The Barbed-Wire Kiss (12 page)

“Not as much as I used to be. Where are we going?”

She signaled, slowed. “Here.”

Ahead on the wide shoulder was a truck selling Italian ices. She pulled smoothly off the road and parked behind it.

“I want one of those,” she said. “Cherry, if they have it.”

He looked at her, got out of the car. The truck’s chimes were playing softly, a children’s tune. He found some crumpled singles in his jeans pocket, went up to the truck, and ordered two small cherry ices. He saw her get out, walk over to the hurricane fencing that bordered the beach. There was a volleyball game in progress beyond, teenagers in bathing suits racing back and forth, sprawling in the sand, laughing.

The ices came in white paper cups. He paid, pulled napkins from the dispenser, and carried them over to her.

“Thanks,” she said, taking the ice. A soft breeze moved her hair, pinned two strands of it to her cheek. She pushed them away with a finger. They walked back to the car.

“Funny, isn’t it?” she said.

“What?”

She leaned against the fender.

“People who haven’t seen each other in twenty years. When they finally do, they don’t have much to say to each other.”

“It’s been a long time. It’s only natural.”

She nibbled at the ice, looked off at the volleyball game.

“So much has happened,” she said. “I don’t know where to start.”

A thin line of red juice ran from her lips.

“What are you smiling at?” she said.

“Nothing.”

“Napkin.”

He gave her one and she wiped the juice from her chin. He slurped some of his own ice, felt the cold run up through his teeth, plant a needle of headache in his skull.

“Well,” she said, “at least you’re not fat and bald.”

“Not yet.”

“And getting you to talk about yourself is still like pulling teeth. How well do you know my husband?”

“Not very. I met him for the first time that day at the club.”

“So why are you giving him money?”

“It’s a long story. The money belonged to someone else. I was just handing it over.”

“Should I ask what it’s for?”

“You can, but I won’t tell you. He might.”

“I doubt it. And I won’t ask. Is there a message that goes with it? Or do I just hand it to him and say, ‘Here, honey, someone gave this to me today for you’?”

“The money is the message. He’s expecting it.”

“It’s always money, isn’t it?”

“What do you mean?”

“Never mind.”

She started around to the driver’s side.

“Come on,” she said. “I’ll take you back to your car.”

She got behind the wheel, started the engine. He waited a moment, then got in beside her, pulled the door shut. She signaled, craned her head to look for a break in the traffic.

“It wasn’t the money,” he said.

She pulled back out onto the road, accelerated.

“That’s not why I followed you.”

She turned to him.

“Then why did you?”

“Because I wanted to see you, talk with you. And I meant what I said on the phone. You haven’t changed much.”

She turned away.

“But I have,” she said. “In ways I couldn’t even begin to tell you.”

She drove another block, made a U-turn in the parking lot of a 7-Eleven, and started back the way they’d come.

They finished their ices on the ride back, neither of them speaking. When they got to the cul-de-sac, she pulled up alongside the Mustang.

“You can leave the envelope,” she said. “I’ll give it to him. Don’t worry.”

“I’m not worried.”

He got out of the car and looked down at her. She took off her sunglasses, turned to face him. Her green eyes were wet and he could clearly see the patch of gold in her left iris.

“Call me,” he said.

She turned away, shook her head. “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

He stepped back. She U-turned, cutting the wheel to clear the opposite curb, then headed back to the cross street. He watched her go.

When he got in the Mustang, he realized he was still carrying the crumpled, red-stained cup.

He took it home with him.

The phone rang. He stirred in his sleep. On the second ring, he reached, fumbled the receiver to his ear.

“Yeah.”

“What are you trying to pull?”

He looked at the clock radio on the nightstand. Two a.m. He shifted the phone to his other hand.

“You there?” the voice said. “You hear me, you fuck?”

“Who is this?”

“You know who this is. Let me tell you something. If you’re pulling something funny, or if you’re even thinking about it, you’ve got shit for brains.”

“Fallon.”

“Who do you think?”

