Going, Going, Gone

by Jack Womack

  ‘Walter!!’ she shouted as we came through. ‘Hold!!’

  ‘Holding!!!’

  This being the second time I’d taken this particular train, I thought I knew what to expect when we came out on the other side; but actually I wasn’t surprised when I felt myself rolling, with Eulie, down a long hill towards what looked like an expressway. We came to a stop long before reaching the shoulder, however, and for several minutes lay there catching our breath. Something fell on us and I looked to see what; tiny silver fish, sardines or minnows or sand dabs. Their rain didn’t last long, and they flopped around in the grass, lips gasping, before saying uncle. While I didn’t feel as if I were going to upchuck, this time around, most every part of my body felt as if someone had gone over it with a sharp rock. Staring up, I saw red brick apartment buildings lining the top of the hill; rolling over, I saw that it was an expressway, the Jimmy Walker. We’d come out in the Bronx. Best of all, when I looked straight up, into the sky, I saw nothing but bright blue – safe again, I thought; thought it until I remembered why we’d had to leave so quickly in the first place, and why I was getting ready to leave, even before that. First things first, though. I reached over, and touched Eulie’s hand. She lifted her head, shook the dust off, and stared first at the expressway and then at me.

  ‘OK?’ I asked.

  ‘AO.’

  After some small struggle we made our way back up to the top of the hill, and climbed over the fence onto the sidewalk. We were both still dizzy; going from her place to mine seemed to produce some semblance of a hangover. Just when I started to think that I hoped I’d never have to go through transfer like that again, I realized that that possibility had been pretty much ruled out. We walked down to 178th Street and headed toward the Concourse, to catch the IND downtown. Neither of us said much for the first few blocks. As we walked past multitudes of Bronxers – young women with strollers, kids tossing balls back and forth, old men with small dogs; firemen, plumbers, beauticians, deli clerks – I tried to figure out what, exactly, had happened; Eulie seemed lost in her own thoughts, as you’d expect, and I didn’t want to interrupt her with foolish questions on my part until she gave me some indication she was ready to hear.

  A short distance from the subway entrance, Eulie left her world, and returned to mine. ‘Walter, are you still capable?’

  ‘Of anything,’ I said. ‘What happened?’

  She gave me the old thousand yard stare, and pulled at her lower lip with her fingers; she’d bitten it, though the cut had closed over. ‘We couldn’t theorize which world would remain,’ she said. ‘Yours, it seems.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘Yours –?’

  ‘Nada,’ she said. ‘Remarkable experience of spatial displacement. Any number of theories-’ Although for a second or two she’d brightened, maybe with the thought of scientific papers to be written, she appeared to realize that she might have a hard time peddling them over here. She started to cry, and I guided her to a bench at a bus stop. An old lady taking up half the seat scooted over enough to let us sit down. ‘Walter, excuse –’

  ‘I know,’ I said, although in fact I hadn’t the foggiest idea of how you’d feel, being the only survivor of your entire world. It was a feeling she didn’t seem to be getting used to very quick.

  ‘Walter –’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Because it hasn’t happened here yet doesn’t mean it won’t,’ she said. ‘Fluxation continues. If anything the situation’s instability is heightened. I’ve no way of telling, however.’ She reached into her bag and took out one of her little black boxes. ‘The connection’s gone. Worthless, all. There’s no way of telling, Walter –’

  ‘We’ll burn that bridge when we come to it.’ I said, realizing that every minute or so I was still looking up, hoping that I wouldn’t see that tell-tale crack starting to take shape. As before, all above us was bright and clear. ‘Are you really all right? I mean physically. That was a pretty rough landing –’

  ‘Chlo and I always came through in Central Park,’ she said. ‘But our departure site was fixed. It could have been rougher.’ I gave her a kleenex I found in my jacket pocket; she dabbed her eyes dry. ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘Dizzy. Feel like I’ve broken half my bones. Worn out. Otherwise, perfect.’ I stood, and offered my arm. ‘I’ve got to lie down somewhere. Both of us do. I think we’ll be safe, heading down to my place.’

  ‘You’re sure?’

  ‘I think the only person anybody’d remember from the Astor would be Chlo,’ I said, ‘and I guess they won’t be taking her in.’

  ‘What about your superior?’

