David Means: Assorted Fire Events: Stories

Around the curve there was enough light — defused across the hazy sky — to make out the shards of broken bottles (if he’d been looking down instead of forward). The piece he stepped on, from an old malt liquor bottle, was as jagged as the French Alps, the round base of the bottle forming a perfect support for the protrusion, the only piece of glass for yards, seated neatly against the rail plate; it went into his heel cleanly, cutting firmly into the hard pad, opening a wound that sent him falling sideways. It was one of those cuts that open up slowly into the possibilities of their pain, widening from a small point into a cone; this was the kind of cut that gave the fearful sense of being unlimited in the pain it would eventually produce; he sat there and thought about it for a moment, not making a game plan but trying to conjure up some image from a Red Cross handbook he’d once memorized. (It was a requirement for his sailing classes.) He’d learned to make a flotation device out of a wet pair of blue jeans; he’d learned how to stanch the flow of blood from an amputated limb by using a leather belt as a tourniquet; he knew to pull the tongue away and to clear the throat of obstructions before beginning mouth-to-mouth; but here, alone in the absolute solitude of his pain, he wasn’t sure what to do except to keep trying to recall a line drawing of some kind, one of those sketchy but useful diagrams of some acute human misery such as a compound fracture, the bone just a set of lines protruding out of some imaginary thigh, two swerves like a Picasso sketch; he sat there and let it bleed for a moment, hoping the tetanus might drain out. It seemed his life had become a series of such episodes, long searching silences as he tried to recall some image lost to him, a faint diagram of a circumstance and the proper manner in which to solve, to patch, to bandage the wounds until further, more professional, help could be obtained.

In the weeded suburban outback, hunched on the endless steel rail (forged in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, and laid down during the late nineteenth century, and used to move limestone from the quarries along the Hudson, to build the great foundations for the great skyscrapers), he removed his shirt and fingered for the weak spot along the seam where it might give. To get it to tear he had to use his teeth.

He wished for a single clear-cut reason for walking alone half naked, the pain from his right heel burning up his leg, the makeshift bandage flapping. An explanation: perhaps the recent catastrophic loss of his wife, Margaret, her car simmering steam and smoke upside down in the wrong lane of the Saw Mill River Parkway, twisted wreckage betrayed by the battered guardrail, the outmoded roadway paved along a trail marked out originally by Indians, the taste of her red hair in his mouth when they last hugged. A soured stock-option deal — his fault. The blame placed on a computer glitch. McKinnen’s firm face behind wire rims, fingers prodding his glass desktop, offering a good package. His wife’s departure one morning; her words of explanation shaky in black ballpoint; the name of his betrayer an old friend, Samson, whose handshake still lingered in the palm of his golf glove upstairs. Better stories could be told if Margaret had died slowly, a long decline as her white cells submitted, the shiver of her lips as they formed her last words. It wasn’t reason enough for his actions. He was certain of that. Their large house stood along the river, excitingly large when they moved in, now just too much house; perhaps all afternoon he’d walked the veranda and looked out at the flat water until, around three, a crew of yard workers arrived, shattering the poetic silence with their blowers and shrieking weed whackers, driving him up to the third-floor office where, face buried in his palms, he asked for his own salvation — salvation not from grief but from something he couldn’t pin down, perhaps just things he hadn’t done. Perhaps steps he hadn’t taken. Maybe he fully accepted that she was nothing but void now; she was skirts hanging in the closet, the smell of her perfume on the unwashed linen piling in the laundry room, recipes torn from magazines piled on her desk in the den.

Again a faint breeze came. He moved forward along the tracks, leaving a pad print of blood behind him on each tie. Ahead of him the tracks curved farther into the darkness; to his left and overhead, the steel girders and chutes of the stoneworks.

To the guys who spotted him a quarter mile later he came out of the hazy air like a wounded animal, nothing but a shadow down the tracks moving with a strange hobble that didn’t seem human. There were four of them, their own shirts off, nursing a small fire of twigs barely producing flames but lots of whitish smoke slinging in the heavy air. Even in the firelight you could see that they were all four skinny in that deprived way, knotty with muscles and the blue-gray shadows of various tattoos. The one who spotted him had just taken a long draw from a quart bottle of beer and was gasping for breath.

