“Sorry to pull you away,” I said.
“That’s what we’re here for, right?” He was the type of benevolent guy who says “It shows to go you” or, if you’re a kid, pretends his thumb is your stolen nose. He looked out over the empty go-kart track. “I still love riding them, even after all this time.” He didn’t seem the slightest bit embarrassed by the fact that he wasn’t talking about golf or bowling.
“I don’t remember them going that fast.”
“They don’t usually. The one I was driving has no governor on the carburetor. Someone your size”—he looked me up and down—“could do thirty-five, forty easy. Give it a go? You don’t have to open it up all the way if you don’t want.”
“No, thanks.”
“Come on. Give it whirl.”
“Maybe another time, thanks.”
“Sure,” he said. “Another time.” I think he was slightly miffed because he got down to business without making any more small talk. He looked at me, then locked the gate behind him. As we walked back toward the store, I felt like I should offer something to fill the silence, like I owed him that much.
“I used to come here every summer with my family.”
“Cape’s a nice place.”
“I mean right here.” I pointed at the ground.
“Lots of people been through here.” He bent over and picked up a flattened cardboard coffee cup that had blown onto his property.
Okay, fuck it, I thought. I don’t want to talk, either.
Mr. Donnelly Jr. decided to forgive and forget: “Just down for a visit? Good time of year for it. All the loonies are gone.”
“Sort of. I’m staying with family in East Falmouth.”
“I like East Falmouth. East Falmouth, Falmouth, Barnstable—they’re more real.” He rubbed some salt of the earth between his thumb and fingers. “Real people. Know what I mean?”
“I think so.”
“That’s good.” He laughed. “Because I don’t know if I know what I mean.” His teeth were neat, though not his own. We were friends again. He unlocked the side door and flung it open. The sleigh bells fixed to it chimed. The interior of the store—contents included—looked the same as it did when I was kid, only now I noticed an irrelevance that must have always been there. I overcame an urge to not go in.
“So, what is it I can do you for?”
I lied right to his face. “It’s kind of silly, but I bought one of those goatskin wineskins here about twenty years ago—” He snapped his fingers and made a beeline to the correct shelf. “This what you’re looking for?”
“That’s it exactly.” It came in a cellophane sleeve that was brittle and yellow around the edges. The staple that sealed the package was rusted. Mr. Donnelly Jr. took it from my hand and brought it up to the counter. We both knew my buying it was a forgone conclusion.
“Anything else?” he asked.
“How many of those little Jameson’s nips you got back there?”
“Let’s see. One, two, three, four. Four.”
“I’ll take all of them.”
It was a few days before Halloween. Mr. Donnelly Jr. looked at me like he’d just rung up my bag of apples, and I’d asked him to toss in a pack of razors.
I GOT BACK onto Route 28. People who had jobs were driving to their lunch spots. I stayed on the thin strip of right-unjustified pavement that separated the white line from a sand-and-scrub-brush shoulder. A couple times I had to stop to avoid veering off the road or into traffic. I wore the wineskin like a shoulder holster against my skin, concealed beneath my hooded sweatshirt and denim jacket.
I could see the Bourne Bridge in the distance. It was an arc of gray discipline rising from, then dipping back into, the mayhem of trees. It seemed out of place and was as arresting as the sudden appearance of a second, larger moon.
As I passed a dirt fire road on my right, the speed-trap cop parked in it gave me a choked-off blast of his siren. I stopped. He waved me over to his window. He was shaking his head like he was witnessing a weekend inventor about to test a prototype flying suit.
“What are you thinking?” he said. He was wearing a baseball type of cop hat and one of those black marksman’s sweaters with the leather rifle-butt shoulder patches. The visible portion of his close-cropped blond hair screamed honorable discharge. He looked like the young leader of a Mormon paramilitary group.
“Nothing.”
“Affirmative.” The admitted purposelessness of what I was up to did not improve his opinion of me. I was guilty as fuck of being stupid. He looked at the bike and the four-day growth on my face and clothes. If I had been wearing the wineskin outside my jacket he would have run my license.
