But he had not slept as deeply. Since hearing of June he was being hounded again by an old nightmare, the iron obstinacy of it like a railway spike fixed through his gut. The nightmare was not about June. Instead, still reigning in his thoughts was the sentinel of Sylvie Tanner, looming naked before him, perfectly alive and beautiful, her skin aglow with a pure unrivaled shimmer.
I’m too warm
, she would say, and his heart would begin to skip out of time.
Please don’t
, he begged her.
Don’t worry
, she’d answer.
It’s okay
. She would then scratch lightly at her shoulder, like she had an itch. But instead of simply scratching she would tuck her fingers beneath her fine skin and then, with no effort at all, no pain, peel it off as if it were a full-length glove. She’d do the same with the other arm, and then start in with her torso, pull it down with a terrible measure, down over her breasts, her belly, slowly skinning herself and revealing to him not blood and tissue but the charred ruins of her insides, all blackness and collapse.
He had awoken hugging Dora’s legs, smothering his own face in her belly, as if to throttle himself in penance. She took his powerful grip for ardor and whispered that she ought to wash down there quickly but he only buried himself deeper and she let him, soon enough pulling and pushing him by his hair. He was more than glad; he wanted to be aligned with her good rhythms, to be her sightless, obliging implement. But could he devote himself to Dora, ongoing? Be good to her and adore her beyond his squalid little universe? He was almost certain he wanted to, and yet his fear of leaving her somehow in shambles ruled him, too, causing him to clam up in moments when he should have been sweetly generous, making him delay before meeting up with her, all of which, of course, only served to make her more unsure of herself than she was and seek his attentions all the more. Although she tried to hide her feelings he could see the welling anxiousness in her eyes, a grime of remorse freshly layering his heart whenever she peeped “It’s fine!” when he showed up thirty minutes late at Smitty’s, or said he had to get to work when he really didn’t. It wasn’t fine, not even close, it was rotten and cowardly and weak, and if such notions of his conduct hadn’t bothered him in years, they were bothering him now.
Yesterday he had tried to take a first small step toward being a respectable mate. Dora had been worrying about his fight with Tick, not mentioning it directly but sighing and saying again how it scared her when he got into fights, that she never wanted to see him hurt. He didn’t want to be hurt, either, not anymore, but it was giving-hurt that disturbed him most. Since the tussle with Tick he’d been thinking how pathetic it was for a fifty-five-year-old man to be so keen to mix it up, how sorry and shaming a picture, and then doubly so from the idea that Dora might have seen him that night standing over poor Tick, pummeling him monstrously and without pause. So at work he had roused Jung from his early-midday nap and told him they were going to drive to Teaneck, where Old Rudy lived. Jung naturally didn’t want to go, saying he had just over half the money together, and that in fact he was going to go there himself next week after he gathered the rest he owed. Hector knew that “gathering” meant “betting,” which would only end in more trouble, and like any comrade might he hoisted up the drowsy man by the collar and counseled him that partial payments were always accepted.
Jung cried out, “What, GI, you work for that old fuck now?”
“I’m working for you, friend.”
“Fuck that, I don’t want to go.”
“We’re going.”
“Don’t betray me, Rambo!”
“We’re going now.”
Jung saw that Hector was serious and relented, if unhappily, grabbing a fresh fifth of Chivas for the road. He cracked the seal and took deep slugs from it while Hector drove his fancy Lincoln coupe, heading them west on Route 4. Hector knew where the house was because he had been there once or twice, years back, to see Old Rudy’s daughter, and only child, Winnie.
Winnie was just twenty-six at the time, a statuesque, buxom woman with huge brown eyes and a sandbox of a voice and who was much like her father in the seismic potential of her temper. She was volatile and sexy and could be downright dangerous if she felt threatened or wronged, a notorious instance of her local legend being that she’d nearly gelded a two-timing boyfriend with a steak knife in a restaurant bathroom. Hector was forty then, as primed and handsome as a fellow ever was, fit for eternal bronze, and in a period of his life when he was bedding women with an almost pathological zeal. For a long time after leaving Korea he had isolated himself, existing, ironically, like some toiling monk, erasing himself and all his memories of the orphanage and June and Sylvie Tanner with unceasing hard labors, and, of course, drink. But eventually an oceanic surge of loneliness and desire roiled him and once he let himself go it was as if he were diving through endless, dense schools of women. He never meant to cause unhappiness or heartbreak but he couldn’t bear anything but serial connections, and with each union’s demise it was their angry tears and shouts that would echo in his head, causing him to move on only quicker.
