The Mt. Monadnock Blues Read online

  “What’s their case?”

  “Venue, for starters. As in continuity of friendships, neighbors, schools. And then, sadly, the fact that you are a flaming pervert.”

  “Perverts have no rights? Jilly knew I was a pervert.”

  “Actually, that could become an issue. Can you prove she knew? And that Monty knew, which isn’t quite the same.”

  “Sure I can. Why can’t I?”

  Had they ever expressed it in writing, or before witnesses? Jill had opposed his break with Karl, urged him to stay in the relationship. Had she put it in a letter? If so, could Tim locate that letter? Was there hard evidence of even one of the dozens of “reminders” from Monty that Tim get himself tested?

  “You’ll also need to hire a lawyer, Tim. The cost could be brutal before this is over.”

  “I have a lawyer.”

  “Not me. A specialist. Someone who knows this area of the law.”

  “You’re saying I need an expensive specialist.”

  “Yes. And I strongly recommend it be a woman. A smart, straight woman. In fact, I have a name for you.”

  “Karl,” said Tim, taking Trickett’s hand, “I realize it may not seem so, but I’m grateful. I know you have paying customers—”

  “Oh Christ, Timmy,” said Karl, ripping his hand loose. “Do you have to be a vulgar idiot?”

  Hustling back to Trips, Tim let the downstairs door float closed on an elderly gent and gunned the elevator to three. Rocketing past Charles and Ellie to his desk, he was determined to do ten hours work in the three remaining hours. But he was locked on the legal hassle.

  Ric had assured him they were going back on the road to finish their trip, or a truncated version of it, a week. But what if Ric had lied, to set him up? With this cute ex parte trick, the kids could be whisked away before they had a chance to disdain their shrink-wrapped sandwiches.

  He pictured Earl striding in with righteous fire in his eyes and holy writ in his hand, issued by some bedrock reactionary New Hampshire judge, a ninety-nine-year-old wrinkled prune who hated gays and Jews and had never even seen a black man. Live free or die!

  Tim wanted to live free, too. He wanted to get Billy and Cindy home and cook them a nice dinner, watch a stupid TV show with them. Today was Monday. Which stupid shows were on Monday?

  Charles’ face appeared and Tim realized he had not done a lick of work since lunch. Not ten hours worth, not ten minutes worth. He had not even bothered to play his messages.

  “One of your fellow travellers checked in,” said Charles, in what seemed a disapproving tone.

  “A client?”

  “Not that sort of traveller, I’m afraid. You left your voice mail on speaker, Tim. Not good. Mrs. Greenglass was with me, and we heard this charming communication.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  What was Charles telling, or not telling him? Then he got it. It had to be the latest vulgar message from Joe Average. The nut did not even have a day job.

  “I am totally cool with your lifestyle, Tim, you know that. But this was not cool.”

  “Charlie, it isn’t what you think.”

  “No? You should have seen the look on Minna’s face when that little gem came wafting over the partition.”

  “He’s a nut case. It’s harassment of some sort—no one I know.”

  He caught the first three words (“Timbo, you bimbo—”) before deleting Joe Average, then listened to two clients wondering politely whether Tim had gotten to their respective issues. They each used the phrase, so he resolved to get to these matters straightaway. He did so and called them back to say so, as if efficiency had never run higher at Trips, Incorporated.

  Punching up routine data on his screen, Tim had to wonder why anyone bothered to call them anymore. Why not just book Net-Trips or piece a trip together on their own? It was a recession, after all. Surely travel agents would begin disappearing from the economy, as typesetters had begun to disappear, and tax preparers. That’s why everyone was desperate to win The Lottery and get rich, before their own professions vanished and they starved.

  Lucky dentists, he thought, for no one would be drilling and filling his own molar. Lucky plumbers, too—sort of.… But Tim did not truly envy all the wealthy dentists and plumbers; he simply felt negativity crawling over him like a tight suit. And why not? He had enemies, for God’s sake. He had always had enemies in a general sense, a whole hostile planetful, but apart from the occasional dartboard target (Anita Bryant, Jesse Helms) they were never personalized. Individuals out to get Tim Bannon.

