The Extinction Event

by David Black

  “What the fuck were you thinking?” Caroline asked.

  “I guess,” Jack said, “you’ve decided to blame me for Robert’s death.”

  In three strides, Caroline was in the pantry.

  Her slap knocked Jack’s head back.

  Jack put the can back on the shelf and said to Caroline, “Take off your sweater.”

  Caroline glared at him.

  “Take off your sweater,” Jack repeated. Softer. More dangerously.

  “You do a pretty good imitation of Robert,” Caroline said. “But, if I’m remembering correctly, you got undressed first.”

  Locking eyes with Caroline, Jack methodically stripped.

  When his clothes were on the pantry floor, Jack nodded. Her turn.

  Caroline pulled her sweater over her head.

  “I wouldn’t give my ex blow jobs,” Caroline said.

  She unhooked her bra.

  “I played the English horn,” she said, “and I was afraid of ruining my embouchure.”

  She unbuttoned her skirt and let it fall.

  “I gave up the English horn,” she said.

  She stepped out of her panties and kicked off her shoes.

  “My ex was a cellist,” she said, putting Jack’s hand on her cunt. “Have you ever watched a cellist’s fingers when he’s playing vibrato?”

  “You don’t want to make love to me,” Jack said. “I’ve got gray pubic hair.”

  Caroline arched her back as Jack fingered her.

  “You want to talk about it first?” Jack asked.

  Caroline said, “No.”

  Over Caroline’s shoulder, Jack saw a can of chicken soup with stars.

  “Not here,” Caroline said, “with Dixie asleep upstairs.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  1

  Their clothes bundled in their arms, just like when Robert forced them out of his father’s house, Jack and Caroline, naked, shivering in the chill, went into the field behind Dixie’s house. Beyond the gaze of anybody accidently glancing out a window. The grass was damp. The sky was starless. Muddy. With a red seam along the horizon.

  Some of the flower beds were already mulched, early, for the coming cold weather. A few plants were tented. In the rising light, a tree showed a scarlet clump of early turning leaves.

  Holsteins were standing in the pasture beyond the field, half of them typically aligned north to south, the other half lying down, a fifty-fifty sign another storm was coming. A few cows were still trailing up from the barn.

  The sky grew lighter.

  They found a spot in a thicket. On a deer track. Bordered by goldenrod and purple loosestrife. Asters, white speckled like nonpareil candies. Dandelion puffs like hair electrified straight out from the head by a Tesla coil. Horse chestnuts lay scattered around. Glossy brown with cream-colored circles like dead eyes. There was a patch of mushrooms, which looked like nipples—a dozen nipples from a many-breasted fertility goddess.

  Mother Earth.

  Jack remembered a woman he dated in the Seventies, who used to say, The Great Goddess is coming back, and, boy, is she pissed.

  Caroline hugged herself.

  Jack draped his shirt over her shoulders.

  “You have a someone?” Jack asked.

  “I don’t love him,” Caroline said.

  “But you fuck him?” Jack said.

  “Not for months,” Caroline said.

  Jack spread out their clothes to make a nest.

  “We should have brought a blanket,” Caroline said.

  They knelt face-to-face. Their chests touching. Their thighs touching. Jack pushed his shirt from her shoulders, so she would be like him, completely naked.

  “Goose bumps,” Caroline said in a childlike voice.

  Later, when she lay in his arms, both gazing at the brightening sky, he said, “My grandparents used to burn cannel coal for heat. The pieces cracked like a gun shot. The biggest treat I used to get was a Hoodsie Cup, vanilla ice cream in a small cardboard cup. On the bottom of the cardboard lid was a picture of a ball player. You’d lick the ice cream off to see what player you got. The knife-and-scissor man still came around, shouting, Sharpen your tools … Sharp tools make work easy. Coal chute. I remember the iceman, the straw sticking to the ice blocks to keep them from melting together, the smell of the peroxide from the permanents in the department store beauty parlor, the X-ray machine in the shoe store where you could look at the bones in your feet.… Milk delivery was a luxury. As I grew older it become a necessity, then old-fashioned, then an embarrassment.”

