by Pete Dexter
* * *
Leonard Crawley undresses against the bench, hanging his clothes on a nail, taking off his rings and his bracelet and his necklace and handing them and his money clip to Michael.
Nick walks to the other side of the room; he doesn’t say another word.
Jimmy Measles follows him over, trying to tell him a story about his dogs. Nick has a dog of his own, but he isn’t listening.
Leonard takes a long time undressing, enjoying it. Without his clothes, he resembles a root system. There are stretch marks on his shoulders, and his arms are black with tattoos.
Peter stands up and talks quietly in Michael’s ear.
"The fuck are you gonna do?" he says.
Michael watches Leonard wrap his hands.
Peter says, "There’s no reason to do something like this."
"I want to see the kid work," Michael says, still watching Leonard wrap. "That’s a reason."
Peter says, "How come you can’t just come over sometime and watch him, like anybody else? How come you got to bring a fucking monster? It’s insulting."
"So somebody’s insulted," Michael says. "So what?"
Peter walks away and finds a seat in the window. There are cars parked on both sides of the street, halfway up the block, waiting for Nick to fix them. Old, beat-up cars; Cadillacs, Fords, Chevys. He still won’t work on anything foreign. He knows who has money and who doesn’t, and he can fix cars a little or all the way, depending on what someone has to pay. He does that without explaining it; he never embarrasses anybody he doesn’t have to.
Leonard Crawley climbs into the ring and begins to throw punches, watching himself in the mirrors, checking the muscles in his arms and back and legs from different angles. Nick sits with his own arms crossed, bone dry in a wet shirt, the afternoon ruined.
Jimmy Measles sees something is going on and leaves him alone about the dogs.
For half an hour, no one speaks. Michael waits in an old stuffed chair and Leonard stands in the corner of the ring, his arms resting across the ropes, the muscles underneath sagging from their own weight.
* * *
Peter sees Harry turn the corner. He pulls the van up onto the sidewalk, opens the back door and unloads half a dozen mufflers and tailpipes in the rain.
Then he shuts the door and, leaving the truck on the sidewalk, he climbs the stairs three at a time.
He pauses at the top, one long second, seeing it all at once—Michael and Peter and Jimmy Measles and his father all sitting down, Monk looking at the posters on the wall, the guy with the muscles standing in the ring; the whole place dead quiet.
Michael stands up and holds out his hand. "Harry," he says, "how you been?"
Nick’s kid puts his hand halfway into Michael’s to shake, protecting it. Like his father, he lives his life with sore hands.
"I was wondering could you give my man Lenny here a couple of rounds."
Peter sits in the window, Nick doesn’t move off his chair. The kid takes his hand away from Michael and looks at Leonard Crawley.
"Three rounds?" he says.
Leonard moves off the ropes and stretches. He says, "Three, four, five, whatever you want."
Nick gets up off his chair and stands in front of his son while he dresses, as if he doesn’t want him looking at Leonard Crawley until they fight.
* * *
Michael checks the clock on the wall. Twenty minutes have passed.
Leonard has been standing in the ring so long Peter has gotten used to the way he looks. Harry is in the ring with him now, loosening up.
Leonard follows the kid’s movements, looking bored. "Yo, Michael," he says, "we gonna do this or what‘?"
Harry stops and looks at him, and then nods. He climbs through the ropes and pulls the plug on the timer, and then takes a cup and the gloves out of his locker. Nick helps him pull the cup on and then laces him up.
He climbs back in, looking pale and thin in the same ring with the weight lifter, and then leans over the ropes toward his father to receive his mouthpiece.
"You ready?" Michael says.
Nick nods without looking at him, and Michael plugs the timer back into the wall. It goes off once, a minute passes and it goes off again.
Nick looks over his son’s shoulder at Lenny Crawley. "Anybody looks like that could fight, we’d know about them," he says. Michael stands in the corner, smiling, having a good time now.
A peculiar sour smell fills the air, something Leonard Crawley secretes when he gets excited. He walks across the ring, hands at his chest, and then his right hand makes a long, slow arc through the air.
Harry steps back and watches as Leonard follows the force of the punch, stumbling.
He steps inside the next time Leonard tries to hit him—another sweeping right hand—and then puts the top of his head under the weight lifter’s chin and allows him to throw all the right hands he wants, fifty or more, some of them at his kidneys, some of them at the back of his head, furious punches without leverage or meaning.
They walk around the ring in this way, Leonard jerking at him, pushing and pulling; Harry watching it, allowing it, relaxed. He lets it go on as long as Leonard wants, and then, when he quits to catch his wind and drops his head onto Harry’s shoulder to rest, the shoulder suddenly moves, and Leonard’s forehead bounces off.
Harry takes half a step back and waits until Leonard’s head drops toward him, and then hits him in the face with an uppercut. Harry doesn’t ordinarily throw uppercuts in the gym, the punch can ruin a nose.
The glove travels just twelve inches, but he turns into it. Leonard stops, balancing on some shrinking spot on the floor, and before he can right himself Harry steps to the side and digs a hook high into his ribs, popping the cork, and Leonard Crawley begins to pour out all over the ring. He grabs Harry around the waist, holding himself up. Half a minute later, he lifts him off the floor and carries him back into the ropes, making a screaming noise as they move.
