Down by the River Where the Dead Men Go Read online

  ELEVEN

  LYLA MCCUBBIN HAD grown up in a boxy brick house on a street named Bangor Drive, in an unremarkable but pleasant development called Garrett Park Estates in the Maryland suburb of Kensington. Her parents had raised three children there, and they had remained long after Lyla, the last child, had graduated from college and gone out on her own. Lyla said that the neighborhood had changed very little since her childhood: a mixture of starter homes and rentals, none too ostentatious, a comfortable kind of place, where you came to recognize the bark of every dog through the open window of your bedroom as you drifted off to sleep on summer nights.

  Lyla’s mother, Linda, had practically raised the children herself, as the father, Daniel McCubbin, was usually off at some meeting, organizing the unions or planning the demonstration for his latest cause. The first day I met Lyla, in her office at D.C. This Week, I had noticed the photograph of her as a child, standing between her bearded father and straight-haired mother, at a Dupont Circle rally circa 1969. Lyla said that the family never had a dime, but there was some pride in her voice as she said it, never regret. Her father, a fine trial lawyer by all accounts, had managed to resist the advances of the corporate firms in town throughout his career, preferring to use his talents to advance the causes of those individuals whom he considered to be on the side of “right.” He wasn’t your typical pompous windbag, though. I liked him and I admired him, despite the obvious fact that he was not awfully crazy about me.

  We were greeted at the door by Linda McCubbin, who kissed Lyla and then me on the cheek. Linda was Lyla with thirty years added to the odometer, with more silver in the hair than red now and an organic heaviness around the waist and in the hips. Men were always told to look at the mothers, as if that was some kind of test; it never had been for me, but if it had been, then Lyla would have passed.

  “Here, Ma,” Lyla said, handing Linda a bag containing two liter bottles of white wine. Lyla had insisted we stop for it, though both of us had once again consumed a little too much the night before.

  Linda took it, said, “Come on in.”

  Daniel sat under an overextended air conditioner in the simply furnished living room, in a La-Z-Boy chair, the arms of which had been shredded by the McCubbin cat, a mean tom that someone had ironically named Peace. Lyla bent to her father and kissed him, and then he shook my hand without rising from the chair.

  “Don’t get up,” I said.

  “Didn’t plan to,” he said. “Hot day like this, I’m going to expend as little energy as possible. How’s it going, Nick?”

  “Good. Good.”

  Daniel smiled, studied me, and kept the smile until it looked nothing like a smile at all. Maybe I had overdone the aftershave, or maybe it was the unironed khakis or the color of my shirt. Or maybe he liked me just fine, and it was just that I was dating his baby daughter.

  “Linda,” Daniel said, watching my eyes. “Get Nick here a drink. What’ll it be, Nick?”

  “Nothing just yet. Too early for me,” I said, rocking on my heels.

  “Is it?” Daniel said, scratching beneath the white of his beard.

  “Well,” Lyla said, “I’ll have one. C’mon, Mom, let’s go in the kitchen. I’ll help you get ready.”

  Lyla winked, left me there with her dad. I gave her a brittle smile as she walked away. I had a seat on the sofa, crossed one leg over the other, nervously missed it on the first go-round.

  “Where’s the rest of the family?” I said.

  “They’ll be along,” Daniel said. “How’s the bar business going?”

  “Good. Real good.”

  “You know, I used to go into that place, in the old days, when I was working on the Hill.”

  “Really.”

  “Yes, it was called something else back then. You’ve been there awhile, haven’t you? Thought you might own a piece of it by now.”

  “No, not me. Tough business, that.” Real tough.

  “And your investigative work?”

  “Coming along,” I said as I watched my free foot wiggle in the air. “How about you… how’s retirement?”

  Daniel raised his substantial eyebrows. “Linda says I don’t know how to spell the word retirement. I guess the difference is, now I don’t get paid for what it is I do. Right now, I’m setting up group homes for Haitian refugees. Our church owns these properties, so… I’m helping fix them up.”

