Wicked Fix

by Sarah Graves

  Wade is not the most verbal guy you will ever meet. Once on a boat in a storm he lost, in short order, his mast, his engine, and a sizable chunk of his left arm, which later required twenty stitches, and I have it on good authority that his only comment was “darn.” But when he wants to, he gets his message across.

  And not only to me, I realized as Sam got up and announced that he would be bunking at his dad’s this evening, so I should please not leave the back porch light on for him or the neighbors would think he had stayed out all night without permission.

  “But me and Tom Daigle and some other guys are watching the playoffs,” he added, “so I might not get in till past midnight.”

  The World Series, he meant; Sam and his young buddies were slaves to the guy-stuff scene lately. But that wasn’t all of it. Victor peeked at me, figuring how to play this: be-cool dad, or tough, stick-to-the-curfew father?

  The deciding factor being which might most irritate me. Like I said, it was only a cease-fire.

  But Sam picked up on that, too, cuffing his father on the shoulder affectionately. “Chill out, Dad. It’s Friday, remember? See you later.”

  Wistfully I watched him pass by outside La Sardina’s window, its dark condensation blurring him to a neon-lit smear. Once upon a time, I had been that boy’s whole world; now, he plotted so that Wade could be alone with me.

  And I wasn’t at all sure I liked it.

  Suddenly a shriek like a bird being torn wing from wishbone came from the bar area. “My ear! That little bastard bit my ear!”

  Moments later a boy-sized man strutted from the bar. In his forties, he wore tight black Levi’s, a T-shirt with rolled sleeves to show off his small, hard arm muscles, and black leather boots with metal cleats on the heels. He had blond eyelashes and hair so blond it was almost white, combed in a ducktail, and a purple birthmark shaped like a teardrop under his left eye.

  It was Reuben Tate himself, and he was obviously out of his skull: tequila, or some other high-proof engine of destruction. His eyes were as bright as highway flares. But he held it well in terms of motor skills; rumor had it that Reuben could walk, talk, and perform an astonishing variety of bad deeds while laboring under a blood-alcohol level that would pickle a lab rat.

  The cleats clicked purposefully across the floor and stopped right beside my ex-husband, and all of a sudden I knew why Victor had not wanted to leave without us.

  “Well, well,” Reuben said smirkingly. “What have we here?”

  “Shut up, Reuben,” Ellie said, startling me. “Leave him alone or I’ll knock your block off.”

  In a pink cashmere sweater, cream slacks, and a sheen of pink-tinted lip gloss, with her red hair falling in waves and her freckles like a sprinkling of gold dust, Ellie looked just about as dangerous as your standard lace-trimmed valentine.

  Reuben ignored her. “My ear!” somebody moaned from the bar. There was a smudge of blood on Reuben’s T-shirt.

  “Why, it’s the doctor,” Reuben drawled, his bright eyes surveying Victor’s perfect grooming mockingly. He kicked the leg of Victor’s chair with the toe of his black leather boot.

  “Hey, doctor.”

  Here I suppose I should explain that Victor was, or anyway had been until recently, an accomplished brain surgeon. Back in the city, he was the guy you went to after the other surgeons refused you, because if they took you into surgery you would very likely die on the table, ruining their operating-room statistics.

  That, by the way, is why when a surgeon does agree to operate, you will probably survive; surgeons love their win/loss numbers more than they love their own mothers. But I digress:

  “Hey, Reuben. Cut it out.” George ate the last bite of his steak, washing it down with a final swallow of Miller Lite.

  Reuben kicked the leg of Victor’s chair again, harder. “Aww, what’s the matter? Big-shot doctor, too good to talk to me?”

  “Reuben, do you remember that time in the playground?” Ellie inquired sternly. “When I beat you up?”

  She sat up straight and gazed at at him without fear. “Well, I’m about to do it again. I’m not scared to get into it with you, Reuben. You know that. You know that I am not.”

  “Ellie,” I said quietly. I couldn’t understand why Wade and George weren’t shushing her, too. She was half out of her chair.

  “Ellie,” I repeated insistently. But she didn’t look at me.