  ‘Inferior, more like it,’ I said, thinking of how Bennett had managed to land feet first; wondering what kind of tricks he’d managed to play in my absence – it came to me that I didn’t even know how long I’d actually been gone; it seemed no more than a day and a half, but the weather in the Bronx, at least, seemed a vast improvement over what it’d been when we fled the coop. ‘Maybe I’d better check in with Martin. Get a line on what’s what.’

  There was a newstand next to the subway entrance, and I sidled over to see if I could read the date below the mastheads. Must have been nothing but a warm spell; the date was as I figured it to be. But what I hadn’t expected to see were the particular headlines plastered across the front of the News, the Trib, the Mirror, the Times.

  BLAME BOOZE,

  CLAIMS BOBBY

  ‘Walter,’ Eulie asked as I laid down fifty cents and gathered up a copy of each. ‘What troubles?’

  KENNEDY VICTIM STILL IN COMA

  Recovery Uncertain

  Insanity Plea Believed Likely

  Robert Kennedy Rules Out Run This Year

  ‘FAMILY FIRST’ EX-CANDIDATE STATES

  JIM SLEEPS

  Mirror Foto Exclusive

  REAGAN: LIKE FATHER, LIKE SON

  ‘Kennedys,’ I shouted, pounding my fists against the nearest streetlamp post. People slowed down to see if I was going to completely wig out, but when I didn’t, they continued on their way. ‘Damned Kennedys. Every last damned one of them –’

  ‘Walter –’

  ‘I hear you, brother,’ some cheerful Republican shouted over to me, not breaking stride. ‘This fixes Bobby’s wagon but good.’

  Before heading into the subway I made two calls – there was no need to call Jim; he wouldn’t be at home. Biting the bullet, I dropped my dime and told the operator to place a collect call, person to person, to Martin. After a moment or so a voice I didn’t recognize came on the line.

  ‘Walter Smith?’

  ‘Speaking,’ I said. ‘Is Martin there –?’

  ‘We’ve been waiting to hear from you,’ the stranger said.

  ‘Is he there?’

  A pause; for some reason, I thought that he was trying to stifle a laugh. ‘He’s in the field. He expected your call, though, and left word to notify –’

  ‘I need to talk to him, sooner the better.’

  ‘Yes, certainly. Your directions are to go to your usual contact point, and wait there.’

  Go home, in other words. That was fine with me. I made one last call, to Trish. As I feared, she wasn’t around either. When I hung up I looked around, quickly, to be sure no one was paying too close attention to me. No; everyone in sight looked as innocent, or as guilty, as anyone in New York ever does.

  ‘Let’s go,’ I told Eulie, and we headed downstairs to catch the train to Manhattan.

  When we got off the train and came up the stairs I couldn’t help but check the sky again; not a thing. We walked over from Sixth Avenue, making for my crib. As it had been my turn to clam, I hadn’t said a word to Eulie the whole trip down. The events of the past two – three? – days burned in my mind. There was really only one thing I wanted to do, after talking to Martin and trying to find out what hospital Trish was in, and that was dig out that perma-bud Chlo had left me – willed me, as it turned out – and send myself (and Eulie, if she wanted
to join in) into a four-day spin. I’d had enough of both worlds; had enough of people. My ire thickened in my throat; I might have finally let go all the way, had Eulie and I not seen what we saw, moments after walking underneath the El and stepping onto my block.

  There was an old sportster wearing a seersucker suit walking toward us, leading his wirehaired terrier on a long black leash. I’d seen him around before – thought he lived on 19th, in one of the old townhouses – and would have at least nodded, out of habit, but he was gone before we reached him. One second he was there, and then in the next second he was gone; he’d been replaced. He turned into a young woman in her twenties, wearing a Yankees cap, her blonde hair pulled through the opening in the back and tied in a ponytail. She wore a sleeveless guinea T and dancer’s black tights. On her feet she wore the fanciest-looking sneakers I ever saw. The wires for her hearing aid ran from her ears down to her waist. She trotted past us, looking neither right nor left; if I hadn’t stepped out of her way, I think she’d have run right into me.

  ‘Eulie –’

  ‘Seen.’

  We stood there for a minute or so, frozen in place as we watched her turn the corner at Third and head south. ‘What happened? Eulie, who was that? What happened to the old coot?’

