Dead I Well May Be

by Adrian McKinty

  I went south, and I had a scare in the Upper East Side when I saw a boy I knew called Roddy McGee coming out of a bar on Third Avenue, so after that I avoided the Mick zones and the neutral zones and kept mostly to greater Harlem. But that was ok. I liked it there. I absorbed Harlem, I took it in and became part of it. I went all the way from the West Side Highway to the Triborough Bridge, from Sugar Hill to Manhattanville, from Washington Heights to Inwood Park.

  The walking was making me stronger, but Ramón noticed how I moved and gave me a telephone number. He didn’t say anything.

  I called the number, and it was a doctor who specialized in the rehabilitation of amputees.

  I went to see him, and he was an old guy in a nice building off 48th Street, which I supposed meant that his practice did very well.

  He was a Vietnam vet, and although he had not seen combat, he had worked in navy hospitals in Saigon for two stints, in 1966–67 and 1969–70.

  We had a consultation and X rays and he put me on a treadmill. After it was done, he recommended that I have corrective surgery to shorten my stump to make it more balanced and comfortable, with a cleaner tuck at the end.

  I absolutely refused. The thought of cutting off more of my fucking leg was utterly absurd.

  But Dr. Havercamp was not to be browbeaten by a civilian patient a third his age, so he sat me down and explained everything in detail.

  A minor operation. One night in the hospital, a week of rehabilitation. Weekly visits for the next few months. I’d be running the New York marathon this time next year.

  He convinced me and bullied me a little, and I saw the sense of it.

  I told Ramón I’d need a week, and Ramón said take all the time in the world, and although I hadn’t told him why, the night before my operation he showed up with a dozen books and magazines and chocolate and a massive jar of vitamin pills from the GNC.

  Take these every day, he said, pointing at the pills.

  I will, I said.

  He asked Cuba to step outside for a moment and when he had, Ramón said confidentially:

  Things will be easier now, you’ll see.

  And as was the case with most things, Ramón, of course, was right.

  Out of the surgery. Morphine dreams. An old trope, the drowned world, New York devoid of people and absorbed like Machu Picchu or Angkor Wat into the jungle. Forest stealing up on buildings, sending seeds here or a root over there or a sapling through there and the whole becoming one organic mass of vines and creepers and glass and concrete. Flamingos in Jamaica Bay, eyries in the Chrysler Building. Seas of orchids on the railway stop at 125th. Dandelions and flowering plants on the fire escapes of tenements. Mahogany and teak and spreading elms. Marshes in the East River and every tunnel a river and every railway a path for animals. The Hudson freezes and over come deer and coyotes and bear. I can see blue-tongued iguanas and lizards, snakes. Piranha and alligators in the reservoir in Central Park. Vultures in Times Square. Jaguars surveying the horizon from the fastness of the roof on PS 125.

  Yes, it’s an old trope and a common one in New York. A place of escape. Either in the primordial past or apocalyptic future, and you have to be careful about this kind of thinking. Raphael (according to Ramón’s copy) in Paradise Lost warns Adam about these kinds of thoughts. Think, Raphael says, only what concerns thee and thy being. Dream not of other worlds.

  These flights of fancy, though, were helping me cope. An alternative New York was a better place to be, sometimes, than my own head.

  A couple of days later, I was on my feet. Visits to the doc. Back up to Ramón. Out again.

  I was walking and dreaming and killing time, but I wasn’t avoiding the issue. No, I’d seen the future and I was aware that I was in it. Aye. I was dandering and dreaming, but I wasn’t mitching my responsibility.

  Strong again. A hundred push-ups, a hundred sit-ups, a long walk every morning. I would eat a big breakfast of eggs and plantains, yellow rice, black beans, and then in the second part of the day I would go over to Ramón’s and hang out and get my money.

  It was ok.

  If you could take the vibe, Ramón’s was all right. Awkward, dull, Ramón’s men always a little afraid of me. Ramón had obviously told them something that had upset them. It didn’t help that they already were a superstitious, suspicious, freaky, paranoid bunch. They hadn’t bullied me or kidded me; but they were still contemptuous. And they were afeared, jumpy. They kept their distance. Once Moreno tried to stare me down, but he broke first. Cuba was the only one who had much time for me. It was a shame, because from what I’d seen of Dominican culture, it reminded me of Ireland.