  “Reuben? Are you listening to me?”

  There was a moment, then, when anything could have happened. But at the end of it Reuben backed down.

  Sort of. “You’ll talk to me,” he told Victor, stepping away. “Like before. Or you know,” he added menacingly, “what I’ll do.”

  “Damn it, Reuben, I told you to get out of here,” Ted Armstrong bellowed, charging from the bar ham-fisted and ready to thump someone. “I’ll drop-kick your butt off the fish pier.”

  Reuben turned on his cleated heel, hands raised placatingly. “I’m going, I’m going. See you, doctor,” he promised with an evil wink. “Oh, and … thanks for that other thing.”

  Then he was gone, leaving us sitting there like the stunned victims of some sudden, cataclysmic natural disaster.

  “What brought that on?” I asked Victor, but he only waved an exhausted hand and wouldn’t answer.

  Ted Armstrong brought us each another drink without anybody asking and motioned Wade’s money away. “On the house,” he said. “Sorry about that. Jeez, I knew I shouldn’a let him in here. But later, you know, that Reuben makes you pay for it, if you don’t. Jeez, does he ever make you pay.”

  He wiped his hands on his apron, apologetically. “Listen, doc, you probably don’t feel like it, and a bite wound’s probably not up your alley anyway, you bein’ a big brain man an’ all.”

  Victor’s prowess as a head doctor was already town legend; in Eastport it was almost as good as being able to fix a crapped-out carburetor with a hairpin and a twist of coat-hanger wire.

  “But I got a guy in there,” Ted went on plaintively, “he’s bleedin’ like nobody’s business. Friday night, clinic’s closed up at this hour, and I’m gonna run outta bar towels.”

  Victor tucked his beautiful blue striped silk tie into his shirtfront, out of the way of the action.

  “Sure,” he said. “Tell your guy he’s in luck. The doctor”—he downed his fourth martini in a gulp—“is in.”

  “So much for a quiet Friday night in Eastport,” Wade said as Victor strode off.

  George snorted wryly. “Folks in the big city hear about it, they’ll all be up here. Mecca of excitement.”

  Somebody dropped another coin in the jukebox: Tony Bennett.

  “Ellie,” I asked, “are you out of your damned mind?”

  “I can take Reuben,” she replied, “with one hand tied behind me. And wouldn’t I love to?”

  Resting there in front of her, Ellie’s fists looked slender but businesslike, pale pink nail polish notwithstanding.

  “Guys,” I said, turning in appeal, but Wade and George just grinned at me.

  “Ellie beat the you-know-what out of Reuben, once, out in the schoolyard. Course,” George added judiciously, “back then we were all a little wilder.”

  “Man, that day she took Reuben on, he ran home to his mother, crying,” Ted Armstrong agreed admiringly. He had come back to our table and was standing there, listening and nodding.

  “That girl,” he enthused, “could punch. Reuben was a big kid, too, remember. For his age, then. Big and stupid.”

  “No, Ted. You’re misremembering,” Ellie corrected gravely.

  George and Wade suddenly looked sober again, also, and as I watched I began realizing that in their view, Reuben Tate was far more than a disruptive annoyance. To them he was serious trouble.

  But I still didn’t know why.

  Meanwhile, dinner hour was over, a younger crowd drifting in as the local band Double Shot began setting up on the small stage near the door. Wade paid the check as Ellie and I bega
n gathering our things.

  Passing the bar, I glanced in to where Victor was stitching a guy’s ear up, using a needle and thread that he always carried with him since God forbid he should lose a button. Also in his walking-around kit were dental floss, a nail brush, some antiseptic hand wipes, and throat spray.

  The guy sat motionless, his shirt drenched crimson, his gaze fixed tranquilly on some far horizon no one else could see. I didn’t know if the guy was so drunk that he was anesthetized, or if Victor had hypnotized him; Victor is like a snake charmer with patients. One look and they trust him utterly.

  Wade put his arm reassuringly around me. “He’ll be okay,” he said, meaning Victor. Not for the first time, I went mentally down on my knees and thanked my stars. Wade was so serenely unthreatened by Victor, he actually wished him well.

