T. Boyle - Riven Rock

Mr. McCormick took a spastic slice at the air, wielding the fork like a dagger. His bare toes gripped the floor. He shifted his weight from foot to foot. “You,” he sputtered. “They, they — Katherine. I want to fu-fuck her, I do, and you bring her here right now. D-do you hear me? Do you?”

How much of the conversation had he overheard? O‘Kane was thinking about that as he signaled Pat with his eyes and began to inch forward, careful to keep his weight on the balls of his feet. You think she doesn’t itch betweenherlegs like any other woman?

And then, just before he hurled the fork at O‘Kane’s face, smashed the plate and glass and tore the sideboard out from the wall preparatory to upending it on Pat’s shins, Mr. McCormick dropped his voice and lulled them for just the fleetingest instant. “I want to fu-fuck her,” he breathed, bowing his head, and he might have been a boy telling his mother what he wanted for his birthday — then, only then, did he explode.

The fork took a divot out of O‘Kane’s cheek, just below his right eye, and he could hear it rattling across the floor behind him as Pat sprang forward and Mr. McC-ormick, shaky on his feet but with the astonishing dexterity of the deranged and otherworldly, upended the sideboard and danced clear. There was a keening in the air now, a razor-edged hysterical singsong chant, “No, no, stay away, stay away,” Mr. McCormick backing into the corner in a wrestler’s crouch, O’Kane and Nick going in low to pull his legs out from under him.

It was a brief but savage struggle that twice saw Mr. McCormick break free and rush the barred door as if he could dart right on through it, but there was no key in the lock this time and they finally ran him to the ground in his bathroom, where he tried to hold the door against the combined weight of the three of them. The shame of it all was Nick. Nick lost his temper. Cursing, his eyes dark streaks in the livid pulp of his face, he was the first through the bathroom door, and he ignored all the rules — open hands only, no blows, use your legs and shoulders and try only to restrain the patient, not subdue him — standing back from Mr. McCormick and letting his fists fall like mallets, the thump of flesh on flesh, not the face, never the face, hitting their employer and benefactor repeatedly in the chest and abdomen until he went down on the tile floor. But that wasn’t enough for Nick — he was possessed, mindless, as crazed as Katzakis or the Apron Man or Gunderson, the big Swede with the rolled dough for arms who killed and decapitated his wife and daughter and held six men at bay for over three hours till finally they had to chloroform him. Nick wouldn’t stop. He kept pounding Mr. McCormick over and over again, though Mr. McCormick was bundled up on the floor with his hands over his head, crying “No, no, no!”

“Nick!” O‘Kane roared, snatching at the heavy arms as they rose and fell, and he felt it coming up in him himself, the uncontainable hormonal rush that makes every one of us a potential maniac. Before he knew what was happening he’d jerked Nick to his feet, spun him around and driven his fist into the soft dollop of flesh in the center of that shining sphere of an overcooked face.

“Eddie!” Pat was shouting, “Nick!” bodies everywhere, the footing treacherous, Mr. McCormick hunched up in the fetal position on the cold hard tiles but with one eye open, one glistening mad eye on the madness churning above him, Nick coming back at him now, at O‘Kane, squaring off, shouting, “You son of a bitch I’ll kill you!” and the fury of their voice magnified in that confined space till the bathroom echoed like some private chamber of hell.

All that was bad enough — the abuse of Mr. McCormick when he was defenseless and just coming out of his haze; the fight with Nick that dredged up all the mistrust and rancor that must have lain brooding between them like a copperhead with somebody’s foot on its tail, though he never suspected and never would have admitted it if he had; the grim prospect of the championship bout awaiting him when he finally did get home to Rosaleen — but for O‘Kane, on that unlucky night, it was just the beginning.

No sooner had Pat separated him and Nick than he turned and stalked out of the apartment, his knuckles raw, Nick raving at his back, Mr. McCormick all but comatose on the floor. “Go on, get out of here, you stinking son of a bitch!” Nick bellowed. “I don’t know what the fuck you’re doing here anyhow — you’re on the day shift, jackass!” He went right on down the stairs and out the front door without a word to anybody, and then he was walking up the drive, engulfed by the night. The lights faded at his back and the darkness closed in on him, a smell of tidal flats on the air, the cold underbelly of the fog catching and tearing and spilling its guts in the treetops. He didn’t think about it twice: he just started walking.

Five miles. His feet were blistered — he wasn’t used to this anymore — he was bleeding from the cut under his eye where the fork had gouged him, and his upper lip was split and swollen. He raged against Nick the whole way, Nick who was thirty-four years old and resented O‘Kane because O’Kane was younger, smarter, better looking, because O‘Kane was head nurse and he wasn’t. Well, fuck him. O’Kane had blackened one of his eyes for him and done some damage that wasn’t so obvious maybe, but he would feel it tomorrow, that was for sure. He walked on, the anger tapering off inside him as the fog came down and the chill of the night took hold of him — and he was getting soft, as addicted to the sun as a lizard on a rock, and what would Boston be like now? Two cars went by, but they were going in the wrong direction. And then, to cap things off, he got to the foot of State Street five minutes after the last streetcar had left.

What he needed was a drink. Or two. But for some unfathomable reason — birth, death, the end of the universe and all things available to man — Cody Menhoff’s was closed at 9:45 P.M. on a Thursday night in the middle of May with grown men expiring for the want of a drink, and he stood there dumbfounded at the locked door, licking the crusted-over scab on his lip, till he heard a shout from across the street. “Hey, partner,” someone called to him, “you looking for a drink?”

He wound up in a saloon in Spanishtown, the seething hovel of mud-brick houses and ramshackle chicken coops where all the Mexicans and Chinks who worked the hotels lived and where you could always find a drink and a whore — not that he was looking for the latter, not especially. What he found himself doing was drinking dirty brown liquid out of a dirty brown cup with a character in a peaked cap and military mustaches who could have been Porfirio Díaz himself for all O‘Kane knew. But he didn’t care. He had no prejudices — spics, wops, Chinks, Krauts, Micks, it was all the same to him. Set up another round and let’s chase it with a couple of those Mexican beers that smell like wet pussy and taste like they were strained through the crotch of somebody’s union suit. Yeah, that’s right, that’s the one. Slainte! How you say it? Salud. Okay, salud!

He was there an hour maybe, long enough to forget his split lip and the pain radiating from a place just above his left temple where Nick had twice caught him with a right hand that felt as if it had been launched from a cannon, and then he thought he might want to see some American faces for a while and wandered up the street to a place he’d been to once or twice before. It was festive inside. Full of life. He saw a raft of women’s hats, pinned-up hair, men in shirtsleeves. The player piano was going and some drunk, a guy he thought he might have recognized from Menhoff‘s, was singing along and running his hands over the keys in pantomime: