Christine Falls: A Novel Page 14

  ANDY STAFFORD KNEW HE WAS NOT THE SHARPEST TOOL IN THE BOX. It was not that he was stupid, but he was no genius either. This knowledge did not trouble him. In fact, he considered that he was pretty much of a good balance. He had known guys who were all brawn, and one or two who were all brain, and both kinds had been a mess. He was between the two extremes, like the kid standing in the middle of the seesaw, having a good time without the effort of all that swinging up and down. So he just could not understand why it had not struck him, before he had agreed to Claire taking the kid, what the consequences might be for his reputation. It was in Foley’s one night that he first heard, behind his back, that particular laugh he would come to hear often, too often.

  He had arrived in from a night and most of a day on the road, and had stopped to drink a beer before going home to the house that these days seemed to smell of nothing else but baby things. Foley’s was crowded and noisy, as it always was on Friday night. On his way to the bar he passed a table of five or six guys, truckers like him, most of whom he knew, sort of. One of them, a big meaty fellow with sideburns the size of lamb chops, name of M’Coy, known as Real—ha ha, big joke—said something as he went past, and that was when he heard it, the laugh. It was low, it was dirty, and it seemed to be directed at him. He got his beer and turned and stood with his elbows behind him on the bar and one boot heel hitched on the brass foot rail and lazily surveyed the room, not looking at M’Coy’s table but not avoiding it either. Be cool, he told himself, be easy. Besides, he did not know the laugh well enough yet to be absolutely sure it was him they had been laughing at. But it was him M’Coy was grinning at, and now he called out: “Hello, stranger.”

  “Hello, M’Coy,” Andy answered. He would not call him Real; it sounded so dumb, even for a nickname, though M’Coy himself was proud of it, as if it really did make him someone special. “How’s it going?”

  M’Coy took a drag from his cigarette and shoved his big gut against the table and pushed himself back, then leaned up his face and blew a fan of smoke at the ceiling, settling in for some fun. “Don’t see much of you, these days,” he said. “Gotten too good for us, now that you’ve moved out to Fulton Street?”

  Easy, Andy told himself again, nice and easy. He shrugged. “You know how it is,” he said.

  M’Coy, grinning wider, gave him a measuring look, while the others at the table, grinning too, waited for what was coming next.

  “I was telling the boys here,” M’Coy said, “I heard you had a miracle over at that new place of yours.”

  Andy let a beat or two pass by. “How’s that?” he said, making his voice go soft.

  By now M’Coy was almost laughing outright. “Didn’t your old lady have a kid without ever being knocked up?” he said. “I call that miraculous.”

  A heave of suppressed merriment passed along the table. Andy looked at the floor, his lips pursed, then sauntered forward, carrying his beer glass. He stopped in front of M’Coy, who was wearing a checked lumberjack shirt and denim overalls. Andy had gone chill all over, as if he was breaking out in a cold sweat, although his skin was dry. It was a familiar feeling; there was almost a kind of joy in it, and a kind of happy dread that he could not have explained. “Better watch your mouth, pal,” he said.

  M’Coy put on a look of innocent surprise and lifted his hands. “Why,” he said, “what’ll you do, give me the one you can’t give your old lady?”

  The others were still scrambling out of the way when Andy with a quick spin of the wrist threw the beer from his glass into M’Coy’s face and broke the rim of the glass against the table edge and thrust the crown of jagged spikes against the side of the fat man’s fat soft throat. The quiet spread outward from the table like fast, running ripples. A woman laughed and was abruptly silenced. Andy had a clear picture in his head of the barman directly behind him reaching down cautiously for the baseball bat he kept slung on two coat hooks behind the bar.

