Alternate Side(27)
“That poor bastard,” Charlie had said after eavesdropping on that conversation.
“Can you please all back off of Ricky?” Nora said that night to Charlie, at the end of a mostly silent Thai takeout dinner, occasioned, she knew, by what she now thought of as The Bob Harris Situation.
Charlie picked up his plate. “Do they work for us, these people, or is it the other way around?” he said.
“These people?”
“You know what I mean. We’re paying for the spaces in the lot, and Ricky isn’t. If he doesn’t like it, I bet there are lots of other guys in this city who’d like the work. George says there’s a guy who works on Seventy-fourth Street who’s cheaper and better.”
“Oh, not again. The last cheaper and better was the tree trimmer who butchered all the trees.”
“You just don’t like George,” Charlie said.
“I don’t like George. I do like Ricky.”
“This chicken satay isn’t great,” Charlie said, standing up to get another beer.
IMPORTANT REMINDER
Only paid occupants of the lot may have keys to the padlock that holds the chain in place. NO DUPLICATES OF THE KEY SHOULD BE MADE UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES. The chain must be in place at all times except when moving a car in or out of the lot.
George
There are sounds that a person never forgets. Charlie Nolan said he would always remember the sound of the earth falling onto the lid of his father’s coffin, although Nora had secretly found it a somewhat soothing sound, like very heavy rain on a very solid roof. Ollie could close his eyes and remember the explosive sound of the first home run he’d ever hit, in middle school, at the field at Randall’s Island; Rachel the involuntary squeal that had come from her mouth when she’d opened a nondescript envelope and seen a check for five hundred dollars after she’d won an essay contest her junior year.
Nora would never forget the high, querulous complaint she’d heard in the delivery room from her children, first Oliver, then Rachel, although Rachel had long ago insisted that Nora admit the two had cried simultaneously, and Nora had complied, and Charlie now even believed this was true because he’d heard it so many times, even though he had been there and knew otherwise.
Afterward Nora realized that the sound she’d heard that morning in December would fall into the same category for the rest of her life: once heard, it could not be unheard. First there was a percussive noise that she thought was a jackhammer, and then something different, something that sounded like big bags of sand falling from the upper story of a building onto a wet pavement. It wasn’t until she got closer and the screaming started, screaming that went on and on and on, so that, like a child, she wanted to put her palms over her ears, that she realized the last had been the sound of Jack Fisk hitting Ricky in the side of the leg with a golf club.
“Jesus Christ, Jack,” Charlie yelled as Nora sprinted down the block toward the lot.
What exactly happened that day, chapter and verse, depended, of course, on who was telling the story. There were only three people who actually were there: Jack, Ricky, and Charlie. Naturally George told everyone, as he trolled the block all weekend long, that he had been standing right there, had seen it all with his own two eyes. He stuck to that until the police wanted an official statement and then it turned out he’d actually been taking the rescue pugs to the groomers to have their nails trimmed.
“Oh my God, oh my God, Charlie, do something,” Nora yelled as she neared the entrance to the parking lot.
She had just finished doing her long run, her Saturday-morning-through-Central-Park-buy-an-everything-bagel-on-the-way-back run. Just under seven miles, just under ninety minutes. Nora liked that feeling about halfway through, when a trickle of sweat ran between her shoulder blades beneath her insulated shirt, at the same point when she had lost all feeling in her nose because it was thoroughly frozen. Then the shivers, coming out of the bagel shop, and the slow lope home. On a shorter run she had time to obsess, about what the twins would do after graduation, about whether they would move away or move back in, about whether Jenny had not called because she was irritated at Nora or away somewhere for work—it was always the latter—about where she and Charlie should go on vacation and whether she wanted to go on vacation with Charlie at all.
But for some reason the longer route eliminated obsession and pared her brain down to purely the motor part of the cortex. Sometimes she would get home and realize she could not remember a single part of the run, that she was like a self-driving car, following a prescribed route with no one behind the wheel. She had been in that sort of fugue state when the screaming started.
By the time she got to her husband, Ricky was lying next to his van, the leg of his khaki-green pants pitch-black with blood, the knee at a peculiar angle that made Nora afraid she was going to be sick when she looked, then looked away. His screams had turned ragged and breathless, his face a terrible putty color. The golf club was on the ground next to him. Nora knelt. She wanted to put a hand on Ricky’s foot but she was afraid anything she did would make him jerk away and hurt himself still more, if that was even possible.
“I hear a siren,” Charlie said.
“Did you call 911?” Nora said, looking over her shoulder. She saw Jack Fisk bent over the curb with his back to her, his hands on his knees. “Jack, did you call 911?”