by Pete Dexter
There is something in the way he surveys the room …
“I’ll do you a favor,” Nick says.
Michael turns, surprised. He begins to smile, and in that moment Nick’s open hand crosses the space between them. The slap turns Michael’s head halfway around, and he stumbles backwards, his heels catching on the base of the ring, and he falls, sitting down hard just outside the ropes. His cheeks bounce as he lands, one of them already carrying the print of Nick’s hand.
The slap hangs in the air, numbing the room, and what follows is dreamlike and slow. Leonard reaching for Nick’s throat, Harry suddenly between his arms, his right hand coming in overhead, finding the edge of Leonard’s jaw.
Leonard drops to the floor as if someone had cut all the strings. Michael’s hand covers the side of his face, tears collect in his eyes.
And everyone in the room—even Eddie Bone—knows that Nick is dead.
Nick and Michael stare at one another in a curious way, each of them realizing what has happened. Peter sits in the window, afraid to move. Afraid to leave this moment, as if by holding on he is holding back everything to follow.
Michael gets to his feet, careful to maintain a distance between himself and Nick; he heads for the stairs. Eddie Bone waits for him, holding his pants and his shoes in his hand. Monk pulls Leonard up off the floor and they follow Michael out.
Peter sits still, and what seems like a long time later he hears his cousin from the bottom of the stairs. “Peter, you comin’?”
Nick and his son watch him push himself up. Peter thinks of their living room, the smell of food. Nick’s wife.
“You comin’ with us or not?” his cousin says.
Peter walks between Nick and his son, close enough to touch either one of them.
A moment is lost, and then the next; it comes to him it is all lost. He is heading down the stairs.
Drifting, he thinks of the living room again; he looks back up at the gym.
It occurs to him that Nick has built the things in his life, he didn’t just show up and try to take them from someone else.
They are closed into a small room in the basement of a row house near Veteran’s Stadium.
Leonard Crawley is lying openmouthed on a cot, lost in the drug he is rubbing onto his gums. He holds his jaw in place with one hand and feeds himself the white powder with the other, his finger going from his mouth to the open plastic bag on his chest, back and forth, waiting for Michael to take him to the hospital.
The house belongs to an old roofer who once did jobs for Michael’s father. He is upstairs with his cat, listening to the radio. He didn’t ask what they wanted in his basement, he simply saw who it was, opened the door and turned on the lights.
Peter is sitting across a card table from his cousin. It is cool in the cellar, and the water condenses on the pipes over their heads and drips on the cement floor. The light from the street swings in the spiderwebs covering the windows.
Michael’s face is bloodless. The slap has faded off his cheek, leaving him with only a swollen lip. He dabs at the lip with the back of his hand.
They have been in the basement over an hour, Peter has not spoken. There is no way to frame the argument against this; there is no argument.
“We do them in the morning,” Michael says, testing the way it sounds.
Peter looks at him, waiting. He has changed his mind—morning to night—half a dozen times. Both times leave something unsatisfied.
Michael puts his hands behind his neck and stares at the sweating pipes, reconsidering the timing. “What I wish,” he says, “there was a perfect moment, you know? When what’s gonna happen is right there with what already happened, where Nick sees it all at once, the cause and the result.…”
He thinks, then shakes his head and looks at Peter. “Tell me how to do it,” he says.
Peter doesn’t say anything.
“What I wish,” Michael says, “we could do them more than once.” He sits looking at Peter. Peter trembles, and something in that satisfies Michael, gives him back what is his. He looks at the pipes.
“We park a car in front of his garage door in the morning,” he says, trying it out. “And when they stop, the kid gets out to open the door, we do him bang, on the sidewalk, in front of the old man where he can see it. I want to make sure he sees it, before we do him.”
He looks down from the ceiling again, his fingers still laced behind his neck. Peter sits still. Nothing has changed, and that satisfies Michael, and gives him back what is his too.
There is a noise on the cot, Leonard Crawley sneezes, then breathes deeply through his nose. He moans softly, “Fuck me,” and puts his finger back into the envelope.
“In the morning,” Michael says to Peter. “You and Monk do it in the morning. I don’t care who does who, but do the kid first.”
It is quiet a moment and then Michael suddenly pushes himself up, the table unsteady under his weight, and climbs the wooden stairs into the old man’s kitchen. A moment later Peter follows him up.
The old man is sitting in a straight-back chair, holding the cat in his lap, looking out the window.
“What do you got for me, Frank?” Michael says.
“What you need?” the old man says.
“Something sawed,” he says. “Pump, double-barrel, it don’t make no difference.”
The old man shakes his head. “I ain’t got nothing like that,” he says.
Michael sits down and stares at the old man; the old man stares out the window.
“I ain’t got time for this,” Michael says.
The old man shrugs. “You got other places you can go.”
“I need them right now.”
“You need everything since you were ten years old right now,” the old man says. “Get yourself a cat, Michael. They teach you it don’t get you nowhere to be in such a hurry.”
