Wolf at the table, p.5
Wolf at the Table, page 5
After that Alec spent a year and a half up in Buffalo, living with his Aunt Grace, working odd jobs, which included hoisting tar shingles for a roofing company, washing dishes at a boarding school cafeteria, and tamping down asphalt for a road construction crew. Nothing ever lasted more than a few weeks because he couldn’t take the physical labor. When he bounced out of Buffalo, the job he liked the most was fishing golf balls from water traps at a country club in Freehold, New York, where he managed to stay employed for an entire summer. He’d wear high rubber waders, a diving mask, and snorkel, and set off into each pond brandishing a fishing net as if he were searching for a legendary pearl oyster. He earned a quarter per ball, each of which he scrubbed clean. The golf course would then resell these balls by the bucketload to club members at their driving range. Sometimes Alec made as much as thirty dollars a day, and for the last few weeks he was even asked to work in the clubhouse, where he bussed tables and occasionally got tipped a five-dollar bill for helping some old drunk shuffle to the bathroom. He loved that golf course: its slow pace and clean, manicured greens; all the rich men in their soft clothes the color of Neapolitan ice cream; the smell of freshly clipped grass; the big, fuzzy, muscular bees vectoring along the fairways; everything bathed in sunlight. But the summer season terminated at the end of August and by Labor Day he was out looking for another job.
“When were you planning on heading to Frankfort?” Alec asks.
“After another round or two of these,” Duke says, knocking back his bourbon and ordering another. He is already well into his third cigarette. “If we make good time, we’ll get the thing done before dawn. I’ll split whatever I get fifty-fifty with you.”
“How do you plan on getting in the back door?” Alec asks.
“I have the key,” Duke replies.
BY MIDNIGHT THEY’RE LOADED into Duke’s Bonneville, heading east on Interstate 90. For the first hour they drive with the windows down. The radio blares Roy Orbison and the Beach Boys and Dean Martin and the Beatles and Martha and the Vandellas. When they reach Batavia it starts to rain. They roll the windows up and Duke triggers the wipers and lowers the volume of the radio.
Alec is suddenly overwhelmed by the sentiment that Duke has chosen him for the adventure. Adventure, yes. He can’t quite classify it as a crime because nothing’s happened yet. Duke has taken him under his wing. He trusts me, Alec thinks. There was never anyone like this in Elmira, only a few priests who had a hard time keeping their hands off him until he grew big enough to be a physical threat. There was an English teacher at Holy Family—Mr. Clarke—who would ask Alec to stay after class now and then to check in on how he was doing. During second quarter of his sophomore year they read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which remains the only book Alec has read cover to cover; he was more vocal than usual during class discussions. Mr. Clarke tried to engage Alec. Did he ever get around to reading the new British novel by William Golding, Lord of the Flies? He might even like Jack London’s White Fang. But Mr. Clarke’s literary overtures didn’t quite catch on. It was still reading, after all, and reading beyond what was required in class. Alec was always eager to get to his next period.
And then there was Alec’s father, who was too quiet, too remote. Donald Larkin seemed to always prefer his daughters to his only living son. Once, when Alec was fourteen, his father took him to a Yankees game. He hardly uttered a word to him during the long drive down to the Bronx, mostly smoking his pipe and listening to the radio. After the third inning Alec went to the bathroom. On the way back he found a full beer abandoned near the concession stand and guzzled it. Then he found another, half full, and drank that, too. By the time Alec returned to his seat, way up in the left-field grandstand, he was drunk, but his father, obsessed with his scorecard, never noticed. In the seventh inning, when the Yankee left fielder, Mickey Mantle, hit his second homer of the game, his father released a high-pitched sound that Alec had never heard come out of his father’s mouth before. It almost shocked him, as he realized it was the first time he’d witnessed his father express anything close to a thrill. If the sound had been made in the dark one might have thought a woman had been knifed.
