The Blade Between Page 3

  “Historic,” Dom said. “One of the founders of the town was named that. Also a whaling ship captain.” At the next stoplight, he turned to me and smiled. “I probably shouldn’t tell you this, because it’s just gossip, but you remember Rich Trappan?”

  “Of course,” I said, “Stubb’s little henchman and partner in crime. The two of them were practically joined at the hip.” I grinned, excited for the gossip, but also—grateful to Dom, because of course he knew how feigned my nonchalance was, how much hate and fear I still had in my heart for Steve “Stubby” Coffin. Funny how I probably haven’t talked to this guy in like fifteen years and he still knows me better than anyone.

  “Well, word is—they actually did join at the hip on a couple of occasions. Buddy of mine who was on the baseball team said he saw them going at it in the gym showers once.”

  “No fucking way,” I said.

  “Fucking way.”

  “Those fucking hypocrites.”

  “Thought you’d like that.”

  “Thanks, Dom,” I said.

  “Anytime, Ro.”

  My knees throbbed, hearing my name in his mouth, his sweet deep voice.

  “I always thought you were like the Prince of Hudson,” he said, pulling up in front of my father’s house. “The castle at the very top of Warren Street, looking down on all of us.”

  It was a great location. I’d always felt like somebody, perched where the main street became a dead end. “The place is a shithole,” I said, and that was true, too.

  “We know real shitholes downstreet,” he said.

  “Dom,” I said, and put my hand on his. He pulled it away. So I didn’t say what I’d been about to say. Which was good, because I didn’t know what it was. And I was afraid of what could have come out of my mouth.

  “Great to see you, Ronan,” he said, and scribbled something on a piece of paper. “Here’s my number. Call me up, if you’re around for a little while. I know Attalah would love to see you, too.”

  “I’d like to see her, too,” I said, and I meant it. I liked her a lot, even if I also harbored an abundance of impure thoughts about her husband. “Thanks for the ride, Dom.”

  “You need a hand with your dad?”

  I did, but how could I ask anything further of him? So I smiled and said, “Nah, I got it,” and went around to let my father out. I had to lean in close, to unbuckle his seat belt. I had to smell him. Cigarettes, Stetson cologne, stale linen, the faintest whiff of body odor.

  Dom drove off. Left us standing there.

  “Let’s go inside, Dad,” I said, and Dad came with me, up the steep steps—a docile child—my child.

  I paused a moment at the front door. Let the wind sough through me. Pulled out the key that I’d never taken off my key ring.

  It still fit. This was home, no matter how hard I had been hiding from it.

  Back inside, safe in familiar surroundings, Dad seemed to come back to some semblance of life. Bolted the door behind us; pulled the blinds; went to the bathroom and started brushing his teeth.

  “You gonna be okay, Dad?” I asked, but, again, the question deserved no answer. He was okay enough to have survived this long without me—and also he wasn’t.

  I didn’t take out my phone and look up train times for tomorrow. New York City already felt flimsy, fading. Eyes shut, feeling my way in the familiar dark, I went down the hall to my room.

  My Walkman was where I’d left it, beside my bed. Thick with dust. I plugged my headphones in, switched on the radio. Static filled my ears, and then, against all logic, music. How did the thing still have battery life after lying silently for so many years?

  I got into bed fully dressed, my head still spinning with withdrawal and the general weirdness of the evening’s chain of events. Stinking like sweat and booze and Hudson sidewalks. Scrolling through my mentions, letting the chatter of strangers distract me from the fresh hurt of my father’s fallen state. It was working, still, but it wouldn’t work for much longer. In the morning I’d have to find myself an actual drug.

  “This is Ms. Jackson, here on the Graveyard Shift,” came the scratchy familiar voice, the DJ who’d soothed all my lonely late nights. As baffling as my batteries, her still being alive all these years later. “It’s coming up on eleven fifty-seven. So this will be the last song of today. Always a difficult challenge for a DJ. How best to sum up everything we’ve been through, and prepare us for doing it all again tomorrow? Tonight I feel like dedicating something to the lonely hearts, the people tucking themselves in tonight. One may be the loneliest number, but remember that we come into this world by ourselves and that’s how we go out of it, and everything in between—all the love and togetherness that fills our hearts—that’s all temporary. So if you find yourself by yourself tonight, just know that you have a leg up on the rest of us. An insight every happily coupled person lacks.”

