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by James Hynes

  And it isn’t until he actually looks at the scrape, at the blood running down his shin and into his sock, that he realizes how much it hurts. He lifts his foot to flex the knee; he can move the joint without any trouble, but the scrape burns.

  “Ow!” he says, his hands twitching over the torn fabric of his trousers. He wants to brush away the grit embedded in his kneecap, but he’s afraid to touch it. He looks up at the sheepishly grinning fat guy, and now, along with the pain, Kevin’s aware that he’s angry.

  “Goddammit, I have a job interview in a couple of hours.” He gestures at the irreparable rip in his suit trousers, at the blood trailing down his leg.

  “Oh, man,” says the fat guy. “I’m really sorry. You should’ve—”

  “I should’ve what? Kicked your fucking dog?”

  The guy cringes and hauls on the leash, forcing the spaniel to his feet and out of range. Now Kevin feels bad. It’s not Barney’s fault, he was just being a dog. Kevin slumps back against the bench, wondering if he’s torn his jacket, too. In frustration he flops his hands into his lap.

  “I mean, fuck. I have a job interview. In three hours.”

  “Easy.” The Amazon has perched on one buttock on the bench next to Kevin. “Right now, we should do something about that scrape. Think you can walk on it?”

  Kevin’s knee is really beginning to sting, and the sun is pressing down on him again. Even if the jacket isn’t torn, his whole suit is wilted now in the heat, wrinkled and dusty and marinated in his sweat.

  “Yeah.” He flexes the knee again; the pain doesn’t seem to go any deeper than his lacerated skin. “I think so.”

  The woman stands. “My vehicle’s right over there.” She nods toward the south end of the pedestrian bridge, where it empties into some drooping trees. “I’ve got a first aid kit.” Her hand hovers over his arm.

  “I can make it.” Kevin waves her away. His hands are still shaking, though. He doesn’t even look at the fat guy as he pushes up off the bench and limps after the woman. The pain’s not so bad after the first couple of steps, and he’s aware again of the oppressive heat and the enervating sunlight and the angry buzzing of the little airplane overhead. Which is getting louder now, not so much a buzz as a deep, throbbing grind. He looks up to see the plane crawling straight overhead, hauling the HOOTERS sign at a steep, unreadable angle west, up the river. The plane’s so low he can see the cables that lead from the fuselage to the banner. He stops, and the woman stops, too, her hand discreetly poised at his elbow, but Kevin’s only scanning the sky for the jet as a gauge of how long he’s been out. Except for the dwindling dopplered drone of the Hooters plane, the sky is empty and silent, but Kevin looks around him for a moment longer. The fat guy has been following, and he stops, too, yanking the dog painfully tight on the shortened leash. “You lose something?” he says.

  Kevin’s not sure. On the Lamar Avenue Bridge, the southbound traffic is backed all the way up the hill toward Gaia; halfway across the bridge, the front end of a small white car is accordioned under the rear bumper of an SUV, and two figures stand gesticulating in the heat. Kevin recognizes neither of them, but then he’s got it, what’s gone missing, what he’s lost: Kelly, Joy Luck, the Girl Who Walks Like Lynda, Kevin’s once and future lover. La belle dame sans merci, his last chance. He’s been flat on his back and bleeding from the leg long enough for her to vanish completely, as if she never existed in the first place. Her absence stings even worse than the scrape on his knee. He hasn’t just lost her, he’s lost the original Lynda, Lynda 1.0, Lynda Classic. Lynda on the dance floor, Lynda à la plage, Lynda on the railing.

  “No,” says Kevin, and he starts walking again. As the three of them—four, if you count the dog—approach the end of the bridge, the fat guy blurts out a further apology.

  “I’d offer to pay for the pants, sir?” he says. “But I’m sort of between jobs right now? But what I could do, I have a really nice pair of pants in my apartment—it’s not far from here?—and I could let you borrow them? Actually, you could have them, they’re a really nice pair of pants…”

  Beyond the trees at the end of the bridge Kevin can see the flash of a passing car. He stops and sighs and looks the guy up and down. Kevin’s not particularly proud of much, but he is proud of the fact that at age fifty, he’s still wearing a 34-inch waist. This guy will never see the inside of 40 inches again. The kid notices Kevin looking, but Kevin doesn’t care.

