Now What?
David and I sat across from each other at a small, white, built-in table along the wall of a typical South Philly sandwich shop. Our table was directly opposite the glass case which displayed the lunch meats and cheeses available to purchase by the pound, or on long rolls as hoagies. The glare of the glass reflected the two of us, me as a brown shape and David as a black one. I was close enough to the pickle barrel to smell the spiced vinegar from the brine inside. I bit into my Italian hoagie and commented around the bite. “Too much oregano.”
When we left the prison, I decided it was time for lunch. I pointed us across the street and half-a-block down to where I remembered the sandwich shop. I hoped a taste of South Philly would be nostalgic for David and would help lift his mood after the stress of having to visit his son in prison. My plan hadn’t worked very well. David absently munched on the potato chips which had come with his order while he ignored the sandwich.
“Thanks for not saying anything when I lied about my folks.” David said.
I shook my head to convey that no thanks were needed. “It’s none of my business what you told your family about your past.”
David explained anyway. “I said that I was an only child and my parents were killed in an accident. After I buried them, I came here to sell some property they left me. That’s how I got the money to buy the farm.”
“David,” I said to get my friend’s attention, “you don’t owe me an explanation. It’s your business.”
“Thanks.” David said again. “What do we do now?” He asked.
I’d been thinking about that very question since we left Larry. I had an idea, but it was vague. “We’ve got two points in time. The first point is when Ted walked away from Larry at the races. The second point is when Ted was dead in the junk heap. Somehow, we have to trace his movements from the first point to the second. If we can do that, we’ll find who killed him. It’s not going to be easy because we’ve got almost nothing to go on. All we know is, when Ted left Larry, he walked toward that Rocket Oldsmobile. The car is the starting point. We have to find it.”
“How can we find one car in this huge city?” David asked.
I took another bite of my sandwich and chewed. “This is how detective work goes.” I said through my full mouth. I finished chewing and swallowed before I went on. “You take the information you have and follow it. You hope like hell it leads somewhere. We know the car was at the races and Larry said he thought its owner had something to do with the shop where Ted worked. After lunch, we’ll go to the shop and talk to them. Tomorrow night, we’ll go to the races.
“In between, we’ll go to the rooming house where the boys lived and to the construction site where Larry worked. I don’t expect to find anything at those places, but it doesn’t hurt to look. Because we don’t have any promising leads, we have to try everything. We have two weeks. That’s not much time, but it should be enough to recreate the limited world the boys moved within.”
David stared at his plate and crunched another chip. He wiped his fingers on his paper napkin, then used those same fingers to fool with the point of his lapel. He heaved a forlorn sigh. “I feel so helpless.” David complained.
I put my sandwich down onto the white butcher paper it had been wrapped in. I tried to encourage my old friend. “You’re doing what you can do. You’re here, ready to work. You brought money. You enlisted me to help you. You even made up with your son and lifted his spirits. You’re doing well. Give yourself some credit. It hasn’t even been a full day.”
David sorted through his potato chips like he wanted to find just the right one. He selected one from the pile and popped it into his mouth. He crunched the chip and peered at me like he’d found himself seated across from a stranger. “You’ve changed.” He said at length.
“Have I?” I asked.
“I don’t remember you being as kind as you are now.”
David’s statement was a mild one, but I felt attacked by it just the same. I was hurt because David had been the recipient of the single most expensive act of kindness I’d ever lavished on anyone. I made light of my hurt as a way to get David to explain himself. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’m the nicest guy I know.”
“Now you are.” David said like he wanted to reinforce the idea that I was a prick when he knew me before. “Back then…you would change so fast. You could be kind, but you could also be mean. The way you are now, I don’t think I could imagine you ever being cruel.”
“Cruel?” I asked in surprise. In just a few sentences, David had called me ‘mean’ and ‘cruel.’ I didn’t know when I was either of those things and said as much. “What the hell are you talking about? Who was I cruel to?”
David had a ready example. “You hurt Kaulana when he said something about me. He told me about it. He told me to be careful of you. He said there was no telling what would set you off.”
I got even angrier because David’s accusations seemed to go on and on. I was especially mad because he’d accused me of hurting someone I didn’t know. “Who the fuck is Kual-la-la-la whatever-the-fuck you just said?”
“Kaulana.” David corrected me. “He was the Samoan man who worked at Mitch’s. He was one of the…the,” David lowered his voice and leaned over the table to whisper, “whores.”
David used his regular voice to finish the description. “You probably called him, ‘K.’ Almost everybody did.”
