by S. J. Rozan
I ground out my cigarette and leaned forward in my chair as Tony walked to where the three men sat.
"You ain't welcomed here, Frank." He spoke low to Grice, ignoring the others. The line of his jaw was white. "Get out.
"What kind of a way is that to talk, Tony?" Frank Grice smiled widely, spread his hands innocently, palms up. "We |just came by for a drink."
"Drink somewhere else."
Grice didn't answer. He took a pack of cigarettes out of his overcoat, pulled one loose. The big guy flicked a gold lighter for him. Grice looked at the flame as if it were something new and interesting. Lighting the cigarette, he looked up at Tony. Smoke streamed lazily from his mouth. He said something softly, so softly I couldn't hear it. Tony went a deep red; I couldn't hear his answer, either. Grice stood suddenly. The other two exchanged looks, then followed suit. Grice sauntered to the door, opened it, and held it open, smiling the whole time, his cigarette dangling from his cockeyed lips. Tony half turned, searching for Marie. "Keep an eye on things," he growled. "I'll be right back." He slammed forward, past Grice, through the open door. Grice followed, his boys followed him, and the door swung shut behind them.
Before the door closed I was out of my chair, moving swiftly past the bar and through the vinyl-padded doors that swung into the kitchen. Buzzing fluorescent lights, too bright, reflected off the stainless-steel counters. The room smelled of garlic and ammonia. A skinny kid up to his elbows in greasy water stared as I slipped out the kitchen door into the winter darkness. My steps made no sound as I rounded the corner of the building, a cold wind pushing its way through my shirt. Three figures—Tony, Grice, and the big, friendly man—leaned close together in the middle of the parking lot; a fourth, the little guy, stood by the bar's front door. I worked my way in the shadows of parked cars.
I couldn't see Tony's face, but his voice came to me, tight and gravelly. "You don't get it, Frank. I want you outta here, damn fast."
"No, you don't get it, Tony." Grice's voice still held a smile. "If I'm thirsty, you pour me a drink. If I'm hungry, you grill me a steak. That's how it is now."
"Hell it is," Tony spat.
A nod from Grice, just a small movement of his misshapen head, and the big man slipped behind Tony like a shadow, pinned his arms as Grice smashed his fist into Tony's belly. Tony doubled over, groaning. The big man pulled him up. Grice laughed, rubbed his fist into the palm of his other hand. He stopped laughing suddenly as I slammed into him like a freight train, spreading him backwards across the rusted trunk of an old red Chevy. I backhanded him once across the mouth, just to slow him down; then I sprang back, left him there. He was Tony's.
Tony tore himself out of the big man's surprised grip and reached both hands for Grice, hauled him off the car while I grabbed the big man's shoulder, spun him around. I threw my best punch into the middle of his mustache. He wasn't any bigger than I was, and my best wasn't bad, but it didn't faze him. He staggered back; then, spreading his lips in a hungry smile, he launched himself at me. I sidestepped, drove a kick into his ribs.
He stumbled; I watched. Then something crashed into me from behind, knocked me to the ground. Small, bony hands lightened around my throat, squeezing, shaking. A knee dug into my back.
Gravel scraped the side of my face as I twisted, digging with my right foot, trying to shake off the little guy as my lungs began to strain for air. I groped at his hands pressing into my windpipe. My heart pounded, raced; yellow and red explosions started behind my eyes. His breath rasped loudly in my ear. I had no breath at all. The world got smaller, darker. Closing on one finger of each choking hand I forced them back, my muscles only half obeying, beginning to tremble. I put everything into bending those two fingers; at the last minute the hands loosened and I clawed them away from my throat.
I sucked air loudly and twisted left, yanking on his right arm. He slipped from my back; I drove my right elbow hard beside me into whatever was there. It landed solidly enough to send bolts of pain ricocheting up and down my arm. From the sounds behind me, I wasn't the only one who noticed. I pulled away and got up on one knee and then the big man was back, with a fist the size of a bowling ball slamming into my chin. My head snapped back and I landed in a cold muddy puddle. I lay motionless, breathing hard.
