Absolute Rage Read online

  Rose giggled. “You’re something else. I swear, I feel like I’ve joined the circus today, our little lonely existence transformed. Where’s your other boy, by the way?”

  “I have no idea, but my guess would be alien abduction.”

  “You’re not worried?”

  “Oh, no. They almost always bring them back after they’ve implanted the spores.”

  “Seriously . . .”

  “Seriously? He’s undoubtedly with Billy Ireland, my trainer, probably at a hardware store looking at flanges or valves and having the time of his life.”

  Holden was little more than a half mile from the farm, a wide place on Second comprising a gas station, a grocery and general store, a miniature marina with a boat-livery/bait-’n’-tackle appendage, three motels, one with a coffee shop attached, four houses (summering as bed-and-breakfasts), and the Harbor Bar. Stuck on the narrowest point of the North Fork, Holden offered access to both the Sound and Southold Bay. It looked like old Long Island, the sort of tiny beach town that had long vanished on the South Shore or farther west; people in Holden still pronounced Montauk with the accent on the second syllable.

  The Harbor Bar was a low, green-roofed white building with beer signs in the windows, backed right up to the water, with a weathered deck built out on pilings trimming it on one side and at the rear. White tin tables with beer-company umbrellas flying from them were set out on the latter, each accompanied by an odd assortment of chairs.

  “ ‘For men must work, and women must weep,’ ” Rose intoned as they followed the trotting children down the deck, “ ‘and there’s little to earn and many to keep, though the harbor bar be moaning.’ My dad used to say that whenever we came here. He claimed it referred to the drunks at the bar. God! Maybe they’re all still there, still moaning.”

  The children ran to a table and the women followed. The place was nearly full with an early-dinner crowd, mostly sun-reddened tourists on their way back from Shelter Island or Orient Point. One table, however (its top nearly covered with empty beer bottles), was filled with locals—two dark, tanned thirtyish men, one burly and tattooed and balding, the other ponytailed, both in cutoff jeans, muddy work boots, and wife-beater shirts, plus an older man, slim, well-knit, blue-eyed, florid, with a fine dust of graying gold on his head, and next to him, a very dirty little boy with a white hard-hat flopping on his head. The blond man caught sight of their group and nodded, smiling, at Marlene, a deep nod, nearly a bow, but nothing mocking about it. The boy saw her, too, and Marlene was not surprised to see appear on his face an expression far from that which ought to blossom on the face of a lad observing his beloved mom, but something much more like dismay. Marlene ignored him and sat down. The children did the same, immediately grabbing the crayons and starting the paper games thoughtfully provided on the place mats.

  “The prodigal son is getting his bag on after a hard day’s work,” Marlene remarked, and, following Rose’s look over at the other tables, added, “The Damico brothers, Gary and Phil, general contractors, and Billy Ireland. I think I’ll just leave the four of them alone. They look too crude for the likes of us.”

  “They would be the Shelley Society in McCullensburg,” said Rose.

  Marlene picked up a little card stuck to the chrome stand that held packets of sweetener. “Gosh, anchovies and artichokes is the special pizza and they’re doing crab cakes, by which I can tell it’s Friday.” She waved to flag down a waitress. “I’m sorry to say we can’t get shit-faced. I have to pick up my husband at eight oh seven.”

  “I bet he’s not crude,” said Rose.

  “Oh, he has his crude moments. But generally he’s the Shelley Society compared to me.”

  “Your trainer is staring at you. Not necessarily an employee-employer look, if I may say so.”

  “Yes, well, that’s partly why I keep him around,” said Marlene. “And he’s terrific with the dogs.”

  2

  MARLENE SAT ON A WOODEN bench outside the little Southold railroad station and stroked her dog’s velvety ears as she waited for her husband’s train to appear. Marlene was a Romantic, like many people who were highly religious in youth and are no longer so, and all Romantics love trains, even cheesy commuter trains. Although she knew her husband as well as she knew herself (better, if truth be told), she still wished for him to be ever a dark stranger. So, waiting in the gathering dusk, and nearly alone on the platform, she amused herself by striking different poses before her reflection in the glass of a trade-school advertisement while entertaining fantastic thoughts.