His hand strokes the animal’s head. An old hand with sunken, spotted skin. Peter sees the bones all the way to the wrist.
“Let’s see what you got,” Michael says.
The old man looks out the window.
Michael closes his eyes, then notices Peter standing at the doorway. He winks. “I got to go upstairs and tear the place apart?” he says. “That’s what I’m gonna do, Frank, you don’t put the fuckin’ cat down and show me what I want.”
The old man turns in his chair to look at Michael, and then at Peter, and then, without another word, he puts the cat on the floor and stands up.
Michael follows him upstairs into a small bedroom and Peter follows Michael. There are pictures all over the walls—ancient, formal portraits of his family on the steps of a large white house. His father and mother, six children arranged by height in front of them. Two girls, four boys. Peter wonders which one of the children is the old man.
The old man opens the closet door and pulls the string cord to the light. The closet is half full of women’s clothing. Peter tries to remember when the old man’s wife died. He thinks it must be fifteen years.
The shotguns are on the floor farther back, and Michael chooses two of them, both double-barreled, both sawed at eighteen inches. Oiled and cleaned. He breaks them open and closes them.
The old man finds a box of shells and turns off the light. “How much I owe you?” Michael says.
The cat appears in the doorway, then wraps itself around the old man’s trousers. He bends slowly at the waist and picks it up, and then sits on the edge of the bed and strokes its head.
“Seven hundred,” he says.
Michael goes back through the kitchen to the basement stairs, holding a shotgun in each hand. Peter follows him.
They are exactly where he left them, Leonard on the cot, Monk standing over by the wall. Peter sits down at the table.
Michael sets the guns in front of him. “You ain’t going to try to talk me out of this?” he says.
Peter doesn’t answer. He looks at the shotguns, accepting them as part of what has happened, and what will happen
next.
Michael drops the box of shells on the table between the shotguns. Peter stares at them; he does not move.
“Take what you need,” he says.
Peter blinks, looking slow and tired, and then his hand reaches across the table and picks up one of the open weapons. He looks at the gun, he looks at his cousin. Michael sees there is no argument in him. He sees everything is settled.
“Remember,” he says, “the kid first, then the old man. He’s got to see it happen.”
Monk picks up the other shotgun and drops half a dozen shells into his coat pocket. He pushes the box across the table to Peter, who takes only two. Tired and slow.
Peter puts the shells into the chambers and closes the breech.
“There ain’t nothing to talk about, right?” Michael says. He watches Monk shake his head; his cousin is looking at the gun in his hands. Michael smiles.
“I was just thinkin’,” he says, “it might be best you did the old man yourself, Pally. Keep it in the family.…”
And he watches his cousin slowly nod, as if he had expected that, and then slowly lift his eyes.
And then, just as slowly, he lifts the shotgun until its barrels are eyes too.
One of them blinks, and it is the last thing Michael Flood sees in his life.
He feels his arm jump, and Michael is blown backwards toward the stairway. Peter stares at the shotgun, deaf or numb from the noise, he doesn’t know which, trying to understand what has happened.
Not the act itself, but the things it changes.
Leonard Crawley is scrambling up out of the cot, Monk reaches into his pocket, looking confused, the broken shotgun awkward in his hands.
Peter watches it happen from a long ways off, watches himself stand up, knocking over the chair, and put the mouth of the gun in the middle of Leonard’s throat. His arm jumps again, and the noise fills the room, and overfills it, and he is insulated in silence. A certain feeling settles, and it seems to him it is snowing.
Monk closes the breech of the gun in his hands and brings it up even with Peter’s chest. He stops, not knowing what to do. He looks from the stairway to the cot. He whispers, “The fuck did you do?”
The two men stare at each other, and small noises return to the room, and the place fills with the smell of cordite.
“Peter,” he says again, “the fuck did you do?”
When they walk upstairs, the old man is back in his chair by the window, holding his cat. “Something’s happened,” Peter says.
The old man nods and stares out the window. He does not turn to the voice. Peter sees he is waiting for something, and understands what it is. He touches the old man’s shoulder, to let him know this isn’t his time, and the old man jumps at the touch.
“Everything’s over,” Peter says. “I ain’t going to hurt you.”
The old man nods and stares out the window, waiting to be shot.
She comes out of her sister’s house carrying a package. The box is long and narrow, wrapped in black paper. A single pink ribbon is wound once around the top.
She puts it between them on the seat of the Buick as he starts the car. “Where have you been?” she says.
He backs out of the driveway. His cousin is dead less than an hour; he wonders if the old man has called the police. The smell of the basement is all over him. She leans across the seat, across the package, and touches his neck with her lips.
“I brought you something,” she says, so close to his ear he can feel her breath. He thinks of the concussive noise as the gun jumped. Her hand runs the length of his thigh and then is gone.
She straightens to her own side of the seat and picks up the black package.
“What is it?” he says.
She shakes her head. “Wait,” she says. He turns onto Route 70 and heads for the expressway. She moves in her seat, hiking her skirt up her thighs. He reaches to hold her hand, to begin to find a way to tell her what has happened, but she stops him.
