Decker

One Continued

When a woman stands close enough to me that I can smell her hair rinse, the first thing I want to do is check her left hand for a wedding ring. And this girl's hand had five thin, wrinkle-free, naked fingers. Of course that could have been for any number of reasons. Could be she was married to some lug ain't got enough scratch to buy her a decent rock. But this woman's looks and shape suggested otherwise. What she had on the shelf wasn't going on no half-price sale.

"Humility's overrated," I told her.

"I think you're right there."

She did the shoulder shrug again; only this time our eyes didn't leave each other's. Something right there and then was telling me, Tom, this is trouble waiting to happen. But I went deaf to the little voice of reason that can guide a person in certain situations, like when to pull out of a poker game when you're ahead, or how to keep your mouth shut when a cop pulls you over. But then there are times when you just know you're feeling lucky, or you're sure the cop will take a bribe. And that's when you end up broke or with a fifty-dollar speeding ticket.

"You be needing anything else then, Miss, uh—"

"McKenna," she said. If the "Miss" wasn't right, she didn't bother to correct it.

"Irene McKenna," she added.

She looked around at the stock behind the counter as if looking for something that wasn't there.

"I'll need a drop cloth. A big one."

I looked behind me, and on the shelf where the nine-by-twelve drop cloths should have been was an empty space.

"Looks like we're out right now. But actually there's a shipment coming in a little later today, if you can come back."

There wasn't any shipment coming in, and I knew there were plenty of nine by twelves in the back room. I detected a tiny smile being hidden around her eyes and cheekbones.

"Oh darn," she said, almost childlike, like she was Shirley Temple missing a dance step. "I have other errands I have to get to. Maybe someone can deliver it to my house later today."

It didn't take a master chess player to figure out my next move.

"Yeah, I could probably drop it off for you after I get off."

"That would be sweet. Could you?"

"Sure, where do you live?"

She gave me an address in Oyster Bay, which didn't surprise me; there's all kinds of money in that town, old and new, and plenty of women like Irene McKenna to go around spending it. I told her I'd be there around five thirty.

"Oh, thank you so much, uh — "

"Tom, Tom Decker."

"Oh. Are you the owner?"

Which is what everyone thinks when first hearing my last name.

"No. I just work here. It's a long story."

The short version of which is that my family had owned the business for three generations, until my father had to give it up during the Depression. He had to sell it all — the building, the inventory, even the name — for just enough cash to keep my mother, him and me out of Hooverville.

McKenna held her hand out to shake and I took it. The warmth and softness traveled right up my arm, across my chest and rattled around there for a moment. She turned, and I watched those legs take her to the front of the store to the register, where she stopped and turned to look back and see me smiling right at her.

Soon after she left, the Connolly brothers walked in, needing paint. The two brothers, Ned and Billy, have been in the painting business for as long as I've known them, which is ever since I worked with them during summers in high school. They are older than me by nine or ten years. Billy, the older brother, is a towering man with a big face and a red nose in the middle of it. He likes to keep his hair crew-cut short and flat enough on top to balance any brimming stemware. He carries a big chest of good nature and speaks with a small, friendly roar. He always refers to me as "Tommy me boy," revealing his second generation closeness to the Potato Famine, and is as well meaning as he is large. Ned, born eleven months after Billy, has hair that was once red and a voice that has been shredded by cigarettes and whisky, making his words comes out with more air than meaning. He is a paler, thinner version of his older brother but clearly the head of the business.

Both men are World War II veterans and always eager to swap war adventures. Ned, a cook on a troop carrier in the Pacific, never tires of telling me how revolting it was to watch Marines eat, and I've lost count of the number of times Billy has showed me the scar on his neck from when he was literally clothes-lined chasing Germans through the backyards of some tiny, nameless village in Sicily. Billy always ends one of his stories with, "But heck, war is hell, ain't it, Tommy me boy?" waiting for me to reciprocate with a harrowing exploit of my own.

I never do.

"Two gallons of your finest Linen White exterior paint, Tommy me boy," Billy said, sounding like thunder one county over.

"Comin' up. You guys still working outside? Gettin' a little cold out there, isn't it?"

"A wee bit. But I'm sure it's nothin' like the cold Korea was, eh Tommy?" He opened up a grin on his rugged face, revealing the big gap between his two front teeth, and stood there like he had just hollered into the Grand Canyon and was waiting for his echo. He would have been delighted if I had told him of one of the moments that has been frozen into my memory since one frosty morning of December 1950 when I was on a squad-sized patrol walking point and the blankness of the snow-filled woods got to me and I became disoriented. The whiteness was all around, three feet deep on the ground, a white sunless sky above, tree branches bent over coated in ice, and the air all around me was filled with big, falling white flakes. I couldn't tell north from south, east from west. And if it hadn't been for the black tree trunks running perpendicular, I wouldn't have known up from down. The only thing heavier than the snow was the silence. The only sounds that came through to me were my own breathing and my footsteps crunching through the snow, which fortunately did not announce my coming, when I found myself twenty yards behind a machine-gun nest with three commie residents. I had stumbled behind enemy lines. Now what?

I finally started hearing something in the distance some hundred yardsbeyond the nest. I could make out the green forms of my squad approaching thekill zone of the Koreans' machine gun. The enemy saw my guys and went intoaction; the gunner slowly and as quietly as he could