I remembered the man and the event David spoke of. K had been a boyish, Pacific islander. I fucked him regularly before David showed up at Mitch’s. Once I saw David, I didn’t have any interest in K anymore. When K tried to entice me back into bed with him, he said something about David that I didn’t like. As I recalled, I pulled his hair and threatened him. I wasn’t sure either of those acts qualified as ‘cruel,’ but I supposed they could be construed as ‘mean.’
The memory helped to illustrate the comparison David had drawn between the version of me he knew in 1929 and the version of me he interacted with in the present. I told David that I understood. “I don’t defend the way I acted back then, but I don’t apologize for it either. I acted the way I needed to so I could deal with the life I lived.”
“What changed?” David asked.
To answer David’s question, I held up my left hand and used my thumb to turn the gold band on my ring finger. “I lost my detective business and moved in with Walt in 1944. He got me a job at the cafeteria where he worked. I was a dishwasher. I hated it, but I did it because I felt like I owed it to Walt for giving me a place to live. I did a lot of things because I thought I owed him. I even let him teach me to cook.
“In 1947, he and I were in Reading, which is about sixty miles to the northwest of here, up into coal country. We went to visit Walt’s mother. The time we spent with her was difficult for me. The old lady never liked that Walt was queer, and she was getting forgetful in her dotage. Her forgetfulness magnified her dislike of Walt’s lifestyle until everything she said to him became a comment on the way he lived. She kept asking when he was going to settle down and find a wife. She also kept forgetting who I was. I know her memory loss wasn’t her fault, but the way she treated us made me mad.”
I opened my mouth to tell more of my story but was interrupted. The fat, swarthy sandwich shop owner shoved his greasy apron against his side of the counter so he could harangue us about not eating his food fast enough. “WHAT’S-A-MATTER?” He demanded in his thickly accented English. “YOU NO LIKE IT?”
The man’s question made me realize that David and I had loitered over our lunches for a while and hadn’t made much progress. The shop wasn’t busy, and we didn’t occupy a table which others wanted to use, but I understood why the man would think we didn’t like the food. I waved at him to placate his hurt feelings. “It’s great. We got distracted talking.”
I took a big bite of my sandwich and urged David to do the same. Once I’d eaten half my sandwich, I tried to finish my story between bites. “Walt knew I was upset, and he wanted to do something about it. He spoke to the local Episcopal priest and got him to agree to marry us, then he bought two rings. I admit, I thought Walt had lost his mind when he got down on one knee to propose to me under the rose arbor in his childhood backyard. Once he explained himself, I agreed to marry him.
“We put on our Sunday suits and were married in a private service with Walt’s sister and his mother as our witnesses. His sister scowled through the whole thing and his mother had no idea what was going on, but Walt married me, and I married him. The marriage, and Walt’s gesture of love behind it, is what changed me. This ring,” I said as I held it up again, “convinced me that Walt loved me because he wanted to, not because he pitied me. After we were married, the world seemed like a kinder place. A kinder world allowed me to be a kinder man.”
“I like that story, Law.” David said as he finished his sandwich ahead of me. “I like who you are now. The old you wouldn’t have warned me about how to act around my son, how to be strong so he can stay strong. The old you wouldn’t have tried to make me feel better by telling me how good I was doing after only a couple hours of work.”
I didn’t know if what David said was true, but the point didn’t seem worth arguing over. I took a bite of what was left of my sandwich and chewed. David followed his thoughts into the past and came up with an old ‘what if’ he wanted to resolve. “Did you ever wish you went with me back then? Did you ever think about what it would have been like if you would have gotten on the train with me?”
“I thought about it.” I answered honestly. “Sometimes, when I think about the past and the choices I made, I’d wonder how my life would have been different if I would have taken you up on your invitation. I never regretted the choice I made to turn you down, though.”
“Why?” David demanded, apparently wounded by my admission of having no regrets.
“Because I wasn’t ready for the life you offered back then. I wouldn’t have been able to live as your partner. It wouldn’t have worked. I think if I’d tried to live that way, I would have hurt us both.”
The look on David’s face told me that he didn’t agree with what I said. I supposed he thought he could have changed me the way Walt eventually did. I didn’t see how it mattered. That decision was in the distant past and nothing could alter it. I tried to point the simple fact out to David, and to remind him what he got instead of me. “My decision worked out for both of us. I got to live a good life here with Walt and you found a wife and had nine kids.”
David didn’t say he agreed with me or disagreed. He didn’t say anything. I took his silence as agreement with what I’d said. I ate my last bite of sandwich and gathered myself to leave. “It’s time to go to H&H Auto Repair to see what we can see.”
