The Dinosaur Club Read online

  “Get a good lawyer,” Kitty snapped. “Or she’ll pluck you like a chicken.”

  If there’s anything to pluck, Fallon thought. The idea brought him back to the original reason for his visit. Another trip to the guilt factory. He leaned forward. “Look, Mom, there’s something else I have to talk to you about.”

  Kitty stared at him suspiciously, but said nothing. The suspicion was enough to make Fallon’s stomach turn.

  “It’s about my job. I may be losing that, too. And fairly soon.” He paused, then pushed on. “That may mean …”

  Kitty cut him off. “I told you not to go to work for that company. I told you to use your GI benefits to go to medical school, or law school. But you wouldn’t listen.”

  Oh, God, Fallon thought. Why not throw in dental school? He drew a long breath and wondered if his mother knew what was coming, was simply avoiding it with a good offense. “Look, Mom, that’s kind of a moot point….”

  “And I never wanted you to marry Trisha. But, as always, you did what you wanted.”

  Again, Fallon was shocked. “When the hell did you ever say anything against Trisha?” he asked. He was flabbergasted by her blatant lie. His mother had always adored Trisha.

  “Don’t curse,” Kitty ordered. She waited until her son sat back, resigned to her tirade. “You never listened to me, John. Never. When you graduated from high school, I told you not to join the Army. But, of course, you did. Then I told you not to volunteer for Vietnam. But off you went. In each case, you did exactly what you wanted. Trisha was just another example.” She raised a hand, warding off an objection that was not forthcoming. “Oh, I know. You came back from that stupid war with all those medals.” She stared at him, preparing the coup de grâce. “And with a bullet hole in your belly.” Another short pause. “But had you listened, you could have avoided that, and gotten on with your schooling, and then you could have done much more with your life.” She paused a beat, then waved a dismissive hand. “Trisha was just one more mistake, John.” She closed her eyes momentarily. “You’re so much like your father.”

  Fallon’s anger flashed. His father had lived with this woman for thirty-nine years and had endured her endless criticisms. James Fallon had been a dreamer, very much a romantic, who had loved life and the people who inhabited it, and who had spent every idle hour working in the basement of their small suburban New Jersey home, struggling to invent the “better mousetrap,” as he had put it. In his real life, he had been a salesman for a paper company—a very modest success who had needed his wife’s income to survive. It was something his mother had never let him forget.

  “I’m what I wanted to be, Mom. And, right or wrong, I married the woman I wanted to marry.” He fought for control; found it; drew another long breath. “Look, talking about all this is pointless. What I’m trying to tell you is that I’m about to hit a financial rough spot, and it may mean I can’t keep up my end of your expenses here. At least not for a bit.”

  Kitty’s hands fisted in her lap; her mouth tightened slightly. It was as if she were warding off a tremor, willing it away. Fallon suddenly realized she was frightened—something he had never seen before—and that unexpected vision sent his guilt soaring.

  “Look, it will work out. It will only be temporary. And it probably won’t happen for a time yet.”

  “Oh, I know, John. You’ve always been lucky. Things always work out for you.”

  His mother was looking away from him now, as though she couldn’t bear to make eye contact. It made him feel desolate, miserable.

  “Tell me about the children,” his mother said. “They never come to visit me, you know.”

  Fallon stared at his well-polished loafers. Guilt washed over him; he was drowning in it. He had beaten his mother down, frightened her with his own failure. Now she could awaken each morning fearful that it might be her last day in this place he helped pay for each month. Maybe he should just finish her off. Do it now while he had the chance. Tell her everything. Even tell her that Don Ho has AIDS. He almost laughed at the madness of it all.

  Fallon looked up at his mother and smiled. “The kids are fine,” he said. “I just talked to them this morning. They’re taking some classes this summer. That’s why they haven’t come to visit.”

  “So, when do you think they’ll boot our asses out?” Wally ended the question with a huge bite of hot dog and began chewing furiously.

  It was the seventh time Wally had brought it up. Seven times in seven innings, and Fallon still didn’t have an answer; was sick of hearing the question, and now wished he had stayed home and mowed the goddamned lawn. And the Yankees were losing 10-2.

