Summer People (19 page)

“Hey, that's enough, you hear me! I said that's enough!” a white-haired
man croaked as he pushed open the door of his screened-in porch. He hobbled down the front walk as Nathan coughed and pulled himself up on his knees.

The lantern-jawed young man was already near the top of the road, backing farther and farther away. The juggernaut backed away also, while Thayer, his hand clutched over his right eye, shouted that if Nathan ever came over to his grandmother's house again he'd fucking sew Nathan's dick in his mouth. Later, Nathan would wonder what gangster movies or prison dramas Thayer must have seen to be able to make such vivid threats.

The old man's face recoiled at what he heard. “Hey, hey, I said that's enough. What the hell do you think you're doing out here?”

“Kicking that motherfucker's ass!” Thayer said as he and the juggernaut walked backward up the road.

“I should kick
your
asses!” the old man sputtered.

The man was so
old,
so profoundly incapable of kicking anyone's ass, that except for a snort of laughter from the juggernaut, the comment ended the confrontation entirely. Thayer and the juggernaut turned to walk up the gravel road, occasionally looking behind them, and once erupting in laughter. The old man asked Nathan, “Are you okay?”

Nathan picked himself up and wiped the dust from his clothes. “Yeah, I think so. Thanks for coming out.”

“What did they want with you?”

“I'm guessing they wanted to hurt me.”

“But why?”

“I don't know.”

“Do you want me to call the police?”

Nathan hesitated. He
could
call the police, he realized. The last time he'd been in a fight was in junior high school, but now he was a legal adult. They were
all
legal adults, which meant that with a witness like the old man, Nathan potentially could have Thayer and the juggernaut arrested. Nathan said, “I might call them in a minute, but I want to think.”

“Well, all right. How do you feel?”

After assuring the old man he was fine, and thanking him again, Nathan lumbered back to Ellen's house. Inside, it was quiet. Ellen had slept through the war, so Nathan made a beeline for the bathroom. He stared into the mirror a long time, moving backward and forward to assess how noticeable his facial wounds would be to others, and, in particular, to Leah. His right ear looked flushed with embarrassment, and his right cheekbone was scraped and swollen, but he was optimistic that by applying ice to these injuries they would be much less noticeable by morning. What concerned him most was the little knot of exploded blood vessels smack-dab in the middle of his forehead, where Thayer had punched him. Nathan pushed and pressed around the bruise with his thumb and forefinger, attempting to mollify the angry veins and minimize what would otherwise be a mortifyingly conspicuous reminder of his defeat.

He was sitting on the living room couch with a stiff drink and two bags of ice when he heard footsteps on the front porch. Lunging up in hopes of preventing whoever it was from awakening Ellen, Nathan's world tilted. He rested his forearm against the door frame, to keep his balance, and quietly opened the door.

Dressed in his wet suit and black cross trainers, Eldwin looked abruptly confused. “Jesus. What happened?”

Nathan said, “I was getting ready to call you. I was on my way up about a half hour ago when a couple guys kind of attacked me.” He barely managed to smile as he stepped further into the porch light and pointed at the dark star on his forehead.

Eldwin grimaced. “Who were they?”

“Mr. McAlister's step-grandson and a couple of his friends. I'd made it to about there when they jumped me.” He pointed to where, in the moonlight, he thought he could see bare patches of gravel and broken branches in the hedgerow.

“Why did they want to beat you up?”

Nathan tilted his head and shrugged. “It's kind of a long story.” He let
go of the door frame. The world seemed momentarily to have righted itself, so he stepped out onto the porch. Bringing the ice bag to his cheekbone, he said, “Have you heard about the fire at Mr. McAlister's house?”

“Yeah, I heard about that,” Eldwin said, his voice low with grave concern about how this might pertain to the fight.

Nathan chuckled, but smiling caused a searing pain beneath his right ear. “Fuck. My jaw,” Nathan groaned, putting his palm to his cheek. His awareness of how pathetic he must have looked made him laugh again, which made him groan again. Eldwin laughed tentatively with him despite a lingering expression of concern.

