Dead I Well May Be

by Adrian McKinty

  Ratko filled me with food, drove me over at paramedic speed in his Hyundai, talked like mad so I wouldn’t notice all the black people, helped me up the stairs, gave me the key, my hundred dollars back, a hearty handshake, and ran away before I could refuse….

  I looked around. The place was abominable, but I was only there two or three weeks. That’s how long it took for Ramón to find me. But you get the picture: vermin, roaches, and a hole in the bathroom that allowed you to see into two floors beneath you. No electricity, but by some miracle there was cold-water plumbing. The building had six stories, and they had a person in an apartment on each floor. Their job was to keep the homeless out of there while renovations were taking place, and it wasn’t too hard a task. The guy prowling the second floor was a huge Jamaican bruiser from some particularly evil part of Kingston who scared the bejesus out of most mortals. He had a shotgun and he’d plugged someone already and the word had gotten round. Harlem had plenty of derelict buildings, so it made sense to go to an easier place.

  Nowadays, Lenox Avenue looks like an ok sort of street and it might be hard to believe it ever was the way I say it was. But back then, I promise you, it was a murder picture. Every other building was a burnt-out graffitied shell. Garbage all over the streets, and people made campfires within the buildings to keep warm. Every floor smelled terrible and, just like in the days of Elizabethan London, you threw your shit out the open hole that should have been a window. The windows weren’t boarded up, because people had ripped down the plywood for furniture and the more shortsighted or desperate simply burned it.

  I’m sure it wasn’t always thus. I might have been living on the same street as the late Langston Hughes or Duke Ellington and for all I bloody knew Ralph Ellison could have been that old, sophisticated-looking guy at the bodega, but it seemed unlikely. The street sanitation was a disgrace, the architecture of the buildings postapocalyptic. It was Belfast, circa 1973, except here there was no civil war as an excuse for the calamity.

  There wasn’t much to do, either. No safe bars, no movie theaters. In fact, around here the most important landmark was the Apollo Theatre, but you’d be the brave white boy up there on a Saturday night in the autumn of 1992.

  And speaking of Apollo, patron of the Muses, true, but also guardian of prophecy and the future, I knew what was going to happen. What was inevitable the minute I stepped off the GWB. I could see it in my mind’s eye, I could see it, I could feel it, but I knew I had to bide my time. I had to lie low. Ratko could know that I was back in New York City, but he was to be the only one. Ratko could keep his mouth shut. Did others know I’d escaped from Mexico? I doubted it. The guards saw me fall into the swamp and not come out. So if Sunshine ever checked, he’d believe the guards, and even if rumors reached him and Darkey that I was somehow alive, why give credence to these paranoid reports? No, they didn’t know anything. They were snug, safe in their beds. Eejit safe in their eejit beds.

  So I had a place, I was incognito, and I figured if you couldn’t speak Serbo-Croat and weren’t part of a gossipy little Upper Manhattan Slavic circle, you didn’t know I was here. I was getting my shit together, making plans, but before I could do anything big I really had to do something about my leg. I wasn’t having nightmares. No phantom limb itches or anything like that, but I was walking too slowly with my crutch, and going up a flight of stairs was like Scott’s return from the Pole.

  Now, lucky for me I wasn’t a million miles away from somewhere I could get help. For if you keep walking on 125th Street you’ll eventually get to the Triborough Bridge and the East River, but before that, if you make a right wheel, conveniently enough there’s a foot hospital. The New York College of Podiatric Medicine. The hospital will give you an artificial foot to stick over your stump and the physical therapists will show you how to walk with that foot, through weeks, sometimes months, of training. They’ll give you drugs, advice, support, and an optimistic glossy brochure with smiling Special Olympians. All this, of course, if you have insurance. If you don’t have insurance and your dancer-tragic-accident letter to Gene Kelly got no reply, you are not completely banjaxed, for as I discovered, there is another way:

  You show up; you’re not an emergency case, so you have to wait. It can be a while, so bring a newspaper. It’s a presidential election year, so there’s plenty of reading, but you’re not an expert and it’s hard to tell the difference between the candidates—both would be Tories back home—so instead you read the sports section. There’s American football and real football and bizarre things like hockey on ice. The World Series is also coming up, but the New York teams aren’t in it. You read and read and you’re almost thinking of giving up, but finally a nurse takes your temperature and she’s so tired that she falls asleep while doing it. They give you a clipboard to which is attached a pink form. You fill in the details of an imaginary person and give his address and name and social security number. The nurse has already willfully suspended disbelief and leads you along a corridor to another man who might be a doctor. The doctor takes a look at your foot and shakes his head and says things like antibiotics and poor workmanship and where did they stitch you and you make a few things up in reply. The only accurate thing on your form is your blood type and he asks your blood type and you tell him and he asks if you’ve ever had any of a following list of complaints to which you reply no. He asks you to come back the following week and see some guy, but you hint that by next week you might not be at the address on your form. All this is part of a charade, for soon another man comes (an orderly, a nurse?) and leads you to a room that is brightly lit like a shoe store and packed with shoe boxes that contain feet. The feet are on little hinges and attach to your limb. Feet of every shape and size and skin color, but mostly black. Baby feet, size 15 feet, feet that stink of plastic and grease. He tries on several and gives you the best fit, which is an off-white. He says that really you should learn all about “stump management.” He tells you the line about the weeks of physical therapy, knowing full well that neither of you will see the other again. You put the foot in a plastic bag and carry it home. You practice in your apartment for hours until you’re chafed, bleeding, crying.

  You practice going up and down stairs and you fall a dozen times. You look at your stump and the straps on the artificial foot and you just can’t believe it. The horror of it takes your breath away.

  But you can’t live in that moment and you restrap yourself over the sores and the cuts, the skin-colored plastic of the foot going up over your stump, your hinged foot hanging there alien and ridiculous, until in jeans and socks and shoes it looks ok.

  Sometimes, for a brief moment, you can even forget what’s happened and think that you’re whole again.

  It’s physical and mental anguish but within the week you’re limping on it, but walking nonetheless, and if you didn’t know you were an amputee, you wouldn’t know, and besides, so many men in Harlem limp already you fit right in.

  When finally I felt strong in mind and body, I hopped an uptown train and went to spy on Bridget. I’d been waiting, I’d been patient. I could wait no more. I had a bushy beard by then and my hair was long and matted under a wool knit hat. I had sea boots and a lengthy black coat, and I could easily have passed for someone who had spent his formative years on a vodka-soaked fishing smack home-ported out of Murmansk or Archangel or some other similarly charming place. Perhaps I had fled the collapse of the Soviet Union and was looking for a ship, though why I thought I could find one in the landlocked part of the Bronx was something I hadn’t worked out yet.

  I took the IRT and got off a stop early and, before I knew what was going on, I was walking to Shovel’s house. By now, Shovel was long out of the old meat shop and up there concocting domestic bliss and sweetness and light with his loving and amenable missus. He didn’t know it, but Shovel more than had his revenge on me. I hung around for twenty minutes and then walked north to the Four Provinces.

  When I got there, I realized quickly that there wer
e no convenient places to hide up, and the lay of the land was very bad. The whole thing was extremely foolish, and I was pretty sure that if any of a dozen people came by, I would be immediately blown despite my outfit.

  Apartment buildings, cars, a few town houses, white people, waste ground about fifty yards up the street, where the kids sometimes played basketball. School was in, so there were no weans, but still it wasn’t an ideal observation post at all. The only spot that might remotely work was on the far side of the waste ground, where you could slip into the alley between two apartment blocks. You could maybe sit there in the shadows, looking out across the waste ground towards the street and then farther down to the Four Provinces. I walked over and checked it out, and it was not ideal. If she came out and turned left I’d never see her at all; if she came out and turned right I’d have a chance of spotting her, but it was so far away I’d really have to be looking. And I couldn’t squat in the alley indefinitely; sooner or later, someone would lean out his bathroom window and say something or tell someone. Broken bottles, condoms, a smashed TV, a stench from a brown box. Still, as shitty OPs went, it could have been worse and if I could disappear into the shadows it would be ok.

  I wasn’t exactly an old hand, but I wasn’t exactly clueless, either.

  In the short time I was in the British Army, I got a whisper from a Jock sergeant, at basic training, that they were grooming me for officer training or the specials, because as the sergeant said: I was a vile, underhanded, sneaky, wee, idle fuck.

