The Last Refuge (3 page)

I was genuinely surprised.

“Senior Center?”

Hodges looked at me like I’d disappointed him. He ticked off a few points on his fingers.

“First there’s the two-dollar breakfasts Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Then there’s the three-dollar cold cut and potato salad lunch every day. Then there’s the five-dollar Sunday supper. You eat better than anywhere else in the Village and it’s practically free. The worst you have to do is say a few prayers and put up with a bunch of fuckin’ old bitches like Regina Broadhurst who act like you’re the only charity case in the joint. Of course, they’re wolfing down the same free shit you are. Subsidized, anyway.”

“I get it.”

“Not exactly. I pay my own way. Work in the kitchen. Once a week, gives me full meal privileges. Can even bring Dotty with me.”

“Dorothy,” said the girl without looking up from the small stack of checks she was tallying up.

“You’re wondering why I’d eat anywhere’s but my own place.”

Hodges looked defensive.

“No. I can see it,” I said.

“You can get tired of fish.”

“He hits on the old ladies,” Dotty slid in.

Hodges gave her a little fake backhand and lumbered back through the swinging door into the kitchen. I thanked him as he retreated and asked his daughter to settle up my bill.

“He actually does it for the church,” she said to me quietly. “For years and years. He’s says he hates religion, but he does things for people. He hardly ever eats there.”

“Nothing wrong with a good deed.”

She seemed to be taking her time with my check. Stalling.

“Why did you want to know about Mrs. Broadhurst?” she asked abruptly as she handed over the slip.

“She’s dead. They fished her out of her bathtub today. I found her.”

“Oh my God.”

“Just wondering if your dad knew her. He’s been around here a long time. She didn’t seem to have any family or friends.”

“He’s going to be sorry he called her a bitch. You should have told him right away.”

“Probably should have. But don’t be too sorry. She was a bitch.”

She almost smiled at me despite herself.

“That’s very harsh.”

“I know. Speaking ill of the dead. God doesn’t like it.”

“God doesn’t care. People do.”

“Apologize for me,” I told her as I started to leave.

She stopped me. “I know Jimmy. Or at least, I used to, sort of.”

“Jimmy?”

“Jimmy Maddox. Her nephew.”

“Really.”

“Wow, like a real asshole. I knew him at school. At Southampton High School. I’m sorry to talk about somebody like that, but some people you just can’t like.”

“It’s okay. He’s not the dead one.”

“I guess he’s still alive. I don’t know. I haven’t seen him for a long time. He got into bulldozers or something.”

“Construction.”

“Big earth machines. Pushing lots of shit around. It would suit him.”

“Lives in Hampton Bays.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“That’s what his aunt told me. She didn’t like him, either.”

“Charming.”

“No other family?”

“That’s all I know about. Jimmy’s parents died when he was still in high school. I don’t know what happened to them, but he was the first kid I knew who lived in his own apartment. But unfortunately he wasn’t cool. He was just fucked up and pissed off all the time.”

“Helluva way to live.”

“Dumb way to live, if you ask me.”

“Yeah,” I said to her, finally leaving, “only an asshole would live like that.”

I’d pretty well forgotten about the whole thing with Regina after a few days. A talent for forgetting was something I’d cultivated since moving into the cottage. I also worked on my body, which was less than it was, but good enough for my age, considering. I’d wanted to be a boxer in my twenties—actually fought
a little to help pay for night school. The only Franco-Italian boxer in New York was how I billed myself—in my own mind. I was too small and too light to be much of a hitter, so I figured myself a finesse guy, which people expected from me, being white. In those days, white people were supposed to be genetically smarter than dark-skinned people, so everyone figured if I could dance around the ring it was proof of my brilliance. This I knew from the dawn of cognition to be complete horseshit, despite my old man’s attitudes. But I was smart enough to know getting beat into pudding by another boxer was a shortsighted operating strategy. Better to get in and out of there quick and do maximum damage to the other guy’s self-confidence in the early rounds. Fool him into thinking you were actually somewhat of a contest. You win more fights that way and get to keep most of the face you were born with.

More than anything, boxing had made hanging around gyms a habit with me. Decent conditioning was also prolonging suicide by alcohol, but that couldn’t be helped.

Deep in the pine barrens above Westhampton a rummy old ex-cop ran a youth club boxing school and gym for retired military, other cops and people like me who’d rather cut their balls off than walk through the doors of a typical health club. I know that’s a kind of reverse elitism, but screw it.

The guy’s name was Ronny and his gym was called Sonny’s, which made it authentic, at least, in that respect. It was off-white cinder block on the outside with pale green cinder block on the inside. The lighting was a
little less dingy than the gyms in the city. The bags, ring and other equipment were tired but solid, and the stink was just within tolerable limits. Most of the kids were Shinnecock Indians and blacks, or a mix thereof, and the “coaches” were all local municipal thugs. I went there about three times a week to jump rope, do some calisthenics and spar with whoever. Usually one of the kids. I had to avoid the more serious guys so they wouldn’t pester me all the time into what they figured would be an easy way to nurture their egos.