“I didn't start the fire,” Nathan explained, smiling awkwardly. He sighed and told him the story of the ill-fated visit to Mr. McAlister's wife's house, the conversation with Mr. McAlister, the fire, and then concluded with a blow-by-hurled-gravel account of being pummeled by Thayer and his friend. It was a long story, during which they sat down on the porch chairs, overlooking the harbor, and Eldwin pulled a pack of cigarettes from inside his wet suit. He was well into his second smoke by the time Nathan paused for a reaction.

Eldwin said, “Fuck.”

“Yeah,” Nathan agreed.

“Do you want me to take you to the hospital?”

“Nah, I think I'm fine. Thanks, though.” Nathan removed the ice pack from his cheek and added, “I'm trying to decide whether or not to call the cops.”

Eldwin nodded as he took a long drag on his cigarette.

Nathan continued, “I want to call the cops right now and prosecute their asses, put Thayer in fucking jail instead of back at Columbia. But then I think: A) that's a lot of work. That means
I've
got to meet with a lawyer and come back here for the trial, however long that takes, and B) maybe if I don't prosecute them, Thayer and his grandmother won't prosecute me for supposedly trying to hit her with the car.”

“How long ago did the incident happen with you supposedly trying to run her over?”

“It's been a few days.”

“And you haven't heard anything from the police?”

“Not yet.”

Eldwin shook his head. “I don't think you're going to hear anything.”

“Yeah?”

“I think if they were going to do it, they would have done it by now. The police would wonder why she waited so long to call them.”

Nathan nodded. “It would still be a lot of trouble to come up here after the summer for a trial, though.”

“Yeah.”

In the silence that followed, Nathan thought about the drink he'd left inside by the couch. “You want anything to drink? I've got wine, or rum and Coke if you want one.”

“I haven't had a rum and Coke in a while.”

Nathan stood and slowly, carefully, walked inside for the drinks. When he returned, he asked, “Have you ever been in a fight?”

Eldwin exhaled a stream of smoke, squinting as if to see into his past. “I had something like this happen to me when I was in junior high. This guy and his friends chasing me around for a while, and then I got really into ninjutsu—like training to be a ninja.” Eldwin tilted his head back and let out a deep laugh, which, noticing Nathan's anxious glance at the upstairs windows, he soon stifled. “I bought some weapons, like throwing stars and nunchucks. But I never used any of it, at least not on
anyone.
I did pretty much destroy my bedroom. The only real altercation I had after junior high was with a police officer when I was in college. I was coming home from a punk show and the officer stopped me because he thought I was drunk. I think I called him a fascist, and he maced me and pushed me down on the ground.”

“Whoa—then what happened?”

“He threw me in the back of the car and they put me in the drunk tank overnight, and I had to go to trial and take some classes. I didn't get my license back for a year.”

“So you had been drinking?”

“Yeah.”

Nathan looked into his glass. “Yeah, you got to be careful with this stuff.”

“They say that,” Eldwin said.

Sipping their drinks, they watched anchored sailboats bob and tilt almost imperceptibly above the dark water.

“I wish I'd had some throwing stars and nunchucks when Thayer and that fucker attacked me,” Nathan announced.

Eldwin reacted to Nathan's half-feigned sincerity with the requisite deadpan nod.

“I would like to take boxing lessons or something,” Nathan continued. “When he started coming at me, and even when he was pushing me, I was just kind of paralyzed. I should have been able to react sooner.”

Eldwin said, “Aristotle says in the
Ethics
that nobody is born brave, but you become brave by doing brave acts, by making a habit of acting bravely.”

Nathan drank and contemplated this wisdom, but something about the notion of bravery turned his thoughts to Leah. When enough time had passed that he thought it would be all right to change the subject, he said, “You know how you were saying this afternoon that you think it's probably wise for Leah and me to keep it casual? Does either of us seem in danger of not taking it casually?”

Eldwin pushed out his lower lip and said, “No, not that I can see. Why?”

“Just wondering,” Nathan said, keeping his eyes fixed on the harbor. He took a long drink, finishing off what was left in the glass. “I think I'm in danger.”

Eldwin had his elbows on his knees and looked over at Nathan before looking back out at the water. “Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, you can't control those things anyway, so I don't know why I said anything. You think she feels the same way?”

