FOUR Fort Lee, 1986 HECTOR ROSE from the cup-sag of his bed. It wasn’t yet dawn. He stepped to the bathroom and pulled the chain on the light above the medicine cabinet. He didn’t look much different, despite the fight with Tick in the street. His, it could be supposed, was the sentence of persistence. Was it an imposition from yonder? Or a dark talent that he couldn’t help but invoke, whenever loomed his possible demise? His jaw and skull and knuckles were sore, his chest pinging with each breath, though it was not exactly the bodily pains that had roused him. The pains and even the scars would pass quickly, as always. But he felt lonesome in his wounds, and he awoke keenly grateful for the company of the woman in his bed. Her name was Dora. He liked her but oddly had not yet actually seen her in the daytime. The bathroom light partly illuminated her as she slept. She didn’t stir. She was a redhead from the bottle, by the look of her graying roots. She lay sprawled on her belly with a corner of the sheet flopped over her eyes and cheek, her mouth cracked open like a burrow hole. A molar was missing, something he hadn’t noticed before, and though the picture was not wholly unattractive to him he clicked off the light so that he didn’t have to see her mouth, being long uneasy with the sight of any insides. He got back into bed. She groaned an unintentionally pleading note. He laid a hand on her cheek and pictured her face. And though of course he knew what she looked like he kept seeing a different woman instead, a woman he remembered from a book he’d read in his youth that had accompanying photographs of hard-used folk living in the wasted land of the dust bowl. The book affected him as a book sometimes can a young mind that is anticipating a story different from what it encounters but is taken up anyway; from the title—Let Us Now Praise Famous Men—he’d assumed accounts of heroes who’d endured great trials and tendered unequaled sacrifices to their gods and people and thereby won the glory of everlasting fame. From the time he could read he’d devoured those stories of ancient Athens and Sparta and Crete, of Alexander and Charlemagne. Yet what was it he encountered in the book but descriptions of penury and degradation that took on an awesome, almost mythical beauty; and the bleakness he saw in the eyes of one prematurely aged young woman made him think pitiably enough of his mother, who was a beauty in her youth but lost it after his father died and always seemed to be searching out an alternate destiny. Dora had those same eyes, despite the surface of her easy levity she had them, and so was it this about her that had finally won him over? He hadn’t even asked her to leave after their lovemaking, which was an iron habit of his. The rest of her now, her pale, sleeping nakedness, the smallish shoulders, the bland wide dune of her lower back, the cleft of the broad, stippled bottom enfolding into dark, struck him as fair and vulnerable, but he didn’t disturb her, thinking he ought to let her sleep. She was a regular at the bar, Smitty’s Below the Bridge, or at least had been a regular for the better part of a year. All the fellows were glad for it. Dora was all right. She was what the place always needed: a good solid-looking woman who didn’t take guff and liked to have a laugh or two and paid for her own drinks. She was smart, too, a book-keeper at the big furniture shop on Lemoine, and perhaps like a lot of them she might have accomplished a lot more in life had certain things gone her way and she hadn’t been so enamored of wine. She wasn’t a full-blown boozer, but she had, in significant part, ceased to care whether her nightly stint in the company of heavy-drinking folks meant she was likely becoming one of them, nor did she mind any longer that she was riding lower and lower in the water, steadily losing buoyancy, and that she might eventually be swallowed up. As for the inevitable round of relations, she had gone out with some of the more presentable of them—Connolly, Big Jacks, once even with Sloan, who was a kind if somewhat simpleminded fellow with a narrow lamb’s face and who took her to a fancy gilded French restaurant in the city with his monthly check from his ancient folks in Rochester—but nobody had yet called Dora a slut because it was plain to see she was a decent gal without airs or too special a self-view and because the rest of them probably still held out hope she might ask for an escort home after last call. Hector had warmed up to her more slowly than did the others, though it was nothing she said or did. His nature precluded any easy rapport and even after all these years at Smitty’s, the others knew to leave him alone for a while when he showed up at his usual midnight hour in the midst of their din and merriment. There always rose a hearty murmur for him when he came through the paint-chipped metal door, which he’d acknowledge with a nod, but then he would sit alone in the back booth with two double shots of Canadian whiskey that Smitty automatically poured for him. By the time he was at ease, they had maybe geared down a bit from their joking and quarrels and songs and were settling into the night’s long, slow coast to some nether realm. On the nights he didn’t want to be part of the company, Hector might still be wearing his janitor’s coveralls and stinking not a little of ammonia and sourness and other human fetors, and on these occasions they knew to keep their distance; he’d be quieter than usual and down his drinks without a word and Smitty would know to double him again before he had to ask. If it happened some unwitting newcomers made a comment about his work clothes, or if a certain crew from Edgewater called the boys out from the street, then all hell could break loose, Hector and maybe Big Jacks out back by the Dumpsters hammering away at the interlopers until somebody up in the surrounding apartments called the cops and the whole lot of them got hauled in. The local precinct sergeant knew Hector’s family from upstate New York and admired his fighting skills, and Hector would be let out first, a few hours later, once levied with the usual hundred-dollar fine for engaging the resources of the municipality, payable to the sergeant in cash. Tonight there had been no expectation of fighting but instead a birthday party for Hector, which Smitty always threw for a small group of the regulars. None of them much liked marking such mile-stones—who needed reminding of the advancing years and, in their cases, the wayward trajectories, the diminished expectations?