Free Form Jazz. Lee Lamothe
the farm hoeing weed or something, bailing or something, but Connie just said, no you go with Harv, keep him away from the Chinamen. He said —”
“What Chinamen?”
“What?” She skidded to a stop. “Chinamen?”
“You said, keep me away from the Chinamen.”
“Chinamen? No, no I didn’t. I don’t even know no Chinamen.”
“Ag, you said, fuck, Chinamen.”
“When?”
“Just fucking now. You said, to keep Harv away from the Chinamen.”
“No. Wasn’t me. You musta heard that on the radio.”
“Ag,” he said, swerving into the hot lane and passing the off-ramps at the city limits, heading for the rising open country north of the city, rounding the lake, “you fucking said it. The radio’s off.”
“I didn’t turn it off. I didn’t even know it was on. You got any CDs?”
Harv shook his head, dazed. He’d love, he thought, to tell Connie about this piece of classic babble. This and the Yo with his yos. But this part of the coming evening wasn’t happening. This part of the evening was a Harv moment.
In one of the soliloquies she asked eagerly if they were going to the super lab. Was she going to see that legendary place?
Harv felt very sad.
* * *
She was quiet the rest of the way to the farm. She squirmed a little in her seat, the miniskirt hiking up, adjusting her scarf. Harv thought Cornelius Cook had probably got a little out of hand. He had the weak man’s urge to thrust when he could, the weak man’s lack of control. And she didn’t know it but she’d been lucky. The Captain was a biter and he had a position he liked where the face was available.
He reflected on the crazy Captain: money up the ass, private schools, a Mercedes when he was still in high school, big motherfucking cottage up in the Lakes. At first, Harv thought it was just street bullshit but he had a pal troll the Internet and there was the Cook couple. At gallery openings in the state capital, in Chicago, even in New York City at the ballet. Donating to causes. Announcing huge mergers in the business pages. The Captain was in several of the photos looking fat and prosperous, often in company with a slim wife with a brittle smile. What the fuck was he doing in this fucking life?
A fat, kinky item was old Connie, but not without a certain diabolical flair. When Harv first met him, the Captain was just a hugely fat fuck among the fat fucks sitting in the dim stage lights of Jiggles, a mob-run club at Stateline where Harv picked up a hundred bucks a night doing the door. One night the bartender pointed Cook out to Harv, saying the fat guy had been in every night but never hit on the peelers, just sat watching. The fat fuck carried a roll of hundreds and never wanted change for his drinks. Harv, who still had bandages on his face from the lab explosion and was on his ass, keeping the door, waited for the Captain outside, near a sleek Mercedes painted a deep shade of grey he’d never seen before that sparkled under the lights, parked furthest from the side entry to the club. The bartender did his thing and after Cookie came out, weaving and collapsing, Harv was amazed. He’d never kicked anything like it. His motorcycle boot seemed to just disappear into the globe of flesh under the bright arc lights. Harv’s foot seemed to go into the fat fuck’s torso and hit nothing of substance. Like kicking a big pillow. Harv didn’t kick him in the head: he’d seen a guy take a light boot, a kiss to the temple, on the ranges in the state pen and the guy had died. Between Harv’s boot and the stuff the bartender had dropped on him, the Captain wasn’t doing much anyway. Groaning a little. He vomited once, probably more from the fission of the drugs mixed into his cognac than anything Harv was doing.
Two weeks later, Harv was leaning on his door when the fat fuck came in. He nodded pleasantly and Harv nodded back. The fat fuck walked a little off-kilter but he had a big smile for the waitress and dealt out his hundreds.
The Captain waved him over when the peelers changed shifts. “How you doing? You making any money?”
“Fuck off.” Harv thought the fat fuck looked pretty pleased, seeing how he’d been given the special vitamin and stomped up a bit. “You don’t know me.”
“You’re Harv, right? Harv. Phil Harvey. Philip One-L Harvey. November six, nineteen fifty. Been up in Craddock, what? Three times? Now you live upstairs, park your bike out back most of the time because most of the time it doesn’t run. You drive an old rattletrap bubble van the owner of this place lends you, weekends, so you can go and cook up some stuff for some other guys who make all the dough while you make gas mileage and walking around money. Were you born stupid, or was it the fire or what?”
Harv started to reach across the table and the fat fuck skidded his chair back a bit and put his hand under the tabletop.
“The fuck do you want? Get out of here.” Harv had taken twenty-eight hundred dollar bills off the guy, the bartender got five hundred. Harv had seventeen hundred left. He’d take a bullet, if that’s what the fat fuck was doing under the table, before he’d give back a nickel.
“You’re getting on in years, Harv. You’ve got too much hair and not enough face. Soon you’ll be a pensioner.” The Captain saw Harv glancing at the tabletop. “Yeah, I got something down there. But what’s more important, I’ve got three guys with me. Ex-cops, city guys. They’re not ex-cops because they got to retire with the pension, you know? They’re the ones who told me about you. The other day they visited the bartender and he’s been off work, since, right?” Captain Cook closed his eyes. “I’m having a vision, Harv. I predict that the next time you see him he’ll be in a motorized wheelchair. And he said he only got five hundred from you, which means: from me.”
Harv looked around and instantly spotted the three guys with the fat fuck. They sat like middle-aged bikers, sprawled at a round table between Harv and the side door. One of them, a short-haired guy with a glittering earring and a gold chain around his neck, smiled and nodded encouragingly.
Harv had taken beatings and he’d never run from one in his life. “How you want to do it, you fat cocksucker?”
“Lunch. How’s that, Harv? We have lunch tomorrow and you tell me how you’re going to give me back my twenty-eight hundred. Or we can do something else, and you can make twenty-eight.”
* * *
It was probably, Harv thought, because they were two freaks that they got along.
At the lunch Connie Cook had explained about boredom and the emptiness of his life.
“If I was this fat and broke at the same time,” he said over hamburgers and fries at a Kelso’s in the swanky Stonetown, “I’d ’a killed myself. No shit, Harv. But I’m fat, I know it and there’s nothing I can do about it, but also I’ve got dough. My wife and I go to the art gallery, nobody turns away, nobody goes wow look at that guy, is he one fat number or what. Nope. They all come over. Mr. Cook, you like another canapé? You’re losing weight, Mr. Cook. Mr. Cook, you want to fund an exhibit next season? Hundred and sixty thousand, we’ll put your name in the program. Gee, thanks. Then the fucker signals another sleek fucker and boom, I got a fundraising guy from the museum over in Chicago on me: Gee, Mr. Cook, we could use some dough to bring an exhibit of Inuit art down from Canada. Your dad used to kick some dough our way, how about it, family tradition? Say, two hundred thousand and we’ll put your name in the program.” Connie Cook laughed bitterly. “So, my wife’s on me to pony up all this dough so she can be in the Post on the parties page, looking good with a ballerina or a fucking opera singer. A real good day, she winds up in the Chicago Trib.”
“Huh.” Harv was only mildly interested. “What’s this you said, about making twenty-eight?”
“Those guys, those three ex-cops last night, with me at the club? They’re security guys from one of my companies. They —” Connie Cook stopped for a moment, chewing the last of his burger, staring at Harv’s face. “That hurt? I mean, it probably hurt when it happened,