Monday, February 17, 2020

A Rest Stop

"Someone wise once said, ‘America is a business.’  Well, as I see it, business is about power."
     “We’re not really here to talk about the whole country, are we?”
     “Why not?”
     “Okay, fine.  But start from the beginning.”

***

“The first thing about it is a romance.  Enos Cherry meets Jay Dumpleton.  Cherry was a cop, Dumpleton ran a charm shop over on Clybourn Avenue.  He responds to an attempted burglary, and she’s half out of her mind, and at first that’s all it is, at least as far as she knows.  She has no idea Cherry knew the burglar, and not in a professional capacity, and that he wasn’t the one who responded to the scene strictly because he was in the area.  All a part of the plot, you see.”
     “Of course.”
     “All the same, there are sparks.  Dumpleton’s not some spinster, she’s young, and he’s young, and they get to talking, and eventually they exchange numbers, she gets a text, and they meet up later.  Turns out they have good chemistry, or whatever it is love is supposed to be. 
     “Anyway, this part doesn’t really interest me.  I feel kind of guilty about it.  Let’s move on.”
     “Okay.”

***

“The second thing about it is the mattress franchise, Rest Stop.  That’s where Frank McCoy enters the picture.”
     “They’re everywhere.”
     “That’s kind of the point.  Anyway, this particular Rest Stop happens to have opened in the exact same location as Dumpleton’s charm shop, where it used to be.  That’s what I mean by ‘the first thing,’ ‘the second thing.’  The Cherry/Dumpleton romance happens first, and then later, McCoy’s Rest Stop.”
     “I got that.”
     “Okay.  Well, McCoy’s not happy.  He hates it.  Every day, the store’s empty.  As you say, there are Rest Stops everywhere, and they never seem to be doing any business.  He could be sleeping on one of those mattresses for anyone would care.  He owns this location, he’s his own salesman.  Long story, that, but kind of beside the point.
     “This particular day, it’s the absolute worst.  He had been watching the news the previous night, heard about what happened to Cherry, they were old friends, and now he’s distraught, can’t believe this is what he has to do, but he has no choice, it’s just business, right?  He shows up like always.  Only today, he gets a visit from a different cop, some joker who never even knew Cherry, didn’t care what just happened, and is there because someone wants to investigate McCoy’s business, says he got a tip, that sort of thing.  McCoy doesn’t want to give time of day, just wants to be miserable about Cherry’s death and the general nightmare of obtaining his life’s dream of running a Rest Stop.
     “Anyway, this part doesn’t make any sense without the next part, either.”

***

“The third thing is, McCoy’s really being investigated because of his friendship with Alexander Quinn.  Quinn’s a regular lowlife, but nobody can ever pin anything on him.  McCoy himself doesn’t really know what Quinn’s into, but our guy Quinn just so happens to be this particular Rest Stop’s most frequent visitor.  I would say ‘customer,’ but as far as I know, he never bought a mattress there.
     “What he does is stop by and talk McCoy’s ear off about ‘Chicago rest,’ and he can’t shut up about it.  McCoy has no idea what it even means, but Quinn just keeps saying ‘Chicago rest,’ ‘Chicago rest,’ ‘Chicago rest,’ every time he visits.  Drives McCoy crazy.”
     “I suppose I could see why.”
     “You have no idea.  This isn’t like Chicago-style, deep dish pizza.  ‘Chicago rest,’ as it turns out, as the cop informs McCoy, is a drug.  McCoy legitimately had no idea.  And Quinn was using his Rest Stop as a front all along.  Slipped the merchandise under the mattresses, as it were, every time.
     “Or so McCoy protests.  But as we know, Quinn and McCoy were good friends all along, just as McCoy knew Cherry.  They were all in on it.
     “But let me tell you about someone else.”

***

“Stumpy.  I don’t remember his real name at this point.  I’ve been calling him Stumpy so long, it doesn’t even matter.  Stumpy was my best friend, going back fifty years, all the way to Vietnam, or I guess, Thailand.  We met in the service, obviously.  He refueled planes, had a knack for backing up.  Was a Catholic.  That’s what always got me about him.
     “A Catholic.  Hard to find anyone in America less respected.  With good reason, right?  Bunch of perverts. 
     “Except Stumpy was a straight arrow, as straight as they came.  Took everything we had to get him to even look at a girly magazine, and even then it was just a novelty to him.  There was a picture, and he’s grinning, and that’s it.
     “Anyway, we were good friends, and we stayed that way, even when we left the service, but after a while, as these things tend to go, we drifted apart.  I came back home to Chicago, and he stayed up there in New England.  I think he went to live somewhere in Maine, eventually.”

***

“Why are you telling me about Stumpy?”
     “It’s relevant.  He’s Catholic, okay?”
     “So you said.”
     “Thought that’d mean something to you.”

