Sweeney on the Rocks Read online

  Talking to Donnie, Tony keeps an eye on the street, the motel, the parking lot. Notes a drunk staggering down the sidewalk. Across the street, a broken-down pickup pulls into the parking lot, bleeding exhaust from the side panels, limping on bald tires.

  Tony squints in the dim light. Something about that driver….

  The truck pulls into the motel lot. A woman steps out of the passenger’s side. Not too hard on the eyes, good set of wheels. And sure the light ain’t too good, but maybe that’s, yeah. That could be her. No, no. Uh uh. That is her, that’s fucking her. And the guy she’s with…something about him. Right on the tip of his tongue. Looks like that guy, that car wreck guy, got his number punched by the Russians. Everybody said it was the Russians. The rat, what was his fucking name…

  “Donnie. I gotta check something out. I’ll call you back, gimme half an hour. You ain’t going to believe this…” Against protestations, he hangs up the phone.

  Turning back, here’s the drunk up against him, slouched and slovenly, eyes hidden under a homburg. He’s got his hand out. Slurs, “Heya buddy, chew gotya couple bucks you might could…”

  “Fuck away from me.” Tony shoves the drunk to the side, watching as Eddie’s wife and that guy (what’s his name?) disappear into the hotel.

  It’s like a poet or something. Like Pound or Frost or… Shakespeare! Shakespeare. Risen from the dead and hiding out in Montana. One part of the puzzle falls into place. That’s why she came all this way out here.

  The drunk is back in front of him again. “Just a few bucks, man. Com’on. Heave a heart.” He bumps against Tony, raises his head. “Please? Tony?”

  And then the drunk swings his hand around quick, a blur with an eight-inch lead sap attached. It collides with Tony’s temple, cracking like an axe into wood.

  Tony’s head fills with a shower of silver confetti. Nausea, and a quick, coalescing curtain of darkness. His last clear thought, even as he feels himself slung limp around the shoulders of the drunk (who is not, of course, a drunk), his last dim, coherent thought, even through the confusion and disappointment, is an apology: Oh I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, Mama, Fontana, me I’m so, oh, I’m….

  Sweeney’s no cop, although in a parallel universe, an alternate reality wherein black is white, up is down, etc. etc., he might have made for a badass detective. Indeed, having watched his ex-wife shed her carapace of earrings, scarves, and minks in favor of starched khakis and a star, anything is possible.

  Exhibit one: He’s never been able to let go of a question.

  Every question, Eddie used to say, has to have an answer, otherwise it ain’t no question at all. The kind of roundabout reasoning Sweeney used to love.

  The problem now? Too many questions. It’s like an old Buster Keaton movie, like opening a closet to let loose an avalanche of hats and coats and wooden tennis rackets.

  Leaving Tina’s motel room—“Just stay close, keep your head down. Anybody knocks on this door? Don’t let them in, okay?”—he thinks, what do I do with all this? The image that comes to mind, right after Buster Keaton, is a juggler with chainsaws, maybe a flaming torch. You can’t slow down, you can’t stop.

  On the concrete stoop outside the motel’s office, he lights a Camel. Hands in pockets, tilts his head back to the stars. A cool night. An hour alone in a motel room with Tina and his virtue is still intact. Cause enough for a few seconds of self-congratulation. Ten years ago, they’d been famished for each other. Biting shoulders, licking ears. So, yeah, he’s held himself together not-so-bad. Performed well viz Aggie.

  Still, he finds himself shaken.

  Bourbon, he thinks. American whiskey.

  In his flannel shirt pocket, the rock from Tina. “You mind if I keep this for a while?”

  She’d been suspicious, until he added, “Down payment on future services rendered.”

  His marriage with Marilyn had been childless. No matter how they’d tried. They’d kept at it, though, despite the train wreck they could see coming down the tracks. Marilyn blamed Sweeney, of course. Sweeney and his gimpy sperm. What he never told her, all it took for Tina to catch was one broken condom. The Saturday he’d chauffeured Tina to the clinic, he’d told Marilyn he was playing eighteen at Dyker Beach.

  Birth is thus incongruously on his mind when he comes up to his International, parked five or six spots away from the nearest light. Key in hand, Sweeney, Jr. in his thoughts (the kid would be eleven years old by now, he’d be dribbling a basketball with both hands, he’d be wearing a baseball glove twice too big and pushing up a batting helmet from over his eyes), Sweeney nearly misses the second body dumped in the bed of his truck.

