Flesh and Blood

by Michael Cunningham

  “A wreck,” Billy said. “We had a wreck.”

  “Wow.”

  “Shit. Sweet Jesus.” Bix chuckled. Lines of blood ran freely down his forehead. A garnet-colored drop trembled on his nose.

  “Bix, you got hurt,” Billy said.

  “I did?”

  “Man, you're bleeding.”

  “I am?”

  “The car could blow up,” Billy said. “Don't crashed cars blow up?”

  “I don't know.”

  “We better get out of here. Come on.”

  Everyone remained utterly still, as if they had all suddenly realized that the car was balanced on the edge of a cliff and any movement could send it toppling into the abyss. Bix remained with his hands on the wheel, smiling and bleeding majestically. Larry looked forward with his habitual expression of good-natured awe, and Dina continued to sit, polite and confused as a great-grandmother, in the back seat.

  Billy said, “Move. It's going to blow up.” They all scrambled out into the altered night, the settling whirlwind of dirt. Billy ran a half dozen paces, then turned. Dina was behind him. Bix and Larry had run the other way. The car stood at an angle, its nose in a ditch and its rear wheels a foot off the ground. It was, at once, both titanic and pathetic.

  “God,” Dina breathed. “Are you all right?”

  He nodded. “I just bumped my head a little. Bix is the one who's hurt. Hey, Bix.”

  Billy ran to the far side of the wreck, where Bix and Larry stood in attitudes of calm appraisal, hands fisted on their hips. “Unbelievable,” Larry said.

  “Bix,” Billy said. “Hey. Let me see your head.”

  Bix put his hand to his forehead with a certain reverence, as if his wound was something precious. “It's okay,” he said. “I just knocked against the wheel a little.” When he brought his hand down the fingers were slick with blood. He smiled.

  “We flew,” he said.

  “Yeah,” Billy said. He stood close to Bix. He could smell the blood, mixed with grass and the faintly fried odor of Bix himself. “You sure you're all right?”

  “Never better. You?”

  “I'm okay. A little bump.”

  Bix looked at his bloodied fingers. He put his hand to Billy's forehead and made a slow, deliberate circle.

  “War paint,” he said.

  Billy's forehead tingled. He was wearing Bix's blood. Dina, the pirate queen, came up whitely from across the field.

  “God,” she said. “Are we all right? What was that that happened?”

  “We lived,” Billy said, and he felt the thrill rising in his voice. “We all lived.”

  “We wrecked Bix's father's car,” Dina said.

  “It isn't wrecked,” Bix said. “I bet we can push it out of that ditch.”

  “Wait a second,” Larry said. He ran back to the car.

  “Don't,” Billy called. “It's going to blow.”

  Bix started to laugh. Then Billy started, then Dina did. Larry went into the car and came out again with the vodka bottle. “There's still some in here,” he called.

  “It's a miracle.” Billy laughed.

  “Look.” Dina pointed. Her rings put out a dull flash. Fifty yards away the cow stood placidly, staring at them. Billy yelped with laughter. Bix pounded his back. Billy fell in the grass and Bix tumbled onto him. Billy smelled the blood and the crisp personal essence of Bix. Billy was laughing so hard he could barely breathe. He had a hard-on. Larry took a sip of the vodka, passed the bottle around. When it was empty Bix stood up and threw it at the cow. The bottle fell thirty yards short, and broke against a stone. The cow didn't move.

