“So he says,” Frankie said, “he says him and Sandy’ll go out, I can use their place. Yeah, and probably one of the kids isn’t gonna get up inna middle of the night and come out, see how come I’m making so much noise, getting laid onna couch. It’s not gonna work, and that’s it, it just won’t work. I got to get some dough and I can’t, this thing John’s got, it’s the only thing I got in front of me right now. I got to listen to the guy.”
“Shit,” Russell said, “listen to him. I’m willing to listen to him. He just didn’t want to say anything in front of me that I could hear. Fuckin’ guy, he don’t like me. Okay. But I’m not gonna go around and check myself into something I don’t even know what I’m getting into or anything. I did that before. I’m not doing that again. This thing I’m doing, I can do that. It’s probably gonna take me longer, get what I need from it, but I can do it. I’m picking my own spots from now on. I don’t have to sit around and take no shit from the Squirrel.”
“Okay,” Frankie said, “that’s what I’m saying. You can take it or you can leave it alone, and that’s fine. I wished I was you. But me, this’s at least ten apiece the guy’s talking about. You don’t want the ten, all right. But I do. And I haven’t got no place else to get it. You have.”
“Not that much,” Russell said. “I’m not gonna get ten out of this. Five, seven’s more like it. No ten. You gimme ten and I’ll be gone so fast it was like I never was here. I know exactly what I’m gonna do, I get that kind of dough. But, I don’t have to get it from what he’s gonna, that he’s got in mind to do. It’s gonna take me a while longer, but I can get it from what I’m doing anyway, and that, that’s on balls, see? Balls. It’s something I think up myself, how I’m gonna do this. So, the guy don’t like me? All right, I still don’t have to kiss his ass, I don’t want to. Fuck him. So it’s up to you and him. It’s up to you guys. You want me, you want me in this, I’ll come in. He’s the guy with the big ideas. Fine. You want to go and get somebody else, also fine. Don’t matter to me.”
A blue and white train pulled in from Cambridge. The doors opened. An elderly drunk stood up unsteadily, ignored the doors open behind him and lurched toward the doors open in front of Russell and Frankie. He wore black suit pants and a white dress shirt and a greenish checkered jacket. He had not shaved for several days. There was a large red bruise on his left cheek. His left ear was bloody. His black shoes were open along the welting and his bare bunions protruded. He made it most of the way across the car before the doors shut. He bent, reaching for the curved edge of the orange seat with his left hand. It was bloody at the knuckles. He reeled backward into the seat. The doors shut and the train departed for Dorchester.
“Must’ve been a pretty good one,” Russell said. “Like to see the other guy.”
“He fell down,” Frankie said. “My father used to come home like that. He was a strange bastard. Payday was no trouble at all. He’d get his check and work all day and come home and give the dough to my mother and they’d go out that night, go shopping. And they’d come home and watch TV and he’d maybe have two beers. At the most, two beers. Lots of times you’d come down in the morning and there’d be the glass on the table next to his chair, full of flat old beer. I remember, I tasted it, the first time I tasted it, I thought: how the hell can anybody drink anything that tastes like this. And he’d go to work. But then some times, nothing on the shape-up. Lots of times. And most of them times, he’d come home and read or something. Never talked much. But some times, there wasn’t anything, see, you wouldn’t know that, he didn’t come home, not all the times but some times. And he always, he knew, he knew when he was gonna do it. Because when he didn’t come home, when he was late, my mother’d start to get worried and walk around a lot, and when he wasn’t there, she’s saying Hail Marys and everything, when he wasn’t there by seven-thirty she’d go to the cupboard. That’s where they kept the money they didn’t use onna shopping. In a peanut-butter jar. And if he wasn’t there, the jar was always empty. Always. And he’d be gone for at least three days, and when he came home, that’s always the way he looked. He always fell down.
“I remember,” Frankie said, “the last time he’s up at the farm. I had to take him up there, and he was, well, it was mostly my mother. She told me: ‘You’re twenty now. You take care of him. I’d do it but I’ve had enough. You take him up.’ So I took him up to Dropkick’s. Doctor P. K. Murphy’s farm. And I checked him in and he was as bombed as you can get. So, he just had new teeth. And he says to me, well, I knew what he was trying to say to me, he wanted me to take his teeth. Paid two hundred and sixty dollars for his teeth. Now what the fuck was I gonna do with the old man’s teeth? I’m probably gonna lose them myself. So I said to the guy, I said, look, he was probably gonna come out of it, one way or the other, they better keep his teeth. And they put them in a box. I saw them do it.
“I go back about a week later,” Frankie said. “I mean, I liked the old bastard. He never hit anybody. Used to drive him nuts, Sandy’s running around the way she did, he couldn’t do nothing about it. But he wasn’t a bad guy. So I went up there, go up there and see him.
“They used to sit around in the back room,” Frankie said. “It looked, they had these tables and a television and it looked just like a fuckin’ bar. I dunno, probably they wanted it that way. They got a drink at nine o’clock and one at lunch and one at six, and some of them, Christ, the whole place, the woods’re full of botties. A guy’d decide, he was gonna check himself in, and he would, and before he did it he’d get a couple friends of his and they’d come down every day and put ten nips in the woods where he said. The guy told me, he said there was one guy, he was stoned all the time and he never went near the woods, and they could tell. they could tell when one of them was stiff, and they started watching him, really careful. And when they, he didn’t think they were watching them, see, he come up in his car, and he’d go out in the yard and get under the car with a cup or something, he filled up the radiator with vodka before he checked in. They thought he was drinking antifreeze. They always had guys bringing in enema bags full of the stuff. At night they’d go around and look in the tanks of all the hoppers. Guys always used to stash pints in there.
“So I go up there,” Frankie said, “and the old man’s got a buddy. One of the guys he used to work with. They’re both on paraldehyde. A little glass of water and the guy comes by every so often and he’s got an eyedropper, and a pitcher, and he puts some of the paracki in the glass and some water and they sit there and they sip it, and they, the television’s going, they’re watching quiz shows or something, they dunno what they’re watching, they got cigarettes in their hands and those butts’d burn right down between their knuckles and you could smell their skin burning and you’d tell them and honest to God, that was the first they’d know about it. You’d tell them and they’d look and they’d say: ‘Oh, yeah.’ And take the cigarette out and look at their fingers and then put the fuckin’ thing back. They couldn’t feel nothing.
“The guy’s name was Burke,” Frankie said. “My old man’s friend was Burke. They were both on paracki and they both smelled like skunks. Just like skunks. That stuff makes booze smell like perfume. And the old man’s complaining. He’s been up there a week and he’s feeling lots better and he wants his teeth. And the guy can’t find his teeth. He goes on and on. Brand-new teeth, guy can’t find his teeth, where the fuck’s his teeth, now he feels good, he wants to eat, where’s the teeth. Burke’s asleep in all of this. I think he was asleep. His eyes were closed. I know he wasn’t dead.