The Havana Room

by Colin Harrison

  The car approached, slowed. A police cruiser, its flasher bar off. It turned in a slow circle, lights catching Jay's truck, then stopped. If they found a cardboard box with two hundred and sixty-five thousand dollars in it, then things would get interesting. A handheld flashlight beam shot directly at the driver's window, illuminating the falling snow, moved to the passenger side, found nothing, rubbed over the ground, rested on the license plate. I expected a figure to emerge and inspect the vehicle, but instead the police car crunched forward in its turn, wheels biting the road again, and disappeared the way it had come, red lights getting smaller.

  I stood up anxiously, wanting to escape. Where were Poppy and Jay? Maybe the police car had encountered them along the road. I considered stumbling my way down the sea cliff then walking along the shore. But it was bitter cold, the wind from the sound whipping upward behind me. Jay's truck would be warmer, and maybe he'd left the keys in it. I ran over the frozen ground to the driver's door and threw myself inside. Drag your ass out of here, Billy-boy. The keys weren't in the ignition. I checked under the seat. Nothing. In the glove compartment I found an owner's manual, another heavily scuffed baseball, an insurance document (which showed that Jay's coverage had lapsed), an empty ammunition box, and, strangely, a schedule of winter sporting events at one of Manhattan's private schools, with every Thursday night girls' basketball game circled. Random, useless things. I put them all back and huddled miserably in my seat.

  Then a figure emerged out of the darkness. Jay in his long coat. I opened the driver's door.

  "You see the car?" he asked.

  "Yeah, Jay, it was the police."

  He sat down in the driver's seat, his face pinched by the cold.

  "Why would the police roll up, Jay?"

  Instead of answering he closed his eyes and seemed to be pulling deep breaths into himself. "Okay… just a second here."

  "You all right?"

  He nodded and pulled the keys from his pocket.

  "Should I drive?"

  "I'll be fine."

  "You need more of those pills?" I suggested.

  "Let me just—" He got out of the truck, opened the rear door, then lay down.

  "Jay?"

  "I'm fine," he said. "I got this under control… Do me a favor and don't tell Allison."

  I reached back and grabbed the keys from him. "I'm taking us out of here."

  I guided the truck back the way we'd come, away from the water. The snow had already started to obscure the police car's tracks, and was piling in drifts on the westerly side of the road in fragile crests and valleys. As we passed the large barns, I noticed something I'd missed before, a modest farmhouse set back from the road, a snowy mirage almost, windows unlit, front porch drifted with snow. Someone had lived there once.

  At the gate to the main road, the police car was waiting for us, parked craftily so that any escape attempt would land the truck in the drainage ditch. I pulled to a stop and cut the engine, keeping the lights on.

  "What's happening?" asked Jay.

  "Cops."

  He groaned and fell back into the seat.

  The policemen opened their doors and walked toward the car, hands on guns, flashlights held up like spears.

  "Who's that?" demanded one.

  I lowered the window. "Hi guys," I said, worrying about the box of cash behind my seat.

  "You taking a little drive?" One of the cops shined the light into the backseat. "Who you got there?"

  "This is my friend," I said.

  "This ain't lovers' lane, buddy," the cop said. "This is private property."

  "It's not like that."

  He smiled with a happy sadism. "What's it like, then? I always wanted to know."

  "Hey, hey, is that Dougie?" Jay called from the darkness of the rear seat.

  "Who you got in there?"

  "Dougie," bellowed Jay, "you married that girl yet?"

  "Who's that? Jay? Jay Rainey?"

  Jay sat up and opened his door, and practically fell into the snow. "Who do you think?"

  The cop shook his head, laughing. "Jay, we thought you was the big-city boy now." He shook hands with Jay, then motioned at me. "Who's this?"

  "This?" Jay answered sloppily. "This is my lawyer, boys."

  "Lawyer?"

  "Uptown, man. The best money can buy."

  The cop shoved his light at my face, making me blink. "You been drinking, too?"

  I shook my head. Snow was blowing into the truck.

  "You don't mind if I check you?"

  "Nope."

  He came over, gave me a perfunctory sniff. "You were drinking but it was hours ago, and you had dinner and somebody was smoking cigars or something."

  "That's right," I said. "Pretty good."

  The other cop laughed. "He can fucking smell pussy in a swimming pool."

  "I gotta get back in the car," Jay announced.

  Dougie helped him and closed the door. Then he held out his hand. "You got some ID?"

  I showed him my license.