—but the beer flowed freely from the taps and Smitty poured plenty of shots on the house and more often than not everyone ended up shoulder to shoulder along the curved end of the bar, happily wrecking some sentimental song. The evening, however, had started somewhat inauspiciously; early on, before Hector showed up, a stranger had come in asking after him. When Hector arrived, Smitty took him aside and pointed out the tall man in the dark suit sitting stiffly in the middle booth. The man wouldn’t say what he wanted. Hector immediately figured it was about the gambling debts of his employer and friend, Jung; last week Hector had put himself between Jung and some baby-faced thug-in-training and without thinking it through grabbed the kid’s throat when he threatened to maim Jung’s kids. There were some things one should never say. The kid turned purplish and from the smell half-shat his pants and had practically crawled out of Jung’s office in the mini-mall. Why the sports book would now dispatch an older accountant-looking fellow to accost him confused Hector, but he didn’t hesitate when the stranger suddenly approached him, catching this one by his tie and collar, if only to get a better fix on things. The man gasped something through his contorted cheeks and when Hector relaxed his grip he was able to cough out “June Singer.” At first it meant nothing, but then the man said, “She said to tell you, from the war. She wants to see you. June, from the war.” June, from the war. As if he could forget from where. Hector didn’t really hear any of the rest, pushing away from the man as if he’d heard a dooming spell, and Big Jacks quickly stepped in and ushered the man out. Hector asked for a drink and Smitty gave him a double and then another and anyone could see not to ask him any more about it. It was too still and Connolly asked aloud if there was going to be a party anytime soon and Hector said let’s go and there was a shout of assent. Smitty then lined up on the scarred walnut top of the bar fifty-five jiggers of Canadian whiskey, one for each of Hector’s years, and the whole gang and Dora and some underage rich kids come slumming from Alpine (whom they didn’t actually mind) finished them in a relay, Smitty and then Dora especially insisting He
ctor step to and fro to take every fifth shot, which he did, as always, without word or sigh or gasp. Just sipping cool tea. Though tonight he was moving faster, as though he were filling a bucket poked with holes. He was locally famous for the ease with which he performed such feats. He was in prime form tonight. He kept hearing the stranger’s words and he grew thirstier. And so he helped himself, as he’d done all his adult life, even as he couldn’t really get drunk the way others got drunk. Unlike his father or cousins or anyone else in the Brennan line, Hector was a great drinker, maybe a historic drinker, he could drink as if his body were not a vessel but a miraculous device of filtration, a man layered inside with charcoal and sand. Dora was not similarly constituted, and after a few shots of the whiskey she resumed drinking the jug wine Smitty stocked just for her and didn’t seem unduly affected until later, when she said “Hey-ya” to Hector outside the john and leaned into his arms and blacked out for a good half-minute, her hair smelling to him of cigarette smoke and riverside nettles and the fish fry she’d surely had for dinner. There was no women’s toilet at Smitty’s and the one stall was where Dora and the few other women who wandered in had to go. He stood there, propping her up with his hands girding the soft flesh of her back, and to his comrades at the bar it must have looked as if he were fancying a dance. But it wasn’t solely Dora he was thinking of, or even the many satisfactions of female grace. It was certainly not June, whom he had never wanted to lay his hands upon. In truth it was another woman, whom he had not pictured in what seemed a lifetime, a woman June could tell of and probably would, a recounting that would only bring him misery. But he was done with misery, yes? It was his birthday, and here was sweet Dora in his arms, a faint smile breaking though her boozy fade-out. When she came to she righted herself and said, “Thanks for catching me.” “I was here.” She brushed her temple with the back of her hand. “That’s never happened to me before.” Hector nodded, even though he was sure the statement was almost certainly untrue. He said, “It’s real late.” “Even for you?” “I’m okay.” “You don’t say that like you believe it.” He didn’t reply, instead just leaning her against the wall where the pay phone used to be, the dirty pocked surface scrawled over with expletives and fake phone numbers and the hasty, anatomically exaggerated drawings that gave no quarter to anyone’s sense of decency or beauty. “I was wondering something,” she said. “What’s that?” “How come you’ve never asked me out?” Dora said, crossing her arms in mock offense. She might have been conscious again but she was still quite drunk, and while the coquettish pose would have normally turned him off, there was a melancholy thrum in her voice that made the question seem much weightier than simply whether he was interested in her or not. “I don’t know.” “Have those meatheads said stuff about me? Been talking big? Because I’ve never been serious with any of them, if you know what I mean.” “I know what you mean,” Hector replied. The fellows had of course talked big, as fellows will, and with enough bluster and shine to make clear to him that Dora was something of an old-fashioned girl. “You have a girlfriend at another bar?” “I only drink in this lousy place.” “Then you must not think I’m pretty.” He did think she was pretty (she was at least as pretty as any man should hope for), and he told her this by meeting her eyes for a good long beat. And then he leaned in and kissed her, and she kissed him back, his whiskeyed lips sweetened by the cheap wine she’d been drinking. “Will you escort me home now?” she said, almost brightly, as though she were starting a fresh conversation. “I don’t have a car. I can walk you, though.” “That’s fine.” “I’m not about to carry anybody, just so you know.” “Don’t be a wise-ass,” she said. “I’m okay now. I just don’t like walking around this neighborhood alone at this hour.” “Nobody does.” “Well, worse things can happen to me than you.” “That’s what you think,” he told her. “Look, buster, do you want to argue the rest of the night or go?” “I’ll go.” They left the bar to the burbling music of his teasing chums and a toast from Smitty (who drank only ginger ale) and he followed her lead and they walked north past the immense concrete support blocks of the George Washington Bridge. It was past three in the morning but not at all quiet as they were buffeted by the welt-welt-welt of the traffic above them rolling over the expansion joints of the elevated roadway. They walked in the middle of the empty street; there was no provision for pedestrians because there was no reason for such provision. Hector liked this upward perspective on the great structure, preferring it to the vista from across the river along the West Side Highway, where one took in the postcard grandeur of the lighted span, this perfected example of human yearning and accomplishment. But he best understood the rather humbling view from below, here between its massive, inglorious feet, where one was just a minor creature skirting about its shadowed trunks. As they climbed the street that rose and curled around the feet of the bridge, Dora’s pace slowed and she confessed to him that she didn’t want to go home just at the moment, that her apartment mate was a teetotaler and born-again and a too-light sleeper who would awake and harangue her with a sermon about her dissolute ways. He said he sympathized. Hector took her hand and hooked it onto his elbow, the rounds of birthday whiskey just now warming the back of his skull in such a manner as he could begin at last to feel that estimably sly speed: here was the sole effect he could fathom, the entire pleasure. Through the long career of his drinking he never came close to the sensation of oblivion but rather this small measure of an extra velocity, this slightest lifting. The ripe scent of the river was like a two-day-old corpse and its fumes buoyed Hector all the more. Had an observer been up on the bridge’s catwalk peering down he might have noticed a levity in the gait of both as they strolled in the cottony warm autumn atmosphere the way any pair grown to middle life together would, her head braced just slightly against his still-square shoulder as he guided them up through the twisting narrow streets of Old Fort Lee, not long ago Jewish and Irish and Italian and now lighted around the clock like any street