“I met Buckley R. Pitank.”
“Mia’s weird neighbor friend. Oh, good.”
“I read his book.”
“I didn’t know he wrote a book. That’s impressive.”
“It’s a handbook for lightning strike survivors.”
“How very strange.”
“I was struck by lightning.”
Paulo looked around the gallery. “That explains it.”
“I’m serious.”
Becca looked for Buckley, but the twirling crowd was like a maze. She said, “He sliced his finger, and Sue took him for a Band-Aid.” Becca took Paulo to Fish, Number Twenty-one, a painting of two severed fish heads. “Buckley Pitank’s blood was the color of rose madder.” She pointed to the blood-streaked fish.
“That’s a little strange, Becca.”
“I know.” Becca scanned the crowd for Buckley. She wanted to talk to him. She asked Johnny, “Have you seen him?”
“Sue’s getting him a Band-Aid. He came with punk rock goth girl.”
Paulo interrupted. “Mia. She went to Columbia.”
The night vibrated with electricity. Becca felt the energy and light pulsating, moving from one end of the room to the other, from one person’s hand to another, and her canvases were the perimeter. With the rain falling outside and the scent of it filling the gallery like a clean perfume, Becca was walking around inside one of her paintings. Buckley R. Pitank and The Handbook for Lightning Strike Survivors, she mused. Life is strange.
Buckley’s thumb was wound tight with Band-Aids, one on top of another and crisscrossed. Mia bumped her hip into his. She sipped a glass of wine and said, “It’s just a little cut. He’s okay. Right, Buckley?” Mia bumped him again and again, like she was magnetically attracted and repelled by Buckley’s hip. “It’s great to meet you,” Mia said to Becca. “I think this shit’s amazing.”
That’s more like it, thought Becca. My shit’s amazing.
Paulo rolled his eyes.
“You know what I mean?” Mia said. “It’s really good. God, Paulo, I’m a fucking painter. It’s shit. That’s what it is. Becca knows what I’m talking about. It’s in your head. You don’t have to be all ‘school’ about it.”
Paulo said, “Okay, Mia. I’m going to find Jack.”
“I’ll join you,” Mia said. “That kid Jack ought to be afraid of you.”
Becca said to Mia, “Thanks for coming.”
Mia leaned in close. “It’s so good. Really. It’s the shit. You’re amazing.”
Buckley stood across from Becca with a finger in the top groove of his ear, running it back and forth. He stared at the gallery floor. “I’m sorry you got struck by lightning.”
Sue waved from across the gallery, calling Becca over. Becca held up a finger to indicate Just a minute (as her father used to do), and then she said to Buckley, “I’m sorry your mother died.”
“I like your paintings.” He kept running his finger in the top groove of his ear. “I can’t believe we’re meeting, and you painted these pictures.”
“Thank you for The Handbook. I felt like a freak until I read it.”
“You’re not a freak.”
“No one believes you,” she said, “or they act like it didn’t happen.”
“You’re a survivor.”
“Thank you for writing me back.” She was flustered and jumbled. Sue waved again. “Look, I’ll be right back. Don’t go, okay?” But Becca wasn’t right back because she got shuffled from one interested person to the next, and when she looked for Buckley R. Pitank and his bandaged thumb, he was gone.
Buckley rode the train home, thinking it was a bit of good luck meeting Becca Burke, meeting someone who had read his book, meeting her face-to-face. He was hopeful—which he hadn’t been in a very long time—that he would meet her again.
Excerpt from
THE HANDBOOK FOR LIGHTNING STRIKE SURVIVORS
NASA scientists monitor lightning worldwide, and although lightning rarely strikes the ocean, it happens. The number of fish and marine animals that die is dependent on the voltage of the strike and the number of animals near the water’s surface.
Lightning flashing cloud to cloud can appear orange or pink over a black ocean.
[34]
The Damicis and the Jesus and Mary Chain, 1989
It was a dreary November.
Carmine saw the thin man through the plate glass and unlocked the door. “How’s it going?” he asked. “You want a drink or something?”
The thin man didn’t say anything. He pulled a cassette tape from his back pants pocket and slid it into the tape deck on the bar.
