T. Boyle - Riven Rock

They heeded not his dying prayer

They buried him there on the lone prairie

In a little box just six by three

And his bones now rot on the lone prairie

He had a terrific voice, the drunk, very plaintive and evocative, and O‘Kane asked him if he knew “Carrick Fergus” and he did but there was no roll for it so they had to settle for “The Streets of New York,” which they ran through twice, O’Kane harmonizing, and then “Alexander’s Ragtime Band.” That made them thirsty, so they sat at a table and O‘Kane ordered whiskey for them both and never mind the chaser, and he was just settling in and feeling expansive, telling the drunk — whose name was Joe something — about Mr. McCormick and how he’d finally woken up like Sleeping Beauty and how he, O’Kane, came to have this gash in his cheek and the split lip and aggravated temple, when he looked up and saw Giovannella Dimucci sitting across the room in the dining area with a man who had his arm around her shoulder and was leaning in to whisper something in her ear. But Giovannella wasn’t looking at the man she was with. She was staring across the room. At O‘Kane.

Who can say what a man feels at a time like that? What miswired connections suddenly fuse, what deadened paths and arterial causeways come roaring to life all in an instant? O‘Kane pushed himself up from the chair without so much as a word to Joe something, who was in the middle of a disconnected monologue revolving around the loss of his hat, his wallet and his left shoe, and propelled himself across the crowded room in a kind of trance. His hips were tight, as compact as pistons, he could feel the heavy musculature of his legs grip and relax and grip again with each stride as he swung his shoulders out and back in a rhythmic autonomous strut, his heart beating strong and sure, everything in the sharpest focus. He wasn’t looking at Giovannella or the man with her, or not at his face anyway — his eyes were locked on the arm that insinuated so many things, the arm he wanted to break in six places. It would have been no use pointing out to him that it was Giovannella’s absolute and unfettered right to go where and with whom she pleased and that it was nobody’s business but her own as to when and how that unwitting arm had come to drape itself so casually across her shoulder, no use at all. The die was cast. Words were useless.

O‘Kane walked right up to the table and tore the arm off Giovannella’s shoulder as he might have stripped a dead limb from a tree and found to his consternation that the arm was attached elsewhere. There was a question of sinew, bone, cartilage, and the initially startled and then outraged flaxen-haired and beefy farmboy in a pair of pale blue washed-out overalls who formed the trunk of this particular tree. “You can’t do that,” O’Kane said, meaning a whole range of things, and when the arm spontaneously tried to reassert itself he slapped it away and showed the farmboy the bloody divot under his eye and the aggravated temple and the lip that had gone yellow with pus, and the farmboy desisted. And still without looking at her, without so much as giving her a glance, O‘Kane reached out unerringly and hoisted Giovannella to her feet. “We’re getting out of here,” he said, and he was fixing his lunatic glare on the farmboy’s evil-eyed companion in the event he wanted his arm wrenched out of the socket too. And then, as if Giovannella might have harbored any doubt as to his meaning or intentions, he lowered his voice to a primal growl and gave the statement a sense of urgency: “Right now.”

She wasn’t happy. She fought him every step of the way, through the maze of tables, into the foyer and out the door into the deserted street. No one challenged him — they barely looked up from their beers — and just let the farmboy and his evil-eyed companion come after him, just let them. He dragged her half a block before she broke away from him, shifted her weight like a professional boxer and hit him with everything she had, and right where it was tenderest, right where Mr. McCormick’s fork had opened up his flesh, so that it felt now, for the briefest sharpest instant, as if his whole face were slipping off the bone like a rubber mask. “You bastard!” she screamed.

“Me?” He was outraged, stung to bitterness and enmity at the sheer unreasonableness of her response. Was she crazy? Was that it? “You were the one sitting in a dive like that with some jerk’s arm around you like some common—”

She hit him again and was rearing back to unleash a complementary blow with the sharp little bundle of knuckles that was her left fist, when he caught her arm at the wrist. Quick as a bolt, she came back at him with the other hand, but he caught that one too. And he wasn’t thinking, not at all, but somewhere inside him he registered the sensation of holding fast to those two frail and quick-blooded wrists that were like birds, sparrows snatched out of the air and imprisoned in the grip of his unconquerable hands, and it was electric. It surged through him, and there was no power on earth that could stop him now. “Like some common whore,” he said.

She spat at him. Kicked out with jackknifing knees. Cursed him in Italian first and then in English. It didn’t matter. Not at all. Because he was supreme and he had hold of her wrists and he wasn’t letting go, not right then, maybe not ever.

He led her down the street in an awkward dance, both of them shuffling sideways, till he found a place thick with trees at the far northern verge of the Potter Hotel grounds, and there was never any question of the outcome. For all the power of her charm and her black persuasive eyes and her body that was flawless and young and without stint of constraint, he was more charming and more persuasive — and more powerful. She had to understand that, and finally, after he’d been rough with her, maybe too rough with her, she did. She clung to him beneath the night-blooming bushes in the dark of the starless night, her skin naked to his, and sobbed for him, sobbed so hard he thought she would break in half, and then, only then, did he let go and feel the warmth infuse him as if his blood had been drained, and whiskey, hot burning Irish from the sainted shores, substituted in its place. They lay there through the slow-rolling hours and they talked in low voices and kissed and let the fog come down like the breath of something so big and overwhelming they could never have conceived of it, and this time, when he pulled her to him, he didn’t have to force her.

Ah, yes. Yes. But all idylls have to end, as well he knew, and all too often they end with clamminess and insect bites and an ache in the head. They end with the break of day, a prick of the fog turned to drizzle, the painful rasping of some misplaced bird. Giovannella looked at him out of the eyes of a bride and he knew he was in way over his head. “I promise,” he told her, “I swear,” and he bundled her in his arms, turned inside out with guilt and regret and fear and self-loathing — and yet, at the same time, he was swelling to the point of bursting with something else altogether, something that felt dangerously like… well, love.

Head throbbing, his suit a mess, his face worse, he went into the hotel, while Giovannella waited shivering in the woods, and telephoned Roscoe. Roscoe was just getting up, just getting ready to have his breakfast in the kitchen of the big house while Sam Wah jabbered at him in Chink-English and Nick and Pat drank black coffee and prepared for the end of their shift and the ride home, after which he planned to pick up O‘Kane in front of the apartment on Micheltorena. O’Kane talked him out of that. O‘Kane called in his markers, reminding Roscoe of all he’d done for him over the course of the past months and of the brotherhood of their barroom binges in the days before Rosaleen arrived, and Roscoe agreed to forego breakfast and slip down to the Potter Hotel to take Giovannella out Olive Mill Road to the place where the gap showed in the oleanders — and take O’Kane to work.