“His what?”
She saw a blush creep up his battered cheek, which she thought charming. “Toy, I mean. When we were growing up, he was the enforcer. ‘Emmett, go get your brother and make him fix his room.’ He’s still doing it. I used to daydream about sending away for one of those karate courses and studying in secret, and one day when he tried to beat on me . . . boom! But, needless to say . . .”
“You got him a few good ones,” said Lucy encouragingly. “He’s pretty tough.”
“Yeah, he is. The only good part about being Emmett Heeney’s brother was that he was the only one allowed to beat on me. I never had a hard look from another kid all through school.” Dan paused, took a breath. “I’m not going back there. I hate it there.”
“I figured that’s what the fight was about. Why didn’t your dad come over and yell at you himself?”
“Because he knew I’d say no, and he’d lose a point. He can’t make me do anything. I’m eighteen, I have a full scholarship, and I can make enough money doing programming to pay my own way. Dad’s a negotiator, and the first rule of negotiations is never put yourself in a position where you’re going to lose. So he sent Mom and Emmett. That way he can throw up his hands and blame them. But the fight . . . it wasn’t really about that. Mainly it was he made a really nasty remark about you. He made out . . . you know. That you were why I didn’t wanted to go home and pass leaflets to the working class.” Dan was starting to blush again.
“And you slugged him to defend my honor?” Before she could help it, a giggle burst from her mouth and she felt herself joining him in shameful red.
“I guess, in a way.” The unfamiliar idea made Dan uncomfortable at first, but after a short while it seemed right. It was not impossible to think of this girl in those terms. Whether in fact Emmett had been correct in his surmise did not get discussed at this point.
“Well, thank you,” she said. “No one has ever done that for me before. Of course, it’s so rarely threatened in any way. My honor, I mean. I’m sorry you got so banged up.”
“I’ve been beat worse.” He picked a grass stem and started to chew it, then flung it away with the thought, oh, great, the perfect hick look, a big shiner and a grass stem in the mouth.
“So,” said Lucy, “what now? You’ll stay here? At your house?”
“No, they’re all leaving after this weekend. People are coming to fix the place up and get it ready for sale. Maybe I’ll get a tent and just live on the beach.”
“Don’t be silly! We can put you up, if you can stand us. I’m sure my mom won’t mind. She likes a medieval ménage—dogs, servants, retainers, children, all banging against one another and having to be straightened out. It’s her fun.”
They walked back toward the house by a shortcut, a sandy path that wound around the kind of slight rise that passed for a hill in eastern Long Island, and through a shady copse of pines. At the base of this hill there was a seep under some boulders where Lucy had once found dog violets, and she wanted to see whether there were any now. Suddenly the sound of machine-gun fire burst out, as imitated by a ten-year-old boy. Lucy flung up her hands, screamed, and collapsed on the path. There was more machine-gunning.
“Die dramatically,” Lucy advised from the ground. Dan did an ahrrrg, staggered, and fell in a heap.
“I got you!” crowed Zak from among the boulders. They rose and inspected the machine-gun nest, a sandy notch dug out and camouflaged with branches. The machine gun was a length of three-inch plastic drainpipe.
“I thought you guys were at the beach,” said Lucy.
“We were but it was boring. I was being imaginary until you guys came along. You didn’t see me until I got you.”
“Yes, but we weren’t looking for an ambush. Next time you want to be lower down, so you’re not silhouetted against the sky. They call it the military crest. Where are the rest of your men?”
Zak pointed out a few places nearby. “Uh-uh,” she said, and knelt to scratch a plan in the dirt. “Okay, let’s say an eight-man squad. Your machine gun is here. Automatic rifles here, here, here, and here. You wait until their point man gets here, and you open up with your automatic rifles from both ends. The enemy forms a perimeter right here, where the trail dips a little, and that should be right in the beaten ground of your machine gun. They call it a kill sack. See?”
“What if they run into the woods?”
“Well, you already mined the woods, and if you have mortars, they’d be preregistered right there. The point of an ambush is to get everyone down in the first minute. So they can’t call for support.”
