Significant Others Page 7

  “The three topics,” he explained soberly, “are Security Measures, Famous Inmates and Discipline.”

  Charlie leaned forward and whispered “Discipline” in Michael’s ear.

  Michael grinned at him.

  As if reading their minds, the ranger added briskly: “Those of you who’ve chosen Discipline please follow Guy through the shower room to D Block.”

  “Oh, Guy,” crooned Charlie.

  By the time they had all assembled in the shower room, the demography of their tour group had become absurdly evident: Michael, Charlie, the strawberry blond, and at least two dozen girls from the Catholic school.

  The ranger led the way into D Block, doing his best to herd the giggling children. “There were a lot of different names given to this area—solitary, segregation, special treatment unit, isolation. Prisoners here spent up to twenty-four hours a day inside their cells. They had their own shower facilities down there at the end of the cellblock, since they were forbidden to shower with the other inmates.”

  Michael and Charlie exchanged glances.

  “Cells nine through fourteen were known by the inmates as the ‘dark cells’ and were the most severe form of punishment on Alcatraz. The men stayed in total darkness inside these cells, which are steel-lined, and they were given mattresses only at night. They were fed twice a day on what was known as a ‘reduced diet'—mashed vegetables in a cup.”

  “Eeeyew,” went the schoolgirls in unison.

  “If you’d like to see what it was like to spend time in a ‘dark cell,’ pick a cell and I’ll close the door behind you.”

  The children squealed with fun house terror, formed protective clumps, and crowded into the six chambers. Michael was headed for Cell 11 when Charlie grabbed his arm. “Use your head, dummy. Go for twelve.”

  He glanced toward Cell 12 and saw a splendiferous smile hovering above a sea of schoolgirls.

  “Go on,” said Charlie.

  Michael hesitated, then entered the cell, watching the smile grow broader.

  Seconds later, the ranger approached and closed the heavy door with a resounding clang. The tiny room was plunged into instant and total darkness, provoking another shriek from the girls.

  Their mock ordeal lasted only a second or two; then the door swung open again, spilling light into the cell. The strawberry blond was no longer smiling, but he seemed a little closer than before. “Pretty creepy,” he said.

  “Isn’t it?” said Michael.

  “And we had company,” said the man. “What can it be like when you’re alone?”

  Michael let the tide of children sweep him out of the cell. The man caught up with him and extended his hand. “I’m Thack,” he said.

  Michael shook his hand. “I’m Michael.”

  Charlie was watching them, arms folded across his chest, a triumphant gleam in his eye. “How was it?” he asked.

  “Um … Charlie,” Michael fumbled, “this is Thad.”

  “Thack,” said the man, correcting him. “It was great. Didn’t you try it?” He met Charlie’s gaze without flinching, Michael noticed. A point in his favor.

  Charlie shook his head. “I can’t handle a crowded cocktail party.”

  Thack laughed, then turned back to Michael. “You guys from around here?”

  “Yeah,” Michael replied, avoiding his eyes. They were too easy to drown in.

  “Isn’t this kind of … touristy, for a local?”

  Michael shrugged. “We’d never done it, so we thought it was time.”

  “Like New Yorkers and the Statue of Liberty.”

  “Right.” Charlie nodded. “Is that where you’re from?” He was hovering like a Jewish mother interviewing a candidate for son-in-law.

  “Charleston,” said Thack.

  “West Virginia?”

  “South Carolina.”

  “A Southerner!” exclaimed Charlie, far too gleefully. “Michael’s a Southerner. You don’t sound like one, though. Where’s your drawl?”

  Michael was squirming. “I think we’d better move it,” he said. “There’s another tour coming.”

  The three of them left the cellhouse through the main entrance and stood beneath the lighthouse, watching the fog erase the city. “I almost forgot,” said Charlie suddenly. “I wanna take a picture of the shower room.”

  “You didn’t bring your camera,” said Michael.

  “Didn’t I? Damn.” He gave Michael a glare that said Shut up, stupid. “Maybe they sell postcards or something.”