My license. I felt a jolt of raw nerve panic. I was sure I’d left it on the writing table at the Gramercy Park Hotel. I folded my arms across my chest to flatten any suspicious bulges.
“Didn’t you read the signs? No Pedestrians includes bicycles.”
I turned on the respect, but not too heavy. “No, sir, I must have missed them.”
He was still seated too low and comfortably for me to go into full panic mode. He did some police work. “Where do you live?”
“Amherst.”
“Massachusetts?”
“Yes, sir.”
“What are you doing here?”
“I’m on vacation,” I said, careful not to sound flip.
“And you’re what, just out sightseeing?” I nodded. “On that bike?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Where were you planning on going?”
“I thought I might make it to the bridge.”
“That bridge?”
I nodded.
“Well, that’s not going to happen.” He grew six inches. “Where are you staying?”
“At my sister’s in East Falmouth. Opal Cove Road.”
“And you took Twenty-eight? The whole way?”
I nodded again. He sighed and opened his door without warning. He got out of the cruiser. Turns out he wasn’t much taller than me.
“I really didn’t know it was illegal,” I said.
“You haven’t been drinking, have you?”
“No.”
“Because it’s not warm out, and you’re sweating pretty good.”
“It’s a hard bike to ride. And I’m out of shape.”
He looked at the bike and then at me. Both things I said made sense to him. He walked to the rear of the cruiser, opened the trunk, and started shifting things. “There’s a Dunkin’ Donuts just up the road. I’m going to drop you off, and you’re going to figure out the rest from there.”
“Okay.”
“I don’t care how you get yourself back to East Falmouth. But what you’re not going to do is bike or walk or roller-skate or anything on Route Twenty-eight. Understood?”
“Understood.”
“Because if I let you go, and you get picked up by someone else further up the road . . . you don’t want that.”
“I won’t.”
“Or if, God forbid, I pick you up again . . .”
“You won’t.”
“Good.” It took two normal tries, then a more serious one to close the Crown Vic’s trunk. “You’re going to have to sit in back. All my radar’s up front.” I got in the cage. The sound of him auto-locking the doors had an opposite effect on my sense of security. “Seat belt on,” he said.
As we were merging back onto 28, another cruiser pulled up and blocked our path. This cop was older. He looked like Boris Yeltsin. A large chief’s badge was painted in gold on his door.
“What he do?” asked Captain Kickass.
“Just biking in the wrong place. He didn’t know.”
“Biking?”
“That’s what I said to him.” They shared a quick laugh about it.
“He’s not Colombian, is he?”
My cop looked back at me, wordlessly passing along the question.
“Irish,” I said. “American Irish.”
“He’s Irish.”
“I’m looking for a Colombian—about his age—who likes to beat up on his pregnant wife. Knocked her to the floor and kicked her across the room.”
“Scumbag.”
“Real scumbag. This guy married?”
I leaned forward, right up against the cage and spoke directly to Captain Kickass. I wanted to eliminate the possibility of any miscommunication that might land me in the tank. “Separated, sir.”
“Where’s your wife?”
“She lives in New York.”
“You ever hit her?”
“I’ve never hit anyone in my life.”
“Nobody?”
“No, sir.”
“Never been in a fistfight? Not a single time?”
“Never, sir.”
He spent about a month looking through that cage, into my eyes. “Yeah, well I have.” He smiled. “Plenty of times.” Without lifting his foot off the brake, he shifted the cruiser into drive. It made a false start. “Let’s keep the bikes on the back roads.”
“I will, sir.”
“And if you see any Colombians . . .” He winked and peeled out of the dirt road. We stayed put until the rooster tail of dust settled.
The cop turned to me. “That’s not really true about never hitting anyone before, is it? ”
“It is.”
“Wow.”
THE COP HIT the Dunkin’ Donuts drive-through before letting me out.
“You want anything? Guys on the force don’t pay.”
“No, thanks.”
The drive-through girl’s spiel came through the tiny speaker.
“Who’s that? Brenda? ” the cop asked into the menu board.
“Tommy? ” she answered.
“Ten-four.”
“No, it’s me, Georgette.”
“Chripesakes,” Tommy said. “You sound more like each other every day.”