in Seoul or Shanghai with its flashing neon scripts and ideograms. He’d settled here more than fifteen years earlier, after kicking around the country, and getting kicked plenty in return, finally tired of the serial misadventure and wreckage, and this place as much as any other had seemed a good locale to sequester himself for the duration, a mostly working-class town with neighborhoods that looked much like those in Ilion, where you could reach out the bedroom window of the weather-worn houses barely hanging on to tidiness and just touch the fingertips of the neighbor girl who was doing the same. Maybe he liked Dora because she could well be that neighbor girl, all grown up. Dora had begun to lean heavily into him, though more out of weariness than desire, but he didn’t mind at all. He liked her fleshy weight. Though he was nothing if not catholic in his tastes, he’d come to esteem such women, not plump ones necessarily, though that was fine, too, but women with a fullness of body, a certain density when they pressed against him, pleasing him on a deep animal level. She was now cooing something, too, and he asked her to repeat herself but then she suddenly pushed away from him and stepped off the road, down into the thigh-high grasses and weeds. “Keep going,” she said, her words breathy and clipped. “I’ll catch up.” He figured she needed to relieve herself and was impressed that she didn’t care about propriety and so heeded her but soon enough he could hear her gagging in the distance and he turned back to help. But before he could he registered a huff of breath from a man charging him from the shadows. He was knocked to the ground. The man struck him on the head and ear with a huge, rocklike fist. There was a fierce succession of blows, the pain lighting his face and skull like a hot fireplace poker. And yet all this quieted him, too, instantly evoking his most special talent; Hector watched his own body leave him and step aside and take the man’s wrist and wrench it to an unnatural position. The big man then hit him with his free hand, hard, with a full and professional extension, the force pushing Hector back over the sidewalk and down the slope. Before he could get up the man hit him again, then again, th
e disciplined rhythm an unlikely anchor for Hector, and oddly catalyzing, for just as the man paused to catch his breath Hector got to his feet and began to return the blows, trading one for one and then soon enough only giving, until the hulking man was down on one knee as if he were on deck waiting for his turn at bat, which of course didn’t come. Hector worked him with the perfect rhythm of a machine, losing himself in his own unrelenting pace, the hard plate of the man’s face going to clay, and the thought crossed his mind that transmogrification was less a process magical than something geologic, pressure and heat still the most mystical forges of the realm. Thus the flesh descends, back to simple terra. “What do you want?” Hector rasped into the bloodied face, made unrecognizable by the gruesome sheen and the darkness. “What do you want?” The fellow groaned miserably, unable to speak, his mouth full of spit and blood. Hector raised his fist again and the man trembled, covering his head as he lay curled up on the ground like a gargantuan shrimp. Hector recognized him now. It was Tick Martone, a former club boxer who was sometimes employed by the usual malign people to collect debts, et cetera, but who in fact was not a bad man at all. Toward the end of his fighting career, Tick became punch-drunk (he was only forty or so now) and got confused easily and sometimes even forgot where he was. In the weak moonlight his puffed-out, gourdlike cheeks looked alarmingly innocent, even adolescent, the sight enough to make Hector’s heart pause for a moment, resurrecting as it did the ugly memory from the Korean War, a war in which, for a long stretch afterward, he wished he had met his end. Hector made him sit up. Tick wiped his bulbous nose and face with his shirtsleeve. “What are you doing here, Tick? Why are you out making trouble for me tonight? It’s my birthday, you know.” “Gee, I’m real sorry, Hector,” Tick said with genuine remorse, in his distinctively shrunken way. He had a miniaturized, lispy, birdlike voice. He had been a tough fighter in his prime, able to take a load of punishment and still hang on until his opponent tired, then step in close and deliver. His opponents couldn’t shake him off. Hence the name. “I didn’t want to, because it was you, but I owe money to Old Rudy, just like that crazy gook, Jung.” “Don’t call him that. He’s a pal.” “Sorry, Hector. You know I don’t mean nothin’.” “I know.” Among other things, Old Rudy ran a sports book, one of the biggest ones in North Jersey. Physically he was still imposing and when younger had been known for his easy, almost casual, brutality. But it was his hooded, gray-eyed gaze that always spooked Hector, his long-fingered, sheet-white hands, as if the man were a bloodless ghoul, a reaper of low-life souls. He was in his seventies now, failing in body, but word was he was losing his mind, too. “How bad were you supposed to hurt me?” Tick was pinching the bridge of his nose to stanch the flow of blood and still could have talked but he wouldn’t answer, which to Hector meant on the serious end of things. “Come on. Just because his errand boy soiled himself ?” “All I know is, Old Rudy wants it to come out of your hide. You’re supposed to pay Jung’s debt for getting in the way.” “And if I don’t? Or can’t?” “I dunno know, Hector. Nobody tells Tick nothin’. But, hey, don’t everybody know you two go back a ways?” Indeed, they did. Like Tick and Jung, Hector owed Old Rudy, but it wasn’t money. It was a debt that he assumed he had more than paid off with the last fifteen years of working menial jobs like the one he had now; he was unable to get auto body or carpentry work on the big construction jobs in the nearby counties because of Old Rudy’s longtime ties to the mob. After a week or two on a job, Hector would be pulled off the site, no explanations, just a couple of days’ severance in cash and advice to not make a peep. Hector easily could have moved on, of course, to another region or state, started fresh, but didn’t a certain part of him want to punish himself, too, for the miserable fate he had brought on Old Rudy’s beautiful daughter, Winnie? She was yet another woman who had come to disaster by having relations with Hector, and he’d promised himself then that she would surely be the last. “Hey, Hector, can I get up now?” “Okay, Tick. Just don’t try anything.” “I won’t.” As Hector helped Tick to his feet, Dora approached them in the street, her gait somewhat steadier now but still careful, slow. She was about to say something but stayed quiet when she saw Hector and the unfamiliar man with his messed-up face. She’d been around Smitty’s long enough to know things like this happened around Hector and the crew, and she simply went to his side and clasped his hand and asked if they could get going now. Tick said, “Hector?” “What?” “Are you gonna try to get even with Old Rudy?” “I don’t know. I guess I can’t just wait around to get jumped. Does he still live in the same house in Teaneck?” “I think so,” Tick said. “Listen, Hector. If you do go over to see him, could you let him know I roughed you up all right? If he asks, I mean. I’m still working down my account.” “Yeah, Tick, sure.” With a wobbly step Tick lowered himself into his car, and even offered Hector and Dora a birthday lift. But Hector waved him away, bidding him good night. Though the back of his skull still sharply ached, and the bones of his knuckles felt