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Curly is whipping toward the blonde’s booth while Larry and Moe keep Radford locked in their grip but now, seeing where Curly’s headed, Radford explodes. He hammers backwards with one heel against somebody’s shin and, with that opening breached, skillfully kicks his way out of their hold and now he goes after the three punks with the silent cold precision of a demolition ball. There’s no question of “fighting fair;” Radford swings a leg toward Curly at the booth, kicks Curly in the groin and flashes around to face the other two. He uses anything as a weapon—steel paper-napkin holder, table, bottle of ketchup, chair, his own hands and feet—this isn’t a neat clean choreographed thing. It’s a brutal fight; Radford fights dirty.
The blonde watches this, wide-eyed. Conrad and Gootch watch with clinical interest. Don the waiter stares, inscrutable. Charlie the owner comes from the kitchen scowling, drawn by the racket; picks up a kitchen knife and comes around the counter lofting his prosthetic hand, but by then the fight is over. Charlie is pleased with him—pleased for him. “O-kay.”
Radford has knocked the living shit out of all three tough guys.
Charlie says, “Finish ’em, C.W. Bust up their kneecaps.”
But the three are down, and Radford backs away.
Curly and Larry painfully pull themselves together and try to rouse the semi-conscious Moe.
Radford hardly even seems to be breathing hard. The scar on his face glistens with sweat.
Don the waiter fades back, disappearing silently.
The blonde seems to be looking for a way to sneak out without being noticed.
Curly and Larry help Moe outside.
Radford watches Conrad and Gootch as they cross to the door and exit.
Outside on the street, the redheaded dealer appears from shadows while Conrad flicks his cigarillo into the gutter; he and Gootch get into their van. This time Conrad takes the wheel (it’s his van). He says to his companion, “That’ll do it. They do a background, they’ll find out he just about beat three guys to death.”
Inside, Radford looks out through the cafe’s big picture window at the three punks who’re staggering away down the sidewalk. His attention is drawn to the van when its engine revs up. What he sees, reflected in window glass, is a puddle behind the van. In the puddle he can see an upside-down backward reflection of the van’s license plate—a reflection within a reflection. The plate number is 7734 OL, and seen upside down and backwards it reads quite plainly “To hell.” Even Radford may remember that …
The van drives away, rippling the puddle, destroying the image.
The blonde comes toward Radford’s shoulder. “Hey, I really—I’d like to …”
Ignoring her, he carries his mop back toward the kitchen.
Mystified, the blonde looks at Charlie. “He always so sociable?… What’s his name?”
“Radford. C. W. Radford.” Charlie shrugs, smiles and goes away toward the back, where he finds Radford washing out the mop as if nothing had happened. Charlie takes out roll of cash, peels off some, tucks them in Radford’s shirt pocket. “All right. Take the night off, will ya?”
Radford’s only acknowledgement is to hang up his apron and head for the back door out.
Charlie says, “See? You can still take care of yourself. Think about it, C.W.”
Radford doesn’t look back; he opens the door and goes out.
Outside as Radford trudges away from Charlie’s, the redheaded dealer intercepts him. “Hey, my man. You was pretty cool back there. This mornin’ and now those guys. You want to buy?”
Radford shakes his head “no” and walks on.
A car approaches him from behind. Its headlights throw his long shadow ahead of him. It seems ominous because of the slow pace with which it catches up to him but he only glances at it—particularly at its rent-a-car plate holder. The car paces him. Then its window opens and we see it’s the blonde who’s driving.
“You never gave me a chance to thank you.”
“Wasn’t looking for gratitude.” Radford’s voice sounds rusty, as if from disuse. Then he looks directly at her. “Lady, it’s three in the morning and this is no neighborhood to go driving around with your windows open.”
“I know. I’d feel ever so much safer if you were in the car.”
He looks back over his shoulder. He can’t be sure—is that slow-moving shadow back there the same van as before?
He keeps walking until the woman guns her car forward and pulls into the curb to block him. She gets out and confronts him.
He says, “Uh-huh?”
“You restored my faith—I was starting to think chivalry was dead, or at least traded in on a second-hand Toyota … That’s a pun, son. Not even a chuckle?”
She opens the passenger door. After a beat, with no break in expression, Radford gets in the car.
When she shuts the door on him Radford glances at the door’s wing mirror. The van’s still back there. Pinpoint glow of a lit cigarillo.
The blonde gets into the car beside Radford, behind the wheel, but before she puts it in gear she leans close and gives him a deeply questioning look. She runs her hand along his coarse beard stubble. “C. W. Radford. That what you call yourself?”
“Mostly I don’t call me at all.”
“Me, I’m A
It doesn’t inspire a response in him.
She says politely, “It’s Hartman. A
“All right.”
In the streaming hot water of A
And then in her bed he’s clean and shaved and mostly ignores the woman while very gently she explores his many injuries. “All these scars—kind of sexy.”
Through slitted lids his eyes explore the room. It’s a stodgy furnished flat on the ground floor of an apartment court, impersonal as a hotel room. She says, “Where’d you get ’em?”
“What? The scars? Place called Kurdistan.”
A
A
On the pillow he rolls his head back and forth in pain. Then he hears the woman approach—her voice growing louder: “C.W.? Hey—you okay?”
A
“Nothing.”
“You can’t think about nothing.”
“Yeah,” he says. “You can. You can teach yourself to do that.”
“Why would you want to?”
He’s thinking about that detention camp on the northern border of Iraq—primitive; stark. Watchtowers. Tangles of barbed wire. Prisoners dying slowly in filthy rags, Kurds mostly, a few volunteers from Kuwait and Armenia, and two gaunt Americans, one of whom is himself, Radford, just a kid then really, covered with suppurating bruises and cuts, and the other of whom is Charlie the cook—also that much younger, and even more beat-up—with a bloody stump, hardly staunched with rags, where his hand used to be.
She brings him back from that camp. She bends down gently to kiss his scarred forehead.
He says, “Lady, don’t waste sympathy on me. I broke.”
She doesn’t quite understand.
“I talked. You know? Went on the telly … Iraqi TV.”
And in the black-and-white TV monitor in his mind he can see his whipped young self speaking straight into the camera with lifeless calm. He says to A
She’s stroking him. “I see.” Then she says, “No one can blame you for wanting to stay alive.”