Where or When (2 page)

“You got that right.” Joe exhales. The wind sends the smoke under his chin, into his collar. “Hadda sell two boats last week. Hadda give 'em away, I should say.”

Charles looks down at the sand. Jesus Christ, he thinks, here it comes.

“So here's the deal.” Joe studies the harbor as if searching for one of the boats he had to give away. “The fuckin' bank slashed my credit line. You know me, Charlie: I been doing business with Eddie Whalen with a handshake for years, and I've paid the bastard faithfully every month. And this is the reward I get.”

Joe Medeiros coughs on the smoke or on his anger, hawks up a glob of phlegm to make his point, spits it onto the sand. “So I go down to find out what's the story with the credit line, and I find Eddie sweatin' bullets. Thinks
he's
going to get the boot now. The FDIC's been goin' over his stuff, and they're tellin' him now that he might of made some loans shouldn't of been made, you follow me. Fact is”—and here Joe Medeiros looks away, unable to meet Charles's eye—“the cash I was gonna use for the premium? I gotta have it for the mortgage payment. It's that simple.”

Charles looks out toward Morocco. He has never been to Africa, nor even to Europe. He wishes he had the ability to banish Joe Medeiros from the dunes, make him disappear. He minds his Sunday morning invaded, the scene soured by the talk of business, the panic he doesn't usually feel until Monday's dawn beginning the slow crawl up his spine.

“Same old story, isn't it?” Charles says casually, as he has had to say too often in the past ten months. He is not surprised that the feds have been looking at Eddie Whalen's books. Eighteen months ago, Whalen was giving money away. Sign on the dotted line. As Charles and half the men in town had done.

“Stop by the office tomorrow or the next day,” Charles says. “We'll talk. We'll figure something.”

With his toe, Charles scratches idle markings in the sand. He knows he ought to have gotten Medeiros's premium up front. The $15,000 commission check would have paid Costa. Tomorrow he will have to call Costa, cancel the construction on the addition. And Costa is a client—Charles will lose his business.

Christ, it never ends, it seems.

“So when are the fuckin' banks going to have a dime to put out on the street? That's what I want to know,” Joe says, looking at Charles now. The fisherman takes another drag, throws the cigarette onto the sand, business concluded. Small sparks from the lit end blow toward Charles's bare feet.

“The wife?”

Charles nods.

“The kids doin' OK? I gotta hand it to you, Charlie. You got the whole scene. Am I right?”

Charles hates this part, the denouement, the ingratiating banter after bad news.

“The kids are fine,” he says carefully.

Another case shot. Charles fights the panic by looking out to the ocean, imagining the Azores. He focuses on a fishing boat trying to negotiate the gut in the chop.

“So I'm goin' back to my line. Probably snagged a shitload of seaweed.” Joe turns as if to leave, then stops. “Listen, Charlie, I'm sorry as shit about this. You know what I'm talkin' about. I know you do. I don't ever forget how you drove out to Jeannette's. After Billy . . .”

Charles looks up at Joe. The fisherman's nose and eyes are running in the wind. Medeiros's son, dead before he was twenty-five, drowned off his father's fishing boat. Charles had sold Medeiros insurance on both his sons, and he remembers the drive out to Billy Medeiros's wife with the check. After he'd heard of Billy's accident (seven years ago at four-thirty on a summer afternoon, and Charles was in The Blue Schooner; the news had rippled down the barstools like a loose and slippery eel), Charles had done the paperwork at once, gone that night to the funeral home for the death certificate, cut out the obituary from the local paper, and sent the required documents in to the home office. In ten days he had a check, which he carried in the breast pocket of his suit coat up the steps of Billy Medeiros's small bungalow on the coast road. Charles had seen grief before—it sometimes went with the job—but never anything as bald as on that day. Jeannette, a small woman with thin dark hair, met him at the door, and at first he didn't recognize her. Her face was fish white, years older, and swollen with her pregnancy. Beside her was a daughter, not four years old, who sucked her thumb.

