“Right,” I said. “Let’s get that done and we’ll go back in.”
“So you’re with them now?” Amber said.
“Sir?” The fat one touched Johnny’s elbow to guide him over to the lectern, which he shouldn’t have done, and Johnny shoved him against the wall and then the other guy was on him, twisting his arm up behind his back. Johnny broke away, swung at him, and both guys took him down. Amber went for them, but I pulled her back—that was my excuse.
“You think we’re playing now?” The fat one was panting and sweating. He took Johnny by the hair and slammed his face against the floor. The other one had his cellphone out. “Okay, you,” the fat one said to me. “I’m giving you a break, right? Get the lady out of here and we’ll call it good.”
“Where’s he going to be?” I said.
“What, you want to come with? He’ll get his phone call. You and this lady better scoot before I change my mind.”
—
I had to get Amber under the arm and march her out to my truck—I told her she could pick up her car later. She wouldn’t speak to me, but once we got clear of Martin’s Falls she made me pull over, got out, stumbled into the dead grass, went to her knees and vomited. I let her have her privacy while traffic whipped past, then found paper towels behind the seat and did my best to clean her face with some old snow. “You okay to stand up?” I said.
“We have to go back.”
“I don’t think so,” I said.
“What happened to Johnny?”
“Let’s just get you home. You think you can walk?”
“I can walk. Why couldn’t I walk?” She shook her head. “I fucked up, didn’t I?”
I helped her back toward the truck and she sat down in the dirt with her back against the front wheel. “I think I have to again,” she said.
“Just let it go,” I said. If a cop pulled over to check us out, I might pass the Breathalyzer and I might not. She turned her head and coughed out some more. I took another paper towel and dabbed at her lips. “When did you start drinking?”
“Over at Johnny’s,” she said. “Before he went to pick up Jesse.”
“So pretty early is what you’re saying.”
“Pretty early,” she said.
“Is it going to work if we try to get going? You’re going to catch cold sitting here.”
“Fuck, where’s my coat?”
“We’ll find it. Best thing now is just get you home.” I reached down; she took my hands and let me pull her up and help her into the cab. I got in my side and buckled her up.
After a couple of miles she said, “Where are we going?”
“Like I said. Taking you home. You have anything to eat this morning? Might do you good. We could stop off at the Hob Nob.”
“Gross, no way. I don’t know, maybe.”
“See how you feel when we get there. You want music?”
“I don’t care, if it isn’t something shitty.”
“Check in there.” I pointed to the glove box.
She looked through the CDs and shut it again. “That must be the kind of shit what’s-her-name likes. You know what we used to call her? Bitch on wheels.”
“Yeah, you said.”
She looked down at her long fake nails; I guess she’d painted them black for the occasion. “You’re like not into me at all, are you? Because I don’t think I’m really probably into you.”
“I’d say you’re a little on the young side,” I said. “Like about thirty years?”
“Thirty-seven. I looked up your Social one time. So how old is she?”
“She’s appropriate.” We were coming into Crowsfield, so I set the cruise at thirty to be extra sure. There’s usually one of them parked beside the convenience store. “You’ve seen her.”
“Yeah, that’s what I want to look like when I get old. Not.”
“Look,” I said, “we better get some food into you. Then you can go home and sleep.”
“You don’t even know I was at Johnny’s last night.”
“That wouldn’t be my business.” The past week I’d thought Johnny was hanging out at her desk too much. I’d seen her touching his chest when she was making a point; she was always touching somebody. But no, I didn’t even know. “So where was his wife?”
“I don’t know, Johnny said she went to Foxwoods.”
“What about your boyfriend?”
“Everybody gets to do what they want,” she said. “Anyways, you’re not going to tell, and Johnny’s not.”
“Perfect. What could possibly go wrong?”
“Shit,” she said. “That was real attractive, me puking and everything.”
