The Big Bounce jr-1 Read online

  The next day-and this, Ryan figured, must be the world’s record for poor timing-he was back in Morning Sessions sitting on the bench in the fenced-off section with the stew bums and colored hookers waiting to go before the same judge. Not Billy Morrison and Jack Ryan this time. Just Jack Ryan.

  It was poor timing and it was also dirty rotten luck of the worst kind because it should never have happened.

  He had gone to lunch with Carl for the little talk; he had gone to a movie and then home. He had to go home sometime, so he went home.

  They were still living in the apartment in Highland Park: he and his mother and, for the past seven months, his other sister, Peggy, and her husband, Frank, who worked at a bakery on the night shift. Ryan was sleeping on the studio couch in the dining room again. The three of them were there when he got home. His mother told him how worried she had been and how Carl had told her not to visit him in jail or go to the court hearing. He remembered they had already eaten. (They ate at 5:30 because Frank had to leave for work by quarter to seven and he liked to sit and watch TV and let his dinner digest.) But they hadn’t saved anything because they didn’t know Jack was coming home. He remembered his mother looking in her purse, then asking Frank didn’t she loan him five dollars last week?-asking him twice because he was watching TV, sitting in his T-shirt with his stringy neck and his dark hair combed in a high roll, his sister Peggy sitting next to Frank, sitting straight with bobby pins in her mouth, putting her hair up, and Frank finally saying he had already paid her back. Ryan said he had money and he remembered his mother saying don’t go to Major’s, go down to Safeway, the hamburger was three pounds for a dollar ten this week. He remembered her saying that pork roasts were on sale, too, and if he saw a nice one and had enough extra money, they could have it for Sunday; Frank was bringing home a pie. He remembered her saying she wished there was an A&P in the neighborhood and he remembered, going out the door, his sister saying yes, A&P was all right, but you didn’t get any stamps there.

  He didn’t go to Safeway. He went to a bar on Woodward up near Seven Mile and drank beer. Maybe they were still talking about the A&P. The way it was before and the way he would always remember it, his father would be in the dining room playing solitaire and his mother would be in the living room with the radio on, the thin, slick-haired man and the lady beginning to get fat. They hardly ever spoke to each other. His mother would bring up the worn carpeting or that she had seen a nice-looking graduation dress for Peggy and his dad would say, “Uh-huh, all right. Fine.” With the cigarette smoke curling up past his eyes, squinting down at the cards. Ryan had wondered if they ever made love. The slick-haired man with his hair combed and his teeth brushed and the beginning-to-get-fat lady lying there wondering if they should trade the Bendix washer in or try to get another year out of it. The man would be smoking a cigarette after and the lady would finally say, “You know, we’ve had that Bendix nine years.” Ryan couldn’t picture them first meeting or dating or the way they were before he was born. But something must have happened. Something, and he would bet anything it was because of money. Counting pennies to buy hamburger. Maybe that tightens you up and once it does, you stay tightened. His dad was different sometimes when they were alone. He would seem to know about things. He would say ask me a capital and Ryan would ask it and his dad would know it. Even Central America. He would know all about places like Guadalcanal and Tarawa and tell about times men had lost their lives because the brass had screwed up, miscalculated, though he had not been in the war himself. He would tell what was wrong with the DSR, how they didn’t have enough buses and how the jigs were getting all the good runs because the big shots were afraid of the racial situation. (Later, when Ryan was working with Leon Woody, he wondered what his dad would have thought of it. He wondered if he would have started breaking into houses if his dad hadn’t died. And then he would think: Why? What’s that got to do with the price of anything? And he would think about something else.)

  When Billy Morrison came into the bar, he felt like decking the son of a bitch, but Billy was grinning and looked really glad to see him, so they drank beer and celebrated the neat way they’d beat the larceny charge. About 11:30 Billy Morrison said how about a little action? Ryan thought he meant pick up some broads somewhere, but Billy said, man, they didn’t have time for that; it had to be a sure thing. Not if it costs money, Ryan said. Billy said come on, it’s a new kick, and Ryan went with him to a gas station over on John R.