  ‘Unknown,’ she said, wide-eyed. Both of us glanced upward; nothing, still, but blue sky. When we returned our gaze to the sidewalk ahead of us, we watched three dented metal garbage cans turn into a pile of black plastic bags filled with something that didn’t seem to be sand; they barricaded the sidewalk, safeguarding it from Eighteenth Street traffic. A pair of pigeons poked along the curb, filling up on seed some kind soul had dumped for them. One turned into a sparrow, and flew away.

  ‘Let’s get inside,’ I said, hurrying her along to my building’s stoop. ‘Quick.’

  ‘Walter, something’s happening –’

  ‘I know. I don’t want to know what, yet.’

  We made it up the stairs much quicker than I figured we would; nothing within my building changed – the dark wainscotting still lined the walls up to where the painted tin began, there were still white tile swastikas embedded in the scuffed red of the ground floor hall – but somehow the look of everything seemed just as frightening as it had started to seem, outside. We didn’t pass any of my neighbours on our way up; whether they were inside their apartments, or somewhere around the corner, I wondered if they were still themselves. The humidity was terrible, that afternoon; we were sweating buckets by the time we got to my floor. I had my keys out and ready, and was about to shove them into the locks when someone opened the door for us.

  ‘Well, well, well,’ Bennett said, sitting in my chair, at my kitchen table, one foot propped up on the stove as if he owned the place. ‘Here’s our wandering boy now.’

  Before we could step back out the doorman, a fairly hulking bruiser wearing Secret Service glasses and with the look of Agency muscle about him seized both Eulie and myself, dragging us inside. Bennett was looking up at a sign I’d nailed up over the door leading to the music room, one I’d found hung on the fence at Tompkins Square the year before, NO LEFT TURNS UNSTONED.

  ‘You’re a card, Walter,’ he said, evidencing a fine case of the smirks. ‘A regular card.’

  ‘Can’t say I’m as pleased to see you as you are to see me, my brother,’ I said. ‘Any special occasion for this break-in?’

  ‘Where were you, anyway? We looked high and low.’

  ‘You’d never look high enough.’

  Another big grin flashed in our direction. Off in the music room I heard the sound of crunching, as if someone were eating celery. Sartorius stepped out of the room, one of my discs in his Nazi mitt. From ten feet away I could see the Paramount label. Holding it out in front of him – farsighted, no doubt, but to admit the need for glasses would have been a sign of inferiority – he read aloud the pertinent information. ’Sugar Tin Blues. Charles Patton. This is your American Negro music?’

  ‘Yes. Put it down.’

  He lobbed it discus-like across the room; when it struck the wall just above the sink, that was the end of Charlie.

  ‘When the performers are gone,’ he said, ‘why should there be music?’

  ‘And I figured you spent all your money on drugs,’ Bennett said.

  I craned my neck and managed to glimpse what remained in the music room. Every shelf was emptied; the floor was several inches deep in shattered shellac and black wax. Sartorius’s footsteps crunched as if on fresh-fallen snow.

  ‘So Walter, have you seen the papers?’ Bennett asked. ‘I know you don’t usually pay much attention but I thought this morning’s headlines might have caught your eye.’

  ‘Get out of my house,’ I said. ‘I told you I quit. I –’

  ‘Oh, shut up,’ he said. ‘I have to hand it to you, though. Mission accomplished with a minimum of bloodshed.’ Clearly he didn’t know about the Astor; not that it mattered, at this point. ‘Bobby out of the running, thanks to his poor little brother. Didn’t come off quite the way Hamilton had planned, but effective enough in its own way. Congratulations.’

  ‘He hurt Trish, didn’t he?’ I asked. ‘My friend. What did he do to her?’

  Sartorius smiled. Another one of their attendants wandered through the music room from the front, stopping directly behind Sartorius. ‘That’s the one sad aspect of the whole situation,’ Bennett said. ‘But when Kennedys are involved, the innocent always suffer. Although from what we know about your friend, we feel fairly sure she led him on. Certainly she was the one who convinced him to fall off the wagon.’ Bennett put his foot back down on the floor. ‘Fell pretty hard, I’d have to say.’

  ‘Where is she?’

  ‘Lenox Hill,’ he said. ‘Don’t know if she’ll come out of it, though. The other one never did. This time around there was a little more press, of course. We made sure of that.’

  ‘Where’s Martin?’ The bruiser had such a grip on Eulie that I thought he was going to break her arm; she stayed remarkably calm, considering. For the first time since I’d seen her, I’d have been very happy if Chlo had been able to come along for this ride.

