Head Wounds sahm-3

by Chris Knopf

“Not then, not now, not for all eternity,” she said in a way that seemed more heartfelt than even the current situation warranted. My face must have betrayed that thought, because she quickly added, “And I don’t want to talk about it.”

  It was the kind of thing I would say myself, so I was perfectly amenable to that. It just wasn’t something I’d heard much out of Amanda.

  With no chance of reconstructing the original mood, we sat there long enough to finish our drinks, then packed it in.

  Given the off-season, there was plenty of parking space out on Main Street, even for my ’67 Grand Prix. The yellow street-lamps sucked the color out of everything, but threw enough light to guide our way. Most of the storefronts were dark, except for the high-end fashion shops that styled their windows with strings of tiny clear bulbs and low-voltage spotlights. The air was dead still and silent but for a low rumble that could have been the ocean or simply road noise coming from Montauk Highway. Amanda walked next to me, but I sensed some distance, so I took her hand. That’s why I felt her tense up before I saw Robbie and Patrick and one other guy come up to us on the sidewalk. Robbie looked a little unsteady on his feet, but the other guys were plenty steady. And big.

  “We’re gonna start calling you Vice-Grip, Aquinas,” said Robbie. “Patrick said you put a bruise on his arm.”

  “Wasn’t that bad,” said Patrick for the benefit of the other guy, who thought it was funny.

  “Acquillo,” I said to Robbie. “But you can call me Sam, since you seem to have trouble with more than one syllable at a time.”

  They looked like they wanted us to stop and talk, but I kept moving. They followed. I hurried Amanda to the Grand Prix, opened the door and shoved her inside before they caught up to us.

  I left her there and moved back onto the sidewalk, away from the curb, where there was more room to maneuver. They approached in a loose formation, hands free and shoulders back. I was hoping even Robbie Milhouser wasn’t stupid enough to start something physical right out on Main Street, though I wished I was wearing something grippier than a pair of penny loafers.

  “Hey, Acquillo,” said Robbie. “Fuck you. How many syllables is that?”

  “Come on, Robbie, give it a rest. It’s getting late. Everybody’s had a lot to drink. Don’t make it worse.”

  “Worse than what? All I want to do is talk a little business. Who the fuck’re you, anyway? Amanda, please,” he said, lurching toward the car. “It’s me, Robbie. What the fuck.”

  I stepped in front of him.

  “She doesn’t want to talk to you. Pay attention to what people are trying to tell you.”

  “Yeah? What’re you telling me?”

  “Your boys need to get you home before you do something really stupid.”

  Robbie looked at first like he was considering my counsel. But then he surprised everybody by getting his big right arm in motion behind an approximation of a roundhouse punch. It took about a year to get there. All I had to do was lean back a little to watch his fist go by my head. His follow-up was thrown so artlessly it looked more like a parody of a drunken punch than the real thing.

  Guys in this situation usually say things like, “Stand still and fight like a man,” but Robbie was preoccupied with the basic requirements of balance and coordination. My concern was the two other guys, still hanging back, but probably feeling their adrenaline stirring, maybe thinking they ought to join the party. I couldn’t wait for Robbie to just tire himself out, so on his third or fourth swing I caught the back of his arm with my right hand and used the left to grip the nape of his neck. Then, by simply adding to his forward momentum, I drove his head straight down into the front grille of a huge SUV parked next to the Grand Prix.

  The resulting bang was loud enough to cover the sound of Amanda getting out of my car, so I didn’t realize she was there until she touched my arm. Patrick and the other guy were bending over Robbie, who was still conscious, miraculously. He sat on the sidewalk holding his head. I tried to elbow Amanda behind me so I’d have enough airspace to get my fists into play if I had to.

  “You motherfucker,” said Patrick, standing up and coming toward me.

  Fear surged inside of me. I didn’t want this. I couldn’t afford it.

  “You don’t want to do this,” I told him.

  “Oh, yes I do,” he said, as he threw the first real live right hook of the evening.

  I caught it on the elbow, which saved my face but almost broke my arm. I pivoted to the left to give me more room and draw the action away from Amanda. Patrick walked toward me, flat on his feet, fists held around the middle of his body. Amateur.

  I let him get a little closer and stuck him in the nose. He reared back and grabbed his face, which is what amateurs always do, letting me step in and sink a right hook into his belly with everything I had.

  “I call the police!” Tommy yelled from the door of the restaurant. The owner and one of the waiters pushed passed him and approached our little gathering. Patrick was doubled over, clutching his midsection. I held him up by his shirt and whispered in his ear.