The big man leaned over me, relaxed and smiling, for a good look. When he was near enough that I could smell the stale coffee on his breath, I shot my arms out and grabbed his jacket, pulled my knee to my chest, shoved my foot into his gut. I straightened my leg and threw him away from me, and this time when he stumbled I was right there, three fast mean punches pounding his face and another sharp kick up under his ribs. He moaned and started to sag. I clenched my hands together and swung them like a hatchet down on the place where his neck joined his shoulder. At first nothing happened; then he fell over sideways like a tree. I stepped back, panting, and looked around. The little bony guy was standing now but he was a lot smaller than I was and he wouldn't try to take me again, not from the front where I could see him coming. I grinned so he'd know I knew that.
A loud, wordless sound came from behind me. I whipped around and saw Tony sitting on Frank Grice's chest, his knees pinning Grice's arms, his square fist thumping repeatedly into Grice's already bloody face. "Tony!" I yelled hoarsely. "Hey, Tony, that's enough! Come on, man, you're going to kill him."
I pulled Tony back and off Grice, who groaned, rolled, and worked his way slowly to his feet. Tony struggled in my grip and I held him, not relaxing until he did.
"All right?" I asked, as his rocky muscles loosened under my hands. He nodded and I let him go.
Grice stood slightly stooped, breathing noisily through his mouth. He lifted a hand to his face, cupping his nose, then moved the hand away. "You'll pay for this, Tony," he hissed. "This was stupid. And you"—he turned his bloody face to me—"whoever the hell you are, stay the fuck out of my way from now on."
"Aw, Frank," I said, my voice still hoarse. "Why should Tony have all the fun?"
Something flared in Grice's eyes. I suddenly noticed how cold I was, soaked with sweat and muddy water out here in the winter night.
"Go on, Tony," Grice said, still looking at me. "You bring me all the smartass muscle you want. It won't help you, Tony." He coughed.
“I don't need no help, you son of a bitch," Tony snarled, taking two fast steps toward Grice.
From off to my right a voice like gears grinding said, "Don't do that." I spun around. Ten feet away, the little bony guy was planted, legs spread apart, holding an automatic pointed at the centre of Tony's chest.
Grice and Tony saw the gun the same time I did. Everyone froze, and for a long moment no one moved in the gravelled lot under the blue-black sky, scattered now with more stars than a man could count, even in a long lifetime.
My gun was pressed to my ribs under my flannel shirt, as out of reach as the stars.
Then Grice laughed, a short, guttural sound, as of something being ripped in two. "Oh, Christ, Wally. What the hell is that for? Put it away. Come on, let's go." He looked at me, then at Tony. "Next time," he said.
He turned sharply and walked to a big blue Ford, got in the front passenger door. The little guy hesitated, swore, then tucked the gun into his belt. He grabbed the big man, who looked as if he wasn't sure what day it was. Steering him to the car, he shoved him through the rear door, got behind the wheel, and sprayed gravel tearing out of the lot.
Tony and I watched the red glow of their tail lights vanish down 30. "I don't like your friends," I told him.
"You got Frank pissed off at you now," he said.
I fingered my left cheek carefully. It felt hot and sore. "You owe him, Tony?"
Tony turned to me. A lead curtain fell behind his eyes. "I don't owe nobody, Smith." He wiped his hand down his sweaty face. "You shoulda stayed out of it."
"Yeah." I shrugged. "But I was hungry. Grice beats the shit out of you, I don't get my lasagna."
We turned together, headed back toward the doo
r. The ancient, pitted tin sign that read "Antonelli's," Tony's father's sign, creaked as it swung in the wind. A smile cracked Tony's face. "Sucker," he said. "I'm outta lasagna."
Two hours later, full of food, warmer, I turned my six- year-old Acura onto the dirt road that leads from 30 down to my cabin. The single lane was rutted and slippery, ruts that fit my tires exactly because almost no one drove that road but me. I parked in the flat field next to my place and spent a long time leaning on the car, looking at the stars through the black cross-hatching of tree branches.
Inside, I turned on the lamp in the front room. The cedar-panelled walls soaked up most of the light, except where the glass frame of a photograph or drawing caught it, threw it back. When I bought the cabin it wasn't winterized, so I'd done that, insulating, finishing with cedar because it stood up well to damp and I liked the smell. I'd reroofed, too, and rebuilt the porch; this year, as soon as the weather was warm enough, I was going to replace the chimney.
