No Deposit Love

Kevin Keating

-1-

Friday afternoon, like so many before and after it, sees Bernie Kaliher broke and desperate for a beer.  He spends an hour, maybe two, he’s not sure how long really, he no longer wears a watch, scrounging for loose change in the pockets of an old winter coat, digging beneath the ragged cushions of a sofa he dragged from a street corner three blocks away, reaching behind the silent refrigerator, it no longer hums, the electricity was shut off weeks ago, looking under the throw rugs, behind the toilet, inside the broom closet, his fingers creeping spider-like into every dark recess and mite-infested alcove and, though he pities himself for doing something so obviously futile, beneath the piss-and-sweat-stained mattress where instead of money he unearths an assortment of dirty magazines, hardened tissues, a sports page with a full-page color photograph of his players standing like an invincible Roman legion in front of the Jesuit high school.  The bold letters read more like a benediction than a byline: “May the Good Lord–and this Coaching Genius–Lead These Boys to Victory.”
…..Only three months ago the local sports columnists–those incompetent hacks who never see eye to eye on anything–all agreed that Kaliher’s team would dispatch each of its regular- and post-season opponents with ease and roll its way to the state championship game.  No one dared to think otherwise.  It was predestined.  God had commanded it to be so.  How then to explain the slew of injuries to his offensive linemen, the diminishing skills of his star quarterback, the heartbreaking defeats in overtime?  Bad luck?  Kaliher doesn’t believe in luck, he believes in a sure thing, and he laughs bitterly at this baffling change of fate.  With mounting frustration, he smashes the newspaper into a ball and kicks it across the room.
…..Resuming his search for nickels and dimes, Kaliher thinks about the big game tomorrow night.  A decisive victory might, just might, turn this disastrous season around.  The odds are in his favor.  God does not abandon the pious, and the Jesuits have ordered the students to remain silent during the day, to pray on hands and knees through the night, to petition the Lord of Hosts, the Lord of Armies to lead their beloved team to victory, but before they begin this spiritual exercise the boys must purge from their captive souls all the impure thoughts that have accumulated since their last confession.  Purity of heart is a perquisite to success as everyone knows.
…..Kaliher intends to do his part.  He will beg god’s pardon for violating the trust of his players.  The sheer stupidity of his mistakes, the magnitude of his financial indiscretions!  He is so contrite that, even when faced with the prospect of eternal damnation, he will not deny his culpability…with this one small caveat.  God must give him an unequivocal answer to a question that has haunted him for many years now: why do so many men have an almost instinctual urge to sabotage their own lives?  But Kaliher doesn’t believe in instincts, just as he doesn’t believe in luck.  Human beings are not animals; they are fallen angels suffering from a spell of amnesia, desperate to recall their true nature.
…..As he awaits god’s pithy reply, Kaliher feels on the back of his neck a sharp tingle like static electricity, and then, suddenly, there comes a loud knock at the door, three solid raps with a pause between each one, a very serious-sounding knock, a knock that says he is in deep shit, maybe the deepest in a long time, and here he is caught without a pair of boots to wade through it.  Using the tough-guy voice he has perfected from a decade of coaching belligerent prep school boys, he shouts, “Go away!” because no one ever knocks at his door except for the obvious reason–money.  His ex-wife and her attorneys, his bookie, even old friends and neighbors, they all line up at his door, looking to hit him up and suck him dry.   Now their work is complete.  Almost.  He still has one card left to play, one last big gamble.
…..“Just a minute, goddamn you!”
…..Though his instincts tell him to flee from the danger, he knows that sooner or later he must face the fire-breathing dragon, not out of choice exactly–what kind of hero yearns for his own gruesome immolation?–but because escape is no longer an option, the entrance to the cave is blocked, the bridge burned to cinders.  He takes a deep breath and cracks open the door.  In the vaulted corridor he hears the sound of a dozen antique keys jangling on a rusty ring, and through a narrow shaft of light he sees a hundred silver strands of cat hair shimmer, loop and twirl.
…..“Why, good afternoon, Mrs. O’Neill.”
…..He tests out a smile, the one he uses when delivering a keynote address at a benefit dinner, the one that gets him into so much trouble with strange women, like that whore upstairs with the long, black tresses and the troubling tattoo on her left ankle.  In addition to all of his other problems, the charms of success have abandoned  him  entirely–a terrible thing for a man who clings to  fading celebrity as an idolater clings to a golden monkey paw–and the smile looks defiant, devious, impudent, smug.  Also, his teeth are yellow with tartar, his breath sour, his tongue dry and white from another week-long bender.
…..“Fuck you, Kaliher. You got somethin’ to smile about these days?”
