Chapter Thirty·one―A Dream of Dancing
“Who says nothing ever happens in Willipaq,” Quigley stared at the formica countertop. Nothing had happened for Quigley, Champion and Everlast. It had started for them with the first sirens of spring. Now it was almost Fall and with the wisdom that hindsight gives, April had been their cruelest month. The world then had taken on a glossy finish as the prospect of pinning down one hundred thousand vagrant dollars shone brighter than the polyurethane on the alleys at the Border Duckpin Lanes.
Quigley was spinning a Canadian dollar coin, absently tracking it through a coffee spill. Eleven-sided, anodized aureate bronze minted on a nickel blank, it had the shine of new gold. The many flats of its edges made it great for spinning. Charlie’s mum on the one side. On the obverse, or reverse, depending on your feelings about the British North America Act, a duck. But the duck is not a duck, it is a loon, the lonesome augur of misted mornings, a shivery cry clinging low on the waters of the inland lakes, below the mists calling the fish to rise. The Canadians call this coin a ‘Loonie’ when they think about it, which is seldom. The Americans never think about it. Hardly the stuff of magic.
Dreams of glory followed by months of thankless work that ate away at the lawmen’s free time. They broke up with girlfriends and were hollow-eyed and snappish on the job. They were frozen in a holding pattern. It was the same old shit day after day. Their tail on the kid had made the three the world’s leading authorities on the unendurable tedium of his regular, predictable, and enviably respectable life in Willipaq, Maine. Eat, sleep, fuck and study. He even recycled and composted. Twice a week he spaded coffee grounds and lettucey salad residue into Harriet’s tiny garden. Alternate Thursday mornings he separated glass and aluminum and drove to the redemption center. Ozzie had sought no gainful employment. He seemed to live love, read and mulch. And with visible means of support, tastefully never flaunted. He was sailing through life on a plastic surfboard, sustained frugally with a modest credit ceiling on a MasterCard and a Visa. A tireless routine, and legitimate. They had checked on his plastic. The accounts were supported by a stipend, which he never overdrew, of a blind trust administered by a reputable old-line law firm. It was the sole bequest of his deceased parents who before they were blown to pieces had squirreled away some insurance policies in the name of their son. Nothing had been happening for an extended period. After the first flurry of elated activity, they were no further along the road to success. Their chimaera of career advancement had flown the coop, and with its elopement taken the dreams of chevrons and pensions.
“Doesn’t that just burn me up,” said Quigley, expressionless, under control. “I am just really cooked, boiled, burned and plain old pissed-off and bummed-out.”
Favorite expressions. Quigley saw himself on the short end of the administrative stick. He was in a rotten mood.
Actually, the Phoenix, the weatherbird of ancient iconography, was the bird who burned, while Chimaeras have reportedly flown coops. The Phoenix, who aside from this paragraph makes no appearance in this story, was another flying analogy of the ancients who should have known better.
Because of living on the Greek isles and all, they were close to nature and blessed with discretionary time for seeing animal shapes in the stars. It was a healthy outdoor life. Despite this, the ancients acquired a reputation for wisdom that persists to this day. Full of pride in their Club Med location, they played with new gods and imported others. The old gods slept.
The new gods danced.
Phoenixes burned and coops were flown. It was a good life. That was there. With his hands busy toying with a shining coin, and nightmares of an empty coop, Quigley was here, in the asshole of nowhere, career-wise.
If you’re keeping score, the Phoenix and Quigley burned, the chimaera eloped with their hopes, taking with it the Ladder of Success, which the boys had left leaning on the eaves of their edifice of dreams.
“There was a northeaster flattened most of the waterfront where we are now sitting.” Champion was trying to be helpful, changing the subject. After six years with the RCMP, he was a constable. He had been posted to Deer Island, an out-of-the-way community at the far end of the Moose Island Ferry. Champion had enjoyed high hopes for career advancement. What had gone wrong? It worked for other recruits. He had seen them rise. Why, just being nearby when the big busts happened, the glory rubbed off and up the ladder they went. They had gone and he had stayed, checking visas and administering breathalyzer tests. Just being near the paperwork had done for them. And he had been there, in the thick of it at the celebrated shootout at Cousteau’s Diner, but no stripes.