  Cuba’s English was better than the others’, and occasionally, while I’d be sitting at the window thumbing through some book, he’d wander across and spend the afternoon with me. He was a kid and didn’t know what he wanted in life and spoke frequently of joining the marines. We’d talk about girls and films and sometimes politics. Cuba was a big guy, well over 220 pounds; he hated Castro, and one day, to bait him, I said I’d wear a Che T-shirt, and he gave me a long and impassioned argument about the evils of communism, Castroites and Che. Stuff he’d got from his dad, mostly garbled. He had a thing against Ricky Ricardo from the Lucy show, but he never articulated this objection clearly. Cuba had fled the island with his father and brother in 1984, and they’d gone first to Spain and then come to the United States. Apart from Castro, Cuba’s other main theme was the stupidity and shortsightedness of Dominicans. Dominicans robbed their children to buy crack, Dominicans had no musical culture, Dominicans had no literature, Dominicans thought they could play baseball, but everybody knew that Cubans were the stars of the baseball world. Dominicans would make nothing of themselves. In whispers he said that even Ramón couldn’t escape.

  Sometimes we’d drag Hector over, and the three of us would play a retarded version of poker with four cards showing and a fifth blind in your hand. Cuba was very good at this, and though we were only playing for pennies, he would get excited when at the end of a session he’d be a dollar or seventy-five cents up over the pair of us. It took me a day or two to realize that the cards were marked, but I played anyway, for the company.

  About this time in New York City, there were two hundred murders a month and most of those were drug-related, so occasionally you’d hear gunfire out in the street. Hector, Cuba, Ramón, and I would be around in the afternoon, Ramón in his study doing whatever it was he did and me and the boys playing cards and out there in the street would be the odd gunshot.

  It was the lieutenants’ job in the daytime to protect their part of the street. Usually the lieutenant and a couple of the watchers would be armed. There were so many independent pushers back then that every once in a while one of them would get uppity and think they were the original Jesus Christ and try to muscle in on Ramón’s hard-won turf. The watchers or the lieutenants would shoot them. I’d hear about this, but I saw little of it. Back home, you’d kneecap them, but here they just killed them.

  We weren’t involved. The bodyguards’ job was to protect Ramón, not to patrol the street. Moreno would tell Cuba, and Cuba would tell me—it disconcerted me. These people were out risking their lives, and what was I doing? What was my role in the scheme of things?

  He didn’t tell me anything, but Ramón had been watching me, waiting for the time he thought I was ready. Whether the incident with Moreno forced his hand, I don’t know.

  It came a day when Ramón, José, Hector, and Cuba had disappeared in the big yellow Mercedes. I was left completely alone in the house throughout the afternoon, and seeing it as a test of loyalty, I didn’t venture into any of the forbidden areas, such as the study or Ramón’s bedroom. I hung out on the balcony staring at the Hudson.

  By six o’clock, the lieutenants started showing up with their day’s profits. Not that their street dealers didn’t work at night, but Ramón was always strict about having his accounting at the same time. Tonight, though, Ramón wasn’t there, and I was. The
lieutenants eyed me suspiciously and got themselves beers from the fridge and sat on the sofa and the white leather chairs to wait.

  The boys were drinking and doing an excellent job of not seeing me. After a while, they put the stereo on and started fucking around with Ramón’s stuff.

  I went over and told them to cut it out.

  They asked me who the fuck I thought I was, and Moreno stood up and started cursing me out a few inches from my face. He’d clearly had it with me. A freeloading fucking Yankee who Ramón was fucking in love with or something. He was yelling, and his nose was an inch from mine now and I was thinking, So this is how it ends, the fucking ignominy of it. Me and him grabbing our pieces at the same time. Me getting one off, the lads spraying me so that I’m more hole than cheese.

  Moreno was shouting at me and showing me a bullet scar in the shoulder he must have taken in loyal service to Ramón.

  Fuck it, Moreno, I said. You boys wanna see a real fucking wound?

