Afterburn (14 page)

If you were smart, you fell in love with a woman who could do that, and you packed up all the other operations. You told your dick no more other women, because this one is the real thing. You make a promise to your dick that in the long run, it would be worth it. And then you go get all the money that you hid in Aunt Eva's basement in Brooklyn (he'd kept her front-door key in his wallet for four years) and you pay for Christina to finish college and get a law degree or whatever else she wanted and get her into the civilized world. If you were smart, that is.

If you were stupid, you got her to do things she shouldn't be doing. But Rick hadn't been smart; he had been crazy for the steroids and had become a joke, a two-hundred-and-sixty-pound clown who could bench-press four-twenty and had two chicks on the side whom he'd told he owned a car dealership on Long Island. More like a body shop that sold secondhand junkers. Dick-wax, his whole life had been dick-wax.

Why Christina had put up with him was a mystery; maybe she saw what he could have been, with the drugs out of him; she was a woman who made her mind up about things and then did them. You'd be okay if you just stayed with me, she'd said once, not in anger but by way of observation. A true statement. She'd decided she would stick with him and she did. And then, once arrested, she'd decided that all contact between them would cease. She'd never answered his letters to her in prison—not that he blamed her. (Now, of course, he didn't get any mail at all. Had no address.) He'd never been good enough for her, knew it even then, although he acted like he was fucking king of the world. The last thing she'd said to him, on the day she was convicted—being walked away in handcuffs back to Rikers Island, her dark eyes glancing into his—was this: "You should get out of the city, Rick." She'd meant it. She had taken everything she knew about him and everything she expected might happen to him and distilled it into one short utterance of wisdom. You should get out of the city, Rick.
Get the hell out of the city, Rick
. And so he did.

When he found Orient Point one day, just driving out of Brooklyn for kicks, he had not expected that he would stay so long, get dug in, find work on a boat catching garbage-fish, learn to grow tomatoes. He'd only known that he needed solitude and removal. If there was pain and difficulty in this, good; it was penance. In the beginning, in fact, it had been the most he could do to simply live in his own skin. The cottage had an ancient phone line strung along the lane, and in the early days after moving there he would pick up the old black receiver, cracked and heavy as a hammer, and listen to the far buzz of the universe. He would think of the people he could call, the many people in the city who would say,
Yo, Rick, man, you been away too long, you gotta come back, do some business
, and he'd see the uselessness of the conversation. He missed Christina, yes, he could admit that. Even four years later. And not just the sex; that wasn't what he thought about so much, except for the one night in the SoHo Grand Hotel, when he got beaten up. It was those mornings, Sundays, when she would buy the paper and they would go for a walk in the city, see a movie. She loved the movies. Always reading, too. One of those people who had a secret life with books. Reading to escape herself, reading to find herself. Swept the floor to relax. She was a girl with some old hurts. She carried them hard, too, he'd always known, not getting anywhere with them. I can't trust anybody, she'd once confessed to him, almost mournfully, I
want
to but it got stolen from me. Of course she meant the rape when she was a teenager. She'd told him once, only once, and then seemed to wish she could take it back inside her. You told me, he'd said. I shouldn't have, she'd answered, you don't understand, you don't know what that kind of thing does to somebody. She'd gotten the broom from the closet and started. You don't know. You don't know me.

Remembering her words, he'd softly set the old receiver on its cradle. Later he'd had the phone shut off, and then, to guard against his own backsliding, taken a wooden ladder he found in the barn and cut the wire that ran from the cottage all the way down the lane and rolled it up, a quarter-mile of it, in the bed of his truck. He strung a piece of the wire between two pines and hung his clothes on it to dry.