It wasn’t that his father didn’t reach out, in his way. He’d invite Alec to go fishing with him up on Lake Ontario, or dove hunting in Pennsylvania. He even tried to teach him how to make copper etchings at his little shop table in the back of the garage. Alec simply wasn’t interested. He wanted to be around his friends, smoking and drinking and riding around in cars, chasing girls over by Quarry Farm.
In Duke, Alec has found someone he can genuinely look up to. He’s his own man. He sets his own rules, lives by his own clock. Duke doesn’t even wear a watch! Alec looks forward to spending time with him at the bar and listening to records with him and driving around Niagara Falls, going from watering hole to watering hole; those long Saturday nights that never seemed to end. They even slept with the same woman once. Her name was Becky and she was so fat they had to do it on the floor. Duke went first. Alec waited in the hall and listened to their whooping and panting and Becky’s squeals of ecstasy. When it was Alec’s turn, Duke didn’t even bother leaving the little apartment. He simply sat in his recliner, shirtless, and smoked a cigarette, staring out the window. Alec was struck by the long, sloping appendectomy scar across Duke’s abdomen, a kind of grotesque smile. When it was all over, Alec had to help Becky off the floor and she almost pulled his shoulder out of its socket. Duke gave her twenty dollars and even though Becky wasn’t a prostitute she accepted the money.
“It smells like fuckin’ horses and trout in here,” Duke proclaimed after Becky left.
They couldn’t stop laughing for ten solid minutes.
In a town called Victor they stop for gas at a rare twenty-four-hour service station. While Duke fills the tank, Alec cleans the windshield. The remains of dead bugs are stunning.
“It’s amazing we didn’t swallow any of those,” Duke says. Alec laughs and Duke looks about for a moment, then peers up at the sky as if in contemplation. “If we pull this thing off tonight,” he says, “do me one favor.” He finishes pumping and screws the gas cap back on.
“Okay,” Alec says, wiping the squeegee. “What?”
“Use the money for somethin’ worthwhile,” Duke says, setting a cigarette between his lips.
“Like donate it to the blind?”
“No, just don’t spend it all on bourbon. That’s the harebrained thing I would do. Sock it away. Put it toward… I don’t know what I’m sayin’…” He trails off. “You’re a young, good-lookin’ kid,” he continues, exhaling smoke, “and you got a decent heart. You still got a chance to do somethin’ positive in this shit-stained world.”
Coming from Duke, this fatherly advice is surprising—no, astonishing—and Alec likes it.
They stop in Utica, a town ten miles west of Frankfort. It’s past three in the morning now. Duke knocks on the door of a small white clapboard house with a tarpaper roof and a lopsided, add-on front porch that looks as if it would slide into oblivion if not for the retired icebox and the stack of used tires anchoring it to the earth. A young woman answers the door. She has red hair—a darker shade than his sister Fiona’s—with long bangs swept to the side, a light dusting of freckles across the bridge of her nose, and the prettiest gray eyes Alec has ever encountered. She wears cutoff blue jeans and an old white tank-top. Her feet are bare. Without a word she and Duke embrace for a long time. Alec peers into the house and can see clear into the kitchen, where the refrigerator has been left open, with only a quart of milk and a box of baking soda visible on a shelf.
“This is Alec,” Duke says, breaking from the hug. “Alec, Nan.”
“Hey,” Nan says.
“Hey,” Alec echoes.
Nan lets them in and they sit at her small kitchen table, its nickel surface scarred with faint knife streaks. After Nan shuts the refrigerator door, she removes an ice tray from the freezer, pops free a few cubes into a clear plastic tumbler, pours a Jim Beam over them, and hands the tumbler to Duke as if she’s done this a hundred times before.
“He’ll have the same,” Duke tells her.
After she fixes Alec’s drink he thanks her and she sits on her ankle in the empty chair. Duke just stares at her and smiles. Alec has known Duke’s grins to be laced with irony or disgust or a caustic knowing, but this one seems to be filled with love; this one is pure, untainted.
