Two Time (23 page)

“Sorry.”

“Like I’d want to blank it all out. Motherfuckers.”

I was happy to see him shut off the T V, a blessed silence, moderated only by the low whir of an air conditioner filling in for the nattering announcers.

“I know you’ve been going over all this with Ross, but the Chief isn’t inclined to keep me in the loop. So you could get me up to speed, or use this time to yell at me some more and I’ll come back tomorrow and try again.”

“Ah, Christ, who’s yelling,” he said, then clammed up.

I just sat there on the bed and waited him out. It’s a trick I learned from a shrink I once had to see in a deal with a prosecutor. Most people hate dead air, so if you make some, they’ll fill it.

Sullivan lasted about five minutes.

“My shift that day is all on record,” he said. “In my case book, and through all the contacts with the dispatcher. All routine stuff. I must have come home at the end of it at about three-thirty in the afternoon. Judy’s still at work then, and I normally either go work out, or play softball, or screw around in the yard, making sure I get back by dinnertime, say six-thirty Though that night she was working late, so I’m not sure about that part. I always change my clothes as soon as I get home, which I did, of course, then I took the Bronco to wherever I took it. For whatever goddamn reason.”

“And no prints, hairs, anything traceable?”

“Oh, you think we shoulda checked for prints? Geez, didn’t think of that.”

I saw something that made me go over and take a closer look at his right hand. He pulled it away and looked at me like I’d tried to give him a kiss.

“Give me the hand,” I said. “Palm down.”

He did it despite himself.

“Interesting. Did Markham say anything about this?”

“What?”

“The abrasion. Been over a week and it’s still healing. Must have been a good shot. Can’t believe I didn’t see it before.”

Sullivan took a look himself, rotating his hand under the pale bedside lamp.

“It’s been sore. Though not a big deal given the hole in my gut.”

“You see? You got one in. Probably a couple. They had to club you or you would’ve beat the crap out of them. You were unarmed. Nothing you could’ve done.”

Sullivan looked at his left hand.

“Not much on this one. Little sore, though.”

“You’re too much of a righty I’ve seen the way you use your left. More defensive. Your right’s the big one.”

As we talked the climate in the room took a decided turn for the better. Clouds of humiliation cleared enough to let a little sun peek through. A little sea breeze blew away some of the fear and the unfamiliar shame of vulnerability.

“I bet I remembered to keep my shoulder up,” he said.

“That’s exactly what I was thinking.”

There wasn’t much else he could tell me. It might be that Ross was holding out on him. Though probably not. Ross had a high regard for Sullivan, trusting his basic good sense and honest cop way in the world. So I chatted some more with him about everything but getting stabbed, until the evening shift nurse showed up, which was good timing because now I was having trouble getting him to shut up so I could leave.

I was half out the door and he was about to chug a little white cup full of pain pills when another thought intercepted me.

“Joe, tell me something.”

“What.”

“Why didn’t you have your gun?”

“I never carry it when I’m off duty. Don’t believe in it.”

“But if you were going to do a little off-hours, semi-official thing, like get in your civvies to pay a call on Ivor Fleming, you’d bring your gun.”

“In which case, I’d be wearing my sport jacket that’s cut for the holster, because yeah, sometimes there’s call to wear civvies on duty. I thought about that. Don’t know what it means.”

“Me neither. Just interesting.”

I left him to think for a few minutes before those happy pills knocked out his ability to think and then knocked him out for the night. But he’d keep chewing on it. Maybe it’d help him turn something up. There wasn’t much else I could do. I really didn’t know what I was thinking about any of it, except to think I wasn’t really thinking properly at all. Ever since Jackie told me Jonathan Eldridge had ginned up his credentials I’d slipped my moorings and been carried off by the tide. With a central assumption destroyed, every other assumption looked devious and contorted.

Just thinking about that gave me a slight case of vertigo as I walked out of the hospital into the early evening light, the sun low on the horizon, casting the surrounding neighborhood into a shadowless glow and capping off the treetops with what looked like gold paint against the deepening blue sky. Seemed like the right time for a drink, and luckily, I’d arranged to rendezvous with Amanda at the big bar on Main Street, so my powers of judgment hadn’t completely abandoned me.

