He saw himself in the supermarket aisles, the prices jumping out at him: $4.99 for a gallon of milk. $3.99 for a halfgallon of juice. $12.99 for a twelve-pack of Bud Lite. Thirty to forty bucks a week for pads and lotions and all the other female stuff. Even hunting for the three-for-a-dollar bargains on canned peas and carrots, the total quickly shot past $100 to $150, then easily cleared the bar at more than $175 for a week’s worth of groceries and other needs. And how the heck were they supposed to get through five months of winter with the price of heating oil rising faster than a Wall Street guy can drop a thousand bucks on drinks at a high-class titty bar?
“I’m going out,” he said, pulling his faded denim jacket off the hook. “You need anything?”
“Sure. Coffee, sugar, paper towels—”
“Better make a list.” He really didn’t want to carry all that crap around, but he’d already offered.
“You need a list to remember three things?”
“All right, never mind.” He yanked the door open while stuffing his arms into the sleeves.
“I’ll write it down for you.”
“I said never mind.” He pushed the screen door so hard it bounced back and nearly smacked him in the face. “Damn it!” He kicked the bottom panel, leaving a dent in the aluminum, and marched out. But the door swung back like it always did and the latch-hook caught the sleeve of his jacket and tore it.
“F-
aargh
!”
He had to let fly at something, so he punched the wall and his fist went right through the sheetrock, which swallowed his arm up to the elbow.
“Jesus …” He pulled his arm out, astonished by the size of the hole he’d left, and brushed the white dust off his sleeve. The last time he’d lashed out like this, in the brick house on Ocean Avenue, he just hurt his hand on the old-school plaster and lath. But these cheap tract houses were made of toothpicks and cardboard.
And now he needed to go to the hardware store to buy a sheet of wallboard, a roll of paper tape, and some spackle.
A swirl of pale green caught his eye. Rusti was on her knees in front of the TV in her faded bathrobe, flattening out the check on the coffee table, a cigarette dangling from her fingers. Her stringy red hair hung loose, covering her eyes, but the smoke curling upward darkened the freckles on her chest, and all he wanted to do right then was find a dark hole he could crawl into and hide out for a while.
He scrambled out the door, but not fast enough. He still heard her sigh, heard the disappointment in her voice when she called after him: “You can forget about the sugar, okay? We can do without.”
The new Spanish supermarket had just opened up on the other side of Route 112, so at least they’d save some money on gas, instead of having to drive to the Pathmark on Nesconset Highway. But he wasn’t ready to face the narrow aisles just yet, or contend with whiny toddlers spilling out of shopping carts, so he kept walking north past the strip mall and the funeral home.
Traffic was heavy on 112, as always, and he had to deal with the crush of cars, battered pickups, and SUVs idling at the light, leaning on their horns and spewing carbon monoxide into the air.
The 104 Bar was closed, and foreclosure signs were sprouting like jagged milestones around the bare trees along the road. And the Claddagh Inn, in a fruitless effort to bring a few tourists up the hill from the port, had switched over to live music, which should have meant Clancy Brothers look-alikes in thick wool sweaters playing Fuck-Them-English-Bastards reels and jigs, but usually meant way-too-loud tribute bands playing lame-ass covers of Van Halen and Led Zeppelin hits from another era.
He desperately needed to walk off the frustration, but the sidewalks were cracked in so many places he had to watch his step, so he couldn’t find a rhythm that would allow him to burn off some of his blinding rage. The wind whipped at the power lines, and dead leaves swirled around his feet. He passed Dano’s Auto Clinic, his eye lingering on the poster-sized graduation photo of Dano Jr. in the window, a seventeen-year-old kid who was shot dead in a booze-and-testosterone-fueled confrontation on a black guy’s lawn.
As if there weren’t enough problems in the world.
He crossed the LIRR tracks and felt like he was crossing the border into enemy territory, into alien turf.
Except for the Army-Navy store, which had owned a piece of Main Street for decades, half the storefronts were empty, and the rest had been taken over by
bodegas
and phone-card stores catering to the latest wave of suckers who actually thought they had a shot at the American Dream. Even the pool hall announced itself in bilingual red-and-yellow neon, and salsa blared from every other doorway.