  Such as getting on this train and staying on it to the end of the line and then back to the City, and staying on trains and getting off in strange cities, and staying in hotels, always second-class hotels near the station, and then boarding another train for another city, and living an anonymous life, and dying, finally, on the Orient Express. Marlene loved her family, of course, and the main attraction of this fantasy was that it would remove them all from the sphere of danger and catastrophe that she felt she dragged around with her. She had been lucky so far, but she understood that good luck builds up like an electrical charge and that at a certain point it sparks over into the bad kind. Although she now tried hard to be good, she believed that the pattern of her life almost demanded this result: that when confronted with certain kinds of situations—arrant injustice, for example, or certain forms of cruelty—she would make decisions and take actions leading to violence. She had personally killed three people and caused the death of several others, and while she hoped that this aspect of her life was over, she had no real confidence in a permanent escape.

  She shook herself like her dog to put these thoughts aside and turned her attention to her business, humdrum thinking about accounts and vet fees and three-inch galvanized pipe and diesel pumps. She wished, really, that she were a struggling businesswoman supporting her children by honest labor and frugal housekeeping, but this was not the case. The kennel and training operation was a tax dodge. Marlene had made a great deal of money in the way that such money was often made in the midnineties, by being in the right place at the right time. She had been a partner in a security firm that had grown rapidly and gone public, and which had profited vastly from a spectacular rescue of a kidnapped client on the eve of its initial public offering. The stock went up and up, on its merits and on the publicity, and later as a refuge for the smart money when the dotcoms tanked. Marlene had, however, discovered that the spectacular rescue was a scam, although the people killed in it had been real enough, and had demanded a buyout, to which her partners reluctantly acquiesced. She assuaged her Godzilla of a conscience by giving almost all the money to the Church, stashed in a religious foundation. A Jesuit named Michael Dugan ran it for her, as Billy Ireland ran the dog farm. So she could slip away without anyone really noticing she was gone. The twins had each other, Karp had his work, Lucy had her forty-eight languages. They would all sit down to dinner and wonder why there was no food. No, that was unfair to Lucy; she could cook as well as Marlene herself.

  Idiot thoughts. Demonic ravings. She was a little crazy, too, tried to keep it under control, mostly a success, except when she drank. She shook herself again, and this time the dog took this as a cue to shake, too. Unlike his mistress, he sent long streamers of white drool in every direction. She stared at her reflection and made gargoyle faces, crossing her eyes. She could really cross them now that she had been fitted with the latest high-tech socket for the left one, which was fake. Now they tracked together, instead of, as before, the fugazy staring out motionless like the orb of a dead mackerel. Most people no longer thought she looked odd, which said something about the perceptions of most people.

  She checked her watch, arose, and looked down the track, into the reddening west. Tiny twin balls of light hovered above the rails out at the limits of vision. It was rather nice having a little summer vacation from being married, she thought. Karp came only on the weekends, so it was almost like college dating again, except
you knew the guy wouldn’t be a complete asshole, assuming one’s husband was not one and you still loved him. Hers was not, by and large, and she did, by and large, although she was not adverse to having an attractive stranger around on the weekdays. Not that she would ever do anything, knowing herself to be the kind of woman who, once unfaithful, would bring her whole life crashing down and end up penniless and drunk in a trailer park in Tempe, Arizona.

  She sat down on the bench again. The dog hadn’t moved, since she had down-stayed him and hadn’t spoken the release. The dog would have stayed there had a butcher’s cart overturned before him and strewn the platform with prime rib. Billy Ireland was a hell of a trainer. She smiled and cooed at the dog, who wagged his tail, but still didn’t budge. The train pulled in and a woman and two men got off. One of these, very tall and broad-shouldered, carrying a canvas overnight bag, and dressed in a beautifully cut tropical-weight blue pinstripe, was her husband, Roger Karp, universally known as Butch. She watched him look up and down the platform. He saw her coming toward him with the huge dog at her heels, and she observed, first, how tired he seemed, his face gray and heavy with the City, and then how it lit up when he saw her. Oh, good! They embraced and kissed, not just a suburban-wife-at-station peck, but a real kiss with plenty of chewing, like teenagers. It was always something of a surprise to both of them that they were still interested although they had been married since the Carter administration.

