Skeleton Crew (40 page)

Englander must have known who she was (her picture had been in the Chicago papers, next to Scollay’s) because he showed her to a table himself and shushed a couple of drunks at the bar who had been snickering at her.

I felt badly for her, like I feel for Billy-Boy sometimes. It’s tough to be on the outside. You don’t have to be out there to know, although I’d have to agree that you can’t know just what it’s like. And she had been very sweet, the little I had talked to her.

When the break came, I went over to her table.

“I’m sorry about your brother,” I said awkwardly. “I know he really cared for you, and—”

“I might as well have fired those guns myself,” she said. She was looking down at her hands, and now that I noticed them I saw that they were really her best feature, small and comely. “Everything that little man said was true.”

“Oh, say now,” I replied—a
non sequitur
if ever there was one, but what else was there to say? I was sorry I’d come over, she talked so strangely. As if she was all alone, and crazy.

“I’m not going to divorce him, though,” she went on. “I’d kill myself first, and damn my soul to hell.”

“Don’t talk that way,” I said.

“Haven’t you ever wanted to kill yourself?” she asked, looking at me passionately. “Doesn’t it make you feel like that when people use you badly and then laugh at you? Or did no one ever do it to you? You may say so, but you’ll pardon me if I don’t believe it. Do you know what it feels like to eat and eat and hate yourself for it and then eat more? Do you know what it feels like to kill your own brother because you are
fat?”

People were turning to look, and the drunks were sniggering again.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered.

I wanted to tell her I was sorry, too. I wanted to tell her ... oh, anything at all, I reckon, that would make her feel better. Holler down to where she was, inside all that flab. But I couldn’t think of a single thing.

So I just said, “I have to go. We have to play another set.”

“Of course,” she said softly. “Of course you must ... or they’ll start to laugh at
you.
But why I came was—will you play ‘Roses of Picardy’? I thought you played it very nicely at the reception. Will you do that?”

“Sure,” I said. “Be glad to.”

And we did. But she left halfway through the number, and since it was sort of schmaltzy for a place like Englander’s, we dropped it and swung into a ragtime version of “The Varsity Drag. ” That one always tore them up. I drank too much the rest of the evening and by closing I had forgotten all about her. Well, almost.

Leaving for the night, it came to me. What I should have told her. Life goes on—that’s what I should have said. That’s what you say to people when a loved one dies. But, thinking it over, I was glad I didn’t. Because maybe that was what she was afraid of.

Of course now everyone knows about Maureen Romano and her husband Rico, who survives her as the taxpayers’ guest in the Illinois State Penitentiary. How she took over Scollay’s two-bit organization and turned it into a Prohibition empire that rivaled Capone’s. How she wiped out two other North Side gang leaders and swallowed their operations. How she had the Greek brought before her and supposedly killed him by sticking a piece of piano wire through his left eye and into his brain as he knelt in front of her, blubbering and pleading for his life. Rico, the bewildered valet, became her first lieutenant, and was responsible for a dozen gangland hits himself.

I followed Maureen’s exploits from the West Coast, where we were making some pretty successful records. Without Billy-Boy, though. He formed a band of his own not long after we left Englander’s, an all-black combination that played Dixieland and ragtime. They did real well down south, and I was glad for them. It was just as well. Lots of places wouldn’t even audition us with a Negro in the group.

But I was telling you about Maureen. She made great news copy, and not just because she was a kind of Ma Barker with brains, although that was part of it. She was
awful
big and she was
awful
bad, and Americans from coast to coast felt a strange sort of affection for her. When she died of a heart attack in 1933, some of the papers said she weighed five hundred pounds. I doubt it, though. No one gets that big, do they?

Anyway, her funeral made the front pages. It was more than you could say for her brother, who never got past page four in his whole miserable career. It took ten pallbearers to carry her coffin. There was a picture of them toting it in one of the tabloids. It was a horrible picture to look at. Her coffin was the size of a meat locker—which, in a way, I suppose it was.

Rico wasn’t bright enough to hold things together by himself, and he fell for assault with intent to kill the very next year.

I’ve never been able to get her out of my mind, or the agonized, hangdog way Scollay had looked that first night when he talked about her. But I cannot feel too sorry for her, looking back. Fat people can always stop eating. Guys like Billy-Boy Williams can only stop breathing. I still don’t see any way I could have helped either of them, but I
do
feel sort of bad every now and then. Probably just because I’ve gotten a lot older and don’t sleep as well as I did when I was a kid. That’s all it is, isn’t it?

Isn’t it?

I can’t go out no more.
There’s a man by the door
in a raincoat
smoking a cigarette.

 

But

 

I’ve put him in my diary.
and the mailers are all lined up
on the bed, bloody in the glow
of the bar sign next door.

 

He knows that if I die
(or even drop out of sight)
the diary goes and everyone knows
the CIA’s in Virginia.

 

500 mailers bought from
500 drug counters each one different
and 500 notebooks
with 500 pages in every one.

 

I am prepared.

I can see him from up here.
His cigarette winks from just
above his trenchcoat collar
and somewhere there’s a man on a subway
sitting under a Black Velvet ad thinking my name.

