“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.