“You’ve got to wait for everything,” she says.
And he sees that is true, and he waits for her to see something has happened.
She picks up the present and taps it lightly against her lips, and leaves it there a moment to consider him. Her lip swells and creases against the edge and he sees the pink inside the crease.
She lays the package across his lap. “You have to be undressed when you open it,” she says.
He looks at the package, the tiny wet spot where it touched her mouth. “That’s the only way,” she says, “I can tell if you like it or not.”
The next time he looks across the seat, she is taking off her underwear. They are on the Atlantic City Expressway. She slides her panties off, her hands between the fabric and her legs all the way to her shoes. She drapes them across the seat back, near his shoulder.
“Something happened with my cousin,” he says.
“I don’t want to hear anything about your cousin.”
They have turned south on the Garden State Parkway, headed toward Cape May. The heel of her hand moves up and down his leg, dragging her fingernails an inch or two behind. He looks out the window; a heron rises out of the tall grass.
“You ought to get away from him,” she says.
He parks the car on the street in front of the house. He sits quietly a moment, staring at the place, trying to tell her. The words aren’t there; the thought itself is blurred. He wants something that doesn’t have a name.
She puts her lips against his ear and kisses him. “Let’s go open your present,” she says.
He steps out of the car; his ear is wet and feels cold in the breeze from the ocean.
He opens the front door with a key that is as old as the house. The familiar, dark living room waits on the other side, its air cool and ancient. He steps into it and feels her behind him, close enough to touch.
“Come on,” she says.
He follows her up the stairs and into the bedroom. He opens the windows and smells the ocean. When he turns back into the room, she puts the present in his hand. The box is heavier than it felt in his lap, the wrapping paper is slick under his fingers.
She steps closer and he feels her hand on his zipper. It will not open for her at first, and she holds the top to pull it down. Her hand comes inside, sliding under the elastic of his shorts until she finds his penis. It is soft in her hand, and she smiles.
“Stay just like this,” she says. “Take off your clothes but think of something, don’t let it get hard.”
He sits on the bed, still holding the gift. He wonders if there are television cameras outside the old man’s house, waiting to take pictures of Michael as he is brought out in a bag.
He leans forward and unties his shoes. She watches him, he watches himself. He takes off his shirt and then his socks. He thinks of the feel of the sheets, the drop of the bed. He is tired.
She watches him take off his pants. The present sits beside him on the bedspread, and he is naked.
“I didn’t think you could do it,” she says, looking at his penis.
He is still lost in what has happened. He sees this room and he sees the other room, with Michael lying on the floor.
Her hands go to the waist of her skirt, and a moment later it drops around her shoes. She stands still, the line of her blouse falling even with her pubic hair; the curtain rises and falls, a shadow as soft as stockings wraps her legs, again and again.
He looks at the box, then back at Grace. The room and everything in it is balanced so carefully he is afraid to move.
“Michael’s dead,” he says. He cannot hold still forever. “I did Michael.”
Something is put into motion then that he cannot stop. She stands in the middle of the room, in the middle of her skirt. And then she bends at the waist. Her bottom shines, and when she stands up again she brings the skirt with her. She turns, checking herself in the mirror. There is a certain familiarity to being in the bedroom when she looks at herself in the mirror, but that is gone even before she
is.
She picks her purse off the chair and steps toward the door.
“The car keys are downstairs,” he says. “You can leave it at your sister’s.”
He hears her on the stairs, then opening the front door. He stands up and walks to the window and watches her get into his car. He sits down in the chair, the wood is cold against his skin, and she drives to the end of the street and then turns left, headed for Cherry Hill.
Her present lies in black paper, unopened on the bed.
He is still sitting in the chair when the car with Pennsylvania plates stops across the street. An hour has passed, perhaps more. He watches the car a moment—three men inside it, talking—and then goes back to the bed and begins to dress.
He waits until he hears them knock downstairs, and then opens the window that faces east to the water and fits himself into the frame.
They knock once, wait a moment, and then come in. He hears them in the kitchen and the closets downstairs, opening doors, and then they are on the stairway.
A breeze comes in off the salt water, a smell as old as the world. He thinks of Nick, wondering what he will make of this. He remembers something he said, gratitude …
The door opens and the Italians walk into the room, holding their guns. The last one closes the door behind him, and then looks at Peter; a glint of recognition. As if he has caught him at something, as if they know each other’s thoughts.
There is a white dog in that look and it freezes his heart.
He sees the dog, and then the child, bundled in her snow suit against the cold, floating toward him through the air. The ground shudders as she lands.
Distinctly shudders.
And then he is floating too, breathless, the familiar stillness of falling fills his chest in an unfamiliar way, and he is watching himself from an unfamiliar place.
And in the moment he hits the ground in the back yard, he sees himself in perfect focus; he sees that he is forgiven.
March 22, 1991
Useless Bay
For
Dian and Casey
BY PETE DEXTER