“How’s the little fella?” Duke finally asks, his usual booming voice cut in half.
“Loud and selfish and completely spoiled,” Nan says. “I put him down again about an hour ago.”
Over the kitchen table hangs a framed needlepoint of a clown with red balloons in his cheeks. Somehow the clown’s expression reminds Alec of the portrait of Christ in the Larkin dining room back in Elmira. He imagines his mother serving dinner to Lexy, Joan, and his father. Lexy is a junior in high school now. She and Joan are the last two Larkin children living at home, held there like hostages under hypnosis, their mother’s voice melodically binding them to those rooms filled with the Son of God and all that high-gloss mahogany furniture. Fiona moved to New York City two years ago, and Myra is in Chicago. Alec hears about his sisters from Myra, whom he’ll occasionally call when he’s drunk or broke or feeling lonely.
“What brings you into town?” Nan asks Duke.
“We were just passing through,” he replies. “I’m gonna head up to Canada for a bit, see what’s happenin’ in Montreal, or Magog.”
This is the first time Alec’s heard any mention of Canada. He figures it’s Duke’s cover story for what they’re about to do in Frankfort.
“How’s the back?” Nan asks.
“The back’s fine. Pretty stiff in the morning but after a hot shower it loosens up. Lately it’s my goddamn ankles.” He drinks and to Alec adds, “Don’t get old. It hurts too much.”
“You’re not old until you’re fifty,” Nan jokes.
“Well,” Duke says, “I feel like I’m damn near sixty.”
“You still got that good face.”
“Tell that to my liver,” Duke says, and excuses himself to the bathroom. Disembarking from his chair is a three-part move with accompanying grunts, at least one of which is real.
When Alec is left alone with Nan he does his best not to stare at her.
“How long you known Jerry?” she asks.
The name Jerry shocks Alec, like swallowing a mouthful of curdled milk, but he manages not to betray his surprise. “Coupla months,” he says. Jerry? Who the hell is Jerry?
“You met him on a job?”
“At a bar,” Alec says.
“That doesn’t surprise me.”
“Yeah, we tie one on now and then.”
“He obviously likes you. He usually doesn’t like anyone.”
“Why wouldn’t he?” Alec offers.
Nan laughs. Alec likes the sound of her laugh so much he has to stare at the table so as not to lose his train of thought. And her smile is sweet. Sometimes a woman’s smile will ruin her face. Alec has always thought that his sister Fiona suffers from this problem. She’s pretty enough, but whenever she smiles she reveals short, imperfect teeth. It looks like something is dissolving in her mouth.
“He’s not really going to Canada, is he?” Nan says.
“I honestly couldn’t tell you,” Alec says.
Jerry. Alec wonders how many other names he uses. Is there a different one for each person he meets? Or a small assortment he chooses from based on how it might suit whatever fool he encounters? Or is Duke simply a recent, self-appointed nickname?
“And what about you?” Nan asks.
“I don’t have any plans at the moment,” Alec replies.
“Just along for the ride?”
“For now, I suppose.”
“What are you, twenty-one?” she asks.
“Twenty-three.”
“What do you do for work?”
“I was picking apples at an orchard near Niagara Falls but I just got laid off.”
“Are you from Niagara Falls?”
“I’m originally from Elmira.”
“Big family?”
“Four sisters,” Alec says. “I had a brother, too, but he died when he was a baby.”
“I can’t even fathom that,” she says. “Are you the oldest?”
“Third oldest,” he says. “My sister Myra has me by almost three years, my sister Fiona by a year and a half.”
“Are you Spanish?”
“No,” Alec says.
“You look like you could be,” Nan says, “with those dark eyes and that hair. But European Spanish, not Mexican Spanish. You’re too tall to be Mexican.”
“My dad’s Irish and my mom’s Scottish and German.”
“What’s your last name?”
“Larkin.”
“Alec Larkin,” she says.