  Meanwhile the fellows at the bar watched Victor over their beers, their rapt eyes following the needle’s progress intently and their expressions admiring.

  “He can do something useful. And he’s willing to. That’s the key to it, in Eastport,” Wade said sensibly.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I guess. You’ve got to wonder, though. A little town like this, light-years from anywhere. You can’t tell how it’ll affect a person.”

  And especially Victor, who until six months ago thought a passport was required for venturing out of Manhattan; that and a guide for negotiating the wild, outer reaches of Westchester.

  “Kill you or cure you,” Wade agreed.

  George and Ellie were waiting for us on the sidewalk. “You okay?” I asked Ellie. She was an Eastport girl right down to the marrow, and she had been my friend since my first day in town, a couple of years earlier. Now, though, her expression looked queer to me: distracted. Oddly distant.

  “Fine.” She forced a smile, while Wade and George conferred privately about something. “I was just thinking again about what Ted Armstrong said.”

  Her gaze probed uneasily into the shadows along the dock, away from the harbor where the deck lamps of the freighter Star Hoisin lit the cargo platform like a movie set. Beyond the ship, the night was so clear and dead calm that you couldn’t tell where the stars ended and their reflections on the flat water began.

  But the stillness felt ominous and the sunrise that morning had been red, promising weather; maybe not soon, but sometime in the next week or so. All the boats from the fishing fleet were snug at their moorings inside the boat basin.

  “What?” I said, wondering again what Victor had gotten himself into. “About Reuben Tate being so big and mean? Because he isn’t. Not big, anyway.”

  My voice sounded uncertain. I’d never seen him up close before, and his size had surprised me, even reassured me. But now an unwelcome mental picture of him rose up: those arm muscles, and the boots. His small, neatly modeled features radiated malice like the face of an evil, flaxen-haired doll, the more malevolent for being in miniature.

  As if summoned by my thought, footsteps came out of the darkness where Ellie was staring. Somebody back there on the seawall, I realized, was walking.

  Listening, maybe, too.

  “No,” Ellie said. “I mean about him not being smart. It’s a mistake, underestimating Reuben. He’s sharp as a tack.” She shook her head, her red hair moving like water under the neons.

  Water with something in it. My imagination was getting the better of me, courtesy I supposed of an extra margarita and that guy with the bloody shirt.

  “That’s what makes him so different. So dangerous. He’s too smart. I wish,” Ellie said earnestly, “he hadn’t come back.”

  Then she thought of something else. “Are you,” she frowned, “still involved in that deal with Victor?”

  “Yes,” I admitted, knowing she disapproved.

  I did, too, actually; involvement in anything that included my ex-husband was a prescription for trouble. But now that he was here, for Sam’s sake I’d thought I needed to do something about Victor. And the something had involved money: my investment in a new trauma-care center that Victor was starting in Eastport.

  “It’s a very good plan,” I said to Ellie. “All he needs to do is the medical part. I can handle the rest. And once it’s all going, it’ll keep him out of my hair.”

  As usual when I tried to explain this, she looked skeptical. Her apparent interest in big money ranged somewhere between zilch and nada and, her idea of keeping Victor out of my hair involved wrapping an anchor chain around his legs, then taking him on a boat ride.

  “One more week and the financing’ll be wrapped,” I said. “I’m just the seed money. He’s got to meet the people I’ve lined up for him. The other investors. Afterwards, it’s a done deal.”

  There was, actually, a little more to it than that, and Ellie knew it. Under the neons, she gave me what Sam would have called the hairy eyeball: Yeah, sure. But before she could say any more, George came over and took her hand.

  Out on the water, a foghorn honked in the distance. Across the bay, the lights on Campobello were like a string of rhinestones. The four of us parted in front of the old Eastport Bank building, a tall brick Victorian pile jutting darkly against the dark sky.

  Wade’s arm draped around me as we walked up Key Street to my house, passing beneath the half-bare branches of the maples, spectral under the streetlights.

  “You okay?” he asked.

  “Yeah,” I said, but I wasn’t. Not really.

