Tough Guys Don't Dance (25 page)

“You were always worried about me, weren't you?”

“Well, your mother was delicate. She spoiled
you a lot. Yeah,” he said, looking at me out of his ice-blue eyes, “I worried about you.”

“Maybe you didn't have to. I took my three years in the slammer without a fall. They called me Iron Jaw. I wouldn't take cock.”

“Good for you. I always wondered.”

“Hey, Dougy,” I said, “what's the virtue? You think I feel like a man most of the time? I don't. What was I protecting? You're an old-line fanatic. You'd put all the faggots in concentration camps including your own son if he ever slipped. Just cause you were lucky enough to be born with tiger's balls.”

“Let's have a drink. You're off your feed.”

“Should you have a drink?”

He made a move with his hands again. “It's an occasion.”

I got two glasses and put bourbon in them. He added a considerable amount of water to his. If nothing else, that was enough to tell me he was ill.

“You have me wrong,” he said. “Do you think I've been living alone for twenty-five years in a furnished room, and I do no thinking? I try to keep up. In my day, if you were queer, you were damned. Don't even ask. You were an agent of hell. Now, they got Gay Liberation. I watch them. There's faggots everywhere.”

“Yeah, I know,” I said.

“Ha, ha,” he said and pointed a finger at me. The early liquor was obviously doing angel's work on his spirits. “My son wins the round.”

“Good at dancing,” I said.

“I remember,” he said. “Costello, right?”

“Right.”

“I'm not sure I know what that means anymore,” he said. “Six months ago they told me to stop drinking or I was dead. So I stopped. Now, when I go to sleep, the spirits come out of the woodwork and make a circle around my bed. Then they make me dance all night.” He gave a cough filled with all the hollows of his lungs. It had been an attempt to laugh. “ ‘Tough guys don't dance,' I tell them. ‘Hey, you bigot,' the spirits answer, ‘keep dancing.' ” He looked into the lights of the bourbon as if their kin could be found there, and sighed. “My illness makes me less of a bigot,” he said. “I think about faggots and you know what I believe? For half of them, it's brave. For the wimps, it takes more guts to be queer than not. For the wimps. Otherwise they marry some little mouse who's too timid to be a dyke and they both become psychologists and raise whiz kids to play electronic games. Turn queer, I say, if you're a wimp. Have a coming-out party. It's the others I condemn. The ones who ought to be men but couldn't show the moxie. You were supposed to be a man, Tim. You came from me. You had advantages.”

“I never heard you talk so much before. Not once in my life.”

“That's cause you and I are strangers.”

“Well, you look like a stranger today,” I said. It was true. His large head was no longer crowned
by his rich white hair, white with the corrupt splendors of ivory and cream. Now he just had an enormous bald head. He looked more like a Prussian general than the model of an Irish bartender.

“I want to talk to you now,” he said. “I may be acting thick, but it came over me at Frankie Freeload's funeral: Tim is all I got.”

I was moved. Sometimes a couple of months would go by, sometimes a half-year, before one of us called. Still, it seemed all right. I had always hoped so. Now he confirmed it.

“Yes,” he said, “I got up early this morning, borrowed the widow's car and told myself all the way here that this time we speak it out face to face. I don't want to die without you knowing of my regard for you.”

I was embarrassed. Therefore, I leaped on the way he said “the widow's car.” “Did you have any hanky-panky with Freeload's wife?” I asked.

Not often did I see my father look sheepish. “Not lately,” he said.

“How could you? With a friend's wife!”

“For the last ten years, Frankie was pickled in booze. He couldn't find his tool or the pot.”

“A friend's wife?” I gave him the family laugh. High tenor.

“It was only once or twice. She needed it. An act of mercy.”

I laughed until the tears came. “ ‘I wonder who's kissing her now,' ” I sang. It was wonderful to
have your father at his own wake. Suddenly I felt like crying.

“You're right, kid,” he said. “I hope and pray Frankie never knew.” He looked at the wall for an instant. “You get older and you begin to feel as if something is wrong. You're in a box, and the sides keep coming closer. So you do things you didn't do before.”

