Chapter 9 American Robin #2
Lolo began to apply her false eyelashes. “I thought it was because she gained weight. She was miserable about that.” She added,
“She did gain weight. But she was too super skinny before. She looked really good.”
“But it wasn’t that?”
“It was more than that. She was all fine one week and then, boom! She didn’t show up . . . That was what . . . months ago?
And after she left, Lily started acting all nervous too.” Guiltily, I thought of Lolo getting a job stripping at Ophelia at
just eighteen, when most girls weren’t even out of high school or were just starting college. She was a smart kid, so . . .
why?
Don’t, I scolded myself. Just don’t.
And then, just as abruptly, I forgave myself for wondering.
Why not ask why? Lolo’s work wasn’t illegal, or particularly dangerous, but it was, yes, it was demeaning.
It was pandering, gratifying a distasteful desire.
It wasn’t really work you’d wish for a daughter to do if you had a daughter, unless, I guess, you did it too.
And even if you did, you’d be fighting with all your might to convince your daughter to do something more worthy of her than being peered at by men old enough to be her dad.
Yes, I was making a moral judgment on Dovey.
But since when was it wrong to make a moral judgment?
I steered my concentration back as Lolo wetted down a sponge and began applying her foundation, the thick, waterproof kind
that would stay put even with sweat and hot lights. “Did you ask Felicity?”
“I tried. She didn’t answer my calls. I went by her house. She wasn’t there.” She stood up and began to use body glue to apply
twirlers to her nipples, then put on a silver shirt that she knotted under her breasts. She shook out a silver pair of hip-hugger
leggings.
“And Lily?”
“I didn’t have to ask her. She was weird. Almost like she was scared too.”
“Of what?”
“Of whom.”
“Okay, of who?”
“She was scared of Jack.”
“Okay, let’s forget about Lily for the moment. Did you get the impression that Felicity was scared of Jack as well?” Lolo
nodded, pressing her lips together for emphasis. “Somebody said Felicity loved Jack.”
“She did. She talked like she did. Or at least, she talked like he loved her. She didn’t talk about things he gave her, but
I know for a fact that he bought that Mercedes for her. And he furnished her condominium. The pool. The landscaping. Have
you ever seen that place? The trees in the shapes of birds?” I said that Archangel had shown me a picture of the living room.
“But then something happened.”
“Do you know what?”
“If I did, I wouldn’t tell you probably because I’m not entirely .
. . I guess you could possibly say I’m scared of him too.
” This went along with what Sam had said, that Jack really was a gangster, that he was capable of the kind of hurt that people assumed went out with movies based on events in the 1960s.
“Only one who isn’t is Archangel. She’s scared of nothing. ”
“Well, if you don’t know what changed, who would know?”
Lolo just shrugged.
“Lily?”
At that, Lolo snorted. “I’m sure! But good luck getting Lily to say anything to you about Jack. Especially now. She knows
better than anyone else . . .”
“Knows what?” Lolo shook her head. “Knows what, Lolo? Would he, like, keep your paycheck? Or key your car? Or . . . ”
“Key your car? Come on. You think that’s what people are afraid of?”
“Can’t you tell me anything else?”
“No!” Lolo said, her face slamming closed like a door. “Ask Felicity yourself.”
Would that I could, I thought, and remembered my sister. “It really is like porn,” Nell said. “You think it’s going to be this forbidden delight.
But it gets boring after ten minutes.”
“Are you going to hang around?”
“For a while maybe,” she said. “I can take the car and come back for you later.”
“I can get a ride to your house. But I have to let Lily go back to the door. I have to be behind the bar.”
“Okay.”
“I’m sorry for stranding you behind the bar,” I told Lily. “But before you go, give me one moment. Let me ask you just one
thing—do you know why Felicity left?”
Before Lily could even open her mouth to answer, one of the guys at the bar quite calmly got up, lifted the guy next to him bodily two feet off the ground, and threw him on top of a nearby table, which broke in half like a dry graham cracker.
Immediately, it was team bar against team table, with everyone from scholarly little nerds to bluff neighborhood types to ex–football players gone to fat, along with a few suited wannabe hoodlums, flooding across the room to join the fray.
