by Tim O'Mara
“It’s nothing, Ray,” Elsa said. “Let’s go eat.”
“Yeah, Ray,” Jacked mimicked. He took a drag of the cigar and exhaled it slowly. “Go eat. Then go home and eat a little more.” He winked. “Spicy. You gonna tell her about the time you chased the street monkey up the fire escape?”
“You’re pushing it, Jack,” I said.
He took another couple of steps. Ten feet separated us now. Elsa tried to turn me by the elbow, but I wouldn’t let her. I moved my right foot slightly forward, shifted more weight onto the right leg, and held the umbrella at my side.
“Let’s just go,” Elsa said.
“I think Jack wanted to apologize first,” I said.
“Looks like you’ll be missing dinner then.” Jack bent over and placed his beer and cigar on the sidewalk. “’Cause I ain’t apologizing for shit.”
“Please, Ray.” Elsa tried pulling me. “He’s drunk. It is not worth it.”
I shrugged Elsa’s hand off my elbow and said to Jack, “You never did learn how to behave in front of real people, did you?” For effect, I added, “Whack.”
“And you never learned when to shut the fuck up.”
“Not when I’m right. No.”
He shook his head and laughed.
“That’s what it’s all about, ain’t it? You being right.”
“Think what you want, Jack.”
“Oh, I will,” he said. “I will.”
He looked down at the ground, pushed off on his back leg, and came at me. He was drunk and not all that graceful, so I was able to sidestep his charge. He spun away, and his momentum carried him into a pile of garbage bags and tied-up newspapers. Jack got up, rubbed his hand across his mouth, and smiled.
“I’d like another shot at that, Teacher.”
I spread out my arms, telling him I wasn’t going anywhere. As he gathered himself together, I took a quick look at Elsa, who was standing between two parked cars.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
“I want to go,” she pleaded. “You don’t need to—”
I held up my hand. “In a minute.”
Jack approached me, slower this time, realizing speed was not on his side. I eased into the middle of the sidewalk and balanced my weight evenly. I was thinking maybe I had been lucky the first time. Jack had quite a few inches and pounds on me and seemed to learn from his mistake.
“Just say you’re sorry, Jack, and you can go back to drinking yourself into a stupor.”
Jack smirked as he crept closer, his breathing heavy but rhythmic. He was about three feet away when he threw his right hand at me. I leaned away from it, only to realize too late it was a feint, and he was able to smack me across the face with the back of his left. I stumbled back a few feet, where someone caught me.
“The fuck is this?” Billy Morris said, holding me up by my armpits. “Ain’t no dancing allowed out here.”
Jack took a few steps closer to us. Billy stopped him with a pointed finger.
“Enough!” Billy said. “You both seem to have gotten your shots in, so just cool the fuck out.” He turned to Elsa and said, “You okay?”
She nodded.
“You,” he said to Jack. “Get inside and drink.”
Jack picked up his cigar and beer and tipped an imaginary hat at Elsa. “Ma’am.” He strolled down the sidewalk and into The LineUp.
“And you,” Billy said as he picked my umbrella off the ground. “I expect that shit from the Whack, but you? Damn, Ray. Go have dinner with your friend.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out a tissue. “Wipe the blood off your face first.”
Billy turned away and headed back inside. I touched the tissue to my nose and it came away red. Shit. Elsa took the tissue and wiped my face. When she was done, she walked over to an open garbage can and dropped the bloody tissue inside.
“I’m not hungry anymore,” she said.
“Excuse me?”
Elsa shook her head. “That was just … stupid.”
“I know. Jack gets out of control sometimes.”
“I was talking about you.”
“Me?” I asked. “I was defending myself.”
“No. You thought you were defending me.”
“Elsa…”
“Three times I asked you to stop. You didn’t listen.”
“He was verbally abusing you. I wasn’t just going to let—”
“Do I look so helpless, I need my honor defended?” She took a step back and pointed at a red mark on her dress. “That is blood. Your blood.” She paused. “I almost didn’t come here because I was worried about the cops at the party. Too much … testosterone. I didn’t think I had to worry about you.”
“You didn’t. You don’t.”
“You could have walked away from him. He was drunk. Instead you had to prove you could stand up for yourself. Stand up for me. I have had too much of that … that machismo shit.” She waited for me to come back with an answer. When I didn’t, she said, “What would you say to your students if they acted as you just did?”
“That’s not fair,” I said. “This was completely different.”
“Because he started it?”
I tried to keep my tone calm. “Don’t talk to me like I’m a child.”
She shook her head. “You are not so different from that Jack as you would like to believe.”
“What’s that?” I asked, ignoring the little voice inside my head telling me to shut the fuck up. “Some of the psychology crap they teach you?”
She looked at me with what could only be called pity and shook her head. She looked up and down the avenue and crossed.
I followed her to the other side. “Where are you going?” I asked.
“Home.” She pointed at a bus sign. “I can take this.”
“Elsa. Can’t we just have dinner?”
“Not tonight. I’m sorry.” She looked over my shoulder. “The bus is coming.”