  “Put down the glass,” M’Coy said, trying to sound tough but his eyes showing just how scared he was. Andy was trying to think of something good to say in reply, maybe something about M’Coy not seeming so Real now, when from behind him someone’s fist swiped him clumsily along the side of the head, making his ear sing. M’Coy, seeing him stunned, gave a shout of terror and reared away from the spikes of glass, and his chair tipped over and dumped him backwards on the floor, and despite the hurt to his ear Andy almost laughed at the thud of the man’s big head as it banged on the boards and the soles of his boots came flying up. There were three or four of them behind him, and he tried to turn and defend himself with the glass but already they had him, one clasping him about the waist from behind while a second one got both hands on his wrist and wrenched it as if it was a chicken that was being choked, and he dropped the glass, not from the pain but from fear that he would gash himself. M’Coy was on his feet again, and advanced now with a shit-eating smile smeared on his fat face and his left fist bunched and lifted—Andy with a sort of dreamy interest was wondering why he had never noticed before that M’Coy was a southpaw—while the others held him fast by the arms so that M’Coy could take leisurely aim and sink the first, sickening punch into his belly.

  HE CAME TO IN A NARROW CONCRETE PASSAGEWAY THAT SMELLED OF sour beer and piss. He was lying on his back, looking up into a strip of sky with stars and rags of flying cloud. He tasted blood and puke. Pains in various parts of his body were competing for his attention. Someone was leaning over him, asking him if he was okay, which seemed to him pretty funny in the circumstances, but he decided not to risk letting himself laugh. It was the barman, Andy could not remember his name, a decent guy, family man, kept the place quiet, mostly. “You want me to call you a cab?” he asked. Andy said no, and got himself to a sitting position, and then, after a pause, and with the barman’s help, succeeded in hauling himself by stages to his feet. He said his truck was out front, and the barman shook his head and said he was crazy to think of driving, that he could be concussed, but he said he was all right, that he should get home, that his wife would be worrying, and the barman—Pete, that was his name, Andy suddenly remembered it, Pete Somebody—showed him a steel door at the end of the passageway that led out into an alley along by the side of the bar to the deserted street and the lot across the way where his rig was parked. The rig looked accusing, somehow, like a big brother who had waited up late for him. His brain seemed swollen a size bigger than his skull and his stomach muscles where M’Coy had landed that first punch were clenched on themselves like a bagful of fists.

  It was midnight when he coasted the rig down Fulton Street and drew to a squeaking stop outside the house. The upstairs was dark, and there was only a faint line of light under the blind in the window of Cora Bennett’s bedroom; he suspected lonesome Cora slept with the light on. He got himself down from the cab, jangling all over with pain but feeling still the excitement of the fight, a tingle like foxfire all along his nerves. The fall night air was chill and he had only his windbreaker to wear but he did not feel like going inside yet. He climbed the porch steps, dragging a leg—someone had kicked him on the ankle—and sat down on the swing, careful not to set it going and make the chains creak: he did not want Claire coming down in her night things and fussing over him, not just yet, anyway. His head ached, his left knee as well as his ankle was aching, his mouth was all cut up at one side and a molar there was loose, but he was surprised not to have been more badly hurt. He had done a deal of damage himself, had landed a few good punches, and kicked M’Coy in the nuts and got his thumb up someone’s nose and tore it half off, before one of them, he did not see who it was, came up behind him and cracked him over the skull with what must have been a chair leg. He leaned his head back on the swing and eased out a long sigh, holding his aching chest in both hands. It was gusty, and clouds were racing across a sky black and shiny as paint, and the walnut tree at the side of the house was rattling its dry leaves. There was a full moon, peering in and out of the clouds; it looked like M’Coy’
s grinning fat face. A miracle, M’Coy had said. Some miracle. He lit a cigarette.

