Heart of Palm (49 page)

“So, what’d you come up with?” Frank said. “What do you think, Mac?” he said, looking over Carson’s shoulder. “Do you think we have any recourse?”

Carson shook his head, laughed. This was so like Frank. Thinking he could go ahead and play dumb, cool as a cucumber, so at ease, so unruffled. Thinking he could ignore the obvious, go ahead and ask about Dean, the money, the bank, without a word about the fact that Carson had just found his wife here at Frank’s house.

Just like when they were kids. Carson always the one getting upset. Frank always cool, collected, calm. “You’re my rock,” Arla would say to Frank. And when she looked at Carson her eyes were worried, strained. They made him feel weak.

“Oh, Frank,” he said. He chuckled again. “You think I care about the money right now?”

Behind him, Mac cleared his throat, and Carson watched a muscle twitch in Frank’s face. Carson had forced his hand, finally. It was time to deal. Carson watched him, waiting.

“Don’t you always care about money, Carson?” Frank said.

Elizabeth stood up. “I’m leaving,” she said.

Oh, no.
No, no, no, no, no
. Not that easy. Not that clean.

Carson blocked her path at the top of the porch steps. “I think we need to discuss a couple of things,” he said. Raindrops dotted his shirt, his pants, the back of his neck.

“Let’s get in outa the rain, Carson,” Mac said, but Carson did not move, and Mac’s path to the porch was blocked.

“Are you okay?” Elizabeth said, looking at Carson. “You don’t look good.”

“Right. He looks better, right?” Carson gestured at Frank.

“No. I mean you don’t look well,” she said, annoyed. “Have you been drinking? Already?”

Her eyes were clear and defiant, and he could see through them to the part of her that felt she owed him nothing. But she was wrong. She owed him everything. The house, the car, the money, the clothes, the trips, the kid, the whole fucking
life
. She owed him everything. His chest tightened. The rushing in his ears grew louder. He pushed her back against the rocking chair, and she fell into it with a small sound.

He hadn’t known Frank could move so quickly. He’d always pegged him for such a measured S.O.B., so careful, so composed. Never got upset, never fell apart, never fucking
lost it,
like Carson himself was doing right now, losing it so fast and so hard and so completely that when Frank flew at him from the top of the porch Carson turned and went with the velocity of Frank’s launch, let the flight carry the two of them to the bottom step, into Mac, who toppled down behind them, and they fell, all three of them, down to the rough dust of the pathway, out into the steaming dirt where the rain had begun to fall in earnest now.

Mac rolled to one side, yelling.

“Damn!” he said. “Damn ya’ll Bravos! Quit!” But it was too late. Carson clenched his fist and connected it, hard, into Frank’s sternum, feeling the thick stop of his brother’s rib cage against his fingers. He watched Frank gasp, double over, but then straighten and pull together that steely strength of his. Where did he
get
it, the skinny shit? Frank regrouped quick enough to deal a glancing blow to the side of Carson’s face that would have taken out half his teeth had it been a direct hit. They clinched, spitting, pushing, cursing, grunting.

Carson brought his knee up into Frank’s midsection and watched him fall backward again, and he took this brief opportunity to catch his breath, but then Frank tackled him around his knees and brought him back down, and Carson was surprised at the ferocity of his anger this time. A thick smear of blood glossed Frank’s cheekbone. Carson pushed him back again, moved, half-crawling, toward the porch. Elizabeth was yelling, pissed off,
stop it stop it stop it
, and somewhere beyond the rushing in his ears the dog was growling, prancing around the two men, the two brothers. Elizabeth’s voice was thin, as if at a great distance, and Carson moved now with great focus, and time slowed down, and he felt in boundless control at that moment, in complete, utter command.

Something long was within his grasp, propped against the porch railing. A paddle from the kayak. Carson picked it up, didn’t think, just moved, and swung it hard, the long flat blade on the end slicing through the air in front of him, missing Frank by a hair. The rain fell in sheets.

