Nervously fingering my eyeglasses, I said, “I had an interview with an agency.”
“Agency, huh?” Shep said with full mouth, his words unintelligible to any but one of his most devoted rats, “Adoption, or intelligence?” For Shep, I had procured a single five-thousand-dollar bill, obtained from a disdainful bank teller who had tallied up my coins with a disparaging glare. This was the apprentice’s severance. Shep whiffed the fresh scratch stashed in the sandwich and plucked it from between pita and paper. He deposited the tribute in his pocket without acknowledgment and took a big, contemplative bite. Shep swallowed, chomped. “Because you need some smartening-up if you think the search is going to be worth it!”
I had expected a little railing. Shep did not let me down.
“A baby, you’re thrown in the bull rushes,” Shep began his harangue. “You float downstream, get plucked up by gypsies, make it to the head of the class, and end up leading your people out of the wilderness…”
For some time, Shep had perhaps sensed the imminent moving-on of one of his more rewarding rats. He had detected the remoteness in my voice and felt my mounting restlessness just as sure as he had heard the cache of coins accumulating in my pockets.
“… or your mother dies giving birth—yours—and you never get a chance to kiss her proper, much less get a name besides My baby!, and so some goofball guardian ends up naming you alliteratively…”
I was beginning to feel like a shmuck. Shep had taken care of me since I was a tot; now I was repaying all those years of nurture with a slap of cold cash, as if all along he had been for hire like some kind of cabby.
“… or you’re sent off with a shepherd because of a really nasty rumor, but he’s a sucker for your sweet feet, and he hands you to another flock-keeper who takes you away to grow up with a king and queen…”
Sheepishly, in an effort to derail Shep’s derision, I said, “I recognize Moses and Nicholas Nickleby, but what about that last one?”
“It’s from a play, one we don’t get to ’til twelfth grade, so I guess you’ll never know.” I was ready to be getting on my way, tail between my legs, when Shep’s expression was contorted by a venom visible even through obfuscating shades. “Best of luck, Eddie. Who’s to say? Maybe there are a couple of finfooted freaks out there on the lookout for their missing baby.”
This one hit home. Shep’s stinger bore a pernicious poison, and now I found myself fantasizing against all reason: What if my mom and dad could track me down, had tracked me down, just like that? Stupid stupid stupid. A sickening sunniness flooded my sinews. I wallowed in the septic warmth. Never before had I spoken this way myself, not even internally, but Shep, in his cosmic indifference, had given voice to a gut feeling that went all the way down into my tulip-bulb toes, the vibration of my desperate inner tone: Maybe they were trying to find me. This hapless wish ignited a little gas jet that had seethed in cool, odorless latency throughout my entire orphan infancy. Once you light a pilot like that, it never goes out.
“Well, Eddie,” Shep said, “I hope you’ll be one, big, flappy family.”
A rage boiled up inside me. I saw things darkly. How could I have gone on so long with such a charmless child-user and a bevy of brothers who cared for nothing more than illicit gain? I kicked over Shep’s stand and ran, leaving the make-believe blind man squawking maledictions and scrambling for his inventory. Shrieking with glee, a sink of rats from rival packs swarmed over the sidewalk and descended on the melee, making off with most of Shep’s spectacles.
I walked alone through the streets of the Beast. Beyond the deserted aquarium complex on Central Wharf, black clouds of discord clustered out over the sea. Our Viking ancestors in their pagan-named ships: How had they dared sally so recklessly? At least Leif the Lucky had known whose son he was! Then those Protestants: their watery pilgrimage; their rock at Plymouth; the battles, suppers, and trysts with the Indians; their angry God and their scarlet letter; and, ringing across the years in modest saltboxes that served as churches, their story of a son who takes an advance on his inheritance, leaves home to go a-whoring, loses everything, ends up eating pig shit, and decides to come crawling back: His humility had been a luxury, his parable lost on rats without any dowry to squander, outcasts who would never know father, much less enjoy the option to bow before his mercy.
