The Barkeep (3 page)

After a long period of turmoil, Justin’s heart slowed, and the pool cleared, and he felt overcome with calm. A perfect stillness, a moment of absolute tranquility. It wasn’t an easy place to get to, and he struggled to stay there once he found it, but it felt like home when he was there. And he was there now.

Have you ever seen the road shimmer before you on a hot summer’s day, the way it looks more like a dream than a hard piece of reality? When Justin’s mind was clean of cant and emotion, when both past and future fell away, the whole world shimmered like that for him.

Shimmered like the harmless illusion that it was. And what kind of barkeep would he be if he could be spooked by an illusion?

3.

SOMETHING HARD

T
here are two types of the mentally deficient in this world. The first type mistake their lack of understanding for bold perception. This type of deficiency is often found in urologists and presidential candidates and is as dangerous as the plague. The second type are acutely aware of their own limitations and embrace the narrow range of their capacities. Think of the idiot savant with a rare genius, who gives the world a great artistic gift that can be both stunning and transformative.

Derek belongs to this second class, being himself a bit of an idiot and a bit of a savant.

Derek knows all that he does not know. Plots and plans fly in the air about him, conspiracies flourish. He can sense the purposes and cross-purposes battling around him, but he is unable to appreciate their true import and so he has left off trying to understand. Schemes are hatched and thrive and die ugly deaths while Derek goes about his business blissfully unaware.

He lets Vern take care of the plotting now. He trusts Vern because he has no choice but to trust Vern. He cannot find the jobs, negotiate the fees, avoid the double cross, count the money. He knows how hard it is to keep the business end of
things straight because Vern constantly tells him how hard it is to keep the business end of things straight. And after that job went sour with Tree, and Derek was left holding the bag in Harrisburg, he is grateful that Vern has stepped into the void. Vern counseled him on how to make his mark in prison so that everyone would leave him alone. Vern counseled him on how to play the parole board when his time was up. Vern counseled him on how to get back into the business. Vern stepped up when Derek needed someone to step up for him.

And so now he trusts Vern. As he had trusted Tree before Vern. And had trusted Rodney before Tree. And had trusted Sammy D before Rodney. They were the smart guys, they were the ones who understood the world. And that they all are dead, except for Vern, only reinforces Derek’s satisfaction with his place in the world. Let the others scheme their way through life, using him as a tool; Derek just goes about his business. Coolly, efficiently, brutally. He might not be an artistic savant, but he is not without talents. And in their strange way, his abilities put a song in his heart.

It is still light when Derek slips along the alleyway to the back door of the Kensington row house north of Center City Philadelphia. He examines the lock, a simple Yale with a rusted cylinder, before taking the proper torque wrench and a half-diamond pick from the vinyl envelope he always keeps in his pocket. A lock like this Derek can scrub open as quick as a breath.

Sammy D taught Derek how to open locks. Sammy D knew everything about lock-picking, but by the time Derek was through with his lessons he was better at it than Sammy D. Rodney could do locks too, but he was a squirrelly little guy, always worried about who was coming up behind him or what was waiting for him inside or how long the job was taking or
how much noise was being made. It was the powder that made him nervous. Sometimes Rodney, under pressure, would fail repeatedly, throwing all the timing out of whack. But Derek never has such problems. He trusts his handler to worry about everything else but the step-by-step of the job. So when he is working a lock, all he cares about is raising the pins and manipulating the cylinder. It is just him and the lock and after a moment—
click, plock, click
—the pins align as if on their own.

Once inside the row house, with the door closed behind him, Derek takes out his flashlight and begins to navigate his way. He knows he has enough time to get in position because Vern has told him he has enough time. The rear door opens into a basement filled with boxes and junk and smelling slightly of crap. A cockroach scurries away from the light, and Derek follows it with his beam until it slips beneath a sagging carton. Derek leans down and sees the slight antennae wave at him. He waves back.

