“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.