“How long have you known you were sick?”

“Ever since I went into St. Vincent's forty-five years ago.”

“That's quite a while to have cancer and never show it.”

“None of the doctors have a feel for the subject,” he said. “The way I see the matter, it's a circuit of illness with two switches.”

“What are you saying?”

“Two terrible things have to happen before the crud can get its start. The first cocks the trigger. The other fires it. I've been walking around with the trigger cocked for forty-five years.”

“Because you couldn't recover from all those hits you took?”

“No. Cause I lost my balls.”

“You? What are you talking about?”

“Tim, I stopped, and I felt the blood in my shoes, and there was St. Vincent's in front of me. I should have kept chasing the bastard who did the shooting. But I lost my nerve when I saw the hospital.”

“Hell, you had already gone after him for six blocks.”

“Not enough. I was built to be that good anyway. The test came when I stopped. I didn't have the nerve to go on and catch him. Cause I could have. Something in the scheme of things might have made him trip. I didn't push my luck. Instead, I stopped. Then I heard a voice clearly in my head. It's the only time I would say that God or someone
highly superior
was speaking to me. This voice said, ‘You're out of gas, kid. It's your true test. Do it.' But I went into St. Vincent's and grabbed the orderly by the collar, and just at the moment when I got tough with that punk in the white jacket was when I felt the first switch get thrown in the cancer.”

“What threw the second switch?”

“It never got thrown. It corroded. Cumulative effects. Forty-five years of living with no respect for myself.”

“You're crazy.”

He took a big belt of his watered bourbon. “I wish I was. Then I wouldn't have cancer. I've studied this, I tell you. There's buried statistics if you look for them. Schizophrenics in looney bins only get cancer half as often as the average population. I figure it this way: either your body goes crazy, or your mind. Cancer is the cure for schizophrenia. Schizophrenia is the cure for cancer. Most people don't know how tough it is out there. I was brought up to know. I got no excuse.”

I was silent. I stopped arguing with him. It is not easy to sort out what effect his words were having. Was I coming to understand for the first
time why the warmth he had for me always seemed to cross a glacial field? I may once have been a seed in Douglas Madden's body but only after that body was no longer held by him in high esteem. I was, to a degree, defective. Agitation had to be stirring in all my old wounds, well-buried and long-resigned. No wonder my father had taken no great joy in me. Intimations came how in years ahead—if I lived—the memory of this conversation might make me shake with rage.

Yet, I also felt compassion for my father. Damnable compassion. He had cast a long shadow across my understanding of him.

Next, I knew a considerable amount of fear. For now it seemed real to me again that I had murdered two women. How many times over these last few years had I come to the edge of battering Patty Lareine with my bare hands? And each time I resisted the impulse, had not a sense of oncoming illness settled more firmly into me? Yes, like my father I had been living in a harsh environment. I thought once more of the impulse that led me to climb the tower. Had that been the night when I hoped to keep the first switch from being thrown?

I knew then that I would confide in Big Mac. I had to talk about the two murders and the plastic bags in the damp cellar of this house. I could hold it no longer. Yet I could not bring myself to speak about it directly. Instead, I more or less sidled up to the topic.

“How much do you believe,” I asked, “in predestination?”

“Oh, yeah,” he answered, “what kind of predestination?” The shift in subject made him happy. Long years behind a bar had left my father adept at living with questions as wide as the heavenly gates.

“The football spreads,” I said. “Can God pick the team that will cover?”

It was obviously a question Dougy had lived with. He revealed that glint in his eye which showed that he was debating whether to disclose useful knowledge. Then he nodded. “I figure if God bet the spread, He'd win eighty percent of the time.”

“How do you come up with that number?”

“Well, let's say the night before the game He passes over the places where the players are sleeping and takes a reading. ‘Pittsburgh is up for this game,' He says to Himself. ‘The Jets are jangled.' Pittsburgh, He decides, is worth a lot more than three points. So He bets them. I'd say He's right four times out of five.”

