The Night and the Music - Lawrence Block [2]
I have a fifteen year old son. And two weeks back he took his first solo train voyage. This one to Washington DC. He needed a book for the journey. So I walked him over to the bookshelf, pulled down The Sins Of The Fathers and told him, “This is what you need.” He smiled. But not half as much as I did.
The last story in this collection is about Matt and Mick Ballou. Over the past twenty years, their friendship has become the soul of the series and means more to me than any other friendship in fiction. It is the one nod to the romantic that Lawrence Block is willing to give us in the Matt Scudder books. The one nod to possibility, to hope, to brotherhood, acceptance, honor and truth between people. But mostly, there is forgiveness. The very act of those two men sitting across from one another late into the night is forgiveness. The talking, sometimes laughing, sometimes just sitting quietly until the morning light starts leaking in through Grogan’s windows, means that there is a safe harbor for each of us, where no one sits in judgment, where no one condemns, where we can be exactly who we are, ruined, sinful, wracked. They are flawed, Matt and Mick, but they are perfect. And when we spend time with them, we believe we are too.
The Matthew Scudder Stories
There was nothing special about her last day. She seemed a little jittery, preoccupied with something or with nothing at all. But this was nothing new for Paula.
She was never much of a waitress in the three months she spent at Armstrong’s. She’d forget some orders and mix up others, and when you wanted the check or another round of drinks you could go crazy trying to attract her attention. There were days when she walked through her shift like a ghost through walls, and it was as though she had perfected some arcane technique of astral projection, sending her mind out for a walk while her long lean body went on serving food and drinks and wiping down empty tables.
She did make an effort, though. She damn well tried. She could always manage a smile. Sometimes it was the brave smile of the walking wounded and other times it was a tight-jawed, brittle grin with a couple tabs of amphetamine behind it, but you take what you can to get through the days and any smile is better than none at all. She knew most of Armstrong’s regulars by name and her greeting always made you feel as though you’d come home. When that’s all the home you have, you tend to appreciate that sort of thing.
And if the career wasn’t perfect for her, well, it certainly hadn’t been what she’d had in mind when she came to New York in the first place. You no more set out to be a waitress in a Ninth Avenue gin mill than you intentionally become an ex-cop coasting through the months on bourbon and coffee. We have that sort of greatness thrust upon us. When you’re as young as Paula Wittlauer you hang in there, knowing things are going to get better. When you’re my age you just hope they don’t get too much worse.
She worked the early shift, noon to eight, Tuesday through Saturday. Trina came on at six so there were two girls on the floor during the dinner rush. At eight Paula would go wherever she went and Trina would keep on bringing cups of coffee and glasses of bourbon for another six hours or so.
Paula’s last day was a Thursday in late September. The heat of the summer was