by Walter Tevis
“Why, bless your heart,” I said, stuffing the cigars in my shirt pockets and the candy bars in my pants. There was no telephone at the store. I went over to Billy Bob’s car, lifted the hood, took out the distributor, and threw it into some bushes.
Then I stood there in the moonlight for a minute and a power realization dawned on me: I was flat broke. Here I was reborn into the world after nine months in the sky, and I had come back to be indeed naked and helpless. I took a deep breath of the night air and felt my heart speed up with it and the small hairs at the back of my neck tingle.
I had to begin somewhere. I turned and walked back into the shop and said, “Arabella, I need some cash.”
She just looked at me imperturbably. “How much?”
“I’ll sell you my watch for five hundred dollars,” I said. It had cost me eight thousand.
“One needs a watch,” she said. “I’ll see what I can do.”
She got up from her chair, went to a closed door at the back of the little shop, and opened it. I peered in. There was a small room filled with tobacco smoke, with Chinese revolutionary posters on the wall, some of them in tatters. At the back of the room was a cot with a wrinkled red coverlet on it and a tiny, wizened Chinese man lying on it reading Sports Illustrated. Probably Mr. Kim. She spoke to him in Chinese in a no-nonsense kind of way. He mumbled something that sounded surly but got off the cot meekly enough. She reached under the mattress and pulled out a little red plastic purse, opened it and took out six hundred-dollar coins. She handed them to me, smiled faintly, and said, “Keep your watch and pay me back when you sell the uranium.”
I glanced out the window to where the stacks of cordwood lay piled and said, “That uranium will put you out of business, you know.”
“It’s a dull business,” she said.
I nodded and put the coins in my pocket. “You’re a good woman, Arabella,” I said. Then I left the shop and took off toward Union Station.
***
I got about five minutes of exultation out of overcoming my arrest before I remembered that remark L’Ouverture had made about snobbery. The son of a bitch had a way of getting under my skin. In a sense I am a snob about good food, good china and good theater. I like Shakespeare immensely, as a matter of fact, now that I’m not trying to win points with Isabel. Bless her heart, she never knew the competition she entered when she took me on as a lover! But I like the good things of the modern world too. I thought of my running shoes. I’d bought them at a place on Forty-sixth Street a few weeks before the Isabel took off. You put your feet in a pretty little device called a Contour Reader, and the son of a bitch makes you a pair of Adidas right there. I mean right on your feet. It’s weird to watch but it feels good to have the warm polymers and rubber molded to your personal arches and to the ball and the heel and then up over the great toe. Like a Japanese massage. The machine even puts laces in, a sight more interesting to watch than most contemporary movies. And Jesus, do I love those gym shoes! Sky blue and made by electronic wizardry right before my eyes, between Madison and Fifth. Five hundred dollars. Eighty more if monogrammed. Mine have a white “B.B.” where the rubber disk used to be on a pair of Converse.
But I was pissed at L’Ouverture. Maybe because he’d pulled racism on me. I pounded along the predawn pavements, through silent suburbs and then along the “Ghost town” where all the poor blacks who did the paperwork for the U.S. Government used to live. Empty high-rise housing glowing dully by moonlight, emptier and spookier than Belson. I felt lucky to have been born in rural Ohio; those places, filled with the smells and sighs of government clerks and their dazed families, back when I was sleeping with Juno, were authentic anger factories. They used to defecate in the elevators in places like that, and do casual rapes on the staircases. No proper life for man at all.
Still, I’d picked up a lot of anger myself in my own loveless home. Anger and hunger—I could hardly tell them apart. Slap, slap went my shoes, the products of electronic sorcery and of my unique, large feet. Whump, whump went my substantial, furious heart; I could feel my quadriceps bulging against my jeans.
I began to think about railroad schedules. One thing about being a coal and wood tycoon: you learn when the trains run. A half-empty freight would be leaving Washington for New York at 5:15 A.M., and it was usually on time. I looked at my watch. I had twenty minutes.
