Later that day, I was sitting at my kitchen table, wondering just what the hell had happened to me when I heard a car pull into the gravel drive. The muffler sounded shot, so I made a bet with myself that it was my old man. Never make a bet with yourself–even when you win you lose. It was my old man, and, since he didn’t come around all that often, I was curious about what he wanted.
I went to the side door and stood there to watch him come up. He slid painfully out of the pickup cab and slammed the door, probably harder than he needed to, but then that always was his way. He turned and limped slowly to the door, letting me get a good look at him, not that I needed one. Although he was only, what? sixty-five? Not any older than that, for sure. Anyway, he wasn’t all that old, but he had that battered face that comes from spending days outside during humid New England summers and frigid New England winters. He was short and wide, like me, but the big muscles were slack and ropy now, and his thick hair was now almost completely white.
“Calvin,” he said as I stepped aside and let him come in. He sat down with a big sigh and I got him a bottle of Coors from the fridge. He drank down half without pause, set it down in front of him and looked sharply up at me. “Heard you were talking to that new guy that blew into town earlier this week.”
“That a fact?”
“Oh, yeah. That’s what I hear.” He stared at me and I could see some of his old challenge still there, the kind of challenge that caused many a fight in the long years past. Once, when I was sixteen, we went at it, and he hit me across the back with a two by four. I pulled it out of his hands and broke it over his forehead, and since then our fights have been mostly shouting.
“Your sources are good, then,” I told him. I knew he wanted me to say more, to tell him the whole story, and it was driving him crazy that I wasn’t spilling. He needed to ask for it, though, was what I decided.
“What’s your business with him?” There.
“Business.” I paused, wondering if I should make him ask again, but I took pity on the poor old fool. “He gave me a job.”
“Oh, yeah?” His eyes lit up. “Is he buying a place here, then? Need some help renovating?”
“Yeah. No.” I wasn’t quite sure how to describe what I was going to do, so I paused again.
“Well, tell the goddamn story. What kind of work is it? Anything for an old guy like me?”
“No, it’s…complicated.”
“What, like electrical work? You know I can do that shit.”
“No, not complicated that way. The job…it’s not the usual kind of thing.”
He leaned back in the chair and made the motions of settling in to hear a story. “Go on.”
What could I say? It was all perfectly normal, but at the same time it felt all wrong, like a bit of carpentry that’s just a little off plumb and skews just enough that the level shows it but not enough to cause any serious problems. I guess I should quit bullshitting around like this and just try to explain what happened.
After Mr. Rich told me I was his hired hand, whether I wanted to be or not, we walked down the road from The White Lily to the old Victorian mansion on the other corner of the green. The Avon mansion is one of those big, rambling houses with lots of little rooms with odd, unusable dimensions–octagonal rooms and strange things like that. The outside looks like it was built by a damnably talented carpenter who was maybe high on whatever passed for crack back in the 1890s. To say that it had gingerbread molding is to say that New England soil has some rocks. Every curlicue, deranged flower shape, and zigzag pattern you could imagine showed up on the outside of that house. Not only that, with all of that fancy-work, there were lots of layers, nooks, and crannies, and each one was carefully painted in some bright color—emerald green, ruby red, amber, you name it. People driving through town like to stop and take pictures of the place, which is one giant pain in the ass if you get caught behind them. Up until a month or so ago, it had been a bed and breakfast, but the owners had enough of the cold winters and moved everything to Florida.
Mr. Rich strode right up the front steps to the large wrap-around porch as if he owned the place, and, before he told me, I knew that he did, in fact, own the place. That figures, I thought. This building had the same sort of prissy, fussy exterior that showed on the man, but, like Mr. Rich, the building was solid and toughly built inside. He stopped at the front door and looked at me.
“This, Calvin, is going to be my new business venture,” he said.
“And I’m going to be your bouncer, right?” I made a show of looking around, even though I knew the place well already. I had replaced the furnace just two years ago. “Don’t know how to tell you this, but it doesn’t exactly look like a place that needs a bouncer. I mean, it doesn’t look like the velvet rope kind of place, now, does it?”
“Bouncer is your word, Calvin,” he told me in a schoolteacher sort of voice. It wasn’t my word but his, but never mind that. “This is going to be an elite little gathering spot.” He pronounced elite “ayleet,” and I started to worry again about how I was going to fit in this “ayleet” establishment.
“It will be a private club, with a very select patronage. Men who may need things done for them, who might feel more comfortable with the knowledge that this is a discreet, secure place, with a tough, no-nonsense security man on the premises. That would be you.”
I turned and walked along the porch railing to the side of the house away from the street. It could work, I thought. Maybe. But wasn’t there already a country club? I know there are a lot of wealthy types up here, but I wasn’t so sure that this town needed another rich hideout. As I was standing there I saw a young girl of come around from the back of the house holding something close to her thin chest. She saw me standing there and she started like a young deer, but then she saw Mr. Rich behind me, and she looked reassured. She had to be his daughter, then, since only blood kin could find him reassuring.
“Daddy,” she said in a small voice. Now that she was closer, I could see that she was a little older than I had thought, maybe thirteen, and my heart broke a little bit more. “Look what I found.” She held up a small black kitten. It made a tiny mewling sound and she stroked its ears softly. “Can I keep it?”
I glanced back at Mr. Rich to see what he would say. He didn’t strike me as the animal-lover type, and I couldn’t imagine his heart getting soft at the sight of a kitten. His daughter, though, was another story. His face softened and he said, “Yes, but you will have to take care of it. This is not a joke. Taking care of an animal is a real responsibility, and I expect you to do it well.”
“Yes, Daddy,” she said. She smiled into the kitten’s fur and ran softly back around the house.
Mr. Rich’s face had returned to its usual state and he eyed me with that same sort of amusement–like he was watching a dog perform some sort of unusually civilized trick–that he normally used with me. The smile he gave his daughter was real enough, but the one he gave me was cold, hard, and calculated. “So, Calvin.” He stopped and seemed to be at a loss. He couldn’t very well ask me if I would take the job, since he had already told me I was taking it, so what was there to say?
“This fancy ‘ayleet’ club–what’s it called?” I asked, giving “ayleet” just a hint of a sarcastic twist.
Mr. Rich laughed, a large, honest laugh for a change. “Oh, Calvin, there is more to you than meets the eye, isn’t there?” He looked around as if sizing up the place. “A name. Yes. I was going to call it simply ‘The Club.'”
“That sounds pretty stupid, if you ask me.”
“You may have noticed, Calvin, that I did not ask you.” That quick glimpse of honest good cheer I thought I had seen a moment ago was gone, and the cold, hard son of a bitch was back with a vengeance. He looked like he might like to hit me again. “What, if I may deign to ask, would call my fine establishment?”
“The Black Kitten,” I said.
Loving this so far!!