“Nice flying, Orville!” Max looked at me and grinned.
“Orville? As in Wright?”
“Yep.”
“Why not Wilbur?”
“You look more like an Orville. Thanks for the ride,” he said and leaned over to kiss me.
“No problem. You’re welcome in my cockpit anytime,” I said, giving him a wink. As he exited the plane, I added, “Be careful!”
I took out a reading light and my book then sat back to wait until he returned.
The headlights washed over the field, and Max got out of the car. He walked to the plane, the duffle bag in his hand. Without hesitation, he got in the cockpit.
“How’d it go?” I asked, eager to hear.
“Fine.” His one word answer wasn’t very enthusiastic and didn’t invite more discussion.
I started the engine and taxied across the field. Max sat back, looking absently out the window. He was preoccupied, enough that he didn’t even notice when I pulled the ultralight into the air.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
“Fine.” Again, the same one-word answer. His mind was somewhere else, not a few hundred feet in the air with the rest of his body. He was silent the entire way home.
Back at the apartment house, I followed Max into Frank’s office. I was surprised to find Frank still awake and waiting for us. It was close to 2:30 in the morning. He handed Frank the duffle bag, then pulled a small, jeweled brooch out of his pocket. He placed it on Frank’s desk. Made of silver with crystal eyes, it was in the shape of a dragonfly. He started to walk out.
“Wait!” Frank called after him. Max turned with a sigh and stood waiting for Frank.
“Here’s your cut.” Frank pushed a thick envelope across the desk toward him. He picked it up, looking at it blankly. Then Frank handed me one. “This is yours. Usual price.”
“Thanks.” I took it and looked at Max. He was still looking at his envelope.
“Take mine. Don’t let me have it.” He handed me the envelope and turned to leave. As an afterthought, he paused, took two twenties out, shoving them in his pocket, then gave the rest back to me. He headed out the front door.
“Hey, where are you going?”
“Out.”
“Wait, let me put the money away first.”
“Ellie . . .” He let his words fall off. He looked away to collect his thoughts then started again. “I don’t want to hurt your feelings but I need to be alone.”
“Are you okay?”
He nodded slowly. “I just need to be alone.”
“Okay.” I shrugged. If he had tried to make up an excuse why he didn’t want me around, I would have been mad, but his honesty softened me, and I could see he needed some time.
He walked off into the night, heading down the sloped street toward the center of the city.
I turned back inside and went into Frank’s office. He was putting stuff away, getting ready to go to bed.
“That must be worth a lot,” I said, indicating the brooch.
“Only to one person,” he answered. I didn’t know what he meant, but he looked at me with those piercing eyes, and I didn’t question it further.
“Good night, Ellie,” he said, dismissing me.
“’Night,” I answered and left his office to go upstairs to my own apartment.
I needed to relax and stop thinking about what had just happened. I sat down and rolled myself a nice fatty. Frank was being secretive, as usual, but Max was acting funny; the flight didn’t even bother him. I was pretty sure he had just done something really bad.
After thinking about it a little too hard, I decided it was none of my business and probably didn’t want to know anyway. I got up, brushed my teeth, peed, and went to bed.
As dawn broke, Max came home drunk.
Really drunk.
When he was sober, he could enter the room like a cat, stealthy and silent. But drunk, he was loud and stumbled in with a crash as he knocked the clock off the night table. He slid into bed half dressed and curled up behind me, wrapping his arms around me. He reeked of whiskey.
“I need you,” he whispered and gave me a squeeze. I could feel him pressed against my backside, hard and ready. He nuzzled my neck, sending little vibrations down my spine.
“Go away, it’s too early,” I mumbled and half-heartedly pushed at him over my shoulder. I had been tossing most of the night and had finally started to drift off.
“How would you know it’s too early? I broke the clock,” he said, giggling.
I smiled despite my sleepiness and turned over to face him. I was glad he was back.
He kissed me, a long satisfying kiss then slid his hand between my legs. He knew exactly how to touch me. He rolled on top of me, hovering on his elbows. I guided him in and moaned with pleasure as he rested his weight on my body. He was fast and a bit clumsy but left me happy and content. When he was done, he lay back on the pillow, a low snore growling from his throat. He had passed out. I snuggled against him, feeling like I could finally sleep.
When Max woke up the next day, I placed a cup of coffee in front of him and sat down.
“What’d you do last night?” I asked, wondering where he’d disappeared to after he left.
“Nothing,” he mumbled.
“Nothing? You were trashed. You must’ve done something.”
He shrugged and took a sip of coffee. “Nothing interesting.”
I noticed a dark bruise on his arm in the shape of a handprint, like someone had grabbed him and squeezed.
“What happened to your arm?” I asked, pointing out the purple smudges.
He looked at it like he saw it for the first time and shrugged again. “I don’t know.”
“It looks like a hand,” I said and placed my own on top of it, surprised by how well it fit.
He grunted a response and looked away.
I started to ask another question, but he got up without finishing his coffee and left the room, elusive and secretive as always. He didn’t want to talk about it, and I realized it was futile to try and force the conversation. It was probably better left unsaid anyway.
8.
