Fulton Street arrives quickly. Mr. Bell pulls to the curb. Nat and Ruth step to the sidewalk in front of the Jamaican Restaurant. They want to ask the question that will reveal why this young man is so unlike other people. Nat holds the car door open for a moment, but a person like Mr. Bell has places to go. “Be seeing you,” he says, and his car pulls away past the Uncle Sam Parking Garage. Mr. Bell, who is not really yet a mister, is gone. After one truck carrying bananas and another carrying dry-cleaning supplies have passed, what’s regular and dusty creeps back in.
A Jamaican couple waiting for take-out go haywire at their Love of Christ! clothes.
“Ku pon dis. A fuckery frock.” The critics use high dialect to speak freely, coded, in front of Nat and Ruth.
“Dos dutty jackets dem from up de hill yaad. Tall hairs. Dem get salt. No madda, no fambly. Zeen.”
“A pyur suffereation.”
At the Stewart’s Shop, Nat shoves two sodas, a tin of Pringles, and a chocolate bar down his pants. No one suspects a boy from the nineteenth century of shoplifting. They eat the loot on the library steps, enjoying each toxic bite.
“What’s up with that?” There is no peace for Nat and Ruth in Troy. A trio of curious men from the Italian ranks of South Central approach. One Mets fan, one Buffalo Bills enthusiast, and one whose T-shirt boasts a mysterious message: WHISKEY TANGO FOXTROT.
“You got a costume party?” one man asks Nat.
“No. No. They’re, what’s it? Hamish people.”
“Amish?” Ruth asks slowly.
“Aww, shit! She talk!” Two of the men high-five.
“No.” Not Amish. “Yes.” She talks.
People in their Corollas slow for a moment to observe Ruth in her long dress, Nat in his plain clothes. There’s no recognition of fellowship or shared humanity. The people shudder or chuckle in their cars. They make a nervous radio adjustment, relieved that they have not been raised by religious weirdoes.
The walk back uphill is hot. Ruth has parceled out her soda to make it last. Nat asks for a sip, having polished off his own. By the time they reach Frear Park, he’s finished hers as well.
That night, Ruth wakes. She pinches the fold of Nat’s underarm. Artificial yellow light flows through the transom of their room. Where is her mom? Where is her other sister? On a map of the world, on a map of New York State, where are they? It wakes Ruth. If Nat can talk to Raffaella’s living mother, why doesn’t he tell her where her mom is?
She puts her hand on his calf.
“What?”
The room is silent.
“What about my mom?”
He pretends he’s still asleep. Ruth cuffs her fingers with his. She digs her nails into his proximal phalanges.
“It’s the middle of the night.”
“Why don’t you ever talk to my mom?” Ruth forces her tongue up against the roof of her mouth, making garbled, devil sounds. “Cooowla trappa waneenee.”
“The dead speak English.”
“Well, what does my mom say? In English?”
“She says she’d be with you, you know, if she could.”
“Same thing the rest of the moms say?”
Nat wakes up fully. “No. Sorry. Come on.”
The basement is dark as fur. Ruth scratches her fingers across the Stachybotrys chartarum mold growing on the stone walls, raising bits of the fungal growth under her nails.
She walks behind Nat; his bottom touches her belly. One bare bulb back at the staircase is the only light. The air smells of bad breath. Nat pats the darkness, arms outstretched, until he finds the corner coal bin. “You first.” He pushes her in. They sit cross-legged. She sees bursts of color behind shut eyes.
“Want a bite?” Nat holds something under her nose.
“No.”
He takes a bite. A sweet odor spreads thicker than it would in the light of day. Candy, taffy from Troy. He puts the rest of it in his mouth. “Call him.” Nat chews. “He likes girls.”
“Who?”
“Mr. Splitfoot.”
She leans in. “But I want to talk to my mom.”
“You’ve got to go through him first.”
“Oh.” So she tries, “Mr. Splitfoot? Hello?”
Doesn’t take Nat but a moment to make contact with the dead. “Konk.”
“Are you talking to me?”
