Against Nature

by Casey Barrett

  It was one a.m. I stood before the building’s private garage next to the lobby doors on 13th Street. Still early to my old way of thinking, the bars would be open for another three hours. I salivated at the thought. When was the last time I’d drunk till closing? When had I last savored the amber on my tongue? Too long. I considered the nearest suitable venues. There was Black & White over on 10th, Old Town up on 18th, an array of others for all ages in between. Then I remembered why I’d been kicked to the curb: Cass. Please call. I took out my cell and walked toward University and listened to it ring.

  “Thank you,” she whispered. “I wasn’t sure if you would call back.”

  “You know that’s not true,” I said.

  “Something terrible’s happened, Duck,” she said. “I really need your help.”

  “Tell me.”

  “My boyfriend,” she said. I seized at the word, wanted to hang up and hear no more. “His name was Victor Wingate. It was serious. We were living together. It was the first real relationship of my life. We were . . . I think we were in love.”

  “What happened, Cass?”

  “He’s dead.”

  “How?”

  “He fell, from the top of a waterfall near our house. I don’t know how. They think he jumped, but I know he didn’t. He . . .”

  She stopped and I listened to the silence. The gulf between us had never been so wide. There was emotion in her voice I had never heard before. I thought Cass was beyond all notions of romance. This was the woman who worked as a dungeon mistress for years at the Chamber. This was the imperious dominatrix who whipped and tortured men for a couple hundred bucks an hour.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, without much depth.

  “I need to see you,” she said. “I need your help.”

  “Where are you?”

  “The Catskills. About three hours on the bus, I can pick you up.”

  She told me the details and I told her that I’d see her tomorrow.

  Then I walked three blocks over to Black & White. The dark bar was playing early White Stripes, “You’re Pretty Good Looking (For a Girl).” The tables were filled with rocker types and the girls who like them. There was one seat left at the bar, next to a tattooed couple talking close and ending each sentence with a kiss. They didn’t acknowledge me. I motioned to the bartender and ordered a double Bulleit. I roared the whiskey down. Ordered another. He smiled with indulgence, asked if I wanted to open a tab. I handed him a card, looked down into the amber, lifted the glass and took a sip. It never tasted so good.

  Chapter 2

  I woke early, with the old confusion, to an empty apartment. All senses were blunt and worn, ground down from misuse. My subterranean flat had the stale smell of neglect. Of late it was used for stopovers, a change of clothes, a remembered book. I spent the occasional night when Juliette and Stevie were out in the Hamptons without me, but I’d more or less taken up residence at their eight-figure loft on 13th Street, which was roughly eight times the size of my one-bedroom cave four blocks away.

  I rolled over and sought the warmth of the one being I could depend on. All that was left was his ghost.

  Elvis died a few months back. He wasn’t young, but I thought we had a few more years together. He never quite recovered from the beating on the night of the double murder at my apartment. The night it was almost a triple when Cass flatlined in the ambulance.

  The hound healed from his kicked-in ribs and the internal bleeding, and he lay by my side every day as we put ourselves back together again. There were plenty of nights when his loyalty was the only thing that kept me from swallowing down a pint of Drano and being done with it. Instead I’d rub his belly on the couch and turn the pages of another book full of blood and suffering, taking solace in the shared misery. Until one day in September when I woke beside him in bed and he didn’t stir. Elvis died peacefully in the night, pressed against my side. There are worse ways to go.

  I spent a week on a blow bender, staying at the St. Marks Hotel, afraid to return to my dog-free apartment. When Juliette Cohen contacted me, through none other than Margaret McKay, I took it as an omen. I accepted the case in hopes that the McKay curse would ruin me further. The coke hangover left me a jangled, depressed mess. I took it out on her lover, Bret. At Per Se one night I confronted him in front of a dozen colleagues. I pretended to be the enraged husband of a woman he was screwing. I shoved him across the table and told his dinner companions that he’d given my soon-to-be ex herpes. Threatened castration if he ever came near her again.

  If Elvis had been alive, I wouldn’t have stayed over at the Cohen apartment quite so often. I would have had the good sense to get away postcoitus and keep my distance. But in my loss home was a space to be avoided, so I accepted her invitations to stay, waking with a romp each morning, until the envelopes fattened and her son grew used to seeing me at breakfast. It was an untenable position, but I can’t say I resisted the gilded setting. I always wanted to be rich again.

