Head Wounds (3 page)

I hauled myself off the daybed and went into the kitchen. I flicked on the stoop light and saw my friend Joe Sullivan, his face cupped against the window. The wall clock in the kitchen said it was three-thirty in the morning.

“Good, you’re dressed. Let’s go,” he said, shoving past me and filling up the kitchen. Sullivan was about six feet tall but well over two hundred pounds. He’d been a patrolman with a uniform and a car with lights on the top for twenty years, but he’d done well enough recently to get promoted to
detective, despite his heartfelt opposition. His wife was the deciding factor, since the new job came with more money and easier hours. At least theoretically.

He was wearing a Yankees cap over his buzz-cut blond hair and a bulky army field jacket. Black Levi’s with a pressed-in crease and a pair of alpine hiking boots completed the look. Ostensibly a plainclothesman, one glance and you’d assume cop, unless you took him for a mercenary fresh from an African coup.

“No time for coffee. Too bad,” he said, his bright blue eyes darting around the kitchen.

His heavy boots were covered with mud. Eddie was helping him distribute it around the kitchen floor. Sullivan bent over to pet his head.

“Maybe I can make it while you tell me what’s going on,” I said, splashing water from the kitchen faucet on my face. It woke me up a little but did nothing to improve my equilibrium.

“Your girlfriend’s house is burning down. Not next door,” he added quickly. “One of the knockdowns.”

He walked into the bedroom behind the kitchen, which had a view of Amanda’s house.

“No lights’re on,” he yelled back. “I guess nobody’s called her yet. Must be asleep.”

“Which knockdown?”

“The one near the tip of the neck. Come on, we gotta tell her. Leave the dog.”

We drove the three hundred feet to Amanda’s house in Sullivan’s busted-up Ford Bronco. He told me he heard about the fire from Will Ervin, the young cop who’d taken over his beat. Sullivan had given Ervin a standing order to report anything that happened in North Sea, supposedly to ease him into his new territory. The transition was now
in its seventh month, and Sullivan’s interest in everything North Sea was still unflagging. Car accidents, break-ins, bar fights, house fires.

“You can see the glow,” he said, pointing to the tree line across the lagoon from Amanda’s house.

“What happened?” I asked him.

“I don’t know, but the whole thing’s involved. Main job now’s keeping the fire out of the woods or jumping to another house.”

The warm air from earlier in the evening had fled and the stiff northwesterly was back, breaking itself across the tip of the peninsula. I shivered on the hard seat of the old 4−4, an electric itch from the vodka skittering across my nervous system. I lit a cigarette to complete the effect. Before Sullivan could tell me to put it out we were there.

We rang the doorbell and lights flashed on.

“This can’t be good,” she said, holding the door open with one hand and her silk robe closed with the other.

“You got a fire, Amanda,” said Sullivan. “One of your houses on Jacob’s Neck. The one near the point.”

“You’re joking.”

“You should get over there,” he said. “Is this for real?” she asked me.

Sullivan brushed past her into the house. We could hear him walking through all the rooms, snapping on lights and opening and shutting doors.

“Why’s he doing that? When did you hear about this?” she asked, her face tight with distress.

“Routine precaution,” I said, as if I knew what I was talking about. Then I answered her other question: “Just a few minutes ago.”

“I got to go now,” she said with a shake of her head, reaching for the front door. I slipped my hand around her wrist.

“Not like that. Get dressed. I’ll go with you.”

She stood up straight and nodded.

“Of course. What am I doing?”

I stood waiting in the foyer until I noticed my legs start to falter. I slid down to the cold hardwood floor and braced myself against the wall. The floor listed to starboard, but I held my ground. My head felt like somebody’d filled it up with lubricating oil. So far my stomach was on the sidelines, relatively calm, but I knew that wouldn’t last. I reminded myself that the only way to sleep off a big night was to actually sleep, which had been the plan for tomorrow, a Saturday without cutoff saws or pneumatic nailers, or iced-over job sites at seven o’clock in the morning.

Sullivan stepped over me on his way out the door.

“When you get over there, keep an eye on her. No histrionics. Firemen have enough to do.”