Leaving two perfect footprints in the center of the ring, his own blood.
Harry allows himself to be taken to the ropes, patient, waiting to see what the weight lifter will do when he quits yelling.
The timer goes off but Leonard doesn’t stop. He reaches around Harry and grabs the ropes on either side of his body. He begins to slam himself into him, over and over. Harry watches a few seconds, covering himself with his arms, timing him, and then, as Leonard Crawley comes again, he lowers his shoulders even with the weight lifter’s and brings up an elbow, and the yelling stops.
That is the first thing Peter notices, the quiet.
Leonard lies on the ring floor without moving, and then his knee raises and rolls, and he seems to follow it, over onto his side. The lower half of his face is hidden under his gloves.
The timer goes off again and a new sound comes out of Leonard Crawley, a long, hollow note which doesn’t seem to have a beginning or an end or a purpose, just something that fades in and then fades out.
Nick is leaning over the ropes, unlacing his son’s gloves. Michael hasn’t moved. Jimmy Measles gets up and walks into the bathroom to urinate.
"He changed his mind, right?" Nick says to Michael. "Four, five rounds, he don’t want them today?"
Michael comes over on his cane and puts his hand on Nick’s shoulder. "Hey, goomba, no harm, am I right? My cousin tells me your kid’s ready to make some money, I just want to see for myself."
Nick looks at Peter half a second; he doesn’t say a word. Leonard sits up holding his face, blood dripping off the end of his nose, his jaw hanging wrong, like a door off one hinge.
The timer goes off again with Leonard still on the floor. Monk climbs through the ropes, carrying a clean towel. He cuts the laces off Leonard’s gloves and gets him on his feet. On the way out he warns him not to bleed in the car.
Jimmy Measles emerges from the bathroom, and the four men leave more quietly than they arrived.
Nick watches them from the window. "These fuckin’ guys,"
he says, looking back at the blood on the floor of the ring. "Everywhere they go, it’s like they broke in."
Peter doesn’t know if he is included in that or not.
P The timer sounds again and Harry begins hitting the hard bag. The chains bang together as the bag jumps. The only other sounds are the punches and Harry’s breathing.
Peter finds a bucket and fills it with hot water and washes the blood off the floor, and when he has finished, has washed as much of his cousin and his cousin’s business from the gym as he can, he showers and leaves.
* * *
A week to the day after Bobby is left in a garbage bag on the service road at the airport, Michael climbs through the kitchen window of a small brick row house on Snyder Avenue—Leonard Crawley boosting him up, Monk already waiting inside—and takes the old Italian who lives there out of his bed, a confused old man who cannot see them without his glasses, and tapes him to the water heater in the basement.
His wife finds him there, his socks sticking halfway out of his mouth, when she comes back from Levittown. She has been there visiting her grandchildren. The bats they used, stained with the old man’s blood, are still lying on the basement floor.
Peter reads the details of the old man’s death in the Daily News. It says he was naked.
Peter closes the paper, closes his eyes. He listens to the ocean through the open bedroom window; it sounds close enough to be washing over his feet.
He has not seen Michael since the afternoon at the gym. He came to Cape May that night, to his mother’s house to sleep, and hasn’t been back.
Downstairs in the kitchen the telephone begins to ring. He stays where he is, listening to it, lying in his shoes on a bed that is too soft and creaks when he moves.
All the furniture in the house was his mother’s. The desk is still filled with carefully stacked piles of scrawled notes and receipts and newspaper clippings; the medicine cabinet is lined with her bottles of pills. There isn’t a picture in the place.
He hasn’t thrown any of it out. He can feel the old woman his mother became in the things she left behind, a compulsive order that imposes itself in every room of the house, as if by imposing order in these few small rooms, she could quiet the disorder that had driven her here.
And it is this sense of order, as much that as the ocean, that allows him to sleep.
The telephone is still ringing. He opens his eyes and looks at the light on the ceiling, a milk-colored antique glass full of dead moths and dust.
No one has the number.
It is five blocks from this house to the store. He walks there in the morning for breakfast and the papers. He sees the same people every day, and speaks to them without knowing their names. The town itself is an hour from Atlantic City, at the southern tip of the Jersey shore. The place is settled, though, unlike the beach towns that lie in between. No one comes through on the way somewhere else, throwing beer cans from cars. Everyone is here on purpose.
The phone goes quiet, and Peter sits up. The bedsprings stretch under his weight, and he looks again at the old man’s picture in the paper. The city seems a hundred years away, and he can almost imagine himself sitting on the benches behind the bulkhead with the old ladies of Cape May, shaking his head at the front page of the newspaper, asking what kind of people would do something like that to a retired gentleman in his own basement. He walks into the bathroom and fills the tub; there is no shower. He settles into the bath and pictures her in this same place, looking at the ceiling, thinking of him. She thought of him, he knows. She left him the house.
He stays in the tub until the water loses its heat, until in the coolness he separates himself from her and stands up and reaches for a towel. He leaves the bathroom without draining the tub, dresses quickly, and walks out of the house with his shirt still sticking to the moisture on his back.