Until now, the fights I’d seen involved no more than a little bluster, some pushing and shoving, lots of sweating and slurring
and swearing. They were nothing like this. Stripped to her undies, Dovey jumped off the stage and vanished. Kelly charged
into the melee like Goliath, but promptly ended up on his butt on the floor. I put out my hand to Nell, who jumped up on her
barstool. A guy grabbed her by the shoulder, and I picked up my ice water pitcher and threw it in his face. Nell scuttled
over the bar and hid behind me. I pulled both of us down onto the floor, which was just what Lily had told me to do in the
event. When she said that, during my interview, I thought she was just being dramatic. I glanced up, and there was Sam. What
was Sam doing here? Of all times? I was so caught up in the action that I couldn’t even compose myself to decide if I should
run to him or ignore him.
He was, however, ignoring me. He was mesmerized. Nobody’s idea of a street-fighting man, he was clearly as fascinated as I
was by the willingness of testosterone-fueled men, ordinary men who had jobs and paid taxes, to go batshit crazy over something
that had nothing to do with anyone except the original battlers—if even with them. He would later tell me that he had never
been in a physical fight, even on an athletic field, but that he almost admired the complete abandon of the combatants.
They huffed and grappled and bellowed, their faces mottled with effort and booze, throwing wild roundhouse punches, only the
tiniest percentage of which landed, and those with no visible harm.
It was fun for them. It was fun for me in all honesty. Nell’s eyes glittered. She was getting the full dark-side extravaganza.
It quickly got serious. One guy got hit and went down hard.
He struggled to his knees, a cut on his head and one on his lip that bled histrionically.
That guy’s friend began to pound the one who threw the punch and soon his nose was a pulp, and he was unconscious on the floor. Two other guys waded into the fray.
“Cut it out!” Lily yelled. “Stop!” In response, still another guy broke a beer bottle and advanced, holding it like a knife,
taking swipes at the guts of anyone who came near him.
Then, suddenly, all the overhead lights switched on. It was like pulling a sheet off a corpse. The wreckage of broken glass,
blood, smashed food, spilled drinks, stained and dropping wallpaper was exposed. The brawlers stood up straight, or pulled
themselves up off the floor, and scuttled away like beetles. Some of them bumped into police who were coming through the door,
probably as insurance against the chance that some few customers might want to pursue a drunken beef. One of the uniformed
police called out, “Lovely Lily Landry! How are you doing, partner?”
“It’s the finest! Better now you’re here, Rambo!” she called back. This was evidently a private joke.
It was when Jack came in that I noticed he was handsome in the way that Sam was: compact, dark-haired, not a large man but
graceful, immaculate, capable, quietly classy. I didn’t know if it was Sam’s brief on him that prompted the next thing I noticed,
which was that he was also something Sam was not—dangerous. He said to the battlers, who were still wandering around as if
they’d just been roughly roused from a nap, “Get out of my club.”
A police officer knelt next to the more aggressive of the bleeders, applying pressure with a bar towel. “He needs an ambulance,”
he said. As if they’d heard their cue, paramedics burst through the door.
Jack asked Lily if she or anyone else were hurt, putting a comforting hand on her wrist when she shook her head. He then turned
to me. “If it isn’t Irene, a good bartender, a bad fake, a nosy writer,” he said affably. “Who is this?”
“This is my sister, Eleanor,” I told him. I plucked up my nerve. “I would love to speak with you about my friend Felicity Wild, who as you know . . .”
“Yes. A terrible circumstance. A lovely and intelligent woman. And yes, of course, I’ll talk to you. I’m an open book.”
I doubted that. Further, I was stunned by his agreeable response. We made a date for coffee the following day, as Sam, clearly
astonished, said nothing. As if they’d been waiting outside the door for our conversation to end, a burly crew of cleaners
with shovels and buckets and wheely bins rolled in. I overheard Jack say that the club would be open for business at the usual
time.
I told Lily that I would return the next day, in the early afternoon, to fill out my last time sheet and turn in my black
vest with the monogrammed pocket of the busty woman in silhouette. I told Lily how that vest, which I wore over my black shirt
from Target, had drawn some stares at the coffee shop—and that I’d made the mistake of grumpily assuming that people were
openly gaping at my bosom. She laughed a little then and turned back to brushing broken glass off the bar.
I then approached Sam and asked, “What are you doing? I mean, I’m glad you’re here but . . .”
“I wanted to tell you something, and when you didn’t answer, I got scared,” he said.
“What did you want to tell me?”
He gestured at the ruin of the room and said, “Well, for some odd reason, Reenie, it just doesn’t spring to mind at the moment.
And you’re obviously okay.”