‘Gallagher’s Pub,’ Rhinemann said. ‘It’s directly across from — ‘
‘I know where Gallagher’s is,’ the driver said, ‘but we don’t go anywhere until you dispose of the cancer-stick, my friend.’ He tapped the sign clipped to the taximeter. SMOKING IS NOT
PERMITTED IN THIS LIVERY, it read.
The two men exchanged a glance. Rhinemann lifted his shoulders in the half-embarrassed, half-surly shrug that has been the principal tribal greeting of the Ten O’Clock People since 1990
or so. Then, without a murmur of protest, he pitched his quarter-smoked Winston out into the driving rain.
Pearson began to tell Rhinemann how shocked he had been when the elevator doors had opened and he’d gotten his first good look at the essential Suzanne Holding, but Rhinemann frowned, gave his head a minute shake, and swivelled his thumb toward their driver. ‘We’ll talk later,’ he said.
Pearson subsided into silence, contenting himself with watching the rain-streaked highrises of midtown Boston slip by. He found himself almost exquisitely attuned to the little street-life scenes going on outside the taxicab’s smeary window. He was especially interested in the little clusters of Ten O’Clock People he observed standing in front of every business building they passed. Where there was shelter, they took it; where there wasn’t, they took that, too — simply turned up their collars, hooded their hands protectively over their cigarettes, and smoked anyway. It occurred to Pearson that easily ninety per cent of the posh midtown high-rises they were passing were now no-smoking zones, just like the one he and Rhinemann worked in. It occurred to him further (and this thought came with the force of a revelation) that the Ten O’Clock People were not really a new tribe at all but the raggedy-ass remnants of an old one, renegades running before a new broom that intended to sweep their bad old habit clean out the
door of American life. Their unifying characteristic was their unwillingness or inability to quit killing themselves; they were junkies in a steadily shrinking twilight zone of acceptability. An exotic social group, he supposed, but not one that was apt to last very long. He guessed that by the year 2020, 2050 at the latest, the Ten O’Clock People would have gone the way of the dodo.
Oh shit, -wait a minute, he thought. We ‘re just the last of the world’s diehard optimists, that’s all — most of us don’t bother with our seatbelts, either, and we’d love to sit behind home plate at the ballpark if they’d just take down that silly fucking screen.
‘What’s so funny, Mr. Pearson?’ Rhinemann asked him, and Pearson became aware he was wearing a broad grin.
‘Nothing,’ Pearson said. ‘Nothing important, at least.’
‘Okay; just don’t freak out on me.’
‘Would you consider it a freak-out if I asked you to call me Brandon?’
‘I guess not,’ Rhinemann said, and appeared to think it over. ‘As long as you call me Duke and we don’t get down to BeeBee or Buster or anything embarrassing like that.’
‘I think you’re safe on that score. Want to know something?’
‘Sure.’
‘This has been the most amazing day of my life.’
Duke Rhinemann nodded without returning Pearson’s smile. ‘And it’s not over yet,’ he said.
2
Pearson thought that Gallagher’s had been an inspired choice on Duke’s part — a clear Boston anomaly, more Gilley’s than Cheers, it was the perfect place for two bank employees to discuss matters which would have left their nearest and dearest with serious questions about their sanity.
The longest bar Pearson had ever seen outside of a movie curved around a large square of shiny dance-floor on which three couples were currently dry-humping dreamily as Marty Stuart and Travis Tritt harmonized on ‘This’One’s Gonna Hurt You.’
In a smaller place the bar proper would have been packed, but the patrons were so well spaced along this amazing length of mahogany-paved racetrack that brass-rail privacy was actually achievable; there was no need for them to search out a booth in the dim nether reaches of the room. Pearson was glad. It would be too easy to imagine one of the batpeople, maybe even a bat-couple, sitting (or roosting) in the next booth and listening intently to their conversation.
Isn’t that what they call a bunker mentality, old buddy? he thought. Certainly didn’t take you long to get there, did it?
