T. Boyle - Talk Talk

He glanced up and there was the river, indented along the near shore by the roofs and projecting angles of the buildings spread out below him, the train station coming into view now, a line of cars creeping up the hill as if hauled on an invisible cable. The sidewalk here had been lifted by the roots of the trees, slabs of concrete shuffled like cards all the way down the long hill, and he felt the strain in the back of his calves and the long muscles of his thighs as he worked his way over the rough spots. Then he was down in the flat, at river level, crossing against the light and moving along the walk in the lee of a restaurant he'd never seen before-upscale Italian, it looked like, and even in the fever of the moment he felt the sting of the irony-and then finally, with a glance in both directions, he pulled back the door of the old man's bar in the old hotel that had been converted to efficiency apartments and Rooms by the Week Only, and let the cool sweet mid-afternoon funk of the place suck him in like a vacuum.

The last thing he wanted was to get hammered or even the slightest bit discomposed, but the first two beers went down like air, and then he had a glass of water and ordered another beer-all in the first five minutes. “It's a bitch out there, huh?” the bartender observed, working his hands in a bar rag, and a couple of the patrons looked up long enough to hear Peck confirm it. The Mets were on the TV. The jukebox was going. It could have been the most ordinary day of his life. He took a sip of the third beer, his thirst waning now-he'd never been so thirsty-and then he drifted back to the men's to clean himself up and get some purchase on things.

The light and fan went on when he opened the door, the smell of the place barely masked by the urinal cake and the gumball deodorizer. His knee was scraped where he'd gone down in the street, but he didn't bother with it, just dabbed at the dried blood on his pantleg and then threw some water on his face. When he looked up, he didn't like what he saw in the mirror. What he saw was not Peck Wilson but some soft scared pukeface whose mind couldn't stop running up against the bared teeth of the moment. What if they searched the car? What if they got his phone? They'd have Sandman's number then and Sandman wouldn't like that. And the house, what if Natalia gave up the address and they searched the house? The key documents were in a safe-deposit box, his bankbooks, passports and the like, but there was plenty there for them to find-the list of names and account numbers in his notebook, for one thing, though there was nothing incriminating in that because nothing had happened yet. They'd find papers though, utility bills, credit card receipts-M. M. Mako, Bridger Martin, Dana Halter. The lease. The car. And they'd trace that back to Bob Almond and the condo and the real estate lady. The fan clacked and stalled and clacked again. The deodorizer hissed. For a long moment he stared at a yellow streak on the wall where somebody had smashed a roach.

But maybe he was getting down over nothing. Maybe Natalia had done the smart thing and got out of there. They had his mother, of course, and his real name and his record now, but she didn't know where he lived, and the thought of that-of where he lived-just opened up a hole in him till he couldn't look at himself in the mirror. There was no chance of keeping the place now-or was there? If he stayed strictly away from Peterskill, just as he'd intended to do in the first place, and made some real money so he could keep it for a weekend retreat or something… But then there was Bridger Martin. There was Dana Halter. And how in Christ's name had “they” found him?

He was so wound up he jumped when the door pushed open and some old man with shoulders the width of a straight rule brushed past him to use the urinal, but then the sound of the jukebox-just a snatch of a tune, Marley, “No Woman, No Cry”-came to him and he caught his own gaze again in the mirror and he was Peck Wilson and he was all right. Very slowly, very carefully, all the while holding his own eyes, he washed his hands in a tight clench of powdered soap and lukewarm water, then took his time with the paper towels as the old man spat in the urinal and waited for his bladder to give it up. When he was finished, he went to the pay phone bolted to the wall in the narrow hallway just outside the men's room, and dialed Natalia's number.

While he listened to it ring, he gazed down the tunnel of the hallway to the deeper tunnel of the bar and his half-empty beer glass sitting there on the counter above the vacant barstool as if he were already gone, already wearing a different face in a different life in a different town. Three rings, four. And then there was a click and he got her voice mail: “This is Natalia, I am not here now, please. Leave a message. Once the beep.” He cursed, hung up, dialed again. “Pick up,” he kept saying under his breath, “pick up,” but she didn't pick up. He must have tried five or six times in succession, pinning the heavy molded plastic receiver to his ear and getting progressively more frustrated and angry and scared each time he dialed, and then the old man blundered out of the bathroom and clipped him on the elbow with the edge of the door and he lost a quarter to the machine and felt as winnowed down and barren and empty as he'd ever felt in his life.

He went back to the bar, drained his beer and ordered another, and that was brilliant-get shit-faced. Sure, why not order a shot to go with it? Fuck up. Get loud. Stumble out into the street and take a cab straight to Greenhaven. “On second thought, cancel that,” he said, raising his voice so the bartender, who was already at the tap, could hear him. The man-forties, bald, chinless-looked over his shoulder and gave him a pained look. “I'm too bloated,” he said in apology, and the guy next to him, some fish-faced clown who might have looked familiar, glanced up, “you know what I mean?” He heard himself then, heard his voice taking on the local color, his accent coming back the way it did when he talked to Sandman on the phone from the coast. “Just gimme a Diet Coke, huh? Diet Coke, yeah. Lots of ice.”

Every five minutes for the next hour he went to the phone, trying her number over and over without success, and he was stalled, checkmated, because there was nothing he could do until he got hold of her and gauged the extent of the damage. He tried to think positively, tried to picture her backing out of the driveway and making her way through the grid of streets till she found Route 9 and went home and buried the car in the garage and waited for him to call. But if she was waiting for him to call, then why wasn't she answering? And would she have taken the initiative to get out of there in the first place-or would she have just stood there, horrified, worrying about his mother and rehearsing his sins and watching Bridger Martin twist and kick on the grass while the sirens started in and people began to stick their heads out the door? Would she have waited for him, thinking that was the thing to do? Maybe. And in that case they were fucked, both of them. But he could also see her exploding in a fury of depilatory Russian curses, jerking round to stamp the flowers into the walk with her heel and then tearing off down the street in the car and everybody-him, especially-be damned. How he hoped that was the case, how he hoped…

The clown next to him-he could have been the bartender's twin-kept saying, “You know, you look familiar,” and Peck kept denying it. Now the man leaned in till they were shoulder to shoulder and said, “I could swear-didn't you go to Peterskill High?”

Peck shook his head.

“You have a brother, maybe?”

“No, no brother. I'm from California. Just trying to get hold of my wife-we're going into New York, catch the sights. Times Square, that sort of thing, you know?”