While Drowning in the Desert (12 page)

I told her, “Sweetie, you’re going about this all the wrong way!
”

“
What do you mean?” she asked.

I told her, “Just get him in the sack but don’t tell him that you ‘forgot’ your birth control.
”

“
I couldn’t do that,” she said. “It wouldn’t be honest. It wouldn’t be healthy for the relationship.
”

Honesty, relationship …
Young people these days. In our day we didn’t worry so much about honesty and relationships. Girls got pregnant, guys married them, we had families, we made out all right.

Anyway she had a good cry and told me all about her and Neal. Imagine that boy not wanting to have a baby with a beautiful girl like this!

But then we got to wondering, Where were Natty and Neal, anyway? When Karen told me about Natty taking Neal’s car and Neal setting off to find him, I started to get real worried. Then I told Karen about Mr. Schaeffer and Miss Done, and the German fellow, and she started to get concerned.

Then Karen called Mr. Graham, and I got on the extension, and the three of started to get worried together.

What could Natty have seen? we all wondered.

“
Unless it had something to do with the fire,” I said.

“
What fire?” Mr. Graham asked.

“
The one next door,” I said.

“
Do you happen to know the address?” Mr. Graham asked.

“
I can go look,” I said, and I did. The street numbers are painted on the sidewalks. It was 1385 Hopalong Way, and I told Mr. Graham so.

He said he’d call back. In the meantime Karen tried to call Mr. Schaeffer, but he wasn’t in. She found his home phone number but he wasn’t there, either. I’ll just bet he’s out with Miss Done. There’s a spark there, I think.

Mr. Graham called back half an hour later.

“
The condo belongs to a Heinz Muller,” he said.

Diary, that’s the German fellow who said he was Natty’s friend! I should have known that Natty wouldn’t be friends with a German. He won’t even ride in a German-made car! What was I thinking about?!

Suddenly, Diary, I knew what had happened! Natty had seen something in connection with the fire! After all, Natty had spent years playing the Catskill hotels
—
he’d know arson when he saw it.

I think
—
Oh, excuse me, Diary! There’s the door! It must be Natty! Thank God! I’ll be right back!

Chapter 18

From the tape of an illegal microphone planted at the Silverstein residence by Craig Schaeffer. The voices have since been identified as those of Heinz Muller (HM), Hope White (HW) and Karen Hawley (KH).

HW: Just what do you mean, coming in like that?

How did you get in?

HM: What did the old Jew tell you?

HW: I beg your pardon? “Old Jew”? You get out right

now before I telephone the police.

HM: What did he tell you?!

HW: Let go of me!

HM: What did he tell you?!

HW: Nothing.

(Sound of a slap.)

(Sound of footsteps.)

KH: Just what the hell do you think you’re doing?! Let her go! Then get your sorry butt out of here before I kick it out.

HM: You terrify me.

KH: Mister, I’ll put this boot so far up your ass you’ll need a pair of vise-grips and a bottle of good whiskey to get it out. HM
(Laughing):
I would like to see you try.

(Unidentified sound: a dull thump.)

(Various bellowing sounds.)

KH: Hope, call 911.

HW: Honey, I haven’t seen a kick like that since the line at Harrah’s.

KH: Hope, call 911.

HM: Don’t do that.

(Sound of telephone ringing.)

HW: Silverstein residence. Oh, hello, Mr. Graham. Listen, I think we’ve located Mr. Muller. He’s here right now and—Oh, dear, I’m afraid I have to hang up right now. He has a—

Chapter 19

Gun.

I should have known.

I mean, I kicked that son of a bitch between the legs so hard I half expected to see his balls come flying out his mouth. The big muscle-bound Kraut hollered like a bull that’s becoming a steer. Neal would probably call this an “apt analogy” because—Well, never mind. You get the picture.

And Neal is always telling me that if I’m going to put a guy down make sure he
stays
down. You know, finish him off. “Turn out the lights, the party’s over” kind of thing.

As if Neal would know. The last time I saw him fight was a barroom brawl with some white-supremacist trash a couple of years back. Neal blocked a couple of punches with his jaw and then kind of dragged his guy to the floor and passed out on top of him. He wasn’t exactly John Wayne. But he was game.

