Shadow Season (14 page)

A wild gust rocks him. He tightens his grip on his cane. The sun’s gone down. His eyes sting from the freezing snow and he throws a hand up to protect them. Even though they’re useless now, he still cares for them. He uses saline drops, does exercises to keep the muscles from atrophying. He fights to keep his gaze from straying. They’re still his eyes, and that gives them a kind of purpose.

Finn resumes his course and passes beneath the arch where the chimes designating the Gate House hang. They’re tangled together, ringing with garbled notes. He hasn’t been to church in years, but there are always bells.

It doesn’t matter at all, except that for some reason it does. He waves the cane and raps the chimes lightly. It doesn’t free them. He smacks harder, working the cane up and down, trying to unknot the snarled strings. He only makes it worse. The disharmony plays on and on for him. He’s goddamn useless. The rage tears through him and he lets out a strangled yelp of frustration.

He shoulders the front door of the dorm and gets inside.

The wind is so strong that the piano in the lobby thrums a low, brutal note. There’s anger in it. Harmful
intent. He imagines the piano rearing up and scampering along, looking for somebody to bite. He turns toward it as if to say something, to talk to the piano, tell it to relax, shut the fuck up. He thinks of his shrink again.

Her voice flat and lifeless as she tells him
it’s normal, perfectly natural
, her breath growing heavy as she almost pants out
in this situation
, smacking her lips, swallowing repeatedly, her oral fixation so apparent,
under these circumstances to personify things
. He wonders if she has a power fetish for the handicapped. He imagines her stroking the stumps of amputated limbs, her eyes dark and alive, insane with need.

STARTING UP THE STAIRS, FINN HEARS
two voices on the landing above him. Lea Grant and Caitlin Jones are having a whispered discussion. He hears the words “fear,” “dissuade,” “damaged spinal column.” The phrases “realm of discourse” and “haunting lyricism of the damned.”

He tries to figure out exactly which topic of conversation might include all of that or even any portion thereof, but he draws a blank. He appreciates their unpredictability in certain areas. They’re his two best students and neither one could give a shit about literature or the English language or anything else so far as he knows. They’ve had their lives mapped out for them since before they were born, and the next goal won’t be achieved until about age twenty when they, like Vi, get married to wealthy blue bloods on the fast track to a power base in a life of high finance or politics.

Finn suspects that, also like Vi, they have an even greater recklessness and coarseness about them than they’re willing to show anyone except each other. He notes signs of it every so often. How they hold themselves and compose themselves, with a haughty air that isn’t really affected so much as it’s a kind of general
disgust for the world they’ve been handed. He can imagine them very easily taking a hint from the politician’s wife and starting up a part-time call-girl ring ten years down the road, just to fully embrace their own wildness.

He overhears snatches of them talking about their lives, and he’s got to admit, their weariness and lack of any real interest in anything, especially people, tend to spook the shit out of him. In another life he would’ve considered them sociopaths without any criminal outlet. Now he just thinks they’re two immensely sad, hyperintelligent kids about to be sent up to a fucked society of their parents’ making. They have no real friends outside each other. They understand each other too well to suffer interference from anyone else. A friendship that close forfeits a hell of a lot. He knows.

Easing up a few more stairs, he smells the liquor on their breath. The good stuff, high-octane bourbon. Sounds like they’re drinking from styrofoam cups. He might be in eyeshot now, but he doesn’t expect them to stop talking just because he’s there.

In their sphere, Finn exists to hand out perfect test scores and nothing more. Sometimes that fills him with a kind of vague sorrow. But when you get down to it, he accepts his role, and it’s almost refreshing not to be taken that seriously. It’s just a goddamn English class, after all.

Lea says, “They want me to visit him, in his little room.”

“And you must, there’s no other recourse,” Caitlin tells her. “You have to act as expected and be the proper younger sister.”

“But he
waves
it at me.”

“Are we still talking about his prosthetic?”

“… plastic and metal… they have others, much better ones it seems, that resemble a real human hand, but he prefers the hook. More specifically two hooks that snap together. He puts on little shows. Picking up a cigarette and lighting it. Playing solitaire, flipping the cards over with great verve. Snap, snap, snap. My parents would applaud but they don’t like to display their hands anymore. They keep them in their pockets now, mostly.”

“As I recall Michael had great verve in most things. On the hockey rink, for instance. Bashing players up against the glass.”

“He did like to bash a few heads.”

“And was quite good at it. On the football field too.”

“Constantly clotheslining other players when the refs weren’t looking. Aggressive tendencies.”

“Nearly broke Toddy’s neck two seasons ago.”

“A couple of cracked vertebrae and he’s set for life. My father paid handsomely.”

“And Toddy never looked up very much anyway, as I recall, or raised his arms above the shoulder.”

It’s like they’re rehearsing for a Russian play. Their monotone could drive Finn insane in the long term, if he had to live with it. He’s suddenly grateful that these two almost never say a word in class.

Lea Grant is weighty in her demeanor and her physicality. She has the kind of dense importance of a brace pole holding up a ceiling. In her papers she generally uses at least two words that Finn is unfamiliar with and must look up later. He sends Roz to the dictionary and she says, This girl, she needs a good smack in the teeth.