  He was thinking over it all, or thinking at least how much figuring he had to do about it all—it had simply not occurred to him before tonight that everyone would know the kid was not his; how dumb can you be?—when he heard the porch door opening behind him. He did not turn, or move at all, just went on sitting there, looking at the sky and the clouds, and for a moment he saw the whole scene as if from outside it, the windy street, the moonlight coming and going on the yard, the porch all in shadow, and him there, hurting and quiet, and Cora Bennett standing behind him with an old coat pulled on over her nightshirt, saying nothing, only raising her hand slowly to touch him. It was like one of those scenes in a movie when the whole audience knows exactly what is going to happen yet holds its breath in suspense. He did not flinch when her fingers found the knot on his skull where the chair leg had landed. Then, instead of sitting down beside him on the swing, she came around in front of him and knelt down on both knees and put her face close up against his. He smelled the sleep on her breath and the stale remains of the day’s face powder. Her hair was untied and hung in trailing strands like a slashed curtain. He flicked the last of his cigarette into the yard; it made a red, spiraling arc. “You’re hurt,” she said, “I can feel the heat from your face.” She touched with her fingertips the bruises on his jaw and the swollen place at the side of his mouth, and he let her, and said nothing. When she leaned closer still her face framed by her hair was shadowed and featureless. Her lips, cool and dry, were nothing like Claire’s, and when she kissed him there was none of Claire’s eagerness and anxiety; it was like being kissed in a ceremony, by some kind of official; it was as if something was being sealed. “Hnn,” she said, drawing away, “you taste of blood.” He put his hands on her shoulders. He had been wrong: she was not wearing a nightshirt, but was naked under the coat.

  IT WAS STRANGE. CORA WAS, HE GUESSED, TEN YEARS OLDER THAN HE was, and her stomach had marks on it that made him guess she must have had a child herself at some time in the past. If so, where was the kid, and where was the kid’s father? He did not ask. The only photograph he saw, in a fancy silver frame on the night table beside her bed, was of a dog, a Yorkshire terrier, he thought it was, wearing a bow around its neck and sitting up on its hind legs and grinning with its tongue out. “That’s Rags,” she said, reaching out a bare arm and picking up the frame. “God, did I love that mutt.” They were sitting on her bed, she at the top end, naked, with a pillow on her lap, and he at the foot, leaning back against the wall, wearing only his shorts and drinking a beer. The bruises on his ankle and knee and all around his rib cage were coming up blue already; he could imagine what his face looked like. The only light was from a shaded lamp on the night table, and in it everything in the room seemed to droop downward, as if the whole place was wilting in the rank heat of the steam radiator humming and hiccuping under the window. He had hardly spoken in the hour he had been here, and then only in a whisper, uneasily aware of his wife’s sleeping presence somewhere close overhead. He could see his nervousness amused Cora Bennett. She watched him now with a faint, skeptical smile through the smoke of her cigarette. Her breasts were flat along their fronts, adroop like everything else in the place; they gleamed, amber-colored in the lamplight; she had pressed his throbbing face between them, and a drop of her sweat had run into his mouth and stung his burst lip. He had never been with a woman as old as she was. There was something excitingly shameful about it; it had been like sleeping with his best friend’s mother, if he’d had a best friend. At the end, when the fierce storm they had whipped up between them was over, she had cradled him against her, nursing his bruised and burning body, as he had sometimes seen Claire hold the child. He could not remember his own mother ever holding him like that, so tenderly.

  Then he found himself telling her about his plan, his big plan. He had never spoken of it to anyone else, not even Claire. He sat with his bare back against the bedroom wall, nursing the beer bottle between his knees—the beer was warm by now but he hardly noticed—and laid it all out for her, how he would get hold of a top-class auto, a Caddy or a Lincoln, and set up a limo service. He would borrow the money from old man Crawford, who liked to think of himself as John D. Rockefeller, the help of the workingman; he was sure he would have the loan repaid inside a year, with maybe enough left over to start thinking of a second limo and another driver. In five years there would be a fleet of cars—he wrote the title on the air with a sweep of a flattened palm: Stafford Limo Service, A Dream of a Drive—and he would be sitting behind the wheel of a crimson Spyder 550, driving west. Cora Bennett listened to all this with a thin smile that in any other circumstances would have made him mad. Maybe she thought it was just a truck driver’s dream, but there were things she did not know, things he had not told her—for instance, that Mother Superior’s promise to talk to Josh Crawford about getting him off the trucks and into some other, better-paid work. She had mentioned a taxicab, but he would never drive a lousy cab. All the same, maybe the nun could fix a meeting for him with Josh Crawford. He was sure he could persuade the old man, one way or another, to advance him the cash. They did not know, Sister What’s-her-name or Josh Crawford or any of them, just how much he knew about this thing they had going with the babies. He saw himself at the Crawford place down there in North Scituate, sitting at his ease over a cup of fine tea in a big room with palms and a glass wall, and Josh Crawford before him in his wheelchair with a blanket over his knees, ashen-faced, his hands shaking, as Andy calmly told him how much he had found out about the baby smuggling, and that a check for, say, ten grand would be a great help to him in keeping his mouth shut…