He locks the front door and heads toward his car in the driveway.
Once before he gets there, he stops and looks back at the house where his mother resumed her life.
* * *
A man Peter has never seen before is sitting in the sun on the steps in front of Michael’s place. He is shirtless, squinting at every car that passes. He stands up when Peter parks, and then moves to the sidewalk to meet him as he crosses the street. He puts one of his hands into the pocket of his pants and cocks his head.
"Michael around?" Peter says.
"Not to you," the man says. He takes his sunglasses off and holds them at his side.
Peter considers him a moment, the hand in his pocket, the flat look in his eyes. He is younger without the glasses, almost a kid. But the kind of kid who would break your legs for a dollar.
A kid who, anyplace but this street, would never meet your eyes at all.
"Before we do something here," Peter says, "why don’t you go inside, ask whoever the fuck you work for is it all right to do it?"
"You got business with Michael," he says, "tell me, and I tell him. That’s the way it works, pal."
The front door opens, offering the sight of Leonard Crawley. His nose is taped and his jaw is wired. He is wearing sunglasses, and beneath them Peter can see the discoloration. The effect, in this light, is horrifying. It looks as if someone has burned Leonard’s eyes out of their sockets.
"Leave him come in," he says.
There are perhaps twenty men in the living room, sitting with beers and cigarettes, most of them kids like the one outside. A television set is on in the corner, The Jetsons.
Leonard and three men Peter does not recognize are standing around a small table near the window, watching the street. They pass a rolled bill, taking turns bending to the table where half a dozen lines of cocaine are laid out on a mirror.
At the edge of the table is a wet towel, and Peter watches Leonard press it into his face after he has taken his turn. He breathes deeply, and when he pulls it away, the towel is spotted with blood.
Peter walks into the kitchen. Michael is in there with Jimmy Measles and Monk and half a dozen people who have worked for him a long time.
"Where you been?" Michael says.
Peter looks over the people in the room; all of them are roofers, none of them have been on a roof in five years. It comes to him that quitting hard work once you are used to it ruins you. That it turns you mean and soft at the same time.
"Pally, you hear what I asked you?" his cousin says. "We made a move night before last, and I asked you where you fuckin’ been."
"The shore," he says.
"I been callin’ you six times a day, and you’re to the fuckin’ shore."
"What the papers said, you didn’t need me." His cousin knows he wouldn’t have gone into the basement to tie an old man to a water heater.
He sits on the counter.
Michael says, "You should of been there, it would have been good for you."
He liked it, Peter sees that he liked it.
"What I wonder sometimes," Michael says, talking more for the others than to Peter, "what the fuck I need you for in the first place. I get shot, you’re at the shore. We got somethin’ to do, you’re at the shore. I come up to Nick’s, you act like you’re ashamed we’re cousins."
He turns to Jimmy Measles and says, "Get me a fuckin’ beer." It is quiet in the kitchen then, all the noise is on the other side of the door. Jimmy Measles gets off his stool and opens the refrigerator.
Michael Flood stares at his cousin.
"So I’m back from the shore," Peter says. "You took an old guy into his basement and beat him to death, and now you got the posse sitting in your living room. You askin’ me what to do next, get them out of here before they burn holes in the carpet."
Michael shakes his head.
"They did Bobby, we did one of them. Now we’re going to end this fuckin’ thing, is what’s next."
"The Italians been around a hundred years," Peter says.
Michael stares at him, wondering briefly if he has been with the Italians and not at the shore. Trying to see what
he’s thinking.
"Everything in this fuckin’ city’s been around a hundred years," he says finally.
There is a noise in the other room, something falling. "So what are you doing?" Peter says.
Michael smiles and nods toward the living room. "I’m turning them loose," he says.
Peter looks in that direction. "The only way you turn people like that loose," he says, "you tell them exactly what to do and promise to cut off their hands they do one thing different than what you say, and that way they only jam you up maybe half the time."
"We ain’t jammed up," Michael says.
Jimmy Measles puts the beer in front of him and settles back into his stool.
"You put them on the street looking for old guys," Peter says, "I’m going to Hawaii."
Michael is quiet a minute, thinking. Then he gives in.
"You go somewhere, Pally," he says finally, "you let me know before you leave, all right?"
* * *
It comes to Peter later that Jimmy Measles is borrowing Michael’s money. He sees him running errands for him, picking up his cigarettes or pizza or laundry, opening doors.
Michael doesn’t thank him.
"You know," he says one night at the club, "there’s nothing written down that you got to ride Otto the chef right to the last spin down the toilet."
Jimmy Measles just smiles. He puts himself into Peter’s life and draws him into his, but he isn’t asking him to carry his problems.
He doesn’t complain about his business, he doesn’t complain about his disease. He puts the atomizer on the table next to his cigarette, and takes one and then the other, barely able to breathe, and never says a word about it.
And Peter likes him for that, no matter what kind of mess he is making, putting himself in places he doesn’t belong. Peter sits at the table now and watches one of the bartenders take four twenties out of the cash register, and then disappear into the bathroom with one of the kids from the art college.