  “Argh,” Bix hollered. He smeared both his hands with blood from his forehead and went running at the cow, screaming and waving his hands. As he watched Bix run toward the cow Billy was overcome with a feeling of recognition. There was the car at its crazy angle, still playing music, its headlights illuminating the ground. There was the spotted cow and there was Bix, running bloody and ecstatic in his army jacket. It was not dèjà vu. Billy didn't feel as if he'd seen all this before. He felt instead that it had been waiting for him, this strange perfection, and now that he was seeing it he was becoming someone new, someone particular, after the long confusion of his childhood. A surge rose in him and, with a whoop, he jumped up and ran after Bix. The earth was soft and uneven under his boots and he felt himself entering a moment so real he could only run toward it, shouting. He caught up with Bix just as the cow turned, with a disgruntled moan, and trotted away. He and Bix chased it until it broke into an ungainly swaying lope that had no true element of haste. The cow was just placid appetite moving, temporarily, at a faster rate. Billy and Bix kept chasing it, screaming, until at the same instant, with a singular accord, they stopped and stood screaming at one another. Bix's face was wild and shining, streaked with blood. They screamed, and something invisible happened. An enormous love arced and crackled between them. Billy stopped screaming. He stood, mute and suddenly frightened. Bix looked at him with no expression, with a face gone blank and stupid as a statue's. Then he turned and ran back to the car. Billy stood alone in the grass, with passion and fear turning hugely inside him. Bix took the moment away and Billy ran after him, greedy for more of whatever could happen. When he and Bix reached the others they all fell briefly into a spasmodic, gleeful dance. The radio played “Light My Fire.” The moment filled everything. It seemed, somehow, that they'd won some kind of victory.

  When the song ended they all sat down in the grass. Crickets buzzed, and the DJ played “Incense and Peppermints.” Billy touched the place on his forehead where Bix's blood had dried.

  “We got to push the car out,” Bix said.

  “Think we can?” Billy asked.

  “Yeah.”

  No one spoke for a while. Dina sat close to Billy, pulling up handfuls of grass, and he watched Bix. Bix was silent and fierce. He had a soldierly self-containment. Billy's heart swelled. He'd do anything, suffer any loss.

  “We flew,” he said. His voice sounded smaller than he'd expected it to. He was aware of the sky—pale stars and the flashing red lights of a plane. The now started to shrink. A whistling, windy nowhere wanted to return.

  “We fucking flew,” he said.

  Bix stood up. He had square shoulders and a graceful, weighted way of standing. He stood as if his pockets were full of stones.

  “Come on,” he said. “We got to get that goddamn car out.”

  By pushing on the front fenders, they were able to inch the car out of the ditch, as Bix had predicted. He slid into the driver's seat and, after several tries, got the engine to turn over. There was no damage. A quiet caught and held. Something had ended, at least for the night. There was no damage. Larry got into the front seat, Billy and Dina into the back. Bix steered the Ford back onto the road.

  “Some night,” Billy said.

  “Far out,” Larry said. Bix and Dina didn't speak. Billy wasn't ready for the nowhere yet.

  “I think I need a little more war paint,” he said. He reached over and touched the blood on Bix's cheek. Bix cuffed him with the back of his hand. He caught Billy on the chin, snapped his head back. The car veered to the far side of the road

  “Bix,” Dina said. “What's the matter with you?”

  “Don't touch me,” Bix said. “I don't want you touching me.”

  “You all right, Billy?” she asked. Her knee pressed against his. He shoved her knee away.

  “I'm fine,” he said. “Leave me alone.”

  The quiet sealed itself, but as long as the pain throbbed in him he was somewhere. The radio played on. Billy held his jaw in his hand and put his boots out the window. His heart was pounding with a love so awful it made him giddy and a little faint. The car sped along and Billy watched the tree limbs flash by. He felt Dina's perfume working itself into his skin. Bix drove in silence and Billy ran his fingertips tenderly along his jawbone, fondling the injury as if it belonged to someone else, someone he adored. The car hurled itself into the g
rowing somewhere. He believed he could drive all night.

  When he got home a pale, tentative light was seeping down the stairwell. He walked as lightly as he could in his boots but they were made for noise. That was the point of them.

  “Billy?” His mother's voice drifted down with the light. He paused on the landing, sucking air between his teeth.

  “Yeah, Ma.” Let me get to my room. All I want, all I need, is quiet and darkness. He got to the top of the stairs and halfway down the hall but his mother came out of her room and caught him with her anxious smile. She was puffy and radiant in a rose-colored bathrobe.

  “It's late,” she said.

  “I know. I know it's late.”

  He stood in his boots and his leather jacket, not looking at her. He knew he smelled of vodka and cow manure. He knew he had blood on his face.

  “Look at you,” she said. “What have you been doing?”