  At the corner, Victor’s lovely old Greek Revival house stood proudly, gleaming with fresh paint, new windows, and tall rebuilt red-brick chimneys. He had at first meant to put a medical office in it, but lately he’d made these other plans.

  “I wonder what Reuben meant about talking to Victor again,” I said. “What would Victor have to talk to Reuben about?”

  The worry went on nudging me as we passed more antique houses—Federals, Victorians, old Queen Anne cottages with their gables looking out every which way. The moon rose, backing the rooflines with silver.

  Wade shrugged. “You know Reuben. Or anyway you’ve heard about him, enough to figure it out. He likes to say threatening things, even when they don’t mean much.”

  “I suppose,” I said, not believing it. “He picked on Victor because he was there, probably. And because Victor’s so different from most everyone else in town.”

  Different, I meant, from the fishermen, dock-workers, boat handlers, and rough-hewn but determined entrepreneurs of various stripes that made Eastport a vibrant place. There was another group beginning to grow in town, too, of scholars, artisans, and craftspeople. As we climbed the hill I noted the lights in Ron Cumberland’s potting studio, in the old stone house now occupied by a museum curator, and in the neatly kept cottages of a small but increasing bunch of painters, writers, and musicians.

  But even among these, Victor with his meticulous appearance and deliberate city airs was a curiosity. Not all the attention he attracted around town was entirely benevolent, though he was working to change this.

  “It probably,” I said, “just makes him a natural target for a guy like Reuben.” I was trying to convince myself, but in fact it wasn’t Reuben Tate’s behavior that troubled me; it was Victor’s. And the reason was simple:

  Victor didn’t suffer fools gladly, especially with a few martinis in him. And when your line of work involves cutting holes in other people’s heads and repairing what you find inside there, you either develop a lot of confidence or you find a way to fake it, somehow.

  Which Victor had. He should have stood up to Reuben Tate and blustered at him until it was Victor’s ear that Reuben decided to take a bite out of. It was the only reaction consistent with Victor’s character.

  Instead he had looked frightened. And knowing him as I did, I couldn’t help suspecting that I understood why.

  “Hey. Going to invite me in?”

  We had come to my own house on Key Street: an enormous 1823 white-clapboard Federal with dark green shutters, forty-eight tall, double-hung original wooden windows, and
the original stone foundation, much patched but still as fundamentally solid as it had been two centuries earlier when the oxcarts hauled the granite blocks there, and the men laid them into the cellar hole.

  It’s the rest of the house that is gradually falling down, but that is the natural condition of very old houses. As long as I kept working on it, I could stay ahead of it.

  I hoped.

  “Oh, I guess you can come in,” I told Wade. “Seeing as your shaving kit’s upstairs, and your clothes, and your work stuff for tomorrow. We should try practicing some restraint once in a while, though, don’t you think?”

  He drew me nearer. Much nearer. “I’m practicing it right this minute.”

  “Oh. Well, in that case, let us not delay,” I managed, and his answering chuckle implied absolutely no restraint whatsoever.

  Going in the back door, we met Monday, my black Labrador retriever, who greeted us with her own canine version of the old buck-and-wing, toenails clicking on the hardwood kitchen floor.

  “Hey, mush-head,” Wade told the dog affectionately, opening the refrigerator and the freezer at the same time, and I really knew better than to accept the chilled, cut-crystal flute of ice-cold, perfectly delicious champagne he offered to me then.

  But I did accept it, and the next one, too, so that one way and another—

  —and what with keeping the dog not only off the bed but actually out of the whole bedroom—

  —I forgot what Reuben Tate had said to my ex-husband, Victor, that night at La Sardina.

  And I shouldn’t have.

  My name is Jacobia Tiptree, and when I first came to Maine with my son, Sam, I had ideas about how our lives would be, here.

  For one thing, I thought I would go back to Manhattan a lot. I was well fixed financially, still reasonably young, and decent-looking; not gorgeous, but my face didn’t stop clocks. And I’d lived in the city since I’d gotten off a Greyhound there at age sixteen, alone, penniless, and without an idea of how to do anything useful.