But he had not slept as deeply. Since hearing of June he was being hounded again by an old nightmare, the iron obstinacy of it like a railway spike fixed through his gut. The nightmare was not about June. Instead, still reigning in his thoughts was the sentinel of Sylvie Tanner, looming naked before him, perfectly alive and beautiful, her skin aglow with a pure unrivaled shimmer.
I’m too warm, she would say, and his heart would begin to skip out of time.
Please don’t, he begged her.
Don’t worry, she’d answer. It’s okay. She would then scratch lightly at her shoulder, like she had an itch. But instead of simply scratching she would tuck her fingers beneath her fine skin and then, with no effort at all, no pain, peel it off as if it were a full-length glove. She’d do the same with the other arm, and then start in with her torso, pull it down with a terrible measure, down over her breasts, her belly, slowly skinning herself and revealing to him not blood and tissue but the charred ruins of her insides, all blackness and collapse.
He had awoken hugging Dora’s legs, smothering his own face in her belly, as if to throttle himself in penance. She took his powerful grip for ardor and whispered that she ought to wash down there quickly but he only buried himself deeper and she let him, soon enough pulling and pushing him by his hair. He was more than glad; he wanted to be aligned with her good rhythms, to be her sightless, obliging implement. But could he devote himself to Dora, ongoing? Be good to her and adore her beyond his squalid little universe? He was almost certain he wanted to, and yet his fear of leaving her somehow in shambles ruled him, too, causing him to clam up in moments when he should have been sweetly generous, making him delay before meeting up with her, all of which, of course, only served to make her more unsure of herself than she was and seek his attentions all the more. Although she tried to hide her feelings he could see the welling anxiousness in her eyes, a grime of remorse freshly layering his heart whenever she peeped “It’s fine!” when he showed up thirty minutes late at Smitty’s, or said he had to get to work when he really didn’t. It wasn’t fine, not even close, it was rotten and cowardly and weak, and if such notions of his conduct hadn’t bothered him in years, they were bothering him now.
Yesterday he had tried to take a first small step toward being a respectable mate. Dora had been worrying about his fight with Tick, not mentioning it directly but sighing and saying again how it scared her when he got into fights, that she never wanted to see him hurt. He didn’t want to be hurt, either, not anymore, but it was giving-hurt that disturbed him most. Since the tussle with Tick he’d been thinking how pathetic it was for a fifty-five-year-old man to be so keen to mix it up, how sorry and shaming a picture, and then doubly so from the idea that Dora might have seen him that night standing over poor Tick, pummeling him monstrously and without pause. So at work he had roused Jung from his early-midday nap and told him they were going to drive to Teaneck, where Old Rudy lived. Jung naturally didn’t want to go, saying he had just over half the money together, and that in fact he was going to go there himself next week after he gathered the rest he owed. Hector knew that “gathering” meant “betting,” which would only end in more trouble, and like any comrade might he hoisted up the drowsy man by the collar and counseled him that partial payments were always accepted.
Jung cried out, “What, GI, you work for that old fuck now?”
“I’m working for you, friend.”
“Fuck that, I don’t want to go.”
“We’re going.”
“Don’t betray me, Rambo!”
“We’re going now.”
Jung saw that Hector was serious and relented, if unhappily, grabbing a fresh fifth of Chivas for the road. He cracked the seal and took deep slugs from it while Hector drove his fancy Lincoln coupe, heading them west on Route 4. Hector knew where the house was because he had been there once or twice, years back, to see Old Rudy’s daughter, and only child, Winnie.
Winnie was just twenty-six at the time, a statuesque, buxom woman with huge brown eyes and a sandbox of a voice and who was much like her father in the seismic potential of her temper. She was volatile and sexy and could be downright dangerous if she felt threatened or wronged, a notorious instance of her local legend being that she’d nearly gelded a two-timing boyfriend with a steak knife in a restaurant bathroom. Hector was forty then, as primed and handsome as a fellow ever was, fit for eternal bronze, and in a period of his life when he was bedding women with an almost pathological zeal. For a long time after leaving Korea he had isolated himself, existing, ironically, like some toiling monk, erasing himself and all his memories of the orphanage and June and Sylvie Tanner with unceasing hard labors, and, of course, drink. But eventually an oceanic surge of loneliness and desire roiled him and once he let himself go it was as if he were diving through endless, dense schools of women. He never meant to cause unhappiness or heartbreak but he couldn’t bear anything but serial connections, and with each union’s demise it was their angry tears and shouts that would echo in his head, causing him to move on only quicker.
In Winnie, Hector encountered someone as restive and inconstant and craving as he; she had a reputation for wildness and a stout appetite for sex, a nature that would have made Old Rudy proud if she were his son but instead drove him mad. For a whole week of nights she and Hector twisted furiously about each other in the sheets and it might have been more had she not driven on this very road, swervy and narrow, in a driving rain to pick him up at a job site out in Wayne. She never showed up. He didn’t much mind, figuring he’d see her the next night. He hitched a ride home with a coworker and the next morning he read about the accident in the newspaper, how a pickup truck skidded and flipped and somehow jumped the dividing median, landing squarely on an oncoming car. There was a photograph of the two vehicles with the article, the picture showing the entire front half of Winnie’s white Camaro crumpled all the way back to the trunk. Hector saw it and threw up in his cereal. When he showed up at the closed-casket wake Old Rudy asked him if he was the man she was driving to meet. When he nodded somberly, Old Rudy grabbed him by the throat with both hands and held on a few scant moments short of snuffing him, which at that point Hector, despising himself all over again, hadn’t minded, and hardly resisted, but a mourner who was an off-duty cop broke Old Rudy’s grip and shoved Hector out the funeral home door.
He hadn’t seen the man since the wake, and as Hector parked in front of the large whitewashed Tudor, he wondered if Old Rudy would even recognize him now, as sick as he purportedly was.
“This is your last chance to be my friend,” Jung said, taking a last drink. “Let’s go back and Sang-Mee will serve us food. I pay.”
“Just give me the money now.”
Jung took out a wad of bills from the inner pocket of his jacket and Hector immediately plucked it from his hand. While Hector counted it, Jung cried, “If I had that, I could make what I owe real quick! Easy winners coming up. How I’m going to make the other half now?”
“You’ll figure it out.”
“I’m gonna take it out of your pay.”
“What, you’re going to lay six dollars on the Mets? Let’s go. And leave the bottle.”
“I gotta stay here, GI. I hate seeing my money in somebody else’s hand.”
“Suit yourself,” Hector told him, suddenly thinking that Jung should stay behind, being that there was a slight chance Old Rudy had somebody-or two-like Tick with him. “Maybe you should keep it running.”