In Winnie, Hector encountered someone as restive and inconstant and craving as he; she had a reputation for wildness and a stout appetite for sex, a nature that would have made Old Rudy proud if she were his son but instead drove him mad. For a whole week of nights she and Hector twisted furiously about each other in the sheets and it might have been more had she not driven on this very road, swervy and narrow, in a driving rain to pick him up at a job site out in Wayne. She never showed up. He didn’t much mind, figuring he’d see her the next night. He hitched a ride home with a coworker and the next morning he read about the accident in the newspaper, how a pickup truck skidded and flipped and somehow jumped the dividing median, landing squarely on an oncoming car. There was a photograph of the two vehicles with the article, the picture showing the entire front half of Winnie’s white Camaro crumpled all the way back to the trunk. Hector saw it and threw up in his cereal. When he showed up at the closed-casket wake Old Rudy asked him if he was the man she was driving to meet. When he nodded somberly, Old Rudy grabbed him by the throat with both hands and held on a few scant moments short of snuffing him, which at that point Hector, despising himself all over again, hadn’t minded, and hardly resisted, but a mourner who was an off-duty cop broke Old Rudy’s grip and shoved Hector out the funeral home door.
He hadn’t seen the man since the wake, and as Hector parked in front of the large whitewashed Tudor, he wondered if Old Rudy would even recognize him now, as sick as he purportedly was.
“This is your last chance to be my friend,” Jung said, taking a last drink. “Let’s go back and Sang-Mee will serve us food. I pay.”
“Just give me the money now.”
Jung took out a wad of bills from the inner pocket of his jacket and Hector immediately plucked it from his hand. While Hector counted it, Jung cried, “If I had that, I could make what I owe real quick! Easy winners coming up. How I’m going to make the other half now?”
“You’ll figure it out.”
“I’m gonna take it out of your pay.”
“What, you’re going to lay six dollars on the Mets? Let’s go. And leave the bottle.”
“I gotta stay here, GI. I hate seeing my money in somebody else’s hand.”
“Suit yourself,” Hector told him, suddenly thinking that Jung should stay behind, being that there was a slight chance Old Rudy had somebody-or two-like Tick with him. “Maybe you should keep it running.”
Jung’s face flashed with alarm, and as Hector walked up the slate path he heard behind him the muted thump of the car’s power locks. At the front door he rang the bell and a uniformed home nurse answered. Hector said his name, adding that he wasn’t expected, and when the nurse appeared again she opened the door and led him upstairs. The house was dim and chilly, the narrow Tudor windows dingy with water stains, the air musty with old carpeting and the lingering gas of reheated food. The bedroom door was wide open and even from the hall Hector could smell the antiseptic sickroom smell, then beneath it the old-flesh smell, the piss-and-half-wiped-shit-and-fungal smell of someone spoiling from within, and he almost turned around then to leave when a raspy, cold-blooded voice weakly called out: “What are you waiting for?”
Hector stepped in the doorway. Old Rudy was sitting up in bed, dressed in a gray hospital gown, a tube for oxygen strapped about his face. Beside the bed stood an air tank in its caddy and a rolling cart topped full of medications. A plastic bag of urine lay on the floor, a line from it snaking up underneath the sheets. His bony shoulders showed through the wide neck of the gown and his once-sturdy flesh had receded, his skin stretched back onto his frame like an artificial hide. He was a menacing physical specimen, this jagged piece of Irish-German rock, and had only been known as Old Rudy because of his prematurely gray hair. But now almost all the hair was gone, leaving just the fins of his temples, the shiny, translucent skin showing through. For a moment Hector wondered what his father, Jackie, would have looked like had he lived to old age. Would his wide, ruddy cheeks have shrunken like this? Would his hand have withered even more? Would he still insist that Hector stay at his side always, to be his best buttress and squire, to sing to in his larking, fanciful tenor?
