Rick remembered. The whole thing had collapsed because he had not noticed the surveillance, felt so comfortable with the off-loading of the air conditioners that he’d even walked down the block to get a sandwich and some cigarettes, and well, the rest of it was one giant fuck-up, with cops everywhere and the crew melting away into the street crowds and Christina sitting in the truck without the keys, having honked the horn to warn everyone and waiting loyally for Rick to come back, which he couldn’t do, since Mickey Simms had pulled Rick into the first doorway he could find and stuck his gun in Rick’s ear, saying, Don’t go back, man, they already got her, you can’t save her, and I’m fucking not going to let you.
“Now, the other thing,” continued the detective, “is that Tony Verducci has a new guy working for him, named Morris. Got kicked out of medical school or something, used to drive an ambulance. I don’t know where they found him. Somebody said Vancouver, somebody said San Diego. I don’t know, and I don’t care. Morris is their go-to guy, you know? Gets in there and actually takes the football over the line—” The detective popped him in the shoulder. “Hey, you know what I’m saying, Ricky?”
Rick nodded.
“Nobody knows how many he’s done. He’s been around, that’s all I can say. We’ll get him one of these days, but right now he’s out there, he’s the dog on the chain. So you see my problem, Rick. I got the D.A.’s Office cutting Christina Welles loose, and she’s got no family I can talk to—mother lives somewhere in Florida but never hears from her daughter—I got Tony Verducci still in business, with his new guy Morris in the picture, and I got you, babe.”
Rick gazed past the detective. Across the bay cut a magnificent sixty-foot sailboat, full of people who didn’t have Rick’s problems. He looked back at Peck. “Why don’t you talk to Christina yourself?”
“It’s fucking impossible to call anybody up at the prison, have a decent conversation. And I just heard all this at eight this morning anyway. And”—here the detective himself looked toward the bright distance of the ocean—“be honest with you, my wife is going into the shop tomorrow, have a breast taken off. St. Vincent’s Hospital. I got to be there, see. I’d drive up to Bedford Hills tomorrow real early, I really would, but it’s my wife, I got to be there, see where the cancer is, hold her hand when they tell her. Christina is going to be gone by the time I could get up there.”
“So you—”
“So, yeah, I came to you, because you’re the only card I got, Rick. She’s walking out of that prison tomorrow morning, probably around 9:00 a.m.”
“Does Tony know that?”
“No, I already thought of that and got the regular discharge time changed for her. I’m looking out for this girl, okay? Once she disappears into the city, it could take a while to find her.” Peck pulled a business card out of his pocket. “I was thinking maybe, since you got your balls back, and since you’ve spent four years out here remembering that you should be doing the time just like Christina, that maybe it would be the fucking morally appropriate thing to forget about the fucking fish for a little while”—he flicked the card at Rick—“and go to the prison and be there when she gets out.”
HE TOOK HIS DINNER in the village every night, driving his patched quarter-ton pickup along the lane, bumping over the same roots each time, grinding the gears a bit, crunching along the curving, up-and-down gravel, slowing once to let a deer gambol across the road, tail flashing flag-white, flag-white, then continuing until a church steeple rose in view and the shingled houses of the village lay before him. He pulled up in front of the restaurant—a place of local people, farmers taking their wives out, teenage boys shoving burgers into their mouths, the occasional stray artist renting a house through the winter—and parked next to a rusted-out school bus packed with cut firewood. Inside, he slid into his regular booth. The waitressing staff consisted of the woman who had worked there seventeen years and whatever three or four teenage girls from the village currently needed to make money for community college or abortions or getting the hell out. The waitresses long ago had quit bringing Rick a menu and instead, on his instructions, set the same chicken breast platter before him every night. If he was a curiosity to them—a large, bearded man in worn overalls and taped glasses who said little—they knew not to show it. He was old enough that they expected that he would look at them with a certain frank sexual attention, as did most of the older men, yet he remained young enough, dark and muscular and self-composed, that he elicited something in them they didn’t quite understand. They knew he lived alone, worked on a fishing boat out of Greenport. They were plain girls, but healthy from outdoor lives, and yet he seemed uninterested in their young bodies, their teenage breasts and slender ankles and hair smelling of cheap shampoo. Sometimes one of the girls got up her courage and asked him his name, but he just shook his head. Their innocence bored him.
