The Blade Between

by Sam J. Miller

Hold tight to the razor edge of your hate, the blade that Hudson lodged ages ago between your ribs. Twist it just enough to keep you sharp. If it cuts your hands and you bleed, so much the better—catch the blood in a rectangle and call it a photograph.

  Chapter Four

  A bell rings, in Dom’s pocket. Clear echoing bronze, sounding like the blue mountain sky above a temple. He’d listened to hundreds of bell sounds online, before he selected the one that would be his cell phone ringtone.

  “Hello?” he says.

  “Hey, hon,” his wife says. “What time you coming home?”

  “Soon,” he says, looking down at Ossie, and feels so weary all of a sudden. “People still over?”

  “Yeah, they’re leaving soon,” Attalah says.

  Impromptu meetings have been happening in his living room a lot lately. Local businesses struggling with rent raises. Family friends—and then friends of friends—wondering what they could do about the eviction notice that had appeared on their apartment doors. His wife is a natural leader, fearless and well connected, and she always has something for everyone who calls her up or comes through the office of UPLIFT Hudson, the organization her mother founded. A lawyer who did favors, a social services agency that could help them access an obscure subsidy. But some things can’t be stopped, not by all the wisdom and connections in the world.

  The tide is rising, in Hudson, and Dominick wonders how long it will be before it swallows them all.

  “You need me to make dinner?” he asks, grabbing a fistful of Ossie’s sheet and sniffing it. She always went a little too long between changing the sheets on her bed. He’d given her shit for it, but now he is grateful. Her smell is strong on them. “I can swing by ShopRite on my way.”

  “Shiloh Baptist had a chicken dinner fundraiser,” she says. “Joe brought enough for everyone.”

  “That was nice of him,” Dom says.

  Shiloh Baptist had been having a lot of fundraisers lately.

  “You okay?” she asks.

  “I’ll tell you when I get home,” he says.

  “Somebody die?”

  He chuckles. “Am I that predictable?”

  “You are, and so is Hudson.”

  “I guess,” he says. The town’s crime rate is high, for it being as small as it is. So are its suicide numbers. “Let me finish up here and I’ll see you soon.”

  “Okay, honey,” she says.

  “I love you,” he says, and here the tears really do come.

  He isn’t in a hurry to share the details on this one. She’s just lost someone to suicide herself, several months ago—Katch, a brilliant, beautiful troubled kid she’d mentored in her organization’s after-school arts program. After graduation he’d spent a couple of messy years trying to be a model. Endlessly traveling down to New York City, “getting his face out there.” Loading up his arms with ink. Making a lot of bad decisions in both places. He’d overdosed, but he’d also left a note.

  And soon after that, Attalah’s mother had had a stroke. A brilliant, incandescent woman, all rage and home cooking, who’d waged war on the newcomers from her public housing apartment when obesity compromised her mobility to the point where she could no longer visit the office of UPLIFT Hudson. Now unable to speak, barely able to move.

  He looks back. Ossie is smaller than she’d ever been before. Already her corpse is replacing her in his head.

  Dom goes downstairs, gets into his car. Sits for a while. Starts it up.

  He isn’t sure why he goes home the way he does. Something he sees out of the corner of his eye, maybe, or he just doesn’t want to go right home. It’s the long way around, looping down to Front Street and then up Warren. Hudson is like that. There are so many ways to go, but every one of them leads to the same place. So you change it up every time you drive. Maybe you turn left on Fifth instead of Third, or right on Columbia instead of State.

  Dumb luck, sailor, or something else, that Dom drives by the butcher shop that night at all.

  Chapter Five

  RONAN

  The train blew its whistle and pulled out of the station. Heading north. On to Albany, Niagara Falls, maybe even Montreal or Toronto. Sleepy people watched me from the windows, and then they were gone. One last whistle, a long and taunting sound, mocking me for being where I was, and then it was swallowed up in darkness and distance.