Jesus shit, he spoke softly, wiping back a long black clump of hair from his face.

The fuck’s this? another said, parting his legs a bit as if to hold steady against an oncoming force. His jackboots crunched on the ballast. He pressed his hands flat against each side of his waist. One of the others stationed himself to the side, running his own palms over the smooth-shorn surface of his scalp in a repeated motion half fidget and half habit; each of them tingled and jittered. They could tell right away that whoever was coming, shrouded as he was in the dark, was enfeebled and in some kind of trouble, indeed, for his shirt was off and he was swaybacking from side to side, maybe drunk or tired or both and ready to be taken, to be seduced by whatever they felt like dishing up; he was all their night had offered, like a prayer answered, something to break up the tedium of dope smoking and empty chattering and cursing and everything else, and they all knew it, seeing him, and were ready.

The spot where they hung out, just before the tracks carved a dark hole in the overflowing cliffside, was strewn with old railroad debris, rails and tie plates and gobs of black tar and broken bottles; it was an outback hovel secluded and safe from everything, as purely wasted and unneeded as they felt themselves to be and, because of that, were; a bunch of rubbish and torn-away flesh, the self-made tattoos brandished on their own young flesh. They were young, tight, and eager. What they saw emerge was a man softening into middle age. In his limp was a slight residue of dignity and formality, the way he lifted his feet as if they were still shod and weighted by the expensive shoes; or maybe all of that wasn’t noticed until, coming up to them, he opened his mouth and spoke, saying hello softly, the vowels widening, the cup of his mouth over those words like an expensive shell … or maybe they didn’t notice at all as they moved around him positing themselves in silence, wordlessly, the guy with the smooth head coming up behind him while the guy with jackboots took one step forward and the others moved in unison to his sides as if he might make some kind of break for it. (That was the illusion of tension their stances produced, wanted to produce, were eager to produce.)

It was later, in the dreamlike reproductions of those moments, that he realized that the silence in which they worked bespoke everything about their young bodies: muscles limber from stunts, flesh marred and bruised and burned with hard little bull’s-eyes from the butts of Dad-held cigarettes; the fuck you’s of bodies being twisted into lockholds and half nelsons, pinned with knees in backs and sternums; bucked tendons and double-jointed bone breaks that sucked the air from their fourteen-year-old mouths in the recessed trailer park stuck down in the shithole wastelands near the town’s toxic dump. These were the singing, mocking kids that he had feared before on walks in the city. Now he was happy to stumble upon souls rising up out of the darkness next to their pathetic fire. There was behind all this, as they worked in a silence that also bespoke the kick that was to come first from the man in the foreground, only the dull sound of the insects, a sound so prolonged it was blanked from his mind and filled in with a new, higher form of silence. The kick landed in his stomach. He fell. Slowly and with grace the two boys to the side came to him and gently helped him up, feeling his lack of resistance immediately, making note of it by bending back his arms behind him far enough to produce a rainbow of pain over his shoulder blades. Their job was to fill the beating with as much dignity as possible, to uphold the ballet of the scene, to make it worth their fucking while — to produce a stasis upon which their friend, with his long swatches of clotty black hair swaying now before his bowed head, might work; and he bowed slightly, directly in front of this shirtless man, letting the little grace period well up between them — then bowing closer and closer until his forehead was right up against the stranger’s forehead, touching it there damp with sweat while he mouthed to him in the hushed whispers of a confessor, a priest muttering penances, We’re going to kick your fucking ass, you know, so you might as well get used to the idea … trailing his words off and offering up a kick to the groin hard enough to double the man over, the two releasing him on cue, so that he fell to the ground, his bloodied foot swiping against the rail; the smooth-headed one removed the wallet from the back pocket and opened it, stooping into the firelight, fingering the thick bills he pulled out, flipping the rest of the black leather into the weeds, where it landed, lying open, spilling into the darkness identification cards, photographs, credit cards, and bank cards that, when slid into the automatic teller machines and offered H H M H — his initials and those of his wife — would eject neat piles of bills, as much as anyone could want or need.