“WELL,” LOU said to me out on the prison patio, “now do you believe me, maybe? That they are coming after you?” He had a heavy jacket on; I kept my topcoat on. We sat in the April sun, which did not warm us much. “Look,” he said when I arrived and looked doubtful about sitting out of doors, “humor me on this one, all right? Out and in, these are things that don’t mean a lot to you. Me, I have to have a good reason to go out, and then I am supposed to be getting exercise or something. Besides, I always did feel better about talking to a guy about things when I was outdoors, you know? They can still pick up what you say, but it’s harder for them.”
“After me,” I said. “Yeah, I guess they are. But then I try to keep in mind, you know, that it could be coincidence. Lawyers, doctors, everybody, all of us go through this. Self-employed professionals. The bastards do not trust us. And we can count on that, all of us, that they do not trust us. So, paranoia, you know, Lou? Have to watch for that.”
Lou had taken up pipe smoking; he had a rough-briar bulldog fully stoked and going. He had also grown a beard. I asked what had brought that on, and he laughed at me. “Oh,” he said, “let’s see. Partly to see what one would look like on me. I was always curious. But when I was out and working, finding out was not practical. In here, what difference does it make, I look like Yasir Arafat? Who is going to see me except a bunch of goddamned crooks? And then it was because of the food, which I do not recommend. That was part of it too, Jerry, I guess.”
“You wanted to grow your own strainer?” I said.
“No,” he said. “See, it is boredom. The food here is not really bad. It is just boring. So I ask around a little, other guys been here a while, and there is only two things, maybe three things, you can do about the food. First one is that you decide you’re Orthodox, all right? And you got to have it kosher, which they will do for you. Trouble with that is, kosher’s also boring. And once you get locked into that, you are stuck with it. Plus which, I think I might have some trouble, selling them that line. These guys, or the ones that put me in here, they have got a book on me. It does not show anywhere that I’m a devout Jew, let alone an Orthodox one. So that is the problem.
“This leaves me with two other things that I can do about it, get myself a different menu because meals become important. Vegetarian is out, and that is one of them. So that leaves just allergies. Maybe there is hope.
“Trouble with the allergies,” Lou said, grinning at me, “is that I don’t have them. I don’t even sneeze at ragweed. What is this with food? For that I will need some symptoms, and that leads me to the beard. I go in and see the doctor, say my skin is acting up. He looks at me, nothing’s wrong. That is what he tells me. ‘Doc,’ I said, ‘you know your business. I don’t argue with you. But I am telling you, it burns. Ever since I came in. Has to be the diet here, ’cause this is something new. When I shave, it’s killing me. Feel like I’m on fire.’
“Now this guy is not stupid,” he said. “He knows about us fakers. So he looks at me and says: ‘Maybe it is shaving. Why don’t you lay off the blades and see if it improves? Then if it still bothers you, come back in and see me.’
“So,” Lou said, “I do that, and it makes me itch like hell. But I get through that and I go back and I say: ‘It was not the shaving, Doc. I still got the burning feeling. I think it is the diet.’
“ ‘So do I,’ the doctor says. ‘You don’t like the food. Very few men like it, but there is no help for that. Get yourself a hobby and stop thinking about it. I bet that your skin improves. You will feel much better.’
“So,” Lou said, “that didn’t work, but I did try the pipe.” He puffed into it so that a fat cloud of heavy blue smoke boiled up out of it. “Dirty, and it stinks, I guess. Takes about as much equipment as the average plumber uses. Makes you drool and it sounds awful, you get water in the bowl. But it does keep you busy and it doesn’t hurt your lungs.” He took the pipe out of his mouth and stared at it critically. He took a pipe cleaner from his pocket and rammed it down the stem. He pulled it out, all bent and brown, and held it up for me. “Look at that, will ya?” he said. “If that isn’t one disgusting piece of shit to have around you where you happen to be sitting, I don’t know what is. I must be related to the goddamned spaniels there.”
“It is pretty gross,” I said, employing one of Heather’s discarded favorite terms without thinking about it.
