Amy
I stood over her casket like one of those gargoyles you see
overlooking the people on a busy street; high up, cold and uninvolved. There was what
appeared to be a small scratch above her left eye that hadn’t been there only a
few days before. They'd done a good job with it. She had been the love of my life, as short as our time together had been. I'd known she was The One by a million tiny clues that came to me like butterflies, some alighting, some only to be seen from a distance. Yet
here she was, dead.
We’d met exactly 3 months ago to this very day. She was
electricity manifesting itself in those blue eyes… to say they were the color of
the Tahitian ocean is to compliment the Tahitian ocean. I remember people, usually men fishing
for a flirt, asking her if she wore tinted contacts. She always said the same
thing with a friendly but slightly ironic smile. “No, but I’ve heard of them.
Thanks for the compliment.”
On our first and only date I asked her if she was telling the truth.
She looked at me incredulously. “Of course, silly. You think I’d lie about
that? What would be the point?” Then she punched me in the arm.
When we first met she was a new bar tender at the bar where I spend some of my time. It's a biker bar, kind of on the edge of town. I’m not really a
biker although I have one. But I'm a freelance welder so I have lots of hardcore
biker friends. I couldn’t believe my eyes, the first time I saw her. What would
a girl like her be doing working here? I
mean, she looked like a Sports Illustrated model or something. Not just the
body, although she certainly had that, but her looks were, I don’t know, pure,
I guess. She looked too young to be in a bar. Not in years, necessarily, but in
demeanor, in manner. She didn’t look like any of the women my buddies and I
hung with that were her age, that’s for sure. Most of those women had leather
skin and steely eyes. Some could actually make themselves up and look ok, but
who they were, what they were, always shone through the getup. This new
bartender girl, I found out her name was Amy, she didn’t wear any makeup. She
didn’t need to. Her blond hair wrapped around her face,
almost hugging it. Her teeth were white. Her voice sounded happy, free from any care
in the world. I fell for her instantly in a way that I hadn’t fallen for anyone in a very, very
long time. She reminded me of what I wanted in a wife one day as a very young man, before I
started settling for other types. I remember sitting in a rear corner booth that night watching her, pool
balls cracking away behind me along with the general mayhem that's common there. I eventually drifted off to another memory of my childhood where I had passed a day away, daydreaming in a field under a blue sky. I remember a
feeling of contentment that I had then that was now almost foreign to me. I
realized that I missed that feeling of everything being right. I mean, I was just gone, lost in this memory. When I came to, she was standing in front of me.
“Can I get you anything?” she smiled.
I smiled back. I always, always, always ordered the same
thing. A shot of Pendleton and a Bud Light. I usually did this three
times a night, a couple or few times a week. Sometimes more, never less. But not tonight,
not now.
“Water,” I said, hardly believing my own words. “I think I’d
like a big glass of ice water.”
I remember her smiling at me like she was
proud of me, as if she had been waiting for me to say something besides
“Pendleton and a Bud Light” for years, centuries maybe. But I’d just laid eyes
on her for the first time that night.
“Coming right up,” was all she said, but her eyes were
laughing.
Another episode came not long after
that when we were all there partying. One of my biker buddies had just sold
something, making a ton of money. He was just throwing cash around. I didn’t
ask what he’d sold. I didn’t want to know. Could have been anything from a mess of drugs to a several bikes. But he had wads of $100 bills all
over, buying drinks. It got pretty rowdy, but I just sat in a corner booth, watching Amy. I began to wonder what she’d do
if it got much crazier. The women didn’t like her much, not the ones we hung
around with, anyways. They’d made that well known in the past couple weeks. They
were all there, partying too, and I wondered if one of them would eventually
tire of the guys at the bar gaping at her, elbowing each other, whispering
behind her back – sometimes so she could hear. I wondered if one of the girls
might try something stupid. Anyway, I was drinking, too. I mean, I’m no
angel…even God himself couldn’t get me to stop all drinking cold turkey. But I wasn’t
drinking much. I hadn’t since the first I’d spoken to her. I didn’t
know her but I knew I didn’t want her to see me drunk,
ever. At one point Sheila, this curvy, rough little Latino girl had shouted something rude at her and was glaring at her from across the bar. I knew it could escalate any minute, so
I got up and went over to where Sheila was standing.