  Those environs, just hours removed, seemed like a lost dream. Reality was my tiny flat on East 17th Street, the basement rental of the elderly Mr. Petit, who would soon be joining Elvis in the ground. I often wondered what would come of his brownstone when he was gone. It was an 1880s Italianate beauty, with all the original accents and crown molding and pocket doors. The kitchen and bathrooms needed an overhaul, but it would be criminal if it fell into the hands of a modernist bastard who gutted the place. I knew my days in the golden handcuffs of below-market rent would soon be coming to an end. Mr. Petit, closeted into his eighties despite the acceptance all around him, had no heirs I knew of. We were friendly enough. I didn’t mind when he watched me out in the garden shirtless on hot summer days. And he’d once worked for my father, before the fall, which explained the sympathy rent he charged me. Still, I doubted I’d be making the will. I was just lucky I wasn’t evicted after his home turned into a homicide crime scene during the McKay case.

  I limped through the waking process, dressed and reached for the leash that still hung on the door side hook. I could smell Elvis’s scent on the harness. Thought about heading straight to the closest animal shelter and adopting the first rescue I saw. But it still felt disrespectful to the hound, so I walked around the block by myself, stopping at all his favorite trees, marked forever.

  It was a fine spring day, the blossoms bursting, days after the latest Kentucky Derby. Won by a rare filly called Smiling Eyes. Cass would appreciate that. She had a fondness for the ponies that I failed to grasp. Triple Crown season was always her favorite time of year. I thought of her up in the mountains, in love a world away from the urban prison she escaped, and now heartbroken after her man jumped to his death. She didn’t believe it could be voluntary, but that was the natural human response. It shattered every narrative. She thought she found peace after all the violence I put her through. Found a man she allowed herself to love. I hated the dead guy already. What was his name again?

  Victor Wingate . . . the name rang a faint bell.

  When I returned home, I Googled him, found the broad search strokes of his past. Wingate was a writer, a magazine journalist of some renown, with one book to his credit. It was called Walk Through Fire, the story of a 1920s boxer named Eddie Finn, a former light-heavyweight champ. The reviews claimed Finn’s life was like “an ancient Irish fable” and that Wingate captured his story with “muscular prose suited to the subject.” It sold well enough, and then it was adapted into a film of the same name. Earned a handful of Oscar nominations. Dylan provided the theme song, a haunting dirge called “The Bell,” which I remembered playing a lot back then. A good book, a better movie, it was enough to set a writer up for a while. It appeared Wingate hadn’t worked much since. The most recent byline I could find was from three years ago. It was a Village Voice obit of a fellow writer.

  I checked the bus schedule and found a five p.m. out of the Port Authority, arriving in a town called Palenville a little after eight. Cass said she lived up the nearby m
ountain. I checked my phone, found nothing from Juliette. Whatever she decided to tell her son, I knew it wouldn’t be the truth, and I knew he already hated me. It happens that way. I promised myself to try to reach out to the kid and set the record straight when I returned. I’d take him to a Knicks game and we’d talk it through, man to man. Just because things didn’t work out between your mom and me doesn’t mean we can’t hang. I was still in touch with one of my mother’s old lovers, an alcoholic pathologist named Dr. David Burke. I sought his counsel on certain cases. I envisioned Stevie and me like that, once he was grown and jaded too. Yeah, right. Whatever you need to tell yourself. I knew I’d just become another failed father figure in the poor kid’s life. Poor . . . Please, the boy had a trust fund in the hundreds. He’d be fine. Better off without the series of damaged males that would pass through his privileged life.

  I left an hour early for the bus, leaving some bonus time for a few belts at a remembered bar nearby.

  The West 40s have always been my least favorite part of the city. It’s the filthy armpit of this yawning island mass. Years ago the New York Times erected its new headquarters across the street from the bus station in a move that declared the true status of the newspaper business in the twenty-first century. The building looked like a grown-up jungle gym; indeed overgrown man-children have been arrested for trying to scale its ceramic rod façade. To the north were the tourist horrors of Times Square and its eternal fluorescent lightness. One avenue west, over on Ninth, the neighborhood known as Hell’s Kitchen continued to live down to its name. There were ugly erections of glass-and-steel condos where razed tenements used to be, and the rents were soaring like everywhere else, but the developers weren’t fooling anyone. It was still aptly named: Hell’s Kitchen. It just had more character when it was an infested mess of porn shops and prostitutes and transient commuter pubs. The one I remembered was called Rudy’s, between West 44th and 45th. Drinkers were offered free hot dogs from behind the bar. It was still standing.