  “One Is the Loneliest Number” came on and I wasn’t mad at it, didn’t feel sad about it. I appreciated her. Like she could see into my heart, just like she always had, and was speaking directly to me and me alone.

  Chapter Seven

  The meeting has mostly broken up by the time Dom gets home. A couple of people around the kitchen table with Attalah, drinking beer and laughing.

  “Dom,” says Joe Davoli, getting up. Shaking hands.

  “Joe. What’s the word?”

  “Same old,” Joe says, avoiding eye contact.

  Joe’s brother is an addict. Dom has never busted him, but sooner or later he probably will. The guy is dumb about the risks he takes, hawking stolen goods on Craigslist or saying on Facebook that he has Percocets for sale. Half the town, it seems, has a hard time looking Dom in the eye. Like they’re afraid he can see their sins glinting there, or the guilt of their loved ones.

  “Everything okay?” Dom asks, sitting down at the table. Attalah had baked. Whatever it was is gone, but the room smells like cinnamon. Their kitchen, like the rest of the house, is small but never feels that way. She makes it feel right.

  “Planning a rent party for Susan,” says Ohrena Shaw, who is several years younger than them but has a creative mind his wife admires. “Her rent went up in January and she’s a couple months behind already.”

  “Awesome,” Dom says, thinking, That’s not awesome. A rent party might buy one, two months max. Not a sustainable business model. Especially not when half of Hudson is scrambling to pull together rent parties of their own. He listens as plans are put together, Attalah typing away on her tablet—who will cook, who will collect the cash, who can borrow a credit card swiper to take donations that way. Eventually Joe and Ohrena drift toward the door and depart.

  “Sorry,” Attalah says, returning. She wears a long red and black and green dashiki. Resplendent as always.

  “Don’t be,” he says. “You know I appreciate the work you do. But what you should apologize for is not saving me any of whatever that was.” He points to a baking sheet where droplets of watery white icing are splattered.

  “Blame Joe,” she says. “You know Becky never feeds him.”

  “I’m glad, actually. I need to not eat so much. I’ve let myself go.”

  She comes up behind him, puts her hands on his belly. “I think you’re perfect.”

  “You’re sweet to say so.”

  She goes to the sink. Dishes clatter. He shuts his eyes, savors the silence beyond their walls. There is space, now, between their lives and that of their neighbors. Three years in a house and he still hasn’t gotten used to it, after spending his whole life in the ceaseless rumble of Bliss Towers.

  “Who died?” Attalah asks, handing him an opened beer. Then she gets one for herself and sits down beside him. In the house she moves around as swiftly and gracefully as she had in high school, using its familiar surfaces to propel herself from point A to point B without the cane she needs to use outside of it.

  “Ossie,” he says.

  “Oh, lord,” she says. “That is so sad. How? Someone so youn
g, there’s no good answer.”

  “Suicide, seems like.”

  Attalah makes a small sound of pain and shuts her eyes. There’s Katch right there, on the fridge. Not five feet away. Huge smile, and the year he was born, and the year he died.

  He almost mentions the salt water. He doesn’t know why he doesn’t. And then he doesn’t know why he would.

  “We were . . . me and Ossie . . .”

  Dom doesn’t need to finish the sentence. She knows how it ends. He feels like tears are imminent and wonders why they don’t come.

  “Oh, honey,” Attalah says, and takes his hand.

  “I’m sorry,” he says. “I know you prefer not to know.”

  She laughs, a short, kind noise. “That’s just when it’s someone I might have to look in the eye,” she says.

  “You’re not threatened by dead women?”

  “Threatened differently,” she says, and smiles.

  He lowers his head to the table and kisses her hand, then rests his cheek against the cold Formica. It feels good.

  “Ronan Szepessy is home,” he says, when the silence has gone on long enough to give weight to the words, to communicate the nameless inexplicable fear he feels about Ronan’s return. “I just picked him up off the sidewalk in front of where his father’s shop used to be.”

