The Astral by Kate Christensen Read Free Book Online Page A

to me was muttering under his breath, something in Polish I didn’t catch but that was not, I was guessing, his mother’s recipe for stuffed cabbage. And he was shifting on his stool in a way that made my hackles rise. If he had taken a dislike to me, he was welcome to it, as long as he kept it to himself.
    Feeling a little better than I had fifteen minutes before, cheered by the doughnut girl and sugar and grease and the warmth of this little place and the rumbling, incipient violence to my left, I finished my cruller and began on my chocolate doughnut. I motioned to the girl and then to my coffee cup. Without appearing to exert the slightest effort, she was before me in a flash with the pot, pouring. I looked up at her and smiled.
    “Thank you,” I said. “You are incredibly beautiful.”
    The man on my left gave a volcanic shudder. The girl looked at him, then went back to the cash register. Then everything happened very fast. The man said something to me in Polish, something brief and savage, a snarl on a hot gust of vodka fumes. I turned to tell him I didn’t speak Polish, but as my neck swiveled, he punched me in the ear. I dropped my doughnut. The girl shrieked and clapped her hands to her cheeks. Her counterpart in the back of the room called to someone in the kitchen. I rubbed my ear, puzzled and slow to understand. My fingers came away without any blood on them, but there was a high ringing sound in there. The Polish drunk, seeing that I needed elucidation, punched me again, this time in the side of the head, missing my ear. My vision went black and then cleared. I stood up and launched myself at him and got his thick bricklayer’s neck in a choke hold and squeezed my thumbs against his Adam’s apple. “Bastard,” I said between clenched teeth. I stared into his ice-hot-blue little eyes. Then I spat at him.
    I was a malnourished string bean of a poet eligible for AARP membership. He was a youngish man who looked as if he spent half his time at the OTOM Gym on Calyer Street pumping iron and the other half drinking lethal-grade hooch in McCarren Park on a bench. It was not going to be a fair fight, but it felt good to pretend to myself, as he gathered his forces to kill me, that I was impressing the doughnut girls.
    Then he struck. One meaty hand squeezed both of my bony ones, convincing me to release my grip on his windpipe. The other meaty hand punched me full in the face and picked up the metal napkin dispenser and slammed it into my eye. I was pulled off him by someone very firm and purposeful, and then my enemy and I were both in handcuffs being led out of the doughnut shop by two cops who clearly would have preferred to stay there all day. My nose was streaming blood. My eye throbbed. Adrenaline and pride prevented anything from hurting yet, but this was going to be a bitch.
    The Polish drunk must have been the doughnut girl’s much-older boyfriend, I surmised, or her uncle or father, or a friend of her uncle or father, or a friend of her boyfriend’s. Whoever he was, he hadn’t liked the way I looked at her and had felt entitled to wipe that look off my face. Well, it was gone.
    The 94th Precinct house was just a couple of blocks away on Meserole, but the cops put us into two separate squad cars and drove us there. This turned into a somewhat roundabout, laborious route because all the east-west streets in Greenpoint run one way. I sat in the backseat watching the cop drive. He was a terrible driver, the kind who sent me into a frenzy of corrective urges. He had a jerky accelerator foot and bad steering technique, at once too sudden and too indecisive. I had never had a driver’s license, myself, but I knew bad driving when I saw it.
    My attacker and I were led out of the cars and into the building through the paper-strewn foyer into a warren of desks and filing cabinets and made to sit quietly several yards apart while two cops officially charged us with public misconduct and fingerprinted us and