Bad Bird (v5)

by Chris Knopf

  My Internet search for Clinton Andrews, the man who owned the Peconic Pantry, who was beaten nearly to death thirty years before, was gummed up a lot by references to the former president, but courtesy of Randall’s illegal software—the equivalent of a digital bloodhound—I eventually turned him up.

  He apparently owned and operated a fitness club up on the North Fork in the hamlet of Cutchogue. According to a deeper search, it was located on a cove next to a small marina catering to shallow keel boats that claimed itself the birthplace of the atomic bomb, since Einstein and a few of his cohorts sailed out of there and presumably cooked up the idea of a nuclear chain reaction while tacking around the Little Peconic Bay.

  I took their word for it and climbed into my Volvo and headed north, without Mr. Andrews having the benefit of a courtesy warning, preparing myself for whatever fallout might result.

  I’d debated bringing along Sam or Harry, but like most of my internal debates on this subject, it ended in a stalemate. So I went on my own, which I was glad for as soon as I reached the South Ferry and crossed over to Shelter Island—the scenic route to Cutchogue—and felt that illusion of safety as Southampton disappeared behind me.

  The day had started out gray and foreboding, but changed its mind and turned sunny by the time I traversed Shelter Island and boarded the North Ferry. Spring was coming on slowly that year, so there was still enough chill to warrant my barn jacket with the flannel lining. To complete the ensemble, I wore cowboy boots and jeans, which I felt enhanced the expeditionary mood of the morning.

  I got out of the Volvo as we crossed the channel and took in the breezy, saline air, and watched the seabirds zing around overhead. Even the occasional spray off the chop brought over the bow by the wind felt refreshingly perfect. One of the ferry guys came up and stood next to me at the gunwale. I asked him if he ever tired of being out on the water.

  “I go back and forth on that,” he said, which I deserved.

  I drove off the ferry when we reached Greenport and headed southwest on Sound Avenue, the North Fork’s version of a freeway. This was Long Island’s wine country, which any average tourist knew more about than I did, having never set foot on a vineyard. I made up for it by drinking a fair amount of their product, my indiscriminate tastes allowing for a broad sampling. I also appreciated looking at the orderly rows of grapevines and the cute buildings along the side of the road where I heard you could drink for free provided you spit most of the wine out into little paper cups. A practice that likely explained my complete lack of interest.

  Cutchogue was a world of inlets and shallow waterways, so it wasn’t surprising that Clinton Andrews’s studio had a water view. I found it easily, guided by frequent references to mushroom clouds and subatomic particles, and Clinton’s sign for The Compleat Physique.

  It was a single-story building with a partial roof, flat on the top and enclosed by a white railing. Nothing said I couldn’t just walk in the door, so I did. Inside was a large open area almost completely covered by a continuous blue mat. There were several big Pilates balls, some large elastic bands, and a few small barbells, but no elaborate gym equipment, which I found very pleasing, since I truly hated gym equipment. In the middle of the mat was a tall man I assumed to be Clinton Andrews. He had long, white hair that flowed from his head down over his shoulders, a deep tan set off nicely by his hair, and a clear, nearly wrinkle-free complexion. He wore a tank top and shorts, displaying a lean but powerful body. Only the subtle folds around his throat and a slight looseness in his skin showed him to be an older man. By my calculations, he couldn’t have been much under sixty, unless he’d opened the Peconic Pantry as a teenager.

  Also on the mat was a young woman, sheathed in a nylon bodysuit that I thought you only wore when you wanted to smooth things out under a tight dress. And usually when you really needed smoothing, which this woman clearly did not. The bodysuit was a color they called nude, which I always thought should be “nude white girl.” On this woman there was a fair amount of contrast, though the illusion of total nakedness was well within reach.