***

“Anyway, that Stumpy, he always got me thinking, not because we had a lot of deep conversations or anything.  We played cards, mostly, something called Hand and Foot, a lot of the time.  I wouldn’t remember how, anymore, so don’t ask me.  Been too long.  It was a long time ago.  I feel bad about it.
     “And that’s the thing!  I never felt bad about things, before Stumpy.  I mean, we were just kids, right?  Just out of high school, the draft was telling us to sign up or face the heat, and so that’s what we did, because we didn’t have anything better, because we were just a couple of poor Americans. 
     “Do you know that we could hear the action?  All the time.  In Thailand, I mean.  But we weren’t really a part of it.  Sort of like Flyover America.  That was our war experience.  So we did our time, had local girls agreeing to work as our maids.  Really!  That’s the kind of war we had.  We played cards, had maids, and listened in on the fighting.
     “And all along, there was Stumpy, the good Catholic.  Attended mass every Sunday.  Said he’d never missed.  I guess in those days it was still being done in Latin.  I can’t even imagine.  I guess you’re too young to know what I’m talking about, right?”
     “I’ve heard about it.”
     “So he gave me the concept of Catholic guilt.  There’s so much shit between all the different Christianities, and of course all the shit you hear about Catholics themselves, you sometimes forget there’s actual, I don’t know, theology involved, whatever you want to call it.  It’s not all just, I don’t know, going to mass.  Catholic guilt.  Wish I’d never heard about it.”

***

“I felt plenty guilty when I heard about Cherry, when he was shot dead like a dog.  The papers, the news, nobody said anything about the Rest Stop thing, nobody knew it had anything to do with it, much less Jay Dumpleton, how she’d been muscled out of that, what was it, charm shop of hers.  Nobody knew I had anything to do with it, of course.  But we all knew each other.  It was a regular conspiracy.
     “We considered it, in all innocence, to be a business opportunity.  At first, none of us knew what Quinn was going to do, and then it was only me, and I never told McCoy, and yeah, I felt guilty about it almost immediately, and damn Stumpy for that.  There was no chance of telling Cherry, obviously, or there would have been real trouble, and not with the law.  Real trouble before the real trouble, anyway.  Although I guess it would’ve saved his life.”

***

“I get caught up in it, all these names, all this guilt.  I swear, I never felt guilt before, not when I was a kid, certainly.  Kids don’t feel guilt.  It’s the opposite of childhood, right?  Kids do things.  Sometimes they’re told they did the wrong thing, and they get punished.  It’s really no different in adulthood, right?  The concept of guilt has nothing to do with punishment.  Punishment is what someone else can do to you, guilt is what you do to yourself.  I don’t know, but I never heard of it before Stumpy.  He said, later, that he always felt guilty that he wasn’t there when his mom died.  How could he?  He was still there, with me, in Thailand.  He was on his way home when it happened, after he was told she was on the verge.  And then it happened, and he never stopped feeling guilty about it.  Why? 
     “So you see, it’s not just from the things you do, but the things you don’t.  That’s guilt.  That’s complete and utter nonsense, right?  That’s got nothing to do with being Catholic, right?  Being Catholic means you go to mass every week.  That’s it.  And then some of their clergy abuse their power.  But everyone with power does that.  Right?  I never got it, singling them out.  I guess there’s a whole history.  Nothing I was ever a part of, nothing that ever concerned me.  But it was always there, and I guess that was enough. 
     “Stumpy never made a big deal about it, and none of us did, either.  He was just a geek, but even geeks get married, and that’s exactly what he did, soon after he got home.  Like the rest of us.  He started a family.  And that was that.”

***

“And I hardly ever talk to the guy anymore, haven’t seen him in person in years.  We live in different parts of the country, what do you want to do about it?  My whole life now means nothing to him, and vice versa, right?  He wouldn’t know the first thing about Enos Cherry, wouldn’t understand why it hurts me so much that Cherry’s dead, but I guess…that’s guilt.  It wouldn’t just be empathy for him.  I want to laugh.  But it isn’t funny.”

***

“Cherry wasn’t in uniform when it happened.  The other cop, he just saw a black man, and what happened happened.  They were working the same angle.  Never even knew.
     “Anyway, that was how it all ended, before all this.”

***

“He wasn’t just a cop, wasn’t just a friend.”
     “No, of course not.”
     “How old were you when you found out?”
     “That my father cheated on my mother?  Far too old.  I guess that’s how it started, or at least that’s what I like to tell myself.  What I used to like to tell myself.”

***

“But the truth is, I didn’t learn guilt well enough from Stumpy, or not soon enough.  Maybe I was already too old for that, too.  Or too young.  Maybe age has nothing to do with it.  I don’t know.  I don’t know anymore.”
     “It’s okay.”
     “Yeah.”

***

“I used to think, a man is only as strong as the community he builds up around him.”
     “Do you still believe that?”
     “No.”
     “So how did you replace it?”
     “By trusting in greater things than myself.”

***

Carthage Daly sat, pensive, and Connor Tong sat beside him.

***

“So that’s the whole shape of it.  We were all in on it.  Cherry went to pressure Dumpleton so we could get her retail space, just another lousy Rest Stop, which McCoy would front, and Quinn would exploit, and there I was, calling all the shots.  Until Cherry was shot.  And then it all fell apart.”

***

“And here I was, at the funeral, and I wasn’t thinking about Enos Cherry at all.  My own brother.  I was wondering what my old pal Stumpy was up to.  What he’d think.  Except I already knew.
     “And because that’s how these things work out, Dumpleton’s running the Rest Stop now.  Of course.  I don’t know what I’d say to her, given the opportunity.”

***

The chaplain walked out of the cell.  He’d been visiting Carthage regularly for months, never got anything resembling honesty from him, and all of a sudden, Carthage poured out his soul, as it were.  Later, he found out, once he’d learned Stumpy’s given name, that his wife had recently passed away, from cancer.  Carthage, of course, couldn’t attend the funeral. 
     The chaplain wondered about the vagaries of life.  He wouldn’t sleep well that night.

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