I shed my jacket, threw it over the broken-in reading « hair by the window. As I turned, lamplight glinted on the child's silver-framed photograph in the middle of the bookshelves. Days, weeks could go by without my looking at that picture, knowing it was there but feeling it only as a source of warmth, a hand on my shoulder. At those times I felt almost at peace; sometimes I even thought I wanted to talk about it, although I didn't know with whom and I never tried.
And then other times, like now, I'd walk by too close, too close, and slice my heart on the sharp edges of Annie's smile. Then the old pain would well up from where it lived in the hollows of my bones, and my eyes would grow hot. Ambushed by this aching, I would stare, as I did now, into this picture that never changed, and wonder why I kept it here, where it was so dangerous. Seven years ago I'd packed away the pictures I'd had in New York, and all her things. Her things were gone from here, too; this was all that I had left, all I'd kept, and I wondered why.
But I knew.
Because although the fresh prettiness of her face, the round cheeks and soft brown eyes and the wave in her hair, had all been her mother's, that sharp, slanted smile was mine.
And because, in all her nine years, I had never seen Annie afraid.
I turned away from the picture. I poured myself some Maker's Mark, left the bottle out. I drank, then flexed my
hands, palms up, palms down; they seemed all right, so I carried the bourbon to the piano bench and raised the cover off the keyboard of the old, battered Baldwin.
I ran through a series of scales, the keys cold and smooth and hard under my fingers; then, after a still minute and a few deep breaths, I started on the Mozart B minor Adagio, trying out the phrasing that had been running around my head since morning. It didn't really work, but I played through the piece anyway, twice, and then went on to more Mozart, the Sonata in A minor, which I'd been playing a lot longer and played better.
As I moved into it, the power and the tension in me grew until my whole body rang with them, with the exhilaration of balancing on a very narrow beam, barely controlling the lines of the music as they wove toward and away from each other, building, fading, stopping and not stopping, only my hands preventing chaos, creating just enough order for just enough time that the immense beauty of the music could exist here, now, in this dark, small place halfway down a wooded winter hillside, under a million stars.
Chapter 2
Morning came, cold, clear, and much too early.
Groggy, I rolled across the bed out of the sunlight, tried to remember why I ached, why my cheek was stiff and sore and my jaw was tender. There must have been a fight, but I didn't remember it, and a sick, familiar feeling began in the pit of my stomach. The fights I couldn't remember were usually ones I'd started, usually over nothing, usually with men I didn't know and had no quarrel with except the quarrel that comes in a bottle of bourbon like the prize in a box of Cracker Jacks. Time had been when I would often wake sick and aching, finding nothing in my memory but shadows and regret. It had been a long time since the last time, though, and it had never happened up here. That was one of the reasons I came here, and so I worked at remembering, pushing my way through the bourbon haze and the dull thudding in my skull.
Nothing came. I groped on the table by the bed for a cigarette. I lit one, missed the ashtray with the match, rolled onto my back. I looked slowly around, to the window, the charcoal drawing on the wall, the bureau, the straight-backed chair with yesterday's clothes slung over it. Nothing. A cloud covered the sun, left the room gray and cold.
Early-morning smoke caught in my throat and I coughed, felt a pain I wasn't expecting. I touched my neck, feeling the sore, bruised places, and then memory and relief flooded in together like tide in a sand castle. It was all there: Tony, Frank Grice, the bony hands around my neck. The muddy puddle. The gun.
I finished the cigarette, threw off the quilt. Standing at the window I watched the high thin clouds drifting east. Birds searched my yard for breakfast. They moved with the jerky speed of a silent movie, flashing from branches to the ground.
I shrugged into a robe, went out to the front room. As always, it was warmer there than in the rooms in the back, the one I slept in and the other, rarely used now.
I flicked on the hot water heater in the corner of the kitchen. I built a fire in the wood stove and put some water on to boil. When the coffee was ground and waiting I took a quick shower, in water I wouldn't have called hot anywhere but here.
I dressed quickly in clothes as cold as the air. I thought about shaving, but I looked in the mirror at my cheek, streaked and raw, and decided to skip it. Eve Colgate would just have to live with it.
