Hector made him sit up. Tick wiped his bulbous nose and face with his shirtsleeve.
“What are you doing here, Tick? Why are you out making trouble for me tonight? It’s my birthday, you know.”
“Gee, I’m real sorry, Hector,” Tick said with genuine remorse, in his distinctively shrunken way. He had a miniaturized, lispy, birdlike voice. He had been a tough fighter in his prime, able to take a load of punishment and still hang on until his opponent tired, then step in close and deliver. His opponents couldn’t shake him off. Hence the name.
“I didn’t want to, because it was you, but I owe money to Old Rudy, just like that crazy gook, Jung.”
“Don’t call him that. He’s a pal.”
“Sorry, Hector. You know I don’t mean nothin’.”
“I know.”
Among other things, Old Rudy ran a sports book, one of the biggest ones in North Jersey. Physically he was still imposing and when younger had been known for his easy, almost casual, brutality. But it was his hooded, gray-eyed gaze that always spooked Hector, his long-fingered, sheet-white hands, as if the man were a bloodless ghoul, a reaper of low-life souls. He was in his seventies now, failing in body, but word was he was losing his mind, too.
“How bad were you supposed to hurt me?”
Tick was pinching the bridge of his nose to stanch the flow of blood and still could have talked but he wouldn’t answer, which to Hector meant on the serious end of things.
“Come on. Just because his errand boy soiled himself?”
“All I know is, Old Rudy wants it to come out of your hide. You’re supposed to pay Jung’s debt for getting in the way.”
“And if I don’t? Or can’t?”
“I dunno know, Hector. Nobody tells Tick nothin’. But, hey, don’t everybody know you two go back a ways?”
Indeed, they did. Like Tick and Jung, Hector owed Old Rudy, but it wasn’t money. It was a debt that he assumed he had more than paid off with the last fifteen years of working menial jobs like the one he had now; he was unable to get auto body or carpentry work on the big construction jobs in the nearby counties because of Old Rudy’s longtime ties to the mob. After a week or two on a job, Hector would be pulled off the site, no explanations, just a couple of days’ severance in cash and advice to not make a peep. Hector easily could have moved on, of course, to another region or state, started fresh, but didn’t a certain part of him want to punish himself, too, for the miserable fate he had brought on Old Rudy’s beautiful daughter, Winnie? She was yet another woman who had come to disaster by having relations with Hector, and he’d promised himself then that she would surely be the last.
“Hey, Hector, can I get up now?”
“Okay, Tick. Just don’t try anything.”
“I won’t.”
As Hector helped Tick to his feet, Dora approached them in the street, her gait somewhat steadier now but still careful, slow. She was about to say something but stayed quiet when she saw Hector and the unfamiliar man with his messed-up face. She’d been around Smitty’s long enough to know things like this happened around Hector and the crew, and she simply went to his side and clasped his hand and asked if they could get going now.
Tick said, “Hector?”
“What?”
“Are you gonna try to get even with Old Rudy?”
“I don’t know. I guess I can’t just wait around to get jumped. Does he still live in the same house in Teaneck?”
“I think so,” Tick said. “Listen, Hector. If you do go over to see him, could you let him know I roughed you up all right? If he asks, I mean. I’m still working down my account.”
“Yeah, Tick, sure.”
With a wobbly step Tick lowered himself into his car, and even offered Hector and Dora a birthday lift. But Hector waved him away, bidding him good night. Though the back of his skull still sharply ached, and the bones of his knuckles felt fused, Hector could generate no real enmity for the man. He couldn’t help but see Tick as the kind of fellow who had earnestly labored all his days for self-interested others (fight promoters, managers, shady businessmen, quasi- and outright criminals) for the end sum of what he had at the very start of his humble existence: a long-odds line on a barely worthwhile life, and not a smidgen more. Maybe Hector was caught in the first onset of that sticky middle-aged empathy, which would now cause his throat to tighten and his eyes to well up at the merest suggestion of thwarted dreams (like the other day, when he walked past a bent-backed, toothless Eastern European couple peddling used clothing and shoes on the sidewalk), empathy meaning connection, connection meaning solidarity, if a solidarity he might never act upon. Or maybe it was plain sentimentalism on his part, a soft form of self-pity for his own long-discarded dreams, though he had no doubt his failings were ultimately self-inflicted, one and all. And what were Hector Brennan’s dreams? Once clarified, surely no different from anybody else’s, in this too often lonely-making world: the haven of a simple, decent love.
