This Is How It Really Sounds Read online

  “Here’s how we’re going to do it,” he said. “I’m going to teach you one technique, and you’re going to practice it every day. Two hours in the morning, two hours in the afternoon. With both sides of your body. You get that one down, I’ll teach you one more, and so on. As long as I see improvement, I’ll keep teaching you. You start sandbagging me, I’m done. And you’ll still have to pay me.”

  “Okay.”

  “Rule number two: no drinking on the days we’re training. If I smell alcohol on your breath, we’re done. And you still have to pay me.”

  There was a longer pause before he answered that one. “Okay.”

  “Let’s see your heavy bag.”

  He brought him into one of the rooms, and the big black cylinder he’d sent over was hanging there from the ceiling with its dull leathery sheen like an electromagnet in a junkyard. As always, part of him instinctively wanted to hit it—that’s how heavy bags were. The red bag gloves were still sitting in their plastic wrapping on a chair. Nearby was a treadmill that probably didn’t get much use either. “I have some weights in the other room, too.”

  “I saw them.” The disassembled stack of chrome-plated disks in a corner. “You won’t be needing those.” He’d thought about this, too. “I have some exercises that will build your strength and your flexibility at the same time. I learned them in China a long time ago. They work.” He showed him Tiger Claws the Tree, a Farmer Lifts a Cart, Opening the Bow, and a Precious Duck Flaps Its Wings, all of them performed slowly with all the muscles tense. “I’m going to test you every three days, and if you don’t show improvement, I’m done. Same rule as before. Let’s see how many push-ups you can do. On your knuckles. Back straight.”

  Harrington managed to do four, and even those he had to do on the carpet because he kept whining about how his knuckles hurt.

  “Today you’ll do four push-ups every hour. Tomorrow, when I come here, I want you to do five. The day after, you’ll do six, then eight, and so on. You’re going to work up to forty an hour, every hour you’re awake. On the wood.”

  The idea of the push-ups wasn’t really to build strength—it was to train his mind. A man who could do four or five hundred push-ups on his knuckles every day was a man who knew he had the will and the fist.

  He had him put on the bag gloves. “Hit the bag a few times. Not too hard. Keep your fist tight.” He watched him throw a couple of roundhouses that were supposed to be hooks, then jabs that glanced off the hard bag, even though they’d been thrown straight at it.

  He put him in a boxer’s stance and showed him how to twist his hips while he punched, then spent ten painful minutes watching Harrington try to imitate his hip twist in every way but the correct one. It was awkward, and Harrington tried to make it better by speeding up, which made it even worse. Charlie went on watching him with his arms crossed.

  The guy punched like a pansy. No, that wasn’t fair, because a lot of pansies could actually punch, when you got right down to it. He’d seen it in the service: queers who’d gotten picked on their whole childhood beating the crap out of the barracks bully when he wouldn’t lay off. And Phil had been a queer. He could punch like a sledgehammer, and a damn good man. Phil had saved his ass in Prague, because he hadn’t trusted the girl, while he himself had been trying to get her in the sack. Then the Stasi set him up with the boy and wrecked his marriage and his life when he wouldn’t turn. The agency paid his loyalty back by furloughing him. Claimed he was compromised. Nineteen fifty-eight. That was how they did it back then. Last time he’d seen Phil he’d been drunk at a queer bar in Denver. Sometime in the eighties. A weird scene. Phil wanted to talk about the old days, and he’d walked into that bar with no idea what kind of bar it was, but he couldn’t leave the guy: Phil had saved his life, so he sat there with the old fairy drinking whiskey while Phil drank Pink Cadillacs, as if Charlie represented the Agency and he was going to show Charlie he didn’t give a shit—he could drink a ladies’ drink if he felt like it. Once in while you’d see flashes of the frightening old steel underneath. Then some young buck would come up, and Phil would fawn all over him. And he wanted Charlie to put a good word in for him if they needed a day agent, somebody who could do the queer thing, because that could be another cover: nobody suspects an old queer. Phil ended up crying, and he wished he could cry, too, just because he wanted to show Phil he understood, deeply, and that he’d never stop being grateful to him, but it was too late for Phil. He was an old man with dyed-blond hair. Just too late. That was the last time he saw him, twenty years ago. Wreckage.