  “Right,” said Michael.

  Charlie turned to Thack. “Keep an eye on him, would you?”

  As Charlie strode away, Thack asked: “Your guardian angel?”

  “He thinks so,” said Michael.

  “Is that KS?” Thack touched the tip of his nose.

  Michael hesitated, then said: “Yeah.”

  “I’ve never actually seen it.”

  Michael nodded. “That’s it.”

  “Is he your lover?”

  “No. A friend.”

  Thack turned back toward the city. “You live over there, huh?”

  “Uh-huh. I can see this light from my bedroom.”

  “Must be nice.”

  “It is,” said Michael. He snatched a pebble off the ground and flung it in the direction of the warden’s house.

  “This is my first time here,” said Thack.

  “How do you like it?”

  “It’s O.K.,” said Thack. “The swimming isn’t much.”

  “The ocean’s a killer,” said Michael, “but the river is nice. You should go up to the Russian River.”

  “I’ve heard of that. Where is it?”

  “Up north. Not far.”

  Thack sat down on a low stone wall and yanked a weed from a crack.

  “How long will you be here?” asked Michael.

  Thack shrugged. “Another week. Give or take a few days.”

  “Where are you staying?”

  “The San Franciscan. On Market Street.”

  “Well, if you need a tour guide … I mean … I’m on vacation myself right now.”

  “Oh … yeah. Well, sure.”

  “I’m in the phone book,” said Michael. “Michael Tolliver. Spelled just like it sounds.”

  Thack nodded. “Great.”

  “Want me to write it down?”

  “No,” said Thack. “I’ll remember it.”

  The return voyage to the city was marked by small talk and biographical data. Thack made a living renovating antebellum houses in Charleston. He was thirty-one years old, seldom ate red meat and never watched Dynasty. His full name was William Thackeray Sweeney, thanks to a mother in Chattanooga, who still taught high school English.

  Charlie pressed Michael for details as soon as Thack had left them at Pier 41. “I want to be matron of honor,” he said. “That’s all I ask.”

  “He won’t call,” said Michael. “Why not?”

  Michael shrugged. “He’s a tourist. He wants instant gratification. He’ll find somebody in a bar or order somebody out of the Advocate.”

  “Don’t be such a cynic,” said Charlie. “It isn’t becoming.”

  They took a cable car up Hyde Street, parting company at Union, where Michael disembarked and walked home to Barbary Lane. When he reached his apartment, Mrs. Madrigal came gliding up the stairs and called to him.

  “Uh … Michael dear?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Brian was by. He asked if you’d give him a jingle.”

  “Did he say what it was about?”

  The landlady shook her head.

  “Probably his nephew,” said Michael. “He’s gay and Brian can’t handle it.”

  She smiled demurely. “I don’t think so.”

  “I hope not. I don’t want him on our side.”

  She cast her eyes upward in the direction of Jed’s apartment, then put a finger to her lips. “There are no sides, dear.”

  He tried to look contrite.

  “He’
s young, that’s all. I expect you and Brian can both be of help to him.”

  He seriously doubted this.

  “Call Brian,” said Mrs. Madrigal, heading down the stairs. “I think it’s important.”

  The Boy Next Door

  EAGER FOR ESCAPE, BOOTER MANIGAULT LEFT WORK early and drove home to Hillsborough. He found his wife drinking Mai Tais on the terrace, his maid brooding in the kitchen. This was a tiresomely familiar scenario, since Emma was plagued by Frannie’s drinking even more than he was.

  “O.K.,” he said, setting his briefcase on the kitchen table. “What happened this time?”

  The maid was poker stiff with indignation. “I told her she was killin’ herself, and she said none o’ your business, nigger.”

  Emma had heard worse, of course. She had been with Frannie so long that she’d arrived as part of her dowry, along with the crystal and the Persian rugs and the John Singer Sargent of Frannie’s grandmother.

