Taming a Sea Horse

by Robert B. Parker

  "Even if I object?"

  She laughed again, wheezing, and choked a little on the smoke of her cigarette and laughed and choked and wheezed at the same time.

  "Object," she gasped. "You can object like a… like a rat's ass," and she laughed and wheezed so hard she couldn't talk for a minute. She stopped laughing and wheezed a little longer and got her breath back and squinted at me some more.

  "You are a by-God big one," she said. "Might be sorta interesting."

  I was gaining ground, so I shut up and smiled and listened. Susan said it was a technique I might consider polishing.

  The fat woman pointed with her chin. "Vern's truck is parked 'cross the street in front of the bowling alley. He'll be inside drinking beer."

  "Thank you," I said.

  She inhaled, coughed, and chuckled in her wheezy way. "Rat's ass," she said.

  I was wearing jeans and running shoes and a gray sleeveless T-shirt and a gray silk tweed summer jacket and a gun. I took off the jacket, and unclipped the gun from my belt and folded the jacket on top of the gun and put them on the front seat of my car. Then I walked across the street and into the bowling alley. The bowling alley was one of those round-topped corrugated buildings that look like a big Quonset hut or a small airplane hangar. There were only three lanes inside, and a snack bar that sold beer and sandwiches. No one was bowling. A short dark-haired man with a bald spot and tattooed arms was behind the bar. He had on a sleeveless undershirt with a spot of ketchup on it. Sitting on a barstool drinking Budweiser beer from a longnecked bottle was a guy with a round red face and a big hard belly. He was entirely bald and his head seemed to swell out of his thick shoulders without benefit of neck. He had small piggy eyes under scant eyebrows that were blond or white and barely visible and his thick flared short nose looked like a snout. The eyes and nose gave his face a swinish cast. He was wearing a dirty white T-shirt and baggy blue overalls and work boots. He hadn't shaved recently, but his beard, like his eyebrows, was so pale that it only gave a shabby glint to his red skin. He wasn't talking to the bartender, and he wasn't looking at the soap opera on television. He was staring straight ahead and drinking the beer. When I came in he shifted his stare at me and in its meanness it was nearly tangible. The hand wrapped around the beer bottle was thick and hammy with big knuckles. There was no air-conditioning in the place but a big floor fan hummed near the bar, pushing the hot air around the dim room.

  I said, "Vern Buckey?"

  He unhooked his bootheels from the lower rung of the barstool and let his feet drop to the floor and stood up. He was at least six feet four, which gave him three inches on me, and he must have weighed eighty pounds more than my two hundred. A lot of it was stomach but what he lacked in conditioning he probably made up in meanness.

  "What did you say?" He spoke in a hoarse kind of whisper.

  "Vern Buckey."

  "I don't like you saying that," he rasped.

  "I don't blame you," I said. "Sounds like an asshole name to me, too, but I want to talk with you about your daughter."

  Buckey put the beer bottle down on the counter and stepped toward me.

  "Get the fuck out of here," he said.

  "Your daughter's dead," I said.

  "I told you to get out," he said, and took another step. "People round here do what I say."

  "I need to know about Ginger, Vern."

  "Then I'm going to rack your ass," he said.

  I shrugged. "Sure. In the parking lot. No point messing up this slick amusement complex."

  I turned and went out the door. In the parking lot cars and pickup trucks and two motorcycles had arrived. People sat in the cars and trucks and on the bikes in a kind of expectant semicircle. The fat woman from the town office was there with a group of other citizens in a cluster, near Buckey's green Ford truck. I gave her a short thumbs-up gesture. She poked an elbow into the man next to her and pointed at me with her chin. I could hear her wheeze. Buckey came out of the bowling alley squinting with his little pig eyes in the glare of the summer. He looked around at the circle of onlookers and hunched his shoulders as if to get a kink out and came straight at me.

  "Talked with a sheriff's deputy on the phone before I came up," I said. "Said you were crazy. Said everyone in this part of the state was afraid of you."

  Bucky tried to kick me in the groin and I turned and he missed and grunted and turned toward me again.

