Motherless Brooklyn

He clapped me on the shoulder, and I clapped his shoulder in return, feeling the shoulder pad in his suit, the tight seam at the sleeve. Then I tugged loose of his embrace, meaning to go, but it was too late. I had to make the rounds and touch the others. I started around the table, clapping each perfectly tailored shoulder. The men of Fujisaki seemed to take it as an encouragement to tap and poke me back while they joked with one another in Japanese. “Duck, duck, goose,” I said, quietly at first. “Otter, otter, utterance.”

“Monk, monk, stooge!” I said, circling the table faster, cavorting. “Weapongrass duckweed!”

“You go now,” said the scowling paddle-wielder.

“Eat me Fujisaki!” I screamed, and whirled out the door.

The second boat had returned to the dock. I went back through Yoshii’s parking lot and down the hill to have a closer look. Smoke still plumed from Foible’s shack; otherwise the scene on the fishing pier was completely still. Perhaps the captain of the boat had joined Foible inside the shack for a drink from a new bottle of gin, on my twenty. Or maybe he’d just gone home to bed after a day’s labor that had started at three in the morning, Urchin Daylight Savings time. I envied him if he had. I crept past the shack, to the other side of the pier. From what I could see the ferry landing was empty too, the boat itself out at the island, the ticket office closed until the late-afternoon landing. The wind was picking up off the ocean now and the whole coastal scene had a bleak, abandoned look, as though Maine in November really belonged to the ragged gulls who wheeled over the sun-worn pier, and the humans had just gotten the news and taken a powder.

It was farther on, in the tree-shrouded parking lot, that I saw something move, a sign of life. I went silently past the ferry landing to a place out of the harsh angled brightness so I could peer into the shadow and distinguish what the something was. The answer was the giant. He stood between his car and Tony’s squinting in the wind and dappled sunlight and reading or at least staring at a bunch of papers in a manila folder, something out of the L &L files perhaps. In the minute that I watched he grew bored or dissatisfied with the papers and closed the file and ripped it in two, then two again, and walked across the lot to the edge where the pavement was divided from the sea by a wide margin of barnacled and beer-canned boulders. He hurled the torn quadrants of the folder in the direction of the rocks and water and the wind whipped them instantly back to flutter madly past him and disperse across the lot’s gravel and into the trees. But he wasn’t finished yet. There was something else in his hand, something black and small and shiny, and for a moment I thought he was making a call. Then I saw that it was a wallet. He rifled through it and moved some folding money into his own pants pocket and then he hurled the wallet, too, with more success than he’d had with the papers, so that it arced over the rocks and possibly reached the water-I couldn’t tell from my perspective, and neither, I think, could the giant. He didn’t appear particularly worried. Worry wasn’t in his nature.

Then he turned and saw me: Laugh-or-cry Edgelost.

I ran the other way, across the ferry landing and the fishing dock, toward the hill, on top of which sat the restaurant, and my car.

The huff of my own exhausted breath, pounding of blood in my ears, squall of a gull and shush of the surf below-all were overtaken by the squeal of the giant’s wheels: His Contour scaped into the restaurant lot just as I got my key into the ignition. His car barreled toward mine. The cliff was near enough that he might push me off. I revved into reverse and jerked my car backward out of his path and he skidded sideways to stop, nearly slamming into the nearest of the parked pickup trucks. I floored it and beat him back out of the lot, down onto Route 1, pointed south. The giant fell in right behind me. In my rearview I saw him bearing down, one hand on the wheel, the other gripping a gun.

Minna and Tony-I’d let them both be gently escorted to their quiet murderings. Mine looked to be a little noisier.