I think fighting’s stupid, anyway.

It was just that this Muller jerk was so damn arrogant. You know, first he breaks in, then he pushes Hope around, and I’ve just seen enough of that trashy behavior to last a lifetime.

And I gave him a chance. I explicitly told him what would happen if he didn’t leave and he said he’d like to see me try it, and I was happy to oblige him in that particular request.

He was one big, strong, hulking side of beef, too. But every man has his Achilles’ heel, you know, and generally it isn’t anywhere near his foot. I mean if you’ve ever seen a cowboy chasing a little calf, and that calf kicks a hoof back around crotch-high, and you’ve seen that cowboy kneeling in the dirt sucking for air, you have a pretty good idea of what Heinz-baby looked like at that particular moment.

So, anyway, there he was on his knees with his big baby-blues bulging out his stupid face, and that’s where I ought to have finished him off, according to famed pugilist Neal Carey. But I didn’t and the son of a bitch had a gun.

A big pistol. A magnum.

I have a theory about men who own magnums. My theory is that they have to buy one because they don’t have one, you know? And the way this Muller galumph held that handpiece, you just got the feeling that however large and passed out on top of him. He wasn’t exactly John Wayne. But he was game.

I think fighting’s stupid, anyway.

It was just that this Muller jerk was so damn arrogant. You know, first he breaks in, then he pushes Hope around, and I’ve just seen enough of that trashy behavior to last a lifetime.

And I gave him a chance. I explicitly told him what would happen if he didn’t leave and he said he’d like to see me try it, and I was happy to oblige him in that particular request.

He was one big, strong, hulking side of beef, too. But every man has his Achilles’ heel, you know, and generally it isn’t anywhere near his foot. I mean if you’ve ever seen a cowboy chasing a little calf, and that calf kicks a hoof back around crotch-high, and you’ve seen that cowboy kneeling in the dirt sucking for air, you have a pretty good idea of what Heinz-baby looked like at that particular moment.

So, anyway, there he was on his knees with his big baby-blues bulging out his stupid face, and that’s where I ought to have finished him off, according to famed pugilist Neal Carey. But I didn’t and the son of a bitch had a gun.

A big pistol. A magnum.

I have a theory about men who own magnums. My theory is that they have to buy one because they don’t have one, you know? And the way this Muller galumph held that handpiece, you just got the feeling that however large he was elsewhere … well, the big pistol was by way of compensation.

And they talk about us and hormones.

So this Muller turd pulls this gun and says, “This is a .57 magnum and could blow your head off. So do what I say.”

So I said, “Okay, Heinz-57. You got the gun, big boy, what do you want us to do?”

“What do you know?”

I felt like I was Dustin Hoffman in that movie with Laurence Olivier-you know the one where old Larry’s the Nazi dentist-because I don’t know anything except that maybe Heinz-57 burned his own house down and maybe Silverstein saw him do it, but I didn’t think that was exactly the brightest thing in the world to say at that particular moment.

“I know that you burned your house down and that Natty saw you,” Hope piped up.

She really is a lovely person, but you don’t want her holding your money in a poker game, if you know what I mean .

Heinz-57’s eyes lit up like a pinball machine, as if this news actually made him happy. There are some jamokes, you know, who are just looking for a rationale to hurt people, and I think that old Heinz-57 was one of these characters.

So he herded us outside where he had his Land Rover parked.

A brand-new Land Rover. I guess arson pays.

He starts to put me in the driver’s seat, then asks, “Do you know how to operate a standard shift?”

“Heinz-57,1 could
build
a standard shift.”

I didn’t bother to tell him that I grew up on a ranch that had a lot more tumbleweed than money on it, so I’d helped my father reconstruct an old flipped-over H tractor about three hundred and thirty times and did more than just hold the wrench, too.

Could I operate a standard shift. About the only person I knew in central Nevada who couldn’t operate a standard shift was Neal, and God knows I tried to teach him.

The man is just hell on cars.