  “Why fix them up?” I said, my foot pinwheeling now, out of control. “You could make more profit by, you know, leaving them the way they are. Crowd a bunch of people in the rooms, I mean—where they come from, they’re used to it. Jack up the rents, too, while you’re at it.”

  A smile came into Daniel’s eyes. “Of course,” he said, “you’re ribbing me, aren’t you?”

  “Just a little.”

  “You know, you don’t always have to work so hard at being cynical around me, Nick. I know that, in your own way, you have a fairly clear idea of what’s right and what’s wrong. Not all the good that gets done in this world gets done in a church or a meeting hall, I realize that.”

  “Yeah, well, we make do with what we have, and work with it, you know?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  He stopped giving me the business and picked up the Outlook section of the Post that was lying by his chair. I noticed a makeshift bar that had been set up on a mobile cart near a mirrored armoire in the corner of the room. There were bottles of gin and vodka, tonic and ginger ale, an ice bucket, and a sealed bottle of Old Grand-Dad. Apparently, that had been purchased just for me; I had never seen the old man take a drink, and Lyla’s mother drank wine, and only with dinner. Something pushed out at the base of the curtains at the bay window and moved along behind them with a deliberate slink: That would be Peace, stalking me as he always did when I came to the McCubbin house for dinner.

  I was watching the curtains, thinking of my possible defense against an attack from that lousy cat, when the front door opened and four people stepped inside: Lyla’s brother, Mike, his wife, Donna, Lyla’s older sister, Kimmy, and Kimmy’s husband, Leo. This time, Daniel stood up from his chair, and we all did our back-slapping moves around the living room. A half hour later, we were seated at a cramped table in the dining room, with Daniel McCubbin leading a prayer. During the prayer, our hands were all joined underneath the table, a McCubbin tradition, and my index finger was wiggling around on the inside of Lyla’s thigh. Lyla, seated to my right, dug a fingernail into my own thigh, leaving a crescent mark that I discovered an hour later in the bathroom.

  “Amen,” everybody said, and then Leo, as usual, reached across the table for the first shot at the main course, and started pushing thick slices of roast beef onto his plate.

  “Leave some for the rest of the family, Leo,” Kim said, only kidding by half.

  “Sure, honey,” he said, then issued his trademark high cackle, a sound that was always surprising coming from a man as fat as Leo. “You know I can’t help it. The Irish love their liquor, and us Greeks love to eat. Right, Nick?”

  Daniel McCubbin’s eyes flashed on Leo. I nodded weakly, not wanting to appear too anxious to admit to being a member of Leo Charles’s ethnic tribe. Leo was a Greek—the Charles had been Charalambides before his grandfather stepped off the boat—but he was not a kid my friends or I had known growing up. Leo Charles was also a bigot, and like all bigots, black and white, he was a loser, and he directed his shortcomings and utter lack of self-confidence outwardly and onto the backs of others. Lyla said Kimmy had zero self-esteem and that was why she had married him. And all the time, I’d thought it was his 280-pound frame, all five foot eight inches of it.

  “How about those Orioles?” Mike said in the too-gentle way of his that unfortunately suggested a weaker version of his father. Mike ran a volunteer soup kitchen operation out of Le Droit Park. He plopped a mound of mashed potatoes onto his plate and passed the platter to his wife, Donna, a shame-about-the-face public defender with just a killer body. All these do-goodniks
at the table, and me. Well, there was Leo, too.

  “Yeah, how about ’em, Nick?” Leo said. “Think the bullpen’s gonna take ’em through to the Series?” Leo loved to talk sports but couldn’t do a push-up.

  “Lookin’ good,” I said, feeling not so good. I really could have used a drink. “I’m going up to Camden Yards tomorrow with a buddy of mine, a guy named Johnny McGinnes.”

  “An Irishman,” Leo said, spitting a little ball of mashed potato across the table in the process.

  “They love their liquor,” Daniel said, but it went over Leo’s head, missed him by a mile. He kept right on chewing, breaking down the load that was in his mouth. Lyla’s mother laughed a little, and she and Mike exchanged fond looks.

  “You didn’t tell me you were going to the game,” Lyla said.