  ‘Oh, him,’ Bennett said. ‘Martin chose to resign his position. The department requested that he resign, I should say. Certain records turned up.’ He made with the tut-tuts. ‘Very disconcerting. You just never know who’s who if you’re not careful. Don’t worry about him, Walter. As far as I know, he’s probably getting used to his new home.’

  ‘Bennett –’

  ‘He played a little fast and loose when he hired freelancers, after all. Now that I’ve taken over his responsibilities, there’ll have to be some changes made.’

  ‘What kind of changes?’

  ‘You’ve covered your tracks very well, Walter,’ he said. ‘Nothing, nowhere. But we just have that feeling. You know how it is.’ He looked at Eulie, whose face remained expressionless. ‘As for your friend here, her status is clear as the nose on her face.’

  Sartorius and the two thugs accompanying them laughed. ‘You know a little more than we’d like you to know,’ Bennett said. ‘So –’

  He reached into his jacket pocket and extracted a small bottle and a plastic case; when he opened the case, a hypodermic lay gleaming in the slot. ‘You’ve never been much of one for narcotics in the pure sense, have you?’ he asked, slipping the needle into the apparatus. ‘This is about as pure as heroin gets. Medical quality. This should do both of you fine. When your bodies are found, I doubt that anyone will be surprised. Walter, don’t look at me like that. I’d think you’d appreciate my thoughtfulness in selecting a style of exit that fits you best.’

  ‘I’m not looking at you like that,’ I said.

  ‘What then?’ he asked, stabbing the needle into the top of the bottle’s cap. I gestured, slightly, towards the wall behind him. Where it had been covered completely with chipped and cracked yellow plaster, it had now been stripped down to the bare brick. I’d also gotten a new refrigerator during the previo
us second or two; this one was four times as large as the one I’d had, made of what looked to be burnished chrome. When he glanced behind him he looked as bumfuzzled as Sartorius and the thug standing behind him. I felt the one holding us loosen his grip, slightly, but not enough to allow us to get away. For the first time in his life, Bennett seemed at a loss for words.

  ‘Walter,’ Eulie said, shaking her head at the music room. Looking over, I spotted my ghost, still on his own. At the first moment I saw him he appeared as crystalline as he always had, floating some few inches above my broken records. Though Eulie was seeing him, I couldn’t tell if the others had spotted old see-through yet. That would happen soon enough, I knew. As we watched he began to fill with colour. His jacket and pants took on the dirty-white look I’d seen when I’m glimpsed him between worlds; his hair turned brown, his skin took on a pinkish tone. At last I saw his shoes; they were black as a 78. It didn’t take him more than ten seconds to solidify; the moment he did, they all saw him. I felt the bruiser behind us let go as he thrust his hand into his jacket. Bennett dropped both bottle and needle as he backed up against the sink. Sartorius blinked, once; his associate wasn’t able to do that much before Jake, back in a world he knew, if not his own, made his move.

  ‘Scheiss –!!’

  It quickly became clear to me where Chlo had learned her stuff. Even as the man behind us fired, striking him in the shoulder, Jake lifted his right foot above his head and swung his left arm out toward Sartorius. The thug in the music room fell backwards, a huge red blot in the centre of his face where his nose had been – it appeared – kicked directly into his brain. Sartorius sank toward the floor, clutching his crushed throat; Jake’s fingers must have caught him right on the adam’s apple. I started to think Jake was upholstered in the same coating Chlo wore until I saw his jacket’s shoulder turn red. As he grabbed Sartorius by the forelock, slamming his German noggin against the new refrigerator, cracking it like an egg, Jake picked up the unbroken half of one of my records and winged it past my head. I felt something warm on the back of my neck as the thug behind me relaxed his grip, and as I turned I saw him trying to pull the record out from beneath his chin; it was slippery, and he couldn’t get a solid grip. It was fascinating, watching my ex-ghost do what he was clearly best at; everything seemed as slow-moving as it had been under the influence of Pi, and I couldn’t help but think I was having some kind of breathtaking flashback. The one behind us managed to get off another shot as he collapsed, striking Jake directly in the stomach; he leapt into the air towards Bennett, trailing streams of red and yellow. He caught my would-be druggist by the collar with one hand, picked up my cheese grater with the other; raked it across Bennett’s face, slowing him down long enough until Jake could take my corkscrew and plunge it directly into B-boy’s temple. He twisted, as if seeing what might come out.