Stumbling unattached through throngs of button-pushers on break in the belly of the Beast, I brooded over the dumb mistake I had made. All those years without any knowledge of my origins, I had enjoyed all-you-can-eat illusions of imaginary parents. It was ridiculous to think there had ever been any chance of finding a biological family, and now I had alienated the only foster I had ever had. How would I get by without a daily dose of Shep’s endearing indignation? Probably I would be crawling back by nightfall, having lost my dowry as well as seniority among the rats, ending up Eddie Feet again, made fun of more than ever before. Should I even bother returning to Metzger’s office? The absurdity of the shepherding service enraged me. What would I get but a nope, no match, guffaw, I told you so, and a rubbing-it-in-my-face whiff of the fancy cigar the old man had bought with my front money; or at best the address of a cemetery where I could go look at gravestones? Shepherding! What had I been thinking? Read between the lines: delusions disabused—for a fee.
As a symptom of my malignant, advancing desolation, I had altogether lost the desire to pick. The million marks milling around the city did not incite the usual flair for helping others by helping myself. I no longer cared about them. Even if I did go and score a sack full of billfolds, wrapping myself in money belts like a gunner in holsters, who would there be to bring it home to? I had no Nec, no dough, no family. Why not give in, give up, turn myself over to the law? I had staggered across Columbus Park and all the way to Dock Square by the time I resigned myself to juvie, where at least I would get a plate of paste and a steel-picket place to dream about idyllic mom and dad and ruminate on how useless my descent had been.
In the lunchtime market throng, I spotted a cop on the stoop of Faneuil Hall, which over more than three centuries had witnessed a host of battles, both bloody and bilious. Mine would be an inconsequential defeat; I would go down anonymously.
I marched toward fate. Hands stuffed sheepishly into empty pockets, I must have seemed the apparition of an oldschool gangster, striding purposefully with hidden pistols— and wasn’t that what they were, after all, these legendary, offending weapons?—but really I was ready to flop over at the feet of the beady-eyed beagle, offering up empty fists to heavy-duty cuffs for which I, no longer a junior Houdini, held no concealed key. The constable, having caught notice of my approach, twirled his nightstick felicitously—much in the way, I presaged, that the judge would wield his gavel at my hearing. I thought about how to word it so as to not waste too much of the badge cat’s time: “Fast Eddie—maybe you’ve heard of me? Responsible for making thousands of pairs of pants a little lighter last year alone?” No, I did not deserve the patina of dignity, and anyway the O’Donnell might not believe me. Better to get the arrest over with and explain later at the station. Maybe: “Hey, shamus, your shoe’s untied,” then knee him in the eye. I was ten feet from a correctional destiny when I heard a voice remotely familiar.
“Hey! Those green sneaks!”
If years earlier he had seemed imposing in the slums of Beacon Hill at night, he looked even bigger now breathing down my neck at high noon in Quincy Market. Mano, the hacker I had left radiating in a Chevy like a rotisserie chicken, had finally caught up with me. He sported my orphaned Chuck Taylors, the uppers shredded almost to ribbons. Why had Mano kept these when he could afford any pair in the Beast? He must have had to stuff the toes with newspaper to force a fit.
The hulking hacker lurched towards me like a walking wall. Fuming fog from his nostrils, he snorted, “You’re the son of a bitch who stole my Air Jordans!”
I took off over the bricks—a great upset of boxed lunches, an explosion of scavenger pigeons. Mano spirited a
fter me, and the policeman, anticipating a good show, joined the chase. I sprinted east at North Market, ricocheted west at Quincy, then east again at South Market, but my pursuers knew all the convolutions. In the fury of my flight the glasses almost flew off my face. I wasn’t sure I could outrun them. Mano was especially fleet for his size. He had spent his days training or at least, by the strategy of his trajectories, had been casing this area for a good long time. Had the jolt he received on Beacon Street endowed him with superhuman speed? West on State, site of the Beast’s infamous massacre, I ducked into the old state house and scrambled up the corkscrew staircase, making a circuit under the dome and clambering back down in the wake of an irate docent, the dealer and the narc both hot on my heels.