After a block Dora slowed almost to a stop, holding on tightly to his arm, his waist.
“We should have taken that ride,” he said.
“I’m fine. I’m glad we didn’t,” she said. “I don’t want to think about you fighting that man. Or anybody else. Look, you’re bleeding.” She reached up and swabbed the corner of his lip with her thumb. But it wasn’t his blood. He had some scrapes and bruises, but they would disappear by morning, along with the aches, just as they always did, with a miraculous, almost furious, speed. As though his own body were mocking him, with its incessant, strange perfection. “Why do you want to get hurt?”
“Who said I wanted to get hurt?”
“Then why fight?”
“Why not?”
“Did your father like to fight, too?”
“That’s a funny question.”
“Is it? Fathers and sons, you know.”
“I don’t know.”
“Legacies, expectations. All that stuff.”
“You’re losing me,” he said, though she in fact wasn’t.
“Oh, just forget it, Hector. Don’t listen to me. I’m a drunk, silly woman.”
“You’re not silly.”
“Don’t be fresh now.”
“Sorry.”
“Okay, then. I’m serious. I want to know. Is it so fun? To be at war all the time?”
“No,” he said, his mind searching a thousand instances, if one. “Not at all.”
“But it just happens.”
“Yeah.”
“Then maybe I ought to stick close to you. Nobody would harm a weak person like me.”
“Not if they had a shred of feeling they wouldn’t. But you’re not weak.”
“I am. You’ll see.” They walked a few more blocks. At a curb she tripped and faltered, and he luckily caught her before she fell. “I think I need some air.”
“We’re outside already,” he said.
“I mean I need to rest,” she answered.
He didn’t know if she meant to sit or lie down (there was no place to do so) and when she teetered he grabbed her and she immediately kissed him, her mouth tasting sappy and fermented with the hard butterscotch candy she’d been sucking to cover the smell of having thrown up. But who was Hector to mind? He was fouled but not sweet and she was no doubt suffering his own ruined flavor as he kissed her in return, embracing her with his full strength, the tender flesh of her waist pushing up between his fingers. The air then truly seemed to go out of her and it was fortunate that his apartment was only a few blocks away. By the time he had the key in the lock she was practically shaking and he lifted her up so that her legs wound around the backs of his thighs and he could feel the sharp but weak dig of her shoe heels.
He carefully walked them through the darkened two-room flat and when he was at the foot of the bed he believed she was out but she began to kiss him with a new force and craving. They fell into the sorry thrift-shop mattress and soon enough she had pulled his T-shirt off and had unbuttoned her own blouse and was atop him, lowering a still-soft nipple into his mouth. It bloomed in a taste of salt and funk and iron. He hefted her other breast and with his free hand he hiked up the willowy crepe skirt and cupped the heat between her legs until she began moving against him in a cadence that marked her breathing. It was terribly stifling in the room all of a sudden and he rose to slide open the glass door onto the weedy uneven patio he shared with a neighbor he’d hardly spoken to. She followed him, dropping her skirt and wilted panties to the floor, the two of them now attracted outside by a cooling breeze, and in the white-green light of the sodium lamps of the apartment’s inner courtyard it appeared as if she might have just ascended from some forsaken underworld, her naked form at once strangely aglow and lifeless. To another man this vision might have been troubling, but to Hector it was an irresistible invitation, and he pressed her up perhaps too hard against the pane of the sliding door. If she gasped with fear it was for but a second, and they stayed there, moving against each other, until it was clear they were too spent to finish, and he carried her already asleep to the bed.