…..Mrs. O’Neill, the owner and manager of the Zanzibar Towers & Gardens and a woman with a remarkable gift for cutting through the bullshit, leans heavily against the doorway.  She wears a bathrobe and slippers and lets a long pillar of cigarette ash wobble between her lizard lips.  Her fingers dig through a pile of hair so dry and brittle and bleached of color that it looks like curled corn husks roasting under a summer sun.  Though it’s fashionable to describe someone of her years as “middle aged,” Kaliher can only think of her as elderly.  His fortieth birthday looms on the horizon, and the idea of being lumped together with a sixty-year old woman, even if only categorically, suggests that his shelf life is limited.  The expiration date is drawing near.
…..“Pay up, Kaliher. Now. Or hit the road. This ain’t no charity ward. Bunch of goddamn infants living here. Helpless parasites, every last one of youse.”
…..Mrs. O’Neill crosses her arms.  Her demeanor suggests not only anger but sobriety.  Not a good sign.  She thrusts her nose past the chain, her nostrils puckering and flaring.  The bulbous tip is covered with meandering tributaries of broken blood vessels that disappear into craters vast and deep and dark.
…..“That ain’t no weed I smell, is it? Cause if it is, I’ll call the cops, by god I will. Make my life so much easier. One call, Kaliher, and out ya go.”
…..“Weed, Mrs. O’Neill?  Heavens no.”  He unhooks the chain and swings the door open.  “Maybe you’d like to come in. Have a look around. Join me in a cocktail?”
…..She isn’t particular, she’ll drink just about anything, cooking sherry, mouthwash, even rubbing alcohol isn’t too good for her, but they both know the truth, know that his cupboards are bare, this is just a little charade they go through each month, but even the destitute abide by a meager sort of etiquette.  Certain rules must never be broken.  Of course this doesn’t alleviate the acute shame he feels for having little else but a glass of cloudy tap water to offer his guest, even an unwelcome one.  What does it matter?  He’s become so desperate that he’s willing to lie just so he can enjoy a few more minutes of warmth.
…..Though the apartment is drafty and poorly insulated, its walls cracked and bubbled from years of damage from rain and sleet and snow, it’s much better than what awaits him outside.  Winter will soon be here.  The weather is already beginning to turn.  There are other dangers as well.  The newspapers tell a grim tale.  A maniac is on the loose, a sadist who enjoys dousing his victims in lighter fluid while they sleep in the park and then sets them ablaze with the flick of a match.  Well, thinks Kaliher, that’s certainly one way to keep warm.
…..Mrs. O’Neill puts her hands on her matronly hips.  “So whadaya got then?”
…..“Um, I have Kentucky bourbon. Irish whiskey. Single malt scotch.”
…..“You ain’t got jack shit.”
…..“No, I swear it.”  He snaps his fingers.  “I know. How about a nice glass of cabernet?”
…..“Listen, you…”
…..He takes her by the hand, but she yanks it away and wipes it across the front of her robe.  Amazing that she is the one to wipe her hand!  But he isn’t about to let a rude gesture get to him, no, that might disrupt his timing, and he has these innocuous little transactions timed to the nearest tenth of a second.  He always thinks in terms of a stopwatch, another habit from his years as head coach.
…..Into the apartment Mrs. O’Neill plods, heavy and compact as a bison, her great humped shoulders threatening to rip apart the doorframe.  He steps aside, afraid she might stampede.  She shambles past him, and he smells wafting around her mouth a seductive blend of dark chocolate and maraschino cherries.
…..“Yer wife was here a few hours ago lookin’ for ya. Musta pounded on the door fer a good ten minutes ‘fore I come down and chased ‘er off. I can’t have some angry cougar makin’ a spectacle of herself. Not in my place. I don’t like troublemakers, Kaliher. Don’t like deadbeats neither.”  She scratches the bristly black hairs sprouting on the back of her calves.  They look like pine needles, sharp and shiny and covered in miniscule scales.  “What’s a pretty woman want with the likes of you anyway?”
…..He glowers at her, his tormentor, his jailer, but he does not reply.
…..“Okay, then, where’s that drink?”  She parts her robe, scratches her knee.
…..Kaliher goes through the ridiculous pretense of opening the kitchen cupboards one at a time, wondering as he always does if this is truly the end.  Afraid he might break down in front of her, fall to his knees and grovel like a slave, he averts his eyes, tries to stick his head inside the pantry.  To his great relief she bursts into laughter, but when he turns to face her she is already gone, has lumbered into the dark bedroom where her imposing silhouette is framed against the window.  There is a long silence, then he sees the bathrobe slide from her shoulders like a snake shedding its skin and hears the heavy ring of keys hit the hardwood floor with a horrible clatter.  The glowing ember of her cigarette hovers like the unblinking eye of a demon spirit before it sinks to the mattress and winks out.  There is no frame, no box spring, no down comforter, primitive arrangements that never seem to bother old, ornery Mrs. O’Neill.
…..“Time!” she proclaims.
…..“Yes, I’m coming,” he whispers, “I’m coming…”

