by Mark Helprin
Marshall asked, “Daddy, where does it come from?”
Livingston answered, “It comes from all over the country, from all forty-eight states.”
“Where?”
“You want me to name the states again, huh.” Marshall waited for Livingston to begin. Soon he would be able to name the states as fast as Livingston, who started at Maine, went down the East Coast to Florida, across the Gulf to Alabama and Mississippi, up through the Middle South and West, the Northwest, the West, and the Southwest. Marshall was dazzled. He tried, but left out Arkansas, Idaho, Nevada, and Minnesota.
A mile before Oscawana they set out at a canter down a stretch of narrow beach. Bass were jumping, and muskrats ran off into the weeds. Marshall had been taken up on a horse the day the doctor said his illness had passed. As far back as he could remember he had been sitting on saddles. At six he was also a tolerably good shot with a boy’s lever-action Winchester, but as yet Livingston had not let him shoot from the horse. With his legs bowing out the brass-buckled stirrups and the rifle cracking in militant repetition, Livingston could shoot accurately and fast from his galloping mount, swiveling from side to side to deal with imagined enemies while Marshall looked on and drank it in to the smallest spaces in his soul as if in rigorous preparation for unknown or generalized vengeance. Only six, Marshall dreamed on occasion of slaughtering his enemies, though he had none, and in his imagination he could be cruel even if he were mostly kind.
They arrived at the crabbing place on the tip of the Oscawana Bend, and took the saddles off the horses. Marshall led them out a little into the sandy flats where they drank from clear pools. Down at Eagle Bay it would have been impossible for the horses to drink from the river and not get sick. But Oscawana was not too brackish, primarily because the Croton River (which they had crossed sinking up to their knees) intervened and blocked the salty bay. It was just a bit salty at Oscawana; horses like that. For several years Livingston had intended not to let them drink from the Hudson, since it was supposed to have been getting dirty—but for the moment it seemed clean enough. By the time Marshall got back and tied up the horses Livingston had baited the traps with gristle and meat scraps. They climbed the rocks and went to a deep place where with all his strength Livingston threw the cages out into the water. They took the lines and wrapped them around a stump, after which they sat down in the sun and ate lunch. It was very hot and humid, with the wind coming off the river.
The opposite side was flat before it became mountainous. High trees silhouetted in shimmering green made it seem like Africa, and it was quiet except for the small curling waves and the sounds of white herons as they took off along the water, splashing and then climbing on an invisible thermal. As it began its descent the sun hit Livingston and Marshall in their eyes, making them squint into the distance and keep still in the placid heat. Now and then they would pull in the traps and put the crabs in a big bucket. But they mainly sat and watched the colors of the distance and the white birds soaring over the river.
When they were somewhat dazed from this, a mirage appeared on the surface of the river. A little town from west of the Hudson, a town unrecognizable to them, was suddenly standing in the ship channel. White herons and gulls circled through steeples intense and wavering in the mirage, and a car moved across the water. It was extraordinary, and it made Marshall rise in wonderment. Livingston too was frozen in its power. For a full half an hour they stared at it, watching movements inside, watching it shimmer and change position. It seemed real.
Livingston had last seen a mirage in North Africa during the war, when he was a major in Intelligence traveling from Algiers to Cairo by truck convoy. They were south of the German pocket, bumping along the dusty road in white heat. Intermittently a song came in on the Allied radio. It was a sharp jazz tune with lyrics which went something like: “If I had a zillion dollars, if I had me just a zillion; when I get frisky give me whisky, give me whisky and I’ll die.” The driver was beating time on the wheel as he went dangerously and jokingly fast. A great white terraced city appeared, resting above the horizon in a bed of blue like the deep blue off the mesas in Arizona—so deep that it damages the sense of uprightness and causes one to circle without restraining force. The driver kept driving to the fast song, but the hair stood up on his arms and neck and he said, “Jesus Christ, Lord Almighty, white terraces, what the hell is that?” although he knew quite well that it was a mirage. They drove transfixed as minutes passed during which the white city danced in the sky ahead of them.
That evening when the convoy pulled into a little encampment, a captain in command of the American detachment called Livingston to interrogate some German prisoners. They were in a barn which smelled of hay and animals and was lit by a kerosene lantern throwing a golden light over the sunburnt faces of the assembled soldiers. There were a dozen or so Germans. Livingston approached a repulsively overproud young officer. Livingston was a good deal rougher, older, more authoritative, and bigger than the thin Afrika Korps lieutenant, but he felt nevertheless at a disadvantage when confronted by the hopelessly and meticulously ingrained worldview of the young Nazi. He began to speak and question in a German tinged with Yiddish and Yiddish intonations. It took the young officer a while to fathom the meaning of the Americans fluent outlandish speech, and in shock and disgust he interrupted his interrogator, saying “You are a Jew,” to which Livingston nodded in the affirmative.