  They didn’t understand, but they stopped while I rolled up my trouser leg, took my foot off.

  They didn’t know.

  Moreno shut up. All of them shut up.

  In that silence, standing there with my foot off and feeling utterly ridiculous, Ramón came back.

  He slipped in as normal, dressed in a coat too big for him. He looked at us for an embarrassing moment and said nothing. He was with his boys, and he muttered something to José, and José said something in Spanish, and everyone went back to the lab. He called me over, and I sat next to him on the white sofa. I gathered my wits and pulled myself together. He waited until I’d strapped my foot on again.

  You’re bored, he said.

  I shook my head.

  Are you strong? he said.

  I nodded.

  He came straight to the point. His voice was low and in a whisper.

  Michael, they stagger things now, they’re careful, different places, but we know their meeting is tonight in the old place, and if you want to go we can give you a lift up there.

  I didn’t need to be told what meeting or who he was talking about. It was time for business.

  Ok, I said.

  Ramón drove me. We didn’t talk. He was smoking a cigar and listening to some crazy Dominican music low on his CD system. He left me ten blocks from the Four Provinces and asked if I needed anything. I told him I was ok. I walked to the spot where I’d waited for Bridget, the alley between the buildings that gave me a good view of the front door.

  I waited for three hours, until it was after midnight. Come on, Darkey, come on, Darkey, come on, Darkey, I was saying over and over. But no bloody Darkey.

  People going in and out, strangers, all of them. Ramón had said something about a change in routine, but I didn’t see how that would affect the regulars at the Four P. Eventually, though, at near to bloody closing, I did see a couple of old stagers I recognized, and a wee while after that, Mrs. Callaghan appeared at the side entrance with a box of rubbish. But even so, it was getting late, and I was thinking that Ramón’s intelligence wasn’t all it was cracked up to be when who should appear in all his Lundy-Quisling-Vichy glory but Big fucking Bob.

  I recognized his ugly shadow before I saw him slinking out the side entrance of the Four Provinces, swaying a bit and singing. Cramped, I staggered to my feet and went after him. He was walking down the alley next to the Four P., heading for the empty lot that people used as a car park. I ran across the waste ground and pulled out the Colt. Bob didn’t know I was after him even though I was making enough noise to wake the dead and damned, a sort of a half-run, galumphing, and making progress but not exactly doing Warp Factor 8. Bob had stopped at the corner of the lot, and when I got to the street a little up from the bar, he climbed into a red Honda Accord and drove off. I leveled the .45 and took aim, but he was so far away and in the dark and with that gun I’d never get a good shot off. I ran to the main street and flagged down the first car I saw. A cream-colored Cadillac, turning at the corner, probably pulling into the same car park for the Four Provinces. The driver either didn’t see me or was ignoring me. I sprinted over and pointed the Colt at the windshield.

  Hey, fucker, I yelled.

  The driver was a bald man in his forties, dark lawyer suit, somewhat distracted, fiddling with his seat belt, playing around with it, and trying to turn into a space at the same time. He didn’t see or hear me and was still driving and almost hit me.

  I banged his window and turned the gun on him.

  Get out of the fucking car or I’ll fucking kill you, I said in pure West Belfast, and that was enough to get his attention.

  He stopped the car and looked at me white-faced. He was shitting himself, perhaps literally. I opened the door.

  Get the fuck out, I screamed.

  He was sweating and nearly crying.

  My seat belt’s stuck, it’s stuck, it’s stuck, he was saying in a complete panic.

  I leaned over and clicked the release button.

  Get out, I said. He still didn’t move, so I had to tug the fucker out by his lapels.

  He tumbled onto the pavement.

  I pointed the gun at his head.

  Wait until morning before calling the police, understand, otherwise I fucking kill you and your fucking wife and your fucking dog. Geddit? I said, and got into the car without waiting for a reply. There was a huge box of Huggies blocking the view out the passenger-side window. I chucked them out, stuck the vehicle in drive, and headed off. Bob, of course, was nowhere now to be seen. Jesus.

  I drove down the road. Tons of traffic. I turned the corner, heading her up towards Broadway. He’d either have gone left or right. I decided on left and went fast and by pure jammy-dodger luck at the turn across Van Cortlandt I saw him.

