Chapter 8 Redheaded Woodpecker #3
The third night, I made drinks for a table of men, one beer and five ginger ales. I watched them curiously. Their conversation
was low-pitched but I remembered what Ross had told me and studied the silences. When people converse, they fidget, crack
their knuckles, glance around them, maybe even stretch. But these men were motionless as they looked into each other’s eyes.
When one talked, the others attended, their hands flat on the table. Finally one of them made a fist and quietly pressed it
into his palm. He got up. He was handsome, not large but graceful and strong-looking, and I knew his suit had to go fifteen
hundred dollars easy. He walked away from the table and spoke to me.
“Hello, Irene,” he said. “I’m Jack Melodia. I own this place. Welcome.”
“Hello,” I said, putting out my hand, which he took. His palm was warm and dry. He held my hand just a beat longer than necessary
and raised it slightly, as if he meant to kiss my hand, then released it with a wide white smile.
“Have fun here. Make lots of money. Be careful.”
What did he mean by that?
Maybe he referred to those very occasional outbreaks of customer fisticuffs.
Nights passed quickly. I slammed drinks, watched mesmerized as the tongues of patrons literally protruded from their mouths
during the shows, and practiced some very inventive dance steps in case I ever wanted to impress somebody with my strut-and-grind
capabilities. My hunch that I really had the personality of someone born in 1965 was confirmed by my instinctive response
to the disco music. I broke up one fight with a single short bark (“Stop that now!”) that I borrowed from my mother, but had
to duck under the bar when another brief brawl ensued that required Kelly, the bouncer, to step in, taking hold of two full-size
men by the backs of their collars and dragging them to the exit with the ease of a cat moving her kittens.
Still, I found myself physically exhausted, my desk-riding days doing me no favors as I sprinted in my ultrasupportive black
leather tennies from one end of that shiny granite bar to the other, as I hunkered down on bended knees to wash glasses and
pull beers and replenish ice, and the combination of that workout and cold temperatures was so potent that I got twinges in
my ankles and fingers and had to rub them out with Aspercreme. It was worse than my old days as waitstaff at Angel on the
Rock, when I’d struggled with sudden leg cramps in the middle of the night, so painful I had to jump out of bed and stretch
until they went away—at least until I learned the old hack of self-medicating with a spoonful of pickle juice. Possibly, I
was just a wimp.
I remembered then listening aghast to the tale told by two of my grad school friends who had hiked to Everest Base Camp the previous spring.
They described the misery of altitude sickness and huddling in all their layers of down as temperatures suddenly fell to zero at night, and that was barely even the starting point!
Those same two friends, now a couple, had contacted me not long ago, inviting me to join them on the Kenosha Dunes Trail, which they referred to as a “cute little baby hike.” At the time, I agreed, imagining this would be a breeze, but now, taxed even by a few shifts tending bar, I realized this might be the apex of my athletic destiny.
My windowless bedroom at Nell’s Victorian hellhole was unexpectedly comforting, as if I were a mouse in the hollow of a fallen
tree. My single bed, demulcent with one of my Grandma Bigelow’s hand-pieced comforters, was cozy and warm. I fell into bed
at night and plunged into sleep, sometimes still fully clothed, with the light still on and my paperback, opened to the single
page I’d stayed awake long enough to read, splayed over my face. In the morning, I would often find one of my false eyelashes
stuck to the book and an imprint of my lip-sticked mouth, as if I’d kissed the page.
It was more than just unaccustomed physical exertion and the new employment of old skills, of course. It was grief.
I longed for Sam, my desire for him an affliction like a headache that crouched in my forehead always waiting to spring. I
longed for him, so I made a conscious decision to fill every hour with things that would help me avoid even the thought of
him. I was not about to fall apart, especially over a guy. The effort felt like removing the bulb from a light that wouldn’t
turn off. I signed up for a baking class. With a group from the local chapter of the writer’s guild, I volunteered to read
a chapter twice a week to elders over lunch. I built all these distracters around my new job.
You can only keep yourself so busy for so long, though.
I was never particularly one for lots of reflection.
I told myself that I did things rather than mulling them over.
But now I was forced to admit that staying upbeat, for me, required a hefty daily dose of denial.
When it came to deep thoughts about the kind of person I was, my chosen rationale had been what I didn’t know wouldn’t hurt me. The truth was that it already had.