M
ONTAUK
H
IGHWAY
, the east-west artery of the South Fork, established an economic Maginot Line as it ran through Southampton. To the south you had to add a decimal point or two to the price of a house, but it also marked a horticultural divide between a hundred years of decorative landscaping and open farm country, now interrupted by strips of new construction featuring halfhearted nods to late-twentieth-century architectural detail appliquéd over standard suburban boxes, and an occasional old farmhouse accompanied by a cluster of outbuildings of the same vintage, tucked inside a grove of sugar maples or white oaks once planted by an actual farmer. When I was growing up one of these places had evolved into an auto repair and body shop specializing in foreign sports cars when the farmer’s kids, Rudy and Johnny Fournier, returned from World War II thoroughly seduced by the exotica of Alfa Romeos, bathtub Porsches and T-series MGs. It was called Contemporary
Car Care. I liked to hang around there and watch the mechanics, some of whom were French and Italian imports themselves, deconstruct peculiar little engines and transmissions and restore lithe lowrider auto bodies to their original
insouciance
. Eventually they started to ask me to hold a wrench or change a tire, which led to simple repair tasks, which evolved into summer and weekend jobs managing progressively more sophisticated undertakings. It was good training for an engineering career, in some ways better than what they taught me at MIT, where the puzzles were more logical and failure had less immediate consequence.

The mechanical design of those postwar European cars was idiosyncratic at best. Parts were hard to come by, or completely unavailable. What manuals we had were usually in the car’s native language, like British English, which stubbornly renamed every automotive component and included tips on driving like “when coming upon an unexpected incline, briskly engage the braking mechanism.” It made working on their American counterparts, with their cavernous engine compartments and adjustment tolerances as wide as the Great Plains, seem entirely sensible and effortless.

So when Amanda gave me the directions to Butch’s place, I knew exactly where it was. The big painted sign with three nesting Cs had disappeared years ago. When you live in the place where you grew up you get used to the continual destruction of familiar reference points. After the sign was gone and the jumble of sports cars in various states of disassembly and repair had vanished from around the only outbuilding visible from the road, I’d never bothered to see what had taken its place. It turned out to be Butch’s Institute of the Consolidated Industrial Divine.

We pulled in the driveway and rounded the first big curve into the main area. The tall trees on the property had grown
considerably, crowding the house in a leafy embrace. The house itself was almost unrecognizable. The screened-in front porch was furnished in mismatched overstuffed chairs and couches, bicycles, a refrigerator, an old streamlined gas pump that used to sit over by the repair bays, a pair of armless mannequins standing front to back, and a jumble of coffee cups, oriental vases, carved wooden statues of Dali’s camel-legged elephants, hookahs, a TV set and a big scale model of a three-masted schooner. On the wall hung a large abstract painting in predominantly reds and oranges, which contrasted alarmingly with the flaky putty-gray color of the cedar siding—the result of some distant ill-advised paint job. I vaguely remembered a neat lawn, which was now full of rocks, weedy broad-leafed plants and feral perennials. Though long gone to neglect, you could discern an underlying order, suggesting the tangled remains of a Japanese garden.

I turned off the engine and was about to get out when the door of the house and the garage doors of the closest outbuilding were flung open and people in bright red jumpsuits, black ski masks and goggles poured out. They quickly surrounded the car and opened both doors, motioning with a flourish for us to step out. Amanda was saying things like, “well, hello,” but I was too busy keeping an eye on everybody. They all carried some sort of tool, and two of the bigger ones were rolling a big hydraulic jack out of the garage. No one spoke, but their gestures were exaggerated, theatrical, like mimes. One motioned for us to step back from the car while the others circled it, using a lot of extra steps and movements, nodding at each other and shrugging and waving their tools in the air. The pair with the jack rolled it under the car and one dropped to the ground to set the lifting pad under a sturdy part of the chassis. At least I hoped that’s what he, or she, was doing.