They always say you’re supposed to pick the toughest guy in Dodge City, hurt him badly and conspicuously, and the other tough guys would leave you alone. Rarely worked, since there was usually a reason why the toughest guys were the toughest. But a bigger problem for me now was being fifty-two years old. So instead I just broadcast a don’t-fuck-with-the-crazy-old-man vibe, hoping to plant a seed of doubt with anyone wanting to exercise his dominance instinct. This, in fact, had worked pretty well so far.

I was at Sonny’s working on the sand bag. The cop, Joe Sullivan, was there lifting some free weights. He ignored me for a while, then came over and stood next to the bag. I ignored him and kept hitting the bag in the loose pattern I’d been hitting it with for about thirty-five years.

“Found any more dead old ladies?” he asked me when he saw I wasn’t going to acknowledge him just standing there.

I kept working on the bag.

“Hey, just a bad joke,” he said after another minute.

I held the bag still with both gloves.

“Not really,” I said. “I’ve heard worse.”

Sullivan shifted his top-heavy body weight from right foot to left.

“I haven’t dug up any nephew. You sure you don’t know the kid’s name? I mean, she’s not even planted yet, and we gotta do something with the house. Haven’t found a will.”

“No will?”

“Not that anybody can find. Not that anybody’s really looked, I should say. Usually there’s family that just does everything. I’m not really supposed to be involved in this shit, but I hate to hand the whole thing over to the court in Riverhead, where they’ll just pay McNally to settle it out, and I hate that dumb fuck of a lawyer. I guess it doesn’t matter. I just know what happens when the court has to handle everything itself. I don’t know why I give a shit.”

Municipal guys on the eastern end of Long Island would rather sell their souls than concede to other New York agencies. There was often talk of seceding from Suffolk County itself. The spirit of disenfranchisement runs deep out here.

I hit the bag a few more times, trying to re-establish the pattern.

“Jimmy Maddox,” I said to him as he was about to walk away.

“Huh?”

“Jimmy Maddox. That’s the name of her nephew. Works construction on heavy equipment. Don’t know where, though I’m guessing he’s still in the area.”

“I think I remember that guy. Didn’t know he was her nephew.”

“I saw him a few times, like I said, hanging around her place. He could be her only living relative.”

“Now that I got a name, I can find him. That house on the bay’s gonna be worth something.”

“House is pretty beat up.”

“Nah, they’ll just bulldoze it and put up some big honkin’ postmodern. Jimmy could handle the dozin’ himself. It’s the land on the bay that counts. Nobody cares about the little shit boxes that’re sitting on it. No offense.”

I stopped working the bag and held it still between my gloves.

“I can help take care of this if you still want,” I said to him.

“What do you mean?”

“Can you get them to make me the executor?”

“You can’t be an executor if there ain’t a will. You gotta be an administrator.”

“Okay then, can you get them to make me the administrator?”

“Yeah. I think so. Like I said, nobody really wants to fuck around with any
intestate
shit. Especially with an indigent.”

“Regina wasn’t indigent.”

“Sorry. You know what I mean. No family.”

“Just the kid. Make this administrator thing happen and I’ll go talk to him. If he wants in, then I’ll cut out. But more’n likely he won’t know what the hell to do.”

“You’re not kidding.”

“I’m used to looking after the old broad’s stuff. It’s part of my family heritage. Just get me the papers I need. I don’t want to have to work at it too hard.”

Sullivan stood there silently until it sunk in that he’d achieved the goal he’d set himself to. Made him a little perky.

“Okay. That’s really cool. I’ll talk to the town attorney—they know how to deal with Surrogate’s Court, get you some kind of administrator papers or something. If you got the time to get on it now. I really can’t. That’s great. That’s a help.”

He lingered a few more minutes like he’d have more to say if I’d made it easier for him. Eventually he drifted away as I built up my pace on the bag, hitting it a little extra hard, hurting my wrists and getting a little winded in the process. What is it about human interaction that makes me feel so sick and ill at ease? I am going to grow old and die without ever learning how to achieve common discourse, free of implications that extend far beyond the importance of the moment.

A few days later I was in the Village to do my monthly banking. It isn’t really necessary to do this in person anymore, with ATMs and PCs. But I didn’t have a PC, hardly ever used my ATM card, and never got over the old-fashioned habit of checking everything out with some semblance of a human being. Maybe I did it because banks would rather you didn’t, even though they had the tellers there for anybody to use. Most of whom were, by training, surly and aloof. Which suited me fine.

The inside of the bank was standard rehab coral
and chrome. The tellers were lined up along one wall manning a mahogany palisade you assaulted after passing through a gauntlet of brass poles and velvet rope. Along the other wall were desks that were supposed to seem friendlier, but in fact felt less approachable. That’s where Amanda Battiston sat and conducted business with a continuous but graceful rhythm. She was what they called a personal banker, somebody you got to talk to if you had a big account and lots of juicy business with the bank. Which I didn’t, but I preferred to deal with a personal banker anyway.

Her husband was the branch manager. He sat in the only enclosed office you could see from the floor. That’s where he met with local businesspeople and out-of-town customers from New York City and other faraway places. He was younger than me, but he was a local and I remembered him and his family from when I was growing up. When I first opened my checking account he tried to engage me, but I preferred his wife. I didn’t like the way his midriff filled out the lower half of his shirt or his smooth meaty handshake. Plus, she didn’t seem to care that I didn’t have a whole lot of money, even though her husband thought I did. Otherwise, he wouldn’t have even looked at me.