Taming a Sea Horse (8 page)

"Vern," I said, "you're just not in shape." I shook my head. "Shame to see a man let himself go like this."

He came at me again, but more slowly. Not cautiously, but in a slower-motion version of the way he had come at me before. There was no change in expression. I made a little feint with my left hand and hooked it over his shoulder and got him on the jaw. I moved away from his punch and hit him a combination, left, left, overhand right. And moved away. Vern turned slowly toward me. His arms were starting to drop. It was what I used to look for when I was fighting. Your opponent got arm-weary and he let them drop and you went for his head. I hit Vern another combination. My head was clear now and the oxygen was flowing in and out easily and the legs were good and the muscles were loose and I could see very clearly. I could see the openings where the punches could go and I was moving in the clean, precise automatic sequences I had learned a long time ago when I thought I was going to be heavyweight champ. Vern was pushing his punches at me now. It was almost done. I knew there were people watching and I knew the sun was out but none of that had any reality, only the swaying massive shape in front of me and the punching lanes and the sequenced movements. It was like dancing to music only I could hear. Even Vern barely mattered in the intensity of my concentration and the rhythms of the fight. There was no pain. Later there would be, but not now. Just the patterns and the movements and the solid jolt as the punches landed.

And then he was through.

He didn't go down. But his arms dropped; he stopped coming, even slowly, and stood motionless, his arms down, gasping for air. I stepped back away from him. The intensity was gone. The meanness was gone. In his eyes there was nothing. As if all he was was mean and if he lost it he ceased to exist. Around us most of the people north of Bangor stood in a ragged semicircle in absolute silence. I could hear my breathing deep and steady easing in and out, and I could hear Buckey rasping desperately. Somewhere in the scrub forests along the highway some kind of bird was making a persistent sound like chips being sliced from a hardwood slab.

Behind me a man's voice said, "Put him away, mister."

And another voice, male also: "Put him down, man… Put the sonova bitch down."

I said to Buckey, "You ready to talk about Ginger?"

A woman's voice said, "Knock him down, mister." And a man said, "Don't stop until it's done."

A lot of voices chimed in. Vern wasn't only disliked. He was disliked widely.

A woman said, "Kill the bastard."

Buckey still stood motionless, still swaying slightly, his head down, gasping. Then he slowly bent forward and his knees buckled and he fell like a weed wilting, crumpling to the ground and lying still with his face in the gravel. Again there was silence and then someone began to clap and then the odd rural crowd began to applaud steadily.

Now I was the toughest guy in Lindell, Maine.

Buckey's pulse was strong and I propped him in the shade against the east wall of the bowling alley. The bartender with the tattoos brought me a bucket of water and some ice and a rag and I sponged Buckey off and soaked my hands and waited. I was sitting on my heels with both hands in the ice-water bucket when Buckey opened his eyes.

I didn't move. His eyes slowly focused on me. I put the ice bucket aside and rested my forearms on my thighs and folded my hands. His eyes moved past me. There was no one else. The big fight was over. The audience had gone away. He looked back at me.

"I'm going to kill you," he said. I nodded.

"When you're sleeping or getting laid or walking along not thinking about it, I'm going to be there and blow the back of your fucking head away."

I nodded again. I had my gun back on my belt and sitting still on my heels I reached around with my right hand and took it out and pointed it at the tip of Buckey's nose and said, "Maybe."

Buckey looked at the muzzle of the gun two inches from his face. He didn't say anything.

I said, "Now I want you to tell me about your daughter, Ginger."

"I ain't telling you fucking shit," he said. But it was weak.

"You've been doing that," I said. "And look what it got you. I want to know about the whorehouse you sold your kid to."

"She's dead," he said.

"Yeah, she was a street hooker in New York City and somebody shot her."

"So what's the fucking difference?" Buckey said.

"Fatherhood rests but lightly on you, Vern," I said. And I thumbed the hammer back on my gun. It made the cylinder turn one notch and Vern could see the copper-jacketed slug go under the hammer. "What whorehouse?"

Buckey shrugged. "Place called Magic Massage in Portland. I didn't sell her. It was a finder's fee."