No, he supposed not, but for the time being he didn’t care. He was just grateful he would be able to see in all directions while they talked . . . or, he supposed, while Duke talked.
‘Bar’s okay?’ Duke asked, and Pearson nodded.
It looked like one bar, Pearson reflected as he followed Duke beneath the sign which read SMOKING PERMITTED IN THIS SECTION ONLY, but it was really two . . . the way that, back in the fifties, every lunch-counter below the Mason-Dixon had really been two: one for the white folks and one for the black. And now as then, you could see the difference. A Sony almost the size of a cineplex movie screen overlooked the center of the no-smoking section; in the nicotine ghetto there was only an elderly Zenith bolted to the wall (a sign beside it read: FEEL FREE TO ASK FOR
CREDIT, WE WILL FEEL FREE TO TELL YOU TO F!!K OFF). The surface of the bar itself was dirtier down here — Pearson thought at first that this must be just his imagination, but a second glance
confirmed the dingy look of the wood and the faint overlapping rings that were the Ghosts of Schooners Past. And, of course, there was the sallow, yellowish odor of tobacco smoke. He swore it came puffing up from the barstool when he sat down, like popcorn farts out of an elderly movie-theater seat. The newscaster on their battered, smoke-bleared TV appeared to be dying of zinc poisoning; the same guy playing to the healthy folks farther down the bar looked ready to run the four-forty and then bench-press his weight in blondes.
Welcome to the back of the bus, Pearson thought, looking at his fellow Ten O’Clock People with a species of exasperated amusement. Oh well, mustn’t complain; in another ten years smokers won’t even be allowed on board.
‘Cigarette?’ Duke asked, perhaps displaying certain rudimentary mind-reading skills.
Pearson glanced at his watch, then accepted the butt, along with another light from Duke’s faux-classy lighter. He drew deep, relishing the way the smoke slid into his pipes, even relishing the slight swimming in his head. Of course the habit was dangerous, potentially lethal; how could anything that got you off like this not be? It was the way of the world, that was all.
‘What about you?’ he asked as Duke slipped his cigarettes back into his pocket.
‘I can wait a little longer,’ Duke said, smiling. ‘I got a couple of puffs before we got in the cab.
Also, I have to pay off the extra one I had at lunch.’
‘You ration yourself, huh?’
‘Yeah. I usually only allow myself one at lunch, but today I had two. You scared the shit out of me, you know.’
‘I was pretty scared myself.’
The bartender came over, and Pearson found himself fascinated at the way the man avoided the thin ribbon of smoke rising from his cigarette. I doubt if he even knows he’s doing it . . . but if I blew some in his face, I bet he’d come over the top and clean my clock for me.
‘Help you gentlemen?’
Duke ordered Sam Adamses without consulting Pearson. When the bartender left to get them, Duke turned back and said, ‘Stretch it out. This’d be a bad time to get drunk. Bad time to even get tight.’
Pearson nodded and dropped a five-dollar bill on the counter when the bartender came back with the beers. He took a deep swallow, then dragged on his cigarette. There were people who thought a cigarette never tasted better than it did after a meal, but Pearson disagreed; he believed in his heart that it wasn’t an apple that had gotten Eve in trouble but a beer and a cigarette.
‘So what’d you use?’ Duke asked him. ‘The patch? Hypnosis? Good old American willpower?
Looking at you, I’d guess it was the patch.’
If it had been Duke’s humorous effort at a curve-ball, it didn’t work. Pearson had been thinking about smoking a lot this afternoon. ‘Yeah, the patch,’ he said. ‘I wore it for two years, starting just after my daughter was born. I took one look at her through the nursery window and made up my mind to quit the habit. It seemed crazy to go on setting fire to forty or fifty cigarettes a day when I’d just taken on an eighteen-year commitment to a brand-new human being.’ With whom I had fallen instantly in love, he could have added, but he had an idea Duke already knew that.