‘Well, if you still want ’em, they’re still yours,’ she said. For a moment she looked solemn . . .
and then she laughed. ‘Shit, I probably would have throwed ’em out anyway, except I forgot about ’em. Course, they’re still broken.’
Hogan turned the key jutting out of the gum. It went around twice, making little wind-up clicks, then simply turned uselessly in its socket. Broken. Of course they were. And would be
until they decided they didn’t want to be broken for a while. And the question wasn’t how they had gotten back here, and the question wasn’t even why.
The question was this: What did they want?
He poked his finger into the white steel grin again and whispered, ‘Bite me — do you want to?’
The teeth only stood there on their super-cool orange feet and grinned.
‘They ain’t talking, seems like,’ Mrs. Scooter said.
‘No,’ Hogan said, and suddenly he found himself thinking of the kid. Mr. Bryan Adams, from Nowhere, U.S.A. A lot of kids like him now. A lot of grownups, too, blowing along the highways like tumbleweed, always ready to take your wallet, say Fuck you, sugar, and run. You could stop picking up hitchhikers (he had), and you could put a burglar-alarm system in your home (he’d done that, too), but it was still a hard world where planes sometimes fell out of the sky and the crazies were apt to turn up anyplace and there was always room for a little more insurance. He had a wife, after all.
And a son.
It might be nice if Jack had a set of Jumbo Chattery Teeth sitting on his desk. Just in case something happened.
Just in case.
‘Thank you for saving them,’ he said, picking the Chattery Teeth up carefully by the feet. ‘I think my kid will get a kick out of them even if they are broken.’
‘Thank Scoot, not me. You want a bag?’ She grinned. ‘I got a plastic one — no holes, guaranteed.’
Hogan shook his head and slipped the Chattery Teeth into his sportcoat pocket. ‘I’ll carry them this way,’ he said, and grinned right back at her. ‘Keep them handy.’
‘Suit yourself.’ As he started for the door, she called after him: ‘Stop back again! I make a damn good chicken salad sandwich!’
‘I’ll bet you do, and I will,’ Hogan said. He went out, down the steps, and stood for a moment in the hot desert sunshine, smiling. He felt good — he felt good a lot these days. He had come lo think that was just the way to be.
To his left, Woof the Amazing Minnesota Coydog got to his feet, poked his snout through the crisscross of wire on the side of his cage, and barked. In Hogan’s pocket, the Chattery Teeth clicked together once. The sound was soft, but Hogan heard it . . . and felt them move. He patted his pocket. ‘Easy, big fella,’ he said softly.
He walked briskly across the yard, climbed behind the wheel of his new Chevrolet van, and drove away toward Los Angeles. He had promised Lita and Jack he would be home by seven, eight at the latest, and he was a man who liked to keep his promises.
Dedication
Around the corner from the doormen, the limos, the taxis, and the revolving doors at the entrance to Le Palais, one of New York’s oldest and grandest hotels, there is another door, this one small, unmarked, and — for the most part — unremarked.
Martha Rosewall approached it one morning at a quarter of seven, her plain blue canvas tote-bag in one hand and a smile on her face. The tote was usual, the smile much more rarely seen.
She was not unhappy in her work — being the Chief Housekeeper of floors ten through twelve of Le Palais might not seem an important or rewarding job to some, but to a woman who had worn dresses made out of rice- and flour-sacks as a girl growing up in Babylon, Alabama, it seemed very important indeed, and very rewarding as well. Yet no matter what the job, mechanic or movie-star, on ordinary mornings a person arrives at work with an ordinary expression on his or her face; a look that says Most of me is still in bed and not much more. For Martha Rosewall, however, this was no ordinary morning.
Things had begun being not ordinary for her when she arrived home from work the previous afternoon and found the package her son had sent from Ohio. The long-expected and long-awaited had finally come. She had slept only in snatches last night — she had to keep getting up and checking to make sure the thing he had sent was real, and that it was still there. Finally she had slept with it under her pillow, like a bridesmaid with a piece of wedding cake.
Now she used her key to open the small door around the corner from the hotel’s main entrance and went down three steps to a long hallway painted flat green and lined with Dandux laundry carts. They were piled high with freshly washed and ironed bed-linen. The hallway was filled with its clean smell, a smell that Martha always associated, in some vague way, with the smell of freshly baked bread. The faint sound of Muzak drifted down from the lobby, but these days Martha heard it no more than she heard the hum of the service elevators or the rattle of china in the kitchen.
Halfway down the hall was a door marked CHIEFS OF HOUSEKEEPING. She went in, hung up her coat, and passed through the big room where the Chiefs — there were eleven in all — took their coffee-breaks, worked out problems of supply and demand, and tried to keep up with the endless paperwork. Beyond this room with its huge desk, wall-length bulletin board, and perpetually overflowing ashtrays was a dressing room. Its walls were plain green cinderblock. There were benches, lockers, and two long steel rods festooned with the kind of coathangers you can’t steal.
At the far end of the dressing room was the door leading into the shower and bathroom area.
This door now opened and Darcy Sagamore appeared, wrapped in a fluffy Le Palais bathrobe and a plume of warm steam. She took one look at Martha’s bright face and came to her with her arms out, laughing. ‘It came, didn’t it?’ she cried. ‘You got it! It’s written all over your face! Yes sir and yes ma’am!’
Martha didn’t know she was going to weep until the tears came. She hugged Darcy and put her face against Darcy’s damp black hair.
‘That’s all right, honey,’ Darcy said. ‘You go on and let it all out.’
‘It’s just that I’m so proud of him, Darcy — so damn proud.’
‘Of course you are. That’s why you’re crying, and that’s fine . . . but I want to see it as soon as you stop.’ She grinned then. ‘You can hold it, though. If I dripped on that baby, I gotta believe you might poke my eye out.’
So, with the reverence reserved for an object of great holiness (which, to Martha Rosewall, it was), she removed her son’s first novel from the blue canvas tote. She had wrapped it carefully in tissue paper and put it under her brown nylon uniform. She now carefully removed the tissue so that Darcy could view the treasure.
Darcy looked carefully at the cover, which showed three Marines, one with a bandage wrapped around his head, charging up a hill with their guns firing. Blaze of Glory, printed in fiery red-orange letters, was the title. And below the picture was this: A Novel by Peter Rosewall.
‘All right, that’s good, wonderful, but now show me the other!’ Darcy spoke in the tones of a woman who wants to dispense with the merely interesting and go directly to the heart of the matter.
Martha nodded and turned unhesitatingly to the dedication page, where Darcy read: ‘This book is dedicated to my mother, MARTHA ROSEWALL. Mom, I couldn’t have done it without you.’ Below the printed dedication this was added in a thin, sloping, and somehow old-fashioned script: ‘And that’s no lie. Love you, Mom! Pete.’
‘Why, isn’t that just the sweetest thing?’ Darcy asked, and swiped at her dark eyes with the heel of her hand.
‘It’s more than sweet,’ Martha said. She re-wrapped the book in the tissue paper. ‘It’s true.’ She smiled, and in that smile her old friend Darcy Sagamore saw something more than love. She saw triumph.
After punching out at three o’clock, Martha and Darcy frequently stopped in at La Pâtisserie, the hotel’s coffee shop. On rare occasions they went into Le Cinq, the little pocket bar just off the lobby, for something a little stronger, and this day was a Le Cinq occasion if there had ever been one. Darcy got her friend comfortably situated in one of the booths, and left her there with a bowl of Goldfish crackers while she spoke briefly to Ray, who was tending bar that afternoon.