“Oh, yeah, and this is Sam Aquinas,” said Robbie. “Amanda’s bodyguard, or so I’m told.”
“Acquillo. Aquinas was the saint. No relation.”
Patrick was still holding Amanda’s hand. She tried to pull it back.
“Bodyguard? There’s a gig I could do. Body like that, do it for free.”
Amanda looked at me again. I half-stood, reached across the table in front of Robbie and got a grip on Patrick’s forearm. It had a lot of tough meat on it, not unusual for a carpenter.
“Her name is Amanda Anselma,” I told him. “Battiston’s the ex-husband. You let go, then I let go.”
Patrick looked unsure of what to do. I dug my thumb between the ribbons of muscle and ligament in his arm. A wince passed over his face and he nodded. He released his
grip and I followed suit. Robbie leaned back to look at me, as if trying to get my face into focus.
“That was interesting,” he said as I sat back in my chair.
“What do you say, boys?” I said. “Time to move along.”
“You know this guy?” Patrick asked Robbie, rubbing his arm.
Robbie was still a massive and unyielding presence at our table. I had my plate back in front of me and used it to push his elbow out of the way. Amanda was looking out at the street through the open doors, as if hoping something would happen that would rescue us from the situation.
“We’re waiting,” she said, calmly.
Robbie muttered some sort of profanity.
“You know me, Amanda,” he said to the back of her head. “For a long time. For a very long time. I’m serious about this. It’s totally in both our mutual benefits.”
She turned her head far enough to lock eyes with me. I shrugged.
“Your friends are waiting for you,” I told him, nodding my head toward the bar. “Come on, give it up.”
Robbie whipped back in my direction.
“Who the fuck are you? Who the fuck is he?” he asked Amanda.
One of the busboys in the place was a guy I’d known for a long time. He had a dark complexion and an accent, so he probably never felt totally at home in Southampton, but everyone liked him, including me. He had some unpronounceable name, so he had everybody call him Tommy. He must have heard Robbie start to raise his voice, because a second later he was there at the table, wiping his hands with a cloth napkin and asking us if everything was okay.
Nobody said anything for a second, then Patrick said, “We’re fine, Sahib.”
“Okay,” said Amanda, tearing her gaze from the street-lit world outside the open doors. “That’s it. Get lost.”
Robbie still had this dopey look on his face, half sneer and half smile, and didn’t look all that ready to leave. His boy Patrick was all business, staring at me.
I sighed.
“I think we’re at that point,” I said to them.
Robbie looked exasperated.
“Come on, Amanda,” he said. “I’m just trying to get something going.”
“Right,” she said. “Get going.”
I’d been in a lot of these situations when I was younger. In those days it usually didn’t mean that much, until it did, and then it could mean life or death. I was fairly sure Robbie lacked the necessary wherewithal to take things beyond a lot of ridiculous talk, but I wasn’t so sure about Patrick. He hadn’t taken his eyes off me since I’d clamped down on his arm. I felt my chest tighten, though it wasn’t my heart I was worried about.
It was my head. An ex-boxer’s head that a doctor had told me had been whacked one too many times. I made a point of not asking him what that actually meant, assuming it was nothing but bad. But I knew my lifetime concussion allotment was all used up.
Robbie finally climbed out of his chair, using Patrick to steady himself.
“Okay,” he said, “your fuckin’ loss.”
I kept my eyes on both of them until they were safely tucked back into the crowd hanging around the bar. In the process I noticed Tommy was still hovering nearby. We nodded at each other, then he went back to work.
“To quote Robbie Milhouser,” said Amanda, “that was interesting.”
When she took a sip of her vodka her hand was shaking.
“Sorry. I thought at first you were old pals.”
“Not then, not now, not for all eternity,” she said in a way that seemed more heartfelt than even the current situation warranted. My face must have betrayed that thought, because she quickly added, “And I don’t want to talk about it.”
It was the kind of thing I would say myself, so I was perfectly amenable to that. It just wasn’t something I’d heard much out of Amanda.
With no chance of reconstructing the original mood, we sat there long enough to finish our drinks, then packed it in.