  "Said even the cops are afraid of you because you're nuts." He kicked at me again and missed again. I was moving around him. He was massive and relentless but he wasn't very fast. If I didn't let my mind wander, I could probably avoid him. It was why I'd come out. I didn't want the fight confined in a small space.

  "Said you'd get on someone's case and maybe they'd be driving along at night and someone would backshoot them with a deer rifle at an intersection."

  Buckey rushed at me and I slipped aside and slapped him across the face. The sound of it made several onlookers gasp.

  "They know it's you but they can't catch you."

  Buckey hit me a roundhouse right-hand punch on the upper left arm and numbness set in at once. He followed with a left but I rolled away from it.

  "I can see why you're a backshooter, Vern," I said. "You can't hit shit with your fists."

  Buckey was a little quicker than he looked and got hold of my shirtfront, and as I tried to yank away he hit me with his right hand again, this time on the side of my head just in front of my left ear. Bells rang. I brought both fists down on his hand where it held my shirt. I didn't loosen his grip, but the shirt tore and I pulled away.

  "Best punch you've got, Vern?"

  He kept coming. I don't even know if he heard my chatter. His eyes pinched nearly shut. His face a fiery red, sweat running down his cheeks, a froth of saliva at the corner of his mouth, he kept at me like a Cape buffalo: stupid, implacable, brutish and mad.

  Fighting is hard work. Big as he was and mean as he was, Buckey was not in training. Most of his fights were one- or two-punch affairs. Knock the victim down and then kick him awhile. Not taxing, except on the kickee. But Vern was having trouble getting me to stay still and in a while he was going to get tired: It wasn't going to be a very long while. I stepped in quick, smacked Buckey on the snout, and moved back away. Blood started down over his lips and chin. He rubbed the back of his left hand over his mouth and looked at the smear of blood and made a sort of growl and rushed at me. I spun aside and kicked him on the side of the left knee and it buckled under him and he went down. Behind me I heard a man say, "Jesus Christ."

  Buckey scrambled to his feet. He limped slightly on the knee I'd kicked and he moved more slowly. The blood from his nose was reddening his T-shirt, mixing with the sweat that had already soaked it. Where he'd fallen some of the parking lot gravel stuck to the moisture. He was breathing hard. He lunged at me again and threw a handful of gravel at my face. It didn't have much effect. But it distracted me for half a second and Vern hit me on the left side of the jaw and knocked me two staggering steps and down flat on my back. My head echoed with hollow distance and my vision blurred. He jumped through the blur, kicking at my head, and, mostly on instinct, I half rolled and got my hands up and the kick hit my upper arm. I kept rolling and crab-scrambled away from the next kick and got my feet under me and was up. I felt dizzy. Vern hit me again on the upper left arm, and then on the right forearm as I covered up and deflected the punches. The ringing in my head was clearing. I could hear Vern's breath rasping in and out. He tried to get his arms around me in a bear hug and when he did I kneed him in the groin and butted him under the chin and broke away. He was gasping and shaking his head, half doubled over in pain. But his eyes were fixed on me with the same red intensity they had when he stepped out of the bowling alley. He was drooling a little and bleeding and soaked with sweat and filthy with dust and gravel. He was breathing like a bellows, oxygen heaving into his chest. But he had stopped coming at me. He stood still, swaying slightly, his head shaking slightly.r />
  "Vern," I said, "you're just not in shape." I shook my head. "Shame to see a man let himself go like this."

  He came at me again, but more slowly. Not cautiously, but in a slower-motion version of the way he had come at me before. There was no change in expression. I made a little feint with my left hand and hooked it over his shoulder and got him on the jaw. I moved away from his punch and hit him a combination, left, left, overhand right. And moved away. Vern turned slowly toward me. His arms were starting to drop. It was what I used to look for when I was fighting. Your opponent got arm-weary and he let them drop and you went for his head. I hit Vern another combination. My head was clear now and the oxygen was flowing in and out easily and the legs were good and the muscles were loose and I could see very clearly. I could see the openings where the punches could go and I was moving in the clean, precise automatic sequences I had learned a long time ago when I thought I was going to be heavyweight champ. Vern was pushing his punches at me now. It was almost done. I knew there were people watching and I knew the sun was out but none of that had any reality, only the swaying massive shape in front of me and the punching lanes and the sequenced movements. It was like dancing to music only I could hear. Even Vern barely mattered in the intensity of my concentration and the rhythms of the fight. There was no pain. Later there would be, but not now. Just the patterns and the movements and the solid jolt as the punches landed.

