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Two Time

The Permanent Press

Chapter One

I'd already ordered an Absolut on the rocks and was settling in to watch. Jackie Swaitkowski hadn't shown up yet, which was no surprise. She was never on time for anything. She lived by an Einsteinian concept of space-time. It was all relative. I didn't care. As far as I was concerned, she could do what she wanted. She was a pal.

Two stories below the deck was a small parking lot where cars could line up along the edge of the lagoon. It served the restaurant and a small marina catering to big sport cruisers and a handful of fishing scows owned by the tattered remains of the local Bayman population. On the opposite shore of the lagoon was a small scrub-covered island with a single two-story house perched precariously over a short sandy cliff. Beyond that was Gardiner's Bay, named for a family who'd owned a big island out there since the middle of the 17th century. Until recently one old Gardiner had it more or less to himself. I don't like that many people, but I think I'd be lonely living on a huge island all by myself. Maybe not ifJackie showed up once in a while. Wouldn't have to be on time.

There were four other people on the deck with me. A freshly scrubbed pair of young fluffs were leaning across a table vamping at each other. He wore yellow cotton pants, a green sweater and tasseled loafers without socks. None of which fazed his date. The delusion of perfect happiness floated freely across her pale blue eyes. The other two were a pair of hags from somewhere up island-faces stretched by surgery into metallic masks, nails hard as epoxy and hair like lacquered teak. One wore a white cotton top embroidered with sequins that matched her slip-ons and something sparkly painted on her eyelids. The other smoked a cigarette held at the outermost tips of her fingers, like you'd hold a splinter with a pair of tweezers. Neither could pronounce the letter "r." They said things like "Don't I know it" and "I mean, honestly." They didn't seem to notice me. I wasn't offended.

The waitress came out every ten minutes to check on us, but didn't catch a lot of action. We were all nursing our drinks. I'd planned on working on a single Absolut until Jackie showed up. I never used to care how many drinks I had or when I had them, but I was on a program of self-improvement. I lit a Camel to preserve the program's transitional character.

A black Lexus pulled into the parking lot down below. Nothing happened for a few minutes, then the door opened and out shot a scruffy miniature French poodle chasing a ball thrown by the driver, who looked sharp and held together in a pure white band-collar shirt and pants the color of his car. His hair, also black, was cut close to the scalp, and his mustache clipped straight above his lip. His white shirt was professionally laundered and neatly tucked. His shoes were the kind of expensive black leather slip-ons that looked effeminate in store windows, but au courant on some people's feet. Definitely not mine.

The poodle conserved nothing in his pursuit of the ball. He captured it on the fly between his legs, then scooped it up in his mouth. It was almost too big to carry, but by holding up his head he could peel back at nearly a full run.

"I don't know what Michael's been doing lately," the woman with the sparkling eyelids was telling her friend, "but it's not working."

"Doing?"

"With his life."

"Oh, that."

"It's ludicrous, the whole rolfing thing."

"I don't know what that is."

"Rolfing. It's like massage, only deeper. More penetrating. They penetrate your muscles."

"Michael's penetrating his muscles?"

"Not his. Other people's."

"This can't be good."

"I don't even know what that means. Rolfing somebody."

"Sounds intestinal to me."

"It's not. It's like massage. I don't know."

"Would you like Michael penetrating your muscles? I don't think so."

"My daughter says it used to be huge in Europe. In Scandinavia."

"They go swimming in the winter. Break the ice."

"I don't understand any of it."

"For this, Michael leaves a perfectly good marriage."

"Not if you ask his wife."

"Exactly."

On her next pass I let the waitress bring me another vodka. Jackie was in deep schedule denial. It happened.

The poodle showed no signs of tiring. The guy had been throwing grounders, but now switched to the long ball. It gave him more time to stand at the edge of the dock and look up at the big boats. Or maybe at the sunset, it was hard to tell. When he wasn't throwing the ball he kept his hands in his pockets, clinking change and car keys. You could tell he was in good shape by the tight wedge formed by shoulders and waist. Measuring a man's latent physical ability, even from a distance, was a fighter's habit. My father taught it to me, unconsciously. This one would be hardheaded, but inexperienced. No marks on him, no signs of wear. But never underestimate people, my old man would always tell me.

The poodle ran up on a blur of dirty white legs. The guy took the ball from its mouth and lobbed it past a pair of wooden dinghies and into the water. The dog listened for the splash and then without hesitation leaped between the boats into the oily dock water.

As the sunset faded the artificial light from incandescents around the parking lot began to alter the color and mood of the deck. It was May, before daylight savings and the angle of the earth kept the sun up in the sky well into the evening. What little breeze we had from the lagoon fell off to a whisper, though it still brought in the scent of low tide and the caterwaul of seagulls circling casually over the Baymen's fleet.

The young swell in the yellow pants left the table and went inside the restaurant. He was thick around the middle and his feet were badly pronated. Would go down in half a second. The girl watched him leave, her eyes ready to make instant contact should he look back. He didn't. As soon as the door swung shut she turned her head toward the lagoon, as if caught without a focus, a legitimate reason for looking at anything at all. Or to avoid looking at me, who was flagrantly staring at her. She turned her head back suddenly and caught me in the act. I winked. She smiled stupidly and tried to look interested in the remains of her tuna salad. Her feet were hooked together under the chair the way my daughter would do when she was sitting at the tiny tea table I'd built for her. It made me want to protect the girl from bad choices in life. Another old fighter's habit.