I made a move toward the car to make sure but Amanda gently gripped my forearm, so I stopped. Seconds later one side of the Grand Prix was up off the ground. Everyone applauded, a muffled sound since they were all wearing red leather gloves. Then one of them blew on a bosun’s whistle, which prompted three of the red jumpsuits to run back into the garage, out of which came two more people, one in a white jumpsuit and red ski mask, the other in a tuxedo wearing a rubber mask that made him look a lot like Woody Woodpecker. He was carrying an old cast iron music stand, which he set up about ten feet from the front of the car and began to conduct the affair with a baton that he pulled from inside of his tuxedo.

Meanwhile, the white jumpsuit pulled out a chrome impact wrench and snapped it to the end of a blue hose that had been hidden in the long grass. Then before I fully grasped what was happening, he used the wrench to take off the two raised tires. The garage door rolled open again and the three red jumpsuits dragged out a wheel balancer. I knew that because I used to balance wheels on it when I worked for Contemporary Car Care. It came from Italy and accommodated standard hubs as well as wire wheels, which you had to tune and true-up as well as balance. A heavy machine, they’d somehow managed to get it up on an industrial grade dolly so they could roll it over the gravel drive to within a few feet of my car. Two other red jumpsuits brought over my tires and hoisted them one at a time onto the machine for balancing. I tried to remember the last time they’d been balanced, and couldn’t, since I’d only driven the car on the highway once in the last five years, lessening the need.

Somewhere over my head in the trees somebody started playing a French horn. That brought my attention back to the Grand Prix, where another team was changing my oil, with one guy on a creeper under the car emptying the oil
pan, the other ready to fill from above. I wondered how trustworthy the old jack was, especially given the weight of the Grand Prix, hoisted up on two wheels. I fought the urge to go find a pair of jack stands, though it wasn’t long before they had all the tires balanced and all four wheels back on the ground. At this point, a pair of garden hoses appeared and the whole crew worked on washing the car, caring little about keeping the jumpsuits dry. In fact, on the final rinse, the holder of the hose turned it on the rest and the whole event degenerated (or advanced, hard to tell) into a kids’ water fight, with a lot of yelling and laughter, which caused me to realize that until now it had been an entirely soundless production, except for the French horn, now silent.

One of first rifts I can remember forming between me and my daughter was after a trip to the City to go to museums, at her urging, since at about sixteen she was already considering going to art school. Allison’s education and enrichment was normally Abby’s task, but there was something about big museums that repelled my wife. Probably because they were filled with art and people who understood what it might all mean, raising the danger someone would ask her opinion on the subject. She had none, since she’d made no attempt to learn anything about Western civilization, except to feel that museums might be useful to her daughter. So under the pretext of improving our father-daughter relationship, already starting to fray Abby volunteered me for the duty.

Abby thought being an engineer made me biologically incapable of knowing anything about art beyond spelling the word. Allison, building on that assumption, and flush with self-importance having had a high school art appreciation course, spent the day instructing me and expressing pity over my sad lack of comprehension. Nevertheless, I did my best to support her critical judgment as we moved from
the Middle Ages through the Renaissance, and into the Romantic Period, agreeing that Leonardo was awesome and that El Greco gave us the creeps. Trouble came when we were standing before some huge piece of canvas apparently ruined by somebody who’d knocked over a can of paint. She said she loved it. I said I didn’t get it. She sighed with exasperation.

“You just don’t know how to like it,” she said.

“No, I’m saying I don’t get it.”

“That’s your way of saying you don’t like it. You’re saying you don’t want to understand it.”

In retrospect, I should have said something like, “You’re right, honey, why don’t you help me understand.” Instead I let her hypothesis of my motives take root, later to combine with other grim hostilities and sad misconceptions, until it all grew into a profound alienation.

I did take the central criticism to heart, and put some effort into learning about contemporary art, and even started to like some things I’d earlier pass by. I learned to approach every artistic expression with an open mind.
Tabula rasa
. To withhold reflex judgments, and allow the underlying intentions of the artist to reveal themselves over time. Most of all, to be caring and sensitive.