  They were performing an exercise whereby Clinton supported her while she bent backward, lifting one leg with toes pointed and allowing her arms to dangle toward the floor. If there had been music playing I would have expected her to straighten out and launch into a pirouette, but she repeated the move several times, her lower back braced against Clinton’s rigid right arm, the tips of her fingers reaching closer to the floor with each bend.

  They must have heard me coming through the door, but neither looked in my direction until they completed the routine. Clinton pointed to a single chair against the wall as they flowed into the next exercise, this time standing face-to-face, arms straight out and parallel to the floor, hands clasped. Then they moved their outstretched arms forward and back, so each person’s arms were either extended backward, or brought forward to assist in the other’s extension. It also had the effect of mashing the woman’s breasts into Clinton’s chest, which neither of them seemed to take note of.

  And thus things proceeded through a number of other exercises, which seemed to be an invigorating mix of resistance training, stretching, and erotic gymnastics. Watching them made the wait more than endurable.

  I found myself straightening my back, loosening my neck, and wondering if Harry would appreciate a more fluid presentation, and less of the full-body impact I tended to deliver. I let my right arm drift eloquently into the air, then caught myself and pulled it back, self-conscious.

  After that I just watched, and about forty-five minutes later, they wrapped things up with some running in place, then a big hug with kisses to each cheek and a toast of something odd in glass jars. After the woman disappeared through a door in the back, presumably leading to the locker room, Clinton came over to me, wiping his hands with a small towel. I stood up and offered to shake.

  “Sweat doesn’t bother me,” I said.

  “Then you’re in the right place.”

  “Clinton Andrews?” I asked.

  “The same,” he said, shaking my hand with the ideal amount of pressure—not too much, not too little.

  “I’m Jackie,” I said.

  “You picked the right time to join. I just had one of my oldest clients move back to the city. Though she promised me she’d still come out to visit.”

  His smile displayed teeth that were perfectly straight and brilliantly white. I wanted to say, Those can’t be real, but it was too early for that, even for me.

  “No gym equipment. I like that,” I said, looking around the big room.

  His smile went up another megawatt.

  “That’s the whole idea,” he said. “All that hardware has nothing to do with fitness, but everything to do with enriching gym equipment manufacturers, especially since most of it sits collecting dust in people’s basements. Did the ancient Greeks get those flawless bodies working out with a machine? I don’t think so.”

  The door in the back opened and the woman came out in a sweat suit and carrying a voluminous, soft-sided gym bag. He smiled at her and she stroked his cheek as she walked by, barely giving me a glance, but what little was there told enough of the story.

  “Are you two …?” I asked.

  He looked puzzled.

  “No. She’s just a client.”

  “Oh. So what is it you do here? Almost looks like yoga, or Pilates,” I said.

  “Like yoga and Pilates, but not. You probably know the fitness regimen behind Compleat Physique is of my own design?” he said, as if it were a question.

  “I did not.”

  That seemed to make him happy, as if he relished the opportunity to explain. As he spoke, he very slowly, but noticeably, began to violate the outer periphery of my personal space. I responded by ever so slightly maintaining a consistent distance, though that involved a slow rotation to avoid getting backed into the wall. As we danced the world’s most gradual dance, I listened to him describe in considerable detail his theories on health and
fitness, well supported by borrowings from every established form of physical and spiritual expression. It was pretty engrossing, and eventually allowed me to tee up my true reason for being there.

  “So what got you interested in all this?” I asked.

  He pointed his finger at me to signal a new thought.

  “You need one of my brochures. It’s a lot to read, but everything you want to know is in there.”

  He strode over to a rack mounted to the wall and took out a thick, 8½ × 11 booklet. I followed him over there and he handed it to me. His handsome face was on the cover, a picture an advertising agency could use to sell toothpaste, hair product, face cream, or longevity pills.

  “That’s great,” I said. “Thanks. But how ’bout the short version. I can read the details later.”

  He used the hand towel to wipe the back of his neck, then reached under his tank top to run it over his chest.

  “Do you like wheatgrass?” he asked.