  “Wally, if you ask me that again, I’ll strangle you.” A collective groan went up from the crowd. The Yankee first baseman had just made an error. Fallon wished he could strangle him as well.

  “Oh great,” Wally said. “So whadda you wanna talk about? Maybe we should talk about Trisha running off with her dentist. Or maybe I should tell you how my ex is running around with a Rolls-Royce salesman. Yeah, that’d be good.”

  Fallon turned to face him. Wally Green’s fat face was red, and Fallon wasn’t sure if it was from seven innings in the sun or the idea of his wife’s new boyfriend.

  Wally pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and mopped his balding head. He was Fallon’s age, maybe a year or two older, and was in far worse shape. The man seemed short of breath even when he sat.

  “Yeah, that’s right,” Wally continued. His soft brown eyes took on a glare. “A Rolls-Royce salesman. And where the hell did she meet a RollsRoyce salesman? I’m asking myself this.” He jabbed the remains of his hot dog at Fallon. A dab of mustard at its end barely missed his peach polo shirt. “Did you ever meet a Rolls-Royce salesman? I never met one.” He waved the hot dog in a wide arc, taking in the sea of fifty thousand plus who had jammed into Yankee Stadium. “I bet none of these people ever met one, except maybe George Steinbrenner, sitting up in his goddamned sky box. Shit, I don’t know anybody who’s ever met one. So how does this happen? How does Janice meet one? She goes to her Hadassah meeting, and one of her friends says, Oh, by the way, I want you to meet my cousin? He sells Rolls-Royce luxury cars’?”

  “What difference does it make?” Fallon asked. “What he does, I mean. You said you were glad to be rid of her. Hell, maybe she’ll marry the guy, and the alimony will stop.”

  “No. She’ll never let me off the hook. I think she met him at the showroom—that she was out looking at goddamned cars.”

  “That’s crazy,” Fallon said.

  Wally was no longer listening. The Yankee pitcher had just walked a batter, and the bases were now loaded.

  “Asshole!” Wally shouted. He was on his feet, pointing his hot dog toward the pitching mound. “How much are they paying you, you creep?” he roared.

  Throughout the stadium angry jeers rained on the pitcher’s mound. Fallon stared across the infield toward the third-base side. The crowd resembled a patchwork quilt of color, each topped with a white or brown face flushed in frustration. He pulled Wally back to his seat.

  “Where would Janice get the money to buy a Rolls-Royce?” he asked.

  “Where? Where? When the company throws my sorry ass out on the street, how much is my buyout gonna be?”

  “Wally, she’s not gonna get that.”

  “Hah! That’s what you think. You don’t know her cousin. Her fucking lawyer cousin. I know that bloodsucker. We went to the same synagogue for years.” Wally’s face had turned scarlet and his fist was squeezing the hot dog, turning it to mush in his hand. He got hold of himself, stared at the mangled frankfurter, then threw it down at his feet. “You should have heard that prick at the divorce hearing.” His voice turned to a whining singsong. “How poor Janice had to pack up like a gypsy every time the company decided to move my ass to another city. How she had to leave all her friends, leave the home she had worked so hard to make for me and the kids. How she had to put the kids into new schools. Deal with al
l the trauma it caused. Start all over again and again and again.” He began pounding his chest with the palm of one hand. “And what about me? For me it was party, party? I didn’t have to deal with all the same shit? The house, the kids, the new schools, the friends? Plus take on a new sales territory I didn’t know fuck-all about?”

  “Wally, a judge is going to know all that,” Fallon said.

  “Oh, yeah? Yeah?” He jabbed a finger toward Fallon’s chest. There were remnants of mustard on it, and Fallon shrank back. “You go to Family Court today, all the judges are women. You haven’t been there yet. Wait. They sit there and look down at your wife, who’s sitting there in her oldest dress because her snake of a lawyer told her to come that way. She’s not wearing any makeup, and she looks like shit—one step away from a cancer ward.” He waved his hand in a broad arc. “All her goddamned jewelry is back at the house. All she’s got on is her wedding band. One lonely little piece of gold on one finger. And it sits there like an accusation. There’s no engagement ring. No goddamned tennis bracelet. No nothing. And already you can see it in the judge’s eyes. She thinks the woman is a candidate for welfare.”

