and snorts them. It dumps straight back into his brain, into his blood. “Get the rest of it and put it in something I can carry,” he says, hoarsely, tossing the hand mirror across the room onto the couch. “And I need something I can go outside in without getting killed.”

The kid's eyes light up. “I've got just the thing.” He sweeps out of the room. When he returns, he drops a Confederate Army greatcoat and a slouch hat at Derrick's feet. “Sometimes I get actors through here, too,” he says, returning to the couch and clasping his knee

“I've got half a mind to shoot you right now,” Derrick says. But he pulls on the coat and jams the slouch hat over his face.

“No one will know what it is,” the kid says. He hops off the couch and moves to dust off the gold braids on the shoulders of the coat. But Derrick puts the muzzle of the gun on his forehead and pushes him back onto the couch.

As ridiculous as Derrick feels in the getup, the kid is mostly right. At first, nobody even looks at him as he shambles down the sidewalk towards Lou's apartment. Cars burn, men and women get stomped into the blacktop, and Derrick shuffles through the shadows like some apparition, holding the huge Colt revolver under the greatcoat with his thumb on the hammer.

But then he is spotted. It's a big black man, somewhere in his fifties, the cataracts in his eyes reflecting back the riot fire in an eerie blue. He's standing in the middle of the street with a sledge-hammer handle in his hands, chest heaving, when, of a sudden he lets out a roar and plows into the crowd at Derrick. Derrick sets his back against the wall and lifts the revolver out from under his greatcoat. “You've got me confused with someone else,” he says.

The man hurtles a discarded bicycle out of his way, his lips curled back from his teeth. “I know exactly who you are, you fucking pig,” the man says. “You put my son in prison on a bullshit weed rap.”

“Come another step and I'll orphan him.”

“I'm gonna break your fucking skull.”

The streets are erupting in a series of minor explosions. Cars getting ripped apart bolt by bolt, rubber-fires detonating, the smoke from it all eddying out from the rage and commotion. The revolver's gunshot cuts through the cacophony like its been fired off in a library, and some of the rioters hit the ground right where they stand, while most just gawk around for the truck bomb they're pretty sure has just detonated. Even as furious as the old man is, it takes him a good twenty seconds to realize he's uninjured and pick himself off the ground.

By which time Derrick has long since slid back into the smoke and shadows.

Another thing that Derrick didn't realize until years after his mother's funeral was that the Maltese hadn't died with her. He figured that out when he found a newspaper clipping of the wreck in a copy of one of his father's books, and there the Maltese stood, huddled against the rain-slickered leg of one of the state troopers on the scene.

Not that Derrick blames his father for putting the dog down. In that town of Labradors and Hounds, he wanted it put down, too. That sure as hell isn't why he hates the old man, anyway. Nor can he blame the scraped out feeling he's had most of his life on the death of his mother. He was never any closer to her than he was to his father. That's not to say he didn't grieve her when she died, but she was a fussy creature of headaches and random pains, all of which she could only cure with an evening's drinks, and when she was drunk she was shrill and unpredictable. To the boy Derrick she was something to be avoided most of the time, tolerated the rest.

Some men are just less easily impressed than others, Derrick thinks, as he slides out of the smoke of the riot and into the cavernous darkness of an Over-The-Rhine alley. Besides the life in his own head, that which he culled out of his books, the rest of Derrick's father's existence was set in grocery stores, classrooms, and dining rooms. Derrick gets suicidal just trying to enumerate all the shit in his life he doesn't care about. This riot, this tiny rampage, this is as close as he's been to interested in anything since returning home from the war. And there were times during the war when he wasn't bored at all. When he was filled with electricity, overflowing and alive.

He tries not to think about it.

Lou's apartment has three rooms. Derrick kicks in the door and tosses it. Turning out the kitchen drawers, ripping books off the shelves. Nothing. Kicking through the beer bottles and paraphernalia they'd left in the sitting room. Nothing. The bedroom. He cuts open the mattress. He smashes the dresser. Then, in the nightstand, he finds a pack of cigarettes, a book of matches, and car keys for a Lincoln Continental that look like they'll fit the one parked down in the alley. He also finds cash, a paper sack of it, on a shelf in the closet.

He pockets the keys and the sack of cash. Then takes the cigarettes into the sitting room, and turns on the small black and white television. Riot footage, every channel. White announcers with heavy side-combed haircuts. Derrick sits down on the couch. Trashcans in the air, club-wielding police, chanting blacks. The camera cuts from the tumult of images to the officer on the scene for explanation. And Derrick laughs out loud.

It's Cirillo doing the explaining. The Tac Squad raided an after-hours party at a local club, claiming dope and prostitution. It was a homecoming party for incoming veterans, sure, but it was also militant recruitment, and nothing makes a militant like a Vietnam veteran. Cirillo says one of the organizers by the name of Everette Anderson, also a Vietnam vet, took a swing at him.

Then the television cuts to an aerial shot of the club where the riot started, and Derrick stands involuntarily.

It's the same club where he got himself suspended.

The television pans across the neighborhood, and Derrick realizes he's only about two blocks away.