Manhattan Beach

by Jennifer Egan

  “If you give your permission,” Phillip said. “And the war is still on.”

  Dexter felt the boys’ quick brown eyes appraising his reaction. Clearly, they’d been more aware of the collective Grady worship than he’d supposed. “Sixteen is awfully young,” he said.

  “We’ll be ready.”

  “If we stop monkeying.”

  “We stopped last week!”

  “Except for this morning.”

  Their window faced the sea. From habit, Dexter’s eye sought the parade of ships past Breezy Point. “Look,” he said. “Here comes a tanker.”

  “The porch has a better view,” John-Martin said.

  “You watch ships from the porch?” Dexter was surprised; he had never seen them do it.

  “When no one is home,” John-Martin said.

  “Which is a lot,” Phillip put in.

  “Let’s go look,” Dexter said. “I like to do that, too.”

  The telephone rang as they were descending the stairs, and Dexter picked up the extension in the front hall. Heels. “Everything all right?” Dexter asked.

  “Frankie Q. telephoned the Pines early this morning,” Heels said. “He mentioned some kind of activity at the boathouse. You might want to take a look on your way over.”

  A telephone call from a son of Mr. Q.’s was unusual. “Someone was in there a few weeks ago,” Dexter mused.

  “Frankie seemed . . . surprised that I didn’t know where to find you,” Heels said. “I told him ours was a marriage built upon trust.”

  Dexter laughed. “What did he say?”

  “Dead silence.”

  “All right. I’m leaving now.”

  The twins were side by side at the porch rail. John-Martin handed him the binoculars. “Take a look, Pop,” he said. After a moment he added, “Sit down.”

  “It will steady your hands,” Phillip explained.

  “Aren’t they steady?”

  “They’re shaking.”

  Dexter never had a tremor. He wondered fleetingly whether he should have gone back down to the harbor bottom, as everyone had begged him to.

  “Mine tremble, too,” Phillip reassured him.

  Dexter braced his elbows on the porch rail and looked through the binoculars. The boys draped thoughtless arms around his shoulders. He was aware of a bodily love for them, an affinity in their bones. Harriet would be pleased by this scene; he was fulfilling a promise. He waited, letting his eyes blur against the binoculars, putting off the moment of telling his sons he must go.

  * * *

  Dexter smelled a rat before he’d even reached the boathouse. It was a setup—he knew this without knowing how he knew, and was pleased to find his faculties still alert, despite the shaking hands and a raw, bright ache behind his eyes. Normally, he would have rounded up a few boys to bring with him, but the tip had come from Frankie Q.—in effect, from Mr. Q. himself. That meant this wasn’t a setup in the usual sense; it was theater. Dexter would have a role to play, and Mr. Q. knew there was no need to prepare him in advance. Dexter liked to think on his feet.

  He parked a block away, flicked dust from his new oxfords, straightened his tie, and walked to the boathouse. A black sedan was parked right out front, dead silence within. The whole thing phonier than a surprise birthday party.

  His pleasure tapered off abruptly when he shoved open the door and found Badger playing at cards with two hoods. Dexter had kept only a vague eye on his erstwhile protégé since the kid had brought his numbers game into two of the minor clubs. Now Dexter took in his painted necktie, pearl stickpin, and Borsalino hat. Badger had prospered since his arrival in New York. Yet apparently, there was still more he needed to be taught.

  Badger and his crew were fresh; they’d washed, shaved, drunk their morning coffee. That was strange. If they weren’t here last night, then whom had Frankie Q. seen in the boathouse?

  “Badger,” Dexter said. “Pleasure.”

  “Have a seat,” Badger said with the crisp magnanimity of a man who believed he was in charge. Dexter let this go. He gazed upon Mr. Q.’s callow relation and waited for the offenses to mount. Badger’s boys melted into the walls, and Dexter took one of their chairs.

  “Drink?” Badger asked. A bottle of Haig and Haig sat on the table.

  “Thanks just the same.”

  “Say, it’s not friendly to let a man drink alone.”

  “Then don’t drink.”