  Wally threw up his hands, gesturing toward the heavens now. “So some bitch in a black robe sits there and looks from you in your nice suit to your soon-to-be-ex wife in her old dress, and she figures: No way is this prick gonna move into a nice bachelor pad and start traipsing around with a bevy of bimbos. And bam. Right there go all the bucks you worked your ass off for. Bam. Shazam. Gone.” He snapped his fingers. “Just like that. And now you end up living in some goddamned walk-up without a pot to piss in. And now you’re out of work, too—a fifty-year-old hump out looking for a job, when the only guys who wanna talk to you are McDonald’s and the asshole who runs the checkout aisles at Kmart. And your ex-wife, she’s driving a Rolls-Royce.”

  They were seated at the bar of Café des Artistes, which seemed sadly empty that holiday weekend. The normally crowded restaurant, a popular after-the-theater haunt on West Sixty-seventh Street, was situated just off Central Park West, not far from Lincoln Center and about four blocks from Wally’s three-room apartment on Amsterdam Avenue. Wally had taken the subway to Yankee Stadium, and Fallon had decided to drive him home and buy him a drink on the way.

  So there they sat, surrounded by the warmth of dark green walls and Howard Chandler Christy murals, as Wally—well into his second scotch, following four beers at the stadium—waxed poetic about the joys of divorce, the pleasures of rediscovered bachelorhood, and the hedonistic raptures of single life in Manhattan. Fallon, who had avoided the stadium’s tepid beer, and who was still nursing his first very light highball, wasn’t buying any of it.

  “You should stay at my place tonight,” Wally insisted. “We could do a little bouncing, check out the action, and I could put you up on the sofa.” He picked up a dove’s egg—the Café’s exotic bar food offering—popped it into his mouth, and awaited Fallon’s reaction. When none came he nudged his elbow and inclined his head toward a woman seated several stools away at the otherwise empty bar. “We could even have her, you know. Either one of us.” Wally had lowered his voice and was leaning in close. “She could probably even dig up a friend if we wanted.”

  Fallon glanced at the woman who had become the object of Wally’s sudden lust. She was dressed in matching white blouse and slacks, set off by a gold belt made up of repeated links forged into the Gucci logo. There were white sandals on her feet, and Fallon noticed she had painted her toenails the same color Trisha often favored—Watermelon. The woman was attractive—probably just over forty, he guessed—with well-coiffed dark hair and a slender, appealing body. There were no rings on her fingers, and unlike other fashionable New York nightspots, the Café was not frequented by hookers. Fallon couldn’t help wondering why this woman was sitting here alone on a holiday weekend.

  He turned back to Wally. “We could have her, huh?” His tone was a mix of sarcasm and a clear lack of interest.

  “Sure,” Wally insisted, still leaning in. “She’s probably a divorcée, looking for the same thing we are.”

  “I’m still too fragile,” Fallon said wryly. “I’m afraid of being hurt again.”

  “Hey, it takes time,” Wally said, missing the irony. He looked past Fallon and studied the woman. “You’re probably right. She looks like your typical Manhattan barracuda. Chew you up and spit out the pieces.”

  “So, when do you think they’ll toss us out on our ass?” Fallon asked. One more attempt at wry wit.

  Still oblivious, Wally bit again. “Me? Probably tomorrow. You? I don’t think you’re on their goddamned list.”

  Fallon laughed softly. “Why the hell not?”

  Wally turned suddenly serious. “Lots of reasons, Jack. First, you’re the national sales manager of one of the biggest wire and cable companies in the U.S. A vice president, for chrissake. Me, I only head up the New York district.” He shrugged, indicating some imagined logic in his words. “Let’s face it—you’re too close to the top, and the boys at the top don’t screw with each other.” Another shrug. “Also, you’ve been with the company since it started. You’re one of the guys who bought in when everybody was being paid peanuts, when everybody worked out of that first half-assed factory in Jersey. Hell, you helped make the company what it is today—four manufacturing plants and a corporate headquarters in the goddamned Chrysler Building. And even that prick, our beloved founder and CEO Charlie Waters, can’t forget you hung with him during the lean times.”