Charles remembers how he took the check from his pocket and handed it to the woman and how her face changed as she comprehended the meaning of the check, how she once again experienced the irrevocability of her husband's accident. And Charles remembers how Billy Medeiros's wife seemed to fold in upon herself, fold in upon the high soft moans that sounded to him almost sexual in nature and struck him as too intimate for witnesses. He recalls wondering what his own grief would sound like if Harriet died, recalls thinking guiltily that it probably wouldn't sound like Jeannette Medeiros's. He had stood helplessly, not knowing if he should touch Billy Medeiros's wife to comfort her, his hands seeming to float huge and useless in his pockets. Finally he had picked up the silent and frightened daughter and taken her out of the house. They'd gone for a Dairy Queen and a round of miniature golf.

Remembering that day and watching Joe Medeiros recross the dunes, Charles thinks again that his job is an odd one to have fallen into—and that is how it seems to him, something he has fallen into, wandered into, not chosen—a far cry from the seminary, though sometimes not. He has few illusions about how his job is perceived by others: an unwelcome (if often necessary) chink in the machinery, a job falling somewhere between that of a CPA and a tax lawyer, the occasional butt of jokes on late-night TV. Usually he thinks of himself as simply a businessman, a salesman with a product, a man who is better with people than he is with the paperwork. Though once in a while, on days when he is filled with hope, he likes to think of himself as a Life Agent, with all that the title, as metaphor, might imply—an agent for Life, an insurer of life, even a kind of secular priest—and he imagines his clients, an entire town of clients (his flock?), as motivated by love, buying insurance from him because they love a woman or a man or a child.

But inevitably there are the bad days, the ones when he wonders if he isn't after all only a paradoxical and unwitting harbinger of mortality.

Last Tuesday was the worst. Just the visual memory of Tom Carney sitting behind his desk makes him shiver involuntarily beneath his hooded sweatshirt. He looks out to sea, as if to shake off the memory, but it is in place now, and though he is watching Cole Hacker tack his Morgan through the gut, it is Carney that he sees.

Charles had pulled into Tom Carney's gas station at twelve-thirty, left the Cadillac by the pumps. A teenage boy with spiky black hair came out of the office.

“Fill her with special,” Charles said. “Tom in?”

“He's in the office,” the boy told Charles.

Charles walked to the office, opened the door. Tom Carney, an inch taller than Charles's six feet three, sat sideways to his desk, a desk littered with receipts, one greasy rag. Carney was bald already, had lost his hair early. The two men had joked about middle age: hair where you didn't want it, none where it was supposed to be. Carney's face, in adolescence, had been badly scarred by acne, and sometimes he still got pimples. Charles had told Carney that this was a hopeful sign—the man's hormones were still working.

Carney was smoking when Charles walked in, and his face was a grayish color that looked like fabric. On the desk was a Styrofoam cup of milky coffee, also grayish-looking, not touched. When he visited this office, Charles often had an impression of metal, as if the room and its entire contents were constructed of metal—metal walls, a metal desk, a metal chair—and this somehow was in keeping with the ever-present stink of gasoline in the air.

“It's right there,” Carney said to Charles. Carney indicated an open letter with his hand. Charles remembered then that Carney didn't smoke; he'd given it up years earlier. Charles took the letter from the desk. Clipped to its top was a check. Charles read the relevant sentence.

He remembers a sensation of being buffeted—as if the air had been blown out of the room.

“Jesus Christ” Charles said softly.

Charles had gone to school with Carney, had played basketball with him, and the two boys had made it as far as the regional championships together. Then Charles had gone off to college and into the seminary, and Carney had stayed to work at his father's Mobil station. Carney owned it now; the father had retired. That was how Charles's business worked; he insured his friends, their referrals. Carney had held off for years, though, had had his children late. Usually it was the fact of the children that brought the new clients in.

Three weeks earlier, Charles had sent in Carney's application on a $300,000 policy, and he'd thought little of it until he'd opened his mail Tuesday. Carney's case was what the home office referred to as “a flat declination.”

“Your client is unacceptable for medical underwriting reasons,” the letter had read. “No further details are available. The initial deposit is being returned to the client with a letter of explanation.”

Charles had been mildly worried for himself financially (another case shot); more seriously for Carney. Such a flat refusal didn't simply mean your client had high blood pressure.

