What the Hell Happened to You?
I took a deep breath once David and I were back on the sidewalk. I felt much better than I had when we entered the house. I felt like my body had purged some of the pain I’d felt all morning. My head was almost clear, and my hangover receded. My shoulders still hurt, but I could deal with pain in my body easier than I could handle pain in my head. The sun was also much higher in the sky. Not having to squint into the rising sun helped as well.
I stuck a fresh cigar in my mouth and chewed it into my cheek. Tobacco had started to taste good again. I still couldn’t handle smoke, but the nicotine flowed into my system from having the cigar in my mouth.
We walked to the east, towards the river. I had a destination in mind, one which had nothing to do with the case. I wondered if David would be happy about where I planned to lead him, or if he’d resent me for it. I hoped for the best because I’d already decided to take a chance.
“I’m so proud of my Larry.” David said as we left the rooming house behind us. “When he was home, he was still a child. From what I’m learning about his life here, I can see he’s becoming a man. Everyone who knows him has a good opinion of him. He’s not fighting anymore. He’s been paying rent and learning new things, like how to plaster and paint. I don’t even know how to plaster. I can paint decent enough, but not much else. Abby always says I’m not very handy. Her father was handy. Her brother, Robert, is handy. I always have to get Robert to help me when I fix things around the house.
“Larry’s been doing it all on his own. He came here basically all on his own. Sounds like Ted wasn’t much help, always looking for…for relations. Larry had to carry the whole load. I’m so proud of him.”
I was happy that David could find a bright side to the colossal disaster we were trying to save his son from. I didn’t have anything to add to his sentiments, so I dug in my pocket and drew out the folded letter and the Canadian quarter I’d found in the boys’ shaving bags. I was able to read the destination address on the letter with the help of the sunshine. It read, ‘Mrs. Mildred Danton, 9182 W Lafayette Blvd, Detroit MI.’
I remembered Ted’s last name was Danton. I guessed he’d written the letter but never mailed it. I resolved to have a look inside the envelope once David and I were in a place more conducive to reading. I tucked the letter away and tossed the Canadian quarter in my hand. I offered it to David with a question. “Does this mean anything to you?” I asked around my cigar.
David snatched the silver coin from me and held it in front of his face. He stopped walking and stared at it. David brought the face of the coin to his lips and kissed it. He folded it into his catcher’s mitt of a hand and pressed it into his palm. All the good thoughts and gentle calm he’d just displayed were replaced with melancholy desperation.
“Law,” David bleated, “I’m so scared for my boy. Tell me you’ll save him. Please tell me that he’ll be alright. Please.”
I hedged my answer because I didn’t want to promise what I might not be able to deliver. “We’re going to do everything we can.”
“NO!” David shouted. “No! PROMISE ME! SWEAR IT!”
I refused David’s demand. “I can’t.”
“WHY?” David pleaded.
“I keep telling you, because this is real life, not a story in a book or one up on a flickering screen.” I took my cigar from my mouth and spat on the ground. I thought a little and spat again. “We’re involved in a very serious matter. This case could quite literally be life or death. I’m not trying to scare you, or to make your burden heavier than it needs to be, but you must understand that I’m not a miracle worker. I’m going to do everything I know how to do. I’ll give you my very best, but I won’t swear to an outcome. I can’t.”
David absorbed my words reluctantly. He seemed to shrink under the weight of them like each sentence was a millstone around his neck. He dragged his long face up on his bent neck and glared at me with hot, desperate eyes. He held the coin out to me and waited. I chewed my cigar back into my mouth and accepted the coin from him.
“I want you to hold onto this quarter.” David said, his voice a miserable shadow of his normal expansive tone. “I gave it to my Larry when he was a very small boy, maybe four or five. I’d been telling him stories about Queen Madam and my time in the Kingdom of Keystone. He asked me if I had anything left from the time I spent there. I gave him the quarter. I’d gotten it in change somewhere. Since Montana is so close to Canada, we always wind up with their change mixed in with our own. Most places don’t make a fuss over it.”
David described the coin to me. As he spoke, I held the quarter up to see it as he described it. “It’s a twenty-five-cent piece and it’s very worn. The bust of Queen Victoria on the front is rubbed down to just the outline of a woman’s head. You can’t read any of the words on the front. If you didn’t know it was Canadian, you would have no way to tell where it’s from.”
I examined the coin and flipped it back and forth in my palm. Everything David said about it was true. I didn’t see what he was getting at, though. “What’s your point?” I asked and slurped at some spit which tried to escape with my words.