  They walked arm in arm to the truck. “So how was the week that was?” she asked.

  “Don’t ask.” He settled himself in the passenger seat and waited as she let the dog into the back and got in behind the wheel.

  “You look tired.”

  “You look great. You’re tan. You’ve been lounging on the beach.”

  “Uh-huh. I met our neighbor there this afternoon. She’s got a little girl the twins’ age.”

  “Our neighbor? That old couple?”

  “No, on the other side. In the big white house.”

  “I thought that was empty.”

  “Me, too, but she’s opening it up. They’re going to sell it. Her dad kicked off and there’s some kind of inheritance tangle. I got her drunk and pried out her secrets. They’re a fine old Long Island family fallen on hard times. A nice woman, though—Rose Wickham Heeney.”

  “Heeney?”

  “Yeah, it doesn’t go with the other names. Apparently she married a working stiff from Appalachia, which didn’t fly too great with the folks.”

  “So you have a basis.”

  She gave him a sharp look. Karp’s family was a sore point. “Yes, and not only that, there’s something worrying her. She’ll be talking away and then kind of freeze and look around for the kid, a little panic reaction.”

  “Well, you know how to pick ’em.”

  “I’m not getting involved. Meanwhile she’s someone to talk to, and the little girl’s a doll. GC is smitten.”

  “How are they?”

  “Thriving. Zak has his rat gun and Billy to tag around after, Gianni is building sand castles of ever greater extent and complexity and he’s farming up a storm. They stay out of each other’s hair.”

  “And your felon?”

  “My felon is fine, and I wish you wouldn’t call him that. He did his jolt and he’s a citizen now.”

  “Aren’t there any girl dog trainers?”

  “Women. Of course, but I haven’t found anyone as good as Billy Ireland.” She slowed the truck for the turn off Route 25. The sun had sunk at last into Queens and the world had turned pearly blue. She switched on the truck’s lights. “You’re just jealous. You think we’re doing it on the kibble sacks.”

  “Are you?”

  “Not on the kibble sacks. And again she asks, changing the subject, how was your week, darling?”

  “Hot. It was over ninety all week and it’s only June.”

  “I mean work.”

  A cloud came over his face. “Fine. The usual.” Which meant, not fine. Unusually awful.

  But he greeted the boys cheerfully enough when they ran out to mob him, and he seemed more relaxed, later, at the table, dressed in worn jeans and a T-shirt. The twins filled him in on the week’s events, including a detailed description by Zak of the backhoe operation and of each of the four rats he had stalked and killed, and from Giancarlo, a long summary of the rules of a swords-and-sorcery fantasy game he had invented, and a crop report, corn and carrots, tomatoes, potatoes, lettuce. She noted, however, that Karp drank two beers, as much alcohol as she had seen him consume at one sitting, and that, try as he might, his attention was drifting.

  “Zik has a girlfriend,” announced Zak when they were clearing the table.

  “I do not!”

  “Yes, he does. She has red hair. He loves her.” A snarling chase through the house, which Karp broke up by grabbing each boy under an arm and dragging them out to the porch, where he plopped the three of them down on the rusty glider.

  “It’s true,” Zak insisted.

  “Is it true, Giancarlo?”

  “No. I have a friend and she’s a girl, but she’s not a girlfriend. I’m too young to have a girlfriend.”

  “I see. When had you planned to start?”

  “When I’m sexually mature, Dad,” said Giancarlo, which reduced his brother to choking giggles.

  After this had subsided, Zak said, “Billy Ireland taught me how to drive the truck. I can put it in second.”

  “Really? Does your mom know about this?”

  “Oh, you know—Mom knows everything.”