  Dexter leaned back in his chair and crossed his legs, both to exhibit his relaxed state and to place his ankle holster within easy reach. In the act of crossing them, he experienced what they called déjà vu: sitting across from Kerrigan in this same boathouse, watching him cross those marionette legs of his. He’d been seated where Dexter was now. But Kerrigan had taken the drink.

  “I’m all yours, Badger,” Dexter said. “Tell me what’s on your mind.”

  “I go by Jimmy now.”

  “No kidding?”

  “Badger was Chicago. Jimmy is New York.” He gestured, left versus right, clutching the cities like two grapefruits.

  There had been no fear in Kerrigan, though he must have had an inkling of what was coming. Dexter could smell a man’s panic a room away: an animal odor, part skunk, part sex. Some men were aroused by it, erections straining at their trouser buttons as their victims wept and begged. But Dexter felt only relief when Kerrigan raised his glass with a steady hand, smiling his cockeyed smile. “To better days,” he said, a standard of the decade. Dexter found he couldn’t meet his friend’s eyes as they drained their glasses.

  “I thought you were nuts for Chicago,” he said to Badger.

  “Why, sure, it’s a fine place for amateurs.”

  He was hopeless: a boy in knickers parroting a moving-picture hood. A walking target. “You grew up,” Dexter said, managing a sober look. “Jimmy.”

  Thus acknowledged, Badger became expansive. “You put me out of your automobile a few months back, you might recall.”

  “Vaguely.”

  “Best thing you could’ve done.”

  Dexter grew alert. Fawning was an anesthetic, nearly always a prelude to something less pleasant.

  “You taught me not to talk so much,” Badger said.

  “Is this your way of saying thanks?”

  “I suppose it is.”

  “Well, I’m touched. And now tempus fugit. I’ve an appointment to keep.”

  “It can wait.”

  Dexter gave him a long look. “You don’t tell me when to go, Badger,” he said slowly. “I tell you.”

  “Jimmy.”

  Dexter stood, impatient to move things along. As expected, Badger’s boys slunk in front of the door and looked up at him with rods in hand, seasick expressions on their faces.

  Now must come the inspiration that Dexter had always managed to provide in like interventions over the years. How to restore order and authority—chastise, humble, and correct—without dealing mortal injury? A damaged finger, sure. A broken ankle. But nothing more serious.

  Dexter smiled at Badger. “I asked before what I could do for you,” he said. “You can’t answer without the heavy artillery?”

  “I want to teach you something, too,” Badger said. “Return the favor, so to speak.”

  The drink had hit Kerrigan instantly—his slenderness, perhaps. He’d looked startled, then disoriented; then he’d just sat, gazing at Dexter in cloudy silence. Dexter hadn’t bothered to feign surprise. The look between them was all the conversation they’d needed: no recriminations, no explanations. The rules were clear to everyone. Kerrigan’s head hit the table not five minutes after he threw back the shot. Something about the set of his shoulders made Dexter think he might sit back up. He waited, watching his friend’s slow breaths while wood ticked in the stove. Only when he’d shaken Kerrigan’s shoulder and felt his body threaten to slide to the floor in that gelatinous sleep of dope addicts did Dexter rise from his chair and rap on a window to summon the skipper and his boys, who were waiting i
n the boat.

  “You think there’s no one above you,” Badger said.

  “Everyone but God has someone above him,” Dexter said. “That doesn’t make it you, Badger.”

  “Jimmy!” Badger roared, slamming both palms on the table. “How many fucking times I have to tell you? Does hobnobbing with picture stars make you soft in the head?”

  “Badger suits you better.”

  He’d blasted his way out of rooms full of rods, God knew. But not in a while. He’d been younger, quicker on his feet, a few pounds lighter, without much to lose if the curtain came down early. Here, survival wasn’t the question; instruction was the question. Setting an example without killing anyone was the question.

  “You think I can’t touch you,” Badger said. “I see it in your face.”

  “You’ve no idea what I think.” But it was true. Badger could not.

  An incongruity returned to Dexter: the call from Frankie Q. had come in the wee hours, when Badger was still getting his beauty sleep. How had Mr. Q. known Dexter wouldn’t come to the boathouse right away? Might he have gotten wind of what Dexter was doing instead?