  “I’ve had them for a while.” Even in the heat, the guy is blushing. “I can’t get into them anymore—”

  “It’s okay.” Kevin waves him away. “Don’t worry about it.”

  The kid, Kevin can see, wants nothing more than to be let off the hook, and Kevin, even though he’s hot, angry, and frustrated, can’t for the life of him see any reason to make this boy more uncomfortable than he already is. Kevin’s a midwestern college-town liberal not just by accident of birth, but by temperament. It’s in his bones to see both sides of a question, and even now he knows just how this boy is feeling—simultaneously guilty and resentful, wanting to do the right thing but afraid he’ll have to pay for something that he doesn’t really think is his fault. Times like this, Kevin wishes he were a Republican, full of absolute certainty and righteous, tribal wrath: he’d yell at the guy, threaten to sue him, offer to visit some Old Testament shock and awe on the kid’s fat ass. He could even have the dog impounded—and then the very thought pierces Kevin’s congenitally bleeding heart, because the spaniel is looking up at his plump master with a goofy, endearing look of pure devotion. At the very least he should dress the kid down, tell him (like Kevin’s mother would) that some people shouldn’t be allowed to have dogs if they can’t keep them under control. But Kevin can’t even muster enough righteous anger to do that. Not to mention the Amazon is watching them both: if he loses his cool in front of her, she might leave him here, bleeding and limping, to fend for himself in a strange city. Suddenly I’m Blanche Dubois, thinks Kevin, depending on the kindness of strangers.

  “Seriously,” Kevin says, softening his tone, “I’m not mad. I got a couple hours, I’ll just go buy another pair of pants. Don’t worry about it.”

  He turns away, but the kid, God bless him, says, “I could give you my address, so when I get a job I could pay you back…”

  Twenty years or so ago, Kevin stood with a weeping Rooster on the sticky roof of Uncle Stan’s bakery in Hamtramck and watched the popemobile glide between mobbed sidewalks under listless Polish flags along Joseph Campau Avenue, and he saw John Paul II in his bulletproof cube like an action figure in its original packaging, gently slicing the air from side to side before him. Now Kevin makes the same benedictory gesture.

  “Ego te absolvo,” he says to the boy with the dog. “Go and sin no more.” Before the boy can say anything else, Kevin limps away alongside the Amazon.

  “That was nice of you,” she says.

  Kevin shrugs. His nerves are still jangling from his fall, his emotions are right at the surface, and the last thing he wants to do is lose it in front of this rather intense woman. He exaggerates his limp a bit so that he can hang back and get a grip on himself. And also, though this wasn’t his first thought, so that he can check her out from behind. She’s certainly powerful-looking. He likes leanness in a woman, but actual muscles, like this woman’s got, don’t do much for him. The fact that he’s not automatically attracted to her worries him a bit—is it possible that he’s not turned on by a woman that he doesn’t think he could overpower? Sometimes with Beth sex used to be a kind of wrestling match, and he’d enjoyed grappling with her as much as (so far as he knew) she’d enjoyed grappling with him, until he’d pinned her, breathless, to the bed. It wasn’t always like this, of course, but often enough, right to the end of their time together. What does that say about him? All these years later, does it turn out that Shulamith Firestone was right all along, that all men are rapists deep down? This woman is certainly solid, almost brawny, with a formidable gravitas; her mili
tary bearing tells him that she doesn’t suffer fools gladly. If he tried to pin this woman to a bed, no matter how playfully, she’d break his neck. As he follows her off the pedestrian bridge and along the street toward a narrow parking lot under the looming, rusting span of the railroad trestle, Kevin gratefully leaps at the possibility that it’s her humorlessness, not her strength, that turns him off. That’s it, that’s the problem: it’s not who would win two out of three takedowns, it’s that he’s never known how to deal with a woman if he couldn’t make her laugh.

  “How you doing?” she says without looking at him, and from a pocket of her running shorts she pulls a key remote and clicks it. The lights of an enormous, shiny red pickup truck blink and chirp.

  “I’m hot.” Limping up to the truck, Kevin takes off his jacket and splays his fingers under the collar so he can slap the dust off the back of it. No rips, thank God, no permanent scrapes. If he’d had to replace the jacket, then he really would be angry.