“Oh Sheila,” I said, putting my arm around her and pulling
her tight in a big-brotherly one-armed hug, “why you gotta be such a badass?
You can see she’s hustling, can’t ya?”
Sheila pushed away, but not too hard. “She thinks she’s all
that, better than us. What the hell she doin’ here, anyways?” as she muscled
her way through the crowd. It was a question I’d asked about
a million times.
Amy made eye contact with me from the very full bar as
she turned to fill yet another drink order and mouthed, “thank you.” I swear my
heart skipped a beat. When we talked about that night on our date, our one date, she told me how scared and alone she’d felt, how
foreign this type of bar was to her, as much as she’d done in her life.
“Why'd you get a job there, then?” I'd asked her.
“I knew it would be something new. I just wanted to see what
it was like, I guess,” is what she said.
I guess Amy was just like that; jumping first, asking questions
later. Trouble is, she was good at it. Where she had jumped in her life, she
had landed upright, like a cat. Hitchhiking in Bosnia, trekking in Southeast Asia
alone, living for a month in a slum in Mexico City with a family whose daughter she’d met in Nicaragua. These are situations not without some
serious danger attached, but although she got in trouble on a few occasions,
she was always able to get out.
One day after she’d been there about six weeks, on a really
dead afternoon before the rest of the work crowd showed up, I asked her out.
She accepted immediately, as if she had been waiting for me to do it.
“Really?” I asked. “Just like that?”
“Sure!” she beamed on me like a full moon over a landscape. Sorry if that sounds over the top, but her smile was different to me. Anyway, we set a time,
but not really an agenda. She didn’t seem to care. I wish she would have. I
wish she’d had some idea that would have taken us on some different path, but
she didn’t.
Before Amy, I just went out with women who hung around us.
Since Amy was different from anyone I'd been out with for a long time, I wanted something different
for her. I asked my sister who’s a doctor in Boston what I should do on a
first date with a nice girl. She almost swallowed the phone.
“Why, you have a friend who’s gonna ask one out?” she
laughed good naturedly. I laughed too. I knew what she meant. Like I said, it'd been a
while.
“Just take her to a nice restaurant, somewhere you can talk
and get to know one another. Movies are too solitary, but maybe a sporting
event if she likes sports. Comedy clubs can be fun first dates as long as you
have an idea about what kind of comedy she likes. The main thing is to get to
know her a little. Ask her about her life. Sometimes just a walk along the
river is good. You’re still in Portland, right?”
A plan began to take shape.
A few mights later I picked Amy up at her apartment on the west side of Portland.
The alphabet streets are what they call them. They’re a bunch of old homes that
people have turned into expensive apartments. I’d done a little research. I
knew there was a nice little restaurant within walking distance of her house. It
was one of those beautiful Portland Spring days. A little warmer than it's been for a while, with blue sky punctuated with a few high clouds and every cherry tree in
the city blooming. The whole city seemed happy, content, like my daydream.
No one wasn’t smiling.
As we started walking, she took my arm, like you see in the
movies. It was like we’d done this a million times. Her arm against mine felt warm, radiant.
We were chatting like old friends, walking towards Serrattos, a little upscale Italian place. We sat down at a booth with my back to the wall like I always did. I could see the cherry blossoms and new leaves just starting on the branches outside. We got settled, ordered, and I did what my sister told me; I asked about her life.
That’s when I found out about Bosnia, Asia, Mexico City, other crazy
adventures. She’d had quite a life. Abandoned by her father and raised by her
saintly but overworked mother until she was 17, she grew up independent, an
only child in every sense of the phrase. We talked about her life through most
of dinner and a glass of wine when she asked about me, something I’d
dreaded almost from the moment I decided to ask her out.
I took a deep breath. "You sure you wanna hear this?" I asked tentatively. She nodded, almost solemnly, as if she already knew.