You did things like that. You made a new world for yourself. Small and clean. You didn't talk to people much. He'd spent about six months seeing a huge, heavy-assed, forty-three-year-old divorcée whose kids were already out of the house, fat with amused eyes, and at first it was something that made him not so lonely. They'd met on the Greenport dock, when he was standing there in his waders and a T-shirt. She was eating an ice cream cone. "Hey, Bob," she'd said, "or Bill or Biff or whatever your big old name is, you stink like fish." She wiped her lips with a napkin and put her fingers around his arm, measuring. "I can't even get my hand halfway around it." He'd looked at her. "Lady, you don't want to talk to me." She grabbed his arm with both hands now. "Oh, maybe I do." He saw she didn't need for him to like her, which was fine. He didn't want to be inside a woman's head, he could barely find his way around his own. All she wanted was sex, she told him. Honestly. He would drive over two or three times a week, playing with his dick in the truck, walk in half-hard already, and just push himself into her for all he was worth. Try to fuck his way over to the other side of something, which, all men learned, always failed. He did not find her attractive, yet this made her desirable in another way. She had great handfuls of flesh, everywhere, nipples big as coffee-cup saucers, and he found himself liking it, the enormity of her. Her ass was something like fifty inches around, you had to press the cheeks apart. He understood that she wanted a big man who could push her around, who made her feel small. Once she lit a cigarette and told him to keep going. "I don't want to talk about anything," she'd say. His orders were just to do it, and he'd never stayed the night, never been invited to, just pulled on his old boxers after washing his dick with soap like his older half brother, Paul, taught him as a kid and gotten back in the truck, sometimes driven around the dark roads with the radio on. But it hadn't worked out. One night she'd casually asked why he'd left the city and he'd said, "You really want to know?" And she'd answered, "Yeah," daring him, and he'd started to talk about Christina and their apartment and the restaurants they used to go to. The woman looked at Rick, eyes distraught, as if she had heard something in his voice that she did not suspect of him—a sound, a tone of remembrance of how it was when you loved someone without reservation—and then she started to weep. "I never heard you talk like this. I thought you were some big dumb fisherman." She choked on her sudden grief, lit a cigarette but could not smoke it. "You ruined it for me," she said. "I want you to leave." So he had stopped seeing anybody, except the crew from the boat. Bunch of fuckwads and drunks and losers, so he fit in well. In the winters he'd listened to the icy tree limbs rasp the cedar shakes on the outside of the cottage. Wondering if he was going crazy. But no longer. The work helped, getting on the boat, just doing the work. He had come around, he was okay.

And now this. The prudent thing was to do nothing, to go nowhere.

AN EDGE OF GRAY LIGHT
high up on the wall, a man heavy on a mattress, sweat around his neck, under his arms. Work boots on the floor, laces loose. The beginning of a breeze, the red buoy clanging softly out there in the flat gloom. He stirred, the dream leaving him, he a Staten Island schoolboy in a neat Catholic-school tie and collar, bending down to inspect something large and dark, unknowable—a shape slumped and monstrous. He pulled back the sheet and slipped on his glasses. His joints were stiff now when he rose. The bed stood next to the window, and the three fat tomatoes from the garden sat there on the sill, dirty and green. He set his feet on the floor, pushed up from the bed, feeling the heaviness.

Outside in the wind, he held a cup of milk. He turned to look at the cottage. Built in 1805, one of the farmers at the restaurant had said, and undergone innumerable additions and renovations since then. He finished his milk. You are going to help her, he told himself, you are going to do only good things.

Back inside, he slipped on his watch and searched for his old belt; the mice had gotten into his bottom drawer and left him three short chewed pieces of leather and the buckle. He had one suitcase—something rattling around inside. He popped the case open. A pair of shoes, good Italian leather ones, cut narrowly with a new heel. He hadn't worn them in four years. They'd probably cost him a couple of hundred dollars, a criminal amount of money. Well, he'd been a criminal. He sat on the low camp bed and set the shoes on the floor. Then he took the left shoe and slipped it on his foot. Didn't quite fit. He could barely jam the foot in. He pulled off the shoe and tried the other foot. Same thing. Maybe his feet had collapsed, maybe it was the calluses, going barefoot so much that his feet were wider. The shoes he wore each day were a pair of old farmer's clodhoppers he'd bought by the side of the road down a few miles, where, among the usual household utensils, cheap wooden furniture, and worn-out hand tools, a woman had sold off her late husband's effects. One of those tough old women who didn't cry as they cashed out their lives.

Now he set the good shoes aside and folded a few clothes into the suitcase, then made his bed, turned off the propane, disconnected the refrigerator, throwing some old rice and beans into the weeds, locked the shutters across the windows of the cottage, washed out his dishes, and put them in the drainer next to the sink. It was 4:00 a.m.; he had to beat the Manhattan rush hour. He put the three tomatoes in his coat pocket, locked the door, and stuck the key under an old oyster shell in the weeds. In the barn he found his bow saw, dull now after four years of cutting firewood, and as he closed the door, he confronted the dark stand of humped sunflowers, watching him leave like disapproving old men.

