The Surrendered Page 9

  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 Hector 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, the 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, embracing 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.