One afternoon, as I left my sister’s house, I got a text from Sam: Need to talk to you. Personal.
I responded as though he’d invited me to jet to Bali for the weekend. But I forced myself to hold off for two hours before
responding: When? Where? Why?
I’ll call you, he texted, and my heart went still. Would he call to set up a time for us to meet, during which meeting we would, quite
naturally, drift back together (although that would be wrong!)?
Instead, he called nearly immediately. I was struck silent just hearing his voice.
“Reenie,” he said. “I heard that you were working at Ophelia. It’s not a good idea. I say this as a friend.”
The term stung. Was that all I was to him? Was that all I ever was?
Quickly, he recalled for me a moment when I’d asked him if he was ever disgusted by his work, by the people he had to defend.
He’d told me that yes, he’d defended people who did what they said they did and he’d gotten them off, but never anyone whose
guilt so offended him that he couldn’t discharge his duty in good conscience. I agreed that I remembered the conversation,
and I remembered asking, “Do I know any of them? Mass murderers? Heartless career criminals?”
“You know one of them,” he said.
“You mean Felicity.”
“I mean John Marco Melodia, who owns that club where you work. Jack.”
“He’s just a businessman. And I’ve barely even seen him. He’s not a gangster.”
“Well, he is, Reenie, he is a gangster. He doesn’t traffic fourteen-year-old girls from third world countries, or import heroin, that I know of.
He doesn’t get his hands dirty, but he has friends who don’t mind.
He has a great many friends, including one of my partners at Damiano, Chen, and Damiano, who grew up with him.
I didn’t work with him directly, but I did indirectly, because I assisted his counsel. ”
“Well, what could be so heinous, Sam? This is Madison, Wisconsin, not Chicago in 1955.”
“You can look up the next thing I’m going to say to you, Reenie, but you can’t look up the thing I’m going to say after that.
I have to trust in your goodness, and your feelings for me, that what I say will never go any farther than this.” I gave Sam
my word. This conversation was making me wildly late for work, but although I probably needed the job more than the job needed
me, I was still destined to be a short-timer, so I wasn’t terribly concerned. I wouldn’t be counting on Lily Landry for a
job reference, although I wondered what Lily really knew about her boss.
Jack’s friends apparently helped their own friends make sure that their places of business never suffered mysterious events,
such as surprise fires or floods. But then, a couple of Madison’s seedier roach motels burned to the ground, on the same night,
no less, in conflagrations so ferocious that trucks from several departments were hard put to extinguish them. It turned out
that these properties had been for sale. A developer was interested, but Jack kept hiking up the price, and the blood between
the two was getting bad, then downright polluted.
“You won’t be surprised to learn that Mr. Melodia made out better with insurance payouts,” Sam said. And then that business
adversary went somewhere, like Missoula, at least according to his estranged wife.
“Did he really go to Missoula?”
“I don’t know,” said Sam. “Does anybody?”
“So, all that is a matter of record. He’s not going to want to come over and kill me if I mention this in my story, not that I can imagine why I would.”
Sam said nothing for a long while. Then he said, “Don’t mess with this, Reenie.”
I said, “Too late.”
Before he could hang up, I asked, “Did you ask Felicity to talk to me?”
“I asked her again. She shut me down right away, Reenie, and I could tell she was mad at me for carrying the water for you.
I did tell her that we had been involved briefly and she did smile about that but she won’t talk to any press, not just you . . .”
“I’m not any—”
“She knows that. Reenie, in all fairness, I’m afraid for her. She’s so thin she looks like she’s dying. I try to send food
to her, but I have other things I have to do too, and she says she can’t eat the jail food at all, and I don’t blame her.
People who work there say she’s quiet and polite but they can hear her crying at night. They almost put her on suicide watch
but the night county matron, and yes, they still do call them that, put her in the holding cell full-time, next to her desk,
so she could talk to her about books and things. They made sure she has binoculars. A couple of people brought her suet cakes.”
“She eats suet cakes?”
“For the birds, Reenie. Somebody rigged up a little sort of feeder from a bent hanger outside her window. She watches the
birds and she reads. She walks in the yard for an hour. I’m afraid for her. If the worst happens, if that happens, I don’t
think she’ll survive.”