Jack (Gilead #4)(41)

He would go back to his room. Just two nights had passed. It was the endlessness of all recent experience that had made him sure he was late with his rent, but he wasn’t. It was a relief to be out on the street. His razor and comb would be there on the dresser where he left them. He thought, I have been outside time and St. Louis, I have been in a dream, a Russian novel. And he decided to put the twenties in his shoes so that he could walk them into a state of wear that would make them less suspect. As an added benefit, should he be shaken down on the long walk home, he might get away with saying he had no money. A woman was waiting at the streetcar stop, watching him with that look people have when they’re trying to make sense of something. He gave her a battered smile and she looked away. It occurred to him that Bradshaw might be getting his money’s worth. The best thing about taking a punch or two in an alley is that, when they ask that witness what Bradshaw looks like, he’ll say he had a terrible black eye, lots of swelling. That’s all people notice. Jack would lie low, and Bradshaw was too big to get hit in the face, so pretty soon no one would match the description, or no one would if Jack remembered not to go down alleys.

The desk clerk glanced at him as he came in the door and said, “Ouch!”

Jack said, “The other guy looks worse.”

The clerk laughed. “Then I guess the poor devil must have been born ugly.”

Very funny.





* * *





He lay down on his bed and reflected on the night he had passed. Was there, or was there not, a Bradshaw? He was clearly a cosmic ruse, a means to an end, in fact a punch line, which was to put money in Jack’s hands that he could not spend. Did he eat and sleep? Or was he conjured for just these few minutes, to rattle the jar in which Jack the specimen was trying to understand the transparent barrier between himself and ordinary life. The money was actually there, he had checked several times, twenty in the left, forty in the right. He did not know of a single establishment in walking distance whose till would not have been completely emptied by making change for a twenty-dollar bill. Nor was there a store where he could make reasonable use of twenty dollars to avoid the problem of change. Then he had a thought. He went down to the desk and said to the clerk, “I would like to pay a few weeks’ rent in advance. With five dollars back.”

The clerk said, “That will require money.”

“Yes, I have money,” but it was in his shoe, which might make the whole transaction less attractive, objectively speaking. He searched his pockets. “Oh, I left it upstairs.” So he went upstairs, took a bill out of his right shoe, evening things up, he thought, and laughed, and went down to put the twenty on the counter. You would have to look very closely to see any sign that it was not brand-new.

The clerk took the bill to the window to see it in a better light. “Where did you get this?”

That dread question. Jack had no better option than the truth. “It’s hush money.”

The clerk laughed. “I guess that means you’re not saying.”

“Yes, I believe it was a mistake. I didn’t actually witness a crime. I saw the fellow run off, probably from the scene of the crime, which I suppose is a crime in those circumstances. He gave me money and told me not to tell anybody anything. Which of course I won’t.”

The clerk shook his head, but he opened the till and put a five on the counter. “There’s your change. But if this twenty is as phony as it looks, I’m calling the cops.”

Jack actually thought about asking if he could have it back, but that would look like a confession. Well, at worst he had five dollars in his pocket. No, at worst he had passed counterfeit currency that he had received for abetting a crime. And at second worst, the clerk would forget to note that Jack had paid rent in advance and Jack would have no way to prove that he had, since the improbability of his having twenty dollars could only be countered by his producing another twenty dollars, which would raise and compound every suspicion. So, after an hour or two, he went back down to the desk and he said, “Pardon me. Could I have a receipt for that fifteen dollars I paid in advance? Or you could just write it down somewhere.”

The clerk shrugged and said, “Maybe you gave me fifteen dollars, and maybe you didn’t.”

Exhausting. How could a man whose life amounted to absolutely nothing have so many things to worry about?

He went up to his room, lay down on his bed, and considered his choices. He could get dead drunk, let the world turn a few times, rouse himself with his face more like his face, his problems receded, even if that meant they were further from his grasp. It might be cops who woke him up, those heavy shoes on the stairs, and then those questions about whatever pernicious thing Bradshaw had been up to, about concealing evidence. He decided to stay sober, to give himself a chance, at least.

This was the world after Della. There were the hours in which he resigned himself, not for the first time, to the fact that he had nothing to give anyone, that his life was an intricate tangle of futility, sustained by the faithful brotherliness of Teddy, that impeccable human being, whose kindness shamed him because he could never reciprocate. He could have gone to his mother’s funeral. How much of his reluctance had to do with a black suit and brown shoes? He laughed abysmally at the thought, the utterly damning triviality of it. It would have meant he could not contrive to maintain himself as himself, and they would all notice and know what it meant. And prison, and that grudging submissiveness to other people as authorities of some kind, which made sense to him, since even that desk clerk had something to do, and did it to some standard of sufficiency. Could I have a receipt? Pardon me. Almost asking him to say no. People in his family did not go to prison. They worked scrupulously, reproduced, and died in a good old age, as his father would say. It had never seemed to him that this was so much to aspire to. He still could not quite aspire to it, and yet any modest version of it was so tauntingly unattainable by him. Taking a preacher’s daughter out for supper. How could this involve them both in humiliation? Clearly harmlessness was more than he could aspire to.