“I don't know. That's what I was trying to get from you.”

Eldwin leaned back in his chair. “Everything I know about her I know from her mother, and that's the reason I guess I said what I did a couple days ago. Those first few weeks I think Leah was getting a little stir-crazy up here. That's why I took her to McAlister's party, so that you two could talk. But then the more she went out with you, I began to feel bad because the main reason her mother wanted her to come up here was to help her avoid getting into another serious relationship.” Eldwin smiled regretfully. “That woman. My God.”

“Her mom?”

“Yeah. She's done an amazing job of making my summer much more complicated. I was debating whether or not to have a nanny come with us, and I made the mistake of mentioning that to Renee before I decided whether it would be a good idea—with Rachel the way she is—or if we could really even afford it. Once I mentioned it to her, though, she just pushed and pushed. She thought that otherwise Leah would end up going straight to New York to be with that musician.” Eldwin shook his head. “I'm going to tell you something, but you
cannot
tell her—because if you do, she'll probably leave and go home.”

Nathan said, “All right.”

“We're able to have her because her mother is supplementing what we pay with her own money, but we're not allowed to tell Leah.”

“Whoa.”

“So that's why I feel a little guilty about taking her money and then setting Leah up with you.”

Nathan laughed, but the sudden sharp pain in his jaw made him whimper.

Eldwin nearly choked on his drink, chuckling. “Are you sure you don't want me to take you to the hospital?”

“No, no. I think I'm good.”

“Well, I'm glad you survived. I would have been angry if those guys had killed my kayaking partner.”

Nathan smiled, then winced. “Thanks.”

“All right. I'm supposed to pick Leah up at the train station at eleven
thirty, if you want to come.”

Nathan hesitated but shook his head. “Nah.” He did not want to look so badly beaten when he saw her again. “I think I should just stay here and keep some ice on my injuries. Try and keep Mount Vesuvius from erupting on my forehead.”

Eldwin glanced at his watch. “I should probably walk the dog before I go.”

Nathan apologized for not being able to kayak. They made vague plans to do it some other evening, then shook hands good-bye. Inside, Nathan went straight to the bathroom mirror. If all he had suffered had been the scratched and swollen cheekbone, he would have been okay. The abrasion added a tough-guy quality to his face that might have given him a rugged kind of sex appeal. But the blotch on his forehead looked like a sprouting fungus.

He refreshed his drink, then collapsed into Ellen's chair. A police drama was on television, and Nathan watched with a bag of ice cradled against his head. He considered calling his father or even Sophie and telling them an edited version of the fight, a version in which he did not seem so timid and had perhaps landed more blows, but his jaw still felt tight when he yawned, and he couldn't muster the energy.

When the news came on, Nathan turned off the television and trudged upstairs to his room. Stripped down to his boxers, he punched at his reflection to see what he might have looked like during the fight. Then he crawled into bed. With the doors and windows locked, the only sound the quiet lapping of the tide against the shore, Nathan nestled beneath the covers and sighed. He hoped Eldwin would not tell Leah too much about the fight. Nathan was looking forward to telling her his own version of the story, which he hoped would elicit her respect and compassion.

Staring at the wallpaper, he rolled over on his other side and felt immediately dizzy. He closed his eyes, but this only made his nausea worse. So he kept his eyes fixed on the nicked corner of a nearby dresser. The world eventually stood still, but Nathan's face remained hot and his heart pounded againt his chest. Maybe he did have a concussion after all. He
tried to remember what he knew about concussions, but all he knew was that sometimes people suffered a severe blow to the head, went to sleep, then never woke up. After a while his face no longer felt flushed and his heart began to beat in normal time. He rolled slowly onto his back, gauging how the nausea increased depending on how quickly he turned. The smart thing would be to drive himself to the hospital and get himself checked out, but how could he drive in this condition? Also, he couldn't just leave Ellen by herself. It was too late to ask Eldwin for help, and besides, Nathan ached with soreness and exhaustion. He wondered if he would die, and what others' reactions would be to his death, until at last his breathing slowed into sleep.