I started in, telling her how my father had also left us, but that’s
where the similarities ended. I was the youngest of five kids raised in
Brooklyn, all of us from different fathers that vanished as soon as we were
born, if not before. There was never a man in the house for any length of time until
my older brother Tony was 18, and he was only there for a few months until he
got picked up by the cops for beating up a guy. He'd almost killed him. I haven’t
seen him since. I got into fighting too, real early. I found I had a talent for
it. I could take a punch for sure, but I could really throw them. And I was a natural
boxer, not just a fighter. And then one day when I was about 12 one of my friends in my
neighborhood had shown me a throwing knife he had stolen from an army outlet.
We'd set up a target in a vacant lot, a piece of plywood left over from some
boarded up window. My friend couldn’t make the knife stick in the target. It
always just bounced off. But not me. I stuck that thing every time, right in the
center. My friend was pissed, but resigned; he traded it to me for some comics
I had laying around.
From then on, I told her, was never without my knife. I learned how to
sharpen it so it was always razor sharp. I took it to school, but I never
showed anyone, never even practiced where anyone could see. It was my bride. It was sacred to me. The older I got, the bigger my fights
got, but I never took it out of my pocket; but then I never needed to.
Eventually, some of the "bigger guys" that ran illegal businesses on my street took
notice of me. So the month I graduated from high school – barely - I started
helping them collect debts. I was really too nice of a guy for the work; I’d
seen enough pain in life to be the cause of more
of it. But I needed the money so I took a job for them here and there. One day I got in
a little over my head, talking tough to this young man who was not much older
than me in an alley. He’d been late on some payments to my employers. He had
part of the money, which I was advised to take before making him think twice
about even eating again before the rest was paid. Suddenly, around the corner
comes this hulking man. I recognized him as the brother of the man I
was “advising”.
I’d never had a gun drawn on me, not in all the years I’d
lived in Brooklyn, not with all the fighting I’d done, which was a miracle. But
sure enough, this guy was taking his hand out of his pocket and I heard a
hammer being pulled back as it rose.
It was pure instinct, I swear, but before he leveled the gun
at me my knife was in his chest. I threw it so hard the force of it hitting and
splitting his sternum backed him up against the brick wall while my guy ran off
into the darkness, leaving me a huge handful of bills, some of them large. Everything went into slow motion. His eyes were already
vacant. The gun hit the ground with a noise that seemed like a bomb going off in my ears. His
knees buckled while he held me in his eyes, the last human he would ever see.
His head hit the ground last, hard. I just stood there, my knees shaking. I had
just killed a man. I wobbled over to him, drew my knife out of chest. I almost
puked at the sound it made, the feel of pulling it out of his body, almost like
it didn’t want to come out, like it fed on him somehow. I wiped the knife on my
pants, carefully stowed it back in its case and then ran off, eventually making my way to Oregon.
"I never went back," I told her.
All at once, looking at her in terror, I realized I had told her all my secrets - even
the most dangerous ones. She literally had information that could kill me. I was appalled and my heart started thumping as I put my
head down, eyes wide. It had been like talking to someone I trusted, but I really only barely knew
her. But still, at the same time a warmth began to
spread in my chest that told me I hadn’t made a mistake that would harm me, that
she could be trusted with any and all of my secrets. But would it turn her off? Of course it
would, even if I could trust her. My heart sunk. I was staring at the table, waiting for her to tell me to
take her home. I’d never see her again except from across the bar at the
watering hole, I knew it.
Her silence got my attention. I looked up into swimming blue
eyes. She was crying. Had I disappointed her that badly?
“I’m sorry, Amy. I shouldn’t have told you that. I’m sure
that’s not what my sister meant when she said we should get to know one
another. I… I’ve never told anyone that stuff. It could get me killed,
actually…”
“Oh, Mark…” she whispered, “you’ve been through so much.”
She reached across the table and touched my arm. “Your secret’s safe with me.”
She paused. “I don’t know, really, why it doesn’t matter to me, but it doesn’t.
I feel something with you, I did the first time I saw you. I feel like we have
done this before, even though you're new
to me. You know, men have always been something like satellites in my life. I’ve never
allowed any to get too close. Even when I’ve had a relationship, I always kept
them at bay to an extent. I don’t want that with you." She paused, looking suddenly unsure. "I’m sorry if that seems too odd, too forward.”