fused, Hector could generate no real enmity for the man. He couldn’t help but see Tick as the kind of fellow who had earnestly labored all his days for self-interested others (fight promoters, managers, shady businessmen, quasi- and outright criminals) for the end sum of what he had at the very start of his humble existence: a long-odds line on a barely worthwhile life, and not a smidgen more. Maybe Hector was caught in the first onset of that sticky middle-aged empathy, which would now cause his throat to tighten and his eyes to well up at the merest suggestion of thwarted dreams (like the other day, when he walked past a bent-backed, toothless Eastern European couple peddling used clothing and shoes on the sidewalk), empathy meaning connection, connection meaning solidarity, if a solidarity he might never act upon. Or maybe it was plain sentimentalism on his part, a soft form of self-pity for his own long-discarded dreams, though he had no doubt his failings were ultimately self-inflicted, one and all. And what were Hector Brennan’s dreams? Once clarified, surely no different from anybody else’s, in this too often lonely-making world: the haven of a simple, decent love. After a block Dora slowed almost to a stop, holding on tightly to his arm, his waist. “We should have taken that ride,” he said. “I’m fine. I’m glad we didn’t,” she said. “I don’t want to think about you fighting that man. Or anybody else. Look, you’re bleeding.” She reached up and swabbed the corner of his lip with her thumb. But it wasn’t his blood. He had some scrapes and bruises, but they would disappear by morning, along with the aches, just as they always did, with a miraculous, almost furious, speed. As though his own body were mocking him, with its incessant, strange perfection. “Why do you want to get hurt?” “Who said I wanted to get hurt?” “Then why fight?” “Why not?” “Did your father like to fight, too?” “That’s a funny question.” “Is it? Fathers and sons, you know.” “I don’t know.” “Legacies, expectations. All that stuff.” “You’re losing me,” he said, though she in fact wasn’t. “Oh, just forget it, Hector. Don’t listen to me. I’m a drunk, silly woman.” “You’re not silly.” “Don’t be fresh now.” “Sorry.” “Okay, then. I’m serious. I want to know. Is it so fun? To be at war all the time?” “No,” he said, his mind searching a thousand instances, if one. “Not at all.” “But it just happens.” “Yeah.” “Then maybe I ought to stick close to you. Nobody would harm a weak person like me.” “Not if they had a shred of feeling they wouldn’t. But you’re not weak.” “I am. You’ll see.” They walked a few more blocks. At a curb she tripped and faltered, and he luckily caught her before she fell. “I think I need some air.” “We’re outside already,” he said. “I mean I need to rest,” she answered. He didn’t know if she meant to sit or lie down (there was no place to do so) and when she teetered he grabbed her and she immediately kissed him, her mouth tasting sappy and fermented with the hard butterscotch candy she’d been sucking to cover the smell of having thrown up. But who was Hector to mind? He was fouled but not sweet and she was no doubt suffering his own ruined flavor as he kissed her in return, e
mbracing her with his full strength, the tender flesh of her waist pushing up between his fingers. The air then truly seemed to go out of her and it was fortunate that his apartment was only a few blocks away. By the time he had the key in the lock she was practically shaking and he lifted her up so that her legs wound around the backs of his thighs and he could feel the sharp but weak dig of her shoe heels. He carefully walked them through the darkened two-room flat and when he was at the foot of the bed he believed she was out but she began to kiss him with a new force and craving. They fell into the sorry thrift-shop mattress and soon enough she had pulled his T-shirt off and had unbuttoned her own blouse and was atop him, lowering a still-soft nipple into his mouth. It bloomed in a taste of salt and funk and iron. He hefted her other breast and with his free hand he hiked up the willowy crepe skirt and cupped the heat between her legs until she began moving against him in a cadence that marked her breathing. It was terribly stifling in the room all of a sudden and he rose to slide open the glass door onto the weedy uneven patio he shared with a neighbor he’d hardly spoken to. She followed him, dropping her skirt and wilted panties to the floor, the two of them now attracted outside by a cooling breeze, and in the white-green light of the sodium lamps of the apartment’s inner courtyard it appeared as if she might have just ascended from some forsaken underworld, her naked form at once strangely aglow and lifeless. To another man this vision might have been troubling, but to Hector it was an irresistible invitation, and he pressed her up perhaps too hard against the pane of the sliding door. If she gasped with fear it was for but a second, and they stayed there, moving against each other, until it was clear they were too spent to finish, and he carried her already asleep to the bed. WHEN THE DAWN BROKE Dora was still fast asleep and he left her a note about locking the door behind her, though nothing about whether he would see her tonight. No doubt he would, whether he wished to or not. But he was quite sure he did. He made his way to work through the scatter of the Sunday-morning streets, already caught by a keen urge to turn back and not so gently rouse Dora from her slumber. A surprisingly clean, waxen scent from her wreathed him, a pleasing note in itself but also a contrast to his own aroma, long indiscernible to him but which he was suddenly aware of now in the already bolting warmth of the late-September day, this stubborn rime of lye and bad meat, a consequence of his job, no doubt, though by any measure it was in fact a much deeper insinuation. He wondered if Dora had noticed anything. He was thinking, too, that if he was going to have the regular company of a woman again, maybe it ought to be one like her, even if it meant a more scrupulous regimen of self-hygiene. In a store window he caught a glimpse of himself and paused; he looked murky, watery, either half eroded or half formed. The image aligned with what he had been thinking of himself even before the birthday celebration at the bar, the crux of the matter being that he was a man not yet fixed into his own life. Jackie Brennan would always say that that was the mark of success, not how large a house a man owned or the model of car he drove but how firmly one was rooted in his family, his neighborhood, his work. Hector had arrived at this point in his life by his own design, and anyone could marvel now at the extent of his feat: he had neither money nor status nor prospects, which was okay by him, even if respectable people might classify him to be a lowlife. But in truth he knew his near-indigence was also easy cover, a way to hide and be freed from responsibility for anything in the least vital or important, which in effect was to be freed from the present, and the foreseeable future, if never quite the past. For with the bright daylight the past reared up, the name of June its unexpected summons. June, from the war. He almost wished now that Tick had gotten the best of him, put him in the emergency room at Hackensack. He’d have to forget all over again. The last time he’d seen June she was only nineteen years old, this fierce, sharp-cornered girl he’d married for her convenience only, despite how miserable and guilty her presence made him. He brought her over to the States and they had lived together (if not as husband and wife) for five months, until it seemed