  A gas station. This was about the craziest thing he’d ever heard of. Billy Morrison said, man, like getting your oil changed. The station attendant dialed a number. They waited about twenty minutes smoking cigarettes before a Pontiac station wagon pulled in with two guys in front, young guys, and a girl in back about sixteen with long, tangled brown hair and a tight skirt way up on her thighs. After you, Billy Morrison said, and Ryan got in the backseat with the girl. She was pretty, but she had on too much perfume and he didn’t like her hair; he didn’t like the two guys; he didn’t like anything about it, sitting in the dark with the three of them as they drove south on John R toward Six Mile. The guy next to the driver asked him if he wanted a beer. Well. Why not? He took the warm beer from the guy and the guy said that would be a buck. Ryan said nothing; he paid him. He asked the girl if she wanted some and she said no. That was all she said in the car. The one word. The two in front talked sometimes but mostly to each other and Ryan couldn’t hear what they were saying. He remembered how quiet it was in the car. Then the sound of his own voice asking where they were going. The guy next to the driver said over by a school yard. Sometimes they went to a park or over to a lumber yard, but tonight it was the school yard. There was a blanket in the back, the guy said. Ryan sipped the warm beer. After a minute, breaking the silence again, he asked how much it would be for all this great service and everything and the guy next to the driver, without turning around, said ten bucks.

  Ryan said they had better drive him back, he wasn’t buying anything today after all. Ahead of them he could see the stoplight at Six Mile Road. They were approaching it, but the car slowed down and turned left into an alley before they reached the corner. The car stopped; the headlights beamed down past trash cans and incinerators and the shadowed back walls of stores. The headlights went off and the guy next to the driver, thin-faced with long hair, about Ryan’s age, turned with his arm on the backrest. He said it would cost ten bucks. He said whether they took Ryan to the school or back to the gas station or anywhere, it would cost ten bucks. Ryan said no, he had changed his mind. The guy looking at him said, man, nothing was free. Everything cost ten bucks. Ryan said okay, I’ll make you a deal. You don’t have to drive me back. I’ll get out here.

  The inside light went on as the driver opened his door. Ryan remembered seeing the girl, her hair lighter than he thought it would be; he remembered feeling the beer running up his sleeve, colder than it had tasted, as he raised the bottle by the neck and saw the guy next to the driver drop behind the backrest. Ryan was out, slamming the door, moving along the car to the rear, then sliding in the gravel and changing his direction. As the driver came past the front end Ryan went into him, chopping the bottle against the side of his head backhanded so that the guy fell against the hood.

  The bottle didn’t break. In the movies the bottle breaks, but this one didn’t. He held on to it and ran, all the way down the alley and right, past the brick side of a store to Six Mile, across the street and east along the sidewalk, not aware that he was still holding the bottle. He was in the next block when he felt the car moving along next to him. He didn’t want to look at the car, he wanted it to pass and he wanted to keep walking.

  But the car didn’t pass and he did a dumb thing. He looked at the car because he had to, a car that as soon as he looked at it was a black-with-yellow-lettering police car. And he ran. He didn’t think, he ran. Later, thinking about it, he realized what a dumb thing he did and made a resolution it would never happen again; but later was too late. He ra
n to the corner and around it; he ran down the length of a cyclone fence, down to the end of it and up over the fence. He hid in the darkness and silence against the wall of the lumber company, in the aisle between ten-foot stacks of two-by-fours, and he was standing there with the beer bottle in his hand when they put the flashlight on him. He held the beer bottle half raised at his side, the light in his eyes, and finally he let go of it.

  The judge at Morning Sessions, a nice calm-looking guy with his hair starting to get gray at the sides, gave him sixty days in the Detroit House of Correction.

  He had had enough bad luck. It was time to have some good luck. There had to be a beginning to the good luck if he was going to have any, and maybe this was the beginning. It was good to have a car again. It was good driving along at night with the radio on. It was good rolling into the Bay Vista and angle-parking in front of the office. If this was the beginning of the good luck, he would have to watch and be ready and, finally, at one point, if it still looked good, he would have to say yes and step into it and do it, go all the way.