Sunset. His ruined truck bounced back down the long lane, and a few minutes later he spent the last light of the day picking the tomatoes in the garden. He ate the ripest ones, getting juice in his beard, and slipped the green ones into his pockets. It was a seventy-nine-day variety. The pumpkin vines curled all over the place; they’d be ready when he got back. Some corn, too. He’d planted twenty rows of thirty plants—enough for the wind to swirl the tassel pollen from plant to plant. He yanked one ear off a stalk, shucked it halfway, and bit the white-yellow kernels, his beard rasping the rough green husk. The raw corn was unseasonably sweet, and this was no small pleasure to him. Rain tomorrow, he figured, looking at the sky—don’t have to water. His sunflowers, a ten-foot variety with huge heads, stooped toward the earth, beginning to die. Above him the bats wheeled and dove as the air cooled. In a month or so he would start to burn a few chunks of scrub oak in the woodstove at night. Behind the cottage he yanked the starter on the pump engine next to the well and let it run five minutes, long enough to fill the water tank in the basement of the cottage. Inside, he brushed his teeth under a bare bulb. He examined the splayed bristles of the toothbrush, then slipped out of his overalls and work shirt.
He wanted to go find Christina. But the prudent thing would be to do nothing. Tony always said, Learn from the Colombians, they know how to do nothing. They would drop a five-million-dollar shipment into a warehouse, lock it up, and then do nothing. For months. A year, even. Just let it sit there, shrink-wrapped, metal-belted to a pallet. They would watch it, of course, to see if anyone else was watching. And if nobody showed up, still they might do nothing. Doing nothing was a course of action, doing nothing was choosing to do what you were already planning to do, staying inside the original plan. Rick’s original plan was to do nothing for a very long time until everybody forgot about him. The problem with his plan was that it assumed that Christina was in prison. Peck understood this, somehow. Or maybe it was a lucky guess, but detectives were paid to make lucky guesses. Then again, Peck had been working undercover at the time; he might have seen Christina and Rick together; you didn’t have to be that smart to see what’s going on between a man and a woman. Not if it was craziness, obsession. No, that wasn’t necessarily true. Peck didn’t know anything. Rick was overthinking it. Peck was an ambitious asshole, working some line of bullshit. Rick had been out of the game so long he didn’t have a feel for the nuances of bullshit: What was truth, what was a near-truth, what was a lie, what was interpretation, what was the lie that was meant to draw attention to itself so that the other, crucial lie would go unseen, what was the truth with a lie inside it. All he knew was that Peck was trying to jump him back into something. Why else track him down, why else drive three hours out from the city and then back again? But of course these questions led nowhere. Peck would assume that Rick would think all of these things. That meant that Peck felt very good about his contraption of cleverness, that he believed Rick couldn’t pull it apart. Which was true. So, all that was left was the fact that Christina was getting out. She was walking her hot little ass and her cold dark eyes right on out of there, into who knew wh
at. It was an emotional thing, which Peck rightly saw. Once you got your emotions involved, you had a problem.
