Those Rockports Won’t Get You to Heaven
Jack Ketchum writes with such a sharp-edged narrative voice it could cut you clean, then stand there and watch you bleed. His spare prose is peppered with exactly the right words, allowing you to see and hear and feel what goes on in his fiction. His ticket to the Borderlands could have been punched by James M. Cain or even Hemingway because he can tell a riveting story of suspense by expertly knowing how much of his story he need never tell.
The place was going all to hell—not that you’d necessarily notice unless you worked there. The floor was mopped and the glasses fairly clean. The bottles were dusted and the bar wiped down, but then I took care of that.
But the owner had two other restaurants on the same block and kept swapping bottles back and forth between them. So you never knew when you came in after the day shift what would be on the shelves. You’d have plenty of Dewar’s one day and the next day maybe a quarter of a bottle. It also meant that you’d find a liter of peach brandy or port wine getting overly chummy with the single malts. The wines kept changing according to whoever threw him the best deal that week, and half the time there was no beer on tap whatsoever.
Waiters, busboys, hostesses—everybody was owed back pay. Myself included, half the time.
It was March and one of the coldest, longest goddamn winters on record, and the heat was off again. Had been all week. All we had between us and runny noses was a single space heater looking lonely and pathetic behind the hostess’s station. Customers ate their taramasalata and souvlakia with their coats on.
There weren’t many of them. You don’t associate Greek cuisine with frozen tundra.
It was six o’clock Thursday evening and of my dwindling group of regulars not a single one had shown up. I couldn’t blame them. They were all wised up to the heating situation. We had more waiters and busboys than customers. Two couples and a party of four in the restaurant and that was that.
I was going fucking broke here.
Not a tip on the bar in two hours.
I polished bottles. It’s a bartender thing. You got nothing to do; you polish bottles.
When the guy walked in with his kid trailing along behind him, the first thing I thought was Westchester. Either that or Connecticut. I don’t know why, because plenty of guys around here are partial to Ralph Lauren and Rockports, and outfit their kids in L.L.Bean. But there was something vaguely displaced about him. That’s the best I can do. He didn’t belong here.
You get so you kind of sense this shit.
They walked directly to the bar but neither one sat down. The kid, maybe fourteen I guessed, taking his cue from Dad.
“Glass of white wine,” he said.
“Sure. We’ve got Pinot Grigio, Chardonnay, and two Greek wines—Santorini and Kouros. Both very nice. What can I get for you?”
“Whatever.”
“Would you care to taste one?”
“No, that’s okay. Give me the Santorini.”
“You got it.”
Like I said, you just get a sense about these things. The guy was wrong somehow. Wound so fucking tight he was practically ready to give off sparks should he start to do any unwinding, and you probably didn’t want to see that.
You’re not supposed to have an underage kid with you at a bar in New York City, but most of the time we look the other way and most of the time the guy will order his kid a Coke or something, and we look the other way on that too. This guy didn’t. And of course I didn’t offer.
I poured the wine and he drained off half of it in one swallow.
“I used to come in here all the time,” he said. Not to me, but to his kid.
Though he wasn’t looking at his kid.
His eyes were all over the place. The rows of bottles behind me, the murals on the wall, the ceiling, the tables and chairs in the restaurant. But I had the feeling he wasn’t really seeing much of it. Like he was scanning but not exactly tracking. Except when he turned to look out the plate-glass windows to the street beyond. That seemed to focus him. He drank some more.
“It’s changed hands, hell, maybe a dozen times since then. This was way before I met your mother.”
The kid was looking at him. He still wasn’t looking back. Or at me either, for that matter. He kept scanning. As though he were expecting something to jump out of the clay amphorae or the floral arrangements. That and turning back to the window and the street.
“Not really, sir,” I said. “You must be thinking of another place. A lot of turnaround on the avenue but not here. It’s been the Santorini for about ten years now and before that it was a Mexican restaurant, Sombrero, from about the midfifties on. So unless you’re a whole lot older than you look . . . ”
“Really?”
“That’s right.”
“Damn. I could have sworn . . . ”
He was trying to act as cool and casual as the clothes he had on, but I could feel him flash and burn suddenly all the same. He didn’t like me correcting him in front of his kid. Tough shit, I thought. Fuck you. Snap judgments are part of my stock-in-trade and I hadn’t liked him from the minute he walked in. He made an attempt at a save.
“I used to live around here. Long time ago. Early seventies.”
“Really? Where was that?”
“Seventy-first, just off the park.”
“Nice over there. And pretty pricey these days. So where are you folks now?”
“We’re out in Rye.”