"Place still there?" I said.

"Was last time I was down to Portland, on Congress Street, around the corner from Franklin."

I smiled, and turned the gun away from his face and let the hammer down gently. Then I flipped the cylinder out, turned it so there was an empty chamber under the hammer, closed the gun and put it back on my hip. Vern watched me.

"You had a fucking gun why didn't you use it," he said. "How come you come on to me without it, if you had one?"

"Wanted to see if you really were the toughest guy in Lindell," I said. I stood up. "See you around, Vern."

"That's all?" Buckey said. "You come up here all this way to fight me and find out about a whorehouse in Portland?"

"Un huh."

"You're fucking crazy, man. What do you care about a whorehouse in Portland? What the fuck you care about some dead whore in New York?"

"Vern," I said, "it was a pleasure to punch your lights out. It was such a pleasure that I may come up sometime and do it again."

I turned and left him sitting slumped against the wall and headed for my car and drove away, back south. Toward Portland.

The sky over Portland is like the sky above San Francisco, unusually blue and high, suggestive of the ocean that surrounds the city on most sides. The buildings were low and that emphasized the high of the sky and the silent presence of the ocean.

I parked along the restored waterfront on Commercial Street and walked up through the Old Port Exchange area to Congress Street. The Old Port Exchange was urban renewal at its chichiest. The nineteenth-century granite buildings restored and full of restaurants and dress shops and places with names like The Elegant Elephant. The people walking about in the area could have been from Boston or Chicago. It was startling when they spoke in the Titus Moody accent that had persisted even here among the bleached oak and hanging plants.

I passed a shop called Gazelle, and a bookstore that displayed the complete works of Thomas Merton in the window, and turned east on Congress Street. The Holiday Inn where I'd spent the night had a map of downtown Portland in its lobby and I had spent a minute in front of it after breakfast. Like Boston, Portland was a red-brick city. There were occasional granite and brownstone buildings and the usual ugly newer ones, but mostly it was red brick. Past Franklin Street, at the east end of Portland, the Magic Massage Parlor, Massages by Women, stood across the street from a store that sold scuba gear.

The storefront display windows were discreetly curtained on the first floor, but a small card in the lower left-hand corner of the biggest window said OPEN. I crossed the street and leaned against the front wall of the dive shop and scoped things out.

Magic Massage was in a three-story brick building. In addition to the massage parlor entrance there was another door. A sign in gilt lettering on the door said LONGFELLOW HOUSE, ROOMS. The two floors above the massage parlor had small balconies. The trim was neatly painted white. The neighborhood was good, the place was neat. Looked like a better deal than Lindell. A brown Chevy van went by with a couple of Cumberland County sheriffs deputies in it. They paid no attention to me or Magic Massage. I shifted position a little and felt the stiffness from yesterday's fight. I looked at myself in the window'of the dive shop. The left side of my face was puffy. I hadn't shaved this morning to spare the puffiness and I had a small dark stubble beginning to show. I looked sort of sinister.

Across the street a customer appeared at Magic Massage. He had a crew cut. He wore a red-and-white-striped short-sleeved knit shirt that was stretched tight over his bulging stomach. He had on new jeans with the bottoms rolled a couple of turns to feature his new shiny brown shoes with three lace-eyelets and thick soles. Nineteen fifty-two grown old. He opened the door with the confidence of an old customer and went in and closed it behind him.

I flexed my hands. They were sore and stiff and the knuckles were swollen. Maybe I should rely more on sweet reason.

I crossed Congress Street again and went in the door of Magic Massage. A small sticker above the doorknob said that MasterCard and Visa were welcome. Inside there was a short high counter to the right. A middle-aged woman with purplish red hair sat behind it. There was a cash register on the counter, and a phone, and one of those little devices that take a credit card imprint. The room was small. Against the far wall was a sofa covered in tan Naugahyde. The arms and legs were dark oak. There were two matching chairs against the left wall and a low coffee table with an assortment of magazines. In the angle of the wall opposite the counter a small color television set was showing a talk show in which the host and audience were debating sex-change operations with an intensity that suggested almost everyone might have one.