  Across the street, a billboard sported a smiling blue sperm whale and the words: WELCOME TO HUDSON: A WHALE OF A TOWN! Loud hellos were being said. Pretty hip people were being picked up by their pretty hip friends. A boy turned to grin, walking past me, and that bare raw flash of gay lust was like another twist of the blade. To be so free and careless of such dangerous desire—here in Hudson, of all places.

  Doors slammed. Cars scurried off. In three minutes, five tops, the station was as silent as it had always been.

  So. Evidently Hudson had evolved. Become something new. The depressed postindustrial dead end I’d left behind was gone. That corpse had been resurrected, Lazarus-like, to be some kind of weekend haunt for the New Brooklyn’s overflow. Vaguely, I recalled my father saying something about a story in the New York Times, the skyrocketing real estate market, “in a year or two we’ll be able to sell the old butcher shop building for millions. Actual millions.”

  My father. Remembering his voice made my breath stop.

  Idiotic, to have gotten off the train. To come here. To go see him. When I’d spent so long hiding from what was happening to him. When I’d ignored the desperate plea in his voice, the one he was too proud to put into words, begging me to come. Missing me. Wanting to tell me that things were serious. That whatever was going on in his brain, whatever was making him vanish into himself—he wasn’t getting better. That he wouldn’t.

  Someone, hopefully human, howled from down by the boat launch. I turned onto Warren Street, scouring my phone for signs of why I was where I was. Still nothing but the calendar entry for coffee—but why couldn’t I recall the actual encounter? Katch didn’t have an email address. Not even a phone number. Our encounters had all been in person, since he first showed up at my studio a week ago. That hadn’t seemed strange, before, but now it added to the uncanniness of my predicament.

  Shadows danced in my peripheral vision. Dark shapes at the ends of side streets. Figures watching me from third-floor windows. A glass bottle broke, somewhere down the block. I felt stretched thin, pulled too tight. Like the Ronan I had been, that poor sad fuck I left behind so long ago, he was here. He’d been waiting for me. And now that I was back on his home turf, he could come clawing out of me at any moment.

  The war between the two Hudsons was particularly acute on Warren Street. Old establishments like the West Indian grocery, with its beef patties and a cat asleep on the bread, or the sporting goods store that had been there since the fifties. But there weren’t very many of those. Mostly it was antique shops. So many antique shops. Windows full of cow skulls. Empty bottles of laudanum or mercury. Campaign buttons for candidates long discredited. Gnarled statues that were probably racist once, but now the paint had peeled away. All of history was here, caught and carved up into tiny profitable pieces.

  I passed Third Street. I stopped in front of one window, which boasted a bronze statue of three stacked life-size pigs. Capped with a weird sort of hat that I swiftly saw was a lampshade. A lamp. A fucking six-foot-tall, six-foot-wide bronze lamp. I took a step back, on outraged instinct. Raised my camera. And only when I looked through the wide-angle lens, taking in the entire storefront, and saw the precise shape of the darkness behind the pig lamp, did I know where I was.

  My father’s butcher shop. Fifteen years gone; died when Wal-Mart came to town. Vacant all this time, I’d imagined. I never knew he rented it out. I never knew so many things.

  HUDSON BUTCHER, said the sign across the front. Where my father’s name once was. An old-time, tongue-in-cheek typeface. Blue letters ribbed in red. So clever. So hip.

  A phantom stepped forward from the darknes
s. Shaped like me—same height, same stoop—so that we each could have been looking at our own reflection—but this was not me. This was Narcissus’s nightmare; Dorian Gray’s portrait. His wrinkled face cracked into a curiosity that was a mirror for my own, but the pajamas he was wearing were a mockery of my own attempt to be sharp, to be fashion, to be somebody.

  “Hey, Dad,” I said, except that no sound came out.

  With mild amusement, I saw that I wasn’t breathing. The amusement evaporated when I saw that even when I tried my hardest, I still couldn’t.

  I dropped to my knees. That helped a little, but I still had to gasp and wriggle to get half a lungful of air. So I fell onto my side, and then lay on my back on the filthy sidewalk that smelled like dog pee. That was better. My father looked down on me from inside the shop. I crossed my arms over my chest and shut my eyes and what did it matter that tears were streaming out of them?

