Guy Noir and the Straight Skinny Read online

  “He put a couple leaves of lettuce in the pastrami and a raw onion. You want I should remove them?”

  “Maybe take smaller bites. Maybe chew with your mouth shut. It sounds like you’re eating a sheet of plywood.”

  “When did you start instructing other people how to eat their food, mister?” And I took a huge bite and leaned toward him and chewed it, splonch-splonch-splonch, with my mouth wide open—childish, I know.

  “Two can play that game,” he said, and pulled out an apple and chomped it, horselike, showing me his big incisors. And then my cell phone rang. It was a 612 number on the caller ID. I answered, and a nasal voice said, “Guy. Been looking all over. Thought you mighta skipped town.”

  “Why would I be skipping town, Larry?”

  “’Cause you know I’m looking for you, that’s why.”

  “Where are you?” I says.

  “Where are you, Guy?”

  “Minneapolis. Sitting in the Forum Cafeteria on Seventh Street across from Dayton’s, enjoying the excellent goulash.”

  “Nice try, pal.” I felt a hand on my shoulder. A hostile hand. And turned, and there he was, snapping his cell phone shut, decked out in a dark blue gabardine suit, red polka-dot hanky in the breast pocket, pink striped shirt and green bowtie, a snap-brim fedora, tassel shoes, lavender socks. “Mr. Larry,” I said, “you’ve been out shopping, I see. You’re looking very spiffy.”

  He pulled up a chair and sat down. He plucked a toothpick out of his pocket and chewed on it thoughtfully and leaned forward and said, “Let me give you some advice, Guy. You got two choices here, one of them good, the other not so good. Naomi has filled your head with all sorts of sugarplum fantasies about Never-Never Land, but take a moment if you will and look around you. You’re in St. Paul, Minnesota. You’re sixty-five. Your gross income last year was less than what they pay the ladies in the grade-school cafeteria. Busboys earn more than you. These are facts. And let me give you another fact. The Food and Drug Administration is not gonna let you sell tapeworms in medicinal form to the American public. Naomi Fallopian wants to sell them retail in upscale men’s clothing stores. Ain’t gonna happen. The FDA is about to land on you with both feet. Hard. They’re gonna throw a fine at you that’ll clean you out for years to come and top that with three years in Sandstone prison. Not a happy prospect. The mattresses are hard plastic, the food is starchy, and every day a screw sticks his hand up your hinder. Your social life is limited to men with chronic depression and the girls in the picture magazines. That’s where Naomi is leading you, pal. She hates men. Read her books. She’s lured you out on a limb, and now she’s gonna saw it off. She’ll take the dough and flitter off to Switzerland with some male model in skinny jeans and leave you to pay the piper.”

  I was half done with the pastrami sandwich and my worms were happy. I gave Wendell the counterman the high sign and said, “Coffee with cream.” The worms tended to get twitchy on coffee. Cream might lessen the shock of caffeine.

  “Your alternative, as I see it,” said Mr. Larry, “is to let me and my guys take the worms off your hands and come up with another business plan that gets around the FDA, like maybe selling the stuff via the Internet and shipping it out of Jamaica. Anyway, that’s our problem. If you turn over the goods now, we’ll pay you exactly the same as she’s paying you, not a penny less. In cash. You’ll never hear from us, never meet with us—zero involvement on your part. If, God forbid, there’s a criminal conspiracy indictment, you’re out of the loop.”

  I waved to Wendell. “Another pastrami sandwich. And mashed potatoes.”

  Mr. Larry handed me a manila envelope containing a sixteen-page complaint of statutory purloinment of research on behalf of Dr. Buddy Wooden and naming me as a co-defendant. “Haven’t filed it and hope I won’t have to,” he said, “but it’ll fill you in on the details. Interesting reading.” He was about to walk away and then turned back and asked me if I’d ever heard of the Bogus Brothers.

  I had, of course, but I feigned ignorance. They were three bullies, originally from Bowlus, who walked around itching to sock someone in the jaw. Professional bouncers who worked clubs like Hook & Ladder, the Blowhole, Fresh Meat, and the No Holds Bar.

  “We’ve paid them a retainer as possible consultants in the case,” he said. “Hope we don’t need them, but they’re there if we do.” He smiled a weaselish smile and said, “No rush. I’ve got all the time in the world. Have a good day,” and ankled out, toothpick in his mouth, whistling “Please Don’t Talk About Me When I’m Gone.”

