“I was wondering something,” she said.
“What’s that?”
“How come you’ve never asked me out?” Dora said, crossing her arms in mock offense. She might have been conscious again but she was still quite drunk, and while the coquettish pose would have normally turned him off, there was a melancholy thrum in her voice that made the question seem much weightier than simply whether he was interested in her or not.
“I don’t know.”
“Have those meatheads said stuff about me? Been talking big? Because I’ve never been serious with any of them, if you know what I mean.”
“I know what you mean,” Hector replied. The fellows had of course talked big, as fellows will, and with enough bluster and shine to make clear to him that Dora was something of an old-fashioned girl.
“You have a girlfriend at another bar?”
“I only drink in this lousy place.”
“Then you must not think I’m pretty.”
He did think she was pretty (she was at least as pretty as any man should hope for), and he told her this by meeting her eyes for a good long beat. And then he leaned in and kissed her, and she kissed him back, his whiskeyed lips sweetened by the cheap wine she’d been drinking.
“Will you escort me home now?” she said, almost brightly, as though she were starting a fresh conversation.
“I don’t have a car. I can walk you, though.”
“That’s fine.”
“I’m not about to carry anybody, just so you know.”
“Don’t be a wise-ass,” she said. “I’m okay now. I just don’t like walking around this neighborhood alone at this hour.”
“Nobody does.”
“Well, worse things can happen to me than you.”
“That’s what you think,” he told her.
“Look, buster, do you want to argue the rest of the night or go?”
“I’ll go.”
They left the bar to the burbling music of his teasing chums and a toast from Smitty (who drank only ginger ale) and he followed her lead and they walked north past the immense concrete support blocks of the George Washington Bridge. It was past three in the morning but not at all quiet as they were buffeted by the welt-welt-welt of the traffic above them rolling over the expansion joints of the elevated roadway. They walked in the middle of the empty street; there was no provision for pedestrians because there was no reason for such provision. Hector liked this upward perspective on the great structure, preferring it to the vista from across the river along the West Side Highway, where one took in the postcard grandeur of the lighted span, this perfected example of human yearning and accomplishment. But he best understood the rather humbling view from below, here between its massive, inglorious feet, where one was just a minor creature skirting about its shadowed trunks.
As they climbed the street that rose and curled around the feet of the bridge, Dora’s pace slowed and she confessed to him that she didn’t want to go home just at the moment, that her apartment mate was a teetotaler and born-again and a too-light sleeper who would awake and harangue her with a sermon about her dissolute ways. He said he sympathized. Hector took her hand and hooked it onto his elbow, the rounds of birthday whiskey just now warming the back of his skull in such a manner as he could begin at last to feel that estimably sly speed: here was the sole effect he could fathom, the entire pleasure. Through the long career of his drinking he never came close to the sensation of oblivion but rather this small measure of an extra velocity, this slightest lifting.
The ripe scent of the river was like a two-day-old corpse and its fumes buoyed Hector all the more. Had an observer been up on the bridge’s catwalk peering down he might have noticed a levity in the gait of both as they strolled in the cottony warm autumn atmosphere the way any pair grown to middle life together would, her head braced just slightly against his still-square shoulder as he guided them up through the twisting narrow streets of Old Fort Lee, not long ago Jewish and Irish and Italian and now lighted around the clock like any street in Seoul or Shanghai with its flashing neon scripts and ideograms. He’d settled here more than fifteen years earlier, after kicking around the country, and getting kicked plenty in return, finally tired of the serial misadventure and wreckage, and this place as much as any other had seemed a good locale to sequester himself for the duration, a mostly working-class town with neighborhoods that looked much like those in Ilion, where you could reach out the bedroom window of the weather-worn houses barely hanging on to tidiness and just touch the fingertips of the neighbor girl who was doing the same. Maybe he liked Dora because she could well be that neighbor girl, all grown up.
Dora had begun to lean heavily into him, though more out of weariness than desire, but he didn’t mind at all. He liked her fleshy weight. Though he was nothing if not catholic in his tastes, he’d come to esteem such women, not plump ones necessarily, though that was fine, too, but women with a fullness of body, a certain density when they pressed against him, pleasing him on a deep animal level. She was now cooing something, too, and he asked her to repeat herself but then she suddenly pushed away from him and stepped off the road, down into the thigh-high grasses and weeds.
“Keep going,” she said, her words breathy and clipped. “I’ll catch up.”
He figured she needed to relieve herself and was impressed that she didn’t care about propriety and so heeded her but soon enough he could hear her gagging in the distance and he turned back to help.
But before he could he registered a huff of breath from a man charging him from the shadows. He was knocked to the ground. The man struck him on the head and ear with a huge, rocklike fist. There was a fierce succession of blows, the pain lighting his face and skull like a hot fireplace poker. And yet all this quieted him, too, instantly evoking his most special talent; Hector watched his own body leave him and step aside and take the man’s wrist and wrench it to an unnatural position. The big man then hit him with his free hand, hard, with a full and professional extension, the force pushing Hector back over the sidewalk and down the slope. Before he could get up the man hit him again, then again, the disciplined rhythm an unlikely anchor for Hector, and oddly catalyzing, for just as the man paused to catch his breath Hector got to his feet and began to return the blows, trading one for one and then soon enough only giving, until the hulking man was down on one knee as if he were on deck waiting for his turn at bat, which of course didn’t come. Hector worked him with the perfect rhythm of a machine, losing himself in his own unrelenting pace, the hard plate of the man’s face going to clay, and the thought crossed his mind that transmogrification was less a process magical than something geologic, pressure and heat still the most mystical forges of the realm.
Thus the flesh descends, back to simple terra.
“What do you want?” Hector rasped into the bloodied face, made unrecognizable by the gruesome sheen and the darkness. “What do you want?”
The fellow groaned miserably, unable to speak, his mouth full of spit and blood. Hector raised his fist again and the man trembled, covering his head as he lay curled up on the ground like a gargantuan shrimp. Hector recognized him now. It was Tick Martone, a former club boxer who was sometimes employed by the usual malign people to collect debts, et cetera, but who in fact was not a bad man at all. Toward the end of his fighting career, Tick became punch-drunk (he was only forty or so now) and got confused easily and sometimes even forgot where he was. In the weak moonlight his puffed-out, gourdlike cheeks looked alarmingly innocent, even adolescent, the sight enough to make Hector’s heart pause for a moment, resurrecting as it did the ugly memory from the Korean War, a war in which, for a long stretch afterward, he wished he had met his end.