-2-

How many men she has lured here over the years?  How many she has cajoled and threatened and humiliated?  The numbers will never be known, can hardly be estimated.  What is plain to everyone is that Mrs. O’Neill actively seeks out male renters, losers one and all, the downtrodden, ruined, addicted, insane.  Usually she captures her prey (“drums up business” as she calls it) at the coffeehouse where the city’s luckless gather to drink one cup of coffee after another (refills are free) and stare out the window as if waiting for someone who actually loves them to miraculously appear and say that all is forgiven, mistakes happen, now it’s time to start life over again.
…..It’s a well-known fact that most men secretly yearn to tell a woman, any woman, all about their private miseries, their personal failures, and Mrs. O’Neill is delighted to play the role of comforter and confessor.  With great patience and understanding she listens and nods her head and squeezes a hand in a very reassuring way.  She offers a warm smile when it is most needed.  Then, moving in for the kill, she brings up the subject of her apartment building, “the property” she says, willed to her by her now deceased third husband, tells these derelicts that no deposit is required to rent a room.  “You just come right on over, honey, see the place for yourself.  Maybe we can work out some kind of arrangement.”
…..Some of these men, the more reasonable among them, must have their doubts about her motives, but in the end desperation always wins out.  The only thing they have left is the worthless currency of a hundred broken promises, and so they don’t even wait for her to scribble the address on a napkin, they just accompany her back to the building, a never-ending parade of fools shambling up the walkway–scrawny, scruffy, their faces frozen with expressions of self-pity.
…..When he sees them from his window, Kaliher feels self-conscious.  Jesus, he thinks, do I look like that?  But he already knows the answer.  And so does Mrs. O’Neill.

-3-

No matter how many times they perform this monthly ritual, Kaliher remains shocked by Mrs. O’Neill’s eagerness, her voraciousness, the rough manner in which she revels in the minute details, the foreplay, the vulgar bedroom talk.
…..“Oh you dirty, dirty boy. That’s right, champ, go on, work it, work it!”
…..Taking direction like a trained seal, Kaliher services her to the best of his abilities.  At one point she shoves his face away from her wrinkled breasts and with pitiless glee barks another command: “Now, suck my toes!”  He resists, but she digs her claws into the back of his neck and rasps, “Suck ‘em like you mean it.”   What can he do?  He rolls his tongue over the tough meat of the sole, up and down the swollen arch, hesitates, then trying to control his gag reflex opens his mouth to accept the five little piggies of her left foot, using his teeth to gently nibble on the thick stumps that resemble a man’s knuckles, large, hairy, simian.
…..Thirty minutes later, when the terrible ordeal is finally over, Mrs. O’Neill fires up another cigarette, last one in the pack, and says, “Okay, you can stay. One more month. But you’re an awful lay, do ya know that, Kaliher? Truly despicable. No wonder yer wife left you.”  She coughs, hacks up phlegm.  “A little advice, huh. Either come up with some cash or improve yer skills in the sack.”  And with that she pulls the bathrobe around her torso and limps out the door.
…..“Oh, you horrible, horrible…” Kaliher whispers.
…..In the darkness, without daring to turn on the lights, he sits cross-legged on the mattress, runs his hands over his head, which is shaved like a mendicant’s.  For a long time he does nothing at all, just stares into space, but then he works up enough courage to flick on the lamp, gathers from the floor his rumpled jeans, his stained underwear.  Naked and sweating, he staggers into the bathroom.  Thankfully there is no mirror with which to inspect the dark circles under his eyes, the new lines on his forehead, the imperishable scowl cemented to the corners of his mouth.  Using the crusty remnants of toothpaste he brushes his teeth, but no matter how long he scours and gurgles and spits; the putrid taste of toenails, sour and bitter like old lemon rinds, clings to the walls of his mouth, the tip of his tongue.  When he can no longer tolerate the dirtiness on him and in him and around him he forces himself to stand in the tub under an icy spray of water.  There is no soap, no exfoliating scrub, no shaving gel, none of the fragrant lotions he once enjoyed as a married man.  In fact, very little remains of his old life except the mattress on which Mrs. O’Neill occasionally positions herself and groans with unbridled pleasure.
…..As he towels off, he thinks about his children, John and Carol, six-year old twins, and recalls how they whimpered all night long in their sleeping bags arranged on either side of that same mattress and begged to be taken home to their mother.  “Please, Daddy, please,” they said.  Upstairs on the sixth floor the jungle drums had started up, the shouting, the screaming.  Through the dusty vents came the mad laughter of men and women, the howls of rail thin dogs, the crash and thud of bodies being hurled against the floorboards.  He vowed never again to bring his children to this sinister building.  Somehow he would find a way to provide for them.  In the morning, after dropping them off at their mother’s house, at his house, the one he built and financed, he rushed to the bank and emptied the athletic department’s discretionary funds account.  Borrowed it he should say.  He has every intention of returning the money, with interest, on Monday morning before the Jesuits even notice the transaction.  The bookies insist on having the money up front this time.  Not that it matters.  The odds are in his favor.  After a string of heartbreaking losses he’s due for a big win.  God would never leave him in a lurch.
…..His wife says that he has a sickness, but this isn’t true, he doesn’t believe it to be so.  On professional sports he wagers only small amounts–four hundred, five hundred dollars.  Big bets are reserved for his own football team, a thousand dollars on the opening game, thousands more in the weeks to follow.  People would curse him for stooping so low, but he has never once bet against his players, has never thrown a game by making a bad call even though a number of important people have offered him outrageous sums to do so.
…..He is faithful to his players and will remain so even now in his darkest hour.  Only twenty-four hours remain until the opening kickoff, and there is still much work to be done, grand strategies to map out, small but crucial tactics to perfect, defeat is no longer an option, victory the only possible means of escape.