  7

  Wrestling with dark angels

  I SAT AT MY DESK watching a big hairy spider rappelling down from the ceiling, and steered her toward the volume of Emily Dickinson’s Selected Poems, which I keep on my desk as a magnet to attract sensitive women should I ever meet one. The book was opened to “Because I could not stop for death, he kindly stopped for me,” and the hapless arachnid landed there near the word immortality, and I snapped the book shut. If you are going to wind up a splotch, why not in the margin of a work of art?

  I knew I should’ve told Mr. Larry, “Hell no, what kind of a louse do you take me for?” and laughed in his face and I had not done that. It didn’t even occur to me. So that is the kind of louse I am. The very one he took me for. A wavering friend. A lucrative offer to betray a pal does not always bring out the best in a man, I am sorry to say. I was afraid he might be right, that the cards were stacked and I was a sacrificial goat in the whole deal and Naomi was planning to throw me to the dogs of the FDA. I tried to banish the thought and it kept popping back up.

  I woke up in the middle of the night, and a small insistent voice was telling me, “She is playing you like a fifteen-dollar concertina, and if the FDA comes around, she will leave you high and dry. Take his money and head for Key West. What is freedom worth, anyway?”

  I tried to arouse my conscience by watching Bill Moyers on TV, and reading a Gideon Bible I’d stolen from a hotel room, and by walking around in a Lutheran neighborhood of south Minneapolis, but all I could think was—“Call Larry and turn over the worms, and you get a bucket of money and you stay out of prison. What part of that do you not like?” He had planted the seed of suspicion in my ear, and though I knew it was bad, nonetheless it stuck in there, and I could imagine the feds at my door, submachine guns in hand, and Naomi fleeing with Mr. Beautiful to a chalet in the Swiss Alps and me taking the rap and spending eight to ten years fending off the advances of desperate old cons.

  All I had to do was pick up a phone and call. Larry B. Larry had given me all five of his phone numbers: home, office, cell, car phone, fax.

  I checked my horoscope for the day, which said: “You are a child of the universe, no less than the trees and the stars, and you have a right to be here.” No help there.

  Well, I thought, if you intend to betray someone, at least you should call them up and tell them personally. I called her over and over. No answer. Her voice mail was full, unable to accept new messages.

  NAOMI WAS GONE. SHE HAD launched Elongate and gotten rich, and what did she need me for? Zero. She was a successful author—it wouldn’t hurt her much if she lost those spare queens in my file drawer.

  “But it would hurt you,” said my conscience in a loud clear voice. “One thing you’ve always admired about the Midwest is the prevalence of trust. People count on each other here.”

  “Oh, go soak your head,” says me.

  “It’s true,” said the conscience. “Your pig farmer, for example. A truck pulls up to the pen, and the farmer herds a truckload of pigs off to be slaughtered. He doesn’t count them or weigh them. He may not know the truck driver, but he gives him a check to cover transportation, and the driver goes off with the livestock. Pure trust. A handshake and a wave. A week or two later, he gets a check from the buyer, whoever that may be. No IDs are checked, no bonds posted, no ten-page con
tract signed and notarized. This is a culture where a person is trusted unless he proves untrustworthy. When you cheat, you are vandalizing something beautiful.”

  “Bad example,” says me. “I’m the pig being loaded on the truck, and I’m trusting the driver to take me to an amusement park to ride the Tilt-A-Whirl and instead a guy is going to fire a bolt into my forehead and slit my piggy throat.” I sat in my office, staring at the telephone, telling myself Do it. Call L.B. as my fingers walked toward the keypad, and then they walked away, and then my iPhone dinged, and it was a text message from Naomi.