AN HOUR LATER, he was alone in a small room by the sea, the window lit by stars. The edge of the sheet brightened in the dark and his eyes were open. For the first year or two the night sky had made him lonely. Certain visions appeared and he would whisper for forgiveness. I did bad things. I never killed anybody, but I did bad things. He had tried to read the Bible, but there was nothing in there about eighteen-wheelers full of stolen fax machines. Or unstamped cigarettes, or industrial elevator panels that cost a quarter million a pop, or French wine, or expensive perfume, or big Japanese motorcycles, or any of the stuff landing in Kennedy Airport twenty-four hours a day, items to be consumed in the roaring maw of New York City. Christina had helped them because he had asked her. Of course Tony wanted to use her again. He knew how smart she was, had tried to get her to run one of his operations. He’d probably suffered some fuck-up in his deliveries and remembered how good Christina’s system had been. Very effective when the buyers were Russians or Chinese gangsters, distrustful assholes who barely spoke English, who wanted to keep as much distance as possible. The pickups were never directly arranged on the phone. The contact person was just faxed a single digit on a piece of paper. It must have driven the cops wild. She would always fax the number from and to a public copy shop, a different one each time. The cops couldn’t wire-tap all the public fax machines in the city. The number did not correspond to the pickup time or place but to a public spot in midtown Manhattan. There the contact person looked at something that was open to view from the street—that was the genius part—and then understood where and when the pickup was. The two parties did not have to talk on the phone, they did not have to meet ahead of time in person, they did not even need to know each other’s identity. It had never failed. They’d moved three dozen jobs using her system.
If you were smart, you fell in love with a woman who could do that, and you packed up all the other operations. You told your dick no more other women, because this one is the real thing. You make a promise to your dick that in the long run, it would be worth it. And then you go get all the money that you hid in Aunt Eva’s basement in Brooklyn (he’d kept her front-door key in his wallet for four years) and you pay for Christina to finish college and get a law degree or whatever else she wanted and get her into the civilized world. If you were smart, that is.
If you were stupid, you got her to do things she shouldn’t be doing. But Rick hadn’t been smart; he had been crazy for the steroids and had become a joke, a two-hundred-and-sixty-pound clown who could bench-press four-twenty and had two chicks on the side whom he’d told he owned a car dealership on Long Island. More like a body shop that sold secondhand junkers. Dick-wax, his whole life had been dick-wax.
Why Christina had put up with him was a mystery; maybe she saw what he could have been, with the drugs out of him; she was a woman who made her mind up about things and then did them. You’d be okay if you just stayed with me, she’d said once, not in anger but by way of observation. A true statement. She’d decided she would stick with him and she did. And then, once arrested, she’d decided that all contact between them would cease. She’d never answered his letters to her in prison—not that he blamed her. (Now, of course, he didn’t get any mail at all. Had no address.) He’d never been good enough for her, knew it even then, although he acted like he was fucking king of the world. The last thing she’d said to him, on the day she was convicted—being walked away in handcuffs back to Rikers Island, her dark eyes glancing into his—was this: “You should get out of the city, Rick.” She’d meant it. She had taken everything she knew about him and everything she expected might happen to him and distilled it into one short utterance of wisdom. You should get out of the city, Rick. Get the hell out of the city, Rick. And so he did.
When he found Orient Point one day, just driving out of Brooklyn for kicks, he had not expected that he would stay so long, get dug in, find work on a boat catching garbage-fish, learn to grow tomatoes. He’d only known that he needed solitude and removal. If there was pain and difficulty in this, good; it was penance. In the beginning, in fact, it had been the most he could do to simply live in his own skin. The cottage had an ancient phone line strung along the lane, and in the early days after moving there he would pick up the old black receiver, cracked and heavy as a hammer, and listen to the far buzz of the universe. He would think of the people he could call, the many people in the city who would say, Yo, Rick, man, you been away too long, you gotta come back, do some business, and he’d see the uselessness of the conversation. He missed Christina, yes, he could admit that. Even four years later. And not just the sex; that wasn’t what he thought about so much, except for the one night in the SoHo Grand Hotel, when he got beaten up. It was those mornings, Sundays, when she would buy the paper and they would go for a walk in the city, see a movie. She loved the movies. Always reading, too. One of those people who had a secret life with books. Reading to escape herself, reading to find herself. Swept the floor to relax. She was a girl with some old hurts. She carried them hard, too, he’d always known, not getting anywhere with them. I can’t trust anybody, she’d once confessed to him, almost mournfully, I want to but it got stolen from me. Of course she meant the rape when she was a teenager. She’d told him once, only once, and then seemed to wish she could take it back inside her. You told me, he’d said. I shouldn’t have, she’d answered, you don’t understand, you don’t know what that kind of thing does to somebody. She’d gotten the broom from the closet and started. You don’t know. You don’t know me.