-4-

The daylight vanishes quickly this time of year.  Darkness steals across the world like a hand closing the lid on a musty bible box.  Bernie Kaliher stands with both hands deep in his empty pockets, his forehead resting against the front window.  Through the soughing trees he can make out the gothic tower of the Jesuit high school.  He must have gazed at that tower a thousand times, more than a thousand, and never once did it look the same to him.  It’s always different, the light different, the color of its bricks glinting with quartz different, the birds roosting on its narrow ledges different.  Peregrine falcons sometimes nest there, sometimes red-shouldered hawks.  This season it’s grackles, golden-eyed birds with iridescent plumage.  In the evening they peck and squawk at the horned gargoyles that crouch at the corners of the building, and in the morning they make forays to the polluted wetlands near the crooked river where they rocket across the sky and hunt frogs and insects.  They can fly far afield without ever losing sight of the tower’s crenellated parapet or the sound of its carillon of fifty bells.  What a magnificent place, Kaliher thinks, but he suspects that hell is also a pretty magnificent place, too, with great walls and a pantheon illumined by lightning storms and lava flows.
…..He lifts his head and sees coming toward the apartment building a young man dressed from head to toe in black.  Judging from his tattered jeans and black T-shirt with a large grinning skull, a memento mori made of metallic foil that seems to cackle in the dying light of this Halloween afternoon, he is another impoverished musician, another artist with no prospects, no chance of garnering recognition of any kind.  His left eye is black and blue, his upper lip swollen. He has seen hard times, harder than most maybe, but like everyone else condemned to stay at the Zanzibar Towers & Gardens, he probably has it coming to him and leaves a long, messy trail of despair in his wake.  Kaliher briefly considers throwing open the window and warning him away from this necropolis of dead dreams, there is no inspiration to be found here, no beautiful muse waiting behind the creaking hinged doors, but then, just as he’s about to tap on the glass, wave his arms, shout “Be gone, fool!”, the young man sees him standing there, and when their eyes meet an enigmatic smirk spreads across the young man’s face.  Could he be a student from school?  No, impossible.  He looks too old, too world-weary, too soul-sick to be a student.  Still, Kaliher is convinced that the young man recognizes him, and like a startled cat he leaps away from the window and pulls the blinds closed.  Paranoia wracks his soul.
…..“Jesus…” he breathes.
…..He’s about to turn off the lights, call it a night, prepare himself mentally for the big game tomorrow, but when he tears away the soiled sheets he notices a twenty-dollar bill wedged between the mattress and the wall.  How he overlooked it he doesn’t know.  With a little whimper of gratitude he holds it up to the light, smells it, rubs it between his fingertips, and when he is certain it’s not a fake he places it in his pocket.  Divine providence, no doubt.  God is watching over him.  He decides to celebrate early.  The local brewery beckons, it’s happy hour, one dollar pints of lager and stout.  He pulls on his coat, marches out into the October cold and feels that his luck is finally beginning to change.

–

–

→VOLUME 12