“When I gave the quarter to Larry, I told him it was money from the Kingdom of Keystone. I told him the bust on the front was Queen Madam. I gave it to him like it was a family heirloom. I told him the quarter was very important to me, but if he was careful with it, he could have it. He accepted it like it was real treasure. He was so thrilled to have a quarter from Keystone. For him, that quarter made all my stories true.
“About a year later, the quarter got him in trouble. He’d taken it to school to show the other kids. One of the others, a shop owner’s son, recognized the Canadian money and accused my Larry of being a liar. That day, Larry was in his first schoolyard fight.
“I had to go to the school and talk to the principal. I had to apologize to the other boy’s parents and Larry had to apologize to the boy. I had to admit to my son that I lied to him about the quarter. Larry took it better than I expected. The funny thing is, he still believed my stories. Back then, he trusted me completely. I can’t believe he still has that old quarter. It touches my heart that he still has it, that he carried it with him through all this time and all this distance. I’m so proud of him.”
I still didn’t see what David was getting at. “Why do you want me to keep it?” I asked and had to slurp again.
David corrected me. “I don’t want you to keep it. I want you to be the one to give it back to Larry once you get him out of jail. I want you to hold onto it to remind you of the innocent child you’re working to save.”
I looked at the coin again. Nothing about it had changed physically. The silver was still worn down and the image of Queen Victoria was nothing more than an outline. What the coin represented had become very heavy indeed. I put the quarter into the inside pocket of my jacket. It knocked against my ribs like a lead weight. I resumed our stroll to the east.
I tried to think about the case as we walked, but my mind wouldn’t focus on any single thing. My thoughts flitted from one subject to the next like an indecisive moth would around the flashing lamps of a movie theater marquee. In rapid succession, I thought about my argument with Walt, my brother and his revelation from that morning, and David and his display of parental skill with little Nathan. To complete my mental merry-go-round was the mission David had assigned to me to save his boy and to return the mythical quarter to him.
A question rose to the top of my troubled mind and refused to recede until I asked it. “What in the hell happened to you?” I demanded. I almost had to slurp again. I got mad that my mouth was full of tobacco laced spit. I took the cigar from it and pushed the slop from my mouth with a stringy, wet splat.
“What do you mean?” David asked back.
I realized I hadn’t premised my question. I collected my thoughts and made a more detailed request for information. “When we knew each other in ’29, you were queer. Your queerness is why you wound up here in the first place. Your father tossed you out like mine did. Now you’ve got a wife and nine kids. How?”
David rubbed his hands together, then he reached with his right hand to thumb the lapel of his jacket. His hand went to where the high peak lapel of his old jacket would have been. The hand withdrew in disappointment when it realized the peak lapel was on the jacket David had left in the breakroom at Walt’s Special. The jacket which David wore was the one I borrowed from Walt, and it had much narrower lapels. “I did what I had to do.” David announced. “I don’t know how else to explain it.”
David jammed his hands in the pockets of his pants and kicked at the sidewalk before he spoke again. “I got to Billings in the beginning of September in 1929. I was still so hurt from being beat up, I could barely walk. I needed time to heal. I got a room and found a doctor to help me. I took it easy for a month. By the time I was well enough to start looking for a farm, the market crashed. I decided to wait and see what would happen.
“I waited until January of 1930. By then, prices had gone way down. I bought two hundred acers in Grass Range for half of what it would have cost in 1929. With the money I saved, I had a house and a barn built, and I bought equipment. As the months passed, land and everything else kept getting cheaper. I bought another fifty acers, then another fifty.”
I stopped David’s story to be amazed at what he’d told me. “You have three hundred acers?”
David shook his head and grinned a proud little grin. “I have five hundred.”
“FIVE HUNDRED!” I thundered in amazement.
David nodded. He went on with his story as a way to explain where all the property had come from. “The farm next to mine was the Olson farm. Marcus Olson owned it. Marcus took a liking to me. He invited me to his church, and I went. He introduced me to his family; his wife Lilly, his daughter, Abbigail, and his son Robert. Abby and I were the same age. Marcus pushed us together.
“I didn’t know what to do. I was lonely. I didn’t want a woman, but I didn’t know how to find a man. Abby was pretty. She’s still pretty.” David touched my shoulder to get my attention. I’d been peeling the saturated tobacco from my cigar while I listened to his story. My aural attention wasn’t enough for David. He wanted my eyes on him as well.