“Wait up, Big Foot!” Mano said. I could feel his powerful huffing on the back of my neck. “There’s something I’ve got to tell you.” I knew better than to fall for that bully’s trick. Doubling back down State I managed to lose the two momentarily, but given the trail of my big-bunioned pugs through this sooty neighborhood it seemed vain to hope for escape. I would not get out of this in one piece unless Mano got what he was after, but what could he want from me but blood?
Alarmingly, a burning spot shot through the heel of my right foot. It was unbearable, like a firebrand poking a hole through my sneaker. I sped up the steps of the Custom House, the great, granite temple that had gone from commercial center to luxury time-share to rave club before being converted into the Beast’s water works. Hiding behind a column, I hastily unlaced, uncorking insufferable stench. I had not removed the shoe in many months. Off my foot it was like somebody else’s severed limb, as nightmarish as a dumpster-dive run-in with a bio-bag. My bare sole, smoking slightly, felt instantly relieved, and deep inside the Nike I recognized the faintest coppery glint: It was One Cent come back to aid me in a jam! It had been so long since I had considered the cryptic token, and, while unconsciously I must have registered the absence, only now, with the coinstantaneous discovery of both its misplacement and its reappearance, did I detect a distant refrain of the fulsome song of fate. I found a chunk of broken glass and pried coin from insole, where it had been fused to rubber by ten thousand miles of pedestrian pressurization. It left a little impression of Lincoln. Abe’s coppery face, tarnished from imbedded neglect, would take some fingering to make shine again. On the flip side, the monument had gotten brighter from constant polishing. Squatting beneath the Custom House portico, I scrutinized through my spectacles: After many months of getting rubbed, the person seated between the columns had become especially descript, and I was surer than ever that the two figures on the steps were people. In a wild surmise, I peeked around my pillar. Sure enough, two people were climbing the steps from opposite angles: Mano and the law’s long arm.
I had expected lucky coins were meant to be used only once, but this one had come around recycled and its burning message was certain: Lose the shoes. It seemed to me like a reasonable ransom, although I wondered what anybody with eyes or a nose could want with those filthy sneaks. I pocketed One Cent, let the other high-top drop, and tossed the trusty pair in the air. Mano stopped in his tracks, gawked at the sky, and scrambled on a tangent across the stone steps. He couldn’t have chosen a better pursuit angle. Mano tackled that badge cat with a thwack! and I booked down the stairs and past the tangled twosome to my barefoot getaway, leaving the linebacker to do the explaining.
Short of breath, satisfied that I had lost my stalkers, I paused in front of Faneuil Hall to contemplate my fate. Full of adrenaline, invigorated by the chase, and reawakened to an old, doleful curiosity, I was suddenly satisfied to postpone self-sacrifice and pay a visit to Metzger Shepherding. If nothing else, perhaps the archaic autocrat would take a moment to explain to me what One Cent meant. Maybe he knew something about the picture on the tail. Clutching the coin, I set off on a barefoot pilgrimage.
By the time I got to Causeway Street I had almost lost my nerve. Standing at the threshold of the squat brick structure, I asked myself why I had come all this way. Strutting unshod across town at lunch hour had been a sure means, in my case, to generate humiliation. I might as well have let that lawman lock my legs in Faneuil Hall’s historic stocks. Me and my silly One Cent! It was bad enough that Metzger was going to rip me off five thousand bucks, now I would also let him ride me for the worthless coin and laugh, just as half the people in the Beast already had, at my great, naked feet. Ringing the bell, I bleakly mused that the futility of the march did not matter. Once I came out, I would not have to walk all the way back to Government Center to find a cop to arrest me.
Metzger himself opened the door. “Eddie! Come in!” Not only did he call me by my name, he patted me on the back, and he didn’t even wipe his hand afterward. Overnight his attitude had turned polite, practically solicitous. “Please, sit down.” The patrimony broker leaned against the great, green desktop, now empty of clutter, and cleared his throat over and over. “Eddie,” he uttered with a grave expression. An instant of clairvoyance told me there was news. I might get my dumb gravestones after all. Metzger was making an obvious effort to hold back emotion. If this was his damned-if-I-know spectacle, I decided it was worth five Gs just for the show. I would tell him this as a former performer myself. “Eddie. . .” he said. I leaned in close. “Eddie … Corrente!” he brayed. “That’s your last name!”