“Carson!” Elizabeth screamed. “Carson!”

Mac jumped up from the yard, tried to step in front of Carson; he waved his hands frantically.

“Come on, man! Carson, man, come on!” Mac said, panicky, but Carson looked beyond him, saw Frank still panting, still staring at him in defiance. And then he took a step closer and swung the paddle harder, faster, brandishing it before him like he was a God-damned samurai, and there was nothing but chaos before him, Frank and Mac dancing, dodging in front of him, trying to evade him and stop him at the same time, but it was no use—when are you going to
learn
, brother? It was that last swing that did it, that connected, hitting with the thin hard edge of the blade rather than the flat rubber side, breaking the cartilage of the nose easy and clean, unleashing a torrent of blood and obscenities and still the shrieking, screaming hysteria of Elizabeth behind him and the barking of the dog. But there was something wrong; Frank was still standing. Mac was down.

“Fucking hell, man!” Mac screamed. “Jesus Christ!” He was sitting in the mud just off the porch steps, both hands to his face, rivulets of blood leaking between his fingers and down his chin and blending with rainwater. His glasses had fallen away somewhere in the dirt drive, and his blue eyes stared in shock, disbelief. “You broke my
nose
!”

Frank was frozen, staring at Carson. Elizabeth had her hands to her face, astonished, but then she came down off the porch, ran over to Mac, led him up to the porch and pushed him into one of the rockers.

“Stay there. I’ll get towels,” she said, and she ran into the house.

The rushing in Carson’s ears was gone now, had dissipated with the sound of Mac’s septum disengaging from his skull, the way his ears would clear suddenly when he was a kid and had been swimming too long and his ears filled with water, then he and Frank would jump sideways on one foot until the fluid dislodged. In place of the rushing was an empty, hollow sound, an echo of memories, a tidal wave of pain and guilt and fear.

“Leave him,” Frank said. “He can make it home.”

“Should we?” Carson said.

“Yeah.”

Elizabeth returned with towels and ice, and she knelt beside Mac, and then Carson felt like he was having a heart attack. He dropped to one knee in the muddy driveway, put his hands up to his head as the rain pelted his body.

“Oh, Jesus,” he said. “Oh, Frank, oh, Jesus.”

Frank walked over and sat next to him. He was still panting from the fight. His shirt was torn and his pants were covered in mud. The cut on his cheek was still bleeding. After a moment, he put a hand on Carson’s shoulder.

“Take a breath, man,” he said quietly, so Carson obliged, focusing on his respiration: in, out, in, out. Frank’s hand was warm on his shoulder. Elizabeth got up from the porch, started for her car.

“I’m leaving,” she said. Her voice was clipped, flat, and Carson had no idea what she was thinking. “They’re bringing Bell back to the condo, and I need to be there.” She stared hard at Carson and Frank. Carson wanted to touch her, but she walked past him to her car.

“You all need to take Mac in to the clinic,” she said, turning back once before climbing into the driver’s seat. And then she was gone.

They took two cars to the clinic. Mac sat in the passenger seat of Carson’s Acura with his head back and a pack of towels planted against his face to reduce the steady flow of blood. Frank followed in his truck. The rain was stopping, and a cloud of steam hung above the blacktop. Mac was quiet during the ride, save for some grotesque snuffling and a few muttered curses, and Carson tried to think of the right thing to say, the right way to apologize.

“You know it was an accident, right?” he ventured.

Mac didn’t answer, but he held his left hand up in Carson’s direction, his middle finger forcibly extended upward.

“Jesus,” Carson said. “I’m sorry, Mac.”

They turned right on Seminary and parked in the empty parking lot of the emergency clinic. Frank pulled in behind them, and they helped Mac, grunting and muttering, out of the car. He lowered the bloody towels away from his face.

“Holy God,” Frank said, looking at him. Mac’s nose was swollen to three times its normal size, and thick ropes of dried blood snaked downward across his face. Purple bruises had begun to form under his eyes.

