The Gin Palace Read online

  “You okay?” I said.

  She looked out the passenger window. “Our lives aren’t very normal, are they?” she said.

  I was going to ask her what was normal, but I realized that would’ve sounded foolish, I knew well enough what she meant, so I said, “No, they’re not.”

  “The kids at school, all they care about are grades and college and who’s having sex with who and where the party is on Saturday night. I could care less about any of that. Do you know what I mean?”

  “Yeah. What’s on your mind, Tina?”

  “You have to go.”

  “She can wait a minute more.”

  Tina shrugged again. “Lizzie, her life is so … normal. She has her mother and father, they have their house. They all have dinner together each night.”

  “You have dinner with them.”

  “Yeah, of course, but it’s not the same. They’re not my family. You’re my family. I sit there and they look at me and they have no idea what I’ve done. The last thing they think about is death.”

  “And that’s all you think about.”

  “Pretty much. I’m reading a book about Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone De Beauvoir for school. They were brave people. You know about them, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Can you teach me French?”

  I had helped her with her Spanish for school. It was once a way for us to pass the time, back when there was a lot of time to kill. I had also helped her when she was reading Julius Caesar in English class, using it to try to get her to grasp the concept that actions have consequences. I wasn’t so sure that particular conversation took.

  “Yeah, I could do that,” I said. “I could teach you French.”

  “I want to speak all the languages you speak.”

  I said nothing to that.

  “I wish I could be with you, Mac, that I didn’t have to sit there in the middle of all that normal stuff, knowing it’ll never be like that for me. Do you know what I mean?”

  I nodded. “It’s better where you are, though.”

  “I just think a family should stick together, no matter what the risks. I want to come to live at your place. I’ve been told to tell you that.”

  “I don’t think it’s a good idea, Tina. Maybe it won’t always be like this. Who knows, maybe someday things will get more normal for us. But for now it’s not safe. We need to keep things the way the are.”

  She didn’t say anything for a while, just sat there and looked at me. I heard the wind outside and thought of my fare waiting. I was about to tell Tina that I had to go when she broke the silence.

  “Lizzie saw you having coffee in the Golden Pear last week,” she said. “You and that woman who works for Paul’s. What’s her name?”

  “Liv.”

  “That’s right. Lizzie saw your cabs parked next to each other on Main Street. She looked around and there the two of you were.”

  There was a time when Tina had thought she was in love with me. I was her father’s best friend, and one bad night I had saved her from a gang rape, and then saved him from the hands of two hired killers. I was told by her father that a crush was inevitable. But that nonsense was over now, the notion was out of her head. Or so I had thought.

  I looked at her for a moment, then said, “She and I are only friends, Tina. It was just coffee.”

  “I’m not mad about it, Mac. I’m not in love with you anymore, if that’s why you look the way you do right now. It’s not about that.”

  “Then what is it about?”

  “Are you seeing her?”

  “Tina.”

  “Are you?”

  “No.”

  “You just meet for coffee?”

  “Yeah.”

  “But you like her?”

  I didn’t answer.

  “You do, right?”

  Liv was beautiful to me, and smart, and I’d be lucky just to be with her. But my life wasn’t about those things; it wasn’t about companionship with a woman I respected, or about luck, and hadn’t been for a long time. It was about causing no harm and making enough to get by while I waited for things to play out, for the consequences of my actions to catch up with me. But I was tired of that way of living, of thinking a good day wasn’t anything more than a day that ended with me still alive. These past few months, though, I’d been finding myself more and more curious about a different kind of life, about all the things Tina and I were missing and everyone else we knew took for granted.

  I knew that certain things would have to happen before I could act on my curiosity and pursue what I wanted; certain things that were still in play would have be followed through to their end. They were things I wasn’t all that eager to face, to go through. Once was enough.

  I said, “We’ll talk about this later, Tina.”

  “She’s a good match for you.”

  “Oh yeah? What makes you think that?”

  “She gave me and Lizzie a ride to Hampton Bays the other day.”

  “What for?”

  “I just wanted to meet her. I wanted to know what she was like. Did you know she was in the army back in Israel?”

  I nodded.

  “So that means she’s someone who can take care of herself.”

  “That’s not the point, Tina.”

  “Maybe she doesn’t care about the risk. Maybe she’s like me.”

  Liv did care. I knew that for a fact. She came to America to flee the day-to-day violence of her homeland. My life, the way things had gone for me the past few years, was close enough to the very thing she was looking to escape.

  But I didn’t bother to tell Tina that. I needed to leave, to get my last fare for the day done with and head home and sack out till it was time to do it all again.

  “We’ll talk about this later, Tina.”

  “I’m not going to lose you like I did Augie.”

  “I don’t plan on getting myself killed anytime soon.”

  “I’ve lost one father already.”

  Was it part of some fantasy of hers, an attempt at gathering a family life, a desperate and wild grasp at normalcy——me and Liv as the parents, Tina our loving daughter, three refugees from too much death safe together under one roof?

  “I should go, Tina.”

  “I’ll talk to you later, then?”

