The Coldest Night (27 page)

“How about you and me go somewhere,” she said.

“Sure, I’d love to,” he said.

Then a look crossed her face that was not hard to read. He turned her away from him as she went down on her knees and vomited on the floor. The crowd at the bar erupted in cheers.

The drunk woman stirred and groaned. Several women bent down to attend her. Henry thought to leave, but he was there already and warmed inside the deep crowd at the bar. He continued down the road of drunkenness, perhaps on his way to a deep and profound sleep. He raised a finger when the bartender looked his way and slid his empty glass forward.

The streets sparkled with light. He watched a patrol car do a slow pass. He was enjoying the drink and noise and the feel of so many people tucked inside one place. He knew he was close to something. He wasn’t sure what it was, but it seemed like there really were reasons for coming here.

I should leave now, he thought.

Then Mercy’s brother, Randall, came out of the crowd, a drink in his hand and an unlit cigarette dangling from his mouth. He approached the blond-haired woman and it was clear there was a kind of familiarity and even friendliness between them.

Henry watched him for how sudden his appearance and yet he did not turn away. It was only a matter of time before Randall saw him. His face, at first, was expressionless and then a look of recognition crossed his face and then it blackened. He set down his drink and took time to light the cigarette. He left the side of the blond-haired woman and came to the bar where Henry sat. Henry turned away but knew Randall was walking in on him.

Henry turned back to face him and lifted his glass to his lips. He had been changed over there and tonight it was as if a gift conferred. The violence that seemed to be always inside him was pleased by this encounter. He stood and squared to meet Randall, who was a head taller than Henry. He wore a crew cut and his shoulders and arms filled his white linen jacket. His fists were balled at his sides.

For some reason Randall held back. What did he see?

“What are you doing here?” Randall said. “You are going to get hurt.”

“Please,” Henry said, gesturing with his chin. “Get the fuck away from me.”

Then he said again “please,” and he reached up with a hand as if to ward him off.

A moment of fear and then anger crossed Randall’s face. He took a drink.

“Nobody wants you here,” Randall said. His intoxicated breath was very close. It was hot and smelled the sour of liquor.

“I will do as I like,” Henry said.

He thought about the question, what are you doing here? Inside, he felt something like cold, blunt iron prodding at him. He understood the violence of existence and did not want to ever go through such again, but here he was. There was never any going back. In the company of violence was his sense of belonging.

The barroom smelled of stale beer, human brine, cigarette smoke. The Christmas lights were so clear they etched the air. He looked down at his fists and they were the color of bone.

But Randall would not relent. He moved in closer and crowded Henry where he stood.

“Come on, then,” Henry whispered. “If you have to, come on.”

Randall’s face darkened and his eyes were filled with anger and then he lashed out with a fist, and though Henry saw it coming, he did not block the punch. He hit Henry over the right cheek. Henry fell back against the bar. His eye was stung and clouded and black pennons radiated in his vision.

Henry squared up and measured him, and when Randall stepped in closer he let himself be hit again. Randall shot out with a right to his stomach and Henry doubled over with an anguished and involuntary sound. He caught himself before he fell and held himself as he gasped for air.

“Is that what you want?” Henry said, and Randall hit him again. Henry’s lip was opened and then his nose was bleeding. He let himself be hit again and his right eye began to close.

“Is that what you want?” Henry said again, spitting his blood onto the barroom floor.

When next he lunged, Henry went down on his left hip and he drove his right boot into Randall’s groin twice. Randall folded and twisted and Henry punched him in his throat and he collapsed clutching at his neck, writhing on the wet floor and desperate to breathe. His eyes and tongue bulged out and he breathed as if his last. Henry went down on top of him and struck him again and broke his nose across his face. Blood was everywhere. He would have fought him to death, but the crowd, having had their tremors of excitement, tore them apart. Henry stood over the man, his eyes bleared with pain and cursed him and spit blood on his white linen jacket.

“I’ll kill you,” he said. “I’ll kill you dead, you son of a bitch.”

Men hustled him out the door and once on the sidewalk held him against the brick wall. Henry was panting and snapping his hands in the air and then calming. He stood upright and told them it was okay and to let him be.

His mind traveled the distance from the eruption of violence to this sidewalk where he stood.

“I will be fine,” he said quietly.

From the Red Pony he walked along the dense black river. It had turned a beautiful night with a splendid emerging moon, distant yellow lights contained in palls of darkness. There were the light towers of the chemical plants and into the very depths of those yellow lights, there was fog and smoke up against blackness and it was so very beautiful to him and he no longer felt purged and winnowed, but like a sinner. It was the war had taught him to call up the devil and he could feel the devil in his legs and arms.

He walked until he paused on the banks of the river.

He thought of how as a little boy he’d walk down here with his mother following the terraced stonework that led to nowhere. They’d pass beneath the willows through reticulated shade, through the reeds and the grasses to the banks of the swirling opaline water so that she could throw into the water a sealed medicine bottle with a folded note, intended for whom he did not know and did not ask. His mother had always performed such acts. She entertained superstitions derived from belief in a world without accident or mistake, where the workings were the way fate supposed them to be. For her, there was wonder to be found in a thunderstorm, a strange sound, a coincidence of numbers. For her life was desire, belief, death, and sweet despair.