“It’s a fucking metaphor for life, is what it is,” he said, holding it up to the sun. “Just like my artsy-craftsy second wife always used to be saying about runny fried eggs, flat tires, any goddamned thing she came across that wasn’t to her liking.” He shifted his voice into a falsetto. “ ‘It’s a metaphor for life, Louis, a statement of the whole human condition.’ Bullshit. What it is is a pipe cleaner that is all shitted up, and what the fuck do you do with a thing that’s made of wire and that you have made so shitty you can’t bear to put down? Eat it?”
“That’d put some roughage in your diet,” I said.
“Yeah,” he said absently, and put the cleaner on the table. He rested his forearm on the edge of the table and looked at me as though I was a student on academic probation, and he was the dean of my college. He shook his head at last and gave me a woeful smile. “I dunno, Jerry,” he said.
“About what, Lou?” I said. This was not the kind of admission I had grown accustomed to from him. It bothered me to hear him say it.
“I have got a pretty good conscience,” he said. “It’s never given me a lot of trouble. I would think of something I would like to do, such as with my first wife, Cheryl, when she really got so she was giving me these huge amounts of shit because I didn’t like her fucking country club broad friends or something, and I woke up one morning after hearing her mouth going all night before I went to bed, and I said to myself: ‘I am going to get rid of this broad even if she did give me my kids. Fuck her and all her fucking noise.’ And that is what I did. And my conscience just sat there in my head like it was an old man getting some sun in Boca in the winter and it didn’t let a peep out of it.
“The same thing with my second wife,” he said. “I knew when me and Sally just decided to get married, this was not a thing that you’d expect to work. I was forty-three years old. I read a book once, several of them in fact. They were all about accounting, tax regs, proposed changes in the filing dates, what you should do for your clients that’re getting their heads bashed in with the new rules on debenture payouts. All that kind of thing. Here is this broad who is twenty-two, and she has got four things in the world. Two of them are her tits, the right one and the left one—very, very nice tits by any man’s standards. The third thing is her brain, which apparently was just about the best that come along in about ten years in the BU graduate school. At first I thought perhaps those profs that said she was so smart were actually ripping off a few pieces of her ass, giving her mind all those good grades so her tits will come to classes. But then I ask around some and I find out I am too suspicious. Sally is actually really very smart. So her brain was the third thing. And the fourth thing was that Sally was ambitious. Really was determined she was gonna get that doctorate, and also equally determined she is going to live good while she’s getting it and afterwards. She was very up-front about that. ‘Graduate school sucks,’ she said. ‘The food is lousy, where you live is lousy, the people you go out with don’t have any money so they can take you places, and in the winter when you get a good vacation, you don’t have the cash to go off anywhere that ever heard of room service. I have had it with this. I am going to get my degree, and I am going to teach, but one way or the other I am going to get some money for myself while I am doing it.’
“It was a straight cash transaction,” Lou said. “No players to be named later, no deferred payments in the contract. I offered first to set her up in an apartment, give her all the things I’d give her if she was my wife, treat her better than most men treated their wives, probably, and then if it did not work out, no hard feelings, toodle-oo. This she did not want. ‘Lou,’ she said, ‘that is fair. But when I get the damned degree, I’ve got to land a job. And there is lots of competition for the jobs I want. I’ll be up against a lot of other people, some of whom will be women, so I won’t have that going for me. And they will try to knock me out of the running by spreading stories about me if I do that, what you say. They will say I worked my way through school by doing a reasonable amount of hooking. And that will demolish me. So either I will have to say that we get married, or you will have to be satisfied with dating me like we are now, knowing I am dating other guys to see if I can find one with some money who will also marry me. I’m sorry that it is this way, but that’s the way it is.’