  ~

  Tina opens on the fourth knock.

  “Thought I told you to keep this shut.”

  “Knew it was you.” Tina still dressed, but with a toothbrush in hand. “What’s a matter? Forget your libido, there, Cosmo?”

  “Come with me out to the truck. I want to show you something. Oh, and uh, yeah. Let’s get one of these sheets off the bed.”

  He’d kept Tina largely shielded. The word is compartmentalize. Marilyn too, of course. But Marilyn had stability to think about, mortgages, checking accounts. Sure, she’d been known to make a gesture, hurl the occasional toaster, but her heart wasn’t in it. If you’re the wife, there’s virtue in blindness. Sweeney remembers holding a compress to his swelling eye. “It’s not drug money, sweetheart, and I didn’t get it for killing nobody. That’s about all you need to know.” Never the entire truth, but enough to calm her down.

  But Tina, she was living inside a whole other kind of narrative. Wouldn’t take no for an answer. What Sweeney eventually learned through hard experience: the girlfriend has no reason to meet you in the middle.

  Sweeney had this place he liked just off the R train on Seventy-seventh. Owned by a second cousin of Castellano’s, it was halfway up to legitimate, and had a blue collar bar where off duty cops from the 68th precinct drank free Budweisers. There was good seafood in the back. Waiters said Sweeney’s name and brushed off his chair before he sat down.

  Makes a man feel good, being treated well in front of his girl.

  In the couple years him and Tina were a thing, it was their Thursday night date. They’d walk down from their apartment and have pasta and fresh oysters. Folks knew to find him there. A hand on Sweeney’s shoulder, a kiss to the cheek for Tina, then Tommy Contadino or Marky Gee would turn a chair around backwards, wave for another bottle of red. “That poker game we been talking about, that thing up in Red Hook, a bunch of us are getting together tomorrow night. We need a sober driver. What you think, you ready to win some money?”

  And later, Tina, digging it, would whisper, “That was Tommy Contadino? From the papers? Wasn’t he part of that cigarette thing, oh, man, what was that thing. You read about it?”

  “Nah, wasn’t him.”

  “And he’s not talking about poker poker, is he.”

  “What.” Half smiling, enjoying the dance himself. “I like my poker games. That a crime?”

  Turns out, the lifestyle turned her on.

  And so, yeah, he’s interested now to see her reaction.

  He has her by the elbow. Pulls her around to the side of his truck. “You wanna tell me who this is? And what he’s doing in my truck?”

  Another thin corpse, another custom suit. The silk picks up a blue-sheened reflection from the street lights. Even inert, there’s something of the serpent here. The way the guy’s twisted; too many vertebrae in his spine.

  He lies in the grease and grime of Sweeney’s truck bed, one arm caught over his head, elbow resting on the handle of a handyman jack, a heel twisted on Sweeney’s spare tire. Shirt untucked and knees akimbo, pants hiked up to show a slice of pale, hairy leg. His hair, previously worn slicked back from his crow’s peak Gordon Gecko style, has exploded.

  Tina makes a noise in her throat. Equal parts cough and question. She puts a foot on the rear tire and lifts herself up for a better look. The corp
se has a heavy blue contusion on his forehead. But that’s not what killed him. She reaches over to touch the guy’s chin, to turn his head, exposing a deep slice just under his throat.

  As opposed to the body in Sweeney’s chair, a guy whose ticket got punched before he was moved, this guy’s throat was clearly cut in Sweeney’s truck. A fresh wash of blood, puddled in the grooves of the truck bed. The nice suit is soaked with it.

  Sweeney says, “Look at the blood, huh. Pretty awful, right?”

  Tina turns the head further, leaning into the truck until she’s close enough for a kiss. She gathers the spit in her mouth and hawks a healthy one onto the forehead.

  “Uh.”

  She hops down, dust off her hands. Takes the sheet from Sweeney and unfurls it over the body. “Let’s get this piece of shit dumped somewhere.”

  “I know a place.” Thinking, even as the world’s saddest film score plays in his head: Oh, Tina.

