Pay and Pay

Chapter 8

KEVVIN sincerely believed that some degree of cool detachment was necessary to prevent reason from being distorted by strong emotion. This did not mean that he did not value emotion or that emotion did not affect him. After his last meeting with Mike, he had had difficulty sleeping for days and even his sleeping pills were of little help. For a couple of weeks, he found himself overwhelmed when the anger and resentment caused by his last meeting with Mike suddenly rose up in him without warning. Only as the intensity of those feelings began to dull was he able to begin to let the wounds heal.

He was astute enough to know that his own motivations for having allowed a relationship with Mike to continue were mixed. He acknowledged that Mike was a source of information to him as a writer. Through Mike, he was able to catch glimpses of a very disturbing life. Those images were made more disturbing by the proximity of Mike himself. Kevvin much preferred to reflect on what Mike told him when he was alone and had the emotional distance not allowed by Mike's physical presence.

Kevvin also knew that he had wanted to help Mike in very practical terms, but he held the conviction that it was ultimately up to Mike to help himself. Complicating both of these understandings of his own motivations was a very human compassion that he had not identified until Mike had been beaten up, and again when Mike was suddenly faced with fatherhood.

In the end, Kevvin decided that he was angry and hurt because not only his good intentions, but more importantly, his genuine concern for Mike's welfare had been consistently rejected by Mike. They had not been brushed aside or dismissed lightly; they had been thrown back in his face. Mike, he concluded, wanted nothing from him that was not immediate and concrete. Since Kevvin was not prepared to offer simple dispassionate material support, he was forced into the decision, that for his own emotional protection, he had to wash his hands of Mike. By the end of the second week in October, thoughts of Mike and memories of their last meeting began to intrude less and less on him. By the end of the month, they came unbidden not at all.

A late Indian summer had tempered the weather and prolonged the damp moistness of the earlier part of the season. The smell of fallen leaves filled the air, but their wetness cemented them into place and the familiar fall sound of dry leaves skittering before the wind down the street could not be heard. When Kevvin left his house that morning to pick up his Times at the local convenience store, he noticed that the dew still sat heavily on the grass and leaves of the lawns he passed. The amount surprised him and he thought that it almost looked like it had rained the night before. If the temperature had been only a few degrees lower, the dew would have been a heavy frost.

It was a bit too chilly to be invigorating so Kevvin took a shortcut. He turned off his street and went into a lane that would lead him to the back of a small park across the street from the store he was heading to. The park itself was tiny and occupied the lot of a demolished building between two others still standing on either side. For whatever reason, the land had come into the hands of the city and had been transformed into a green space. Aside from a few low bushes intended as landscaping near the lane behind, the only other sign of its purpose was a pair of benches facing each other across the footpath that bisected the park. The walls of the two buildings flanking it still held the ghostly traces of the walls and floors of the demolished building.

Kevvin took a quick look before stepping onto the path from the lane. This was a simple act of prudence, for although the park was seldom used, panhandlers and others like them occasionally sat on the benches on either side of the path and made nuisances of themselves that were impossible to avoid when you passed them. He saw a wino asleep on one of the benches, his back turned to the path. Kevvin decided to take the chance.

Just as Kevvin was about to pass the bench, the man on it stirred and rolled onto his back. He opened his eyes and looked directly at Kevvin. Kevvin was angry and dismayed to see Mike had intruded into his life once again. At the same time, he saw that Mike looked very sick. He face was ashen except for the dark hollows of his eyes; his clothes were not simply unkempt, but dirty. His cheeks seemed sunken in.