Charles looked at Carney in his metal office. Through the window, Charles could see the boy replacing the cap on the gas tank, moving the Cadillac away from the pumps. The boy's gestures seemed choreographed, dreamlike.

“I've got two kids,” Carney said.

Charles held the piece of paper, read the sentence again. He wanted to say to Carney that there must be some mistake, but he knew it wasn't a mistake. The blood tests never lied.

“And my wife . . . I've got to tell my wife.”

Charles put the letter back where it had been. He wanted to know how, but would not ask. He wanted to say he was sorry, but that seemed an insult.

“You want a drink?” he asked Carney.

Carney was quiet, wouldn't answer him. Carney's hands were large, had always been large. He'd been brilliant, fast with the ball.

“Let's get out of here, Tom, go get drunk at least,” Charles said.

Carney was staring at a spot on the opposite wall. He shook his head slowly. “About five years ago, I had some encounters . . .,” he said.

Encounters. The word hung in the air. It was an oddly restrained and formal word for Carney to have used, and it didn't necessarily mean one specific thing or another, but Charles didn't have to know more.

After a silence, Charles had left Carney in his office, left the gas station. He'd gone to the Qwik Stop, bought a six-pack, and driven over the bridge to the beach. He'd drunk the six beers as fast as he could, on no lunch. It had seemed to him then that if he hadn't tried to make the sale, Tom Carney would never have known. It was illogical linking, Charles knew, but he couldn't stop himself from making the loop. He'd thought of Portugal that afternoon, of emigrating to Portugal. He had wanted to be sitting at a cafe in the hot sun, eating braised octopus with Portuguese sausage and—for a change—looking out the other way across the Atlantic. He'd missed two appointments.

Charles watches Medeiros disappear behind the dunes, relieved to be alone again on the beach. Charles likes the bridge and the beach, and he thinks of the drive here as the “drive to nowhere.” He imagines the drive itself, the drive alone even without its eventual destination, as a balm, a respite from the business in town. And sometimes, when he comes here and when he is absolutely certain he is all alone, he sings: show tunes, oldies from his youth, once in a while a current hit that has captured his imagination on the radio and that he has bothered to learn the lyrics to. He likes his voice—a good Irish tenor—and occasionally he wishes he could join a church, any church, just for the pleasure of singing in a choir, though immediately, when he has this wish, he thinks of having to endure the rest of the service or the mass, and his fantasy deflates. So he sings alone. Often, if he can, he brings Winston with him, his dog, his black lab, and if he can get him going, he will sing too—a high, lonesome, off-key wail that drives the gulls crazy and almost always concludes with Winston bounding out of the car along the dark muck of the bayside, chasing the gulls and plunging into the frigid waters if need be.

It was why he'd bought the oversize Cadillac, a car big enough, he thought at the time, for himself and his dog. (Charles thinks of himself as getting bigger too, with each passing year, as if life itself were causing him to inflate, though except for the occasional pound or two, he knows this can't be true.) There were other reasons as well for the purchase, all of them nebulous but of equal weight, the sum total of which urged him to make this uncharacteristically showy gesture. He'd driven a Cadillac in Milwaukee on a business trip, and the car had reminded him of the big cars of his boyhood, the mythic Bonnevilles and Chevrolets of his early teens. And when he'd come home from the business trip and passed the Cadillac dealership and seen the sign announcing the sale, he'd pulled in, knowing as he did so that he'd be seriously chastised if he bought such an ostentatious American car, by Harriet and by his friends and even by many of his clients, and somehow this had perversely pleased him, though not as much as turning in the Saab—that ever-present symbol of New England yuppiedom—had done.

Charles crosses the dunes twenty minutes behind Medeiros. He takes the bridge fast; by now, he knows, Harriet will have passed from merely impatient to tight-lipped. He reaches down in front of the passenger seat, snaps the cooler lid, brings a bottle of beer between his legs. With a practiced gesture, he twists the cap, inhales a long swallow. It's ten o'clock in the morning. But it's a Sunday; it's OK. His soul is not in jeopardy. Yet.