you if you're happy with your work, if it's paying you enough. If you say you like the work but you sure could be doing better, the guy encourages you to talk about whatever you're carrying on your back: your house, your car, your kids'college education - maybe you've got a wife with a taste for clothes a little fancier than she can by rights afford . . . see?'
'Sounding you out?'
'It's more like feeling you up,' he said, and then laughed. 'But yeah. The dance is every bit as mannered as a minuet. There are all sorts of phrases and pauses and steps. After the guy finds out what sort of financial burdens you'd like to get rid of, he starts asking you what sort of things you'd like to have. A Cadillac, a summer place in the Catskills or the Poconos, maybe a boat.
I gave a little start at that, because I knew my dad wanted a boat about as badly as he wanted anything these days; a couple of times I had gone with him on sunny summer afternoons to marinas along King George Lake and Lake Passeeonkee. He'd price out the smaller yachts and I'd see the wistful look in his eyes. Now I understood it. They were out of his reach. Maybe if his life had taken a different turn - if he didn't have kids to think about putting through college, for instance - they wouldn't have been.
'And you said no?' I asked him.
He shrugged. 'I made it clear pretty early on that I didn't want to dance. For one thing, it would have meant getting more involved with him on a personal level, and, as I said, I thought he was a skunk. For another thing, these guys are all fundamentally stupid about numbers - which is why so many of them have gone up on tax convictions. They think you can hide illegal income. They're sure of it. He laughed. 'They've all got this mystic idea that you can wash money like you wash clothes, when all you can really do is juggle it until something falls down and smashes all over your head.'
'Those were the reasons?'
'Two out of three.' He looked in my eyes. 'I'm no fucking crook, Dennis.'
There was a moment of electric communication between us - even now, four years later, I get goosebumps thinking of it, although I'm by no means sure that I can get it across to you. It wasn't that he treated me like an equal for the first time that night; it wasn't even that he was showing me the wistful knight-errant still hiding inside the button-down man scrambling for a living in a dirty, hustling world. I think it was sensing him as a reality, a person who had existed long before I ever came onstage, a person who had eaten his share of mud. In that moment I think I could have imagined him making love to my mother, both of them sweaty and working hard to make it, and not have been embarrassed.
Then he dropped his eyes, grinned a defensive grin, and did his husky Nixon-voice, which he was very good at: 'You people deserve to know if your father is a crook. Well, I am not a crook, I could have taken the money, but that . . . harrum! . . . that would have been wrong.'
I laughed too loud, a release of tension - I felt the moment passing, and although part of me didn't want it to pass, part of me did; it was too intense . I think maybe he felt that, too.
'Shhh, you'll wake your mother and she'll give us both the devil for being up this late.'
'Yeah, sorry. Dad, do you know what he's into? Darnell?'
'I didn't know then; I didn't want to know, because then I'd be a part of it. I had my ideas, and I've heard a few things. Stolen cars, I imagine - not that he'd run them through that garage on Hampton Street; he's not a completely stupid man, and only an idiot shits where he eats. Maybe hijacking as well.'
'Guns and stuff?' I asked, sounding a little hoarse.
'Nothing so romantic. If I had to guess, I'd guess cigarettes, mostly - cigarettes and booze, the two old standbys. Contraband like fireworks. Maybe a shipment of microwave ovens or colour TVs every once in a while, if the risk looked low. Enough to keep him busy these many years.'