Sabbath’s Theater Read Free Page A

the greatest show on earth—accidents, burglaries, domestic disputes, suicides. Most people never see a suicide victim, but a girl whom Matthew had gone to school with had blown her head off in the woods, sat under an oak tree and blew out her brains, and Matthew, in his first year out of the academy, was the cop on the scene to call the medical examiner and wait for him to come. In that first year, Matthew told his mother, he was so pumped up, felt so invincible, he believed he could stop bullets with his teeth. Matthew walks in on a domestic dispute where both of the people are drunk and screaming at each other and hating each other and throwing punches and he, her son, talks to them and calms them down so that by the time he leaves everything is okay and neither of them has to be pinched for breach of peace. And sometimes they’re so bad he does pinch ’em, handcuffs the woman and handcuffs the man, and then waits for another trooper to come, and they take the couple in before they kill each other. When a kid was showing a gun in a pizza place on 63, flashing it around before leaving, it was Matthew who found the car the kid was driving and, without any backup, knowing the kid had a gun, told him over the loudspeaker to come out with his hands in the air and had his own gun drawn right on the guy . . . and these stories, establishing for his mother that Matthew was a good cop who wanted to do a good job, to do it as he’d been taught to do it, frightened her so that she bought a scanner, a little box with an antenna and a crystal that monitored the police signals on Matthew’s frequency, and sometimes when he was on the midnight shift and she couldn’t sleep, she would turn on the scanner and listen to it all night long. The scanner would pick up the signal every time Matthew was called, so that Drenka knew more or less where he was and where he was going and that he was still alive. When she heard his number—415B—boom, she was awake. But so was Matthew’s father—and enraged to be reminded yet again that the son he had been trainingevery summer in the kitchen, the heir to the business he had built from nothing as a penniless immigrant, was now an expert in karate and judo instead, out at three in the morning stupidly trailing an old pickup truck that was going suspiciously slowly crossing Battle Mountain. The bitterness between father and son had grown so bad that it was only with Sabbath that Drenka could share her fears about Matthew’s safety and recount her pride in the amount of motor vehicle activity he was able to produce in a week: “It’s out there,” he told her. “There’s always something—speeding, stop signs, taillights out, all kind of violations. . . .” To Sabbath, then, it came as no surprise when Drenka admitted that with the five hundred dollars he had paid her to complete the trio with Christa and himself she had bought, for Matthew’s birthday, a portable Makita table saw and a nice set of dado blades.
    All in all, things couldn’t have worked out better for everyone. Drenka had found the means by which to be her husband’s dearest friend. The one-time puppet master of the Indecent Theater of Manhattan made more than merely tolerable for her the routines of marriage that previously had almost killed her—now she cherished those deadly routines for the counterweight they provided her recklessness. Far from seething with disgust for her unimaginative husband, she had never been more appreciative of Matija’s stolidity.
    Five hundred was
cheap
for all that everyone was getting in the way of solace and satisfaction, and so, however much it disturbed him to fork over those stiff, new banknotes, Sabbath displayed toward Drenka the same sangfroid that she affected as, lightly enjoying the movie cliché, she folded the bills in half and deposited them into her bra, down between the breasts whose soft fullness had never ceased to captivate him. It was supposed to be otherwise, with the