Songs in Ordinary Time (31 page)

She didn’t even close the door behind her.

“Lester! Lester!” Mr. Stoner’s voice clung to her all the way home like the mist of the damp night air.

E
unice Bonifante was in the bathroom when the telephone rang. She took another slug of beer and continued rubbing eye shadow from her left eyelid. The phone kept ringing through the empty house. Ten o’clock, too early for the breather, and if it was Sonny, he could wait, just like the shriveled pork in the oven had waited. The ringing stopped, then started again, seconds later. She grabbed her beer can from the toilet tank and scuffed into the living room.

“Mrs. Bonifante! This is Carl at the station! Something just happened!”

“What, Carl?” Eunice groaned. Carl was easily rattled at night.

148 / MARY MCGARRY MORRIS

“Mooney was just here. Blue Mooney, him and his whole gang!”

“Christ! What happened?” Damn Sonny and his soft heart, thinking all Mooney needed was a break for once.

“Well, there was a lot of looking around, you know, checking things out, and—”

“How many were there?” she interrupted.

“Uh, three. Yah, three.”

“Three! Three what? Carloads?”

“Three guys.”

“What’d they do?”

“They got gas.”

“Okay, Carl. Let’s see now, it’s ten o’clock and you wake me up from a sound sleep to tell me three guys just bought gas.” She waited. “Did I get that straight?”

“Well, I just thought you should know,” he said sulkily. “In case anything happens.”

“Nothing’s going to happen.” She belched softly. “Believe me.”

“I hope you’re right.”

“I’ll tell you what, Carl. Why don’t you close up now and…”

“Thanks, Mrs. Bonifante!” he said, hanging up while she was still talking.

“…go home…you little asshole.”

Damn him, she thought. Damn Al for leaving her alone like this. Damn Sonny. Damn all men. She went to the refrigerator and took out another can of Sonny’s favorite beer. She went into the living room and flopped onto the sofa to watch television. Fifteen minutes later she went in for another can. “The hell with it,” she muttered as she stretched over the arm of the couch and dialed. Grinning when she heard Sonny’s voice, she began to pant into the mouthpiece.

“Hello? Hello? Who’s there?” Sonny demanded.

“It’s me,” she giggled.

“What is it?”

“I need you. I need you so bad.”

“I see.”

“You can’t talk!”

“That’s right.”

“Oh!” she said, closing her eyes. “You’re in Carol’s room. Oh God.”

“No,” Sonny hedged.

“Then Lester’s there.”

“That’s right,” he said.

“I miss you, Sonny.” She sniffed and her eyes filled with tears. “I had everything ready. I’ve been waiting….”

“Oh. Well…why don’t you call me in the morning, then. There’s not much I can do right now, not without my folder on the case,” he added, clearing his throat.

“I wish you were here, Sonny. I’m so lonesome.”

“For police business, you really should call the station, sir.”

SONGS IN ORDINARY TIME / 149

“It is police business, goddamn it! As a matter of fact, Carl just called here all shook up about a carload of creeps that were just at the station. Mooney and his buddies.”

“Mooney? Not him again.”

“Yah, him again.” She laughed. “Now, maybe you should come up here and get all the details while they’re still fresh in my mind.”

“Is that so?” Sonny cleared his throat again. “Anything happen?”

“Not yet, baby. But it will when you get here.”

“Well,” Sonny sighed. “In that case, maybe I better check it out, then.”

“Oh yah, you better!”

“Okay. Very good, that’s what I’ll do.”

“Pull in the garage and come up through the cellar.”

“Will do,” Sonny said.

“Roger!” she laughed and hung up.

Sonny hung up at his end. And then, up in her bedroom, so did Carol Stoner. She slipped her hand under the mattress to check her stockpile. She could hear Sonny at the bottom of the stairs. “Probably nothing,” he said to Lester. “But I wouldn’t feel right if I didn’t check it out.” After he left, Lester went into his bedroom, and then for the rest of the night all she could hear was the sputtering static of the police radio. Her husband and her son needed their freedom, but she still didn’t have enough pills.

D
ressed completely in black, Robert Haddad waited in his unlit office, eyes trained on the window of Hammie’s Bar and Grill. At midnight the last patron, an old man with suspenders over his white undershirt, lingered in the doorway talking animatedly as, little by little, Hammie inched the door shut. Haddad stood up now so he could see Hammie, who was behind the bar washing and drying glasses while he smiled up at the television.