The universe was boundless but in balance. There was nothing at its furthest reaches that could not be uncovered. There was a place somewhere that concealed the source, albeit decomposing, of my origins. I lay my head on that indestructible steel desk and pictured myself leaving One Cent at the site in a final act of expiation, then wandering the earth barefoot, ears deaf to common mockery. Afloat in a state of anaesthetized levity, I mumbled, “My mother and father—where are they buried?”
“Eddie, they’re alive!”
Now I really felt sick. I had propped my parents’ glowing, undefiled corpses affectionately atop my mind’s pyre. Now Metzger, robbing me of that solace, threw a switch and reanimated them. They were out there, somewhere, stalking stiffly towards me with burnt-out eyes and outstretched arms. I had no control, at least not conscious, over my response: “Oh, no.”
“They’ve been looking for you all these years and now they want to take care of you.” Take care of me: What was that supposed to mean? It sounded like a Mafia threat or as if I was incontinent—either way you look at it, an awful arrangement. But what could I do? I had started this grievous process in motion and now I had to ride it out to the crash. Metzger had begun to brief me on the reunion, but I, in a daze, understood only that it involved going to Jersey. I was still reeling when I realized he was ushering me out the door. “Your ride is here.”
At the curb, a stretch limousine. “Hold it … wait a sec…”
“Oh, by the way, here’s your deposit back.” Metzger handed me an envelope with a crisp five-thousand-dollar bill in it, not the tidy pile of coins I had stacked on his desk the day before.
“Deposit? What about the investigation, your contact commission—and what’s this car about?”
“It’s all taken care of,” Metzger said, pushing me into the big, empty back seat.
“But—”
He shut the car door. “Been nice knowing you.”
I fumbled with the buttons and managed to lower the automatic window, but, frowning like a disfavored dog, I didn’t know what to say. Standing back on the curb, Metzger seemed relieved to be rid of me. And yet there was an aspect of dread in his retreating figure that seemed to imply the possibility—and at once, with my lame luck, presage the certainty—of our future meeting. “Good luck,” he called, “son.” Son, he said. It was the first time anybody had ever called me that, and instinctively I was repulsed. If someone had to do it, why did it have to come so patronizingly, in such dispiriting circumstances, from this shyster’s simpering lip? It struck me as so premature and abrupt that I instantly, internally rejected the designation like a transplanted kidne
y of the wrong blood type.
What might have been excited anticipation was contaminated by a sense of entrapment—echoing in my head: They want to take care of you—capped off by the limousine imprisonment, tinted glass between front and back keeping me from seeing who was at the wheel. I was awakened to the awful claustrophobia of the situation: I was confined to a back seat, and it might as well have been in a squad car—after all, it was a car. To think that just an hour before I had almost been overcome by the impulse to surrender! I could barely buttress the metaphysical gravity. These were the very vehicles that haunted rats on our runs. They were the predators of the street, always out to take us down. Not a few rats had gotten popped and been forced to spend weeks recouping, months catching up with missed rent. Being shut in a box is something you never get used to and yet, with practice, you can train yourself to access that smidgen of cool. The limo captivity unlocked the old escape artist within. I knew better than to bang on windows or shoulder the door and roll. To forestall hyperventilation, I summoned my old deep-breathing techniques. I had enough oxygen to last indefinitely, there was no external menace (sword, saw, shark). In fact, the only exigency was at my bladder. Sometimes the best means of escape is to wait.
There was a certain novelty to the luxury: a fridge full of drinks, a telephone, a TV with virtual reality. But I already had to pee. Who would I call? And I was too busy watching the world go by—fast!—to stare at a screen. Ever since those underground stretches of I-93 and the Pike had been abandoned, navigating a car around the Beast meant a royal snarl, but things sure sped up out on 95 South. Too timid even to tap, much less ask the driver to stop for a bathroom break, I rolled up the five-G note Metzger had pressed on me and, disowning the tender that had gotten me into this fix, stuck it in the back seat ashtray for the ghost chauffeur’s gratuity. One Cent in my pocket was all I had left. In the rush, I never had gotten a chance to show the old codger the coin.
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