  “We’ll figure all this out. I promise.”

  She looked at me squarely. There was machinery behind her eyes. She nodded once, slid across the seat and yanked the door handle. Then she nudged the door open with her shoulder and I watched her get out. I saw the book in her hand, She Came To Stay. It was a library copy. I watched Tina walk past the cab and cross the lawn. The porch light was bright, like a spotlight, and made a silhouette of her, casting her elongated shadow across the grass. She reached the door but didn’t look back, just pulled it open and went inside. Once the door closed I dragged the column shifter down into reverse and backed out onto North Main Street.

  I headed back toward town with a deep sense of uneasiness. It nagged at me as I drove, lingering, a tangle in my mind. All I could think of was how Tina used to be: troubled but no more so than any other kid in town; confused by her own body, curious about love to the point of recklessness. There was a time when she’d had a chance at a normal life, a good chance, when she could have had everything that everyone she knew took for granted. She could have been any person, any one of our neighbors, at home most nights, contentedly watching TV, entirely unaware of the terrible things of which people would be capable should someone put their backs firmly against a wall.

  Tina’s chance at a normal life was long gone. I knew that. You just don’t see your old man murdered and go on with your life, unchanged by it. And you don’t put three bullets point-blank into the head of the man who killed your father and remain the person you were before you squeezed the trigger.

  Chapter Two

  A woman was standing outside the stationery and office supply store just past the corner of Newtown Road and Ma
in Street, looking in the opposite direction from where I was coming. I spotted her right off and could tell by her body language that she was my fare. Waiting shows itself in the way a person holds his or her head and shoulders. I’ve learned this much from my months behind the wheel. It’s much the same posture people affect when stuck in mid-thought, or when they’re about to lie and aren’t at all that good at it. She was a person, I could tell, very anxious to get where she wanted to be. When she spotted me, she stepped quickly to the curb and raised her right arm high in the air and waved at me. But that wasn’t really necessary because I had obviously already begun to pull over. She hurried for the door, bent a little at the waist, as if under fire.

  A burst of bitter cold came into my cab with her. I looked at her in the rearview mirror. She was wearing an expensive-looking overcoat, leather gloves, and a densely knit scarf, all dark. I could see her face well enough, until she closed the door and the interior light went out. From what I had seen, she seemed young, maybe in her mid-twenties, maybe younger. It didn’t really matter. Her hair was blonde, almost yellow, pulled back tight into a pony-tail. Bluntly cut, brushed-down bangs hung almost to her eyes, all but concealing them.

  With the air she brought in with her, she was like a cold spot in my cab. I could feel it coming off her clothes. I jacked up the heat for both of us.

  “You’re going to Montauk?”

  “Yes,” she said softly. I could barely hear her over the sound of the fan blowing heated air. Her head was turned to the right and she was looking out her window. I didn’t know if she was shy or stuck-up or hiding from me. But did it really matter?

  “For a one-way fare like that we usually charge a flat rate of fifty bucks.”

  “Fine.”

  I waited a moment, then said, “You’re meeting someone out there?”

  She nodded.

  “There isn’t a lot out there this time of night, is the thing.”

  She spoke flatly. “That’s the idea.”

  I took this as an invitation for me to mind my own business. It was an opportunity for which I was more than eager. A woman going out of her way to meet with a man in a place where there would be no one to see them wasn’t exactly what I would classify as new under the sun. I took my log book off the seat beside me, wrote in it “Montauk, six-fifteen, flat rate,” then placed it back on the seat, shifted into gear, and pulled away from the curb.

  The wind was getting bold now that it was dark. Gusts pushed against the wide windshield one second, then shouldered the broad side of my cab in the next, buffeting us. We rode in silence for the first mile or so, till Newtown Road became Montauk Highway out by the diner. The wind got even stronger here, and I knew it was only going to get worse the closer we got to the end of the island.

  Somewhere past Water Mill I looked in the rearview mirror and saw that she was looking at me, at what the mirror reflected of my face. The dark scarf she wore was wound tight around her neck, framing finely boned features. I could see her well enough when we passed under the blue-white light of street lamps.

  She said something then, but I didn’t hear what it was, so I asked her to repeat herself. When she spoke again her voice was only slightly louder than before. But it was enough for me to hear.

  “You have Thoreau’s eyes,” she said. “Do you know that?”

  I looked back at her, saying nothing.

  “You’re that guy, aren’t you?” she said.

  “What guy?”

  “That MacManus guy,” she said. “Declan MacManus. You’re him, aren’t you?”

  What would be the point in denying it? And anyway my hack license was mounted on the seatback directly in front of her.

  I nodded. “Yeah, that’s me.”

  “Mac,” she said, “that’s what people call you. Mac, right?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Of all people, they send you. I guess maybe the world really is a strange place after all.”

  “Do I know you?”