“I thought that was fair,” Lou said. “I married her. Maybe it would work out and she would still like me after she was running the department somewhere at some school where guys who look like I do until twenty years ago were known as sheenies. Not anymore, though, at least not to our faces—too many of us on the faculties these days. Then again, she might teach at one of those schools, meet some dip-shit who inherited a lot of money so it didn’t matter if he spent his entire fucking life reading books nobody ever heard of, by some guys like him who lived about four hundred years ago, and decide that she liked being with him more than she liked being with me. In which case we would get divorced, no alimony on account I told her if that was the deal I wanted an agreement down in writing before we got ourselves married. No big deal, all right?
“Well,” Lou said, “I was a little off, I guess—what she met at some conference was not another guy, but another broad—but otherwise I had the whole scenario correct, and so I get divorced from Sally. Once again, I sleep like a baby. No grief from my conscience. And now I’m in the can, all right? My present wife, Joanna, she is not what you would call the sort of woman who ought to’ve been a nun, all right? I meet her in Vegas. It was if you want the truth a business arrangement, not the first of those for either one of us, but still quite a bit better than most of the other ones that either of us had. So I see her for a second date, a third one and a fourth one, and we get along together great, better every night. We like the same things even when we’re not in the bedroom. And finally I say to her: ‘Joanna, all right? In the first place, while you are obviously the best piece of ass God ever let loose on the world, and while I’ve made a number of wise investments in my time, this is running into money. In the second place, there’s a limit on how long I can stay out here in the desert, seeing shows and betting a few dollars here and there when I get the urge. I stay here long enough and when I go back I will find my nephew Mendel taking calls and telling people not to worry even though I am dead, because he’s a better guy to do their work than I am. So I have got to haul ass back to Boston.’ So I propose to her, and she says she has tried this once before and he turned out to be an asshole as a steady guy for her, but she supposes that don’t mean every man’s an asshole and besides, she’s getting older and she should think of the future. And once again, it’s all right, although I have got to say I hope she don’t get serious about some guy while I am in here, if she isn’t really keeping her legs crossed like she claims she is.
“You see what I mean,” Lou said. “That is just about all of the dealings I have had in my life where I got involved in something that included other people. My kids, all right, I didn’t do so good with, but they were mostly Cheryl’s idea anyway, and I supported them. Otherwise I have been fair with people, I believe. I did not ask them to do something that was not maybe exactly in their own best interests, unless I came out and told them I was asking them to do something that might put them in the shit. So far as I can see, nobody ever ended up in the shit because of something I did, but that is more luck than good intentions. I was honest about things, and that’s all I really deserve any credit for.
“Except, Jeremiah,” Lou said mournfully, “where you are concerned. Where you are concerned, I have got some serious problems with this nice quiet conscience of mine. You should not have got involved in this. I should not have gotten you involved in this. I told Frank that in the first place, when it is first becoming obvious that since they cannot lay their hands on Uncle Nunzio there and do mean things to him, because I will not allow it, they are coming after me. ‘Frank,’ I said to him, ‘we are now in the situation where they’re saying: “Aw right, wise guy, let’s see just how good you are.” Things are about to start getting very hairy, very interesting.’ Frank knew what I meant, but he was sick. ‘You got to have a lawyer,’ Frank tells me as though I can’t see that one for myself. ‘This I am aware of,’ I tell Frank. ‘You are not telling me something that I did not know before I talked to you.’
“ ‘I am sick,’ Frank says to me. This I also knew,” Lou said. “It was getting so when somebody saw Frank walking down the street, having lunch in Locke’s, or getting on a plane to go somewhere, it is an event. People call each other up and spread the joyous news. ‘Seen Frank headin’ down to Florida the other day. Said he’s gonna get some sun, take a little rest. Didn’t look good, Frank. Kind of green around the gills. Claimed he felt all right, felt fine. You think Frank is gonna be all right? Tell me, Louis, all right? Man to fuckin’ man? You think Frank Macdonald’s really gonna be all right?’
“ ‘I know Frank is sick,’ is what I would say to these guys,” Lou said. “I would say to them: ‘The fuck do I know if he’s gonna be all right? I see him and he tells me, he is taking care of himself for a change. Looking out for his health, now that he is getting old. What can I tell you?’