Wearing my jacket and gloves, I took my coffee outside to the porch. Up on the ridge 30 ran, invisible, around the rim of my land. The damp smell of decaying leaves mixed with the dryness of woodsmoke. In the crisp and clear air the black skeletons of trees were sharp against the sky. The oaks up by the road I'd planted myself, the first summer I was here. They were still small; oaks are slow growers.
By the time I'd finished the thick, bitter coffee the Bounding in my head was gone. I smoked a cigarette while the pale- sun stabbed through the branches as though it were searching for something. I grabbed a handful of bird- seed from the can by the door, scattered it in the yard. Then I went back inside, rinsed out my coffee cup, slipped on my holster and my .38. I wiped the frost from the car and headed up the road to meet Eve Colgate.
Eve Colgate's house sat on the crest of a hill along Route 10 in the north of the county. Below, the state highway gleamed two wide flat ribbons laid over the fields. Cars raced along it with a faint whoosh. From Eve Colgate's place you could see that, but there were better things to look at. The sky was a brilliant blue and the wind raised miniature waves on puddles by the roadside. The sun was almost warm. Eve Colgate had apple, peach, and cherry orchards, pasture for a small dairy herd, and a long, straight drive arched over by chestnut trees planted close. A stand of forsythia already showed tiny spots of green.
The house was small but solid, yellow clapboard with white shutters and a big front porch. To the right of the drive a lawn slanted up to the house. On the drive's other side, ten feet of lawn separated the chestnuts from a tangle of undergrowth and scrub trees sloping down to the forest. A hundred years ago someone had cleared the forest from that slope, probably intending to plant and harvest and
Prosper. But the ground was rocky and winters were hard. Some of the scrub trees were as tall as the house.
A muscular black dog came charging off the porch as I drove up. I parked behind a blue Ford pickup. In front of the house was another truck, a work-scarred red one. Eve Colgate, in a black sweater, hatless and gloveless, stood beside it talking with a thickly built man.
I got out of the car. The dog barked, planted his feet, growled deep in his throat like a dog who means business. I took a step forward. So did he. I stopped, waited.
"Leo!" Eve Colgate called. The dog looked to her, then quickly back at me, giving
one wag of his tail. He didn't stop growling. "Leo!" she called again, more sharply, and he hesitated, then went to her reluctantly, glaring at me over his shoulder.
Eve Colgate stood scratching the dog's ears. I walked up the drive toward her and the heavy man. The dog bristled as I got close but he didn't move.
Eve Colgate's eyebrows rose slightly when she saw my face, bruised and unshaven. She looked from me to the man next to her; then she explained us to each other. "Bill Smith, Harvey Warner. The Warners have the next farm to mine. Mr. Smith is up from New York. He has a cabin near North Blenheim." We shook hands.
"Well, I'll call you," Warner said to her. "Is day after tomorrow's good?"
"It's fine," she said. "I'll be sure to have read this by then." She gestured with a folder of papers she was holding.
"Damn thing better be all it's cracked up to be." Warner spat in the dirt. "Else I swear I'm gonna sell them damn cows, go sharecroppin' for Sanderson like everybody else."
"You swore that last year," she smiled.
"Yeah well, this year I'm gonna do it. Damn pipeline's gonna ruin my best pastureland anyway. Or maybe I'll just stick Sanderson with the whole damn place, retire to Florida before he figures out he's out of his mind. To hell with it. I'll call you." He swung into the red pickup, drove nil down the muddy drive. The dog chased after him, yapping.
Eve Colgate watched the truck go, then looked at me, her eyes probing my face as you might test an ice field before you walked out on it.
"What did he mean, sharecropping?" I asked, to be saying something under those eyes.
She turned back to the drive, watched the dog trotting up it. "That's what they all call it. The small dairy farmers are all giving up. They're selling their herds to whomever will buy them, and their land to Appleseed. Then they contract to Appleseed, putting the pastureland into vegetables. They grow what Mark Sanderson tells them to and he pays them whatever he wants." She ran a hand through her blunt gray hair. "A lot of people are bitter about it. But they do it, because they're farmers and this is what they know, even on land that's no longer theirs." She gestured with the folder in her hand. "Harvey's grandfather settled that farm. But fifty cows aren't enough anymore. I have even fewer. We're talking about consolidating our herds and investing in new equipment."