  She curses softly, kindly. Of course she feels it, knows it. What this might mean. How it might disrupt the fragile status quo that has so far kept the Pequod Arms project at bay. Who knows how. Maybe Ronan will talk his father into selling. Or get a power of attorney, sell it himself. They sit there for a long time, and then they head to bed.

  When Dom comes out of the bathroom, she has switched on the radio. Their favorite DJ is midway into her set.

  “This is Ms. Jackson, here on the Graveyard Shift,” comes the scratchy familiar voice. “It’s coming up on eleven fifty-seven. So this will be the last song of today. Always a difficult challenge for a DJ. How best to sum up everything we’ve been through, and prepare us for doing it all again tomorrow? Tonight I feel like dedicating something to the lovers, the couples tucking themselves in tonight. The world is a cold, dead, sad, scary place, and love is the one thing that makes it livable. So cuddle closer, to the sound of Otis Redding, who knew love like nobody else before or since.”

  “These Arms of Mine.” One of their favorites. Ms. Jackson has a knack for that, like she sees into their heart, and speaks directly to them and them alone. He gets into bed beside her. They cuddle closer, spooning together sexlessly, immaculate.

  Chapter Eight

  RONAN

  I lay in bed with my eyes closed for as long as I could, trying to convince myself I was safe at home in New York City and the night before had all been a dream.

  But I knew from the second I woke up where I was. I could tell by the smell that I’d come home—old man and cigarettes, coffee and Stetson cologne and the muck of the river—and by the amber brilliance of the sunlight.

  I lay still, taking stock of my body. Searching for the aches and woes of withdrawal, but came up with nothing.

  Nothing, except abject emotional misery. And a head full of bizarrely vivid dreams (black water; whales in the sky; drowning in the dreamsea). And whatever the hell had happened to me the night before, to get me to Hudson.

  One new piece the morning light illuminated: Katch called me, from a pay phone, and told me to meet him at Penn Station. And when I got to the station he’d called me again, from a different pay phone, telling me he was delayed but to get on the 9:30 train to Hudson, and he’d meet me there.

  Why the hell would I have agreed to that?

  More pieces were missing. I’d have to wait and hope they resurfaced.

  I put clothes on, moved through the house. Taking stock of the situation. The fridge full of mismatched plastic containers; food brought by friends and neighbors. The line of empty beer cans beside the kitchen sink. Pabst Blue Ribbon; Dad hated the stuff. But Marge, the woman who’d worked the butcher shop cash register for as far back as I could remember, had loved it. Funny, how well I still knew the man, how certain I could be about this. That he would never be sleeping with Marge, any more than he would buy Pabst Blue Ribbon even if it was on sale. She was taking care of him. Cooking, cleaning. Wiping his ass for all I knew.

  “Hey, Dad,” I said, coming into the living room.

  My father frightened me. Sitting in his ancient recliner, still in the same pajamas. Still not hearing me when I spoke. Still not seeing me.

  Water dripped into a bucket in the corner. The bucket was overflowing. I picked it up, took it to the bathroom, dumped it into the toilet. Some splashed onto my hand. I lifted it to my face—smelled it—licked it. Sure enough: salt water.

  “What’s up with the ceiling, Dad?”

  No facial hair. More forehead than I remembered. His curly hair cut shorter.

  “Ro,” he said, then opened his mouth, but nothing further emerged—which had always been his way, to say as little as possible, to make his sentences short if they happened at all. Back then I’d felt like it was a choice, a facet of his taciturn masculinity to keep his words mostly to himself. Now it was like there was nothing there, like a lifetime of holding back his words had caused him to lose them altogether.

  I went back to my room and got dressed to go out. I had to get the fuck out of there.

  Dad was waiting for me when I stepped out of my room. Standing in the hallway, mouth slack, eyes glazed.

  “They’ll be so glad you came home,” he whispered.

  “Who, Dad?”

  He turned and padded softly back to his recliner.

  “No one’s happy to see me, Dad. Nobody in Hudson likes me.”

  “They finally got you here,” he muttered as he went. “They’ve been trying for so long.”

