Tonight there had been no expectation of fighting but instead a birthday party for Hector, which Smitty always threw for a small group of the regulars. None of them much liked marking such mile-stones-who needed reminding of the advancing years and, in their cases, the wayward trajectories, the diminished expectations?-but the beer flowed freely from the taps and Smitty poured plenty of shots on the house and more often than not everyone ended up shoulder to shoulder along the curved end of the bar, happily wrecking some sentimental song.

The evening, however, had started somewhat inauspiciously; early on, before Hector showed up, a stranger had come in asking after him. When Hector arrived, Smitty took him aside and pointed out the tall man in the dark suit sitting stiffly in the middle booth. The man wouldn’t say what he wanted. Hector immediately figured it was about the gambling debts of his employer and friend, Jung; last week Hector had put himself between Jung and some baby-faced thug-in-training and without thinking it through grabbed the kid’s throat when he threatened to maim Jung’s kids. There were some things one should never say. The kid turned purplish and from the smell half-shat his pants and had practically crawled out of Jung’s office in the mini-mall. Why the sports book would now dispatch an older accountant-looking fellow to accost him confused Hector, but he didn’t hesitate when the stranger suddenly approached him, catching this one by his tie and collar, if only to get a better fix on things. The man gasped something through his contorted cheeks and when Hector relaxed his grip he was able to cough out “June Singer.” At first it meant nothing, but then the man said, “She said to tell you, from the war. She wants to see you. June, from the war.”

June, from the war.

As if he could forget from where.

Hector didn’t really hear any of the rest, pushing away from the man as if he’d heard a dooming spell, and Big Jacks quickly stepped in and ushered the man out.

Hector asked for a drink and Smitty gave him a double and then another and anyone could see not to ask him any more about it. It was too still and Connolly asked aloud if there was going to be a party anytime soon and Hector said let’s go and there was a shout of assent. Smitty then lined up on the scarred walnut top of the bar fifty-five jiggers of Canadian whiskey, one for each of Hector’s years, and the whole gang and Dora and some underage rich kids come slumming from Alpine (whom they didn’t actually mind) finished them in a relay, Smitty and then Dora especially insisting Hector step to and fro to take every fifth shot, which he did, as always, without word or sigh or gasp. Just sipping cool tea. Though tonight he was moving faster, as though he were filling a bucket poked with holes. He was locally famous for the ease with which he performed such feats. He was in prime form tonight. He kept hearing the stranger’s words and he grew thirstier. And so he helped himself, as he’d done all his adult life, even as he couldn’t really get drunk the way others got drunk. Unlike his father or cousins or anyone else in the Brennan line, Hector was a great drinker, maybe a historic drinker, he could drink as if his body were not a vessel but a miraculous device of filtration, a man layered inside with charcoal and sand.

Dora was not similarly constituted, and after a few shots of the whiskey she resumed drinking the jug wine Smitty stocked just for her and didn’t seem unduly affected until later, when she said “Hey-ya” to Hector outside the john and leaned into his arms and blacked out for a good half-minute, her hair smelling to him of cigarette smoke and riverside nettles and the fish fry she’d surely had for dinner. There was no women’s toilet at Smitty’s and the one stall was where Dora and the few other women who wandered in had to go. He stood there, propping her up with his hands girding the soft flesh of her back, and to his comrades at the bar it must have looked as if he were fancying a dance. But it wasn’t solely Dora he was thinking of, or even the many satisfactions of female grace. It was certainly not June, whom he had never wanted to lay his hands upon. In truth it was another woman, whom he had not pictured in what seemed a lifetime, a woman June could tell of and probably would, a recounting that would only bring him misery.

But he was done with misery, yes? It was his birthday, and here was sweet Dora in his arms, a faint smile breaking though her boozy fade-out. When she came to she righted herself and said, “Thanks for catching me.”

“I was here.”

She brushed her temple with the back of her hand. “That’s never happened to me before.”

Hector nodded, even though he was sure the statement was almost certainly untrue.

He said, “It’s real late.”

“Even for you?”

“I’m okay.”

“You don’t say that like you believe it.”

He didn’t reply, instead just leaning her against the wall where the pay phone used to be, the dirty pocked surface scrawled over with expletives and fake phone numbers and the hasty, anatomically exaggerated drawings that gave no quarter to anyone’s sense of decency or beauty.

“I was wondering something,” she said.

“What’s that?”

“How come you’ve never asked me out?” Dora said, crossing her arms in mock offense. She might have been conscious again but she was still quite drunk, and while the coquettish pose would have normally turned him off, there was a melancholy thrum in her voice that made the question seem much weightier than simply whether he was interested in her or not.

“I don’t know.”

“Have those meatheads said stuff about me? Been talking big? Because I’ve never been serious with any of them, if you know what I mean.”

“I know what you mean,” Hector replied. The fellows had of course talked big, as fellows will, and with enough bluster and shine to make clear to him that Dora was something of an old-fashioned girl.

“You have a girlfriend at another bar?”

“I only drink in this lousy place.”

“Then you must not think I’m pretty.”

He did think she was pretty (she was at least as pretty as any man should hope for), and he told her this by meeting her eyes for a good long beat. And then he leaned in and kissed her, and she kissed him back, his whiskeyed lips sweetened by the cheap wine she’d been drinking.

“Will you escort me home now?” she said, almost brightly, as though she were starting a fresh conversation.

“I don’t have a car. I can walk you, though.”

“That’s fine.”

“I’m not about to carry anybody, just so you know.”

“Don’t be a wise-ass,” she said. “I’m okay now. I just don’t like walking around this neighborhood alone at this hour.”

“Nobody does.”

“Well, worse things can happen to me than you.”

“That’s what you think,” he told her.

“Look, buster, do you want to argue the rest of the night or go?”

“I’ll go.”

They left the bar to the burbling music of his teasing chums and a toast from Smitty (who drank only ginger ale) and he followed her lead and they walked north past the immense concrete support blocks of the George Washington Bridge. It was past three in the morning but not at all quiet as they were buffeted by the welt-welt-welt of the traffic above them rolling over the expansion joints of the elevated roadway. They walked in the middle of the empty street; there was no provision for pedestrians because there was no reason for such provision. Hector liked this upward perspective on the great structure, preferring it to the vista from across the river along the West Side Highway, where one took in the postcard grandeur of the lighted span, this perfected example of human yearning and accomplishment. But he best understood the rather humbling view from below, here between its massive, inglorious feet, where one was just a minor creature skirting about its shadowed trunks.