  And then he was through.

  He didn't go down. But his arms dropped; he stopped coming, even slowly, and stood motionless, his arms down, gasping for air. I stepped back away from him. The intensity was gone. The meanness was gone. In his eyes there was nothing. As if all he was was mean and if he lost it he ceased to exist. Around us most of the people north of Bangor stood in a ragged semicircle in absolute silence. I could hear my breathing deep and steady easing in and out, and I could hear Buckey rasping desperately. Somewhere in the scrub forests along the highway some kind of bird was making a persistent sound like chips being sliced from a hardwood slab.

  Behind me a man's voice said, "Put him away, mister."

  And another voice, male also: "Put him down, man… Put the sonova bitch down."

  I said to Buckey, "You ready to talk about Ginger?"

  A woman's voice said, "Knock him down, mister." And a man said, "Don't stop until it's done."

  A lot of voices chimed in. Vern wasn't only disliked. He was disliked widely.

  A woman said, "Kill the bastard."

  Buckey still stood motionless, still swaying slightly, his head down, gasping. Then he slowly bent forward and his knees buckled and he fell like a weed wilting, crumpling to the ground and lying still with his face in the gravel. Again there was silence and then someone began to clap and then the odd rural crowd began to applaud steadily.

  Now I was the toughest guy in Lindell, Maine.

  14

  Buckey's pulse was strong and I propped him in the shade against the east wall of the bowling alley. The bartender with the tattoos brought me a bucket of water and some ice and a rag and I sponged Buckey off and soaked my hands and waited. I was sitting on my heels with both hands in the ice-water bucket when Buckey opened his eyes.

  I didn't move. His eyes slowly focused on me. I put the ice bucket aside and rested my forearms on my thighs and folded my hands. His eyes moved past me. There was no one else. The big fight was over. The audience had gone away. He looked back at me.

  "I'm going to kill you," he said. I nodded.

  "When you're sleeping or getting laid or walking along not thinking about it, I'm going to be there and blow the back of your fucking head away."

  I nodded again. I had my gun back on my belt and sitting still on my heels I reached around with my right hand and took it out and pointed it at the tip of Buckey's nose and said, "Maybe."

  Buckey looked at the muzzle of the gun two inches from his face. He didn't say anything.

  I said, "Now I want you to tell me about your daughter, Ginger."

  "I ain't telling you fucking shit," he said. But it was weak.

  "You've been doing that," I said. "And look what it got you. I want to know about the whorehouse you sold your kid to."

  "She's dead," he said.

  "Yeah, she was a street hooker in New York City and somebody shot her."

  "So what's the fucking difference?" Buckey said.

  "Fatherhood rests but lightly on you, Vern," I said. And I thumbed the hammer back on my gun. It made the cylinder turn one notch and Vern could see the copper-jacketed slug go under the hammer. "What whorehouse?"

  Buckey shrugged. "Place called Magic Massage in Portland. I didn't sell her. It was a finder's fee."

  "Place still there?" I said.

  "Was last time I was down to Portland, on Congress Street, around the corner from Franklin."

  I smiled, and turned the gun away from his face and let the hammer down gently. Then I flipped the cylinder out, turned it so there was an empty chamber under the hammer, closed the gun and put it back on my hip. Vern watched me.

  "You had a fucking gun why didn't you use it," he said. "How come you come on to me without it, if you had one?"

  "Wanted to see if you really were the toughest guy in Lindell," I said. I stood up. "See you around, Vern."

  "That's all?" Buckey said. "You come up here all this way to fight me and find out about a whorehouse in Portland?"

  "Un huh."

