“I chose you out of the world,” the chicken boy whispered to the unconscious behemoth. “And the world will not love those who are not its own.”
16
Nadia was sitting on the hood of the Honda, looking like a different person. The nurse’s whites were gone and she was wearing a short black skirt and red silk halter and a pair of high-heeled sandals. She had let all that thick black hair down and it changed the look of her face. Her cheekbones seemed higher, more pronounced, and Sweeney thought her eyes were more almond-shaped.
She smiled when she saw him.
“How’d you know it was my car?” he asked.
“You look,” she said, “like an Accord kind of guy,” and he thought there was no way to take it as a compliment.
He came to a stop at the bumper and she leaned forward onto her knees.
“Aren’t you beat?” he asked.
She shook her head. “It always takes me a while to come down. It’s like, being around all that sleep. .” and she rolled her eyes and shook her head and the thick hair, wavy and bordering on wild, bounced around her face.
“So where is this place?” Sweeney asked.
Nadia put out her hand and said, “It’s probably easier if I drive.”
AS SHE PULLED out onto Route 16, Sweeney adjusted the rearview and looked at the Peck.
“Jesus, it’s ugly,” he said.
“Doesn’t it kill you?” Nadia said. “More money than God and they build this monstrosity.”
“Maybe in its day,” Sweeney said as the Clinic slipped off the mirror.
“That place,” Nadia said, “was a goddamn tomb from day one.”
They rode in silence for a quarter mile. It was an odd feeling. Except in cabs to the airports, Sweeney hadn’t been a passenger in over a year, and he’d rarely been one in his own car. But it wasn’t unpleasant, and Nadia was a smooth and confident driver. She accelerated up a rise and he looked down at her leg and saw a gold chain tight around her ankle. He turned on the radio, rolled the tuner until he came to some Al Green.
“It’s weird,” he said. “This thing was giving me some problems this morning.”
“I’ve got friends with a garage,” she said. “Just let me know.”
“You from around here?”
She laughed and it was low and throaty and Sweeney moved in his seat.
“God, no,” she said. “Can you imagine being from here?”
“I haven’t seen much of the actual city,” he said.
She took a quick right and suddenly they were moving through a noman’s-land of forgotten industrial parks — brick and concrete bunkers surrounded by dead fields. Sweeney counted three cars that were burned down to the frames and abandoned on the side of the road.
“You’ve seen the Clinic,” Nadia said, “then you’ve seen the city. A bunch of comatose patients lying in an ugly warehouse.”
He flinched and she noticed and said, “I’m sorry. I forgot. It’s just a big, grimy mill town. You’re not missing anything.”
“You wanted,” he said, “to talk to me about Danny.”
She nodded.
“I’d rather wait, you know, till we’re at the place. Till we can relax a little.”
He started to reply and she said, “Shit. I forgot my cigarettes.” She looked over at him and said, “You don’t smoke, do you? You look like a health nut.”
This he took as a compliment.
“I ate a dozen peanut butter crackers for dinner last night,” he said.
Nadia turned her head toward him, pushed out her big lips, then said, “Well, keep it up, it’s working.”
She watched him flush and fed the Honda some gas.
He said, “I was a pothead in college. But I never smoked cigarettes.”
“You were not,” she said.
“I swear to God. I was stoned day and night for years.”
“You don’t look the type,” she said.
An ad came on the radio and Sweeney turned it off and said, “Things have changed.”
She took another turn. He realized that though he’d been watching the landscape roll by — warehouses and foundries and obsolete chemical plants — he hadn’t been paying much attention to the route and he probably couldn’t find his way back to the Clinic.
“I thought this place was close by,” he said.
“You’ve got someplace else to be?” Nadia asked and he was a little surprised and put off by the way it came out. Nothing soft about it. No smile in its wake.
“I just don’t like to be too far from Danny,” he said.
“Danny’ll be fine,” she said. “You’re the one I’m worried about.”
Now they were driving past tenements, crumbling brownstones and row houses, heading toward a downtown section full of neon and traffic.
“Worried about?” he repeated.
She sighed and reached to the dash and turned the radio back on. The Moments were singing “Love on a Two-Way Street.” She looked at him for so long that he got nervous and said, “Drive the car.”
“I really didn’t want to do this,” she said, “until we had a couple of drinks in front of us.”
“Do what?”
“I’ve worked at the Peck for a year, okay?” she said. “And before that I worked at Rasicott Memorial in Cincinnati. And before that at the Ford-Masterson in Phoenix. All right? I’ve seen a lot of people like you, Sweeney.”
“How like me?”
“Like they’re so angry and so guilty and so sick with grief that they’re staying alive just to punish themselves.”
He kept silent for a long minute and then, unexpectedly, Nadia took a left down a wide, dark avenue and came to a stop in front of a gravel lot full of motorcycles.
She sat staring at him, waiting for the response. He reached over and killed the engine and said, “You don’t know me at all.”
They both took it as a threat. She let it hang there for a while, then said, “Why don’t we argue about it over an eye-opener?”
Nadia got out of the car, slammed the door and started walking toward a red brick ark next to the lot. Sweeney let himself watch her ass. Even in the heels, she finessed the gravel. She moved as if she knew he was watching. He pulled the keys from the ignition and followed her. The air was cooler than he’d expected and a little wet. It felt good on his face and he didn’t want to go inside a stuffy bar. But she’d already entered the building through a pair of towering steel doors. So he jogged up the front walk to join her.
Carved into the granite arch above the entrance, in huge block letters, were the words
HARMONY PROSTHETICS.
The doors below featured two heavy brass bars that required pushing down for entry. Sweeney leaned on one bar, then the other, but both refused to budge. He blew out some air and looked back at his car. Then he put the keys in his pocket and pounded on the doors with his fist.
There was no answer. He moved around the side of the building and came to the gravel lot full of bikes. They were all Harleys, parked as if on display in a showroom, perfectly aligned, the forks angled just so. But they were all a mess, mud-spattered and grease-caked.
He walked down the line, inspecting them, came to the last bike and put his hand, lightly, on the throttle.
And he heard, “Don’t you fucking touch it.”
It wasn’t yelled. The words came out slow and even. He turned around and saw the speaker, skinny and bearded, all denim and leather, ass perched on an iron rail that fenced a concrete loading apron, which hung off the back of the factory and wrapped around the side. The biker had his torso angled to see Sweeney and he clutched a chicken leg in one fist.
Sweeney took his hand off the throttle.
“I was just admiring the bike,” he said. “That’s all.”
The guy on the loading dock brought the drumstick to his mouth, tore off some meat, and began to chew. Before he was finished he said, “How ’bout I admire your faggot ass?”