Blow Fly

39

IT IS ONLY eight p.m. in Boston. Pete Marino sits at the US Air gate, eating chocolate-dipped pretzels and listening to another apologetic announcement that promises his flight will depart after another minor delay of only two hours and ten minutes. This is after an earlier delay that has already held him hostage in Logan Airport for an hour and twenty-five minutes beyond his scheduled departure.

"Shit!" he exclaims, not caring who hears him. "I coulda walked by now!"

Rarely does he have plenty of time to ponder his life, and he thinks of Benton and diverts his misery and rage by focusing on Benton's physical conditioning and hard, manly body. He looks even better than he used to, Marino depressingly decides. How can that be possible after six years of what amounts to solitary confinement? Marino can't comprehend it. He starts on a brownie from the basket of Delicious Desserts of Gainesville that he happened upon in the airport gift shop and wonders what it would be like if he quit working for Lucy, just gave up going after dirtbags. They're cockroaches. Squash one, and five others take its place. Maybe Marino should go fishing, maybe become a professional bowler (he almost had a perfect score once), find him a nice woman and build a cabin in the woods.

Once, very long ago, Marino was admired, too, and the mirror did not hate him. Women-and men, he supposes with confusion and disgust- stare at Benton and lust for him. Marino is certain of this. They can't resist him when added to his good looks are his brain and his big-shot FBI status, or, more accurately, former FBI status. Marino pushes back strings of gray hair and wakes himself up to the fact that people don't meet Benton anymore and know his real name or admire his former FBI career. He is supposed to be dead or Tom or nobody. That Scarpetta could miss Benton so much causes Marino a sick pain somewhere around his heart and topples him into deeper despair. He hurts deeply for her. He hurts deeply for himself. If he died, she would grieve, but not forever. She has never been in love with him, never will be, and doesn't want his fat, hairy body in her bed.

Marino wanders into another gift shop and snatches a fitness magazine off a pile on the floor, an action as foreign to him as Hebrew. Men's Workout has a handsome young man on the cover who looks as if he's cut of smooth stone. He must have shaved his entire body except for his head and polished his tanned skin with oil. Marino returns to a nearby sports bar, orders another Budweiser on tap, finds his same table, brushes off pizza crumbs, and sets down the magazine, somewhat afraid of opening it. He finally musters the nerve to pick it up, and its slick cover sticks to the table.

"Hey!" Marino calls to the bartender. "Anyone ever wipe off a table in this joint?"

Everyone in the bar stares at Marino.

"I just paid three-fifty for this watered-down beer, and the tables so disgusting, my magazine's sticking to it."

Everyone in the bar stares at Marino's magazine. Several young men nudge one another and smile. The annoyed bartender, who would have to be an octopus to keep up with orders, tosses a wet bar towel to Marino. He wipes off his table and tosses it back, almost hitting an old woman in the head. She sips her white wine, oblivious. Marino starts flipping through his magazine. Maybe it isn't too late to reclaim his masculine plumage, to have muscles he can flex like a peacock fanning its tail. As a boy in New Jersey, he made himself strong from chin-ups, push-ups and maniacal repetitions with free weights he constructed from cinder blocks and mop or broom handles. He lifted the rear ends of cars to work on his back and biceps, clutched a laundry bag filled with bricks while doing squats or running up and down stairs. He boxed with laundry drying on the clothesline, always on windy days when the clothes and linens fought back.

"Peter Rocco! You stop fighting with the laundry! You knock it in the dirt and you get to wash it!"

His mother was a meshed figure behind the screen door, hands on her hips, trying to sound severe as her son's savage right hook yanked one of his father's wet undershirts from wooden clothespins and sent it sailing into a nearby bush. As Marino got older, he wrapped his fists in layers of rags and threw wicked punches at an old mattress he kept in the crawl space beneath the house. If it was possible to kill a mattress, this one died a thousand times, propped up against the porch, its ticking finally ripping and its dry-rotted foam rubber disintegrating with each blow. Marino scavenged neighborhood trash piles for discarded mattresses, and he battled his stained obtuse opponents as if he hated them for some unforgivable sin they had committed against him.

"Who you trying to kill, honey?" his mother asked him one afternoon when he was dripping with sweat and wobbly from exhaustion and flinging open the refrigerator door for the ice water his mother always kept there. "Don't drink out of the jug. How many times I gotta tell you? You know what germs are? They're little ugly bugs crawling out of your mouth right into the jug. Don't matter if you can't see 'em. Doesn't make them any less real, and those very germs are what gives you and everyone else the flu and polio, and you end up in an iron lung and…"

"Dad drinks outta the jug."

"Well."

"Well what, Mom?"

"He's the man of the house."

"Well, ain't that something. Guess he ain't got little ugly bugs crawling out him like everybody else, since he's the man of the house. Guess he don't give a rat's ass who ends up in an iron lung."

"Who you fighting out there when you beat up the mattress? Fight, fight, fight. You're always fighting."

Marino buys another beer and consoles himself with the thought that the male models in the workout magazine are not fighters, because they have the flexibility of a rock. They don't dance on their feet, boxing. They don't do anything but lift iron and pose for photographers and poison themselves with steroids. Still, Marino wouldn't mind having a stomach that looks like moguls in a ski run, and what he wouldn't give for his hair to come home to his head instead of continuing its relentless migration to other parts of his body. He smokes and drinks to the noise of a basketball dribbling, shoes squeaking and crowds yelling on the big-screen TV. Loudly flipping through a few more pages of his magazine, he begins to notice advertisements for aphrodisiacs, performance enhancements and invitations to skin parties and strip volleyball.

When he reaches a centerfold of hairless hunks wearing G-strings and fishnet bikini briefs, he slaps the magazine shut. A businessman sitting one table over gets up and moves to the other end of the bar. Marino takes his time finishing his beer and gets up and stretches and yawns. People in the bar watch him as he makes his way toward the businessman and drops the magazine on top of his Wall Street Journal.

"Call me," Marino says with a wink as he saunters out of the bar.