  “Yeah, Johnny won some tickets, sold a million refrigerators last month in some promotion, something like that.”

  “That ought to be interesting,” Lyla said, killing the remainder of the wine in her glass. She picked up the bottle off the table and poured herself some more, clumsily trying to fill the glass to the top, spilling some in the process. Daniel looked at her and then at me. Lyla’s ears were a little red, her cheeks flushed.

  “Anybody want a little more cool in here?” Lyla’s mother said. “We could turn up that air conditioner.”

  “Let me handle this,” I said with a wink. “I used to be in electronics—I know how to operate the unit.”

  I got out of my chair and walked to the window where the air conditioner had been set. As I got to it, I saw something black seem to rise out of nowhere from behind the curtains near my feet, and I heard a woman’s voice cry out behind me just as the wail of an animal pierced the air. I felt a slash of pain, pulled my hand back as the crazy tomcat cartwheeled in the air, landed on his feet on the carpet, and took off back across the room, scurrying for his hiding place behind the drapes.

  “Fuck!” I shouted, waving my hand, the blood already coming to the surface of the cut. That quieted the rest of them down.

  Mike got up and found the cat, carried him back into the room. Lyla tossed me a napkin and went to get a Band-Aid. She returned with it, but by now the cut had stopped bleeding. I put the Band-Aid on anyway, a sympathy play to make my obscenity seem more justified.

  “Peace, man,” Mike whined, stroking the cat.

  “Peace, man,” I said, and made a V with my fingers, smiling stupidly at the McCubbin family. Nobody laughed.

  “I guess that cat doesn’t like you so good,” Leo said. “Right, Nick?”

  “Leo,” Kimmy said, “you’ve got a piece of lettuce on your cheek.”

  I sat back down. Lyla patted my thigh under the table. We finished our Sunday dinner.

  A COUPLE OF HOURS later, when Lyla’s siblings and their spouses had gone and Lyla went to the kitchen with her mother to wash and dry the dishes, I took a beer to the concrete patio out back and had a seat in one of four wrought-iron chairs grouped around a glass-topped table. I lit a cigarette and watched a young father play catch with his son in an adjacent yard. The man rubbed the top of his son’s head when they were done, and the boy skipped off toward their house. Then the back door of the McCubbin house opened and Daniel came out and stepped down to the patio.

  “Mind if I join you?”

  “Of course not,” I said. “Have a seat.”

  He grunted as he settled into a chair across the table. I dropped my lit butt into the top of the beer can and heard it hiss as it hit the backwash. I put the can at my feet.

  “How was it?” Daniel said.

  “Cold beer on a Sunday in the summer, it’s always pretty good.”

  “Yes, I remember. Watching you today, it took me back to when I was first dating Linda, the times we’d go to her parents’ house for dinner. I could have used a drink on those occasions, wanted one desperately, as a matter of fact. It really would have relaxed me, taken the edge off. There’s nothing more humbling than dealing with the potential in-laws, no matter how much confidence you have. It’s like, all of the sudden, you’re a little boy again.”

  “You guys aren’t so bad,” I said, and a smile passed between us. “Besides, it’s Lyla, so it’s worth it.”

  “You love her, don’t you?”

  “Yes, sir. I believe I do.”

  “How much do you love her? Do you love her enough to do what’s right for her, even if it means losing her?”

  “I don’t follow you.”

  Daniel sat back in his chair, looked into the depths of his own yard. “I told you earlier today that I used to frequent that place you bartend in, when I was on the Hill. I don’t know if Lyla’s ever told you the… degree to which I frequented those types of establishments.”

  “No,” I said, “she hasn’t.”

  “Well, I was quite a regular in those days, in that place and plenty of others. I wish that I could give you the details, but I don’t remember all that much of those years. If it wasn’t for photographs, it would be difficult to recall even the faces of my children as they were growing up. All that wasted time. But I can’t get it back now, so…” Daniel pulled at the errant edges of his beard. “Anyway, things turned out all right, I think. I got myself into a program, managed to see my children become wonderful adults, with most of the credit for that going to Linda, of course, and I ended up doing a bit of good along the way. So I think you’ll understand it when I say, maybe because of the fact that I wasn’t always there for them, that I’m rather fiercely protective of my children to this day.”