Westchester, I thought. Gotcha.
He turned back to the street again. I noticed that his son was staring at me and I thought, Jesus, if this guy looks displaced, his kid looks absolutely lost. He had big brown eyes as bright and clear as a doe’s eyes and the eyes seemed to want to make contact with me. For just a second there, I let them.
It could have just been me, but it felt like he was looking at me as though I was some kind of crazy lifeline. It wasn’t a look I was used to. Not after two divorces and fifteen years’ bartending.
“I’ll have another,” the guy said.
I poured it for him and watched him gulp it down.
“We don’t get over this way much anymore,” he said. “Hardly at all. His mother’s across the street shopping.”
His mother, I thought. Not “my wife”, but “his mother”. That was interesting.
And I figured I had it now—pretty much all of a piece. What I had here in front of me was one stone alky sneaking a couple of nervous quick ones while the little wife wasn’t looking. Dragging his kid into a bar while she was out spending all that hard-earned money he was probably making by managing other people’s hard-earned money so he could afford the house in Rye, the Rockports, and the Ralph Lauren and L.L.Bean.
I wondered exactly where she was spending it. Betsey Johnson, Intermix, and Lucky Brand Dungarees, I figured, would be way too young for anybody he’d be married to, and I doubted she’d be bothering with the plates and soaps or scented candles over at Details. That left either L’Occitane if she was into perfume or Hummel Jewelers.
My bet was on the jewelers.
My other bet was that there was great big trouble in paradise.
And I was thinking this when I heard the pop-pop-pop from down the street.
The kid heard it too.
“What was that?” he said. He turned to the windows.
The guy shrugged and drained his wine. “Backfire, probably. I’ll have one more, thanks.” He set the glass down.
Only it wasn’t backfire. I knew that right away.
When my first wife, Helen, and I lived in New Jersey we’d now and then get slightly loaded afternoons and take her little Colt Pony and my .22 rimfire semiauto out to the fields behind our house and plunk some cans and bottles. The Colt made pretty much the same sound.
Ordinarily I’d have been out in the street by now.
Instead I poured him the wine.
This time the guy sipped slowly. Seemed calmer all of a sudden. I revised my thinking big-time about him being just another alky. His eyes stopped skittering over the walls and settled on the bar in front of him.
“Dad?” the kid said.
“Uh-huh.”
“Shouldn’t we go see how Mom’s doing?”
“She’s shopping. She’s doing fine. She loves shopping.”
“Yeah, but . . . ”
And now it was the kid’s eyes that were darting all over the place.
“We don’t want to rush her, do we? I’ll just finish my wine here. Then we’ll go see what she’s up to.”
I got that look from the kid again. The look seemed to say, Do something, say something, and I considered it for a moment.
The phone on the wall decided for me.
By the time I finished noting down the takeout order—Greek salad, mixed cold appetizers, calamari, roasted quail, and two cans of Sprite, for God’s sake—the woman’s name, address, and phone number, the guy was reaching for his wallet. His hands were shaking. His face was flushed.
“What’s the damage?”
“That’s twenty-four dollars, sir.”
He fished out a ten and a twenty and downed the last of his wine.
“Keep the change,” he said.
Nice tip, I thought. You don’t see 25 percent much. Maybe the bar at the Plaza, but not in this place. I figured he wanted me to remember him.
I figured I would remember him. Vividly.
The kid turned back to look at me once as he followed his father out the door. It was possible that I might have seen a flash of anger or maybe a kind of panic there, but I could have been imagining that. You couldn’t be sure.
I rang up the wine and cleared his glass and wiped down the bar. He’d spilled a little.
There were a few ways to play this. First, I could be straight about it and report exactly what I saw. All of what I saw. Not just his being there but the high-wire tension going slack as shoestrings once the shots went off and then all nervous again when he was about to leave. The way the kid kept looking at me. Or, just for fun, I could try to fuck the guy over royally and completely by saying, “Gee, I really didn’t remember him at all, to tell the truth.” Though that might not work if his kid said otherwise. Finally, I could find out who he was and shake him down for a whole lot more than 25 percent, in maybe a day or so.
Hell, I already knew where he lived.
But I pretty much knew what I was going to do.
As I said, I’ve had two divorces and know what a bitch they can be. And I’m no big fan of married women in general either.
But my daughter by my second wife was just about this kid’s age. Maybe a bit younger.
I wondered whom he’d hired. How much he’d paid. If they’d actually hit the jewelry store just for show or only the woman inside it.
I polished bottles—it’s a bartender thing—and waited for the gawkers and the sirens and New York’s finest to come on in.
—Thanks to Matt Long