  Out front there was a large waving plastic pig dressed in a red jacket and black bowtie. Inside it felt like a good place for a slow, pleasant death. There were cracked red leather banquettes along the wall, facing a worn bar populated by a few day-drinking regulars. Above the cash register was a sign that advertised RUDY’S STIMULUS PACKAGE—a shot of Bushmills and a pint of Rudy’s own blonde draft for five bucks. I ordered it along with a hot dog. The Irish whiskey was just right; the beer and the dog were not. Three sips and two bites and I headed for the restroom in the back. Not the way to prepare for a three-hour bus ride. On the way out I was grateful for the jukebox come to life. Some warm soul had put on Sam Cooke’s “Cupid.” I defy anyone to name a finer voice in human history than the beautiful Mr. Cooke. He lightened my spirits and settled my belly, and I moved down the bar, humming along with an easy smile.

  “Hey, sugar,” said a syrupy voice to my left. I turned to find a large black prostitute in a tight red dress that matched the garish banquette. She mimed a bow and arrow as Sam sang about letting it go, gave me a wink. “Care to join me?” she asked. I shrugged, slid in next to her. She placed a hand over her ample chest and started to sing: “ ‘Straight to my lover’s heart for me . . .’”

  “Buy me a drink?” she asked after the chorus. “What are you drinking, honey?”

  “The Stimulus Package,” I said.

  She wrinkled her nose. “No wonder you went rushing to the bathroom.” She laughed a thick, throaty laugh. “I’ll take a Bushmills, skip the rotgut on tap.”

  I agreed, went back to the bar, returned with two more of the Irish blend.

  “Cheers,” we said, and downed them.

  “What’s your name, baby?” she asked.

  “Duck,” I said. “You?”

  She pretended to waddle in her seat. “I’m Melody.” She leaned in, touched my hand. “So, Mr. Duck, you meetin’ anybody or you here all by your lonesome today?”

  “Sadly solo,” I told her. “Just killing some time before my bus.”

  “How much time you got?” Her thick finger circled the rim of the shot glass. She licked at painted purple lips.

  “Not enough time to satisfy the likes of you,” I said.

  She gave me a Cheshire smile, reached out and squeezed my hand. “Sugar, it ain’t about me. I wanna sa-tis-fy you.”

  “Sorry, I, um . . .”

  “I got a place right down the way,” she said. “I get you to your bus on time, don’t you worry.”

  The jukebox DJ was sticking with Sam. “Everybody Loves to Cha Cha Cha” came next. I looked into my empty glass, then up into her glassy eyes. The pupils were dilated. The whiskey wasn’t the only thing coursing through her system. She kept on smiling through glistening lips. The tip of her tongue danced against her upper teeth. I felt a hand sliding up my inner thigh. Nothing stirred in me and I felt embarrassed by what she wouldn’t find. Then her face was flooded in a flash of daylight. Melody raised her other arm and blocked her eyes, waited for the bar door to shut and darkness to return. I glanced back at the new patron.

  He was a well-built, good-looking guy, around thirty. Shaved head, broad shoulders, tattoo sleeves snaked up both arms. His jeans and blank white t-shirt looked fresh off the shelf. So did his smile. It was a cocky smirk that announced physical confidence, a guy who hoped to brush shoulders on the way past. He moved with a slight shuffle, like an athlete trying to walk off an injury.

  When he reached our table, he stopped and looked down at us. The smile widened.

  “Duck?” he asked.

  Melody removed her hand from my thigh, inched away from me, no stranger to bad vibes.

  “Wrong guy,” I said.

  We looked at each other until he blinked. His eyes were lit for action. Up close he had the handsome vacancy of an actor. His face was well proportioned, masculine; he’d get through a few rounds of casting. Beneath the chin, before the tattoos began, there was a thin scar along his neck. The kind left by a blade, I had a few of my own. I didn’t want to know where he got his.

  “Yeah, it’s you, Duck Darley, what’s going on, man?”

  His accent was distinct, German or Austrian, something central European. He pushed himself into the booth, pinning me in the middle. He stared across at Melody.