The German spit in his face. Livingston slammed his fist into the lieutenants stomach, collapsing him in a heap. The younger man was rather fragile, but Livingston jumped him anyway and was ready to beat him when he snatched Livingstons pistol from its holster. The guards came alive. As one of them emptied a carbine into the German, the German completed his last intended act and shot himself in the head. Everyone drew back. It had been so sudden, and he lay in the middle of the earthen floor directly under the lantern, a mass of blood and torn tissue. The prisoners and their captors were speechless in the sharp night noise of the crickets, and the lantern swayed back and forth.
Marshall had never heard anything like this, and looked at Livingston as if he were the key to a great many mysteries of which Marshall had not even begun to know. As the sun was getting low and softer over the mountains, he put his head in his hands and closed his eyes. Marshall touched him, knowing that he could not comfort him, not in a million years. Livingston was crying, something Marshall had never seen him do and would not see again.
When it became cooler and everything was quiet and calm as if in preparation for darkness, they arose, pulled in the traps, saddled the horses, and got ready to leave. Marshall had been thinking of the poor cows and pigs he had seen going to slaughter. They had cried and he had heard them. But then it had been bright daylight with the sun shining on him and the wind striking his face, so he had not noticed. Later, when dusk caused sadness even among the landed birds, Marshall remembered the terrifying cries of the animals packed together in the railroad cars. He turned to Livingston and said, “Daddy, lets throw the crabs back,” and they did.
7
NOT SURPRISINGLY, Eagle Bay was a residence of eagles, who had been there before anyone could remember and chose the forest and reedy bays as refuge for their last great eastern congregation. A score or more of them rested in the tops of the highest trees, on cliffs overlooking the river, in the dead branches of giant oaks. Marshall had trouble distinguishing the younger ones from hawks, especially in flight, but the old eagles had white hoods and muscular bodies unlike those of their air-slim competitors. These were the biggest and the most like the eagle in pictures or on silver dollars. All of them (eagles, eaglets, hawks, hawklets) hunted in the forest and across the river, and could be seen returning from the west in paired flight, a young one following his instructor.
One day Marshall decided to climb a cliff which rose about 150 feet from the river shore. He had frequently reached the top by descending Brandreth Ridge, but never had he gone directly up its face of jutting granite and
loose rocks with trees rooted only here and there. He took a double lasso wrapped around his body as in pictures of climbers in the Alps or the Himalayas. He knew very well that there was no way to use the rope and that it would probably be a nuisance, but it looked good. It was a sunny day with some light breezes, and the river was choppy.
At first it was easy. Grasping projecting rocks and roots he climbed fast until he was about 75 feet off the ground. He rested and looked down. The railroad tracks were as thin as fishing line, and he could not hear the sound of the little waves. He promptly froze to the face of the cliff, sorry that he had been stupid enough to get as far as 75 feet. Imagining his dead body on the tracks below, he decided to retreat, whereupon he learned a basic anatomical lesson, that human beings do not have eyes in their feet. In ten minutes of agonizing distress he descended only a few inches. He would hang on to handholds which he knew he could grip for only a few seconds, and feel around with his feet until he found a ledge, with no way to tell if it would hold. His rope was indeed useless. He thought of lowering himself, but there was nothing onto which he could tie. The lasso was leather and smelled like a horse. He threw it down, noting that it took uncomfortably long to reach the ground. It was clear that he had to go up.
Past the halfway mark the handholds and crevices seemed to get smaller and looser as he got higher, and by the time he reached 125 feet he was soaking wet and trembling with exhaustion. He dared not look back, but the noise of a train passing directly below seemed distant and muffled.
Fifteen feet from the top he came to an outcropping which projected a foot or two from the pitch. He had to reach backward, grab the top of the ledge, and hang until he summoned strength enough to pull himself over. As he made past the jutting rock, every muscle in his body shaking violently from the exertion, he found himself face to face with an eagle which sat on an enormous nest Marshall had never seen from the top of the cliff only a few feet away. Marshall threw himself against the grass and lichen on the little plateau, and lay there breathing desperately, strengthless. The eagle was so surprised that it remained still for a long time. Marshall saw directly into its eye, in which the river and the mountains on the opposite shore were reflected in black and silver.
Then the eagle enacted all its parts and muscles into a rising so strong, slow, and furious that it seemed to Marshall as if the earth were shaking. The eagle rose into the air and swayed out over empty space, reached an apogee, and then swayed back, talons extended. Marshall began to run up the steep incline, and when the eagle made its first pass it had to veer because a gnarled tree between the rocks shielded Marshall’s way. Marshall kept on, while the eagle flew up into the air, as if it wanted to clear its mind with high altitude and mastery of flight. The second time it came in, air passing through its feathers and talons made a screaming noise.