  "You're fucking crazy, man. What do you care about a whorehouse in Portland? What the fuck you care about some dead whore in New York?"

  "Vern," I said, "it was a pleasure to punch your lights out. It was such a pleasure that I may come up sometime and do it again."

  I turned and left him sitting slumped against the wall and headed for my car and drove away, back south. Toward Portland.

  15

  The sky over Portland is like the sky above San Francisco, unusually blue and high, suggestive of the ocean that surrounds the city on most sides. The buildings were low and that emphasized the high of the sky and the silent presence of the ocean.

  I parked along the restored waterfront on Commercial Street and walked up through the Old Port Exchange area to Congress Street. The Old Port Exchange was urban renewal at its chichiest. The nineteenth-century granite buildings restored and full of restaurants and dress shops and places with names like The Elegant Elephant. The people walking about in the area could have been from Boston or Chicago. It was startling when they spoke in the Titus Moody accent that had persisted even here among the bleached oak and hanging plants.

  I passed a shop called Gazelle, and a bookstore that displayed the complete works of Thomas Merton in the window, and turned east on Congress Street. The Holiday Inn where I'd spent the night had a map of downtown Portland in its lobby and I had spent a minute in front of it after breakfast. Like Boston, Portland was a red-brick city. There were occasional granite and brownstone buildings and the usual ugly newer ones, but mostly it was red brick. Past Franklin Street, at the east end of Portland, the Magic Massage Parlor, Massages by Women, stood across the street from a store that sold scuba gear.

  The storefront display windows were discreetly curtained on the first floor, but a small card in the lower left-hand corner of the biggest window said OPEN. I crossed the street and leaned against the front wall of the dive shop and scoped things out.

  Magic Massage was in a three-story brick building. In addition to the massage parlor entrance there was another door. A sign in gilt lettering on the door said LONGFELLOW HOUSE, ROOMS. The two floors above the massage parlor had small balconies. The trim was neatly painted white. The neighborhood was good, the place was neat. Looked like a better deal than Lindell. A brown Chevy van went by with a couple of Cumberland County sheriffs deputies in it. They paid no attention to me or Magic Massage. I shifted position a little and felt the stiffness from yesterday's fight. I looked at myself in the window'of the dive shop. The left side of my face was puffy. I hadn't shaved this morning t
o spare the puffiness and I had a small dark stubble beginning to show. I looked sort of sinister.

  Across the street a customer appeared at Magic Massage. He had a crew cut. He wore a red-and-white-striped short-sleeved knit shirt that was stretched tight over his bulging stomach. He had on new jeans with the bottoms rolled a couple of turns to feature his new shiny brown shoes with three lace-eyelets and thick soles. Nineteen fifty-two grown old. He opened the door with the confidence of an old customer and went in and closed it behind him.

  I flexed my hands. They were sore and stiff and the knuckles were swollen. Maybe I should rely more on sweet reason.

  I crossed Congress Street again and went in the door of Magic Massage. A small sticker above the doorknob said that MasterCard and Visa were welcome. Inside there was a short high counter to the right. A middle-aged woman with purplish red hair sat behind it. There was a cash register on the counter, and a phone, and one of those little devices that take a credit card imprint. The room was small. Against the far wall was a sofa covered in tan Naugahyde. The arms and legs were dark oak. There were two matching chairs against the left wall and a low coffee table with an assortment of magazines. In the angle of the wall opposite the counter a small color television set was showing a talk show in which the host and audience were debating sex-change operations with an intensity that suggested almost everyone might have one.

  Leaning against the end of the counter was a tall guy wearing a beige gaberdine suit and black cowboy boots. He had on a white shirt and wore one of those odd little shoestring pieces of neckware fastened at the throat with a silver clasp. On his head was a big black cowboy hat with the brim turned down all the way. His face was thin and he had a long pointy nose and prominent upper teeth and a large Adam's apple. His hands were big and the knuckles were outsized. He wore a big ring with a blue stone in it on his little finger, left hand. There was a thin, jagged-looking scar along his jawline almost back to his left ear that looked as if someone had tried to cut his throat with a broken bottle five or ten years ago and made the swipe too high.