  If that was so, then he’d read the situation backward: he was the one to be taught a lesson, and what Mr. Q. wanted from him was not instruction but apology. The amateurish setup was for his own protection: keep it in the family, avoid a public reprimand or any real danger. Dexter’s failure to consider this possibility was an uncharacteristic lapse—perhaps a consequence of his throbbing head. Had the dive blunted his thinking? It was obvious now how this was supposed to go: he would grovel to Badger, and word of his groveling would reassure Mr. Q. as he unswaddled his grapevines when the weather turned. Dexter would carry on as before, on a tighter leash. Badger would be Jimmy, his equal.

  All of that lay in one direction, predictable as sunrise. And in another lay something less distinct: an unfathomable landscape, flickering and dark, full of glowing dust. A mystery.

  Mr. Q. was an old man. A very old man by now.

  Dexter was tired of groveling. He’d been groveling most of his life. And the fact was, he didn’t have to. He knew that, and so did Mr. Q.

  With a swiftness he hadn’t known he still possessed, he grabbed the throat of one of Badger’s boys in each hand and squeezed until he felt cartilage snap. They fired wildly. One must have hit Badger, because someone shouted, and the room was full of pain. Then Dexter was on the floor clutching his belly, recalling that the Negro had warned him about stomach cramps.

  But he hadn’t the bends. Badger had shot him in the back.

  The kid loomed over him, his face suffused with the lurid wonder of someone gazing into a bonfire. Dexter knew then that his murder had been sanctioned. But how? By what radical reordering of the world had such an act become feasible? The answer arrived with cold certainty: his father-in-law had forsaken him. The old man had cut him loose.

  Badger stood above him, gat raised and ready. Like any garrulous killer, he wanted his victim to hear him out before he finished him off. As long as Dexter appeared to listen, he would live. He fastened his eyes on his assailant’s face while the contours of what had happened revealed themselves like parts of a building through fog: George Porter had blabbed preemptively, out of fear of being exposed. The channel Dexter had yearned for between the old man and Mr. Q. had come into being—perhaps had existed for years. And both men had done with him.

  Badger spoke eagerly, apparently flattered by Dexter’s captive interest. Dexter didn’t hear a word. He slipped the confines of his skull like a boat sliding away from a pier when her lines are cast off. Soon he found himself on open water, the wet night in his face. The skipper was beside him, erect and commanding, the stroke not having felled him yet. Kerrigan lay crumpled on the bottom.

  “Will you remember where we are?” Dexter asked the skipper.

  “Always do.”

  “Suppose they tell you not to.”

  The skipper lifted his hands, raw and knotted as newborn calves. “They own these,” he said. Then, tapping his skull, “Not this.”

  Dexter’s boys wrapped the chain around Kerrigan and fastened it to the weight. No one wanted him floating to the surface in the April thaw. Now, having seen that chain, Dexter knew that nothing of his friend remained inside it—not a bone, stitch, hat, or shoe leather. This irregularity filled him with hope. His discovery of the night before returned to him with effortless clarity: rising through the dark harbor, he’d felt his own edges dissolve, and a surge of current had leaped from inside him toward a glowing intimation of the future. What he was trying so hard to do, he’d already done! He was American! The lust and yearning that seethed in his veins had helped to fashion whatever was to come.

  “You’re smiling,” Badger said. “You know something I don’t?”

  Keeping his eyes on Badger, Dexter sank into the pause that followed, dividing it in half, then in half again, determined not to arrive at its opposite shore. He fell into the stillness, dark enclosing him like the harbor water, while on the open boat he helped his boys hoist Kerrigan’s chained and weighted body up to the gunwale and tip it over the side.

  Eddie held still just long enough that anyone watching from the boat would see him disappear. Then he commenced the spastic writhing he’d been practicing in his mind’s eye from the moment he began to feign unconsciousness—tentatively at first, half expecting Styles to jump to his feet and ask what the matter was. Eddie had had an inkling of what might be in store, and come to the boathouse armed with a few tricks from his vaudeville days: razors in the lining of his trousers, a lock pick nestled between his jaw and gum. He’d been afraid of swallowing the pick while pretending to drink, but in the event, he hadn’t had to pretend. Styles had looked away, and Eddie had flicked the shot over his shoulder.