I turned around and saw the blue and white city bus making the left under the BQE.
“Let me take you home,” I tried.
“I can take myself home.”
The bus pulled in front of us, opened its doors, and let off a handful of passengers. I thought about getting on the bus with her. Telling her about my trip to Highland, the clue I had found. She would see by my actions what kind of man I really was.
Maybe she already had.
Chapter 13
“HOW’S THAT FEEL?”
“Like someone’s sticking a hot needle into the back of my legs.”
“Excellent.” Muscles Marinaccio looked down at me and grinned. “That means you’re doing it correctly.”
I did another one. The sharp pain began just below my knees and turned into a bright light as it moved its way north.
“I must be doing it very correctly,” I said, exhaling and easing back into a squatting position. “Because it hurts like a bitch.”
“That’s the lactic acid rushing into the muscles,” he continued. “If you’d been doing these consistently for the last four years, you’d know that. Also, it wouldn’t be hurting so bad.”
I was on a piece of gym equipment that required me to wrap my hands around two rubber grips, squat, and then stand up, raising the padded bar connected to the weights. Once my legs were straight, I was to count to three and then slowly—“Very slowly! There are two parts to this exercise!”—return to my original position. I’ve seen pictures in textbooks of similar devices that were used during the Spanish Inquisition to punish the unfaithful. This one was used to punish delinquent patients with torn ligaments behind their knees. As Muscles watched, I did five more, for a total of ten, and stopped.
“I said this to you four years ago, Raymond. You didn’t just tear the meniscus.” He touched below the back of my right knee and brought his finger up and around the kneecap. “You tore your ACL and pretty much fucked around with both patellas.”
“Don’t get so technical, Doc.”
“How about this? Your k
nee bone ain’t exactly connected to your leg bone the way God meant it to be. That dumbed down enough for you?”
“Sorry.”
“You should be.” Muscles reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out two white pills. “Take these,” he said.
“Ibuprofen?”
“Wintergreen. Every time you exhale, I get hit with a faceful of vodka. Where the hell’d you go last night?”
I popped the mints into my mouth. “Every bar between The LineUp and my apartment. I had some thinking to do.”
“You pissed off at your liver?”
“Just pissed,” I said, and told him about last night’s aborted date with Elsa and the fight with Jack Knight.
“No offense, Raymond,” Muscles said, “but Jack could break you in two.”
“He was drunk.”
“That would just give him more reason to want to. That why you’re back here today? After all these years of neglect? Tired of getting sand kicked in your face?”
“That’s part of it.”
“What’s the other part?”
“This morning,” I said, “when I was drinking my coffee with The New York Times spread out on the carpet?”
“Yeah?”
“It took me five minutes to get up off the floor.”
Muscles shook his head and offered his hand to help me out of the contraption. As he did, his left bicep ballooned to the size of a cantaloupe. All he needed was a tattoo of an anchor and a can of spinach to complete the image. “The surgery was not the end of your problems,” he said. “You should have been coming here every week for physical therapy.”
Here was Muscles Marinaccio’s gym-slash-rehabilitation center on the top floor of an East River–front factory building that housed mostly artist studios and a few illegal residences. If you wanted to work out in a no-frills, no aerobics, let’s-not-do-some-carrot-juice-afterward environment, this was the place. Since Muscles was also a licensed physical therapist, you could use his facilities and expertise to recover from an injury. I had come to him after my accident, just like the doctor had ordered. Then I didn’t feel like coming anymore. The pain became a part of me, something I deserved.
“Why would you put yourself through that?” Muscles asked, sliding the palm of his hand over his crew cut. “I’ll never understand it. It’s not like you’re stupid.”
He was looking at me like I was stupid.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I’ve been busy.”
“Busy? Bullshit. Busy limping around Brooklyn making the damned thing worse, and feeling sorry for yourself. So last night and this morning got to you, huh?”
“Yeah.”
Muscles looked at me for ten seconds and said, “What else, Raymond?”
I took a deep breath. “I guess I just got tired of the pain.”
“About fucking time.” He pointed over at the blue padded table by the window. “Go over and do some stretching. I’m going to search the archives and see if I can unearth your file.”
As Muscles walked away, I went over to the table, placed my leg on top, and reached for my toes. I got about as far as the ankle when the burning started again. I settled for placing my hand on the knee and leaning forward. I felt pain in muscles I had forgotten were there.
There was only one other person in the place. A woman, about fifty or so, working up a sweat on the stair machine. We acknowledged each other with brief smiles and nods, and went back to our tasks. I looked out the window at the river in an attempt to keep my mind off the fire behind my knees. It was calm out there today. A light mix of smoke and clouds hung above the city, the sky once again not committing itself to either rain or sun.
“Should I bore you—again—with the details of the MRIs and X-rays?”
Muscles’s voice brought me back inside.
“No.”
“Good. You wouldn’t be able to follow most of it anyway.” He pulled up a stool and sat next to me. “The bottom line is—if you’re serious this time around—you need to be coming to see me three times a week. There was a lot of damage to both knees. It’s still there. Like I said, the surgery took care of some of it, but…”
“I’ve got to do the rest,” I finished for him.