  “I don’t think you’re too old for me,” Caroline said.

  “Do you know who The Great Gildersleeves is?” Jack asked. “Henry Aldrich? Little Annie Roonie? Frank Pangborn?”

  “I’ve watched Preston Sturges movies,” Caroline said.

  In the dawn light, the ghost of the moon vanished.

  “For my first science fair in junior high, I built a dinosaur,” Caroline said.

  Jack levered himself up on an elbow and smiled at her.

  “Life size,” Caroline said. “A brontosaurus.”

  Jack kissed her upturned face.

  “Out of two-by-fours, chicken wire, and papier-mâché,” Caroline said. “No, I didn’t realize how heavy it would be. And it never occurred to me that it wouldn’t fit through the bulkhead. Dixie helped me cut it into three parts. The neck and head. The body. The tail. Which we just managed to get out onto the driveway. With lots of help. We then hooked the three parts together. Using pulleys and cables. Put it on wheels. We cut a view port just under where the neck met the body. I recruited half a dozen friends to go inside the body with me. Together, we pushed it down the streets, a mile, to school. I couldn’t understand why I didn’t win a ribbon.”

  Jack kissed her again. This time on the mouth. He covered one breast with his hand—and felt Caroline go rigid.

  “It was around the time I was waiting for my first period,” she said. “The boy I was in love with—he used to dry hump me under the school stairwell. But when I raised my skirt and hooked my finger under my panties to pull them aside, he wouldn’t fuck me.”

  Caroline, lying legs straight, arms close to her sides, looked past Jack to the sky.

  “It wasn’t his fault,” Caroline said. “I don’t think he had a clue. But I wanted revenge. For two weeks, I went everywhere with Kotex. Just in case. At a dance, when I felt myself getting moist down there, I took him into an empty class room, lifted my skirt, stepped out of my panties, and sat on his lap. The front of his khakis were covered with my blood.”

  Jack touched her cheek, but she turned her head away.

  “I stood,” she said, “clipped on the Kotex, pulled up my panties, and smoothed my skirt. He look down at his lap. Horrified.”

  She met Jack’s eyes.

  “I’m a difficult girl,” she said.

  2

  “Bleeding on that kid’s lap isn’t exactly a sin,” Jack said.

  “Shouldn’t we say a prayer for Robert?” Caroline asked.

  “Maybe when I’m not so angry,” Jack said.

  Caroline started to say something else. Jack put his finger to her lips.

  “As Bette Davis once said about Joan Crawford,” Jack said, “just because someone’s dead doesn’t mean they’ve changed.”

  3

  The sunlight came at a low angle across the fields.

  When Jack climbed on Caroline again and started making love to her, he became aware of something approaching, coming out of a spinney along the deer track on which they lay. He raised his head, raised his chest from Caroline’s, and saw a young man in Nikes, gym socks, gym shorts, and T-shirt heading toward them—his face, as he noticed them, turning into a mask of woe.

  Too embarrassed to stop, unsure what to do about the two naked, coupled bodies in his path, the cross-country runner jumped over Jack and Caroline.

  And, before Jack and Caroline could rise, roll out of the way, hide in the thicket, a second,
appalled cross-country runner leaped over them. A third. A fourth. Each one, as they saw the fucking couple, stricken with expressions ranging from embarrassment to glee. A fifth. A sixth … A dozen runners in all.

  After the last runner jumped over them, they lay still for a long while. To make sure no one else would appear on the path.

  Jack’s head was still up, his back arched as he watched for oncoming cross-country team members. When he was sure the coast was clear, he forced himself to look down at Caroline—who, instead of being humiliated, was trying to suppress giggles.

  They lay on the cross-country route that they had mistaken for a deer track, semi-coupled, surrendering to mirth.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  1

  07-2376.

  The docket number found in a file in Frank’s collection of the Flowers papers.

  Although it didn’t have an initial federal court ID number, Jack was pretty sure it was a New York case.

  Jack no longer had access to a PACER account or a valid New York State Unified Courts System eTrack registration, so he called in a favor from an assistant district attorney in Morgenthau’s office in New York City, a guy he’d gone to law school with, who looked up the complaint.