  Why would it be any harder than going into a house for TV sets and fur coats? Or any harder than walking into his own room.

  From the bed, sitting across it against the wall and his cracked curl-toed boots sticking out over the side, Frank Pizarro said, “Hey, Jack, how you doing?”

  “Get off the bed.”

  “What’s the matter with you?” Pizarro pushed himself to the edge and sat with his legs hanging, not touching the floor.

  “How’d you know I was here?”

  “Billy tole me. What’s the matter with you?”

  “I mean this room.”

  “A guy outside, when I came. I ask him.”

  “He tell you to walk in, make yourself at home?”

  “No, I wait out there awhile, then I think maybe you sleeping and don’t hear me, so I try the door and it’s open. Listen, I got fired from my job.”

  “I heard.”

  “From Billy. But he didn’t tell you about the bus.”

  “Frank, I’ll see you, okay?”

  “Listen, Camacho wants me to drive the bus back for the money I owe him. Drive him in it and leave my truck because the goddamn thing’s busted anyway.”

  Ryan hesitated. “That’s fine with me.”

  “Sure, but how do the rest of them get home? See?”

  “In the bus.”

  “No. Camacho say, ‘I don’t have to take them home.’ I say, ‘But they already pay you to take them.’ He say, ‘That was when I was crew leader. But I’m not crew leader no more, so I don’t have to take them.’ He say then, ‘But if they want to pay my bus company five hunnert dollar and give me money for the airplane, then I leave the bus here.’

  “Come on. They believe that?”

  “What are they going to do? They tell him they don’t like it, Camacho leave them here.”

  “What do you care? You’ve got a ride.”

  “What do I care? They all my friends.”

  “Come on, Frank.”

  “I mean it. I work with them seven years.”

  “All right, so why come to me?”

  “Man, we been friends, right? Billy say, ‘Why don’t we borrow the money from Jack?’ Pizarro’s flat, open face stared up at Ryan.

  “Five hundred dollars.”

  “Billy say you got it. He say if you spent it, you can get some more easy.”

  “Where is Billy?”

  “He don’t want to come. You know, to ask you.”

  “It doesn’t bother you any.”

  “Listen, I don’t ask you for the money. Billy say that. I want to borrow it from you and we pay you back.”

  “You think I have five hundred?”

  “You don’t, you can get it. Easy.”

  “If I loaned you what I have, you’d pay it back, uh?”

  “You know that. Sure.”

  “When?”

  “Next year when we come up.”

  “It’s been nice knowing you, Frank.”

  “Man, we got these families. How they going to get home?”

  “Come on-I’ve got this family.”

  “You don’t care what happens to all those people?”

  “Hey, Frank, I’ll see you.”

  “Okay, buddy,” Pizarro said. He came off the bed slowly. “Screw you too.”

  Pizarro moved past him and opened the door; narrow shoulders and drooping pants seat, checkered pants that were worn and dirty, shapeless, with slash continental pockets and a snappy snap-around elastic waist.

  “Wait a minute,” Ryan said. “You got your truck?”

  “I tole you, it’s busted.”

  “You going to walk?”

  “No, I’m going to rent a goddamn Hertz car.”

  Ryan hesitated, watching Pizarro holding the door open, but only a moment. He said, “See you, Frank.”

  Pizarro noticed the mustang in front of the office. He looked at the car as he walked past it and something about it was familiar. There were a lot of dark green Mustangs, but there was something else about a Mustang that stuck in his mind. He walked down to the first side road beyond the Bay Vista and got his panel truck out of the trees and headed for Geneva Beach as fast as the rusted-out panel would move. But by the time he got there, the bars and liquor stores were closed and the town was locked up for the night. Goddamn Ryan.