Derek is fascinated with animals of all kinds—bugs, rabbits, muscular mastiffs—and they all seem just as fascinated with him. But of all the animals, Derek is most fascinated with horses. He loves their coats, their smell, the way they lift their front hooves, the way they feel between his legs when he rides them. And Vernon has promised Derek his own horse if all works out right. He has always wanted his own horse and has been promised one many times before, but as of yet he is still waiting. Derek is tired of waiting. Derek is going to hold Vern to that promise.

A set of rough wooden stairs climbs to a doorway that leads into a large eat-in kitchen, with bare counters, an old rusted stove, yellow linoleum flooring. Derek passes through the kitchen like a shadow, through an arched passageway to a dining alcove, and then to a living room with the front door on
its far wall. A sagging sofa, an old television, a telephone set by a greasy green easy chair in the corner. The room smells of mold and body odor.

Derek walks over to the phone and picks up the handset. He dials the number Vern told him to dial. He has instructions for what to do if the phone is answered and what to do if it is not answered. There is no answer now, so he waits for the voice-mail message and then stays on the line, humming to keep it from shutting off. Vern told him to hum something, but Derek needed more specific instructions, so Vern told Derek to just hum his favorite song. Derek had to choose between “God Bless America” and “Mary Had a Little Lamb” and he worried about that decision for the longest time until he decided to sort of mix them together. When he is done humming, he hangs up the phone, sits in the green chair, and waits.

And here is another advantage of Derek’s mental deficiency in his unique line of work. This could be a difficult moment, the waiting, when doubts start sprouting like weeds. Rodney could never bear these moments. He could not stop himself from nervously talking when they were in it together. Yap-yap-yammering about plans and angles and things that Derek never could follow. Rodney had never learned the trick that seems to come naturally to Derek. As the outside darkens into night, Derek’s mind goes just as dark; in the quiet of the room, Derek’s mind is just as quiet. His pulse remains low, his breathing even. And it stays that way, until he hears the scuffing at the front door.

When the front door finally opens, a man slouches in, shuts the door behind him, and flicks the light switch by the door. The room is bathed with a dull yellow from an overhead fixture, but the man is so preoccupied with emptying his pockets onto a side table and examining the contents, including a
small packet with white powder inside, that it takes a moment for him to realize that someone else is in the room.

“What the hell—” says the man. He is old and skinny, wearing a pair of dirty jeans and a long-sleeved T-shirt. His shoulder-length gray hair is stringy with grease, his face is bathed in sweat, and he smells bad, as if he has not showered in weeks. When he opens his mouth, Derek can see a set of rotting teeth behind his thin, scabby lips.

“Are you Flynn?” says Derek. His voice is slow and deliberate, and every syllable is equally accented.

The old man examines Derek for a moment, and then a smile emerges. He is calmed by Derek’s voice. Everyone seems to be calmed by Derek’s voice. “Yeah,” says the old man. “I’m Flynn. What, did Mac send you?”

“Who did you talk to?” says Derek, only asking what he has been instructed to ask.

“No one. Why?”

“The DA?”

“She called. No biggie. I just repeated what was in the thing I signed. She insisted that I come to the office to talk to her. I’m going tomorrow. If I had a choice, I’d say no. But, you know, I’m still on probation and so—”

“Who else did you talk to?”

“No one.”

“The son?” says Derek.

“Frank? No, of course not. The son of a bitch almost killed me last time I saw him.”

“And the other son?”

“Who, the kid? No, jeez, I told Mac I’d seen him in the street, but he passed me by like he didn’t know me. I haven’t talked to him since the whole thing happened.” Flynn bounces his weight nervously from one leg to the other. “You tell Mac
it’s all clean. I knows I owe him. I was jammed up before, but this I can handle. Tell him he can count on me.”

“Where were you?” says Derek.

“Out. Getting some provisions.”

“Drugs?”

“Food and stuff.”

“Drugs?”

“Okay, yeah, if you can call them that,” says the old man with a derisive snort. “There’s so much talcum in each bag, it would be more worthwhile to dust my dick with it than to put it in my arm. But it’s tough staying here, waiting, like I’m supposed to, and I got this thing tomorrow. I just needed something to take the edge off, that’s all. You tell Mac not to worry.”