We looked at each other. She looked
relieved and I’m sure I looked the same. It’s a cliché,
but it really was like it was only she and I in the whole world for that
instant.
Just then, movement from behind her caught my eye. I saw a leaf fall. It was light green, silhouetted, backlit and neon bright in the glare of the exterior lighting of the restaurant. It was like a shooting star, but it was only a leaf. Why would such a young leaf fall?
She broke the silence by asking more about my life once I
got to Oregon. I told her about a few stumbles I’d had with the law, my choice
to get into a trade school to learn how to weld, some Buddhist guys that helped me through some rough
times. But what she really wanted
to know about was my knife-throwing. I told her about the contests I’d won,
both official and some pretty entertaining unofficial ones. She laughed when I told her my nickname
was “Nevermiss Mark” and that it had been given to me by my current biker buddies.
In a shy voice, almost a whisper, she asked to see my knife; the same one I had traded for so many years ago. I
actually hesitated. This would be a more intimate act than anything I could
think of. It had never been shown for any reason other than to use in a contest or the occasional bet. I even sharpened, oiled and practiced with it in private. After all, it had
taken a life and had a seeming life of it's own. Almost like it had borrowed one.
I took my knife from it's case on my belt and laid it on the table. It looked like a man; a man that is inherently evil, only benign when he is asleep. Those thoughts crossed my mind for the first time, right then. I frowned and pushed them aside as I looked at her.
To her credit, she didn’t ask to hold it. That would have
been too much, somehow. She just looked at it, and looked back at me with
gratitude.
“Thank you, Mark. I know the knife means a lot to you. More
than I could ever know, probably.”
I nodded and put it away. Something felt permanently shifted
in my world. This was one hell of a first date.
It was getting late. It was that time when it
either turns into a real late night or you take her home a little earlier than
you would have liked. Either way, it was time to leave the restaurant. The bill
had been paid well over an hour ago, we were the last ones in the place and I
could see some of the employees starting to look at their watches. We got up
and walked out.
At the exit we could either turn left towards
her apartment or right towards my car that would take us to a nice walk along
the river, among the cherry blossoms. A full moon shone on us, almost
metaphorically.
She looked at me, questioningly, with trust. It was the most
beautiful thing I had ever seen.
“Can I drive you to the river? We can take a walk...”
“Sure, I’d love to,” was her smiling reply.
We got there in a matter of minutes. I felt fortunate, like we had just happened on something of
great worth. I was going to take every lesson I’d ever learned in
relationships, in life, and use them to build something for her. I didn’t say
any of these things of course, but I felt them. And, strangely, I felt them
reflected back at me, an unheard conversation.
We got out of the car and started walking. It was getting
late, almost 11 o'clock. But we walked along,
smelling the sweet blossoms, noticing the moonlight reflected back on the
river. When we walked under an overpass that was generally a safe enough place
to be, I heard him behind me. It happened so suddenly.
“Give me whatcha got, bitch.”
My heart leapt and I wheeled around to a fist in my face.
The ground seemed to lift straight up vertically, and hit me again. It was a
fraction of a second before I realized the ground had not risen, I had hit the
ground. Hard. I heard Amy scream and saw as I began to rise another man grab her
from behind. This was not happening. No way.
Every fight I had ever been in came to bear in that
instant. I moved so fast, the guy that hit me didn’t have a chance. I closed
both his eyes and started working over his kidneys and liver with powerful
punches that would have broken my hand if I had hit anything else.
He cried out, trying to scramble away on all fours. I gave
him one more kick that probably broke two more ribs and made sure he was going
before turning my attention to the man that held my girl. My Amy.
He had a knife to her throat.
“Back off, man…” his voice quivered. He held my girl tightly
with one filthy hand, his knife to her throat with the other, his misshapen head
touching her perfect one as he gazed maliciously at me. They were about 10 feet
away. I’ll never forget her face, as long as I live. Trust, fear and hope…all in
those perfect blue eyes.
The knife was out and in the air in an instant.
I missed.
