David Ellis - The Hidden Man

“I knew you were going to say that.”

I caught eyes with a woman up near the bar, a woman in a green dress, the Lady in Green, who broke eye contact in an easy way, as if she hadn’t been looking at me. I suppose I should have been flattered but it made me feel uneasy, for some reason. Or maybe it was the five vodkas I had drunk. I pondered for the twentieth time tonight what I was still doing here, why I had come here to begin with, why I still feared God.

I also wondered who had hired me to defend Sammy Cutler.

“-a doctor or a lawyer or something.”

I watched the Lady in Green’s eyes tour the bar again as she waited for her drink. She had a narrow, sculpted face. Her head angled upward, revealing a vulnerability that belied her confident appearance.

“I’m a police detective,” I told the lady trying to converse with me. I say trying because she’d had more to drink than I had.

“A cop .” She said it like a cuss word. Lot of people feel that way about our city’s finest. Sometimes I’m one of them.

Now I had the attention of the entire tribe of women at the table. What kinds of cases did I handle? Did I ever shoot someone?

“You don’t seem like a cop. You seem like a Wall Street banker.” This from the black woman, or I guess I’m supposed to say African American, but she had a British accent so did that make her English American? African British? I thought of asking her but I would need a bullhorn to communicate with her across the table, and no matter how I tried to phrase the question it would probably sound politically incorrect. Why bother? Why bother with any of this?

“When I was a boy,” I said, “my parents were killed in front of me by an armed robber. I swore, that day, that I would devote my life to fighting crime.”

Pete returned from the bathroom, wearing an enthusiastic grin, rejoining the conversation with renewed vigor. I doubted that taking a piss could have put him in that good a mood. I trained my stare on him and he knew it, but he avoided my look and the question it raised.

“Jason’s a lawyer,” Pete chimed in. “One of the best in the city.”

“That explains how he lies so easily.”

I laughed, for the only time that night. I looked back at the Lady in Green who, yes, was checking me out again. The logical part of my brain, when it was functioning, told me that at some point in my life I would be interested in women again, but it seemed beyond comprehension thus far.

I watched Pete work the ladies. The kid had been through some rough patches. He got it a lot worse at home than I did, growing up. My father could look you in the eye and convince you he was heir to the British throne, but in his soul he was not an enlightened man. He was bitter and temperamental and opted, instead of a psychiatrist’s couch, to relieve tension by taking swats at his boys. I went through a pretty good spell of it myself, though I spent more time working up a sweat dodging my father’s punches than actually receiving them. I would juke right, fake left, hit the floor, anything to make him miss, only heightening his drunken rage, but in the end usually exhausting him, until he finally turned his ire on an inanimate object like my bedroom door, sometimes a chair. The wall of my bedroom looked like a Beirut stronghold.

Looking back, it was probably comical, my father swatting at air, cursing me out, while I danced around him or crawled beneath him. I probably should have hung one of those punching bags in my room. My dad could have gotten in a pretty good workout, maybe even turned pro on the welterweight circuit. But he wouldn’t have enjoyed people hitting back.

Once I sprouted up in height, and especially once I started making a name for myself on the gridiron, my dad basically left me alone. Something in the acclaim I received on the football field, and throughout the community, gave me immunity within the confines of our house. I figure, my father couldn’t put me down when everybody else was propping me up, so he gave it a rest.

Either that or he paid attention that one night when I actually swung back. I always wondered if he had even remembered the punch the next day, waking up with a hangover and a shiner under his left eye, which he rightly could have chalked up to another night at the office in his line of work. That was right around the time the abuse stopped, as it happened, but I never really knew if he remembered his kid popping him, and it didn’t seem like polite dinner conversation. One of the many unspoken things that festered among our family.

There was something ironic in the ability I had to make defensive backs miss in the open field, each of them my drunken father lunging at me and finding air. I have a distinct memory, my junior year of high school, taking a screen pass sixty yards or so for a touchdown, dodging two or three defenders in the process, then standing in the end zone and looking up in the stands at my family. My mother and Pete were there, as always, but that particular time so was my father, though I don’t remember him clapping. What I do remember is wondering, at that moment, looking up into the stadium lights on a cool Friday night, several hundred fans screaming with enthusiasm, what my father was thinking and having no idea. My best guess was that my father resented me at that moment.

In any event, when I was no longer a convenient target, Pete bore the brunt of our father’s abuse. He was younger but also smaller and more docile. He wasn’t a fighter, and he wouldn’t avoid my father. He took it, every time. I would listen to it, lying awake, my head inches off the pillow, the sickening sound of open-handed slaps and closed-fist punches, Pete’s muted groans. I did nothing to stop it. To this day, I can’t put my finger on why. No matter how much I hated him, no matter how much I disre spected him, and even when I stopped fearing him, he was still my father.

Pete and I never really discussed it. I broached the topic a time or two, but he always deflected it. As a child myself, I took it as survival instinct, a coping mechanism, but as an adult I can’t imagine what it did to him. I do know he’s had trouble committing to an occupation (three jobs in four years, currently in pharmaceutical sales) and to a woman (three in four months), and he gambles and parties way too much. It doesn’t take Freud to see a connection.

It pained me to watch him at work here, reminding me as he did of our father. A part of me wanted to shake him, because he had all the charm of our dear daddy but none of the underlying malice. He could put up an impressive front, no question, especially in a setting like this, entertaining a flock of women. And it wasn’t insincere. There was a big heart in there. This guy basically rescued me after everything happened with Talia and Emily. Maybe it helped him, in a way, looking out for me instead of the other way around, over these last few months.

Now, here he was, back to sneaking cocaine in the bathroom of a nightclub. He’d never been an addict, per se, at least as far as I knew, but how far removed from addiction could he be? I hadn’t been in a position to know, not these last few months.

I felt a surge of nausea, thanks to the vodka and the mixture of smoke and expensive perfume in the air. I excused myself for the bathroom. I made several wrong turns through the mosh pit of people, then I felt nauseated again and decided to get some fresh air. I didn’t see the point in entertaining these women any longer, assuming they had been amused at any point. I certainly wasn’t entertaining myself.

On the other hand, I wasn’t in a hurry to get home, and I only lived twenty minutes away, so I decided to hoof it. I like the city in predawn, the world in transition, decelerating from the night’s sins, the first glimmer of orange-red warming the sky after the city has recharged its batteries. Plus the streets are pretty much empty, so I don’t have to talk to anyone.