  “Beg pardon?”

  “It’s a juice. Great source of chlorophyll.”

  “Okay,” I said. “As long as my hair doesn’t turn green.”

  “That’d be a pity; it’s such a lovely reddy blond.”

  He led me through another side door that opened into a spare, starkly furnished office. In addition to a white-Formica-covered desk, there was a matching table and four shape-fitting chairs like the type you saw in the 1960s. I took one while he dug bottles of wheatgrass juice out of a compact refrigerator.

  He snapped open the drinks and handed me one as he sat down next to me, again, not invading but skimming the frontier of my personal space.

  “Do you know how old I am?” he asked.

  “That’s always a dangerous question, but I’m guessing around fifty-eight.”

  “Sixty-eight. You’re ten years off.”

  “Wow,” I said, sincerely.

  He ran a hand through his long, silken white hair in a gesture that would have been preening on anyone else at that moment, but which on him seemed entirely genuine.

  “What I’m going to say to you will sound insane, but if you let me explain, you’ll see that it’s completely rational.”

  I started to get it. This was the standard presentation, delivered at podiums, around conference room tables, in living rooms, and here in his office, each calibrated to suit the occasion.

  “Sure. I’ve got an open mind.”

  “Thirty years ago I died. Then I came back to life as a completely different human being.”

  He paused there for dramatic effect. I respected the silence for a moment, then said, “Okay. That’s cool. How’d you die?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” he said, modestly.

  “Hey, no fair. You get me hooked on the story, you gotta tell me everything that happened.”

  He smiled again, this time indulgently.

  “If you must know, I was clubbed to death with what the police believed was a galvanized pipe, though the weapon was never recovered. I was still breathing when they got me to the hospital, but I died in the emergency room. They didn’t have the technology they have now, so it took a while to bring me back, but only as far as a deep coma. At that point, any reasonable society would have pulled the plug, but the Sisters of Mercy got ahold of me and I spent a year as a vegetable. And I’d probably have stayed that way if they hadn’t constantly prayed for me. On God’s whim, I just woke up one day.”

  “Wow,” I said again, only half sincerely this time, since I already knew some of the story.

  “ ‘Woke up’ is too generous a term,” he said. “I opened my eyes, but it took days to know what I was seeing, and weeks to form a thought. By then, they’d moved me into the rehab wing, where the physical therapists worked on me. The half of me that still worked.”

  Another stock line, but it was easy to hear. Clinton Andrews was very easy to listen to overall. His voice was deep and softly modulated, each word spoken in a calm, leisurely fashion, as if there were limitless time to share his tale. I noticed when I first saw him that he wasn’t wearing a wedding ring, since I always look. I’d read in the Chronicle’s archives that at the time of the robbery he had a wife, but no children. Now, of course, I was dying to ask, but since this was obviously the first stage of a well-rehearsed seduction—one intended to get me either into his club or into his bed, or both—I didn’t want to upset the flow.

  “How long did it take to get everything working again?”

  “Thirty years,” he said, pleased to be handed a great setup line. “One to stand, two to walk with crutches, five to run, and the rest to go way beyond being a simple grocer with no more ambition than to pay my mortgage, watch TV, and do a little fishing. I was fat, dumb, and unhappy. I just didn’t know it.”

  Now that I was sitting, it was harder to move away as he drifted inexorably closer. So I had to literally pick up the chair and move back a few inches. He took the hint but held his forward position.

  “So, if I’m hearing you right,” I said, “what should’ve been a tragedy turned out pretty well in the end.”

  Though still placid, his face tightened, almost imperceptibly.

  “It was a tragedy. A horrible tragedy. You can’t imagine the physical pain and despair I went through. I’m a better man than I would have been, but I would have eagerly chosen a less agonizing route to my good fortune,” he said, his tranquil blue eyes slightly ablaze.

  Wow, I said, this time to myself. I didn’t know if I was talking to Jack LaLanne or Gandalf.