  The Sargent looked like holy hell in Booter’s modern low-beamed ranch house, but Emma and the other furnishings had worked out fine. She was old and cantankerous, but her loyalty was indisputable. In his eyes, that made her the last of a breed.

  “She didn’t mean it,” he told the maid quietly. “It’s the whiskey talking.”

  Emma grunted, then rearranged her licorice-stick fingers on the tabletop. “Crazy ol’ white woman, that’s who was talkin'.”

  He left her and confronted his wife on the terrace. “Would you go make up with Emma, for God’s sake!”

  Frannie looked at him with red-rimmed basset eyes, then squared her jaw in a pathetic imitation of resolve. “I’d sooner fry in hell,” she said.

  “Did you call her a nigger, Frannie?”

  She thrust out her lower lip.

  “Did you?” he persisted.

  “You use that word all the time.”

  “Not about people I know,” he said. “Not to their faces.”

  “I’ve known her for forty years.” She raised her bejeweled fingers to her head and repositioned her wig. “I can call her anything I want.”

  “She’s a servant, Frannie. It isn’t done.”

  “It’s none of your business, Booter. Emma and I understand each other.”

  In a way, she was right about that. The two women bickered constantly, then drew blood, then made up. Emma and Frannie were more of a couple than he and Frannie would ever be.

  “When are you leaving?” she asked.

  “This afternoon,” he replied.

  “For how long?”

  He hated this kind of third degree from a woman he still regarded as an old friend’s widow. “Four or five days,” he muttered.

  She heaved a melodramatic sigh.

  “Don’t give me that. Edgar used to go for the full two weeks.”

  “It’s not just the Grove,” she said glumly. “You never take me anywhere.”

  She had said the same thing the year before when he’d gone to Europe without her for the fortieth anniversary of D-day. As a member of the American Battle Monuments Commission, he’d been entitled to bring her along for the festivities, but he’d known better than to risk the embarrassment.

  Emma, as usual, had held down the fort at home, while he trudged about the beaches of Normandy in a drip-dry blazer, only paces away from the President. Traveling alone had been his only option, given Frannie’s drunken mood swings and her long-standing feud—dating back to gubernatorial days—with Nancy Reagan.

  “We’ll do something soon,” he said.

  She took a sip of her drink and stared forlornly at the distant hills.

  “I’m making a speech,” he said brightly, trying to pull her out of it.

  “Where?”

  “The Grove.”

  She grunted.

  “It’s a Lakeside Talk.”

  “Is that an honor or something?”

  Damn right, he thought, annoyed by her deliberate indifference. Edgar, after all, had never been asked to make one.

  “What’s it about?” she asked.

  “The SDI,” he replied.

  “The what?”

  “Frannie … the Strategic Defense Initiative.”

  “Oh. Star Wars.”

  He winced. “We don’t call it that.”

  “Well, I do. I don’t care what that horrid old actor calls it.”

  He glowered at her, then turned away, catching sight of a diminutive figure as it dashed across the tennis court and up the lawn. It was little Edgar, Frannie’s half-breed grandson, intruding once more on his peace and quiet.

  “Damn it to hell,” he muttered.

  “Don’t be mean to him,” said Frannie.

  “I’m not mean to him. When have I been mean to him?”

  “Well, you aren’t very nice. He’s your grandson, for heaven’s sake.”

  “Oh, no,” said Booter. “He’s your grandson, not mine.”

  “Well, you could at least show a little concern.”

  “Look. Just because DeDe had no more sense than to get knocked up by a chink grocery boy—”

  “Booter!”

  “At least that was normal,” he added. “It’s beats the hell out of this unnatural—”

  “Edgar darling,” Frannie called. “Come say hello to Gangie and Booter.” She gave Booter a venomous look and polished off her drink just as the boy arrived breathless on the terrace. Booter couldn’t help wondering what Edgar Halcyon would have made of this slant-eyed namesake.

  “Mom sent me,” said the boy.

  “That’s nice,” said Frannie. “You want Gangie’s cherry?” She held out her glass to the boy.