  Twenty minutes later, they stand side by side at the guardrail, unwinding the bloodstained sheet, twirling the body down, down, down to the now-familiar splash. Then Tina releases the sheet. They watch it blow and furl over itself, pale as an abdomen, ballooning briefly in the water before being swept away. Tina says, “I need another drink. How about you?”

  ~

  Him and Aggie, they’ve never spoken the word marriage. Not once in five years. Aggie with two divorces, Sweeney with one. A good night’s sleep, that’s what they both want. High fiber and the good opinion of peers. But then the bruises start to fade, and maybe you forget about the pain.

  The hardest part about lying? One lie leads always to at least two more, in a j-curve of predictably-increasing falsehoods. Good liars perforce need good memories. These last ten years, Sweeney’s devoted a lot of effort to keeping his stories straight. He keeps a notebook.

  Having dinner with Aggie, for instance, as he’s opening the second bottle of wine, she’ll ask him, “Your parents ever drink as much as we do?”

  Sweeney has said he’s ambivalent about his fictional parents, enough to explain his own long pauses, but she still needs an answer. “Dad had a problem when he was younger, had to quit. But Mom still liked a couple glasses with dinner. More than a couple? She’d get mean, sarcastic.” Later that night, he’d write in his notebook, “Dad, former alcoholic. Mom, mean drunk. Wine with dinner.”

  Over time, he’s come to be fond of his dog-eared old notebook. Smeared with the dirt and blood of his handyman work, here’s the human condition in microcosm. A nutshell of love and sex and ambition, of flawed self-image and perceived insult, deceit and melodrama and addiction. And all of it entirely a product of his own imagination.

  One o’clock in the morning, he uses his key to slip into Aggie’s house. The kitchen table lit by a candle guttering down into melted wax. Beside it, a slice of cold meatloaf and a single, uncut potato. A cold dinner. Maybe it’s a rebuke, or maybe it’s Aggie being thoughtful. Hard to tell. Aggie’s a Monet of the mixed message.

  He does not feel like an intruder here. Slipping quietly through the carpeted hall to the bedroom, he does not feel out of place.

  In Aggie’s bedroom, partially lit by a nightlight from the hall, her slight, sleeping form.

  He sits beside her and stares for a time at the rise and fall of her breasts. A slight snore every third or fourth breath. Marriage, he thinks, is what happens when you’d rather die than disappoint her. It’s the pinball tilt, it’s the default position.

  The kind of money Tina’s talking about, it’s going to bring trouble like a needle pulls thread. That rock? Fifteen carats, maybe twenty. Hard to tell with rough, but assuming it’s gem quality…Jesus. And then she’s talking about a few dozen of those stones?

  Aggie’s a light sleeper. All he has to do is touch her shoulder (warm as a peach on a windowsill) and she jerks awake. “What is it?”

  “It’s me.”

  “Ted?” She sits up, sheets puddling around her lap. She’s wearing his old Bobcats t-shirt. “What time is it?”

  “Late.”

  “Where’ve you been?” In the dimness, her face is unreadable. She’s a stewer, and would have been sitting at the table, drinking wine, staring at his empty chair, numbering her grudges. But she is equally a generous soul, and will often give him the benefit of the doubt. At this point, it’s a coin toss which way she’ll go.

  “I ran into an old friend of mine from back home.”

  “Brooklyn? Here? What’s his name?”

  “Her. And she’s uh, she’s kind of in trouble.”

  “Oh Ted. What kind?” She takes his hand, preparing herself to be sympathetic. Maybe thinking cancer, unwanted pregnancy, debt collectors.

  “The kind that could follow her out here.”

  “What’s that even mean?”

  “Do you love me?”

  She’s supposed to repeat it back to him. Sure, hell yeah, damn tooting. Instead, he gets the world’s most suspicious look. “What’s her name, Ted.”

  “Do you trust me?”

  “Not too goldern much, no, not right at this particular moment.”

  Sweeney considers the upended chessboard that, thanks to the last thirty-six hours, has become his life. “Sweetheart, this isn’t the way I wanted to do it, but here’s what I’ve been carrying around in my pocket all day.”

  He leans up on one cheek and finds the box. In his closed hand, the crushed blue velvet. He avoids her eyes while he tilts his hand, shows it to her. Gives it a long two or three seconds, then tucks it away again. “That’s how much you mean to me. And, I, well, there’s things from Brooklyn that are catching up to me. And I want to talk to you about them. I do. But not right now. Okay?”

