Even now, sitting at his desk, watching the information come to him like a gift from the gods, he could remember the way it felt when he found out Gina was seeing somebody. He'd let himself slip-if he was working out more than every second or third day, that was a lot-and he was drinking too much, spending more than he wanted to on women who did nothing for him, letting work eat him up. He was at a club one night after locking up, a local place that featured a live band on weekends, standing at the bar waiting for Caroline to come back from the ladies', thinking nothing, when somebody threw an arm round his shoulder-Dudley, one of the busboys from Lugano, the one who was always in the cooler, smoking out. “Hey,” Peck said.
“Hey. 'Sup?”
Dudley must have been around nineteen, twenty, hair corded in blond dreads, pincer eyes, big stoned grin, tattoos to the waist, which was as far down as he'd ever been exposed on the premises of the restaurant, but Peck could speculate about the rest. This was the kind of guy-“dude”-who probably had the head of a dragon staring out of his crotch.
In answer, Peck told him “Not much,” and then went on to regale him with a laundry list of woes, not the least of which was his bitch of a wife, and then Caroline came back and they all three had a shot of Jäger and the band pounded away at a Nirvana tune and they just listened, nodding their heads to the beat. When the band took a break, Caroline went outside to have a smoke and Dudley leaned in, his elbows tented on the bar, and opined, “It sucks about the restaurant.”
It did. Peck agreed. There was movement at the door, ingress and egress; somebody stuck some money in the jukebox and the noise came roaring back.
“Yeah,” Dudley said, raising his voice to be heard above it, “and it sucks about Gina too.”
A little fist began to beat inside Peck's right temple. “What do you mean?”
Dudley's face receded, flying away down the length of the bar like a toy balloon with human features painted on it, and then it floated back again. “You mean you don't know?”
The next day, he didn't go in to work. He felt the faintest sting of conscience-they'd be shorthanded, short on produce too, and the dishwasher would just sit around and listen to right-wing talk on the radio and Skip would be so drunk he'd burn the crust off the pies and squeeze the calzone till it looked like road kill on a plate-but the tatters of his work ethic were nothing in the face of the rage he felt. What was he working for, anyway? “Who” was he working for? At first he refused to believe what Dudley was telling him. That she was seeing anybody was enough to light all his fuses, but that she was going out with-sleeping with, “fucking”-Stuart Yan was beyond comprehension. That he was Asian, or half-Asian, had nothing to do with it, nothing at all (and yet he couldn't help wondering just exactly how the Bullhead must have felt about that). The problem, the immediate problem that settled inside him with the weight of a stone, was how he was going to face people, anybody-Dudley, his friends, former customers, people at the bar-when his wife was fucking some slope and he was paying for it, paying for her to just lie around like a slut and get laid all day.
By ten in the morning he was parked at a turnout just off the road to her parents' house. The season was spring, late spring, and already the vegetation was twisted up like a knot, weeds crowding the front bumper, the branches of the trees in full leaf, but still he was afraid she'd notice the car-metal-flake silver wasn't exactly an earth tone. Cars went by, three and four at a time, as if they were attached on a cable, then nothing, then three and four more. There were birds crowding the canopy of the tree that hung out over the car-tiny black-and-yellow things he'd never noticed before, popping in and out of the leaves like puppets-and he worried briefly that they'd spot the top of the car with the drooling white beads of their excrement, but eventually they faded out of his line of vision and he forgot all about them. He didn't really know what he was doing there parked under a tree on a back road to nowhere, didn't have a plan, and yet every time he heard the hiss of tires on the road his heart started slamming at his ribs. He watched pickups rattle by, cars of all makes and descriptions, a kid on a green Yamaha. There was the smell of the sun on the pavement. After a while he buzzed the window down all the way, let the radio whisper to him, the soft thump of a song he'd heard so many times he might have written it himself. An hour cranked by, two hours, three.
Finally, and he might have dozed for a while, he couldn't be sure, he came up fully alert, just as if someone had slapped him or doused him with a bucket of ice water: there she was. Her car. The metallic blue Honda her father had bought for her, and she was behind the wheel with her ugly black-framed glasses on, two little white fists like claws jerking back and forth though the road ran straight as a plumb line in front of her, and there was the kid's seat in back-Sukie, strapped in and clutching a neon-orange teddy bear, her face a blur-and another face there too, on the passenger's side in front. The car was coming toward him-he'd chosen this straightaway for its sight lines-and the whole thing was over in the space of ten seconds, come and gone, and yet still he recognized that face, round as a beachball, the sleepy eyes, the clamped dwindling afterthought of the mouth, and before he could think he'd turned the key in the ignition and slammed the car into gear.
If she hadn't seen him there at the side of the road, she saw him now. He watched her eyes go to the rearview and then her head bobbed toward Yan's and Yan looked over his shoulder and that was all it took to put him over the line, that unconscious gesture of complicity, of intimacy-“putting their heads together”-and he came up on the bumper of the Honda so fast he had to hit the brakes to keep from tearing right through them. And he might have-might have run them off the road, because he was acting on impulse only, inimical to everything that walked or drew breath on the planet-if it wasn't for Sukie. His daughter. His daughter was there, strapped in with her bear, and he was the one out of line here, he was the one endangering her. He dropped back half a car length-safety, safety first, because Gina was as uncoordinated and ungifted a driver as he'd ever seen-but he stayed there, raw and hurt and put-upon, stayed there, right on their tail, till a gas station rolled up on the right and Gina hit the blinker and pulled in.
As if that could help her.
He was out of the car in a heartbeat, screaming something, he didn't know what-curses, just curses, maybe accusations too-and he had his hand on the driver's side door of the Honda even as Stuart Yan was puffing himself out the other side and some bald suit at pump number 3 shouted, “Hey, what's going on here?” If he recalled anything with clarity from those diced and scrambled moments excised from his life, it was the look on Gina's face behind the rolled-up window and the locked door-pale, distant, afraid, terrified of what was about to unfold-and the look of his daughter. Her face was like a big open wound, hurt and puzzled and caught dead-center in a tornado of emotions. That look-Sukie's look-almost stopped him. Almost. But he was running on fumes at this point, the high-octane stuff, fully combustible, and he lit into Stuart Yan with a kick to the windpipe and then he took hold of the suit-some real estate drone with an inflated opinion of himself-and flung him across the hood of the car. What did it take? The trash can, the first thing that came to hand, metal anyway. He raised it above his head, shit flying everywhere, cups and paper wipes and soda cans, and brought it down against that window, again and again and again.