  Little Edgar shook his head. “D’or won’t let me.”

  “Don’t be silly, darling. Just the cherry.”

  “It has red dye,” said the boy. “It’s poison.”

  Frannie looked confused, then faintly indignant, setting the glass down. Served her right, thought Booter. What did she expect from a couple of bulldaggers raising a child?

  Little Edgar said: “Mom wants to know if you guys still have that two-person tent.”

  “I am not a guy,” said Frannie, bristling.

  The boy studied his grandmother for a moment, then turned to Booter. “It’s the one Anna and me set up in the orchard last summer.”

  Booter nodded. “It’s in the potting shed. On the shelf.”

  “Can we use it?”

  “May we use it,” said Frannie.

  Booter ignored her. “C’mon, I’ll help you get it down.”

  They walked together to the potting shed. “So,” said Booter. “Your mother’s going camping?”

  “We’re all going,” said the boy.

  “Well, you’ll need more than one tent.”

  “I know,” said Edgar. “We’ve got a pup tent for me and Anna.”

  Booter pictured this unwholesome arrangement and got a bitter taste in his mouth. “Where are you going?” he asked.

  The boy gave him a guarded look, then shrugged. “Just camping.”

  When they reached the shed, he found the tent, telling Edgar: “I think those plastic rods are all present and accounted for. You’d better get your mother to check.”

  The boy hefted the bundle and said: “I can check.”

  “Good,” said Booter. He reached behind a row of flowerpots and retrieved the plastic dinosaur he had found there two days earlier. “This is yours, I think.”

  The boy nodded, taking the toy. “Thanks,” he said. “This one’s my favorite.”

  “It is, huh? You know the name?”

  “Protoceratops.”

  Booter steered the boy toward the door. “They were big fellas,” he said.

  “No,” said Edgar. “This one wasn’t.”

  “Well, maybe not that one …”

  “They were only six feet long and three feet high. Their eggs were only six inches long.”

  “I see.”

  “I’ve got some of the big ones too. Wanna see ‘em?”

>   “Not today, son.”

  “I could bring ‘em over here. You wouldn’t hafta come to our house.”

  “I’m busy, Edgar.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, I’m going on a trip this afternoon. Just like you.”

  “Oh.”

  They walked across the lawn in silence. He was afraid Edgar might follow him back to the house, but the boy blazed his own trail when they reached the tennis court, squeezing through a hole in the privet before crossing the orchard to Halcyon Hill.

  Call Waiting

  CHARLIE DIDN’T BOTHER TO IDENTIFY HIMSELF. “WELL, has he called?”

  “How could he,” Michael answered, “when you keep calling to find out if he’s called?”

  “Bullshit. You’ve got Call Waiting.”

  “Well … he hasn’t. O.K.?”

  “He will. What are you gonna tell him?”

  That was the burning question, all right. What would he say? I like you, Thack. I’m attracted to you, and I think we could have something here. But I think I should tell you before we go any further that I’m antibody positive.

  Yeah, boy. That was the stuff of romance, all right. Who wouldn’t be turned on by a line like that?

  “I’ll play it by ear,” he told Charlie.

  “What about the river?”

  “What about it?”

  “Why don’t you take him there? You said he’s never been.”

  “I can’t afford it, Charlie.”

  “Ah, but I have a place.”

  “Since when?”

  “Since my Shanti volunteer went to Boca Raton to inseminate a lesbian.”

  Michael laughed. “Great. Thanks for clearing that up.”

  “Well, it’s a big compliment, actually. Who’s asked for your semen lately?”

  “Charlie, what the hell are you talking about?”

  “O.K. Arturo—my Shanti buddy—has this great place in Cazadero. Only he can’t use it now, since he’s gonna be a sperm donor.”

  “Right.”

  “He took the test two weeks ago, and it came back negative, so the girls went into a huddle and sent him a plane ticket. Which leaves this great cabin completely empty. And I can’t use it, since I’m going ballooning.”