With all the lights on, Hammie looked younger and happier in the empty glare, and richer. His unvaried routine never exceeded twenty-three minutes.

After he set all the chairs on the tables, he would sweep the floor and then he would remove his register drawer and carry it down to the basement, where he’d sit on a wooden Poland Spring box and count his receipts on a round metal garden table. Some of the cash went into a green night deposit bag, which he dropped off at the bank on his way home, but most of it, Haddad knew, was hidden in a padlocked steel box Hammie kept in the base of an unused, capped chimney. This he had learned after many patient nights crouched in the swelter of the dark alley, observing the cranky bar-keeper through the mesh-covered cellar window.

Last Saturday night, Haddad had been ready to execute his plan when Vic Crowley, the cop, hurried into the alley. Haddad had ducked into the wedge of the darkness behind the trash cans. When he heard the zip, then the long, steady drumroll of urine against the cans, he scrambled out and 150 / MARY MCGARRY MORRIS

ran, leaving Crowley trapped midstream, calling helplessly over his shoulder, “Halt! I said halt!”

Tonight, Haddad was ready. He watched the last light go out. He watched Hammie back his red Buick carefully out of the alley, then drive off. Still Haddad waited. Tonight, there would be no rush. This was the beginning of a brand-new life. He was going to straighten it all out. And from this night forward there would be no more falling behind. No more foolishness.

From now on, if he and Astrid didn’t have the money, they’d go without.

He’d cover the unpaid premiums and set things straight, tonight, with this one act.

That this might be wrong, criminal, immoral was not a consideration, because it was that first step, that fortuitous foothold all successful businessmen needed. And it would be just this one time. It would be the boost he needed. It was in the nature of things. Often, for shrubbery to thrive, it first had to be hacked to the ground. Besides, the whole system was just too unfair, too lopsided, with him having to be accountable for every penny while Hammie’s cash trade was untraceable and virtually tax-free. Life was a network of inequities that had to be realigned, readjusted, made fair for all men, he thought with a surge of conviction.

He crossed the street with his new black sneakers springing into the alley.

He knelt down and with only a few jabs of his long screwdriver into the rotted wood, pried loose the cellar window and lifted it on its hinges. The dead cellar air seemed to suck him in, so quickly did he find himself dropping down, then scrambling through the dark to the chimney. He needed to turn on his flashlight only once to find the latch on the pitted metal clean-out door. As soon as he had the strongbox out of the chimney, he clicked off the light and unfolded the large grocery bag he’d carried in his pocket.

Into it he poured the dollar bills, then returned the strongbox to the chimney, carefully latching the door closed again. It would be twenty-four hours before Hammie discovered his loss.

Haddad lifted himself easily through the window, closed it, then raced back to his office, where, in the dark, he stuffed the bag of cash into his briefcase. He changed into his suit and tie, then started home. Along open stretches of sidewalk he walked with tight deliberate steps, but whenever he entered the safe shadows of trees, he ran, at times careening into them, throwing his arms around their rough girth, holding himself there, flattened, his cheek to the bark, like a man caught in a windstorm, holding on for dear life, and laughing.

I
t had been a week. At four o’clock Marie called the house from work.

Alice answered and said Benjy had come home from the pool a while ago and was watching a show.

“Were there any calls?” Marie interrupted.

“Just that Father Gannon again. He said he’d call you back.”

She cleared her throat. “So it’s just the two of you there?” she asked, wincing.

SONGS IN ORDINARY TIME / 151

“Just us,” Alice answered.

After she hung up she resumed her typing, and the minute Astrid left for the ladies’ room with her new movie magazine and her cigarettes, she dialed the Mayo sisters’ boardinghouse. “Hello, I’d like to rent a room,” she said, pinching her nostrils, her mouth close to the receiver. “Do you have any available?”

“Well, I don’t know, that is, oh dear, I’m…I’m not sure,” sighed May Mayo’s sweet flutter. “It depends…we might. My sister…well, you see, we have to wait until the week is up…and then we’ll know. I hope.”

Marie closed her eyes. “So you do have an empty room.”

“Not really. Well, it’s empty, you see, but the rent’s paid till Sunday.”

