Hearts in Atlantis(154)

'Go south? Florida, maybe?'

'South?' Willie looks startled, then laughs. 'Oh, no,' he says. 'Not this kid. I've got plenty to do around the house. A person's got to keep their house in order. Else it might come right down around their ears someday when the wind blows.'

'I suppose.' Ralph bundles the scarf higher around his ears. 'See you tomorrow?'

CHAPTER 27

'You bet,' Willie says and holds out his gloved hand. 'Gimme five.'

Ralphie gives him five, then turns his hand over. His smile is shy but eager. 'Give me ten, Willie.'

Willie gives him ten. 'How good is that, Ralphie-baby?'

The man's shy smile becomes a gleeful boy's grin. 'So goddam good I gotta do it again!' he cries, and slaps Willie's hand with real authority.

Willie laughs. 'You the man, Ralph. You get over.'

'You the man, too, Willie,' Ralph replies, speaking with a prissy earnestness that's sort of funny. 'Merry Christmas.'

'Right back atcha.'

He stands where he is for a moment, watching Ralph trudge off into the snow. Beside him, the streetcorner Santa rings his bell monotonously. Willie picks up his case and starts for the door of his building. Then something catches his eye, and he pauses.

'Your beard's on crooked,' he says to the Santa. 'If you want people to believe in you, fix your f**kin beard.' He goes inside.

5:25 P.M.

There's a big carton in the storage annex of Midtown Heating and Cooling. It's full of cloth bags, the sort banks use to hold loose coins. Such bags usually have various banks' names printed on them, but these don't - Willie orders them direct from the company in Moundsville, West Virginia, that makes them.

He opens his case, quickly sets aside the rolls of bills (these he will carry home in his Mark Gross briefcase), then fills four bags with coins. In a far corner of the storage room is a battered old metal cabinet simply marked PARTS. Willie swings it open - there is no lock to contend with - and reveals another two or three hundred or so coin-stuffed bags. A dozen times a year he and Sharon tour the midtown churches, pushing these bags through the contribution slots or hinged package-delivery doors when they will fit, simply leaving them by the door when they won't. The lion's share always goes to St Pat's, where he spends his days wearing dark glasses and a sign.

But not every day, he thinks, now undressing. I don't have to be there every day, and he thinks again that maybe Bill, Willie, and Blind Willie Garfield will take the week after Christmas off. In that week there might be a way to handle Officer Wheelock. To make him go away. Except . . .

'I can't kill him,' he says in a low, nagging voice. I'll be f**ked if I kill him.' Only f**ked isn't what he's worried about. Damned is what he's worried about. Killing was different in Vietnam, or seemed different, but this isn't Vietnam, isn't the green. Has he built these years of penance just to tear them down again? God is testing him, testing him, testing him. There is an answer here. He knows there is, there must be. He is just - ha-ha, pardon the pun - too blind to see it.

Can he even find the self-righteous sonofabitch? Shit yeah, that's not the problem. He can find Jasper the Police-Smurf, all right. Just about any old time he wants. Trail him right to wherever it is that he takes off his gun and his shoes and puts his feet up on the hassock. But then what?

He worries at this as he uses cold cream to remove his makeup, and then he puts his worries away. He takes the Nov-Dec ledger out of its drawer, sits at his desk, and for twenty minutes he writes / am heartily sorry for hurting Carol. He fills an entire page, top to bottom and margin to margin. He puts it back, then dresses in Bill Shearman's clothes. As he is putting away Blind Willie's boots, his eye falls on the scrapbook with its red leather cover. He takes it out, puts it on top of the file-cabinet, and flips back the cover with its single word - MEMORIES - stamped in gold.

On the first page is the certificate of a live birth - William Robert Shearman, born January 4th, 1946 - and his tiny footprints. On the following pages are pictures of him with his mother, pictures of him with his father (Pat Shearman smiling as if he had never pushed his son over in his high chair or hit his wife with a beer bottle), pictures of him with his friends. Harry Doolin is particularly well represented. In one snapshot eight-year-old Harry is trying to eat a piece of Willie's birthday cake with a blindfold on (a forfeit in some game, no doubt). Harry's got chocolate smeared all over his cheeks, he's laughing and looks as if he doesn't have a mean thought in his head. Willie shivers at the sight of that laughing, smeary, blindfolded face. It almost always makes him shiver.

He flips away from it, toward the back of the book, where he's put the pictures and clippings of Carol Gerber he has collected over the years: Carol with her mother, Carol holding her brand-new baby brother and smiling nervously, Carol and her father (him in Navy dress blue and smoking a cigarette, her looking up at him with big wonderstruck eyes), Carol on the j.v. cheering squad at Harwich High her freshman year, caught in midleap with one hand waving a pom-pom and the other holding down her pleated skirt, Carol and John Sullivan on tinfoil thrones at Harwich High in 1965, the year they were elected Snow Queen and Snow King at the Junior-Senior prom. They look like a couple on a wedding cake; Willie thinks this every time he looks at the old yellow newsprint. Her gown is strapless, her shoulders flawless. There is no sign that for a little while, once upon a time, the left one was sticking up in a witchlike double hump. She had cried before that last hit, cried plenty, but mere crying hadn't been enough for Harry Doolin. That last time he had swung from the heels, and the smack of the bat hitting her had been like the sound of a mallet hitting a half-thawed roast, and then she had screamed, screamed so loud that Harry had fled without even looking back to see if Willie and Richie O'Meara were following him. Took to his heels, had old Harry Doolin, ran like a jackrabbit. But if he hadn't? Suppose that, instead of running, Harry had said Hold her, guys, I ain't listening to that, Fm going to shut her up, meaning to swing from the heels again, this time at her head? Would they have held her? Would they have held her for him even then?