  * * *

  IT WAS WORSE BY DAYLIGHT, somehow. The night before it hadn’t felt real, the spectacle of what had happened to Hudson. In the dark it had the same stillness of any normal American city that wasn’t New York. The store signs were all updated, that was all. Now I could see it for the corpse that it was.

  But not a corpse, or not just a corpse. The dead city had been infected with something, and reanimated. Doors opened and shut, cash registers clanged, pedestrians smiled; but the soul was gone.

  Last night it had felt like the phantom ache of a long-gone tooth. Now each gap felt raw, fresh, like a hard fist to the face had just popped it clear out of my jaw.

  A clothing boutique inhabited the body of what had once been Warren Street’s best Italian restaurant, Mama Rosa’s. My favorite toy store was now stocked with antiques. So was the bakery. So was the photography shop.

  What did they do to you? I whispered, over and over again.

  Barely ten A.M., and there I was. Awake. Dressed. Walking. When was the last time I’d done that?

  Historical Materialism, one store was called. I went in looking for Karl Marx references, but of course it was only capitalism being clever—good old-fashioned materialism, the empty pursuit of material objects, as applied to old things—not historical, per se, but old, having been created during history.

  “The theme this month is seafaring,” said a sweet young woman with rectangular spectacles who I was probably wrong to instinctively hate. Harpoons hung from the ceiling. She held up a tray in which hooks and blades lay spread.

  “That’s so great,” I said, staggering backward, fumbling for the doorknob in a blur of horror. “So great.”

  It slammed behind me.

  I’d written a note. Left it on the butcher block in the kitchen. Hey Marge! I’m back in town for a bit—give me a call when you get this? Ronan. And I added my cell phone number.

  The weirdest part of all: a coffee can ashtray on the front porch. Full of cigarettes. Unfiltered, though, and not Dad’s brand. I’d picked one up, sniffed at it. Cloves. Katch’s brand.

  Marge made sense. Her beer cans could fit into a comprehensible narrative. Katch and his
cigarette butts popping up on my father’s porch could not.

  Was he from Hudson? Was that why he showed up at my studio’s doorstep? Was that why he’d had me come home?

  They finally got you here, my father had said. They’ve been trying for so long.

  I remembered the big real estate project Dom had mentioned. Maybe the people behind that were the they? But they’d have had a million ways to reach out that didn’t involve a boy like Katch.

  The next-best guess I could come up with was a homophobic conspiracy to get me home and murder me . . . but Katch was clearly queer himself, and probably wouldn’t be a part of that . . . and why would my hometown bullies suddenly want me dead?

  The familiar sooty chrome exterior of the Columbia Diner caught my eye, sucked me inside by awakened twenty-year-old instinct— an entire childhood’s worth of Saturday-morning breakfasts with my dad, on our walk to work at the butcher shop—remembering the way I always wanted to sit on the stools along the counter, but Dad said those were for people who were by themselves, whereas we got to sit in the booths—and how I’d always imagined the counter to be for grown-ups, and dreamed of the day when I’d walk in the door on my own, miraculously an adult, and sit down on a stool and ask for my regular—

  But there were no stools now. No counter. The booths remained, but their shredded pleather had been replaced with something shiny and stylish, in one of those of-the-moment shades I refused to know the name of. Puce, probably, or ecru. And there was no bowl of pee-flecked mints beside the cash register anymore. And there was no cash register. And the massive laminated diner menus I loved so dearly had been replaced by small squares of card stock. And instead of a heavy old Greek there was a young man with rectangular spectacles.

  “Cup of coffee,” I whispered, horrified as a recovering alcoholic would be to hear himself ordering a scotch on the rocks. “Black. No sugar.”

  He took me to a table. I sat. I drank my coffee when it came.

  I never touched the stuff in New York City. My life was already high-strung enough without surplus caffeine. Part of my patented System for mind-altering substances. By exerting control in small ways, like skipping coffee or never smoking pot, I could ignore how I’d lost control in big ways. Like how I was spending five hundred dollars a week on crystal meth—Tina to her gay friends—and doing some increasingly unwise things while under her influence.