Leaning against the end of the counter was a tall guy wearing a beige gaberdine suit and black cowboy boots. He had on a white shirt and wore one of those odd little shoestring pieces of neckware fastened at the throat with a silver clasp. On his head was a big black cowboy hat with the brim turned down all the way. His face was thin and he had a long pointy nose and prominent upper teeth and a large Adam's apple. His hands were big and the knuckles were outsized. He wore a big ring with a blue stone in it on his little finger, left hand. There was a thin, jagged-looking scar along his jawline almost back to his left ear that looked as if someone had tried to cut his throat with a broken bottle five or ten years ago and made the swipe too high.

The woman said, "A nice massage today, sir?" She had on a red blouse and wore big round rose-tinted glasses with blue frames, the kind where the bows come off the bottom instead of the top.

I said, "This is sort of embarrassing, but may I speak to the manager?"

The tall guy in the cowboy hat said, "What do you want to see the manager about?" He was looking very hard at me. Hard enough to notice that someone had whacked me recently along the side of the head. He seemed like a man who noticed such things.

"I'd like to ask about a young woman," I said, "used to work here."

"You ain't a cop," he said.

"I'm too polite," I said.

"Un huh."

"-I'm working on a thing in New York," I said. "No problem for you."

"Private cop," he said.

"Yes."

"There a reward?"

"No," I said, "except I go away and don't annoy you."

He nodded. "What's her name?" he said.

"You the manager?" I said.

He grinned. His bottom teeth were missing in front. "I represent the manager," he said. "What's her name?"

"Ginger Buckey."

A guy in a gray plaid suit came in. He looked at us uneasily. The tall guy gestured with his head and we walked over to a door beyond the sofa. Behind me I heard the lady with the purplish red hair say, "A nice massage today?"

We went through the door and into a corridor. There was a stairwell up the right wall. The tall guy opened one of the doors. It was a small room like the examining room at a doctor's office. The walls were narrow vertical planking painted green. There was a table covered with a white sheet, a straight chair, and a small side table with baby oil and lilac water and a small pile of towels on it. The tall guy closed the door and leaned against it.

"Customers get sort of nervous they see a guy looks like you hanging around in the reception area."

"Afraid I'm a cop?"

"Well, you got the look, 'cept you're so polite."

"Nothing wrong with a good massage," I said. "No law against that."

"Sure, what do you want to know about Ginger Buckey?"

"Where she went from here," I said.

"Beats me," he said.

"Her father brought her to you," I said, "and you gave him a finder's fee. Now that may be doing business just like U.S. Steel does business, but it might be white slavery."

"And if it was?"

"If it was, or if it looked like it was, I bet I could get the cops and Cumberland County and maybe the U.S. Attorney's office interested enough in whether it was white slavery or not to make a genuine economic impact on the business here."

"Maybe you'd end up feeding lobsters in Casco Bay, you did that," he said.

"Tough talk for a guy wearing a shoestring for a tie," I said. "I'm already the toughest guy in Lindell."

"Where the fuck is Lindell?" he said.

"It's where Ginger came from. Why do this hard? You tell me where she went from here and I go away and leave you to massage your way to health and fortune, maybe even get yourself a lower plate. You don't, and either you've got to put me in the bay, which I don't think you can do, or have me accusing you of trafficking in children. The Press Herald will be on your ass, and the cops. It'll be awful."

He was wearing a gun under his left arm. You can wear a gun without it showing, but some guys want it to show, and some guys don't care.

"You don't think I can handle you," he said.

"If I thought you could, would I still be here annoying you?"

He put his left hand into his side pocket and came out with a pair of brass knuckles. He put them on his right hand and moved it in a little circle at waist level and said, "Now what do you think?"

I sighed. "I think it's been a hard year," I said. "And I'm tired. And I think you are dumb as hell to put those things on your right hand, which means it will take you an hour and ten minutes to get your gun out from under your left arm, whereas I…" I took the gun off my hip and showed it to him without really pointing it. He looked at the gun. His right fist stopped moving in a circle.