  Chapter Six

  RONAN

  The cop car pulled up, flashed lights, double-parked. A door opened.

  Shit, I thought, pressing my cheek into the cold dirty sidewalk. What kind of bullshit town has Hudson become, where a damaged addict can’t even lie in the street anymore?

  “Sorry, Officer,” I said, shutting my eyes, gathering my strength, my charm. “I fell.”

  “I thought that was you,” the cop said, his voice strumming a chord deep in my belly. “Didn’t quite believe my eyes.”

  Against my will, my eyes opened. It was him all right. Tears clouded my vision again.

  “Dominick?”

  “Hi, Ronan. Having some trouble?”

  “You might say that.”

  I stared. Black bare tree branches spread out in a crown behind his head. Past that, the sky. Stars. I hadn’t seen them in so long.

  He held out one hand. I grabbed it, held tight. His touch unlocked something that had been locked up tight for a long, long time, except I wasn’t sure what exactly it was.

  He pulled. I pulled. Dom was trying to bring me back up to my feet, and I was trying to pull him down to the ground with me. Of course he won out. He’d always been the strongest man I knew. I rose up slowly, unwillingly, but when I was standing again he tugged me forward, into a hug.

  “It’s good to see you, Ro.”

  “You too,” I said, and shut my eyes again, let myself collapse into the hug. He smelled the same. Same body oil he’d always worn, like the inside of a mosque, clean and sacred and earthy. Once, on 125th Street, I’d passed a street vendor with a table full of incense, burning a dozen different kinds at once, and one of them had been Dom’s, except I couldn’t separate it out from the panorama of overlapping scents.

  “You’re a cop,” I said, stupidly.

  “Don’t hold it against me. I try not to be one of the bad ones.”

  I laughed. It couldn’t be easy for him, downstreet. Cops were right up there with cockroaches on the list of things people complained about. I got shit from the girl behind the counter at a store once because I have the same last name as an officer, someone I’m absolutely no relation to.

  “So . . . my dad’s in there,” I said, pointing to the inside of the antique shop that had once been our butcher shop. “He doesn’t . . . look well.”

  “No worries,” Dom said, opening the door and calling my father’s name. He stepped from the shadow, looking lost and little in his pajamas.

  “Does this happen often?”

  “Not often,” Dom said, taking my father by the hand, leading him out into the streetlamp light.

  “Hey, Dad,” I said, trembling—startled at how much this hurt. After how hard I’d been trying to hide from him. From this. The tiny man he’d become. The damage that had clearly been done.

  My father didn’t answer. He looked in my direction like he could see me, but not like he recognized me.

  Or he does, and he’s too disappointed to know what to say to you.

  “You’re back,” Dom said, the way you do when you want to distract a guest from something embarrassing. “For a day, or . . . ?”

  “Not sure,” I said, and then thought, Wait, now we’re not sure? Now it’s not, you can bet your ass I’ll be on the first train out of here tomorrow morning?

  “You’re one of them, now,” he said. “The hipster invaders.”

  “I’ll try not to be one of the bad ones,” I said.

  “I set that up for you. You’re welcome. Come on, I’ll give you two a ride home. In the back like a perp, or in the front like my partner?”

  “Your partner,” I said, and wondered if he could hear the hunger in my voice.

  He opened the door for me. “Some people get a thrill out of riding in the back, is all.”

  “Yeah, maybe some other time.”

  “Your dad gets to be the perp then,” he said, opening the back door for him. Another twist of the blade, to see the childlike way he obeyed. Allowed himself to be seat-belted.

  It smelled like Dom in there. Dom, and coffee, and leather. I got an instant erection and put my bag on my lap to hide it.

  “My dad still lives in the same place,” I said, pointing to the tippy top of Warren Street.

  “I know,” he said.

  Of course he did. Hudson was small. Everyone knew everything about everyone else. “How’s he . . . been?”

  It was an idiotic question. The answer was right behind me, and it was Not great. Walking the chilly streets at night, barefoot and pajamaed, going to work at a job he hadn’t done in ages. Living in a city that no longer was.

