As they climbed the street that rose and curled around the feet of the bridge, Dora’s pace slowed and she confessed to him that she didn’t want to go home just at the moment, that her apartment mate was a teetotaler and born-again and a too-light sleeper who would awake and harangue her with a sermon about her dissolute ways. He said he sympathized. Hector took her hand and hooked it onto his elbow, the rounds of birthday whiskey just now warming the back of his skull in such a manner as he could begin at last to feel that estimably sly speed: here was the sole effect he could fathom, the entire pleasure. Through the long career of his drinking he never came close to the sensation of oblivion but rather this small measure of an extra velocity, this slightest lifting.

The ripe scent of the river was like a two-day-old corpse and its fumes buoyed Hector all the more. Had an observer been up on the bridge’s catwalk peering down he might have noticed a levity in the gait of both as they strolled in the cottony warm autumn atmosphere the way any pair grown to middle life together would, her head braced just slightly against his still-square shoulder as he guided them up through the twisting narrow streets of Old Fort Lee, not long ago Jewish and Irish and Italian and now lighted around the clock like any street in Seoul or Shanghai with its flashing neon scripts and ideograms. He’d settled here more than fifteen years earlier, after kicking around the country, and getting kicked plenty in return, finally tired of the serial misadventure and wreckage, and this place as much as any other had seemed a good locale to sequester himself for the duration, a mostly working-class town with neighborhoods that looked much like those in Ilion, where you could reach out the bedroom window of the weather-worn houses barely hanging on to tidiness and just touch the fingertips of the neighbor girl who was doing the same. Maybe he liked Dora because she could well be that neighbor girl, all grown up.

Dora had begun to lean heavily into him, though more out of weariness than desire, but he didn’t mind at all. He liked her fleshy weight. Though he was nothing if not catholic in his tastes, he’d come to esteem such women, not plump ones necessarily, though that was fine, too, but women with a fullness of body, a certain density when they pressed against him, pleasing him on a deep animal level. She was now cooing something, too, and he asked her to repeat herself but then she suddenly pushed away from him and stepped off the road, down into the thigh-high grasses and weeds.

“Keep going,” she said, her words breathy and clipped. “I’ll catch up.”

He figured she needed to relieve herself and was impressed that she didn’t care about propriety and so heeded her but soon enough he could hear her gagging in the distance and he turned back to help.

But before he could he registered a huff of breath from a man charging him from the shadows. He was knocked to the ground. The man struck him on the head and ear with a huge, rocklike fist. There was a fierce succession of blows, the pain lighting his face and skull like a hot fireplace poker. And yet all this quieted him, too, instantly evoking his most special talent; Hector watched his own body leave him and step aside and take the man’s wrist and wrench it to an unnatural position. The big man then hit him with his free hand, hard, with a full and professional extension, the force pushing Hector back over the sidewalk and down the slope. Before he could get up the man hit him again, then again, the disciplined rhythm an unlikely anchor for Hector, and oddly catalyzing, for just as the man paused to catch his breath Hector got to his feet and began to return the blows, trading one for one and then soon enough only giving, until the hulking man was down on one knee as if he were on deck waiting for his turn at bat, which of course didn’t come. Hector worked him with the perfect rhythm of a machine, losing himself in his own unrelenting pace, the hard plate of the man’s face going to clay, and the thought crossed his mind that transmogrification was less a process magical than something geologic, pressure and heat still the most mystical forges of the realm.

Thus the flesh descends, back to simple terra.

“What do you want?” Hector rasped into the bloodied face, made unrecognizable by the gruesome sheen and the darkness. “What do you want?”

The fellow groaned miserably, unable to speak, his mouth full of spit and blood. Hector raised his fist again and the man trembled, covering his head as he lay curled up on the ground like a gargantuan shrimp. Hector recognized him now. It was Tick Martone, a former club boxer who was sometimes employed by the usual malign people to collect debts, et cetera, but who in fact was not a bad man at all. Toward the end of his fighting career, Tick became punch-drunk (he was only forty or so now) and got confused easily and sometimes even forgot where he was. In the weak moonlight his puffed-out, gourdlike cheeks looked alarmingly innocent, even adolescent, the sight enough to make Hector’s heart pause for a moment, resurrecting as it did the ugly memory from the Korean War, a war in which, for a long stretch afterward, he wished he had met his end.

Hector made him sit up. Tick wiped his bulbous nose and face with his shirtsleeve.

“What are you doing here, Tick? Why are you out making trouble for me tonight? It’s my birthday, you know.”

“Gee, I’m real sorry, Hector,” Tick said with genuine remorse, in his distinctively shrunken way. He had a miniaturized, lispy, birdlike voice. He had been a tough fighter in his prime, able to take a load of punishment and still hang on until his opponent tired, then step in close and deliver. His opponents couldn’t shake him off. Hence the name.

“I didn’t want to, because it was you, but I owe money to Old Rudy, just like that crazy gook, Jung.”

“Don’t call him that. He’s a pal.”

“Sorry, Hector. You know I don’t mean nothin’.”

“I know.”

Among other things, Old Rudy ran a sports book, one of the biggest ones in North Jersey. Physically he was still imposing and when younger had been known for his easy, almost casual, brutality. But it was his hooded, gray-eyed gaze that always spooked Hector, his long-fingered, sheet-white hands, as if the man were a bloodless ghoul, a reaper of low-life souls. He was in his seventies now, failing in body, but word was he was losing his mind, too.

“How bad were you supposed to hurt me?”

Tick was pinching the bridge of his nose to stanch the flow of blood and still could have talked but he wouldn’t answer, which to Hector meant on the serious end of things.

“Come on. Just because his errand boy soiled himself?”

“All I know is, Old Rudy wants it to come out of your hide. You’re supposed to pay Jung’s debt for getting in the way.”

“And if I don’t? Or can’t?”

“I dunno know, Hector. Nobody tells Tick nothin’. But, hey, don’t everybody know you two go back a ways?”

Indeed, they did. Like Tick and Jung, Hector owed Old Rudy, but it wasn’t money. It was a debt that he assumed he had more than paid off with the last fifteen years of working menial jobs like the one he had now; he was unable to get auto body or carpentry work on the big construction jobs in the nearby counties because of Old Rudy’s longtime ties to the mob. After a week or two on a job, Hector would be pulled off the site, no explanations, just a couple of days’ severance in cash and advice to not make a peep. Hector easily could have moved on, of course, to another region or state, started fresh, but didn’t a certain part of him want to punish himself, too, for the miserable fate he had brought on Old Rudy’s beautiful daughter, Winnie? She was yet another woman who had come to disaster by having relations with Hector, and he’d promised himself then that she would surely be the last.