“Why are you calling me?”

“You were supposed to come to the restaurant. You’ve got a lot of fucking nerve, following my wife like that.”

“Is that what all this is about?”

“You want to be a smartass? Fuck with me and see where it gets you. You understand what I’m saying?”

“I understand.”

“Then what do you have to say for yourself?”

“Just this, I guess. Did you get the money?”

“Yeah, I got the money.”

“Then go fuck yourself,” Harry said and hung up.

He pulled the plug from the back of the phone, let it drop to the floor. He rolled over, pulled the pillow to him and, within five minutes, was asleep again.

He woke the next morning with the vague sense of having set something in motion, of purpose. It felt good.

After he showered and ate, he found Cortez’s phone bill, slit the flap of the envelope with his pen knife. He saved the pages with the outgoing calls, threw everything else away.

There were about twenty calls listed, most of them local, but there were a half dozen to a number with a 609 area code—South Jersey. He remembered what Bobby had said about Jimmy’s biker friends. There was a single call to Denver on June 16 and no calls at all after June 28. He circled the long-distance numbers with a pen.

There was no answer at the Denver number and no machine. He called Denver information and asked for listings for Cortez, on the off chance the sister was unmarried or had kept her maiden name. He got ten numbers back from the irritated operator, one for an A. Cortez that matched the number on the bill.

He left the other numbers for later, found the coffee shop napkin. He copied the information he’d gotten from Ray onto a yellow legal pad. There had been only one vehicle registered in Cortez’s name, a blue 1990 Monte Carlo, license number TFW-456. The registration was up for renewal next month.

He looked at Lynn Pettimore’s number. After a long moment, he picked up the phone again, keyed in the number. It rang six times and then a male voice, irritable, answered. Harry set the receiver back in the cradle.

He spent the rest of the afternoon under the hood of the Mustang, his
Chilton’s Guide,
pages spotted with dark fingerprints, open on the fender. He replaced the spark plugs and points, started the engine. Listening closely, he adjusted the idle setting on the carburetor, turning the tiny screw that regulated the air-to-fuel ratio until the roughness in the engine noise was gone. Then he shut the hood, put away his tools, and went for a test-drive.

He headed west on 537 to Route 9, then turned north. He worked smoothly through the gears until the needle was trembling at seventy-five. Stopped at a light, he heard an engine racing and turned to his left to see a teenager in an old Mercury Cougar alongside him. The car was painted a metal-flake blue and had oversized rear tires. The kid looked over at him, teased the gas so that the Cougar seemed to strain forward. The kid gestured up at the light and Harry nodded.

Harry shifted into first, pushed in the clutch, gave it gas, the 289’s rumble growing into a roar. The kid revved his own engine in answer, looked up at the light. When it switched to green, the kid popped the clutch, shot off the line, rear tires squealing, raising smoke. Harry watched him go, took his foot off the gas, and waited until the SUV behind him beeped its horn before he started across the intersection.

The Cougar was already out of sight. He wondered how far the driver had gone before he’d realized he was alone.
Adios, kid,
he thought.
Don’t kill yourself.
He U-turned at the next jug handle, headed home.

He was in the kitchen, washing the rest of the engine grease from his hands, when the phone rang. He dried his hands on a dish towel, picked up the receiver.

“For somebody who gives my husband money,” she said, “you sure seem to make him mad.”

He leaned back against the counter.

“I guess it wasn’t enough.”

“With him, it never is. Are you all right?”

“What do you mean?”

“When I told him about running into you yesterday, it really set him off. He got angrier than he’d been in a long time.”

“I know. He called me last night.”

“I overheard. His end of it, at least.”

“Would your husband happen to be in the room there with you now?”

“No. He’s over at the restaurant. He’ll be back in a little while.”

“What can I do for you?”

“I was just wondering. Do you need me to make any other mysterious deliveries for you, or are you planning to handle it yourself from here on?”

“I’m not sure,” he said slowly. “Maybe it’s something worth talking about.”