“She won’t throw herself on the fire. Though I might if this headache gets any worse.”

“Now that you mention it, you do look like crap.”

“We’ll see you there.”

A few minutes later Amanda ran past me pulling on a gold barn jacket. I was going to offer to drive, but she beat me to her Audi and had the engine going before I reached the car door. I was glad Sullivan had left ahead of us. He didn’t like people speeding through North Sea, even on the way to personal calamity. Amanda’s jaw was set and she held the wheel with both hands as she spun the little car through the tight neighborhood turns. I held onto my internal organs.

We approached the flashing red, blue and yellow lights and the hard crackle of VHF radios. Amanda rolled down her window and the acid smell of wood smoke filled the car. The air was soaked with vapor billowing off the gushing fire hoses. Neighbors stood in tight huddles, staring intently and
pointing at the burning house, their faces reflecting the strobe lights and diffused glow from the drowning fire. A Town cop stopped our car. It was Will Ervin.

“I’m the owner,” said Amanda.

“Joe told me you were coming. Park over there,” he said, but Amanda was already underway. She jammed the Audi into a slot in the underbrush and jumped out of the car. I gathered myself up to follow.

There wasn’t much to look at. The last time I dropped by, the rough plumbing and electrical work had been completed and the walls recently sheetrocked. The finish carpenters were partway through the baseboards and trim—the job I had over at Joshua Edelstein’s.

Now it was a blackened skeleton enshrouded in smoke and haze.

I think we simultaneously remembered that the kitchen cabinets had been delivered and stored in big cardboard boxes in the garage. We moved closer and saw the garage was now a mound of charred timbers, with only the south gable standing like a tombstone. I heard Amanda choke in a breath. I thought she was about to burst into tears, but she burst into something else.

“Motherfucking sonofabitch,” she yelled loud enough to provoke a firefighter to spin around.

“What the fuck happened?” she asked him.

“House caught on fire,” he yelled, smirking.

“No shit, genius,” she yelled back.

I put my hand on her arm, but she shook it off.

“Hey, they’re on your side.”

She spun around and pushed me with both hands.

“Nobody’s on my side,” she said through clenched teeth. “Never.”

“Christ, Amanda, what’s that supposed to mean?” I asked,
but she was stalking off toward the other end of the house. Sullivan’s caution was apparently warranted. I wondered how he knew. Prescience instilled by twenty years in a patrol car. I looked for him, but he wasn’t in sight. I followed Amanda instead, at a safe distance.

I caught up to her talking to another firefighter, an officer in a yellow slicker and white officer’s hat with a black brim and gold emblem. He held a walkie-talkie and nodded while he listened to Amanda. As I approached I could hear him say, “Won’t know till we can get the investigators in from the County. But it looks funny to me.”

“What’s funny?” she asked.

“Too uniform. And too hot. Without furnishings or carpets, fires in new construction don’t spread so easily. Tend to be confined to one area. Not involve the whole house. Who are you?” he asked me.

“I’m with her. Nominally.”

This close in, the smell of the fire was sweeter, stickier. I assumed because of plastic things like PVC pipes, wiring insulation and vapor barriers. I heard a crash and turned to see Amanda kicking over a stand the carpenters were using to support a cutoff saw. The fire official looked at me like it was my fault.

“Maybe you should get her behind the yellow line,” he said to me.

“Sure, just lend me your gun.”

“We’re not armed.”

Amanda was standing over the aluminum stand as if daring it to get back up and fight. I walked behind her and grabbed her around the waist with my right arm. There wasn’t a lot of meat on her, but she was surprisingly strong, in a rangy, slippery way. I still hadn’t fully mastered my balance, so I had to dig deep to carry her all the way to the
yellow tape, where I was grateful to see Sullivan standing with a walkie-talkie up to his face.

I put Amanda back on the ground and held the tape up for her. She ducked under without looking at me.

“The County boys are on their way,” Sullivan said to me. “None too happy about it. Dickheads.”

“Isn’t this what they do?”

“They like it better when the fire’s out.”

“Oughta strike while the iron’s hot,” I said.

“That’s my thought.”

