The boy shook his head. He gestured with his eyes for Hector to come closer. Hector knelt and leaned in and the boy suddenly grabbed at his belt, snatching a grenade. Hector wheeled back away from him, but he was slipping on the side of the shallow well. The boy held the pin. To pull it would be to live a few more seconds. But he waited for Hector to get his footing, waited for him to hike up to the path. At the top he peered down and the boy was gazing skyward, perhaps waiting for him to gain distance, perhaps already blind with the nearing oblivion. Hector sprinted away, getting nearly all the way back to the rear line before he heard the distant, blunted blast.
FOUR
Fort Lee, 1986
HECTOR ROSE from the cup-sag of his bed.
It wasn’t yet dawn. He stepped to the bathroom and pulled the chain on the light above the medicine cabinet. He didn’t look much different, despite the fight with Tick in the street. His, it could be supposed, was the sentence of persistence. Was it an imposition from yonder? Or a dark talent that he couldn’t help but invoke, whenever loomed his possible demise? His jaw and skull and knuckles were sore, his chest pinging with each breath, though it was not exactly the bodily pains that had roused him. The pains and even the scars would pass quickly, as always. But he felt lonesome in his wounds, and he awoke keenly grateful for the company of the woman in his bed.
Her name was Dora. He liked her but oddly had not yet actually seen her in the daytime. The bathroom light partly illuminated her as she slept. She didn’t stir. She was a redhead from the bottle, by the look of her graying roots. She lay sprawled on her belly with a corner of the sheet flopped over her eyes and cheek, her mouth cracked open like a burrow hole. A molar was missing, something he hadn’t noticed before, and though the picture was not wholly unattractive to him he clicked off the light so that he didn’t have to see her mouth, being long uneasy with the sight of any insides.
He got back into bed. She groaned an unintentionally pleading note. He laid a hand on her cheek and pictured her face. And though of course he knew what she looked like he kept seeing a different woman instead, a woman he remembered from a book he’d read in his youth that had accompanying photographs of hard-used folk living in the wasted land of the dust bowl. The book affected him as a book sometimes can a young mind that is anticipating a story different from what it encounters but is taken up anyway; from the title-Let Us Now Praise Famous Men-he’d assumed accounts of heroes who’d endured great trials and tendered unequaled sacrifices to their gods and people and thereby won the glory of everlasting fame. From the time he could read he’d devoured those stories of ancient Athens and Sparta and Crete, of Alexander and Charlemagne. Yet what was it he encountered in the book but descriptions of penury and degradation that took on an awesome, almost mythical beauty; and the bleakness he saw in the eyes of one prematurely aged young woman made him think pitiably enough of his mother, who was a beauty in her youth but lost it after his father died and always seemed to be searching out an alternate destiny.
Dora had those same eyes, despite the surface of her easy levity she had them, and so was it this about her that had finally won him over? He hadn’t even asked her to leave after their lovemaking, which was an iron habit of his. The rest of her now, her pale, sleeping nakedness, the smallish shoulders, the bland wide dune of her lower back, the cleft of the broad, stippled bottom enfolding into dark, struck him as fair and vulnerable, but he didn’t disturb her, thinking he ought to let her sleep.
She was a regular at the bar, Smitty’s Below the Bridge, or at least had been a regular for the better part of a year. All the fellows were glad for it. Dora was all right. She was what the place always needed: a good solid-looking woman who didn’t take guff and liked to have a laugh or two and paid for her own drinks. She was smart, too, a book-keeper at the big furniture shop on Lemoine, and perhaps like a lot of them she might have accomplished a lot more in life had certain things gone her way and she hadn’t been so enamored of wine. She wasn’t a full-blown boozer, but she had, in significant part, ceased to care whether her nightly stint in the company of heavy-drinking folks meant she was likely becoming one of them, nor did she mind any longer that she was riding lower and lower in the water, steadily losing buoyancy, and that she might eventually be swallowed up.
As for the inevitable round of relations, she had gone out with some of the more presentable of them-Connolly, Big Jacks, once even with Sloan, who was a kind if somewhat simpleminded fellow with a narrow lamb’s face and who took her to a fancy gilded French restaurant in the city with his monthly check from his ancient folks in Rochester-but nobody had yet called Dora a slut because it was plain to see she was a decent gal without airs or too special a self-view and because the rest of them probably still held out hope she might ask for an escort home after last call.
Hector had warmed up to her more slowly than did the others, though it was nothing she said or did. His nature precluded any easy rapport and even after all these years at Smitty’s, the others knew to leave him alone for a while when he showed up at his usual midnight hour in the midst of their din and merriment. There always rose a hearty murmur for him when he came through the paint-chipped metal door, which he’d acknowledge with a nod, but then he would sit alone in the back booth with two double shots of Canadian whiskey that Smitty automatically poured for him. By the time he was at ease, they had maybe geared down a bit from their joking and quarrels and songs and were settling into the night’s long, slow coast to some nether realm. On the nights he didn’t want to be part of the company, Hector might still be wearing his janitor’s coveralls and stinking not a little of ammonia and sourness and other human fetors, and on these occasions they knew to keep their distance; he’d be quieter than usual and down his drinks without a word and Smitty would know to double him again before he had to ask. If it happened some unwitting newcomers made a comment about his work clothes, or if a certain crew from Edgewater called the boys out from the street, then all hell could break loose, Hector and maybe Big Jacks out back by the Dumpsters hammering away at the interlopers until somebody up in the surrounding apartments called the cops and the whole lot of them got hauled in. The local precinct sergeant knew Hector’s family from upstate New York and admired his fighting skills, and Hector would be let out first, a few hours later, once levied with the usual hundred-dollar fine for engaging the resources of the municipality, payable to the sergeant in cash.
Tonight there had been no expectation of fighting but instead a birthday party for Hector, which Smitty always threw for a small group of the regulars. None of them much liked marking such mile-stones-who needed reminding of the advancing years and, in their cases, the wayward trajectories, the diminished expectations?-but the beer flowed freely from the taps and Smitty poured plenty of shots on the house and more often than not everyone ended up shoulder to shoulder along the curved end of the bar, happily wrecking some sentimental song.
The evening, however, had started somewhat inauspiciously; early on, before Hector showed up, a stranger had come in asking after him. When Hector arrived, Smitty took him aside and pointed out the tall man in the dark suit sitting stiffly in the middle booth. The man wouldn’t say what he wanted. Hector immediately figured it was about the gambling debts of his employer and friend, Jung; last week Hector had put himself between Jung and some baby-faced thug-in-training and without thinking it through grabbed the kid’s throat when he threatened to maim Jung’s kids. There were some things one should never say. The kid turned purplish and from the smell half-shat his pants and had practically crawled out of Jung’s office in the mini-mall. Why the sports book would now dispatch an older accountant-looking fellow to accost him confused Hector, but he didn’t hesitate when the stranger suddenly approached him, catching this one by his tie and collar, if only to get a better fix on things. The man gasped something through his contorted cheeks and when Hector relaxed his grip he was able to cough out “June Singer.” At first it meant nothing, but then the man said, “She said to tell you, from the war. She wants to see you. June, from the war.”