“But why four out of five?”

“Because footballs,” said my father ominously, “take funny bounces. It is not practical to get better than four out of five. That's good enough. If He wanted to take account of the physics of every bounce, He'd have to do a million times more work in His calculations in order to get up from eighty to ninety-nine percent. That's not
economical. He's got too many other things to work at.”

“But why did
you
settle on four out of five?”

My father took this as a most serious question. “Sometimes,” he told me, “a football handicapper can get a great streak going and hits up around seventy-five percent against the spread for a month or more. I figure that's because he's got a pipeline for a little while into higher places.”

I thought of Harpo. “Can some keep it going longer?”

My father shrugged. “Dubious. These pipelines are hard to maintain.” He showed no concern at mixing his metaphor: “It's a high-wire act.”

“What about a terrible losing streak?”

“Those guys are on the pipeline too. Only the flow is in reverse. Their hunches are one hundred and eighty degrees wrong.”

“Maybe it's just the law of averages.”

“The law of averages,” he said with disgust, “has done more to mess up people's minds than any idea I know. It's horse manure. The pipeline is either feeding you or it's tricking you. Greedy people get fucked by the pipeline.”

“What if your bets turn out fifty-fifty?”

“Then you're nowhere near the pipeline. You're a computer. Look in the papers. The computer predictions end up at .500.”

“All right,” I said, “that's prediction. What I really want to talk about is coincidence.”

He looked troubled. I got up and freshened our drinks. “Put a lot of water in mine,” he said.

“Coincidence,” I said. “What do you make of it?”

“I've been doing the talking,” he said. “You tell me.”

“Well,” I said, “I think it's not unlike the pipeline. Only it's a network. I believe we receive traces of everyone's thoughts. We're not aware of it usually, but we do.”

“Wait a minute. You're saying people are able to send and receive wireless messages? Telepathy? Without knowing it?”

“Whatever you want to call it.”

“Well,” he said, “for the sake of argument, why not?”

“Once,” I said, “I was up in Fairbanks, Alaska, and you could feel it. There was a network.”

“Yes,” he said, “near magnetic north. What were you doing in Fairbanks?”

“A scam. Nothing significant.” Actually, I had gone up on a cocaine run after Madeleine and I had split. It was in the month before I got busted on a quick trip to Florida for the same deed. Selling two kilos of cocaine. Only the services of a lawyer well paid for his powers of plea bargaining got it down to three years (with parole).

“I had a ruckus one night with a guy in Fairbanks,” I told him. “He was bad news. In the morning when I woke up, I saw his face in my thoughts. His expression was ugly. Then the phone rang. It was the same fellow. His voice
sounded as ugly as his face. He wanted a meet with me late that afternoon. All day I kept running into people I had seen the night before, and not once was I surprised by their expression. They looked angry or happy in just the way I expected them to look. It was as precise as a dream. At the end of the day I met with the heavy. But now I was no longer uptight about it. Because, as the afternoon went on, I could see him clearly in my thoughts and he was looking wasted. Sure enough, when I met up with him, that's how he was, a bigger coward than me.”

My father chuckled.

“I tell you, Dougy,” I said, “I think everybody in Alaska drinks so they can shut themselves out from living in everybody else's head.”

He nodded. “Northern climes. Ireland. Scandinavia. Russia. Drunk like skunks.” He shrugged. “I still don't see what this has to do with your argument.”

“I'm saying people don't want to live in each other's heads. It's too scary. It's too animal. Coincidence is the sign that they're approaching such a state.”

“What kicks it off?” Dougy asked.

“I'm not sure,” I said. I took a breath. Everything considered, there were worse matters to contend with than my father's scorn. “I think that when something big and unexpected is about to happen, people come out of their daily static. Their thoughts start pulling toward one another. It's as if an impending event creates a vacuum,
and we start to go toward it. Startling coincidences pile up at a crazy rate. It's like a natural phenomenon.”