“The fuck’s this guy?” he asked Frankie.
“It’s Charlie Crosby,” Frankie said.
“Who the fuck?”
“He’s a guy named Crosby,” Frankie said.
“ ’Scuse me,” the guy said. “He smells like shit. Tell him to get out of here. Hey, you, Charlie Crosby; you look and you smell like shit — get lost.” I remembered stories about how sometimes the guys on the fishing boats that worked out of Stonepoint would stage fights on a pier or in an alley behind a bar at night. They’d make some crew member fight the toughest guy in the fleet, and threaten to beat him half dead if he didn’t. They’d get him drunk and riled up and show him a little wiry guy they said was talking shit about him and say that if he didn’t beat the guy up they’d beat him up for being a punk. They’d always snare a new guy into this trap, the bigger the better, because he’d always think that he could take the little guy they pointed out. I remembered stories guys to whom this had happened told about how all the other fishermen made a circle and got the little guy and the dupe in the middle and started taking bets about how long it’d take the little guy to put the big new guy into a coma. Every version of the story I’d heard was about how unbelievable it was what a ruthless and tough fighter the little guy had been and how the guy he’d beaten had woken up in his own apartment three days later packed in ice, so battered that he couldn’t see or eat or nearly move just to get a sip of water for a week. In all my time working on painting and landscaping crews, I’d never been in a fight and never seen one as bad as the ones they described (sometimes guys took a slap at each other, but nothing really brutal). I could see the guy sitting next to Frankie being sick and drunk and high and underfed and never getting any sleep and hauling fish or lobster traps up into a boat in a T-shirt with bare hands in roasting sun and drenching rain and freezing snow, every day that the seas weren’t too high, for twelve, fourteen hours a day, looking every second as if what he was supposed to do was die, as if it was his real job to die, young and viciously, whether through ignorance or orneriness or hatred born of destroying himself in revenge against whatever it was that brought him into this world from his mother’s womb just so that it could watch him suffer his dad’s fists and his friends’ fists and after die back out of it, ground down and broken.
I didn’t know whether the guy with Frankie was tough like that or one of the guys who weren’t strong, weren’t tough, but were the wretched of the wretched and for that reason left alone by the brawlers, or not left alone but let be by them, allowed to be a kind of mascot. He made me feel sick and frightened but also guilty. Part of me felt like I’d like to grind him right up and out of this world, like a roach, because he was so bereft of anything like human kindness or intelligence or light. But for the same reason part of me felt defensive of him against that very same sentiment of disgust and contempt.
I stepped back from the stool I was about to sit on.
“Hey, hey; okay; I don’t need to stay. I just want to ask Frankie something,” I said.
“Oh, well, fuck you,” the guy said, in a high voice, like he was trying to imitate a little girl.
Frankie snorted out a laugh and looked at the guy for a second and looked again at the bottles lining the back of the bar and shook his head. “Jesus, Scruff,” he said. “You’re a white-hot little leprechaun today. It’s business, man.”
“I bet it’s business,” Scruff said. He looked at me from my shoes to my hair. “Fucking gimp.”
“Sorry. Don’t mind Scruff. He gets all fucked up whenever there’s a storm.”
“When there’s a fucking gimp,” Scruff said.
“I don’t got anything right now,” Frankie said.
“Nothing?” I said. “Oh, man — I was hoping — you’d been to New Mexico.” I meant to come off as nonchalant, to keep it sounding light.
He turned from the bar toward me and dragged on his cigarette and squinted at me. “Nah. I don’t go to New Mexico no more,” he said.
“Last time you ever say ‘New Mexico,’ ” Scruff said. “Ever.”
“Okay, okay. Sorry, sorry,” I said. “But I’m kind of in a jam.”
“I got twenty Vickies, twenty-five each,” Frankie said.
“That’s kind of steep,” I said. He was gouging me because I was clearly starting to fray.
“How about fifty each, gimp?” Scruff said.
“I only have three hundred,” I said. “Can you do it for that?”
“Nope. A dozen for three hundred.”
Scruff swigged at his beer and tucked his chin in to swallow and get his next insult out as fast as he could. I wished I could dash his brains out on the bar top. The whole predicament was so lurid and so cartoonish, so almost diabolical, though, that I just repeated, “Okay, okay, okay, okay” as fast as I could, to stop Scruff from saying anything more, and yanked the money out of my pocket and handed it to Frankie.
Scruff looked at the dirty hank of cash. “How much dick you have to—”
“Oh, man,” I groaned. “Just shut up, would you? Jesus, you’re a grim pain in the ass.”
Scruff leaned back on his bar stool and blew smoke up at the ceiling and laughed and slapped his knee. “Ha! You’re worse than me!” he coughed. “You’re some kind of sad shit, Kemo Sabe.”
Frankie opened a plastic bag and removed eight white pills from it and put them, loose, back into his pocket. Instead of being glad for the bag of twelve pills he handed me, I could only think about the eight he’d put back in his pocket. The pills were strong but full of acetaminophen I’d have to extract, and that made me all the angrier. I slid the pills into my pocket.
“All right, Frankie,” I said. “Thanks for everything. Will you have some stuff by the end of the week?”
“I don’t know. Check in if you want to.”
“Okay. Thanks for everything.” I turned and walked toward the door.
Scruff called out behind me: “I hope a tree falls on you and you die, fuckwit.” I bowed my head and waved and left the bar.
OUTSIDE, THE WEATHER IN front of the hurricane made it feel like another planet. Moisture saturated the air, insulating sound and making it feel as if I were moving through liquid, almost as if I could lean forward and gently push off the sidewalk with my feet and do the breaststroke floating half an inch off the ground the rest of the way home. The light behind the ceiling of low, dark clouds seemed to come down to the earth through water and not air. I swallowed two of the pills dry, and by the time I reached the bridge that connected Stonepoint with Barnton, across the harbor, it felt wholly as if I traveled through an underwater kingdom of refracted light and quiet. Even though there was no wind or rain yet, everyone already seemed to have made their probably needless, I thought, dashes to the supermarkets and hardware stores for batteries and bottled water and plywood and masking tape.
When I crossed the town line from Barnton into Enon, the quiet and stillness seemed to deepen even further. I felt as if I were the only man on earth, as if I were floating through some uninhabited, primeval realm. Only jellyfish and I would watch the vast nets of lightning being cast across the sky above and the rains churning the ceiling of our watery kingdom into sizzling, unmappable topographies, and hear the muted roaring of the winds over the face of the water, and watch with our simple eyes the atmosphere cooking and boiling and synthesizing itself so that when the storms quieted and passed and the sun shone back down on us, we would step onto the sand with our brand-new feet and walk out of the carbonated surf onto the fern-littered shore. What was that first clot of plasma not merely cooked by lightning? What colloidal smudge shivered and convulsed at the charge for an instant? What Adamic fleck of aspic was that? What first, shocked self that then became the first corpse?