  I never did make officer selection, because the next week I stole a Land Rover and drove from Aldershot to Cambridge to see a girl. Typical, and like some Mick curse, strong drink was behind most of this little adventure. I returned the vehicle undamaged, but my file had increased in size threefold and I was never to be out of the army’s bad books again. I didn’t do time for that, which showed how much they liked me, and the Jock sergeant and the captain hurt me more with their disappointment than any punishment. I worked a wee bit harder after that and though I was only in a year they let me take a corporal’s course (which I failed), but even being asked showed that I still had some promise. I think they thought if I could get through the first year or two, I might be a useful wee character in and around West Tyrone or the badlands of South Armagh. After twelve months, I was sent to Saint Helena on a recon course and taught to scout and do legwork and OPs, and I enjoyed it and might have made a go of things had I not been woefully immature. I was not seventeen when I joined and far too young to respect authority, never mind the fucking British Army, and a bar fight during the recon course (when I nearly killed a local sheep farmer or fisherman or whatever it is they do out there) was the final straw for Her Majesty and they kicked me out after a spell in the pokey.

  But although my experience working for HM Forces had been brief, it had been fruitful. They’d taught me to harden my body, to harden my mind, they’d shown me how to shoot and (more pertinent here) how to do observation layups and how to wait. The corporal’s course was to be useful a few weeks later when I was being tailed, but the recon came in useful right now. It was taught by a Geordie SAS staff sergeant who knew his business but could barely speak intelligible English. If you paid attention, though, he came off with some good stuff. He told us how to stay awake, he told us how to kip, he told us that Saint Helena herself was British and that the stories about Napoleon’s dick were not true. And among those diverse georgics that he taught us up on the windy cliffs of east Saint H. he told us not to believe in cop shows where you see peelers sitting with mugs of coffee and doughnuts on a stakeout. Never, he said, take diuretics on a layup, especially if you’re on your own. If you forget everything else, remember to be careful about peeing. That was it, really, all the rest was about finding a good spot and waiting.

  So thanks, Sarge. I had a long pee down the alley, found a good spot, and then waited. I was extremely patient, extremely still. I wasn’t smoking anymore and this was better. Easier. All you could do was breathe and look. I squatted in the shadow near a wall for an hour and then I changed my position so that I was sitting cross-legged and then after a time I stood. The movements between each pose were seamless and slow and my eyes never left the street.

  I was still quite poised and alert five hours later when Bridget appeared in a camel hair coat, black jeans, black DMs, her hair tied back, a handbag over her right shoulder. She was listening to a Walkman, which would make things simpler. I let her stroll the length of the street and turn right at the corner. I crossed the waste ground; I didn’t run, but I walked fast. She was halfway along the road, turning right. She wasn’t going to the subway, so I tried to think where she was going. What was down that street? I tried to remember. Another bar, an Irish food store, a butcher’s, a paper shop, a bakery, what else? I couldn’t remember. Van Cortlandt Park and the IRT were way down the hill but if she was going to the park or the subway she’d have turned left at the Four P. and saved herself the journey of an extra few blocks. A man appeared on the corner in front of me just as I was about to cross from the waste ground. He was a big man in his late fifties or sixties, an old bruiser, black coat, plus fours; he looked like fucking Boris Karloff out for a dander. He was walking at a brisk pace, and if I slipped in behind him and she did look back, she’d notice him only and not me. The big guy turned the corner; I slid over and in behind the bastard.

  He made it to the next corner and then I did. Bridget was nowhere to be seen. Unless she’d run she couldn’t have gotten to the end of the block and turned again. She’d had to have gone in somewhere. There were a dozen shops on both sides of the street. Maybe the bakery; maybe it was her mum’s birthday or something. The big guy went down to the butcher’s and stepped inside. I waited at the corner looking nonchalant—which is absolutely the hardest part of tailing someone. It was about five minutes, a lifetime exposed out there in the broad.