  He finally looks at her. Waits. “You can blink or something.”

  She closes her eyes. Keeps them closed.

  “So yeah, okay. You have time to think about it. Do I want this screwed up New Yorker in my life for good? Is what you should be asking yourself. But what I want to ask you, in the meantime…you quit your job, right? I heard about that. Okay, you got some time off. Would you mind if I paid for a little trip? Something to get you and Elizabeth out of town for a while?”

  Her hands work at the bottom hem of her shirt, picking at a loose thread. Finally, she says. “I don’t think I’ve ever been as mad at you as I am right now.”

  Not the response he’d hoped for. “Sweetheart…”

  “What are you thinking, Ted? Show me a ring box, then put it back in your pocket. Tell me to get out of town on the same night you basically just proposed to me. Please, what are you possibly thinking?”

  “Well, I…”

  “I mean, what’d you do. Kill somebody? And then! Then you’re already treating Elizabeth like some kind of abused stepdaughter. She told me what you said, and that is not okay, Ted. That is not okay. Show me the ring.” She holds out her hand.

  “What?”

  “I want to see the ring.”

  Reluctantly, he hauls out the box again. Cracks it and holds it to his chest. He elects not to put it in her hand. If they’re having a fight, call this a symbolic stand.

  “Well,” she sniffs, “you got good taste in jewelry, at least. That’s something.”

  “You like it?”

  “I guess it’s beautiful, yeah.”

  “Listen.” He stands up, tosses the ring box on the bed. “Put that on if you want.” He digs for his wallet. “And here. Take a credit card. This one’s got a few hundred bucks on it. Go up to Fairmont, or whatever. Give me a call when you get back. You still want me to propose, I will. We’ll go out to a good dinner, maybe try that new place in Bozeman. Something romantic so I can do this right. Meantime, don’t take candy from strangers.”

  She ignores the ring but accepts the card. Pinches it up between two fingers. “Call this hardship for putting up with another man who won’t tell me the…” her voice catches, “the goddamned truth.”

  ~

  Twenty minutes south of Rockjaw, Marilyn has h
ung her hat next to the Yellowstone River, feathered her nest in the kind of bland, soulless modular that sucks the eyes right out of a bright summer day. Paradise Valley, they call it. And it used to be. Before it got filled up with subdivisions, with toy windmills on porches and lawns patched by dog-urine. House after house, vaporous yard lights and garden gnomes, ceramic deer and sickly cedar shrubs. Two centuries ago this valley was a winter encampment for the Crow. Teepee rings and arrowheads. Now each house has its five acres of rocky pasture. Thank a generational series of myopic county commissioners. Here’s where we eat, is the thinking; let’s go shit in it.

  In his ungenerous moods, with too little sleep or too much drink, Sweeney looks at these houses and sees lost souls, dupes, automatons, small horizons and limited means. We are all of us just each trying to capture some last vestige of romance, of true West, a slow ride off into the sunset. Cynicism, under a certain light, is the only rational response to the age. Depression isn’t an illness so much as evidence of intellect.

  But if he’s rested and sober, and as part of an ongoing project of self-betterment (a very private determination to make of himself a more generous soul), he sees a tribe, a community of struggling, aching, failing, sweating Sisyphuses, all of us striving from morning alarm to late night infomercial, and for what? His theory? To feel good about ourselves, to feel admirable in our own eyes. Sweeney is capable of envying the chutzpah, the courage it takes simply to get out of bed.

  It’s an effort, then, to be around Marilyn. This dour reminder of his own failures.

  Three o’clock in the morning, he pulls into her subdivision. His dog’s been in the cab of his truck for six, eight hours. Sweeney parks briefly next to the stacked clutter of mailboxes, lets Zeke jump down onto the hard gravel road. Sweeney idles slow down the circuitous drive while Zeke runs along behind.

  He’d hoped to find Marilyn awake (she’s an inconsistent insomniac, an early morning tea drinker and crossword cheater), but he finds the house dark and quiet. Instead he sits in his truck between her prowler and Subaru. The wagon has bumper stickers: I heart My Shih-tzu, I heart My Persian.