clear enough she could make her own way, and for what seemed an eternity he’d not heard a word of her, neither of them much caring whether the other was even alive. He walked faster now, as if he might outpace the visitation. A sweat broke out on his back and chest and he was glad that the good aura of Dora was still clinging to him; he breathed it in, to etherize himself. He was thirsty. He knew there was a pub around the corner, and luckily the owner was just opening up, nine o’clock on a Sunday morning. It was his kind of place (or, more aptly, a place for his kind), and amid the stools still perched upside down on top of the bar he stood and quickly drank three draft beers and by the end of the fourth he felt cooled enough to get going again, his thoughts quelled and lingering once more on Dora. He should think only of Dora. He was honestly looking forward to seeing her tonight. The last time he was with a woman—a long while now, as it had been cold and wet, March or April—he had encountered that most alarming of troubles and despite the woman’s patience and valiant efforts he had remained as inert as a day-old balloon. He could not be coaxed. It had never happened before but it didn’t surprise him—for some years now he had been sensing a steady depletion in that area, the feeling that what had always seemed his vast reserves of desire were being drawn down at a rate too quick for anything save an eventual exhaustion. Sometimes he thought maybe he was spent because he had been sexual too early, just as he reached puberty: he was not quite twelve years old when two crazy girlfriends of his crazy older sister took him down to an abandoned boathouse on the Erie Canal and showed him how to play doctor and probe every facet and fold of their wild-blooming bodies and they’d do magical things to him with their tongues and soon enough they would be trysting in all manners like the hobo couples they sometimes spied on in the reeds. When his mother overheard him tell his friends what the three of them were doing she banned the older girls from visiting his sister and threatened to drag them to the police station, but even back then Hector could not imagine any better initiation, Jeanne and Jenny and him playing with one another with the same pure delight as if they were at the big carnival fair in Herkimer, where, naturally, they’d done fanciful stuff, too, high up in the Ferris wheel gondola. In Ilion, people would tell him he ought to be a film actor, and during World War II a local committee asked him to model for a war-bonds poster that would feature a handsome family, he being the boy bursting with pride as he gazed up at his uniformed older brother. For the poster the artist had to render him a bit more wholesome than he was, recasting the set of his eyes and diminishing his full mouth in a mold less shadowed and sexualized. The poster went out all across the country and was seen locally as well, though in Ilion it was perhaps unnecessary, for the town had already been awarded the “T Flag” from the Treasury office in Washington for having one of the highest participation rates of war-bond buying in the country; its sons would enlist in the services in record measures as well, returning home maimed or dead in corresponding proportions, a mostly uncomplicated point of pride in the city that was the birthplace of Remington Arms, manufacturer of the famed Berthier, Enfield, and Springfield rifles, carried on killing fields from the Marne to Iwo Jima. History is made by what is made in Ilion, Hector’s father used to croon darkly, most all of Hector’s uncles and cousins either in the employ of the company or bearing its arms into battle, or both. Hector turned sixteen a week before Hiroshima was leveled and like most of his friends he was ready to take the bus to Albany where no one knew them and enlist, of course by lying about his age. He’d had to wait until a place called Korea erupted in war five years later to take his turn. Certain grown women were always asking him if he would do some yard work or painting for them, and when he was a sophomore in high school he took to the forlorn beds of young wives in the neighborhood whose husbands were away in the Pacific. Of course, given the smallness of his neighborhood, of his town, he well knew the young men, a few of whom would never return. Among those was James Cahill, a Navy lieutenant, who had been an all-county hal
fback and track star and the youngest floor boss ever at Remington Arms, his wife, Patricia, of the ebony tresses and the hueless glowing skin the one who, that fateful night, shamefully and miserably wept after she and Hector finally coupled. But she had not let him leave right afterward, instead reaching down while she was straddling him and tightly squeezing the weary root of him to sustain another congress until she was almost faint with soreness. She had uttered his name as though he were harming her and he tried to twist away but she held him down by pressing on his shoulders with all her weight. When she finally released her grip, he was unsure if she had come but he let himself go in a violent, near-blinding acceleration that he would rarely achieve afterward, that hot push behind the eyes. He now wondered if he could have that same push with Dora, but, really, what would he do if he ever felt so vibrantly alive again? Maybe it would be better to count himself as among the creeping, living dead. His worry now was whether Dora might suddenly be inspired beyond his ability to please her; he imagined her now padding about the two dim rooms of his existence in her pale, florid nakedness and thinking that he was not such a dreadful sort at all, certainly sufferable, even suitable, a man with whom she might do things other than drink and share a tumble in the bed. Of course he was not a suitable man, and if in the past he never bothered to alert the relevant parties of said truth, he thought he should do so for Dora, in case she was similarly mistaken. He had been around enough places like Smitty’s to know that a woman of Dora’s age and station had perhaps one remaining chance at a generally undamaging union. No one at Smitty’s was any use, but maybe someone would walk in one night by accident and save her, a traveling salesman, a retired cop or firefighter. Even (and, maybe, best) another woman. Or perhaps Dora had no chance, being already lost, a scenario in which he would thus serve as none other than the precipitating element in her life’s final downdraft. He made his way east on Whiteman Street and then walked the half-block south on Lemoine Avenue to where he worked, a small two-story Korean mini-mall wedged between Lemoine and Palisade avenues. Hector was the night and weekend custodian of the property, and more often than not he did the work of the day custodian as well, given that the day custodian—his boss, Jung—only periodically showed up. This morning he found Jung as he sometimes did on Sundays, the thin, deeply tanned man curled up in the ratty vinyl love seat in the ground-floor custodian’s office, snoring loudly with a mesh golf cap pulled down over his eyes. Hector could smell the familiar stale reek of Jung’s busy night, the sugary charcoal of Korean barbecue and the funky gas of his sleep breath sharply perfumed by garlic and Marlboros and Chivas Regal. An empty bottle of the whiskey lay on its side on the floor. Today was unusual only because Jung was still wearing golf clothes, wearing even his black-and-white saddle golf shoes, tufts of grass and dried mud stuck in constellations about the spikes. As Hector changed into coveralls, Jung grunted, eyeing him, rooting around in his trousers to