When Finn sees Lea he sees Carlyle’s mistress.
Sleepy eyes, thick ringlets working over both shoulders, only a faint trace of pink lipstick. Zaftig but a power walker, with muscular thighs that could crack a walnut. Carlyle ran a triborough syndicate that was hardwired with some top-ranking politicians and a bunch of cops. Whenever the DA managed to drag him into court, a lot of people would start to sweat and a half-dozen bodies would turn up in the East River.

Finn and Ray were both subpoenaed and had to take the stand because they’d busted one of Carlyle’s runners. Finn found threatening notes in his locker. Maybe only one in every twenty brothers in blue was on the take, but it still added up. Once someone left him a photocopied picture of Dani with red ink poured over it like blood spatter. It was her college yearbook photo. Some fucker had done a little homework. Finn taped the photo up on the wall of the locker room and unloaded three rounds into it. It was a mixed metaphor but he figured the message would get through.

Caitlin Jones appears to him as a runaway Finn found in the Port Authority, twenty minutes off the bus and already bait for a chickenhawk who’d moved in for the kill. He was sweet-talking the girl and promising her a job in modeling, said he owned a luxury suite in Trump Tower. He had his hands all over her, this pale waif with dishwater-blond hair and bee-stung lips, huge blue eyes that tipped the balance of her face. The hawk had a two-hundred-dollar haircut, Hollywood hipster black duds, and a choirboy’s smile.

Finn frightened the shit out of the girl by tossing her into the lockbox at the precinct for three hours. He showed her the file on the hawk, the photos of some of
the girls he’d worked over. After that she called her mother, who owned a hair salon in Muskogee, Oklahoma, and begged Mama to wire her the fare back home.

The hawk was released without so much as a fine. Later that night, after Finn had changed out of his blues, he found the punk on the prowl in the Port Authority again. Finn fucked the choirboy smile up for all time in the men’s room, washed the blood off his hands, found two porcelain crowns on the floor, and crushed them under his heel. He said nothing the entire time.

When he got home that night, Dani massaged the tension from his back while his fists soaked in ice water, and said, Whatever you did, I know you did it for the right reason, and that you made the right choice.

“Mr. Finn, you going to come up and say hello or stand there beneath us indefinitely?” Lea asks.

Caitlin says, “Perhaps by standing below us on the stairs he’s commenting on and rebelling against some kind of social status or caste system?”

“Is he critiquing, staring at us on high and finding us lacking, as if situated in an ivory tower?”

“Or is it an observance of—”

Finn just can’t listen to it. “It’s not an observation, critique, comment, or rebellion, ladies,” he says, moving up the stairs again. He sounds angry, even to himself. “It’s a digression.”

“From what, Mr. Finn?” Lea asks. “Life in general or particular circumstances?”

“From the present. I was reminiscing.”

“Fill us in.”

“No.”

“Mr. Finn has enjoyed his times at bashing as well,” Caitlin adds. “See it in his build, the set of his shoulders?”

“Brawny. Aggressive. I think you’re right.”

“Who do you plan to bash tonight, Mr. Finn?”

He sweeps up past them and can hear music above on the third floor. “Why aren’t you girls at the party?”

“A party without male guests, excepting those of the faculty, isn’t so much
a fete
as it is a klatch, Mr. Finn.”

He wants to say, Well, pardon the fuck-all out of me, then.

But he decides that, when you get down to it, they’re right. He can’t blame any of the students for their resentment at being placed in an all-girls school in a half-dead town. In another year or three they’ll be on some Ivy League campus where they’ll get more of a challenge out of the world, some high-end demanding classes and the kind of social interaction that will give them the smack in the teeth they need. He has hopes for these two, even while they mock him.

“Say hello to Vi for us,” Lea tells him.

It nearly puts a hitch in his stride, but Finn manages to ignore her teasing. At least they don’t giggle. He appreciates that.

Finn continues up the stairway to the fourth floor, where Roz has a small apartment down the hall from Duchess.

He knocks on her door but there’s no response. It’s the original oak door, updated with a new lock, the old keyhole sealed with some kind of putty that’s hardened into rock, but which is also cracked and powdering. He scrapes his pinkie nail across it and enjoys the graininess
of the sealant, the divot at its center. Textures take up a large amount of his attention. He’s constantly surprised by what small consistencies, grains, and compositions his fingers, on their own, seem to find so amazing and impressive.

The knob resists him. He leans forward and nearly presses his forehead to the door. He strains to hear anything inside the room, in effect trying to will himself inside. The resonant bass from the party below gets his foot tapping. His shoulders wag like he wants to dance. He tries the door again, asks, “Roz? Roz?”

Finn can’t help feeling that there’s someone on the other side of the door, exactly at eye level, mimicking his every move and listening, just as intently as he is, for any stray sound from the enemy.

THE PARTY’S KICKING UP IN THE
communal suite on the third floor. It’s a TV room slash lounge area slash kitchen where the students are allowed to have a hot plate and a microwave. There’s a foyer with expensive futons where the girls can lie around and study. As if it ever happens.

Out of sight, he moves into the foyer, slumps against a cushion, and hears Jimmy Stewart arguing with Mr. Potter in the other room beneath the blaring music. The songs are rock versions of Christmas classics, the same ones he listened to when he was their age. It bridges the gap a little, makes him feel a touch less obsolete.