  “I understand.”

  Daniel breathed out slowly, folded his hands on the table, bumped one thumb against the other. “Lyla, she’s always taken on my traits, even as a child. I know you think she looks like her mother, and certainly she does. But I’m talking about resemblances in less obvious ways.”

  I didn’t respond.

  Daniel kept on: “When Lyla was a teenager, when she used to come home late at night, I could always tell what she had been up to. Her own body, it betrayed her. When she drinks, you know, even now, her ears turn this blazing shade of red. That same thing used to happen to me—in fact, they used to call me ‘Red’ in some of the bars where they knew me pretty well.” Daniel looked me in the eyes. “She’s got a problem with it, you know. It’s hereditary, I suppose, in a gene I gave her. The researchers, they’ve been claiming that for quite some time now. She’s got the same problem that I had when I was her age. And I see it… I see it only getting worse.”

  Again, I didn’t answer him or respond in any way. A drop of sweat moved slowly down my back. Daniel leaned in, rested his forearms on the table.

  “You’re an alcoholic, Nick,” he said. “You would never admit to it, but that’s what you are. You’ve probably done some binge drinking in your day, but I would say that in general you’re what they call a controlled drinker. The worst kind, because it allows you to convince yourself that you don’t have a problem, and now you’ve managed to bury the thought of doing something about it entirely. I’ve been around enough people like you; I just don’t think you’re ever going to give it up.”

  “I know what I’m about.”

  “Yes, I think you do. But I’m not responsible for you, so that’s not good enough. Lyla needs someone strong to tell her what she is and to stand next to her and help her through it. You’re just not that person.”

  I pushed away from the table and stood slowly from my chair. “It’s getting late. I better be going.”

  I began to walk past him, but he wrapped a hand around my forearm. I looked down on him, saw that his eyes had softened.

  “I like you, Nick. I want you to know that. I think that you’re a good man. You’re just not good for her.”

  “Thanks for dinner.”

  I walked across the patio in the dying light.

  “WHAT WERE YOU AND Dad doing out back?” Lyla said. We were driving south on Connecticut, to Lyla’s apartment. “What was he, asking about your i
ntentions?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Dad’s always been tough on my boyfriends.”

  “He’s only looking out for you,” I said.

  “I know,” Lyla said, and touched the Band-Aid on my finger. “Tough day, huh, Stefanos?”

  “Tough day.”

  I stopped at Lyla’s apartment building off Calvert, let the engine idle.

  “What, you’re not coming up?”

  “I better not,” I said. “Got something going on early tomorrow on this Jeter thing.”

  “I should chill out, too. My editor left a message on my machine yesterday. That story I’ve been working on, the one I finished and turned in after we had lunch the other day, in Chinatown? He wants to meet with me about it in the morning. Sounds ominous.”

  “You’ve always been able to control him. You’ll do fine.”

  Lyla leaned across the seat, put her hand behind my head, and kissed me on the mouth. “Love you, Nick.”

  “I love you too, baby. Take care.”

  TWELVE

  IN D.C., IT’S tough to find a good clean place to catch an art film anymore, and next to impossible to find consistency in repertory. The near-legendary Circle Theater on Pennsylvania Avenue, where many Washingtonians got their film education, is long gone, its “ten tickets for ten dollars” deal a permanent fixture now in the local nostalgia file. Georgetown boasts the Key and Biograph theaters, but Georgetown has devolved into a slum-out for suburban teens, drunks, and tourists—a guy I know calls it a “shopping mall without a roof”—and a lot of in-towners just don’t care to bother. Out-of-town bookers place the rest of the films in their corporately designated “art theaters,” their unfamiliarity with our city demographics resulting in sometimes laughably illogical bills. It’s true that you can catch some cool stuff at the Hirshhorn or at other galleries or museums, but you have to know where to find the listings, and by the time you’ve gotten around to checking out the art calendars in City Paper and D.C. This Week, it’s often too late.