“ ‘You think Frank looks good?’ they say. What am I supposed to say, you wanna tell me that? Frank looks good if you spend all your time in funeral parlors, all the people that you see are lying down and guys are coming in and saying how they look so natural. Of course Frank doesn’t look good. I should lie, perhaps? What good does that do? ‘No,’ I say to them, I don’t think Frank looks good. I think Frank looks shitty. But you tell me he is going down to Georgia. Maybe he will get a nice tan for himself, play a little golf and eat some fruit or something, so he should feel better for a change, and then if and when he comes back here, he will look like he is better. But I don’t know, all right? I am not Frank’s doctor.’
“ ‘Frank,’ I say, ‘I know you’re sick.’ This is when I need a lawyer and he tells me he is sick. ‘I am the guy it seems like is the information desk for you in Boston where the guys check in that love you and would like to have some news about how you are feeling. And you’re telling me you are not feeling so good, Frank? You want maybe I should stop all of this talking about tax collectors and them guys and start rolling up my sleeves so I can give you high colonics?’ And Frank says no, that is not what he means. And this is when I am fighting there with him and Nunzio, that I am getting you for my case and that is the end of it. And I say: ‘Frank, all right? We both know what is going on here, which is something Jerry doesn’t. And if it happens, what I think, after they get me, they will come back again and see if maybe they can work him over some. And when that happens, Frank, you know, as it probably will, you are going to have to come through, without no apologies.’
“ ‘Well,’ he says, ‘if I am better, naturally, I will.’
“ ‘Frank,’ I say, ‘that does not do it, if you are feeling better. Maybe you will not be, and then what happens, huh? Jerry will go in and he will do this thing for me. And after Jerry does it, Frank, I will be in jail. And then it will be your turn, Frank—he does not know Nunzio. And you will have to do it then, and just come through for him.’ And Frank says: ‘I know this.’
“So,” Lou said to me in the logician’s sun that provided light but no heat which would have warmed us, “now the time has come and you have got to cash that chit. What you need is Magazu, and I can’t get him for you. Frank can get him for you, Jerry, and he has to do that. Call him up and tell Corinne, let you talk to him. Tell him that you talked to me and what I said to do. Do not let him bullshit you. Don’t let her do it either. Frank is well enough for this. He can make a phone call.”
“Lou,” I said, “I can’t do that.”
“Jerry,” he said, “bullshit. Take your fucking pride and shove it. This is serious. You are now the TV star? You are on the news? You tell me this asshole, Rowley, wants you once a week? You come down here like a jerk and tell me all this stuff? Channel Eight is gonna pay you what my lawn guys used to get, and that makes you important? Jerry, pay attention here. This is serious.”
“Lou,” I said, “listen to me. Serious, I know. But I have not got Frank’s phone number, all right? I can’t call him, Lou. I already tried that. If I want to call him, Mousie Feeley has to tell him. I assume that Mousie called him and he told him what I said. Frank did not return my call. That is what I mean. Mousie won’t give me the number. I cannot call Frank.”
Lou looked at me speculatively. “I don’t know about you, Mister Kennedy,” he said. “Sometimes I think you’re making progress. Other times: you’re hopeless.”
“You have got Frank’s number?” I said. “Tell me, and I’ll call him.”
Lou put his head back and laughed. “I do not believe this,” he said, “how damned gullible you are. No, I do not have Frank’s number. I don’t have my files here, you know, or my call director. But if I did and I felt lazy, I would not need them. I would just dial up nine-twelve, and ask the operator.”
“Ask the operator,” I said slowly. “As in Information?”
“As in Information, Jerry,” Lou said, grinning at me. “Nine-twelve and then you dial three fives. After that dial twelve twice. And don’t come back down here and tell me there’s no twelve on the phone. Ask for Frank Macdonald’s number, in Sea Island, Georgia. While you’re at it, get Corinne’s, case his line is busy. Call the fucker up and tell him, what I said to you. Tell him: ‘Call Bert Magazu. This is serious.’ ”