10

Lee Boyle drank three cups of coffee in quick succession inside a café downtown. It was located in a new pedestrian precinct cobbled in red stone, fancy black wrought-iron street lamps here and there, flower boxes, boutiques galore.

He was sweating under the whirring ceiling fan and conscious of potted ferns made to sway by the breeze of the blades. A minute ago he’d thought somebody was watching him from behind, but when he swiveled his head all he saw was one of the ferns shimmering. He wondered about plant sensibilities – a random notion that just chugged into his head.

He sucked urgently on sugar cubes and smoked cigarettes and made an inventory of his long trawl through the city. Here, there, looking for Almond. Clubs, late-night dives. Nobody had seen her.

He remembered going back to his apartment at some point and opening the Yellow Pages and calling round motels and hotels, asking if they had a guest called Almond – which was pointless, because she wouldn’t be registered under that name. She wouldn’t be registered at all. Night clerks tended to hang up on him when he started to describe her – beautiful little girl, about five-two, maybe eighty-five pounds, dark hair, kind of Latino looks, you’d remember if you ever saw her. But nobody wanted to get into long telephone conversations with a guy that sounded desperate and incoherent. Well, fuck you, I happen to be looking for a missing person. Click. Dead connections.

Somewhere in the course of all these phone calls he’d also tried to contact The Kid, but he didn’t get anything except the answering machine again. He left a message instead of just hanging up. ‘Hey, this is Lee. You got anything I can use? I need something, man. Anything. Get back to me.’

He’d snorted more of Stretch’s powder, instead of mainlining, and it had burned his nasal passages like he’d inhaled Comet, but Jesus! the boost was there. Then he’d gone out and walked around some more in the dawn light, driven by manic energy, but the dives were all closed and the kind of people who might have seen Almond had gone underground. They were people of the night, couldn’t hack sunlight, vampires. He’d left messages everywhere he could. Tell her to get in touch. Like immediately.

What he needed was sleep. But his mechanism wasn’t even close to shutting down. He knew this condition. Restless, marginally demented. He tapped his fingers on the table.

The waitress, a fat girl with healthy rose-colored cheeks, came with the coffee pot. ‘Another refill?’

‘Sure. Why not.’

She leaned over and poured into his cup. He had a desire to engage her in conversation, but she’d already drifted away among the greenery. He drained the coffee and left, walked back in the general direction of his apartment.

Almond. Beautiful little girl, about five-two, dark eyes. He had only to snap his fingers – like so – and she’d do whatever he wanted. Because she adored him. Because he was good to her, in his fashion. But strict, because she needed that.

He turned a corner and entered a street of derelict office buildings. His mouth was dry. He knew if he looked at his tongue it would be the color of coffee. He came to a cross street and popped inside a bar, thinking of ice-cold lager going smoothly down his throat. It was one of those Irish pubs of the 1930s immigrant school, dark and unfriendly – no plastic shamrocks here, no furry little leprechauns for tourists who’d lost their way.

He asked for a Heineken. He drank half of it, aaah, then scanned the clientele, a few pre-noon dark-faced boozers, who sat hunched over their drinks like men communing with private gods. He finished his drink, ordered another, chugged it. He liked the glorious icy feel.

He noticed a payphone by the door and he thought, Why not? Why the hell not? Because he despises you. He sees you as a wastrel. Somebody down the tubes. A young man who didn’t know what to do with the silver spoon. In his present frame of mind, one of whirlpools and agitations, Boyle wasn’t convinced that these were sufficient reasons, so he fished coins out of his pockets and went to the phone. He remembered the number, dialed it. He felt a great surge of confidence suddenly, above the hubbub of everyday life.

‘Yes?’ Always the same brittle response.

‘It’s Lee here.’

A silence you could cut with a chainsaw. Lee Boyle imagined his father behind the big walnut desk inside the fancy house on Cable Hill. The high-ceilinged rooms, cornices restored by craftsmen imported from Milan, antiques up the ying-yang.

‘Lee,’ Hugh Boyle said. The tone was deep-freeze.

‘I just thought I’d give you a call,’ Boyle said. ‘It’s been a long time. Last time we spoke was at Monique’s wedding.’

‘How dare you bring up Monique’s wedding?’

Trying to ease his way back into his father’s favor, Boyle realized he’d need one of those ice-cutting ships that negotiated the Antarctic. ‘We talked about stuff.’

‘What “stuff” exactly did we talk about, Lee?’

‘I remember you –’

‘Stop. Let me tell you what I remember. You got outrageously drunk and fell face-first into your poor sister’s wedding cake. You brought with you – entirely uninvited, I might add – a couple of underdressed young women of dubious vocation, and that wretched crony of yours, Vann, Vass, whatever he’s called. Your little crew then proceeded to disgrace itself. Do I have to go into detail? There was blatant evidence of drug-taking in a bathroom. A valuable hand mirror was shattered. Sexually explicit graffiti was lipsticked on walls. Sums of money and credit cards mysteriously disappeared from the pockets of coats in the cloakroom. I am not speaking of an isolated prank, Lee. I’m looking back over an entire history of misdemeanors, some of them utterly appalling.’