Remembering her words, he’d softly set the old receiver on its cradle. Later he’d had the phone shut off, and then, to guard against his own backsliding, taken a wooden ladder he found in the barn and cut the wire that ran from the cottage all the way down the lane and rolled it up, a quarter mile of it, in the bed of his truck. He strung a piece of the wire between two pines and hung his clothes on it to dry.
You did things like that. You made a new world for yourself. Small and clean. You didn’t talk to people much. He’d spent about six months seeing a huge, heavy-assed, forty-three-year-old divorcee whose kids were already out of the house, fat with amused eyes, and at first it was something that made him not so lonely. They’d met on the Greenport dock, when he was standing there in his waders and a T-shirt. She was eating an ice cream cone. “Hey, Bob,” she’d said, “or Bill or Biff or whatever your big old name is, you stink like fish.” She wiped her lips with a napkin and put her fingers around his arm, measuring. “I can’t even get my hand halfway around it.” He’d looked at her. “Lady, you don’t want to talk to me.” She grabbed his arm with both hands now. “Oh, maybe I do.” He saw she didn’t need for him to like her, which was fine. He didn’t want to be inside a woman’s head, he could barely find his way around his own. All she wanted was sex, she told him. Honestly. He would drive over two or three times a week, playing with his dick in the truck, walk in half-hard already, and just push himself into her for all he was worth. Try to fuck his way over to the other side of something, which, all men learned, always failed. He did not find her attractive, yet this made her desirable in another way. She had great handfuls of flesh, everywhere, nipples big as coffee cup saucers, and he found himself liking it, the enormity of her. Her ass was something like fifty inches around, you had to press the cheeks apart. He understood that she wanted a big man who could push her around, who made her feel small. Once she lit a cigarette and told him to keep going. “I don’t want to talk about anything,” she’d say. His orders were just to do it, and he’d never stayed the night, never been invited to, just pulled on his old boxers after washing his dick with soap like his older half brother, Paul, taught him as a kid and gotten back in the truck, sometimes driven around the dark roads with the radio on. But it hadn’t worked out. One night she’d casually asked why he’d left the city and he’d said, “You really want to know?” And she’d answered,
“Yeah,” daring him, and he’d started to talk about Christina and their apartment and the restaurants they used to go to. The woman looked at Rick, eyes distraught, as if she had heard something in his voice that she did not suspect of him—a sound, a tone of remembrance of how it was when you loved someone without reservation—and then she started to weep. “I never heard you talk like this. I thought you were some big dumb fisherman.” She choked on her sudden grief, lit a cigarette but could not smoke it. “You ruined it for me,” she said. “I want you to leave.” So he had stopped seeing anybody, except the crew from the boat. Bunch of fuck-wads and drunks and losers, so he fit in well. In the winters he’d listened to the icy tree limbs rasp the cedar shakes on the outside of the cottage. Wondering if he was going crazy. But no longer. The work helped, getting on the boat, just doing the work. He had come around, he was okay.
And now this. The prudent thing was to do nothing, to go nowhere.
AN EDGE OF GRAY LIGHT high up on the wall, a man heavy on a mattress, sweat around his neck, under his arms. Work boots on the floor, laces loose. The beginning of a breeze, the red buoy clanging softly out there in the flat gloom. He stirred, the dream leaving him, he a Staten Island schoolboy in a neat Catholic-school tie and collar, bending down to inspect something large and dark, unknowable—a shape slumped and monstrous. He pulled back the sheet and slipped on his glasses. His joints were stiff now when he rose. The bed stood next to the window, and the three fat tomatoes from the garden sat there on the sill, dirty and green. He set his feet on the floor, pushed up from the bed, feeling the heaviness.
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