Baltimore Noir - Laura Lippman [9]
“Fuck it,” Tom said. “I’m on. See you at 8, Ty.”
“Attaboy,” Tyler said. “I promise you something special. You’ll see.”
After the movie, Tom took Flo out for a drink at a mall bar called The Firehouse. It was loud and brash and filled with obese guys with scraggly facial hair and plaid shirts, which they wore hanging outside of their pants. Their girlfriends and wives wore bright red lipstick and dyed their beehive hair in primary colors.
“I hate it here,” his mother said. “I always hated this side of town anyway. Parkville, the Belair Road. Buncha hairhoppers and rednecks. Christ, I’d rather live over in the Northwest with the Jews. ’Cept the Jews don’t live there no more. Now it’s all the so-called black nations.”
Weeks liked to think he was up on the latest demographics in Baltimore, but he was shocked when he heard the Jews had moved away from Northwest.
“Where do the Jews live these days, Mom?”
“Further out, hon,” his mother said. “I heard from Harvene that the Jews have just about taken over Pennsylvania. They nearly run the Amish out. Of course, as soon as they left Pikesville, the jungle bunnies moved right in and had about ten million kids, and started killing each other over drugs at the drop of a hat.”
Weeks shut his eyes and imagined blacks all over Baltimore, dropping their funky baseball hats and firing 9’s at each other. The hats floated down like leaves, followed by their wiry, blood-soaked bodies.
“What kind of drink do you want, Mother?”
“Vodka,” she shot back. “And not that cheap well shit either. I want Grey fucking Goose.”
“Good for you,” Weeks said, as he watched three fat men in Ravens T-shirts roll by. They were all singing along with George Thorogood’s version of “Bad to the Bone.” Weeks felt an intense jealousy for their innocent belligerence. When was the last time he had sung anything with his pals? That was easy, 1968. The year the singing stopped.
“Yeah, I know what you’re thinking,” Flo said, with a mischievous grin on her face. “I get good and drunk, then you can drop me off back at the goddamned prison camp and go see one of your old girlfriends.”
“I haven’t got any girlfriends, old or otherwise, in Baltimore anymore.”
“Bullshit,” his mother said as the waitress approached. “You’ve always had girlfriends everywhere you go. Girls made fools of themselves for you, because they don’t know what a rotten bastard you really are.”
She laughed and looked up at the waitress, who wore two-inch false eyelashes and enough rouge to make her look like a clown in drag.
“Gimme the Goose,” Flo said. “A double. And keep ’em coming. My big shot son is here and he can afford it.”
The waitress looked at Weeks, and when she smiled she showed about a half-inch of gum.
“Your mother is soooo cute,” she said.
“Yeah,” Weeks said. “Mom’s a living doll.”
By the time Weeks carried the drunken, cursing Flo up to her apartment, he had a screaming headache and a pain in his chest. He thought about popping another blood pressure pill, but they tended to wear him out and he still had to drive all the way downtown to see Ty.
Fuck it, he thought, as he gently lay his mother down in her bed and kissed her sweating forehead. Maybe he didn’t really need to see Ty after all.
And yet there was something about meeting the old convict that was impossible to resist.
He was about to leave his mother’s side when she reached out a bony hand and grabbed his wrist. “Hey,” she said. “You can fool those pinheads out in California but you can’t fool me. You know what you did the first two months of your life?”
“No,” Tom said, feeling dizzy again. “What?”
“You wet the bed every night. Every damned night. And it wasn’t your father who came in and cleaned you up and walked you around when you were screaming. It was me, your horrible old mother. The one you hate so much.”
Weeks felt something cracking inside of him. Like his bones, his heart. All of it cracking and falling into splinters.
“I gotta go, Mom.”
“Well, you have a good time,” she said as she shut her eyes. “Have a few