“Has he moved out? I mean, your tenant.”

“Well, that’s hard to say, dearie. The poor man’s only got the clothes he wears. I offered him some of the—”

“Thank you,” Marie said and hung up quickly as Astrid teetered back into the office on her gold spike heels. The two women avoided each other’s eyes. Astrid smoothed her skirt over her hips and sat down. Marie’s hands trembled as she rolled a sheet of stationery into the typewriter.
He’s gone
, she thought.
Omar’s gone
. She still had six more letters to do.
Oh God, he’s
gone
. She buried her face in her hands and took a deep breath. She felt like screaming.

“You okay?” Astrid asked, glancing up from her adding machine.

“Just tired.” She started to type quickly, before any conversation could start. This morning she had turned off Astrid’s radio and asked her to please be quiet, and Astrid, offended, hadn’t spoken since. The icy silence had been a relief. As she typed now she could feel Astrid staring at her.

“I’m sorry,” Astrid said finally. “I should’ve thought. I mean, here you are struggling at this shitty job, and I come in blabbing about Bobby’s bonus and my new dryer and my new hi-fi.”

“It wasn’t that,” she said coldly, still typing. “I just need quiet when I work.”

Today Astrid wore a white satiny dress with a wide gold cinch belt. Even when she didn’t look directly at Astrid, her corner of the cramped little office seemed to glow.
Like she’s dressed for a night-club
, Marie thought irritably.

With Omar gone, everything got on her nerves, especially this mindless, brash woman who didn’t even have to work, whose husband had his own business. Working was just an extension of Astrid’s social life, a chance to show off her new clothes, she thought, banging the carriage so hard on every return that the typewriter jumped and now sat crooked on the table.

“I hate quiet, and you hate noise.” Astrid sighed, staring, for a moment awed by another of life’s conundrums.

Marie kept typing. Frowning, she bent closer to the letter, as if Astrid’s chatter were obscuring her vision.

“Of course, I don’t have kids and all that, so I guess I just got used to my own commotion.” She paused. “Speaking of which, I hear Sam’s locked up.”

152 / MARY MCGARRY MORRIS

She looked up, blinking, not certain she’d heard correctly.

Astrid smiled. “Must be so nice now, not having that worry hanging over you, you know, of him barging in here or bothering you at night.”

Marie started to say something, then closed her mouth. There was nothing she knew to say; not a word came to mind. These were her troubles, which she had never discussed with anyone, and certainly wasn’t about to with this gum-snapping sleazy showgirl who had obviously lived such a low life herself she considered everyone else’s misfortunes public property like her own. Marie had never understood how women could bare their souls with such ease, exposing themselves so shamelessly to one another. It was a weakness she had always despised. Sometimes the most unsettling legacy of Sam’s failure as a husband, father, provider seemed to be this viraginity, this obdurate male soul in female flesh that set her apart from women as well as men. Well, people might find her abrasive, but she’d choose strength and honesty any day over Astrid’s perfumed guile and featherbrained duplicity.

“Do him good,” Astrid was saying. “One of these days he might shock the hell out of you and just never take another drink.” She shook her head and smiled. “They’re sweet guys, too, the lushes; you know they’ve been there. Hey!” Astrid gave a sly wink of her blue-lidded eyes. “Who’s the dreamboat I saw getting out of your car last week? Tall guy, dark hair, hanging over your window like he hated saying goodbye. I saw him, and I said to myself, ‘Hey now, Marie don’t fool around.’” She raised her hands over her head and shimmied in her chair. “‘She’s got herself a
man
,’ you know what I mean?”

Marie jumped up and started for the door. Around her, everything blurred. Hearing Astrid talk about Omar suddenly confirmed her loss, her failure to keep him.

“Oh Marie,” Astrid called, hurrying after her and throwing her arms around her. “Oh you poor kid. You poor, poor kid,” she crooned, holding her close, so close that Marie was shocked to feel Astrid’s breasts press against her. “It’s not easy, is it?” Astrid said softly, and Marie shook her head. Astrid patted her back, and she didn’t dare move. “They’ll drive you crazy,” she whispered. “They will.” She stepped back and held Marie at arm’s length, then laughed that quick hard laugh that set everything back where it had been before.

Marie hunched over her typewriter as Astrid’s adding machine seemed to keep time to her words.