scratch and rearrange. He let out a sharp fart before turning over and going back to sleep. He was already snoring when Hector opened the janitor’s closet where he kept the tools of his trade. The man was a lower god of indolence. Hector noisily hefted the heavy commercial vacuum (Jung didn’t stir) and rode up the elevator to the second floor. It was just after nine in the morning and the place was empty of activity save in the Korean restaurant on the mezzanine, which was open twenty-four hours; a lone diner spooned methodically at a half-dozen small plates of vegetables and a stoneware casserole of steaming soup. A waitress sat two tables away, robotically folding utensils within cloth napkins. When she looked up and saw him, her body relaxed and she smiled, waving him in. Hector suddenly realized he hadn’t eaten—not since yesterday’s lunch—but he wasn’t hungry yet and made a gesture to her to say that he would work first. He set himself to vacuuming, pushing the machine back and forth on the mezzanine where the carpeting wasn’t frayed and could get caught up. In most spots it was worn down to the webbing; one could see the poured-concrete floor beneath it. The mall itself was similarly decrepit, the linoleum overlay by the entrance scratched and buckling, and the central elevator rickety-sounding and dangerously temperamental, its doors sometimes opening just before reaching the right level. The entire inside was painted in cheap off-white paint, save for the ceiling above the central open well, which was a slightly different shade of the old color, somewhat duller, where the painters couldn’t (or hadn’t bothered trying to) reach. The owner didn’t care if the place was in presentable, or even half-presentable, shape, as the tenants clearly valued most the modest rents. Nor did the poor condition of the building seem to dissuade the steady foot traffic of the Koreans and Chinese and the few non-Asians who shopped there and ate at the restaurants. Despite the state of the mall, most of the goods in the shops weren’t inexpensive, certainly nothing Hector could ever afford—knockoff designer clothing and shoes and home and car audio equipment with brand names he didn’t recognize. There was also a hair salon, an Asian video store, a toy shop, a bakery, a copy shop, a dentist who was also an acupuncturist, and a tae kwon do studio, as well as the karaoke bar and the restaurant. In the time that Hector had worked in the mall, there had been what seemed to him an extremely high turnover of tenants, none except the restaurant remaining open for very long, and then even the restaurant changed ownership twice in the last few years. Jung had told him that it was because the tenants were often inexperienced business-people, immigrants who got onto a notion of selling some product they could import cheaply and easily, but rarely, it would turn out, cheaply and easily enough to compete with the stores at the large malls nearby. The dentist did reasonably well, as did the bakery, which sold sweet, buttery breads and pastries filled with custards and sweet bean paste the customers couldn’t get anywhere else. But mostly the stores here were poorly planned, overhopeful, hastily opened ventures that were preordained to fail, or, even worse, to fail ever so slowly, in an unremitting, soul-grinding diminishment that was invisible by the hour and the day but by season’s end could be seen in the wilted posture of a store owner as she hand-lettered signs for a clearance table of handbags and scarves. Except for Sang-Mee, the waitress at the restaurant, Hector kept his distance from the tenants so as not to have to deal with their potential difficulties and failures, which might stir up in him an even more insidious disturbance than his suddenly charged empathy, something that he could not so easily drink into oblivion or brawl his way through. Before the incident with the boy soldier he had been a willing enough soldier in their war. Or maybe not their war exactly, but Mao’s war, or Truman’s, or someone else’s; it was a war that from the beginning had been nobody’s cross, inciting only mild attacks of patriotism and protest, jingoism and pacifism, a war both too cold and too hot and that managed to erase fifty thousand of his kind and over a million of theirs. Hector had enlisted immediately after hostilities broke out and so was among the first to be shipped to Japan before landing in Inchon, among MacArthur’s forces. He was twenty years old and of course carnally educated but knew little of much else. He had a healthy native intelligence but it was never more than lightly worked, due to his patent beauty and his prowess on the playing fields and in schoolyard fisticuffs. If the North Koreans hadn’t invaded their brethren in the South, he would simply have worked at Remington, if not in arms, then in typewriters, adding machines, whatever else. He would have been a husband and a father and played baseball on summer Saturdays with his buddies and inevitably slept with some of their wives, but at least it wouldn’t have been at his invitation, never his initial doing. In his alternate life there would have been the customary troubles, his own wife maybe leaving him and coming back and leaving him again in a serial drama that had as its greatest satisfaction the comfort of familiarity, of reprise, his days played out in a circle no larger than the carry of a human shout. He sometimes wondered what his life would be like for him now, as a middle-aged son of Ilion; by now he’d be drawing a small pension and playing with his grandchildren on the porch of a row house on a street thick w
ith other Brennans and wondering what it would have been like to have ventured out and seen the wider world. With the war he saw it fully wide and dark and deep. But it wasn’t the usual rough awakening: he’d never been in thrall to the notion of hero. As a soldier he’d pictured himself not a savior, or some killing machine, but rather one of countless figures on the battlefield, just like the toy soldiers he played with all through his youth; each mini-statuette was formed in one of several poses, as either a prone shooter or a bayonet-wielding assaulter or a marcher, Hector seeing himself as the last of these, the ones the other boys didn’t care for and would trade to him at ten to one for the others. He was captivated by the swarm of great numbers, the feel of them bunched in his hands like a massing of tiny bones. On the chipped, painted porch of his parents’ house he’d line them up in neat rows, the marchers, gritty-faced, pushing on, their rifles shouldered, and though many in the front would perish before the shooters and bayonets, he knew their flood would prevail. Now, as he put the vacuum back in the closet and began filling the rolling bucket, Jung woke up and stood and stretched, yawning wide as a lion before sitting back down. As if he’d slept with a lighter and cigarette in his hand, he instantly lit one up. Hector well knew the pattern of the man’s Saturdays; Jung would play a heavily wagered round at the municipal golf course at Overpeck and then eat and drink and gamble the rest of the night with his playing partners and maybe visit some bar girls at one of the Korean nightclubs in town. In between, when he could get to a phone, he’d bet on football games, baseball games, basketball in the winter. He was in his mid-thirties and married and had young children, but a few weeks ago his wife had kicked him out of their apartment in Palisades Park, fed up with his womanizing and chronic absence and gambling and his unrepentant laziness, which was in fact his core charm. There was an admirable self-comfort in Jung’s