Good publicity for the corps meant advancement all around. Champion had even had his picture in the national press. He had figured to generate countless column-inches of newspaper stories with the high profile investigations at a busy border crossing like Stack O’ Trees, his previous posting. But here he was staring at a tiny circle of sky from the bottom of a well of oblivion, an unperson. Six years and still a constable. Champion too, was grumpy. Short shrift sat not well with him. “That was 1972, you were five years old.” Moose Island was at the far end of Quigley’s patrol, a dead end, the last planks on the dock of authority as defined in the procedures manual of the Department of Public Safety. And a reflection of how he was thought of, if he was ever thought of, at headquarters in Augusta. Quigley’s patrol was the end of the line bureaucratically as well as geographically. Quigley was haunted by the notion that he had been forgotten in the administrative shuffle, his career dossier languishing at the bottom of some senior clerk’s In box, a missing-in-action with the bad grace to keep on endorsing his paychecks. “Natural calamities make a lasting impression on a kid.”
Champion was still reminiscing on the gale of ‘72. His use of the words ‘calamities’ and ‘kid’ struck a responsive chord with his dinner partner. Quigley groaned. Oswaldo Patricio Melendez O’Rourke y Nuńez was ‘the Kid’. They had come to call him ‘the Kid’ in their day-to-day dealings. Strangely—or perhaps, not so strangely—they had forgotten to remember that he had died.
Champion, Everlast, Quigley and ‘the Kid’ had become close during the months of their partnerless dance, their potentially calamitous bal masque.
Quigley knew Champion was right. There had been no perceptible forward motion since the first few weeks of their concentrated tailing of the Kid. They had almost had him that night at the library he was sure. Since then it had become a ritualized pursuit. In the theater piece that Champion had explained, the toughs had been strutting, acknowledging each other’s presence but out of mutual fear and the respect fear engenders, not allowing their glances to rest overlong on the transcendent beauty, a prize from beyond the tracks dancing beneath her class, the other’s beautiful woman. There is power in a glance, the power that if your eyes linger overlong on another dancer’s partner this will require him to forget his timing, drop rhythm, to break the truce. We have pretended we are here for the dance. He must then kill you for breaking the fragile protocols that bind together the keepers and the kept. Her long blonde hair bound in a stylish coil, picture hat and gauzy dress, the patrician beauty dances open mouthed, taking short frequent breaths—more, surely, than are demanded by the exertions of the waltz—her eyes rolled back to the whites in a stylized gesture of sexual anticipation which her escort must notice. The escort notices, but he is busy just now covering his back. Both preoccupied they spin on woodenly—dancing about the floor around an object of which they must never speak, whose existence must never be acknowledged but for their presence at the dance.
Champion had seen something just like this on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s television service. Over the months past the dancers invaded his dreams and, while dreaming, invited him to join them. This he had not confided to his partners.
Though he spoke of the show, the dream of dancing was his not to share.
“You watch too much TV, Ed. Pass me down the sugar would you?” said Quigley.
Watching, alone in his room, Champion had been struck by the parallels between the dance and his life. The beautiful feminine women and beautiful feminine men in a ballet of thugs walked out the designs he had observed forming in their own affair of Oswaldo and the money. For after all, but for the money what were they all doing here? The kid had been a model citizen over all the months of free-time surveillance, happily living off the charity of a rich uncle, Harriet’s salary and his own plastic umbrella. They knew Oswaldo was their man. He had to be. Yet there he was, popular as hell, bouncing around town with the irrepressible energy of a boxcar load of ping-pong balls. Ozzie’s English was coming along swimmingly. Old people, children and small dogs just loved him. And the money, the evidence, through some legerdemain known only to Ozzie and God, was probably in a safe deposit box in Recife by now.
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