Given the off-season, there was plenty of parking space out on Main Street, even for my ’67 Grand Prix. The yellow street-lamps sucked the color out of everything, but threw enough light to guide our way. Most of the storefronts were dark, except for the high-end fashion shops that styled their windows with strings of tiny clear bulbs and low-voltage spotlights. The air was dead still and silent but for a low rumble that could have been the ocean or simply road noise coming from Montauk Highway. Amanda walked next to me, but I sensed some distance, so I took her hand. That’s why I felt her tense up before I saw Robbie and Patrick and one other guy come up to us on the sidewalk. Robbie looked a little unsteady on his feet, but the other guys were plenty steady. And big.
“We’re gonna start calling you Vice-Grip, Aquinas,” said Robbie. “Patrick said you put a bruise on his arm.”
“Wasn’t that bad,” said Patrick for the benefit of the other guy, who thought it was funny.
“Acquillo,” I said to Robbie. “But you can call me Sam, since you seem to have trouble with more than one syllable at a time.”
They looked like they wanted us to stop and talk, but I kept moving. They followed. I hurried Amanda to the Grand
Prix, opened the door and shoved her inside before they caught up to us.
I left her there and moved back onto the sidewalk, away from the curb, where there was more room to maneuver. They approached in a loose formation, hands free and shoulders back. I was hoping even Robbie Milhouser wasn’t stupid enough to start something physical right out on Main Street, though I wished I was wearing something grippier than a pair of penny loafers.
“Hey, Acquillo,” said Robbie. “Fuck you. How many syllables is that?”
“Come on, Robbie, give it a rest. It’s getting late. Everybody’s had a lot to drink. Don’t make it worse.”
“Worse than what? All I want to do is talk a little business. Who the fuck’re you, anyway? Amanda, please,” he said, lurching toward the car. “It’s me, Robbie. What the fuck.”
I stepped in front of him.
“She doesn’t want to talk to you. Pay attention to what people are trying to tell you.”
“Yeah? What’re you telling me?”
“Your boys need to get you home before you do something really stupid.”
Robbie looked at first like he was considering my counsel. But then he surprised everybody by getting his big right arm in motion behind an approximation of a roundhouse punch. It took about a year to get there. All I had to do was lean back a little to watch his fist go by my head. His follow-up was thrown so artlessly it looked more like a parody of a drunken punch than the real thing.
Guys in this situation usually say things like, “Stand still and fight like a man,” but Robbie was preoccupied with the basic requirements of balance and coordination. My concern was the two other guys, still hanging back, but probably feeling
their adrenaline stirring, maybe thinking they ought to join the party. I couldn’t wait for Robbie to just tire himself out, so on his third or fourth swing I caught the back of his arm with my right hand and used the left to grip the nape of his neck. Then, by simply adding to his forward momentum, I drove his head straight down into the front grille of a huge SUV parked next to the Grand Prix.
The resulting bang was loud enough to cover the sound of Amanda getting out of my car, so I didn’t realize she was there until she touched my arm. Patrick and the other guy were bending over Robbie, who was still conscious, miraculously. He sat on the sidewalk holding his head. I tried to elbow Amanda behind me so I’d have enough airspace to get my fists into play if I had to.
“You motherfucker,” said Patrick, standing up and coming toward me.
Fear surged inside of me. I didn’t want this. I couldn’t afford it.
“You don’t want to do this,” I told him.
“Oh, yes I do,” he said, as he threw the first real live right hook of the evening.
I caught it on the elbow, which saved my face but almost broke my arm. I pivoted to the left to give me more room and draw the action away from Amanda. Patrick walked toward me, flat on his feet, fists held around the middle of his body. Amateur.
I let him get a little closer and stuck him in the nose. He reared back and grabbed his face, which is what amateurs always do, letting me step in and sink a right hook into his belly with everything I had.
“I call the police!” Tommy yelled from the door of the restaurant. The owner and one of the waiters pushed passed him and approached our little gathering. Patrick was
doubled over, clutching his midsection. I held him up by his shirt and whispered in his ear.
“It’ll only get worse,” I said to him.