  Fallon took a small sip of his drink and smiled. “I like your theory, except for all the holes.” He raised one of his own fingers. “First, I’m not at the top. Close, but no cigar. And, in case you haven’t noticed, a lot of the guys who were up there with me—the guys I started out with—saw what was coming and folded their tents a long time ago.” He picked up his glass, held it out, and stared at the amber liquid. “And, my observant friend, if you take a long look at the clowns who are sitting behind those desks now, you aren’t gonna find any who want to be Jack Fallon’s rabbi.” Fallon put his glass on the bar and gave it a half turn. “Now let’s take that beloved prick, Charlie Waters, who I sweated my balls off with all those years ago, and who now only talks to me through his high-priced lackeys. Hell, I could be gone three years before good old Charlie even noticed.”

  Fallon’s mind went back twenty-three years to when he had first met Charlie Waters. He had been a kid—at least as much of a kid as you could be after two tours in Vietnam. Two years of being scared out of your wits, until you just wanted to crawl up in a ball and hide. And, yes, as his mother had so brutally pointed out, he had been awarded medals, although even then he hadn’t been sure if they meant anything, had seen them as little more than yet another accident of fate.

  His thoughts flashed to the day he had gotten the most impressive of those medals, just as it did, even to this day, during the occasional haunting nightmares. His company had hit a small village northwest of Bong Son, and had walked into a killing ground. The V.C. had been lying in wait and had chopped them up with heavy machine-gun fire, the rounds coming in from three sides. He had taken cover behind a battle-torn hootch, shaking like a leaf, the men on either side of him already dead. In the center of the village, only yards away, three more men lay wounded and screaming for help. He had waited, silently praying that someone else would go out and get them. Then his company had begun to withdraw, and there had been no one else left. He had lain there shaking, his bowels feeling as though they might burst. And then he had started to crawl toward the men—had been halfway there before he even realized he had begun to move. He had crawled through a drainage ditch filled with fetid water, incoming rounds churning up the stench. Then covering fire had come from the trees, and he had reached the first man and had dragged him back behind the hootch. Then the second. When he had returned with the third, other members of his company had gotten there to drag the first two into the surrounding forest.

  He was covered in
blood, uncertain if it was his own or from the men he had brought in. His fatigue pants were drenched, and he didn’t know if it was from the putrid water he had crawled through or the result of his own terror. Overhead he could hear the choppers coming in to pull them out. Someone was shouting at him to leave the third man behind, and he had looked back and had seen the man’s intestines spilled out onto the heat-packed dirt of the village. The man was dead, and Fallon realized it was the first time he had looked at his face. He was one of the replacements who had just joined the company, and Fallon didn’t even know his name. That was when he had begun to cry, the tears streaming down his cheeks. But he had dragged the man out anyway, crouched low to the ground, back into the safety of the trees. Only five of them had made it back that day, including two of the men he had pulled to safety—only five out of thirty.

  They had given him the DSC, and the medal, like his dreams, had haunted him. But it had seemed to mean a lot to Charlie when he learned of it. Charlie was six years older than Fallon—in his early thirties when they had met—and he had seemed slick and sophisticated, a brilliant young engineer out of RPI with a brilliant idea, and he was looking for people to help him sell it, to help launch a business that could revolutionize a small but vital segment of the aeronautics industry. They had met at a party, introduced by a mutual acquaintance, and immediately Waters had started selling Fallon on the idea of joining him. Fallon, he had argued, was just the man he needed, somebody who could go to government and military officials—a war hero who could get their backing to pressure government aircraft contractors into giving his idea a chance. Fallon had been reluctant. Not about the company, which excited him, but about his so-called hero status. But Waters had been a helluva salesman. It was something Fallon still believed, even now. So he had signed on, had worked his butt off, along with a handful of others. Later, when the war in Vietnam had turned into a fully accepted national disgrace, they had downplayed his war-hero image, but by then they were in the door, had their start, and could fight and scrape their way from there. And then the company had started to grow, to diversify, to become bigger than any of them had ever dreamed. He wondered now if it had simply become too big.