Melanie is relieved that it isn’t me, or probably isn’t me.
“Maybe,” she says, “it’s something else he wanted to talk about.”
“I know what he wanted to talk about.”
“You’re sure.”
“No.”
“Instinct?”
“Look, I know.”
I’ve taken another sick day. That won’t favor me when it comes to my performance evaluation. But I’ve got to get regular and I’ve got to get some sleep, real sleep. I’ve been reading stories about how dangerous it is otherwise. People need sleep. Anything less than eight hours a night, said the article, is dangerous. Eight hours a night? Are you kidding? For more than a year I’ve been subsisting on one hour a day. I am going to kill those pigeons. One night, or one day, I will kill all those pigeons. I will try to sleep without a pill. We shall see.
But here’s the good part about being up by night and in a fog by day. You hardly read a newspaper and hardly watch TV, the news. You don’t know what’s going on.
That’s a blessing.
In the world of publishing, Judith Regan of Regan Books, says that she’s had “amazing sex,” but it wasn’t with me, so what do I care.
So I’m not current.
When I was in newspapering I was current to the minute. I needed the news and the news needed me.
Well that’s how it is anyway, when you’re on graveyard. There is no news. Nothing is happening. No wars, no politics, nothing.
You’ve missed everything and you’ve missed nothing.
(Up in the cafeteria the TV is all sports or sitcoms and when there’s news, it’s Spanish.)
Rumor has it that there’s a recession going on. Slot attendants, like me, keep paying jackpots and fixing hopper jams. The place is full. How come? What recession?
Melanie is at the computer fiddling with a book review. She’s biting her nails. She’s reluctant to write something bad about a bad book. Her mind has been preoccupied with her father in Cincinnati, who’s had a bypass. He’s recuperating all right, and her mother insists that everything is fine, but Melanie thinks we should make the trip, which we cannot afford to do, by car or by plane, and anyway, by the time we got there we’d be ready to head back. I cannot keep taking sick days and…we are saving my vacation days for New York, when it’s time to celebrate the signing of a book contract.
Day to day we are prepared to celebrate, not me so much, but Melanie, who’s the optimist, still the optimist.
Lucky we’re one of each as I’d hate to imagine two pessimists in the same family.
“I think,” she says, “you did wisely.”
We’re onto Toledo and what I’m not supposed to know about him but I do. That maybe he is a thief. “You never want to become an informer,” she says.
I’m glad she agrees, but then she adds:
“I just keep wondering what you’re doing in that world anyway.”
Like it or not, I say, it is my world.
Melanie has given up on the computer. She leans back and sighs, rubs her eyes.
“I can’t write a bad review,” she says.
“So write a good one.”
“Can’t do that, either.”
We drive over to the McDonald’s. It’s that or meatloaf. So it’s McDonald’s. They don’t heat these places. I think I know why. They want you in and out.
We find a table that’s clean except for two crumbs. No table at McDonald’s is ever totally clean. There’s always two crumbs.
She brings me a double cheeseburger, medium fries and a coke. She’s having the chicken sandwich and a diet coke.
She doesn’t need to diet, but she does. Not really, but she is temperate. She is temperate in food and in everything else. She does not have mood swings. Though lately…
“The fries are cold.”
“Cold,” she asks, “or just not hot enough?”
“Not hot enough.”
“Should I take them back?”
“Never mind.”
We sit there and munch. I stare out the window when I’m done. I’m a quick eater. I gulp it down. She’s still eating. I wish there was something good to say.
Things could be worse, or, as my Russian self-defense master, Boris, keeps saying, things should never be better. That’s considered a blessing where he comes from. Things should never be better. That’s how you bless someone. You have to think about this before it sinks in. So we’re sitting here and enjoying that roundtable up a few rows where the old-timers have gathered. All McDonald’s are alike except that each table is its own universe. They’re always here, a group of old men, retirees and most probably widowers, at the same table, gabbing away, swapping tales, usually about the wars they’ve fought in and how everything has changed, and this usually starts an argument, some saying that it was better before and others insisting that now is the best time of all, and how special it is just to be alive. They’re always here from visit to visit and it’s all very pleasant – although, given that these are mostly World War Two vets, and Korea, there’s usually one of them missing, never to be seen again – another empty chair.
Melanie always smiles just to be watching them.
She brings back chocolate chip cookies from the counter, which is an extravagance but always a treat and more than that, somehow comforting, a signal that everything’s going to be all right. She reminds me that there is still hope from Sylvio. Much hope. I don’t tell her that you can’t live off hope and can’t live off the next phone call that may not even come. But she knows what I’m thinking.
