The waitress who had served my beer, a rode-hard-and-put-away-wet peroxide blonde of fifty or so, suddenly burst into tears. That decided me. I got off my stool, wove my way around the tables where men and women sat looking at the television like solemn children, and slipped into one of the phone booths next to the Skee-Ball machine.
The operator told me to deposit forty cents for the first three minutes. I dropped in two quarters. The pay phone bonged mellowly. Faintly, I could still hear Kennedy talking in that nasal New England voice. Now he was accusing Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko of being a liar. No waffling there.
“Connecting you now, sir,” the operator said. Then she blurted: “Are you listening to the president? If you’re not, you should turn on your TV or radio.”
“I’m listening,” I said. Sadie would be, too. Sadie, whose husband had spouted a lot of apocalyptic bullshit thinly coated with science. Sadie, whose Yalie politico friend had told her something big was going to pop in the Caribbean. A flashpoint, probably Cuba.
I had no idea what I was going to say to soothe her, but that wasn’t a problem. The phone rang and rang. I didn’t like it. Where was she at eight-thirty on a Monday night in Jodie? At the movies? I didn’t believe it.
“Sir, your party does not answer.”
“I know it,” I said, and grimaced when I heard Lee’s pet phrase coming out of my mouth.
My quarters clattered into the coin return when I hung up. I started to put them back in, then reconsidered. What good would it do to call Miz Ellie? I was in Miz Ellie’s bad books now. Deke’s too, probably. They’d tell me to go peddle my papers.
When I walked back to the bar, Walter Cronkite was showing U-2 photos of the Soviet missile bases that were under construction. He said that many members of Congress were urging Kennedy to initiate bombing missions or launch a full-scale invasion immediately. American missile bases and the Strategic Air Command had gone to DEFCON-4 for the first time in history.
“American B-52 bombers will soon be circling just outside the Soviet Union’s borders,” Cronkite was saying in that deep, portentous voice of his. “And — this is obvious to all of us who’ve covered the last seven years of this ever more frightening cold war — the chances for a mistake, a potentially
There were a few cries of protest at this bloodthirsty sentiment, but they were mostly drowned in a wave of applause. I left the Ivy Room and jogged back to Neely Street. When I got there, I jumped into my Sunliner and rolled wheels for Jodie.
My car radio, now working again, broadcast nothing but a heaping dish of doom as I chased my headlights down Highway 77. Even the DJs had caught Nuclear Flu, saying things like “God bless America” and “Keep your powder dry.” When the K-Life jock played Johnny Horton caterwauling “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” I snapped it off. It was too much like the day after 9/11.
I kept the pedal to the metal in spite of the Sunliner’s increasingly distressed engine and the way the needle on the ENGINE TEMP dial kept creeping toward
She kept a spare key under the back step. I fished it out and let myself in. The unmistakable aroma of whiskey hit my nose, and the stale smell of cigarettes.
“Sadie?”
Nothing. I crossed the kitchen to the living room. There was an overflowing ashtray on the low table in front of the couch, and liquid soaking into the
“Sadie?”
Now I could smell something else that I remembered well from Christy’s binges: the sharp aroma of vomit.
I ran down the short hall on the other side of the living room. There were two doors facing each other, one giving on her bedroom and the other leading to an office-study. The doors were shut, but the bathroom door at the end of the hall was open. The harsh fluorescent light showed vomit splattered on the ring of the toilet bowl. There was more on the pink tile floor and the rim of the bathtub. There was a bottle of pills standing beside the soapdish on the sink. The cap was off. I ran to the bedroom.
