Robert Tanenbaum: Absolute rage

"You're not worried?"

"Oh, no. They almost always bring them back after they've implanted the spores."

"Seriously…"

"Seriously? He's undoubtedly with Billy Ireland, my trainer, probably at a hardware store looking at flanges or valves and having the time of his life."

Holden was little more than a half mile from the farm, a wide place on Second comprising a gas station, a grocery and general store, a miniature marina with a boat-livery/bait-'n'-tackle appendage, three motels, one with a coffee shop attached, four houses (summering as bed-and-breakfasts), and the Harbor Bar. Stuck on the narrowest point of the North Fork, Holden offered access to both the Sound and Southold Bay. It looked like old Long Island, the sort of tiny beach town that had long vanished on the South Shore or farther west; people in Holden still pronounced Montauk with the accent on the second syllable.

The Harbor Bar was a low, green-roofed white building with beer signs in the windows, backed right up to the water, with a weathered deck built out on pilings trimming it on one side and at the rear. White tin tables with beer-company umbrellas flying from them were set out on the latter, each accompanied by an odd assortment of chairs.

" 'For men must work, and women must weep,' " Rose intoned as they followed the trotting children down the deck, " 'and there's little to earn and many to keep, though the harbor bar be moaning.' My dad used to say that whenever we came here. He claimed it referred to the drunks at the bar. God! Maybe they're all still there, still moaning."

The children ran to a table and the women followed. The place was nearly full with an early-dinner crowd, mostly sun-reddened tourists on their way back from Shelter Island or Orient Point. One table, however (its top nearly covered with empty beer bottles), was filled with locals-two dark, tanned thirtyish men, one burly and tattooed and balding, the other ponytailed, both in cutoff jeans, muddy work boots, and wife-beater shirts, plus an older man, slim, well-knit, blue-eyed, florid, with a fine dust of graying gold on his head, and next to him, a very dirty little boy with a white hard-hat flopping on his head. The blond man caught sight of their group and nodded, smiling, at Marlene, a deep nod, nearly a bow, but nothing mocking about it. The boy saw her, too, and Marlene was not surprised to see appear on his face an expression far from that which ought to blossom on the face of a lad observing his beloved mom, but something much more like dismay. Marlene ignored him and sat down. The children did the same, immediately grabbing the crayons and starting the paper games thoughtfully provided on the place mats.

"The prodigal son is getting his bag on after a hard day's work," Marlene remarked, and, following Rose's look over at the other tables, added, "The Damico brothers, Gary and Phil, general contractors, and Billy Ireland. I think I'll just leave the four of them alone. They look too crude for the likes of us."

"They would be the Shelley Society in McCullensburg," said Rose.

Marlene picked up a little card stuck to the chrome stand that held packets of sweetener. "Gosh, anchovies and artichokes is the special pizza and they're doing crabcakes, by which I can tell it's Friday." She waved to flag down a waitress. "I'm sorry to say we can't get shit-faced. I have to pick up my husband at eight oh seven."

"I bet he's not crude," said Rose.

"Oh, he has his crude moments. But generally he's the Shelley Society compared to me."

"Your trainer is staring at you. Not necessarily an employee-employer look, if I may say so."

"Yes, well, that's partly why I keep him around," said Marlene. "And he's terrific with the dogs."

Marlene sat on a wooden bench outside the little s outhold railroad station and stroked her dog's velvety ears as she waited for her husband's train to appear. Marlene was a Romantic, like many people who were highly religious in youth and are no longer so, and all Romantics love trains, even cheesy commuter trains. Although she knew her husband as well as she knew herself (better, if truth be told), she still wished for him to be ever a dark stranger. So, waiting in the gathering dusk, and nearly alone on the platform, she amused herself by striking different poses before her reflection in the glass of a trade-school advertisement while entertaining fantastic thoughts.

Such as getting on this train and staying on it to the end of the line and then back to the City, and staying on trains and getting off in strange cities, and staying in hotels, always second-class hotels near the station, and then boarding another train for another city, and living an anonymous life, and dying, finally, on the Orient Express. Marlene loved her family, of course, and the main attraction of this fantasy was that it would remove them all from the sphere of danger and catastrophe that she felt she dragged around with her. She had been lucky so far, but she understood that good luck builds up like an electrical charge and that at a certain point it sparks over into the bad kind. Although she now tried hard to be good, she believed that the pattern of her life almost demanded this result: that when confronted with certain kinds of situations-arrant injustice, for example, or certain forms of cruelty-she would make decisions and take actions leading to violence. She had personally killed three people and caused the death of several others, and while she hoped that this aspect of her life was over, she had no real confidence in a permanent escape.

She shook herself like her dog to put these thoughts aside and turned her attention to her business, humdrum thinking about accounts and vet fees and three-inch galvanized pipe and diesel pumps. She wished, really, that she were a struggling businesswoman supporting her children by honest labor and frugal housekeeping, but this was not the case. The kennel and training operation was a tax dodge. Marlene had made a great deal of money in the way that such money was often made in the midnineties, by being in the right place at the right time. She had been a partner in a security firm that had grown rapidly and gone public, and which had profited vastly from a spectacular rescue of a kidnapped client on the eve of its initial public offering. The stock went up and up, on its merits and on the publicity, and later as a refuge for the smart money when the dotcoms tanked. Marlene had, however, discovered that the spectacular rescue was a scam, although the people killed in it had been real enough, and had demanded a buyout, to which her partners reluctantly acquiesced. She assuaged her Godzilla of a conscience by giving almost all the money to the Church, stashed in a religious foundation. A Jesuit named Michael Dugan ran it for her, as Billy Ireland ran the dog farm. So she could slip away without anyone really noticing she was gone. The twins had each other, Karp had his work, Lucy had her fifty-seven languages. They would all sit down to dinner and wonder why there was no food. No, that was unfair to Lucy; she could cook as well as Marlene herself.

Idiot thoughts. Demonic ravings. She was a little crazy, too, tried to keep it under control, mostly a success, except when she drank. She shook herself again, and this time the dog took this as a cue to shake, too. Unlike his mistress, he sent long streamers of white drool in every direction. She stared at her reflection and made gargoyle faces, crossing her eyes. She could really cross them now that she had been fitted with the latest high-tech socket for the left one, which was fake. Now they tracked together, instead of, as before, the fugazy staring out motionless like the orb of a dead mackerel. Most people no longer thought she looked odd, which said something about the perceptions of most people.