  "You got something that tells me who you are, I mean?"

  I fumbled with my wallet. "This is my old business card."

  The cop pinched it from my fingers. "Hey, I even heard of this law firm. You don't work there no more?"

  "Uh, no."

  "Disbarred?"

  "What?"

  "Only joking."

  "I wasn't disbarred."

  "Just want to make sure that you're giving Jay here proper representation, Mr. William Wyeth." He nodded at his partner. "Okay, since the car is not stolen, and since you are not drinking and since the owner of the property is with you, although apparently rather incapacitated, then I don't think we have a problem." He slipped my card into his pocket, however. "We saw lights from the main road, thought people was messing around." He looked at me. "What you guys doing out here this late, anyway?"

  "He was showing me the land," I said. "He had kind of a big night and wanted me to see it."

  "I heard Jay was selling it." He bent and addressed the backseat of the truck. "Jay, you come back here before the city eats you up, hear?"

  No answer came. "Get the local boy home safe, okay?" he said softly to me. "Jay and I go way back. Played some ball together before—" He stopped.

  "Before—?" I prompted.

  But he'd turned away. "Just take care of him, okay?"

  "You got it," I said, eager to get going.

  The cop car backed over the snow, then pulled away in front of us. I let the truck roll forward. "Jay?"

  He didn't say anything.

  "Jay," I announced anyway, "you need another lawyer." I waited for an answer. I remembered to hang the chain back up behind us and close the lock. I turned the truck onto the main road and watched for on-coming traffic. Ninety minutes back to the city. "I mean, this is not what I do, not what I used to do, not what I want to be doing." I looked over to see his response.

  He had none. He was gone, curled asleep against the seat like— well, like a boy.

  * * *

  It was late now, past 4 a.m. The evening seemed impossible, scenes in a strange, cold dream. From the moment I'd stepped into the Havana Room five hours earlier, nothing had made sense. I drove west, toward the lights of Manhattan, running the heater and wishing the cop hadn't kept my business card. He hadn't needed it, right? I glanced back over the seat. Jay was completely gone, his breath entering and leaving his nostrils noisily, coughing thickly now and then. From time to time he muttered in his sleep. I didn't like what had happened, I didn't like my complicity. Certainly Jay had enjoyed the right to move the bulldozer up over the sea cliff because it constituted a danger to anyone below. That much was justifiable. The rights of the living trump the rights of the dead. And my own assistance in this discrete action seemed more or less defensible. But moving the body farther from its absolute point of true death was loaded with problems. Of course, Herschel, being deceased, never knew that his body was being transported over the frozen farmland a
few hundred yards away. But his very unknowingness constituted part of my objection. Surely the dead have the right to be properly discovered by the living— that is, to be preserved in the circumstances of death so that their families may reckon with death, may complete the narrative, compose an ending. The principle of the undisturbed body derives from the basic needs of society and tribe. Moreover, I'd not told the policemen what we'd done. I'd lied to his face, despite the fact that policemen are often quite interested in lies, especially as they pertain to bodies moved in the night.

  All this gave me a bad feeling that I was falling, again, falling even further from my old life, further from Timothy. And I missed him so, missed the soft flop of his head against my chest when he was a baby in my arms, lips pooching and puckering in his sleep, missed the errant burps and innocent fartings, the blond duckling softness of his hair after his bath, drowsing, the soft breathing weight of him on my chest. Years removed, as I drove through the night, this memory pierced me again and again. Where was he? In misery I almost said it aloud. Where was my son? The boy who sat on my shoulders and steered me by pulling on one ear or the other, the boy who was reading the sports page when he was five years old, the boy who left streaks of toothpaste all over the bathroom, the towels thrown across the floor, wet footprints stamping down the hall? The boy I kissed good night each evening at nine sharp. My boy, where are you? In another land, in the arms of another man, in a place far away and waiting for your father to come and get you.

  * * *

  I pressed forward through the snow. Given the hour, we moved quickly. Arriving from the east, New York City is a sequence of subtraction and addition. First comes dark, pine-barren nothingness that gives way to exurb tract housing and new office buildings, and they in turn fill into traditional suburban sprawl. Soon the yards shrink as the borough of Queens approaches and the buildings become squat and dense, crowding each other, semidetached houses changing to row homes. Meanwhile the road surface becomes worse, the exits more frequent, the drivers more insane, and then you are in Queens proper, facing the sheer wall of Manhattan, a thousand-foot stone tapestry hung from the sky, and then you're whizzing downward under the East River into the halogen-mad tunnel, daring and dared by the other vehicles to pass at eighty miles an hour, then up onto the island proper, the city that night a muffled village of snow. Behind me Jay slept. At the first stoplight I glanced back at him; his face was slack, almost as if he were the second dead man of the evening, but then he gave a grunty cough and lifted his head.