“No. Shh.” He bobs his head from side to side, clearing the air of her question. Mid-bob, he freezes. Their grip tightens. The house groans. A disturbed and breathy voice comes from Nat’s mouth. “Got any more candy?” Mr. Splitfoot sounds sexy.
“Who are you?”
Nat leans into her, inhaling like an animal. She feels the brush of his soft stubble on her cheek. Then quickly, in her ear, “Who do you think, you filthy?”
She can just make Nat out in the dark. “That’s my mother?” His chin is twisted, his neck hard-cranked to the left. His eyes bob in their sockets. “Nat?” She tilts her chin up.
Dirty water rushes through a pipe overhead.
Like an electric shock, his arms go rigid. His chin tracks right before resetting as an electronic typewriter might. A bit of drool forms in the corner of his mouth and dribbles out. “Say. Say.” The voice does not fit in Nat’s mouth.
“Who are you?”
“Let me check.” Nat’s eyes dip back into his head, white with fine strands of blood.
Ruth pokes Nat in the chest.
“Tirzah. Kateri Tekakwitha. Yaaa-deee!” He lifts up to his knees, a man begging his wife for one more chance. “Ruthie. Ruthie. Ru. The mangled and the mauled.” And a whisper, “Starlight. Star bright. First pair of shoes we’ve seen tonight. Ha.”
Nat’s head sways. His eyes are glazed. There are the sounds of the house. Then, “Kateri.” Then, “Claustrophobia. A little slice can feel so nice.” The room is charged with a fresh dampness. Nat wheezes, air passing through the stretched lips of a balloon. “Sorry, Ruth.” The voice is an old record in a deep well. “Oh, Ruth. Oh, Ruth.”
“Nat?”
The voice grows softer, kittenish. “She wish she may, I wish I might, get those lungs back, bitch, tonight.”
“My lungs?”
“Uh-huh. And heart.”
“Nat?”
“No. Not Nat.”
“Mom?”
“Yeah.”
“Go to hell.”
“It’s lovely down here.”
When it’s over, he reaches for Ruth’s hand, squeezing her fingertips separately, like release valves. “That was her?” she asks.
But it’s not Nat who answers. Another voice, positioned behind Ruth’s head, cuts in. “Bravo. Bravo. Good style, young ones.”
Ruth screams.
A hand swiftly covers her mouth and nose.
“Shh. Shh. Shh. Quiet there, girl. I beg you.” His words are so close, they move her hair.
“Who’s that?” Nat asks as Nat again.
“Hold your tongue. Tranquility.”
They know his way of speaking. Mr. Bell draws the rest of himself up behind her. “Remember me?”
She nods yes.
“Can I uncover your mouth?”
Yes, again.
He releases her. He fumbles in his pocket for a match, a needle to prick the iris. She looks away from the light, sees his pants, his knees. He squats on the coal bin floor beside them.
“Very well done.”
“What are you doing here?” Nat stands.
“Forgive my intrusion. I’m a traveler, trying to earn a living best I can, and you see this month I’ve come up a hair short. These are not the dwellings I’m accustomed to, but, we, I, make do.”
Nat and Ruth wait for a further explanation.
“An opportunity presented itself. You folks have this large basement, and I needed a place to sleep. I’ll ask you please not to reveal my pallet to your father. In the morning I will be gone.”
“He’s not our father.”
“Forgive me. I misunderstood the nature of your
relationship. Is there a mother? I haven’t seen a mother.”
“You snuck down here?”
“Sneaked. Yes. A mother?”
“Hiding?” Nat wants to know.
“Only to secure a night’s rest. The air outside had a chill, and the good city of Troy impounded my chariot until she’s made more homogenously legal.”
The match burns out. Ruth hears him breathe. “What?”
“Car got towed.” He lights another match and extends it into the back of the coal bin. The tight space resembles a coffin. His sleeping bag is a sack of orange nylon. Cowboys and Indians whoop across its flannel lining. “I was asleep until you two scared the fleas off me.”
One good scream would wake someone overhead. “What’s in that case? What do you sell?” Nat asks.