manner, like he’d evolved himself so completely that anything but utter acceptance of his ways would be absurd, akin to thinking less of hippos for wallowing in mud, or of flies for seeking dung. Jung never actually worked as a custodian, sub-hiring a day laborer or two off a street corner in Little Ferry to fill in for him; the most he did was light carpentry for the tenants or replace burned-out fluorescent tubes, and of course collect the rent. “Starting late today, huh, GI?” Jung murmured, checking his fat gold diver’s watch, his eyes squinting against the stream of the smoke. “Want to know why?” “What, you have big date last night?” “In a manner of speaking.” “She fat lady?” “He.” “No fucking way,” Jung guffawed, the cigarette tilted down loosely in his mouth. “Don’t tell me this, GI!” “Relax. He wasn’t there to be nice to me.” “Oh shit,” Jung said, sitting up in the couch. “You okay? You look okay.” “I’m all right. But do me a favor. Don’t mess around with this any longer. Pay what you owe. For my sake as well as yours. I might not be around when the next guy comes, and even if I were . . .” “Okay,” Jung said, smoking slowly now. “Okay.” “You don’t have the money, do you?” “I’ll get it.” “I hope you win big this weekend, chief.” “Me too, GI.” Jung had been calling him GI since learning that Hector had been in the Korean War, or else called him Joe, or Rambo, something else Hector would have never suffered from anyone else but didn’t mind from Jung. In fact he took a small pleasure in the idea that more than thirty years of tumultuous world history should presently lead to a moment like this, for him to be dressed in cheap coveralls, mop in hand, preparing to clean the toilets of a grubby Korean mall in New Jersey for this most slothful of their kind, a man who was, literally, born in a roadside ditch during the war but didn’t remotely know or care a thing about it now. “But hey, Rambo, you got hot sex last night, too, huh?” “Why do you say that?” “Otherwise you’d be real mad at me.” “I wouldn’t tell you if I did.” “See, I’m right,” Jung said, leaning back on the couch. He had already forgotten about his betting debts. “I’m glad. I’m afraid you some homo.” “Dream on.” “Maybe, brother. You never know. Maybe I’m sick of women. Sick of all their bullshit. You not?” “Not near as much as they’re probably sick of mine.” “See what I mean? Listen to you! We getting trained, like this! Fucking bullshit. My wife make me jump up and down whenever she want. Go to work early, go back home early, don’t see my friends, feed baby, fix shower door, fix car. Don’t touch, no sex now. Or, wake up, wake up, sex right now. Now she kick me out and I get same kind bullshit, but from God damn waitress!” “You should leave Sang-Mee alone.” “Tell me about it! Whole night she was crying, her face a fucking mess, saying where I been? Why golf take so long? Why poker take all night? How come no more present, no more ring and necklace? How come I don’t love her anymore? I want to say, ‘When did I ever love you, fucking bitch?’ ” “But you didn’t.” “Hey, I was tired. Then she got very mad, when I fell asleep. Then she cry some more. She was here for a while but I guess she’s gone.” He immediately checked his wallet, expecting it to be emptied, but there was still a decent slab of bills inside. Being skilled at golf and cards, Jung made his pocket money off his friends; but, after the custom, he spent most of the winnings on their eating and drinking afterward, and whatever was left on his mistresses. “I’m hungry. Hey, you want to eat? I pay.” “I got work to do.” “No problem. I give you morning off.” “You know I’ll just have to work twice as long tomorrow. Besides, the head’s probably a mess. Mrs. Kim will just complain.” Mrs. Kim owned the Korean restaurant on the mezzanine, and because her customers had to use the mall bathrooms she was often harping on Hector, though more to get him to speak to Jung than anything else. She despised Jung because he never did anything he promised in the way of improvements, but she let him eat gratis anyway (even if he ordered extravagantly), for he convinced his uncle, the mall owner, who lived in Long Island, to keep extending her lease every six months, at a very reasonable rent. She had the cook make the food too salty or sweet whenever he came in with his buddies, so they would think twice about eating there when he next suggested it in the hope of saving himself the tab. “Okay, you work, and when I wake up again we can eat.” “Sang-Mee’s working today,” Hector told him. “You think I give a damn? I’m not afraid of her.” Last week Sang-Mee spilled a pitcher of water onto Jung’s back, saying it was an accident. Jung had jumped up and might have struck her but Hector had held him back. Sang-Mee mused aloud how fortunate it was that it wasn’t hot soup. This made Jung angrier and he berated her viciously in Korean but she just smiled and went into the kitchen. Jung deserved it; he had been seeing her off and on for the past couple of years, but had dumped her right after his wife booted him, presumably because he had no more excuses about having to stay in his marriage. Hector liked Sang-Mee, for she was always quick with a kind word and had a spark in her eyes that made her prettier than she was otherwise, but then he pitied her, too, for her sticking by Jung for so long. “I’ll eat with you if we eat somewhere else.” Jung cried, “What? Now you on her side?” “I just think you ought to leave her alone.” “Me? She better leave me alone! She harass me. Last week she spit in my tea! I get her fired real easy, you know.” “No you won’t.” “Okay, Rambo, okay!” he said, holding up his hands. “See, you on her side.” “You want to eat or not?” “Okay. But I want to eat here. I leave her alone. Been too long, and Mrs. Kim getting off easy. Plus, I need cash. My wife taking all my money, say it’s for kids but I know she lying.” “She’s using it for booze and gambling and boys?” “You hilarious guy, Joe. Maybe I’m not so hungry anymore.” “Suit yourself. I still have the bathrooms to do.” “Okay, okay, let’s go up.” “I filled the pail already. I’ll meet you in an hour.” “I’m starving, Joe!” “Go by yourself, then,” Hector answered, turning to leave. “You better work first,” Jung grumbled, tapping out another cigarette. He lit it and flitted his hand at Hector. “Go, go. I can wait, God damn.” Hector wheeled the full rolling pail of hot water and ammonia to the elevator and keyed it to STOP while he swabbed the floor and then wiped down the walls and button panel with a dampened rag. Like everything else in