“Should have brought my passport with me,” he grumbled, as three dark-skinned guys hanging in front of the Spanish deli narrowed their eyes at him.
He started down the hill past the biker bar with the misspelled sign,
Harley’s and Honey’s
(didn’t anyone know where to put apostrophes these days?). There was already a row of gleaming Harleys lined up along the curb outside the bar, and God help you if you rode anything less than a Harley. How could these geezers afford them, anyway? And doesn’t it matter that Harley-Davidson just royally screwed its workers?
He glared at the aging bikers, almost daring them to start something. But they picked up on the intensity of his anger, and refused to meet his gaze.
Harley-Davidson
, he thought. Proudly made in the U.S.A. Except that the bubble had burst and his brother steelworkers in Milwaukee had just caved, approving a seven-year wage freeze and a two-tiered pay scale that screwed the new hires and paid the temp workers even less,
even when demand for the cycles went up
, which sure wasn’t how they taught the laws of supply and demand at the local community college.
He paused at the corner when the lights changed. On a clear day you could see all the way to Connecticut from where he stood. But the power plant’s red-and-white-striped smokestacks were belching twin plumes of thick gray smoke that blended seamlessly with the clouds and obscured the horizon like a moldy blanket.
A flier for the annual Dickens Festival was flapping in the breeze, half-glued to the lamppost across the street. Every year, on a Saturday in mid-December, the well-to-do Port Jeff villagers dressed up in Victorian costumes and strolled around the center of town reenacting their favorite bits from
A Christmas Carol
. Maybe they should have gone with
A Tale of Two Cities
instead, since they elected to split the town in half to keep their tax revenues from going up the hill to the bums in Port Jeff Station and to keep the riffraff out of their school district.
Port Jefferson Village was once a sleepy town with little more than a post office, a diner, and a used bookstore where you could get fifty-cent paperbacks (and macramé supplies, back in the day). Then somebody got the bright idea of building a couple of fishermen-themed restaurants, including one in the shape of a ship’s hull, and things started to take off.
And now the windows were going dark up on the hill.
Jimmy let the dead weight of his mood pull him further down the hill. But even with a black hole where his heart should have been, he managed to formulate a plan of sorts to head to the docks and watch the waves come in and maybe let the cold November wind chase the dark clouds from his thoughts.
There were fewer foreclosure signs on this side of the tracks, and the houses got bigger and nicer and further back from the street. Suddenly a Spanish chick with dynamite tits and a clipboard in the crook of her arm stepped in front of him.
“We’re having a blood drive today,” she said. The entranceway to Infant Jesus R.C. Church arched up behind her, framing her face like a monk’s hood, which made for some strange associations with the dynamite tits.
But the pleasure was short-lived. He was about to say,
Screw you, I need every drop,
and step around her, when she added, “In memory of Jefferson Nuñez.”
Jimmy knew the name. It had been in the papers for weeks. Nuñez was a hard-working guy, an Ecuadorian immigrant who never made trouble for anybody, until one night a bunch of teenagers hopped into a late-model SUV and went looking for a “Mexican” to jump. They spotted Nuñez outside a bar in Ronkonkoma and “beaner-hopped” him, kicking the crap out of him, then a kid with an Irish name delivered the final blow and left him lying in a pool of blood like a piece of roadkill, not a guy who had as much right to breathe as any of these punks from Sachem East High School.
“We’re also raising money for a scholarship in his name,” she said.
Jimmy recognized some of the day workers from the Home Depot parking lot lining up outside the parish house. Then a teenage girl with short black hair stepped out to talk with them, snippets of Spanish floating down to him in the street. A tiny red spot bled through the gauze bandage on her arm, and one of those bright red
I Gave Blood
stickers adorned her chest like a badge of honor.
And Jimmy found himself saying, “Yeah, sure. Why not?”
The woman smiled, handed him a sheet of instructions, and directed him up the steps to the parish house.
The plastic ID holder pinned to her scrubs said her name was
Gabriela
. She had dark wavy hair, full lips, and an oval face with a few lines around the edges.