  “Beat it,” he said.

  I grabbed her wide thigh and squeezed. “She’s with me,” I said. “And I don’t know you.”

  Melody started to squirm from my grip, then looked from the bald stranger back to me. Made her choice. “The fuck are you?” she asked him. “What’s good, rude boy?”

  “Told you to beat it, slut,” he said, leaning in for the challenge. He said it low, but the whole bar seemed to hear. The room quieted and grew tense like someone had just shouted the N-word and now held its breath for retribution.

  For the first time in too long, I moved through some aikido progressions in my mind. I was out of practice and out of shape, softened by rich living, unlike this specimen, who looked wired and primed for these encounters. The scar said enough. I placed both elbows on the small table between us, pressed my hands together beneath my chin, breathed through my nose. Slowed my heart rate and tried to focus on the calm before the coming chaos.

  “You think you know me?” I asked.

  “Sure do,” he said. “Lawrence ‘Duck’ Darley, everybody knows you. You’re famous. I’m a fan of your work.”

  Among the mess of dragons and skulls tattooed up his arms, I noticed an iron cross and the letters NSM—the initials of the National Socialist Movement. Neo-Nazis. On the knuckles of his right hand, the numbers 1488 were inked in Gothic type. I remembered the hate numerology from my days inside. The number 14 alluded to the fourteen-word philosophy of white-supremacist groups, something about securing a future for white children.... The number 88 was a stand-in for HH, with H being the eighth letter of the alphabet. Thus, 88 was the equivalent of the “Heil, Hitler” salute. A real subtle prince, this one.

  “Like my ink?
” he asked with a grin.

  “At least you’re up front about it,” I said. “Inside, did you only take white cock?”

  He stiffened. Blood rushed to his clean-shaven face. The neck scar seemed to thicken.

  “You want to make your move and get messy?” I asked. “Or do you want to make your point first? You’re obviously an errand boy.”

  He set both palms flat on the table. A vein pulsed at his temple. Our glasses shook as his knee jackhammered beneath us. Somehow he restrained himself.

  “There’s no need to be rude,” he said. “I just wanted to introduce myself.” He stuck out a bony hand. I let it hang. “I’m Oliver. I’ve read all about you.”

  “You can read? Good for you.”

  “I read about your friend too,” he said. “The one who likes the whips and chains, yeah? What’s her name, Cassandra?”

  My heart rate spiked at the sound of her name. I felt every fiber tense.

  “You going to see her?” he asked. “Up in the mountains? You don’t want to miss your bus.” He looked at a tatted wrist with no watch. Then he slid from the booth and peered down at me. “Tell her to be careful,” he said. “Both of you be careful. As you might have learned—some things, they’re not worth it, yeah?”

  I watched his wide back as he walked down the bar without another look. I climbed out and followed. As the door opened and daylight flooded in, I caught sight of an older man waiting for him outside. Tall and trim, he was dressed in a slim-fitting gray suit. Aviator shades covered most of his face. He nodded to Oliver and looked over his shoulder at me. I caught the door as it tried to swing shut.

  “Hey, tough guy,” I called. “Where you think you’re going?”

  Oliver turned with a grin, like I was giving him just what he’d hoped for. The man put a hand on his shoulder; he shook it off, stepped toward me.

  “You want to tell me how you know Cass and me?” I asked.

  “I told you, you’re famous.”

  As he moved closer, he seemed to inflate. It’s like that with practiced fighters. The most undersized scrapper can seem like a UFC heavyweight champ when he’s coming in with blood on his breath. Oliver had that scent. Fear was a foreign concept. But aikido is made for dealing with men like him. It’s all about turning aggression on its head, using force against itself. As he charged, I received him, already anticipating his reaction to mine, a chess match moving at high speed, with higher stakes. There are over ten thousand named techniques in this art; I remember maybe a couple dozen. Inside a cage or alone at night, I would have been doomed. But out on a Manhattan daytime sidewalk, with cops lurking at every corner, I needed one good move to protect myself and make my point. Like a matador, I sidestepped him, stole his energy, and delivered a wheel throw that sent him crashing into the bar-front pig. Before he could scamper up and charge again, I went to the older man, grabbed his wrist, and twisted it behind his back. He didn’t resist, and though the pressure point exerts extreme pain, he never flinched.