The music started and Carmine said, “What the fuck’s this shit?” When the thin man didn’t answer, Carmine said, “She wanted it, man. I’m telling you. It was mutual.”
The thin man turned the volume up.
In the kitchen, Buckley heard the menus slip one after another like playing cards from the tabletop. He heard Carmine mumbling and the tap-tap of menus being restacked. “Hurry the fuck up!” It was after midnight. “I ain’t got time for this shit.”
Buckley dropped the Tupperware bowl of mozzarella trying to seal it shut, and the white brine sloshed across the tiles. He was down on his knees, his fingers milky with cheese, when Carmine called, “Did you mop out here? It doesn’t look like it.” Mr. Damici, Carmine’s father, still didn’t trust Buckley to lock up.
Buckley thought, Of course I mopped the floor. Carmine was a real jerk. Buckley tossed the mozzarella balls into the trash and wiped the floor with a rag. He wasn’t going to mop the kitchen floor again. He checked to make sure the grill was off, and then he heard the music. It was a Jesus and Mary Chain song, “Dark-lands.” He knew the song—had heard it in Mia’s apartment only a week earlier. It was a strange song, Buckley had thought. It was stranger now.
He liked Mia a lot, despite her weird music, like the Jesus and Mary Chain. Despite her punk rock clothes and eccentric friends, like Paulo and Sheila. Mia had taken him to see Lightning Fish. If it weren’t for Mia, he wouldn’t have met Becca Burke or seen that painting with the fish on the beach and the lightning. He was going to get in touch with Becca Burke. Buckley thought, I’m glad I met Mia. I’m glad she harassed me. I’m not glad about Sheila. Sheila wrote him poetry that didn’t rhyme. She said he was her “dark lord.” He needed to stay clear of her.
Buckley still had to wrap and label the other cheeses, the leftover spinach, and the asparagus. He shouted, “I need ten more minutes,” but Carmine didn’t answer. Buckley liked the song “Darklands,” but he couldn’t imagine why Carmine was listening to it. It was no secret that Carmine liked classic rock like Led Zeppelin and Jethro Tull. Buckley had worked for the Damicis long enough to know the tastes of everyone in the family. “There’s no album better than Houses of the Holy,” Carmine had told Buckley a month ago when Buckley was closing up.
“Do you like the Pixies?” Buckley had asked. Mia and her friends liked them. So did Buckley.
“Is that faggot music?”
Buckley had resumed sweeping.
Tonight, Carmine was listening to the Jesus and Mary Chain and Buckley was rushing so Carmine wouldn’t knock him in the back of the head with an open palm. Carmine had picked up his father’s habits of endearment. Buckley put the spinach away, checked the stove one more time, and flipped the light switch. Then he heard the pop. Not a loud pop, but a muffled pop like one firework exploding far away. With his apron still in his hand, he ran into the dining room. There was a tall thin man, scruffy-faced, bedraggled, no more than twenty-five, thirty at most, pointing a handgun at the air where Carmine had presumably stood, and Carmine was dead and bloody on the floor with a hole in his new Louis Vuitton shirt, a hole just above where his heart would be. Buckley thought, Treat the apparently dead first. The music still played. The gunman, who wore leather driving gloves, turned to Buckley.
Buckley thought, I am going to die. I am going to die, and part of him thought, Finally. F
inally. It had come to this: He would die in a restaurant on the Upper West Side of Manhattan at the age of thirty. He was ready.
The gunman said, “He raped my sister,” and unscrewing the silencer from the gun, set the pistol and the silencer on the bar beside the gold-tasseled menus. “Carmine raped my little sister.”
Buckley said, “The night deposit bag is beside the register.”
“I don’t want money.”
Buckley was a witness to a murder. He was going to die.
“My sister’s name is Margaret.”
Strange as it might sound, Buckley said, “That’s a pretty name.”
“She’s a pretty girl.” The killer with the sister named Margaret picked his gun and silencer up, and Buckley closed his eyes.
“I got no beef with you,” the shooter said.
Buckley opened his eyes.
The shooter secured the gun in the waist of his jeans, exposing his thin torso. With his trigger-happy hand, he stopped the cassette deck and slid the Jesus and Mary Chain tape into the back pocket of his jeans—from whence it had come. He shrugged as he picked up the night deposit bag: That’s not why I’m here, but sure, I’ll take it.