 

Men have discussed me in back rooms.
If the phone rings there’s only dead breath.
In the bar across the street a snubnose
revolver has changed hands in the men’s room.
Each bullet has my name on it.
My name is written in back files
and looked up in newspaper morgues.

 

My mother’s been investigated;
thank God she’s dead.

 

They have writing samples
and examine the back loops of pees
and the crosses of tees.

 

My brother’s with them, did I tell you?
His wife is Russian and he
keeps asking me to fill out forms.
I have it in my diary.
Listen—
listen
do listen:
you must listen.

 

In the rain, at the bus stop,
black crows with black umbrellas
pretend to look at their watches, but
it’s not raining. Their eyes are silver dollars.
Some are scholars in the pay of the FBI
most are the foreigners who pour through
our streets. I fooled them
got off the bus at 25th and Lex
where a cabby watched me over his newspaper.

 

In the room above me an old woman
has put an electric suction cup on her floor.
It sends out rays through my light fixture
and now I write in the dark
by the bar sign’s glow.
I tell you I
know.

 

They sent me a dog with brown spots
and a radio cobweb in its nose.
I drowned it in the sink and wrote it up
in folder GAMMA.

 

I don’t look in the mailbox anymore.
The greeting cards are letter-bombs.

 

(Step away! Goddam you!
Step away, I know tall people!
I tell you I know very tall people!)

 

The luncheonette is laid with talking floors
and the waitress says it was salt but I know arsenic
when it’s put before me. And the yellow taste of mustard
to mask the bitter odor of almonds.

 

I have seen strange lights in the sky.
Last night a dark man with no face crawled through nine miles
of sewer to surface in my toilet, listening
for phone calls through the cheap wood with
chrome ears.
I tell you, man, I
hear.

 

I saw his muddy handprints
on the porcelain.

 

I don’t answer the phone now,
have I told you that?

 

They are planning to flood the earth with sludge.
They are planning break-ins.

 

They have got physicians
advocating weird sex positions.
They are making addictive laxatives
and suppositories that burn.
They know how to put out the sun
with blowguns.

 

I pack myself in ice—have I told you that?
It obviates their infrascopes.
I know chants and I wear charms.
You may think you have me but I could destroy you
any second now.

 

Any second now.

 

Any second now.

 

Would you like some coffee, my love?

 

Did I tell you I can’t go out no more?
There’s a man by the door
in a raincoat.

I
t was forty miles from Horlicks University in Pittsburgh to Cascade Lake, and although dark comes early to that part of the world in October and although they didn’t get going until six o’clock, there was still a little light in the sky when they got there. They had come in Deke’s Camaro. Deke didn’t waste any time when he was sober. After a couple of beers, he made that Camaro walk and talk.

He had hardly brought the car to a stop at the pole fence between the parking lot and the beach before he was out and pulling off his shirt. His eyes were scanning the water for the raft. Randy got out of the shotgun seat, a little reluctantly. This had been his idea, true enough, but he had never expected Deke to take it seriously. The girls were moving around in the back seat, getting ready to get out.

Deke’s eyes scanned the water restlessly, side to side
(sniper’s eyes,
Randy thought uncomfortably), and then fixed on a point.

“It’s there!” he shouted, slapping the hood of the Camaro. “Just like you said, Randy! Hot damn! Last one in’s a rotten egg!”

“Deke—” Randy began, resetting his glasses on his nose, but that was all he bothered with, because Deke was vaulting the fence and running down the beach, not looking back at Randy or Rachel or LaVerne, only looking out at the raft, which was anchored about fifty yards out on the lake.

Randy looked around, as if to apologize to the girls for getting them into this, but they were looking at Deke—Rachel looking at him was all right, Rachel was Deke’s girl, but LaVerne was looking at him too and Randy felt a hot momentary spark of jealousy that got him moving. He peeled off his own sweatshirt, dropped it beside Deke’s, and hopped the fence.

“Randy!” LaVerne called, and he only pulled his arm forward through the gray twilit October air in a come-on gesture, hating himself a little for doing it—she was unsure now, perhaps ready to cry it off. The idea of an October swim in the deserted lake wasn’t just part of a comfortable, well-lighted bull-session in the apartment he and Deke shared anymore. He liked her, but Deke was stronger. And damned if she didn’t have the hots for Deke, and damned if it wasn’t irritating.

Deke unbuckled his jeans, still running, and pushed them off his lean hips. He somehow got out of them all the way without stopping, a feat Randy could not have duplicated in a thousand years. Deke ran on, now only wearing bikini briefs, the muscles in his back and buttocks working gorgeously. Randy was more than aware of his own skinny shanks as he dropped his Levi’s and clumsily shook them free of his feet—with Deke it was ballet, with him burlesque.

Deke hit the water and bellowed, “Cold! Mother of Jesus!” Randy hesitated, but only in his mind, where things took longer
—that water’s forty-five degrees, fifty at most,
his mind told him.
Your heart could stop.
He was pre-med, he knew that was true ... but in the physical world he didn’t hesitate at all. He leaped it, and for a moment his heart
did
stop, or seemed to; his breath clogged in his throat and he had to force a gasp of air into his lungs as all his submerged skin went numb.
This is crazy,
he thought, and then:
But it was your idea, Pancho.
He began to stroke after Deke.