“Have you . . . spoken to . . . Uncle about this?” Mr. Q. asked.
“Of course not,” Dexter exclaimed, grateful for the shrieking canner to mask his astonishment. Could Mr. Q. possibly think him stupid enough—disloyal or crazy enough—to talk to the feds without his blessing?
Mr. Q. covered the flame, and the cacophony collapsed into silence so profound that it made Dexter want to pop his eardrums.
“Trouble is,” Mr. Q. breathed, “you open a channel . . . now it exists. Hard to regulate what . . . passes through or . . . what direction it . . . moves.”
Dexter said nothing. What the hell was he getting at?
“This may be your . . . blind spot.”
Kerrigan. It was the first allusion Mr. Q. had made to that mistake since assuring Dexter it had been forgotten. Apparently, it was not forgotten.
And now his boss was holding Dexter’s cheeks, his hands soft and clumsy and full of blood. “We have many plans in our future,” he said. “Many, many plans.”
Dexter went rigid. There was a code to Mr. Q.’s utterances: repetition invoked a law of opposites. “Many plans,” uttered twice, meant: not this plan.
“Many plans,” Mr. Q. said again, drawing out the words as he gazed tenderly into Dexter’s eyes.
No plans.
Meetings with Mr. Q. hewed to a stealthy efficiency, and Dexter found himself outside the front door just moments later. His boss embraced him as when he’d first arrived, affection undiminished—magnified, even. He favored Dexter, adored him. Dexter knew this.
“Ah! Slipped my . . . mind,” Mr. Q. said, knocking his forehead with the hull of his hand. “How many . . . ripe tomatoes you . . . had this week?”
“They haven’t any taste,” Dexter mouthed. He was trying to absorb what had just happened. He stood on the porch while his boss disappeared back inside the house. Weak sunlight glistened on piles of shoveled snow. The local children played far away from this block; aside from the bawling of Mr. Q.’s livestock, there was no sound but distant harbor noises. Mr. Q.’s horse cart was parked at the curb. He still used it to deliver produce to his store—a rarity nowadays except for milkmen, who’d yet to find an automobile that would advance to their next stop while they delivered bottles at the last.
Eventually, Mr. Q. returned and pressed a small brown bag full of ripe tomatoes into Dexter’s hands, along with a jar of peach jam, unlabeled. If Dexter wasn’t mistaken, it was the very jam he’d helped his boss scoop into jars years before. Christ, how long did botulism prevention last? “Thank you, boss,” he said.
“Good to see you, son,” Mr. Q. wheezed. He leaned in the doorframe, gasping from his errand. It seemed to Dexter he’d declined markedly in the months since his last visit. In the bald winter light, he looked almost pale. “You should visit . . . more often. Come more . . . often. Don’t . . . leave an old man alone.”
Meaning: he’d exhausted his time with Mr. Q. for several months. Dexter took the fruit and preserves, kissed his boss on both cheeks, and walked to his car.
He drove with little idea where he was going. He wanted to think, but his need to move—to act—made it difficult to think unless he was driving. He was dumbfounded that Mr. Q. had rejected his idea out of hand. Had he really? Was that entirely clear? Was a wait of several months—the soonest he could conceive of returning unless asked—the same as a rejection? Had Mr. Q. fully understood what he was proposing?
He soon found himself at Coney Island, everything closed for winter, the clam and hot dog joints shuttered over. As a kid, Dexter had liked this time of year best; no more day-trippers. Just the people who lived here—or came, from all over, to eat at his pop’s restaurant.
He parked and climbed onto the deserted boardwalk. Coast Guard sentries patrolled the waterfront. Muddy brown waves shoved in from the Lower Bay against the snowy sand. He thought of his pop: a man with a passion to cook—to serve. Dexter had revered him until around the time his mother died, when he was fourteen. At that point his adulation had reversed itself without warning, yielding a caricature of his father as cringing and servile. Dexter couldn’t dispel it.
He’d said nothing to his pop about his first visit to Mr. Q.’s yellow house, but the memory of it lived in Dexter’s belly like a snake, luxuriantly rearranging its coils. When his pop had learned of it some months later, he’d yanked Dexter by the ear into his office, although by then Dexter was sixteen and bigger than his pop. His father stared at him, nostrils flaring. “This is the single thing on God’s earth I’ve most feared,” he said.
“More than Ma dying?” Dexter countered, wriggling his feet in the stiff new spats he’d been flush enough to buy.
“More.”
“More than going broke?”
“More. You take money from that man, you belong to him for life.”
“I’d rather take his money than give him mine.”
Such bald disrespect normally would have earned Dexter a cuff. But his pop leaned toward him urgently. “You’re not of age,” he said. “If you pull away now, he’ll let you go.”
“Pull away!”
“Do it now and do it clean. Put the blame on me.”
Dexter saw that his father was frightened—for him. And out of some crude wish to reassure him, he said, “Mr. Q. is an old man, Pop. He won’t live forever.”
His father slapped his face with such force that tears sprayed from Dexter’s eyes like juice from an apple smashed between the jaws of a horse.
“I’m not going to say don’t talk that way,” his pop said very softly. “Don’t think that way. Or he’ll guess it. He’ll sniff you out.”
“You don’t know him, Pop.” His voice shook.
“Mr. Q. has been around here a long time. I’ve seen people disappear like they were never born. One day to the next. You think I’m kidding? You think he’s an old man, helping his wife can the fresh fruit? Hah!”
“You’ve never met him.”
“One day to the next. And no one mentions their name. Like God never made them.”
“Maybe you should be careful.”
“I don’t take his money.”
“He might read your thoughts.”
“I’d tell him to his face.”
“You might disappear, Pop. You ever thought about that?”
He wanted his father to feel the magnitude of Mr. Q.’s power, his own comparative frailty. But his pop’s fear had gone, leaving only disgust. “Get out.”