“We just need to get a sample to test for anemia,” she said, pricking his finger and pressing a thin clear tube to the wound to draw out a drop of his blood. “Just routine, ’cause you don’t look very anemic to me,” she said with a slight accent, her eyes running up and down his body.
She took his blood pressure, and after confirming for the fourth time that he hadn’t had sex with a fag, a whore, or a junkie in the past three years, she made him lean back and roll up his sleeve.
She pulled the elastic band tight and tapped her gloved fingers on the pale skin of his forearm, feeling for a vein. Her other hand gripped his upper arm. An impish grin stole across his face and he flexed his bicep for her, but when he looked into her face, she was frowning.
“Is it that bad?” he asked, his smile fading.
“Sometimes it can be hard to find the vein. But on you, it’s easy.”
She stuck him with the needle, and his ass clenched reflexively. She held the needle in place with her finger, secured it with a piece of surgical tape, then slid the tube into position and twisted it tight.
“That’s not what I meant.”
“I know what you meant,” she said flatly. She must have heard every dumb pick-up line that guys use on nurses a million times.
She eased the valve open with her thumb, and dark red blood invaded the clear plastic tube, flowing so fast it felt like she was sucking the life out of him through a silly straw. She adjusted the tiny plastic wheel and got it under control so his blood was dripping slowly into the pint-sized bag.
“Don’t know why I’m giving it away,” he said. “I should be selling this stuff.”
“Then why don’t you?”
“Got nothing else to offer, I guess.”
She reached across his chest and took his other hand, felt its weight, ran a finger over the scratches and calluses, eyed the wedding ring on his fourth finger.
“Oh, a man like you has plenty to offer,” she said, a bit of boob peeking out of her V-neck. Had a few miles on them, but they were still nice to look at. “There’s something special about you.”
“What’s so special about me?”
“Look around,” she said, her eyes flitting from side to side like a scam artist checking the street for cops before offering a hot tip on the fifth race at Belmont. She brushed a few wayward strands of hair out of her eyes with a gloved finger. “We don’t get many Anglos in here.”
“Just caught me at the right time, I guess.”
“Maybe. Timing is everything. I bet you could get good work as a—what do you call it?
Un abogado
.”
“A what?”
“Sort of like a lawyer—”
“You kidding me?” A jolt went through him, causing a gurgle in the plastic tube.
“I’m sorry. Is that the wrong word?”
“Right word, wrong guy. Me and lawyers don’t always see eye to eye, know what I mean?”
Gabriela straightened up and massaged her neck, and the bag swelled with his blood as she flitted over to the supply table and spoke in low tones with another volunteer.
She came back and looked right at him with those big, dark eyes. “Okay, my friend Marissa says that
abogado
usually means
lawyer
, but in this situation it’s closer to
advocate
.”
“What’s the difference?”
“An advocate is someone who offers what you might call extra-legal assistance.”
“And what does a pretty lady like you need an advocate for?”
Her face hardened at the compliment. “Because we have laws that are not just, so we must have justice that is not lawful. That’s why we need an advocate.”
There was a fire in her eyes that wasn’t there before.
He understood why. At least he thought he did. And if she was serious, then money was involved. “I’m listening.”
She leaned in close and whispered things in his ear, nasty things about her job at the hospital and what the nurses’ aides had to endure to keep their jobs—the demeaning comments, the unwelcome contact, the … well, if it wasn’t truly consensual then it was rape, wasn’t it? According to the laws of New York State, it was, although they could never prove anything. Nothing could be done because he was an administrator and most of the staff were of questionable legal status and were too afraid to speak up.
And she had the scars to back it up.
“You ever think of calling the cops?”
She nailed him with a look. “Maybe you’re not the right man for the job, after all.” The blood bag was full. She closed the valve and detached it, sealed and labeled it.
“Okay, now hold it, hold it. If you got a job for me, I said I’m listening.”
She yanked off the surgical tape, pressed a cotton ball over the spot where she had punctured his skin, and pulled out the needle. “Hold that for me.”
He held the cotton ball in place while she tore off another strip of tape, and explained that the girls had agreed to pool their resources in order to send the boss a clear message that it was time to start rethinking his priorities.