“I have something for you,” says Derek. He rises from the chair, walks over to the table where the old man has dumped the contents from his pocket, and drops a small box on top of the pile.

It is covered with a bright-blue paper, a red ribbon wrapped around it and tied into a bow. It is pretty.

“What’s that?” says the old man.

“A present,” says Derek. He backs away and sits again in the chair.

Flynn looks at the box, raises his head to look at Derek in the corner, and turns his attention back to the box. He waits for a moment before attacking the box like a kid on Christmas morning with a real family to take care of him, sliding off the ribbon, ripping the paper, opening the lid. He pulls out a small plastic bag filled with a few large chunks of dark-red powder.

“What’s this?” says Flynn.

“A present.”

“From Mac? I don’t understand.”

“Go ahead.”

Flynn opens the bag, takes a sniff. His eyes flutter.

“Go ahead,” says Derek.

“Oh, I see. Something to keep me busy, to make sure I play my part and don’t talk to anybody. I told you he doesn’t have to worry, but you tell him I appreciate the gesture. You want a taste?”

Derek simply shakes his head. He tried heroin once, Derek has tried everything once, including sex, but like sex, heroin did not take. Derek does not need drug-fueled flights of fantasy or an escape from the hard truths of reality. Because Derek does not pretend to understand the hard truths of reality. He lives in the simplicity of the moment, and there is beauty there, even in this crumbling Kensington row house. So, content in the limitations of his own mind, he watches as the old man sits down on the couch by the table and makes his preparations.

Sammy D, Derek’s first partner, was an addict. Derek watched Sammy D shoot up hundreds of times in the worst kinds of shooting galleries in Baltimore, watched Sammy D follow the step-by-step path to oblivion, with the spoon and the candle and the cotton and the needle. Sammy D was the first to promise Derek a horse, when Derek was just starting out in the business and Sammy was hustling for jobs. “Horse” was also what Sammy D called the powder he threw away their money on, and so Derek watched the horse slip needleful by needleful up Sammy’s arm. When Sammy finally expired, all Derek could think was that if he had gotten the animal, they both would have been better off.

Now Flynn has the needle prepared. Derek watches as he rolls up his sleeve and ties the rubber strap around his biceps, grabbing it with his teeth. The old man flicks his forearm, like Sammy used to flick his forearm, and then sticks the needle in, drawing blood into the syringe before releasing the
dark-brown fluid. The last thing Derek sees is a dreamy smile before the old man nods off.

Derek sits in the chair and waits for the old man to wake up. Vern told him what to do. Derek likes his instructions simple, and that is what these are. If the old man wakes up, Derek is supposed to slice his throat. But from the way the old man’s breathing catches, stops, and starts again more weakly, Derek knows the old man is not going to wake up. The way Sammy D did not wake up when Derek prepared a second batch and gave it to him while he was still nodding off to the first. “What are you doing?” Sammy said dreamily as Derek gently pressed the plunger.

When the old man’s breath catches for a second time and stops again, Derek does nothing. He sits and waits, and waits some more. When he is sure, he stands and goes over to the table, picking up the wrapping paper, the ribbon, the box, the plastic bag. He does not know why the old man had to die, does not know who wanted him dead, does not know how much Vern has been paid for the job.

All he knows is that he has done exactly what he was supposed to do. And that Vern better get him a horse.

4.

JOHNNIE WALKER RED

T
he Capital Grille was one of the big-bellied, flushed-faced steak joints that had taken over Broad Street. Old guys like Birdie Grackle fervently believed the height of living was a hunk of grilled cow, hold the veggies, which was why Justin had suggested the place. Steak as bait.

They were at a white-tableclothed table in the corner of the restaurant, set away from other diners at Justin’s request. The porterhouse on Birdie’s plate was the size of his head, and his dentures danced as he chewed. Between bites he slurped his Scotch like it was mother’s milk. A few intrepid drops escaped his greasy maw and slid down the side of his stubbled chin. It was altogether a lovely sight, and Justin was paying for every disgusting inch of it. But Justin figured it was worth the price, because even as Grackle chewed with his mouth foully open, he was talking all the while.