When he got close enough to the camp to see the glow of candlelight suffusing the walls of the wigwam, he was startled by a sudden harsh shout and then Pal started barking, and there was movement there, framed against the drizzle of the light. “I said you ever touch her I’m going to kill your ass, because she’s my soulmate, you motherfucker, my soulmate, and you know it!”
Sky’s voice sang out, harsh and ragged, “Get off of me, get out of here, go on, get out!” And the barking. The barking rose to a frenzy, high-pitched, breathless, and then suddenly there was the dull wet thump of a blow, and the barking ceased, even as the movement shook the floating walls and the light snuffed out. “Here comes, you son of a bitch,” Dougie’s voice shouted out, “I’ll give you here comes,” and there was that wet sound again, the percussion of unyielding metal and yielding flesh, and again, and again.
Raymond froze. He took a step back in the dark, collided with something that shouldn’t have been there, a solid immovable shape stretched out across the flat of the ground — and the tarp, the tarp he’d slept on — and the ankle gave way. He went down again, and the bottle with him, the sudden explosion of its shattering like gunfire in the night. His blood raced. He felt around him for a branch, a rock, anything, and that was when his hands told him what it was he’d tripped over. Her hair was the first thing, then the slick cotton of the dress, and everything wet and cold.
The night went silent. He couldn’t see, all the shadings of uncommitted dark swelling and shrinking around him. A shadow rose up then out of the black pool of the ground no more than twenty feet away, rose to full height, and began to slash at the darkness where the wigwam would have been, and Dougie was cursing, raging, beating at everything in the night till the galvanized post rang out against the stones. Raymond was no longer drunk. He didn’t move, didn’t breathe. The post rose and fell till the shadows changed shape and the curses subsided into sobs and choked, half-formed phrases, to barks and whispers, and then there was another sound, the clangor of the post flung away against the stones of the railway bed and a new metallic sound, the whirring of gears, and suddenly the shadow was moving off down the deserted tracks on the dark skeleton of a mountain bike.
IT TOOK HIM NEARLY an hour, hobbled by the ankle that felt as if it had been snapped off the bone, sharpened to a point and jammed back in again, an hour treading along the railway ties, through the sand, up the sidewalks still full of safe, oblivious people passing from one appointment to another. He just kept walking, rotating up off the bad ankle, and they saw his face and stood aside for him. Dogs barked. Cars shot past. There were shouts and voices in the night. He had never been down there by the railroad tracks, never been to any bum’s encampment, never passed a bottle with a bunch of derelicts, and there’d never been any question in his mind about going to Sky’s aid or calling the police or anything else. He was just walking, that was all, walking home. And when he got there, when he saw Dana just getting out of her car, her face softened with drink and her hair newly cut, cut short as an acolyte’s, he got down on his knees and crawled to her.
All the Wrecks I’ve Crawled Out Of
ALL I WANTED, really, was to attain mythic status. Along the lines, say, of James Dean, Brom Bones, Paul Bunyan, my father. My father was a giant among men, with good-sized trees for arms and fists like buckets of nails, and I was not a giant among men. I wasn’t even a man, though I began to look like one as I grew into my shoulders and eventually found something to shave off my cheeks after a close and patient scrutiny, and I manfully flunked out of three colleges and worked at digging graves at the Beth-El cemetery and shoveling chicken shit at the Shepherd Hill Egg Farm till I got smart and started bartending. That was a kind of wreckage, I suppose — flunking out — but there was much more to come, wrecks both literal and figurative, replete with flames, blood, crushed metal and broken hearts, a whole swath of destruction and self-immolation, my own personal skid marks etched into the road of my life and maybe yours too.
So. Where to start? With Helen, I suppose, Helen Kreisler. She was a cocktail waitress at the restaurant where I was mixing drinks six and a half days a week, four years older than I when I met her — that is, twenty-seven — and with a face that wasn’t exactly pretty in any conventional sense, but more a field for the play of psychodrama, martyrdom and high-level neurosis. It was an old face, much older than her cheerleader’s body and her still relatively tender years, a face full of worry, with lines scored around her eyes and dug deep into the corners of her mouth. She wore her hair long and parted in the middle, after the fashion of the day, and her eyes — the exact color of aluminum foil — jumped out of her tanned face from a hundred feet away. They were alien eyes, that’s what I called them. And her too. Alien, that was my pet name for her, and I used it to urge her on when she was on top of me and my hands were on her breasts and her mouth had gone slack with the feeling of what I was doing to her.
It was about a month after I started working at Brennan’s Steakhouse that we decided to move in together. We found a two-bedroom house dropped down in a blizzard of trees by the side of a frozen lake. This was in suburban New York, by the way, in the farthest, darkest reaches of northern Westchester, where the nights were black-dark and close. The house was cheap, so far as rent was concerned, because it was a summer house, minimally insulated, but as we were soon to discover, two hundred dollars a month would go up the chimney or stovepipe or whatever it was that was connected to the fuel-evaporating furnace in the basement. Helen was charmed despite the water-stained exterior walls and the stink of frozen mouseshit and ancient congealed grease that hit you in the face like a two-by-four the minute you stepped in the door, and we lied to the landlady (a mustachioed widow with breasts the size of New Jersey and Connecticut respectively) about our marital status, got out our wallets and put down our first and last months’ rent. It was a move up for me at any rate, because to this point I’d been living in a basement apartment at my parents’ house, sleeping late as bartenders will do, and listening to the heavy stolid tread of my father’s footsteps above me as he maneuvered around his coffee cup in the morning before leaving for work.
Helen fixed the place up with some cheap rugs and prints and a truckload of bric-a-brac from the local head shop — candles, incense burners, ceramic bongs, that sort of thing. We never cooked. We were very drunk and very stoned. Meals, in which we weren’t especially interested, came to us out of a saucepan at the restaurant — except for breakfast, a fuzzy, woozy meal heavy on the sugars and starches and consumed languidly at the diner. Our sex was youthful, fueled by hormonal rushes, pot and amyl nitrate, and I was feeling pretty good about things — about myself, I mean — for the first time in my life.
But before I get into all that, I ought to tell you about the first of the wrecks, the one from which all the others seemed to spool out like fishing line that’s been on the shelf too long. It was my first night at work, at Brennan’s, that is. I’d done a little bartending weekends in college, but it was strictly beer, 7&7, rum and Coke, that sort of thing, and I was a little tentative about Brennan’s, a big softly lit place that managed to be intimate and frenziedly public at the same time, and Ski Silinski, the other bartender, gave me two shots of 151 and a Tuinol to calm me before the crush started. Well, the crush started, and I was still about as hyper as you can get without strictly requiring a straitjacket, but way up on the high end of that barely controlled hysteria there was a calm plateau of rum, Tuinol and the beer I sipped steadily all night long — and this was a place I aspired to reach eventually, once the restaurant closed down and I could haul myself up there and fade into a warm, post-conscious glow. We did something like a hundred and ten dinners that night, I met and flirted with Helen and three other cocktail waitresses and half a dozen partially lit female customers, and, all things considered, acquitted myself well. Ski and I had the door locked, the glasses washed and tomorrow’s fruit cut and stowed when Jimmy Brennan walked in.