“Maybe it is,” she said.

There was a steady wind out of the northeast and, even though the day was warm, it was chilly here at the top of the hill. They were standing on the stone parapet outside the Twin Lights, the pair of century-old brownstone lighthouses rising fortresslike behind them. She’d gotten a waist-length black leather jacket from the BMW and put it on over her chamois blouse, zipped it against the wind. Her hair was loose and moved in the breeze.

He leaned against the parapet’s waist-high wall. Below was a steep drop through trees and brush as the hill sloped down to the Navesink River. He looked toward the ocean. In the hazy distance to the north, out past Sandy Hook and the long stretch of New York Bay, he could see the silhouette of the Verrazano Bridge, Brooklyn beyond.

“I remember the first time we were ever up here,” she said.

He nodded. They had sneaked in here often at night, after the park gates were closed, to look out at the lights of New York. On clear nights, they could see all the way to Coney Island, the glow of the Ferris wheel lighting up the sky. A month before she left, they had made love here, on the soft grass of the north side of the hill. He remembered rolling over to look up at a sky full of stars, his breath still heavy, and seeing the blink-quick path of a meteor out over the ocean.

“Tell me about your wife,” she said.

“What do you want to know?”

“How old was she when she got sick?”

“Thirty-four.”

“Was it sudden?”

“I came home one night, late, found her on the kitchen floor. She was semiconscious, couldn’t speak. I had no idea what had happened. I called nine one one and we got her to the hospital.”

There were about a dozen tourists around, taking photos of the view or picnicking on the grass. A sudden shift in wind snatched napkins and paper plates, sent them scudding along the ground, owners in pursuit.

“Had she been sick at all? Any symptoms before that?”

He shook his head. “If so, she never let on.”

“What happened at the hospital?”

“Our doctor met us there. After a while, when they had her stabilized, she was able to talk a little bit. She said she’d gone into the kitchen to answer the phone and the last thing she remembered was the smell of burning wires.”

“Wires?”

“The doctor told me later that stroke victims often smell burning wires just before the attack. When they started running down the list of what it could be, a stroke was the best-case scenario.”

“What did they do?”

“Ran a CAT scan. She was conscious mostly by then, scared. That’s when they found it.”

“A tumor?”

He put his thumb and index finger together in a circle. “About this big. They couldn’t believe she’d been walking around with it, not been affected. They decided to go in right away, get as much of it as possible. She was in surgery sixteen hours. When it was over, the surgeon told me they’d gotten all they could. The way the tumor was placed … well, there wasn’t a lot they could do.”

“Does it bother you to talk about this?”

“Not too much anymore.”

“What happened after the operation?”

“She was in the hospital about two months. They started the chemo there. They sent her home because there wasn’t much else they could do for her. We were living in Metuchen at the time. I rented a hospital bed, set it up downstairs. I took some time off from work, hired a visiting nurse. We kept up the chemo. She had good days and bad days.”

“Was she aware of what was going on?”

“Most of the time. During those first few months she could talk more or less, though sometimes she had trouble stringing her thoughts together. Later on, she couldn’t talk at all. I just did whatever I could to keep her comfortable.”

“You never had any children?”

“No. We’d been talking about it. But the time just never seemed right. Then she got sick and suddenly there was no more time.”

“How long was it? Between when she went home and …”

“She died?”

“Yes.”

“Eight months.”

“That’s so quick.”

“It didn’t seem that way. Toward the end, she was hallucinating. She was in pain a lot of the time, so we had a morphine drip hooked up. Even with that, it got pretty bad.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s me who should be apologizing. You don’t need to hear all this.”

She hooked her elbow in his. “Come on,” she said. “Let’s walk.”

They started back toward the lighthouses.

“After you left,” he said, “I used to come up here sometimes on my own. I still do every once in a while.”

They walked out onto the picnic area. There was an unoccupied redwood table and a pair of benches in the shade of a sycamore tree.

“You were upset,” he said. “The other day. When you dropped me off.”

She leaned against the table.