The main channel was a jewel in the moonlight, refracted light beneath its inky surface. On the opposite bank, above the city, there were lights and below the lights the darkened boathouses built overtop the water’s flow. The water played tricks with noises in the night making it impossible to judge their origin or distance.

He’d wanted no summoning of the past, but that’s just what he’d gone and done. Upriver he fixed on the skewed window light of a single boathouse. He calculated the distance and then turned for home, his mind a torment of pain and his eyes beginning to close. He stumbled on, trying to keep a straight line. He had to clear his head. An automobile slowed behind him and a blue light strobed once. When he turned to face the light a patrol pulled alongside.

“Get in,” the policeman said.

It was the young policeman he’d seen Adelita talking to, the one who was a new father. He was sucking on a Life Saver, clicking it against his teeth.

Henry let slide a stream of blood from his mouth and got into the patrol car.

“Jesus Christ,” the policeman said. “How are you even walking?”

“I have some experience,” he said.

“Do you know who his father is?”

“What’s it matter? Behind every bastard is another one.”

“I’m taking you to the hospital.”

“Just take me home,” Henry said.

When he arrived home he went to the backyard where he stripped to the waist and washed with the water from the hose. The water was cold on his skin and hard and his blood ran red down his body and then pink and then the water ran clear and silver.

Under this cold moonlight he felt the shimmer of self. He felt no guilt, no pain, no remorse for what he’d done. He could have killed if he wanted to, but he did not. He felt as if he understood men, their discontent, their need to see what they’d not seen before, their need to be where they’d never been. He was one of them. He’d lived in a world of killing and blood and this world was returned to him. He’d lived in the silence and ineluctable mystery of violence. He knew the hold war had on him, the gore that would never come off in this world. He knew he could have killed Mercy’s brother with his hands and it was this knowledge that gave him peace.

Chapter 37

A
T THE MIRROR OVER
the bathroom sink Henry stitched his torn lip and split eyebrow with needle and thread. Stitch by stitch he worked the needle into his pinched skin and slowly drew out the thread until his skin was closed and the thread knotted.

In the mirror he saw Adelita appearing in the doorway behind him. She held her arms in fold and her shoulders pressed to the doorjamb.

“Can I look at you?” she said.

“I got in a fight,” he said, turning to her.

She went to him and she was so close he could smell her skin. She took his face in her hands and gently turned it to one side and then the other. Her eyes were blue and clear and her gaze sustained.

“Come closer,” she said, and upon further inspection she told him he’d done an adequate job and with the scissors she snipped tight the thread ends where they sprang from knots.

“You almost killed him,” she said.

“Next time I will,” Henry said, but he knew she did not believe him. She did not understand he would have killed him tonight if that was his intention, but it wasn’t.

“Perhaps a better use of your time is called for,” she said quietly.

How could he express to her the freedom he felt this night? He was possessed by no idea other than this one. How could he tell her he had a world of his own and one that could not be conceived by her?

“Take them off and I’ll wash them for you,” she said, tugging at his bloody khakis.

She bent to turn on the taps and draw him a hot bath. He waited for her to leave the room that he might take off his trousers, but she didn’t. She told him he didn’t have anything she hadn’t seen before and to hurry up before she lost her patience and inclination. He unbuckled his trousers and let them fall and tried to step out of them but tripped and slumped against her. She braced against him and held him up and he felt her strong smooth hands on his body as she helped him into the bath.

“Henry?” she said, his name an invitation to explain his mind.

He shrugged and turned his head away. He did not care to say anything. He did not want her to know what he had been through. He did not want to explain how different and how separate he was.

“What is it?” she said.

“What difference does it make?” he said. The powerful illusion of naming things held little sway with him. To say, to name this feeling, to name these thoughts, what would it matter?

“What is it?” Adelita said again, her hand tight on his shoulder, the lines in her face drawn, her voice insistent.

“I am a murderer,” Henry said, his voice flat and unaffected by the words he declared.

“No,” she said. “You were a soldier.”

“We killed them,” he said. “For what they did we killed them and we nailed their hearts to the door.”

He remembered for her that morning in the warehouse. Each of their hearts was tough with muscle and in the odd light were garnet red and sketched with white and blue. He sliced open their chests and the cold blood washed through his hands, jelled and viscose, and the hearts, still dripping, he set aside while Lew watched and then he nailed them to the door of the warehouse.

“You hush yourself,” she said.

“You ask me these things,” he said.

“You hush,” she said. “I am not afraid of you. Even if you did what you say, I still love you.”

H
E WAS ALONE
in the front room watching the fire when Adelita came to him again. She placed a cup of tea beside him. She handed him pills and told him to take them lest his pain become a torment.

“I am all right,” he said.

“Maybe you are now, but you won’t be,” she said, and shook them in her hand.

After he downed the pills she sat beside him and they were both quiet for a long time.

There was a rattling of the windowpane, as if someone was knocking at the door. He listened to the cat lapping its milk. He was cold and shivering and she found a sweater for him and he pulled it onto his shoulders and buttoned it.

“Snow is falling,” she said.

He went to the window and the hemlocks beyond the porch were bent by the weight of the snow. One released and sprang up. A cascade of white sifted through the branches releasing more branches as it tumbled and the branches scraped the window. The tree seemed to shake the way a horse or a man might.

Headlights opened on the street and a black Oldsmobile drove past the front gate. Henry stood at the window and watched as it came by again. This time it stopped and idled at the gate.

“Don’t go out there,” she said. She was standing by his side.