The wind hissed its icy breath in my face as I bundled my coat around my ears against the freezing February air. Max and I stepped out the door of RíRa, a rowdy Irish pub, and onto the red brick pavement of Church Street.
Blocked off from motorized traffic, the main drag in Burlington undulated with the movement of the night crowd. It was a great place to watch people. Street musicians played instruments trying to make a few bucks, couples getting lucky walked arm in arm as they headed back home with the person they hooked up with at the bar, college students rubbed their hands together to keep warm while they chatted in tight circles of friends, and hippies wandered their way down to Nectar’s to listen to live jamming and ease the munchies with French fries smothered in gravy and tiger sauce. It didn’t matter that the temperatures were well below freezing or that the wind was whipping off Lake Champlain, Church Street was abuzz as usual.
“Let’s get a hotdog,” I suggested. I always wanted fatty foods when I drank. It helped absorb the beer.
“Sure.” Max smiled at me and started to walk toward the hotdog vendor that was usually stationed near City Hall.
Weaving down the street, I tripped on the uneven pavement and grasped Max’s arm to steady myself. Laughing at my own clumsiness, I slid my hand down into his for balance, clasping his fingers in mine and feeling the heat from his skin. He looked at me and smiled, a little drunken glint in his eyes. He stopped walking, took me in his arms, and kissed me in the middle of the street.
I was getting into it, enjoying his lips pressed to my own, tasting the beer on his tongue, when a voice called out, interrupting us.
“Hey, Max, you fucking bastard! I haven’t seen you in ages!”
A stocky man in his mid-twenties stood there staring at us with a big goofy grin on his square face. Despite the cold, his coat was open to reveal a Bruins t-shirt tha
t hung down over his baggy jeans. His red baseball cap sat backwards over his shaved head and his dirty sneakers shuffled in place as he took a drag off his cigarette. In his other hand, he held a leash attached to a very muscular pit bull.
“Ellie, this is Steve. Steve, Ellie.”
“Hi, it’s nice to meet you,” I said and shook his hand. It was large and rough, calloused like a carpenter’s hand.
“Pleasure’s mine,” he said, his thick Vermont accent coming through.
“Can I say hello to your dog?” I asked.
“Sure. That’s Paco. He’s a good boy.” Steve ruffled the dog’s head.
I crouched down and held my hand out for the dog to sniff. After getting enough smell to know I was okay, Paco sat back on his haunches and let me stroke his chest. He was stocky and square, just like his owner. His light brown fur was surprisingly soft and exactly matched the light brown color of his eyes. He was a sweet dog, nothing like the vicious beast so often associated with pit bulls.
While Max and Steve were deep in their conversation, I noticed a young woman, probably a college student, approaching us. She was holding a camera. “Excuse me,” she said to me. “Do you want to ride the deer?”
“What?” I asked, not sure I had understood.
“It’s this thing I do. I try to see how many people I can get to ride the deer and I take a picture of them.” She pointed toward the granite steps of City Hall where a double staircase wound up to the front door. On either side of the stairs was a fountain, each with a life-sized bronze statue. The one on the right depicted a bear with cubs, the one of the left, a deer.
“Oh, that deer,” I said as I stood up to speak with her face to face.
“Want to see?” The girl smiled drunkenly. Her group of friends laughed around her as she held her camera out to me, showing me the previous photos she had taken that night.
“I have a ton on my computer. I like to collect them,” she said, giggling.
“Sure, I’ll ride the deer,” I said and marched over to the fountain, climbed the granite steps onto the platform where the deer stood and swung my leg up and over the bronze back as if mounting a horse.
“I’m going to count to three and take your picture.” She started fumbling around with her camera, her eyes probably too unfocused with beer to read the icons on all the buttons. “Hold on, give me a sec.”
While I waited, I watched Max talking to his friend. Steve pointed at the dog and waved his fist in the air. Max shook his head, looking positively pissed off.
“Okay, I got it,” the girl said. “One. Two. Three!”
The flash sprayed a blue light across the pavement, and I blinked away the stars it left behind my eyes.
“Perfect!” she said as she looked at the little digital display. “Want to take a look?”
I dismounted and took the camera from her. Peering at the little screen, I started to laugh. My photo was awful. I looked like a drunken dip shit, my eyes half closed and my mouth wide open. “Oh, geez. That’s terrible.”
The girl started laughing. “That’s part of it. Your expression is priceless.”
“Well, I’m glad you like it.”
“Thank you so much! Really, it’s perfect,” the girl said.
“No problem. I’m always happy to look stupid for a stranger.” I gave her a friendly wave as she walked away in search of a new victim.
Max and Steve were ending their conversation with a handshake. Steve ambled up the street with Paco in tow, and Max turned to me, slipping his hand in mine as we headed to find our midnight snack.
Several days later, when Max asked if I wanted to play a Game, I took him literally and, without looking up from my book, said, “No, thank you. I’m reading.”