  Now Ellie’s face appeared, to tell him good night. The work day was over. “Call me if you need to talk.”

  “I do need to talk. Why don’t you come to dinner?”

  “Not tonight, Tim.”

  “But you just said—”

  “Absolutely. Call me. After you’ve put the kids to bed.”

  Ellie had nothing scheduled—and nothing in her house to cook. She was convinced, however, that Tim could benefit from a dose of reality, a succession of nights without help; without coverage. He would know better what he was up against.

  Sprinting to the car, Tim did know some of it. He knew the kids could be gone. He steeled himself, imagined bursting into the Community Center and finding no one there, not a living soul. Fury fired up inside him, rage by spontaneous combustion. If Earl had kidnapped those kids, legally or illegally, then by God the battle was joined. He would get his own fucking court order tomorrow and snatch them right back.

  The traffic, oddly enough, calmed him down. Horns blared, road rage was real, the swan boats stayed on his left for more than five minutes—yet the fire banked. A second perspective came tickling at the gates of volition. If the kids were gone, his evening was freed up. Short term, this was not so terrible. He could use some solitude, listen to music or read. He could even venture out, if the solitude proved unwieldy.

  So he knew this too: what was worse for Billy and Cindy was not necessarily worse for him.

  If it was a test, however (angel on one shoulder, devil on the other), Tim passed. As the traffic lurched along toward Tremont, rage rekindled. He was not ambivalent: he wanted the kids to be there, not just clearly but powerfully. He hammered his own horn at a hopelessly clogged intersection, spewed curses at invisible yet despicable judges. Had he spotted Earl Sanderson jaywalking, he might well have run him over.

  Saffron, the young lady assigned to Cindy, reassured Tim that his “daughter” had crumbled only at the very last. “It’s a long day for these kids,” said Saffron, who looked young enough to remember this precisely. “They just get tired.”

  Hair stuck with paste, face pale and blotchy, Cindy looked worse than tired. She looked wrecked. Billy had been playing volleyball during the half hour his sister dripped sundry wet substances onto poor Saffron’s lap. Nonetheless, he had the answer. “Mickey D would cheer her up, Unk.”

  Stuffing her into the back seat, Tim asked if she was hungry and she wailed “Nooooooo” and slap-paddled the air in front of her forehead as though breaking up a cloud of black flies. Fine. McDonald’s was not Tim’s idea and it was not good ritual, either. Fruit and veggies were in order. Roughage. Or had roughage been discredited? It was never easy staying abreast of the musts and must-nots. Was cholesterol still the villain? Tim was more attuned to sore throats and subtle hints of fever; every tiny blemish was potentially a lesion.

  Sprouts-versus-saturated fat was deferred for the moment by traffic. You could not prove by their ground speed that any of these cars were being operated by living drivers. City driving was masochistic, rush-hour flat out insane. Tim walked or he biked, when he had a bike. (Sometimes he had it, sometimes The Bicycle Thieves had it.) But how could you efficiently transport two kids, heavy laden with gear, except by car?

  Gridlock suited Billy. Happy with cacophany, he skated his fingers over the radio spectrum. Cindy issued risky stalactites of snot, then vacuumed them back just before they broke off. (Would a thick shake an
d fries solve this?) They got bottlenecked at Park Plaza, motionless through two light changes, and Cindy began to moan. “Unk?” said Billy, meaningfully. Meaning Mickey D.

  “Let’s play a game. Let’s do capitals. Cynthia: England.”

  Astonishingly, it worked. She had the answer and she had to show she did. A face brightened, and out of that face came the word London.

  “Bill, your turn. Ireland.”

  “Dublin. Belfast.” But worldweary. Syllable by syllable. Duhblinn. Belff-assed.

  “France, Cynthia.”

  “Paris,” said Cindy, as they finally inched through the intersection.

  “Bill? The capital of the Czech Republic.”

  “There it is, Unk. You know.”

  “Are you stalling for time?”

  “No way. Prague. They got McDonald’s there now, I think. I know they got it in Moscow.”

  “Prague is correct. And they do have it, not got it, in quite a few European cities.”