Zak nodded, taking it in. Dan gaped. Zak said, “You learned that from that guy, right?”
“His name is Tran.”
“Yeah. Dad really doesn’t like him, does he?”
“No, he doesn’t.”
“But Mom likes him. And you like him.”
“I don’t like him. I love him.”
Zak looked puzzled. “You can’t do that. Love is like like but more.”
“Actually, it’s not. Like is from here”—she touched his head—“love is from here.” She poked him in the center of his chest so that he squirmed away. “Le coeur a ses raisons que la raison ne connaît pas.”
“That’s French,” said Zak.
“That’s right. You should go back to the beach before Dad thinks you’re drowned and calls the police.”
Zak laughed and trotted off with his drainpipe, spraying the woods with deadly blasts. They walked on.
“Wow, what was that all about?” Dan said after a minute. “Who’s Tran?”
“Tran is an elderly Vietnamese gentleman. He was sort of my governess when I was growing up. He also worked with my mom.”
“And he taught you military stuff? Was that all on the level?”
“Oh, yes. And from a distinguished practitioner. We did small-unit problems all afternoon in Central Park. I also know how to tail someone, shake a tail, and clear a building of defenders. And shoot.”
“Why?”
“Oh, partly it was practical. My mom had a lot of enemies at the time and he wanted to protect me. The other stuff . . . he was of the opinion that you never could tell what was going to happen in your life. He was planning to teach literature and ended up guerrilla fighting almost his whole life. So he wanted me to be prepared. Weird, but there it is. Yet more useless knowledge in my head.”
“What happened to him?”
“Oh, he’s a small-time gangster now. He’s a pretty awful person, I guess, but he’s our awful person. He and my mom get along fine.”
* * *
Marlene had no problem putting another plate on the table, after having first called Rose Heeney to tell her these plans. They had a polite conversation, like two school mothers arranging an overnight for a fifth-grader, as if Heeney violence had not occurred on Marlene’s doorstep. The weekend oozed along peacefully. Sunday, Lucy whipped the twins out of bed with the cry “Pagan babies! Up! Up! Prayer is better than sleep!” and drove them off to mass at St. Perpetua’s in Southold. Just after one, the Heeneys came by, with their car packed for the trip. Marlene gave them a civilized lunch at which no alcohol was served, nor were the fights mentioned. Heeney discussed dogs he had known and trained for hunting, to all appearances an affable good old boy. It was perfectly artificial, but not at all unpleasant. Giancarlo gave Lizzie an origami crane, but secretly. Dan and Lucy allowed their eyes to meet for tiny instants, but otherwise kept away from one another. When the clan left, something heavy seemed to go out of the air. Dan Heeney felt a pang of disloyalty, for he felt this, too, but it did not prevent him from enjoying the rest of the day.
That evening, Marlene put Dan in a tiny room at the end of the upstairs hall, originally the hired girl’s room, as Marlene explained, and more recently used for sewing. It held a narrow iron cot, a dresser, an old Singer, and a dressmaker’s dummy.
“You won’t mind sharing a room with Ermentrude, will you?” Marlene asked, indicat
ing this object.
“No, ma’am.”
“Feel free to run up a party dress, if you want.”
He blushed and showed an uncomfortable smile. Oh, now I’ve impugned his manhood, Marlene thought. Should I watch the badinage henceforth? Maybe not; the boy needs a thicker skin, and this family is the place to get it.
While Dan was thus engaged, Lucy was on the phone with her best (and nearly only) friend, Mary Ma in New York. After the usual exchange of the latest, Lucy asked, “Listen, Ma, do you know Dan Heeney? He’s in your class.”
“Dan Heeney the Lollipop?”
“The what?”
“If it’s the same guy. Tall, golden curls, big blues, looks like an angel on a Christmas card.”
“That’s him. Why do they call him that?”
“Because everyone’s dying for a lick. It takes something to draw us MIT girls from our studies, but he’s a something in that class. How do you know him?”
“He’s living in our house out here.”
“Lucy! You sneaky bitch! How did you arrange that?”
“I didn’t; it just happened. Anyway, what’s he like?”