“Looking like her, too,” Georgette said, not too pleased about it.
“Hey, hey, enough of that,” Tommy said. “You could do worse. A lot worse.”
“I don’t know about that,” Georgette said. She yelped when an offended hand—presumably Brenda’s—slapped a naked, fleshy part of her. “See what I have to put up with, Tom? ”
Brenda overrode her: “You mean see what I have to put up with? ”
“You could both do a lot worse,” Tommy said.
“We’ll see about that,” Georgette said. “Large with milk and two Sweet’N Lows? ”
Tommy turned to me. “You sure you don’t want anything? ”
“I’m sure.”
“That’ll do it. Large with milk and two Sweet’N Lows.” He drove around to the pickup window. Georgette had his coffee waiting. Her mother stood behind her. Both women were overweight and at different points of the same free fall. They saw me in the back.
“Who’s that? ” the daughter asked.
Tommy reached out for the coffee. “Nobody.”
“What he do? ” the mother asked.
“Nothing.”
“Why’s he in the back? ”
“Is he dangerous? ”
“No, he broke down. I’m just giving him a hand.”
Both women shifted their eyes to him. “That’s good of you, Tom,” the daughter said. “You guys”—she shook her head in admiration of all cops—“you’re always sticking your necks out for other people.”
“People who don’t even appreciate it,” the mother added. “Boy, Tom, I tell you, I sure do.”
“Me, too,” the daughter said.
“That’s nice to hear.” He started to dig some money out of his pants pocket. “It makes this job—”
The daughter waved him off. “No, no, no, no, Tom. I couldn’t charge you.”
Tommy stopped himself before completely saying the word
but
. It was one of the weakest “No, let me pay” protests I’d ever seen.
“It’s just a cup of coffee, Tom,” the mother chimed in. “What’s it, two cents to them? ” She said it as if the moneygrubbing Dunkin’ Donuts head honchos were just out of earshot.
“Not even,” the daughter added.
“You guys.” Tommy stopped digging for money. He turned to me. “Can you believe these two? ”
I couldn’t.
“Call it one of those what-do-you-call-its,” the mother said.
TOMMY LET ME off at a brown fiberglass picnic table next to the pay phone. Before he drove away, he asked me if I was sure I was feeling okay. He seemed like a decent guy for a cop.
I sat on the picnic table with my feet up on the bench. It was a beautiful day. The kind you expect it to be when you get the phone call notifying you that someone close to you has died unexpectedly. I lit a smoke, then took the wineskin out from under my coat. I took a healthy pull of Jameson’s.
“What the fuck am I going to do? ”
Georgette and her mother were eyeballing me through the plate glass. I turned my back to them. There was the Bourne Bridge, dizzying, spiritual, and off-limits. There’d be no epiphany on it for me today. I called James and asked him for a lift. He asked me how I ended up way the fuck up there. I told him I got lost.
IT WAS PISSING RAIN when I woke up. I was thinking about the woman who lost her shit and faked being pregnant after James cheated on her with my sister. I felt horrible. I decided to call Jocelyn’s answering machine and let her know that I didn’t walk out on her for someone else. I biked over to Spunt’s Gas and Grocery to use the pay phone. I didn’t even bother trying to stay dry.
“Can I have three of that in quarters? ” I interrupted the kid behind the counter. His head was the size of a large pomegranate. He couldn’t quite figure out how to make it work so that my change would include three dollars in quarters. I didn’t want to embarrass him, so I just hung back and let him struggle through it.
“I have to do it all over,” he said, frustrated and apologetic.
“It’s okay.” He gave me back my twenty, put the rest of the money in the register, and started over.
“You want gas? ” he asked for the second time.
I shook my head again. I started thinking about that film clip of the Vietnam War protester who doused himself and his baby daughter with gasoline on the Pentagon lawn. The cops managed to talk the guy into letting the baby go unharmed before he torched himself. I wondered if the whisked-away baby was found by the fiery fuse that yoked her to her father.
“Eleven dollars and nine cents.” The kid looked at me over his water-spotted glasses. I paid him again. The drops beating against the windows made the outside look like the inside of an aquarium.