Sometimes I think God sent me to Belson and Juno. Twenty years of space exploration by three countries had yielded nothing worth having. I, a rank amateur, had found two paradises with hardly any effort. One was a genuine Eden with food and trees and pleasant air; the other its reverse, made for the likes of St. Simeon Stylites, Origen, Cotton Mather and me. Oh, the varieties of religious experience! I had five minutes to find myself a comfortable freight car and get aboard.
***
The station, being electronic, had nobody around. The train was there when I arrived; it hissed a bit, made those endearing heavy clangs that trains make, and looked energetic. I found a big open car with BELSON MINES clearly stenciled on it—one of my very own. I climbed up the ladder at the side, slipped over, and let myself down. There was some coal dust at the bottom and nothing else. No way to see outside. But what the hell.
I was still panting from the run and had a godawful stitch in my side. My left wrist was painfully swollen from the handcuff when I’d jerked Billy Bob. My feet hurt like hell. Suddenly I remembered that I was a human bomb of endolin! There was no need to feel pain. I got one of the plastic packs from around my left arm, took a pinch, swallowed it with a bite of a Mars bar, and in a few minutes I felt terrific. So much for pain.
After the train got started, with more noise and vibration than the Isabel made landing on Belson, I slept for about an hour. When I awoke the sky was beginning to lighten overhead. I climbed up the ladder and was able to perch somewhat uncomfortably on the side of the slow-moving car and watch the sun coming up over misty fields. Now that I had something to compare our Earth with, I enjoyed it even more. Only one sun and one moon and no rings either, but a beautiful planet and one to treasure. Where else would you find a Canyon de Chelly or a Pacific Ocean, a Florida Keys or an India? My heart leaped to see that sweet green of summer grass on Earth, and maple trees in leaf, cattle out in fields, and birds everywhere, determined busybodies in the morning air!
***
The train had a forty-minute stop in Philadelphia, at a power plant. There were a couple of railroad people there to refuel the engine and oversee the unloading of some coal, but I was able to get out for a break without their noticing me. I left the terminal and did a few simple exercises. My body was stiff and sore and I added a bit of endolin to my Mars bar breakfast. There was a water fountain outside the station—my first Earth water in nine months. The sun was well up, and warm on my face.
I found myself in a shabby part of Philadelphia—one of those “Big House Slums” you read about. Population falls so fast these days that there is ample space for the poor in solar-house suburbs and town houses in the cities. The problem is they can’t heat the places in the wintertime and the solars don’t work, and the houses were so cheaply made in the first place that they were now, there among the pacified hills of a former suburb, a tatterdemalion aggregate of fallen plastic shingles, ruined lawns, cracked glass roofs and vine-clotted breezeways. It beats sleeping in doorways, but it’s a depressing sight.
I found an open drugstore and bought a six-pack of club soda, some beef jerky, a box of cookies and a pack of brown hair dye. Sixty dollars and change. As I was starting to leave the store I saw a pile of Enquirers, and sure enough, there I was on the front page. But without the beard, thank God. No one had taken a picture of me with the beard. And in the picture I looked rather well-groomed and serious. The headline read BILLIONAIRE OUTLAW FOILS COPS. I gave the man at the counter his two dollars for the paper. He didn’t even look at me. I left, reading.
It was comic in its way. I was called a “berserk eccentric” and a “financial
maverick.” I especially liked “berserk eccentric,” which suited my mood: John the Baptist still slept in me.
***
Back in my coal car I proceeded to dye my hair, using a couple of the cans of club soda and wishing I had bought a mirror at that drugstore. What I did was pour half the liquid dye into the plastic can of soda, shake it up, and then work it into my hair and beard with my fingertips. I left it there for twenty minutes, while the train chugged its way across the border into New Jersey, and then rinsed it off with another canful. I’d have given a hundred dollars for a pocket mirror. I’d dyed a spot the size of a five-dollar piece on my left forearm, where it was at its hairiest, and I used that for a kind of control; when I rinsed it off after twenty minutes there was a patch of convincing-looking brown on my arm. I hoped that on my head and beard the results were as good.
The day was uneventful and warm. I lay around in the bottom of the car like Huckleberry Finn on his raft, or rode up on the side and watched the countryside go by and ate my beef jerky and Mars bars and drank the four other cans of club soda and had a pretty good time of it. It seemed more of a real journey than traveling halfway across the Milky Way had been.