  What was it that made a man’s life disappear behind him, anyway? With Phil, you could argue that he’d made a mistake by being queer, and, supposedly, that could be a reason for losing his wife and his family and his profession. But what about everybody else? Your friends moved away or died; your jobs dried up. You spent all that effort making sure nobody put a bullet in your lungs, only to find out sixty years later that your lungs were shot anyway and, instead of matching wits with the Czech StB you were trying to train some puffed-up has-been to hit a bag.

  “I’m going to show you your attack,” he told Harrington. “Put up your arm, like you’re protecting your face.” Charlie gently pushed the arm down a few inches as he shuffled in and threw a slow punch toward the musician’s face.

  “That’s your attack. You’re going to walk up to him, say his name, tell him whatever you need to tell him, and then, if he lifts his arm up defensively, you’ll rest your hand on it and push it down, like this, just a few inches. That’s the trap. You’ve got to hit him before he realizes what’s happening. Hit him right in the bridge of the nose, as hard as you can. That way, you’ll stun him. His eyes’ll tear up and he’ll probably start bleeding. If you do it right, you’ll break his nose. At that point you can continue your attack or walk away, whatever you want to do.” He watched the musician’s face as he explained it. It was one thing to train for violence. It was something very different to actually carry it out. The singer didn’t flinch, though. He peeled off a piece of athletic tape and stuck it to the bag at the level of Harrington’s nose. “You’re going to do two hundred of those on each side, every hour, every day, with the trap and the shuffle and then hitting this piece of tape. Get it to where the trap and the hit are one motion. Let’s try it.”

  He held his arm up, and Harrington clutched it and punched, too far away to reach him.

  “Step in as you punch.”

  He stepped in, but ended up crosswise to him.

  “No. Shuffle in. Don’t take an actual step. Just shuffle. Your feet don’t cross.”

  Now he shuffled in, and suddenly Charlie felt a stab of pain at the floor. He recoiled silently, and for a second he thought he was going to fall. When his head cleared and the sharp misery of his bad foot had died down, he realized that Harrington’s hands were wrapped around his upper arm. “Sorry! Is your foot okay?”

  Charlie looked down at the hands, and the musician pulled them away. Then he limped over to the stool and settled on it with a small groan. He inhaled and then let out one long single breath. “That’s my bad foot.”

  “Shit, Charlie! I’m really sorry—”

  “Just keep hitting the bag.”

  Harrington hit the bag, clumsily. He hit it again.

  This was feeling all wrong. Some jobs were wrong, and the sooner you sensed it and gave it a pass, the better off you were. Like when he’d gone down to San Salvador to help Colonel Quintero set up an off-the-books intelligence network, then figured out pretty early on that what he was really setting up were death squads. Hell, he’d figured it out before he even went down there. Bill Casey’s baby. Not that the Cubans weren’t running around whacking their share of people, but he should have pulled out. Instead, he read about his work two years later under an ugly headline in The New York Times. Stuff that would turn your stomach. They called Quintero a mad-dog killer, which showed how full of crap they were, because Quintero was actually a sly, manipulative kill
er, a proficient liar who’d given him enough lip service about due process and rehabilitation that he could pretend it was all for the better. Even the ruling families couldn’t control him, and when the story hit the Times, the CIA sent him back to solve the problem, since he and Quintero were such good buddies. He put Quintero crossways with the military, killed his top guys, froze his finances. Finally got him by watching his bank in Panama and picking him up there when he ran out of money. Closed the book on a bullshit job that got a lot of people killed in bad ways, which in El Salvador in those days was like the afternoon rain. Never should have taken it, but he’d had a whole other pile of problems: Millie in the nursing home with Alzheimers, savings running low, and, to be honest, at sixty-five years old, he figured if he turned down this job, they’d find someone else for the next one, too. Permanently.