  Darling, I know it’s unfair, leaving you to guard the chicken coop against the coyotes while I am gallivanting around Dallas, with Santa Fe, San Francisco, Seattle, Atlantic City, Cincinnati, Atlanta, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Lake Tahoe, Omaha, St. Louis, Honolulu, Houston yet to go, and let me tell you: it’s unfair and I love it. When your book is number one, you don’t ever have to eat out of vending machines. You are cosseted and cared for, driven around in Lincoln Town Cars with leather seats by polite young men in uniform who leap to open the back door for you, you are housed in boutique hotels with French names, and whisked up in small private elevators to suites with real paintings on the walls, suites right out of Hotel Beautiful magazine, where English matrons in starched linen uniforms run you a hot bath and an hour later a Jamaican gentleman in black tie and tails serves you a Sauvignon Blanc and morsels of Sevruga caviar on quail’s eggs on toast points, while a girl named Simone fluffs your hair and paints your nails, and Ingrid your masseuse is kneading your shoulders, and your personal pianist Phillipe is rendering your favorite Gershwin, and Ariadne your aromatherapist is spritzing you with narcissus, sassafras, and cinnamon. Darling, I can never go back to the squalor of academia, the dusty offices, the dreary classrooms reeking of indifference, the horrors of the cafeteria. Nor can I return to Minnesota where everyone is expected to suffer and if you don’t, they will see to it that you do. I am much much too happy. Meanwhile, our little business enterprise is going like a house afire, mon amour. Fabulous word of mouth, sales exploding daily, and guess what? The filmmaker Michael Moore has lost 100 pounds on the pill, and now he has a workout video of himself in bikini briefs doing exercises to old labor songs. It’s called Solidarity Aerobics. Isn’t that cute? I’m on a book tour for a couple months, soaking up the critical acclaim and the phenomenal sales numbers, but I miss you desperately. There is a guy missing from my life and it is you, darling. Do keep the second week of June free, and let’s drive north to Lake of the Woods, where my cousin Will has a cabin on a heavily wooded island that is not within sight of any other island. A one-bedroom cabin with a commodious bed and a sauna just big enough for two, and I think we could make a memorable weekend.

  I checked my calendar, and the second week of June was completely free. As were the first, third, and fourth. And that was that. The prospect of sitting naked with Naomi was what moved me to call up Mr. Larry and say, “No deal. Forget it. Ixnay. No can do.”

  “Okay,” he said. “Then I will inform the Bogus Brothers that they should find you and provide additional motivation.”

  “Do what you’re going to do, and just know that I have friends who are armed and demented and too old to care what happens to them—they don’t want to spend their declining years in a herd of wheelchairs in a nursing home. They would rather go down in a blaze of hot lead.” And I hung up.

  8

  The male sits on the nest

  SPRING COMES SUDDENLY IN MINNESOTA. You’re holed up in your dank cave, living on Spam and canned water chestnuts, reading the obituary pages, your prostate feels like a hockey puck, you light a candle, you curse the darkness, and the drummer you were marching to is leading you into a vast frozen swamp. You are out of cash because detective work is slow in the winter: it’s so cold you can’t tail anybody because nobody goes anyplace because if they did, they’d freeze their tail off, which in this case would be you. So they don’t, and you don’t either. You just sit at a desk trying to visualize success, and instead you see a moonscape of suffering. It’s like trying to build self-confidence by reading the prophet Jeremiah, and no wonder you feel like a shrunken plant trying to grow in the dark. You see a gray cloud low in the sky, which looks like someone you once knew, and then realize you are looking at the reflection of your own face. It isn’t a cloud, it’s you, Bubba. You long for sunshine, vegetation, warmth. You call up Danny’s Deli to order a life-saving hot pastrami and you get an old lady on the line, and you ask for Danny or Wendell, and she screeches at you, “Wrong number, creep!” and now you hear All Things Considered in the background, and she yells, “Get out of my life or I’ll come over and cut your throat with a serrated bread knife!” and you’re shocked to realize you’ve reached a public radio listener, probably a public radio member, maybe a birdwatcher and book club member, who nonetheless has murder in her heart, and you realize how thin is our veneer of civilization, and if a blizzard hit and supermarkets ran low on food, this woman might shoot you for the last jar of pimento olives even if she does listen to Bach and Mahler—she’d bury a knife in your chest for the last chunk of Cheshire cheese. This realization pushes you to the brink of despair. Visions of liberal Unitarian women, veterans of civil rights and ERA marches, turned into raging animals. And then suddenly it’s spring—you look out the window one morning, and a girl so beautiful she makes garage doors fly open walks by in a bright green skirt and sweater—no parka, no scarf or mittens—and a breeze blows her skirt up over her shoulders revealing that she forgot to wear underwear—and she isn’t embarrassed in the least!—and two days later the tundra blossoms and burgeons and foliates, and flowers leap from the ground, and Minnesota becomes so lush and verdant, you could almost film a deodorant commercial here.