I’d never seen where Amber lived—someplace in Egdon, that’s all I knew. It was mostly A-frames, double-wides and unpainted farmhouses; when the old town hall burned down in the fifties they’d put up a Quonset hut. There was still a commune left over from the hippie days, and you could smell their goats half a mile away. Amber pointed me to the shortcut off the Bozrah road, which turned to dirt and then back to pavement and came out by the Egdon Tavern. “What do I do here?”
“Left at the stop. Then just keep going till I tell you.”
We passed a swamp with cattails, a falling-down barn with no house nearby—I’d have to find out who the owner was—next to a cornfield that nobody’d gotten around to harvesting last fall.
“He left me his all money,” she said. “He didn’t want my dad or any of them getting it. I’m going to be a rich-bitch like her.”
“I would doubt she’s rich. You know what she probably makes a year? It’s not like she’s teaching at Harvard.”
“Yeah, well she sure lets you know it. Okay, so fine, it’s this school for fuckin’ losers. She was always looking at my nails and shit—and even like the way she said my name. It’s a fucking porno name, okay? Well, my moms thought it was beautiful. You know what I’m going to do? Go somewhere.”
“Where were you thinking?”
“Where the fuck ever. Away from this shit place.”
“So am I going to be losing you?”
“Well, I don’t have it yet. It’s got to go through probation—no, what is it, probate. Shit, and I didn’t even get the fucking flag. Just up here on the right. You think they’ll still let me have it?”
We turned into a dirt drive, with a two-legged wooden sign reading Nagirreb Estates. Right, I remembered: a developer from Holyoke named Tony Berrigan started putting up crappo town houses in the middle of a field and then got sent away for tax fraud. I don’t know why he wanted to make it sound like someplace on the West Bank, but maybe Egdon had enough Sunnyhursts and Bonnie Braes.
“That one there.” She pointed to a two-family with aluminum siding and a three-foot-square overhang above the door. The path to it was just footprints, and somebody’d parked a rusted-out Buick Regal on the muddy lawn, next to a lamppost with the numbers 5-7 on it. “You better just go.”
“You still be in Monday? Or you need some time off?”
“I don’t not show up for work,” she said. “I sort of don’t want to see Johnny, though.”
“You might not.”
“He’s going to be pissed at you,” she said. “Just saying.”
—
T-Mobile doesn’t work at my house, so I still have a landline and an answering machine. I thought it would be blinking when I came in—who else would Johnny call? But I made coffee, ate some cereal and still no word. From Kristin either; she was doing whatever you do in Boston. I turned on the radio, forgetting that Saturday afternoon was the opera. I tried to stick with it for a few minutes, then turned it off. My parents used to listen when I was little, and this man with a cultured voice would give the plot beforehand, which I could never follow—actually, I remember his name, too. Milton Cross. He must be dead by now. I remember our house smelled like mothballs, and the women singers would be shrieking away and the men singers bellowing, and I always thought my parents were just pretending to themselves that it was beautiful. I mean, I can recognize it as beautiful now—I’ve studied enough theory since then—but it’s not a beauty I can make myself rise up to all that often. Kristin was going to take me. She went down to the Met when she could afford it; she said supertitles made all the difference. Watching on DVD was good, but not the same thing. And she wasn’t even an opera buff per se—just a regular educated person, and this was part of life to her. I wasn’t that anymore, and I wasn’t completely the other thing either—Amber spotted that the second she opened my glove box, not that she didn’t know already. Nights when I don’t go out, I’ll read books because I can’t stand how a television sounds, no matter what they have on, which means half the shit people talk about is lost on me. Hey, this is where I live. When Obama ran the second time, I looked up the local returns the morning after, and Bozrah went for Romney 178 to 51. Jesse refuses to vote, even though he sent Obama a hundred dollars, so the one would’ve been me. The locals just know me as basically a good guy, kind of an oddball sometimes, and of course the new people wouldn’t think to have me over for cocktails. I’m their fucking contractor.