  "You konked out," I said.

  "Yeah."

  "I'm driving to my place and then you can go on."

  "Sure. That's great."

  "I'll check on your deed tomorrow, like I promised." I let a snowplow rumble past me. "But then I'm out, Jay. Don't consider me your lawyer."

  I turned on Thirty-sixth Street. The sky was starting to lighten, and in an hour the sun would start to drop along the eastern face of the buildings. "We're here."

  Jay didn't seem to notice my miserable neighborhood.

  "I've got to go upstairs and sleep," I told Jay. "Can you drive? I can call Allison."

  "No, no," he said, pulling himself up. "I can drive." He opened his door. "Cold out there."

  I didn't like the way he looked, but I got out anyway, leaving the driver's door open for him. "You all right? Remember you got a box of cash with you."

  "Sure, sure."

  I waited for some kind of thanks, or recognition of the extremity of the evening. But none came. I hopped up the steps into my building and let the door swing shut. Then, perhaps out of worry, I lingered behind the glass and watched him.

  For a moment nothing happened, and I considered going back outside to insist that I drive him home. He looked barely able to stand. But then he pulled himself out of the truck and made his way unsteadily to the rear hatch. He popped it open, looked up and down the street, then bent over into the rear. I couldn't see what he was doing but he was busy with his hands. I glanced at what looked like a thick plastic tube, but it disappeared. He stood bent over for a minute or so, a vulnerable position given the hour and the location, and I remembered the Puerto Rican guy who prowled the neighborhood looking for a fight. But Jay stood up and shut the back of the truck. It took him two tries. How could such a big guy be so weak? He shuffled toward the driver's side, almost slipping once, and reached the door. Then he stood with his arms on the roof, like a winded runner.

  I was just about to go outside when he slid in his seat. The driver's door closed, the truck rolled forward. I stepped out to see if he made the left-hand turn onto Eighth Avenue, which would be the logical action if he was headed to Allison's. He didn't turn, and instead continued east on Thirty-sixth Street. Maybe he was going crosstown and then up to her neighborhood. I stepped out into the street and watched Jay's taillights two blocks away. At Seventh Avenue, he turned south. He definitely wasn't headed to Allison's apartment. No, Jay Rainey, whoever he was and whatever his condition, was on his way somewhere else.

