Part 19 (1/2)

No Pigeyes in sight, none of his pals. I put on a winter hat and drew up my m.u.f.fler and went out to see if I could talk a hack into taking a ride at night into the West End. I was thinking about Brushy. She had kissed me goodbye in the bathroom, a long, lingering embrace full of all her s.p.u.n.k and ardor, and issued fateful advice before disappearing: 'Don't get another rash.'

XXV.

THE SECRET LIFE OE KAM ROBERTS,.

PART TWO.

I got to the West End with more than an hour and a half to spare and I spent the time in a little Latin bar on the corner near the Bath where almost no English was spoken. I sat sipping soda pops, sure every second that I was going to break down and order a drink. I was thinking about Brushy and not enjoying it much, wondering what-all that was coming to, whether I wanted what she did or could give it, and as a result, I was in one of my most attractive moods, refusing to move my elbows and waiting for somebody to try to hoist my no-good Anglo a.s.s.

But the fellas here were pretty good-natured. They were watching one of those taped boxing matches from Mexico City on the bar TV, commenting en espanol, and taking peeks now and then at yours truly, figuring all in all I was too big to mess with. Eventually I got into the mood, jos.h.i.+ng with them, throwing around my four or five words of Spanish, and recalling my longtime conclusion that a neighborhood joint like this might be the single best cla.s.s of places on earth. I was more or less raised at The Black Rose, a terrible thing to admit maybe, considering the rumpot I turned out to be, but in a neighborhood of tenements and tiny homes, people longed for a place where they could expand, lift an elbow without knocking down the crockery. At the Rose, it was all right if your wife came; there were kids running round the tables and jerking on their mothers' sleeves; there was singing and those jokes. Humans warmed by one another's company. And me, as a kid, I couldn't ever wait to get out of there, to blow the whole scene. I recollected this with chagrin, but suspected for reasons I couldn't explain that I'd end up feeling the same way if you put me back there today.

Ten o'clock even, I headed out and walked down the alley. This was a big-city neighborhood where the cops and the mayor long ago installed those orange sodium lights with their garish candlepower that seemed to turn the world black and white, but the alley was still all kinds of menacing shadows - garbage cans and dumpsters, sinister alcoves and iron-barred doorways, a lot of lurking spots for Mr S/D, Stranger Danger, to smile and wield his knife. Walking on, I had the usual dry rot in the mouth and watery knees. I heard a grating clank and stopped dead. Someone was out here waiting for me. I reminded myself that was how it was supposed to be, I was meeting somebody.

When I got closer, I saw a figure beckoning. It was the Mexican, Jorge, Mr Third World Anger, who'd questioned me the day I was down here. He stood in the alley in bathroom slippers and an iridescent blue silk robe. His hands were shoved deep in his pockets and you could see the great puffs of his breath hazing above him in a blade of light angling from the doorway behind. He chucked his face in my direction and said, 'Eh.'

Bert was inside, out of sight of the door. We seemed to be in a supply area behind the locker room, and he greeted me as eagerly as he had the other night. Meanwhile, Jorge engaged the dead bolt on the door and padded off. Apparently he was going back to sleep. He paused to poke his head down the hall.

'When you leave, lock it. And, men, don't leave n.o.body see your a.s.s. I don' want no f.u.c.kin s.h.i.+t here. I tole you a long time ago, hombre, you was f.u.c.ked up, all f.u.c.ked up.' He said this to Bert, but he pointed at me. 'I tole you, too.'

Jorge, Bert said, had to get up at four, arrange the stones which had been in the oven firing all night, and make the place ready for the bathers who'd begin arriving as early as 5:30 a.m. I wondered where Jorge stood with the outfit guys. There were a lot of them that came around here to steam off the stink of corruption and ugly deeds. Jorge, I suspected, kept everyone's secrets. But if a guy with a tommy gun or a coat hanger knocked on the front door now, Jorge'd point out where we were and go back to sleep. It was a tough life.

I told Bert we had to talk.

'How about the Bath?' he asked. 'You know, oven's on. It's blow-your-brains-out hot in there. It'll be great. Get all that oil and stuff right up to the skin. How about it?'

I had some thoughts, silly bigoted ones, about sitting around naked with Bert, even wrapped in a bedsheet, and then I began to feel sheepish and stupid, sure that if I said no he'd read that as the motive. So we hung our clothes in the lockers and Bert found the way down, both of us in the ocher-colored bedsheets cinched at our bellies and worn much like skirts. Bert didn't dare burn a light near a window. The shower room outside the bath remained dark, and the bath itself was lit only by a single bulb that left a gloomy light the color of tea. The stones had all been shoveled back into the oven and the room was arid, the great fire roasting the air. Even so, the place still had a vaguely vernal scent. Bert cracked the door a bit on the oven and then sat himself down on the top bench in the stepped wooden room and made exultant noises in the withering heat.

You'd have thought he had no troubles, chatting away about the Super Bowl, until I asked him to tell me on the level how it had been. He looked down then between his knees and didn't answer. Scary times, I suppose. Here was a fella who'd flown wartime missions, who knew what it was like being throttled by fright. But time had pa.s.sed; the imagination takes over; honest memories fade. The pain of fear had plainly surprised him.

I been eating fried food. Drinking bad water, man. Can't tell what's gonna get me first. You know?' He smiled. Loopy old Bert. He thought he was funny. Lead from the tap or a gun barrel was lead either way.

'And where the h.e.l.l have you been hiding out?' I asked.

He laughed at the question.

'Brother,' he said and laughed again. 'Here, there, and everywhere. Seeing the sights. Tried to keep moving.'

'Well, let's take today, for instance. Where'd you start out?'

'Today? Detroit.'