A flash of lights bounced off the store windows across the street, reflections from the Village police cruiser racing down Nugent Street, and then making a hard right onto Main Street. I let go of Patrick, who did his best to stand up straight. Amanda grabbed my bicep with two hands and pulled me back. The people from the restaurant were helping Robbie’s other boy drag him to his feet. I could see a decent-sized egg already growing on his forehead.
The cop was a short, dark-haired woman named Judith Rensler. She wasn’t much of a talker, but looked like she knew bullshit when she heard it, which is why she didn’t believe Robbie’s story about tripping on the curb. Since nobody was willing to contradict him she had to let it go at that.
Patrick just stared at me as he felt delicately around his nose. I ignored him, though I took note that he was still standing, not an easy thing given what I planted in his gut. It wasn’t hard to know what the stare meant: next time was going to be different.
We drove in silence back to Oak Point. Amanda sat shrunk into herself, wedged into the corner defined by the back of the seat and the passenger side door.
When I tried to light a cigarette I discovered my hand wasn’t steady enough to do the job. I had to reheat the Grand Prix’s antique lighter and try again. I looked to see if Amanda was watching these exertions, but she was staring out the window.
“Just a jerk,” I said to her.
“Worse than that.”
There wasn’t much of a moon, but the sliver cast enough light to reflect off the Little Peconic Bay, and the air was clear
enough to see the sparkle of the houses built along the opposite shore. When I pulled into our shared driveway she told me she wanted to go right to bed.
“He’s just a jerk,” I repeated when she opened the door. She shut it again, switching off the cabin light, so I couldn’t see her face.
She leaned over and kissed me, then got out of the car.
I watched her walk down her stretch of the drive and disappear into her house. I always liked to watch Amanda walk, and despite it all that night was no exception.
Eddie Van Halen, the mutt who lived with me, was waiting on my front stoop. He had a secret door to the house that led through the basement hatch, but like me he preferred to stay close to the weather, so I’d usually find him outside when I came home. Either that or he faked it by running out the hatch whenever he heard the Grand Prix coming up the street.
He honored me with a slow wave of his long feathered tail and a look that said something glorious was awaiting us inside the house.
In my case it was another Absolut on the rocks. For Eddie, a Big Dog biscuit, which he waited to crunch on until I was with him on the screened-in porch facing the Little Peconic Bay. This was where we lived year-round with the help of a woodstove and the big wooden storm windows my father built as an energy-saving measure, or maybe as an act of self-preservation against the screeching brine-soaked winds that came off the bay throughout the winter months. Neither of my parents ever used the porch in the cold weather, but I found it impossible to be in the cottage without staring out on the impatient, unpredictable little sea.
When the moon was big in the sky, I’d sit in the dark so I could see the surface chop throw back the silver blue fragments of moonbeam. Despite the lack of moon, I decided to
leave the light off, more for the mood than the view. Given the unusually warm weather, I didn’t need the woodstove, though I lit it anyway. Eddie lay where he always did, stretched out on the braided rug.
I was going to sit at the battered pine table, but I didn’t think I had the strength to stay upright. So I lay on the daybed and recited out loud, like an incantation, my reasons for avoiding any and all confrontations.
“I can’t do it again,” I said finally to Eddie. “For any reason.”
I didn’t like to think of myself as a middle-aged guy who sat drinking alone in the dark, talking to his dog about his fears and uncertainties. But I’d been doing that to Eddie since saving him from the pound, so he must have assumed listening to a bunch of worthless crap was part of his daily work product.
“I can’t do it,” I repeated.
All he did was look at me over the crumbled remains of his biscuit. I let it stand at that and finished my drink, then one or two more to be on the safe side, before letting the encyclopedia of irresolvable quandaries that continually cycled through my consciousness shift into a dream state, thereby maintaining a continuity of torment from wakefulness to sleep.
A
FEW HOURS LATER
I awoke to someone pounding on the kitchen door. In the glow from the embers in the woodstove I could see Eddie curled up on the braided rug, his head slightly raised, not bothering to bark, the urgent bashing coming from the kitchen not rising to his standard of alarm. I was still in my clothes, which added to the feeling of squalid disorientation as I swam through a layer of exhaustion, adrenaline poisoning and partially metabolized Absolut.