  Four

  HEREWITH, an abbreviated history of Manhattan real estate: a mountain range of stone, ancient as the moon; twelve thousand years of pulverizing glaciers, which, receding as recorded time began, left behind an island of bedrock buried over with gravel and sand, as well as a wide river flowing into a protected bay; unbroken expanses of oak, maple, elm, and chestnut; infinities of oysters, clams, fish, deer, beaver, rabbit, and fox; Algonquin Indians and their leafy footpaths; Henrik Hudson and the Dutch East India Company; Peter Stuyvesant and his bowerie; improvements in the construction of sailing vessels; King Charles II and his kid brother, the Duke of York; the 1720 riot by black slaves, which accelerated the segregation of their housing; the 1763 Treaty of Paris, in which all of North America was ceded to England; the adoption of the largest Algonquin trail as a "broad way" north and south; a lovely buttonwood tree on Wall Street under which men in beaver hats traded securities; Robert Fulton and his spluttering steamboat, which improved trade upriver; the great fire of 1835, which destroyed the business district; the Erie Canal, which connected Manhattan to the continental interior and allowed immeasurable amounts of lumber, rye whiskey, livestock, and farm produce to float downstream into the digestive maw of the new city; further extension of Broadway up the length of the island; the potato famine of 1846, which flooded the city with cheap Irish labor; the failed Revolution of 1848, which flooded the city with cheap German labor; the shantytowns in the center of the island, which contained such pestilence, crime, and shocking immorality that the city fathers decided to clear the land for a central park; the willingness to fill in coves along the banks of the Hudson River with oyster shells, bottles, dead horses, cannonballs, leather shoes, and anything else; the Civil War, which made merchants rich; improvements in the manufacture of iron; Cornelius Vanderbilt and his Pennsylvania Railroad; the aforementioned purity and ample supply of the watershed north of the city, which could support a mighty population; the construction of great docks along both sides of the island; the discovery of oil in western Pennsylvania; banker J. P. Morgan and his enormous, florid nose, so ugly it scared people who might otherwise have opposed him; Thomas Edison's 1878 invention of the lightbulb, which became instantly irresistible and led to the wiring of the city; the conversion of trains from steam to electric; the Lower East Side's houses of prostitution, which ignited the sexual appetites of innumerable young men; "Boss" Tweed, who, although he stole $160 million, accelerated the naturalization of aliens, including hundreds of thousands of Italians and Jews from Eastern Europe, many of whom crowded into the Lower East Side and frequented the houses of prostitution; the invention of the electrified elevated train to move these masses; the booming stock market; the documentation, by photographer Jacob Riis, of the Lower East Side's pestilence, crime, and shocking immorality; the arrival of "patent" medicines, often little more than opium and so pleasurable that their customers forgot they were dying of dysentery; the stock market crash of 1894; the obsole
scence of the wooden sailing ship; the development of cast-iron architecture; improvements in the refining of crude oil; the invention of the internal combustion engine; the new and irresistible telephone, which led to the wiring of the city; improvements in the manufacture of structural steel; World War I, which flooded the city with cheap black labor from the South and made merchants rich; the destruction of Europe; the new and irresistible radio; the obsolescence of the horse; the rise of Harlem as the center of black culture, much of it from the South; Prohibition and the appearance of speakeasies; the presence or absence of bedrock upon which high office buildings might now be erected; the booming stock market; the commodification of a certain well-dollared, ironic smugness, which supported various purveyors of this consciousness, among them dozens of celebrated bars, hotels, and clubs; the smoky burlesque theaters, which ignited the sexual appetites of innumerable young men; the new and irresistible ocean liners; the stock market crash of 1929; the Great Depression, during which time the Chrysler Building, the Empire State Building, the Waldorf-Astoria, and Rockefeller Center were completed; the new and irresistible moving pictures; World War II, which made merchants rich; the conversion of the old Times Square burlesque theaters to movie houses; the 1943 riots by blacks in Harlem; the destruction of Europe; the building of the United Nations complex, which introduced the glass-curtain-walled skyscraper to the city; rising Puerto Rican immigration, much of which packed into the Lower East Side as Jews and Italians left; improvements in the refining of crude oil to create a new product called "jet" fuel; the new and irresistible television; the falling cost of domestic airplane travel; the 1960s riots by blacks in Harlem; the booming stock market; the construction of the American interstate highway system, which helped the trucking industry; the bankruptcy of railroads and the 1966 demolition of the old Pennsylvania Station (looming, neoclassically magnificent, civitas captured in stone), prompting a storm of protest; the arrival of heroin, so pleasurable that addicts would commit daily felonies to support their habits; the conversion of Times Square movie houses to porno theaters, which ignited the sexual appetites of innumerable young men; the collapse and removal of the rotting, obsolete docks on both sides of the island; white flight out of the city; the depressed stock market; the erection of the 110-floor twin towers of the World Trade Center; the suburbs as haven; the Stonewall riots by gay men in the Village; the suburbs as wasteland; the arrival of high-quality cocaine, so pleasurable that people did not mind burning holes inside their heads with it; the booming stock market; population explosions in Haiti, India, and Pakistan; the falling cost of international travel by jumbo jet; the arrival of crack cocaine, so pleasurable it could make men suck happily on the leg of a chair; the dissolution of the USSR; white flight back into the city for the purposes of real estate speculation and convivial association; the soaring, gaudily crenellated edifice of Donald Trump's ego; the stock market crash of 1987; the obsolescence of ocean liners; the 1994 riot by blacks in Howard Beach; the shantytowns in Tompkins Square Park, which contained such pestilence, crime, and shocking immorality that the city fathers decided to clear the land; the commodification of a certain well-dollared, ironic smugness, which supported various purveyors of this consciousness, among them dozens of celebrated bars, hotels, and clubs; a post-Communist wave of stamping, ginseng-chewing Chinese immigration; the new popularity of the Internet, which led to the wiring of the city and ignited the sexual appetites of innumerable young men; the conversion of Times Square porno theaters to tourist hotels; the booming stock market, borne aloft by the Internet; coffee bars filled with people discussing the Internet and the stock market; the postmillenial stock market implosion; and, of course, the crashing of two jumbo jets into the World Trade Center towers, which— some would say— marked the true beginning of the twenty-first century.