  Cora Bennett had moved down in the bed and now her foot came out from under the sheet and started trying to wriggle its way into his shorts. He got up and put on his shirt and pants. He was sitting on the end of the bed pulling on his boots when she scrambled to her knees and waded forward and draped herself over his back, the way Claire liked to do, and he could feel her naked breasts and belly pressing against him. “It’s late,” he said, trying not to sound irritated, which he was. She breathed a hot, low laugh into his ear, her hands reaching down to his crotch. He had to admit, she certainly was something. That thin mouth of hers could do some special things, things no one, certainly not Claire, had ever done for him before. She asked when she would see him again, but he said nothing, only turned and kissed her quickly and stood up, buckling his belt. “So long then, Tex,” she said, with that smile again, kneeling there on the bed naked in the lamplight, with those flat breasts, the nipples dark and shiny like his bruises. Tex, she was calling him. He did not think he liked that. It felt as if she was laughing at him.

  He went out by the front door and around by the side of the house—something skittered in the boughs of the walnut tree—and hauled himself up the wooden stairs and through the French door. The place was silent, and still there were no lights burning, he was relieved to see. He was bone tired, and his knee and his cut mouth hurt like hell. He limped into the bedroom, making hardly a sound, but of course Claire woke up. She raised herself on an elbow and peered at the luminous hands of the clock beside her. “It’s late,” she said, “where were you?” and he said “Nowhere,” and she said his voice sounded funny, and when he did not answer she switched on the lamp. When she saw his mouth and the swelling on his cheekbone she jumped up from the bed like she had been scalded, and then there was the usual palaver. What happened? Who did it? Was there a fight? He stood motionless in the middle of the floor, arms hanging and eyes cast down, waiting for her to finish. Did women really feel all this stuff, he wondered, or were the fluttering and squeaking and hand-wringing just their way of getting through the first minute of a crisis while they figured out what to do? She soon calmed down and went off to the bathroom and came back with wads of cotton wool and Lysol or something and warm water in an enameled bowl. She made him sit down on the side of the bed and began dabbing at h
im with the disinfectant, which stung. He thought of Cora Bennett, lying below in the dull yellow light of the lamp beside her bed, and his anger flared again. He felt weakened, as if he had let her take something away from him, something inside him that no one should ever even be allowed to see. Yet what angered him most was not the memory of what they had done together in her bed and how it might have affected him, but the fact that he had told her his plan for Stafford Limos.

  “What happened?” Claire said again, calm now that she had something to be busy at. “Tell me,” she said, almost commanding, “tell me what you were fighting about.”

  She was standing over him, pressing a pad of wet cotton against his face; he could feel the blanket warmth of her body. Her hands were capable and strong, surprisingly strong for such a skinny girl. He was being, he realized, mothered, for the second time that night, but how differently this time, with none of Cora’s hot tenderness. Claire put her hand to the back of his head to make him sit steady and pressed the swelling there and he flinched. Suddenly it came to him, out of nowhere, that it was not one of M’Coy’s buddies who had whacked him with a chair leg, but the barman, Pete the goddamned barman, with his baseball bat! He recalled him in the passageway, a tough little harp with a boxer’s nose, leaning over him and asking him if he was okay. Of course, it had to have been him—he would naturally have sided with M’Coy and the others. Andy clenched his fists on his knees. Somehow this betrayal was the thing that made him most angry now, angrier even than he had been when he broke the beer glass and stuck it at M’Coy’s throat. He could just see Pete, the little bastard, sidling out from behind the bar and taking up a batter’s stance, hefting the bat in his hands, waiting for just the right moment to give it to him across the back of the head. Well, he would get his, would Pete; some night at closing time after he had locked up and was stepping out by that steel door into the alley on his way home to his harp wife and his harp kids Andy would be there, waiting for him, with a tire iron—