  Driving cautious, drunk-man speed, but keeping a cool head and not too slow. He was heading east either up the shore or onto Long Island or maybe even doing a turnabout to go down into Manhattan. I tried to think if I’d ever heard anyone speak about where Bob lived, but I didn’t recall it ever coming up. He tried to make a traffic light and then aborted the plan and stalled the car, coming to a screechy stop. He was a bit freaked, and he took a couple of tries to get it going again. Someone behind honked him, and I saw Bob undo his seat belt as if he was going to get out of his car and have words.

  Bob, stay in the car, don’t get yourself arrested, you big shite, I was saying.

  He changed his mind about the seat belt and got going again. He took a wrong turn or two and had to double back, and I wondered if he was being especially clever trying to figure out if there was a tail on him. But he wasn’t that smart or collected—just half blitzed probably.

  He took us on a path through the South Bronx and somehow we ended up in Queens. Bob pulled in at a newsstand and got himself some cigs and a Coke and a copy of Penthouse. The newsstand was fairly isolated and I thought about doing it there, but this was no place for business; and besides, I wanted to have a word with the big ganch. So I let him go. He drank the Coke, and it improved his driving.

  We went together out past La Guardia and Shea and I became reasonably convinced that Bob lived somewhere on the North Shore of Long Island. It was late and traffic was light and I had a job keeping the big cream-colored Caddy far enough away to avoid getting in Bob’s paranoid rearview mirror.

  The highway was brightly lit and the cars going too fast, but at least it was an automatic so that my left foot wasn’t always on the clutch. It was the first time I’d driven since I’d come back from Mexico and the straps that held the foot onto my leg had almost given way on the run across the waste ground. I wasn’t in the mood to do any Long John Silvers, so I was glad they’d stayed on. I made a mental note, though, to go see Dr. Havercamp about those running lessons he was offering before.

  Yeah.

  The adrenaline was coursing through me. Hours on an OP and suddenly seeing the target will do that for you. And I’d dreamed about Bob, dreamed of this very event, of this very night.

&n
bsp; We drove out farther onto the island. The surface of the road went clay-colored and the lines voided themselves into two lanes. I wound the window down, the air cooling my damp skin.

  Highway lights, trucks, petrol stations, the city in the rearview, and even in all this light, pollution, stars. Saturn and Venus and a labyrinth of concordances bringing me onward.

  Onward to the inevitable. No, it wasn’t Darkey’s night, but maybe it was Bob’s. Aye, and suddenly, there was a cheerlessness within me. And perhaps almost a creeping reluctance. If Bob could only keep driving forever, if only he could keep going. All the way through Nassau County and Suffolk, all the way to the end of Long Island, where there are potato fields, where Gatsby had his mansion, and on out into the blackness of the Atlantic. Yes, keep driving, over the ocean, and like Alcock and Brown, we’ll crash somewhere near Clifden. I know this pub in Galway town, this lovely pub, we’ll pull in and have a jar and be on our way. Tell ya, Bob, you think the Guinness in the Four Provinces is good, there they take a year and a half to pull your pint.

  A session, and then we’ll be off. Sea dogs and rose petals and away from that coast across the Great Bog and up to the mysteries of the Boyne Valley. We’ll be in Newgrange for the solstice, where the pagans brought the returning sun. And down at the river. King William was here and James over there. We’ll climb Tara and look out over the fifths. And then across another sheugh, I don’t know, we’ll hit Cumbria and the lakes and the Yorkshire Dales. We’ll go over oil rigs with their great burning lamps of fire. On east through the Baltic and Russia, and we’ll meet the sun again somewhere in the vast wastes of Siberia.

  Bob, please understand me, real pain isn’t in the body, no, you may think that, but believe one who knows, it isn’t in the body or the mind. It’s in the spirit.

  You’ll see. You’ll see soon.

  Trucks, cars.

  The teeming anthills, the moon, kisses of houselight in the shadows. A service station. American girls in jeans and white shirts. Fill your tank, Bob, and be about your way. Don’t stop, if you know what’s good for you. His black shirt, his little eyes, his hands like the claws of scorpions.