  Jack expected it to involve Jean. Some case Frank fixed for her—probably, Jack thought, on Keating’s behalf.

  But Jack’s law school pal—Vincent Tremain—called a day after Jack asked him to look up the case and said, “It’s an assault beef. Some guy named Shapiro took a swing at a guy named Flowers.”

  “Shapiro?” Jack asked. “Dr. Matthew Shapiro?”

  “Matthew Shapiro, right,” Tremain said. “I don’t know about the doctor part.”

  “Took a swing at Robert Flowers?” Jack asked.

  “Hang on,” Tremain said. “No, not Robert.”

  “Keating?” Jack asked.

  “That’s it,” Tremain said.

  2

  Jack caught the 12:20 Amtrak from Hudson to New York City, to talk to the lawyer who had defended Shapiro. Paul Guzman. From a reputable firm: Traylor, Wein, and Castello.

  He wanted to get information on the case—especially why Shapiro had attacked Keating—before he confronted Shapiro or Keating.

  Caroline reminded Jack to be back in time for Robert’s funeral.

  “You really want to go?” Jack had asked her.

  “Don’t you think it would look suspicious if we weren’t there?” Caroline asked.

  “The paper reported Robert’s death as an accident,” Jack said. “And no one’s reached out to us. No reason for them to do so.”

  “He was a colleague,” Caroline said. “And a friend.”

  A tall, cowboy-looking guy with long blond hair, wearing pointy brown boots with decorative stitching, jeans, and an olive work shirt under a denim jacket, followed Jack into the coach car and sat two rows behind him on the other side of the aisle.

  Hooper—the guy who beat Jack up—said the guy who paid him looked like a cowboy with long blond hair.

  Jack studied him.

  Could be the same guy.

  An artsy-looking forty-year-old woman with white-streaked hair in overalls and two twenty-something girls, each plugged into their own iPods, entered the car and found seats.

  When the Cowboy followed Jack into the café car, Jack took more interest in him.

  The café was closed.

  Jack had gone there to make a cell phone call.

  Why had the Cowboy gone into the café car?

  The Cowboy studied the café menu.

  When Jack returned to his seat, so did the Cowboy.

  Curious, half an hour later, Jack again went into the café car and this time pretended to make a cell phone call.

  Again, the Cowboy followed and studied the closed café menu.

  When Jack got off at Penn Station, the Cowboy followed him up the escalator and out onto Eighth Avenue. As Jack waited in the taxi line, the Cowboy, standing behind him, studied a Nokia ad on a billboard.

  Jack left the line and, instead of taking a taxi, headed down Eighth Avenue.

  The Cowboy strolled after Jack, checking out a barbecue joint, a shoe store, a bead store, looking at everything except Jack.

  Whoever hired him, Jack thought, hired an amateur.

  Or someone so professional and protected he didn’t have to be invisible.

  3

  Guzman’s law firm, Traylor, Wein, and Castello, which Tremain had said was reputable, was on the twenty-second floor of a steel and glass building on Lexington Avenue between 52nd and 53rd Streets.

  Jack took a circuitous route, down 8th, east on 27th, up 6th, passing a former bank building, which looked like a Greek temple and was now a pharmacy, and, catty-corner across the intersection, a former pharmacy, which was now a bank.

  When did we replace worshipping money with worshipping health? Jack wondered.

  To make sure the Cowboy was following him, Jack stopped at X-Cite XXX, where he browsed the sex toys, the lubricants, the aisles of porn films, identified like sections in a supermarket: Bondage, Lesbian, Interracial, Barnyard.…

  The Cowboy studied whips and handcuffs, leashes and collars, C-clamps and dildos that looked like chew toys.

  The feathered masks and restraints seemed like artifacts of some dead religion. Or like things you would find in a pet store or hardware store.

  “Last night,” a customer in hospital greens was saying to the Pakistani or Indian clerk, “this guy comes into the emergency room with a lightbulb up his ass. He apologizes. I tell him, Honey, you don’t know who you’re talking to.…”

  “You going to buy the magazine, too?” the clerk asked.