“Don’d even dell me,” Mac said. His voice was comically nasal, some of his
t
’s and
n
’s devolving into
d
’s in a way that might have been very funny to them under different circumstances. “I can ondly imagine,” he said.

“I hope this place is open,” Carson said, looking around the empty parking lot. “Shouldn’t they be open all the time?”

“Did you brig your paddle?” Mac said. “You could break the door dowd.”

Carson didn’t answer. They walked to the front door which was, blessedly, unlocked, and they entered the tiny waiting room. Frank took a clipboard from the receptionist—who looked at the three of them skeptically—and they sat together on miniature metal chairs that seemed to have been made for schoolchildren. The woman had good reason for her reaction, Carson supposed, as he looked at Frank and Mac. They both looked like holy hell, bloodied and battered and still covered with mud from Frank’s driveway. He knew he himself didn’t look any different.

“I’ll fill this out, Mac,” Frank said. “Just tell me the information.”

“You know everything there is do know aboud me,” Mac said. “Except why I condinue to hang around you assholes. And I don’d even know thad myself. Just fill the damn thing oud,” he honked. “What you don’d know, make up.”

They sat quietly for a few moments, Frank scribbling on the form, and in the sudden silence the whole wave of trouble lapped again at the edges of Carson’s mind. He looked at Frank, and the bubble of anger that had led them all here to the clinic threatened, for a moment, to surface again, but then subsided, submerged, still whole, but somehow dormant, for the moment. He was just too tired. That was it. Jesus, he was just so tired. And too sick of everything. He looked down at his shoes, covered with mud and what was probably a fair amount of Mac Weeden’s blood. They were very nice shoes, soft chestnut leather. They’d cost a fortune, but he’d made the investment to buy a little confidence. He’d planned to wear these shoes to meet with Christine Hughes later this week. He’d planned to pay her off with the settlement from the house. He thought he’d settle everything, take care of everything,
fix
everything in these new, overpriced leather shoes. And now they were ruined. Huh. Things never, never turned out the way you thought they would, he decided.

Maybe that’s why, when the clinic’s interior door opened and two nurses emerged, supporting a limping, shuffling Dean Bravo between them, Carson was not even surprised.

“Hell’s bells,” Dean said. He smiled broadly at the nurses. “Look here, it’s my boys. Just park me over there with them, would you, darlins?”

The nurses collected the form from Frank and took Mac back into the exam room. Dean reclined awkwardly, painfully it seemed, across two of the metal chairs, his hands parked behind his lower back, his teeth clenched together. His face was pale. A nicotine patch was stuck to his forearm. A yellowed bruise ran down his jawline.

“What is wrong with you?” Frank said.

“I could ask you two the same thing,” Dean said. “You all look like you been rode hard and put up wet.” He looked them over appraisingly. “I’m guessing Mac lost. But who the hell won?”

They stared at him, not answering. Carson considered the irony of this situation. They’d not seen Dean since the morning of Arla’s death, when he’d lit out from the kitchen at Aberdeen and had headed, no doubt, toward a colossal bender fueled by the pent-up energy of what must have been, for Dean, an unprecedented near-month of sobriety. And now here he was, his month of good behavior and his stint at Aberdeen notwithstanding, in the exact same condition—beat up, gimped out, and hungover—that he’d been in when Carson had bailed him out of the hospital in August. Brilliant. And this was a man who now had six million dollars to his name.

“But me,” Dean continued. “I done threw the hip out again. That busted cheek—it keeps coming back to haunt me. I had a little trouble last night, I guess. There was a fish fry in South Utina. I seem to remember I made some folks a little mad for some reason.”

“You can do that,” Carson said.

“I’ve been told,” Dean said, and he smiled, but then the smile dropped away, and it was hard to tell if he was in physical pain or if it was something else, but his face clouded over and he looked from Carson to Frank with an expression that made Carson almost—
almost—
feel sorry for him.