“I figured you’d come around,” Old Rudy said, having to take a rushed extra half-breath after every fourth or fifth word. “You should make your move, before I croak.”
“I’m not here to hurt you.”
“Oh yeah? What did you come for, then, to pay your respects? To wish me well?”
Hector showed him the thin brick of bills, saying it was from Jung and that the rest of it was coming but would be a little while. He placed the money on the rolling cart. Old Rudy didn’t look at it, or seem at all to care, breathing out with some effort through his mouth like Hector had already begun pressing a board against his chest. Old Rudy groaned, “You think I’m worried about a few thousand bucks?”
“Seems like two weeks ago you were.”
“Two weeks ago I was feeling like I wasn’t going to die right away. Now even when the piss flows out of me I’m sucking wind.”
“What’s the matter with you?”
“Everything,” he said, but before he could elaborate he was besieged by a long fit of nasty coughing. When he finally settled down, his eyes were bloodshot and glassy, and he gestured to a large lidded styrofoam cup on the cart. Hector gave it to him and Old Rudy took some sips through the straw, the drink the same color as the liquid in his catheter bag. He said wearily to Hector, “You don’t look much different than you did.”
“You’re not seeing my insides.”
“Fair enough,” he said, handing back the cup to Hector. His voice was hollowed out from the coughing, and his body seemed emptied, too, husklike, its weight hardly pushing back into the pillows. “How long has it been?”
“Maybe fifteen years.”
“You’ve been cleaning buildings since?”
“Other things, too. But pretty much.”
“That’s my doing, I guess.”
“I could have moved on, if I wanted construction work.”
“But you didn’t.”
“No,” Hector said.
“How come?”
“I guess cleaning suits me, after all.”
“Do you remember what she looked like?” He meant Winnie, of course, and Hector began to realize that the old man had simply wanted to talk about her, and had thus reached out to him in the only way he knew how.
“I do.”
“You’re the last person who spent any real time with her,” Old Rudy said. “She and I just argued constantly. I stopped seeing her like everybody else did. Like you probably did.”
“She was very beautiful.”
“Was she? You’re lucky. The last time I saw her, I had to see her in the morgue. There wasn’t much left of her, above the chest. Really no face at all. You know how I identified her? She wore a ring of her mother’s, a sapphire with diamonds around. When I think of her now I just try to see her hand. It was colorless and pale but it was perfect. Maybe they washed her, but there wasn’t even any blood on it. You think they did that? You think they washed her?”
“I don’t know,” Hector answered, recalling that it was he who most often washed the corpses in the Graves Unit, as it never much bothered him, initially with a hose and then, if necessary, with a bucket and rag. In fact it had heartened him to see them come clean, even as brutally ruined as they were, to leave them again, at least in one small way, pristine. Maybe that was mercy enough.
The home nurse came in to take Old Rudy’s vitals, before giving him a shot. Hector made to leave but Old Rudy waved at him to hold on. The nurse turned him over and swabbed a spot on his sunken rump and stuck him with a needle. He didn’t flinch. She checked his air and refilled his drink cup and changed out his bag and told him it was time to rest.
“Rest for
what
?” he said.
“For whatever you want, honey,” she answered, and then she left.
Old Rudy was fading fast and turned his head to Hector. “Tell your friend Jung not to bother with the rest. It doesn’t matter anymore. I won’t be around anyway.”
“Okay,” Hector said. “What about me?”
“What about you?”
“I want to be left alone,” Hector said, realizing that for the first time in years he was meaning
we
, as in he and Dora. Which was why he would have never asked before. “That’s all.”
“What, you think that’s up to me?”
“Isn’t it?”
“You’re crazy,” Old Rudy said, almost smirking at him now. “Who the hell gets left alone?”
In the car, Jung had been ecstatic with what Old Rudy let pass, but then berated Hector for not trying to claw back the money they’d brought after the dying man fell asleep.