I’d lost track of Amanda again, but then saw her leaning on her car, both hands laid flat on the hood. I walked over to her and wrapped both arms around her waist. I put my lips next to her ear.

“You got insurance,” I whispered. “The foundation’s still there. Start over tomorrow. Make an even better house.”

“Fuck the house,” she whispered back. “It’s the principle.”

“Okay, whatever that means.”

“This project was important to me. Something they couldn’t take away from me. That’s the principle. My life is the principle.”

“Who’s they?” I asked.

I stepped a few paces back from her face so I could better see her eyes. They were unflinching.

“You said, ‘Something they couldn’t take away from me.’ Who’s they? Milhouser?”

She just stared at me, her face now an alien thing.

“That’s ridiculous,” she said.

“Then what’s with all the angst? It’s bad, but it’s not the end of anything. You buck up and do it again. Get back on the horse.”

I tried to hold her, but she wiggled out of my grasp, then came back at me, pushing her chest into mine the way kids
used to do on the playground when trying to start a fight. I did the opposite of what I used to do in those situations and dropped my hands to my sides.

“Yeah, like you’re the expert on that,” she said, an inch from my face. “Nice job of bucking up. I should be taking lessons from you.”

She had a valid point. I’d made a pretty spectacular hash of my life, and whatever repair I’d managed was a long time coming. So bucking up wasn’t a specialty of mine. I was much better at resignation and denial. And better yet at avoiding emotional conflict.

Amanda and I had built our relationship out of spare parts, and not all of them fit so well together. It’s unfashionable to find individual fault for romantic shortfalls, but I knew most of ours were mine. But those places where we’d found common ground were more precious to me than I fully understood before that night under the glow of her burning aspirations. I’d lived most of my life in other places, filled with cruel, demoralizing words. I might not have made much of myself since then, but I wasn’t going back there.

“You’re right,” I said. “I’m the last one to be handing out advice.”

I started to visualize my jogging route, which included a stretch from my house through portions of Jacob’s Neck, the connection for which was only about a half block from where I was standing. I zipped up my jacket as I turned on my heel and started to jog that way, weaving through the firefighters and onlookers and cops standing by their cars and trucks, hypnotized by the blinking lights.

In a few minutes I was on the sandy road, which I followed by muscle memory down Jacob’s Neck to the segment of hardtop that ran in front of the abandoned WB factory, then back on to a sandy path that followed the contours to the tip
of Oak Point where my cottage waited for me, equipped with a negligent watchdog, a perfect view of the Little Peconic Bay and the remaining half fifth of Absolut, which fit neatly with a tray of ice cubes into my big aluminum tumbler.

Back within the protection of the screened-in porch I parked myself at the table with the tumbler and a pack of cigarettes. I turned out the light and smoked quietly, looking for signs of something more than indifference from the bay. Some justification for bearing endless witness to the moonstruck water, the black and smoldering sky.

T
HE
M
ONDAY AFTER
Amanda’s house burned down I was at the corner place in the Village buying a large Viennese cinnamon coffee and a customized croissant stuffed with cheese and Virginia ham. After five years of steady seduction I’d finally established a fragile rapport with the tiny Guatemalan woman who ran the pastry counter. This allowed me to wrangle special orders, managed mostly through the lavish use of terms like
bonita, guapa
and
Señorita Lista.

It was half an hour before I had to show up at Joshua Edelstein’s house, so I sat on the teak park bench and pretended the temperature was above freezing. The coffee helped the cause, steaming up in my face and easing down the ham sandwich.

A battleship gray Crown Victoria swung so abruptly into the parking space in front of the bench I almost pulled my feet out of the way. It was Sullivan, resplendent in Yankees
cap, tough-cop sunglasses and aftermarket battle wear. He said something into a radio before getting out of the car.

“You like that faggie coffee,” he said, standing in front of the bench with his hands in his jacket pockets.

“You’re blocking my sun.”

“Stay put,” he said and went into the shop, returning soon after with a bagel and a tall cup of his own. Looked like a latte. He sat down next to me, taking up more than half the space.

“I got the prelims on the fire from the County,” he said. “Wasn’t much of a challenge, even for those bozos.”

“Arson.”