  Suddenly Tim saw his way clear, saw that bad parenting could make good parenting possible. A snack at Mickey D’s could make dinner possible. It was one of Monty’s own tricks—call it a snack, technically, and swear them to secrecy. “If you don’t eat your whole lunch,” Monty would tell them, “Mom will figure it out.”

  “Anyone up for a snack?” he said, accordingly.

  “Great idea, Unk! What do you say, Simp?”

  “Paris,” she blurted out, again. She had fallen asleep.

  “Unk’s hungry, so we were gonna get a snack at Mickey D.”

  So dinner got underway on the late side, but Tim did make some footprints in the kitchen by enlisting their help. Participation! It was as though he had read the book on childrearing. Cindy put away the groceries and organized the pantry shelves. Billy chopped onions and green peppers, then set the table. Both went about their assignments intently, conscientious to a fault.

  While Tim cooked to the jazz show on WGBH, they shifted furniture around, creating a “guest room” for Tim in the large but windowless walk-in closet. They gave him the foldout bed (and made it up) and found a milk crate on the fire escape for his night-stand. It was quite cozy, he thought; to a homeless man it would be paradise.

  The sauce was bubbling and Tim had his wine. They were on the couch watching Jeopardy when the telephone rang. It pleased him to see Cindy run for it; pleased him that she felt so at home. By the time the squalid possibility of Joe Average occurred to him, she was chatting away, fortunately (or not) with Erica. Billy, reluctant but polite, also took a brief turn.

  “Aunt Erica says to say hello,” he reported to Tim.

  “She didn’t want to talk to me?”

  Billy shrugged. “I think she was at a pay phone.”

  So far as Tim could recollect, Ric had never telephoned his house. As he dropped pasta into the boiling water, he understood that she still hadn’t—she was simply carving her own trail of trust through the jungle. They were eating when Tim asked Cindy if she liked Aunt Ric. He convinced himself he had spoken tonelessly, without a hint of suasion.

  “Sure,” she said.

  “You don’t have to like her. I’m just curious.”

  “I think she’s pretty.”

  “And Uncle Earl?”

  “He’s not pretty.”

  “He’s pretty cool,” said Billy. “The time we went there he let me shoot at cans. And he can stick a knife in a tree, from like here to that wall.”

  “Well, that’s a handy skill to have in today’s economy.”

  Wrong. What could appeal to Billy Hergie more than sticking knives in trees? But Billy gave him a pass on it.

  “Sometimes he takes us to the lake,” said Cindy.

  “Like once.”

  “More than once.”

  “Once exactly, Simp. Are you gonna dump us there, Unk?”

  “Not a chance,” said Tim, tickled by the boy’s bluntness.

  “Then how come you’re asking all these questions?”

  “Just curious.”

  “Is it cause you don’t?”

  “Don’t what?”

  “Like them.”

  “I like them if my Hergies like them. And I sure did like their dog. What was that pooch’s name again?”

  (No harm taking a lesson from one’s own mother.)

  “I don’t know, but he was big.”

  “He was pretty,” said Cindy.

  Enough. They were children, not idiots, and he did not wish to fool them in any case. He was merely weak, and stumbling a bit. Best stop trying to poison their minds and poison them benignly with some Ben & Jerry’s. Surely Chunky Monkey was good precedent?

  “How was the spaghetti?” he said, as they cleared the plates. “That’s the real question here.”

  “It was delicious, Unk.”

  “Yeah. Really good.”

  “I thought it had a hint too much oregano,” Tim said, raising his nose in the air like a comic gourmand. “Don’t you agree, Cynthia?”

  “Oregano? Hey Unk, what’s the capital of Oregano?”

  “I haven’t a clue, sweetheart.”

  “Portland!” she shouted.

  “Sorry, Simp,” said Billy. “It’s Salem.”

  Morning clipped the heels of night. They had eaten late, gone to bed late, and the kids wanted to sleep late. “It’s summer,” Billy groaned. Tim’s best offer was a promise to pick them up from the camp by four o’clock. This was his concession to Cindy, or to the reality that it was his only hope of getting her to leave the house without duress.