While his truck idled just off the public road, the tomatoes on the dashboard, he walked back along the drive and cut a sizable oak—a foot wide at the base—so that it fell across the lane leading to the cottage. You'd have to use a chain saw or a bulldozer to get up the drive in a vehicle, and if somebody did cut up or drag away the tree, then Rick would know when he returned. He had enough boat money to last a few days; beyond that he would have to retrieve some of his cash in Aunt Eva's basement. He slid the saw behind the seat in the truck and drove west. Thirty miles on Route 25, then seventy-odd miles on the Long Island Expressway, the needle right into the heart of New York City. He would run into some traffic, then head north toward the prison. Even stopping for breakfast, he'd get there well before 9:00 a.m., just to be safe. Christina would not want to see him, he knew. But she wasn't expecting him, either, and he hoped that, in the moment of recognition, she might understand that he'd been imprisoned, too, in his own way, certainly not as badly as she had been, but caged by remorse and grief for the time lost. Their time lost.

WHEN HE ARRIVED
at the prison, he pulled the truck into the visitors' parking lot and gazed toward the brick buildings on the hill. It didn't look like a prison, not really, more like an old factory or abandoned school surrounded by the meanest fence he had ever seen in his life—savage razor wire coiled everywhere. The state wasn't spending much money here, except for the wire. He watched a few women in green uniforms walk slowly up the hill. In the cement-block building attached to the prison's main gate, a heavyset guard looked up from a table.

"Sign in and put your keys and coins anything made of metal in the tray step through the detector."

"I'm not going in," Rick answered, anxious at the idea of visiting even a women's prison. "I'm just waiting for someone to come out."

"Who?"

"Christina Welles."

"I just got on my shift. Let me look at the log. Maybe she left."

"How do they leave if no one's here to pick them up?"

"Prison gives them forty dollars and generally they call a cab," the guard replied. "Cab takes them up to the train station about a mile away, then they go into New York."

"I think she probably hasn't come down yet," Rick said. "You mind calling inside?"

When the guard hung up the phone, he shook his head. "No, you got it wrong."

"I was told she was being released here."

"You got bad information."

"Why, what's wrong with it?"

"She be at court today, State Supreme Court."

"In Manhattan?"

"Think so."

He realized that he couldn't see his truck from where he stood, couldn't see who was sitting in what car in the prison parking lot, waiting for him to return. "I was told she'd be here, at 9:00 a.m."

"That was wrong, too. She left before that."

"I was told 9:00 a.m. on very good authority."

"They telling everybody that, I guess."

He didn't like this. "What do you mean?"

"I mean"—the guard mustered a cruel little smile—"you already the second guy come looking for her this morning. She's gone, pal."

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817 Fifth Avenue, Manhattan
September 9, 1999

HE TOOK A BIG RED PLANE
and a little blue pill, and woke up on the other side of the world, alert as coffee and hanging eight thousand feet above Manhattan's stony skyline, which, after the glass rocketry of Hong Kong and Shanghai, appeared worn and obsolete. As he bounced through customs and immigration and into the black company car waiting for him, he forgot the dream he'd had on the plane but remembered the eight million after-tax dollars vomited from Sir Henry Lai's mouth. A very pleasing sum of money, enough to procure an East Hampton mansion, a minor Picasso, or—better than these and not nearly as expensive—a secret child. A boy, a girl, who cared? Assuming that Martha Wainwright had followed his wishes, his advertisement would appear in the personals sections of the next issues of
The Village Voice
and
New York
magazine. Read each week by thousands of young, fertile, intelligent, and caring women who could recognize a good deal when they saw one. Who would be intrigued by an ad placed by a "mature executive" willing to support mother and child for twenty-one years. Medical expenses paid. Education expenses paid. They'll write me, Charlie thought, how could they not? And while that might be good, here was something bad, handed to him by the driver in a sealed folder prepared by Karen: the weekly sales tracking report! Did he dare peek? The summary showed raw numbers only, but he knew what to look for, and what he saw was Manila Telecom coming after him in every market with every product, jinking around, stunting and harassing him, stealing his salespeople away, cutting prices to the bone, copying Teknetrix's products, even bribing clients' purchasing personnel. MT had two major factories in Indonesia. Give me a little labor riot there, Charlie thought, give me a currency fluctuation, something to slow MT down. He had to get the factory in Shanghai up and operational or MT was going to keep gnawing away at Teknetrix's market share, and with it, Charlie's breakfast. No, worse than that. After MT ate his breakfast, it would chew through his tongue and esophagus and right on down to his shoes. That was the telecom-component manufacturing business. Supply or die.