A Thousand Pardons Read Online Free

looking at her ass again, and thinking about the difference between imagining what it looked like unclothed and remembering it) and he lifted his head just in time to receive the first blow right on the mouth. It was like being kicked by a horse. He couldn’t believe how much force was behind it. He intuited what was happening, mostly from the quality of Cornelia’s screams—she was trying to control the young man rather than plead with him—even though he’d had no idea there was any sort of boyfriend in the picture at all. He didn’t appear in Cornelia’s personnel file. His name, evidently, was Andy. Ben dropped to his knees and then felt a kind of splintering in the area of his nose before everything went white. The blows were all just one blow for a while, and then they had stopped. “No police,” he mumbled in a voice that didn’t sound like his own voice at all, and he opened one eye and sawthat there was no one there to hear him anyway; the corridor he viewed sideways from his prone position on the carpeted floor was empty, and both Cornelia and his young assailant were gone.
    His first thought, naturally, was to go back into the room, which was paid for. But the key card was not in his pocket. It was entirely possible that he had forgotten it on the dresser, or even that he had left it there on purpose since he’d thought they were checking out. It seemed too long ago to remember now. Avoiding all mirrors, he rode down to the lobby, bulled his way through the horrified stares of strangers and bellhops in the lobby, and ordered the doorman to get him a cab.
    “Sir?” was all the doorman was able to say.
    Ben gave up and barged past him, head down, into the back seat of the first cab he saw. “Thirty-eighth and Tenth,” he said. The cabbie was one of those who spent his whole shift talking incomprehensibly into a hands-free cellphone. He might have had Bigfoot in his back seat for all he knew or cared. Ben smiled, and immediately wished he hadn’t. Something was broken in there, or if not broken, then way too loose.
    The parking garage attendant at Thirty-eighth and Tenth was someone Ben had spoken to five afternoons a week for the last four years, and so the quality of the man’s reaction gave Ben a little bit better idea just how bad he must have looked. His lapels and shirtfront were brown with blood, that much he could see, but his new face was still a mystery to him. The attendant—Ben had tipped him a hundred bucks last Christmas but was suddenly unable to remember his name—stood there like a statue, pale and terrified, even though Ben’s mere presence should have made the fact that he wanted his car crystal clear without any further instruction. But the man’s fear of him brought home to Ben that his spectacularly fallen condition, paradoxically, lent him a certain fleeting authority, a license to say anything, and that gave him an idea. He pulled out his wallet and gave the attendant—Boris! that was the name—two fifties.
    “Boris, my man, go across the street,” he said as clearly and haughtily as he could, pointing to the liquor store directly across Tenth Avenue from the garage, “and buy me a liter bottle of Knob Creek bourbon. If they don’t have the Knob Creek, then Maker’s Mark.”
    And Boris did it, if only to get away from the bloodstained arm around his shoulders. When he returned, Ben took the bag from him and made an extravagant gesture of impatience, as if to say, And where the fuck is my car? Once that was accomplished, Ben climbed in and shut the door, stuck the bottle between his thighs and uncorked it, and began, for the very last time, his nightly commute home to Rensselaer Valley.
    He never made it, though he did get as far as County Route 55 just four and a half miles from his house, which under the circumstances was an impressive enough achievement. The trip from West Thirty-eighth Street to Meadow Close should have taken two hours at most; the extra hours were