  “You’re a little overdressed for the trail, don’t you think?” Now the Amazon smiles back at him. It’s a knowing smile, showing some bright teeth. Okay, thinks Kevin, she’s capable of irony, that’s a start. She opens the driver’s door and pats the seat, and he climbs up into the baking heat of the cab and sits sideways in the bucket seat with his jacket folded across his lap and his knees sticking out the door. Meanwhile she leans over the side of the truck bed and rattles around in a big plastic storage box. His scrape is really burning now, and his sock is sticky and warm where the blood has soaked into it. New trousers, new socks—he draws the line at a new pair of shoes, no matter how much blood soaks into one of them. A hundred and fifty dollar shoes, he reminds himself, his anger flaring again. He slumps sideways in the seat, his temple against the padded headrest, the heat at his back even worse than the heat outside, the glitter from the traffic at the end of the Lamar bridge getting to him even through his sunglasses. Maybe I should just pack it in, he thinks, call a cab, go back to the airport, fly home. I can’t live in this wretched heat, in this merciless sunlight, surrounded by upscale Gaians and mouthy homeless guys and fat slackers with clumsy spaniels. Not to mention brawny, imperious women who could break me in two. I can’t take it. I’m not engineered for it.

  “What’s that?” The Amazon is standing in front of Kevin again, twisting the cap off a bottle of water; there’s a red plastic first aid kit wedged under her arm. Now that he’s marginally less distracted by everything that’s happened in the last few minutes—falling, bleeding, sweating—Kevin takes a good look at her. She’s a little older than he thought—she has laugh lines, improbably enough, and a few more lines in her neck than he noticed before—but she truly is amazingly fit. Even when all she’s doing is twisting the cap off the bottle, her biceps flex under her glistening bronze skin. Sweat beads across her tight forehead and along the struts of her collarbone, and she peers at him with some sort of professional gaze, like she’s sizing him up.

  “Sorry?” Kevin says.

  “You said something about engineering.” She hands him the bottle. “Are you an engineer?”

  “No.” Kevin’s alarmed that he spoke without realizing it. The bottle is blessedly cold in his hand, and he puts it to his lips and chugs a third of it. The shock of the cold water against his palate almost blinds him. Meanwhile the woman reaches into the truck bed again, and Kevin hears the hollow thump of a cooler lid and the liquid rattle of ice. She comes back with a bottle of orange Gatorade, which she twists open just as briskly.

  “Editor,” gasps Kevin, the cold water freezing all the bones around his sinuses.

  “Mm.” The woman nods with her mouth full, recaps the Gatorade, and sets it on the pavement.

  “I’m an editor.” Kevin presses the cool lower half of the water bottle to his forehead.

  “Okay,” she says. “Hold this.” She lays the first aid kit on top of Kevin’s jacket on his lap; it’s like the grade-school lunchboxes of his youth, only without gaudy pictures of the Monkees or the Man from UNCLE. She stands so close to him now that he can see the fine texture of her skin, but she doesn’t meet his eye; Kevin can’t tell if she’s being wary or demure. Of course, it has to be wariness—who’s demure anymore? She pops open the kit with her thumbs, reaches in, and snaps on a pair of surgical gloves.

  “Wow,” says Kevin. “Is it that bad?”

  “No.” She stoops to pry apart the rip in his pant leg with her latex fingers. The whitish gloves stand out on her dusky skin like she’s dipped her hands in paint. Kevin notes the Euclidean straightness of the part in her tight, glossy hair, admires its military precision.

  “But I don’t know where your blood’s been, do I?” She says this abstractedly; it’s a line she’s used before. Then she looks up, fixes his gaze with her dark eyes, and smiles. “These pants are goners. Mind if I tear them a little wider to get at your knee?”

  “Usually I’d expect dinner and a movie first,” Kevin says, “but go ahead.”

  She smiles, but it’s a professional smile. She’s heard that one before, too. Kevin’s lizard brain begins to race. Who needs Kelly? Who needs the shopworn memory of Lynda on the railing? This moment right here, as the Amazon in latex tears his pant leg down to the middle of his shin with one sharp jerk, this is his official Austin Cute Meet. Yes, she’s formidable, and certainly fitter than Kevin—those biceps, those quads—but didn’t he used to fantasize about Sigourney Weaver in Aliens? And buff Linda Hamilton in the second Terminator? And, more recently, tough little Starbuck on Battlestar Galactica? Not to mention that the Amazon is more age-appropriate for him than Kelly or Stella or even Beth. Linda Hamilton, yeah, sort of crossed with that Latina actress he likes—not Jennifer Lopez, but the one who used to be in those John Sayles movies. She didn’t get those muscles and her brisk, no-nonsense manner from working in an office, thinks Kevin, and he remembers the first Amazon he saw today, the fierce National Guardswoman at the airport, and he wonders if this warrior priestess, dabbing the blood and grit away from his knee with a piece of gauze, might also be in the military. Wouldn’t that freak out his friends in Ann Arbor, if he ended up with a Texan, a Chicana, and a soldier!