He closed up the folder. “For someone as seemingly bright as yourself, you’re taking a hell of a chance with your physical well-being. You looking forward to spending the last half of your life not moving around too much?”
“No.”
“Then quit fucking around.”
“I am,” I said. “I will. That’s why I’m here.”
“All right then.” He took out a piece of paper and handed me what appeared to be a spreadsheet. “That is your plan for the next six weeks.”
I took some time to look over the paper. He had me scheduled for three days a week, including one on the weekend, Saturday or Sunday, my choice. Under each day was a series of empty boxes, and next to them, initials.
“Translate this into English for me?” I asked.
“That’s more for me than you.” He touched his index finger to the initials. “These are the exercises you’ll be doing. In these boxes, we’ll fill in your reps and weights. When the six weeks are up, we’ll analyze your progress.”
“And after that?”
“We schedule another six weeks.” He saw the look on my face. “This isn’t a sprint, Raymond. It’s a marathon. A lifelong marathon.”
I took another look at the sheet. “What’s this about abs and quads? I thought I was working on getting my knees back.”
Muscles leaned into me and grabbed my stomach. He pinched the two inches or so of flesh between his fingers. “Any other questions?”
“Jesus.”
“The Lord’s got nothing to do with this, Raymond. It’s just you, me, and all this modern rehabilitation equipment.”
I handed the paper back to him. “About the cost of all this…”
“You got insurance, don’t you?” he said.
“Yeah, but I don’t think they’ll cover this. Working out?”
“It’s called rehabilitation therapy,” he said. “You got an orthopedist?”
“No.”
“I do.” He produced a business card between his fingers like a magician turning a trick. “He’ll write you a scrip for six weeks of therapy, three days a week. I will bill your insurance. You won’t have to fork over a dime.”
“Copayment?”
“Please.”
“I appreciate that. What if I can’t make it three days a week?”
“I still bill the insurance. Three a week is standard. They have any qualms, they’ll request copies of your X-rays and MRIs. Believe me, after they see the damage you did to your knees…”
“So you get paid whether I show up or not?”
“That’s the way it works, yeah.”
“That doesn’t sound…”
“It’s the way it is. But it doesn’t really matter, does it?” He placed a hand just above my knee and squeezed. “Because you will show up. Right?”
“Absolutely,” I answered.
“Good.” He stood up. “Now give me ten minutes on the stationary bike. I’ll hit you with the ice and electric stim on the knees, and you’re done for the day.”
“Electric stim?”
“Relax. It’ll feel like pins and needles. Speeds up the recovery.”
“The insurance covers that, too?”
“Hell, Raymond. I’m going to charge them for the ice and bill them just for this conversation. Sorry. ‘Consultation.’”
I waited for him to smile or wink. When he didn’t, I held out my hand. “Thanks.”
“Welcome back, Raymond. Now hit the bike.” He walked toward his office, turned back, and said, “And stop picking fights with drunk cops twice your size. I can only do so much.”
Less than an hour later, I was showered and still in pain. “Good pain,” Muscles had called it. “Replacing the bad.” Either way, I was buzzing with endorphins—or whatever it is that
gives you the high after working out—and felt myself deserving of a treat. I stepped out into the heat thinking of chicken with garlic sauce from the place by my apartment. Not watching where I was going, I just about knocked Detective Royce off the top step.
“Mr. Donne,” he said.
“Detective,” I said, not hiding my surprise. “You looking for me?”
He gave me a what-do-you-think? look. “I found you, didn’t I?”
“How did you—?”
“Part of the job description, last I checked.” He moved the gym bag he was carrying from his left hand to his right. “Speaking of which, I had a little talk with your uncle yesterday.”
“I figured you might have,” I said.
“Actually, he had a talk. I had a listen.”
“Sorry about that. I just—”
“Sorry about what?” Detective Royce asked. “Messing with my case even after I told you not to? Or sorry about screwing up my weekend, which I just would have wasted on time with my family anyways?” He swung the bag over his shoulder. “Nothing I like more than coming into work on my day off. By the way, Mr. Donne,” he took a step closer, “you look like shit.”
I ran my fingers through my hair and said, “I just had a workout. And I’m getting over a little something.”
“Smells like”—he leaned in—“you’re getting over a little vodka.”
“Did you have a question for me, Detective? If not, I’d really like to go home and eat.”
“Matter of fact, I do have a couple of questions. Tell me why you went up to Highland.”
“I wanted to talk to Frankie’s cousin and her husband.”
“Even after I told you to stay out of my way?”
“I had the funny feeling we wouldn’t be running into each other up there.”
Royce looked as if he wanted to take a bite out of my face. After a few seconds and a deep breath, he said, “And…?”
“And what?”
“What kind of feel did you get off of them?”
I smiled. “I only spoke with her. The husband was down here.”
“Yeah?”
“She told me he was planning on talking to you.”
“News to me,” he said.
“And … she didn’t like the idea of the—of me—coming to her house. She kept telling me her husband was handling everything.”