The shooter left the way he’d come in—through the front door.
• • •
Frank Damici shouted, “Why Carmine and not you?! You’re fucking worthless! A waste of life. A waste of breath, you fuck!” He slugged a shot of something dark and slammed the glass on the bar, and one of the detectives, an older man, said, “Frank, it’s not his fault.”
Another detective said, “This is a goddamn crime scene, Mark! Take it outside. Now!”
The restaurant was framed with yellow police tape, much in the same way that Carmine Damici’s body had been framed with white chalk on the floor of the restaurant, and Buckley was taken to the Twenty-fourth Precinct, where he was questioned by Detectives Jones and Smith (really, Jones and Smith). The two men whispered five feet from where Buckley sat at a table alone. Jones folded his arms. He said, “The guy’s a little slow.”
Smith said, “What is it they call it? Functionally retarded?”
“My wife teaches those kids. It’s educated mental retardates.”
“He’s slow.”
Jones patted Buckley’s back and then both detectives sat down, asking Buckley again if he wanted some coffee. No, he didn’t drink coffee, but he wouldn’t mind a candy bar. “Something with nougat.”
Smith said, “We can do that.” He got Buckley a Zero bar from the vending machine.
Jones and Smith asked the same questions over and over, including “Do you like your job?” “Is the candy bar all right?” “Do you like your boss, Frank Damici?” “How long have you worked for Frank?” “Where you from?” “What exactly did you see?” “What’d you hear?” “Tell us again what you were doing when you heard the shot.” “Take us through step by step.” “Can we get you a glass of water?” “So, you heard music and then a shot?” “What’s the Jesus and Mary Chain?”
Buckley’s answers to the police included the following: “I’ve worked for Frank and his family for eight years. Since 1981. Carmine and I were friends.” “I heard this music, this song by the Jesus and Mary Chain, which was strange because Carmine likes classic rock, and then I heard the shot and when I ran into the restaurant, he was there on the floor, shot in the chest. When I opened the front door, I saw this person in a black overcoat running away. I was going to chase after him, but I knew I needed to call an ambulance.” “The candy bar was good.” “I didn’t know what to do. Did I do the right thing? Can I have a glass of water?”
“How do you know our shooter is a him?”
“I think it’s a him, but I don’t know. The shooter was tall.”
“How tall? What color was his hair?”
“Not like a giant or anything. It was dark. I don’t know the hair color.”
“So the shooter played the music? Is that some kind of punk rock stuff?”
“I don’t know.”
Buckley heard Jones whispering to Smith, “Carmine’s a known heroin user and small-time distributor.”
“Frank’s boy?” Smith shook his head. “Fucking unbelievable. You give your kids everything, you know.”
Jones said, “The shooter took the night’s deposit.”
“Why would a drug dealer play a tape and walk through the front door? It doesn’t make sense.”
“It doesn’t.”
Carmine was not a junkie. He was a cokehead. Frank Damici didn’t know. He thought Carmine drank too much espresso. That’s all.
Carmine Damici’s funeral, an elaborate two-day affair, was held at St. Michael’s Cathedral. Buckley would have wished as much for his mother or Clementine, but then again, maybe not. Carmine, like the others, was dead, and dead is dead.
On Friday night, Buckley sat in a back pew for the prayer vigil, where Frank Damici eulogized his own son, and the Damici clan, five dozen or so, along with their friends and friends of friends, packed the cathedral. Frank said nice things about his son Carmine, like “He was a good boy,” and then the crowd hushed, so the first person heard to cry out was Carmine’s mother, Christina Damici.
On Saturday morning, with the silver mesh trash cans spilling over onto the sidewalks, the sky gray, Buckley walked thirty-six blocks to Carmine’s funeral liturgy. He watched row after row rise and take Communion. He had to shift in his seat to let the good Catholic mourners pass, and he waited in the pew with the little kids who were not yet old enough for their First Communion, for the Body and Blood of Our Lord Jesus Christ. A little girl in his pew, maybe five or six years old, went, “Psst, psst.” Buckley looked at her. She said, “Your hair looks funny.” He felt the top of his head, and sure enough, a tuft of his thick brown hair was sticking straight up. He smoothed it with his hand, and whispered back, “Thanks.”