“You’d like her, Law. My Abby is a beautiful woman. She’s tall and she has a fine figure. She’s got black hair and bright blue eyes. She’s very kind and thoughtful. She…she loves me, and I love her. I never thought it was possible, but it is. Marcus pushed us together and we courted. I thought the courtship would fail, but it didn’t. We learned to have fun together. We learned to like each other and then to love each other. One night, just before the new year at the end of 1931, Abby and me…we had relations.
“I liked it.” David said like he was still surprised. “After that night, I decided to marry Abbigail and have a family. A few years later, Marcus died of influenza. His widow, Lilly, turned the farm over to Abby and her brother Robert. Robert is a good man, but he was young, too young to run a place on his own. I offered to buy him out and he accepted. The last two hundred acers I got were the Olson farm. I hired Robert to help me run the combined farm.”
I listened to David and let my eyes return to my cigar. I peeled the loosened tobacco leaves carefully, as not to disturb the dry part of the cigar or the delicate inner leaves. I kept walking as I fooled with the cigar. David walked with me. His story was finished, but I hadn’t reacted to it yet. David seemed nervous about what I would say. He rubbed his hands together.
I noticed the air had started to smell salty and fresh. None of the normal, acrid city smells of automobile exhaust or the soot from the coal burning electric plants remained in the air. I knew we were close to our destination. I finished with the cigar and tossed the peeled leaves into the gutter. I chewed the smaller cigar into my cheek and considered what David had said. I remained silent as we walked the length of one more block. I halted our progress when we’d crossed the final street and stood on the sidewalk at the foot of a scorched set of curved marble stairs.
“You told quite a story.” I said to David around my cigar. I asked him about the one thing he hadn’t said as he told me of his life. I asked him about the most important thing. “Are you happy?”
“I am.” David announced without hesitation. “I’m happier than I ever expected to be. When I first married Abby, I thought I’d made a terrible mistake. The feeling lasted until we had Larry. When my first son was born, everything changed. I became a family man and Larry was the most important thing in the whole world. The things I wanted weren’t important anymore. The only thing that mattered was taking care of my child.
“Children change everything. They make you grow up. They give you someone to love. The very best thing is they love you back. That’s why I had so many. I wanted to share my love with as many children as I could. Abby wanted a big family, so we had them one after the other. I can’t imagine a situation where I didn’t make the choices I made. I’m still lonely sometimes. I’m still attracted to men. The queer never went away. I guess that’s why I made those passes at you, Law. I am sorry.”
“I wondered if you even remembered.” I said and chewed my cigar further into my cheek.
“I remember.” David admitted. “I didn’t mean to tempt you. What you said was right. We’re both married men. We both made our choices. It’s just…” David’s speech trailed off into silence.
David scrubbed his hands together and tried to thumb his lapel again. “You saved my life.” He said to the sidewalk, like the admission embarrassed him. “If not for you, I don’t know where I would have ended up. Back when I came here, when the last produce truck dropped me off in this city, I had nothing but bad luck. I’d get a job and lose a job. I felt like no one wanted me, like I was no good. The night we met, I was so depressed, I was trying to figure out how to end it all. I assumed I’d screw up as a bartender and get fired. I just didn’t think I could go on.”
David kicked at the sidewalk, then he looked at me with the biggest amused grin I’d ever seen. “You showed up and you scolded me for being sad. You made me try. When I tried, I succeeded. I was so happy. When the bar closed the first night, you stayed and let me talk to you. You listened to me. You made me feel welcome. After that night, I thought I’d be alright. I was still sad, but I didn’t feel hopeless.
“Then I got beat up. When I woke up in the hospital, I wanted to die. The next time I woke up, you were there. You worried about me and wanted to help. You offered me money to leave the city. You didn’t even want anything from me. You gave me so much money, then sent me away. I didn’t realize until the train pulled out of the station that you saved my life, and I’d probably never see you again. You saved my life, and I never even thanked you.”
I thought I understood what David was getting at. I gnawed on my cigar and tried to clarify around it. “So, you tried to seduce me because you’re grateful?”
“No.” David corrected me. “I am grateful, but that wasn’t the reason. Since you made me get on the train back in ’29, I’ve been living the life you gave me. It’s been a great life. I worked hard for it, but I never would have had it if not for you. I think about you every single day. I fantasize about you. When I have a tough decision to make, I try to imagine how you would handle things. I’ve even,” David snapped his mouth shut like he was about to say something he hadn’t intended to. He lifted his huge shoulders in a helpless shrug and said it anyway. “I’ve written letters to you.”
“What letters?” I asked. “I never got any letters.”
“I never sent them.” David admitted.