  She didn’t answer, just turned her head and looked out the window. Her eyes flickered, catching objects as they passed by outside, letting them go after a second, then catching something else again, only to let that go, too. It seemed to me as good a way of passing the time for her as talking. She seemed content with it. I watched the empty road ahead as I drove, checking her every now and then in the mirror. Silence was fine with me, too. Eventually, though, after a considerable delay, she responded to my question. She did so by shrugging, just once. We rode a good while in silence after that. It wasn’t till several miles later that she spoke again.

  “It gets dark so fast this time of year,” she said. “Have you noticed?”

  I told her that I had. I expected her to tell me some tale of woe at any moment. I was on my guard, waiting for it. This was the way it usually happened, the way people came at me when they thought I could help them. I was ready to tell her I wasn’t interested, that what she had heard about me just wasn’t true, I didn’t do things for people, never had, and there was nothing I could do for her. I was ready to tell her anything to bring an end to the whole thing right then. But to my surprise she didn’t go there. She didn’t seem inclined to ask for my help. She just looked out her window at the bare roadside trees passing by, and the low Long Island horizon beyond them, which seemed to me now to harden more than darken, and muttered, “Love is the world’s excuse for being ugly.”

  I waited, but she said nothing more after that. I looked away from the rearview mirror. It was time for me to go unseen. If anything, it was past time for that. All I wanted was to drop her off at the Point, then get myself out of there and make it through one more day without doing harm.

  My radio squawked then, and I heard Eddie telling Angel over the two-way that he was leaving Jessup Neck at that moment and was free to take another fare.

  * * *

  Fifty-five minutes after leaving Southampton I pulled my cab into the parking lot of Montauk State Park. It had been nothing but headwind for the last five miles of the drive. There were no other cars in the gravel-covered lot. The wind was strong here, like a hundred shoving hands. Montauk was the end of the island, the easternmost point. We were just yards from the edge of a cliff, a hundred feet below which was the open Atlantic Ocean and piles of rocks the size of luxury cars.

  I stopped in the middle of the empty lot and shifted into Park. I looked back in the rearview mirror. It was the first time I had done so since she had last spoken.

  The woman avoided my eyes as she handed forward a fifty-dollar bill. I took it from her gloved hand. She had no purse that I could see, no wallet. The bill was half-folded, half wadded up from being inside her pocket.

  Her hand disappeared then, only to return again a few seconds later to the top of the seat. In it was another bill she had dug out of her coat pocket. Actually, it was more than one bill. It was a roll. I couldn’t tell the denominations by looking at it. I didn’t really care to. By the size of it, whatever the bills were, there were many of them. She rested her hand on the back of the seat and offered me the money. She didn’t say anything, just held it there, but I made no move to take it.

  “Fifty’s fine,” I said to her.

  “I should tip you something, for your trouble. It’s all I have. I want you to take it.”

  “You keep it.”

  “Just take it. Please. I don’t need it. Take it.”

  I turned my head and looked at her. The mirror wasn’t enough anymore.

  “I don’t see any other cars,” I told her. “Your friend’s not here yet. I’ve got time. You can wait in here where it’s warm.”

  “I’ll be fine. Just take this. Please.”

  I still didn’t make a move for it. Finally, still without looking at me, she let the roll drop. It landed on my log book, bounced once, then fell to the seat by my leg.

  “Thanks for the lift,” she said. She pulled the door handle toward her, then leaned against the door with her shoulder, swinging it open. Th
e wind came rushing in like a pack of wild animals.

  She didn’t say anything more, just got out and swung the door shut, cutting off the wind. The cold she had let in lingered, though. It touched my face. I watched her walk away, cross the lot, and start up one of the sandy paths toward the lighthouse. Then she was gone from sight.

  It wasn’t long before I opened the door of my cab and got out. You didn’t have to be a genius to know what was up. And, anyway, it was too cold for her to be out in the open, even if the reason she had given me for coming out here was true. I crossed the lot and followed the winding scrub-lined path she had taken to the very edge of the world. The wind was remarkable here, like highway trucks passing right by us, the air they pulled behind them blasting us. I was wearing a barn coat, Tina’s Christmas present to me. It was a good coat, heavy corduroy with a wool lining. But nothing would have been enough against this cold. I looked down at the rocks below, at the ocean splintering to pieces against them. Then I looked forward, out into the dark offshore. All I could see were the white caps of the waves. They moved like ghosts from some shipwreck, crashing in against the rocky shore. It was like some endless wheel of life and death down there. The white-tipped waves and the shimmering rocks were all I could see in the darkness, but I didn’t really need to see anything more.

  I looked to my right and there she was. She barely stood out against the night in her dark coat. I saw her mainly by her blonde hair. The wind flattened her bangs, pressing them into her eyes. But she didn’t seem to notice. She had walked exactly to where I had expected her to go, to a place a hundred yards off the path, where the drop to the rocks below was the most vertical.

  She wasn’t looking downward but rather out, toward the eastern horizon. I followed her gaze. There was nothing to see but a silky night sky and high fragmented clouds flying by in chunks. We might have been at the very end of the world, she and I, the only two people left on the planet. Directly below us, the dark ocean, where it met the sky at the distant horizon, was indistinguishable from the night.