So I got behind the wheel and Hope sat in the passenger seat. Heinz-57 sat behind me with his magnum (the pistol, that is) poked behind Hope’s ear.

“No monkey business,” he said. “Do not even consider blinking the lights, or speeding, or driving to a police station. I will blow her head off.”

This was a pretty smart threat. He knew he couldn’t blow my brains out or the car would crash. . “Where are we going?” I asked.

“I will give you directions,” he said. Then added, because he just couldn’t help being an asshole, “We are going to meet some Jews in the desert.”

Jews in the desert. There’s a fresh concept.

But I figured that one of those Jews was probably Nathan. And I was praying that the other one was Neal.

Chapter 20

Ah, night in the desert.

The open sky, the sparkling stars, a fire crackling in the brisk air.

Add to these simple pleasures the joys of no food, no water, no blankets, the inimitable camaraderie of an old man soliloquizing about the good old days, and a moronic Lebanese kidnapper pointing a gun at you, and the heightened sensibilities produced by the awareness of one’s imminent execution, and you have yourself one of life’s peak experiences.

It’s Miller time!

Nathan seemed to occupy a mental space all his own. I could hardly blame him. A man his age must have been exhausted after a carjacking, a kidnapping, a car accident, an explosion and a hike up a dirt road to an abandoned mine where he would be starved, dehydrated and frozen. I didn’t feel so zippy myself.

So it was little wonder that he had gone into the drone zone, a stream of consciousness that had innumerable pools and eddies.

We all leaned against our logs and stared into the fire. Sami held the gun in his lap pointed directly at yours truly while he used his free hand to alternately massage his sore crotch and rub his inflamed eye.

Nathan had been at it for a good two hours and had just worked his discursive way back to the DeLillo Sisters.

I was barely listening as Nathan droned. “… and the DeLillo Sisters were twins. You could not tell them apart except that Dorothy DeLillo had a mole on her
tukus,
but of course only Donahue knew this because the DeLillo Sisters were in vaudeville, not burlesque. Nobody saw Dorothy DeLillo’s
tukus
except for Donahue because Dorothy DeLillo was very proper except for one time, and that was when she shared a bill with the Great Rulenska. Hypnotists always have Russian names, don’t ask me why. But you never see a hypnotist with an Italian name. Rulenska wasn’t Russian, he was Polish, from New Britain, Connecticut. Why they call this town New Britain I’ll never know because it’s all Polacks there. I stayed one night in New Britain on my way from New Haven to the Catskills.…”

There go the DeLillo Sisters, I thought. And I still didn’t know what had happened to Hannigan’s glass eye, either. Not to mention how Nathan had come to teach “Who’s on First” to Lou Costello.

I looked over at Sami, who had a dazed look in the one eye that wasn’t all red and swollen and rapidly closing.

“… because there was a snowstorm. You cannot get a lightbulb changed in New Britain, Connecticut, because there are so many Polacks living there. No Jews either, so just try to get decent deli. A Polish sausage maybe. Sauerkraut,
drech.

“In the Catskills they have Jews. More Jews in the Catskills than in Israel. I played the Catskills many times. The delicatessen? Magnificent. Not Wolff’s perhaps, but very good. The one time I played the Catskills after spending an endless night in New Britain, Connecticut, I do my schtick to an empty room. There are maybe twelve Jews plus the waiters in the room. Try making twelve Jews and three waiters who are making no money laugh. They laugh at nothing. A fire maybe they laugh at, because the hotel is losing so much money.

“I told them the joke about the priest and the rabbi. Father Murphy goes up to Rabbi Solomon and says, ‘Sorry about the fire in your synagogue.’ Solomon says, ‘Shhh. It’s tomorrow.’

“Nobody laughed. To them this is not funny. That night, what do you think? I can’t get to sleep, I look out the window of my room, what do I see?”

Nathan had my attention. It finally occurred to me (duh) that what I was hearing was what we graduate- school types recognize as an allegory. Sami, on the other hand, was not really listening, but I don’t think he ever had the advantage of attending graduate school. So he was just staring into the fire. But trained as I am to find symbolism in everything, whether it’s there or not, I was listening, as they say, intently.