  “Am I hurting you?” She lifts the bloody gauze away from his knee.

  “No,” Kevin says, so she presses a little harder. It does hurt, a little, but he’d never admit it to a woman like this. Obviously she’s some sort of health care professional—she snapped those gloves on without hesitation, and she’s probing expertly at his knee. Oh my God, she’s a nurse, concludes Kevin, this is my lucky day, not just because he’s getting his minor injury treated for free by a professional, but because she’s a nurse. Mick McNulty used to rhapsodize about nurses: among all the crummy jobs he’d held before his crummy job at Big Star Records, he’d been an orderly in a couple of nursing homes, and he used to tell Kevin that nurses made the best lovers, that they weren’t squeamish or sentimental about bodies, that they saw blood and shit and puckered flesh all day long, that fucking was just another natural function as far as they were concerned. In the years since, Kevin has realized that McNulty’s enthusiasm about the sexual sangfroid of nurses was just a variant of the male erotic mythology that celebrates the innate lubricity of cheerleaders, flight attendants, and waitresses. But on the other hand, McNulty claimed to be speaking from a deep and intimate experience of his subject.

  “Get yourself a nurse, young man,” said McNulty, the Horace Greeley of guilt-free balling, and now Kevin can’t help but smile, because his inner nineteen-year-old is telling him that he’s hit pay dirt. Meanwhile Nurse Amazon is shaking up a little plastic bottle.

  “Now this is going to sting,” she says, soaking a fresh piece of gauze.

  But it doesn’t sting at first, it only stains his knee a rusty orange, and Kevin is relieved. It wouldn’t do to squeal like a girl in front of Nurse Amazon, but then of course his knee begins to sting like the slow burn of a hot sauce, and Kevin gasps in spite of himself.

  “Told you
,” she says.

  “What is that,” Kevin says, as the burn creeps all the way through to his kneecap, “some sort of jalapeño marinade?”

  “Actually,” says the woman as she rips the backing off a large, square bandage, “capsaicin, which is what makes jalapeños hot, is the active ingredient in some topical pain ointments.”

  “It’s not working, then,” says Kevin, wincing as she presses the bandage across his scrape.

  “Not this.” She smoothes the adhesive edges down with her thumbs. “This is an antiseptic, and it’s citrus-based. It’s supposed to burn.” She smiles at him again, and her laugh lines crinkle fetchingly. “That’s how we know it’s working.”

  “Mission accomplished.” The sting of the antiseptic actually seems to be making Kevin sweat more, if that’s even possible. “Plus,” he says, “my wound will be lemony fresh.”

  She laughs, this time for real. Suddenly Kevin’s tumble on the bridge, his embarrassment, the citric acid burning through his patella—now it all seems worth it. He’s gotten Nurse Amazon, the Priestess of Minor Injuries, to laugh.

  She snaps off the gloves as briskly as she snapped them on—no wedding ring, notes Kevin—and pitches them into the truck bed. “You’ll want to keep that clean and dry. And here.” She hands him another, clean bandage from the first aid kit. “Just in case.”

  She has to stand close to him again to shut the kit on his lap. This time he catches her eye, and she purses her lips and ducks her gaze—can it be?—demurely.

  “Thanks. You’ve been really great.” Kevin tucks the bandage into the breast pocket of his shirt, while she returns the first aid kit to the storage box. “You take Blue Cross?”

  Nurse Amazon has stepped back from the truck to swig some more Gatorade. It’s almost as if she wants Kevin to get a better look at her, but then he considers how he must look to her—pale, sweaty, rumpled—and thinks, I should be so lucky. But of course he takes a good long look anyway, admiring her solid, fat-free thighs, the definition of her biceps, the muscles in her throat as she tips her head back and swallows. Then she lowers the bottle, swipes her lips with the back of her hand, and says, “No charge.”