Close to dusk, the train gave me my first view of the Manhattan skyline. It was breathtaking, as it always is to me. Yet I could have wept to know that the upper floors of all the tall buildings were vacant. It is saddening to see the city at such times and know that it was once a powerhouse and isn’t anymore, although those tall old buildings still stand there quiet and aloof from the streets below them. I’m crazy about the idea of New York. It’s one of the great inventions of the human spirit, like the fugue or the Pythagorean Theorem or the airplane—the apotheosis of the polis and still to me the world’s greatest city.
We came into Manhattan through the old Pennsylvania Railroad tunnel and climbed back aboveground at Thirty-fourth and Seventh Avenue, at the Coal Dock. What a dusty, smelly place to see New York from! Almost all the fuel for the entire city came in at that point, and there were heaps of coal the size of small mountains, with the dust from them penetrating the air everywhere; I felt I could get black lung in ten minutes.
There used to be a department store—Macy’s, I think—on Thirty-fourth Street; the old building was now used for coal storage. My train stopped there and I was able to climb down from the car unobserved. There were a lot of guards around, but they were there to keep coal thieves out; I merely nodded and walked past them. It was a quarter to eight and there was still some light in the sky. I found Fifth Avenue and headed uptown. A good many people were on the street but nobody paid attention to me. I felt fine—loose and easy in the body and pleasantly tight in the stomach. It was something like my first trip to the city that time I’d come to stay with Aunt Myra; I was an anonymous and rootless tourist, starting a new life, on my own in the world’s best place to be on your own.
There was a mirror in the window of a videosphere store at Thirty-ninth Street, and I stopped to see myself at full length. I looked like hell—like a raunchy and fragrant derelict-rapist. The dyed hair and beard were a shock, as was the coal dust smeared on my face. I was something to scare children with. One elbow of my shirt was ripped open; my pants were baggy and filthy with coal and soot; there was a stain from hair dye on my shirt collar; and the dye on my beard and hair was uneven, with dark and light clumps sticking out crazily. I could have slept on park benches for the next twenty years and nobody would have noticed me.
***
When I was a teenager a fine old skyscraper sat at Forty-second Street between Lexington and Third. It was Aunt Myra’s favorite piece of hopeful architecture and she was the first person to name it to me: the Chrysler Building. They tore it down a few years after the elevators were stopped by the legislature in Albany. Elevators have counterweights and the whole thing wasn’t really necessary, but Albany wanted to show the world it was energy conscious. Its decree changed New York in a horrifying way, making the upper floors of all those unconscionably tall buildings inaccessible. Above the eighth it was all emptiness, derelicts and the odd fugitive.
Now where the Chrysler Building had once been there was the Heating Emporium, an open market for coal, wood, and alcohol, together with a few more exotic combustibles; I was glad to see the Belson Fuels corner well stocked and it pleased me to stand there a moment, looking like the raunchiest and most fragrant of bums, and see that each stick of neatly stacked cordwood had the name BELSON stamped on it in purple letters. Next to it was a heap of my coal, and that was not so pleasing. It was all bituminous, and you could tell it would be foul stuff by the color. But the Mafia had all the anthracite, and they weren’t about to let go of it in a controlled market.
I walked up Fifth to Fifty-third Street and turned over toward Madison. A couple of cops gave me a hostile eye, and a family of Chinese tourists seemed as boggled by me as a Chinese permits himself to be. A member of the capitalist underclass—one of the dregs. We do these things better in Hangchow. Well, in Hangchow I’d be wearing a gray uniform and sweeping the streets with a plastic broom and touching my forelock to the fat Communist bourgeois as they daintily strolled the streets with their chubby families. I liked being a disheveled bum in New York better, with my newfound pirate’s soul.
There was no doorman at the building and I walked up to the third floor. The apartment door had three locks. I banged loudly. After a minute the locks began clicking and, finally, the door opened. There was a small Japanese maid standing there, in uniform, staring up at me in shock.
I spoke softly to her, but with authority in my voice. “Tell Miss Belson it’s her father,” I said.