“I think it’s time to phone Lindy,” she says.
Lindy is my sister, older by a few years, and it’s a long story about her, but the short of it is that she is still quite gorgeous but refused to trade that in for acting and went for song writing instead, that, plus developing new shows for TV, the stage, and the movies. She’s always had more creativity and talent than she knew what to do with, but it all went kaput when she came up with an idea for a children’s show, and it got ripped off. They bought the project, except that they never gave her the money, or the credit, and the show became the biggest thing on the air…and still is. Walking in, she knew nothing about agents or lawyers and how to protect herself.
So after all that, and cured of ambition, she moved back to Montreal and became religious, though with ties to no particular religion…and not hypocritically pious. She has recovered and become quite strong. Now she teaches. She teaches Inspiration and Motivation and has quite a following. When she calls, or when I phone her, she always tells me to bless everything.
“I think I will call her,” I tell Melanie over another cup of coffee along with the chocolate chip cookies.
“I think you should,” says Melanie. “You need a good pep talk.”
We glance over at the kid who mops the floor and tidies up here at McDonald’s. He’s disabled, and severely so, walks on one good leg and there is something wrong with his face. He never talks to anyone and no one talks to him. Melanie always tips him two dollars. We watch him, Melanie and I, and we don’t have to say what we’re thinking, but I wonder if he is blessed, or thinks he’s blessed.
I see blessings and curses every day in the casino.
She says, “You are doing the right thing, aren’t you? About that kid.”
“Toledo? Of course.”
She says she’s worried. “Suppose you were forced to talk?”
“I’d have nothing to say.”
“But you know what he did. You know it’s him.”
“I’d never talk, Melanie. That’s the first rule of the schoolyard.”
“But this isn’t the schoolyard. You were talking to a real detective.”
“I’m no snitch, Mel.”
“Listen to your language. You’re starting to talk just like them.”
“Snitch?”
“Isn’t that how they talk?”
“Well, it certainly ain’t how Felix Grubner talks with his two Ph.Ds. Anyway, you’re so big on multiculturalism.”
“Not when you bring it home,” she says smiling, because she knows how I tease her about being such a flaming liberal. I can be a liberal, too, but I once got in trouble with her group in Haddonfield when, after another suicide bombing in that other part of the world, I said, “Can you be called a bigot if by their words and deeds they turn you into one?” That is no way to make friends and influence people; not in Haddonfield.
“Do you know how serious this is?” she says as we’re finishing up here at McDonald’s where, for some reason, I feel a sense of comfort. There’s a part of me that’s afraid to go home. Home is where the pigeons live. I particularly like Melanie’s dad, a true, red-blooded Cincinnatian. I love his story about how the pigeons took over Fountain Square and, once a year, the citizens were allowed, even invited, to shoot them. I am not that kind of person, but about pigeons, yes. Anyway, I think pigeon shooting has been stopped in Cincinnati. Because of her dad, I root for the Reds, and he has plenty of stories about them, too, as he goes back to the days of Wally Post, Gus Bell, and most of all, Big Klu. A part of Cincinnati is hillbilly country, as it sits next door to Kentucky, and her dad always tells the joke about the hillbilly who refused to marry a virgin “cause if she ain’t good enough for her own kin, she ain’t good enough for me.” This cracks him up, and me, too. I am also afraid of home because that’s where the bills come, and the phone calls.
“So do you?” Melanie says. “Do you realize how serious this is?”
“I’ve been told. The detective told me.”
“But you still wouldn’t…snitch.”
“Come on, Mel. Would you want me to?”
She’s thinking.
“No, I guess not,” she says. “No, that wouldn’t be right.”
I explain that, besides the ethics, I am a hero to Toledo Vasquez. As I am no hero to Roe Morgan and the rest of them, I am a hero to Toledo Vasquez. That counts.
“But what if it’s a choice between you and him?”
“One step at a time.”
“Could you go to jail? My God!”
“But you’re with me on this.”
“Yes. I guess.”
“You guess.”
She thinks I’m being awfully flippant about this business. But, I explain, there is nothing worse than an informer, or hardly anything.
“How bad can this get?” she asks.
“Pretty bad.”
“Aren’t you afraid?”
“No. Maybe.”
She is still suspicious that I may be involved, considering all those tips I bring home. Are they really tips?
How is it that when she sends me off saying we need a hundred and fifty dollars for the phone bill, the next morning I bring home a hundred and fifty dollars?