  She stepped out of the dry cleaner’s with a plastic bag over a dress. Small, one of hers, spangly. An event dress, a we’ll-fuck-tonight dress. She was heading back the way she’d come. Walking brisk. Swinging her hips. Excited. I eased out of her field of view and slipped down the basement steps of the apartment building on the corner. She’d stay on my side of the street and go past above me about six feet away. I’d see her face, but she wouldn’t see mine down here in the shadow. I backed against the wall and waited. All the time there was the possibility that when she went by I’d say something. I’d call her name. Bridget, down here, ssshhhh, don’t be afraid, Mouse, it’s me, my Mouse girl, it’s me, I’m alive, don’t cry out, pretend you’ve dropped something.

  She’d be astonished, maybe she’d faint, yell, she’d start to cry: They told me you were dead, I thought you were dead. Oh, my God. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. Sweet Jesus.

  I’d whisper instructions to her, we’d meet that night in the park, she’d tell her ma she needed a walk after dinner. That wasn’t so unusual; sometimes she went for a walk before starting her shift in the bar. We’d meet in the park and I’d tell her everything. Christ, Bridget, you’re not going to believe it. Take a breath. I’ve been through the mangle a bit, but I am alive. We’ll have to be quick. Smart. It isn’t safe for me here. If Sunshine found out, if Darkey found out, they’d have to kill me, they’d have to. No choice. They know me. No, no, don’t call him, it’ll all be lies. Lies. Didn’t they say that I was dead? No, Sunshine, too, he’s worse, if anything. I promise you it’s all true. Don’t cry, be tough. They’ll notice if you’ve been crying. Listen, I’ve it all worked out. We’ll go away; you’ll book tickets for both of us for this weekend. I can rustle up some documents by then. It’ll cost me, but I can do it. I’ll get the cash somehow. Don’t pack or fucking look at atlases or anything like that. Don’t get your hair cut. Change nothing. Saturday morning get up. Say you’re going shopping in midtown. Take the train. No extra bags. We’ll meet at the 181st Street stop and take the A train to JFK and then fly to: where? anywhere? Australia, there’s a second cousin of
mine in Queensland. England, I know a couple of people in London, Coventry. Ireland, dozens who could hide us out. A cottage in Donegal. Oh, Bridget, it’s so beautiful there: the Blue Mountains, the hills, the loughs, the Atlantic thundering up on empty beaches. You’d love it. I’d get a job in Derry, maybe you, too, we’d raise kids, get a wee fishing boat, a wee rower, teach them to fish, there’s surfing there now too, it’s not behind the times. We’d use aliases, they’d never find us, never. I know Darkey can pull strings and Mr. Duffy has connections, but we’d be clever. Clever, Bridget, and happy, so happy…

  I hear her steps on the sidewalk. It’s a sharp day. She has a purposeful walk. She gets close.

  It was you, Bridget. Please believe me when I tell you that you’re the one that kept me going. I thought of you. I was half-mad out there. Christ, the things that happened to us. Only I made it. It wasn’t luck, it was all you, Bridget, can’t you see that? I’m sure of it. Yeah, I know, I know, I’m a pochle, a liar, there are other girls. I know, you don’t have to tell me, but that’s behind me. I don’t remember them. All that time it was you. I swear it. You.

  She’s even closer, ten paces till she reaches the corner. She’s humming along. Happy. Her boots squeal and she turns the corner. I see her face. Lightly powdered. Radiant. Her hair is darker than I’ve seen it, tied back. The music on her Walkman is U2, she’s singing with it, one of the upbeat ones. She’s smiling as she sings. Aye, the dress under the plastic is a fancy cocktail outfit; Darkey must be taking her to some do. Something special, no trip to the pictures this night, it’s the Met, or some fund-raiser, or a restaurant in Tribeca or on Central Park South. She’s parallel with me for a moment, frozen there, and then she’s past. I hear her steps recede down the sidewalk. Fainter and fainter. She turns at the corner. I’m about to come up the steps when, lo and behold, old Boris Karloff appears behind her. Practically skipping now, rushing to keep up, not sure if the whole trip to the dry cleaner’s was a blind or not. Well, well, so this is as far as Darkey’s trust goes. Even now. God help some boy she meets by accident, what’ll happen to him? Maybe he’ll win a trip to Cancún through the mail, or is that track too beaten for Sunshine now? Maybe it’ll just be a wee hiding behind the bike sheds, a fist punctuating every word: Stay-the-fuck-away-from-her.