  “This guy,” the customer said, “was ripped. Gorgeous.”

  “The magazine?” the clerk said. “I should ring that up?”

  “Ever think that’s an odd term for muscle definition?” the customer said. “Ripped!”

  The clerk shrugged, rang up the magazine, and put it into a brown paper bag with a DVD.

  “Some nights,” the customer said, “I mean, honey, this is St. Vincent’s, the Village, there are so many people in the ER with body art, the place looks like a tattoo convention. Twenty, thirty years from now, I don’t want to see these people with their clothes off.”

  A woman in a G-string the green of a Japanese beetle was taking a break next to her one-on-one booth and talking to another woman in a sheer white bodysuit. G-String, who had high-piled auburn hair, wore green spike heels. Bodysuit, who had a Louise Brooks helmet of glossy black hair, wore fuzzy slippers with cat-face toes.

  G-String nodded at Bodysuit’s slippers.

  “Those’ll get you in trouble for sure,” she said. “Attract a Furry. You know, one of those freaks into dressing up like a cartoon animal.”

  The cell phone in her clear plastic pocketbook made a chattering sound, like a toaster having a nervous breakdown.

  Jack walked toward the back of the store.

  A half-dozen men were studying photographs on the covers of porn movies or porn magazines with rapt attention, as if they were worshipping.

  In a way they are, Jack thought. Worshipping what’s between a woman’s legs.

  The source of life.

  The Great Goddess is coming back, and, boy, is she pissed.

  Jack went into a booth. He put a dollar into a slot, which, with a whirr, inhaled the bill.

  The split screen offered four previews. The booth smelled of disinfectant.

  Jack heard the door of the next booth close.

  Jack slipped out of his booth, left the shop, and was halfway down the block before the Cowboy came out of the peep show and spotted Jack turning a corner.

  The Cowboy’s indifference about being spotted struck Jack as dangerous.

  At a Papaya King, Jack ordered two chili dogs.

  He took one and told the henna-haired clerk to give the other to the Cowboy—which she did when the Cowboy made his demonstration stop at the counter.

&nb
sp; The Cowboy touched his hat brim in thanks—and followed Jack over to Lexington, as they both ate their dogs.

  Just before entering Guzman’s building, Jack folded the paper napkin, which smelled of the chili, dabbed at the corners of his mouth, balled it up, and walked to a trash can—where he was joined by the Cowboy, who also tossed in his balled-up napkin.

  The Cowboy smiled.

  Jack smiled back and, pointing with his thumb over his shoulder at the office building, asked, “You going in?”

  The Cowboy shrugged.

  “I’m going in,” Jack said. “Traylor, Wein, and Castello.”

  The Cowboy stuck out his lower lip and nodded, another thanks.

  “Figure I’d save you the trouble,” Jack said.

  The Cowboy nodded.

  “Twenty-second floor,” Jack said.

  Again, the Cowboy nodded.

  “Figured you’d find out anyway,” Jack said.

  The Cowboy nodded.

  “You going to follow me in?” Jack asked.

  The Cowboy nodded.

  “You’ll have to sign in,” Jack said. “You got a name?”

  The Cowboy shook his head no.

  Jack went into the building, showed his driver’s license, and signed in.

  Waiting for the elevator, Jack glanced back at the Cowboy, who flashed some kind of ID and was waved through without having to sign in.

  Amateur or protected?

  Jack had his answer.

  Protected.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  1

  The receptionist in the office of Shapiro’s lawyer, Paul Guzman, checked and told Jack that Guzman was in court.

  As Jack left the office, the Cowboy leaned over the receptionist and flashed his ID.

  The receptionist looked sideways at Jack. Suspiciously. And repeated for the Cowboy the information she had just given Jack.

  Whatever ID the Cowboy possessed impressed people.

  Jack and the Cowboy waited for the elevators side-by-side, facing forward. Not talking.

  Side-by-side, they entered the elevator, simultaneously turned to face-forward as if they were a double act in vaudeville, and rode down to the lobby in silence.

  Jack hailed a cab.