‘You ought to let all that water flow under the bridge,’ Boyle said. ‘It’s past. It’s gone. I’ve changed my ways. I’ve just spent weeks in a rehab clinic. I’m clean. I’ve been doing social work.’

‘I think I’ve heard this one before. It’s the angular approach to asking for money.’

‘Did I mention money? Did I mention money? You’re the one that brought it up. Not me.’

‘You’re an embarrassment, Lee.’

The jay makes answer as the magpie chatters. W. Wordsworth. It was weird what kept coming back to him across the years.

‘Goodbye, Lee. Don’t call again. Do you understand me?’

‘I need a little help here, I’m tapped out, I’m having difficulties, it would only be a loan, you’d get it back at twenty, twenty-five per cent interest, I mean that.’

He was talking into a disconnected line. He slammed the handset back in place, raging. He cut me off. His only son. An embarrassment. Well, screw you too, Hugh. You’ll get yours.

He must have been speaking very loud because the drinkers were watching him. He returned to the bar. He was burning up.

The barman said, ‘You okay, fella?’

‘Nothing a chilled brew won’t cure,’ Boyle said.

The barman, who had fat tattooed arms, slid a green bottle across the countertop. Boyle felt the urge to talk to this guy, explain his outburst on the phone. ‘I don’t get along with my father,’ he said. ‘Oil and fucking water.’

‘Mine’s dead,’ the barman remarked.

Boyle leaned across the bar. ‘You know what name he gave me when I was born? Huh? Lee Harvey Boyle. Lee Harvey. You carry that round and see where it gets you. You know why he did it?’

The barman shook his head slowly. ‘Tell me.’

‘Because Lee Harvey Oswald shot John F. Kennedy, which made Oswald a big-time hero in my father’s book. He hated Kennedy. Loathed him.’

‘The name’s a weight all right,’ the barman said.

‘Fucking right it’s a weight.’ Boyle felt spit gather like cotton at the corners of his lips. ‘My fucking sister, little Miss Precious, she gets Monique, ooh la la, and what do I get? Huh?’

‘It’s a hard road any way you travel it,’ the barman said.

Boyle poured his lager into his glass. He wanted to forget Monique, and all of his family, but sometimes Monique’s face came drifting up to him, out of the shallows of memory, pale and pretty and utterly despicable. Her and her fucking wedding to that geek stockbroker type called Austin Arganbright. What kind of name was that? It sounded like a goddam mouthwash.

He said to the barman, ‘All I want is Love in a hut, with water and a crust. Keats. You know what I’m saying?’

‘Keats,’ the barman said, like a man chewing on an unexpected bit of tofu.

Boyle took a great swallow of his lager, then asked, ‘Where’s the toilet?’

The barman pointed to the other side of the muggy brown room. Boyle crossed the floor, entered the john. It was scented with pine, but that didn’t disguise the fact that somebody had recently taken a highly fermented dump in one of the cubicles. He unzipped, leaned against the urinal, cursed his father.

Lee Harvey Boyle. The gunman in the book depository in Dallas.

He looked at the stream of his urine. That goddam Almond, he thought. Had she just upped and left town? That was like giving him the finger. He’d get to the bottom of it. He’d track her down. She wasn’t getting out from under him. And if she thought that –

‘Hey. You. Bright boy.’

Boyle, lost in his roiling thoughts, hadn’t heard anyone enter the john. He turned his face round. There were two guys. One was tall and ponytailed and wore a leather jacket, the other was short and thick-necked with an off-center mohawk that gave his skull the look of a lopsided skunk. Bad hairdos, both of them. The one with the slanted mohawk was carrying a lead pipe, maybe a foot long.

Uh-oh. Boyle zipped up quickly.

The guy in the leather jacket had a severe case of acne. ‘You know Vern Crassman, I understand.’ He had a country twang to his voice, maybe hick Kentucky. It was a voice Boyle associated with mangy dogs, tar-paper shacks, haggard old women shucking corn.

He turned from the urinal. He was thinking rapidly. ‘Crassman,’ he said. ‘Vern Crassman. Umm. Do I know Vern Crassman?’ He glanced at the lead pipe. Mohawk was holding it against his side and emitting unambiguous rays of impending brutality. From the corner of his eye Boyle realized the john had no window. Ergo, no escape route. So it was down to him and these two bad-looking hillbillies Crassman had despatched. The prospect of pain sizzled in the air.

The one in the leather jacket said, ‘You hurt Vern, buddy.’

‘There might have been a minor fracas, I guess,’ Boyle said. ‘Some kind of misunderstanding.’ He wondered how long this pair had been following him.

‘A fracas,’ the guy with the lead pipe said.