  He’d left his affairs in order, the second bankbook open on the bureau for Agnes, who knew nothing. That had been his sole condition to Bart Sheehan: his wife must never know, even if the worst should happen. Especially then. Knowledge invited action, and Eddie was resigned to be remembered as the worst sort of rat rather than risk Agnes training her single-mindedness on the question of who’d done him in. Too hazardous. Men walked out on their families every day—miscreants he’d always said should be jailed. Yet, if murdered, Eddie would be remembered as such a man. So often did he remind himself of this fact that at times he was surprised to find he was still alive, still at home, where his presence had become superfluous. He’d mattered once to Anna, but not anymore. It might relieve her to be rid of him.

  The weighted chain hurtled him downward at such a clip that he thought his skull would be squashed by the water’s pressure like a walnut under a boot. His writhing freed up a leg, then an arm, and at last the chain and weight divested themselves of his person and continued their rush to the bottom. Nobody chained an unconscious man with the care they would use on a man who was fully awake.

  He began kicking madly in his stocking feet, pumping his arms and reaching toward what he prayed would be air, but it was water, still water, until he thought he must have swum the wrong way by mistake. His heart slowed and his legs grew heavy as unconsciousness groped him with its blunt, furred touch. At last he broke through, gasping weakly. It was then he came closest to drowning, for he’d no strength left. He lay on his back under a yellowish night sky, moving his hands like fins to keep afloat. He breathed and breathed, and the buoyant salt water saved him.

  It was a long time before he’d enough strength to look for a shore. It wasn’t Brooklyn. He began to swim, a soft edge of summer still in the water. Eddie swam long after his last resources had been spent, like scooping at an empty container in hopes that more would somehow be inside, a little bit more, a little bit more, a little bit more, and miraculously, there was just enough each time for one more stroke.

  He washed up on the southern shore of Staten Island, near a small dock. A fisherman had stayed out longer than usual chasing a school of bass, which was why there was enough light
for him to see a man’s body left by the tide in the muddy shallows. He assumed it was a corpse and dreaded the long walk to the nearest telephone to report it, but when he tied up his boat and looked again, he saw that the body was shaking.

  His wife drew a bath and added boiling water until the temperature was barely warm. They lowered Eddie in, and the man held him under the armpits while his wife heated kettles and warmed the bath gradually, over hours, until it verged upon hot. When at last Eddie stopped trembling and color returned to his cheeks, they dried him, greased him with lanolin, swaddled him in feather blankets, and laid him on a pallet in front of the stove. The fisherman pressed his ear to Eddie’s heart and found its rhythm stronger, more regular, than before.

  Eddie woke into a fever, looked for a familiar face, but saw only a woman with a gray stripe at the parting of her hair. Sometimes there was a man whose fish-smelling hands touched Eddie’s forehead and chest. Eddie raved at these two—they’d stolen his pocket watch. They spoke of bringing him to a hospital. No, he murmured. No! And forced himself not to mention the pocket watch again.

  When the fever broke, he sat upright on a kitchen chair, wrapped in a blanket made of feathers. Harlan, the fisherman, poured each of them a glass of clear spirit that tasted like rye bread. His grandson did schoolwork at the table by the stove. Harlan was Norwegian, born here. As a boy, he’d fished with his father to supply the lobster palaces, Rector’s and Café Martin, Shanley’s, the fishermen entertaining one another with gossip about the outsize appetites of Diamond Jim Brady and Lillian Russell: fourteen lobsters between them one night, and the lady had to remove her corset. Eddie listened with his own story ready—I fell off a ship—but the question of why he’d been in the harbor never came. He understood. Knowing another man’s trouble made it yours, and Harlan was barely getting by, fishing to feed his family and trade with his neighbors for eggs and apples and milk.

  With each new day, Eddie felt the mounting pressure of his life, so nearby. His mind was too weak to fathom what should happen next. They would have to flee New York—but go where? To Agnes’s people in Minnesota, who disdained him? He would perish in that muddy land of bawling animals hundreds of miles from the sea. To some place where they knew no one? Eddie found himself clinging to the forms of convalescence, closing his eyes and trying to sleep.