“Smart enough to stay in Cambridge. Manners. Eats with his mouth closed, which is not universal among the elite here at MIT, I’m sad to say. Oh, the tragic flaw. He’s in love with Olivia Hampton; she’s sort of a skanky, depraved SoHo wanna-be type, works in a coffee shop near here. The Human Bean? She’s a singer, ha ha. Anyway, he worships her, apparently, and of course, she thinks he’s appalling. What a waste!”
Lucy was not exactly let down by this news, as she had not allowed herself to rise very high up. If Dan Heeney noticed a certain cooling of her attentions, he did not show it. He was in any case used to being held in low esteem by girls he was interested in.
Karp left for the City on Tuesday, and life at the dog farm settled into a pleasant, disorderly routine. Dan often recalled during this period Lucy’s remark about her mother’s medieval aspect. The farmhouse often did resemble a lesser court of that period: the cooking of huge, spicy meals for many noisy people; enormous black dogs underfoot, snapping at scraps and being cuffed away from the plates; strangers arriving at the last moment, always fairly interesting ones, cops and dog breeders, relatives and priests; the dog handlers, louche, profane, and voluble, always in and out of the house, with their half-fabulous animal tales; the children raucous and filthy, bringing unwholesome objects in for inspection; oldies blaring from the greasy radio above the sink; the silence that fell in the midst of all this when Lucy bowed her head and said grace. It was as different as possible from his own family’s mealtimes, which were nuclear and short, Red always having to dash for meetings, Emmett stuffing it in and jumping up to go play ball or see his girl. After that and after the intense year at school, monastic despite his best efforts, it was like living in a dream, the colors brighter, the scents more heady than in real life.
Lucy and Dan became friends. Aside from a minimal spell Dan spent at the farm office, they were together all day, working the dogs, corralling the twins, doing the necessary chores, and all the while talking. They discovered that they were both serious people, more serious than the average person their age, far more serious than the type of youth the media held up for emulation. He told her about superstrings and explained relativity to her so that she almost got it. She taught him how to say ridiculous things in foreign tongues—Help, a dwarf has burgled my kaleidoscope—in Urdu, in Yoruba, in Gaelic, and showed him Chinese poetry in calligraphy, and what the calligraphy meant and the poetry, how that whole ancient culture danced in the sounds and in the lines. They told stories about their parents. Almost all of his were about his father; almost all of hers were about her mother. They agreed that neither of them was from a normal family.
“What if my father had married your mother,” Lucy proposed.
“A perfect family,” he said. “Meals on time. No craziness. The most exciting thing would be waiting for SAT scores to come. And the reverse—your mom with Big Red Heeney?”
They both laughed. “Homicide,” she said. “Two weeks after the wedding, tops.” About religion they did not speak seriously, only in the half-joking way that friends do when one is devout and the other is not. She took him to mass once because he was curious, but she didn’t ask him what he thought and he didn’t volunteer anything beyond the polite. He didn’t ask to go again.
This life went on for some weeks. On the Fourth of July, Karp came out and stayed for four days, and when he returned, Lucy and Dan went with him. A year in Cambridge had not turned him into a city boy. He frankly gawked: at the loft on Crosby where the Karps dwelt over the Chinese grocery store; at the continuous circus of SoHo and Chinatown; at the sort of people Lucy seemed to know—beggars, street Arabs, elderly Chinese, nuns. She would fly across a crowded street to have a long conversation in Spanish with a bundle of rags.
They went to dinner at a Chinese restaurant owned, it seemed, by the parents of a girl he recognized vaguely from MIT, and in a private room they all ate a large meal, no single item of which was recognizable to him, after which they went uptown to the ballet. She had tickets. He paid for the cab. She never had any cash; she was always giving bills to people on the street. He had never seen a ballet before and did not think he would ever make a habit of it, but the prima was certainly the most beautiful and graceful being he had ever seen in his life. Who turned out to be a dear friend of his little guide. They went backstage afterward, and the goddess flung herself on Lucy’s neck and insisted that they all go out to Balthazar and have drinks. This they did, together with several of the company and assorted balletomanes. They drank a good deal, Dan being heavily vamped by beautiful people of both sexes, which he was not used to, but which he handled fairly well. He knew he would definitely not have handled it well had Lucy not been sitting there, speaking Russian to some blonde and occasionally giving him a friendly eye-roll.