the mall, the elevator car was in a sorry condition, the wooden floorboards buckled and the metal walls dented and scratched and scrawled over with permanent marker in several languages. As he rode it up to the second level, the car lurched and seemed to slip off its catches as if due to a worn clutch and he imagined the cable above him finally fraying and sending him hurtling to the bottom. And it would be fine, if his end should happen here; there was no better place, if certain dark gods should be served. But the fall might not be quite far enough (there was just one underground parking level) and he knew his fate would likely be that he’d emerge as usual from a heap of sure mayhem with nothing deeper than the usual transitory wound. The bathrooms he saved for last, for if he started there he’d have to change again before vacuuming the carpets amid customers. It always smelled like a stable, but then worse for the carelessness of people. People could only wish that they lived like animals. Hector could clean them up well enough, but the general condition of the facilities was past maintaining, the stall doors long missing, the walls covered in graffiti, the sinks cracked, most of the panels of the drop ceiling water-stained and ajar. When some of the panels finally rotted through enough to fall down, he mentioned it to Jung, but nothing was ever fixed or replaced and Hector felt no need to mention it again. As usual the bathrooms were a disaster, the toilets plugged, the basins and floors rankly fouled as they always were on weekend mornings, but especially so ever since the karaoke bar opened, several months ago. The women’s room required extra attention, as someone had vomited in the sink but mostly missed the mark. Hector swabbed it first with the mop before spraying it with ammonia and then took a sponge in his hands to wipe down the worn porcelain and rusting faucet and handles. He didn’t use gloves. His hands were perennially red from the cleansers but no longer felt the sting of the caustic solvents, being scalded into numbness; as such they were also oddly smooth to the touch, as Dora had once noted in the bar. The mirror above the sink had long been smashed and instead of glass Jung had screwed a thin panel of stainless steel to the wall. Hector took a plunger to the toilets and worked each steadily until all manner of detritus welled up and after flushing each several times he mopped the floor and then had to mop it again with a freshly filled pail from downstairs in the janitor’s closet. On the way back up he saw Jung and Sang-Mee across the mezzanine, standing very close to each other outside the restaurant. She was softly pummeling Jung in the chest as he was trying to pull her against him. They were both slight of frame and not tall, and if he hadn’t known them he could have mistaken them for youths in thrall of a complicated and passionate first love. Then they were kissing, quite tenderly, and Hector was reminded that while rife disorder ruled this world, there was also human tendency and need (however misguided, however wrong) forever tilting against it. Love was the prime defiance, of course, most every story told of that, though well short of love there was the simple law of association, just nearness and contact, which Sang-Mee and Jung were reenacting, and which Hector was perhaps about to broach more deeply with Dora. He was rootless and unstrung as always but something in his gut felt at ease with the notion that she might be in his apartment when he returned. He cleaned the men’s room in the same manner, and by the time he finished, his hands and arms and the front of his coveralls were splattered with muck and dirty water, dressing him in a feculence that was at once vile and familiar, this coat of waste and rot. He was long past being repulsed by such things. After the trouble with Zelenko in his regular platoon, he was assigned to a Graves Registration Unit. Hector ended up serving in it for the largest part of his active duty; like many of the Graves Units it was a colored one, and as such the assignment itself was meant to be an equal part of his sentence, apart from the work of having to handle bodies in every state of mutilation and decay. It was unsettling at the beginning for him to work side by side with the black GIs, for he’d never known or even been in close proximity to any blacks except when he was in Albany once with his parents and they got momentarily lost at night in the streets of Sheridan Hollow, finally venturing into a church to get directions out. The Negro soldiers were estimable and relaxed among themselves, and though he kept his distance as he did with everyone else, none of them had a need to call him out or taunt him for his movie-idol looks. They avoided trouble because there were other troubles to be had equal to or worse than the misery of body handling, like unloading munitions, or fighting on the line. Better to do the ghoul’s work of cleanup and retrieval, which was dangerous enough with the booby traps and land mines. But it was like anything else, for as disgusting as the tasks were, one grew accustomed to the abominable sights and smells and processes of the necessary operations: the way you’d have to tug just enough on a corpse’s arms, say, if the rest of him was stuck in the dirt and a bit too ripened, so as not to pull them off completely; or how you’d pour hot water from a kettle and chip away carefully with a bayonet to release a poor bastard who was frozen facedown in snow and ice, the flesh falling off sometimes like shredded meat, and other times remaining absolutely preserved and perfect if he’d been there only a night or two. Or in the first days of the spring thaw how they’d find a mess of bodies in a ditch and could tell only from the uniforms if they were enemies or friendlies, and if friendlies maybe only from the hair whether they were white or black, because all of them had turned the color and sheen of licorice by then, the skin finely lacquered by the elements. Every man is a black man in the end, was the joke among them, which made for a bitter laugh and a moment’s introspection before they’d continue traversing the slushy snowpack of the hillsides in search of newly exposed bodies. That is, when the front line had moved far enough forward; but even then there was the threat of sniper fire or an opportunistic mortar round, Davison and Jeffords getting it that way one day in early April, a single round landing on the exposed slope of the next hill and leaving a scatter of red on white. The Chinese mortar position was instantly wiped out of existence by both rear and forward artillery batteries, and then Hector and his partner and a pair of medics didn’t wait for the regular grunts to go up but hiked up to help them, though it quickly became apparent when they reached the spot that it was retrieval duty for them now, Hector immediately heading back down and then up again with body bags, their uniforms and boots getting more bloodied than usual from handling the freshly dead. Hector could never quite inoculate himself against the sight of blood, and he readily volunteered to do the very worst tasks, gaining the respect and appreciation of the other men, though it was secretly to avoid that certain hue, that crimson brightness. They called him the Prim Reaper, though chummily, judging him to be a little crazy as he knelt over some headless, legless, armless torso, probing with chopsticks or needle-nosed pliers or with his fingers to see if the dog tags had somehow descended into the flesh. They couldn’t know that he’d rather deal with the horror of a rotting body visibly shifting and radiating a sickening warmth from its hold of maggots than with that clean red proxy of life. It was that blush still in the skin, in the eyes, that residual vitality of someone just dead or killed, that always shook him to his bones. Life was too fearsome. At least the long dead were dead, if fouled and base, their forms a mere figuration of the inevitable, just flesh collapsing, denaturing into nothing but unsung mud and dirt. It was mud and dirt he was lifting, bagging, collecting with his bare hands, and he could simply wash it off afterward, though having to clean carefully under his fingernails, scour them with a tuft of steel wool dipped in kerosene to rid the most resistant notes. He unconsciously brought his fingers to his nose now, as was his habit ever since those days, and while they stunk for sure he couldn’t make out any of that unsavory, fecund redolence. And yet, something else had been revived. Was it the smell of smoke, of ash? He had long thought that was finally dissipated, gone for good, but then he was someone who was too often mistaken.
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