I hated games. Board games, sports games, card games, they all irritated me. Games of chance were random and therefore seemed pointless to me. There was nothing the player could do to change the outcome; a dog could play as well as I could. Games of skill, although I was usually good at these, took too much time and effort. I wasn’t competitive and didn’t care about winning. I could look at a chessboard and think ahead to all of the possible outcomes, but why bother? On the rare occasions I found myself stuck playing a game, I always just moved the pieces without thought in hope of getting it over faster.
Max sat on the coffee table in front of me and pushed the spine of my book down to get my attention. His eyes met mine and held them in their viridian gaze.
“Not that kind of game,” he said.
Suddenly, I was intrigued. Did he mean a sexual game? Now that was the kind of game I could play. “Ooo, what do you have in mind?” I asked, wiggling my eyebrows in a suggestive manner.
He smiled and looked out the window at the falling snow. We were getting hit hard by a Nor’easter. “Not that kind of game either,” he said with a chuckle. “But, maybe later?”
I looked at him skeptically. “What are you talking about then?”
His smile grew and he got that look in his eyes, a look filled with mischief and excitement. “I have an idea.”
“What kind of idea?”
“A job.”
“I thought you called your jobs Beer Runs.”
“That’s a different kind of job. Those are someone else’s ideas. A Game is my own idea.”
“What does it involve?”
“It’s really simple.” He pulled out a map of Burlington and flattened it on the coffee table, his hands smoothing out the creases of the folds.
“All I need you to do is drive me to this spot here.” He pointed to a red dot he had drawn on the map. “And pick me up at this spot here.” He pointed to another red dot.
“Okay.”
“Do you need to put them in your GPS?”
“No. I know my way around Burlington.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes, it’s not that complicated,” I said, minor irritation creeping into my voice. “What are you doing, anyway?” I wanted to know what would happen between the red dots.
“You’ll see,” he said, a mysterious glint in his eyes.
I sat in the car at the pickup point, waiting and drumming my fingers. My breath blew out in frosty clouds as I clenched my jaw to keep from shivering. It was one of those crisp, cold nights that everything crackled with the freezing air, the temperatures plummeting into the negatives. He told me he’d be about 45 minutes. I was expecting him any time now.
An explosion rocked the nighttime quiet. I turned to see what was happening behind me. A flash of light lit up the sky like the 4th of July. Fireworks blazed across the horizon, all going off at the same time. I was pretty sure I knew who had lit them.
A moment later, Max ran around the corner, skidding on the icy sidewalk, and came to a halt just outside the car. He yanked the door open and jumped in, positioning himself sideways on the seat.
“Go! We’ve got to get out of here. Now!”
“Why are you sitting like that?”
“I think I burned my ass.” He turned, and I could see the black scorch mark running across the seat of his jeans.
I started laughing.
“That’s not funny,” he said.
“No, that is funny.” I couldn’t help it. The more irritated he looked, the harder I laughed.
“We don’t have time to hang around while you laugh at me.” He glared at me until I put the car in gear.
Still laughing, I pulled out on to the street, the headlights sweeping their beams over the freshly plowed snow. The snow banks were high, their edges sharp where the plow blade cut through the white mounds.
“What happened?”
“It didn’t go quite as planned,” he said.
“That’s obvious.” I giggled again and looked over at him. A red blush crept up his neck and blossomed on his face.
“Can we just go home?”
“Aren’t you going to tell me what happened?” I pressed the accelerator a little hard and felt the tires spin on the icy road. I eased up a b
it and straightened us out.
“No.” He folded his arms across his chest.
“You never confide in me. You know, if you told me ahead of time what you were up to, I might have been able to prevent whatever bit of stupidity you just pulled.”
“How do you know it was stupid? I didn’t even tell you what it was about.”
I rolled my eyes. “Your ass is burned, half of Burlington is lit up like a centenarian’s birthday cake, and I don’t see any money. How smart could it be?”
He looked at me blankly.
“A centenarian is a person who’s 100 years old,” I explained, thinking the blank look was incomprehension at my use of a big word.
“Yeah, I know what the word means. I’m stupid, not illiterate,” he answered, offended that I thought his vocabulary was under par. “Who said anything about money?”
“So you’re admitting what you just did was stupid?” I went on, ignoring his indignation and glazing over the fact he just said there wasn’t any money involved.
“Yes. At least the fireworks part of it.” He shrugged. “Other than my burned butt, it all worked out. Steve got what he was looking for.”
“Wait a minute. Steve? There was someone else with you?”
“Yeah.”
“Who else?”
“Jimmy and Alan. Everything worked out. The plan was smooth as butter.”
I didn’t know who the hell Jimmy and Alan were but I was too focused on the entire event to even ask. “You were successful?”
“Yes.”
“In doing. . .?” I waved my hand in a circle to coax him into giving me more details.
He sighed heavily as if giving up. “Remember that dog Steve had the other night?”
“Yeah, the pit bull. Nice dog.”
“He had been a fighting dog. There’s a whole ring of dogfights in this area and people make a lot of money on them. Steve won him and took him home as a pet.”
I was shocked. I knew Max had a love of gambling but I really didn’t think he’d be into dog fighting. Now I wasn’t so sure it was a good idea to know what he was up to. “You’ve been betting on dogs?”
Hashimoto Blues Page 5