When he hears her say his name he has the sensation that his head has momentarily floated away from his body; it’s drifting toward the ceiling, and if there were a hole in it, his head would just keep going, up into the night sky. He would like to say her full name but he doesn’t know it. Instead, he asks her if she has any siblings.
“It’s only me,” she says. “As far as I know, at least, though my dad had a lotta fun.”
“Where is he?” Alec asks.
“Dead,” she says. “Some big machine fell on him in a gravel pit.”
“Sorry,” Alec says. “What about your mother?”
“What about my mother? What about your mother?” Nan quips.
“My mother’s taller than most men,” Alec replies. “And more Catholic than the pope. Still sings in the choir at St. John the Baptist. I wasn’t good enough for her.”
“My mother lives on a houseboat in Knoxville, Tennessee,” Nan says. She reaches across the table and seizes his tumbler.
“Really?” Alec says.
“No. She lives on the other side of town with a three-hundred-pound man who thinks a big spaceship’s gonna come down and take the saved away to some planet with American currency and air-conditioning.”
“I’d like to see that planet,” Alec says.
“Plus they’re nudists,” Nan adds. “So I tend to keep my distance.”
Alec takes his tumbler back, drinks from it, and chews an ice cube. “How old are you?” he asks.
“Too young to be sittin’ around an eat-in kitchen, flattening my own ass,” she says. “Twenty-four.”
“You’re pretty skinny for just having a kid.”
She laughs. He knows it was a stupid thing to say, but she seems more charmed than upset.
“You shoulda seen me nine months pregnant,” she says. “Nursing takes the weight off.”
Alec thinks she’s talking about nursing as a profession and imagines her in a white uniform with the hat and the soft shoes. “My sister Myra is a nurse,” he offers.
“Nursing the baby,” Nan explains, laughing again.
“Right,” he says. “Feeding.”
After he drinks another mouthful of Jim Beam he asks her what she does for a living. She tells him she’d been going to beautician school but had to put it on hold after she had her son.
“Where’s the father?” he asks.
“Not where his lady and his little boy are.”
“He ran off on you?”
“Like a gazelle on one of those nature shows.”
“What’s his name?”
“Drew.”
“Drew,” Alec echoes. Uttering the man’s name makes him feel vengeful, like some character in a movie who has to come up with a plan.
“Why?” Nan says, “You gonna go hunt him down?”
“Maybe,” Alec jokes.
“Well, he’s about six-foot-three, two hundred pounds. Light brown hair, blue eyes. Big rangy bastard, kinda like you, but not as skinny. I could try and sketch him for you.”
“You don’t have a snapshot?” Alec jokes again.
“I tore ’em all up.”
Nan reaches across the table again and takes another drink from his bourbon. Her eyes have such a hold on him that he can feel it in his throat. With each look they share, it feels as if she’s stealing a little bit of his oxygen.
“Why are your hands shakin’?” she asks.
“I don’t know,” he says. “Sometimes they just shake on their own. They always have.”
“Restless heart,” she says.
He shows her his hands, palms up. “The only time they don’t shake is when they’re holding cash.”
She draws her fingers across his palms and the gesture nearly pulverizes him. It’s witchy, but good witchy. It feels like he’s coming apart. She’s turning him to sawdust.
Duke returns from the bathroom cradling the baby, who wears a bulging diaper and a look of wonder on his face.
“Say hello to Drew,” Duke says to Alec.
“Hey, Drew.”
“Drew, this is Alec. My one true friend in this world.”
Drew has big blue eyes and he might be the quietest baby Alec’s ever seen. For a moment he thinks he might be deaf.
“How old?” Alec asks.
“Four and a half months,” Nan replies. “This heat makes his face puffy. I keep a fan going in his room.”
“His face is perfect,” Duke says. “It’s a perfect little face.” Drew clasps onto Duke’s pinkie. “What a grip you have,” Duke says. “Soon you’ll be swingin’ a hammer.”
With his tiny wrinkled hand Drew paws at Duke’s nose, then his mouth, his chin.