  Later, when the boys were in bed, Karp sat on this same glider with his wife, who was drinking Rémy out of a juice glass. The night was humid and warm, but there was a comfortable salt breeze from the Sound. Crickets sawed away in the surrounding trees, invisible in the country dark, real darkness, which Karp always found disconcerting after the City’s perpetual glow. They had turned off the lights in the house. Then a light appeared from the small window under the barn’s eaves. It came from the small apartment occupied by the dog trainer.

  Which reminded Karp. “What’s this I hear about Ireland letting Zak drive the truck?”

  “Oh, it’s just on the property. He’s thrilled about it. You know how he is.”

  “It’s still dangerous.”

  Marlene shifted to look directly at him. “No, it’s not, and you don’t really think so, either. You’re pissed off about something at work and you are about to start a wrangle to get your ya-ya’s off at me.”

  “I’m not.”

  “Everything’s perfect at the office?”

  “Yeah, it’s fine.”

  “Oh, bullshit!”

  “Marlene, forget it. I’m just tired.”

  “What are you tired about? I thought you conquered crime up there. You’re not a kid ADA running around Centre Street with fifty open cases. You have a nice office, a glamorous secretary, minions at your beck and call . . .”

  “Marlene, be serious. I’m chief assistant district attorney of New York County. There are a lot of pressures . . .”

  “Like what?”

  “Nothing.” Long pause. A release of breath. “Jack’s calling me off the congressman.”

  Marlene raised her eyes to heaven and her palms upward. “Thank you!” And to him: “Why do I always have to worm it out of you?”

  “Because it’s my problem, okay? Why should I bring that shit home?”

  “It’s not your problem. It’s our problem, because when you’re pissed off at that fucking office, you snarl, and pick nits, and get on everyone’s nerves. My nerves, to tell the truth. The boys are so glad to see you, you could whip them with coat hangers and they wouldn’t mind. So give! What’s with the congressman?”

  Karp cleared his throat. His childhood memory did not recall a single scene in which his father had talked business with his mother, and despite the years he had lived with Marlene the process remained uncomfortable, unnatural.

  “Well, you’ll recall we had that e
lection last year, and I think that’s what’s behind this. McBright got 48.6 percent of the vote against Jack, including nearly 80 percent of the nonwhite vote. The congressman campaigned very hard for McBright.”

  “Being a black guy himself.”

  “That is a racist comment and unworthy of you,” said Karp primly. “I’m sure the congressman thought he was the better man for the job. However, that’s the fact. Given the demographics of the City, in the future it will be very hard to win office in New York County conceding 80 percent of the nonwhite vote. Are you sure you want to hear this?”

  “I’m riveted and would be even more so if you would tickle my head.”

  Karp started to massage his wife’s scalp and continued. “Okay, this started with looking at dirty money uptown. The congressman naturally has a campaign fund. Many uptown notables and businesses contribute to this fund. Among the biggest contributors is a firm called Lenox Entertainment Enterprises. They own clubs and restaurants and movie houses, uptown mainly but also all over the City. The firm makes a corporate contribution, as do a large number of its employees, up to the personal max. This is hard money, by the way, right into the congressman’s coffers. You wouldn’t think that a guy who cleaned up a movie house after the show could afford to drop a grand on a political campaign, but it is so. And not just one, either.”

  “That’s America, God bless her!” said Marlene. “Lower, please.”

  “Okay, shady campaign funding . . . not our problem, really. But it turns out that one of the partners in Lenox is a person named Waylin Pennant, aka Beemer Pennant. Or Pimp Pennant, as we like to call him. Who is definitely our problem. This campaign stuff is what tickled our interest, in fact.”

  “Gosh, Butch, if pimps can’t give money to politicians, they’ll have to shut down K Street. Or Texas.”

  “True, it’s Mr. Pennant’s right to support the candidate of his choice with money beaten out of whores. Pennant, by the way, is not just your average street Mac. He seems to have industrialized the process, like the Mob did back in the old days. Basically, he doesn’t run girls himself—pimps pay him for territories, and he probably gets a rake-off out of most of the fleshly commerce in the City. And he does the usual loan-sharking and so on. No drugs, though. He’s a smart cookie.”