  LARRY B. LARRY FIRED OFF an ultimatum: Surrender the queens in forty-eight hours or accept the consequences. I opened the Q-T file drawer and opened the bag, and there they were, eleven of them, hatching eggs like crazy. I called Ishimoto on the cell and told him to come to my office. “Is the office secure? No Boguses?” he said. He came right over, a tiny Japanese man in black Spandex, shaved head, dark glasses, a silver canister under his arm. He walked in, and before I could say good morning, he said, “Lock the door, Mistah Cholly.” And went around pulling the shades. I tried to engage him in conversation, but he waved it off. I opened the drawer, and he scooped out the eggs with a spoon. And he said: “Did she tell you we must store the eggs in you?”

  Pardon me?

  “Eggs need to be kept in warm place. You are the host, Cholly.”

  He opened a black leather bag and brought out six little plastic balls about the size of walnuts but soft, and he pointed to my mouth and traced a line down my gullet to my belly. “Eggs safest in there.”

  “I signed up to be security. I didn’t agree to be a mule.”

  He didn’t understand. So he whipped out a cell phone and punched the number one, and there was Naomi. Why does Ishimoto have instant access to her while I have to leave messages on voice mail? Oh well.

  “Darling!!!” she cried.

  “Where are you??” I replied.

  “Bengali, on a trolley.” The publicity tour was taking her around the world (Sun Valley, Mount Denali, Bali, Sea of Galilee), the book was an international hit, published on the subcontinent under the title Pruning God’s Garden, and Indian women, long oppressed, sold into marriage, abused, enslaved, were buying it by the carload. Naomi was number one in New Delhi and on her way to Shanghai and having a whee of a time, eating up a storm, keeping trim thanks to Irma and Herman, her personal parasites. “I have missed you, darling Guy. The book is setting sales records left and right. But fame is ephemeral and money is only a means to an end, and it dawns on me now that long-term loving relationships are what matter most in life.”

  “When do you come back?”

  She wasn’t sure. With Mr. Larry and the Bogus
Brothers gunning for her, she thought maybe she should cool it on the other side of the world. “Ishimoto sent me pictures. Three gorillas with shaved heads and spiderweb tattoos and pecs the size of pot roasts. Darling one, life in Academe did not prepare me to fight off illiterate brutes, only highly educated ones. Not the kind who want to sock you in the puss. So I’m counting on you to guard the nest.”

  “I don’t know, sweetheart. I’ve been going through some physical changes lately, and I’m feeling punier and punier.”

  “Of course! The tapeworms are working! You’re becoming svelte, darling. A slender stripling. I can’t wait to see for myself and feel your abs, your delts and pecs.”

  “Perhaps I could fly to Bengali and reconnoiter,” I said. “I almost forget what you look like. We could recline under a banyan tree and read aloud from the Kama Sutra—I understand there’s a chapter called ‘Plumbing the Inner Sanctum.’”

  “Oh darling. If only. My heart leaps at the thought. But I need you there. In St. Paul. Fighting the good fight. Protecting our flank.”

  The word flank brought up visions of her pale radiant haunch in the spotlight of the Kit Kat Klub as she unsnapped the G-string and twirled it over her head and it flew like a glittering bird into the mitts of the howling mob.

  “That’s why we’re sending you those lovely checks,” she murmured. “I notice you keep cashing them.”

  “Perhaps we could afford to hire additional security,” I offered. “Beefier men in their twenties with jujitsu skills. I don’t lean on people quite so well as when I was bulkier.”

  “The fewer people in on the secret, the better,” she said. “You’re lighter and quicker, and you’re wilier. You can’t stomp on these Boguses, but you can outwit them.” Easy to say when you’re lying around the Ganges Hilton and a guy named Gupta is bringing you a tall mango smoothie. “And now Mr. Ishimoto is scared to death. He got an anonymous e-mail saying ‘We know what you’re doing, and we know where you are. Hand over the livestock. Or else.’ He is having a double hernia over it. So we need to store the eggs in a warm moist place. And I thought immediately of you.”