  Now look at him! Him, a man who’d been a soldier for his country for sixty years, playing to some guy’s petty vanity. He wanted to show that he was still on top of his game, and all it did was provide incontrovertible proof that he really was finished. It was stupid. The whole thing. He’d call the manager and give back the deposit. Tell Zhang in Shanghai to stand down. Whatever he’d left unfinished there was finished all by itself, on its own terms, which he couldn’t dictate. That ticket had been canceled a long time ago.

  “Is this right?”

  The client was still whaling away at the bag without doing much damage. As likely to hurt himself as whoever he was up against. It was just an overhand right, for Christ’s sake! “Okay,” Charlie said, putting his hand on the younger man’s shoulder. “I think that’s enough.”

  His foot was killing him. He carefully climbed off the stool and limped back into the cluttered living room.

  Harrington followed him. “You want a beer or something?”

  “Nope. Thanks. I’ve got another appointment.” That always worked well for a quick exit. He picked up the hand pad he’d brought and moved toward the door.

  The client could sense his mood. “So, how’d I do today?”

  He turned to him. It might as well be now. “Let’s talk about that.” He saw the worry go across the singer’s face as he stood before him, about three feet away. “Mr. Harrington, I have to step away from this project.”

  “Why?”

  The man looked so genuinely hurt that he didn’t have the heart to say, because it’s chickenshit. “It’s just not a job I feel comfortable with.”

  “But you knew what the job was when you took it.”

  “That’s true.”

  “Is it me? You think I can’t do this? Because I can.”

  His voice got a little thinner as he lied. “I know you can do it.” He swallowed. “Mr. Harrington, what is this all about? Really.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah. You lost some money just like everybody else in the country. Why do you want to push this?”

  The singer dropped his usual puppylike air. He actually seemed to be considering what he said. “Okay. Let’s be straight up, Charlie. You spent your life going to dangerous foreign places and doing complicated scary shit that only one out of a million people can do—why?”

  Charlie answered flatly. “I was serving my country.”

  “And I’ll bet when you say that people usually just kind of widen their eyes and say, Oh, wow, thanks, man! But, see, I think you’re laying back on me here a little bit, Charlie. I’m not doubting your patriotism, but you could have been in the Peace Corps and served the country. You could have been in the IRS. That’s like me saying I became a rock star because I wanted to give the world great music. I like singing, yeah. But I wanted the girls and the bucks and the excitement and the people standing on their chairs and fucking howling my name for an encore.”

  “I’m not sure I understand what you’re getting at.”

  “On some level, you wanted to do shit that would scare the crap out of most of us. Why? Because it makes you feel like your life is about something other than the mortgage and the bills and going to the supermarket and getting older. You wanted to do hero shit, not punch a time card. Am I right? Straight up, now.”

  Charlie nodded slowly. “There’s something to it.”

  “So, sure!” Harrington continued. “I could kick back and be reasonable about this dirtbag ripping off the world. It’s not my job to be, like, global policeman, and when you get screwed by someone rich, the deal is you kick back and accept it. But there’s a whole world of shit I don’t accept, Charlie. I don’t accept getting old. I don’t accept being a statistic. I don’t accept that my life means nothing. I don’t accept death. And I realize all that stuff may happen to me, but I do not accept it. And I don’t think you do, either. That’s why you’re still going for it at the age of … fucking a hundred and fifty, or however old you are! I don’t see you sitting in a rocking chair.” His face lightened. “And admit it, Charlie, you like the game. Fucking Modern Maturity!” He laughed, shaking his head. “Dude, you played me like a two-year-old!”

  Suddenly, Charlie couldn’t help laughing. He laughed for a while, and then he thought about Pete Harrington and started laughing all over again. The singer laughed with him, muttering, It’s true, man, like a child!

  When he’d settled down, Harrington clapped his hand on his shoulder.

  “It’s okay, Charlie. You’ve lived the life and reached an age when you’ve earned the right to do anything you want to do. You’re sacred, man. You really are. You want to drop me? That’s completely cool. A lot of other people have. But I will do this. Even if I have to learn karate from a fucking comic book, I will finish this.”

  “You couldn’t even finish your workout two days ago.”