A cell phone twilled impatiently. The sound was momentarily untraceable. The woman from the East Side stopped talking and looked in her purse. Then it happened again and the guy on the docks looked toward his car. Yellow Pants came back out on the deck, moving chairs to clear his path, masking the sound of the cell phone's next ring. But the man on the dock heard it, and walked a few steps to the passenger-side door, opened it and dropped into the seat. He left the door open and sat with his feet outside on the gravel surface. He held the phone in his hand as it repeated the persistent chirping. He punched at the keys, but with no apparent effect. The two women started talking again, complaining about the coffee, comparing it unfavorably to the cappuccino they'd recently had at a trattoria off the Palazzo del Duomo.

"Firenze. That's what they call that town over there. I keep telling you. Fur-en-zee."

"Doesn't sound anything like Florence to me."

"I always thought she was a queen or something."

"Before they had democracy."

"Nothing they say sounds like anything I recognize. My sister's husband's family-they're Italian."

"I always wondered what the hell this woman Florence had to do with anything. And I was there for, what, a week?"

The guy with the Lexus pulled his feet inside the car and shut the door. I caught sight of the poodle. His nose was just above the crest of the water, the ball in his mouth slowing his progress. A little wake formed behind him in the greasy seawater. I mourned the expensive upholstery inside the Lexus.

The first boom was almost subterranean-too low for the human ear. The girl with Yellow Pants whipped her head around like a startled herbivore. The inside of the Lexus was filling up with beautiful orange-red blossoms, a turbulence of roiling flame that broke like a wave against the tinted rear window. The car began to rock back and forth. The rear window splintered into a jagged web woven by a drunken spider.

I heard someone yell something. It came from the stairs that ran along the side of the deck. It was a familiar voice. The poodle stopped swimming and looked up at the car. The girl with Yellow Pants reached for her white wine. Disorientation swept the deck.

There was something about the color of the flame. I ran to the edge of the deck to get a closer look. Yellow Pants huffed at me as I shoved his chair out of the way.

I heard Jackie Swaitkowski again, yelling my name. By then I knew what was going on with the flame. I thought I was probably out of time, but there was nothing left to do but leap over the railing above the stairwell, almost landing on Jackie, who was down there staring at the car, pressed against the wall with the back of her hand stuck to her mouth. I grabbed a handful of her shirtfront. She yanked back involuntarily.

"Move."

When she saw it was me, she stopped resisting. I pulled her up the staircase, shouldered open the main entrance to the restaurant, and slammed into the cigarette machine that filled the vestibule just inside the door. The air began to glow a soft, flickering yellow.

"Sam?"

I pulled her around the payphone and rack of brochures that clogged the vestibule and shoved her inside. The place was almost empty. A man with a thin black mustache was behind a glass counter standing in front of an old-fashioned cash register. Below were rows of breath mints and kid-sized candy bars. He was staring at the brilliant, fuzzy glow outside that was flooding the interior of the restaurant, one hand feeling around the top of the counter for the telephone.

We plowed over a sign that said "Please Seat Yourself" and made for the back of the room. The path was blocked by a table filled with happy-hour hors d'oeuvres and crudités. Jackie tried to pull away from me.

"What the hell are you doing?"

I tightened my grip on her shirt and threw her over the table. She slid across the surface through buckets of Buffalo-style chicken wings and big glass bowls filled with green peppers and celery sticks. I put my hands under the table and flipped the whole thing over on its side. A big fist of air punched from behind, and a glittering spray of glass that felt like electric sleet washed my back as I vaulted the overturned pines-lab table.

It was heavy enough to save us from being flayed alive by the hurricane of pressure-treated beams and floor joists, window frames, Cinzano umbrellas, ashtrays and Long Islanders that blew in from the Windsong deck.

Some time after that a small woman with short-cropped black hair was pulling at my fingers. They were woven together behind Jackie's head, which I was holding off the ground. The woman was speaking only to me, since Jackie had her eyes closed. Or one eye for sure. The other was too mashed up to tell.

The woman said something to me, but I couldn't hear her. I shook my head.

"It would be helpful if you let me examine her, sir," she shouted.

The big slab table had saved Jackie's life, but hadn't stopped the blast debris from swirling down on top of us. A piece of something, maybe the glass salad bowl from the appetizer table, had slammed into the side of her face. I didn't see it happen, but I saw the result. When the short woman found us, I was telling her why baseball was never the same after the advent of free agency, and checking her breathing periodically by putting my cheek down next to her nose.

I let the short woman move her hands down under Jackie's head as I moved mine under her neck. She used her thumb to pull open Jackie's good eye, into which she shot the beam of a tiny flashlight. When she was done she poked around Jackie's chest with a stethoscope. While she was doing that another medic ran up with an elaborate-looking plastic thing in tow that he threw on the ground with a clattery smack. Without looking up the short woman shot out an order that caused the guy to turn on his heel and run off.

"What about the others?" I asked, but she didn't answer me, and I didn't want to ask her again until she was ready.

She eventually looked at me. "Sorry?" she asked.

"The others. On the deck. What about them?"

"How many were there?"

"I don't know. Five?"

She went back to Jackie, gently folding her hands down by her sides and configuring the plastic thing into the brace it was obviously meant to be.

"I'll tell the recovery people. Locate parts for five," she said.

"Parts?"

"I really need you to let me work, sir."

She put her soft little hands on my wrists and I let go. That's when I realized I was listening to my breathing from inside my head, and the sound of a little dog barking frantically in the distance.

I lay back and looked up at the sky, still a lovely pale blue, with a faint hint of pink and purple from the sunset over on the western horizon and the flickering remains of the fire on the edge of the docks, seagulls drifting into view, wondering what all the commotion was about.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Two Time by Chris Knopf Copyright © 2006 by Chris Knopf . Excerpted by permission.
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