  “Nothing,” he said. He wanted a mother like Bix's, who carried a cocktail from room to room. Who didn't need anything but Rents and Scotch and her own bitter, wised-up personality.

  “What happened to your forehead?” she asked. “Did you hurt yourself?”

  “No. I'm totally fine. I'm going to bed.”

  She tried to touch his forehead but he took a heavy-heeled step away from her. She managed to catch his sleeve. His lungs tightened and he pulled in air through his clenched teeth, striving for a full breath. Lately he'd been suffering these attacks of breathlessness, though he hadn't told anyone about them. He suspected he had lung cancer.

  “This is no way for a Harvard man to act,” his mother said with whispered cheerfulness.

  “I'm not a Harvard man, Ma.”

  “You will be in September, Billy. Do you know how special you are? Do you know how much is going to happen to you?”

  “Maybe I don't want to go to Harvard after all,” he said.

  “Don't be ridiculous. After all that work.”

  “I haven't even told anybody about it. I mean, Bix and Larry and everybody. They don't even know.”

  She put her face closer to his. She smelled of powder and sleep and something else, a vague but insinuating sweetness that frightened him. “Bix and Larry,” she said. “I want you to watch yourself with them. Do you hear me? Bix and Larry are basically nothing but juvenile delinquents.”

  “Yeah. Well, that's what I like about 'em.”

  “Honey,” his mother said, and her voice took on deeper, more harshly whispered urgency. “What's wrong with you? What's going on?”

  “Nothing's wrong,” he said evenly. “I'm tired. I need to go to sleep.”

  “You're not the same,” she said. “You're not the same boy. I don't know who you are these days.”

  He wanted to put his hands in her hair, to grab hold and tell her—what? A new world was coming, and she would have to stay home. He stood briefly in a transport of love and fury, surrounded by dim unbreathable air, wanting to touch her for what felt like the last time.

  “Right,” he said. “I'm somebody else. I'm already gone.”

  1970/ Constantine had been specific—no interruptions, not for any reason. Not when he was with Bob Nupp. Nupp, obese in a red-striped shirt, was the trickiest of the county inspectors. You had to tickle Nupp; you had to make talk. You had to woo him like a girl, flatter him, and then slip him the money the way a schoolboy might drop his hand onto a girl's breast, with suave and showy indifference. It was a performance, and if you lost momentum at a crucial point you could lose Nupp completely. Constantine had seen it happen. Nupp lived in a sluggish agony of mixed feelings, and if the meeting got interrupted he was capable of heaving his burdened frame up out of his chair, going off empty-handed, and showing up the next morning, sharp-eyed and wheezing, to look over the work and start issuing citations.

  So when Sandy opened the office door and put her nervous head into the room Constantine thought to himself, That's it, she's finished. He couldn't fire her now, not in front of Nupp. For now he frowned and said sharply, “Sandy, I told you. No interruptions. Did I tell you that?”

  “Mr. Stassos, I'm sorry. I know. I just, well. It's the police. They said it was important.”

  Constantine sucked in a breath that tasted of pine-scented air freshener and Nupp's sweat. The police. Was it Susan, who now lived outside the sphere of his protection? Was it Billy, racing with those friends of his? The world was all danger. Having children gave you a lifelong acquaintance with fear.

  “Thanks, Sandy,” he said. He hesitated over the phone on his desk, glancing at Nupp. If it was bad news, he didn't want to hear it in front of this fat imbecile. Nupp had lips thick and mottled as sausages. He wore his big-collared shirts with the top three buttons open, showing the hirsute sag of his breasts as if they were rare and beautiful.

  'I've got to be going, anyway,” he said. “Ill show myself out.”

  Constantine nodded. “See you tomorrow morning, Bob,” he said, and with a clarity for which he would later despise himself he regretted the fact that this telephone call was going to cost him a fortune in cited violations. He would definitely fire Sandy.

  He waited until Nupp had negotiated his way out of the chair and through the door. He punched the button on his phone.

  “Constantine Stassos,” he said. “What can I do for you?”

  “Mr. Stassos?” The voice, male, was flat and measured. It might have been the voice of the telephone itself.