The man rubs his hands together. “I’d like to tell you, I would, but I’m wondering who you were talking to five minutes back.” He stops the hand rub, chuckling as if he’s got Nat trapped.
He doesn’t have Nat. “Dead people. What’s in your case?”
“Ah, the dead. Just as I thought, but you’re doing it wrong. Too much gibberish. People like their supernatural to make a little more sense.”
“What do you know?”
“Some things. I know some things about talking to the dead. And one of the things I know is that if you’re going to con people, a little gibberish goes a long, long way.”
“He’s not conning anyone.”
“Beg pardon?”
“He can really talk to the dead.”
Mr. Bell draws his chin back. “Then he’s even more clever than I thought.”
“What’s in the case?” Nat asks.
“What’s in the case.” The match goes out. “I’ll show you and perhaps you’ll allow me to teach you something about talking to dead people. Tomorrow? I haven’t got the case here with me. Trapped in my transport. But tomorrow. You know Van Schaick Island, in the river? A place between, yes? Start of the Erie Canal. Or its end. Meet me there? Follow Park Avenue along the shores of the Mohawk. Sometime after four. Yes?”
Ruth doesn’t wait for Nat’s answer. “Yes.”
She wakes before dawn. Their bedroom is a narrow closet at the top of the stairs, where the house’s heart would be if it had one. They have one yellow blanket and a door that’s so old, so glommed up with paint, it sticks in the summer and makes Ruth wonder about all those painters, about the people who were here before her. There’s a stubby pencil on the bedside table sharpened so the letters embossed on the side now spell MERICAN. Ruth hasn’t slept much. All night she imagined Mr. Bell in the basement, a strange person in an ordinary sleeping bag. Though probably he’d fled after being discovered.
Nat’s still asleep. Their hips touch. Ruth turns to Nat’s feet, acrid pale fishes. A few hairs sprout from his insteps. “Sleep is to ready us for death,” the Father says, but that doesn’t seem true of the way she sleeps with Nat.
A door slams down the hall. The Mother taking a predawn shower. Soon the house will wake but not yet. Ruth can lie with Nat under their yellow blanket, stewing and melting together.
Morning comes on slowly through the transom. “It’s real, right?”
He stretches, his toes reaching past her head, pressing flat feet against the wall. Nat jumps out of bed and stretches again. He rattles off a dry report of farts, neither answer nor confirmation.
Ruth and Nat walk to Van Schaick. It’s not easy to get there. Industry has kept access to the Hudson restricted, Homeland Security. The banks are often lined with trash. There are fuel tanks where Haymakers Field, a major league baseball diamond, used to be. The cars on the bridges overhead zoom like spaceships lifting off. Rushes growing by the river sound like snakes when the wind is in them. Ruth is wary of snakes. Fourteen or fifteen snow geese have landed on the bank. She calculates the omens. Spaceships plus snakes minus snow geese. She moves forward. “It’s real, right?” she asks again.
Nat spits to one side.
In a forgotten part of the floodplain, between the Mohawk and the Hudson Rivers, Mr. Bell sits on his case still wearing his burgundy suit. Yellow weeds are flattened and dried by the tides. He’s tossing rocks into the river. “Amigos.” He stands to greet them. “A powerful confluence here.” He jerks his chin out to the water. “Though the power isn’t necessarily visible to the naked eye, this land looks forgotten, but I assure you, we’re standing at a most important place. You know the history of this great canal?”
Ruth shakes her head no.
“This is where north and south meet east and west. From here”—he points one way—“New York City and the Atlantic. And there”—his finger follows the curve of the river up—“the rest of the country. A passage through antiquity: Utica, Rome, and Syracuse. Tonawanda by way of Crescent, Tribes Hill, Canajoharie, May’s Point, Lyons, Palmyra, Macedon, to Buffalo. Each lock is a miracle of engineering built with nary an engineer. The excavated dirt formed a towpath beside the canal beaten flat by the mules who built New York State. These days, though, the canal doesn’t get much use.”
Ruth, Nat, and Mr. Bell stare down the Mohawk. “‘Low bridge,’” Mr. Bell sings out, but he is met with blank looks. He has to explain. “That’s where you sing, ‘Everybody down.’ Don’t you know that song?”
