Adrian McKinty - Dead I Well May Be

Ramón didn’t say anything. He hadn’t touched his glass. He sighed.

You look down, Michael. You’re a serious person, but perhaps you should relax more. I could send some girls over, if you want, he said, unhappily.

Girls. Christ, Ramón. Fuck. No… Actually, I could do with a girl. Any girl. Jesus. No. Jesus, this whiskey, getting to me. Cigar. Not used to it. It’s the time of year, Ramón. It’s not me or what’s happening. It’s the time of the year, do you understand?

Ramón looked a little concerned and shook his head. I was a bit drunk now, rambling.

See, it’s November, that’s all it is. November’s the worst month. January has all the optimism of the new year. February has Valentine’s. March is the start of spring. April to May are the pleasant months, you know. June to September is the summer. October has the leaves and Halloween. December has Christmas. But November has nothing. We don’t do Thanksgiving. See? We’ve Remembrance Day. Fucking riot, that is. I used to have to blow taps at it, depressing. Always freezing, bugle would go flat, nightmares. Horrible month. Horrible.

He nodded, but it was clear he didn’t know what I was talking about.

Maybe I could get you a glass of water, he said.

Fuck your water. Fuck your water and your fucking whiskey and your fucking cigars, Ramón, I screamed, and let the glass drop onto the floor. It didn’t break. I clutched my head and snarled at him.

What the fuck did you come over for? Fucking telling your boys I’m killing all these wankers for you. I’m killing nobody for you. Fucking liar, hypocrite. All your talk. Fucking hypocrite. You’re worse than Darkey; at least he doesn’t kid himself. Fancy plans, my arse.

Michael, wait-

Don’t ever talk about me, Ramón. Is that clear? How fucking dare you? Get the fuck out of here.

Ramón smiled. He wasn’t sure if I was pulling his leg or not. If I was being sarcastic or ironic against myself. He seemed uncomfortable.

I stood and yelled at him and told him to get the fuck out and leave me the fuck alone. My head was pounding. I wasn’t drunk. It was, as they say at AA, a moment of clarity. I picked up the whiskey bottle from the counter and threw it at the living-room window. The glass was thick and doubled-glazed and the bottle bounced harmlessly off and landed safely on the shag pile rug. My rage boiled over.

That is fucking it, I screamed, and went for him. I tripped, but I got a grip on his arm and bundled him to the ground. All of it came pouring out. Shovel, Dermot, Mexico, Big Bob. All of it. In howls, deflected blows. All of it, like a volcano.

Jesus Christ. Yells, punches, white light thumping between my temples.

So this was it, my breakdown at last. I screamed and spat. I tried to deck him, but he was strong and threw me off. I roared incoherently for a half a minute, grabbing at him, desperate to get purchase on his clothes and throw him through the glass coffee table. Ramón elbowed me in the throat, stood up, and put his hand on the inside of his jacket. He didn’t take out the piece, the threat was enough.

Aye, go ahead, do it, do it, I yelled at him, laughing.

Calm down, he said, backing off but keeping his hand there.

I looked at him and thought for a second about trying it on, going for him, but I didn’t.

I was exhausted.

We held the pose for half a minute.

Get out of my house. I don’t know what you fucking want from me. You’re a vampire. That’s what you are. And don’t send Cuba over either, I said.

Michael, really, I don’t know how you got so upset, if I said any-

Are you deaf? Get the fuck out, I said wearily.

Ramón opened the door and went out and closed it gently behind him.

Bastards, I said, and for a while I kneeled there, expecting tears, but even when I forced it, none came.

I stayed in bed the next day and most of the next. No one came to see me. Cuba didn’t bring his chicken. I didn’t read. I didn’t do anything. I drank brown water from the tap.

Finally I got up and went to a restaurant on Broadway and 189th Street. The menu was entirely in Spanish, and I ordered something that seemed like a stew and when it came it was tripe soup with bits of what looked like embryo in it. I couldn’t start on it and left the cash and got up, but the waiter was affronted and wanted to give me something I would like, and since I was the only customer the cook came out, urged me to try the soup. I tried to explain the biblical prohibitions, but he was unfamiliar with them and any form of English I could recognize, so things went badly. The guys were only being nice and wanted to feed me, but I was a wanker and pissed them off and the word puta got raised and I left and on the way home picked up some Dominican cakes instead.

That night I got a six-pack of Corona and plugged the TV in and flipped through the channels. There wasn’t anything good, really, if you discounted cable access. I saw somewhere that there was trouble in Ireland, but that hardly counted as news.

I went to bed and got up the next morning and decided to go for a walk. I pulled on a pair of jeans and a T-shirt and a sweater and a black raincoat. I walked to the George Washington Bridge and found myself crossing over to the other side. About the middle I stopped and took a look down the Hudson towards the bottom of Manhattan. There was no one else crossing, although traffic was heavy coming over from New Jersey. I wondered what the time was and could only guess at about seven or eight. Had the clocks been put back yet? Did they do that here? They put them forward in the spring, so I suppose they went back in the autumn.

The area on the far side of the GWB was dreary and uninteresting. I explored it for a little while, and at a bakery I got some choux pastry stuffed with custard. It was quite good. They did coffee there too, so I had a cup, but it was so weak and nasty that it wiped out the taste of the good custard thing.

I wandered back in the direction of the bridge and found myself trying to figure out how you got down to the wooded area that I’d looked at so many times from my apartment window. I took a few turns and found a tiny sign pointing to Palisades Park, which seemed to be the spot I was looking for. From my side of the river it seemed an interesting and perhaps beautiful place, with cliffs and trees tumbling down to the water. Of course, now the trees had given up much of their cover, but perhaps it would still be nice. I took a road that was wending its way downward, and before I really knew it, I was in the middle of the forest and deep somewhere under the bridge. It was like that story of the troll and the Billy Goats Gruff.

The men had been tailing me since at least the bakery and probably all the way over from Manhattan. They had been in a blue car but now they’d parked it up the road and were on foot. They were keeping well behind, but I could tell there were two of them, both pretty heavy guys. I imagine they’d picked me up outside the apartment building and followed me onto the bridge, but because of the traffic, they couldn’t have gone at walking pace, so they must have made the decision to drive over and wait for me; hoping, I suppose, that I wasn’t going to stop halfway and turn back. If I had at rush hour, I would have lost them, but they’d gotten lucky and they were now behind me on the road, a good bit back, so it wasn’t life and death just yet.

It puzzled me. If they knew where I lived, why hadn’t they just come in the morning and got me? The building had some security, but nothing a professional couldn’t get around. My door, too. It would have been easy pickings. They couldn’t be following me to see where I was going, because once I’d gone down into the Palisades, the only way back out was the way I’d come. The thing to do would have been to have one man wait back at the car and the other slip down the road after me, to see if I was meeting anyone, or picking up a drop, or whatever. But they weren’t doing that. They had parked the car, and both of them were coming down the hill after me. It was an odd thing to do, for if I started walking back up and past them, it would then be pretty fucking obvious if they turned and began following me again. Whereas if there’s only one of you tailing the suspect, you just keep walking along if you see him double-back, and then the other guy follows him from the car. But both were coming, and I was pretty sure that the car had had only two occupants. They couldn’t have got to a phone, so, unfortunately, the only reason both of them could possibly be coming down this hill at this time was to intercept me and then probably kill me. Nothing else would quite make sense.