Chicago by David Mamet

Author:David Mamet
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2018-02-27T05:00:00+00:00

Parlow had joked that his country owed Mike an incalculable debt, as he was the only returned veteran who had not published a book about the War.

“There’s nothing you can say about it,” Mike said. “’N’ if there was I wouldn’t say it.”

The explanation, retold at the Port, gained Mike an increase, if not in status, then in appreciation of his sagacity, the general opinion of the old hands being, “This kid, it seems, has been holding back.”

And, Mike had concluded, neither was there anything to be said about aviation, which, he’d told the boys one drunken night, was like sex: you had to be there.

He’d deeply regretted the quip, as information of a private nature shared with uninitiates for a laugh.

For the two (and it was no one’s business but the flier’s) were, of course, linked. And barring a consideration of “mother,” or “the girl next door,” few of the fliers would have dreaded death but for its unfortunate curtailment of flying, or of fornication with the odd teenage barmaid.

And now Mike’s life had been corrupted by the death of his girl. “What kind of men,” he wondered, “would kill an innocent girl?” The answer, of course, was “bad men,” and he was back where he started, his perseverative thoughts themselves becoming overused, and leaving him with incathectable rage, and loss. “Bad men,” and he was, of course, one of them.

For he had truly loved the Irish girl. “Who wouldn’t love her? There was no merit in it,” he thought. “She was an angel.”

He returned, as often as he dared, to memories of their meeting—rationing them in concern that overuse might render them stale.

The compact of their love-at-first-sight had been concluded, as all are, on the instant, leaving Mike dazed. He’d once had that bright idea the boys at the Port referred to as an appersoo—that gangdom could be charted through observation of its florists—and followed the flag. The flag, in this case, was the florist’s tag, Walsh’s The Beautiful, adorning the larger and more lavish gangland tributes.

Mike had opened the glass door giving on Clark Street.

On his first visit Mike had prepared no story to explain his presence, feeling, as he always did, that to concoct an improvisation in advance was cheating. He would, as always, trust to his inspiration and his luck.

But the various, and obvious, possibilities: My aunt died, I am planning a wedding, or, in extremis, I write for the Trib, and we’re doing a feature about holiday arrangements, these and their mundane like fled from Mike. He did not remark their flight, but stood tongue-tied, looking at the girl behind the counter, who was looking back at him.

Some time passed and neither he nor the girl had moved. It was the strangest impulse he was ever to feel in life: to walk behind the counter and have her; and she slowly turned, and he saw that she knew it. She lowered her eyes in the most primal gesture of modesty and acquiescence. He began to move toward her.

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