After a night spent in the loft, they went back to Southold on the early train. Marlene had a worried look on her face when she picked them up.
“You need to call your brother,” she said to Dan. “He called early this morning and I gave him the loft number, but you’d already left, because he called again. He sounded upset.”
“Oh, it’s probably nothing. Emmett spends a good deal of time upset. He probably can’t find his fishing rod and thinks I know where it is.”
Dan called from the phone in the office. Lucy was in the yard when she heard him cry out, “What! Oh my God!” She ran into the house. He was slumped on the old couch, his face paper white, the dead phone clutched in his hand.
“Dan! What is it?” she cried.
“I have to go home,” he said in a horrible, creaky voice. “They’re all dead. Somebody killed them. They even killed Lizzie.”
5
MARLENE DROVE HIM TO LA Guardia airport in her truck, with his few belongings in a nylon bag that sat on his lap. He said nothing during the trip. Several times he passed the back of his hands across his eyes and sniffled. Twice he uttered a sigh, or groan. She did not try to initiate a conversation or to comfort him. Comfort was not notable among her talents. Vengeance was, but he did not ask for that, nor did she offer. When she let him off at the US Air terminal, he turned his face and said, thank you, ma’am, you’ve been very kind. She said, I’m sorry for your loss, if there’s anything I can do . . .
Then he was gone through the glass door. She brought Gog into the front seat and drove off.
What she felt most was embarrassment, tinged a little with shame. Murder was like that, the instinct of the pack to turn away from the injured one. Marlene had never sympathized with the whole yellow-ribbon shtick, the little mounds of toys and notes and candles people placed nowadays at the scenes of killings. What possible good could it do to place a teddy bear? Selfish juju, stupid and sentimental. It said, hoo, boy! God, don’t let it happen to me! This family had barged into her life, unasked, with their burden of violence. Now it had clai
med them and they were gone, and she felt relief. That was part of the shame, but there it was, she had to be honest. Of course, she felt sorry for them, too—she had genuinely liked Rose, and the little girl, that was unspeakable, but there were so very many unspeakable things going on around the world. Sorry was such a pathetic little emotion. And the other part, the thrill of terror that violence brings when we think of our own loved ones, well, she had that covered. No one was going to take her babies, not unless they could get past a brace of ferocious, highly trained dogs, and her well-armed self, and her ferocious, highly trained friends. Still, a little uneasiness there, the old instinct still present, half-asleep. No, not anymore. She couldn’t take it. Don’t get involved, tattoo it on your forehead, Ciampi!
Suddenly, she swerved across four lanes of traffic and left the highway, occasioning a chorus of horns and a grand display of flip-offs.
“What we should do is go see Butch,” she informed the dog. “How would you like that, honey? See the old neighborhood?” The dog shook himself, flipping drool. Marlene steered the truck onto the westbound highway and turned the radio on to WQXR. Some kind of motet, Monteverdi. Up with the volume, music from another time of rampant murder, soothing. It still worked. She picked up her cell phone and dialed.
* * *
The twins asked Lucy why she was crying, or Giancarlo did, his brother standing silent by his side. She told them, and Giancarlo burst instantly into tears. She was like him in this, she thought, crying easily. She cried often in church, at mass; a leaf falling, a certain cast of light, a poem by Li Po or Hopkins, would all start the faucets, although on the several occasions when she had faced real and mortal danger, she had not shed a tear. Since Dan’s awful phone call, she had been dripping shamefully, off and on. Immediately after the call, she had embraced him, spontaneously, their first (and clearly to be last) fleshly contact, but he stiffened and did not want to talk or be comforted, at least not by her. Her mother had whisked him away so quickly, there had been no time to . . . what? Have a relationship? She could see he blamed himself, for not being there, for not dying with them, and she wanted to explain to him, to make him understand that this was not a wise thing to do.
Absolute Rage Page 9