The maid nodded, shut the door and locked it. I waited. After several minutes it opened again and there was Myra, tall as ever, on crutches, looking at me quizzically for a moment. Finally she said, “Jesus Christ! Daddy.” She opened the door wider. “Jesus!” she said again.
I came in and hugged her. Gently, because Myra could be hurting almost anywhere. “It’s good to see you, honey,” I said. I was crying. I hadn’t thought about Myra much in the past few years—thinking about her could make me feel terrible—but I really loved her.
“Jesus, Daddy,” she said, “did you fall in?”
I shook my head. “Something like that.”
She laughed in that sort of childish way she has. Myra is almost thirty. “Let’s sit in the living room.” I followed her as she walked with care on her aluminum crutches into the big living room with windows looking down on Fifty-third Street. Myra had never met my Aunt Myra but she had somehow arrived, as if by reincarnation, at Aunt Myra’s style in interior decoration. I seated myself on a black velvet sofa, leaned back, and lit up a cigar. “I’ll wash up after a bit,” I said. She nodded and there was an embarrassed silence for a minute. There usually is, when I see her. “How about some coffee?” she said, “or whiskey?”
“Coffee.”
“Sure,” she said, with relief. “Martha, can you fix coffee for my father, with cream and sugar. I’ll have whiskey and soda.”
She turned back toward me and seated herself carefully in an armchair that faced the sofa I was sitting on. “You were on the TV news last night.” She laughed a bit uneasily. “They showed some old holos and called you the ‘billionaire fugitive,’ but it wasn’t clear what the police wanted you for.”
“The bastards,” I said. “They don’t know what they want me for. It’s that son of a bitch Baynes, and probably the Mafia too.”
“I thought it was something like that. Is that uranium dangerous, Daddy?”
“No,” I said. “Hell, no. On the contrary. It’s the safest uranium in the universe. I feel like Galileo when those cardinals were after his ass. Have they bothered you?”
“No. Do they know you’re in New York?”
“I don’t think so,” I said. “I’ve been sly about it. How’s your arthritis?”
She shrugged. “Same as always.”
“Hurts like hell?”
“Yes, Daddy. It hurts like hell.” She smiled at me in a way that might be described as “bravely” except that I sensed a hidden edge of blame in it. If only I had been around more during her childhood, had not been off in hotel suites dissolving corporations on paper in the middle of the night or bouncing around in bed with actresses or—let’s face it—finding ways of staying away from Anna and her fortitude, her unflinching zeal to be undeceived by the fripperies and fantasies of the world. If I hadn’t drunk so much when I was at home. If I hadn’t fought so much with Myra’s mother, bellowing my space pirate’s voice down the hallways and across the kitchens of whatever houses and apartments—in California or New York or Atlanta, or wherever my geographical yearnings took us…
Well, now I had endolin. “Myra,” I said, “I’ve got something for you.”
“Daddy.” She frowned. “I don’t need any more presents. Not even from outer space.”
“Honey,” I said, “this is no present.” I began unbuttoning my shirt, for a moment embarrassed by the sexual implications of what I was doing, being about to transfer that endolin wrapped to my sweating body to the body of my daughter sitting there in her stiff, arthritic way.
“What the hell…?” Myra said.
“It is something from another planet,” I said, pulling one of the bags filled with powder out from under the bandage that held it to my chest. I pushed aside a group of ivory netsuke and a Venetian-glass ashtray on Myra’s coffee table and set the packet of endolin down. Then I began opening the clear plastic carefully. My fingers trembled a little. “I have great hopes for you and this, Myra,” I said. I was shocked to hear my voice: vibrato, on the edge of tears. “I think it may be your anodyne…” I couldn’t finish. I got the bag open and looked at the powder sitting there, like some kind of super fix, a mainline for King Kong, that destructive fellow pirate in New York. Come on, Kong, I said to myself, do something good for someone you love, for a change.
“I’ll need to get a glass of water,” I said aloud, holding back tears. I stood up and barged into the kitchen, where Martha was putting ice in Myra’s drink of whiskey. I got a glass from a shelf and half-filled it with water. Then I grabbed a silver spoon from the sonic dishwasher and went into the living room again. I put a pinch of endolin into the water and stirred it, shakily.