  “It’ll only get worse,” I said to him.

  A flash of lights bounced off the store windows across the street, reflections from the Village police cruiser racing down Nugent Street, and then making a hard right onto Main Street. I let go of Patrick, who did his best to stand up straight. Amanda grabbed my bicep with two hands and pulled me back. The people from the restaurant were helping Robbie’s other boy drag him to his feet. I could see a decent-sized egg already growing on his forehead.

  The cop was a short, dark-haired woman named Judith Rensler. She wasn’t much of a talker, but looked like she knew bullshit when she heard it, which is why she didn’t believe Robbie’s story about tripping on the curb. Since nobody was willing to contradict him she had to let it go at that.

  Patrick just stared at me as he felt delicately around his nose. I ignored him, though I took note that he was still standing, not an easy thing given what I planted in his gut. It wasn’t hard to know what the stare meant: next time was going to be different.

  We drove in silence back to Oak Point. Amanda sat shrunk into herself, wedged into the corner defined by the back of the seat and the passenger side door.

  When I tried to light a cigarette I discovered my hand wasn’t steady enough to do the job. I had to reheat the Grand Prix’s antique lighter and try again. I looked to see if Amanda was watching these exertions, but she was staring out the window.

  “Just a jerk,” I said to her.

  “Worse than that.”

  There wasn’t much of a moon, but the sliver cast enough light to reflect off the Little Peconic Bay, and the air was clear enough to see the sparkle of the houses built along the opposite shore. When I pulled into our shared driveway she told me she wanted to go right to bed.

  “He’s just a jerk,” I repeated when she opened the door. She shut it again, switching off the cabin light, so I couldn’t see her face.

  She leaned over and kissed me, then got out of the car.

  I watched her walk down her stretch of the drive and disappear into her house. I always liked to watch Amanda walk, and despite it all that night was no exception.

  Eddie Van Halen, the mutt who lived with me, was waiting on my front stoop. He had a secret door to the house that led through the basement hatch, but like me he preferred to stay close to the weather, so I’d usually find him outside when I came home. Either that or he faked it by running out the hatch whenever he heard the Grand Prix coming up the street.

  He honored me with a slow wave of his long feathered tail and a look that said something glorious was awaiting us inside the house.

  In my case it was another Absolut on the rocks. For Eddie, a Big Dog biscuit, which he waited to crunch on until I was with him on the screened-in porch facing the Little Peconic Bay. This was where we lived year-round with the help of a woodstove and the big wooden storm windows my father built as an energy-saving measure, or maybe as an act o
f self-preservation against the screeching brine-soaked winds that came off the bay throughout the winter months. Neither of my parents ever used the porch in the cold weather, but I found it impossible to be in the cottage without staring out on the impatient, unpredictable little sea.

  When the moon was big in the sky, I’d sit in the dark so I could see the surface chop throw back the silver blue fragments of moonbeam. Despite the lack of moon, I decided to leave the light off, more for the mood than the view. Given the unusually warm weather, I didn’t need the woodstove, though I lit it anyway. Eddie lay where he always did, stretched out on the braided rug.

  I was going to sit at the battered pine table, but I didn’t think I had the strength to stay upright. So I lay on the daybed and recited out loud, like an incantation, my reasons for avoiding any and all confrontations.

  “I can’t do it again,” I said finally to Eddie. “For any reason.”

  I didn’t like to think of myself as a middle-aged guy who sat drinking alone in the dark, talking to his dog about his fears and uncertainties. But I’d been doing that to Eddie since saving him from the pound, so he must have assumed listening to a bunch of worthless crap was part of his daily work product.

  “I can’t do it,” I repeated.

  All he did was look at me over the crumbled remains of his biscuit. I let it stand at that and finished my drink, then one or two more to be on the safe side, before letting the encyclopedia of irresolvable quandaries that continually cycled through my consciousness shift into a dream state, thereby maintaining a continuity of torment from wakefulness to sleep.

  TWO

  A FEW HOURS LATER I awoke to someone pounding on the kitchen door. In the glow from the embers in the woodstove I could see Eddie curled up on the braided rug, his head slightly raised, not bothering to bark, the urgent bashing coming from the kitchen not rising to his standard of alarm. I was still in my clothes, which added to the feeling of squalid disorientation as I swam through a layer of exhaustion, adrenaline poisoning and partially metabolized Absolut.

  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 ou
t 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.