  “It must have been tough on your family,” I said, looking conspicuously at his left hand, as if first noticing the lack of a ring. He followed my eye, then looked back at me.

  “My wife left me year one. Another gift I would have chosen from a different source.”

  I didn’t know exactly where to take this from there. I was genuinely absorbed, but I had another agenda that seemed unfair to hide. On the other hand, if I wasn’t able to reveal myself to my own brother, how would I reveal myself to Andrews as his attacker’s sister? But if I didn’t, how would I get the information I wanted?

  Easily. I lied.

  “Mr. Andrews, I’m an attorney by trade, but I’ve always wanted to write a book about some of the intriguing people I’ve met in the course of my practice. I would love to tell your story,” I said, then took a deep, cleansing breath, pretending to have just cleared my conscience.

  He reached over and tapped on the brochure I held in my lap.

  “Start with that,” he said. “I’m sure it’s all there, but I’ll be happy to tell you anything you want. Especially if you do me the honor of joining The Compleat Physique,” he added, reaching behind himself to slide an application off the top of his desk.

  “I would love to,” I said, leaving off the “but” part of the sentence as I took the application out of his hand. He didn’t set a very high bar for admission to The Compleat Physique. Name, address, telephone number, and a brief description of your spiritual and physical fitness goals. And a credit card number.

  “We can start today, if you want,” he said when I looked up.

  I sighed with disappointment.

  “You know, I’m just not prepared. No gym clothes.”

  “No need for that,” he said, his voice dipping into a slightly lower register. “We keep several bodysuits on hand.” He looked me up and down. “I know I have your size.”

  Having recently fought off a rapist, you’d think the guy’s insinuations would have triggered my customary feminist outrage. But the tangled labyrinth that makes up my moral constitution made me feel an exception was in order. After all, I was there under false pretenses. And also, contrary to all good sense, it felt sort of flattering.

  Still, there are limits.

  “I’ll stick with my workout clothes,” I said, sitting back in my chair. “It’s the only way I’d feel comfortable.”

  He also sat back, in gracious, patient retreat.

  “Of course.”

  I opened t
he brochure and scanned the table of contents. I was eager to dig in, but I didn’t want to lose his attention, however problematic.

  “Did they catch the guy who did this to you?” I asked. “Sorry to dwell on that part, but the legal stuff is my business.”

  Still looking patient, he said, “They caught a guy, but that wasn’t the end of it for me.”

  “Really.”

  “I steer clear of the legal stuff. It’s not what people are interested in hearing about.”

  “I’m very interested,” I said, leaning forward again. “For my book.”

  He paused—not to hesitate, I thought, but to form the right words.

  “I remembered nothing of the attack until nearly five years after the fact. By then, the attacker was already tried, convicted, and locked away. The science on recovered memory is far from settled, and I concede that my own damaged mind could have concocted the recollection, but I maintain my belief that it wasn’t a single perpetrator that night, but three. I cannot recall their faces, black or white, or the color of their hair, or how they spoke or what they said, but in my mind I see not one but three men milling around my store as if they were unknown to each other, and then suddenly acting as one. Whether all three beat me, or only two, or only one as the police maintained, I don’t know. But I do know there were three. No more, no less.”

  “You brought this to the cops,” I said.

  “I did. And the DA, although the actual prosecutor had retired by then. Predictably, no one believed me, and even if they had, there wasn’t a scintilla of evidence to support my testimony. Even the lawyer for the son of a bitch they caught said his client never told him there were accomplices, which if proven, could have deflected the full brunt of the prosecution, or at least helped out in his defense.”

  Sort of, I thought, having heard the it-was-that-other-guy-they-didn’t-catch-who-did-it assertion a few hundred times. Most judges I went before had heard it a few thousand.

  “So what did you do?”

  He shrugged and loosened his posture, which had taken on an uncharacteristic stiffness as he recounted the experience. And the shining smile came back.