'Doing what?'

He fidgeted in the dense heat while words evaded him.

'Orleans had a game up there last night,' he said finally. He was looking the other way as he said it and he didn't say any more. I got the picture: Bert was seeing all the best places, Detroit and La Salle-Peru, chasing Orleans, romancing on game nights in funky motels, places like the U Inn.

'And what about money? What've you been doing to live?'

'I had a credit card in another name.' 'Kam Roberts?'

That startled him momentarily. He'd forgotten what I knew.

'Right. I thought it'd be better than using my own, they'd have a harder time tracking me down, but they did anyway.'

I thought Orleans used that card.'

I had one, he had one. We scissored them finally. The cards were about to expire anyway. But we piled up some cash. That's okay. What the h.e.l.l do I need? A motel with cable, I'm cool. It's just those guys, man. They were right on us. They were checking at stores where Orleans used the card, stuff like that. Scared the h.e.l.l out of us both. Man.' He looked at me. 'Those guys were cops, you're saying?'

'They're hot on the trail.' I had remained on my feet. I figured if I kept the sheet clutched around me and my b.u.t.t off the boards, I'd make Brushy happy and come home unblemished. 'That's our problem, Bert. The coppers. They know I've been looking for you, so now they're looking for me, especially after that runaround at the House of the Hands on Friday. I haven't slept at home for four nights. You and I have to scope out what I tell them, Bert, cause ”I dunno” doesn't really seem to cut it. This whole thing with Orleans - I'd like to know how it happened, just so we can figure what kind of dance step I do.'

I wasn't facing him then. There was no point in that. Even so, I could feel him sort of hanging, suspended in s.p.a.ce as we sat here in this hot wooden box.

I mean, you know,' he said behind me.

'Right,' I said. We were going forward easy. 'You met him when he came to visit his mom at work. Something like that.'

'Right.'

So we stumbled around in conversation and Bert told me the tale of Orleans and him in his own half-a.s.s way. We were there broiling, not looking at each other, just two voices in the tea-gloomy light and incredible heat. Bert wasn't much of a story-teller. He did a lot of s.h.i.+t-out-of-luck mumbling. 'You know,' he'd say, 'you know.' And I did, I guess. I got the point. Orleans changed Bert's life the way people's lives are ordinarily altered only by human violence and natural disasters - volcanoes, hurricanes, typhoons. You see the pictures all the time, some poor son of a b.i.t.c.h in his hip waders, looking with zoned-out disbelief at the roof of what used to be his house, now angled into the black waters of the flood. That was Bert after Orleans. I'd only seen the guy across the distance of a basketball court, so I couldn't tell you a thing about him, except that he was a fine-looking young fellow. But as I put the pieces together, my two bits, he was sort of high-strung and erratic. Apparently he'd been a high-school football star who tore up his knee and suffered a lot over that, getting cut out of athletics, then started refereeing various sports while he was still in college. These days he taught grade school PE as a sub and reffed, but his princ.i.p.al occupation apparently was fighting with his mother. He had a peculiar job history, moving in and out of town, always coming back, living at home half the time. I suppose Glyndora wanted him to be different and he was engaged in the usual parent-child struggle, always angry with her and wanting her to accept him, the way we all want with our folks at one level or another.

Somehow, though, they connected. For Bert, it was epochal. Orleans, I took it, was Bert's first actual real-life thing, and Bert was in love with him the way you'd love the genie if you'd found that magic lamp. Orleans to Bert was liberty. Destiny. In the midst of his longing, his attachment, Bert was also wild with grat.i.tude. It's hard to believe that this could really happen in this day and age - people who live on the other side of earth from what they're really feeling -but the old copper in me says it occurs every day. Look at Nora. Look at me. Suddenly you're at an age when your own naughty thoughts exhaust you; no matter how much you try to ignore them, they remain. Whatever ugly stamp they place on your soul is impressed there indelibly. You might as well be whatever it is they say you are. You are anyway.

So they got their rumba going, Bert and Orleans, and Glyndora caught on and went wild. I got the feeling that was okay with Orleans, to be causing that kind of ruction.

Bert was walking back and forth now on the tier above me, roaming on his big feet with the long nails and the calluses from his loafers and athletic shoes. His black hair was heavy with perspiration and his unshaven cheeks looked darker in the heat.

'And how'd this betting thing happen? Whose idea?'

'Oh, you know, man,' he said again, for the one hundredth time. 'There was never any idea about it. We'd talk games. Players. Stuff like that. You know how it is, you hang with somebody, you kind of figure what they're thinking, I mean maybe he'd say - He'd say. You know, before the Michigan game, he'd say, ”I'm going to call Ayres tight, he's a street player, you got to call him tight.” Or Erickson at Indiana. All elbows.'

'And you'd bet it. Right? If Ayres was going to be called tight, you'd bet against Michigan.'

'Yeah,' he said. He was slowed by shame. 'It didn't seem like much. Just a little edge. I didn't really think twice.'

'Did Orleans know?'

'To start?'

'Eventually?'

'Man, do you know I bet the games?'

'I do,' I said. Orleans, he was saying, knew too. I thought for a sec about Bert as a gambler. What was it that compelled him? Did he l.u.s.t to feel favored by chance, or did he want to dare punishment? What drew him? The men? Or the sport? The grace, the fact that it was all winners and losers with no compromise? Something. It was part of the game of hide-and-seek he was playing with himself.

'Did he ask if you bet his games?'

'Not like that. He'd just ask what I was down on. You know, I'd tell him. He wasn't even sure where he was going until 4:30 the day before.' This was slow: 'He never said I'm gonna fix this. It was nothing like that.'

'But did you notice that he was taking care of it?'