  Waiting for Ryan and not finding anything to drink in Ryan’s place, he had thought of getting a bottle of something, tequila or gin. Or a bottle of red. If he bought wine, he’d have a few bucks left over. He had four dollars and sixty cents of the hundred Ryan had given him as his cut. Sure he had waited in the truck. But, goddamn, it was his truck; he was the one to drive it. At the time he should have pulled off the road and laid it on him. “Hey, man, where’s my cut? No chickenshit hunnert dollars, my cut.” Lay it on him and let him know. Ryan had been lucky with Camacho; but that didn’t mean he was always lucky.

  He had never liked Ryan. Ever since San Antonio, at the gas station: Ryan standing there with his bag looking for a ride, standing there with his hands on his hips looking them over as they pulled in-the bus, the panel truck, and two cars, all migrants; then talking to Camacho for a while and getting in the bus. Ever since then. Ever since, on the trip up, Ryan started going into the stores where they had trouble being served to get the pop and stuff to make sandwiches. Ever since in the town in Oklahoma talking the gas station man into letting them use his stinking broken-down washroom, thinking he was a big shot because he did it. Ever since he started talking to Marlene Desea and before they were out of Missouri had got her to leave the panel truck and ride in the bus with him. Somebody else, one of the other girls, had said, “Frank, I would love to ride with you.” But he had told her nothing doing, nobody was riding with him now.

  Camacho was right-what he said after they had reached the cucumber fields-that Ryan only wanted a ride. He got what he wanted and there was nothing to keep him-not Marlene Desea, not anything. He used the truck. He used Billy Ruiz. He used everybody and once he got what he wanted, he left. Sure, that’s the kind of guy.

  Beyond Geneva Beach, on the highway south, he turned off on the dirt road that pointed through the fields to the migrant camp.

  Goddamn cucumbers. He was through with the cucumbers. He could pick ten times more than the goddamn kids they sent up from Saginaw and Bay City, but if they wanted the kids instead of him, that was up to them. He had drunk a little too much since Saturday, a hundred dollars worth almost, but buying the others a lot of it too. It was gone, the hundred, and he owed Camacho four hundred fifty dollars and he didn’t have a job and San Antonio was sixteen hundred and seventy miles away.

  But Ryan wasn’t gone. Man, he had Ryan. All he had to do was think of a way to tell him, a good way to tell him without getting his jaw broken. Like:

  “Hey, Jack. You know that beer case with the wallets you tole us to throw away? We don’t throw it away, man. I got it hid somewhere.”

/>   Then Ryan would say something and he would say to Ryan, “How much you give me for that beer case, buddy? So somebody don’t find it with your name on it.”

  That would be the difficult part, to tell Ryan so he would see clearly that he had no choice but to buy the case of wallets. “Look, you swing at me, you never see the beer case, you understand?”

  The son of a bitch, you didn’t know what he might do. Tell him quick, “Something happen to me a friend of mine take the beer case to the police. How you like that, buddy?”

  Then tell him how much. Five hundred dollars for the case. No, six hundred dollars. He don’t have it, he has to work for it then, go in some places.

  He had planned to tell Ryan tonight. Begin with the phony story about the bus and see if he could get some money that way, the easy way. Then tell him about the beer case. But when Ryan came in and was standing there, he couldn’t do it.

  Maybe get some paper and write it to him. Buy the paper and get a pencil somewhere. Write it clearly and some night put it under his door. But he would have to see Ryan sooner or later, or else how would he get the money from him? Goddamn, why did it have to be so hard to do?

  For a reason Frank Pizarro would never be sure of-other than he might have seen the car with the girl in it going past the camp, going past this shed where he was now stopping-he remembered the dark green Mustang and remembered at once who owned it. Mr. Ritchie’s girlfriend. Sure, the same green Mustang with the dents in the front end, the same dents in the same car in front of Jack Ryan’s place.

  Pizarro turned off the engine and the headlights, but he didn’t get out right away. He kept thinking about the green Mustang because he knew goddamn well Jack Ryan had something to do with it.

  10

  “IT’S A GOOD DEAL,” Mr. Majestyk said. “Thirty bucks a week she comes in every day but Sunday. Sunday I like to cook a steak outside on the grill, nice sirloin, this guy at the IGA cuts it about two and a half inches thick.”