Marshall was at the top, and he turned around just in time to get knocked over. He rolled in panic, the eagle trying to hook and bite him, its wings folding and slapping the ground or beating in the air to keep balance. They were entangled in one another, and then as fast as it had swooped it took to the air and flew in a descending line downwind to the south. Marshall was intact, eyes, throat, genitals, and extremities still there, but he was scratched all over and cut in a lew places, and he could not see out of his left eye because blood from a cut just above it filled the almond cup and blinded. He limped through the woods shaken, bleeding, and stunned. From that encounter he carried a scar between his left eye and eyebrow. People sometimes asked where he had gotten it, and because they did not believe him he learned to say: “A kid hit me.” He loved the eagle, fierce and hard as it was. He loved the way it had risen and flown away. He envied its command of the air, and every time he looked at a silver dollar he felt a strange sense of pride. Having wrestled an eagle, he remembered what few would ever know, and that was the sound of its heart beating and its breathing as it fought. It sounded like a woman in love.
8
FOR EACH thirty or forty miles of mainline track the New York Central railroad had some kind of security man. Since Eagle Bay was not far from Harmon Yard, a major installation where electric changed to diesel (or steam, as the case had been), the roadbed running through it was in the charge of a full-fledged bull, a senior detective who had cased the tracks from Chicago to Boston before landing promotion to an easy berth near New York just outside the city limits so that he would not be troubled by the nests of vandals bred south of Spuyten Duyvil.
His name was L. H. Triggers, and in his declining years his strength was more than matched by intelligence and skill. He was thoroughly adept at all the techniques: fingerprints, telephone tapping, stakeout, acid gravure, revelatory footbaths, microscopic alignment, stool pigeons, plaster of Paris, tying little strings all over the place, etc., etc. It is said that when on loan to a Southern railroad he solved a major theft case in Biloxi by taking a fingerprint off a bean. And like all good detectives he had that instinct—a direct wire to the Devil—which led him down the right paths until he got his man.
Marshall first encountered him in 1956, when Marshall was nine. The Livingstons were close to a family of Russian emigres called Gurkapovitch. They used to travel in the Gurkapovitches’ old open car up the river to Garrison, where they spent afternoons eating and drinking at a Hungarian restaurant set between a pine wood through which rushed a fast cold stream and the New York Central tracks. The Gurkapovitches were old, given to long meals and talk of better days in different places—the kind of talk to which Marshall had dozed off half his nights. But the Gurkapovitches had two strange children born when Monsieur Gurkapovitch was past seventy: Semyon, Marshall’s age, and a six-year-old named Lad, for they had wanted him to assimilate. Lad (or as his father pronounced it, Led), his brother, and Marshall could tolerate reminiscences of Petersburg and Budapest for only an hour or two, during which they stuffed themselves with pastries and (from nervousness more than anything else) drank the dregs of wine left on the table. Monsieur Gurkapovitch was a wine aficionado and always ordered three or four different vintages as well as champagne.
As their parents sat contentedly watching the stream, the children busied themselves with pouring and fiddling, moving in their chairs, playing with the table implements and matches, and draining half a dozen wine bottles. Soon the three boys arose from the table and staggered out of the restaurant into a dirt parking lot. Lad’s eyes fixed upon the railroad gates, miraculous engines at the roadside.
Thirty-five feet long, the braced triangular gates were painted in black and white stripes and fitted with wire-caged red lights. Having misjudged the potential of a country lane, the railroad had put them there to protect voluminous traffic which had never arrived. Staring upward, the two Gurkapovitches and Marshall stood at the base of one of the monuments. At its tip was a red light like a melon-sized cherry. That, and the promise of a view beyond the pines into the rolling farmlands and the mountains, set off their deep-seated urge to climb. But the lead counterweight was so massive that in the upright position it prevented access. They had drunk too much and could not make a human pyramid, so they sat by the side of the road with shoots of grass in their mouths, when from the north they heard the faraway steam whistle of a freight. In due time the wheels and gears of the gate began to sound and it lowered itself with a flashing of lights and a crashing of bells.
Marshall and the older Gurkapovitch straddled the tips of both gates. The train rumbled through the junction, shaking the wooden frames on which the boys nervously perched. When the caboose cleared the crossing the wheels and gears began to sound again, but the gates refused to lift. Soon the engines and transmissions were straining so hard and making such a cacophony that Semyon despaired and jumped off. His gate arose so fast that it nearly snapped. Marshall’s was still straining, and white smoke began to come from the electric motor. Not wanting to give up forever the possibility of gaining the summit, the elder Gurkapovitch grabbed his brother and hooked his lederhosen around the top lig
ht. Marshall dismounted, and the gate lifted smoothly to the perpendicular. Lad had become the conqueror, but it did little good, for his vocabulary and experience were not sufficient to describe the afforded view. He was, however, quite content to be so high, safely held by leather straps, his feet firmly planted on a crossbar.
After a few minutes, his brother called for him to descend. Lad wiggled about but was unable to disengage himself from the hook of the light. The harder he struggled the more he became fixed to the tip. He was only six, and would have begun to cry for fear of being held up there until the next freight, but the wine kept him silent and happy. The two older boys were puzzled. As they sat down in hope of arriving at a solution, an old Ford truck with the New York Central oval came chugging down the road. Marshall turned to Semyon. “Distract him,” he said, after which they began to dance the Charleston.