  But it meant that work was hopeless again, for he had another unavoidable appointment at lunch time, and this one was with his new lawyer—hence a lunch without any lunch, alas. Attorney Dee Barnes ran a low-key one-woman shop on the first floor of her Chandler Street row house, so low-key that the tarnished nameplate was unreadable at arm’s length.

  The furnishings were alarmingly unpretentious (a yard sale desk of old scratched oak) and there was no secretary anywhere in sight. Watercolors, not diplomas, adorned the off-white walls. And to anyone casting about for a tough-as-nails lawyer, Barnes herself was alarmingly unpretentious. She could be a schoolmarm on the big prairie, in her long black skirt and gray cardigan sweater. She wore her brown hair loose, had no makeup, and minimal jewelry—a silver bracelet and a gold wedding band.

  Tim thanked her for squeezing him in on short notice, while privately wondering if she simply had no other clients. But then she smiled (“I tried to say no to you”) and her smile was wonderful, radiant. Maybe she smiled at judges, instead of displaying her diplomas.

  “I must have sounded a little desperate,” Tim said. “I am a little desperate.”

  “You said custody. How many children are there?—what ages?—and who are they with for now?”

  This was good. Pleasant, yet right to the point. Concision, Karl had counselled Tim. “Say no to coffee. The meter is running while you stir in your sugar.” But Attorney Barnes had not offered coffee, and seemed (“You said custody”) the very model of concision.

  “There is a boy, eleven, and a girl, eight and a half. And they’re with me. But this is an unusual situation—”

  “Everyone thinks that.”

  Barnes tipped her chair back so far he feared she might go over, but Tim kept his focus. “I mean they aren’t my children. It’s not like I have a wife and—”

  Barnes allowed her chair to fall forward at this and Tim leaned back, in response. Somehow it seemed the distance between them should remain a constant. “They’re my sister’s kids. I’m their uncle. Obviously. My sister Jill and her husband Monty were killed in a car crash three weeks ago. That’s why the kids are with me.”

  “I’m so sorry. And you’re right. It is unusual.”

  Tim told her his story and she told him, by means of the radiant smile, that he was doing fine here. That he was not a selfish husband trying to beat out a long-suffering wife. For over the phone she had confided, “I generally get the wife.”
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  “Does Erica have children? Cousins to William and Cynthia?”

  “Ric’s thirty-eight, never wanted kids, doesn’t have any, doesn’t work, travels a lot.”

  “The husband works?” Tim noticed that Barnes and he were speaking the same language: shorthand.

  “Sells,” he responded. “Houses.” Concision absolute!

  “And travels a lot? Real estate doesn’t seem the ideal product for a traveling salesman.”

  “They travel in the summer. He stops selling to travel.”

  “Let’s summarize. They wish to contest the will and take on—possibly adopt?—Jill’s two children, although—or because?—they have no children of their own.”

  “Not because. They have none by choice. I said that.”

  “You did say it of your sister. Not of the spouse.”

  “Oh, more so the spouse.”

  “So why contest? Is it because you’re single?”

  “It’s because they hate me. And they hate me because I’m gay.”

  “Okay.”

  “Okay as in that’s cool? As in the Law shows no preference?”

  “Okay as in keep talking.”

  “Oh. Okay. Earl Sanderson—the spouse—is a vicious homophobe who probably favors shooting abortionists, lynching uppity blacks, and castrating gays to halt the spread of AIDS.”

  “Probably?”

  “Well, he can be cagey about it. But he is definitely that sort of good American.”

  “It’s interesting to me that you come from South Carolina, you and your sisters, and you find yourself living in the North in close proximity—but it’s not an indication of close family ties?”

  “Just chance. Monty came to take a job. I came because of a relationship—with a Boston lawyer, come to think of it.”

  “And Erica?”

  “Also a job. Not hers, his. They met down South, where he was stationed. Then some buddy set him up with a job, which Earl quit like one day later. But they stayed.”

  “Okay.”

  Barnes pushed her chair back and stood up. Apparently an hour had slipped away, one hundred dollars worth of law. He had filled out the form in a flash, had not been offered coffee (much less lunch) and had been a paragon of concision throughout. The hundred dollars was fine, until you started multiplying it by weeks and months. They had barely scratched the surface.