  “Yeah. Stassos. What's up?”

  “Mr. Stassos, this is officer Dan Fitzgerald. We need you to come to the Nassau County sheriffs office. As soon as possible. It's located on Old Country Road in Mineola, are you familiar with that location?”

  “What is it, officer? Is one of my kids—?” He stopped. He couldn't bear to give this voice so much power over his future. Before the voice had a chance to speak again he added, “I want to talk to the man in charge there. Get me the sergeant.”

  “Mr. Stassos, if you'll come down to the sheriff's office—”

  “Just tell me, you son of a bitch. Tell me. Is my daughter all right?”

  There was a pause, filled with the soft crackle of the phone lines. Constantine could hear the ghost of another conversation. He heard the words “whole days,” faintly, in a woman's voice.

  “I don't believe she's your daughter, sir,” the voice said hesitantly. Constantine thought that for some reason they were calling him about another man's daughter, an unknown girl. Susan, he thought, in a silent prayer.

  “Sir,” the voice continued, “the woman we're holding is your wife.”

  He and Mary drove back from the sheriff's office in a silence that would not break. Constantine took her to the downtown street where her car was parked, and she got out of his car and into her own without a word, without a gesture of recognition. She was blank, uninhabited. Her makeup had blurred, giving her a slightly melted aspect, baleful and furious.

  Constantine followed her home, keeping close behind the sloped rear end of her Dodge Dart. Not the first time, the police had said. They wouldn't arrest a respectable woman, a member of the community, if she'd just once slipped a few inexpensive items into her purse. No, Mary had been watched over a period of months. Security didn't like to make trouble. They let the first two go, then they gave her a warning. Ma'am, I think you've made a mistake here. I'm sure you didn't mean to put that hairbrush in your bag. When she did it again, they had her arrested.

  The cops were polite, even embarrassed. This was America. If you were accomplished, if you'd made money, even the police wanted to believe in your innocence. Their embarrassment was more dreadful to Constantine than their hatred would have been. They suggested that Mary see a psychologist. He'd nodded, signed the papers, shaken the hand of the man who brought his wife to jail. What else could he have done?

  Mary pulled into the driveway and he followed her. Inside the house, she stood in the kitchen holding her pocketbook in two hands and looked around with a dazzled expression, as if this fam
iliar room had been suddenly rearranged.

  “Mary,” Constantine said, behind her. She was nicely dressed, in a short dark skirt and green jacket. Constantine was surprised to find himself noticing her shape, the swell of her hips and the strong symmetry of her stockinged legs.

  “Don't,” Mary said.

  “Don't what?”

  “I don't know. I don't want to talk. I don't have any right to ask that, do I?”

  He heard the ragged intake of her breath. He came and stood in front of her. She was crying, though she stood straight and held her pocketbook in both hands. He could hear the effort of her breathing.

  He knew he should be angry. He knew in fact that he was angry, but his anger burned somewhere outside of him. It dipped and glistened, just out of reach. All he could seem to feel was confusion and shame, as if he himself had committed a crime.

  “Mary,” he said again.

  “Oh, please, Constantine,” she said, and her voice was strong through her tears. “There's no conversation for us to have.”

  “Cologne,” he said. “A key ring. A bar of soap.”

  She nodded. “They were for Billy,” she said.

  “Huh?”

  “I was thinking about him when I took them. Oh, Con, I'm going to bed. I think I just need to go to bed for a while.”

  “Why?” he said. “We have enough money. We could have bought that stuff. What did it cost? Ten, fifteen dollars?”

  “About that, I suppose.”

  “Then why?”

  “I don't know.”

  Constantine looked at her, and saw the girl she had been. He saw her breezy self-assurance, her hard shining indignation and the heartbreaking ease with which she had danced, conversed, sipped from a glass. He saw that now, in this kitchen, she was and was not that girl. Something had wilted and dampened, touched the hard underlayer of bone. Something erect and determined remained.

  “I don't understand,” he said.

  “That makes two of us,” she said. “Maybe you should scream at me and break the dishes. Maybe you should knock me down. I wonder if that might make us both feel better.”