  “That was then. Now I’m alone. It’s me against the fucking universe, and when it gets down to that, I say, ‘Universe! Me and you’”—he pierced the air with his finger—“‘it’s fucking on!’”

  Charlie smiled. For the first time, he actually liked Pete Harrington. He opened the door and stepped outside before turning back. No sign of disappointment on the singer’s face. He looked solid. Almost serene.

  “Keep training,” Charlie said. “I may just check in on you down the line.”

  “I’m already there. Trap and hit. A Precious Duck Flaps his Fucking Wings. I’ve got the faith, man. Even if you don’t.”

  Charlie nodded, then turned his back on Harrington and made his way through the underground garage to his car. Give him a couple of weeks. See how much he trained. See if it really was “on.” Then they’d find out who had the faith.

  5

  The House in Columbus

  It had been somewhere in southern Indiana. Near Columbus. He’d been looking for investors for Crossroads, to get it going, and he’d gone there to do a presentation to a man named Simon Schloss. Schloss had made a lot of money marketing a putty used in repairing dents in car bodies and had a global sales network that he ran from an office in Columbus. In Washington, D.C., inside men in the administration had just crushed efforts to regulate the secondary bond market, and those few who understood the ramifications knew that the gold rush had begun. Schloss knew that: he was a bald, fat, coarse man who’d built his auto-putty empire through a relentless marketing effort that had consumed two wives and the last thirty years of his life. He’d educated himself about finance and had scored enough small wins to risk a couple of million on the fund. Later, he’d multiply his money by a factor of seven and get out before the bust. He didn’t have expensive taste, and because he, Harrington, was the one asking for money, he didn’t have to pretend he did. They met at a modest restaurant near the highway whose menu Schloss had obviously memorized, and Harrington sold him the deal over a BLT on whole wheat and a cup of watery coffee in a white ceramic mug with two green pinstripes along the rim. Schloss left a ten-dollar tip and called his lawyer to have him prepare a memorandum of understanding. He left first to draft the papers and suggested Harrington take the scenic route back to his lawyer’s office in Columbus, along t
he old highway. He sketched it out on the back of the place mat and took off. While Harrington was in the bathroom the waitress crumpled up the place mat and threw it away.

  He started down the rural route. It had rained that day and the tires made a wet sound like radio static as he swooped through the corridor of cool air between the trees. It was autumn, and the big hardwoods were letting go of orange leaves and yellow leaves. The countryside was rural: old-looking little farmhouses and occasional smallish fields. What did these people do? Where did they work? Did they commute the half hour to Indianapolis? What crops could they grow in these fields that would make them enough money to live? How could they compete with the huge farms in Ohio and Iowa and California that measured their acreage in the hundreds? Red or white barns glistened in the wet gray air. Pickup trucks rusted quietly. Metal mailboxes: THE PRICES. THE MARTINS. There was something mesmerizing about the road and the feeling of people who weren’t at all attached to his world, or anything he knew of the world. This is how he’d thought of The Country when he was growing up, before everything around every city was a vast suburb of swallowed-up towns.

  He soon became lost. Schloss had mentioned Old Post Road, but when he actually reached it, he could no longer remember whether he was supposed to turn on it or cross it. He’d expected to see signs with an arrow pointing toward Columbus, but the poles only said Springdale Road and Old Post Road. Old Post Road. Old Post Road. He imagined a stage coach, a man in breeches holding a whip, the dark trees, the houses far apart. He thought the interstate lay somewhere close by, but he couldn’t see it.

  He saw a farmhouse nearby and decided to ask directions. He pulled the car into the long dirt driveway. The house looked old, with a wide porch, and as he approached he saw a panel of stained glass above the door that had probably been leaded by a German immigrant in the last century. The afternoon was fading, and the rain made it even darker, so even at four o’clock the windows of the house had a pale yellow light coming out of them. Off to the left stretched a long field, anchored by a red barn with wide-open doors and yellow leaves hanging from the rafters. What did these people do? Could they live simply by this one field? He rolled down his car window and waited to see if a hound would come barking out at him, but nothing happened, so he got out of the car. The driveway was hard but still muddy, and the mud looked yellow against his black leather shoes.