“You’re welcome.”
He didn’t understand the singing or the organ music, but it was nice in a dark way, much like that band the Jesus and Mary Chain. He thought the Reverend Whitehouse could’ve learned something about reverence from the Catholics. He wondered if the reverend had ever been to a Catholic Mass before.
He did not follow the body of Carmine Damici or the Damici family to the cemetery, because when Frank Damici saw him in the cathedral, he shouted from his pew at the front of the church, “It should’ve been you! It should’ve been you!” and the siblings of Carmine Damici had to physically restrain their father. Mrs. Christina Damici wept louder. Frank Damici was still shouting, “It should’ve been you.”
Buckley left the church. Even outside on the front steps, he could hear Frank Damici wailing: “It should’ve been you!”
Buckley didn’t think so. Not this time.
He walked home and finished packing.
The police questioned him once more. “More of a formality than anything else,” they explained. “For Frank. For the family.”
Jones said, “We talked to Frank. He said you couldn’t have done it. You’re not a killer. He did say …” But Buckley could imagine what else Frank Damici had said, and Jones didn’t finish the sentence. Rather, he smacked Buckley on the back and winked at Smith.
Two days after leaving the Twenty-fourth Precinct for the last time, Buckley called Rebecca Burke, even though he hardly knew her. He left a message on her answering machine: “This is Buckley Pitank. I wrote The Handbook for Lightning Strike Survivors. We met at Sue’s in Soho. I’m, uh …” he stuttered, and wished he hadn’t called. “I’m uh … leaving New York today. I’m going to Wanchese. You probably don’t know where that is. It’s in North Carolina.” The message was already too long. “If you’re ever there, I mean in Wanchese, not North Carolina. Wanchese is on the coast. It’s a fishing village. It’s supposed to be nice.” The answering machine beeped and shut off. He called back, “Just, if you’re ever there, in Wanchese, give me a call.”
Buckley hugged Mia goodbye in the stairwell. He said, “Take care of yourself,
” knowing full well that she could never understand the gravity of those four words: Take Care of Yourself. He told Mia that she could have what ever she wanted from his apartment, and then Buckley R. Pitank left the Bronx, his home for eight years, with one red and black checkered suitcase.
Buckley took a bus from the Port Authority to Elizabeth City, North Carolina, and slept most of the way. He woke in a sticky, dry-mouthed fog here and there and thought about the song “Darklands.” He had been to those lands. He had walked there among the “river of disease” where heaven is too close to hell, and he was tired from the darkness. He couldn’t save Carmine. No one could, and he had no doubt that Carmine had raped that man’s sister. Carmine had probably done much worse in the eight years Buckley had known him. Buckley thought, I lied to the police. I let a murderer go free. I saved a man’s life. My mother would be proud.
At one point, as the bus headed south down I-95, an old woman’s silver-haired head wobbled onto his shoulder, her temple heavy and furrowed. He didn’t care. Buckley fell back asleep. Fifty miles west of Elizabeth City, he woke again—this time to the sound of rain. At first just metallic pitter-patters, drip-drops, like a spring rain falling on an old tin roof. Clementine’s roof. But then a full-on tempest, and the old silver-haired woman, awake now, saying her Rosary, ran the tiny red beads through her wrinkled fingers. The wind blew the rain in sheets from the west, as if God stood on the ground hurling pellets at Buckley’s window.
The streets in Elizabeth City were flooded with a foot of water, and the bus seemed more like a boat to Buckley than an automobile on tires and road. He felt the rushing water beneath his feet through the rubber-covered floorboard, and he wondered for a moment if he’d die on a bus. His mother died with one foot on a boat. He didn’t want to die. Revelation: He did not want to die.
Despite the flood, Paddy John was there at the Elizabeth City bus depot, water pooling on and dripping off the rim of his canvas hat. He shook Buckley’s hand. Tide also reached for Buckley’s hand, but Buckley, overwhelmed from his long journey or maybe by seeing Tide all grown up, pulled Tide to him and gave him a hug. Tide smelled of bourbon.
The Handbook for Lightning Strike Survivors Page 26