  I felt skinned, stripped bare. Like I was the barefoot streetwalker. Exposed to Dom and everyone in Hudson as an utter failure of a human being, the selfish son who abandoned his father, ignored his descent into . . . whatever this was.

  Dom shrugged, started up the car. “It’s been hard on him, these last few years. The way the town is changing.”

  I nodded, like I knew.

  “You know your dad,” Dom continued. “This town is everything to him. Friends with everybody. So it’s been rough, watching everybody suffer. Businesses closing. Folks getting evicted, struggling to pay their rising rents.”

  “Sounds like Brooklyn,” I said. “I didn’t realize it had gotten so bad.”

  “Some folks say your dad is the only thing standing between this town and total destruction,” Dom said.

  “How’s that?”

  “Refuses to sell the butcher shop building. Rents it, but won’t sell. And it’s the last piece they need, for this big proposed real estate development project. Pequod Arms, they’re calling it. A bunch of big condo and rental developments that would fuck us all the way up.”

  “I’m glad to hear that he’s holding out,” I said, and wondered idly what kind of money was on the table. Like, buy a Brooklyn apartment money? Never have to worry about rent again money?

  “But, yeah. It’s messed him up a lot, the way this town has changed lately. My wife is the same way.”

  “Your wife,” I said, and, yeah, I was vaguely aware he’d gotten married—had seen it on Facebook, maybe, or gotten an email?—to a classmate of ours, Attalah, a brilliant illustrator, in all my art classes, the only other person besides me who refused to say the Pledge of Allegiance. “Congratulations.”

  “Thanks,” he said, with a chuckle. “Been ten years now. Have we really not seen each other in that long?”

  “Been busy,” I said. The streets went by slow, outside his window. The five-and-dime was gone; the family-owned restaurant. The toy store where my father got me a big plastic magenta allosaurus the day eight-year-old me crashed his bike and broke his wrist. Replaced by antique store after antique store. Each one throbbed like the socket of a long-gone tooth.

  “Busy being a big-deal photographer,” he said. “Your father is super proud.”

  “Thanks,” I said, disturbed, to think of my father seeing my dirty sexy pictures. Somehow I imagined he’d be too squeamish to Google me, go to my website, follow the links I posted to new spreads and c
overs as they came out.

  “You look exactly the same,” he said. “How is that?”

  “I’m a gay man, Dom. We’re neurotic and obsessed with our appearance.”

  “Unlike straight guys like me who really let ourselves go, you mean.”

  I laughed. He laughed. It was a joke.

  I mean, he had let himself go. But he was still every bit as beautiful as he had been in eleventh grade.

  I started to say, So now you’re straight? But there was no need. Because of course he’d always been straight. Even when he was my first boyfriend, his big secret, I’d known what was up. Why we could never be.

  This was bad, that I’d been back such a short time and already I was feeling so many emotions. I had to get the fuck out of here. But first: I had to steer the conversation onto less raw ground.

  “Stubb still around?” I asked, mock-nonchalant, like the boy I feared most was a matter of no importance to me at all. The most vicious of my high school bullies; the horriblest homophobe, the one who would punch me in the arm again and again in math class while the teacher pretended not to notice; the one who, one Saturday night while I was at the movie theater with my mom and dad, hollered from the back row, Ronan Szepessy is a faggot!

  “Course he is,” Dom said, shaking his head. “Where else is he gonna go? Nobody’d put up with his shit anywhere else, but here he’s got his daddy the mayor to keep on shielding him from the consequences of his actions.”

  “His dad is still the mayor? How is that possible?”

  “No term limits in Hudson. He’s not running for reelection, though. Jark Trowse is running, and that’s his handpicked successor.”

  “The internet guy?”

  “Yup. Word is, mayor’s stepping down ’cause his son’s a liability. Sick in the head, or maybe an addict. Whatever it is, people say it’s just a matter of time before he does something really cataclysmically bad, and Daddy Coffin doesn’t want to have to be in the public eye when it happens.”

  “It’s a little on the nose,” I said, “the last name. Coffin.”