‘Yeah, a fracas,’ Boyle said. He looked at the squat man, who was overweight and probably ponderous in his movements. He was the kind of guy who always got the heavy shit to lift when you needed something moved. Here, grab this grand piano, Mohawk Man. All dumb strength, a real grunt.

Boyle walked to the washbasin and turned on a faucet. Thinking, thinking. He wasn’t going to be able to schmooze his way out of this situation because neither of these guys looked like a good listener. They’d been sent by Crassman and they were here to redress the balance of things, plain and simple. Violence begets violence.

The one with the ponytail suddenly grabbed the lapel of Boyle’s jacket.

Boyle said, ‘Take care. This is an Armani, friend.’

‘It don’t look it.’

‘Like you’d know?’ Boyle asked.

‘Armani. This is a fucking rag, what it is.’ The guy tugged hard, bringing Boyle’s face close to his own, affording Lee Boyle a close-up of acne pits, pustules, blackheads. It was like the surface of some hostile planet.

Boyle pulled his face back. He heard stitches pop in his lapels and he was aware of the squat fellow with the lead pipe coming up from behind.

This is total squalor, Boyle thought. Violence in this shithole. He knew there was a better life. If this was the best the human condition had to offer, somebody had a whole lot to answer for.

He said, ‘I do judo. Be warned.’ It was worth a try.

The mohawk snorted. He probably thought judo, like Armani, was another fashion designer, a Jap one.

The lead pipe was raised in the air and coming hard and fast toward Boyle’s skull. He reacted without any thought, because the time for thinking was past, everything was measured in microseconds, and the idea of a lead object embedded in your head concentrated your goddam mind like nothing else. He made a great effort to free himself from the grip of the guy in leather, twisted his face to one side, and the pipe whoomed past his head and crashed against the sink, cracking the ceramic. Boyle saw his lapel come away and saw the guy in leather holding a strip of what had once been a fine jacket. So the jacket was a write-off, but on the plus side he was free, he could move now, he could act. He felt energy come up from his feet and rush through his body. He was spiked.

The mohawk made a snarling noise and drew the pipe back up a second time. ‘Judo my pecker,’ he said, and the pipe began its spooky descent.

Boyle’s perceptions were suddenly unlimited, as if he’d just become plugged into an all-encompassing awareness he never knew existed. He was conscious of a flood of brilliant light. Watching from a place above, he saw himself bring his knee up into the pipe-wielding guy’s groin and, in almost the same instant, headbutt the one in leather and watch him stagger back against one of the urinals, while the mohawk – squawking – was doubled over like a constipated man with his asshole stitched shut. The pipe had rolled out of his hand and Boyle bent down to pick it up and whacked it against the mohawk’s head. Next he turned to the guy in leather, who was crouched in a urinal, holding his face in his hands as water flushed automatically down the tiles and diluted his blood, turning it pink like the juice from certain grapefruits.

What the hell. Sweating, heart roaring, Boyle smashed the guy’s kneecaps with the lead pipe.

The guy went all the way down. His mouth was open but nothing was coming out. He was in that place where pain made you mute. Boyle turned and gazed at mohawk, who was flat on his back and gazing up at the ceiling with a deeply dazed expression. He wasn’t seeing anything except maybe his own private planetarium.

It was a moment of huge satisfaction. Incalculable satisfaction. Boyle pondered some extra violence, but decided the best idea was to blow this place entirely. He tossed the lead pipe inside one of the cubicles, walked out the john and through the bar to the street. He went several blocks in his ruined Armani, but, hey, what was a jacket? You kicked ass, Lee. You took the pair of them and you destroyed them. What you ought to do next is go over to the trailer park and have a word with Vern Crassman. Surprise the hell out of him. See Crassman cower.

It was only when he’d made it back to his apartment that he felt the symptoms of collapse. He looked at the drugs on the coffee table and contemplated the notion of dabbling in just a tad more, enough to get him through the rest of the day so he could continue to look for the bitch.

Runaway.

His hands were wet and they’d begun to tremble beyond all social acceptability, and when he shut his eyes he could see that lead pipe smash the mohawk’s head and he could smell the rancid stench of the toilet. You got lucky, he thought. It could have gone the other way: your skull caved in, your all-American looks demolished.

He went inside the bathroom, dipped his face under the cold-water faucet. The inside of his mouth tasted foul. He walked back into the living room and surveyed the crystals of speed.

You don’t need it, Lee. Yes you do. That little nagging voice in his ear.

He wandered to the answering machine. The message window read ‘2’. He pressed playback. Almond. Let it be. But the first voice was Jimmy Plumm’s. ‘I hope I’m not pressuring you unduly, love. But time is passing. Time is indeed passing.’

The second message was uttered in a hushed voice he recognized immediately.

‘Lee, you old speed-freak, I hear you’re looking for your little Almond,’ it said. ‘Maybe I can be of some tiny assistance?’