Patrick Quinlan: The Hit

He jumped up and continued the game. Foerster was running for the next low wall, bent over and limping now like a monkey. That tackle had hurt him – his small body took the brunt of it. Jonah pursued. Foerster reached the wall, jumped up, and then stuck his arms out like a tightrope walker crossing the gorge. Sure enough, the next roof was a big jump, fifteen feet, and Foerster walked the length of a piece of thick flat lumber about two feet wide. He reached the other side and leaped down. Jonah stopped. There was more lumber piled here, three or four big pieces.

Another gap. Another long fall.

Across the way, Foerster grabbed the beam and yanked it out from Jonah’s wall. He let it fall into the abyss, and it clanked and clattered all the way down to the alley below.

‘Heads up!’ Jonah shouted. He leaned over and watched it go, but there was nobody down there. At the bottom, in the alley, all manner of garbage was piled high. He gazed across the abyss. Foerster was there, just beyond Jonah’s reach. Maybe Foerster had known nobody was in the alley, maybe he hadn’t. What if people had been picking through there today? Foerster could have killed somebody.

‘Let me guess,’ Jonah said. ‘You don’t like jail too much, am I right?’

Foerster leaned on the opposite wall, catching his breath. ‘Ever been?’

‘Can’t say that I’ve had the pleasure.’

‘Never been, but you put people in for money,’ Foerster said. ‘That makes as much sense as anything.’ He turned his back and began to walk away. Then he stopped. ‘You’re a fucking hypocrite, you know that? You and everybody like you.’

He kept walking.

It wasn’t over, though. Not like that.

Jonah picked up the longest piece of lumber in the pile. The damn thing was heavy. He pictured ninety-pound Foerster here days before, muscling one of these things around to build that bridge, then coming back every couple of days to make sure it was still there. Jesus. The motherfucker was a boy scout. Jonah slid the lumber out over the alley, pushing down hard on his side to keep the other end up. He slid it. He slid it some more. It was too short. It fell away, banging and crashing on its trip down.

‘Fuck!’

He heard laughter. He looked up and there was Foerster, leaning against the elevator shaft and smiling at him.

Foerster pantomimed a guy checking the time. ‘I could watch this all day,’ he said. ‘But I got places to be, all right?’

The hot sun made her feel sexy.

Thirty-three year-old, bikini-clad Katie Gant reclined in a lounge chair on a massive stone terrace, floppy sun hat shielding her eyes. The terrace looked over the backyard of her giant Tudor style home in the suburbs of Charleston, South Carolina. It was a bright afternoon, and from her lounge chair she could drink in the sloping and closely manicured back lawn, the sparkling blue water of the in-ground swimming pool, even the riot of plantings tucked against the back of the house that made up her own kitchen garden, which had seen quite a bountiful harvest this year, thank you. Although her eyes were open, she saw none of these things.

She had a lot on her mind.

For a little while, as the perspiration beaded and slowly rolled down her skin, she imagined a shirtless young man in jeans shorts and flip-flops down there cleaning the pool. Her husband was away on business, again, and frustrated housewife Katie was trying to get that sculpted Adonis of a pool boy to climb the steps to her. She couldn’t hold the image, though, and gradually it faded and was replaced.

She remembered a morning fishing trip with her dad when she was a little girl down in Beaufort, when at first light they flushed a heron out of the reeds by the shore. The great gangling bird flapped its huge wings and took off across the bay. It was so graceful, that bird, once it got going, gliding just a couple of feet above the water. A few minutes later, the sun came up over the saltwater flats, Dad was tying her bait, and all the world boiled down to just the two of them in a nine-foot aluminum jonboat. At that moment, she never wanted to leave. She wished that time would stop forever.

Yet she had run away from Beaufort soon after graduation. By eighteen, the town was too small to hold her. She was confident, she was blonde, she was beautiful – everybody told her so – and she loved to talk and meet people. The world seemed to hold such promise. There was so much to do and see, and she couldn’t wait to get started. Some kids were going to college, but she knew college would always be there when she was good and ready for it. First she wanted to taste adventure.

She moved to Washington, DC, with some vague sense that powerful people, movers and shakers, lived there. This was closer to the excitement, but somehow she always seemed to just miss out on it. Part of the problem was the jobs she could get. Secretarial jobs – she was always somebody’s secretary. One day, while working as an assistant at the law firm of Benton and Hoffman, she spent seven hours pushing the green START button on a Xerox copy machine. That morning, the machine developed a glitch. It would copy only one page at a time. She needed to make a dozen copies of a government contract that was nearly two hundred pages long. For some reason, unexplained, the job had to be done that day. And for some reason, also unexplained, they couldn’t send it out to Kinko’s or Copy Plus. So Katie did it.

‘Good job today, Katie,’ her boss said, and meant it.

When the day was over, she went home to the apartment she shared with two other girls and cried. At the age of twenty, her employer valued her because she could stand in one place all day long and push the same button more than two thousand times in a row.

Where was the promise? Where was the adventure?

The copy machine debacle helped her realize she wasn’t cut out for the business world. It wasn’t just that she felt humiliated. It wasn’t that she had been treated like a machine, or part of a machine. It ran deeper than that. She saw that if she were in her boss’s position, there was no way she could demand that someone push a button two thousand times. It was a soulless, spirit crushing thing. She wanted no part of it. She was too sensitive, she felt things too deeply.

As it turned out, she was actually an artist. When she was a child, she had loved to draw and to paint, and a life drawing class she took on eight Saturdays reminded her of this. She moved again, this time to Dewey Beach, Delaware, where there was open space, open air and open water.

It was a party town on the Atlantic Ocean, and she partied right along with it. On summer weekends, it seemed like half of the mid-Atlantic region descended on the beaches. She worked as a waitress, first at a bar and grill, then at a seafood place, then at a steak house. Sweating through the menial jobs didn’t bother her anymore. She was having fun.

All night keg parties at rented waterfront townhouses always seemed to end at dawn with eight or ten people nude in the surf. Katie was always one of them. Riding through town in late summer on the back of some guy’s motorcycle, high on pot, the sun sinking in hues of red and orange and gold. Steamy lovemaking sessions on the beach, in the outdoor shower, on the back porch, on sandy sheets, with all sorts of guys. A sun-bleached surfer one summer. An artist, like herself, who came to paint the fall foliage one November, and who stayed through until the following April. A married fireman from Philadelphia who shared a ramshackle house with five other firemen, and who came to town every two weeks. Her first and only black man, a retired football player named Ray.

Ray had spent three years on the Kansas City Chiefs without ever getting into a regular season game. The way he saw it, he made all that money and didn’t get hurt, and that made sense to Katie. She broke it off with him when he tried to get her into a menage a trois with a hard-bodied black woman he brought over from Baltimore.