“No,” Ruth says. “Sorry.”
“‘Fifteen Miles on the Erie Canal’?”
“Sorry.”
Nat jerks his chin. “What’s in the case?” He’s almost rude. Perhaps he’s worried that Ruth likes Mr. Bell too much. The three of them stand around the suitcase, hands clasped like farmers admiring a prized pumpkin. Finally Mr. Bell flops the case open.
“There’s nothing in there,” Ruth says. It is empty save for its soiled pink taffeta lining.
“No, there’s not.”
“What was in there? What were you selling?”
“There’s never been anything in there. I carry an empty case.”
“Why?”
“It gives me a reason to knock on people’s doors, ask them questions. You already understand the potential in empty space and curious customers. Empty space made you two agree to meet me, a strange man in an abandoned location. Why would you do that?”
No one, besides an outraged bird, makes a sound.
“Empty space lures your customers into a dark and dreary basement. Why?”
“What kind of questions do you ask?”
“Whatever I need to know.” Mr. Bell claps his hands, smiles.
“Like?”
Mr. Bell squats as a catcher. He rubs his hands over his face, preparing his snake oil for presentation. “Do you have life insurance? Do you have a son? Do you own any property in Florida?” He straightens. “Just as examples.”
“Why do you want to know those things?”
“Information enables me to shape my con, to make something from nothing.”
“Pardon?”
“I am a con man.” He offers himself to them without a filter, opening arms. “This is how I make my living, separating fools from their money.”
“But we don’t have any money.”
“And I am not conning you.”
“Did you con Father Arthur?”
Mr. Bell snickers. “As a man of faith, he’s already familiar with my tricks.”
“So why’d you want to talk to us?”
“For you, in my suitcase, I have a proposition.”
Nat and Ruth bend closer to the empty case, peering inside again.
“No,” Mr. Bell says. “I’m speaking metaphorically.”
They stand.
“I should like to become your manager.”
“That’s what’s in the case?”
Ruth sees a small path to the river, a muddy slide down to the water. “What will you manage?”
“Your careers as seers, mediums, psychics. I’ll collect an audience. I’ll be a barker of sorts. You’re familiar with the term?”
No. “Yes.”
“I meet a lot of people.” Mr. Bell doesn’t have to convince them. Up close, in the light of day, he’s pocked with experience and some rough-looking tattoos. Mr. Bell still hasn’t told them his first name. “Many of these people would be interested in your services.”
“What are those?”
“Contacting the dead. Or putting on a good show.”
“You don’t believe in ghosts?” she asks.
“No.”
“You will once you sit with him.”
“I doubt it.”
“Why would we let you manage us after you’ve admitted to being a con man?”
“Like likes like.” When he smiles, his teeth are strong.
“You mean we’re con men also?”
“Yes.”
“Nat’s for real.”
“To you.”
“So you don’t believe in anything?”
Mr. Bell grins. “My beliefs are of a fossilized nature. Petrified. Luckily, my beliefs matter little. I’m a businessman, and if you say so, we’re in business.”
The river currents churn like something thicker: oil, booze, or blood.
“You must be rich.”
“No.”
“You went to college?” She’s looking for any advantage he might have over her.
“No. Why?”
“There are no atheists in foxholes.”
He smiles at her turn of phrase. “Not so, young lady. I can see the stars from this trench. Regardless of its extraordinary depths. Why? What do you believe?”
“Birds. Jesus.” She leaves Nat’s name off the list for now.
“A Christian.”
“No. I just like the man.”
“The man Jesus?”
“That’s the one.”
Mr. Bell smiles as if she’s a cute kid, as if he’s far older than he is. “Do we have a deal?” he asks Nat, but Nat looks to Ruth.
She studies the river. It’s hard to read. “OK,” she tells them. “A manager. Why not? We’ve got nothing to lose.”
Mr. Bell lets loose a small whoop. He swings the empty case, orbiting himself before letting go of its handle. It lands in the river with a sucking splash, floating downstream on its way to a new life in the big city.
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